Valera Meylis

Just Watched: Cowboy Hip Hop

2010-07-06T23:14:00.001-04:00

if you look at the dancers lignup 30 seconds into a clip, you may mistake the young guy on the left for a younger me (as it was pointed out to me just now).... LOL and ROFL all the way.

Just Watched: Weeds

2010-06-27T21:55:00.006-04:00

Intro

Andy's Plan

Masturbation lesson
(little background: kid's uncle is asked to teach nephew how to masturbate since the kid kept throwing "used" socks into the toilet)

Wired on Internet

2010-06-19T19:16:00.004-04:00

During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers—three experienced Web surfers and three novices—for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics—the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car—the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow.

The two groups showed marked differences. Brain activity of the experienced surfers was far more extensive than that of the newbies, particularly in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving and decisionmaking. Small then had his subjects read normal blocks of text projected onto their goggles; in this case, scans revealed no significant difference in areas of brain activation between the two groups. The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.

The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. “Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.

When first publicized, the findings were greeted with cheers. By keeping lots of brain cells buzzing, Google seemed to be making people smarter. But as Small was careful to point out, more brain activity is not necessarily better brain activity. The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”

What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

Back in the 1980s, when schools began investing heavily in computers, there was much enthusiasm about the apparent advantages of digital documents over paper ones. Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on monitors would be a boon to learning. Hypertext would strengthen critical thinking, the argument went, by enabling students to switch easily between different viewpoints. Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed pages, readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections between diverse works. The hyperlink would be a technology of liberation.

By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension. A 1989 study showed that readers tended just to click around aimlessly when reading something that included hypertext links to other selected pieces of information. A 1990 experiment revealed that some “could not remember what they had and had not read.”

Even though the World Wide Web has made hypertext ubiquitous and presumably less startling and unfamiliar, the cognitive problems remain. Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links. In a 2001 study, two scholars in Canada asked 70 people to read “The Demon Lover,” a short story by Elizabeth Bowen. One group read it in a traditional linear-text format; they’d read a passage and click the word next to move ahead. A second group read a version in which they had to click on highlighted words in the text to move ahead. It took the hypertext readers longer to read the document, and they were seven times more likely to say they found it confusing. Another researcher, Erping Zhu, had people read a passage of digital prose but varied the number of links appearing in it. She then gave the readers a multiple-choice quiz and had them write a summary of what they had read. She found that comprehension declined as the number of links increased—whether or not people clicked on them. After all, whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which is itself distracting.

A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse.

In a study published in the journal Media Psychology, researchers had more than 100 volunteers watch a presentation about the country of Mali, played through a Web browser. Some watched a text-only version. Others watched a version that incorporated video. Afterward, the subjects were quizzed on the material. Compared to the multimedia viewers, the text-only viewers answered significantly more questions correctly; they also found the presentation to be more interesting, more educational, more understandable, and more enjoyable.

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.

Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by varying the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer much of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of knowledge and wisdom.

On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream.

Psychologists refer to the information flowing into our working memory as our cognitive load. When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to process and store it, we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with other memories. We can’t translate the new material into conceptual knowledge. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains weak. That’s why the extensive brain activity that Small discovered in Web searchers may be more a cause for concern than for celebration. It points to cognitive overload.

The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There’s also the fact that numerous studies—including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases—show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe.

The penalty is amplified by what brain scientists call switching costs. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information. On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher.

The Net’s ability to monitor events and send out messages and notifications automatically is, of course, one of its great strengths as a communication technology. We rely on that capability to personalize the workings of the system, to program the vast database to respond to our particular needs, interests, and desires. We want to be interrupted, because each interruption—email, tweet, instant message, RSS headline—brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch or even socially isolated. The stream of new information also plays to our natural tendency to overemphasize the immediate. We crave the new even when we know it’s trivial.

And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us in ever more varied ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the fragmentation of our attention, and the thinning of our thoughts in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information we receive. We rarely stop to think that it might actually make more sense just to tune it all out.

The mental consequences of our online info-crunching are not universally bad. Certain cognitive skills are strengthened by our use of computers and the Net. These tend to involve more primitive mental functions, such as hand-eye coordination, reflex response, and the processing of visual cues. One much-cited study of videogaming, published in Nature in 2003, revealed that after just 10 days of playing action games on computers, a group of young people had significantly boosted the speed with which they could shift their visual focus between various images and tasks.

It’s likely that Web browsing also strengthens brain functions related to fast-paced problem-solving, particularly when it requires spotting patterns in a welter of data. A British study of the way women search for medical information online indicated that an experienced Internet user can, at least in some cases, assess the trustworthiness and probable value of a Web page in a matter of seconds. The more we practice surfing and scanning, the more adept our brain becomes at those tasks. (Other academics, like Clay Shirky, maintain that the Web provides us with a valuable outlet for a growing “cognitive surplus”; see Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution

But it would be a serious mistake to look narrowly at such benefits and conclude that the Web is making us smarter. In a Science article published in early 2009, prominent developmental psychologist Patricia Greenfield reviewed more than 40 studies of the effects of various types of media on intelligence and learning ability. She concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies, she wrote, has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” But those gains go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacity for the kind of “deep processing” that underpins “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”

We know that the human brain is highly plastic; neurons and synapses change as circumstances change. When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the use of a new medium, we end up with a different brain, says Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of the field of neuroplasticity. That means our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our brain cells even when we’re not at a computer. We’re exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply.

Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. “Everything distracts them.” Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”

There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.

Saramago is dead

2010-06-18T10:10:00.003-04:00

José Saramago Dies

By FERNANDA EBERSTADT

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation and a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, has died at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, his publisher said on Friday. He was 87.
The publisher, Zeferino Coelho, told the Portuguese newspaper Publico that Mr. Saramago’s health had been deteriorating after a recent illness, but gave no other details, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Saramago, a tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, gained international acclaim for novels like “Baltasar and Blimunda” and “Blindness.” (A film adaptation of “Blindness” by the Brazilian director Fernando Mireilles was released in 2008.)
Mr. Saramago was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, Mr. Coelho.
Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years, Mr. Saramago used his status as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.
read more To many Americans, Mr. Saramago’s name is indissolubly associated with a statement he made while touring the West Bank in 2002, when he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.
As a professional novelist, Mr. Saramago was a late bloomer. (A first novel, published when he was 23, was followed by 30 years of silence.) He became a full-time writer only in his late 50s, after working variously as a garage mechanic, a welfare agency bureaucrat, a printing production manager, a proofreader, a translator and a newspaper columnist.
In 1975, a counter-coup overthrew Portugal’s Communist-led revolution of the previous year, and Mr. Saramago was fired from his job as deputy editor of the Lisbon newspaper Diário de Noticias. Overnight, along with other prominent leftists, he became virtually unemployable. “It was the best luck of my life,” he said in a 2007 interview. “It drove me to become a writer.”
His first major success was the rollicking love story “Baltasar and Blimunda.” Set in 18th-century Portugal, the novel portrays the misadventures of a trio of eccentrics threatened by the Inquisition: a heretic priest who constructs a flying machine and the two lovers who help him — a one-handed ex-soldier and a sorceress’s daughter who has X-ray vision.
The novel, published in an English translation in 1987, won Mr. Saramago a passionate international following. The critic Irving Howe, praising its union of “harsh realism” and “lyric fantasy,” described its author as “a voice of European skepticism, a connoisseur of ironies.”
“I think I hear in his prose echoes of Enlightenment sensibility, caustic and shrewd,” Mr. Howe wrote.
Asked in 2008 to assess Mr. Saramago’s achievement, the critic James Wood wrote: “Jose Saramago was both an avant-gardist and a traditionalist. His long blocks of unbroken prose, lacking conventional markers like paragraph breaks and quotation marks, could look forbidding and modernist; but his frequent habit of handing over the narration in his novels to a kind of ‘village chorus’ and what seem like peasant simplicities, allowed Saramago great flexibility.” On the one hand, Mr. Wood wrote, it allowed the writer to “revel in sheer storytelling,” while on the other, to “undermine, ironically, the very ‘truths’ and simplicities his apparently unsophisticated narrators traded in.”
Paradox was Mr. Saramago’s stock in trade. A militant atheist who maintained that human history would have been a lot more peaceful if it weren’t for religion, his novels are nonetheless intimately preoccupied with the question of God.
His novel “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” in which Jesus on the cross apologizes to mankind for God’s sins, was deemed “corruscatingly blasphemous” by some believers and deeply religious by others. When the Portuguese government, under pressure from the Catholic Church, blocked its entry for a European Literary Prize in 1992, Mr. Saramago chose to go into exile, setting up residence in the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession.
Mr. Saramago’s hard-scrabble origins did not seem to predestine him for a life of letters. Born in 1922 in the village of Azinhaga, 60 miles northeast of Lisbon, Mr. Saramago was largely raised by his maternal grandparents, while his parents sought work in the big city. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Mr. Saramago spoke admiringly of these grandparents, illiterate peasants who, in the winter, slept in the same bed as their piglets, yet who imparted to him a taste for fantasy and folklore, combined with a respect for nature.
One of Mr. Saramago’s last books — and one of his most touching — was a childhood memoir titled “Small Memories.” In it, he recounts the trauma of being transplanted from his grandparents’ rural shack to Lisbon, where his father had joined the police force. Several months later, his older brother Francisco, his only sibling, died of pneumonia.
Mr. Saramago loved to tell a story of how he came by his surname. His real family name was de Sousa. But when the 7-year-old boy showed up for his first day of school and was obliged to present his birth certificate, it was discovered that the clerk in his home village had registered him as José Saramago. “Saramago,” which means “wild radish,” a green that country people were obliged to eat in hard times, was the insulting nickname by which the novelist’s father was known.
“My father wasn’t very happy, but if that was his son’s official name, well, then he too had to take it,” he recounted in the 2007 interview. The family remained so poor, Mr. Saramago recalls in his memoirs, that every spring his mother pawned their blankets, hoping that she might be able to redeem them by the following winter. Despite being a good student, Mr. Saramago was obliged by his family’s financial straits to drop out of grammar school at 12 and switch to a vocational school, where he was trained as a car mechanic.
The most oppressive influence on Mr. Saramago, however, was one he rarely wrote about: the fascist regime that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974.
“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,” regarded as his masterpiece, is his only novel to deal directly with the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Set in 1936 in a Europe darkened by the ascendancies of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar, the book tells the story of a doctor and poet living in Brazil who returns to fascist Lisbon when he hears of the death of his friend Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s great modernist poet. What gives the book its dreamlike blend of historical reality and illusion is the fact that the title character’s name was actually one of the aliases the fantastically prolific Fernando Pessoa used to publish much of his verse. The novel, consisting of increasingly macabre encounters between the ghost of Pessoa and his fictional alter ego Reis, is a delicate meditation on identity and nothingness, poetry and power.
In his later years, Mr. Saramago’s fiction became more starkly allegorical. In novels like “Blindness,” in which an entire city is struck by a plague of sightlessness that reduces most of its citizens to barbarism, readers have found a powerful parable about the fragility of human civilization.
“Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world,” the critic Harold Bloom said in 2008. “He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.”

LRB on God

2010-06-16T21:51:00.000-04:00

The Atheists’ Picnic

Julian Bell

Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion by David Lewis-Williams Thames and Hudson, 320 pp, £18.95, March 2010, ISBN 978 0 500 05164 1

‘God created man.’ There are various ways you might read those words even without looking beyond the scriptures. Set them in the context of archaeology and a different reading altogether suggests itself. Primates turn recognisably human when factors beyond the reach of the senses leave traces in their behaviour. It is an intrusion of the invisible that sets homo sapiens apart from other species. This animal has the unique habit of making one thing stand for another: where prehistoric evidence of that habit shows up, we infer that the agents knew – in the way that we know, and in a way that other creatures seemingly do not – what it is like to contemplate and to relate physical objects, on some plane distinct from the objects themselves. ‘Mind’ is the obvious label for that not exactly material zone. It is not obvious, however, where mind cuts off from the larger bodilessness that we point towards when we speak of God. Perhaps objects interrelate in our individual minds because they are already interrelated within a communal mind. Perhaps understanding is located not in us alone, but in the world about us in the manner of water under the ground, of blood under the skin or the flame within fuel: perhaps it’s a stuff within objects, awaiting release. In which case, homo sapiens becomes sapient by dowsing for that flow – or, to switch metaphors, by seeking spark-points where that fire will catch to illuminate the world.

Engraved ochre block, c.75,000 BCE

Was it in some such matrix that the concepts ‘God’ and ‘man’ first arose? That seems to be the implication when, in the opening pages of Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams examines the earliest records of symbolic behaviour. It is unlikely we will ever pinpoint just when the human habit of investing objects with significance took hold. But for the moment, until fresh discoveries arrive, the most striking evidence we have comes from the Blombos cave on South Africa’s Cape coast, which was inhabited some 75,000 years ago. read more Another site along the same coast, Pinnacle Point, indicates that anatomically modern humans had already added an interest in collecting chunks of red ochre to their long-standing use of hand axes and of fire nearly a hundred thousand years before that. It was occupants of Blombos, however, who fashioned what Lewis-Williams calls ‘the world’s oldest objets d’art’, when they scored a linear design onto two small blocks of ochre, each the size of a box of cook’s matches, making their marks on one of the long narrow faces – on the striking panel, as it were. What was the purpose of the patterns? Perhaps, Lewis-Williams writes, they ‘refer to something inside the ochre’ – a pre-eminently symbolic substance, he suggests, in its intense inherent redness – ‘rather as the title on a book spine refers to what is inside the volume’. He pursues the speculation further: ‘We may have here an early hint of an important component of religious thought: immanence. Gods and supernatural powers can be inside statues, mountains, lakes, seas, nature itself, and of course people.’
We also have here – though the fact does not concern Lewis-Williams – our earliest evidence of systematic line-drawing. The ends of the blocks were flattened to make planes suitable for patterning. The closed off criss-cross hatchings rendered on one block roughly correspond to those on the other; the intervals and intersections of the scorings aim at regularity. Such patterning makes best sense as a conscious stab at perfection. Beyond each scratch that we can see, there lay an intended ideal geometry, luring the draughtsman on. A pure, complete and cohesive network of interrelations was evidently the endpoint. If we take these little chunks of red mineral seriously – if we accept that as 3D objects, they possessed a symbolic charge that set them apart from their environment and that they were in effect keys to unlock its meanings – then we might also consider that the scratches on the objects’ 2D planes had to do with thought as a weightless, abstract thread, one fit to weave the environment around it into unity. Religion, Lewis-Williams might have added, has always shuffled from one foot to the other: here it isolates some object, place or person and declares them special, there it proposes to embrace everything in a resolved coherence.
Lewis-Williams’s pen-picture of the Blombos cave, on a high cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean, is brisk and vivid – a testimony to skills honed over fifty years of lecturing. His career in archaeology began elsewhere in South Africa, in pursuit of the nation’s most haunting relics, the vast corpus of rock paintings left by the retreating San (or Bushmen) after farmers drove them from the land during the mid-19th century. As of the 1960s, this field of research was still being freshly harvested. It was Lewis-Williams’s senior colleague Patricia Vinnicombe who brought out the foundational study of San rock art, People of the Eland, in 1976. Her book, recently republished,[*] is a monumentally thorough documentation of exquisite, eloquent paintings and, moreover, a remarkable biographical document. Vinnicombe set out as a girl on horseback, trekking the Drakensberg hills above her own family’s farm: the figure-filled pictures she noticed on the rocks sent her poring through grim newspaper reports of dispossession and massacre from just a couple of generations back, with which many of the depicted scenes turned out uncannily to correspond. But her ever widening investigations of San life and thought shifted her interests towards a structuralist theorisation of the field: by the book’s conclusion, she was serenely contemplating a Lévi-Straussian cat’s cradle of cultural oppositions.
Lewis-Williams pursued a contrary route. He sifted the ethnographic evidence – picture tracings, testimonies from the last of the Drakensberg’s departed San, field reports on those still living in the Kalahari desert – until he had to his own satisfaction isolated its dominant theme: the fact that trances, induced by communal dancing, led the San to believe that they lived in a tiered cosmos. Whatever they saw happening at ground level related to what happened in the skies above and in the earth below, and their paintings were a means to connect with those spirit-ruled zones. Lewis-Williams wanted not so much to explore how that cosmology was expressed as to determine exactly what made these people think this way. The task required that he cross disciplines: it lay, in a word, in neurology. From the late 1980s, he became a frontman for an approach to the study of hunter-gatherer societies headlined by the words ‘entoptics’ and ‘shamanism’. Entoptics is what you see as you enter a trance: shapes generated by activity in your own stimulated brain, either nakedly geometric in appearance or dressed up in costumes from your culture’s mythic wardrobe, often followed by wholly hallucinatory scenes and stories. Lewis-Williams claimed to identify these little twists of neural scrap metal – zigzagged, chequered or cupular – in the rock art, not just of the San, but of other small-scale societies across time and space. The study of such ‘shamanic’ cultures, in which affairs typically coalesced around a cosmos-hopping thaumaturge, had major historical implications. For this was the way all our ancestors originally lived: the San were our nearest available witnesses to the distant and elusive palaeolithic age.
The Mind in the Cave (2002) put Lewis-Williams’s researches before the general public. The famous subterranean art shows of southern France and Spain, painted between 30,000 and 12,000 years ago, became the foreground of the discussion. When hunter-gatherers plunged inside the limestone flanks of the Dordogne and the Ariège, Lewis-Williams argued, they believed they were passing into a spirit zone. For them, the walls of the caves were ‘membranes’: running their eyes and hands over the passages’ bumps and hollows, they sensed the ghost-animals who dwelled within the rock. Painting them, ‘they reached out to their emotionally charged visions and tried to touch them, to hold them in place … They were not inventing images. They were merely touching what was already there.’ Lewis-Williams’s fetchingly empathetic interpretations of the art were underpinned by schemata of how minds operate. The ‘entoptic’ zigzags and chequers appearing on Lascaux’s walls alongside the visionary bison suggest that the cave-art complex was intended to sustain an acutely ‘intensified consciousness’, a state of mind which lifted upwards from the thought patterns of daily activity rather than falling down away from them in the manner of sleep and dreaming. At the same time, the actual construction of that palaeolithic Gesamtkunstwerk indicates considerable social organisation – the artists must have built platforms to paint the 13-foot-high ceiling of its ‘Hall of the Bulls’ – and hence must point us to a proto-politics, centred around a master of ceremonies. Lewis-Williams’s book bound the neurological and the sociological together into a single argument.
His feat was all the smarter for being highly self-conscious. In its course, the professor pushed his way forward through the history of palaeolithic studies, appraising and criticising predecessors, before borrowing from the philosopher Alison Wylie a name for his own method. He was ‘cabling’, he claimed: that is, ‘intertwining multiple strands of evidence’. Where – as so often in archaeology – one such strand was weak and incomplete, strands from associated fields of research could carry the weight instead, allowing the story to clamber up towards a plateau of coherence. What height, then, had Lewis-Williams arrived at? Not actually at ‘an origin of image-making’, as one of the book’s chapter titles brashly claimed: he never fully told us why one cave-goer should first bring paint to the rockface nor why a second should make sense of the resultant markings, let alone why they and the San rendered their spirit-animals with such marvellous lyrical naturalism. (Besides, 45,000 years separate the Blombos engravings from the earliest cave art, a gap from which we have next to no evidence of complex symbolism: our ignorance remains stupendous.)
And yet the integrated perspective gained by Lewis-Williams’s cabling of disciplines opened up plenty of interesting new questions. If at Lascaux we glimpse the beginnings of social stratification, how did that process develop, and how did it interact with the arrival of agriculture? Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005), which Lewis-Williams wrote with a colleague, David Pearce, carried the inquiry over to the megalithic sites: first to the astonishing ‘temple’ constructed around 9600 BCE at Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, one of the major archaeological discoveries of our era; then on from the Near East to Stonehenge and Newgrange, and hence into the third millennium BCE. This successor volume, equally rich in bold conjectures, took care to justify and qualify the seemingly provocative reductionism of the neurological approach. Their argument, they pleaded, was ‘in no way deterministic’, for ‘all the stages and experiences of consciousness that we distinguish are mediated by culture.’
It turns out, now, that Lewis-Williams wants to carry his interpretation of history forward yet again – through the classical world and on into the present. It turns out that in the course of his long scientific career he has been assiduously going through the library of great thinkers and making critical notes. It turns out that in his mid-seventies he feels there is something he ought to let the world know. He wants to make it clear that the anthropological empathy colouring his earlier writings was merely a heuristic ploy. Let there be no doubt: those San trance-dancers, those cave-painters, those megalith-erectors – those countless subscribers, across the millennia, to the epiphenomena of an intensified consciousness – have all been in the grip of a grievous and fundamental error. The process of identifying that error started in 585 BCE, when Thales of Miletus combined observations and mathematics correctly to predict a solar eclipse. From then onwards, very haltingly at first and yet, from the 17th century, inexorably, scientific reason has been rolling back the brain’s wayward tendencies. For sure, those tendencies are innate, but then so is the appendix: from a modern Darwinian perspective, they’re similarly anomalous features of the organism. Surely by now those who would erect an ontology on them are looking pretty cornered. Sooner or later, they’ll be forced into saying it. Go on, it’s simple: ‘There is no God.’
And so the intrepid mountaineer hauls himself up over the final overhang – and collapses into a company of picnickers. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris motored up to his chosen summit a while ago; and here, sure enough, stepping forward to pat the newcomer on the back and welcome him along, who should it be but Philip Pullman? ‘Magnificent … a sane, courteous and devastating criticism of religion,’ reads his statutory puff on the dust jacket of the latest addition to the New Atheist library. Lewis-Williams, however, makes a hesitant arrival. The seasoned communicator of archaeologists’ excitements, the masterly critic of methodologies, he has too dry a temper for any popular cut and thrust. In his preface he expresses scepticism about the effectiveness of his fellow atheists’ tracts and claims that he’s joining their company ‘reluctantly’.
Yet within a few pages, he too feels obliged to hack and slash his way through Western history. Overshadowed by déjà vu and a weary sense of duty, his efforts make for stale, sour reading. The usual suspects are named: authoritarian Plato; ‘a man of the first century AD named Saul’ who ‘hailed from Tarsus’ (what age group is this pitched at?); the ‘wily’ Emperor Constantine; and Augustine and Aquinas, with ‘their obsessed, twisted minds’. At last, after the benighted Middle Ages (‘another country, another world, and a distasteful one at that’), glimmers of reason start to shine through (‘all in all, Newton was a man of mixed beliefs’) before Darwin sheds his sunlight. And yet even today, we find supposed men of reason – those theologians across campus – determined to go on blundering around in the dark!
Lewis-Williams sounds not just cross with most of history, but fed up with everything from ritual dances and cathedrals (‘they all come down to tinkering with the neurology of the brain’) to Eastern meditation (‘no more than consciousness fiddling’). He cares nothing for level-headedness or, pace Philip Pullman, for courtesy. ‘How ghastly,’ he yelps, gawping at the ritual bloodlettings of the Maya. In fact, he sounds pretty peeved with the universe itself. ‘The world and all that is in it is actually a higgledy-piggledy, wasteful mess … Evolutionary history is littered with wasteful, meaningless dead-ends. Perhaps human beings are another.’
Possibly – but it’s a poor way to win them over. No doubt Lewis-Williams should have taken lessons in rhetorical comportment from the bullish, sanguine Daniel Dennett, whose Breaking the Spell (2006) is by far the best mannered of the atheist tracts. ‘The world is sacred,’ Dennett paradoxically affirms, even while he tries to subsume sacredness within a story of Darwinian causation: yes, he urges his all too God-respecting fellow Americans, you could at once be ontologically virtuous and still have your epiphanic cakes and ale. Nonetheless, when it comes to content, the grumpy neuro-archaeologist may just have the edge over the jaunty philosopher. Dennett’s speculations as to how religion might have evolved among palaeolithic humans, drawing on the work of anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran, hardly come together in a reliable ‘cabling’: rather, his narrative is a flimsy clutch of ‘what ifs’, patched up with this or that ‘plausible candidate for filling in the blank’, as he himself puts it. Religion must certainly have evolved, but it is anything but certain that Dennett’s book tells us how. In the middle three chapters of Conceiving God’s ten – the book’s most worthwhile section – Lewis-Williams gives the issues a tighter conceptualisation. God, he reckons, has been a persistent presence in human affairs because a trinity of interlocking categories sustains him. ‘Religious experience’, tied to certain brain states, generates socially arbitrated systems of ‘religious belief’, and these get expressed in concrete, hierarchical forms of ‘religious practice’ – which in turn foment new experiences. His familiarity with the neurology of trances and shamanic ‘inner journeys’ makes the chapter on ‘experience’ particularly incisive.
Does his conceptualisation here support his assertion that there is no God? Clearly, if it works, it adds a level to our preceding descriptions of religion. It doesn’t however cancel them. If you tell me, ‘The thermometer reads -7º centigrade,’ you aren’t superseding my remark that ‘it’s bitterly cold.’ When you say ‘I sense the presence of God’ and I say, ‘The right temporal lobe of your brain is aroused,’ we have no cause to argue. What, then, is the order of priority here? The pervasive coloration of affairs with intention and emotion that’s implicit in calling the cold ‘bitter’ – or for that matter in remarks on the cosmic weather, ranging from ‘God loves us’ to ‘the world is a wasteful mess’ – is fundamental to any narrative of our personal experience and will not be wished away. And without personal experience we have nothing: personal experience comes first. At the same time it constantly awaits correction. When the temperature drops to -12º C that ‘bitter’ may acquire a retrospective sweetness; equally, you may come to realise that your inward vision left you blind to your next-door neighbour’s distress. Against that perspectival flux, the abstract linear registration of the thermometer – and of science in general – seems to offer a necessary neutral constant.
To ring-fence events from scientific description, as the religious-minded often do, to insist that, here and there, spiritual weeds ‘miraculously’ burst through the world’s physical tarmac, is essentially incoherent. At root, there can only be one structure of causation – call it physical, call it spiritual, call it what you like – because that’s what causation is: it’s how all events are temporally related. It seems, however, that we have at least two indispensable ways to describe events and that these track each other somewhat inadequately. Maybe we can think of them as ‘levels’ – accepting, like the San, that we inhabit a tiered cosmos – but somehow we have to keep both in view. That, it seems to me, is one of the challenges taken on by theology: to attend to the personal, intention-suffused perspective that seizes on a given place (or person, or chunk of bright ochre, or archaeological discovery) and affirms it to be crucial, at the same time reconciling it with the contemplation of place-neutral, ideal, linear pattern, the type of vision promised by science.
I think theology enrages Lewis-Williams and his fellow New Atheists, partly no doubt because they would prefer their enemies to be stupid, but chiefly because it assails their own sentimental ring-fencing: they zealously cherish their apprehensions of a pure, intention-free Darwinian universal story. Such a vision of the cosmos can be beautiful and spiritually consoling – it is, after all, a prospect of selflessness – and they long for nothing to disrupt it. Threatened, claustrophobically, by any reminder that the totality of experience is stained through and through with feeling and that large swathes of human behaviour make no sense without that acknowledgment, the atheists fire barrages of angry, distracting flak – witness Lewis-Williams’s specious claim that ‘supernaturalism inevitably leads to oppressive government’ – but they also, more reasonably, ask their assailants to spell out what character any creator of such a world as this could have.
That question forms the flipside of the scientific question that Lewis-Williams tries to answer – ‘Why are human beings typically religious?’ – and probably neither of them will ever get a wholly satisfying reply. Suppose I am lying very ill in a hospital ward. The viruses in my body and those dragging my neighbour to an agonising death, not to mention the cold pasta bake and the Daily Mail on my bedside tray: all these, by any intelligible theology, are either as God wills, or ‘in’ his nature somehow – he’s answerable for them, anyway. Suppose that, praying to God, I gain the strength to make an unlikely recovery; and suppose I then thank God for his mercy. If I do so, I do not assert that my neighbour failed to pray hard enough, nor that the hospital should now drop the forms of medical care that – in the staff’s view – enabled me to live. I simply claim that this is the minimal necessary story into which my own experience fits. My recovery is my chunk of ochre, my place to start. If my prayer of thanks for it could be recast as a statement, it might not exactly be refutable, but it would be patently incomplete and I would have no idea how to perfect it. Nonetheless, all causes and events most certainly form a single fabric, and seeking to live, trying to retain a conscious purchase on that unity, I implicitly state both that I stand dependent to it and that it is precious. There is a way to sing those statements: ‘God created me, and God is good,’ the voices go; though you may prefer to stand aside from the song.

LRB on Sonnets

2010-06-14T21:43:00.000-04:00

Toolkit for Tinkerers

Colin Burrow

The Art of the Sonnet by Stephen Burt and David Mikics. Harvard, 451 pp, £25.95, May 2010, ISBN 978 0 674 04814 0
Sonnets have no rival. They’ve been written about kingfishers, love, squirrels, the moon (too often), God, despair, more love, grief, exultation, time, decay, church bells beyond the stars heard, war, statues, castles, rivers, revolutionaries, architecture, madness, seascapes, letters, kisses, and more or less everything else from apocalypse to zoos. Since its invention in 13th-century Sicily the sonnet has been the most versatile and enduring of poetic forms. It has been pumped with inscape and instress by Gerard Manley Hopkins, filled with sentiment by Anna Seward, cut and pasted by Ted Berrigan (his 1964 Sonnets were apparently assembled with the help of the 1960s equivalent of a Pritt Stick), and worked into a tortuous frenzy by Michelangelo. Blank verse and the heroic couplet, the staples of English versification from the 16th to the 19th century, seem small-timers by comparison. Sestinas have come and gone. Ottava rima and rhyme royal had their day, but lost favour when readers ceased to want long poems which combined storytelling with epigrammatic cleverness. Even now, when set poetic forms are generally snarled or snored at, the sonnet is probably the only verse shape that almost all literate people would be able to identify, if only through having seen Shakespeare’s ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ printed in the order of service at weddings. Most people of a certain age could recite a sonnet or two by Wilfred Owen, or Keats, or Shakespeare.

read more How did this half-page filler, a half-pint form of a mere 14 lines, come to be so successful? From a reader’s point of view the answer is obvious. A sonnet is short enough not to get lost in but long enough to encompass at least one thought and probably a counter-thought too. They’re teachable and learnable. From a poet’s perspective the sonnet is a dream of organised flexibility, offering both liberties and bounds. For large portions of English literary history the word ‘sonnet’ could be used to describe more or less any short poem, but even the narrow definition favoured by the OED (‘14 decasyllabic lines, with rhymes arranged according to one or other of certain definite schemes’) allows for ingenious transformation. Fourteen is a good number to divide up. It can yield three quatrains and a couplet (the so-called Shakespearean sonnet, actually first used in the late Henrician period), or an octave and a sestet (the Petrarchan form, actually found as early as Dante), or even a set of seven couplets. Within each of these variations there may be further variations: do the quatrains hide a couplet within them (abba) or do they make up a couplet of rhymes (abab)? Should ‘a’ and ‘b’ rhymes dominate the octave, or can ‘c’ and ‘d’ jostle their way in too? The sonnet is a toolkit for tinkerers, and its formal flexibility can be matched by shifts and tricks in argument: poets who liked to turn things upside down could begin with a six-line rhymed unit (as Shelley did to evoke the topsy-turvy world of ‘England in 1819’), or use quatrain to refute quatrain, or break up the quatrains into couplets in quizzical dialogue with each other – as Alison Brackenbury does in her mischievous sonnet of 2004 called ‘Homework. Write a Sonnet. About Love?’
When poets have written about the sonnet they have tended to represent it as a small orderly space. Samuel Daniel is often quoted as having said: ‘is it not most delightful to see much excellently ordered in a small room?’ But he preceded that remark by commenting ‘especially seeing our passions are often without measure’, and potentially measureless freedoms also seem to come into poets’ minds when they think of the sonnet. That’s probably true even of Wordsworth’s declaration that ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room’ and that ‘’twas pastime to be bound/Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.’ As Leigh Hunt drily noted in The Book of the Sonnet (1867), ‘thousands of nuns, there is no doubt, have fretted horribly, and do fret.’ That surely was part of Wordsworth’s point: a sonnet is not just an orderly space, but one which contains a passion or a thought fretting to get out. And that’s why, throughout its history, the sonnet has appealed to people who think of themselves as innovators or modernists – as Petrarch, Sidney, Dante, Michelangelo and Shakespeare did, as well as more recent experimenters such as Hopkins, John Berryman or the sub-Prynnean Tony Lopez. Donne and Hopkins used sonnets as vehicles for religious anguish because it’s so easy to suggest that they’re buckling under pressure, that the spirit will not run true to the form, or to God. The sonnet has a structure that invites mild rebellion. Its formal restrictions suggest less the unfretful Mother Teresa than the Julie Andrews kind of nun, who might just want to rip off the wimple and sing.
Stephen Burt and David Mikics’s collection of 100 sonnets through the ages is heavily weighted towards poems from the 20th and 21st centuries, and also towards some occasionally groan-worthy American poems – though perhaps hearts less jaded than mine leap up at Emma Lazarus’s effusion on the Statue of Liberty (‘Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’). Many of the more recent poems in the collection fret at the discipline of the sonnet form, and several transform it into a vehicle for poetic liberty. At the more extreme end is Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’, which, with 14 half-rhymed or unrhymed lines of six syllables or fewer, looks like the left-hand half of a sonnet cracked down the middle. It begins ‘Caught – the bubble/in the spirit level’ and goes on ‘Freed – the broken/thermometer’s mercury’. It asks us to wonder if being captured is actually preferable to being freed: mercury cannot measure without a thermometer around it, nor can spirits level without a vial of glass; but mercury freed – quicksilver – is fun. For Bishop the word ‘sonnet’ suggests the benefits and costs of enclosing the amorphous within a fragile container. Amy Clampitt’s ‘The Cormorant in Its Element’ is more obedient, but it stages a natural rebellion by diving from the octave to the sestet with a hyphen, as the

cormorant astounding-
ly, in one sleek involuted arabesque, a vertical
turn on a dime, goes into that inimitable
vanishing-and-emerging-from-under-the-briny-deep act.

One reason sonnets have come to be thought of as the natural form of what we now call ‘lyric poetry’ is that they can imply stories, or gesture to wider truths which might be immanent in a simple daily action, like praying, grieving, cutting hay, watching birds or reading a letter. Sonnets have often been written in larger groups, or ‘sequences’ as they’re misleadingly called, which can make these larger ambitions apparent. Groups of sonnets do not form sequences in the sense that the numbers 3,6,9 do: they don’t follow one from another in a predictable order but work together to imply a personal history, or an argument. Individual sonnets within a sequence are not bound to fit in, and sometimes single poems or small groups of poems can suddenly hint at a different version of the story from that which seems to be related in the larger sequence – as the small number of sonnets about the supposed ‘Dark Lady’ in Shakespeare’s sequence appear to do.
This aspect of the sonnet began with Dante’s Vita Nuova of 1295, which mixes verse with prose in order to relate, part as allegory, part as fiction, his love for Beatrice and his sorrow at her death. Dante’s sonnets sometimes recapitulate the surrounding narrative and sometimes widen its emotional scope. Each is followed by a short critical analysis which explains how the poem divides into two or three sections. The sonnets are therefore ‘occasional’, but not in the simple sense of being occasioned by a particular moment. They’re lyric responses to the larger story from which they arise, but they’re also presented as works which might stand on their own: Dante gives each its own title as well as its own commentary. La Vita Nuova prompted Petrarch to write his Rime sparse, which in turn led scores of sonneteers throughout 16th-century Europe and beyond to adore their Lauras, Delias, Stellas and Cassandras. Dante made the sonnet a lyric form in which a whole situation, a life, perhaps even a civilisation could be embedded in 14 lines.
That legacy runs right through the sonnet tradition. It enables an individual sonnet to function as a synecdoche: a single sonnet is visibly small and partial, a mere sonetto, a shapely little suono or ‘sound’, but it is a part which may suggest a larger story. The Petrarchan tradition is often disparaged today (Burt and Mikics have little time for it), but Petrarch took the sonnet a step further than Dante, and not just by getting rid of prose narrative and making the ‘narrative’ links between the poems implicit rather than explicit. The Petrarchan lover represents being in love as an endless state of pining and yearning, but also hopes that he is part of a story (boy inches towards girl, or boy inches towards boy; girl dies, or boy leaves, or scorns the poet). That gives Petrarch’s sonnets a curious temporal status: they’re caught between telling a story and the endless process of loving. And the paradox of loving is that it can be at once a state of being and a particular act that testifies to that state – a declaration of passion, a statement of physical desire. That paradox shapes the Petrarchan tradition, in which the expression of love is an obsessively repeated act which strives to carry an eternity of loving within it. This has a number of consequences for the history of the sonnet. Most Petrarchan poets are afraid of being swamped by repetition, and of replicating Petrarch’s story. The worst do indeed repeat and self-replicate endlessly. But it also means that the Petrarchan love sonnet has a touch of what came to be thought of as the sublime: because it does not quite tell a story it seems always to be gesturing to something beyond itself, a love which is never either fully consummated or revealed, but which is grandly on the edges of vision, glimpsed only in parts, through individual and more or less defective sonnets.
The sonnet fell out of favour in England for around a century after Milton’s death in 1674. It’s probably fruitless to try to explain why this happened, since ‘causes’ in literary history are as chaotically multiple as those that underlie changes in fashion. People get bored of static intensity in short poems as they periodically tire of floral shirts. But there is something about the deliberate provisionality of the sonnet which makes it unimaginable that Alexander Pope should ever have written one, or that Ben Jonson (who wrote only six) would take them seriously. Milton’s abrasive political sonnets, prompting ‘the age to quit their clogs’, which used the form to make an urgent response to both personal and political events, may not have helped the status of the sonnet in the early 18th century either. The revival of the form in the final quarter of the 18th century, though, makes sense in ways that go beyond fashion. At around this time there was a new excitement about Shakespeare’s sonnets, which came to be read as confessional poems (Wordsworth was following a whole generation of commentators when he claimed that ‘With this key/Shakespeare unlock’d his heart’). There was also a growing interest in the sublime and in ruins. This was one of those uncanny moments in literary history when a later age both misreads what’s going on in earlier writing and recognises something in it that appears obvious once you have been taught to see it. Suddenly the sonnet seemed like the perfect vehicle for a small-scale personal meditation on bare ruined choirs, a modest form that could gesture towards sublime emotions.
In her Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), Anna Seward quoted a ‘Mr White’ from the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1786 who said ‘the style of the sonnet should be nervous, and, where the subject will with propriety bear elevation, sublime.’ Mary Robinson (described by Coleridge as ‘a woman of undoubted genius’, but perhaps too full of dim memories of Gray and Milton quite to deserve that praise) duly described the moon as ‘sublimely still, and beautifully pale!’ In ‘On Bamborough Castle’, William Lisle Bowles praises a sublime ruin in lines that shake up Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth with a dash of Mary Robinson:

Ye holy Towers that shade the wave-worn steep,
Long may ye rear your aged brows sublime,
Though, hurrying silent by, relentless Time
Assail you, and the winter whirlwind’s sweep!

Bowles, creaking though he now sounds, was a big influence on the sonnets of the major Romantic poets, which were generally written to stand on their own rather than in sequences, and which were often inspired by Miltonic vehemence as well as by a belief that Shakespearean sonnets revealed personal emotion; the love theme tends to drop out or be transformed. So Coleridge’s ‘Work without Hope’ (1825) adapts the commonplace of the Petrarchan tradition that the year renews and birds and bees fall in love while the speaker remains alone and unloved, a theme on which the Earl of Surrey (who had been freshly edited in 1815), among others, had composed variations. Coleridge, though, is not a frustrated lover but a frustrated poet, yearning to produce a larger artwork which lies beyond the scope of the poem and beyond the capacity of the poet: ‘Bloom, o ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,/For me ye bloom not!’ The sonnet had arrived as an apologia for a non-existent longer work, or as a testament to broken spiritual energy: as Hopkins put it (perhaps echoing Coleridge, perhaps Surrey), ‘birds build – but not I build.’
Poets continued to build in sonnets’ pretty rooms. Shelley could thunder against his times in a revival of Milton’s political sonnets, but he also wrote the sublime and seemingly fragmentary ‘Ozymandias’, which takes a broken work of art as a miniature token of a larger story about tyranny:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

A sonnet without a sequence is a part without a whole, and that is one reason ‘Ozymandias’ is so powerful. We see only a part of an artwork, ‘vast and trunkless legs of stone’ and ‘a shatter’d visage’. Around those fragments lie deserts of ‘lone and level sands’. A part can reverberate with the force of a whole, and can convey nostalgia, fear or excitement about the absence of that whole. Keats works in a similar way when he describes the ‘dizzy pain’ elicited by the Elgin Marbles, ‘That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude/Wasting of old Time – with a billowy main –/A sun – a shadow of a magnitude.’ ‘A shadow of a magnitude’ magnificently evokes a larger structure that isn’t there, and also suggests the curious power of the sonnet to evoke a larger lost form. Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, in the same vein, describes a headless statue that ‘holds fast and shines’ even though ‘We never knew his head and all the light/that ripened in his fabled eyes.’ The poem exploits the power that comes from seeing only a part of things; it ends with the abrupt order, ‘You must change your life,’ and the statue seems to generate a surplus of authority by being partly lost. Probably a poem which was not a sonnet could have done the same thing. But the post-Romantic sonnet, with its roots in a poetic of the sublime, and with its buried legacy of sequences that use single poems to articulate a larger story, is particularly well suited to create this kind of shock. A part has lost its whole, but gains from the loss.
This is not an easy or an entirely comfortable legacy, and 20th-century writers of sonnets have sometimes seemed to try too hard either to be like or to differentiate themselves from earlier exponents of the form. In this collection there are those like Tony Harrison who want to hector the sonnet into becoming anti-elitist; there are others like Forrest Gander who are perhaps too keen to see the form as just a set of rules to break. But there are some great recent poems here, several of which manage that distinctive sonnetish trick of describing a small occasion in a way that suggests an obscured larger history. Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’ turns a boundary dispute between Irish farmers into a Homeric encounter. Geoffrey Hill, the modern master of the sonnet as vehicle for embedded history, reflects on the idea of England in one of the sonnets from ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’ (not ‘Loss and Gain’, the one that Burt and Mikics include, but the even finer ‘The Laurel Axe’). The poem describes a single scene, but also alludes to the attitudes which enable one to notice that scene and which also perhaps distort or ‘romanticise’ it:

Platonic England, house of solitudes,
rests in its laurels and its injured stone,
replete with complex fortunes that are gone,
beset by dynasties of moods and clouds.

That quatrain weights every word with time (‘Platonic England’ is an allusion to Coleridge), but also with mythologies which inspire intimacy and mistrust. The line ‘replete with complex fortunes that are gone’ is dazzling, and it suggests why the sonnet is such a good form in which to explore English histories and church histories in particular. It’s not just that Donne and Herbert wrote sonnets; rather the sonnet has become a short space that can be filled with time, ‘replete with complex fortunes that are gone’. A ‘house of solitudes’ (and sonnets are often figured as protective enclosures, a pretty room, a cell) that ‘rests in its laurels’ is not just like a great house surrounded by a laurel hedge: the phrase suggests something resting on its laurels, near to ruin.
Because sonnets tend to imply so much and say so relatively little they have always generated commentary: Dante’s came complete with their author’s notes, Petrarch’s were repeatedly worked over by more or less pedantic editors, and Michelangelo’s were first printed accompanied by a thick layer of neo-Platonist commentary. Shakespeare’s have been picked over at great length by Edmund Malone, Helen Vendler, Stephen Booth and so many others, while the fearsome poet (though no sonneteer) J.H. Prynne has produced a whole volume of commentary on the single Sonnet 94 (‘They that have power to hurt’). Commentary on sonnets is particularly hard to write, because it can end up filling in the gaps which really need to remain gaps if the poem is to retain its power – to imply, as it were, that we need to see and know the whole of the Elgin Marbles in order to understand what Keats is on about when he enthuses over their fragments. Burt and Mikics write two or three pages about each of their poems, and mostly these are clear and patient guides to rhythm and form, allusions, their relations to the lives of their authors. Sometimes they sound a little like patient teachers doing the diligence (or mostly doing the diligence, since there are a couple of howlers: the course of English poetry might have been rather different if the Earl of Surrey had lived to become ‘a proud Elizabethan nobleman’, rather than being executed in 1547, 11 years before Elizabeth’s accession). Often, though (and particularly in the commentaries signed by Burt), they say just the right thing to make their readers turn back to the poems. Since the editors regard the sonnet as ‘a shape where strong emotion might make sense’, they tend to position each poem on an axis that runs fairly smoothly from formalism to autobiography. They are of their age in doing so, but it means that they don’t always recognise how the sonnet can function as a symbolic fragment which obliquely alludes to larger narratives.

Poem du jour

2010-06-11T22:59:00.001-04:00

First Glance

by BEN WILKINSON

Like that, the sudden hell-bent flap
of a pigeon at the window -
as if livid, bothered

by my lifting some slim volume
from a shelf,
rather than half-trapped,

taking glass for air
and flailing against a trick
of the light as much as itself,

reminds me of that time I saw
what I thought was you
(before I truly knew you)

kissing someone else,
only to find you, minutes later,
strolling up the street I was traipsing down.

TLS on Death

2010-06-09T22:54:00.000-04:00

on Death

My future me

by THOMAS NAGEL

a review of Mark Johnston's SURVIVING DEATH
416pp. Princeton University Press. £24.95 (US $35). 978 0 691 13012 5

If your existence depends on the life of a particular human being, you will vanish when that creature dies: the centre of consciousness that is now reading the TLS will be annihilated, and the universe will close over you. In Surviving Death, an ambitious and quixotic book, Mark Johnston shows a deep understanding of the natural fear of death and rejects a number of traditional religious and philosophical accounts of how we might survive it. He then offers his own explanation of how, even if one assumes a naturalistic world-view, surviving our own biological death might be theoretically possible. But the hope of survival he offers, apart from its philosophical implausibility, is one which neither the author nor his readers have a significant chance of achieving. So the book offers little comfort; but it is stimulating, written with skill and charm, and packed with illuminating philosophical reflection on the question of what we are, and what it is for us to persist over time - on the relations among selves, persons, human beings, bodies and souls.
What is it you care about, if you don't want to die? Not the survival of a particular organism, as such. The survival of that human animal concerns you because it is a condition of your continuing existence; if you could survive its death, then even though you might miss the old jalopy, the worst would be averted. But can we give sense, and perhaps even credence, to this possibility? Most of us can easily imagine waking up on the Day of Judgment, or being reincarnated as someone else, but perhaps that is just a trick of the imagination, a projection of the self that corresponds to no real possibility.
read more Johnston is moved in this inquiry not only by the pure wish to survive, but by another wish that seems to require survival for its fulfilment: the wish that goodness should be rewarded. Those who are good are not good for the sake of reward, but if great sacrifice in the name of the good is not rewarded, Johnston believes, the importance and even the rationality of goodness are threatened. He concludes, like Kant, that faith in the importance of goodness requires hope of reward in an afterlife. I have no sympathy for this view, because I believe that the reasons to be good are self-sufficient, even if they require sacrifice. But Johnston's conviction leads him to seek a demonstration that death is better for the good than for the bad, and that will be the key to his analysis of survival.
First, however, he has to dispose of the considerable array of alternative theories. These fall into three types: immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, and psychological continuity. Johnston rejects each of them as a way we might survive death, for different reasons, and his arguments constitute an excellent tour of the territory of theological and philosophical theories of personal identity. He says that there is no evidence against the naturalistic view that nothing but a properly functioning brain is necessary for conscious mental life; in particular, psychical research has turned up no credible evidence for a detachable soul. He argues on subtle metaphysical grounds that even a body just like yours, reassembled by God at the Day of Judgment out of the same atoms that constituted your body shortly before your death, would not be the same body. And he maintains that, though we care about the continuation of our memories and personalities, such psychological continuity alone is not enough to guarantee that a future psychological replica will be you.
Though the issues are far from settled, Johnston makes a good case for the view that none of these three forms of survival is available. His weakest argument is that even if you had an immaterial soul, that would not justify your special concern for its future, since everyone else would also have such a soul - to which the reply is that your soul's future experiences are the only ones that would be yours. Suppose, however, that we concur with Johnston in setting aside these three types of account; what is the alternative?
To decide whether surviving death is possible, we need to know what would make a future experience mine. One of Johnston's important and plausible claims is that we cannot discover this by a priori reflection on what to say about various possible cases, because our concept of personal identity does not work that way. Instead, it operates by "offloading" the conditions of identity on to the real nature of certain actual persisting things - human animals, in our own case - which we reidentify only by their manifest properties. As he puts it: "The idea of offloading can be expressed by means of a motto, 'I don't know what the (non-trivial) sufficient conditions for identity over time are, but I do know a persisting object when I see one'". This phenomenon of offloading is familiar from the case of "natural kinds" like water or gold, whose real essences can't be discovered by a priori reflection on our concepts, but require empirical investigation.
We can offload the criteria for identity over time by referring to what metaphysicians call a substance, that is, "something whose present manifestation determines what it would be to have that very same thing again". Living things are the clearest examples of substances, in virtue of their active disposition to maintain themselves over time. To determine personal identity - identity of the self - we offload on to persisting human beings, a class of living things that we regard as possessing embodied minds. And now that we have learnt about the dependence of mental life more specifically on the operation of the brain, we add that if a brain could be kept alive without its body, it would continue to embody the same mind. This seems to imply that the true conditions of personal identity are determined by how mental life is generated in the brain, and it seems to rule out decisively any possibility that we might survive biological death. I think that is the correct conclusion. Johnston, however, believes he can escape it.
To do so, however, he must dismantle the ordinary idea of the persisting self, an idea he evokes vividly as follows: "The most immediate way in which I am given to myself is as the one at the center of this arena of presence and action". This is the subjective sense of "I", and it is this subjective I for whose interests he has an immediate, absorbing concern, and whose death he finds terrifying. "My sheer desire to survive may feed a desire that Johnston survive, but it is not itself a desire that Johnston survive. It is the desire that there will continue to be someone with the property of being me." The crux of Johnston's argument is that there is no such property - or none that could justify the special future-directed self-concern to which it is supposed to give guidance. The way the world is, independent of our attitudes, does not determine what it would be for this same arena of presence and action to exist at a later time.
Johnston denies (unconvincingly, I believe) that this subjective sameness can be secured by offloading on to the persistence conditions of the particular human being who occupies this arena of presence and action at the present moment. Instead, he claims that the self is a merely intentional object, whose identity is not an objective matter, but depends on what the subject takes it to be. Like the dagger that Macbeth imagines, its re-identification at different times is wholly determined by how the subject sees it. Johnston's relativism about personal identity is a radical inversion of the traditional dependence of your future-directed concerns on your belief about who will be you. He contends that personal identity is "responsedependent": it is the disposition of your future-directed concerns that determines who will be you, instead of the other way around.
To introduce this idea, Johnston imagines three tribes of human animals, whom he calls Hibernators, Teletransporters and Humans. The Hibernators fall into a deep sleep during the winter months, and they do not regard the person who will wake up in the spring in their body, with their memories and personality, as being numerically the same person as they are; they do not believe they survive dreamless sleep. The Teletransporters, on the other hand, are accustomed to superfast travel of the kind familiar from science fiction. They step into a machine that takes a complete reading of the microconstitution of their body, destroys the body and sends the information at the speed of light to a target machine at the destination, where a body physically and mentally indistinguishable from the original is produced from local materials. The Teletransporters believe they survive these trips, and unproblematically regard the person who will step out of the target machine as themselves. Finally, the Humans believe that they survive dreamless sleep and don't believe they would survive teleportation: they wouldn't get into one of those machines for a million pounds. In each case, the conviction is immediate and shows itself in unreflective patterns of special future-directed concern.
Johnston says that the Hibernators, Teletransporters and Humans are all right, each on their own terms. There is no objective fact that could make one belief right and the others wrong. Identity is response-dependent, and it is the disposition to identify with some future person deeply and consistently - to care about what happens to him or her in the first-person way - that constitutes the identity-determining disposition.
And here is the punchline: You can survive the biological death of the human being who is now at the centre of your arena of presence and action, if you develop a disposition of future-directed concern for all of the human beings who will exist after he is gone - if, in other words, you become someone who literally loves your posterity as yourself. But once the independent reality of the self is recognized as an illusion, this becomes the rational attitude to take: "If there is no persisting self worth caring about, the premium or excess that special self-concern expects and rejoices in cannot represent a reasonable demand or expectation . . . . One's own interests are not worth considering because they are one's own but simply because they are interests, and interests, wherever they arise and are legitimate, are equally worthy of consideration".
Therefore agape, the universal love that is the Christian ideal of goodness, brings with it its own reward, for those who can attain it. Persons are protean: a single person may be constituted by one human being, or by a series of human beings, or even by a huge crowd of human beings, "the onward rush of humanity", depending on which interests he is immediately disposed to incorporate into his practical outlook. Johnston's theory vindicates the importance of goodness by making absolute goodness the condition of continued life.
This form of survival through extreme selflessness would require a transformation that is out of the reach of almost everyone, and in any case not subject to the will. Johnston adds, though, that even if we cannot attain this perfect goodness, it is important to transcend natural selfishness and nepotism in a more familiar way, by recognizing that everyone's interests have the same importance as our own. Even if we cannot be truly good, we can become "good enough", not to survive death but to "face death down, to see through it to a pleasing future in which individual personalities flourish . . . . For the utterly selfish, however, the obliteration of their individual personalities is the obliteration of everything of real importance to them". But this is a familiar point, and does not cancel the absoluteness of one's own death.
To accept Johnston's theory that identity is relative, that persons are protean, and that we could survive death by coming to identify with future human beings, would require at least as large a dose of wishful thinking as belief in the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body. It seems far more likely that the world, in particular the facts about how the brain sustains the mind, determines what we are, even though those facts are still largely unknown. Johnston's scepticism about a purely mental substance as the carrier of personal identity is reasonable, but the familiar, and alas perishable human animal is harder to dislodge from its decisive control over our fate.

NYT on Marriage

2010-06-09T14:39:00.002-04:00

What Brain Scans Can Tell Us About Marriage

By TARA PARKER-POPE

THE sudden breakup of Al and Tipper Gore’s seemingly idyllic marriage was the latest and among the sharpest reminders that the only two people who know what’s going on in a marriage are the two people who are in it.
The truth is that most marriages, even our own, are something of a mystery to outsiders. Several years ago, a marriage researcher — Robert W. Levenson, director of the psychophysiology laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley — and his colleagues produced a video of 10 couples talking and bickering. Dr. Levenson knew at the time that five of the couples had been in troubled relationships and eventually divorced. He showed the video to 200 people, including pastors, marriage therapists and relationship scientists, asking them to spot the doomed marriages. They guessed wrong half the time. “People on the outside aren’t very good at telling how marriages are really working,” he said.
Even so, academic researchers have become increasingly fascinated with the inner workings of long-married couples, subjecting them to a battery of laboratory tests and even brain scans to unravel the mystery of lasting love. Bianca Acevedo, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studies the neuroscience of relationships and began a search for long-married couples who were still madly in love. Through a phone survey, she collected data on 274 men and women in committed relationships, and used relationship scales to measure marital happiness and passionate love.
read more Dr. Acevedo expected to find only a small percentage of long-married couples still passionately in love. To her surprise, about 40 percent of them continued to register high on the romance scale. The remaining 60 percent weren’t necessarily unhappy. Many had high levels of relationship satisfaction and were still in love, just not so intensely.
In a separate study, 17 men and women who were passionately in love agreed to undergo scans to determine what lasting romantic love looks like in the brain. The subjects, who had been married an average of about 21 years, viewed a picture of their spouse. As a control, they also viewed photos of two friends.
Compared with the reaction when looking at others, seeing the spouse activated parts of the brain associated with romantic love, much as it did when couples who had just fallen in love took the same test. But in the older couples, researchers spotted something extra: parts of the brain associated with deep attachment were also activated, suggesting that contentment in marriage and passion in marriage aren’t mutually exclusive.
“They have the feelings of euphoria, but also the feelings of calm and security that we feel when we’re attached to somebody,” Dr. Acevedo said. “I think it’s wonderful news.”
So how do these older couples keep the fires burning? Beyond the brain scans, it was clear that these couples remained active in each other’s lives.
“They were still very much in love and engaged in the relationship,” Dr. Acevedo said. “That’s something that seems different from the Gores, who said they had grown apart.”
Indeed, if there is a lesson from the Gore breakup, it’s that with marriage, you’re never done working on it.
“It’s not that you have to be constantly scared about your relationship, but you do have to renew it,” said Stephanie Coontz, a marriage historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. “I think the warning we should take from this is not that marriages are doomed, but that you can’t skate indefinitely and be doing different things and not really be paying attention to the marriage itself.”
Research from Stony Brook University in New York suggests that couples who regularly do new and different things together are happier than those who repeat the same old habits. The theory is that new experiences activate the dopamine system and mimic the brain chemistry of early romantic love.
In a new study, the Stony Brook scientists will have couples playing either a mundane or exciting video game together while their brains are being scanned.. The goal is to see how sharing a new and challenging experience with a spouse changes the neural activation of the brain.
But for those of us without a brain scanner, there are simple ways to find out if your relationship is growing or vexed by boredom. Among the questions to ask yourself: How much does your partner provide a source of exciting experiences? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? In the last month, how often did you feel that your marriage was in a rut?
If the answers aren’t exactly what you hoped for, take heart. From a statistical standpoint, your risk for divorce begins to fall once you’ve passed the 10-year mark. According to Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, recent Census Bureau data show that only about 4 percent of recently ended marriages involved couples married for 40 years or more.
And it’s worth noting that the Gores married in 1970s, the beginning of a generation of couples that has consistently struggled with marriage more than any other group. Dr. Stevenson calls them the “greatest divorcing generation.”
Lost in the discussion about the Gore divorce is the inherent optimism that the decision represents. Professor Coontz recalls living next door to a couple in their 70s who disliked each other so much that during the summer, they sat outside in lawn chairs on the opposite sides of the house. “I think it’s good that people can go ahead and start over before they get to that level of anger and hostility,” she said.
Dr. Stevenson called the Gore breakup a “glass-half-full story.”
“They had 40 years of marriage, and they had what, by many dimensions, should be considered a successful marriage,” she said. “The fact that they both can look forward and see a promising future by not being married — it’s unfortunate that the answer is ‘yes,’ but it’s also somewhat a celebration about how much optimism they have for the rest of their lives.”

Tara Parker-Pope writes the Well column for The New York Times and is the author of “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage,” which was released last month by Dutton.

Listening to Bajka

2010-06-09T00:29:00.000-04:00

2010

The Economist on Birds and Bees

2010-06-08T23:17:00.000-04:00

Sex hormones

For the birds

What regulates the lengths of human fingers?

Jun 10th 2010

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours

FROM financial traders’ propensity to make risky decisions to badly behaved schoolboys’ claims to be suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, testosterone makes a perfect scapegoat. In both of these cases, and others, many researchers reckon that the underlying cause is exposure to too much of that male hormone in the womb. Positive effects are claimed, too. Top-flight female football players and successful male musicians may also have fetal testosterone exposure to thank for their lot in life.

Yet the evidence that it is exposure in utero to testosterone that causes all these things relies on a shaky chain of causation. What these people actually share is a tendency for their ring fingers to be longer than their index fingers. This peculiarity of anatomy is often ascribed to fetal testosterone exposure because it is common in men and much rarer in women, and because there seems to be a correlation between the point in gestation when it appears and surges of testosterone in the womb. But the link has never been proved decisively. It has, rather, just become accepted wisdom.

Research carried out on birds now suggests that the accepted wisdom could be wrong. In their study of the feet of zebra finches published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Wolfgang Forstmeier and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, conclude that oestrogen—the hormone of femininity—rather than testosterone, may be to blame.

Although it is well over 300m years since people and finches had a common ancestor, the basic vertebrate body plan is the same in both. So, a few years ago Dr Forstmeier, an expert on finch behaviour, wondered if the link between digit ratio and behaviour might show up in his animals, too.

It did. The ratio between a zebra finch’s second and fourth digits (which are not fingers but toes in birds) is associated with more courtship songs by males and fewer flirtatious hops by females—in other words with more masculine behaviour, regardless of the sex of the individual.

Dr Forstmeier probed the matter further. He has been investigating the birds’ oestrogen and androgen receptors—molecules that respond to female and male hormones, respectively.

Zebra crossing

The receptors in question orchestrate both behavioural and physical development, including some types of bone growth, in many vertebrate species. Different versions of a receptor (encoded by genes that have slightly different DNA sequences) can be more or less sensitive to the appropriate hormone. That led Dr Forstmeier to ask whether the type of hormone receptor a bird has influences its digit ratio, its sexual behaviour or both.

To find out, he looked for correlations between genes, ratios and behaviour in more than 1,100 zebra finches. Surprisingly, in view of the working assumption about humans, the type of testosterone receptor that a bird had proved to be irrelevant. Its oestrogen-receptor variant, however, had a significant impact on both digit ratio and courtship behaviour. This suggests that the sorts of predispositions that in people are blamed on fetal testosterone are caused in birds by fetal oestrogen (or, rather, the response to it).

That does not, of course, mean the same thing is true in people: 300m years is quite a long time for differences to emerge. It is also true that the digit-ratio that predicts male-like behaviour in birds is the opposite of the one found in humans (ie, the second digit, rather than the fourth, is the longer of the two). But it does suggest that it would be worth double-checking. Though science likes to think of itself as rational, it is just as prone to fads and assumptions as any other human activity. That, plus the fact that most scientists are men, may have led to some lazy thinking about which hormone is more likely to control gender-related behaviour. Just possibly, the trader’s finger should be pointing at oestrogen, not testosterone.

Science and Technology

Poem du jour

2010-06-07T22:29:00.000-04:00

A Maxim

by Carl Dennis

To live each day as if it might be the last
Is an injunction that Marcus Aurelius
Inscribes in his journal to remind himself
That he, too, however privileged, is mortal,
That whatever bounty is destined to reach him
Has reached him already, many times.
But if you take his maxim too literally
And devote your mornings to tinkering with your will,
Your afternoons and evenings to saying farewell
To friends and family, you’ll come to regret it.
Soon your lawyer won’t fit you into his schedule.
Soon your dear ones will hide in a closet
When they hear your heavy step on the porch.
And then your house will slide into disrepair.
If this is my last day, you’ll say to yourself,
Why waste time sealing drafts in the window frames
Or cleaning gutters or patching the driveway?
If you don’t want your heirs to curse the day
You first opened Marcus’s journals,
Take him simply to mean you should find an hour
Each day to pay a debt or forgive one,
Or write a letter of thanks or apology.
No shame in leaving behind some evidence
You were hoping to live beyond the moment.
No shame in a ticket to a concert seven months off,
Or, better yet, two tickets, as if you were hoping
To meet by then someone who’d love to join you,
Two seats near the front so you catch each note.

Sally Mann's Kids

2010-06-07T10:03:00.001-04:00

Sally Man

View more presentations from blindlibrarian.

Vision étrange : dans les rues de Lausanne, des affiches vantent une exposition à voir dans la ville. La photo en noir et blanc représente une fillette de 10 ans, de biais, les mains jointes vers le ciel, et qui nous regarde. Elle est nue. Photo innocente. Mais depuis quelques années, il est difficile de ne pas rapprocher le sujet de la pédophilie.
L’auteur de l’image s’appelle SallyMann. Cette belle Américaine aux yeux verts, 59 ans le 1ermai, vit avec son mari dans une ferme perdue de Virginie. Elle a droit, jusqu’au 6 juin, à une rétrospective au Musée de l’Elysée, belle demeure bourgeoise qui domine le lac Léman. La première salle de son exposition, d’où est extraite la photo de l’affiche, a pour titre «Immediate Family». Elle réunit des photos prises entre1984 et 1991, de ses enfants qu’elle regarde grandir – ses filles Jessie et Virginia, son fils Emmett.
read more Ce ne sont pas des instantanés mais des mises en scène lentes, réalisées avec une lourde chambre photographique en bois, sur pied. C’est l’été, il fait chaud. Les enfants sont souvent nus, ils plongent ou émergent de l’eau. Les tirages sont habités, les poses évoquent l’iconographie religieuse, mais aussi la sexualité en fouie chez l’enfant, qui pose lascivement, suggère la femme, comme ce portrait de Jessie, à 10 ans,une cigarette à la main.Ilya un côté mystique, écolo, comme un retour à la terre, un mariage intemporel et paradisiaque entre les corps et la nature.
Avec cette série, Sally Mann obtient une notoriété internationale, à la fin des années 1980. Les photos sont publiées, exposées, vendues en galerie à des prix confortables. Un livre, en 1992,aux éditions Aperture, devient un best-seller.
Mais c’est aussi avec cette série que Sally Mann tutoie l’enfer. Dès le milieu des années 1990, plusieurs photographes reconnus, montrant des enfants nus, sont inquiétés, aux Etats-Unis surtout: interdiction d’expositions, dénonciation dans la presse, pages arrachées dans des livres en vente, perquisitions, ordinateurs examinés, visites de policiers, procès…
Ce qui était jugé innocent est désormais rapproché de la pédophilie. Les images sont les mêmes, mais le regard porté dessus a fortement évolué. Sally Mann a senti le vent tourner et pris les devants : avec mari et enfants, elle a rendu visite au FBI pour jurer de son innocence, faire témoigner ses filles.
Aux policiers, elle a dit en substance: «Mes enfants vont très bien, je suis une bonne mère.» Elle évoque tout ce la dans un film documentaire qui lui est consacré, What Remains (2005), de Steven Cantor, projeté au Musée de l’Elysée. Ses enfants, aujourd’hui adultes, parlent dans le film, défendant leur mère – Jessie est devenue modèle pour des photographes.
On sent dans le film que la douleur reste présente chez Sally Mann. Le sujet larattrape toujours. Car c’est sa meilleure série, la plus demandée. Elle n’a pas voulu figurer dans l’exposition «Controverses », qui réunissait des photos ayant fait débat ou scandale dans l’histoire, présentée ici même en 2008, puis à la Bibliothèque nationale de France en 2009. «Elle a refusé parce qu’elle a trop souffert », nous expliquait Daniel Girardin, qui a conçu l’exposition.
SallyMann ne renie pas ces photos, mais prend des précautions.
C’est elle qui a constitué l’exposition, écartant les images les plus suggestives, publiées dans ses livres. Elle a refusé que la fillette à la cigarette figure sur le carton d’invitation et l’affiche. «Elle est compliquée », dit Nathalie Herschdorfer, en charge de l’exposition. «J’ai eu tellement d’histoires avec ça…», lui a-t-elle dit.
Et ce n’est pas fini. A LaHaye, où l’exposition a été présentée avant Lausanne, de septembre 2009 à janvier, la police a rendu visite au directeur du Fotomuseum, à la suite d’une plainte. A Lausanne, quelques affiches ont été taguées, et le musée n’a pu trouver de sponsors pour cette exposition. L’association Terre des hommes a envoyé au musée une lettre dénonçant la présence d’une fillette sur une affiche à des fins de marketing. Sur une radio, un invité a jugé scandaleuse la pose d’enfants aguicheurs. Dans le livre d’or, parmi des phrases élogieuses, un visiteur a écrit :«Certaines images m’ont un peu choqué.» Et un autre: «Une psychopathe qui exhibe ses propres enfants.»
Il y a une autre douleur chez Sally Mann. Le monde muséal de la photographie goûte peu ses photos parce qu’il les trouve trop classiques, décoratives, «cartes postales». L’artiste a en revanche du succès auprès du gand public. «Nous attendons 20000 personnes jusqu’au 6 juin, ce qui serait notre meilleur résultat depuis des années », dit William Ewing, le directeur du Musée de l’Elysée. Sally Mann est aussi représentée par des galeries prestigieuses, Pace MacGill ou Gagosian, mais qui ne vendent pas la partie sulfureuse de son oeuvre.
Après les photos d’enfants, Sally Mann, grande amie du peintre Cy Twombly, achangé d’air et de registre, en photographiant des paysages. Des photos hyperclassiques, presque passéistes. Puis elle est retournée vers d’autres enfers: des photos des os de son lévrier mort, d’autres de corps humains en décomposition, et maintenant, son mari, atteint d’une maladie génétique incurable, qu’elle photographie nu.
Michel Guerrin

Wordpress [slideshare id=11929&doc=sally-man-19152]

Le Monde: Mithra

2010-06-06T14:03:00.001-04:00

Mithra

Un culte réservé à une élite militaire

LE TEMPLE de Mithra mis au jour à Angers (Maine-et-Loire) contient des éléments dont les chercheurs ignorent la fonction.Comme ce vase représentant un cerf, dont le museau, percé de trois orifices faisait office de verseur.D’un type inconnu, cette céramique du IVe siècle de notre ère avait-elle une fonction rituelle particulière? «Le mithraïsme est un culte initiatique marqué par le secret qui n’a pas laissé de documentation écrite, explique l’historien et archéologue Christian Goudineau (Collège de France). Nous n’en savons que peu de choses, soit par l’iconographie, soit par les écrits que nous ont laissés des auteurs qui étaient en général assez hostiles aumithraïsme.»
Le nom de Mithra est cité dans l’Avesta, l’ensemble des textes sacrés de l’antique religion iranienne. Les plus anciens d’entre eux datent vraisemblablement de l’an mil avant notre ère. Mais le succès de ce dieu oriental dans l’Empire romain est beaucoup plus tardif. Il remonte, selon Plutarque, au Ier siècle avant J.-C.et à la campagne menée par le général Pompée contre les pirates de Cilicie (sud-est de l’Asie mineure).

Click the image to read the article in PDF format

Dieu solaire et martial

Par le truchement de ces derniers, parfois fervents adeptes de Mithra, le culte de ce dieu solaire et martial, souvent représenté terrassant le taureau, se serait propagé dans l’armée de Rome, puis au sein de l’administration impériale.De fait, les vestiges des temples dédiés à Mithra sont souvent découverts non loin des casernes – dans les vallées du Rhin et du Danube notamment. Le mithraïsme connaît son apogée dans l’Empire romain aux IIe et IIIe siècles, sous une forme romanisée qui n’a sans doute plus grand-chose à voir avec sa version iranienne.
Religion secrète, réservée à une élite sociale et militaire masculine, sa diffusion dans tout l’empire n’a pas suffi à assurer sa pérennité. Paradoxe: le christianisme, fondé sur l’amour de son prochain et la tolérance, n’a laissé aucune chance à ce culte martial célébrant un dieu présumé pourtant par ses fidèles toujours «invaincu»…
read more

Un dieu iranien à Angers

Les archéologues le savent bien: les plus belles découvertes ne sont pas forcément les plus spectaculaires. Ainsi, de ces modestes 70m2 qui viennent d’être dégagés sur un chantier de fouilles préventives ouvert au coeur d’Angers (Maine-et-Loire), sur le site de l’ancienne clinique Saint-Louis, destinée à laisser bientôt place à un ensemble de logements. La découverte, qualifiée d’«exceptionnelle » par l’archéologue et historien Christian Goudineau (Collège de France), est celle d’un petit temple daté des premiers siècles de l’ère chrétienne et dédié…
au dieu Mithra. Seuls une dizaine de tels lieuxdeculteontjusqu’à présent été identifiés sur le territoire français.
Un sanctuaire voué à une divinité solaire iranienne dans le centre de la capitale angevine? Pourle néophyte, cette mise au jour semble d’autant plus incongrue que le culte de Mithra s’enracine aussi loin d’Angers que du début de l’ère chrétienne: il naît sur le plateau iranien, sans doute au IIe millénaire avant notre ère. Ce mithraeum témoignes implement du succèsde quelques religions orientales dans l’Empire romain. Celles-ci se sont livrées une âpre compétition au terme de laquelle une seule – célébrant un jeune Judéen mort en croix – a durablement émergé.
Le mithraeum d’Angers est daté du début du IIIe siècle après J.-C. Il était installé au coeur d’un quartier urbain huppé, comme en témoignent les deux domus et le système de voirie partiellement dégagés par les archéologues de l’Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (Inrap) sur les quelque 4600m2 du chantier. En outre, les fouilles montrent que cette partie d’Angers était déjà occupée sous l’empereur Auguste, au tout début de l’ère chrétienne.
«La ville augustéenne est donc bien plus étendue que nous ne le pensions jusqu’ici», it l’archéologue Jean Brodeur(Inrap), responsable de la fouille. Quant au mithraeum, «c’est une grande pièce encavée qui devait se situer sous une riche demeure»: «On peut penser que son propriétaire était un adepte du mithraïsme et qu’il a aménagé en lieu de culte une partie de sa maison, précise-t-il. Nous avons d’ailleurs retrouvé le soupirail qui donnait sur l’extérieur, preuve du caractère souterrain de cet espace.» Cette caractéristique est attendue : le culte de Mithra s’exerçait en secret, en des lieux figurant la grotte où, selon la tradition, le dieu naquit d’un rocher.
Manque cependant un détail. «On sait que le plafond d’un mithraeum représente généralement un ciel étoilé, mais ce détail semble absent ici puisqu’on n’a pas retrouvé de débris d’enduit peint», dit M.Brodeur. Il est toutefois possible que cet élément du décor « ait été réalisé grâce à une simple étoffe», note M.Goudineau.
Auquel cas il n’en demeure rien. Pour le reste, tout y est. L’organisation du sanctuaire est analogue à celle, caractéristique, de la centaine de mithraea connus, de Memphis (Egypte) à Rudchester (Royaume-Uni) et de Garni (Arménie) à Troia (Portugal). Le plan est rectangulaire. Deux banquettes maçonnées de 7mètres de long, disposées de chaque côté de la pièce, permettaient aux fidèles de participer, allongés, aux banquets cultuels.
L’élément déterminant dans l’identification du mithraeuma été la découverte, mi-mars, d’un petit vase votif. C’est un petit gobelet à boire inscrit d’une dédicace à «Mithra, le dieu invaincu».
Par chance, l’objet est bien conservé et le nom de son commanditaire nous est parvenu : il s’agit du « citoyen Genialis ». «Nous pouvons déterminer que cette céramique, datée entre 160 et 230 de notre ère, a été cuite après que la dédicace y a été inscrite, ce qui signifie qu’il s’agit d’un objet commandé pour être dédié au dieu, dit Maxime Mortreau, céramologue à l’Inrap.
Nous savons aussi qu’elle provient des ateliers de Lezoux, près de Clermont-Ferrand.» Une bribe de mot(«amb…») placée après le nom de Genialis offre une autre indication : le commanditaire du vase ne résidait sans doute pas à Angers, mais peut être était-il ambien, c’est-à-dire de la région d’Amiens.
Le petit vase raconte ainsi l’histoire d’un mithraïste du IIIe siècle de notre ère, peut-être parti d’Amiens pour parcourir les 600km qui le séparent des ateliers réputés de la région de Lezoux. Là, il fait réaliser sans doute plusieurs éléments de vaisselle, dont ce vase dédié à son dieu.
Puis il repart, parcourt encore 500km pour rejoindre le mithraeum d’Angers et y faire son offrande. Avant, imagine-t-on, de retourner chez lui au terme d’un périple de plusieurs mois…
D’autres éléments mis au jour dans le mithraeum ont validé l’interprétation des chercheurs. Des dalles en marbre suggèrent que cette grande cave n’était pas destinée à un usage purement domestique ; des fragments de lampes à huile jadis montées sur un lustre, dont là encore les
archéologues découvrent les restes ; des centaines de monnaies, elles aussi offertes au dieu; la tête, très abîmée, d’une statue à l’effigie de Mithra, identifiable au bonnet phrygien qu’il arbore dans nombre de ses représentations. De la statue, qui devait mesurer 1,20 mètre environ, les
fouilleurs trouvent également le socle. Enfin, des ossements de coq, retrouvés en nombre dans les abords immédiats du mithraeum, suggèrent que le sacrifice rituel du taureau, courant dans le mithraïsme, avait ici été, sans doute, remplacé par celui du volatile.
Ces vestiges racontent eux aussi une histoire. Celle d’une interruption soudaine et brutale du culte. «Le visage de la statue a été martelé intentionnellement, dans un acte iconoclaste très violent », raconte M.Brodeur. Des traces d’incendie sont également présentes. Quant aux plus tardives des monnaies retrouvées sur place, elles datent de 392 de notre ère, précisément la date à laquelle l’empereur Théodose interdit les cultes païens dans l’Empire. Jean Brodeur rappelle que la fermeture de ces temples ne s’est pas toujours faite dans une parfaite concorde.
La documentation historique fait par exemple de l’évêque saint Maurille d’Angers, au Ve siècle de notre ère,un féroce détracteur de tous les paganismes: il fit notamment détruire un sanctuaire païen à Chalonnes-sur-Loire (Maine-et-Loire) pour y bâtir une église… Le mithraeum d’Angers fut détruit peut-être selon le même scénario.
Retrouvé 1618 ans plus tard, il devrait bientôt subir une dernière ruine. Les archéologues remettront les clés du terrain à l’aménageur fin août, après dix mois de fouilles.Le béton devrait commencer à couler dès la fin de l’année. A moins qu’une procédure exceptionnelle ne soit mise en oeuvre pour épargner cette petite enclave orientale au coeur de l’Anjou.

Listening to Dani

2010-06-06T13:30:00.000-04:00

2010

The Economist on Papua

2010-06-05T22:40:00.002-04:00

Papua

Indonesia's last frontier

Indonesia is a democracy. But many Papuans do not want to be part of it

Jun 3rd 2010 | TIMIKA

THE hotel provides free mosquito repellent and closes its pool bar before dusk to prevent guests from contracting malaria. The former Sheraton still offers the best accommodation in Indonesia’s little-visited province of Papua, catering mainly to employees of its owner, Freeport-McMoRan, an American mining giant. Freeport protects its staff from more than malaria. Since July 2009 a spate of mysterious shootings along the road linking the hotel in Timika to the huge Grasberg mine up in the mountains has killed one employee, a security guard and a policeman and wounded scores of others. Workers are now shuttled from Timika to the mine by helicopter.

Before the pool bar closes, a jolly crowd of Freeport employees have their beers stored in a cool box. They take it to one of the—mostly dry—seafood restaurants in town. As in the rest of Papua, all formal businesses are run by Indonesian migrants who are predominantly Muslim. The mainly Christian Papuans sit on the pavements outside selling betel nuts and fruit.

“We are not given licences to run a business,” says a young Papuan independence activist who does not want to be named. He sits in a car with two bearded guerrilla fighters of the West Papua Revolutionary Army, the militant wing of the Free Papua Movement (OPM). For more than 40 years the OPM has fought a low-intensity war to break away from Indonesia. Partly because of restrictions on reporting it, this is one of the world’s least-known conflicts. It is getting harder to keep secret.

Unlike its independent neighbour, Papua New Guinea, which occupies the eastern half of the vast island, the western part used to be a Dutch colony. During the cold war the United Nations said there should be a plebiscite to let Papuans decide their future. But Indonesians, the Papuans say, forced roughly 1,000 Papuan leaders at gunpoint to vote unanimously for integration into their country. This “act of free will” has been contested ever since.

The two bearded rebels drive around town to evade security forces. “Indonesia might be a democracy, but not for us Papuans,” says one. “They gave us autonomy which is a joke. We are different from those Indonesians. Just look at our skin, our hair, our language, our culture. We have nothing in common with them. We beg President Obama to visit Hollandia when he comes to Indonesia in June to witness the oppression with his own eyes,” says the other, using the colonial name for Papua’s capital, Jayapura. (America’s president is due to visit the country on June 14th.) In the 1960s indigenous Papuans made up almost the whole population of Indonesia’s largest province; since then immigration from the rest of the country has reduced their share to about half.

The two rebels do not want to take responsibility for the shootings along the road to the Grasberg mine, but leave no doubt either about their sympathies or their intentions. “The Indonesian shopkeepers, the soldiers and the staff of Freeport are all our enemies. We want to kill them and the mine should be shut,” they say. “Grasberg makes lots of money but we Papuans get nothing. When we achieve independence, we shall kick out the immigrants and Freeport and merge our country with Papua New Guinea.”

The car draws up in front of the seafood restaurant where the Freeport staff are becoming ever more cheerful, unaware that rebels are watching them. Freeport is the biggest publicly traded copper company in the world, and the Grasberg mine remains its main asset. The complex, the world’s largest combined copper and gold mine, is enormously profitable. It provided $4 billion of Freeport’s operating profit of $6.5 billion in 2009. The mining facilities are protected by around 3,000 soldiers and police which were supported by Freeport with $10m last year, according to the company. In December 2009 the police shot dead Kelly Kwalik, one of the OPM’s senior commanders, whom the police blamed for a series of attacks on Freeport’s operations, a charge he repeatedly denied.

Foreign journalists are restricted in their travel to Papua. Your correspondent was lucky enough to slip through the net. In the towns, it is clear that the guerrillas generally keep a low profile. But in the central highlands they are free to operate more openly. This is their heartland. Anti-Indonesian feelings run high because of the sometimes brutal suppression of the OPM by the army.

A well-hidden rebel camp in the Baliem valley—home to a Stone Age tribe discovered and disturbed by outsiders only in the 1930s—lies a few kilometres from a small army base. The guerrillas conduct military training with villagers who use spears, bows and arrows, all without metal heads. Students with mobile phones and video cameras teach the farmers revolutionary rhetoric. They have lost faith in peaceful means of protest and hope to provoke a bloody confrontation that will push Papua on to the international agenda. So far the government has refused to talk to the fractious OPM. Unless it changes its mind, it risks being unable to prevent the young radicals from kicking off a revolution.

Asia

TLS on Food

2010-06-05T22:34:00.002-04:00

on Food

What We’re about to Receive

Jeremy Harding writes about the future of food and its supply

What we eat is what we talk about. Red meat v. non-red, all meat v. no meat at all, GM v. organic, long haul v. local, dirty v. ‘environmental’ and so on; how we prepare a dish, how Heston Blumenthal does it. What makes these conversations possible is the abundance we’re now accustomed to: plenty is the medium in which our anxieties, our pleasures and even our ‘ethics’ thrive. So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.

This belief is new. Until recently the discussion was largely about quality. Quantity and availability only entered the picture when we wondered how to reconcile the diet of a British family with that of a poor family in east Asia, say, or the Horn of Africa. The answer used to be simple: free up the markets, oppose trade barriers for producers in the developing world, extend bilateral aid to their countries, but be sure to eat up, because the more we put away, the better off the struggling poor will be. In the newer thinking, however, our habits are dangerous for them, but also for us: we are eating beyond our means and stretching our supply lines. A food supply that depends on imports (90 per cent of the fruit we consume, 60 per cent of the vegetables) is vulnerable: food policy experts were advancing this view well before the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. VFC – ‘Volcano Flight Chaos’, as the BBC referred to it – was no more than a beginner’s level test of food security. Most of our food imports come from the EU, by truck and ferry; bananas still arrive on the banana boat. Had the flight ban continued, exporters in developing countries would have taken critical losses: three days into the shutdown, Blue Skies, a fair-trade supplier, posted an SOS to the effect that its processing factories in Latin America and Africa were closing. Exporters of perishable food from Britain would have suffered too. Consumers would have noticed gaps on the exotic fruit shelves, but we’d have remained well short of a level-red threat to the food supply.

< read more p>The threat is there, however, as the food prophets have been warning us. ‘The appearance of infinite abundance is an illusion’ (Tristram Stuart, Waste, 2009). Habits ‘will have to change if only because they simply cannot go on. We are now entering a period of rapid transition’ (Felicity Lawrence, Eat Your Heart Out, 2008). ‘We depend just as much on our gas-guzzling, chilled plug-in, “just-in-time” food deliveries as ancient Romans did on foreign conquests, shipping and slaves – and our food system is no more secure, ethical or sustainable than Rome’s was’ (Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, 2008).

These opinions are shared by many organisations in the UK, among them the National Farmers’ Union, the Soil Association, the Sustainable Development Commission (a government watchdog) and even the Royal Institute of International Affairs. They underlie the ‘Food 2030’ strategy launched by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in January: ‘Our food system needs to be prepared for shocks and to be able to manage risks – from climate change, sharp commodity price increases and natural disasters to food contamination.’ At the production end of the British system farming capacity must be shored up. At the retail end, there is concern about the future of imported produce. The effects of water shortage and climate change get ‘critical’, a senior manager of Asda told me, ‘round about 2030 to 2050’. His suppliers of fruit and veg are already relocating from Spain – they’ve depleted the aquifers of the south-east coast – to Morocco, where there is enough ground water to last them until 2035.

Defra’s is the latest warning that sooner or later rises in temperature, water shortages, crop failure, diversion of grain yields to livestock and biofuels, disease in the animals we’re eating, soaring energy costs and armed conflict will disrupt the delivery systems, built on long distances and short order times, that service our needs. The new hesitation about food reflects broader doubts about the last 30 years – the trente glorieuses of the Anglo-Saxon model: our confidence in the energetic binge-and-treadmill culture that propelled us through the 1980s and 1990s has taken a knock. We doubt, above all, whether we can pay off our rising debts to the environment. Feelings about eating and not eating are more immediate than thoughts about rainforests; like the energy or water embedded in the produce we buy, many fears, including fundamental ones about life and death, destruction and incorporation, are already embedded in food. Others migrate to it, making food the bearer of unwieldy questions about the survival of a planet whose destiny we can’t foresee and the fate of people whose problems aren’t the same as ours. Do we bolt down what’s in front of us or do we curb our appetite in the name of our children’s future, or a ‘good’ we can’t guarantee? The modern table is groaning with dilemmas.

They’ve been compounded by global price increases – and the trends that policy analysts and scientists believe they reflect. Since 2000, worldwide cereal harvests (wheat, maize, rice) have outstripped anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk by 69 per cent); the price of chicken went up by two-thirds. A month before the banking meltdown in 2008, ‘food inflation’ was running at 12.8 per cent in the UK. The hit was manageable in Britain, where on average we spend about a tenth of our income on food – in developing countries, it can be seven times that amount – but it was still a hit. There were short-term reasons for these rises: global grain stocks were low, the weather had been hard on farmers, grain-producers withheld exports, there was pig disease in China and bluetongue in the EU. In 2009 price inflation eased off but food experts were already saying we shouldn’t rule out a similar crisis before long.

Last year, a team of experts and strategic analysts recruited by Chatham House published their findings on ‘food futures’ and the looming threats that we should keep in mind. As one of them explained to me, food is now a ‘real security issue’, too long obscured by the government’s preoccupation with ‘terrorism and razor wire’. Their study identifies seven factors, or ‘fundamentals’, bearing down on the global food supply – of which Britain’s is a small part.

The first is the nature and extent of population growth: we are six billion now and by 2030 we’ll be eight billion; increasingly we are clustering together and most of us are now living in cities, which is also where most newcomers will be born. Urbanisation on this scale poses big questions about land use (housing v. farming) and the production of food by a minority for a majority as the gap between the two gets wider.

The second is ‘the nutrition transition’: generations that once lived on grains, pulses and legumes have been replaced by more prosperous people with a taste for meat and dairy. Crops like maize which once fed many of us directly now feed fewer of us indirectly, via a costly diversion from which they emerge in the value-added form of meat. Global production of food – all food – will have to increase by 50 per cent over the next 20 years to cater for two billion extra people and cope with the rising demand for meat.

The third factor is energy: the industrial production of food is sure to become more expensive as fuel costs rise. It takes 160 litres of oil to produce a tonne of maize in the US; natural gas accounts for at least three-quarters of the cost of making nitrogen fertiliser; freight, too, depends on fuel.

Land is the fourth. The amount of the world’s land given over to agriculture continues to grow (in the UK, roughly 70 per cent of land is agricultural), but in per capita terms it’s shrinking. As with oil, it’s possible to envisage ‘peak food’ (the point of maximum production, followed by decline), ‘peak phosphorus’, i.e. the high point in the use of phosphate fertiliser (one estimate puts it at 2035), and, as the FAO suggests in its diplomatic way, ‘peak land’: the point at which the total area of the world’s most productive land begins to diminish (soil exhaustion, climate change) and marginal land comes up for reassessment.

Alternative fuels are reducing the amount of land available for growing food. When the Chatham House team began its work, the first effects of the rush for biofuels were becoming clear. In 2006-7, about 30 million tonnes of grain were diverted to bioethanol. That’s less than 5 per cent of global wheat and maize yields, yet the World Bank felt it was instrumental in driving up food prices: many wheat exporters, including EU countries, had turned their land over to biofuel crops, with the result that by 2007, global wheat stocks were half what they’d been at the turn of the century. The biofuels industry is squeezing our capacity to feed ourselves.

Worldwide, one in three people face water shortages – factor five – and by 2030 the ratio will have narrowed. Why should a global water shortage put pressure on the UK, with its high rainfall? Much of our fruit and veg comes from water-scarce countries and as Sir John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, remarked last year, lack of water closes down food production and livelihoods: from the European edge of the Mediterranean to points east and south, it will turn migrant workers and settled communities into drifters and foragers. Places like Britain with sturdy, rain-fed agriculture must stand by to grow a lot more and face the prospect of inward migration. Any surplus food will be welcomed elsewhere, including in southern Europe, where water gets scarcer by the year.

A sixth factor is climate change and its downward pressure on cultivation in many parts of the world; extreme weather events will also jeopardise agriculture and the movement of food from one place to another.

Finally, there is the state of the world’s 1.1 billion agricultural workers: more than half of them own neither land nor machinery and live in a state of semi-slavery. The conditions of this new global underclass are at last a matter of concern: worldwide food production is set on a downturn as their wretchedness weakens their capacity to produce and earn, driving more people inexorably towards the cities. The head count of these land armies – 600 million at a guess – sounds impressive but it doesn’t change the fact that the overall number of people working in agriculture is falling. ‘In both developed and developing countries,’ the Chatham House report states, ‘the pressure on the agricultural workforce is increasing.’

Land and labour issues are present in Britain in a low-key way. Take the tension between immigration policy and the need for foreign workers: government capped the number of migrant fruit-pickers at 16,000 in 2007; the strawberry growers and the NFU lobbied hard to raise the cap – this year it’s 21,500. The average age of the British farmer is higher by about 20 years – some put it at 58 – than that of the worker in the Square Mile. Farming is no longer a career in demand. Tax relief for farm properties has led to the rise of speculation in farmland, while tenant farming has fallen away. Farming incomes rose last year, as they did in 2007, but unless you’re a barley baron with a vast acreage in East Anglia, the going is tough. The average income of a full-time farmer in the early 1980s – £26,000 in today’s prices – has fallen by about £10,000. Three years ago, a Farmers’ Voice survey found that one-third of the 2000 farmers it approached were worried about staying in the industry or meant to get out altogether. Increasingly, farmers supplement their income by ‘diversifying’ into bed-and-breakfast, farm tourism, go-kart tracks … Anything to weather the low points – BSE, foot-and-mouth – and survive in the narrow gap between rising input costs (fuel and fertiliser) and dwindling receipts: between 1998 and 2008 the farmers’ share of the price their food fetches at the supermarket checkout fell by 22 per cent.

Scientists, policy analysts, nutritionists, campaigners – call them the food observatory – don’t have seven big solutions to the seven fundamentals. Instead, they put together a mix of different approaches, shuttling strategically between agricultural and cultural, global and parochial, chemical and organic, the death of the planet and the fun of the kitchen, ‘sustainable production’ and ‘sustainable diet’. You only have to spend a moment on the literature to grasp that these are not confused people, unable to make up their minds; it’s simply that they want a range of interventions on several, overlapping fronts, and soon. So at one level, consumers must be urged to change their habits. At another, retailers must encourage consumers to make that change. At another still, government must repair the heavy machinery of policy, which has been left to rust when it might have helped consumers, chivvied retailers into line and revived British farming.

The food observatory is looking for a new kind of consumer, whose habits are informed by the seven big stories and who acts – or eats – accordingly. Climate-change consciousness plays a big role in this. What better place to think about the environment than at the table? Yet there’s a magical quality in the way the part has come to stand for the whole: we are now hoping to influence very large outcomes, well beyond an individual’s control or even that of a single society, by transforming matter and placing it in our mouths. This mixture of the down to earth and the sacramental is very powerful and it’s one of the reasons we’re seeing more rapid developments in our attitudes to diet than in our dawdling contemplation of climate change itself.

Cue the role for government. Broad agreement about the precarious future of food in the UK is a more attractive prompt for anyone in Westminster than melting polar ice, and politicians clearly feel there’s a point in trying to protect Britain from a breakdown in food supply (a far more remote possibility in France and the US, where old statist habits persist). Defra believes it’s time to arrest the decline of farming capacity. It wants more young people to consider farming as a livelihood and landowners to lease to people who’d like to grow food. Four months before the election campaign, Hilary Benn announced a modest £50 million funding top-up for food and farming R&D over the next five years. In Food 2030, Defra insists that Britain must find a way to farm and fish ‘sustainably’ – that word again – setting out targets and measurements (monitoring soil quality, water use, greenhouse gas emissions, fish stocks etc).

The trouble is there’s very little money in the pot. That’s why Defra puts such stress on tending the shoots of the cultural revolution it has identified. In the rise of the celebrity chef, the national appetite for appetite, the prowess of the kitchen, the pride of the vegetable plot, the bustling farmers’ markets, the government sees how aware we’ve become about food. Defra reported last year that one-third of Britons already grow some of their fruit and vegetables – generally thought to be an encouraging sign.

At the same time Defra has taken the opportunity to talk openly about the worrying thoughts in our heads as we drain the brown fluid from the meat in a polystyrene punnet. Obesity, heart disease, animal welfare, greenhouse gases, the nagging intimation that we can’t go on as we have without parts of the food chain shearing away: Defra grasps that our misgivings, like our pleasures, could lead us towards a serious re-evaluation of food without massive expense to the public purse.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, the last time a British administration felt that the entire food supply was in danger, government had a decisive role. Nowadays it can spell out desirable objectives, but it is only one member in a partnership with producers, retailers and consumers. The consumer is still the child-sorcerer of market democracy, sweet-toothed and capricious, gaining weight by the meal and ready to throw it about: government can’t quite face off against us. Well, not yet – but there’s a strong hint that in Defra’s thinking ‘choice’ is no longer the only yardstick of the democratic mile. It prefers ‘informed choice’, but who will inform us? While government will be pressing retailers to get into line, with more sustainable, healthy offerings on the shelves, campaigners who’ve been lobbying Westminster for change will needle away at us in more outspoken terms than politicians can afford to use. Politicians will tell us what we’re doing right while campaigners of one kind or another – including the press – will tell us where we’re going wrong, in schools and in ‘the community’.

For Defra’s ideas to come good, it won’t be enough for one-third of the population to tend radishes in their window boxes. There have to be producers turning out several tonnes of food a day with the seven big stories in mind. Modern hydroponic schemes are well established in California and the Netherlands and for British growers a state-of-the-art version now exists on the Isle of Thanet.

A consortium of Dutch growers and Fresca, a fresh-produce agglomerate whose food has been through millions of gullets in Britain, first explored the possibility of massive, hydroponic, low-carbon horticulture in Britain six years ago. Lloyds agreed a loan for part of the infrastructure, but no UK bank would put up anything like the money they needed to create Thanet Earth, billed as the largest glasshouse complex in the UK: British banks simply didn’t get it. In the end, Rabobank in the Netherlands underwrote Thanet Earth.

Fresca and the growers bought up 90 hectares of land and began assembling their gigantic rectangular hangars: there are now three gleaming glasshouses covering roughly a quarter of the site. In aerial photos they look like giant solar panels; from the road, as you approach, like blocks of polished quartz. Lagoons have been dug to capture rainwater. In the glasshouses themselves, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes are grown; in the tomato greenhouse growth is driven along through the winter by stadium lighting. In 2009, Thanet Earth’s first year in production, 2.5 million tomatoes left the glasshouses for the sorting area in an average week; the cucumber and pepper harvests peaked at half a million and three-quarters of a million a week. The company reckoned it was meeting 2 per cent of UK demand. Planning permission exists for another four glasshouses on the site and the target, at that point, is to supply 4 per cent of all tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers consumed in the UK.

In the tomato glasshouse, the sharp, sage-and-lime scent of the vines is the strongest impression. The next is that there are very few indigenous British among the workforce running trolleys up and down the rails built into the grid layout of the building. ‘They’re originally Eastern European,’ one of the Dutch growers explained. ‘Only they’re in Thanet for the long term and they’re not thinking of going back.’ They are not strictly ‘migrant’ labour, but they’re waged and, at present, non-unionised. So on one of the seven fundamentals – the precarious lives led by the people who feed us – Thanet Earth score no better or worse than any other grower.

On water they are ahead. Their produce is grown on blocks of rock wool about a metre off the ground; surplus water drains into long trays underneath the blocks and from there it’s borne off to the lagoons, along with rainwater off the roofs, to be pumped around again. The company’s energy strategy is imaginatively back-to-front: first build a substation to power the entire complex and bathe your plants in light; sell your surplus to the national grid, capture the waste heat from generation and divert it to the produce. The glasshouses are heated by emissions from the generating process, which are run through kilometres of baggy tubing under the plants: every few minutes there is flatulent sigh as heat and CO2, on which growth depends, come gusting out of the tubes. This system, known as Combined Heat and Power, is not nearly as widespread in British horticulture as it might be. On other issues – minimal pesticide use, preserving the biodiversity of what was once a sprawling cauliflower patch on the Kent coast – Thanet Earth is a virtuous producer.

Thirty Thanet Earths could bring Britain to self-sufficiency in ‘salad’, but even if you regard that as a triumph, there are snags. For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For another, buyers for the big UK supermarket chains can squeeze a mega-grower like Thanet Earth as hard as any other producer. A larger query hanging over hydroponic growing in the UK is quite what it solves until we all start eating many more tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. This means we have to agree on what foods we ‘should’ be eating and which of those we’re short of in Britain.

The UK is about 60 per cent self-sufficient in food, yet food analysts would like an increase in domestic production, some arguing that a global shortage of food puts us under a moral obligation to grow more, others that it’s a big revenue opportunity for Britain. The next point they make is that the foods we have in abundance – meat and dairy – are the ones whose intake we need to moderate, while the foods we import – fruit and vegetables – are the ones we should learn to like: meat and dairy put far more strain on the health budget and the environment than fruit and veg do. Defra agrees with these dietary imperatives, but it won’t call the balance of imports and exports into question and thinks our £18 bn trade deficit in foodstuffs is about right. We have trade surpluses in other sectors: why wouldn’t the principle of comparative advantage hold good for food?

Shopping in the big Sainsbury’s near Ladbroke Grove, you’ll find fruit and vegetables cascading in from the EU, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Egypt, the Occupied Territories, Kenya. (In return we sell them booze, red meat and smoothies.) The presence of sustainable hydroponic culture in the UK could mark a radical upturn in domestic production and signal a change not only in what we eat but where it comes from. The new consensus among environmentalists, nutritionists and academics is that it has to.

In 1939, the figures for self-sufficiency were the other way about: Britons depended on two-thirds of their food coming from overseas, mostly possessions and dominions. A map drawn at the time, and reproduced in a memoir by Lord Woolton, minister of food during the war, as well as on this page, drove home the point that if two or three supply routes were cut, hunger and shortages at home were sure to follow. (Note the threat to jam.) Woolton’s department took charge of the supply and distribution system, effectively buying up food in Britain and selling it on to the population. Labour and resources were put at the disposal of British farmers and the order went out that everyone should dig for victory. Within four years Britain had doubled its domestic food supply. Food production peaked in the 1980s, since when it has dropped away.

Only hardliners believe in full self-sufficiency for Britain. Realistic food observers who argue that we should boost domestic supply tend not to use the term. They talk instead about the importance of ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’ – we’ll come to these – as the two prerequisites to ‘food security’, the objective they have in view. The FAO defines food security as a state of affairs in which all members of a given community ‘at all times, have access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life’. That’s a tall order even in developed countries: in the UK there could be as many as one in 12 people experiencing the opposite of food security, i.e. ‘food poverty’ (the figure was four million when the Rowntree Foundation looked into it ten years ago).

When food experts speak about ‘resilience’, they are expressing concern about the hair-trigger system of delivery in Britain. Supermarkets are the genii of the logistics game: barcodes going through the checkout enable a precision-picture of the state of the shelves in any given outlet and trip the switch for incoming orders, which arrive ‘just in time’: the process is so finely tuned that most of the warehousing a supermarket chain requires can be handled by a fleet of lorries plying our motorways round the clock. In the new thinking, this is cutting it fine, like only ever refilling the tank of your car with a couple of litres: it works as long as there’s nothing you hadn’t thought of, but it also means that Britain is never much further than ‘nine meals from anarchy’, as Andrew Simms, head of the New Economics Foundation, put it.

A sudden disruption, caused by extreme weather, or an energy crisis, would leave a government depending on the expertise of the supermarkets, currently servicing a Byzantine consumer choice model, to get food around the country. The just-in-time system would become a hardy distribution engine, patrolled by the police and maybe the army, while a break in the food chain was repaired: a source of weakness, in other words, becomes a strength in an emergency. But this still leaves analysts worrying about external shocks that could disrupt the complex networks and long supply chains – see Woolton’s map – along which fruit, vegetables, soya and fertilisers make their way, and wondering whether a community can arrive at resilience if it’s only as strong as the markets on which it depends. Defra, of course, stops short of this last reservation, but the Sustainable Development Commission insists that markets may look very different in future and we shouldn’t assume that our strong ‘financial and service sectors’ will enable us to access food from around the world indefinitely. Better to arrest the decline of British farming: the carnival of food awareness in the UK requires a corollary in the landscape of production.

The word ‘sustainability’ and its cognates occur more than 150 times in Food 2030. A ‘sustainable’ culture is one that produces and consumes within its means; if it functions with an eye to the sustainability of other communities, so much the better. In the academic literature, sustainability is now the bedrock on which food security is thought to rest.

The most passionate advocate of this view is Tim Lang, who began his radical contemplation of food during the 1970s, when he worked a hill farm in Lancashire. He’s now professor of food policy at City University. It was Lang who showed me Woolton’s map, with its premonition of food miles, a concept he himself developed in the 1990s, and when we met, he took me back to the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s: a good example, he believes, of trading interests driving down domestic food production. Lang is not opposed to trade; it’s just that on the religion of the markets he is agnostic and feels this is becoming a respectable position: whatever they say in public, fewer people in government now think that ‘food security can be left to the market.’

an insight into food miles in 1940

Lang puts great weight on the seven fundamentals; he also has a longstanding interest in food ethics and what he calls its ‘underlying hardness’. What does that mean? People who worry over the rights and wrongs of the Kenyan mangetout or greenhouse gases embedded in meat seem, on the face of it, to have ‘fuzzy’ thoughts (Lang’s word), circumscribed by ‘niceness’, but equally they’re pondering the move away from a food system built on cheap, plentiful oil and fertiliser and abundant water, which may be tougher than we think. Such a move could breathe life into muffled conflicts about land and wealth and widen the perimeter of shortage beyond developing countries. Food ethics, Lang says, sees past ‘the core values of consumer capitalism: the “right” to unalloyed choice, purchaser power, the pursuit of lower prices, ignorance about the nature of production’. It isn’t really to do with niceness.

A common thread in the alternative food movement – stronger in Britain than in any other EU member state – is a rugged opposition to the ‘externalised’ costs of food. Like mainstream food prophets, Lang takes the view that what we eat in Britain is cheap because so many of the real costs of producing it are absent at the checkout. Costs, that is, in terms of underpaid labour in distant countries whose poverty becomes a burden on their communities, land exhaustion, motorways pummelled by ‘just-in-time’ deliveries, billowing carbon emissions, the conjuring of tropical forest into soya and from there into the British Sunday roast. A mass of debt is embedded in the way we produce and eat. One example: a study in 2000 put the price of cleaning up the UK water supply after a year of farm pollution at around £200 million – an expense that sidles past the till to hit the taxpayer or the utility customer later. You could just call that redistribution, but food campaigners don’t: they think there are too many hidden costs in food that get shrugged off to the environment, or dumped on the world’s poor.

If you agree that all countries must produce as much food as they can, then the Common Agricultural Policy is no longer the monster food campaigners took it to be. To Lang it is lumbering and anomalous, but still a useable legacy of the ‘productionist’ era, as he calls it, when prosperous states, and others – India, for example – revolutionising their agriculture, intervened in farming and markets to raise output. He regards it as a benign phase in the history of food policy, informed by the Great Depression and the Second World War. The 1947 Agriculture Act in Britain, which saw massive support for farmers in the form of price guarantees and marketing boards, corrected shrewdly for the end of Empire and was informed, as Lang has written, ‘by a moral duty to increase output and to ensure the adequacy of supplies for public health’.

Excess, waste, high chemical inputs, environmental damage, barriers against struggling growers in poor countries: Lang is alert to the horrors of the CAP, but he sees a strong case for reform and none for running the policy down. In a briefing paper last year – and you can hear Lang’s voice – the SDC called for ‘a new Common Food Sustainability Policy’ built on radical reform of this agro-funding powerhouse and the way in which food is grown; how fertiliser, pesticides and GM are used (Lang is opposed only to their ‘corporate hijack’), how land is managed and labour rewarded. The overriding point, he says, is that sustainable production must be increased everywhere: ‘Growing more here needn’t mean cutting off producers in the Third World, in my view.’

Lang has coined the expression ‘omni-standards’ to suggest a variety of approaches to the seven big stories. They might have to do with the prevention of obesity and diabetes, animal welfare, reforestation, fair prices for vegetable growers in Africa or dairy producers in Europe: every argument is carefully examined and the points at which they intersect are noted. In his tenacity and command of the materials Lang can strike you as a one-man wartime ministry of food. Even big retail management, some of whom regard him as a tricky customer, have begun to acknowledge his ideas.

‘Sustainable diets!’ he announced cheerfully, waving me down the steps at City. ‘For all this to work, the food on our plates is the thing … it’s the mediating idea.’ It put me in mind of Naked Lunch: ‘a frozen moment’, Burroughs said of the book’s title, ‘when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork’. In Lang’s frozen moment, we see the whole story as our food arrives on the table: the place where all the issues coalesce. Perhaps it’s another way of saying grace, though to Lang there’s no mystery in what we’re about to receive. It shapes lives and puts pressure on eco-systems in distant parts of the world as well as our own.

A few conversations with food observers and you’re starting to decode your surroundings for clues about sustainability. Driving up to the Glemhams in Suffolk last winter, I couldn’t pass a lorry without thinking there was a 25 per cent chance it was on a round-trip food delivery and a 50 per cent chance it was empty; couldn’t scan a field of winter wheat without wondering if it was destined for pigs or poultry; couldn’t imagine my way beyond the low, courteous country either side of the A12 to a vision of cattle ambling in the Stour Valley without totting up what it takes to produce a kilo of prime beef: 35 kilos in greenhouse gas emissions, eight to 15 kilos of grain, maybe 10,000 litres of water, depending who’s counting. Food experts are working hard to express those costs in pounds, dollars and euros, but who will agree on their sums? Would the bill take the form of large numbers of destitute people clamouring for space? Apparently, what we eat must now bear the burden of fears about population movement, as Beddington hinted last year in his remarks about water.

At her home in Great Glemham, Caroline Cranbrook recalled how she’d joined battle with the big retailers in East Suffolk in the 1990s on the grounds that out-of-town megastores drive high street shops under, depress farm production and disrupt the sociability of local food systems. Cranbrook became a hero of ‘local’ after defeating a plan for a monster out-of-town Tesco in 1998.[*] She has reservations all the same: ‘an amorphous aspiration … nobody knows what “local” means.’ Yet consumers love it; so do the associations of growers and suppliers who make common cause, self-consciously, to become the motor of a local food system: a hub. Last year Bidwells Agribusiness, a farm management consultant, carried out a feasibility study for a gigantic hub to service London – a ‘local food goldmine’, they reckoned, with potential demand worth £9.3 billion.

Local is now the prevailing doctrine of the alternative food movement. Many ‘locavores’ are attentive to the global food supply, yet their philosophy is based on a growing exasperation with the bigger picture beyond the parish. Overwhelmingly, in Bidwells’ research, caterers, retailers and customers say ‘knowing where it’s from’ is the main reason they prefer local. ‘Our cultural focus,’ say the authors of Local Food: How to Make It Happen in Your Community, ‘is shifting from the outward-looking exploration of the new, the far-away, the complex and the illusory to a reconnection with what’s familiar, local, simple and real.’ Even food campaigners who find this a bit too ‘simple and real’ for their liking are forced to acknowledge the virtue of local: it’s founded on production, in the gardens, fields, butteries and processing houses of Britain.

Supermarket strategists have had their eye on local for a while. Paul Kelly, in charge of ‘external affairs and corporate responsibility’ for Asda, told me of a distribution hub in Cumbria that was pouring local produce into one of his stores in Kendal (30 tubs of English Lakes ice cream are sold for every one of Ben & Jerry’s). He’s committed to the model of competitive retail, and defends his corner of the industry: it isn’t just the supermarkets driving hard bargains with producers; a handful of ‘intermediaries’ – big wholesalers and food processing giants – are at it in a major way (‘these guys have enormous power’). If you want to know who ruined the high street, blame the planners not the supermarkets.

In some respects, however, Kelly is close to the Chatham House researchers. Like Lang, he believes the vulnerabilities of the food chain will have to be addressed by diet changes. But he argues (as you’d expect) that Asda ‘sells what people want, it doesn’t sell diets’ and that government must take the lead, nudging the public towards more realistic eating. At that point, retailers would be well placed to help. ‘There’s no point selling fish from unsustainable stocks,’ Kelly reckons. ‘For example, North Sea cod’: Asda has already reached a decision on behalf of its customers about the fish stocks we’ve run down and stopped selling cod in 2006. Even though Kelly believes ‘it’s not yet deliberate’, choice-editing on the part of big retailers, informed by their sense of what can and can’t be replenished, is starting to happen. Some shoppers will be relieved to know that tough decisions in the lanes of a large supermarket are slowly being taken out of their hands.

Lang detects this development, too: ‘23-year-old store managers’ are used to ‘editing’ for turnover, he told me, so they’ve no trouble mastering the art. At the same time, supermarkets have begun, carefully, to tell us what’s good for us, in terms of health and waste. In the Sainsbury’s near Ladbroke Grove a few weeks back we were instructed in colourful lettering not to throw away broccoli stalks (they make ‘delicious soup’). Retailers are also behind the Department of Health’s five-a-day campaign: as Tesco says, pledging lower prices on fruit and veg, ‘some foods are just plain good for us.’ Kelly foresees more choice-editing in favour of healthy eating and sustainability, but worries that farmers will find it hard to respond efficiently and quickly to the new priorities. ‘Supermarkets are very fleet of foot,’ he said. ‘They can adapt to almost any environment.’ WalMart, the Asda parent, is currently ‘adapting’ to the Indian market with a new chain of supermarkets, after a setback in South Korea. The move is controversial, but Kelly has already thought it through; he goes straight to Tristram Stuart’s Waste, and glosses the passages about how much food decays in the granaries of India and Pakistan through lack of modern storage techniques: the kind of problem, he argues, that a powerful retailer can sort out.

At the end of last year, the SDC published advice to the government in Setting the Table, a study offering much more detail about what Lang, one of the drafters, meant when he spoke of diet as ‘the mediating idea’. Setting the Table is about nudging ‘consumption patterns’ towards sustainability and the role government could play in the process by beefing up its guidance to the public. So for example, the ‘Eatwell plate’, promoted by the Food Standards Agency as a sensible balance of starch, protein, fruit and veg, plus a small dollop of junk, would tell us what is good not only for us but for the environment. There is no end of these improving schemes but as Lang points out, we’ve begun to think about sustainable food supply – ‘after a lot of grumbling’ – and sustainable eating ‘shouldn’t be too much to ask’.

Setting the Table lays out 13 guidelines about how diets should be ‘modified’ with sustainability and (a big one for Lang) social equality in view, as well as health. The advantages of each recommendation are set out – and so are the disadvantages. Guideline eight, ‘reduce consumption of meat and dairy products’, cites possible iron deficiencies during pregnancy, a potential rise of osteoporosis, the decline of livestock economies and migration to cities as undesirable effects. Guideline 13 – ‘eat fish from sustainable stocks’ – foresees an increase in harmful effluents from fish farms. Invariably, the pros outweigh the cons.

Taken together, the recommendations sketch out a simpler diet than we’re used to, an equivalent for rainy, hectic Britain of what Elizabeth David discerned in the Mediterranean diet when she called it ‘the rational, right and proper food for human beings to eat’. Except there’s no romantic sense, as there was in David, of a benign landscape supporting people who understand its limits; on the contrary, we’re being told that our crowded mezzanine culture is putting serious strains on the park. By far the most arresting point is recommendation one: ‘consume less food and drink.’ Likely negative impact? Sales in the food and drinks industry. Whether you feel dismay or a tremor of relief, you can’t help noticing that after half a century of abundance, much of that time at the edge of excess, a watchdog is advising government that the party’s over.

Is that a joke? Ministers don’t have to listen to their advisers, but they may regret it if they don't. ‘Less’ is probably harder to sell than a distant war, since it’s a direct challenge to our habits on the home front; announcing it would be like preparing us for disaster, in the mind of any government. Yet perhaps we’re headed for it anyway. Felicity Lawrence reported in February that most of the price reductions trumpeted by Asda and Tesco at the end of 2009 were cuts of one penny only, while the majority of their price rises in the same period were ten times that. Food prices may not spike again as they did between 2005 and 2008, but they’re unlikely to return to 2005 levels.

The best short document about the way things go from here remains the Chatham House study, Food Futures. Hardin Tibbs, an independent strategic analyst drafted onto the Chatham House team, modelled four projections for the food supply in the short to middle term. The first proposes without much conviction that 2008 was ‘just a blip’ and habits can stay as they were. The second is a story of deferred pain: prices rise and we redouble pig and poultry production, our hopes invested in cheap meat and cheap imports of other produce, but it’s a tough, environmentally costly battle and we stand to lose in the end. In the third, the worldwide cost of producing food continues to rise while domestic production continues to fall. The gap can’t be rephrased on the markets as anything other than a food shortage; alternatives are dutifully lowered into place, like timbers in a trench. In the fourth and most disturbing model, we resemble the pharaoh, halfway through his dream in Genesis: the seven fat cattle are long out of the river, grazing the fertile plain and we’ve rolled over in our sleep. Now in the dream the seven lean cattle are clambering up the bank, baring their rotten gums and preparing to devour the seven fat cattle. They are bellowing verses from the Book of Revelation, or just quoting from the Chatham House document: ‘Multiple shocks disrupt food production and supply. Prices skyrocket as stocks plummet, triggering food shortages, famine and civil panic.’

An influential minority of consumers have responded to the call for a new food consciousness; environmentalists, media personalities (led by the heroic Jamie Oliver), nutritionists and food analysts are optimistic that it’s on the rise. Yet vast numbers of us still require nudging and guidance, and, if the food observatory is right, we will have to learn to doubt the evidence of our eyes: where they foresee austerity, we see abundance – the result of a flourishing, interconnected system of commerce which reaches its highest expression in the aisles of the larger supermarkets, stacked with produce like the wharves of fabulous ports. Why not eat what we fancy eating? And why not bin what we don’t?

Politicians can legislate away civil liberties on a good enough excuse, as we’ve seen, but they’ve been loath to come out in the open and curtail consumer choice. It wasn’t so long ago that the tobacco lobby claimed civil liberties and consumer choice were one and the same – and perhaps the assault on smoking is a precedent for regulating our intake of ‘bad’ food. Incrementally, that’s to say, with a round of restrictions on advertising here, tougher directives to retailers there, health and sustainability warnings on products, fiscal measures that penalise harmful eating and draw the wrath of the lobbies. Imagine the media in tow, thickening up the atmosphere of disapproval. It’s an unattractive prospect.

Campaigners don’t like to say out loud that food should acquire a protected status, stabilised against the turbulence of markets, as it was in the past and remains in France and the US, and shielded from over-consumption and waste. Yet if they want ‘resilience’, they will have to state their reservations about markets more clearly; and if not now, in the twilight of neoliberalism, when? Maybe only a jarring blow to our food supply would persuade us that the principle of comparative advantage no longer applied to commerce in food. But who would want the industry to own up to its externalised costs, while other parts of the economy were spared this punishing audit? Cheap food is a miracle and we’d prefer it if the days of miracles and wonders were here to stay. Still, the food observatory has warned us we’ll have to countenance a change in the way we eat – and so will the next government. Drifting into uncharted waters on a raft of voluntary codes with a sail rigged for propitious trade winds seems like a form of madness.

A digest of sources:

Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by Tristram Stuart.
Penguin, 496 pp., £9.99, July 2009, 978 0 14 103634 2

Eat Your Heart Out: Why the Food Business Is Bad for the Planet and Your Health by Felicity Lawrence.
Penguin, 352 pp., £8.99, June 2008, 978 0 14 102601 5

Hungry City: How Food Shapes our Lives by Carolyn Steel.
Vintage, 400 pp., £8.99, March 2009, 978 0 09 953168 5

Food Policy: Integrating Health, Environment and Society by Tim Lang, David Barling and Martin Caraher.
Oxford, 320 pp., £32.95, March 2009, 978 0 19 856788 2

The Memoirs of the Rt Hon the Earl of Woolton.
Cassell, 452 pp., 1959

Eating: What We Eat and Why It Matters by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.
Arrow, 400 pp., £7.99, September 2006, 978 0 09 950402 3

Food Futures: Rethinking UK Strategy by Susan Ambler-Edwards, Kate Bailey, Alexandra Kiff, Tim Lang, Robert Lee, Terry Marsden, David Simons and Hardin Tibbs.
Chatham House, 50 pp., February 2009
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/695/

Rising Food Prices: Drivers and Implications for Development by Alex Evans. Chatham House, 11 pp., April 2008
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/612/

Sir John Beddington’s speech to the Sustainable Development UK conference, March 2009.
http://www.govnet.co.uk/news/govnet/professor-sir-john-beddingtons-speech-at-sduk-09

Defra:

Food 2030. Defra, 81 pp., January
http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/food/pdf/food2030strategy.pdf

Food 2030: How We Get There. Defra, 22 pp., January
http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/food/pdf/food2030strategy-summary.pdf

UK Food Security Assessment: Detailed Analysis. Defra, 145 pp., August 2009, updated January 2010
http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/food/pdf/food-assess100105.pdf

Sustainable Development Commission:

Food Security and Sustainability: The Perfect Fit. SDC, 145 pp., July 2009
http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/SDCFoodSecurityPositionPaper.pdf

Setting the Table: Advice to Government on Priority Elements of Sustainable Diets. SDC, 57 pp., December 2009
http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/Setting_the_Table.pdf

‘Ethical Foodscapes’ edited by Mike Goodman, Lewis Holloway and Damian Maye. Forthcoming from Environment and Planning A.
http://www.envplan.com/A.html

The Real Choice: How Local Foods Can Survive the Supermarket Onslaught by Caroline Cranbrook.
CPRE, 15 pp., June 2006, 1 902786 84X
http://www.cpre.org.uk/news/view/30

Bidwells Property Consultancy:
http://www.bidwells.co.uk/cms.php?pageid=1031

Local Food: How to Make it Happen in Your Community by Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins
Transition Books, 216 pp., September 2009, 978 1 900322 43 0

For a tour of Asda: http://your.asda.com

[*] The store would have been built outside Saxmundham, which got a Waitrose instead. Last month plans were announced for a Tesco near the centre of town.

The Economist on Anti-Gay Laws

2010-06-05T19:02:00.000-04:00

Very interesting how easily women get off (wink-wink, nudge-nudge)...

The Economist on Genital Cutting

2010-06-04T23:12:00.000-04:00

TLS on Human Cooking

2010-06-04T22:50:00.000-04:00

on Cooked Food

One for the pot

by BARBARA J. KING

a review of Richard Wrangham's CATCHING FIRE
How cooking made us human 312pp. Profile. Paperback, £15. 978 1 846682 85 8 US: Basic Books. $26.95. 978 0 465 01362 3

Richard Wrangham, biological anthropologist at Harvard University and expert observer of chimpanzees at field sites in Tanzania and Uganda, sat down to lunch with a trio of raw foodists some years ago. Already a champion of a significant role for cooking in human evolutionary history - an idea that would form the core of his book Catching Fire - Wrangham watched his companions make a curious choice: they refused not only any cooked foods from the menu but also any prepared foods.
"They politely declined a salad", Wrangham writes in Catching Fire, "because its ingredients had been chopped and mixed. The natural way, they explained, is to do what chimpanzees do. Just as those apes find only one kind of fruit when eating in a given tree, so we should eat only one kind of food in any meal." Out came a basket prepared ahead of time by the trio and smuggled into the restaurant. One raw foodie chose an apple, another a pineapple; the third opted for chunks of buffalo femur, inside of which was "a cold pink mush that looked like strawberry ice cream". Raw, these foods "best suited" the diners' bodies - or so the diners' instincts informed them.
Wrangham fails to record what he himself ate at the lunch. We may guess that he accepted prepared, cooked items from the menu rather than dipping into the ape-dietoriented basket. And we may guess as well that he was too polite to announce a conclusion that would come to underpin Catching Fire: had his cooked-food-refusing companions lived in the Palaeolithic instead of the pampered present, their genes wouldn't have contributed much to the evolution of Homo sapiens.
According to Wrangham, cooking was the main reason that humans evolved differently from apes. "Cooking", Wrangham writes, "increased the value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time, and our social lives." This is no Man-the-Hunter theory with an added-value cooking clause, for it is plant matter and not meat on which Wrangham focuses. "Certainly meat eating has been an important factor in human evolution and nutrition", he notes, "but it has had less impact on our bodies than cooked food. Even vegetarians thrive on cooked diets. We are cooks more than carnivores." Jargon-free and jarring in the best way of offering new angles on old conundrums, Catching Fire is good public anthropology. With its balance of storytelling (that pink-gloop-filled buffalo femur grabs the reader in the first chapter) and coherently explained data, the book will enjoy a deservedly wide readership.
read more An apt question is whether "coherently explained" translates to "convincing". The biologist Steve Jones has complained that the book offers too many "empty calories", because Wrangham speculates so freely on our past. Yet four out of the book's five central arguments - the impact of cooking on our food, our bodies, our brains, our use of time, and our social lives - are substantive and convincing. The last of his arguments is the least persuasive. Despite his welcome abandonment of spear-thrusting male hunters as the drivers of humanity's development, Wrangham falls headlong into a genderessentializing trap. His argument about the evolution of our social lives is weakened as a result.
To take his theses in turn, beginning with food value: raw-food diets rage in popularity. Yet case study after case study offered by Wrangham, ranging from Inuit (Eskimo) traditional diets to the desperate choices of people lost at sea, show that raw foods can't properly sustain the human body for longer than about a month. Our species cannot do what other animals can: extract enough energy from non-cooked foods to survive on them in the long term. Here, Wrangham's case seems airtight. Cooking makes up for humans' physiological constraints - or brought them about in the first place? - because it "substantially increases the amount of energy we obtain from our food". Through cooking, starch is gelatinized, which means that enzymes make it more readily digestible. Further, protein is denatured, and foods are rendered softer, aiding in digestion as well. Gains to our ancestors' reproductive success must have been considerable, Wrangham reasons, in order to offset the nutrients that may be lost and the toxins that may creep in with cooking. "When our ancestors first obtained extra calories by cooking their food", he summarizes, "they and their descendants passed on more genes than others of their species who ate raw."
Who, then, were the first cooks? Pride of place is given to Homo erectus, upright walkers much resembling us in physical form. These ancestors originated a number of startling innovations in technology and colonized new areas of the globe. Wrangham's logic regarding this choice of ancestor is clean. As he outlines, meat-eating may explain the origins of our genus Homo, because com- pared to earlier forms like australopithecines, the first Homo species (called Homo habilis) was able to scavenge more meat, allowing a brain expansion. But the astounding brainand-behaviour flowering that came along with Homo erectus cannot be tied to meateating.
The jaws and teeth of Homo erectus are "poorly adapted for eating the tough raw meat of game animals", and "cannot be explained by Homo erectus's becoming better at hunting. Something else must have been going on". That something else, of course, was acquiring energy from cooked foods.
It is hard to date the advent of cooking precisely, although a site in Israel strongly suggests its origins at about 800,000 years ago. Comparative anatomy, once again, comes to the rescue. With Homo erectus, Wrangham writes, we see not only a tooth reduction, but also the winning combination of smaller gut and bigger brain. Both, he believes, were made possible by cooking - the smaller gut because of the changes in food value, the bigger brain because of the extra energy unleashed. In short, "cooking was responsible for the evolution of Homo erectus". A glance at the roster of behavioural firsts achieved by Homo erectus - first travel outside the African continent, first creation of a complex stone tool kit, and so on - fits comfortably with this conclusion. And this transformative process would have been ongoing. "Although the breakthrough of using fire at all would have been the biggest culinary leap", Wrangham notes, "the subsequent discovery of better ways to prepare the food would have led to continual increases in digestive efficiency, leaving more energy for brain growth."
Wrangham introduces at this stage of his argument a novel concept: the chewing time budget. Raw-food diets require lots of chewing.
Time and energy diverted to chewing aren't free for more calorie-enhancing pursuits.
Cooking, writes Wrangham, "freed hunters from previous time constraints by reducing the time spent chewing. .. . Hunting could contribute to the full development of the family household, reliant as it is on a predictable economic exchange between women and men". It is reasonable enough to invoke, as generations of anthropologists have done, a male-female division of labour in our evolutionary past. It's in the next bedevilling details where Wrangham makes a wrong turn. Wrangham contends that cooking is and always has been women's work: "Women's cooking for the family is a universal pattern", he flatly states. In a famous anthropological study of the 1970s, when 185 cultures were surveyed for sex differences in productive activities, cooking came in as the most female-biased. Women did all or most of the cooking in 97.8 per cent of the societies surveyed. Even the exceptions, Wrangham claims, work in his favour, because where men cook, they do so for the community instead of the family. This family-versus-community distinction matters for reasons we will see more clearly in a moment.
There is no use injecting gratuitous egalitarianism into cross-cultural data; if men aren't cooking, they aren't cooking. And there's really no doubt that women cook more than men do, around the world. Yet this separation of the sexes is neither as invariant as Wrangham would have us believe, nor as accurately projected back into our past. In The Hadza (published earlier this year), the anthropologist Frank Marlowe offers a fascinating ethnography of the Hadza people, hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Wrangham himself refers briefly to the sexual division of labour among the Hadza, but Marlowe's rich data flesh out the picture. He lists five "common" scenarios regarding Hadza food-gathering. In one, women go out and dig tubers, then roast and eat them on the spot. In another, "a man returns to camp with a rock hyrax that he cooks for his children only". The point here is not that women don't cook for their families as much as Wrangham says, nor that men cook more for their families than Wrangham says. It's rather that an abundance of caution is needed when one projects a contemporary pattern of foraging millions of years into the past. Careful ethnographic analogy is, though, a staple of anthropology, and lots of data from hunter-gatherer societies do accord with Wrangham's framework. On balance, Wrangham gets a considered pass here.
Far more problematic is his insistence that prehistoric women cooks would have needed male protection. Wrangham's chain of inference begins like this: cooking takes effort and energy, and the hard-won products of cooking are ripe for stealing by shirkers in the community. How would our ancestors have responded to the threat of thieves in their midst? Pair bonds, asserts Wrangham, via a sort of "primitive protection racket". As he sees it, "husbands used their bonds with other men in the community to protect their wives from being robbed, and women returned the favour by preparing their husbands' meals. Females needed male protection, specifically because of cooking". So not only are women consigned to the prehistoric home and hearth, they must also be made weak and vulnerable. This smacks of outdated cultural norms, and alternative possibilities spring readily to mind. Why is a male tapped for the starring role of protector? Women were physically smaller and thus weaker on average, yes; the fossils tell us this. But what about women's alliances? Precedent for this sort of female bonding surely exists in the behaviour of some apes. Yet Wrangham dismisses the idea out of hand: "There are no indications that human females or their ancestors have ever been prone to forming the kinds of physical fighting alliances with one another that protect bonobo females from being bullied by males", he says. What indication, though, would he wish palaeoanthropologists to search for? Isn't this speculative arena - the nature of our ancestors' social lives far back in time - relatively evidence-free, beyond the fact of sex differences in size? And what if the highest goal achievable, as a result, is simply the internal coherence of a speculative argument? Keeping that goal in mind, isn't the logic (without direct evidence) of female-female alliances just as solid as the logic (without direct evidence) that early Homo erectus pair-bonded at all? Catching Fire, with its treasure trove of great stories, makes for pleasurable consumption. But its stories about our gendered past, prepared and served up with flair and confidence, require a keenly discerning palate. We may politely decline to believe some of them.

TLS on Myths

2010-06-04T22:18:00.000-04:00

on Good Music

How the Greeks met their gods
What was so mysterious about mystery cults in the ancient world?Mary Beard

a review of
Hugh Bowden
MYSTERY CULTS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
256pp. Thames and Hudson. £28 (US $39.95).
978 0 500 25164 5

The ancient Greeks and Romans must have been very good at keeping secrets. Or so our lack of information on the famous “Eleusinian Mysteries” (celebrated in an impressive sanctuary just a few miles outside Athens) would suggest – not to mention our lack of information on all the other, similar, initiatory religions found throughout the ancient world, from the ecstatic cult of Dionysus featured in Euripides’ Bacchae to the worship of the god Mithras by the Roman squaddies on Hadrian’s wall. There must have been literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of initiates, across the millennium of Classical history. And at Eleusis they included some of the most prominent (and garrulous) writers, thinkers and politicians of antiquity: Socrates and Plato, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, and many more. These cults are often set apart, by modern writers, from the calmer, less participatory, less emotional traditions of Graeco-Roman state religion. But we have no explicit ancient account of what the secret mysteries of any cult actually were, what happened at initiation or what exactly was revealed to the initiates. So far as we can now tell, there was hardly a leaky vessel among them; or, at any rate, whatever the gossip on the ancient street, there was no one who risked committing the religious secrets to writing and so sharing them with posterity.
It is true that on one notorious occasion, in the middle of the Peloponnesian War just before the disastrous expedition sailed to Sicily, a group of elite young Athenians were said to have parodied the Eleusinian Mysteries at private parties, and so “revealed the secret things to the uninitiated”. The jape (assuming it was no more than that) had a deathly serious end. Prosecuted for the offence, the men were found guilty and – those that had not escaped into exile first – were executed. But we hear of nothing of that kind ever again. The attitude of Pausanias in his second-century ad Guide to Greece is far more typical. Whenever he comes to describe a sanctuary of a secret cult of this type, he makes it very clear that he cannot give the game away. At Eleusis he even claims to have been warned in a dream not to divulge any of “the things within the wall of the sanctuary” – because “the uninitiated [that is, many of his readers] are not allowed to learn about what they cannot take part in”.
In the absence of any explicit eyewitness (or even second-hand) accounts, we have to rely on various kinds of indirect evidence.

read more There are some general descriptions of initiation by ancient writers, which often dwell on strange sounds and bright lights, or the clash of light and dark. There are some notable works of literature which may engage with the theology of these cults: the so-called “Homeric Hymn to Demeter”, which tells the story of Demeter’s grief after the rape of her daughter Persephone by Hades, is often thought to reflect the myth underlying the rituals at Eleusis. There are also a number of speculative, and probably almost entirely imaginary, accounts written by ancient critics of the cults. Livy includes in his history of Rome a lurid tale of the cult of Bacchus, which stresses debauchery, murder and a clever trick with sulphurous torches, which stayed alight even when plunged into the waters of the Tiber. Early Christian writers found these initiatory cults a predictably easy target. Clement of Alexandria, for example, at the end of the second or beginning of the third century AD, tried to forge an etymological link between the ritual cry of the Bacchic worshippers (“euan, euoi”) and the Judaeo-Christian figure of Eve – helped by a reputed fondness of the Bacchists for snakes. Clement’s idea was that they were actually worshipping the originator of human sin.
So, for modern scholars, it has always been a frustrating task to discover the secret of these ancient mystery cults (“mystery” from the Greek mysterion, which has a range of meaning, from “Eleusinian ritual” to “secret knowledge” in a wider sense). What was it that the initiates of Dionysus or the “Great Mother” knew that the uninitiated did not? In his refreshing new survey, Mystery Cults in Ancient World, Hugh Bowden suggests that we have perhaps been worrying unnecessarily about that question. In fact, we don’t have to imagine the ancients were so much better keepers of secrets than we are, for no secret knowledge, as such, was transmitted at all. To be sure, there was a whole range of objects involved in these cults that outsiders could not see, and words that they were not allowed to hear. (In the cult at Eleusis, from descriptions of the public procession to the sanctuary, we can judge that the cult objects were small – at least small enough comfortably to be carried in containers by the priestesses.) But that is quite different from thinking that some particular piece of secret doctrine was revealed to the faithful at their initiation.
Bowden would prefer to see the religious culture of the mysteries in “imagistic” terms. Drawing – perhaps a little over-enthusiastically – on recent work on the anthropology of prehistoric religions, he contrasts imagistic with doctrinal forms of religious experience. The latter are best seen in the institutionalized, regular patterns of (relatively low-key) worship, associated with modern mainstream Christianity. The former rely on the kind of striking, occasional, intense, episodic moments of religious change that are associated with ancient mystery and initiatory cults: impressive and mind-blowing maybe, but not defined by a doctrinal message (hence all that stuff about sound and light).
Not to say that it was, therefore, all empty impression, signifying little. For Bowden, what these initiatory religions offer is a face-to-face vision of the divine. One of the big issues of Greek and Roman culture in general is exactly how far the gods are, safely, visible to mortals. The cautionary mythological tale here is that of Semele, who (as brilliantly refigured in Handel’s opera) demands to look at her lover, Jupiter, only to be destroyed by that vision of godhead. In standard ancient ritual practice, there were all kinds of ways in which the worshipper’s direct vision of the gods was avoided (through representation in statues, for example). Bowden shows convincingly that the mysteries broke through this veil, and offered a direct vision of the god – and, unlike Semele’s experience, one that did not kill the worshipper. As Lucius, the initiand in the cult of Isis in Apuleius’ novel The Golden Ass, observes: “I approached the gods below and the gods above face-to-face, and worshipped them from nearby”.
Bowden’s Mystery Cults is a consistently sensible book in a field where common sense is often lacking (the temptation to see some ancient initiatory rituals as if they were New Age religions has proved almost irresistible). And, in the course of a wonderfully, and intelligently, illustrated 250 pages, he debunks an impressive number of myths about ancient mystery religions. He pours some much-needed cold water over the idea that the inscribed golden “leaves” (offering instructions for navigating the underworld) found with a number of burials in the Greek world attest to a defined “Orphic cult” with advanced ideas of eschatology; better, perhaps, to see them as examples of a much more humdrum commercial religious trade, selling reassurances of a happy afterlife for grieving relatives to put in the graves of their loved ones. And he takes many scholars to task (myself included) for assuming that the cult of the Great Mother in Rome, based on the Palatine Hill, just next to the Roman imperial palace, was served by ecstatic eunuch priests who castrated themselves with a piece of flint. Some of us had already been a little more circumspect about this than Bowden allows: you only have to read accounts of pre-modern full castration (for the Great Mother was supposed to demand the removal of both penis and testicles) to recognize that few priests could have survived any such procedure. But he shows that, feasible or not, the practice is anyway much less clearly attested in Roman literature than we like to think.
More often than not, in fact, the details of these cults may not be quite as they seem. He cites an intriguing second-century AD inscription from just outside Rome, listing the members of a Bacchic troupe (or thiasos), under a priestess called Agripinilla. It is anyone’s guess whether we see here a group of respectable Roman men and women really imitating the mad Bacchants of Euripides’ play, and taking to the mountains in religious fervour – or whether this was the ancient equivalent of modern morris dancing (that is to say the Roman equivalent group of bank managers on their days off pretending to be lusty medieval rustics). My hunch, as Bowden almost suggests, is the latter.
The book, however, is concerned to do much more than debunk. Taken overall, Bowden’s examples of mystery cults – from the famous rituals of Eleusis to those little communities of Mithraists huddled in their ritual “caves” along Hadrian’s Wall – suggest a much fuzzier boundary with the official, civic cult of Greece and Rome than even he acknowledges. For a start, many of these religions are not only personal and initiatory but also part of the state religious framework. The rituals in the sanctuary at Eleusis, where the secret initiation (whatever it was) happened, were preceded and followed by large public processions of the citizens of Athens. The sanctuary of the Great Mother at Ostia was a place of considerable local splendour, castration or no castration – and, as we know from the inscriptions found there, it was subsidized by grandees of the local community.
But it is also the case that some of the concerns of the initiatory religions overlap strikingly with those of civic cult. Bowden rightly lays stress on all kinds of problematic issues of naming, and on the uncertainty of divine identity within mystery cults. Some mystery gods are nameless, some are addressed under a variety of alternative titles. Some inscribed texts hedge their bets: “Great Gods of Samothrace”, or “Dioscuri”, or “Kabeiroi”? Uncertainty and ambivalence, in Bowden’s view, were part of the essence of the mysteries. But so also were they part of the essence of civic cults, where those who wanted to play safe in addressing a god always hedged their bets: “whether you are god or goddess” was a standard Roman formula of prayer, just to make sure that there had been no mistake about the sex of the deity.
Likewise the question of incomprehensibility. As Bowden explains, the Greek mysteries of the island of Samothrace “included someone reciting incomprehensible words” – another index of the intellectual puzzlement at the heart of such mystery cults. But, although Bowden does not mention it, there is plenty of incomprehensibility in ancient civic, official cults too: in the first century AD, when the priests known as the “Salii” danced through the streets of Rome twice a year and sang their special hymn, no one (not even the priests themselves) had the foggiest clue what the hymn meant. Perhaps in the early periods of Rome’s history, the participants had understood; or more likely it had always been mumbo-jumbo. All ancient religion celebrates its own incomprehensibility, as part of its mystique.
This overlap between civic and initiatory religion comes out particularly vividly in a series of inscriptions commemorating leading pagan aristocrats of the late Roman Empire, which proudly list all their religious offices – initiation into mystery cults next to official state priesthoods. These were men who boasted of holding the traditional offices of augur or pontifex, as well as of being initiated into the cult of Mithras or Egyptian Isis. Bowden rightly focuses on these at the end of his book and argues against a common view that they reflect a new form of aggressive pagan religiosity, developed in response to the rise of Christianity, or that they are part of a pagan “revival” in a Christian context. Much more likely they show – albeit under the magnifying glass of late imperial Rome (where everything appears larger than life) – just how closely different forms and styles of cult, “mystery” or not, had always gone hand in hand. However secretive they might have been about what went on in their ceremonies, however uncertain or elusive the “message” of the cults might have been amid all that sound and light – initiation in a variety of different cults was something that these late antique aristocrats were happy to parade.

Mary Beard is the author of The Roman Triumph, published in 2007, and Pompeii: The life of a Roman town, 2008. Her most recent book, It’s a Don’s Life, a collection of her TLS blogs, appeared in 2009. She is Professor of Classics and Professorial Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Classics editor of the TLS.

TLS on Scottish

2010-06-04T22:14:00.000-04:00

on Language

French words in Scots. We sought clarification of a quirk of Scots English, namely that it is rich in French-derived words (NB, April 9). A number of readers wrote to say, "Och, it's the Auld Alliance", as if that explained everything. More helpfully, Roy Love sent us some pages from The Guid Scots Tongue by David Murison, former editor of the Scottish National Dictionary. He states that it "is a common mistake to ascribe all this [French] vocabulary to ... the Auld Alliance", which was "effective from about 1330 until the Reformation of 1560". Equally important, according to Murison, was "Norman French", brought to England by William the Conqueror, from where it percolated northwards over the next hundred years. The trade resulting from the Auld Alliance only cemented on the Scottish tongue words which had faded from its Sassenach neighbour.
We hereby list some of the Franco-Scottish words we have collected so far. Others will be welcomed, so long as they are in more or less common use.

aumrie wardrobe (cf. armoire)
ashet plate
bonny good
bouls (child's game of) marbles
cowp capsize
douce sweet
fashious angry
gigot lamb chop
pettycoat tails shortbread (cf. petites gautelles)
pooch pocket row street (cf. rue)
serviette napkin
scrivener, scribe writer (cf. écrivain)

Every Scottish schoolchild knows the Edinburgh expression "Gardyloo!", which preceded the dumping of slops into the street from high tenement windows, short for "prenez garde à l'eau". They still say it, though they no longer (mostly) do it.

Un livre à lire

2010-06-04T13:23:00.001-04:00

Que demande le peuple ?
Trois siècles de représentations des «pauvres» analysés par l’universitaire Déborah Cohen
Par JEAN-YVES GRENIER

Déborah Cohen. La Nature du peuple. Les formes de l’imaginaire social (XVIIIe-XXIe). Champ Vallon, «La chose publique», 448 pp., 27 €.

Qu’est-ce que le peuple au XVIIIe siècle ? Pendant longtemps, au moins jusqu’aux années 1760, il est absent des livres et des discours, si ce n’est pour affirmer sa soumission au roi. «Les élites ne voient pas le peuple», écrit Déborah Cohen, c’est «un regard qui sait d’avance». Et ce savoir est nourri d’un a priori radical selon lequel la pauvreté, ou l’appartenance au peuple, n’est pas un phénomène social mais un fait de la nature, voulu par la providence. Etre mendiant, voleur ou vagabond est pensé comme relevant d’une nature dont on ne peut pas se défaire. Nul besoin de rechercher les identités singulières, car l’individu de basse condition n’a pas de personnalité propre, seul compte l’appartenance à un collectif. Pour les dominants, «il n’y a pas d’hommes et de femmes du peuple, seulement des masses, des groupes, des agrégats, le plus souvent en émeute». Le peuple est perçu comme tout entier du côté du corps, incapable de réflexion politique. Dès lors, il ne peut qu’être par nature profondément séditieux. La crainte de la révolte est profonde chez les élites. Pourtant, aucun soulèvement important ne se produit au cours du XVIIIe siècle, avant 1789.

Hiérarchie.

Après le milieu du siècle, la représentation du peuple devient moins abstraite et le schéma théologique s’efface en partie au profit de descriptions plus concrètes du paysage social. Cette évolution s’explique par la place considérable prise par le sentiment, le désir de ressentir une émotion face à des individus réels, au sein d’une génération marquée par la lecture de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La providence divine n’expliquant plus l’ordre social, c’est la valeur morale qui détermine désormais la hiérarchie. Quand un individu issu du peuple fait preuve de vertu, il faut seulement le plaindre d’y appartenir par erreur. Quant aux autres, les seuls qui trouvent grâce aux yeux des dominants dans la littérature, ce sont ceux qui acceptent l’ordre tel qu’il est et s’y soumettent. L’enseignement tiré par Déborah Cohen de ce passage d’une loi de nature à une approche qui se veut plus empirique, c’est qu’il y a peu de changement dans la faible considération accordée par les élites au peuple. Et quand les premiers économistes font accepter des lois pour libéraliser le commerce des grains et que se multiplient les séditions contre le prix du blé qui s’envole (c’est la «guerre des Farines», en 1775), ils voient dans ce mouvement irrationnel de la foule «la fantaisie d’une multitude ignorante, effrayée», selon l’expression de Condorcet.

read more

Imaginaire.

Après le regard des élites, l’ouvrage s’interroge sur la représentation que le peuple a de lui-même, question délicate car les autobiographies populaires sont rares. Déborah Cohen montre avec finesse comment cette représentation oscille entre une intériorisation de l’ordre voulu par les élites et des tentatives pour échapper à son destin social. La plus spectaculaire est le changement d’identité, comme cette «demoiselle de Brulle», en fait une fille de perruquier, qui prétend être la veuve d’un aristocrate avant de finir à la Bastille, où elle écrit ses mémoires en 1761. Echanger ainsi les rôles, c’est manifester l’impossibilité d’une mobilité sociale, mais c’est aussi affirmer, contre le discours naturaliste des élites, qu’une femme ou un homme issu du peuple peut ressembler à s’y méprendre à un aristocrate.
Déborah Cohen s’interroge également sur les analogies entre le monde d’hier et celui d’aujourd’hui. Les XIXe et XXe siècles ont abordé le peuple au travers de la «question sociale»,une réflexion sur le prolétariat ouvrier et sur la promesse républicaine d’une promotion possible. Le début du XXIe siècle est en régression, ressemblant sur bien des points au XVIIIe. Même blocage de l’ascenseur social, même insécurité et, surtout, mêmes explications qui stigmatisent les pauvres et les rendent responsables de leur situation.
Comme au XVIIIe siècle, le groupe populaire est éclaté, ayant perdu la relative unité que pouvait donner le sentiment d’appartenir au monde ouvrier. Il devient les exclus, les immigrés, les jeunes de banlieue, les chômeurs en fin de droits… Cette dispersion ne donne du peuple qu’une définition par la négative. Comme avant 1760, l’imaginaire a pris le pas sur l’analyse empirique. Et de l’imaginaire aux fantasmes angoissés, il n’y a qu’un pas.

The Economist on Cats and Mice

2010-06-03T22:52:00.000-04:00

Toxoplasmosis and psychology

A game of cat and mouse

There is tantalising evidence that a common parasite may affect human behaviour

Jun 3rd 2010

IF AN alien bug invaded the brains of half the population, hijacked their neurochemistry, altered the way they acted and drove some of them crazy, then you might expect a few excitable headlines to appear in the press. Yet something disturbingly like this may actually be happening without the world noticing.

Toxoplasma gondii is not an alien; it is a relative of that down-to-earth pathogen Plasmodium, the beast that causes malaria. It is common: in some parts of the world as much as 60% of the population is infected with it. And it can harm fetuses and people with AIDS, because in each case their immune systems cannot cope with it. For other people, though, the symptoms are usually no worse than a mild dose of flu. Not much for them to worry about, then. Except that there is a growing body of evidence that some of those people have their behaviour permanently changed.

One reason to suspect this is that a country’s level of Toxoplasma infection seems to be related to the level of neuroticism displayed by its population. Another is that those infected seem to have poor reaction times and are more likely to be involved in road accidents. A third is that they have short attention spans and little interest in seeking out novelty. A fourth, possibly the most worrying, is that those who suffer from schizophrenia are more likely than those who do not to have been exposed to Toxoplasma.

Nor is any of this truly surprising. For, besides humans, Toxoplasma has two normal hosts: rodents and cats. And what it does to rodents is very odd indeed.

Fatal feline attraction

Joanne Webster of Imperial College, London, has been studying Toxoplasma for years. Like Plasmodium, which cycles between mosquitoes and man, Toxoplasma cycles between its rodent and feline hosts, living out different phases of its existence in each. In cats, it resides in the wall of the small intestine and passes out of the host in its faeces. These are then picked up by rats and mice (and also by other mammal species, including humans), where they form cysts in brain, liver and muscle tissue. Eventually, if the parasites are lucky, their rodent host is eaten by a cat and the whole cycle starts again.

Unlike Plasmodium, however, which can rely on the natural behaviour of mosquitoes to spread it around, Toxoplasma’s rodent hosts have a strong aversion to helping it into its next home. Which is where, in Dr Webster’s elegant phrase, fatal feline attraction comes in. Rats and mice infected with Toxoplasma start wandering around and drawing attention to themselves—in other words, behaving in ways that will bring them to the attention of cats. They are even, Dr Webster’s work suggests, attracted to the smell of cats.

How these behavioural changes come about was, until recently, obscure. But in 2009 Glenn McConkey of the University of Leeds, in England, analysed Toxoplasma’s DNA. When he compared the results with those of other species, he discovered that two of the bug’s genes encode enzymes involved in the production of a molecule called dopamine. This molecule acts, in animals that have nervous systems, as a chemical messenger between nerve cells. It does not, however, have any known function in single-celled critters. Moreover, dopamine is particularly implicated in schizophrenia. Haloperidol, an antipsychotic drug, works by blocking dopamine receptors.

Intriguingly, Dr Webster has found that haloperidol serves to reverse fatal feline attraction in rats. This suggests the parasite is indeed interfering with the brain’s dopamine system—and thus that it might be doing the same thing in people. Dr McConkey is now making a version of Toxoplasma with the dopamine genes excised, to see if rats infected with this modified bug are protected from the fatal attraction.

Culture club

The evidence that human toxoplasmosis does more than appears at first sight is, it must be said, quite scattered. But it is intriguing and probably worth following up.

The connection with schizophrenia was originally suggested in the 1950s, but only really took off in 2003, when it was revived by Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, near Washington, DC. In collaboration with Bob Yolken of Johns Hopkins University, Dr Fuller discovered that people who suffer from schizophrenia are almost three times more likely than the general population to have antibodies to Toxoplasma.

That does not, of course, prove Toxoplasma causes schizophrenia. As every science student is taught from the beginning, correlation is not causation. It could be that schizophrenics are more susceptible to the infection, or some third, as yet unidentified variable may be involved.

Another interesting correlation has, though, been discovered by Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague. Dr Flegr has studied several aspects of the Toxoplasma question. In one case he looked at the infection rate of people involved in road accidents. Both drivers and pedestrians who had been in accidents were almost three times more likely to be infected than comparable individuals who had not been. Similar results have been found in Turkey, by Kor Yereli of Celal Bayar University, in Manisa. And Dr Flegr has found other abnormalities in infected people. These included reduced reaction times and shorter attention spans—both of which might help to explain the accident statistics—and a reduction in “novelty-seeking”.

This latter is curious. The sort of behaviour shown by rodents is, if anything, an increase in novelty-seeking. But the point is that novelty-seeking is controlled by nerve cells that respond to dopamine. Humans are dead-end hosts as far as Toxoplasma is concerned, so the exact effect will not have been honed by natural selection and may therefore be different from the one in animals that are actually useful to the parasite.

All of these suggested effects are obviously bad for the individuals involved, but some researchers go further and propose that entire societies are being altered by Toxoplasma. In 2006 Kevin Lafferty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a paper noting a correlation between levels of neuroticism established by national surveys in various countries and the level of Toxoplasma infection recorded in pregnant women (a group who are tested routinely). The places he looked at ranged from phlegmatic Britain, with a neuroticism score of -0.8 and a Toxoplasma infection rate of 6.6%, to hot-blooded France, which scored 1.8 and had an infection rate of 45%. Cross-Channel prejudices, then, may have an unexpected origin.

To repeat, correlation is not causation, and a lot more work would need to be done to prove the point. But it is just possible that a parasite’s desire to get eaten by a cat is shaping the cultures of the world.

Science and Technology

TLS on Renaissances

2010-06-03T22:06:00.000-04:00

on Renaissances

Powers of Writing
by Jonathan Benthall
a review of
Jack Goody's RENAISSANCES The one or the many? 322pp. Cambridge University Press. Paperback, £15.99 (US $27.99). 978 0 521 745161

The United States has held itself together by demoting languages other than English. The cultural coherence of China, with its linguistic diversity, owes much to its logographic script (where signs represent units of meaning rather than units of sound), which facilitates an immense internal market. Therefore the European Union, being of necessity multilingual, should consider dropping its phonetic script and adopting the Chinese alternative. Sir Jack Goody's logic is perfect, but he is not angling to be commissioned by President Van Rompuy to help push through this somewhat ambitious reform. He is not an "applied" anthropologist.
But nor does he aspire, I think, to an Olympian objectivity, though others have seen in him a successor to the great nineteenth-century synthesizers. His aim, in throwing out such a provocation in Renaissances, is to unsettle what he sees as the Eurocentric complacency that turns interpretations of our past into a kind of salvation history. Goody admits that he may be slightly exaggerating the achievements of the Eastern civilizations and playing down those of Europe, but "if so, it is a corrective that was to be made, given the continuing trend of much social science, not only western".
Literacy was at the heart of the Bronze Age transformation, together with advanced agriculture and the growth of cities, bureaucracies and social classes based on landlordism. But whereas other scholars have emphasized a split between East and West as the highest level historical divergence, Goody prefers to see Eurasia as a unified field, with the potential for a "knowledge society", distinct from sub-Saharan Africa and other regions that never experienced a Bronze Age and have remained predominantly oral. read more Out with stereotypes of Asiatic despotism and stagnation. China was the world's major export manufacturer before the nineteenth century; India's mathematicians gave us "Arabic" numerals, rescuing Europe from our lumbering Roman arithmetic. The Phoenicians, who invented our alphabet and also provide examples of early democracy, are largely "written out of the Antiquity script". The West's commercial and scientific supremacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have been no more than a temporary surge that is now receding.
Within Eurasia, the highest level differentiation was, according to Goody, between the three Abrahamic monotheisms and the more eclectic spirit of religion that prevailed elsewhere.
Goody is at his most original in his analysis of "iconophobia", the banning of naturalistic representations, which was a marked feature of the monotheisms (though not unknown further east, as in early Buddhism). At various periods, iconophobia inhibited the visual and performing arts. Moreover, since God was omniscient, it was possible to dismiss scientific inquiry into the natural world as redundant. Yet "elements of scepticism were not altogether absent from even the most rigid of religious beliefs".
Goody defends the contested idea of a Dark Age following the fall of the Roman Empire and the collapse of trade in Western Europe. The European Renaissance rediscovered the arts of the Greeks and the Romans, and thereby diluted Christian hegemony with a secular pluralism. In the sciences, an allimportant channel of continuity with ancient Classical achievements was via Islam. The sphere of religion shrank, while new sources of energy were retrieved from an earlier era and aligned towards the future. With a qualified acknowledgement to the monumentally unfashionable Arnold Toynbee, Goody draws attention to other renaissances, or efflorescences, in world history. The opposite of a renaissance is a "reformation", which looks back to a fixed text of sacred origin. Renaissances and reformations are possible in any literate society. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Islam experienced its period of philosophical and scientific flowering, one of the drivers for which was the introduction of paper, originally a Chinese invention, by Arabs.
So how unique was the Italian Renaissance? Goody draws attention to a number of less prominent renaissances within Christianity.
Byzantium, for instance, had its own dark age, and dark ages alternate with efflorescences.
In a series of chapters (three of them written in collaboration with Stephen Fennell), Goody tests his model of renaissances against the evidence from Islam, Hinduism and China. He concludes that the unique feature of the European Renaissance was its looking back for revitalization to worldviews that had been restricted by the Church, some of them atheistic and materialistic. India and China, by contrast, accumulated their achievements gradually, less hampered by the problem of circumscription by the divine. Europe's Renaissance had to "make up for lost time in a rush", and was given an added spur by New World colonization.
A long and complex chapter on Islam reminds us that, originally, both Christianity and Islam were radical reformist reactions to Judaism. Islam experienced over the centuries a number of temporary and local efflorescences.
Under the Abbasid caliphate, for instance, Greek scientific literature was rediscovered, but the revival did not extend to an admiration for Greek literature or sculpture or architecture. Goody sums up this long history as "the ebb and flow of a civilization in constant contact with others", an alternation between traditionalism and rationality. By contrast with the Italian Renaissance, Islam never institutionalized the "secular vision".
Another chapter examines the case of Judaism: first the "Judaeo-Arab synthesis" in Andalusia, which Goody does not hesitate to call a "golden age", and later the Emancipation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Ashkenazi or East European Jews succeeded in freeing themselves not only from the limits placed on them by Christendom, but also from self-imposed religious restrictions. This efflorescence of Jewish culture was enhanced by immigration to America. Iconophobia was abandoned to the extent that Jews were able to play a leading role in developing the new visual media of the twentieth century. But the introduction of secular thought into Judaism by Moses Mendelssohn and others was more a result of looking laterally at the world around it than of looking backwards.
One can only admire Goody's comparativist ambition, his omnivorous curiosity, his disdain for disciplinary boundaries, and his willingness to dispute received opinion. Two questions remain. First, about his concept of religion. He has elsewhere criticized two of his contemporaries, Eric Hobsbawm - a friend to whom this book is dedicated - and the late Ernest Gellner, for discounting the importance of religion as an autonomous determinant. But rather oddly for a great social anthropologist - whose discipline specializes in holding up words such as "civilization" and "art" to the light - he does not seem to want to question the definition of religion and allied categories, being satisfied with the assertion that "what religion is about" is "the transcendental". His study of Eurasian world-views might have been enriched by the insight of a scholar such as Peter Beyer, who argues that a model of religion based on Christianity, and to a lesser extent on Islam, was imposed on regions such as India and China, but was later widely adopted as a global category. "Hinduism", for instance, was a neologism formulated first by European scholars, and later adopted by Indian intellectuals. Such a shift would enrich Goody's argument, which rightly stresses the porous and contested boundaries of the religious field.
The second question concerns Africa. Goody made his name originally as an Africanist, but sub-Saharan Africa figures in this latest book almost entirely as a negative: no Bronze Age, no long tradition of literacy except under Christian and Islamic influence, no urbanization, no haute cuisine, no "culture of flowers" (the title of one of his earlier books). Yet Goody's reputation as a stern opponent of all racism and a defender of oral cultures is unquestionable. He has always stressed the power of writing to oppress illiterate people, as well as its liberating capacity.
A clue may be found in the epigraph to this book, T. S. Eliot's "In my end is my beginning".
Goody read English Literature when he went up to Cambridge in 1938, and was first attracted to anthropology by the notes to The Waste Land. It is as if, now entering his tenth decade, he has achieved a personal renaissance, looking backwards in his life, as well as alongside and forwards, to present us with a brilliant flowering of the intellect.
Goody has recently turned his attention again to Africa in Ghana Observed, Africa Reconsidered (2007), but that is a collation of essays written over forty years. He has been charged by another student of world civilizations, Bruce Lincoln, with underestimating the damage that exploitation by the colonial powers has done to Africa. However, previously impoverished Asian nations now seem to be able to connect more successfully with the world economy. Goody's early fieldwork experience in Ghana, according to his most thoughtful adherent, Keith Hart, has always underpinned his venture into comparativism, since he was politically engaged in the project to make possible a new world order after the Second World War. Hart notes that Goody - unlike many other social anthropologists of his generation - has spurned both a "myopic ethnography" focusing on discrete tribes and the seductions of binary structuralism à la Lévi-Strauss.
Borrowing a lens from Goody, Hart sees the Western democratic project as secondary to the long Eurasian record of class stratification, which is now intensified so as to dominate the world economy. Sub-Saharan Africa was on the whole more egalitarian than Eurasia, and held together by kinship rather than by land rights. Africa has undergone a recent population explosion and a late, extremely fast and wide-ranging urban revolution. It missed out on earlier machine revolutions, and is far behind in the present one associated with digitalization.
New kinds of state sustained by foreign powers, urban elites and unregulated city markets have been grafted onto societies organized in a different way. So some of the task of explicitly fitting sub-Saharan Africa into Goody's interpretative scheme may have been carried out for him already. The implications for the future of that continent are troubling, though West African music and imaginative literature, for example, would seem to qualify fully as "efflorescences".
Renaissances is a magisterial book, despite stretches of densely potted history and some ungainly repetitions. Another possible gap for this indefatigable author to fill in would be Central Eurasia, from which originated several of the greatest Muslim scientists and philosophers such as Avicenna and al-Biruni. A recently published historical study, Empires of the Silk Road, by Christopher Beckwith (reviewed in the TLS, April 16), emphasizes the heroic warlord as a key figure underlying that region's commerce and radiating into the continent as a whole.
One of the many discussions that Goody's model of history will stimulate relates to the future of Islam and its deficiency in what he calls the "permanent institutionalization of the secular in universities or academies". There is clearly a crisis of authority in Islam today as a result of various fundamentalist trends. But if Islam has known its "golden ages", and its history is so intertwined with that of the West, there can be no inherent reason in its theology why it should not experience a full-blown renaissance, just as the Europeans did, making up for lost time six centuries ago. Contemporary Islam since 9/11 is, for the Tunisian Muslim writer Abdelwahab Meddeb, "inconsolable in its destitution". Jack Goody's book may be specially recommended to Muslims looking for an intellectual complement to the current, entirely understandable preoccupation in most of the Muslim world with international politics. As John Wansbrough, the qur'anic scholar, wrote of the concern in foundational Islam for community cohesion, "The notion of decline from an ideal state is seldom accompanied by a conviction that reversal is impossible . . . . Nostalgia and optimism are not, after all, mutually exclusive".

The Economist on DHA

2010-06-03T19:11:00.000-04:00

Diet and the evolution of the brain
Fish and no chips
The wonders of docosahexaenoic acid
May 27th 2010

TO PIN one big evolutionary shift on a particular molecule is ambitious. To pin two on it is truly audacious. Yet doing so was just one of the ideas floating around at “A Celebration of DHA” in London this week. The celebration in question was a scientific meeting, rather than a festival. It was definitely, however, a love-in. It was held on May 26th and 27th at the Royal Society of Medicine to discuss the many virtues of docosahexaenoic acid, the most important of that fashionable class of dietary chemicals, the omega-3 fatty acids.
DHA is a component of brains, particularly the synaptic junctions between nerve cells, and its displacement from modern diets by the omega-6 acids in cooking oils such as soya, maize and rape is a cause of worry. Many researchers think this shift—and the change in brain chemistry that it causes—explains the growth in recent times of depression, manic-depression, memory loss, schizophrenia and attention-deficit disorder. It may also be responsible for rising levels of obesity and thus the heart disease which often accompanies being overweight.
Michael Crawford, a researcher at the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition in London, believes, however, that DHA is even more important than that. He suggests that it was responsible for the existence of nervous systems in the first place, and that access to large quantities of the stuff was what permitted the evolution of big brains in mankind’s more recent ancestors.

Fish-eye lenses
According to Dr Crawford, DHA’s first job was to convert light into electricity in single-celled organisms. This gave them a crude form of vision, allowing them to move in response to light and shade, but also brought into biology a way of controlling electrical potential. If organisms are to be multicellular, cells must be able to talk to each other. Electrical potentials, the basis of every nervous system, are one way of doing this. And DHA was the enabler.
The molecule is certainly ubiquitous. Some 600m years after animals became multicellular, more than half of the fatty-acid molecules in the light-sensitive cells of the human eye are still DHA, and the proportion of DHA in the synapses of the brain is not far short of that, despite the fact that similar molecules are far more readily available. Indeed, Dr Crawford thinks that a shortage of DHA is a long-term evolutionary theme. The molecule is most famously found in fatty fish. He suggests this might explain why, for example, dolphins have brains that weigh 1.8kg whereas zebra brains weigh only 350g, even though the two species have similar body sizes. Furthermore, he argues that the dramatic increase of the size of the brains of humanity’s ancestors that happened about 6m years ago was not because apes came out of the trees to hunt on the savannahs, but because they arrived at the coast and found a ready supply of DHA in fish.
Not everyone, it must be said, agrees with this interpretation of history. For one thing, humanity’s ancestors do not seem to have been exclusively coastal. What they do agree about, though, is that substituting DHA with other, superficially similar molecules is a bad idea.

Accept no substitute
Joseph Hibbeln, a researcher at America’s National Institutes of Health, has been looking at the supply to babies of DHA from breast milk and at genetic variation in the ability to produce this molecule from other omega-3s. A study that began in the early 1990s has shown that children who are breastfed have the same range of IQs, regardless of whether they have the ability to make their own DHA. In the case of those fed on formula milk low in DHA, though, children without the DHA-making ability had an average IQ 7.8 points lower than those with it.
Nor is intelligence the only thing affected by a lack of DHA. There is also a body of data linking omega-3 deficiencies to violent behaviour. Countries whose citizens eat more fish (which is rich in DHA) are less prone to depression, suicide and murder. And new research by Dr Hibbeln shows that low levels of DHA are a risk factor for suicide among American servicemen and women. Actual suicides had significantly lower levels of DHA in the most recent routine blood sample taken before they killed themselves than did comparable personnel who remained alive. More worryingly, 95% of American troops have DHA levels that these results suggest put them at risk of suicide.
America’s department of defence has taken note. It will soon unveil a programme to supplement the diets of soldiers with omega-3s. The country’s Food and Drug Administration may change one of its policies, too. Thomas Brenna, a professor of nutrition at Cornell University, has written a letter (co-signed by many of the scientists at the meeting) urging the agency to revise its advice to pregnant and fertile women that they limit their consumption of fish. This advice, promulgated in 2004, was intended to protect fetuses from the malign effects of methyl mercury, which accumulates in fish such as tuna. The signatories argue that this effect is greatly outweighed by the DHA-related benefits of eating fatty fish.
They may, however, be swimming against the tide. The popularity of omega-6-rich foods based on cheap vegetable oils will be difficult to reverse. Indeed, if another of Dr Hibbeln’s studies proves true of people as well as rodents, it may be self-fulfilling.
In this experiment he fed rats diets that were identical except that in one case 8% of the calories came from linoleic acid (an omega-6 fatty acid) while in the other that value was 1%. These percentages reflect the shift in the proportion of omega-6s in the American diet between 1909 and the early 21st century.
In the 8% diet, levels of rat obesity doubled. It turns out that in rats (and also in humans) linoleic acid is converted into molecules called endocannabinoids that trigger appetite. Those who eat omega-6s, in other words, want to eat more food. And since, in the human case, omega-6-rich food is much cheaper than omega-3-rich food, that is what they are likely to consume.
The way out of this vicious circle is not obvious. Eating fish is all very well, but the oceans are under enough pressure as it is. Biotechnology might be brought to bear—creating genetically modified crops such as soyabeans with higher levels of DHA. Until that day, though, the best advice is probably that which was posted over the oracle at Delphi: “Nothing in excess”.

TLS on American Fake Smiles

2010-06-02T22:00:00.000-04:00

on Good Music

Let's go negative

by Carol Tavris
a review of
Barbara Ehrenreich
SMILE OR DIE
How positive thinking fooled America and the world 237pp. Granta Books. £10.99. 978 1 8470 81353

Barbara Ehrenreich's essay about her experience of breast cancer, published in Harper's in 2007, was like a bracing blast of clean, cool air in a musty room. Her article was not about her medical treatment but about the infantilizing breastcancer-survivor industry, with its pink ribbons, teddy bears and relentless cheerfulness. You may not call yourself a victim or a patient; you must see yourself as a "survivor".
You must not be angry or raise political questions about the dismal state of health care in America, or the possible environmental causes of cancer. You must not whine or cry, because negative emotions and attitudes are not only a sign of psychological defeat, but also a sure way to make the cancer return or grow faster. If it does return, it is your fault for not being positive enough and thinking the right thoughts. Ehrenreich is furious at the burden that this erroneous belief places on patients, and quotes one woman's statement: "I know that if I get sad, scared or upset, I am making my tumor grow faster and I will have shortened my life". Smile or die, indeed.
read more Barbara Ehrenreich has long been a tireless fighter against the purveyors of silliness and self-deception who clog America's airwaves and bestseller lists, and she reserves her special venom for those who profit by taking advantage of the poor, the unemployed, the uninsured. In books such as Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America (2002) and Bait and Switch: On the (futile) pursuit of the American dream (2006), she reminded readers to ask who it is that benefits when Americans who are struggling financially are advised to solve their problems by wishing harder and praying more. In Smile or Die (which is published in the US under the title Bright-Sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America), she takes on the excesses, delusions and unsupported promises of the positive-thinking movement, tracking both its naive and its corrupt manifestations in the worlds of health, business, religion and psychology.
"Positive thinking" is the shmoo of American culture: an irresistible target that invites mockery but is impossible to eradicate. (The shmoo, a cartoon character invented by Al Capp in 1948, would do anything to make you happy, absorb any abuse you cared to hurl at it, and then, if you were hungry, turn itself into a nice steak dinner for you.) Ehrenreich examines the rise of positive thinking from its inception in the nineteenth century, where it began as a revolt against Calvinism's doctrine of hard work and eternal damnation. Mary Baker Eddy's invention of Christian Science, allied with Phineas Quimby's New Thought movement, held that illness was all in the mind, and therefore a mind cure was better than a medical one. (In many cases, given the state of medicine at the time, it was.) What Mary Baker Eddy was to the nineteenth century, Norman Vincent Peale was to the twentieth; his The Power of Positive Thinking (1990) in turn spawned legions of bestsellers, such as Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006), whose secret is that if you are poor, unhappy, or jobless, the fault lies not in your stars or your circumstances but in your thoughts.
What a welcome message for companies busily laying off employees! Between 1981 and 2003, some 30 million full-time American workers lost their jobs as corporations downsized. As that happened, Ehrenreich argues, positive thinking became a big business, and big business was its principal client. Corporations, having no safety nets to offer their laid-off workers, offered psychological cheerleading instead: how better to manage workers' despair and head off anger than by hiring motivational speakers to give them pep talks about all the new opportunities they now had? Don't be angry at your boss or blame the system, one Christian motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, advises, "work harder and pray more". Corporations bought the message of positive thinking themselves, too: "Why bother worrying about dizzying levels of debt and exposure to potential defaults", Ehrenreich writes, "when all good things come to those who are optimistic enough to expect them?". Ehrenreich knows that the economic collapse that struck America has many complex causes, but she argues that positive thinking paved the road to disaster as American corporate culture replaced "the dreary rationality of professional management" with cheery expectations of evergreater success. They were victims of the same delusional thinking they sold to their workers: wishing will make it so.
Ehrenreich is at full speed by the time she takes on positive psychology, a movement within academic psychology that investigates "the science of happiness". She interviews one of the founders of the movement, Martin Seligman (an eminent professor at the University of Pennsylvania), who, perhaps aware of her scepticism, does his best to elude her probing questions. Ehrenreich gives him a hard time about his "Authentic Happiness" questionnaire, on which she scored a "lessthan-jubilant 3.67 out of 5", mostly because she didn't feel "extraordinarily proud" of herself and confessed to being pessimistic about the future - "assuming that it was the future of our species at issue, not just my own". Unlike many of the reporters who have interviewed researchers in the positive psychology field, Ehrenreich has done her homework, examining the data beneath the claims that are made and learning that many of them are tenuous or wrong. Optimism does not prolong life. Support groups do not affect the course of cancer. Among older people who lose a loved one, pessimists are less likely to become depressed than optimists. People who are grumpy and neurotic "do more complaining about angina but are at no greater risk of pathology than cheerful people". Happy people do not have "feistier immune systems than less happy people", as Seligman has stated. Many of the researchers in this field are careful in their professional writings, for example by noting, as one team did, "serious conceptual and methodological reservations" about the literature on positive emotions and health, the "inconsistent" findings, and even the "potentially harmful" effects of some of the research. Yet when most of them speak to reporters or to a general audience, or write popular books, they admit that they often get "ahead of the science". They oversimplify, smoothing away the inconsistencies and negative findings.
(Both the media and the major funder of research in positive psychology, the conservative Templeton Foundation, want positive results about positive thinking.) Seligman says that within a decade "we'll have selfhelp books that actually work". Given that he has already written one, this curious remark suggests he is practising some positive thinking himself.
Ehrenreich may be forgiven for not knowing the origins of positive psychology within the field, but Seligman and his colleagues should know better. They rarely acknowledge their debt to Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, who, in the 1960s, argued that it was time for a "third force" in American psychology - humanism, an alternative to thendominant world-views of psychoanalysis and behaviourism. Humanists wanted psychologists to pay more attention to the positive aspects of life, including joy, humour, love and the rare moments of rapture caused by the attainment of excellence or the experience of beauty. The humanists were not scientists themselves, but they spurred research on such admirable attributes as empathy, courage, resilience, altruism, the motivation to excel and self-confidence. This was the kind of positive psychology Ehrenreich would welcome; as her own book Dancing in the Streets: A history of collective joy suggests - she is certainly not opposed to joy.
Like all warriors with a take-no-prisoners approach to a problem, however, she occasionally sweeps some innocent civilians into her net. For one thing, the basic premiss of "positive thinking" is neither new nor American: the Stoic philosophy that negative, destructive emotions are created by our thoughts and errors of judgement flourished 300 years bc. The modern practice of cognitive behavioural therapy is based on this notion, and it has been supported by hundreds of empirical studies. Further, decades of research in social psychology have shown that the attitude Ehrenreich finds so saccharine and typically American - the remarks that many cancer patients make to the effect that "I'm a different and better person now" - reflects a universal human need to make sense of negative experiences.
But what is uniquely American is the way that motivational entrepreneurs, religious hucksters and psychologists who are willing to jump "ahead of the science" have packaged and sold positive thinking as a commodity, as if it were a tonic that can bring us safety, security and health all on its own. "The threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off selfabsorption and taking action in the world", Ehrenreich writes. And that requires thinking critically as well as positively, as this fine book exemplifies.

TLS on Mahal

2010-06-02T21:55:00.002-04:00

on Love of Mahal

Love of Mahall

by Francis Robinson

a review of

Fergus Nicoll's Shah Jahan
The rise and fall of the Mughal Emperor 332pp. Haus. £20. 978 1 905791 910

At its height, the Mughal Empire was the greatest of the early modern Muslim gunpowder empires, ruling 100 million people, as compared with the 22 million of the Ottomans and the 6.5 million of the Safavids. Indeed, it was surpassed only by China's Ming Empire. From 1526 to 1707, with only a brief interval, the Mughals ruled most of India.
The wealth of the Mughal court made it a huge source of patronage, such as no European court could rival, and thus a destination for ambitious and gifted Arabs, Persians, Turks, and even the odd European. The men and women who ruled the empire (there were two women who controlled the royal seal from the harem, and others who participated in government) were remarkable both for their gifts and for their personalities. Shah Jahan, the son of the Emperor Jahangir by a Hindu Rajput wife, lived from 1592 to 1666 and ruled as emperor from 1628 to 1658. He had been a favourite of his grandfather, Akbar, and had kept vigil by the old emperor's bedside as he lay dying. As a young man he was a successful soldier, being awarded the title Shah Jahan "King of the World" by his father in 1617 on his return from successful campaigning in the Deccan. He continued to be personally involved in warfare up to his failed attempt in the mid-1640s to recapture the family patrimony in Samarkand.
He loved music, singing in a light baritone voice and playing the violin.

read more
He was a connoisseur of jewels, studding his Peacock Throne with the most precious of them and deploying semi-precious stones in his signature white marble buildings. He is famous for his love of his second wife, Mumtaz Mahal "Most Exquisite of the Palace", who bore him fifteen children in eighteen years and died bearing her last child. His grief, the adventurer Manucci tells us, turned his black beard white in the space of a few days.
If he had any passion that rivalled that for Mumtaz, it was for architecture. From his teenage years he commissioned new buildings and altered old ones, developing the high Mughal style. His most notable achievements were Shahjahanabad, now known as Old Delhi, a complete new capital built for the effective display of royal power, and, of course, the Taj Mahal, his exquisite tribute to Mumtaz Mahal. It is a building which impresses even the most cynical of visitors. Shah Jahan spent his last eight years gazing at the Taj from his imprisonment in Agra Fort. Having seized power himself by ordering the murder of two brothers and at least six other relatives, he discovered that his sons were not slow to follow his example. "How do you still regard the memory of Khusrau and Shahriyar", Aurangzeb the victor asked him, "whom you did to death before your accession and who had threatened no injury to you?" Fergus Nicoll sets out to tell the history of the rise and fall of Shah Jahan, combining scholarship with accessibility. His work is supported by wide reading in the primary and secondary literature; there are footnotes aplenty. Scholarly appendices explain complex issues such as dating (at least five different calendars are involved) and chronograms, the art of producing a verse about an event the value of the letters of which (each letter of the Persian alphabet has a numerical value) equals the date of the event. Nicoll's style readily grabs the attention. The only problem for the scholar is that one does not know at which point his use of imaginative licence ends and facts supported by evidence begin.
Nicoll gives particular emphasis to three great succession struggles; those to succeed Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The Mughals did not practise primogeniture, so succession was a vicious affair. Rulers did try to indicate who their successors should be. But it was a dangerous business; if one son became too powerful, there was a chance that he might overthrow his father, a fact which made Jahangir keep Shah Jahan in uncertainty, damaging their relations. Whatever happened, as the Emperor began to age, or suffer a temporary illness in the case of Shah Jahan, the princes would prepare for the showdown. They knew that only one of them would survive the outcome. Nicoll narrates these struggles with great verve and with alertness to the play of court factions.
Particular emphasis, too, is given to the role of women. Following Ruby Lal, who, in Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (2005), demonstrated the centrality of women to the Mughal project in the sixteenth century, Nicoll sets out the important role played by Mumtaz Mahal and in particular Nur Jahan, the wife of Jahangir, in the politics of the era. Shah Jahan might have been married to Nur Jahan's niece, but this did not prevent her from making his life miserable. Towards the end of Jahangir's reign she manipulated court politics to try to take the succession away from Shah Jahan in favour of Jahangir's son, Shahriyar, whom she had got married to her daughter by her first husband. Her aim, of course, was less that her daughter should be queen than that she should continue to be the power behind the throne.
Following Ebba Koch, whose masterly The Complete Taj Mahal was published in 2006, and whose personal assistance Nicoll graciously acknowledges, proper attention is given to the building's design and construction.
Shah Jahan was fully involved in every aspect of the project, which drew on the skills of craftsmen not just from India but from across the Islamic world to the Ottoman Empire. An appendix lists which suras of the Qur'an can be found on which parts of the structure. We are reminded that the Taj was just part of a much larger complex of buildings, including a bazaar and a caravanserai, and that it had a counterpoint across the River Jumna in the recently excavated Moonlight Garden, in which the marble tomb was to be enjoyed at night.
Nicoll does not dwell on Shah Jahan's dissipation after the death of Mumtaz Mahal. He consorted with the wives of nobles, to whom beggars cried out as they passed: "O breakfast of Shah Jahan! Remember us!" or "O luncheon of Shah Jahan! Succour us!". The reason for Jahan's illness in 1657, which sparked the succession struggle leading to his overthrow, was the impact of aphrodisiacs taken to revive his flagging powers. Moreover, in that struggle it is worth noting the emperor's further misery in finding his able daughters on opposing sides.
There are points where Nicoll's scholarship is not entirely secure: Allahabad was never the capital of the Mughal subah of Bihar, being the capital of its own subah; Chishti Sufis are not usually linked by blood, as Nicoll suggests, but by spiritual descent; Balkh is not a mountainous kingdom but in the plains of northern Afghanistan; and "Islamism" or "political Islam" is a term of art in contemporary political science which is not properly applied to Shah Jahan's moves in an orthodox direction.
Nicoll makes several claims to establish new facts, of which the strongest is his explanation for the five-year gap between Shah Jahan's engagement to Mumtaz Mahal, and his eventual marriage, in terms of her family falling out of favour because of her uncle's involvement in a succession plot. But his real claim to novelty is in providing the first book-length study of this remarkable emperor since R. N. Saksena in 1932, and doing so in a manner which deserves to bring a new following to Mughal history.

NYT on Happiness

2010-06-02T21:16:00.004-04:00

Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says
By Nicholas Bakalar

It is inevitable. The muscles weaken. Hearing and vision fade. We get wrinkled and stooped. We can’t run, or even walk, as fast as we used to. We have aches and pains in parts of our bodies we never even noticed before. We get old. It sounds miserable, but apparently it is not. A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.
“It could be that there are environmental changes,” said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, “or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological — for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes.”
The telephone survey, carried out in 2008, covered more than 340,000 people nationwide, ages 18 to 85, asking various questions about age and sex, current events, personal finances, health and other matters.
The survey also asked about “global well-being” by having each person rank overall life satisfaction on a 10-point scale, an assessment many people may make from time to time, if not in a strictly formalized way.
Finally, there were six yes-or-no questions: Did you experience the following feelings during a large part of the day yesterday: enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger, sadness. The answers, the researchers say, reveal “hedonic well-being,” a person’s immediate experience of those psychological states, unencumbered by revised memories or subjective judgments that the query about general life satisfaction might have evoked.
The results, published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were good news for old people, and for those who are getting old.
read more On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.
In measuring immediate well-being — yesterday’s emotional state — the researchers found that stress declines from age 22 onward, reaching its lowest point at 85. Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off. Anger decreases steadily from 18 on, and sadness rises to a peak at 50, declines to 73, then rises slightly again to 85. Enjoyment and happiness have similar curves: they both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.
Other experts were impressed with the work. Andrew J. Oswald, a professor of psychology at Warwick Business School in England, who has published several studies on human happiness, called the findings important and, in some ways, heartening. “It’s a very encouraging fact that we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s,” he said. “And it’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.”
Dr. Stone, who is a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said that the findings raised questions that needed more study. “These results say there are distinctive patterns here,” he said, “and it’s worth some research effort to try to figure out what’s going on. Why at age 50 does something seem to start to change?”
The study was not designed to figure out which factors make people happy, and the poll’s health questions were not specific enough to draw any conclusions about the effect of disease or disability on happiness in old age. But the researchers did look at four possibilities: the sex of the interviewee, whether the person had a partner, whether there were children at home and employment status. “These are four reasonable candidates,” Dr. Stone said, “but they don’t make much difference.”
For people under 50 who may sometimes feel gloomy, there may be consolation here. The view seems a bit bleak right now, but look at the bright side: you are getting old.

Economist on Moslems vs Facebook

2010-06-02T18:55:00.000-04:00

First Facebook, then the world
An annoying web page prompts a worrisome precedent

NOT for the first time, feelings in Pakistan have been hurt and censorship provoked by an overseas campaign to blaspheme the Prophet Muhammad. On May 19th the Lahore High Court suspended access to Facebook, a popular social-networking site. Facebook has been “responsible for immense hurt and discomfort”, the court found. It ordered that the site be blocked, subject to a review on May 31st. For Pakistan’s 22m internet-users, havoc has ensued.

The offence was an American cartoonist’s idea for a “Draw Muhammad Day”. Enthusiasts proceeded to draw thousands of images, many of them offensive. Facebook’s policy of prohibiting hate speech was apparently in abeyance: drawings of pigs urinating on the Koran—and worse—were posted.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) argued against the ban on the grounds that it would hurt the country’s economy, but was overzealous in enforcing it: first Facebook, then YouTube, also for “sacrilegious” content, then another 450 sites. Parts of Wikipedia, BBC News, Twitter and Webster’s online dictionary have been blocked, though sometimes only briefly. Proxy servers, which might have been used to circumvent the prohibitions, were also blocked. Even Blackberry services were hit (to gasps of horror from the business elite).
A group called the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement argued in favour of the ban, taking the view that any economic sacrifice is justified to defend the Prophet’s honour. Demonstrations on the street, though relatively small, suggest that the ban has some grassroots support. Many online commentators support it too.
Fasi Zaka, a newspaper columnist, worries that the precedent could be used by governments to stifle criticism. “The one thing that Pakistan had going for it was relative freedom of expression. That’s in danger right now.” Further censorship might appeal to some in power. Facebook plays host to a page that mocks President Asif Zardari, whose 133,000 fans have together posted almost 1,700 derogatory images of the man.
The three main secular parties in the ruling coalition have kept quiet. Sherry Rehman of the Pakistan People’s Party has no qualms about censoring “those who cause wilful offence”. But she too worries, lest the incident “become a curtain-raiser for other curtailments.”

Listening to Jack Johnson

2010-06-02T15:29:00.008-04:00

2010

Le Monde: Our Future Food

2010-06-01T19:55:00.008-04:00

Brochettes de sauterelles, criquets sauce piquante, purée de punaises d’eau géantes, larves frites, scorpions au chocolat… Le menu n’est a priori pas très ragoûtant, mais il faudra peut-être vite s’y habituer. Le développement de la consommation d’insectes comme substitut de la viande ou du poisson fait partie des pistes étudiées très sérieusement par plusieurs experts, dont ceux de l’Organisation des Nations unies pour l’alimentation et l’agriculture (FAO), pour assurer la sécurité alimentaire mondiale dans les décennies à venir. La FAO est en train d’élaborer des recommandations, et devrait, avant la fin 2010, encourager officiellement ses Etats-membres à «maintenir et développer» leur consommation.

Andrey Voznesensky Dies at 77

2010-06-01T14:41:00.004-04:00

Andrei Voznesensky, left, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in New York in 1967. The poet was on a reading tour of colleges. Meyer Leibowitz/The New York Times.

LRB on Hamsun

2010-05-29T22:39:00.002-04:00

Regret is a shabby thing

Bernard Porter

read in MHTML format

BuyKnut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter by Ingar Sletten Kolloen, translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik

Yale, 378 pp, £25.00, September 2009, ISBN 978 0 300 12356 2
BuyKnut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance by Monika Zagar

Washington, 343 pp, £19.99, May 2009, ISBN 978 0 295 98946 4

If Knut Hamsun is remembered at all in Britain – he never really caught on here – it is as the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian writer who became a Nazi, and a betrayer of his country during the Second World War. For the majority of his compatriots, suffering under the German occupation and yet still, many of them, courageously resisting it, this fall from national hero to traitor was hard to fathom, and even harder to stomach. Ways were found around it. It was attributed to senility: Hamsun was 80 in 1939. Isolated during the war years, and profoundly deaf, he simply didn’t realise what Nazism was like. Some blamed his second wife, Marie, who was certainly more active in Nasjonal Samling (i.e. Nazi) circles than he was. Or maybe it was in part a pretence; a guise he assumed to enable him to use his influence to save at least some resisters from execution.

It was also argued – and still is – that none of this matters when set against his huge literary achievement. ‘His Nazism was after all only one streak in him,’ the writer Sigurd Hoel said just after the war. ‘His writing flowed from quite different sources.’ ‘The stigma of his politics will one day be separated from his writing, which I regard very highly,’ Thomas Mann said in 1955, but when asked to support the setting up of a Knut Hamsun Society in Germany he replied that ‘the wretched, and really wicked things he constantly said, wrote and did are too fresh in my mind.’ The idea of the society was in one sense not inappropriate, though perhaps insensitive: almost from the beginning of his writing career Hamsun had been able to count on the support of German publishers and readers, in stark contrast to the indifference he met with in Britain. (The Ring Is Closed, for example, is now appearing in English translation for the first time, 74 years after it was written.)[*] This, he wrote to his Munich publisher Albert Langen in 1898, after receiving a generous advance, showed that ‘Germany is a great country.’ This could be offered as another excuse, though hardly a proud one, for his pro-Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as for his Anglophobia, which was correspondingly extreme. He felt he owed Germany, literally.

Monika Žagar was provoked to write Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side to counter the ‘whitewashing’ of Hamsun which, as she sees it, continues to this day. Included in her indictment are Jan Troell’s 1996 biopic of his later years, Hamsun, with Max von Sydow playing the elderly author, on the whole sympathetically; Ingar Sletten Kolloen’s first, two-volume version of his biography (2003-4) which has now appeared, abridged and translated, as Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter; and Robert Ferguson’s Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (1987). Žagar’s assessment doesn’t seem fair to Ferguson and Kolloen (unless the latter’s original version differs substantially from this one), neither of whom pulls many punches, though she aims a few more, directed mainly at Hamsun’s racism and his views on gender. Reading both these new books, as well as Hamsun’s own early novels, one can be in no doubt that he was a thorough Nazi in the 1930s and 1940s, and a proto-Nazi before then. He was also, I think (though I’m not an expert in these things), a great writer. He was not alone, after all, in harnessing sublime art to vile opinions. The devil does occasionally get some of the best tunes.

Hamsun’s tunes began (after some false starts) with Hunger in 1890, which follows the delirious thoughts of a young writer who deliberately (it must seem to the reader) starves himself, as he wanders around the city. It remains his best-known work, certainly outside Norway. According to Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘the whole modern school of literature in the 20th century stems’ from it. Its novelty derived from its intense psychological subjectivity, reminiscent of Dostoevsky, and at times of Joyce. Being subjective, it is bound to be autobiographical, as indeed are the leading characters in his next few novels, which means that using them as guides to his own thoughts is more reliable than it is with many other writers. In any case, the same thoughts turn up in his journalism and polemical writings. After Hunger, many of the novels are overtly political, the politics usually taking Nietzschean (or what Hamsun thought to be Nietzschean) forms. Nagel, for example, the main protagonist of Mysteries (1892), is obsessed with the notion of a ‘wielder of supreme power’, the sort of man (always men) whom ‘we may see only once in a thousand years’, the ‘super-mind’, capable of perpetrating ‘extraordinarily vicious and terrifying’ villainies, ‘none of your minor transgressions!’ ‘A great man,’ Nagel says, ‘does things on a large scale! He doesn’t just live in Paris, he occupies Paris.’ ‘I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, the master, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses,’ the hero of Hamsun’s play At the Gates of the Kingdom (1895) announces. ‘I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.’

These of course are selective quotations, taken out of context. Besides which, Mysteries always leaves open the possibility that Nagel might not entirely mean what he says. He has this trick, he says, of deliberately shocking people (especially women) so that they’ll like him more when they find out he isn’t so bad. Hamsun’s own diatribes against democracy, socialism, ‘worker scum’, God (‘I shall spit in his eye for the rest of my life’), the fourth commandment (he believed parents should honour their children), goodness, peace, all forms of liberalism, and almost every writer with a social agenda, but especially Ibsen (whom he once invited to a lecture in order to insult him; Ibsen behaved with commendable dignity), could be seen in the same light. This may be the reason his readers disregarded them – until the 1930s revealed that he’d been in deadly earnest all along.

There are other tell-tale signs in these early works. His view of women was an elevated one – so long as they stuck to their primary role in life, which was to bear and bring up children in the Nazi ‘Kinder, Küche’ way. (His own very ill-used wives gave him five.) He believed native Americans were ‘simply half-apes’, and ‘the Negroes … a people without a history, without traditions’, and ‘with intestines for brains’. He denied being anti-semitic, regarding the Jews as a people ‘of high intellectual prowess’, unrivalled in the arts of poetry and music – which, as he saw it, justified the creation of a new land for them where they could ‘use their best qualities to benefit the entire world’, without subjecting the ‘exclusive white race’ to any ‘further mixing of blood’. His hostility to ‘England’ long predated the British lack of interest in his work, and is supposed to have originated in tales of perfidy – the naval bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, for example (which the Danes still remember, but not so bitterly); in resentment at British ‘imperialism’, but not imperialism per se (he thought Germany should have more colonies) and in the ubiquitous presence of British tourists in Norway. There can be no doubt that British tourists could be problematic: in the 19th century there was a whole genre of novels ridiculing them. None, however, went quite so far as Hamsun’s The Last Joy (1912), which features a couple of Englishmen ‘performing an obscene act in the goat shed’, so illustrating England’s ‘degeneracy’, which the narrator hopes ‘Germany’s healthy destiny shall punish with death one day’.

Hamsun had almost no direct knowledge of England. The only time he set foot there was to catch the train from Hull docks to Liverpool, on his way from Oslo to America in the 1880s. But it may well be that had he known the country better it would have made little difference; On the Cultural Life of Modern America (1889) is full of gross inaccuracies, though he worked in the US as a young man and got to know the country pretty well. Where he got Britain and America roughly right was in seeing them as the vanguard of ‘modernisation’, meaning industrialism, urbanisation, the rise of the common people, unsettling change, and the general flight of man away from his ‘roots’ in the countryside and the social structures that grew ‘naturally’ out of them; this flight was exemplified for him by the massive emigrations of rural Norwegians (and other Scandinavians) to their own towns and cities, and then to America, emigrations he himself found guiltily seductive at certain periods of his life. Britain had gone through the same process much earlier, which is why it was easy to pin the responsibility on the British for its spread to Norway. ‘The Anglo-Saxon,’ Hamsun wrote in 1910, ‘has imported his modern, warped view of existence; the Anglo-Saxon has derailed life.’ If it had not been for England, he might have blamed capitalism, as his British predecessor Carlyle had done. This essentially romantic-reactionary view of politics is implied in Hunger, which Ferguson describes as ‘one of the great novels of urban alienation’, and is explicit in most of Hamsun’s later novels, starting with Under the Autumn Star (1906) and including his Nobel Prize-winning Growth of the Soil (1917). It also came to dominate his personal life: his own return to the ‘soil’ in 1911, for instance, and then (after one farming failure) in 1918; and was the main factor – surely more important than the royalties he received – in turning him towards Germany, whose ‘youth’ as a nation and a race, he felt, carried the promise of the renewal he craved. None of these notions was intrinsically or inevitably proto-Nazi; but there was food for Nazism there.

Just as significant as the ideas was the way he arrived at them. Hamsun was not a thinker. All the biographies stress the poor, abused peasant boy’s lack of formal education (252 days of schooling in his entire life, Kolloen estimates): this was an embarrassment for him early on, but later he came to regard it as a strength. He always put feeling and instinct ahead of learning; they governed the way he wrote, and may form the vital link between his writing and his Nazi beliefs. According to one witness he rarely read books properly, but merely glanced at them, explaining that ‘he had a peculiar intuitive capacity to come directly to the essence of a book’s content and its author’s ideas.’ He liked argument, which for him usually meant ranting, but couldn’t abide discussion, refusing the customary question and answer sessions after the notorious public lectures of 1890 in which he lambasted Ibsen and just about every other European author. He was cavalier in his use of facts, but saw nothing wrong in this; caught out by a professor in 1914 (the mistake had to do with relative birthrates in Germany and England), he was quite untroubled: ‘no matter how much he or I “know” about this matter, in the final analysis it is a question of intuition and understanding. And even though Herr Collin has read a million more books than I, in a matter like this my understanding has a greater value for me than his.’ If that sort of response failed him he had other positions to fall back on – like doubting the importance of truth. ‘What really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe’ – this in defence of popular religious faith, even in doctrines he knew to be false. This assertion is made by the Hamsun-Nagel character in Mysteries, who elsewhere describes himself as ‘a philosopher who has never learned to think’. Which was maybe the thing that freed Hamsun up to write his great ‘psychological’ novels, sensitising him to what he once described as ‘the whisperings of the blood, prayers of the bone’.

That he became so involved in public life was partly the result of the unusual prominence Norway afforded its writers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the leading writer of a given generation being seen as its fører (‘guide’), representing the ‘collective conscience of the nation’, as Ferguson puts it. Hamsun was expected to assume this mantle after the death of the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (another Nobel laureate) in 1910; and clearly took it seriously. It gave him an opportunity to influence Norwegian society. So all those novels about the flight from the countryside and the corruption brought about by city life and the English were more than explorations of the psyche: they were intended as ‘a warning to my generation’. From 1910 at the latest, Hamsun was always an overtly political writer. He was also – thanks to ideas and attitudes that went back many decades, about greatness, leadership, ‘the soil’, nature, women, race, and the primacy of instinct over reason – ideally situated to greet the arrival of the ‘great terrorist’, when he finally appeared on the horizon in 1932.

So the idea of a sudden ‘swerve to conservatism’ in the 1930s (James Wood’s phrase, in a review of Hunger and Hamsun’s Selected Letters in the LRB of 26 November 1998), when it could in theory be attributed to old age and a manipulative wife, doesn’t stand up. From the 1890s at the latest, all the elements that would attract him to Hitler were already embedded in his novels, whether that makes the latter essentially ‘Nazi’ or not. ‘Hamsun is Nazism before it arrived,’ is how his compatriot Alf Larsen put it. Indeed, it is at least arguable, if one bears in mind the popularity of his novels and plays in Germany in the prewar years, that he was present at the birth of the movement, helping to create the German world-view that would eventually take the Nazi name. ‘Just as you created your characters for the world out of an indestructible will,’ the Nazi theoretician Alfred Rosenberg wrote to Hamsun on his 80th birthday, ‘you have released many similar feelings in the German people.’ The issue then is not so much Nazism’s influence on Hamsun as his influence on Nazism. That being so, he could hardly be expected to disown his own child.

His involvement with the Nazis from the 1930s right through the war years was committed and (almost) unquestioning. He was pro-Vidkun Quisling from the start, pleased with the way Quisling was supposed to have smashed an industrial strike in 1931 by bringing in troops, seeing in him the ‘great terrorist’ he had been waiting for, or at least the John the Baptist who would come before. Whether or not he was technically a member of Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling, which became an important issue at the time of his postwar trial (he was not a great joiner: the likelihood is that his wife Marie paid his subscription without his knowledge), he certainly supported it. (Kolloen has a photograph of him wearing its pin.) He believed Norway would inevitably become Fascist in time. (Hamsun had a happy knack of spotting ‘inevitabilities’ in politics – Britain’s ultimate defeat by Germany, for instance – which he put down to his extraordinary ‘historic intuition’.) Mussolini was another hero: ‘what a man in the midst of these confused times.’ Hitler, however, was the genuine article: ‘a crusader, a reformer’. He would create ‘a New Age, a New Life’. He was ‘a miracle of will’. ‘Hitler has spoken to my heart.’

The two men met in 1943, at the Berghof, though the meeting was not a happy one. Hamsun ranted, which Hitler was not used to, and may have been drunk. (The occasion features in the Jan Troell film.) He got on better with Goebbels, partly because Goebbels so admired him, in return for which Hamsun made him a present of his Nobel medal, no less. In the Norwegian press he stoutly defended the Nazis’ ‘terrorist’ methods, including the (pre-Holocaust) concentration camps. His line was that ‘Germany is in the middle of a process of recuperation. When the government decides to introduce concentration camps, then you and the rest of the world ought to understand that it has its good reasons for doing so.’ And later: ‘was it any wonder that they [the Nazis] resorted to methods like the bullet through the back of the neck?’ This was the price that had to be paid to ‘bring back the old Germany’ from its capture by Brüning (chancellor between 1930 and 1932), the Communists and the Jews. He also spoke for Hitler and against Britain – ‘England must be brought to her knees!’ – in speeches in Germany and Austria, which boosted the Nazis tremendously. ‘Can we think of anything more encouraging,’ the author Edwin Dwinger wrote in 1943, ‘than the knowledge that the greatest living writer in our time stands on our side?’ Goebbels naturally milked Hamsun for all the propaganda value he could. Hamsun’s admiration for Hitler even survived the Führer’s squalid death, which he commemorated with what must be one of the most extraordinary of all obituaries: ‘I am not worthy to speak Hitler’s praises … He was a warrior, a warrior for all mankind and a preacher of the gospel of rights for all nations.’ In the end he had been ‘felled’ only by the ‘unparallelled brutality’ of the age. (He didn’t mean that of the Nazis.) ‘We, his closest supporters, bow our heads at his death.’

Hamsun realised that most of his compatriots felt differently, though he claimed he was at a loss to know why. They probably first became aware of his Nazi leanings in 1935, after a newspaper article in which he attacked the German peace activist Carl von Ossietzky, whose incarceration by Hitler in a concentration camp had provoked an international outcry. Hamsun was also suspected of influencing the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee against him. (The next year Ossietzky was awarded the prize retrospectively: Hitler’s response was to forbid Germans from accepting the Nobel Prize.) Hamsun was convinced his stand was good for Norway. In the short term the country needed Germany’s protection against Britain, the real oppressor. But it went deeper than that. Germany had always been particularly kind to Norway; ‘every single great and proud name in Norwegian culture’, he said, had had to go ‘through Teutonic Germany in order to win the acclaim of the world at large’. The connection between them, he declared, was ‘rooted in kinship and blood. We are all Germans.’ This would ultimately be sealed in a great Teutonic alliance, in which a renewed Norway would play a ‘radiant’ role. It was another of Hamsun’s ‘inevitabilities’, ‘not a prophecy’ but ‘solid knowledge and historical intuition’ (again). So, he wrote in his notorious public appeal to resistance fighters, issued in May 1940: ‘NORWEGIANS! Throw down your rifles and go home again. The Germans are fighting for us all.’ For those who didn’t heed him and were arrested he felt little sympathy – they had put themselves in this position, after all – though he did try to intercede on behalf of some individuals. All this made him pretty unpopular in Norway. There were stories – some may have been counter-propaganda – of people tossing his books over the fence of his house at Nørholm, and of his local post office having to take on extra staff to deal with the flood of books being contemptuously sent back. It was inevitable that he would come under scrutiny for his ‘treason’ at the end of the war: inevitable, but also deeply upsetting for a nation that placed such trust in its literary fører.

It was then that the ‘conspiracy’ began to have him declared senile or at least manipulated by his wife, both of which excuses Hamsun angrily rejected, against a board of psychiatrists who eventually ruled that, though he was not insane, his ‘mental faculties’ were ‘impaired’. (What did they know about psychology with all their books, by comparison with the superior intuition of the artist, he sneered.) This meant he could not face the criminal charge of treason, but only a lesser civil one, which he seemed to regard as an insult. Still, he mounted a defence. (The core of it formed the centrepiece of his last book, the memoir or quasi-novel On Overgrown Paths, published in 1949.) He insisted that Hitler had been right, that he himself had nothing to apologise for, that his conscience was clear, that he stood by ‘every word’ he had written during the war and everything he had done. At the back of this lay the conviction that apology was weak and ‘unmanly’, irrespective of the circumstances, or the rights and wrongs of a particular case. ‘I think regret is a shabby thing … I am a man after all, and will not back-pedal in any way.’ He did not regard himself as a traitor – and would not have been one technically if the war had turned out differently. Though he respected public opinion and the law, he trusted his ‘own guiding principles’ (or subjectivity) more. ‘He had lost,’ as Kolloen puts it, ‘but he had not yielded.’ To anyone familiar with most of his works, this shouldn’t have come as a great surprise. ‘I’ll never give up – never!’ (This is Nagel in Mysteries.) ‘I grit my teeth and harden my heart because I’m right. I’ll stand alone against the world and I will not yield!’ Hamsun obviously got a buzz from this kind of feeling, which may be why he was so annoyed not to have the chance to be further battered by a criminal court.

So, on the one hand, firm, masculine, even heroic resistance; but weakened in its effect by the numerous excuses he offered for his conduct, many of them immediately followed by weasel words like ‘I do not say this to defend myself,’ which will have fooled no one. Some of his excuses were plausible. One of the motives behind his pronouncements probably was, as he said, to dissuade young Norwegians from risking their lives. ‘I never informed against anyone,’ he insisted, and there is no reason to doubt that. When approached, he interceded with the occupying authorities to try to get death sentences commuted, and he implied that this happened on numerous occasions. ‘I sent telegrams night and day,’ he said, though he admitted that he had no idea what effect these had. Intercession, indeed, was the chief motive behind his visit to Hitler in 1943, on that occasion to try to get the brutal Josef Terboven, Hitler’s Reichskommissar in Norway, replaced by a government of Norway’s own Nazis. ‘We believe in the Führer, but his will is being corrupted.’

All this rings true; but it comes to appear a little disingenuous when he implies (in On Overgrown Paths) that this explains the degree at any rate of his collaboration: he wanted to be able to help his compatriots from within the system. ‘I was surrounded the whole time by German officers … they were not particularly pleased with me. They had expected more of me than they received … I had to strike a balance.’ As to his ‘Nazism’: ‘I have tried to grasp what National Socialism means, I have tried to understand what it stands for, but it came to nothing. But it may well be that now and then I did write in a Nazi spirit. I do not know, for I do not know what the Nazi spirit is.’ And then he goes into a whole rigmarole about being isolated up there on his farm, deaf, a simple farmer, ‘tilling the soil as best I could in the midst of those hard times’; with ‘no one’ to tell him ‘that it was wrong that I sat there and wrote’, and never receiving a single ‘bit of good advice from the world about me’. If that isn’t meant as an ‘excuse’, I can’t imagine what would be.

Hamsun undoubtedly had the means of knowing a great deal of what was going on under the Nazis, even if he chose not to listen. Some of his information came from his youngest daughter, who was living in Germany, and at the age of 16 displaying worryingly liberal tendencies: ‘Cecilia,’ Hamsun wrote to her in 1934, ‘you are living in a great country now … You mustn’t go writing to the maids about this or that person committing suicide, they will think it is awful in Germany. Write about the things Hitler and his government are achieving, despite the whole world’s hatred and hostility.’ He knew what was happening in occupied Norway, too, from those who petitioned him on behalf of their condemned sons and lovers, as well as from friends and others who told him quite openly that he was ‘wrong’. Indeed, this is implicitly admitted in his complaint to Hitler at that notorious meeting of theirs: ‘the Reichskommissar’s methods do not suit our country, his Prussian ways are intolerable. And then all the executions. We can’t take any more!’ As for not understanding National Socialism: well, that just might be difficult if you are in the habit of relying on ‘intuition’ rather than book learning for your knowledge; but Hamsun did read the right-wing Norwegian newspapers every day, and, as we have seen, had quite enough of the ‘Nazi spirit’ in his bones to have a sense of what it was. In fact, the image he seems to be trying to establish here of the poor old innocent did not become him. To use his own word: it does not seem very ‘manly’.

If his extreme old age was responsible for anything, it was probably this weakness and confusion, rather than any ‘swerve’ in his political views. There is some poetic justice in this. In his youth he had expressed contempt for anyone over 50: ‘the old have been people once; now it’s over.’ He may not have expected to grow old himself. At 60 he tried to reverse the process by means of an operation intended to divert male hormones from his testes into his blood. But, by his own way of thinking, he should have shut up then. If he had, the full implications of his earlier proto-Nazism would not have been so obvious, and he would have been spared the obloquy of those awful octogenarian years. We could have concentrated on his writing, instead of attending to this constant controversy over whether he was a ‘genuine’ Nazi or not (of course he was), and whether, if so, his writing was infected by his politics, or ‘transcended’ it. (I think both.) These two books would have been very different, but far less interesting. For in many ways Hamsun’s greatest and most tragic work was his long life.

[*] The Ring Is Closed is translated by Robert Ferguson (Souvenir, 352 pp., £12.99, April, 978 0 285 63868 6).

The Economist on Corn Fructose

2010-05-29T19:07:00.002-04:00

High-fructose corn syrup

Sickly sweetener
Americans are losing their taste for a sugar substitute made from maize
May 27th 2010 | New York

IN A sun-dappled yard, above the cheerful whoops of healthy children, one mother assures another that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a sweetener made from maize (corn), is, like sugar, “fine in moderation”. Yet fewer and fewer Americans, it seems, are convinced of the claim, made in a series of advertisements by the Corn Refiners’ Association, an industry group. Demand for HFCS declined by 8% between 2007 and 2009. Several fast-food chains and consumer-goods firms have ostentatiously dropped it from their recipes. Michelle Obama, the first lady, has expressed concern. Some Americans feel so strongly that they have posted spoof advertisements online, explaining that lead poisoning, Nazism and genital mutilation are also “fine in moderation”.
HFCS, which became a common ingredient in processed foods in the 1980s thanks in part to an abundance of subsidised maize, is cheaper than sugar. A rise in the price of sugar in recent years has increased the difference, yet big firms such as Pepsi and Kraft have substituted sugar for HFCS in many of their products. ConAgra, another big foodmaker, announced earlier this month that it had removed HFCS from its Hunt’s ketchup brand, and slapped a prominent label to that effect on the bottles. The move, the firm says, reflects consumer demand.
The most common complaint about HFCS is that it has helped to make Americans fat. But that idea is hotly disputed. The American Medical Association and the American Dietetic Association argue that there is no direct link between obesity and consumption of HFCS in America, although both have surged in the past 30 years. Other studies have fingered HFCS, including one released in March by scientists at Princeton, which found that rats gained more weight eating it than table sugar. HFCS’s defenders blame perfidious sugar refiners for their bad press.
Another complaint centres on subsidies for maize, which, the theory runs, have warped America’s entire food chain. Yet high tariffs on imported sugar, to the benefit of America’s beet and cane farmers, have also helped to promote HFCS. Mike McConnell of the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service estimates that HFCS and sugar would be roughly comparable in price in a free market. In that respect, at least, the two products are as bad as each other.

LRB on Mubarak

2010-05-27T22:32:00.000-04:00

Mubarak’s Last Breath

Adam Shatz reports from Egypt

read in MHTML format

On 6 October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the American, British and French aircraft Egypt had recently acquired: symbols of its realignment with the West after more than two decades as a Soviet ally. Sadat wore a Prussian-style uniform but no bullet-proof vest: it would have ruined the line. Rumours of a plot were in the air, and his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, had warned him not to go. Sadat brushed this off, but when he stood to receive the salute, he was killed in a hail of grenades and bullets, fired by a group of Islamist soldiers in his own army. ‘I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death,’ the lead assassin, a 24-year-old lieutenant, declared.

Only eight days later a new pharaoh rose in Egypt, and he has been in power ever since. Hosni Mubarak, who stood beside Sadat at the procession, was an improbable successor: a circumspect career soldier whose appointment to the vice presidency in 1975 had come as a shock to political observers. Born in 1928 in a small village in the Nile River Delta, the son of an inspector in the Ministry of Justice, Mubarak was little known to Egyptians, or even to his colleagues: he was a loner, with no outside interests to speak of, and no taste, or talent, for the rituals of mass politics at which both Nasser and Sadat excelled. Unlike them he had not been among the Free Officers who seized power in the 1952 coup against the monarchy. He had, however, loyally served the state and – as commander in chief of the air force – launched the surprise attack in 1973 which allowed ground forces to cross into the Sinai Peninsula. Mubarak admitted his political inexperience when he took office, pledging to ask for advice, and suggesting limited presidential terms. He is now 82, and has ruled Egypt – and presided over its decline – for 29 years. Presidential elections are scheduled for next year, but he has said he will serve ‘until the last breath in my lungs, and the last beat of my heart’. This is a promise he’s likely to keep.

Egypt has never been a democracy. The military has always dominated its political life. Even during the age of liberal nationalism after the First World War, when it had a lively parliamentary life, popular sovereignty was sharply curtailed by British power. Since the 1952 coup which brought Nasser to power, it has been ruled by military dictatorship, although the establishment of multi-party politics in the late 1970s brought a measure of cosmetic diversification. Still, autocratic though they were, both Nasser and Sadat ensured that what Egypt did mattered. Nasser’s failures were spectacular: the aborted union with Syria in the United Arab Republic; the disastrous intervention in the civil war in Yemen; the catastrophic 1967 defeat to Israel that resulted in the destruction of three-quarters of Egypt’s air force and the loss of the Sinai; the creation of a vast and inefficient public sector which the state could not afford; the suppression of dissent, indeed of politics itself. But he also carried out land reform, nationalised the Suez Canal, built the Aswan High Dam, and turned Egypt into a major force in the Non-Aligned Movement. When Nasser spoke, the Arab world listened. Sadat broke with Nasser’s pan-Arab vision, promoting an Egypt-first agenda that ultimately led the country into the arms of the US and Israel. But, like Nasser, he was a statesman of considerable flair and cunning, with a prodigious ability to seize the initiative. By leading Egypt to a partial victory in the 1973 war, he washed away some of the shame of 1967, and eventually secured the restoration of the Sinai. And though his peace with Israel infuriated the Arabs, whom Nasser had electrified, he made Egypt a player in the world. Under Mubarak, Egypt, the ‘mother of the earth’ (umm idduniya), has seen its influence plummet. Nowhere is the decline of the Sunni Arab world so acutely felt as in Cairo ‘the Victorious’, a mega-city much of which has turned into an enormous slum. The air is so thick with fumes you can hardly breathe, the atmosphere as constricted as the country’s political life.

Frustration, shame, humiliation: it does not take much for Egyptians to call up these feelings. It’s still often said that ‘what happens in Egypt affects the entire Arab world,’ but nothing much has happened there in years. Egypt has fallen behind Saudi Arabia – not to mention non-Arab countries like Turkey and Iran – in regional leadership. Even tiny Qatar has a more independent foreign policy. Egypt is by far the largest Arab country, with 80 million inhabitants, yet it’s seen by most Arabs – and by the Egyptians themselves – as a client state of the United States and Israel, who depend on Mubarak to ensure regional ‘stability’ in the struggle with the ‘resistance front’ led by Iran.

The liberalisation of Egypt’s economy – launched by Sadat’s Infitah (Open Door) policy in 1974 – has earned Mubarak praise from the World Bank. The 2007 constitution, purged of references to socialism, says that ‘the economy of the Arab Republic of Egypt is founded on the development of the spirit of enterprise.’ Yet Egypt’s market is anything but free: businesses tend to have very close, and mutually profitable, relationships with the state, in which the Mubarak family often participates and takes its cut. Hussein Salem, a hotel magnate, arms dealer and co-owner of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Company – an Egyptian-Israeli consortium that recently secured a $2.5 billion contract to sell Egypt’s natural gas to Israel – is thought to be one of Mubarak’s frontmen; the gas began flowing in early 2008, just as Israel was tightening the siege of Gaza.

Despite the promises of the regime – and contrary to the expectations of Egypt’s sponsors in the West – economic liberalisation hasn’t led to much in the way of political liberalisation: in 1992, the year it adopted an IMF stabilisation and structural adjustment package, Egypt began sending civilians to be tried at military tribunals. The Emergency Law, in force since Sadat’s assassination and recently renewed despite Mubarak’s promise to lift it, grants the government extraordinary powers to arrest its opponents without charge and to detain them indefinitely; there are an estimated 17,000 political prisoners, most of them Islamists.

The ideology of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party has undergone marked shifts in recent years, alternating between Milton Friedman and Muhammad, as the occasion demands. Arab unity, as the novelist Sonallah Ibrahim remarks, has been reduced to the ‘unity of foreign commodities consumed by everyone’. Not inappropriately, the most popular military officer on billboards in Egypt isn’t Mubarak but Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The increasing globalisation of the economy, along with its 7.5 per cent growth rates, is something the NDP likes to boast about, but it is seen rather differently by the population: inflation has soared since the currency was floated in 2003, and real unemployment is 26.3 per cent. Mubarak’s reforms haven’t turned Egypt into a ‘tiger on the Nile’, as promised; the economy remains precariously dependent on the price of oil, American aid (more than $62 billion since 1977) and tourism. Egypt still imports more than half the wheat it consumes.

Foreign policy is a particularly anguished subject. While the peace with Israel reached in 1979 by Sadat may make Egypt a ‘moderate’ state in the eyes of Washington, it has left many Egyptians deeply embittered. Mubarak drew a lesson from Sadat’s fate: it was one thing to make a deal with Israel – quite another to make nice. He would honour the peace treaty, but he would not go to Tel Aviv, or engage in ostentatious displays of friendship that would offend Egyptian honour; and he would turn a blind eye to anti-Israel invective in the press, so that opponents of ‘normalisation’ with Tel Aviv could let off steam. By maintaining an appearance of froideur, Mubarak was able to repair relations with the Arab League and with the Arab states that had cut their ties with Egypt in 1979. Meanwhile, he has developed a partnership with Israel on trade and ‘security’ that is far more extensive than Sadat could have imagined. Their intelligence services work closely together, and Mubarak has supplied weapons and training to the Palestinian Authority in its war against Hamas. The government is also doing what it can to maintain the siege in Gaza, concerned that if it opens its border crossing, Israel might shut down all its crossing points and try to dump Gaza in Egypt’s lap, which would be particularly unwelcome given that the Hamas rulers in Gaza are allies both of Mubarak’s domestic opponents, the Muslim Brothers, and of his foreign adversaries, Iran and Hizbullah.

Mubarak doesn’t want to be responsible for the welfare of more than a million impoverished Palestinians, or to be blamed by Israel for every Qassam rocket fired at Tsederot. When, in January 2008, Hamas blew up part of the fence at Rafah, and tens of thousands of Gazans crossed the border, some of his fellow countrymen were persuaded by his ‘Egypt First’ argument. But more of them were outraged when he refused to open the crossing during Israel’s invasion last year. Many suspect a degree of complicity between Israel and Mubarak against Hamas: the war began less than 48 hours after Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, visited Cairo.

As well as securing the border at Rafah, Egypt is building a wall 18 metres underground, an impenetrable barrier made of super-strength steel. It is reported to be doing this with American assistance, though the US denies it. In any case the entire plan was kept secret until recently, and the Mubarak regime isn’t keen to draw attention to what it euphemistically calls ‘engineering installations’. The official line is that it’s intended to prevent arms smuggling by Hamas, but the barrier could choke the Gazan economy, which depends on the tunnels. Mubarak, however, insists: ‘We do not accept debate on this issue with anyone.’ Like many of his least popular policies, this one comes with a fatwa from a group of pro-government clerics according to which ‘those who oppose the construction of this wall violate the sharia.’

The Islamisation of Egyptian society deepened after the 1967 war; it became explicit government policy under Sadat, the self-styled ‘believer president’ who supported radical Islamists in his battles with the left, and who made the sharia ‘the principal source’ of law in 1980 – a year before his assassination by an Islamist. Under Mubarak, praying has become as popular as shopping or football and now serves a roughly similar function as a distraction from the innumerable frustrations of Egyptian life. Indeed, Islam as observed by Egyptians is increasingly an Islam that caters to consumerist needs. The popular televangelist Amr Khaled mixes Quranic citations with boosterish advice of a more general kind. This variety of Islam is no threat to the regime, but it has made life far less easy-going. ‘My neighbour used to water his plants in his pyjamas on the balcony, where he’d be joined by his wife in her nightie,’ a friend tells me. ‘They’d drink beer in the open, and then he’d go downstairs for the sunset prayers in the local mosque. Today he’d be killed for this, but at the time he would have seen no contradiction.’

The growing power of the mosques – and the considerable influence the Muslim Brothers exert in poor neighbourhoods – has made Egypt’s Coptic minority increasingly anxious, and they have developed a no less assertive piety of their own. The Copts, whose ancestors were in Egypt before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, account for about 10 per cent of the population. Although many of them are poor – the largely Coptic zabaleen, who pick up most of Cairo’s garbage, are packed into an immense slum in the Moqattan Hills Settlement east of the capital – they are widely seen and resented as economically privileged. (Egypt’s richest family, the Sawiris, who own the enormous conglomerate Orascom and are close to Mubarak, are Copts.) They suffer various forms of discrimination: senior positions in the civil service and the professions tend to be closed to them and churches, unlike mosques, don’t receive subsidies. They find little reassurance in the rhetoric of the Muslim Brothers – whose former General Guide, Mahdi Akef, recently declared that he would prefer a Malaysian Muslim as president to a Christian Egyptian – and fear that if Egypt becomes an Islamic state they will be forced to leave. Fanatics in the Coptic diaspora, some of whom have made common cause with Christian Zionists in the US, have done little to dispel the impression among Muslims that Christians are a Trojan horse of the West.

This climate of distrust has resulted in increasingly frequent spasms of sectarian violence. On Christmas Eve last year, six worshippers in the town of Nag Hammadi were murdered outside a church in a drive-by shooting, apparently in retaliation for the rape of a Muslim girl. Anti-Muslim looting followed and the government was swift to intervene, declaring that the violence wasn’t sectarian but merely traditional score-settling between families. This fooled no one. Not long before, tens of thousands of pigs, on which the zabaleen depend for their livelihood, had been slaughtered by the state, allegedly to prevent swine flu. Many Muslims were secretly relieved, flu or no flu. But even the most secular Christians were horrified by what they saw as a state-sanctioned sectarian assault.

The 1952 revolution, once the central legitimating myth of the regime, is now criticised by most of the population as having destroyed a potentially promising experiment in parliamentary democracy, condemning Egypt to dictatorial rule. Many continue even so to pine for Nasser, with his commitment to ‘Arab socialism’ and non-alignment. Others look back to the classical age of Egyptian liberalism in the last decades of British rule, while still others pray for the return of the caliphate.

Another symptom of this retreat into nostalgia is the growing curiosity about the ethnic minorities – Jews, Greeks, Armenians, Italians – who once helped run Egypt’s economy, and made Cairo and Alexandria remarkably cosmopolitan cities, before they were put under pressure to leave in the mid-1950s. At the time, their exodus, like Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, was seen as a great coup: evidence of Egypt’s triumph over foreign hegemony. Now it’s seen as the beginning of its economic and cultural decline.

In Heliopolis, a new film by Ahmed Abdallah, a young man doing research on ‘minorities’ in pre-revolutionary Egypt befriends an elderly Jewish woman; in a striking documentary sequence, a group of old people fondly remember a time when local shops were run by Jews and Greeks. If Egyptians long for an irretrievable past, Abdallah suggests, it’s because their future has been put on hold. He leaves little doubt as to the causes. A young couple who are drifting apart wait in one of Cairo’s interminable traffic jams, only to be told by a police officer that they will have to wait a bit longer: the road ahead has been blocked to make way for the president’s motorcade.

Mubarak’s Egypt is often compared to Iran in the last days of the Shah: a middle class squeezed by inflation; anger at the regime’s alliances with the US and Israel; a profound sense of humiliation that is increasingly expressed in Islamic fervour; near universal contempt for the country’s ruling class; a state whose legitimacy has almost entirely eroded. In 2005, the Egyptian Movement for Change – a coalition of leftists, Nasserists and Islamists better known as Kifaya (‘Enough’) – staged a series of demonstrations in downtown Cairo, where, for the first time, Egyptians dared to criticise Mubarak in public, and to call for him to step down. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have demonstrated: leftists and Islamists calling for an end to the Emergency Law; judges denouncing constitutional amendments that strip them of their right to supervise elections; workers striking for better wages and independent trade unions; poor farmers on land redistributed under Nasser defending themselves against attempts by large landowners – often with the backing of the state, sometimes with the help of armed thugs – to ‘reclaim’ their property. The spread of these protests, on a scale not seen since the 1970s, when left-wing students mobilised against Sadat’s infitah and his alliance with the West, has led some observers to see this as Egypt’s ‘moment of change’, the subtitle of an informative new anthology on Egyptian social movements.[*]

Yet the protests have failed to coalesce into a broader movement with a clear agenda. And the regime has partly succeeded in neutralising dissent by allowing some freedoms: privately owned opposition newspapers have been legalised and public criticism of Mubarak is allowed. ‘We were given a licence to scream and vent,’ one supporter of Kifaya told me, ‘but what good did it do?’ Most Egyptians have kept their distance from the protests. Since the riots of January 1977, which began after the state raised the price of aysh al-baladi, the dry bread on which most people depend, the Egyptian masses have been silent, even as their living standards have declined. This stoicism is often explained by variations on the theme of national character, or of the pharaonic legacy. The Egyptian, one is often told, is ‘a survivor’, or ‘a flexible conformist’ who just wants a better life, and doesn’t care who is president. Revolts in modern Egypt have been few; even Nasser’s revolution was a top-down affair, a ‘passive revolution’ in which, as his left-wing critic Anouar Abdel-Malek remarked, the role of the much praised masses was merely to provide ‘manpower’.

The inertia of the Egyptian people may well have less to do with temperament, or historical tradition, than with sober calculation. About one in every four Egyptians lives in a shantytown; more than a third of Cairo’s 19 million residents live in areas known as ashwaiyyat, without clean drinking water or proper sewage systems. They are the people you see at places like the Souq al-Goma’a, or ‘Friday market’, a sprawling bazaar set up on railway tracks next to a flyover skirting the City of the Dead, where tens of thousands of Cairenes squat in family mausoleums. The working poor come here to buy household necessities. Anything and everything is for sale: old silverware, tyres, toilets, computer parts, birds, monkeys, vegetables coated in dust and dirt, and rotten fish that’s been buried underground until it gives off an unforgettable smell. There is a saying in Egypt that ‘anyone who hasn’t begged in the time of Mubarak will never beg.’ Those forced to beg tend not to attend demonstrations.

As Hani Shukrallah, an editor at Al-Shorouk, one of the new independent papers, points out, ‘the regime has pursued a deliberate policy of selective repression based on class.’ Shukrallah, a veteran of the student left of the 1970s, illustrated this by describing an aerial photograph of a Kifaya demonstration in downtown Cairo. ‘You can see three circles: the first is composed of the demonstrators, a few hundred people. Around them is a circle of several thousand police officers, and around the police is the people. The people are onlookers, spectators. The middle-class professionals in Kifaya can chant slogans like “Down with Mubarak” because they risk, at worst, a beating. But most Egyptians live in a world where anything goes, where they’re treated like barbarians who need to be conquered, and women are molested by the security forces. The average Egyptian can be dragged into a police station and tortured simply because a police officer doesn’t like his face.’ The tortures to which Egyptians are subjected in police stations have been well documented and include electric shocks to the genitals, anal rape with sticks, death threats, suspension in painful positions and ‘reception parties’, where prisoners are forced to crawl naked on the floor while guards whip them to make them move faster.

For those it can’t afford to brutalise, the Mubarak regime has found other means of intimidation. One is the presence of state security in residential neighbourhoods and on university campuses. In Garden City, checkpoints were set up near the British and American Embassies after a demonstration against the invasion of Iraq in 2003; they are now permanent, and locals refer to the area as ‘the Green Zone’. Only a few minutes’ walk from the American Embassy – the second largest in the world, after Baghdad – is the Ministry of the Interior, a forbidding, futurist building. Very little of consequence gets done without the ministry’s agreement: the appointments of university professors, judges and journalists all require approval from the ministry’s security officers; so does anyone who wants to set up an NGO, a school or a television station. The ministry has an army of about two million informers: one Egyptian in every 40. It has become one of the state’s most powerful branches, rivalling the army, since Egypt withdrew from the struggle with Israel and shifted towards suppressing its internal enemies: leftists, human rights activists and, above all, Islamists.

Mubarak’s principal domestic adversary – and perhaps his greatest asset in selling himself to the West, and to a frightened middle class – is the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher, the Brotherhood remains the country’s largest, best organised opposition movement. There have been many strategic shifts over the years but the message hasn’t changed: social justice, clean governance based on Islamic principles, opposition to imperialism, solidarity with Palestine. Both Nasser and Sadat were fellow-travellers, if not members, in the 1940s. The Brothers initially supported the 1952 coup, but soon fell out with the new government. Denied what they felt should be their share of the spoils, they became Nasser’s fiercest critics, and in 1954 a member of the Brotherhood’s clandestine wing shot at him as he was giving a speech. Nasser famously didn’t flinch, and shortly afterwards ordered the first in a series of crackdowns, in which tens of thousands of Brothers, including the jihadi theorist Sayyid Qutb, were jailed, and often tortured in the so-called mihna, or ‘inquisition’ that followed.

Qutb responded by calling for holy war against the Egyptian state and was hanged in 1966 for plotting its overthrow. The Brotherhood took pains to distance itself from Qutb’s radicalism, and by 1970, when Sadat came to power, had renounced violence: a position it maintained throughout the 1990s, when the security services were waging a dirty war against a radical Islamist insurgency inspired by Qutb’s writings. The Brothers sought to transform Egypt more gradually, by promoting Islamic values, denouncing state corruption, and providing medical and social services to the poor. These services – virtually comprising a state within the state – have been subsidised by Brotherhood-run Islamic banks, and by donations from the pious middle class as well as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. If the Brotherhood continues to enjoy wide support, it is in large part because of its service to the poor.

Mubarak was never close to the Brothers, but he has had to find a way to live with them, if only because they are too deeply embedded in society – and in the mosques, no-go zones for the state – to be eliminated. Their status is often described as ‘banned yet tolerated’: ‘banned’, because they would pose a serious threat to the regime if they were allowed to participate freely; ‘tolerated’, because they allow Mubarak to present himself as Egypt’s only defence against an Islamist takeover. Thus, under American pressure to open up Egypt’s political system, Mubarak permitted the Brothers to run in the 2005 legislative elections. To the horror of the liberal opposition, and of the Bush administration, they won 88 of the 160 seats they contested, a fifth of the seats in the lower house of parliament, making them the second most powerful party after Mubarak’s NDP. Since then, the US has all but dropped its pressure on Mubarak to democratise, and the Brothers have had their wings clipped. They weren’t allowed to run in the 2007 elections for the upper house; the applications of all but two dozen of the 5000 Brothers who sought to run in the 2008 municipal elections were rejected; and thugs were sent in to attack their supporters at polling stations. Hundreds of Brothers have been arrested: high-ranking moderates who have been trying to reform the Brotherhood from within are the preferred target.

The effect has been to strengthen the hand of the hardliners led by the new General Guide, Mohammed Badie, who was imprisoned with Qutb in 1965 – Badie and his acolytes are known as the Group of 1965. They consolidated their power in January’s internal elections, in which the intellectual reformer Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh lost his seat on the Brotherhood’s Guidance Council. They are disinclined to build alliances with secular forces, frown on overtures to women and Copts, and are not especially troubled by Mubarak’s dictatorship so long as it allows them to preach. They draw their support from conservative rural members, many of whom have worked in the Gulf and been influenced by Wahabbism, with its emphasis on external signs of piety and mistrust of Western-style democracy. As they see it, the openness advocated by the reformists has left the Brotherhood vulnerable to intrusions by the state, and to the temptations of secular liberalism: secrecy is the only means by which it can survive; and survival, not governing, is the principal aim. Until the day when the state falls into their hands like a rotten fruit, they prefer to avoid confrontation with it, devoting themselves instead to Islamising society (da’wa), and defending Egyptian virtue from such threats as Beyoncé, whose concert at a Red Sea resort they were lobbying to prevent when I was in Cairo last winter. They have been encouraged in this by the state, which has expanded the role of the clerics on television and in education: as Sophie Pommier argues in Egypte, l’envers du décor (2008), it’s a mistake to see the NDP as a ‘secular party whose principles are radically opposed to those of the Muslim Brotherhood’. The result is an undeclared power-sharing arrangement between Mubarak and the Brotherhood, a cat and mouse game that masks a deeper convergence of interests: both sides, after all, have reason to portray the Brothers as the only real alternative to the regime.

A perfect example of this collusion is the experience of the new Centre Party, Hizb al-Wasat, founded in 1996 by Abul-Ela Madi, a moderate Islamist with strong links to leftists, Nasserists and liberals. Broadly sympathetic to a school of thought Bruce Rutherford describes as ‘Islamic constitutionalism’,[†] which tries to harmonise liberal views on the rule of law and individual rights with Islamic tradition, he is also close to Aboul Fotouh and the reform wing of the Brotherhood. Yet he is no longer a member of the Brotherhood, having concluded that the NDP and the Brothers are ‘the double face of our crisis’. The only way forward, as he saw it, was to create a new party which, though rooted in Islamic values, would ‘separate politics and preaching’ and welcome Copts and women – something he has succeeded in doing, despite attempts by intelligence officers to frighten his Coptic members. He has not succeeded in much else, however. His party has yet to be granted a licence to run in elections, mostly because a multi-confessional, moderately Islamic, democratic party might stand a chance of getting somewhere. The Ministry of the Interior, accusing him of being a front for the Brothers, claims that the party fails to ‘fulfil a legitimate purpose not met by an existing party’ – never mind that the ‘existing party’ in question, the Brotherhood, is officially banned. A prominent leader of the Brothers was happy to second this: the new party, he said, ‘thinks just like us’.

Having a licence, however, is no guarantee of influence. None of the two dozen registered opposition parties has a popular following, or any chance of achieving one, thanks to restrictions on freedom of assembly imposed by the Emergency Law. As Rif’at al-Said, the leader of the left-wing party Tagammu (two seats out of 454 in the lower house), put it, Egyptian parties are merely ‘groupings of individuals floating on the surface of society’. Their function is to create the illusion of democratic politics, the number of seats they gain depending less on the will of the voters than on the needs of the NDP. Mounir Fakhri Abdel-Nour is the secretary-general of the New Wafd Party (six seats in the lower house), founded in 1983, which takes its name from the party that led the movement against the British occupation after the First World War, and promotes an updated version of that party’s genteel, constitutional liberalism. Abdel-Nour, a banker from a prominent Coptic family, sighed when I asked him about his party’s activities: ‘Our experience as a party has been catastrophic. It’s true that we now have almost unlimited freedom of the press, but it’s useless because we can’t get a direct relationship to the street. The Muslim Brothers have that connection through the mosque, but we’re not even allowed to hold rallies.’

It’s hard to imagine Abdel-Nour addressing a crowd. A charming, cosmopolitan man, he recalls the era before Nasser’s revolution, when politics was the preserve of elites. He wants to open up the system, but not too much, and not too quickly. Asked whether the ban on the Brothers should be lifted, he sipped his tea and paused. ‘It’s a tricky question,’ he said, playing with a ruler on his desk. ‘Egypt is a country where two religions coexist. You can’t have the Islamic Republic of Egypt – it will never happen. We can’t accept a Muslim party that says a Copt or a woman can’t be president of the republic. And I refuse to be ruled by someone who thinks a Malaysian Muslim is closer to him than a Christian Egyptian. I know some decent people in the Brotherhood, like Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh. You speak to them and you wonder, why aren’t you with us? But I don’t trust them.’

This distrust is shared by many middle-class Egyptians, and it is a major reason why they have been willing to tolerate the Mubarak family for so long. Whether they will accept Mubarak’s son Gamal is another matter: he may be the only person who is more widely disliked in Egypt than his father. A former investment banker who had no political experience when he was appointed to the General Secretariat of the NDP in 2000, he is a symbol of what Mubarakism has wrought: the growing influence of technocrats linked to multinationals; economic liberalisation in the absence of political liberalisation; and corrosive nepotism. The idea of dynastic succession, or tawrith al-sulta, is particularly insulting to Egypt’s national pride: the country has been a republic since Nasser’s overthrow of King Farouk, and few people are keen on its becoming a ‘republican monarchy with houmus’, in the words of the novelist Khaled Al Khamissi. Born in 1963 and known to friends as ‘Jimmy’, Gamal spent his early adult life in London, working at Bank of America and Medinvest, a private equity firm he helped found, until he was whisked back to Egypt in 1995. Since then, he has risen rapidly through the ranks of his father’s party; at the 2002 NDP congress, he was promoted to head the Policies Secretariat, a government advisory board made up of several hundred wealthy Egyptians linked to the regime or the Mubarak family, together with intellectuals who style themselves ‘liberal reformers’. Collectively they’re known as ‘Gamal’s cabinet’.

Although both father and son deny that Gamal is being groomed for the presidency, he has been aggressively sold as the face of a new Egypt, in ‘Meet Gamal’ town-hall meetings, on billboards in Cairo, and on television. Now the third-ranking official in the NDP, Gamal has made a number of trips to Washington, fawningly covered by the state-run media, and been praised in the New York Times as an ‘intelligent, handsome policy wonk’. In Sophie Pommier’s words, he ‘preaches reform in an incantatory mode, with slogans about renovation and “new thinking”’ – mainly opening markets and selling off state industries. For the majority of Egyptians getting by on $2 a day, he has shown little understanding, declaring at the height of the financial crisis that there could be no retreat on privatisation. The need for ‘democracy’ is another favourite slogan among ‘Gamal’s boys’, but the conditions for it, they hasten to add, don’t yet exist. As one of his advisers says, ‘you can’t have democracy without democrats.’

What Gamal Mubarak doesn’t yet have is the support of the military, at least according to Osama al-Ghazali Harb, who quit the Policies Secretariat in 2006 having decided that it was merely a vehicle for the president’s son. He has since established his own party, the well-meaning, ineffectual Democratic Front, so ineffectual indeed that it was immediately given a licence. ‘Gamal’s support comes from people in the business elite,’ al-Ghazali Harb says. ‘They are plotting away, trying to mobilise the support of members of the party and the army. But if his father dies tomorrow they will shut him out. And trust me: Hosni Mubarak won’t leave his position even one hour before he dies. We’re not in the US. We don’t have vice presidents. Here you’re either in your position or you’re in your grave. And within five or six minutes of his death, you’ll see tanks in the streets.’ This isn’t a prospect that alarms him. ‘The army is the only force that can guarantee that the transition will be peaceful.’ Last year al-Ghazali Harb dared to say what many Egyptians opposed to Gamal were quietly thinking: that the army should take over as soon as Mubarak steps down or dies, so that a new constitution can be drafted, and then, after two or three years, civilian rule restored. When I asked him who would head that transitional government, he didn’t hesitate: ‘Omar Suleiman.’

Suleiman, the head of General Intelligence, is both a lieutenant general in the army and a member of Mubarak’s cabinet. He is the second most powerful man in Egypt, a key player in negotiations between Israel and Hamas and one of the most formidable spymasters in the Middle East. Born in 1935 in Upper Egypt, he belongs to the generation of poor Egyptians who saw their fortunes rise when Nasser came to power. Like Mubarak, he studied at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in the 1960s, and received further training at Fort Bragg in the 1980s, after Egypt shifted its alliances. He and Mubarak grew close in the mid-1990s, while fighting the radical Islamist insurgency. When a group of Islamists opened fire on Mubarak’s limousine in Addis Adaba in 1995, Suleiman was sitting beside him; they were unhurt because Suleiman had insisted on travelling in an armoured car. His success in crushing the insurgency – and the dossier he compiled on Egyptian jihadists, many of whom joined Bin Laden after their defeat in Egypt – made him a valued partner for the CIA after 9/11. (As did Egypt’s usefulness in ‘extraordinary renditions’. In the words of the CIA agent Robert Baer, ‘If you wanted to make someone disappear – never to return – you sent him to Egypt.’)

Suleiman is a redoubtable figure, but nothing he has said or done suggests a yearning for political reform. Nor is it clear that he is willing take over from Mubarak: according to one rumour, he refused the presidency in early April and the army is now promoting another Mubarak loyalist, Ahmed Shafiq, a former air force commander and current minister of civil aviation. But Al-Ghazali Harb and a growing number of dissidents continue to hope that Suleiman will be the man who saves Egypt from dynastic succession, and helps lay the foundations of civilian rule.

The announcement at the beginning of December last year that Mohamed ElBaradei might run for president as an independent has galvanised advocates of reform. Born in Cairo in 1942, ElBaradei is the son of a liberal lawyer who, as head of the Egyptian Bar Association, campaigned for an independent judiciary under both Nasser and Sadat. He has spent most of his professional life in the West; he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work with the International Atomic Energy Agency (he donated the proceeds to orphanages in his hometown); and he crossed swords over the inspections in Iraq and Iran with the Bush administration, which tried to force him out of his job. All reasons to respect him. When he flew home from Vienna in February, at the end of his third term at the IAEA, he was greeted at the airport by a thousand supporters. He then met members of the opposition, from Kifaya to the Muslim Brothers, and gave a series of blistering interviews on the state of Egyptian political life. Sounding rather like Obama in 2008, he insisted that he was ‘not a saviour’, that ‘only with the help of the people could he try to change the authoritarian regime in power for the last 50 years’. It’s easy to understand why Egyptians are tempted to see him as a saviour: an outsider, untainted by compromise and unaffiliated with any of Egypt’s political parties, he is someone on whom extravagant hopes can be pinned. Apart from generalities – restoring the rule of law, ensuring social protection for the poor, providing humanitarian aid for Gaza – he has said little about what he would do as president. ‘He remains an unpolitician,’ as the reporter Issandr El Amrani put it.

Still, the unpolitician has travelled throughout Egypt, delivering public speeches in defiance of the Emergency Law. The regime has responded by arresting the publisher of an admiring biography and persuading the authorities in Kuwait to deport 17 Egyptian residents who support him. Vitriolic attacks have come from the press, which has painted him as a pawn of Washington or Tehran (‘parachuted into the country in which he was born’), and from the official opposition parties: Abdel-Nour of the Wafd, for example, recently said that his insistence on running as an independent ‘reflects the kind of fascism that has caused disasters everywhere in the world’. But ElBaradei’s international prestige affords him valuable protection. His candidacy could also make it difficult for Gamal Mubarak to run: the contrast with the ex-director of the IAEA and Nobel laureate would be embarrassing.

The Mubarak regime, however, has many ways to fend ElBaradei off. The 2007 amendments to the constitution allow the president to disband parliament, and strengthen the power of the NDP, while the tightening of eligibility requirements makes it almost impossible for an independent candidate to run: to qualify, ElBaradei would need the backing of at least 250 members of parliament and municipal councils. Even if he were to get their backing, the regime can intimidate voters or rig the results, now that judicial supervision at the polls has been eliminated. ElBaradei has said he won’t run unless the constitution is revised; he has also called for international monitoring of Egypt’s elections. But Mubarak has little incentive to give in to either demand – unless the US government pressures him to do so.

Five or six years ago, it might have. From 2003 to 2005, the Bush administration appeared to be serious about democratic reform in Egypt: the ‘freedom deficit’ was seen as a key reason for the frustration and anger of men such as Mohammed Atta and Ayman Zawahiri – both Egyptians. Condoleezza Rice called for an end to the Emergency Law at the American University of Cairo in 2005 and, in his 2005 State of the Union address, Bush declared that ‘the great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy.’ While continuing to avail themselves of Egypt’s services in extraordinary renditions, Bush and Rice embarked on a ‘freedom agenda’: for the first time, Egyptian NGOs which hadn’t been approved by the authorities in Cairo received direct US grants, infuriating Mubarak. The US was chastened, however, by the Muslim Brothers’ success in the 2005 legislative elections. And that was just the beginning. With Hamas’s election in 2006, resistance and sectarian conflict in Iraq, the spread of Iranian influence, and Hizbullah’s strong performance in the 2006 war with Israel, it was clear that the ‘freedom agenda’ was backfiring in the rest of the region. Suddenly, the promotion of reform in Egypt came to seem imprudent, and Washington remembered why it had always appreciated Mubarak: his co-operation in the Israeli-Palestinian theatre and the war on terror; his hostility to Tehran; the precedence given to US warships seeking expedited passage through the Suez Canal; the willingness to allow American planes to refuel in secret at the West Cairo airbase on their way back to Iraq. By the time the 2007 constitutional amendments were passed, the Bush administration had reversed its course. The amendments, Rice said in Cairo, were ‘disappointing’ but ‘the process of reform is … going to have its ups and downs.’ Then she got to work: Palestine, Iran, Iraq. The political conditions Congress had imposed on $100 million of the $1.3 billion in military aid were waived by Rice, on the grounds that US military ships needed to be able to go through the canal at short notice.

Barack Obama, keen to break with Bush’s messianic talk about spreading democracy, has worked to rebuild trust with the Egyptian government. In his speech in Cairo in June 2009, he spoke of his belief that all people want ‘government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people’, and insisted that ‘we will support them everywhere.’ Yet he has done little more than express mild criticism of Mubarak for extending the Emergency Law, and his administration has reverted to the pre-2004 position of reserving USAID funds for NGOs approved by the Egyptians. Military aid, Robert Gates has made clear, will be provided ‘without conditions’. Egypt, the second largest recipient of US aid after Israel, recently received $260 million in ‘supplementary security assistance’, as well as $50 million for border security, which probably means reinforcing the blockade of Gaza. There is also a brisk traffic in arms: US manufacturers recently announced the sale to Cairo of 24 new F-16 fighter jets and other equipment, worth an estimated $3.2 billion. Steven Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations has published a ‘contingency planning memorandum’ in favour of continued support to the regime, which, as he describes it, ‘has helped create a regional order that makes it relatively inexpensive for the United States to exercise its power’. Less expensive at any rate than it would be in the event of an Islamist takeover that ‘would pose a far greater threat – in magnitude and degree – to US interests than the Iranian revolution’. This seems to be the Obama administration’s implicit wager, too. It’s bad news for ElBaradei and his supporters: bad news for all the Egyptians who fear that they will never know democracy because of the ‘American veto’.

[*] Egypt: The Moment of Change, edited by Rabab El-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet (Zed, 186 pp., £16.99, December 2009, 978 1 84813 021 0).

[†] Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam and Democracy in the Arab World (Princeton, 292 pp., £24.95, December 2008, 978 0 691 13665 3).

The Economist on Selflessness

2010-05-26T09:36:00.000-04:00

Selflessness of strangers

The search for an evolutionary theory

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. By Oren Harman. W.W. Norton; 464 pages; $27.95. The Bodley Head; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHEN George Price died in January 1975, his funeral in London was attended by five homeless men: dishevelled, smelly and cold. Alongside them were Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, both distinguished British evolutionary biologists. All seven men had come to mourn an American scientist who helped to unpick the riddle of why people should ever be kind to one another, who had chosen to give away his clothes, his possessions and his home, and who, when his generosity was exhausted, slashed his own throat with a pair of scissors, aged 52.

Ever since Charles Darwin had published his theory of evolution in 1859, scientists have pondered whether it can explain the existence of altruism: behaviour that decreases an individual’s fitness but which increases the average fitness of the group to which he belongs. Such benevolence is not unique to humans but exists also in complex insect societies. Bees, for example, live in colonies headed by a queen and populated by sterile workers. One reading of Darwin’s theory says that, because the workers do not breed, evolution should result in their elimination. Yet this is not what happens in nature.

In the 1960s, Hamilton proposed that evolution acts on characteristics that favour the survival of close relatives of a certain individual. The bee colonies that survive are those in which sterile workers (which are daughters of the queen) provide the “fittest” service to their mother. Each worker thus strives to favour the reproductive success of the queen, even at the price of her own reproductive failure.

Price wanted to describe mathematically how a genetic predisposition to altruism could evolve. He devised a formula, now called the Price equation, that describes how characteristics that can, in some cases, prove disadvantageous, nevertheless persist in the population. By tinkering with the variables, he was able to describe populations in which kindness was widespread, everyone benefited and altruism was passed down the generations, and other, more brutal worlds, where charity was abused and kindness died out.

Ultimately, Price ended up in such a place. Oren Harman’s account of his life traces his early years, including a stint at the University of Chicago, where he worked on detecting radiation as his colleagues toiled to produce the first atomic pile. It bounces between his many interests: Price trained as a chemist but worked on electronic transistors at Bell Labs before going into computer-aided design. Then a generous payment from his health insurance for a thyroid tumour enabled him to abandon his wife and two young daughters and move to London in 1967.

There he hooked up with Hamilton and derived the equation for which he is famed. At the same time, his interest in altruism blossomed into something less kin-based and more practical: he began to seek out needy strangers. At one stage, he had four homeless men staying in his flat, while he slept in his office. As he became increasingly unwell, both physically and mentally, he redoubled his efforts to help the poor, moving into a dirty squat where, one freezing night, he committed suicide. As Mr Harman so vividly describes, Price ultimately became one of the vagabonds he had set out to save.

Syrian Orchestra

2010-05-24T09:49:00.001-04:00

Syrian Presidential Orchestra is struggling to play the Russian and Syrian national anthems. Amazing!

Listening to Solveig Slettahjell

2010-05-23T10:36:00.000-04:00

2005

2005 Pixiedust

2006

2006 Good Rain

2007

2007 Domestic Songs

2009

2009 Natt I Betlehem

2010

2010 Tarpan Seasons

The Economist on Work

2010-05-22T11:42:00.001-04:00

Schumpeter

Overstretched

Many people who kept their jobs are working too hard. What can companies do about it?

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IN GEORGE ORWELL’S “Animal Farm” the mighty cart-horse, Boxer, inspires the other animals with his heroic cry of “I will work harder”. He gets up at the crack of dawn to do a couple of hours’ extra ploughing. He even refuses to take a day off when he splits his hoof. And his reward for all this effort? As soon as he collapses on the job he is carted off to the knacker’s yard to be turned into glue and bonemeal.

“Animal Farm” looks ever more like a parable about capitalism as well as socialism. Everybody knows about the scourge of unemployment. But unemployment is bringing another scourge in its wake—overwork. The Corporate Leadership Council, an American consultancy which surveys 1,100 companies every quarter, reports that the average “job footprint” (what a worker is expected to do) has increased by a third since the beginning of the recession. The Hay Group, a British consultancy which recently surveyed 1,000 people, says that two-thirds of workers report they are putting in unpaid overtime. The reward for all this effort is frozen pay and shrinking perks. The only difference between these overstretched workers and Boxer is that they can see the knacker’s van coming.

So far workers have borne all this with remarkable stoicism—partly because they feel lucky to keep their jobs and partly because they want to save their firms from going under. But the Dunkirk spirit is beginning to fade. The Hay survey notes that 63% of workers say that their employers do not appreciate their extra effort. And 57% feel that employees are treated like dispensable commodities. Half report that their current level of work is unsustainable. People are wearying of frantic reorganisation as well as the added toil—floods of memos and meetings, endless reshuffles, the exhortations to do more with less.

For their part, companies are beginning to notice the downside of all this overstretching. Absenteeism is on the rise. Low-level corporate crime is growing. Corporate loyalty is on the wane. The Corporate Leadership Council reports that the proportion of workers who are willing to put in “discretionary effort” has dropped by almost half since 2007, while the share of respondents who claim that they are “disengaged” from their jobs has risen from a tenth to a fifth. But “discretionary effort” and “engagement” are vital sources of the innovation and creativity that companies claim to value so highly.

The biggest danger for companies is if workers head for the door as the economy picks up. The Hay Group reports that 59% of its sample are either considering leaving or actively looking for a new job—and more than 85% of those who are not in the job market are staying only because that market is so dismal.

Most problematic of all is when star employees decide to look for work elsewhere. These “high-potentials” (HiPos) are doubly frustrated: they have been asked to shoulder a disproportionate share of the growing burden of work and they have seen senior jobs dry up as older managers try to cling to their positions.

A few signs suggest that overstretched companies are beginning to hire again. America added 290,000 new workers in the past quarter. But the growth in employment is likely to be much slower and patchier than it has been after previous recessions. Bosses report that they expect a prolonged period of slow growth in the rich world. And the recession that has battered the private sector will soon reach the long-protected public sector as governments desperately try to bring their deficits under control.

What can organisations do to cope with this new era of overwork? Most obviously they can redouble efforts to make staff feel valued. Cash-strapped companies are making more use of symbolic rewards. Cap Gemini, an IT consultancy, has a “gold awards programme” complete with a public ceremony every six months. This might sound suspiciously like the parades that the pig-dictator in “Animal Farm” organises to reconcile his fellow animals to their desperate lot. But, given people’s worries about their job security, it seems to work like a treat.

A second strategy is to make more use of that old favourite, “empowerment”. This means trying harder to explain why companies are acting as they are. At Dollar General, a retail chain, managers brief selected front-line workers on corporate strategy and then ask them to explain what is going on to their workmates. It also means giving workers some more control over their lives. Best Buy, a seller of electronics, measures staff by their results rather than their hours. Bombardier, an aircraft-maker, encourages managers from different divisions to act as consultants to each other. Cap Gemini gives as many people as possible 3G devices so that they can do their administration while travelling. More companies are allowing staff flexible working hours as a way of reconciling them to added burdens—if they can’t have more pay, workers can at least have more control over how and when they work.

Power to the HiPos

A third strategy is to pay particular attention to high performers. A striking number of companies have introduced “HiPo schemes” to identify and nurture potential stars. Procter & Gamble, which sells consumer goods, encourages rising stars to tackle difficult problems (“crucible roles”). Hewlett-Packard, an IT firm, lets its stars attend high-level strategy meetings and suggest solutions. The companies are combining these schemes with judicious pruning of less productive workers.

This approach is less divisive than it sounds. Most workers are surprisingly keen on rewarding superstars (who hold the future of the organisation in their hands) and on dumping freeloaders. And sensible bosses are well aware that their competitors are already compiling hit lists of high-flyers who are dissatisfied with their lot. All animals are equal, remember. But some animals are more equal than others.

The Economist on Freedom of...

2010-05-22T00:26:00.003-04:00

Liberty, privacy and some bottles of beer

Want to talk politics with your neighbour? Better ask permission

May 20th 2010 | SEATTLE | From The Economist print edition

PAT MURAKAMI runs a small computer repair shop and does a little political agitating on the side. She worries about her neighbourhood, a vibrant area full of Vietnamese shops and veiled women waiting at bus stops. The city of Seattle tried to declare parts of it “blighted”, which would have enabled it to seize people’s homes and hand the land to private developers.

Mrs Murakami started a group called “Many Cultures, One Message”, to rally her neighbours in protest. She prevailed. Or at least, the plan to knock down chunks of her neighbourhood was shelved in 2007. But she worries that the politicians and their developer chums may try again, so she wants to reform Washington state’s rules on “eminent domain”, which give local government extraordinary powers to condemn private property.

She ran into a second little-known state law. If she prints some flyers, calls some meetings and urges her neighbours to write to their state representative demanding change, she has to register as a “grassroots lobbyist”. This rule applies to any group that spends more than $500 in any given month trying to influence the legislature. That sum includes not only cash but also anything else of value.

To comply with the law, Mrs Murakami must provide details such as the name, address and occupation of everyone who helps organise her campaign or who contributes more than $25 in cash or kind to it. All this information is then made public on the internet. She must also provide monthly reports on all the group’s activities and expenditures. Failure to follow the rules can result in ruinous fines; $10,000 per violation, which could mean every time she sends out a mailshot.

Mrs Murakami is suing to have this law overturned. If the first amendment means anything, she reckons, it surely protects the right of Americans to talk politics with their neighbours. Many of Mrs Murakami’s supporters are recent refugees from autocratic regimes. If getting involved means having their personal details published, they would rather not.

The same worry afflicts supporters of unpopular causes. Alfred Petermann, who runs a discussion group called “Conservative Enthusiasts”, says it is “unbelievable” that he has to publish the name, address and occupation of anyone who brings $25-worth of beer to a meeting. “Conservative” is a dirty word in Seattle, he says. Some in his group fear repercussions at work if they are outed.

All states regulate professional lobbyists: ie, paid agents who communicate directly with politicians in the hope of swaying them. Fair enough. But a new report from the Institute for Justice, a libertarian group, reveals that 36 states also impose restrictions on “grassroots lobbying”, meaning people like Mrs Murakami. The rules are often complex and unclear. The first sentence of the Massachusetts guidelines for grassroots lobbyists is but a whisker shorter than the Gettysburg address and comprehensible only to a lawyer. Small groups cannot afford lawyers. Yet a few states even threaten criminal penalties for breaking the rules. In Alabama, the maximum sentence is 20 years in jail.

The most severe punishments are seldom, if ever, applied. But they still have a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech. The constitution says people have a right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”. Politicians hate that.

The Economist on New Life

2010-05-22T00:21:00.001-04:00

And man made life

Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived

TO CREATE life is the prerogative of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine spark, a vital essence. It may come as a shock, then, that mere mortals have now made artificial life.

Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor (see article). Pedants may quibble that only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff. Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order.

That ability would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The bomb, however justified in the context of the second world war, was purely destructive. Biology is about nurturing and growth. Synthetic biology, as the technology that this and myriad less eye-catching advances are ushering in has been dubbed, promises much. In the short term it promises better drugs, less thirsty crops (see article), greener fuels and even a rejuvenated chemical industry. In the longer term who knows what marvels could be designed and grown?

On the face of it, then, artificial life looks like a wonderful thing. Yet that is not how many will view the announcement. For them, a better word than “creation” is “tampering”. Have scientists got too big for their boots? Will their hubris bring Nemesis in due course? What horrors will come creeping out of the flask on the laboratory bench?

Such questions are not misplaced—and should give pause even to those, including this newspaper, who normally embrace advances in science with enthusiasm. The new biological science does have the potential to do great harm, as well as good. “Predator” and “disease” are just as much part of the biological vocabulary as “nurturing” and “growth”. But for good or ill it is here. Creating life is no longer the prerogative of gods.

Children of a lesser god

It will be a while, yet, before lifeforms are routinely designed on a laptop. But this will come. The past decade, since the completion of the Human Genome Project, has seen two related developments that make it almost inevitable. One is an extraordinary rise in the speed, and fall in the cost, of analysing the DNA sequences that encode the natural “software” of life. What once took years and cost millions now takes days and costs thousands. Databases are filling up with the genomes of everything from the tiniest virus to the tallest tree.

These genomes are the raw material for synthetic biology. First, they will provide an understanding of how biology works right down to the atomic level. That can then be modelled in human-designed software so that synthetic biologists will be able to assemble new constellations of genes with a reasonable presumption that they will work in a predictable way. Second, the genome databases are a warehouse that can be raided for whatever part a synthetic biologist requires.

The other development is faster and cheaper DNA synthesis. This has lagged a few years behind DNA analysis, but seems to be heading in the same direction. That means it will soon be possible for almost anybody to make DNA to order, and dabble in synthetic biology.

That is good, up to a point. Innovation works best when it is a game that anyone can play. The more ideas there are, the better the chance some will prosper. Unfortunately and inevitably, some of those ideas will be malicious. And the problem with malicious biological inventions—unlike, say, guns and explosives—is that once released, they can breed by themselves.

Biology really is different

The Home Brew computing club launched Steve Jobs and Apple, but similar ventures produced a thousand computer viruses. What if a home-brew synthetic-biology club were accidentally to launch a real virus or bacterium? What if a terrorist were to do the same deliberately?

The risk of accidentally creating something bad is probably low. Most bacteria opt for an easy life breaking down organic material that is already dead. It doesn’t fight back. Living hosts do. Creating something bad deliberately, whether the creator is a teenage hacker, a terrorist or a rogue state, is a different matter. No one now knows how easy it would be to turbo-charge an existing human pathogen, or take one that infects another type of animal and assist its passage over the species barrier. We will soon find out, though.

It is hard to know how to address this threat. The reflex, to restrict and ban, has worked (albeit far from perfectly) for more traditional sorts of biological weapons. Those, though, have been in the hands of states. The ubiquity of computer viruses shows what can happen when technology gets distributed.

Thoughtful observers of synthetic biology favour a different approach: openness. This avoids shutting out the good in a belated attempt to prevent the bad. Knowledge cannot be unlearned, so the best way to oppose the villains is to have lots of heroes on your side. Then, when a problem arises, an answer can be found quickly. If pathogens can be designed by laptop, vaccines can be, too. And, just as “open source” software lets white-hat computer nerds work against the black-hats, so open-source biology would encourage white-hat geneticists.

Regulation—and, especially, vigilance—will still be needed. Keeping an eye out for novel diseases is sensible even when such diseases are natural. Monitoring needs to be redoubled and co-ordinated. Then, whether natural or artificial, the full weight of synthetic biology can be brought to bear on the problem. Encourage the good to outwit the bad and, with luck, you keep Nemesis at bay.

Le Monde on Anticancer

2010-05-21T00:06:00.000-04:00

Pour votre assiette anticancer, êtes-vous plutôt David Khayat ou David Servan-Schreiber? Plutôt viande rouge ou saumon? Plutôt aspartame ou sirop d’agave ? Plutôt foie gras ou crabe? Trois mois à peine après la nouvelle édition du best-seller Anticancer (Robert Laffont, 416p., 21¤) du psychiatre David Servan-Schreiber, c’est au tour du cancérologue David Khayat, ancien président de l’Institut national du cancer (INCA), de publier Le Vrai Régime anticancer (Odile Jacob, 336p.,19,5 ¤). Et avec ça, je vous mets quoi? Une bonne dose de patience pour dénicher les bonnes recettes!
«Je n’ai pas lu le livre de Servan-Schreiber», affirme le professeur Khayat dans Le Nouvel Observateur. Pourtant, fin 2007, lors de la sortie de la première édition d’Anticancer, le cancérologue expliquait dans Le Monde: «Le message de Servan-Schreiber est frappé au coin du bon sens : mangez mieux, bougez, évitez les stress, soyez plutôt heureux. Ce n’est pas un livre dangereux.» Aujourd’hui, il critique dans son avant-propos «ceux qui voudraient tirer d’une expérience personnelle, singulière, avec le cancer, des règles qu’ils voudraient imposer à tous, sans même la prudence du conditionnel propre à tout vrai chercheur».
Une allusion au psychiatre qui raconte dans son livre sa confrontation avec la maladie et comment il s’est soigné. Sauf que David Servan-Schreiber, tout comme David Khayat revendiquent d’avoir épluché la littérature scientifique avant de livrer leurs recommandations.
Face à cette cacophonie nutritionnelle, une chose semble acquise: le potentiel anticancer de l’alimentation aurait été sous-estimé. Après, à chacun son régime. Vous avez le choix entre manger des oignons rouges et des cassis au déjeuner mais surtout pas au dîner (version Khayat) ou mélanger la tomate et le brocoli lors d’un même repas, car ils seraient plus efficaces contre le cancer ensemble que séparément (version Servan-Schreiber); estimer que le sucre est sain et le sirop d’agave du grand n’importe quoi (Khayat) ou le contraire (Servan-Schreiber); remettre en question les bienfaits des oméga-3 (Khayat) ou ne jurer que par eux (Servan-Schreiber)…
Restent les aliments qui font l’unanimité: le curcuma, le jus de grenade, le thé vert, l’ail, l’oignon, le brocoli, le gingembre, les champignons, le pain complet, etc. Finalement, à lire les deux ouvrages, on constate qu’il vaut mieux manger une nourriture du terroir ou biologique plutôt qu’industrielle, équilibrer et diversifier son alimentation, pratiquer une activité physique. Tout ça pour ça! En prime, cela marche aussi pour lutter contre les maladies cardio-vasculaires, l’obésité et le cholestérol.

New Yorker on Jesus

2010-05-20T23:54:00.001-04:00

What DID Jesus do?
Reading and unreading the Gospels

by Adam Gopnik

Then we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? This curious criterion governs historical criticism of Gospel texts: the more improbable or “difficult” an episode or remark is, the likelier it is to be a true record, on the assumption that you would edit out all the weird stuff if you could, and keep it in only because the tradition is so strong that it can’t plausibly be excluded. If Jesus says something nice, then someone is probably saying it for him; if he says something nasty, then probably he really did.
So then, the scholars argue, the author of Mark, whoever he was—the familiar disciples’ names conventionally attached to each Gospel come later—added the famous statement of divine favor, descending directly from the heavens as they opened. But what does the voice say? In Mark, the voice says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased,” seeming to inform a Jesus who doesn’t yet know that this is so. But some early versions of Luke have the voice quoting Psalm 2: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” Only in Matthew does it announce Jesus’ divinity to the world as though it were an ancient, fixed agreement, not a new act. In Mark, for that matter, the two miraculous engines that push the story forward at the start and pull it toward Heaven at the end—the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection—make no appearance at all. The story begins with Jesus’ adult baptism, with no hint of a special circumstance at his birth, and there is actually some grumbling by Jesus about his family (“Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house, is a prophet without honor,” he complains); it ends with a cry of desolation as he is executed—and then an enigmatic and empty tomb. (It’s left to the Roman centurion to recognize him as the Son of God after he is dead, while the verses in Mark that show him risen were apparently added later.)
read more
The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith. The more one knows, the less one knows. Was Jesus a carpenter, or even a carpenter’s son? The Greek word tekto¯n, long taken to mean “carpenter,” could mean something closer to a stoneworker or a day laborer. (One thinks of the similar shadings of a word like “printer,” which could refer to Ben Franklin or to his dogsbody.) If a carpenter, then presumably he was an artisan. If a stoneworker, then presumably he spent his early years as a laborer, schlepping from Nazareth to the grand Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris, nearby, to help build its walls and perhaps visit its theatre and agora. And what of the term “Son of Man,” which he uses again and again in Mark, mysteriously: “The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” As Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in his new, immensely ambitious and absorbing history, “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years” (Viking; $45), the phrase, which occurs in the Gospels “virtually exclusively in the reported words of Jesus,” certainly isn’t at all the same as the later “Son of God,” and may merely be Aramaic for “folks like us.”
Belief remains a bounce, faith a leap. Still, the appetite for historical study of the New Testament remains a publishing constant and a popular craze. Book after book—this year, ten in one month alone—appears, seeking the Truth. Paul Johnson has a sound believer’s life, “Jesus: A Biography from a Believer,” while Paul Verhoeven, the director of “Basic Instinct,” has a new skeptical-scholar’s book, “Jesus of Nazareth” (Seven Stories; $23.95). Verhoeven turns out to be a member of the Jesus Seminar, a collection mostly of scholars devoted to reconstructing the historical Jesus, and much of what he has to say is shrewd and learned. (An odd pull persists between box-office and Biblical study. A few years ago, another big action-film director and producer, James Cameron, put himself at the center of a documentary called “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.”)
What the amateur reader wants, given the thickets of uncertainty that surround the garden, is not what the passionate polemicists want—not so much a verdict on whether Jesus was nasty or nice as a sense of what, if anything, was new in his preaching. Was the cult that changed the world a product of Paul’s evangelism and imperial circumstance and the military embrace of one miracle-mystery cult among many such around? Or was there really something new, something unheard of, that can help explain the scale of what happened later? Did the rise of Christendom take place because historical plates were moving, with a poor martyred prophet caught between, or did one small pebble of parable and preaching start the avalanche that ended the antique world?
Ever since serious scholarly study of the Gospels began, in the nineteenth century, its moods have ranged from the frankly skeptical—including a “mythicist” position that the story is entirely made up—to the credulous, with some archeologists still holding that it is all pretty reliable, and tombs and traces can be found if you study the texts hard enough. The current scholarly tone is, judging from the new books, realist but pessimistic. While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes: there were intellectual-minded detectives around, and Conan Doyle had one in mind in the eighteen-eighties, but the really interesting bits—Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the Reichenbach Falls—were, even if they all had remote real-life sources, shaped by the needs of storytelling, not by traces of truth. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like Jesus, because the audience demanded it. (The view that the search for the historical Jesus is like the search for the historical Superman—that there’s nothing there but a hopeful story and a girlfriend with an alliterative name—has by now been marginalized from the seminaries to the Internet; the scholar Earl Doherty defends it on his Web site with grace and tenacity.)
The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over—but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, “Jesus, Interrupted” (HarperOne; $15.99), Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.
The odd absences in Mark are matched by the unreal presences in the other Gospels. The beautiful Nativity story in Luke, for instance, in which a Roman census forces the Holy Family to go back to its ancestral city of Bethlehem, is an obvious invention, since there was no Empire-wide census at that moment, and no sane Roman bureaucrat would have dreamed of ordering people back to be counted in cities that their families had left hundreds of years before. The author of Luke, whoever he might have been, invented Bethlehem in order to put Jesus in David’s city. (James Tabor, a professor of religious studies, in his 2006 book “The Jesus Dynasty,” takes surprisingly seriously the old Jewish idea that Jesus was known as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Pantera—as well attested a tradition as any, occurring in Jewish texts of the second century, in which a Jesus ben Pantera makes several appearances, and the name is merely descriptive, not derogatory. Tabor has even found, however improbably, a tombstone in Germany for a Roman soldier from Syria-Palestine named Pantera.)
What seems a simple historical truth is that all the Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the First Jewish-Roman War, in 70 C.E.—a catastrophe so large that it left the entire Jesus movement in a crisis that we can dimly imagine if we think of Jewish attitudes before and after the Holocaust: the scale of the tragedy leads us to see catastrophe as having been built into the circumstance. As L. Michael White’s “Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite” (HarperOne; $28.99) explains in daunting scholarly detail, even Mark—which, coming first, might seem to be closest to the truth—was probably written in the ruins of the Temple and spiritually shaped to its desolate moment. Mark’s essential point, he explains, is about secrecy: Jesus keeps telling people to be quiet about his miracles, and confides only to an inner circle of disciples. With the Temple gone, White says, it was necessary to persuade people that the grotesque political failure of Jesus’ messianism wasn’t a real failure. Mark invents the idea that Jesus’ secret was not that he was the “Davidic” messiah, the Arthur-like returning king, but that he was someone even bigger: the Son of God, whose return would signify the end of time and the birth of the Kingdom of God. The literary critic Frank Kermode, in “The Genesis of Secrecy” (1979), a pioneering attempt to read Mark seriously as poetic literature, made a similar point, though his is less historical than interpretative. Kermode considers Mark to be, as the French would say, a text that reads itself: the secret it contains is that its central figure is keeping a secret that we can never really get. It is an intentionally open-ended story, prematurely closed, a mystery without a single solution.
Even if we make allowances for Mark’s cryptic tracery, the human traits of his Jesus are evident: intelligence, short temper, and an ironic, duelling wit. What seems new about Jesus is not his piety or divine detachment but the humanity of his irritability and impatience. He’s no Buddha. He gets annoyed at the stupidity of his followers, their inability to grasp an obvious point. “Do you have eyes but fail to see?” he asks the hapless disciples. The fine English actor Alec McCowen used to do a one-man show in which he recited Mark, complete, and his Jesus came alive instantly as a familiar human type—the Gandhi-Malcolm-Martin kind of charismatic leader of an oppressed people, with a character that clicks into focus as you begin to dramatize it. He’s verbally spry and even a little shifty. He likes defiant, enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, perhaps by design. A story about a vineyard whose ungrateful husbandmen keep killing the servants sent to them is an anti-establishment, even an anti-clerical story, but it isn’t so obvious as to get him in trouble. The suspicious priests keep trying to catch him out in a declaration of anti-Roman sentiment: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not, they ask—that is, do you recognize Roman authority or don’t you? He has a penny brought out, sees the picture of the emperor on it, and, shrugging, says to give to the state everything that rightly belongs to the state. The brilliance of that famous crack is that Jesus turns the question back on the questioner, in mock-innocence. Why, you give the king the king’s things and God God’s. Of course, this leaves open the real question: what is Caesar’s and what is God’s? It’s a tautology designed to evade self-incrimination.
Jesus’ morality has a brash, sidewise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness. His pet style blends the epigrammatic with the enigmatic. When he makes that complaint about the prophet having no honor in his own home town, or says exasperatedly that there is no point in lighting a candle unless you intend to put it in a candlestick, his voice carries a disdain for the props of piety that still feels startling. And so with the tale of the boy who wastes his inheritance but gets a feast from his father, while his dutiful brother doesn’t; or the one about the weeping whore who is worthier than her good, prim onlookers; or about the passionate Mary who is better than her hardworking sister Martha. There is a wild gaiety about Jesus’ moral teachings that still leaps off the page. He is informal in a new way, too, that remains unusual among prophets. MacCulloch points out that he continually addresses God as “Abba,” Father, or even Dad, and that the expression translated in the King James Version as a solemn “Verily I say unto you” is actually a quirky Aramaic throat-clearer, like Dr. Johnson’s “Depend upon it, Sir.”
Some of the sayings do have, in their contempt for material prosperity, the ring of Greek Cynic philosophy, but there is also something neither quite Greek nor quite Jewish about Jesus’ morality that makes it fresh and strange even now. Is there a more miraculous scene in ancient literature than the one in John where Jesus absent-mindedly writes on the ground while his fellow-Jews try to entrap him into approving the stoning of an adulteress, only to ask, wide-eyed, if it wouldn’t be a good idea for the honor of throwing the first stone to be given to the man in the mob who hasn’t sinned himself? Is there a more compressed and charming religious exhortation than the one in the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus merrily recommends to his disciples, “Be passersby”? Too much fussing about place and home and ritual, and even about where, exactly, you’re going to live, is unnecessary: be wanderers, dharma bums.
This social radicalism still shines through—not a programmatic radicalism of national revolution but one of Kerouac-like satori-seeking-on-the-road. And the social radicalism is highly social. The sharpest opposition in the Gospels, the scholar and former priest John Dominic Crossan points out in his illuminating books—“The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” is the best known—is between John the Faster and Jesus the Feaster. Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and, finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine.
The table is his altar in every sense. Crossan, the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, makes a persuasive case that Jesus’ fressing was perhaps the most radical element in his life—that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees Jesus living within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on “commensality,” would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal allegiance, which would have shocked most Jews. The most forceful of his sayings, still shocking to any pious Jew or Muslim, is “What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.” Jesus isn’t a hedonist or an epicurean, but he clearly isn’t an ascetic, either: he feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He’s interested in saving people living normal lives, buying and selling what they can, rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves.
To a modern reader, the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table can seem undermined by the other part of Jesus’ message, a violent and even vengeful prediction of a final judgment and a large-scale damnation. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet who is preaching the death of the world—he says categorically that the end is near—and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living. If the end is near, why give so much sage counsel? If human life is nearly over, why preach in such detail the right way to live? One argument is that a later, perhaps “unpersonified” body of Hellenized wisdom literature was tacked on to an earlier account of a Jewish messianic prophet. Since both kinds of literature—apocalyptic hysterics and stoic sayings—can be found all over the period, perhaps they were merely wrenched together.
And yet a single figure who “projects” two personae at the same time, or in close sequence, one dark and one dreamy, is a commonplace among charismatic prophets. That’s what a charismatic prophet is: someone whose aura of personal conviction manages to reconcile a hard doctrine with a humane manner. The leaders of the African-American community before the civil-rights era, for instance, had to be both prophets and political agitators to an oppressed and persecuted people in a way not unlike that of the real Jesus (and all the other forgotten zealots and rabbis whom the first-century Jewish historian Josephus names and sighs over). They, too, tended to oscillate between the comforting and the catastrophic. Malcolm X was the very model of a modern apocalyptic prophet-politician, unambiguously preaching violence and a doctrine of millennial revenge, all fuelled by a set of cult beliefs—a hovering U.F.O., a strange racial myth. But Malcolm was also a community builder, a moral reformer (genuinely distraught over the sexual sins of his leader), who refused to carry weapons, and who ended, within the constraints of his faith, as some kind of universalist. When he was martyred, he was called a prophet of hate; within three decades of his death—about the time that separates the Gospels from Jesus—he could be the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine like this one. One can even see how martyrdom and “beatification” draws out more personal detail, almost perfectly on schedule: Alex Haley, Malcolm’s Paul, is long on doctrine and short on details; thirty years on, Spike Lee, his Mark, has a full role for a wife and children, and a universalist message that manages to blend Malcolm into Mandela. (As if to prove this point, just the other week came news of suppressed chapters of Haley’s “Autobiography,” which, according to Malcolm’s daughter, “showed too much of my father’s humanity.”)
As the Bacchae knew, we always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like. Still, a real, unchangeable difference does exist between what might be called storytelling truths and statement-making truths—between what makes credible, if sweeping, sense in a story and what’s required for a close-knit metaphysical argument. Certain kinds of truths are convincing only in a narrative. The idea, for instance, that the ring of power should be given to two undersized amateurs to throw into a volcano at the very center of the enemy’s camp makes sound and sober sense, of a kind, in Tolkien; but you would never expect to find it as a premise at the Middle Earth Military Academy. Anyone watching Hamlet will find his behavior completely understandable—O.K., I buy it; he’s toying with his uncle—though any critic thinking about it afterward will reflect that this behavior is a little nuts.
In Mark, Jesus’ divinity unfolds without quite making sense intellectually, and without ever needing to. It has the hypnotic flow of dramatic movement. The story is one of self-discovery: he doesn’t know who he is and then he begins to think he does and then he doubts and in pain and glory he dies and is known. The story works. But, as a proposition under scrutiny, it makes intolerable demands on logic. If Jesus is truly one with God, in what sense could he suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, horror, and so on? So we get the Jesus rendered in the Book of John, who doesn’t. But if he doesn’t suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, and horror, in what sense is his death a sacrifice rather than just a theatrical enactment? A lamb whose throat is not cut and does not bleed is not really much of an offering.
None of this is very troubling if one has a pagan idea of divinity: the Son of God might then be half human and half divine, suffering and triumphing and working out his heroic destiny in the half-mortal way of Hercules, for instance. But that’s ruled out by the full weight of the Jewish idea of divinity—omnipresent and omniscient, knowing all and seeing all. If God he was—not some Hindu-ish avatar or offspring of God, but actually one with God—then God once was born and had dirty diapers and took naps. The longer you think about it, the more astounding, or absurd, it becomes. To be really believed at all, it can only be told again.
So the long history of the early Church councils that tried to make the tales into a theology is, in a way, a history of coming out of the movie confused, and turning to someone else to ask what just happened. This is the subject of Philip Jenkins’s “Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years” (HarperOne; $26.99). Jenkins explains what was at stake in the seemingly wacky wars over the Arian heresy—the question of whether Jesus the Son shared an essence with God the Father or merely a substance—which consumed the Western world through the second and third centuries. Was Jesus one with God in the sense that, say, Sean Connery is one with Daniel Craig, different faces of a single role, or in the sense that James Bond is one with Ian Fleming, each so dependent on the other that one cannot talk about the creation apart from its author? The passion with which people argued over apparently trivial word choices was, Jenkins explains, not a sign that they were specially sensitive to theology. People argued that way because they were part of social institutions—cities, schools, clans, networks—in which words are banners and pennants: who pledged to whom was inseparable from who said what in what words. It wasn’t that they really cared about the conceptual difference between the claim that Jesus and the Father were homoousian (same in essence) and the claim that the two were homoiousian (same in substance); they cared about whether the Homoousians or the Homoiousians were going to run the Church.
The effort to seal off the inspiration from the intolerance, nice Jesus from nasty Jesus, is very old. Jefferson compiled his own New Testament, with the ethical teachings left in and the miracles and damnations left out—and that familiar, outraged sense of the ugly duplicity of the Christian heritage is at the heart of Philip Pullman’s new plaint against it, “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” (Canongate; $24), in which the two aspects are neatly divided into twins borne by Mary. The wise Jesus is brother to the shrewd Christ. One leads to the nice Jewish boy, the other to Paul’s scary punitive God. Pullman, a writer of great skill and feeling, as he has shown in his magical children’s fantasies, feels the betrayal of Jesus by his brother Christ as a fundamental betrayal of humanity. He wants us to forget Christ and return to Jesus alone, to surrender miracles for morals. Pullman’s book, however, is not narrowly polemical; he also retells the parables and acts with a lucid simplicity that strips away the Pauline barnacles. His real achievement is to translate Jesus’ sayings into a simple, almost childlike English that would seem to have much of the sound we are told is present in the artless original Greek: “Those who make peace between enemies, those who solve bitter disputes—they will be blessed. . . . But beware, and remember what I tell you: there are some who will be cursed, who will never inherit the Kingdom of God. D’you want to know who they are? Here goes: Those who are rich will be cursed.”
If one thing seems clear from all the scholarship, though, it’s that Paul’s divine Christ came first, and Jesus the wise rabbi came later. This fixed, steady twoness at the heart of the Christian story can’t be wished away by liberal hope any more than it could be resolved by theological hair-splitting. Its intractability is part of the intoxication of belief. It can be amputated, mystically married, revealed as a fraud, or worshipped as the greatest of mysteries. The two go on, and their twoness is what distinguishes the faith and gives it its discursive dynamism. All faiths have fights, but, as MacCulloch shows at intricate, thousand-page length, few have so many super-subtle shadings of dogma: wine or blood, flesh or wafer, one God in three spirits or three Gods in one; a song of children, stables, psalms, parables, and peacemakers, on the one hand, a threnody of suffering, nails, wild dogs, and damnation and risen God, on the other. The two spin around each other throughout history—the remote Pantocrator of Byzantium giving way to the suffering man of the Renaissance, and on and on.
It is typical of this conundrum that, in the past century, the best Christian poet, W. H. Auden, and the greatest anti-Christian polemicist, William Empson, were exact contemporaries, close friends, and, as slovenly social types, almost perfectly interchangeable Englishmen. Auden chose Christianity for the absolute democracy of its vision—there is, in it, “neither Jew nor German, East nor West, boy nor girl, smart nor dumb, boss nor worker.” Empson, in the same period, beginning in the fatal nineteen-forties, became the most articulate critic of a morality reduced “to keeping the taboos imposed by an infinite malignity,” in which the reintroduction of human sacrifice as a sacred principle left the believer with “no sense either of personal honour or of the public good.” (In this case, though, where Auden saw a nice Christ, Empson saw a nasty Jesus.)
Beyond the words, we still hear that cry. The Passion is still the point. In Mark, Jesus’ arrest and execution feels persuasively less preordained and willed than accidental and horrific. Jesus seems to have an intimation of the circumstance he has found himself in—leading a rebellion against Rome that is not really a rebellion, yet doesn’t really leave any possibility of retreat—and some corner of his soul wants no part of it: “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take away this cup from me.” Mel Gibson was roughed up for roughing up Jesus, in his “Passion of the Christ,” but, though Gibson can fairly be accused of fanaticism, he can’t be accused of unfairness: in the long history of human cruelty, crucifixion, practiced as a mass punishment by the Romans, was uniquely horrible. The victim was stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, then whipped bloody, and then left to die as slowly as possible in as public a manner as conceivable. (In a sign of just how brutal it was, Josephus tells us that he begged the Roman rulers for three of his friends to be taken off the cross after they had spent hours on it; one lived.) The victim’s legs were broken to bring death in a blaze of pain. And the corpse was generally left to be eaten by wild dogs. It was terrifying and ever-present.
Verhoeven, citing Crossan, offers an opening scene for a Jesus bio-pic which neatly underlines this point. He imagines a man being nailed to a cross, cries of agony, two companion crosses in view, and then we crane out to see two hundred crosses and two hundred victims: we are at the beginning of the story, the mass execution of Jewish rebels in 4 B.C., not the end. This was the Roman death waiting for rebels from the outset, and Jesus knew it. Jesus’ cry of desolation—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—though primly edited out or explained as an apropos quotation from the Psalms by later evangelists, pierces us even now from the pages of Mark, across all the centuries and Church comforts. The shock and pity of failure still resonates.
One thing, at least, the cry assures: the Jesus faith begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down, and the promise wasn’t kept. “Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God,” Jesus announced; but none of them did. Jesus, and Paul following him, says unambiguously that whatever is coming is coming soon—that the end is very, very near. It wasn’t, and the whole of what follows is built on an apology for what went wrong. The seemingly modern waiver, “Well, I know he said that, but he didn’t really mean it quite the way it sounded,” is built right into the foundation of the cult. The sublime symbolic turn—or the retreat to metaphor, if you prefer—begins with the first words of the faith. If the Kingdom of God proved elusive, he must have meant that the Kingdom of God was inside, or outside, or above, or yet to come, anything other than what the words seem so plainly to have meant.
The argument is the reality, and the absence of certainty the certainty. Authority and fear can circumscribe the argument, or congeal it, but can’t end it. In the beginning was the word: in the beginning, and in the middle, and right there at the close, Word without end, Amen. The impulse of orthodoxy has always been to suppress the wrangling as a sign of weakness; the impulse of more modern theology is to embrace it as a sign of life. The deeper question is whether the uncertainty at the center mimics the plurality of possibilities essential to liberal debate, as the more open-minded theologians like to believe, or is an antique mystery in a story open only as the tomb is open, with a mystery left inside, never to be entirely explored or explained. With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants. Somebody seems to have hoped so, once. ♦

Listening to Nicki Parrott

2010-05-19T19:52:00.003-04:00

There is something extra sexy about a blonde with a huge booming tool in her arms.

Poetry Please is 30 Years Old!

2010-05-18T00:39:00.004-04:00

As I grow reluctantly older, I find myself drawn more and more into the world that I unwittingly abandoned so many years ago - poetry. I do read a lot of it, both classical and modern, but I just never feel right about the way I "consume" it. I feel like I am doing it a disservice. I feel that my rudimentary skills at scanning and voicing it are so far away from being even remotely acceptable. It has been about 6 mos since I discovered this wonderful radio show, and it turns out it is quite a phenomenon in Britain (of all the countries!). When I get to a complete rehash of my website, there will be a separate section just for poetry - the art of strumming our brain's inner rhythmic strings overwhelming it with raw emotion while sedating its intellectual zeal. The (proper) opium of the (proper) masses...

Listening to Rolling Stones

2010-05-17T22:36:00.018-04:00

1972

In Memoriam: Dio

2010-05-16T16:35:00.000-04:00

An Amazing Artist

2010-05-15T16:19:00.000-04:00

See more of his creations at http://bentobjects.blogger.com or buy his book

Valera Meylis

Just Watched: Cowboy Hip Hop

Just Watched: Weeds

Wired on Internet

Saramago is dead

José Saramago Dies

LRB on God

The Atheists’ Picnic

Julian Bell

LRB on Sonnets

Toolkit for Tinkerers

Colin Burrow

Poem du jour

First Glance

TLS on Death

My future me

NYT on Marriage

What Brain Scans Can Tell Us About Marriage

Listening to Bajka

The Economist on Birds and Bees

Sex hormones

What regulates the lengths of human fingers?

Poem du jour

A Maxim

Sally Mann's Kids

Le Monde: Mithra

Mithra

Un culte réservé à une élite militaire

Dieu solaire et martial

Un dieu iranien à Angers

Listening to Dani

The Economist on Papua

Papua

Indonesia is a democracy. But many Papuans do not want to be part of it

TLS on Food

What We’re about to Receive

Jeremy Harding writes about the future of food and its supply

A digest of sources:

The Economist on Anti-Gay Laws

The Economist on Genital Cutting

TLS on Human Cooking

One for the pot

TLS on Myths

TLS on Scottish

Un livre à lire

Hiérarchie.

Imaginaire.

The Economist on Cats and Mice

Toxoplasmosis and psychology

There is tantalising evidence that a common parasite may affect human behaviour

TLS on Renaissances

The Economist on DHA

TLS on American Fake Smiles

Let's go negative

TLS on Mahal

Love of Mahall

NYT on Happiness

Economist on Moslems vs Facebook

Listening to Jack Johnson

Le Monde: Our Future Food

Andrey Voznesensky Dies at 77

LRB on Hamsun

Regret is a shabby thing

Bernard Porter

You are logged in as heyvalera@yahoo.com and have access to all subscriber-only content.

The Economist on Corn Fructose

High-fructose corn syrup

LRB on Mubarak

Mubarak’s Last Breath

Adam Shatz reports from Egypt

The Economist on Selflessness

Selflessness of strangers

The search for an evolutionary theory

Syrian Orchestra

Listening to Solveig Slettahjell

The Economist on Work

Overstretched

Many people who kept their jobs are working too hard. What can companies do about it?

Power to the HiPos

The Economist on Freedom of...