Poem of the Day

Apes
One branch, I read, of a species of chimpanzee has something like territorial wars,
and when the ... army, I suppose you'd call it, of one tribe prevails and captures an enemy,
"Several males hold ahand or foot of the rival so the victim can be damaged at will".

This is so disquieting: if beings with whom we share so many genes can be this cruel,
what hope for us? Still, "rival", "victim", "will" - don't such anthropomorphic terms
make those simians' social-political conflicts sound more brutal than they are?

The chimps Catherine and I saw on their island sanctuary in Uganda we loathed.
Unlike the pacific gorillas in the forest of Bwindi, they fought, dementedly shrieked,
the dominant male lorded it over the rest; they were, in all, too much like us.

Another island from my recent reading, where Columbus, on his last voyage,
encountering some "Indians", who'd greeted him with curiosity and warmth, wrote,
before he chained and enslaved them, "They don't even know how to kill each other."

It's occured to me I've read enough now; at my age all I'm doing is confirming my sadness.
Surely the papers: war, terror, torture, corruption - it's like broken glass in the mind.
Back when I knew I knew nothing, I read all the time, poems, novels, philosophy, myth,

but I hardly glanced at the news, there was a distance between what could happen
and the part of myself I felt with: now everything's so tight against me I can hardly move.
The Analects say people in the golden age weren't aware they were governed; they just lived.

Could I have passed through my golden age and not even known I was there?
Some gold: nuclear rockets aimed at your head, racism, sexism, contempt for the poor.
And there I was, reading. What did I learn? Everything, nothing, too little, too much...
Just enough to get me here: a long-faced, white-haired ape with a book, still turning the page.

C.K. Williams

A New Book on my Shelf

Rectifications along the Rhine
by Christopher Clark

review of David Blackbourn's THE CONQUEST OF NATURE Water, landscape and the making of modern Germany
512pp. Jonathan Cape. £30. 0 224 06071 6

In 1809, inspired by the Austrian campaign against Napoleon, the poet and sometime Prussian guards officer Heinrich von Kleist envisaged an all-out war against the French:

Whiten with their scattered bones
Every hollow, every hill;
From what was left by fox and crow
The hungry fish shall eat their fill;
Block the Rhine with their cadavers;
Until, plugged up by so much flesh,
It breaks its banks and surges west
To draw our borderline afresh!

What strikes one about these lines – apart from their brutality – is the strangeness of the notion that one might use the massed corpses of French soldiers as a means of correcting the course of the River Rhine. Kleist’s conceit was, of course, a sarcastic gloss on the contemporary French claim that the Rhine constituted the “natural frontier” of France. But it was also topical in another, seldom noted sense: in 1809, when he wrote those lines, plans really were afoot for a massive “rectification” of the Rhine.
The nineteenth-century transformation of the Rhine was the greatest civil engineering scheme that had ever been undertaken in German Europe. For centuries, the river’s meandering waters had flowed through an archipelago of thickly wooded islands. Its navigable course constantly shifted, sometimes twice or three times a year. On those stretches of the upper Rhine where it passed between France and the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, this meant that an island or village that was French one year might find itself on the German side of the border in the following spring.
All this changed after the rectifications. Under the indefatigable supervision of the Badenese engineer Johann Gottfried Tulla, the river was rechannelled through a system of cuts, excavations and embankments over 354 kilometres of its length, from the Swiss border at Basel to the Hessian border at Worms. The multiple tributaries and deviations of the Rhine valley were marshalled into a single bed, with (in Tulla’s words) “gentle curves adapted to nature or . . . where it is practicable, a straight line”. The object was to banish for ever the unpredictable floods that periodically devastated the towns and villages of the Rhine Valley and to create a faster, deeper, shorter river whose formerly marshy plain could be turned over to agriculture.
More than 2,000 islands and outcrops – comprising a billion square metres of real estate – were excavated out of existence. Their substance was used as landfill for a massive chain of main dykes. Immense stocks of timber were consumed to shore up the cuts and embankments. As the engineers gradually tautened the river, its length fell, for the stretch between Basel and Worms, from 354 to 273 kilometres. The work was long (it took half a century to complete) and arduous, but also politically delicate. Along those stretches where the river was an international border, there were protracted negotiations with the French. There was also bitter domestic opposition to the scheme, especially from towns that stood to lose their access to the river, and those that faced the prospect of being stranded on the wrong bank.
As David Blackbourn shows in this wide-ranging and highly original study, the management of water has been central to the making of modern Germany. The Conquest of Nature opens on the floodplains of the Oder River, drained and converted to agriculture during the reign of Frederick the Great. Then we move west to the Upper Rhine and from there to Jade Bay on the North Sea coast of Oldenburg, a place of sodden moors, malodorous mudflats and devastating storm floods, and thence to the colossal dam-building schemes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At every point, Blackbourn brings home the epic scale of the human effort required to discipline the great watercourses. The drainage and rectification works on the Oder River were carried out over many years of exhausting toil by thousands of shovel-wielding labourers and soldiers, working waist deep in malarial swamps. The construction of the Prussian harbour facilities on the mudflats of what would become Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay cost the lives of 247 labourers. When its retaining wall was completed, after six years of construction work, on June 26, 1914, the Edertal Dam was the largest in Europe, its waters stretching for sixteen miles over a valley floor dotted with drowned villages and farms.
One could tell the story of this “war with water” as a narrative of progress, in which humans gradually secured mastery over the most mercurial and dangerous element in their natural environment. This was certainly the way many contemporaries saw it. The reclamations – not only of the Oder floodplain, but of numerous marshes and wetlands across the kingdom of Prussia – were a stock theme in the literary hero-cult that sprang up after the death of Frederick the Great in 1786. No less mythopoeic were the great river-valley dams, whose vast ramparts and turbines were objects of wonder, a German analogue to the “technological sublime” Americans discerned in the awesome contours of the Hoover Dam. Contemporaries wrote in triumphant tones of the “subjugation of natural forces and the conquest of the earth”.
There is something to be said for this narrative of progress. In the drained Oder floodplains, malaria swiftly receded, as standing waters evaporated and dairy cattle replaced humans as the preferred source of blood. The opportunist diseases – pneumonia, dysentery and so on – that preyed on populations infected with the malaria parasite were soon also in retreat. As the vast areas of reclaimed land, rich with centuries of alluvial silt deposits, began to yield grain and pasture, there were signs of real prosperity among the settlers brought in to people the land.
And yet at the same time, Blackbourn observes, there was a price to pay for every major intervention in the life of the great watercourses. The Oder floodplain had sustained a unique way of life for centuries before it was drowned under grain and grass. Communities of fishing folk had found ingenious local solutions to the unstable conditions of the plain, supplementing their catches of pike, bream, burbot, lamprey and eel with vegetables grown on dykes fashioned of twigs, mud and animal dung. Their specialized skills and idiosyncratic culture disappeared in the aftermath of the reclamations. On the Rhine, successive manipulations of the river brought a drastic decline in biodiversity. The myriad fish-life of the old Rhine plain was largely destroyed, making way for a cruder ecosystem dominated by the zander and the eel and the dense webs of wild fruit trees, oak, elm, alder, willow and water-meadows that had once flanked the river were replaced by the patchworked monocultures of modern agriculture.
All this might conceivably have been a price worth paying if the rectifications had banished for ever the ancient menace of the flood. But, as Blackbourn points out, they had the opposite effect. The faster, deeper rivers produced by reclamation and rectification flooded less often, but more catastrophically – witness the devastating floods of 1983, 1988, 1993 and 1994 on the Middle and Lower Rhine. Koblenz, Bonn and Cologne are now more at risk than they were before Tulla began redirecting the river in the 1810s. The Oder, too, remains a danger zone. In 1997, heavy summer rains, exacerbated by deforestation and stream regulation in the river’s uplands, drove the Oder to break its banks, claiming 100 lives and inundating 1,200 villages, mostly in Poland and the Czech Republic. The old Oder floodplain, now densely populated, would have been under metres of water if 30,000 Bundeswehr soldiers and 20,000 civilian volunteers had not worked frantically to reinforce the dykes, while helicopters circled overhead, dropping sandbags into weakened sections that threatened to open up under the weight of the swollen river. Even the great dams, once celebrated as the ultimate symbol of human mastery over water, brought dangers in their wake. Quite apart from the ecological damage they inflict, there is evidence to suggest that dams cause heightened seismic instability. They also remove the debris and sediment from rivers, increasing the risk that lighter, faster-running streams will scour their beds, killing vegetation and depressing the water table. And during the Second World War the great dams offered vulnerable targets for aerial bombing, as the inhabitants of the Eder and Möhne valleys discovered after the RAF’s early-morning dam-busting raid on May 17, 1943.
After 1945, the problems of flooding and access in times of shortage were eclipsed by pollution, a pestilence that threatened to remove every last trace of animal life from the river system. By the early 1960s, a blend of industrial effluent, chemical run-offs from agriculture, and household waste had transformed much of the German water system into a toxic sewer. On some canals the foam towered twelve feet over the waterline. Over large stretches of its length, the Rhine was biologically dead by the 1970s. The turning point for West Germany came with the evolution of the environmentalist movement into a major political force. By the mid-1980s, key “green” objectives had been incorporated into the programmes of the major political parties, and the Rhine was recovering from the near-death experience of the previous decade. Blackbourn contrasts these developments with East Germany, where the socialist regime continued to cling to its own dilapidated version of the technological sublime, with horrific environmental consequences. A range of environmentalist groups did struggle into existence in the GDR, but they were easily infiltrated and undermined by the Stasi. Only after 1989 could the restoration of the East German waterways begin.
It is a distinguishing feature of modernity that human beings have often imagined themselves in a state of “war” with the natural environment. The metaphor implies a linkage between mastery over natural resources and the domination and destruction of human beings. At particular times, notably in the history of anglophone colonial settlement, the struggle to secure control over resources became intertwined with the more or less systematic destruction of indigenous peoples and their way of life.
Nowhere, Blackbourn observes, were the potentialities of the relationship more brutally realized than in the Third Reich, where the metaphorical nexus between reclamation and race hardened into a policy of genocide. For Hitler, the conquered Soviet Union was Europe’s counterpart to the American Wild West, a vast untamed resource whose exploitation must inevitably involve the enslavement or extermination of its indigenous human inhabitants. The Racial Resettlement Officials of the Third Reich spoke of “dyking” the East against the Slavic hordes and of reclaiming the marshlands of Russia for “resettlement” by Germanic farming families. When Kleist imagined damming the Rhine with French cadavers, it was no more than a gruesome wordplay. But Otto Rasch, commander of Einsatzgruppe C, spoke in deadly earnest when he proposed in the summer of 1941 that “superfluous masses” of Jews be “used up” in drainage works on the vast marshlands of the Pripet.
Blackbourn does not exactly “think like a river”, as the environmentalist historian Donald Worster has suggested we should, but his book has a meandering, riverine motion. This has something to do with the subject matter. Throughout The Conquest of Nature, the reader senses the mobile energy of water, as alarming when it rises as when it retreats. Blackbourn weaves elegantly among the disciplines, integrating the histories of science, technology, politics, diplomacy, culture and ecology into a nuanced and many-layered analysis of change. He constantly shifts the perspective, so that we hear from the beneficiaries and enthusiasts of the great water management projects, but also from those who suffered the consequences of river rectifications and drainage schemes. His protagonists include engineers, fisherfolk and peasants, but also eels, alders and beetles. But if the book has an unconventional, circuitous feel, this is, above all, because Blackbourn refuses to buy into either of the two most familiar narratives of environmental change. This is not the story of how a pristine environment was corrupted by greedy humans, nor does it tell a tale of steady improvement. Instead, Blackbourn holds both narratives in tension, making us see, by virtue of a kind of double exposure, how both are true.
David Blackbourn’s writing has always been informed by a critical awareness of how grand narratives – whether pessimistic or optimistic – can distort and impoverish our understanding by imposing retrospective coherence on a profusion of contradictory impulses. In The Peculiarities of German History, the influential essay he published with Geoff Eley in 1980 (first issued in English in 1984) Blackbourn took the “critical school” of German historians to task for suggesting that the German past should be conceptualized in terms of a “special path” (Sonderweg) leading from the failed Revolutions of 1848 to the advent of the Nazi regime in 1933. In other studies, he opened up the history of modern German Catholicism, liberalism and political mobilization in ways that unsettle our assumptions about what was “progressive” and what was not. It is in keeping with this anti-teleological cast of mind that The Conquest of Nature should end where it begins, on the fortified banks of the River Oder. Here, it seems, the struggle between humans and water has turned full circle. During the floods of 1997, it was widely observed that localized spillovers on the Upper Oder helped to prevent worse inundations further downstream. Most experts on the river’s management now agree that the best safeguard against future disasters lies in dismantling the great dykes and pulling them back from the river. Two and a half centuries after the reclamations began, the Oder is to be returned to the liberty of its ancestral floodplain.

India 2006

5 arrested for sacrificing boy, 11, in eastern India.
The Associated Press

PATNA, India Five people, including a confessed sorcerous, have been arrested for sacrificing an 11-year-old boy in eastern India, police said Monday. The body of the boy, Gulu Kumar, was found in a field Sunday near the village of Shaguni, some 15 kilometers (10 miles) east of Patna, the capital of India's Bihar state, said local superintendent of police Upendra Kumar Singh.
Five women have been arrested and have confessed to the killing, Singh said. They said that the incident started when one of the women consulted a local sorceress how to save her critically ill 2-month-old child. The witch, Manorma Devi, said he would only be cured if another male child was sacrificed to the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, Kali.
They kidnapped the boy while he was on his way home from school, giving him a drugged candy. They then took him to an alter to Kali and slit his throat, Singh said. While animal sacrifices to Kali are still common, human sacrifices are extremely rare in India. Singh said police had recovered the knife used in the crime and the women have been charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Turkmenistan's 15th Anniversary Parade

See more pictures at the BBC site on 15th anniversary of Turkmenistan's Independence

Did ya know...

...The subdivision will finally undo an anachronistic property-leasing arrangement created under the state's 1913 Alien Land Law, which effectively blocked Chinese immigrants and their children from owning land. The law was part of a wave of legalized discrimination against Asian immigrants that swept across the nation nearly 150 years ago.

The Alien Land Law, which was copied by more than a dozen other states, was struck down in California in 1952. Two states, Florida and New Mexico, still have versions of the statute on their books, although they are not enforced.

Korea from satellite

That big shiny blob in the middle on the left is Seoul.

Sao Paolo

Admit you thought it was some kind of gay resort. Well, it's a prison in Sao Paolo after the riots.

Portraits of little brethren

Shanghai

It is a great photo, but you should click on it to see a larger image to see the ancient temple still surviving in a middle of the construction boom


There are more than 20 million people in Shanghai and its suburbs.


Shanghai's stock market

L'Histoire d'un arbre

Au 93, boulevard Port-Royal, à Paris, un arbre est promis à l’abattage car il gêne le passage du bus de la ligne 91. Ultime péripétie d’une très longue histoire. En toile de fond, les élections de 2008

NYT: Beyond Belief

What a crappy review - without even having to read the book under the review I can smell the bias (which is a nice aroma after all and I always valued the frankness of prejudice), but the use of Darwin to fight for religion? Agreeing with the big, sorry, the BIG bang to bash the atheism?


Beyond Belief
By JIM HOLT

review of THE GOD DELUSION By Richard Dawkins.
406 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $27.

Richard Dawkins, who holds the interesting title of “Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science” at Oxford University, is a master of scientific exposition and synthesis. When it comes to his own specialty, evolutionary biology, there is none better. But the purpose of this book, his latest of many, is not to explain science. It is rather, as he tells us, “to raise consciousness,” which is quite another thing.
The nub of Dawkins’s consciousness-raising message is that to be an atheist is a “brave and splendid” aspiration. Belief in God is not only a delusion, he argues, but a “pernicious” one. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” Dawkins’s case against religion follows an outline that goes back to Bertrand Russell’s classic 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian.” First, discredit the traditional reasons for supposing that God exists. (“God” is here taken to denote the Judeo-Christian deity, presumed to be eternal, all-powerful, all-good and the creator of the world.) Second, produce an argument or two supporting the contrary hypothesis, that God does not exist. Third, cast doubt on the transcendent origins of religion by showing that it has a purely natural explanation. Finally, show that we can have happy and meaningful lives without worshiping a deity, and that religion, far from being a necessary prop for morality, actually produces more evil than good. The first three steps are meant to undermine the truth of religion; the last goes to its pragmatic value.
What Dawkins brings to this approach is a couple of fresh arguments — no mean achievement, considering how thoroughly these issues have been debated over the centuries — and a great deal of passion. The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie. There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy. Dawkins fans accustomed to his elegant prose might be surprised to come across such vulgarisms as “sucking up to God” and “Nur Nurny Nur Nur” (here the author, in a dubious polemical ploy, is imagining his theological adversary as a snotty playground brat). It’s all in good fun when Dawkins mocks a buffoon like Pat Robertson and fundamentalist pastors like the one who created “Hell Houses” to frighten sin-prone children at Halloween. But it is less edifying when he questions the sincerity of serious thinkers who disagree with him, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, or insinuates that recipients of the million-dollar-plus Templeton Prize, awarded for work reconciling science and spirituality, are intellectually dishonest (and presumably venal to boot). In a particularly low blow, he accuses Richard Swinburne, a philosopher of religion and science at Oxford, of attempting to “justify the Holocaust,” when Swinburne was struggling to square such monumental evils with the existence of a loving God. Perhaps all is fair in consciousness-raising. But Dawkins’s avowed hostility can make for scattershot reasoning as well as for rhetorical excess. Moreover, in training his Darwinian guns on religion, he risks destroying a larger target than he intends.
The least satisfying part of this book is Dawkins’s treatment of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. The “ontological argument” says that God must exist by his very nature, since he possesses all perfections, and it is more perfect to exist than not to exist. The “cosmological argument” says that the world must have an ultimate cause, and this cause could only be an eternal, God-like entity. The “design argument” appeals to special features of the universe (such as its suitability for the emergence of intelligent life), submitting that such features make it more probable than not that the universe had a purposive cosmic designer.
These, in a nutshell, are the Big Three arguments. To Dawkins, they are simply ridiculous. He dismisses the ontological argument as “infantile” and “dialectical prestidigitation” without quite identifying the defect in its logic, and he is baffled that a philosopher like Russell — “no fool” — could take it seriously. He seems unaware that this argument, though medieval in origin, comes in sophisticated modern versions that are not at all easy to refute. Shirking the intellectual hard work, Dawkins prefers to move on to parodic “proofs” that he has found on the Internet, like the “Argument From Emotional Blackmail: God loves you. How could you be so heartless as not to believe in him? Therefore God exists.” (For those who want to understand the weaknesses in the standard arguments for God’s existence, the best source I know remains the atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie’s 1982 book “The Miracle of Theism.”)
It is doubtful that many people come to believe in God because of logical arguments, as opposed to their upbringing or having “heard a call.” But such arguments, even when they fail to be conclusive, can at least give religious belief an aura of reasonableness, especially when combined with certain scientific findings. We now know that our universe burst into being some 13 billion years ago (the theory of the Big Bang, as it happens, was worked out by a Belgian priest), and that its initial conditions seem to have been “fine tuned” so that life would eventually arise. If you are not religiously inclined, you might take these as brute facts and be done with the matter. But if you think that there must be some ultimate explanation for the improbable leaping-into-existence of the harmonious, biofriendly cosmos we find ourselves in, then the God hypothesis is at least rational to adhere to, isn’t it?
No, it’s not, says Dawkins, whereupon he brings out what he views as “the central argument of my book.” At heart, this argument is an elaboration of the child’s question “But Mommy, who made God?” To posit God as the ground of all being is a nonstarter, Dawkins submits, for “any God capable of designing a universe, carefully and foresightfully tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide.” Thus the God hypothesis is “very close to being ruled out by the laws of probability.”
Dawkins relies here on two premises: first, that a creator is bound to be more complex, and hence improbable, than his creation (you never, for instance, see a horseshoe making a blacksmith); and second, that to explain the improbable in terms of the more improbable is no explanation at all. Neither of these is among the “laws of probability,” as he suggests. The first is hotly disputed by theologians, who insist, in a rather woolly metaphysical way, that God is the essence of simplicity. He is, after all, infinite in every respect, and therefore much easier to define than a finite thing. Dawkins, however, points out that God can’t be all that simple if he is capable of, among other feats, simultaneously monitoring the thoughts of all his creatures and answering their prayers. (“Such bandwidth!” the author exclaims.)
If God is indeed more complex and improbable than his creation, does that rule him out as a valid explanation for the universe? The beauty of Darwinian evolution, as Dawkins never tires of observing, is that it shows how the simple can give rise to the complex. But not all scientific explanation follows this model. In physics, for example, the law of entropy implies that, for the universe as a whole, order always gives way to disorder; thus, if you want to explain the present state of the universe in terms of the past, you are pretty much stuck with explaining the probable (messy) in terms of the improbable (neat). It is far from clear which explanatory model makes sense for the deepest question, the one that, Dawkins complains, his theologian friends keep harping on: why does the universe exist at all? Darwinian processes can take you from simple to complex, but they can’t take you from Nothing to Something. If there is an ultimate explanation for our contingent and perishable world, it would seemingly have to appeal to something that is both necessary and imperishable, which one might label “God.” Of course, it can’t be known for sure that there is such an explanation. Perhaps, as Russell thought, “the universe is just there, and that’s all.”
This sort of coolly speculative thinking could not be more remote from the rococo rituals of religion as it is actually practiced across the world. Why is it that all human cultures have religion if, as Dawkins believes he has proved, it rests on a delusion? Many thinkers — Marx, Freud, Durkheim — have produced natural histories of religion, arguing that it arose to serve some social or psychological function, such as, in Freud’s account, the fulfillment of repressed wishes toward a father-figure.
Dawkins’s own attempt at a natural history is Darwinian, but not in the way you might expect. He is skeptical that religion has any survival value, contending that its cost in blood and guilt outweighs any conceivable benefits. Instead, he attributes religion to a “misfiring” of something else that is adaptively useful; namely, a child’s evolved tendency to believe its parents. Religious ideas, he thinks, are viruslike “memes” that multiply by infecting the gullible brains of children. (Dawkins coined the term “meme” three decades ago to refer to bits of culture that, he holds, reproduce and compete the way genes do.) Each religion, as he sees it, is a complex of mutually compatible memes that has managed to survive a process of natural selection. (“Perhaps,” he writes in his usual provocative vein, “Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one.”) Religious beliefs, on this view, benefit neither us nor our genes; they benefit themselves.
Dawkins’s gullible-child proposal is, as he concedes, just one of many Darwinian hypotheses that have been speculatively put forward to account for religion. (Another is that religion is a byproduct of our genetically programmed tendency to fall in love.) Perhaps one of these hypotheses is true. If so, what would that say about the truth of religious beliefs themselves? The story Dawkins tells about religion might also be told about science or ethics. All ideas can be viewed as memes that replicate by jumping from brain to brain. Some of these ideas, Dawkins observes, spread because they are good for us, in the sense that they raise the likelihood of our genes getting into the next generation; others — like, he claims, religion — spread because normally useful parts of our minds “misfire.” Ethical values, he suggests, fall into the first category. Altruism, for example, benefits our selfish genes when it is lavished on close kin who share copies of those genes, or on non-kin who are in a position to return the favor. But what about pure “Good Samaritan” acts of kindness? These, Dawkins says, could be “misfirings,” although, he hastens to add, misfirings of a “blessed, precious” sort, unlike the nasty religious ones.
But the objectivity of ethics is undermined by Dawkins’s logic just as surely as religion is. The evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, in a 1985 paper written with the philosopher Michael Ruse, put the point starkly: ethics “is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate,” and “the way our biology enforces its ends is by making us think that there is an objective higher code to which we are all subject.” In reducing ideas to “memes” that propagate by various kinds of “misfiring,” Dawkins is, willy-nilly, courting what some have called Darwinian nihilism.
He is also hasty in dismissing the practical benefits of religion. Surveys have shown that religious people live longer (probably because they have healthier lifestyles) and feel happier (perhaps owing to the social support they get from church). Judging from birthrate patterns in the United States and Europe, they also seem to be outbreeding secular types, a definite Darwinian advantage. On the other hand, Dawkins is probably right when he says that believers are no better than atheists when it comes to behaving ethically. One classic study showed that “Jesus people” were just as likely to cheat on tests as atheists and no more likely to do altruistic volunteer work. Oddly, Dawkins does not bother to cite such empirical evidence; instead, he relies, rather unscientifically, on his intuition. “I’m inclined to suspect,” he writes, “that there are very few atheists in prison.” (Even fewer Unitarians, I’d wager.) It is, however, instructive when he observes that the biblical Yahweh is an “appalling role model,” sanctioning gang-rape and genocide. Dawkins also deals at length with the objection, which he is evidently tired of hearing, that the arch evildoers of the last century, Hitler and Stalin, were both atheists. Hitler, he observes, “never formally renounced his Catholism”; and in the case of Stalin, a onetime Orthodox seminarian, “there is no evidence that his atheism motivated his brutality.” The equally murderous Mao goes unmentioned, but perhaps it could be argued that he was a religion unto himself.
Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience. As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds. Dawkins asserts that “the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.” But what possible evidence could verify or falsify the God hypothesis? The doctrine that we are presided over by a loving deity has become so rounded and elastic that no earthly evil or natural disaster, it seems, can come into collision with it. Nor is it obvious what sort of event might unsettle an atheist’s conviction to the contrary. Russell, when asked about this by a Look magazine interviewer in 1953, said he might be convinced there was a God “if I heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to happen to me during the next 24 hours.” Short of such a miraculous occurrence, the only thing that might resolve the matter is an experience beyond the grave — what theologians used to call, rather pompously, “eschatological verification.” If the after-death options are either a beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right.
As for those in between — ranging from agnostics to “spiritual” types for whom religion is not so much a metaphysical proposition as it is a way of life, illustrated by stories and enhanced by rituals — they might take consolation in the wise words of the Rev. Andrew Mackerel, the hero of Peter De Vries’s 1958 comic novel “The Mackerel Plaza”: “It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.”

Jim Holt, a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is working on a book about the puzzle of existence.

Daniel Emilfork est mort...

Avec son physique de héros expressionniste, il a incarné de multiples rôles hors normes

C'était un dandy, un monstre, un personnage comme on n’en fait plus, aussi extraordinaire « à la ville » que dans ses rôles au cinéma et au théâtre : le comédien Daniel Emilfork est mort, à Paris, mardi 17 octobre, à l’âge de 82 ans. Il l’avait incarnée plusieurs fois, cette camarde qui vient de l’emporter : il la tutoyait, la défiait, jouait avec elle. Comme un torero. Elle l’a eu.
Pour beaucoup – pour les plus jeunes,notamment–, Daniel Emilfork restera comme l’inoubliable Krank, le voleur de rêves d’enfant de La Cité des enfants perdus, le film de Caro et Jeunet. Les autres se souviendront d’un des multiples rôles hors normes qu’il a incarnés avec son physique de héros expressionniste. Des méchants et des monstres. Des vampires, des diables, des savants fous, des espions. Sade en personne, son plus grand rôle au théâtre, dans Marat-Sade, de Peter Weiss, mis en scène par Walter Le Moli en 1986.
Il aurait pu être le Nosferatu de Murnau, il sera homme-libellule dans le personnage à la mesure de sa démesure que Fellini sut lui dessiner dans son Casanova. Et un de ces nombreux seconds rôles qu’il habita de sa présence étrange et crépusculaire, dans des films signés Henri-Georges Clouzot, Roger Vadim, Alain Robbe- Grillet, Romain Gary, George Cukor ou Roman Polanski. Au théâtre, Luchino Visconti, Claude Régy, Patrice Chéreau, avec qui il aura un vrai compagnonnage, ou André Engel s’attacheront cette silhouette d’outre-monde, venue des confins obscurs de la vie.
En janvier 2003, par un beau matin d’hiver, Daniel Emilfork nous avait reçue dans son petit deux-pièces de Montmartre, qu’il occupait « depuis que le Bateau- Lavoir, où [il] occupait l’atelier de Pissaro et deMaxJacob », avait brûlé. Il était, comme toujours, vêtu avec une élégance d’un autre temps – cette élégance qui était tout sauf une question d’argent : costume, cravate et bottines noires, chemise blanche à poignets mousquetaire ornés de boutons de manchette en perles grises. Et l’opale. Cette énorme pierre de malheur aux couleurs changeantes, qu’il portait à la main gauche, comme un défi au destin. Autour d’un thé bouillant, à la russe, il avait rembobiné le fil de ses souvenirs, et rapidement, porté par sa voix grave et profonde, on était rentré dans un monde à la Blaise Cendrars, où s’enroulaient les volutes du réel et de l’imaginaire comme s’enroulaient les boucles formées par la fumée de son éternelle cigarette.
Daniel Emilfork était né au Chili, dans une bourgade dunomde San Felipe, le 7 avril 1924. Ses parents, juifs russes socialistes chassés d’Odessa par les pogroms, avaient fini par échouer là, au terme d’une longue errance. « Accent moldo-valaque » Enfance modeste et souffreteuse, où le sentiment de l’humiliation, de la différence, vient claquer comme un coup de fouet à l’âge de 12 ans, comme il le racontait avec son étonnant « accent moldo-valaque » : « Je ne savais pas que j’étais juif. Un jour, mon professeur de français m’a dit : “C’est curieux, toi, tu n’es ni blanc ni noir, tu es gris. Tu es juif.” » A cela, sa mère répondra qu’« être juif, cela voulait dire appartenir au peuple du Livre », et qu’ils n’avaient « d’autre pays que les mots ».
Daniel Emilfork ne l’oubliera jamais. C’est par amour pour la littérature qu’il arrive à Paris, à 25 ans, avec 50 dollars en poche. La vie de bohème, pour lui, sera une réalité, et pas un cliché pour touristes ou pour bourgeois en mal de chic artiste. Daniel Emilfork était un ogre exquis et vachard. Il aimait ou détestait, sans nuances, balayait d’un revers de ses interminables bras tel ou tel qui avait eu le malheur de lui déplaire, ou allait tout à coup chercher un volume d’Héraclite sur un des rayonnages de son impressionnante bibliothèque. « Je suis acteur pour que les jeunes gens et les vieux écrivent des poèmes et aient des utopies. Je veux que les gens rêvent à un autre monde», avait-il coutume de dire.
C’était une diva, une vraie, pour qui l’art et la vie ne faisaient qu’un. Sans lui, nous rêverons moins bien, c’est sûr.
Fabienne Darge

North Korea: Always Vigilant

WSJ: Orhan Pamuk's Reality

by Melik Kaylan

When the Turkish controversialist (and novelist) Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature, no doubt the awarding committee felt the usual frisson of delight as they watched the world quarrel, yet again, about their choice. They certainly know how to push buttons. Last year, they chose Harold Pinter, who had written nothing of consequence for decades. Instead he'd turned his life into an extended political rant against the U.S., and that clearly appealed to the Swedes. The award itself, one might conclude, became an act of agitprop. Still, in his heyday, Mr. Pinter did do great things for the language and literature of theater, no matter how long ago. So what has Orhan Pamuk done?
If the Nobel jurists, in awarding their prize, droned rather opaquely about Mr. Pamuk's qualities -- he has "discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures" -- who can blame the committee? I have read Mr. Pamuk's novels in both English and Turkish and I couldn't tell you now, or even while reading, what happens in most of them. Mine is scarcely a unique reaction. Maureen Freely, one of his translators, cheerfully avowed in a recent interview that you need a good memory to follow the plot of "The Black Book." Or did she mean "My Name Is Red," in which a coin, a tree, a dog and a dead man (among others) internarrate an impenetrable mystery over hundreds of pages? She could equally have meant "The White Castle" -- Kafka, anyone? -- where the Sultan's chief engineer tries, with Sisyphean longueurs, to relocate a giant cannon up a hill for an entire book. I believe that's what happens. You're not really supposed to know. You are only the reader. The text refers to itself and to other texts; we are merely eavesdroppers. Horace Engdahl, the Nobel Committee's chairman, has commented fearlessly about his own preferred criterion for selection, namely, "literature that has witnessed reality." Reality?
All of which, one might say, adds up to the literary equivalent of Enron Syndrome: Nobody knows what's going on but they're in the temple of smartness and too ashamed to admit their stupidity before the next guy. Mr. Pamuk's obscuration is the more impressive for being utterly beyond one's ken; the percipient Nobel selector compliments himself by discerning the "reality" we cannot.
The pity of it all is that Turkey desperately lacks a writer to explain itself to the world. Deplored by other Muslims for being too Western, and by the West for being neither Iran nor Switzerland, Turks remain a worrisome mystery to others. In "Snow," his last fiction work, Mr. Pamuk talks most clearly about contemporary Turkey, with its religious-secular-ethnic rifts, but he does so with so much Kafka/Borges/post-Theory tomfoolery that it reveals more his literary ambitions than his country.
Which is why his political adventures ring so false. Some months ago, he was prosecuted and subsequently acquitted of the crime of "insulting Turkishness" for talking publicly about the mass deaths of Armenians and Kurds in years past -- something that, as he sees it, nobody else in Turkey dares to do. Here then is Mr. Engdahl's "witnessed reality": It has nothing to do with literary quality, everything to do with politics. Trouble is, all Turks already know and talk about these issues; and for many Americans, that's all they know about Turkey. (One wonders how well Mr. Pamuk would be tolerated if he "insulted" Iraqis, or Russians, or Syrians, or Iranians, as an inhabitant of those neighboring countries.) So, many Turks long ago realized that Orhan Pamuk writes in Turkish for foreign plaudits. He hasn't taught anyone anything they didn't already know, but he has made precisely the right noises that the "progressive" arbiters of taste in Europe like to hear. And it flatters their own semi-informed sense of activism to reward him for it.

Mr. Kaylan, born in Istanbul, is a writer in New York.

Putin

The Hippest One

Poetry

Song
by C.K. Williams

A city square, paths empty, sky clear; after days of rain, a purified
sunlight blazed through; all bright, all cool, rinsed shadows all vivid;
the still-dripping leaves lush, sated, prolific.

Suddenly others: voices, anger; sentences started, aborted; harsh,
honed hisses of fury: two adults, a child, the grown-ups raging,
the child, a girl, seven or eight, wide-eyed, distracted.

"You, you" the parents boiled on in their clearly eternal battle:
"you creature, you cruel," and the child stood waiting,
of going to play on the slide or the swing stood listening.

I wished she would weep; I could imagine the rich, abashing salt
gush springing from her: otherwise mightn't she harden her heart;
mightn't she otherwise without knowing it become scar?

But the day was still perfect, the child, despite her evident
apprehension, slender, exquisite: when she noticed me watching
she precociously, flirtily, fetchingly swept back her hair.

Yes, we know one another, yes, there in the sad broken music of mind
where nothing is lost.

Sorrow, love, they were so sweetly singing: where shall I refuge seek
if you refuse me?

C. K. WILLIAMS

Graded grains

by William C. Burger
review of
CIVILIZED LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. Scientists on intelligent extraterrestrials. By George Basalla. 233pp. Oxford University Press. Pounds 17.99 (US $29.95). - 0
19 517181 0.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has played an active role in scientific discourse over the past half-century. With the advent of radio astronomy, it became possible to listen to celestial airwaves for signals from other civilizations. Imagining such civilizations, however, has a long history in human thought, as the philosopher George Basalla makes clear in his authoritative and accessible new book, Civilized Life in the Universe.
Since Plutarch, and doubtless before, our culture has toyed with the idea that man-like creatures might be living on the Moon. Giordano Bruno, a heretic burned at the stake in 1600, strongly advocated a plurality of worlds. Johannes Kepler, the first to calculate that the planets moved in elliptical, not circular, orbits, penned what some refer to as the first instance of science fiction in Western culture: Somnium ("Dream"), published after his death in
1634, claimed that three different kinds of intelligent beings lived on the Moon. But as telescopic techniques developed, revealing no signs of cultural activity on the moon, interest shifted to Mars.
Giovanni Schiaparelli, carefully mapping the faint telescopic image of Mars, thought he saw lines on the planet's surface, which he dubbed canale. In an
1893 essay, he went so far as to suggest that a "collective socialism" had allowed Martians to construct massive canals in their harsh desert environment.
Basalla follows the trajectory of "life on Mars" with a detailed analysis of the work and influence of Percival Lowell. Building his own observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, Lowell proceeded to publish and promote the Martian-canal theory; it is perhaps no coincidence that he promulgated these ideas at the very same time that America's arid South-West had become the subject of major irrigation and development projects. Though Lowell died in 1916, and his interpretation of canals on Mars remained controversial, he left a strong legacy. Basalla notes that, in a 1928 poll, a majority of astronomers "agreed that plants and perhaps simple animal forms existed on Mars".
Those who had hoped for complex life on Mars were dealt a severe setback by images returned from the Mariner 4 spacecraft in 1965. The surface, pockmarked by craters, was dry, and appeared lifeless. One enthusiast, Carl Sagan, nevertheless continued the imaginative efforts of previous decades, claiming that plants and even animals might survive in hidden moist recesses. His statements were utterly unrealistic, but politically effective, and over $1 billion was spent on the Viking project, which explored the planet in 1976.
Though here, too, the evidence for life in any form proved negative, hope was again rekindled in 1996. A Martian meteorite, found in Antarctica, was claimed to have minute bacteria-like spherules within its matrix. The National Science Foundation promptly awarded over $2 million for the further study of this two-kilogram lump of Mars. Unfortunately, the spherules seemed too small to be bacterial, and the matrix of the rock itself indicated that it had been formed under temperatures that would have destroyed complex organic molecules. Again, the evidence proved negative; but even today there are those who maintain that Mars once supported life, bolstered by evidence that the planet may once have had considerable water on its surface. Thus astrobiology ("the science without a subject") continues to prosper.
Life elsewhere in the universe, as claimed by Bruno, is another important aspect of Basalla's survey, which gives the "Copernican Principle" or "Principle of Mediocrity" considerable attention. The notion that our corner of the universe differs in no fundamental way from other parts of the firmament is the philosophical foundation for our attempts at understanding the universe at large.
read more
Observation of the light from distant stars supports the Copernican principle.
And, following the claims of Copernicus, if we are not the centre of the solar system nor the centre of the universe, then we are nothing special; we are, in effect, mediocre. Many scientists have incorporated these ideas into their speculations regarding intelligent civilization throughout the universe. If intelligent beings and technological society could develop here on Earth, surely they could do so elsewhere in the firmament.
Such arguments, Basalla suggests, are an unwarranted extension of the Mediocrity Principle. For example, recent exploration of our solar system has revealed a virtual zoo of heavenly bodies. No one had expected that the larger moons of Jupiter would be so different from each other. These discoveries were a huge surprise to astronomers, who had expected much greater uniformity within the Sun's family. Clearly, historical contingency had played a powerful role in the evolution of each of these heavenly bodies, just as it has in the history of life on Earth.
In addition to the problems created by historical accidents, the author discusses sociological factors, together with our strong religious impulses, and shows how they have fostered the projection of imagined civilized life throughout the firmament. Basalla also questions the universality of progressive technology, one of the fundamental beliefs of modern society, and points out that this cultural conviction has provided an essential justification for the SETI program. Basalla discusses many aspects of the career of Carl Sagan, whom he sees as Percival Lowell's successor in advancing the concept of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Communicating effectively with a wide public through a number of books, a novel and a television series, Sagan was instrumental in marshalling funds for further planetary exploration. Likewise, the work of the radio astronomer Frank Drake is reviewed and critically assessed. Drake's famous equation, regarding the probable number of radio-transmitting civilizations in our galaxy, is considered from a variety of viewpoints. By including astronomical, biological and social factors in a simple equation, Drake gave legitimacy to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Basalla also tackles the notion of "panspermia", where bits of life are hypothesized to travel across the hostile emptiness of space to fertilize appropriate planetary surfaces, and he surveys relevant aspects of the United States space programme, the debates over funding for radio telescope surveillance, and, finally, continuing support for SETI research through private funding.
A number of recent books have addressed the "SETI question" by focusing on the unusual qualities of our star and our planet, together with the many fortuitous events that have propelled the human odyssey forward over the past 4,000 million years. For example, our large Moon helps reduce the Earth's axial wobble, something crucial to the stability of terrestrial vegetation. Likewise, if Earth had a slower spin, days would become torrid and nights frigid, while a faster spin would produce high wind velocities; either case severely restricting the development of terrestrial plants. A rich, stable vegetation has been seen as a fundamental prerequisite for building both civilizations and radio telescopes -no matter where in the universe, or by whom. And without the flowering plants, we simply wouldn't be here -whether as primates, bipedal omnivores or grand civilizations. Grass, for example, supported a rich fauna of large animals on African savannas, providing nutrition for a lineage of bipedal apes that would triple their brain volume in only 3 million years. In addition, the grains of grasses became our most important cultigens. This perspective suggests that the human achievement is likely to be extremely rare in the universe, perhaps even unique within our own galaxy. These arguments by natural scientists focus on what has been called our "evolutionary epic": a detailed narrative created by the natural sciences over the past few hundred years in an attempt to reconstruct our long history.
In contrast, Civilized Life in the Universe considers the question of human uniqueness from a humanistic and cultural-historical perspective. Emphasizing sociological circumstances, popular cultural values and psychological imperatives, Basalla presents our search for other civilizations as a projection of human hope, not very different from many religious beliefs. He is especially critical of what he sees as anthropomorphism in the projection of our own cultural attitudes onto distant life forms. He gives considerable weight to the arguments of the philosopher Nicholas Rescher, who sees our science as extremely parochial and "refuses to equate human science with the science created by beings who are biologically distinct, and who inhabit radically different physical, social, and cultural milieus". However, I suspect that the constraints of biochemical energetics, genetic information transfer and natural selection sculpting populations over time would produce convergent creatures circling other stars. Why shouldn't those beings develop concordant sciences?
The strongly negative attitude regarding SETI formulated in this book is refreshing. Though Basalla is sometimes repetitive, his argument is clear throughout. A variety of historical illustrations and helpful diagrams enhance the reader's understanding. Some of his sociological and philosophical arguments may be overstated, but they are a significant contribution to the field. George Basalla has produced a devastating deconstruction of our continuing efforts to imagine grand technological civilizations among the stars.

Linux and Lenin

Sep 21, 2006 - By Andrew Conry-Murray


Linux versus Microsoft has always been a clash of ideology as much as technology. Now communists are getting involved, giving the debate an air of a global socio-economic struggle. The Indian state of Kerala, which is communist, recently announced it plans to promote Linux in its 2,724 high schools.
"We are against monopolies of multinational companies in any sectors," the Agence France-Presse quotes Kerala's education minister, M.A. Baby, as saying. "Ideologically I support Linux and free and open operating systems." Baby promised Microsoft won't be banned from the schools, but it makes you wonder if there's deeper meaning to the name "Red Hat." --Andrew Conry-Murray,

Poetry

Gravity
by Tobias Hill

How can there have been a time when this
still lay undiscovered: light falling
through the trees, and the first leaves falling
all at once into the cold evening,
leaves through light in endless gravity?
By the church where I sang as a boy
and dreamed I'd be a scientist
I break my walk, and sit quite still.

How still must I sit to hear the dead?
Through the obduracy of the yews
the wind shuffles and stills and runs on

into the fallen leaves by the locked church door,
with the sibilance of the Lord's Prayer.

Forgive us our trespasses.
Dusk falls into the streets.

The owl quarters its territories.
Still I am not still enough.


TOBIAS HILL

Soon at the airport near you...

Get a load of the Quiet Supersonic Transport (QSST) plane, from Supersonic Aerospace International. The company has finalized the design for one of the fastest passenger jets ever, designed to cut the travel time for longdistance jaunts in half. The supersonic jet is supposed to be able to fly coast to coast in an eye-opening 2 hours. The speedy bug-smasher (seen in an artist’s rendering here) was achieved
by placing Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works under contract. It’s designed to produce a sonic boom noise level of less than one-hundredth of the Concorde’s, earning the jet permission to fl y at super sonic speeds over populated areas. The QSST will travel at speeds up to Mach 1.8, should seat 12 passengers, and is aimed at government and business travelers. For a progress report, see Supersonic Aerospace’s Web site .

Wow....

Although it looks like some kind of Sci-Fi snake, that’s actually an extreme close-up of the sharpest man-made object ever. The photo is a field-ion microscope image of the tip of a very sharp tungsten needle. Each semispherical globular shape is an individual atom. The longer shapes are traces—like comet tails—of the atoms as they moved while being photographed.


This photo, made by researcher Moh’d Rezeq working with Robert Wolkow at the University of Alberta and the National Institute for Nanotechnology, illustrates how powerful microscopes assist nanotechnologists in exploring, altering, and improving materials at nanoscale. As for the needle itself, its sharpness can aid its role as an ultraprecise electron emitter—a key process as nanotechnologists work on creating everything from ultrastrong, steel-like alloys to hard drive materials that can rapidly expand storage capacities.

—Sebastian Rupley