Tuesday, October 8, 2013
WHEN WE ALL THINK ALIKE, THEN NO ONE IS THINKING. - Walter Lippman
I find myself increasing uninterested in people. Perhaps I am a misanthrope. Or, perhaps, it is because, in recent years, I have seldom encountered a person who thinks for himself or herself. I don't mean persons having original thoughts, for true original is extremely rare. It is very hard to have a truly original thought; the odds are stacked against it. And I don't mean persons merely with opinions. There is a lot of opinion, most of it thoughtless opinion, out there. What I mean is someone who is committed to ideas and, more importantly, committed to critically assessing ideas. Good critical thinkers. I cannot help believing such people are out there, somewhere. But I seem to live in a zip code called conformity. I need to move.
UNPUNISHED CRIMES COMMITTED IN ORDINARY LIFE
Javier Marias, The Infatuations: A Novel, translation from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Knopf, 2012, 2013) ("As I said, I cared nothing for justice or injustice. What business were they of mine, for of Diaz-Varela had been right about one thing, as had the lawyer Derville in his fictional world and in his time that does not pass and stays quite still. it was this: 'Far more crimes go unpunished then punished, not to speak of those we know nothing about or that remain hidden, for there must inevitably be more hidden crimes than crimes that are known about and recorded.' And perhaps also when he said: 'The worst thing is that so many disparate individuals in every age and every country, each on his own account and at his own risk, and not, in principle, subject to mutual contagion, separated from each other by kilometres or years or centuries, each with his own thoughts and particular aims, should all choose the same methods of robbery, deception, murder or betrayal against the friends, colleagues, brothers, sisters, parents, children, husbands, wives or lovers whom they once loved the most. Crimes committed in ordinary life are more scattered, more spaced out, one here, another there; and because they only trickle into our consciousness, they cause less outrage and tend not to provoke waves of protest, however incessantly they occur: how could it be any other way, given that society lives alongside them and has been impregnated with their very nature since time immemorial.'" Id. at 334-335.).
Sunday, October 6, 2013
ADDICTION AND FAMILY
Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (New York: Norton, 2004) ("The Zen master tells me that my body is the communication of my father's body. This is a hard fact, he says. By now I've already spent countless hours in twelve-step meetings, perched on a folding chair, listening to sorry-assed people tell sorry-assed tales in one church basement after another. I've heard of a pilot talk about waking up in Paris, not remembering he had flown himself and three hundred passengers in the night before. I've befriended a guy who poured gasoline on his hand and lit it, just to get the morphine. It takes a year to realize I am no different form anyone else. The Zen master says that if I can understand the nature of my body I will understand the cosmos--this is one promise of Buddhism. Unfortunately, I learn, the path to understanding is through my father's body, which, it seems, is my body, inescapably. To be caught in a notion of self is bad. To be caught in a notion of nonself is worse. I saw him sleeping in the sun on a bench on the Esplanade, He rose and staggered to the edge of the river to piss. Jesus said, Forgive! Buddha said, Awaken! The first warm day of spring, families out for a Sunday stroll. I watch them watch him, saw how they steered clear. That fucking little girl." Id. at 292-293.).
Friday, October 4, 2013
IF ONLY ONE COULD GET LAW STUDENTS, LAW PROFESSOR AND LAWYERS TO READ LITERARY FICTION
NEW YORK TIMES 77 Comments
For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov
By PAM BELLUCK
Say you are getting ready for a blind date or a job interview. What should you do? Besides shower and shave, of course, it turns out you should read — but not just anything. Something by Chekhov or Alice Munro will help you navigate new social territory better than a potboiler by Danielle Steel.
That is the conclusion of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.
The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity.
“This is why I love science,” Louise Erdrich, whose novel “The Round House” was used in one of the experiments, wrote in an e-mail. The researchers, she said, “found a way to prove true the intangible benefits of literary fiction.”
“Thank God the research didn’t find that novels increased tooth decay or blocked up your arteries,” she added.
The researchers, social psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York City, recruited their subjects through that über-purveyor of reading material, Amazon.com. To find a broader pool of participants than the usual college students, they used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, where people sign up to earn money for completing small jobs.
People ranging in age from 18 to 75 were recruited for each of five experiments. They were paid $2 or $3 each to read for a few minutes. Some were given excerpts from award-winning literary fiction (Don DeLillo, Wendell Berry). Others were given best sellers like Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” a Rosamunde Pilcher romance or a Robert Heinlein science fiction tale.
In one experiment, some participants were given nonfiction excerpts, but we’re not talking “All the President’s Men.” To maximize the contrast, the researchers — looking for nonfiction that was well-written, but not literary or about people — turned to Smithsonian Magazine. “How the Potato Changed the World” was one selection. “Bamboo Steps Up” was another.
After reading — or in some cases reading nothing — the participants took computerized tests that measure people’s ability to decode emotions or predict a person’s expectations or beliefs in a particular scenario. In one test, called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes,” subjects did just that: they studied 36 photographs of pairs of eyes and chose which of four adjectives best described the emotion each showed.
Is the woman with the smoky eyes aghast or doubtful? Is the man whose gaze has slivered to a squint suspicious or indecisive? Is she interested or irritated, flirtatious or hostile? Is he fantasizing or guilty, dominant or horrified? Or annoyed that his tech stock dropped half a percent on the Nasdaq in a round of late trading after news from the Middle East? (Just kidding — that last one isn’t on the test.)
The idea that what we read might influence our social and emotional skills is not new. Previous studies have correlated various types of reading with empathy and sensitivity. More recently, in a field called “theory of mind,” scientists have used emotional intelligence perception tests to study, for example, children with autism.
But psychologists and other experts said the new study was powerful because it suggested a direct effect — quantifiable by measuring how many right and wrong answers people got on the tests — from reading literature for only a few minutes.
“It’s a really important result,” said Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about human intelligence, and who was not involved in the research. “That they would have subjects read for three to five minutes and that they would get these results is astonishing.”
Dr. Humphrey, an emeritus professor at Cambridge University’s Darwin College, said he would have expected that reading generally would make people more empathetic and understanding. “But to separate off literary fiction, and to demonstrate that it has different effects from the other forms of reading, is remarkable,” he said.
Experts said the results implied that people could be primed for social skills like empathy, just as watching a clip from a sad movie can make one feel more emotional.
“This really nails down the causal direction,” said Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study. “These people have done not one experiment but five, and they have found the same effects.”
The researchers — Emanuele Castano, a psychology professor, and David Comer Kidd, ? a doctoral candidate — found that people who read literary fiction scored better than those who read popular fiction. This was true even though, when asked, subjects said they did not enjoy literary fiction as much. Literary fiction readers also scored better than nonfiction readers — and popular fiction readers made as many mistakes as people who read nothing.
There is much the study does not address: How long could such effects last? Would three months of reading Charles Dickens and Jane Austen produce larger or smaller effects, or have no impact? Are the differences in scores all attributable to the type of material read? Would the results hold if the same person read all of the types? And would it matter if the literary fiction was particularly difficult? (Nobody was asked to read James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon.)
The study’s authors and other academic psychologists said such findings should be considered by educators designing curriculums, particularly the Common Core standards adopted by most states, which assign students more nonfiction.
“Frankly, I agree with the study,” said Albert Wendland, who directs a master’s program in writing popular fiction at Seton Hill University. “Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives.”
He added: “Maybe popular fiction is a way of dealing more with one’s own self, maybe, with one’s own wants, desires, needs.”
In popular fiction, said Mr. Kidd, one of the researchers, “really the author is in control, and the reader has a more passive role.”
In popular fiction, said Mr. Kidd, one of the researchers, “really the author is in control, and the reader has a more passive role.”
In literary fiction, like Dostoyevsky, “there is no single, overarching authorial voice,” he said. “Each character presents a different version of reality, and they aren’t necessarily reliable. You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is really something you have to do in real life.”
Dr. Castano added that, in many cases, “popular fiction seems to be more focused on the plot.”
“Characters can be interchangeable and usually more stereotypical in the way they are described,” he said.
Ms. Erdrich, the author, said the study made her feel “personally cheered.”
“Writers are often lonely obsessives, especially the literary ones. It’s nice to be told what we write is of social value,” she said. “However, I would still write even if novels were useless.”
Want to help the researchers with their work? You can participate.
PUBLIC CREDIT AND THE GROWTH OF THE MILITARY-FISCAL STATE
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume One: The Enlightenment of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1999).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Two: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1999).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Three: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2003) ("Early in he seventeenth century, Francis Bacon had proposed that three technological inventions had transformed human history about the year 1500: the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder. About 1700, it began to be perceived that history was being again transformed by a new series of inventions, of which two that here concern us were social rather than technological in character; the third, the new philosophy of Locke and Newton, was a separate if more universally important phenomenon. The two were the standing army and public credit. The first--the acquisition by the state of the means of paying and maintaining an army year after year--transformed not only the nature of warfare but the nature of the state itself, giving it an effective monopoly of the means of violence. The standing army, regularly paid out of the state's fiscal resources, was professional, an arm of the state proper, whereas its immediate predecessor, raised by short-term contracts on which the state regularly defaulted, was mercenary; the former was unlikely to intervene in the government of the state, but gave the state new and alarming power over its citizens. It had been the strength of Harrington's politico-historical perception that he saw that a state lacking such fiscal resources was dependent on an army that could live of its own, but his weakness that he greatly underestimated the state's ability to acquire such resources. Premising that a bank could never pay an army, he had imagined the New Model as a body of armed proprietors--which it was not--and had constructed a Gracchan history of Europe, in which the free military colonists of the republic had become the stipendiated but unreliable legions of the principate, and had been replaced by the feudal colonies of the Goths, out of whose unbalanced system a free people in arms had emerged in England, as an unintended consequence of Tudor legislation. His scheme could be modified, but not replace, by the supposition that the Gothic model had included freemen in arms, living by tenures rather allodial than feudal." "It was the invention of public credit that destroyed the Harringtonian account of history. Many banks, both national and diasporic, took part in it; but a major effect upon Britain of the Dutch invasion of 1688 and the enlistment of England and Scotland in the Dutch resistance to France was the erection of the Bank of England to which the Revolution regime pledged its credit, and the consequent growth of the 'military-fiscal state' that enabled the Kingdom of Great Britain to challenge both the French and the Dutch for hegemony in both Europe and Europe's oceanic empires. The Enlightened vision of a European republic of states was the expression of a temporary equilibrium in this contest for imperium; it came to an end a century later, when the burden of public debt to pay for wars of empire grew too great for some of the contending states to bear. Meanwhile, however, what were the effects of the new military-fiscal order upon the individual as proprietor, subject and freeman? The state's possession of a standing army went far towards eliminating any possibility of a civil or religious war in which he might have to draw the sword himself. Notably in England, where such a war was a nightmare not far from recurring, this assurance was heartily welcomed and it freed the individual to take part in all the rich diversity of commerce, manners and civil society offered him by what we are calling Enlightenment. But by laying aside the sword, as Hobbes had abjured him to do, he was laying aside the ultima ratio he had once possessed for determining what the state might or might not do, in peace and war. Machiavelli had located this freedom in the Roman plebs, so long as they retained the arms which made them necessary to the republic's armies and this is why Roman history remained of importance to Europe in the age of Enlightenment and the standing army. The new state of Great Britain, where civil war was a vivid and highly politicalised memory but military strength in the state a new experience, furnished an ideological theatre in which these issues were contended for in detail." Id. at 310-311.).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Four: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2005).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Five: Religion: The First Triumph (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2010).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Two: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1999).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Three: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2003) ("Early in he seventeenth century, Francis Bacon had proposed that three technological inventions had transformed human history about the year 1500: the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder. About 1700, it began to be perceived that history was being again transformed by a new series of inventions, of which two that here concern us were social rather than technological in character; the third, the new philosophy of Locke and Newton, was a separate if more universally important phenomenon. The two were the standing army and public credit. The first--the acquisition by the state of the means of paying and maintaining an army year after year--transformed not only the nature of warfare but the nature of the state itself, giving it an effective monopoly of the means of violence. The standing army, regularly paid out of the state's fiscal resources, was professional, an arm of the state proper, whereas its immediate predecessor, raised by short-term contracts on which the state regularly defaulted, was mercenary; the former was unlikely to intervene in the government of the state, but gave the state new and alarming power over its citizens. It had been the strength of Harrington's politico-historical perception that he saw that a state lacking such fiscal resources was dependent on an army that could live of its own, but his weakness that he greatly underestimated the state's ability to acquire such resources. Premising that a bank could never pay an army, he had imagined the New Model as a body of armed proprietors--which it was not--and had constructed a Gracchan history of Europe, in which the free military colonists of the republic had become the stipendiated but unreliable legions of the principate, and had been replaced by the feudal colonies of the Goths, out of whose unbalanced system a free people in arms had emerged in England, as an unintended consequence of Tudor legislation. His scheme could be modified, but not replace, by the supposition that the Gothic model had included freemen in arms, living by tenures rather allodial than feudal." "It was the invention of public credit that destroyed the Harringtonian account of history. Many banks, both national and diasporic, took part in it; but a major effect upon Britain of the Dutch invasion of 1688 and the enlistment of England and Scotland in the Dutch resistance to France was the erection of the Bank of England to which the Revolution regime pledged its credit, and the consequent growth of the 'military-fiscal state' that enabled the Kingdom of Great Britain to challenge both the French and the Dutch for hegemony in both Europe and Europe's oceanic empires. The Enlightened vision of a European republic of states was the expression of a temporary equilibrium in this contest for imperium; it came to an end a century later, when the burden of public debt to pay for wars of empire grew too great for some of the contending states to bear. Meanwhile, however, what were the effects of the new military-fiscal order upon the individual as proprietor, subject and freeman? The state's possession of a standing army went far towards eliminating any possibility of a civil or religious war in which he might have to draw the sword himself. Notably in England, where such a war was a nightmare not far from recurring, this assurance was heartily welcomed and it freed the individual to take part in all the rich diversity of commerce, manners and civil society offered him by what we are calling Enlightenment. But by laying aside the sword, as Hobbes had abjured him to do, he was laying aside the ultima ratio he had once possessed for determining what the state might or might not do, in peace and war. Machiavelli had located this freedom in the Roman plebs, so long as they retained the arms which made them necessary to the republic's armies and this is why Roman history remained of importance to Europe in the age of Enlightenment and the standing army. The new state of Great Britain, where civil war was a vivid and highly politicalised memory but military strength in the state a new experience, furnished an ideological theatre in which these issues were contended for in detail." Id. at 310-311.).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Four: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2005).
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume Five: Religion: The First Triumph (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2010).
Thursday, October 3, 2013
WILL CHINA LEARN FROM AFGHANISTAN HISTORY WHAT THE BRITISH, RUSSIANS AND THE AMERICANS DID NOT?
William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 (New York: Knopf, 2013) ("At the end of Kim, Kipling has his eponymous hero say, 'When everyone is dead, the Great Game is finished. Not Before.' In the 1980s it was the Russians' withdrawal from their failed occupation of Afghanistan that triggered the beginning of the end of he Soviet Union. Less than twenty years later, in 2001, British and American troops arrived in Afghanistan, where they proceeded to begin losing what was, in Britain's case, its fourth war in that country. As before, in the end, despite all the billions of dollars handed out, the training of an entire army of Afghan troops and the infinitely superior weaponry of the occupiers, the Afghan resistance succeeded again in first surrounding then propelling the hated Kafirs into a humiliating exist. In both cases the occupying troops lost the will to continue fighting at such cost and with so little gain." Id. at 430-431. "'These are the last days of the Americans,' said the other elder. 'Next it will be China.'" Id. at 435.).
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
ON LONELINESS AND TECHNOLOGIES
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Communicating (New York: Harper One, 2013) ("Loneliness is the suffering of our time. Even if we're surrounded by others, we can feel very alone. We are lonely together. There's a vacuum inside us. It makes us feel uncomfortable, so we try to fill it up by connecting with other people. We believe that if we're able to connect, the feeling of loneliness will disappear." "Technology supplies us with many devices to help us stay connected. But even when we're connected, we continue to feel lonely. We check our e-mail, send text messages, and post updates several times a day. We want to share and receive. We might spend our whole day connecting but not reduce the loneliness we feel." "We all hunger for love, but we don't know how to generate love in order to feed ourselves with it. When we're empty, we use technology to try to dissipate the feeling of loneliness, but it doesn't work. We have the Internet, e-mail, video conferencing, texting and posting. apps, letters, and cell phones. We have everything. And yet it's not at all certain that we have improved our communication..." "We believe too much in the technologies of communication. Behind all these instruments we have the mind, the most fundamental instrument for communication. If our minds are blocked, there is no device that will make up for tour inability to communicate with ourselves or others." Id. at 13-14. As the Beatles sang, 'all the lonely people, where do they all come from?').
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)