Preoccupations

if the algorithm holds ...

Doug Rushkoff's Edge formula entry:

Edge's Formulae for the 21st Century ('What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?'). More about Doug Rushkoff, on Edge, here.

Technorati tags: Edge, Doug Rushkoff

Historic Quotes

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning. — Max Planck

Found here — a great source of quotations, some just plain "historic", others forecasting the future, greeting new discoveries/ideas, etc, and getting things badly wrong:

"What use could this company make of an electrical toy?" — The President of Western Union responding to Alexander Graham Bell's offer to Western Union of the exclusive rights to the telephone for $100,000 in 1876.

Technorati tags: quotations, future, forecasting

Alchemy

Before I forget … Last Tuesday, passing en route Lincoln's Inn — looking beautiful on what we might soon come to call an unseasonably cold night, I went to the Royal College of Surgeons for a Royal Institution Lecture: 'Alchemy, the occult beginnings of science: Paracelsus, John Dee and Isaac Newton' — Dr Phillip Ball, freelance writer and consultant editor, Nature; Dr Peter Forshaw, British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of London; Professor William Newman, Chair of Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, USA.

Alchemy first came across my path back in my teens (again), reading Jung and then discovering the bizarre Helios bookshop at Toddington in rural Gloucestershire. A chance to attend a Jungian therapists' informal conference quickly brought all this to a close: I was taken aback at their anti-scientific attitude, but I continued to be fascinated by alchemy, the origins of science … and, later, the NeoPlatonism of the Renaissance.

We arrived a tad late at the RCS, courtesy of the warmth and cheer of the Seven Stars, to find Philip Ball already in full spate, rushing through the life of Paracelsus, his extraordinary travels (Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Scotland), his aspiration to devise the first "theory of everything", his rootedness in NeoPlatonism, the doctrine of signatures, chemical medicine, the tria prima (sulphur, mercury, salt), macrocosm and microcosm …

Cornelius Agrippa and Marsilius Ficino investigated occult (hidden) forces and Paracelsus brought alchemy to this table. Philip Ball suggests that Paracelsus is important in the history or development of science — he worked from one observation to explain others and made central to his work the very idea of explaining the observed. Philip Ball's book, The Devil's Doctor, appeared earlier this year. The man was clearly extraordinary. From the Guardian review:

His stay in Basle [1527] had started out well. Many students had attended his unofficial courses. He told them that doctors didn't need "eloquence or knowledge of language and books", but "profound knowledge of Nature and her works". His own wisdom was, he told them, based "upon the foundation of experience, the supreme teacher of all things". 

… medicine in the early Renaissance had advanced little since Roman times. For instance, physicians did not think it necessary to examine patients, relying instead on a urine sample for diagnosis. "All they can do is to gaze at piss," said Paracelsus scornfully. He accused them of "villainy and knavery" and said that if people realised how they were being deceived, medics would be stoned in the street. They, in turn, accused him of drunkenness, and it's true that Paracelsus did prefer to expound his wisdom in taverns than in university lecture halls.

His written works, most of which were only published posthumously, could be "paranoid, repetitive, vain and self-aggrandising". But beneath the bluster and posturing were genuine insights. Giordano Bruno said of him: "Seeing how much this inebriate knew, what should I think he might have discovered had he been sober?" Paracelsus turned his back on Aristotle and Galen and embraced experience as his mentor. He taught that "every land is a leaf of the Codex of Nature, and he who would explore her must tread her books with his feet". Paracelsus brought "a new, questing spirit" to natural philosophy. He investigated the plague at considerable risk to himself, devised a "chemical diagnosis of madness" and, although celibate, wrote about "the diseases of women" at a time when medics turned a blind eye to their suffering.

… For Paracelsus, alchemy was not merely about the creation of gold, but was a medical and mystical philosophy that explained the functioning of the body (the transformation of food into flesh, blood and excrement) as well as the more general principles that revealed the mysteries of the earth. "Alchemy becomes so powerful and so beautiful in Paracelsus's hands," writes Ball, "because it is a part of a greater system: a magical vision of the universe distilled in the overheated alembic of a feverishly imaginative mind." Paracelsus saw the "great art of transformation" - alchemy - as the key to understanding man and nature. It was "a reflection of the natural art that makes a flower grow, that stores up metals in the earth, and brings wind and rain. By taking alchemy out of the smoky laboratory and setting it free in wild nature, Paracelsus stakes his claim to genius."

… writers from Blake to Borges have been captivated by his words …

Peter Forshaw took over, to speak at an equally fast pace about John Dee, adviser to Elizabeth I on matters astrological and scientific, a mathematician and a 'converser with angels'. A keen advocate of colonisation, he was the first man to use the term 'the British Empire'. Through the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558) to Monas Hieroglyphica (1564; Dee's glyph, right, is "explained" in this work), alchemy figures. Owner of the largest private library in England at the time, his marginalia indicate he interrogated the alchemical texts he read, testing, checking weights, recording the time taken for experiments to run and results to be achieved. His reading of Pantheus' Voarchadumia, as revealed in his marginalia to that work, was mentioned, and this is the abstract to Hilde Norrgrén's article, 'Interpretation and the Hieroglyphic Monad: John Dee's Reading of Pantheus's Voarchadumia':

John Dee's marginalia in his copy of Johannes Pantheus's Voarchadumia (now in the British Library) are an interesting source of information about the development of Dee's scientific ideas in the period between the Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558) and the Monas Hieroglyphica (1564). In reading the book, Dee has systematically compared the text with Pantheus's earlier work, the Ars Metallicae, and noted any differences between the two largely identical works. Therefore, most of Dee's comments are not indications of his own interests, as has previously been assumed. Only the marginalia that are not concerned with comparing the two texts can be taken to express Dee's own views. These marginalia, probably written in 1559, provide evidence that Dee had already at this time a strong interest in cabbalistic methods as a means of gaining knowledge about natural substances. Cabbalistic speculation was to be central to Dee's thought in the Monas Hieroglyphica, and has previously been taken to indicate a dramatic change in Dee's scientific outlook, towards a spiritual quest. In his marginalia in the Voarchadumia, however, Dee appears to be using cabbalistic methods to gain information on wholly material, non-spiritual matters. The abundant use of the symbol of the hieroglyphic monad in the marginalia provides a further source of insight into the alchemical import of the symbol, five years before the publication of the Monas Hieroglyphica.

Finally, William Newman, author of Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution, and currently engaged in 'deciphering Isaac Newton's chymical laboratory notebooks and manuscripts' (read more at Newton's Alchemy, recreated). Boyle, Locke, Newton all believed in the possibility of transmutation. Professor Newman demonstrated some alchemical experiments performed by Newton: the "silica garden" (Newton's Alchemy, recreated: 'a 17th century version of a silica garden, made with potassium silicate and ferric chloride. In the 17th century, it was thought to confirm the fact that metals can be made to "vegetate"; 'Newton wrote an unpublished treatise about such metallic trees - for him they were an indication that metals had their own sort of life, and hence could, it was hoped, be made to multiply'); the apparent transmutation of silver into gold, as performed originally by Wenceslas Seiler (I think I have this name right) in 1677 at the Court of Leopold I; the "transmutation" of iron into copper, by immersing an iron nail in copper sulphate. (Inadequate cameraphone pics follow.)

 

 

Check out The Newton Project:

Although Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is best known for his theory of universal gravitation and discovery of calculus, his interests were much broader than is usually appreciated. In addition to his celebrated natural philosophical writings and mathematical works, Newton also wrote many theological texts and alchemical tracts. We already have texts and images of many of these works on offer on our site and our goal is to make all Newton's writings freely available online.

And the RCS needs an early re-visit …

   

Technorati tags: alchemy, history of science, Newton, Paracelsus, John Dee, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Institution, Philip Ball, Peter Forshaw, William Newman

A remembered future

Sometimes, posts just seem … right. This is Morgan Meis (3 Quarks Daily):

The twentieth century was insane. We forget to remember that. … Through it all, the challenge to the coherence and sustainability of human experience was relentless. If tradition was disrupted and broken down here and there in the 19th century, it was upended completely, remade from the insight (inside ?) out, and sometimes obliterated during the 20th. …

Czeslaw Milosz was as sensitive to these issues as anyone. This is a man who picked his way through the rubble of Warsaw when its ruins were still steaming, when the place was just an open wound. That experience, and the knowledge gained from it, is shot through everything that Milosz ever wrote. For Milosz, man is guaranteed nothing. That’s it. Nothing. And man can be reduced, or reduce himself, to nothing, at any moment. …

Gombrowicz too experienced such things. … But Gombrowicz chose flight, literally and metaphorically. … That is his particular freedom. It is the freedom of Socrates as Kierkegaard describes him in The Concept of Irony, the freedom that escapes from every possible determination.

Truth be told, this version of freedom annoys Milosz. Because for Milosz, the possibility of meaning in human affairs is dependent on commitment. If nothing else, it is founded on the capacity for human beings to hold experience together even as forces from within and without work to tear it apart. How one does this is not entirely clear but Milosz’s entire oeuvre is the sustained attempt to do so even as he lacks a blueprint. That is a pretty brave literary task to set in front of oneself. From Milosz’s standpoint, Gombrowicz has retreated into his own consciousness instead of forcing himself constantly to confront the problems of the world as it is encountered. …

But then the two come together again, in Milosz’s mind, because Gombrowicz never falls into the trap of those intellectuals who have lost track of the root problems of experience, actual experience, that have been thrown up by the 20th century. Milosz writes that, “A comparison of Gombrowicz with western writers, with Sartre, for example, would reveal, in the case of the latter, a deficiency of a certain type of experience connected with history and specific cultural traditions, a deficiency that is compensated for by theory.”

I think we’re still working this stuff through. And I’ll make one more rash claim. The future right now is in the past. Sometimes it is in the past, the immediate past, where things get clear again. For those of us whose lives stretch from the era of the 20th century into the next one, the most important thing for taking the future seriously is doing work on the things that have recently past. Only now is it becoming even vaguely possible to understand how important are the tentative thoughts put forward by people like Milosz and Gombrowicz. And there are others, back there, waiting for us. We simply have to take seriously the idea that turning our backs on the future is a way of renewing it.

We are, beyond question, 'still working this stuff through'. Spot on.

'A remembered future'? In July of last year, I wrote:

In 1984, Harold Fisch published A Remembered Future and wrote of how art can give us 'the unappeased memory of a future still to be fulfilled'. More recently, Heaney has written of how 'We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. The best it can do is to give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering. What is at work … is the mind's capacity to conceive a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity' ('Joy or Night', 1990, in The Redress of Poetry, 1995).

For me, reading Milosz is to remember the future.

Technorati tags: Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz, Gombrowicz

Amartya Sen, again

Amartya Sen is a remarkable thinker. I blogged about him back in February. Now this, from the Daily Telegraph, via 3 Quarks Daily:

He praised Britain's multicultural society, from which he believed all of Europe, notably France and Germany, had much to learn. However, he felt that Tony Blair's government, for which he had voted, had unwittingly made two serious policy blunders - increasingly encouraging a society in which the ethnic minorities and especially Muslims were defined almost exclusively by their religion and endorsing the establishment of faith schools.

Prof Sen, who is addressing the Institute of Public Policy Research, the Asia Society, the Nehru Centre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, explained to The Daily Telegraph: "It overlooks the way Christian schools have evolved and often provide a much more tolerant atmosphere than a purely religious school would. A lot of people in the Middle East or India or elsewhere have been educated in Christian schools."

He recalled: "A lot of my friends came from St Xavier's in Calcutta [a Jesuit-run public school] - I don't think they were indoctrinated particularly in Christianity. But the new generation of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh schools are not going to be like that."

Although he wanted mainstream British schools to broaden their curriculum to include more on the contribution of, say, Muslim mathematicians to science, he added that faith schools "are a pretty bad thing. Educationally, it's not good for the child. From the point of view of national unity, it's dreadful because, even before a child begins to think, it's being defined by its 'community', which is primarily religion. That also drowns out all other cultural things like language and literature. I am a believer in the importance of British identity."

But he wanted the definition to be framed in such a way that allowed the evolution of a "plural multi-cultural society", rather than a "mono-cultural" one in which different groups lived side by side with little interaction. "We have many different identities because we belong to many different groups," he said. "We are connected with our profession, occupation, class, gender, political views and language, literature, taste in music, involvement in social issues - and also religion. But just to separate out religion as one singularly important identity that has over-arching importance is a mistake. One of the problems of what is happening in Britain today is that one identity, the religious identity, has been taken to represent almost everything."

He argued: "Of course, this policy immediately has the effect of making some people extremely privileged - those who speak in the name of religion. There may be some moderate people but mostly they are extremists who appeal by saying, 'Forget everything else, you are a Muslim' ." Prof Sen, who has written a book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, added: "This is a point of view that Islamic terrorists share with western theorists who define human beings only in terms of their religion because both agree that if you are Muslim, then that is your primary identity. Religion has been inadvertently politicised by the UK Government in a way that is counter-productive. It makes the battle against terrorism so ham-fisted and clumsy."    

Sen's new book, Identity and Violence, is on my to-be-read-next list. There's an excerpt in the New Statesman, here.

Technorati tags: Amartya Sen, faith schools, identity, multiculturalism, sectarianism

Matisyahu

To the Hammersmith Palais last night to hear Matisyahu, Hasidic reggae artist. I'd heard both Live at Stubb's (Dance Music has a short review) and Youth: his voice is terrific, the rhythms (with the forward guitar sound) immediately engaging. Pitchfork produced a snotty review of the latter; the Guardian had a brief but appreciative mention of it.

Notoriously, last December Sam Endicott said:

Matisyahu - just your average Hasidic reggae rapper. Yeah, you heard me. This guy is a straight-up Hasidic Jew from New York who busts mad flow over dancehall and reggae beats. This is the future of music.

Last Sunday's Observer had a lengthy interview with Matisyahu, and ten days before that there was this interview in the Guardian. PopMatters reviewed an Iowa City gig (January 2005):

He was dressed in the conventional Hasidic style. He wore a black fedora, dark suit and a white shirt whose tail stuck out revealing his tzitzits (fringes of his prayer shawl) underneath.

Matisyahu's vocal style resembled chanting more than conventional singing. He began each song in Hebrew, and then repeated the words in English. He introduced many of the songs as "written as a song of praise by King David," but he rarely sang an entire psalm. Instead he would just sing the opening four or five lines, and frequently restate short phrases and sounds as if they were a holy mantra.

There was a great similarity between Matisyahu's utterances and typical reggae lyrics. For example, when the Hasid began singing "Chop 'em down, chop 'em down, chop 'em down" over and over again, one could not help but be reminded of Bob Marley's classic "Small Axe". Other songs repeated lines like "Raise me up from the ground / I've been down too long", and "I will fight with all of my soul / all of my heart / all of my might" both of which are reminiscent of common reggae tunes. This is not accidental, as reggae uses the same Old Testament sources as lyrical inspiration.

Perhaps the strangest resemblance, which seems somewhat coincidental, has to do with both the Jamaican and Yiddish patois' use of the exclamation "oy". Matisyahu would croon "oy, oy, oy" in three/four rhythm between the verses -- something reggae artists commonly do, but in a slightly different way, more like "oy, yo, oy, yo" (think of Marley's classic "Buffalo Soldiers").

Matisyahu also preached to the crowd. At one point he got down in a catcher's crouch and started to sermonize. "According to Hasidic philosophy, every person, every being, even every inanimate object has a soul, an inner rhythm, a life force," he said. "This is the part of Hashem (the Lord) that makes us all one, a unity, and brings us light. Our job is to illuminate the darkness with our light. It is our true mission."

The jury's still out: 'The Crown Heights pioneer of Hasidic reggae is certainly bringing something new to the table' (Ben Thompson); 'Matisyahu earns respect as more than just a novelty act' (Steve Yates); 'it's treacle jammy stuff; with all those natty drum fills, MOR progressions and lockstep dub grooves, the good will goes to shit' (Sean Fennessey); 'it comes honey-sweetened and easy to swallow' (Thomas H Green).

And then there's this:

Earlier this year, Madonna sent word that she'd like to invite him to her Seder dinner at Passover. However, Madonna, by virtue of being herself, goes against Matisyahu's beliefs: according to Hasidic Judaism, women are not allowed to sing in public. ('Um, yeah,' he confirms uncomfortably, 'it's something that we wouldn't really support.') He didn't go to the Seder, needless to say, and seems embarrassed when the subject is mentioned.

Last night was packed. Never before have I seen such a Jewish presence at a gig, and the floor in the main knew the songs word-perfect — this man already has a cult following. The evening rocked and the final number, 'King Without a Crown' (lyrics here), was a tour de force that roused the audience to new heights. The 2006 tour has its own Flickr road journal. My photos are here.

Technorati tags: Matisyahu, gigs

A bit of a gap

At my school, the last three weeks or so of the term that's just died are dominated by mock exams for the final year GCSE and A Level groups — and therefore, for us, the teachers, by marking. Hence, in part, my silence. This last week (the start of our holiday), I have been absorbed in things literary: John Burnside came and read for us a few weeks back, and then I wanted to finish his new book, the memoir about his father, A Lie About My Father, before he read from the book at the end of the Oxford Literary Festival (event 136, yesterday).

This is a great book and one that exhausted me: for all the difference between our backgrounds, there is enough in common between my father and John's for the effect to be both illuminating and draining. Blake Morrison reviewed John's book well in the Guardian, but it's to Hilary Mantel in the LRB that I keep going back:

The book ends as it begins, with Halloween, or rather in the light of the day following, as the writer leads his small son along the quay of a small Scottish fishing town on the east coast. We see that this is the child for whom the phantom of fatherhood must be raised. The writer leaves us with a final sharp picture of the man of lies whom the book has transfigured into truth. He sees him, on a distant night, standing on the edge of woodland; white shirt visible against the dark, a cigarette in his hand, he is captured in a moment which holds, on an indrawn breath, all the events and non-events of his life, all that happened and all that ever could. He did not want to die in public, but that was his unheroic fate: collapsing at the Silver Band Club, on his way to the cigarette machine. An ordinary man with an ordinary death, a nameless man with thoughts that few would care to name, he is now one of the ‘spirits’ who ‘feed our imaginations’. To move from the interiority of this memoir back to what passes for ordinary life is like surfacing from under the sea, reshaped by its strong and unforgiving currents. It is a book by a master of language, pushing language to do what it can. Fastidious, supple and unsparing, it is a book about lies that is more true than you can say.

It was a great pleasure to hear John and to have so many friends together: Tim, Colin and Molly, Olly and Ben, Karl, Mark and Georgie … Like that evening when John read at Radley, a couple of weeks back, this one wound up in the wee hours.

The day before, Karl and I had gone to hear Tim talk (event 97; capacity audience) about his latest book, What is the Point of Being a Christian?, and yesterday afternoon we'd taken in Tsotsi, a profoundly moving film — the book of which I'd read over two decades ago. (See also this Guardian piece.)

Tonight, I had the chance to read John's as yet unpublished sequence of poems centred on/inspired by Saint-Nazaire (which he read at Radley a few weeks back). My head is full of these beautiful, resonant poems — annunciation, tradition (Eliot!), the 'actually loved and known' …

On Molly's recommendation, I've just ordered Keeping Mum and am about to start on Memoir — and then news tonight that John McGahern has died. A bit of a gap.

Technorati tags: John Burnside, Molly McGrann, Timothy Radcliffe, Tsotsi, John McGahern

Falling out over satire

BBC News:

Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage. France Soir, Germany's Die Welt, La Stampa in Italy and El Periodico in Spain all carried some of the drawings. Their publication in Denmark has led to protests in Arab nations, diplomatic sanctions and death threats. Islamic tradition bans depictions of the Prophet, but media watchdogs defend press freedom to publish the images. Reporters Without Borders said the reaction in the Arab world "betrays a lack of understanding" of press freedom as "an essential accomplishment of democracy."

In Berlin, the prominent daily Die Welt ran a front-page caricature of the prophet wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb. The paper argued there was a right to blaspheme in the West, and asked whether Islam was capable of coping with satire.  "The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical," it wrote in an editorial.

Also from the BBC, further details of the Die Welt commentary:

The paper points out that the issue has nothing to do with "a battle between cultures" as there are "thresholds of consideration" which cannot be crossed when it comes to making fun of religion. "But the standards that Muslims require are overtaxing for open societies," the paper believes.

The daily points out that in the West there is no right of exemption from satire. "Christianity itself has become a subject of pitiless criticism, an object of satirical analysis, which marks the triumph of humour over religious worship", it argues.

It points out that there was no protest when a primetime programme on Syrian TV portrayed a rabbi as a cannibal.

And from the same BBC site:

Sweden's Expressen says the front-page letter published in Danish, English and Arabic by Jyllands-Posten in which it apologizes for publishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad "sends out unpleasant signals that threats work".

"How Jyllands-Posten thinks - or rather does not think - plays less of a role after the flag burnings, threats and diplomatic pressure from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries over the last few days", the paper says. Jyllands-Posten's "retreat-like humming and hawing is simply an unpleasant confirmation that fundamentalist threats - against individuals, against economic and political interests - win through", it goes on.

"Defending freedom of expression against fundamentalist threats is a cause. It is a matter of principle, whether it involves Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses', a film about veils and the oppression of women or some clumsy drawings in a Danish newspaper."

Technorati tags: Islam, fundamentalism, press freedom, freedom of expression

Swedenborg: Buddha of the North

Whenever I've tried to turn English friends on to Milosz's great work, The Land of Ulro, I've had a very poor success rate. But now (via 3 Quarks Daily) comes news of Gary Lachman's article in The Independent, 'What do William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Arnold Schoenberg, August Strindberg, Honoré de Balzac, Aldous Huxley, Czeslaw Milosz and Charles Baudelaire have in common?': Swedenborg.

Why … is this Scandinavian Da Vinci not better known? Because in 1744, when Swedenborg was in his mid-fifties, he went through a profound psychological and spiritual crisis, culminating in a visitation by Christ and his own entrée into the spirit world. Swedenborg abandoned his scientific work and for the remaining years of his long life devoted himself to what he considered his destined task: the deciphering of the hidden, "internal" sense of Scripture, the full explication of which would usher in the New Church and Christ's second coming - not a physical return, but the unveiling of the Bible's true message, hitherto obscured by Catholics and Protestants alike.

Milosz has much to say about Swedenborg in The Land of Ulro. Now, we should all read Lars Bergquist's Swedenborg's Secret.

Tariq Ramadan

Just heard Tariq Ramadan on Channel 4 News, talking about the very much continuing "problems" in France.  Brilliant.  Spoke about the deep, disturbing deafness of the French government and the immensity of the problem of the marginalised. No comfort here for the UK (contra some of the British press): ghettoising is as much a reality in Bradford as in any of the Parisian banlieues.

Tariq Ramadan has the measured delivery of an academic, which is no more than you would expect from a man who used to be a high school principal and wrote his doctoral thesis on Nietzsche. But as the leading Islamic thinker among Europe's second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants, the Geneva-based university lecturer also inspires a good deal of mistrust—from both Arab Muslims for his Western sensibility and Westerners for his controversial Islamic roots. Ramadan, 38, is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder, in 1928, of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic revival movement that spread from Egypt throughout the Arab world, criticizing Western decadence and advocating a return to Muslim values. Yet Ramadan says, "I'm a European who has grown up here. I don't deny my Muslim roots, but I don't vilify Europe either." Time.com

And from the man himself:

For almost two weeks now, violence had raged nightly in the suburbs of France’s cities. In response, the country has, for the first time in half a century, invoked a state of emergency. Its police are now armed with broad new powers; even as they try to calm rioters with promises of jobs and social programs, they are enforcing curfews, conducting raids without warrants, restricting media. The riots have destabilized the very heart of the Republic and raised a series of questions that must be faced head-on. The entire political class in France has got it wrong. … Left and Right are struggling to grasp the scope of a phenomenon that will requires a veritable intellectual revolution in the way the terms of the debate are now posited.

There can be no doubt that violence is no solution, that the destruction of public property, buses and cars must stop and wrongdoers punished. Nor is there any doubt that some young people are indulging in pure vandalism. Restoration of law and order is a priority, especially for residents of the suburbs - the first victims of the violence. The fact remains, however, that such measures will be ineffective if France fails to grasp the nature of the message that this orgy of violence is sending. Continuation of a head-in-the-sand policy toward the suburbs will ultimately have devastating consequences for social peace. France urgently needs rigorous criticism of the way in which its political and intellectual classes have for the last 15 years considered questions of the unity of the Republic, and how immigrants and their children are integrated. We have witnessed passionate (and repetitive) debates about secularism, schools, and the compatibility of Islam with republican values. French politicians and intellectuals have a surprising capacity to sustain these deafening debates for months about questions that are poorly expressed and/or have in fact already been resolved. The upshot is an unhealthy climate of general confusion concerning ways to deal with substantive questions - starting with this one: Will France finally realize that Islam is a French religion? …

France urgently needs a revolution in thinking. The nation has changed and its education programs must express this. Those who make up France today are entitled to official recognition in the nation’s collective memory. History, far from being an unhealthy competition of memories, must involve objectivity and respectful understanding. A new breath of creativity is needed in educational policy, a new focus on teacher training and school administration. To truly create equality of opportunity will require a tripling of investment in those areas that are educationally disadvantaged.

And let us recognize that it is counterproductive to send in the police following a political speech mixing insult and disrespect. Little will change until the residents of the suburbs are not merely seen as problems but are respected as full French citizens, listened to and allowed to be involved in devising solutions.

Paris burning

Good coverage in this morning's Observer of the last 10 days of civil unrest in Paris and elsewhere in France. With a son studying in Paris (UPX), I'm following this with more attention than I would anyway:

• Violence sweeps France in 10th night of riots
• The week Paris burned: 'The riots that have convulsed France over the past week have raised huge questions over the country's ability to integrate its Muslim population - concerns which have implications for the rest of Europe.'
• An outcast generation: 'it is important not to confuse actions by youths from poor, largely immigrant neighbourhoods with ordinary delinquency. These riots show evidence of social protest. In one group of five youths questioned about the riots, three had left school at 15 or 16 with no qualifications and against the wishes and knowledge of their family. Another was an absentee father, while the last had a criminal record for abusing the police and handling stolen goods. None envisaged any employment beyond a job at McDonald's'.
• 'We're not germs or louts. Sarkozy should've said sorry'

Some years ago, we flew to Paris for a weekend break. Usually we take the Eurostar, which whisks you in to the Gare du Nord. Arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport and take a taxi or bus, and you see another Paris altogether. I wrote recently of how parts of Liverpool shocked me, but the great sink estates, the 'ghettoised banlieues', of Paris are something else again. Aulnay-sous-Bois is a pretty name but a place of severe contrasts, pretty only in part (BBC: 'just a mile or so from where the menacing, dilapidated tower blocks have seen nightly clashes between angry youths armed with petrol bombs and the police, is the Vieux Pays … district of Aulnay which has the feel of picture-postcard France'). My Paris photos from February of this year are here. As you can see, I didn't get out into the suburbs, but last week Jean-Claude Irvoas 'got out of his car in Epinay-sur-Seine to take a photograph. As his wife and daughter sat in the car, Irvoas was attacked by three men, said to be Arabs from a nearby housing estate, and savagely beaten. He died in hospital later that evening'.

We stayed within what I now know Parisians call Paris intra-muros, a term with, we'd like to think, a distinctively medieval ring to it — the civilised world within the stockade, a place apart behind the barbican. An historical term. Not us, not now.

In France, '28,000 cars have been burnt on housing estates this year alone' (Observer).

Literary critics have often delighted in discovering in the changing valencies over time of a word's meaning, and in its etymology, significant meaning for the present. From the OED's entries:

Enough ironies there for a Sunday morning in rural Wiltshire …

Labyrinths and Internet

Fascinating, and frustrating, posting at things magazine: I'm not sure why the advent of 'global communications technology' is seen as leading to the demise of reliquaries, and I certainly don't date the going of the 'divine on the defensive' to about a 100 years ago — that's being going on since at least the sixteenth century. As Cornelius Ernst (see here, paras 6 & 7; Tim's address), my favourite twentieth century theologian, puts it: 'I cannot think of a single clerical philosopher of real distinction since the Middle Ages (and whether it is appropriate to speak of any medieval thinker as a 'philosopher' is of course problematic)'.

But I was interested by this (thanks to Matt Webb for drawing my attention to it):

The internet feels like a giant reliquary at times. … The web is also like being stuck in a giant uncatalogued library, with every dusty shelf offering up hidden treasures; you just have to hunt for them. Our mental picture is a combination of the Gormenghastian, before the great fire, and the octagonal library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The latter was apparently inspired by the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, a brutalist construction by Mathers and Haldenby, in collaboration with Warner Burns Toan & Lunde. The library does have a medieval aspect , a fortress of knowledge (according to the Wikipedia, one of its nicknames is 'Fort Book'. It's also the subject of the widespread 'sinking library' urban legend).

Eco's fictional medieval library was strongly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, in particular the Argentinian's Library of Babel, an unfolding, labyrinthine, almost infinite space, that apparently contained all knowledge:

'When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.'

… Perhaps the internet is also best understood as a dual system (and not just the DOS vs Mac hierarchy that Eco playfully compared to religion back in 1994). We suggest that rather than just a cabinet of curiosities (the traditional wunderkammer remains a popular web metaphor), the internet is in fact a combination of reliquary and labyrinth, both a maze of one's own making and a receptacle for wonder, a place where getting lost is a self-conscious act, portals act as balls of twine, to be unwound or ignored at your peril.

The internet as 'a receptacle for wonder': I linked last year to something Matt Jones posted about awe and wonder and the net. The image of the net as labyrinthine library containing all knowledge makes me think of Dante's great image in the Paradiso (Canto XXXIII; Borges' fantastical library of course recalls this, in deliberately distorted form), when he looks into the heart of the eternal light and 'Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe' ('Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna, / legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l'universo si squaderna', Temple Classics translation).

'Reliquary' I am less sure about. I think it more useful at this point to do more work on the net-as-memory (individual +) and on what light might be (unexpectedly) shed upon this by studies such as Penelope Reed Doob's The Idea of the Labyrinth — which dedicates some pages to the relationship between labyrinth imagery and medieval understanding of memory and memory practices (on which, I recall, there's Mary Carruthers' book, The Book of Memory, amongst much else). Gabriel Josipovici years ago drew attention to the labyrinth as 'the favourite image of modern literature', 'the mazes of Kafka, Proust, Beckett, Borges and Robbe-Grillet' (The World and the Book). It takes me further than I meant to go in this post, but I can't resist quoting this from Gabriel's book:

In place of Dante's ordered journey we find ourselves involved with heroes who wander without map or compass along paths which are endless for the simple reason that we would not recognise the end even if we came to it. … there is no emergence for the heroes of modern fiction from the labyrinths of reflecting mirrors and demonic analogy. At the end they are no nearer the exit than they were at the beginning. All they have done is move through all the arteries of the labyrinth. Yet this, if they but knew it, is both the exit and the answer. … the writing was the travelling.

Unlike Dante, we have no vantage point from which to 'look back, standing on solid ground, over the winding uphill way, with its little figures of men and women dotted about at various stages of their own ascent' (The World and the Book). The internet, without end, is our own faithfully reflecting mirror, or demonic analogy.

Question

Steven Shaviro's photo.

Listening to: World Gone Wrong.

9/11

Jonathan Raban, NYRB, looks back at September 11, 2001:

That week, my compatriot Christopher Hitchens, stranded in Seattle after giving a lecture on September 10 in Walla Walla, Washing- ton, said over dinner that "at times like this, America turns into a one-party state," and reminded me of the prophecy made by Robert Lowell back in 1966, when he answered a questionnaire sent to him by the editors of Partisan Review:

I have a gloomy premonition... that we will soon look back on this troubled moment as a golden time of freedom and license to act and speculate. One feels the sinews of the tiger, an ascetic, "moral" and authoritarian reign of piety and iron.

The mood of our fellow diners in the restaurant was one of forced joviality — a few jokes and laughs too many were coming from the tables around us. "I think we've just entered the reign of piety and iron," Hitchens said.

… the war on terror increasingly distorts our view of the domestic scene. Under Bush's self-styled "wartime presidency," the composition of the American landscape is steadily altering. What was once in the foreground is moving into the background, and vice versa. Our world is being continuously rearranged around us in deceptively small increments. Though we like to pretend that the emerging new order is "normal," that daily life proceeds much as it always did, with a few small novel inconveniences, we keep on bumping uncomfortably into the furniture. It seems important to remember that this strange and disorienting redisposition of things is not the inevitable consequence of the September 11 attacks, but has been engineered by a political administration that could, and should, have responded to the attacks quite differently. For a sense of what alternative responses the Bush administration might have made, see the deeply thoughtful international colloquium, Club de Madrid Series on Democracy and Terrorism, published in June 2005 and available online at safe-democracy.org. It is a model of the kind of informed discussion that should have taken place in the United States before the Patriot Act was rushed through Congress, and in Britain before Tony Blair came up with his hasty threats of anti-terror legislation.

Lowell's "gloomy premonition" turns out to have been full of uncanny prescience. The greatest military power in history has shackled its deadly hardware to the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christianity, with all its righteously simplistic moralism, in a war of "good against evil" and "freedom against fear." Vietnam, though it was a terrible political and strategic miscalculation, was not like this. Yet American military iron is not an inexhaustible commodity, and even its piety, in the absence of all the promised miracles, looks now as if it just might be on the verge of running out.

Theology in high places

Joi Ito, way up high in the mountains of Utah:

I just finished chatting with reverend AKMA about my last post, trying to see if there was something similar to good theologians and open source leaders. We talked about the importance of humility and the risks of greed. (AKMA pointed out that he was by far the most humble person on the planet.) I noticed that my thoughts seem to be somewhat more spiritual than usual.

Then I remembered reading somewhere that there was a scientific study that showed that people were more likely to have spiritual experiences in high altitudes due to the lack of oxygen. They theorized that maybe a lot of enlightenment in the past occurred on mountains because of this. (A bit disconcerting to think that a lot of our theological thought comes from the asphyxiation of hermits.) But then I remembered another article I read somewhere that said that 20% of all scientific studies are wrong. Then AKMA reminded me that according to David Weinberger, 78% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Now via Cameo Wood (commenting on the original post):

Why revelations have occurred on mountains? Linking mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience

Shahar Arzy^{a, b, c}, Moshe Idel^d, Theodor Landis^b and Olaf Blanke^{a, b}

^aLaboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain-Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
^bDepartment of Neurology, University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland
^cDepartment of Neurology, Hadassah Hebrew University Hospital, Jerusalem, Israel
^dFaculty of Humanities, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Received 26 March 2005;  accepted 21 April 2005.  Available online 28 July 2005.

Summary

The fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions, among many other revelation experiences, had occurred on a mountain. These three revelation experiences share many phenomenological components like feeling and hearing a presence, seeing a figure, seeing lights, and feeling of fear. In addition, similar experiences have been reported by non-mystic contemporary mountaineers. The similarities between these revelations on mountains and their appearance in contemporary mountaineers suggest that exposure to altitude might affect functional and neural mechanisms, thus facilitating the experience of a revelation. Different functions relying on brain areas such as the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex have been suggested to be altered in altitude. Moreover, acute and chronic hypoxia significantly affect the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex and both areas have also been linked to altered own body perceptions and mystical experiences. Prolonged stay at high altitudes, especially in social deprivation, may also lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions such as low resistance to stress and loss of inhibition. Based on these phenomenological, functional, and neural findings we suggest that exposure to altitudes might contribute to the induction of revelation experiences and might further our understanding of the mountain metaphor in religion.

Mystical and religious experiences are important not only to the mystic himself, but also to many followers, as it was indeed with respect to the leaders of the three monotheistic religions. Yet, concerning its subjective character, mystical experiences are almost never accessible to the scholars interested in examining them. The tools of cognitive neuroscience make it possible to approach religious and mystical experiences not only by the semantical analysis of texts, but also by approaching similar experiences in healthy subjects during prolonged stays at high altitude and/or in cognitive paradigms. Cognitive neurosciences, in turn, might profit from the research of mysticism in their endeavor to further our understanding of mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self consciousness. Science Direct

I must ask my theologian friends about this.

No end to credulity?

… apparently intended to debunk lunatic and/or obsessive idée fixe eschatologique (?), so that's all right then … (Though it's elsewhere described as 'The End of the World For Dummies' and 'stealth evangelism' from 'a conservative evangelical publisher that embraces pop culture'.)

But there's this from Jim Pinkoski (and I can't remember where I first got this link, but credit to The Ferrett), A Creationist's View of Dinosaurs and The Theory of Evolution:

I found myself recalling the absurd El Niño/Al Nino confusion of 1998. (More links here. Wikipedia on El Niño.)

Pain, that cruel guest

I missed this last month: Robert McCrum, writing in The Observer, about 10 years of living with the aftermath of 'a devastating stroke (at 42) which left him paralysed down his left side. During his extended convalescence, he wrote a memoir. It was meant to close the door on his illness, but instead it opened another into a parallel world of other people's pain':

I have become a lightning conductor for a thunderstorm of physical calamity that is raging just over the horizon … my story is not unique. I am just a more visible representative of an army of sufferers across this country, and across the world. I have had letters from widows, orphans, hospital carers, parents. I try to answer these letters, but compared to the stories I'm hearing, my experience has been trifling - as more than one correspondent has pointed out. Sometimes, I feel ashamed to claim fellow citizenship with these sufferers, but there it is: they are writing to me and there's not a thing I can do about it. As well as looking through the eyes of someone who might have died, in these 10 years I have acquired a quite new view of the world. Of course, I recognise that people will want to communicate with those they feel are sympathetic to their plight, but now I have come to believe something different. It is this: that despite the stupendous journalism of feelings, there is still a vast unarticulated story out there that gets no publicity, a story of almost unendurable pain and desperation. Sure, I've been to hell and back, but these people are living in hell every day of their lives.

Oddly enough, the more everything is reported, analysed, expounded, categorised and explored in newspaper column after column, and the more people feel able to express whatever they think about virtually anything under the sun,the more deafening is the general silence that hangs over illness and ill health. There is a sea of horror lapping at the edges of the everyday world, and these messages in bottles are floating in on every tide. These are the messages from the world of pain, messages that describe the suffering of strangers.

From this, I have learned three things. First, that the world's frontline pain is the pain of Aids, cancer, heart disease and stroke (the big killers). Behind the line, there's the pain of despair, loneliness and loss. The aching void in the lives of the bereaved and the afflicted. Second, I now know that we are all, in some sense, in the doctor's waiting room. I used to be indifferent towards, and frightened of, illness. Now I recognise it as part of the human condition. Illness is OK. There's nothing wrong with infirmity. It's part of the way we are. In the famous words of Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho: 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' Failing better is something every stroke sufferer knows about.

Finally, there's this recognition. Despite the extraordinary progress of medicine, despite all the safeguards we have built into the way we conduct our lives, we are still in the world of our ancestors, when life was characterised by the poets as a sparrow fluttering out of the storm into the brightly lit mead hall, circling through the laughter and the smoke for a moment, before disappearing once more into the dark. Sometimes, when I read these letters, I sense that dark just beyond the window. And I feel grateful to be still alive, in the warmth and the light of summer, out of the storm.

I remember Alphonse Daudet's La Doulou, translated by Julian Barnes in 2002 as In The Land of Pain, the history of his own terrible suffering with tabes dorsalis