Shunya's Notes

Greetings from Goa

Part 3: The Path of Reason

Part 1: The Rise of Islam  /  Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Islamic scholars during the golden age of Islam (roughly 9th-12th centuries) widely referred to Aristotle as the ‘First Teacher,’ evidence of the high regard in which they held the ancient Greek philosopher. The man ranked by them as second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim thinker by the name of Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE). [1] Perhaps a good way to illustrate the rational current of early Islam is through the life and times of this important thinker. In the words of Muhsin Mahdi, a modern scholar of Islamic studies,

‘[Al-Farabi was] the great interpreter of the thought of Plato and Aristotle and their commentators, and the master to whom almost all major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers turned for a fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome and intricate questions of philosophy ... He paid special attention to the study of language and its relation to logic. In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle’s logical works he expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire range of the scientific and non-scientific forms of argument and established the place of logic as the indispensable prerequisite for philosophic inquiry.’ [2]

For a flavor of what other notable thinkers of his age thought of him, consider this remarkable passage from the autobiography of Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna, 980-1037 CE), the Persian philosopher and physician famous in the West as the ‘Islamic Galen.’ Ibn Sina wrote that after a diligent study of ‘the logical, natural, and mathematical sciences’ in his youth, he finally reached the study of metaphysics:

‘I read the Metaphysics [of Aristotle], but I could not comprehend its contents, and its author’s object remained obscure to me, even when I had gone back and read it forty times and had got to a point where I had memorized it. In spite of this I could not understand it nor its object, and I despaired of myself and said, ‘This is a book which there is no way of understanding.’ But one day in the afternoon when I was at the booksellers’ quarter a salesman approached with a book in his hand which he was calling out for sale. He offered it to me, but I refused it with disgust, believing that there was no merit in this science. But he said to me, ‘Buy it, because its owner needs the money and so it is cheap. I will sell it to you for three dirhams.’ So I bought it and, lo and behold, it was Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s book on the objects of Metaphysics. I returned home and was quick to read it, and in no time the objects of that book became clear to me because I had got to the point of having memorized it by heart. I rejoiced at this and the next day gave much in alms to the poor in gratitude to God, who is exalted ...’ [3]

Flesh of Your Flesh

Should you eat meat? Here is a really good essay by Elizabeth Kolbert that also reviews Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.

Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually ... “We have so many customers who say they’d eat macaroni and cheese before they’d cut back on their dogs,” a Colorado pet-store owner recently told the Denver Post. In a survey released this past August, more than half of all dog, cat, and bird owners reported having bought presents for their animals during the previous twelve months, often for no special occasion, just out of love. (Fish enthusiasts may bring home fewer gifts, but they spend more on each one, with the average fish gift coming to thirty-seven dollars.) A majority of owners report that one of the reasons they enjoy keeping pets is that they consider them part of the family.

Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.”...

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner?

More here.  (via 3QD. Also check out my previous posts on this topic here, here, and here.)

Ian Jack on Churchill

Earlier this week the BBC invited the chairman of the fascist British National Party (BNP), Nick Griffin, now a member of parliament, to its Question Time debate. The move led to a huge controversy and public protests outside the BBC studio, and attracted 8 million TV viewers. Griffin observed rather memorably that if Churchill had been alive today, he would have been a member of the BNP. The mostly dismayed British press has jumped to the defense of their beloved leader, but Griffin's observation is not entirely off the mark, as Ian Jack writes:

However foolish Nick Griffin may have been on Question Time, one thing he said rang true: that if Winston Churchill were alive today, the British National party would be the only party that would have him. Churchill had notably racist opinions. About Indians, as the historian Ramachandra Guha has written, he could be "truly dreadful". Leo Amery, his long-suffering secretary of state for India, recorded many Churchillian moments in his diary. One from September 1942 reads: "During my talk with Winston he burst out with, 'I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion'." The next year hundreds of thousands of people lay dead or dying from starvation in Bengal. When the cabinet was discussing the possibility that grain might be sent to relieve this appalling famine, Amery writes that the prime minister butted in with "a flourish on Indians breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war".

In the end Amery wondered if his boss was '"really quite sane" about India. We could wonder the same about Griffin's attitudes to Muslims. But when Jack Straw said on Question Time that the BNP's policies contradicted "the longstanding values of British society", we might also wonder just how long-standing some of those values have been.

More here.

Is Football Like Dogfighting?

I got my first taste of live American football on my very first date in the US in a packed and roaring Louisiana stadium nearly twenty years ago. I have long thought of it as an exceedingly uncivilized sport, in which violence is endemic to the sport itself—part of standard operating procedure—frequently causing traumatic injury, cognitive disability, and even dementia. I wondered: How can so many enjoy its brutal form and look past its grievous impact on the players? What does this say about its parent culture?

Malcolm Gladwell has written an informative and provocative essay in which he compares football with dogfighting. In a 3QD debate on it, I've argued that the comparison is apt in as much as their respective fans have a similar, seemingly blind capacity to get pleasure from violence and the suffering of others. The least one can do as a thinking citizen-consumer, I suggested, is to withdraw one's monetary and emotional support from the sport, especially when little more than one's entertainment is at stake.

Happy Diwali!

Today is Diwali. It doesn't feel the same to me outside India, so I'm celebrating vicariously through pictures.

The Dark Side of Dubai

British journalist Johann Hari goes to the desert kingdom and finds a sea of disturbing stories:

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats...; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

More here (and some videos: one, two, three). For this article, Hari was banned from Dubai and his writing blocked from access there.

Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam

Part 1: The Rise of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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A great rebellion had overthrown the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus in 750 CE, after which power shifted east to Baghdad—a city more Persian than Arab back then—reflecting the growing prominence of Persians in Islam. A new caliph, Abu Al-Abbas, a great-grandson of Muhammad’s uncle, founded the Abbasid dynasty, satisfying the fond desire of many rebels to get a caliph from the Prophet’s lineage. But their hopes were soon dashed when the new caliph began living up to his nickname, Al-Saffah—‘the blood-shedder’—by ruthlessly eradicating former allies like Abu Muslim. For the new regime, loyalty to the dynasty, and not the brotherhood of Islam, would be the basis of empire.

Leading up to the rebellion that had ousted the Umayyads, the Abbasids had made great play of the former’s addiction to wine and women. Now that they were themselves in power, their promise of a return to ‘true religion’ under the Prophet’s own family vanished into thin air; luxuries and irreligious behavior grew instead. The Abbasids, partly out of expediency, began patronizing a more liberal school of theology—the Mu’tazilah—much to the resentment of the Shiites and the orthodox Sunnis; it led to more crushed Shiite rebellions. [1]

The caliphs that followed Al-Abbas now presided over a loose collection of provinces, each with a governor and a bureaucracy similar to older Persian arrangements, where local satraps had a good deal of autonomy and power. Administration was divided into departments—or divans—headed by the vizier. The old Arab monopoly on power had passed—Islamized Persians began entering the higher echelons of leadership. The dominant Abbasid legal system—there were at least four to choose from, all proceeding from the Shari’ah but with significant variations nonetheless—became the Hanafi rite, the most liberal of the lot. In making civil laws and administering justice, it opposed overly literal readings of the Qur’an, relying instead on analogy, consensus, and judicial reasoning. [2]

In the ensuing decades came an era of relative peace. A general flourishing of agriculture and trade led to unprecedented prosperity and a huge burst of intellectual and cultural creativity, especially during the reigns of Haroon al-Rashid (786-809 CE) and al-Mamun (813-833 CE). This ushered in the ‘golden age’ of Islam;[3] Baghdad became the richest city in the world—only Constantinople came somewhat close. In A Short History of the Arab Peoples, Sir John Glubb wrote:

‘Their ships were by far the largest and the best appointed in Chinese waters or in the Indian Ocean. Under their highly developed banking system, an Arab businessman could cash a cheque in Canton on his bank account in Baghdad. [Wealthy women wore] lavish jewels and pearls, silks and embroidered fabrics. [A new upper class valued] exquisite carpets and cushions, the sparkling fountains, the soft music and the exotic perfumes of private apartments [of] musk, myrtle and jasmine ...

On Being Exiled from Nature

The vast majority of readers of this blog do not live in close proximity to nature but in urbanscapes of steel and concrete, as I do as well. Sure, now and then we go out camping or hike on a forest trail, but isn't that as far as we go? Perhaps we go out because, as Thoreau said, "We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe, to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest." Or perhaps deep down we feel, as John Muir did, that going out is really going in.

Our distant human ancestors lived in intimate contact with plants and animals, but in recent millennia, technologically advancing societies have been erecting barriers between us and nature, hoping to be shielded from its harshness, dangers, and unpredictability. Who among us would wholly dismiss that urge? By any yardstick, this process—which accelerated with the industrial revolution—has come a long way, and it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that a hallmark of our modernity is a near total loss of first-hand biological knowledge and personal experience of nature's beats and rhythms. Our "objective" classroom knowledge now tends to be bookish, theoretical, and detached.

Childhood development was once shaped by the direct experience of plants and animals, their cycle and drama of birth, decay, and death, with folkbiology furnishing the taxonomy, teleology, and the interrelationships of the living world, including the attitude and knowledge needed for survival in a given ecological zone. A great many children now develop amidst apartment blocks, public parks, and city streets, where the context of local ecology, its delicate dependencies, and the sense of its inherent limits is less visible than ever before.

What implication does this have for human cognition, as in how we learn about and relate to the world? Don't we already get socialized into a culture that regards nature as an abstract realm detached from daily life, a kind of pleasure zone we can visit on vacation? Or nature as a mere resource, amenable to manipulation and cost-benefit analysis done from the comfort of our concrete jungles? Yet, understandable as this is, big questions remain: do we know the full cost of this cognitive shift, its weaknesses and blind spots? What's at stake if we don't?

Nick Enfield touches on some of these topics in his review of "The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature" by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, an alluring interdisciplinary work in anthropology and psychology:

Why is the biological knowledge of traditional societies so remarkable to an educated westerner? The literature is littered with awestruck descriptions of the fieldworker's sense of wonder at what villagers know. Ask a traditional cultivator to name as many tree species as he can, and the list will go on and on and on, literally into the hundreds. And it is more than a mere list of names: he will also have a rich body of knowledge about the functions of different trees, and their ecological interrelations with other plants and animals. One might wonder how they do it, but the real question is: How is it that we can't do it? The average educated westerner knows as much about nature as a Hanunóo tribesman is likely to know about computer software. Atran and Medin's book opens with this unsettling fact. When the authors ask their US university students to name all the trees they know, these young people are at a loss. Here is the response of a Northwestern Honours student: Oak, pine, spruce, ... cherry ... (giggle) evergreen,... Christmas tree, is that a kind of tree? ... God what's the average here? Needless to say, it is not merely an inability to name the trees, but also to say anything sensible about their functions or ecological roles. Compare this to the richly annotated lists of up to 500 species readily elicited from members of the least technologically advanced and least formally educated small-scale traditional cultivator societies.

To get a sense of how and when this poverty of understanding among modern literates has come about, Atran and Medin delve into recent history of the English language. Tracing historical references to trees in the OED, they find that ‘writing about trees is less extensive now than in any other time in the history of the English language'. Their matter-of-fact conclusion about the world of English speakers is a headline with a disturbing ring to it: ‘Cultural support for trees has declined'. The authors show that since the industrial revolution, Anglo intuitions for nature have devolved. Is it a problem? One response is that it simply reflects the lack of relevance of trees in daily life. We understandably don't know much about what we don't need. But perhaps the problem is not that we lack this knowledge, it is that we think we don't need it. Biological illiteracy is more alarming than illiteracy itself. Knowledge of nature is not specific to an invented environment like that of books or cyberspace. While only some of us invented writing and computer programs, none of us invented nature. Nature invented us. And nature will be the agent of our eventual collapse. As the biologist Jared Diamond describes it in his book of that title, a key cause of collapse is lack of awareness that there is a problem at all.

More here.

Global Muslim Demographics

The Pew Research Center has published a new study on global Muslim demographics along with a helpful map. It should help combat some of the complacent stereotypes about Muslims as a monolithic group, including where they live and what they believe.

A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion.

While Muslims are found on all five inhabited continents, more than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% is in the Middle East and North Africa... [One-fifth of the Muslims] live in countries where Islam is not the majority religion. These minority Muslim populations are often quite large. India, for example, has the third-largest population of Muslims worldwide. China has more Muslims than Syria, while Russia is home to more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined. Of the total Muslim population, 10-13% are Shia Muslims and 87-90% are Sunni Muslims.

As this article says, "Extrapolating the figures from the survey, the Islam that is largely practised around the world, particularly in large swaths of Asia, is more moderate and integrated than its stereotypical characterisation as an often militant and intolerant faith." It notes that the frequent conflation of Muslims with Arabs is a gross error. What do the matrilineal Muslims of western Sumatra have in common with those of S. Arabia; the Muslims of Xian with those of Cappadocia; the Muslims of Andhra Pradesh with those of Nigeria, etc.

(Also check out Usha Alexander's thoughtful essay on the prejudice in the US against Muslims, where speaking of Muslims as fanatics and terrorists is not even considered bad manners; instead, it is seen as a comic expression of the truth.)

A Vaccine for HIV?

Dr. Sudhir Paul is a scientist at the very forefront of HIV research. A graduate of AIIMS, he is currently Professor and Director of the Chemical Immunology Research Center at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. Below is an excerpt from an article that describes why his research holds a great deal of promise, followed by a video that is part of a fund-raising drive led by the Covalent Immunology Foundation (CIF) to finance the final phase of his research—(expensive) clinical trials that could lead to a cure and a vaccine for HIV (see another video here).

Scientists working to develop a vaccine for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) report they have created the first antigen that induces protective antibodies capable of blocking infection of human cells by genetically-diverse strains of HIV. The new antigen differs from previously-tested vaccines by virtue of its chemically-activated property that enables close sharing of electrons and produces strong covalent bonding. Researchers used a mouse model to generate the antibodies. The report by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston is online and will appear in a print issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry in November. (Read more)

Dr. Paul also happens to be the husband of Ruchira Paul, a former co-editor on Shunya's Notes. We wish him success in his life's work.

No Longer Golden

Paul Harris on the dire straits of California:

California has a special place in the American psyche. It is the Golden State: a playground of the rich and famous with perfect weather. It symbolises a lifestyle of sunshine, swimming pools and the Hollywood dream factory.

But the state that was once held up as the epitome of the boundless opportunities of America has collapsed. From its politics to its economy to its environment and way of life, California is like a patient on life support. At the start of summer the state government was so deeply in debt that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. Its unemployment rate has soared to more than 12%, the highest figure in 70 years. Desperate to pay off a crippling budget deficit, California is slashing spending in education and healthcare, laying off vast numbers of workers and forcing others to take unpaid leave. In a state made up of sprawling suburbs the collapse of the housing bubble has impoverished millions and kicked tens of thousands of families out of their homes. Its political system is locked in paralysis and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen as a disaster – his approval ratings having sunk to levels that would make George W Bush blush. The crisis is so deep that Professor Kevin Starr, who has written an acclaimed history of the state, recently declared: "California is on the verge of becoming the first failed state in America."

More here.

Michael Sandel on Justice

"Hundreds of students pack Harvard's Sanders Theater for Michael Sandel's "Justice" course—an introduction to moral and political philosophy. They come to hear Sandel lecture about great philosophers of the past—from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill—but also to debate contemporary issues that raise philosophical questions—about individual rights and the claims of community, equality and inequality, morality and law." Below is the first lecture of his popular course. Additional ones can be viewed as they are made available here in the weeks ahead.

More Sandel? Check out his excellent BBC Reith Lecture from earlier this year, A New Citizenship. Also check out Justice: A Journey in Moral Reasoning, and The Case Against Perfection: What's Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering.

Who's Afraid of Savita Bhabhi?

The Indian government recently banned a website that runs a cartoon strip about the sexual escapades of a hot Indian bhabhi ("sister-in-law"), described as a "regular Indian woman who just can’t get enough sex". This is a curious move in an age of widely accessible cyberporn, with countless sites saturated with far more explicit hardcore videos and images, representing ~10% of the most trafficked Internet sites. What is so transgressive about Savita Bhabhi to warrant such draconian action? Shohini Ghosh examines the phenomenon in some detail.

Savita is an attractive middle class housewife whose dull, workaholic husband is rarely home. Consequently, she has ample time and space for torrid sexual encounters with, among others, a door-to-door lingerie salesman, local teens playing cricket, a former lover visiting from abroad, a potential boss, his secretary, a famous film star (with an uncanny resemblance to Amitabh Bachchan), a newly employed servant, the husband of her husband’s office colleague and a terrorist. As is evident from this brief summary, Savita Bhabi embodies for the moral purists, the most terrifying ideas about sexual transgression. She is married but not monogamous. She has sex for fun and not for procreation or love and in choosing lovers she does not discriminate on the grounds of class, caste, gender, occupation, age or status. Having had the most outrageous escapades, she gets away with it all.

More here.  You can find more related articles on Asian Window.

Dalrymple on Travel Writing

William Dalrymple on the future on travel writing in the shrinking, globalizing world of the Internet age: 

Today, however, many of the most interesting travel books are by individuals who have made extended stays in places, getting to know them intimately: such as Iain Sinclair's circling of the capital in London Orbital or Sam Miller's Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity. There is also Ghosh in his Egyptian village, published as In an Antique Land, or Christopher de Bellaigue's magnificent recent study, Rebel Land, which examines the way that the ghosts of the Armenian genocide and Kurdish nationalism haunt a single remote town in eastern Turkey. As Mishra puts it, in a more globalised, postcolonial world the traveller "needs to train his eye in the way an ethnographer does . . . to remain relevant and stimulating, travel writing has to take on board some of the sophisticated knowledge available about these complex societies, about their religions, history, economy, and politics."

The last world should go to Thubron, the most revered of all the travel writers of the 80s still at work. He is also clear that travel writing is now more needed than ever: "Great swaths of the world are hardly visited and remain much misunderstood - think of Iran," he told me recently. "It's no accident that the mess inflicted on the world by the last US administration was done by a group of men who had hardly travelled, and relied for information on policy documents and the reports of journalists sitting interviewing middle-class contacts in capital cities. A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people's existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute."

More here.

The Truth About Burning Man

Jay Michaelson's take on the famous event held each year in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada:

You don't get it. You don't get what it's like to have 50,000 people circle around a wooden effigy, with 1000 people spinning fire and 500 more playing drums, all encircled by 200 art cars -- and then all roaring in unison as the effigy is set afire. You might think you get it, and it may scare or tempt or delight you, but I assure you, you don't get it. None of us do, because it's not about any one thing in particular; "it" can be an orgiastic celebration, or the sad mourning of a lost loved one. Or a warm, hippie-like community. Or a mean, Mad-Max-like apocalypse. "It" is chiefly a space in which all these things are possible.

The temporary erasure of societal, social, and personal boundaries is, for most of us, terrifying. Such boundaries help build the structures of society and self; they give form to human life, which is often chaotic and unpredictable. Thus they have been the bedrock of religious and civil life for millennia, even before the Furies were imprisoned under Athens, and Moses descended from Sinai.

But if religion creates boundaries, mysticism and spirituality efface them. In the transcendence of ordinary distinctions, peak experiences such as those encouraged at Burning Man give a glimpse of the ultimate, the infinite. It may seem absurd to suggest that Burning Man is a mystical event. But then, if it's just a big party, why is there a temple in the middle of it?

More here. Is that the whole truth? Check out a contrasting view in the comments section. I have never attended myself.
(Photo sources: one, two, three)

Shilling for Apples

Champion of the Green Revolution Dies at 95

Who has heard of Norman Borlaug? I had not heard of him until now, after his death, when the Wall Street Journal calls him "arguably the greatest American of the 20th century".

Borlaug's life work, the Green Revolution, is the reason the world is not starving today as it was half a century ago. As the individual responsible for spreading high-yield agricultural practices through the hungriest parts of the world, beginning with South Asia in the 1960s, he was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2006. He changed the world, as much as did Louis Pasteur or the Wright Brothers, yet his name is commonly unknown outside the Developing World. And his contribution is today seen as controversial.

He is eulogized today in the Wall Street Journal:

Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II.
....

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."

Part 1: The Rise of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Imagine the Middle East in the early centuries of the Common Era. There is no Islam. The two dominant powers in the region are the Romans and the Persians, with a long history of fighting over territory and trade routes. The border between their two empires keeps shifting across Syria and Mesopotamia.

To the north of this border, in the steppes, are the Turks, deemed ‘savage and warlike’ by Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth century Roman historian and native of Syria. To the south, in the desert, are the Arabs. Neither the Persians, nor the Romans, took much interest in conquering these semi-nomadic tribal peoples. Instead, they followed that most pragmatic of imperial policies: turn these ‘semi-civilized’ folks into allies and use them opportunistically to score against their main rival.

At stake, besides territorial control, were the trade routes to the East for Chinese silk and Indian spices, which either went through the northern Turkish lands, or across the Sinai and the Red sea, or over the caravan routes hugging the western Arabian coast down to Aden and beyond by sea. [1] The Persians, during times of conflict, blocked all overland eastern access for the Romans.

So the two empires acted like modern corporations doling out political ‘contributions’, and the Arabs and the Turks learned to exploit the situation to their advantage, extracting a variety of military and economic subsidies from both empires. The Romans, after a botched military campaign to gain a foothold at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula and the Red sea, preferred thereafter to rely on the principalities of Arabia for the safer overland route to Aden. This caravan trade soon supported several small towns and kingdoms in Arabia. The imperial powers, by and large, sought to maintain some form of indirect rule or clientage.

How to Write About Africa

Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan author and journalist, in the winter 2005 issue of Granta:

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates... Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls...

Friday Cats

Five from the Shunya archive.

The Merchant of Weapons

The NY Times reports that the leader of the free world accounted for 68.4% of all international arms trading in 2008, netting $37.8 billion, about $30 billion of it from the developing world. Thirteen of the top 25 buyers "were either undemocratic governments or regimes guilty of major ongoing human rights abuses," often with weak internal arms controls. A New America Foundation report says, "U.S. arms transfers are undermining human rights, weakening democracy and fueling conflict around the world." The top five nations that profit from the global arms trade happen to be the five original members of the nookiller weapons club: USA, UK, France, Russia, and China. They are also the only five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and the only five with veto power. No pattern there. 

Even a US President, Jimmy Carter, noted as far back as 1976, "We can’t have it both ways. We can’t be both the world’s leading champion of peace and the world’s leading supplier of arms." Now one might say that the US is just fulfilling demand that exists out there. If it doesn't sell, someone else will, such as Russia, or Italy. One might say that the leaders of developing countries are responsible, who either have their priorities all messed up or have a legitimate desire for security. The demand side of the market is the problem, warlike human nature is the problem. The problem is not the merchant of weapons.

This strikes one as almost reasonable until one recalls the US State Department's attitude to drug trading, and the moralistic war on drugs it has taken to the supply side for years, to the jungles of Colombia and to Afghanistan, while locking up hundreds of thousands of drug dealers at home. (Of course, the rise of international drug cartels was largely due to US Cold War politics and its need to finance proxy wars around the world, but that's another story.) For now, let's just reflect on this neat reversal in attitudes: when it comes to drugs, the supply side of the market becomes the problem, profiteering from it becomes the problem. The messed up priorities of American consumers, or their legitimate desire for recreational intoxication is not so much the problem. The problem, they declare, is the merchant of drugs.

The Passion of GMB Akash

"My passion for photography started in 1996 when I received an old camera from father ... For a long time, I have been focusing my attention on portraying people living on the edge of society and have done this in various countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. ... For the last four years, I have been working on child labor. ... Children in poor countries spend long days working under very unfavorable conditions. Child Labor is an issue closely connected with poverty, education, socio-economic exploitation and discrimination. These factors keep children out of school and force them to work under harsh and dangerous, unhealthy and fatal circumstances. Child workers are subject to abuse, both physically and mentally, by their employers. These youngsters even risk their lives for low pay."

Read Manisha Verma's short interview of GMB Akash and checkout his photography at his website.

A Culture of Fear

Europe has long held an edge over the US when it comes to social welfare for its citizens, such as labor laws, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and public housing. This is reflected in various quality-of-life surveys across countries, where the Scandinavians top most lists. But one area where Europe lags way behind the US is in assimilating its immigrants and ethnic minorities. Remember the French civil unrest of 2005? The historian Tony Judt recently wrote, "For nearly four decades mainstream European politicians turned a blind eye to all this: to the impact of de facto segregated housing; isolated unintegrated communities; and the rising tide of fearful, resentful white voters convinced that the boat was "full.""

Today there is an altogether sharper climate of anti-immigration hysteria and, lately, the fear of being swamped by Muslims. Pankaj Mishra takes a courageous stand against such shameful developments in the Western intelligentsia, laying bare their lies and prejudices.

Is Europe about to be overrun by Muslims? A number of prominent European and American politicians and journalists seem to think so. The historian Niall Ferguson has predicted that "a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise — the term is not too strong — a senescent Europe". And according to Christopher Caldwell, an American columnist with the Financial Times, whom the Observer recently described as a "bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties", Muslims are already "conquering Europe's cities, street by street". So what if Muslims account for only 3% to 4% of the EU's total population of 493 million? In his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It? — which was featured on Start the Week, excerpted in Prospect, commended as "morally serious" by the New York Times and has beguiled some liberal opinion-makers as well as rightwing blowhards — Caldwell writes: "Of course minorities can shape countries. They can conquer countries. There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today."

Apparently it's not only Islamist revolutionaries, but also rapidly breeding Muslims who are transforming Europe into "Eurabia". The birthrates of Europe's Muslim immigrants are actually falling and converging with national averages, according to a recent survey in the Financial Times; but "advanced" cultures, Caldwell claims in his book, "have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to 'primitive' ones". As the Daily Telegraph, quoting Caldwell, asserted last weekend, Britain and the EU have simply ignored the "demographic time bomb" in their midst. Muslims, Nick Griffin of the BNP once warned, are seducing white girls as part of a plot to take over Britain. ...

Caldwell stops short of speculating what Europe would or should do to atone for its folly of nurturing a perfidious minority. The Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, whom Martin Amis has hailed as a "great sayer of the unsayable", does not hesitate to spell it out in his bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. ... In a democratic age, you can't buck demography—except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out—as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em.

More here.

An Ethnography of Wall Street

Mention the word ‘ethnography’ and a tribe in a faraway place comes to mind. But couldn’t it just as well apply to us moderns, with our own myths, rituals, assumptions, customs, and oddball ideas of the world? Here is Scott McLemee on anthropologist Karen Ho’s ethnography of bankers, traders and analysts, the tribe of elites who shape our world in the image of ‘Wall Street’s bulimic culture of expediency’.

Each social group has its particular mixture of small-scale habits, large-scale rationalisations and everyday assumptions about the how the world really works. Like a good journalist, the ethnographer will find and describe telling details about what goes on within a subculture. But the ethnographer takes an additional few steps by trying to understand how even the most taken-for-granted aspects of behaviour within a group reflect a set of powerful but largely implicit rules and beliefs. Daily experience tends to reinforce the subculture’s shared outlook in ways that make it seem inarguable.

It’s one thing to do this with, say, Albanian shepherds – and something else to attempt it with those financial titans who Tom Wolfe once satirically called the Masters of the Universe. But the same general principles apply. The ethnographer has to spend time observing what the Albanian shepherd expects from the sheep, and from himself – and also figuring out how either may be different from what a Greek shepherd expects. A significant part of Wall Street’s outlook is available in documents, of course, unlike with a rustic subculture; but the really interesting dimension of Liquidated comes from its account of how the financial sector’s members understand their own daily experience.

More here (via 3QD). I wonder if anyone has done a similar ethnography of today’s professional scientists (esp. the neo-atheist type).

Plastic, Plastic Everywhere

For the first time ever, scientists have embarked on a study of the Plastic Vortex, also called the Pacific Garbage Patch, a gargantuan collection of plastic trash that has collected in the North Pacific Ocean. The garbage patch floats on and near the surface of the ocean in the North Pacific Gyre; it is currently believed to be about twice the size of Texas.

About a month ago, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego and the nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute sent two research vessels, The New Horizon and the Kaisei, to meet at the gyre and study its composition, dimensions, and impact. The ships have just safely returned from their journey, and the first details of their findings are trickling out. The San Jose Mercury News reports:

Scientists who returned to the Bay Area this week after an expedition to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" brought piles of plastic debris they pulled out of the ocean — soda bottles, cracked patio chairs, Styrofoam chunks, old toys, discarded fishing floats and tangled nets.

But what alarmed them most, they said Tuesday, was the nearly inconceivable amount of tiny, confettilike pieces of broken plastic. They took hundreds of water samples between the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and the notorious garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California, and every one had tiny bits of plastic floating in it. And the closer they sailed to the garbage patch, which some researchers have estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the more plastic pieces per gallon they found.

This short video (2:45) sums up the mission and their preliminary findings:

If you're interested to learn more about Project Kaisei, you might start with the websites Project Kaisei, SEAPLEX, and Marine Debris.

Language on the Philosopher's Zone

The Art of Biography

"Ray Monk from the University of Southampton in the UK is something unusual in philosophers of the English-speaking world: he's a biographer.... he tell us about the challenges of writing the lives of Bertrand Russell and of the great Ludwig Wittgenstein and why he thinks that biography is a very Wittgensteinian genre."

The Art of Translation

"We continue our look at translation by examining the extreme case of radical translation. How do you translate from a language which has no connection with yours and of which you do not speak a single word, and what does all this have to do with the mysterious word 'gavagai'? We also look at the challenges of translating philosophy this week focusing on translating French, German and English."

A History of the Middle East

Who has ruled the Middle East over the course of history? Lots of people, including Egyptians, Turks, Macedonians, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Europeans... Here is a visual overview in 90 seconds.

The Dark Side of the Moon

Go see the movie Moon. I rarely watch, let alone recommend, science fiction, but this one felt close to the classics of the genre, such as 2001, Blade Runner, and Solaris. What do they have in common? They're less about exploring outer space than the inner one, less about the gee-whiz-bang of science & technology than what it means to be human. Moon raises questions of identity, loneliness, corporate greed, and bioethics, with haunting landscapes and music to boot. No gratuitous explosions, crashes, chases, laser guns, femme fatales, or superheroes saving the day for planet earth. Instead, it offers a slow and deliberate unfolding of character through crisis—the crisis of self-discovery.

Asia on the Philosopher's Zone

 Graham Priest on "Asian Philosophy"

"For a long while, Western philosophy has had little to do with the philosophical traditions of India and China. A common view ... was that all thought in the Asian traditions was not philosophy, but religion or mysticism. But now, slowly, Western philosophers are starting to engage with Asian thought ... Graham Priest, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University, talks about what these philosophers are finding there, and why it's often challenging for someone who knows only Western philosophy."

 Philosophy in another tongue

"Philosophy aspires to universal truths but it has to do so in a particular language. How does the language in which philosophy is expressed affect what can and cannot be said, and how does translation affect our understanding of it? ... we ask a Chinese philosopher how different Confucius is in English and we consider attempts to make Plato sound as though he came from Oxford."