Shunya's Notes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Alan de Botton on Success

Here is a breezy talk in which Alain de Botton looks at our ideas of success and failure, the anxiety we feel over our careers, why it's harder now to feel calm than ever before. Is success always earned? Is failure? What role does snobbery and envy play in our lives? What is the flip side of equality, individualism, and meritocracy? Where do our goals and ambitions really come from? And more (via 3QD).

Doniger's Hindus

Ananya Vajpeyi reviews Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History.

From ancient times men have dominated the world of Sanskrit scholarship. Originally those men were Brahmins; then they became Europeans, then Englishmen, and finally Indians. It is only in the past 50 years or so that women have begun to enter this esoteric field of study, and in this regard, Wendy Doniger has been a pioneer and a force to reckon with. Her new book, The Hindus: An Alternative History brings 30 years of her rigorous and innovative scholarly practice to a fitting climax – and I use the word advisedly. Doniger has studied Hinduism in its erotic, aesthetic and corporeal aspects, making her the target of envy as well as criticism from her colleagues. Her work, which includes a translation of the Kamasutra and extensive writing on Shiva, the Hindu god of cosmic destruction, who is worshipped in the form of a phallus (linga), is often seen to be titillating. She is interested in asceticism, but also in sexuality; in the spiritual, but also in the carnal.

Hindu traditions are diverse and heterodox enough to incorporate a number of parallel doctrines, theologies and belief systems, as well as an enormous repertoire of deities, symbols, rituals and concepts that contradict one another and yet coexist. Doniger’s openness to the varieties of religious experience permitted under the accommodating and multifarious rubric of Hinduism has upset all manner of people, from devout Hindus, to the votaries of Hindu nationalism (“Hindutva”), from American professors to German philologists. Nearly all of them misunderstand her work, particularly her creative ways of exploring how Hindu thought connects mind, body and soul, rather than placing them in conflict with each other.

More here. Additional reviews by VV Raman, Pankaj Mishra, Sandip Roy, David Arnold, and Michael Dirda. I have just ordered my copy!

The Omo of Ethiopia

(Photography by Hans Silvester. Link via Maniza Naqvi @ 3QD)