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2/27/09

A Study in Contrast: PhilPapers & Storm Front


A new website is available, and it looks interesting. I quote from it:

"PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophy articles and books by academic philosophers. We monitor journals in many areas of philosophy, as well as archives and personal pages. We also accept articles directly from users, who can provide links or upload copies."

PhilPapers can be found here.

Not on topic but rather about the absence of rational thought. I found at CNN an article titled, "Growing Hate Groups Blame Obama, Economy." In such movements, there is an abysmal lack of philosophical thinking. Interest in the article led me to a site called Storm Front, a white supremacist group. Under a rather ironic heading, Ideology & Philosophy, I found a discussion forum with comments like this that are assumed by forum members to pass for philosophy:

"I know that if I don't cope with it .... I'll starve. It's unfortunate that we've been forced into this multicultural hell hole where the races are no longer free to segregate themselves and live apart as nature intended for us to do. Because of my own poverty and inability to pay rent in a nicer apartment complex; I live on the wrong side of the tracks where I pay a bit less rent but over 90% of my neighbors are black. My job simply doesn't pay me enough to live amongst fellow white people. That's a shame too. There was a time in this country where white people of all income levels could still enjoy the luxury of living in an all white neighborhood or apartment complex. Sadly, that's not the case anymore."

Although not always the situation, here is a comment showing that racism can be interwoven with alienation from mainstream society--alienation due to poverty and inability to find better employment.

2/25/09

Right-Brain Strokes and "I"

This picture was drawn by a woman, PP, who suffered a stroke in the right hemisphere of her brain. Notice that the left side of the cat and the lady are not wholly filled in.

She is typical of right-brain stroke victims. So to speak, they lose one half their world. They will eat food on the right side of their plate and leave the left side untouched. When somebody turns the other half to the right side, they see it and will eat it.

If two people stand before them, they may only respond to the visitor on the right.

When we first learn about this phenomenon it surprises us. Surely we would not do anything so foolish as fail to see one half of our world. We believed there is a higher awareness, a consciousness, a self, an "I" that oversees it all and remedies our errors.

Right-stroke victims provide evidence that we might be mistaken to continue believing so.

But that does not make the issue of consciousness much simpler. The gap between brain and mind remains a chasm, despite claims of philosophers and neuroscientists that it soon will be narrowed. Those who doubt them often hold that a difference exists, one between worldviews. In one, physical laws are expected to explain consciousness processes. The other points out that in the community of advanced physics there is a growing sense that other dimensions are hidden from us and will forever remain so.

What implications does right-brain stroke behavior have for science writ large? In a sense, not much. Like Buddhism, the scientific worldview does not need an inner self, although most people are convinced they have one. (One exception was Suzanne Segal and the change in her profoundly affected her life.)

Most people also hold that belief in self is vital for social cohesion. Without it, they say, individuals lose motivation and the moral order is threatened.

2/24/09

Reinhold Niebuhr:The Theologian Who Influenced Obama's World View

I have tried to read theologians, and have succeeded more with some than with others. I recall reading what physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne said about his own theological writings, that he was a "bottom-up" kind of guy. You couldn't prove it by me. What he said still seemed like castles in the air. As I tried to read Polkinghorne I was reminded of what H.L. Mencken said: "For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."

But Obama's theologian? I can understand why the President likes Niebuhr. Here is a theologian whose head was not in the clouds. In his writings he tackled real problems head-on.

Barack Obama regards Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) as one of his favorite thinkers . Niebuhr influenced Obama's understanding of the world, religion, and politics. In Niebuhr, Obama found a fusion of intellect, faith, and realism. In Niebuhr he also found a pragmatist. The theologian once said that democracy "is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems." Listen at Speaking of Faith.

(Killed by Nazis, the Christian martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was also influenced by Neibuhr. Imprisoned after his voluntary return to Nazi Germany from the states, he led a courageous, exemplary life for his fellow inmates. There is a movie on Bonhoeffer's life. I have watched it, and found it helpful to understanding the man.)

2/23/09

Mickey Spillane and Political Correctness

I wrote this opening to a pulp detective story and would have used it in a novel had I been Mickey Spillane in the 1940s:

There in the dimly lit garage she leaned against the doorway, her eyes saying come hither. But the gun in her hand told me to stay away. Her lips wanted to be kissed. But her mouth said, "You lied to me."

"Hello, doll," I said. "Fancy meeting you here." I nodded at the gat. "Now, that's not very friendly." I smiled.

Her finger wrapped around the trigger. "Put up your hands. Way up." She poked the .32 in the air at me.

"Mind if I smoke first?" I smiled again.

"It'll be your last." She tossed me a pack and I caught it with the hand that wasn't in my pocket. "Thanks," I said. I lit up and took a puff, blowing the smoke toward her face.

She waited while I took a few puffs, but she became fidgety, and I didn't like how she was holding the gun. She got tired of waiting.

"Enough. Now raise them. All the way." She tilted her automatic toward the ceiling.

My right hand said goodbye to the Smith & Wesson snuggled in my coat pocket. I reached for the clouds. She was nervous. Her hand was shaking. "Careful, sweetheart," I said. "That thing might go off and I'm standing right in front of it."

"No maybe about it. It will. But first I want to hear you tell the truth. Tell me you didn't love me."

"First, can I take this fag from my mouth?," I mumbled. "Kind of hard to talk otherwise."

"Go ahead, but do it slow. Real slow." She smiled for the first time.

"You got it." I gently dropped the cigarette onto the floor. It glowed red in the dark. "I ought to tell you there's a flatfoot standing behind you, ready to book you for murder one. Nice girls don't pull triggers. I'm just a private dick. It don't pay to shoot me."

"Don't think you can pull that trick on me, Mike. It's the oldest con in the world."

"No trick, baby." I lunged at her. The gun blasted the darkness. Sweet dreams began to tuck me in as I fell to the floor, glimpsing Nicholson grab her with hand cuffs in one hand. This was the end of something; I didn't know what.
_____
But I am not Mickey Spillane and this is not the 1940s and Mickey Spillane by modern standards is quaint. It's 2009, so I am told, and if you believe in calendars. Mickey Spillane offered a different kind of belief, one where men were men and women were, well, lollipops. Today, if you believe in the sit-coms, men are numskulls while women are intelligent and competent. The times have demanded historical revision. It's only a nicer, more just lie; that's all. Call it a white lie if that term is okay. It's part of our era's political correctness.

2/20/09

Colin McGinn on Faith and Reason

Colin McGinn on Faith & Reason. McGinn currently teaches at U. of Miami. Each segment below is relatively short. Part 1. A rough sketch of some of his comments: (1) People don't believe in unicorns, but we have good psychological reasons to believe in God that don't apply to unicorns; (2) We have moved from the Old Testament God of Wrath to an abstract God largely devoid of human characteristics; (3) A question is, How much is the longing for God part of human nature, and how much enculturation? (I will some day discuss Andrew Newberg, who hypothesizes a God Factor wired into the brain.); (4) McGinn dropped God from his life and sees no difference in it; (5) Religion, not indoctrination, can serve in schools as an important access to vital questions on the meaning of life and human values.



Part 2. A rough sketch of some of his comments: (1) In the dialogues between faith and reason, too much emphasis is given to faith, not enough to reason. (2) Intellectuals have told the world that truth and objective systems are all illusions. Ergo, we should accept subjectively-based systems and opinions as merely another way of thinking about the world. (3) A popular perspective is that because all things are relative, we are politically incorrect when we criticize the incoherence of somebody else's opinions or faith. Watch here.

Part 3. The story of Jesus is a powerful story. It has many ingredients, including injustice and justice . . . Watch here.

2/19/09

Student to Richard Dawkins: What if You're Wrong?

A Student Asks Richard Dawkins, "What if you're wrong?" She says hers is "the most simplest question," and poses it to him. Her solecism drew attention to her rather than the empty-minded response Dawkins gave. Once again, he simply proves himself an evangelist for atheism. His campaign against religion has a very emotional element to it. (For somebody who claims to be a rationalist, there is little that is rational about his evangelism.) He begins by presuming that the girl is a Christian, and continues with humor about believing in Flying Spaghetti Monsters. His point is that each believer with her religion and her God is a product of her environment. He doesn't bother with the implicit question--What if Dawkins is wrong about the existence of a higher intelligence regardless of religious belief? Instead, after a minute of his whimsical response he asks her, "What if you're wrong about the Great Ju-Ju Monster at the bottom of the sea?" This fits propaganda though it drew admiring whoops and applause from the student audience at Randolph-Macon College. Although he has one, he provided no reasoned explanation of his own position as an answer to a serious question from a young mind. Somebody not an ideologue could have explained that natural selection can still allow for that intelligence, although it would probably affect her view of the intelligence's attributes. (I make no brief either for or against a higher intelligence (which might be conscious or it might not be) ; I only point out Dawkins' tactics.)

Suzanne Segal & A Sudden Loss of Sense of Self

Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head
(from Lapus Lazuli, by W.B. Yeats)

Waiting at a Paris bus stop, four months pregnant, Suzanne Segal was about to take a step that would change her life forever. It occurred as she boarded the number 37 line.

"I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges . . . All the body's signals seemed to take a long time to be picked up in this non-localized place, as if they were light coming from a distant star. Terrified, I looked around . . . All the other passengers were calmly taking their seats . . . I shook my head a few times, hoping to rattle my consciousness back into place, but nothing changed. I felt from afar as my fingers fumbled to insert the ticket into the slot and I walked down the aisle to find a seat. I sat down next to an older woman I had been chatting with at the bus stop, and I tried to continue our conversation. My mind had completely ground to a halt in the shock of the abrupt collision with whatever had dislodged my previous reality."

Her personal identity disappeared and she began to live in terror. Of her body she said it was "an outline empty of everything of which it had previously felt so full. " She also said, "Everything seemed to be dissolving right in front of my eyes, constantly. Emptiness was everywhere, seeping through the pores of every face I gazed upon, flowing through the crevices of seemingly solid objects. The body, mind, speech, thoughts, and emotions are all empty; they had no ownership, no person behind them. I was utterly bereft of all my previous notions of reality."

Although others acknowledged a change in her, she was puzzled that nobody else noticed what she saw so clearly: "as if there were an unseen doer who acted perfectly."

Later in her narrative: "The first response that the mind had to this completely ungraspable experience was absolute terror; but that terror never changed the experience for a moment. In other words that terror never got the reference point back again. There was no personal self, but nothing stopped; the functions continued to function just as before. In fact, better than before. Speaking was still speaking and walking was still walking. I even went to graduate school and got a Ph.D."

"I experienced this fear for ten years. During this time, I consulted a lot of psychotherapists because it seemed like something I needed to be cured of. Every single one of these therapists considered this to be a problem. And they all had a diagnosis for it. They couldn't quite understand how it could be that there was such great functioning occurring, but they took the fact that there was a lot of fear to be a sign that this was a problem. "

This, on sex: "Sexuality still functions, but without the lust or longing that are self-referencing aspects. Sex serves no personal desire and has no deeper meaning that makes it anything but what it is at the moment. Like all other functions, the sexual function is engaged when the vastness deems obvious, for a mysterious, non-personal purpose. When lovemaking occurs, there is no one making love to no one. How could this possibly be comprehensible to the mind?"

Segal eventually stopped asking therapists for help and turned to spiritual teachers. "Towards the end of the ten years, there was a clear awareness that this was not something that was going to go away. It was time to start investigating other possible descriptions of what this was. It was time to investigate it with people who maybe knew more about it than Western psychotherapists. I started reading spiritual books. . . ."

American Buddhist teachers assured her that her absence of self was not pathological, which helped her understand it in a different light, whereupon her fear subsided. "I realized that the mind had been clinging tenaciously to the erroneous notion that the presence of fear meant something about the validity of the experience of no-self. Fear had tricked the mind into taking its presence to mean something it did not. Fear was present, yes, but that was all it was! The presence of fear in no way invalidated the experience that no personal self existed. It meant only that fear was present. Everything occurs simultaneously--form and emptiness, pain and enlightenment, fear and awakening. Fear's grip broke, and joy arose at once."

After this understanding a further shift occurred: "I was driving north to meet some friends when I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself. For years there had been no-self at all, yet here on this road , everything was myself, and I was driving through me to arrive where I already was. In essence, I was going nowhere because I was everywhere already. The infinite emptiness I knew myself to be was now apparent as the infinite substance of everything I saw."

She had referred to her bus stop experience as a "bus hit." In summer 1996 a series of powerful hits occurred, which at first were pleasant, rapturous, then increasingly disturbed her, causing her to rest after especially strong ones.

In early 1997 X-rays revealed a brain tumor. She had surgery and died on 1 April 1997, age 42. Her book is titled Collision with the Infinite.

Post script. The skeptic might argue that her disease provides evidence for the materialist position-- that she merely hallucinated.

As a response to the materialist, consider this in William James' classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience: "Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. . . . And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined. . . . "

"According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to . . . scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. . . ."

"To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time."

2/18/09

Scientologists: Because of Psychiatrists 9/11 Happened

Psychiatrists Caused 9/11 According to Scientologists.

It's all in the twisted ways that shrinks make us think about our minds, according to Scientologists. Never mind that founder L. Ron Hubbard once bragged that a person could get rich inventing his own religion. (He did invent one and he did get rich.) His own son testified in court that the religion is fraudulent. The son about his father in a legal document: "He is a fraud and has always been a fraud." The son also stated, "The stated representations are all false. He never obtained degrees from those universities, or ever served in combat. He was relieved of duty three times as being unfit, and ended up in a psychiatric hospital at the end of the war."

An FBI document states that psychiatrists diagnosed Hubbard as paranoid-schizophrenic and that he wrote the FBI complaining about his wife as well as alleged communists, one of whom allegedly broke into his apartment and stuck a hypodermic needle into his heart, inducing coronary thrombosis and electric shock.

The title for this post comes from a video link. In an interview, a Scientology spokesman blamed 9/11 on psychiatrists. I had the link below, which I have replaced with its picture. In other words, it doesn't work. Because somebody taped an interview and dared to call it for what it was--bullshit--the video was pulled by Scientology from YouTube, claiming a copyright for the "Church's" Axiom 10 Productions. They follow the precept of their founder, L. Ron Hubbard--strike hard and fast at your enemies.

2/17/09

David Hodgson: A Plain Person's Free Will

David Hodgson: A Plain Person's Free Will.

David Hodgson is "a Judge of Appeal of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia" who is "also deeply interested in philosophy." He has published books through Oxford University Press (Consequences of Utilitarianism and The Mind Matters ), as wells as articles on consciousness, probability and plausible reasoning.

Here is an abstract of his "plain person's" thesis as found in the Journal of Consciousness Studies: "In my experience, plain persons (here meaning persons who are neither philosophers or cognitive scientists) tend to accept something like a libertarian position on free will, namely that free will exists and is inconsistent with determinism. That position is widely debunked by philosophers and cognitive scientists. My view at present is that something like this plain person’s position is not only defensible but likely to be closer to the truth than opposing views. "

Hodgson's ideas can be read at his website. More. The abstract above refers to this argument by Hodgson in The Journal of Consciousness Studies.

2/16/09

Everybody's Magazine and Its Times

Everybody's Magazine and Its Times.

In a world where the next eye-candy bauble is only a mouse-click away, this magazine gives us pause to think about a time when people in their busy lives actually set aside leisure time to read.

I found an October 1912 copy of Everybody's Magazine in an antique shop and was struck by both similarities and huge differences between that time and this. The differences are reminiscent of the contrasts Peter Laslett made to far earlier times in The World We Have Lost. We are sleepwalkers unaware and indifferent to vast social changes that have gradually, almost imperceptibly, happened to generations. For now, though, an essay at comparison demands more space than I want to allow. For the moment I am content to present some pages and comment on them.

After the cover, I have provided pages of advertisements. The ads are introduced at the opening pages and at the end. None interrupt articles or stories; the idea must have been that an advertiser feared annoying the reader with an intrusion of his product into reading material, and possibly alienating the reader from the product.

Above is the cover. No pictures. Only words. The idea then was that the buyer need not be "grabbed" by an alluring babe or flashy celeb. People expected to find descriptive words not catchy graphics. Apparently Thomas W. Lawson wrote a sensational series a few years before--called "Frenzied Finance." In this issue's "The Remedy" Lawson argues that the stock market is merely a legalized casino and should be abolished. He writes it with a tone of high dudgeon. As people would say today, it is a kind of "I am fed up and am not going to take it anymore." His view of financial markets was widely shared by his readers. As I read it I was reminded of current popular disgust with Wall Street and high finance.

The first series, "Frenzied Finance," appeared intermittently and lasted from July 1904 to February 1908. To promote it, Lawson spent $250,000 of his own money, a hunk of change back then. The money helped. Sales reached 750,000 by 1908.

This ad for a Savage automatic pistol appears rather strange today. No weapons are now advertised in popular magazines. The population then was to a greater extent rural, and elsewhere shotguns and rifles are advertised. Clearly, fear of crime is not new. This ad is pitched to the lady of the house. Notice that she neither wounds nor kills the burglar, which would not be ladylike. She "tips" him.

Notice the nicely dressed women getting out of the Baker Electric car below. Then as now: You too can buy social status if you just purchase our vehicle. So they want you to believe. The illustration shows that ladies can stand up in it before exiting, so they won't harm their lovely hats. No man is shown. The point is that a woman can drive herself and her friends to a place where a dog can romp. In an era before women had the right to vote, this is a tactical point for Baker Electrics. It speaks to feminine freedom.

Some things don't change. One is Campbell Soup. The art work for the children is different, but the design is basically the same, and kids are still used to promote the product.

He didn't buy the suit off the rack. His tailor made it. The product is not the suit, but the serge material that he chose. The tailor would make the man's suit from the serge manufactured by OswegoAmerican Woolen Company.

Des Moines, Iowa, was an up-and-coming town back then. Go West, young man, until you reach Des Moines. That didn't stop others from reaching the Pacific. In the classifieds, Los Angeles is advertised as the "fastest growing city in the West." You could buy a farm in L.A. with "rich loam soil, ideal for vegetables [and] fruit." Or you could plant peach and walnut trees. The reader is reminded that the property will "increase in value" as the "Panama Canal opens next year." By the 1960s Burt Bacarach would describe the area differently with his lyrics, "L.A. is a great big freeway."

This fellow below looks rather dapper in his cap, suit coat, and tie. No biker jeans and leather jacket for him. The Harley was a young gentleman's way to get around. The manufacturer pushed comfort, not power, not speed, not macho. Harley-Davidson then competed with other American manufacturers, among them Indian and Excelsior-Henderson. 1912 was the year Harley introduced chain drives. Before, they had used belts. A 1912 Harley was recently auctioned at $100,000.

Everybody's Magazine was founded in 1899. This was the era of muckraking, of deep investigative journalism that came about because of great social evils and atrocious robber barons. The editor, John O'Hara Cosgrave, intended the magazine to have popular appeal, but to include hard-hitting journalism while entertaining readers with many short stories. (With no TV or radio, people read.) Upton Sinclair was featured in it as well as Frank Norris--both muckrakers determined to reveal the evil side of an America that many feared was being taken over by Fat Cats.

Before 1917, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton, wrote in Everybody's Magazine for a series titled "America's Neutrality as England Sees It." In 1917 neutrality was over, and the public was roused by a popular song, "Over There," with its patriotic "We won't be back till it's over over there." Young men were encouraged to enlist with another song, "Johnny Get Your Gun." The United States was in the war a little more than a year. Since 1914, Europe had lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare and machine guns.

After The War to End All Wars was over, so was Everybody's Magazine. Not suddenly, but gradually. The Jazz Age had begun, prosperity had come, and Americans wanted to enjoy themselves in speakeasies or make a wad in the stock market that Thomas Lawson had denounced in his articles on "Frenzied Finance" and "The Remedy." In December 1926, the magazine owners ended its charged political articles, and focused on entertaining short stories. It didn't work. Everybody's Magazine sold its last copy in March 1929.

2/13/09

Does Buddha Apply to The Fast-Changing Modern World?

Does Buddha Apply to The Fast-Changing Modern World?

I liked what Pankaj Mishra said, but I cannot fully concur with his analysis. I find it rather simplistic, as it uses a few simple precepts to explain a world that our understanding yields as far more complicated than in Buddha's time. I have no doubt that we are troubled by everything Buddha talked about, and I find in myself--as well as in the world--the burning source of his Fire Sermon, but research in cognitive psychology and brain science provide knowledge of consciousness, seeing, and perceptions unknown to Buddha, who had only his own mind to subjectively examine. (He had a question, If all is perception where is the perceiver? Modern research has a different take on it, which reveals the question as not altogether mysterious.)

Still, here is the poser:

If the Christian religion is increasingly seen as irrelevant by some Americans and Europeans, what about Buddhism? Turning away from Christian doctrine and dogma, many have embraced Buddha's teachings. But how about the relevance of Buddhism? Pankaj Mishra explored the question. He sought the answer traveling through India and Europe, Afghanistan and America. The answer he found has to do with the political economy on which globalization is based. Buddha urged us to extinguish desire and material appetite. But what about poverty in the world? What about the massive economic upheaval spreading across the globe? What is the relevance of Buddha's teachings to all that? More at Speaking of Faith.

2/12/09

William James & Religious Belief

William James & Religious Belief

As has been often said, William James was ahead of his time. He has an answer to the problem of maintaining religious belief in the modern age and, according to the Wilson Quarterly, "remains perhaps America’s most significant contribution to philosophy and a source of inspiration for contemporary thinkers." More

2/11/09

Ann Coulter & Charles Darwin

Ann Coulter & Charles Darwin

Ann Coulter has discovered that shrillness works. Her books consistently make the New York Times Best Seller Lists. The sales have made her rich and her media appearances have made her famous.

As one reader asked, "How can you not love someone who calls for the bombing of newspapers, demands the conversion of non-Christians by the sword, and mocks the grieving of Cindy Sheehan for her son and the 911 widows?" Another says "She brilliantly exposes the most dangerous ideologies that are destroying a once Christian nation. Everything is going down the tube."

In one book she takes on Charles Darwin. You can read a witty and good review of her book at Skeptical Inquirer. More

2/10/09

Soldiers of Fortune: Americans In The Egyptian Army

Soldiers of Fortune: Americans In The Egyptian Army

In 1865, after Lee signed the surrender to Grant at Appomattox, after Johnny Reb turned, dusty, tired, to wend his way to farms and villages in Mississippi, Georgia, or Alabama, after Billy Yank trudged wearily back to Iowa, Ohio, or New Hampshire, the war was not over for some officers on both sides. No, they were not ready to fight again. Rather, they liked soldiering, it was all they knew, and the United States was not the place for it--not unless they wanted to spend dreary years at some wilderness outpost on the plains or in the desert, waiting the next sutler's wagon with salted beef and whiskey to wash it down, helping them forget where they were--as they waited for some excitement such as the next hunt for Indians, who were rarely found.

Some had other ideas. Pick up and move on, they thought, but not toward the Western horizon, and instead across the waters to where the sun arose. Not to them just the East, but in those days the far, far East. Over there somewhere somebody could use a good soldier, tested in battle. One was Thaddeus Mot and he wound up fighting in the Egyptian army. You might say that he got there because Cotton was King in the South. With the War of The Rebellion, as it was then called by Northerners, cotton exports to Europe dried up. Europe turned to Egypt for her supply, and the Egyptian economy boomed. Cotton became King in Egypt, and when it was deposed the way was paved for Mot and his fellow soldiers. Here is the story.

Egypt's ruler, the Khedive Ismail had plans for his country. With money in his coffers from huge cotton exports during the American Civil War, he wanted to modernize Egypt. Not just for its own sake, but because the Khedive wanted to free Egypt from the Ottoman Empire, and to build Europe into a nation equal to European countries. His uncle Saïd had begun construction of the Suez Canal and Ismail finished the project. As money flowed to Egypt, Ismail tossed it on projects, especially the Suez Canal, finished at immense cost. The Canal's cost weakened his economy and opened the door to English and French influence in Egypt; he had fallen to their suasion.

The Khedive had a new problem, how to strengthen Egypt against their influence. An obvious answer was to build up his army, modernize it, and then use it to rattle his saber, the louder the better, and to fight wars, a disastrous one with Abyssinia. The Nile flowed quietly into the Mediterranean as it had to, the sun baked the pyramid at Cheops as it had since the time of the Pharoahs, and from afar Ismail had watched something new, a war in what was called the New World. This was a different kind of war, with fresh inventions and tactics. Gatling guns, armor plated warships, and men trained on the battlefield. The Khedive was interested in it.

Thaddeus Mot found his way to Turkey and became a familiar of those in power. In 1868, Mot, a Union colonel and a favorite of the Turkish court, met the Khedive Ismail in Constantinople, now Istanbul.

He impressed the Khedive, and was soon commissioned as a major general in the Egyptian army.

Mott quickly convinced Ismail to add more American veterans to the Egyptian staff. With the Khedive’s blessing he returned to the United States, and with the help of General of the Army William T. Sherman, began enlisting recruits. One of them was Confederate Major William Wing Loring, one-armed veteran of the Mexican war.

The situation presented a new chance for dozens of Civil War veterans. About fifty former Union and Confederate officers would make the three-week journey to Egypt. In addition, at least four active U.S. officers were given leaves of absence, allowing them to gain experience in Egypt. All of these men accepted actual commissions in the Egyptian Army, agreeing to fight for Egypt in any war, except one against the United States. One of then would become chief engineer in erecting the Statue of Liberty, originally proposed for the mouth of the Suez Canal.

Some stayed for only a few months (or even days), while others remained for years. Several Confederate luminaries, including P. G. T. Beauregard, Joseph Johnston, and George Pickett considered going, but declined.

More at Americans In The Egyptian Army. Also see A Confederate Soldier in Egypt, and An American Pasha's Neglected Tomb, among others.

2/9/09

Déjà Vu & Physicist Julian Barbour

Déjà Vu & Physicist Julian Barbour

An old woman sits in her wheel chair in a nursing home, a photo album recently on her lap. She has given it to another old lady to show pictures of herself with her first beau on the village green, of herself in bridal gown, of her child sitting on her knee. She looks up at the bare walls, and sees somewhere herself at sixteen, turning many heads, her father carefully screening suitors at the door. It all happened so fast, first that and now this. She opens the album to a new page to show her husband in the year before he died, proudly washing their new Ford in the driveway.

Consume my heart away, sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. (W.B. Yeats)

In Julian Barbour's world, every first date, every kiss, every senior prom, every marriage, every departing is repeated precisely and endlessly. Every hot dog at a baseball game will be eaten again and again. A teenager's coolness lasts forever. Couples meet and fall in love for the first time and then they become again to fall in love again. They grow old together or become divorced, forever aging, divorcing. Or one watches the other become sick and waste into death. Gew gaws hanging from their crib, they awaken as infants to the bright world and it starts over. Sometimes during the night as middle aged men and women, they dimly recollect something, but life presses them forward and they forget.

It has all happened millions of times before, Earth, the cosmos, hot dogs, the World Series, Caesar's conquests, everything. Nothing changes. Time and motion are illusions, according to Julian Barbour. More



Barbour uses the term Platonia, in deference to Plato's idea of eternal forms. Here is Barbour's website with its URL by that name.

2/7/09

Atheists, Believers, and Buddha



Atheists, Believers, and Buddha

"The magic of ordinary experience. Buddha avoided the tragi-comic debate about God's existence to focus on far more important issues.

"When I first started reading about the Buddha's life, I was disappointed to learn that the existence of God was one of the subjects on which he declined to make a definitive comment.

At the time, this seemed to me either rather unfair or something of a cop-out . . . . More at the Guardian.

2/6/09

Robert H. Frank, Big Houses, & Happiness

Robert H. Frank, Big Houses, & Happiness

All our stuff. We have bunches of it. Stuff here, stuff there, stuff everywhere. We need a place to put all that stuff, don't we? So buy a big house to put it all in. Suppose you do want to buy a house, and suppose its square feet have an impact on public policy. Public policy and big houses?, you ask. What's that have to do with anything? Think about this, then. Here are some interesting scenarios, each with implications for the environment and public happiness:

In Daedalus, (Vol. 133, Issue 2, spring 2004) Robert H. Frank (author of Luxury Fever) casts an interesting light on the subject. He offers two scenarios, one with a people living in 4000 square foot homes, totally isolated from another people living in 3000 square foot homes. He calls each Society A and Society B. Because separated from one another, each people is equally satisfied and does not question the square-footage norm. Further, the larger houses do not provide advantage in terms of longevity or health.

He observes that "it takes real resources to build larger houses." The difference between 3000 and 4000 square feet implies a difference in resources. His question: "Are there alternative ways of spending these resources that could have produced lasting gains in human welfare?"

Society B (smaller home) residents use saved resources for the commonweal. They spend the money and material to promote specific changes in their living conditions. ". . . cost savings from building smaller houses are sufficient to fund not only the construction of high-speed public transit, but also to make the added flexibility of the automobile available on an as-needed basis." (Frank) In short, they don't need a car but can drive it if they want to. They simply don't have one thousand additional feet of floor space.

Because all income goes toward stuff, Society A residents have no excess resources for improvement of their situation. They cannot fund pubic transit and must depend on the automobile. Their cars continue to cause traffic gridlock and high stress levels. Although nicer to live in, is the larger home more valuable in the context of longer commute times, traffic jams, and traffic noise?

These are factors demonstrably correlated to reduction in happiness. When a new, noisy highway was opened, people living next it were studied. Shortly after its opening, 21 percent said the noise did not bother them; a year later, the figure dropped to 16 percent. Prolonged exposure to noise elevates blood pressure lastingly. Auto commuters are subject to various noises. Things are out of their control. They cannot predict bottlenecks or accidents. They get cut off by drivers even more tense. "A large scientific study documents a multitude of stress symptoms" from daily commuting. The stress is known "to suppress immune function and shorten longevity." (Frank) This is aside from the risk of accidents or the inhalation of carcinogenic exhaust fumes.

Frank points out that a rational person would choose Society B in order to promote his own happiness. Rational. Research in cognitive psychology demonstrates people are anything but that. Daedalus in PDF. Here is a very negative opinion of Frank.

2/5/09

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

Douglas Hofstadter: What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

Douglas Hofstadter has a vivid recollection of a pig's head on a table in a market. As a teenager he could see the severed neck that once had lines of communication with the body, that had once connected all the outposts of information with the headquarters in consciousness. He asked, "Who once had been in that head? Who had lived there? Who had looked out through those eyes, heard through those ears? Who had this hunk of flesh really been? Was it a male or female?"

He had a mid-life loss. "In the month of December 1993, when we were just a quarter of the way into my sabbatical year in Trento, Italy, my wife Carol died very suddenly, essentially without warning, of a brain tumor. She was not yet 43, and our children, Danny and Monica, were but five and two. I was shattered in a way I could never have possibly imagined before our marriage. There had been a been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out."

So what does all this mean? He tries to understand. "Deep down, your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles. On a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call 'symbols.' The most central and complex symbol is the one you call 'I.' An 'I' is a strange loop where the brain's symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

To each human being, this 'I' is the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real? Is our 'I' merely a convenient fiction? Does an 'I' exert genuine power over the particles in our brains, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?" From I Am A Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. Here is A Washington Post book review.

Poppa Neutrino: The Happiest Man In The World?

Poppa Neutrino: The Happiest Man In The World?

Poppa Neutrino is the free spirit (or lunatic according to some) who sailed across the Atlantic with his family on a raft made of scraps.

In his book The Happiest Man in the World, Alec Wilkinson chronicles the life of Poppa Neutrino. Now Poppa is supposedly preparing for a solo journey across the Pacific. You can listen on NPR.

You can check out the DVD featured on the picture above at this site. Here are earlier links in Mind Shadows: Poppa Neutrino: "The road to the mystical is triadic. To get through the doorway is nomadic." and 72 Year Old To Cross The Pacific On A Raft of Scraps as well as Latest on Poppa Neutrino

Below is a video of Poppa.

2/4/09

Theodore Dalrymple: The Politics and Culture of Decline

Theodore Dalrymple*: The Politics and Culture of Decline *(Pen name. Real name Anthony Daniels.)

Theodore Dalrymple has been compared to George Orwell. His German mother fled to Britain from the Nazis; his father had been a communist activist. He has lived as a physician in a ragged, dusty Tanzanian village. He has talked to prisoners locked away from the dizzying spin of daily London life. He has been arrested as a spy in Gabon. South African police sought to arrest him for violating apartheid. He infiltrated an English communist group to attend a youth festival in North Korea. He performed in an Afghan Shakespeare play. He smuggled books to dissidents in Ceaucescu's Romania. He was arrested and beaten by Albanian police for photographing an anti-government demonstration. He ran a psychiatric clinic in the Gilbert Islands. In East Timor police put him under surveillance. Riding with chickens, bouncing on dirt roads, he has taken public transportation across both Africa and South America. In Africa, he treated "children bitten by puff adders," and "adults mauled by leopards."

As a boy he precociously read the classics and studied arguments for and against God. He favors Shakespeare, Chekov, and Turgenev for their insights into the evils, follies, and goodness of human nature. As a doctor he worked in a London slum hospital and saw a side of modern civilization television and newspapers sweep under the carpet.

With his experiences and travels he is equipped to see through the veneer of modern Western civilization. He distrusts contemporary ideas and covert ideologies. He sees an intellectual trend toward elevating the individual at the cost of society. Conventional limits on individual behavior are being eroded. Academics embrace complex and absurd theories that are mindlessly absorbed by popular culture, only to the detriment of the masses who believe that is the way things are. Intellectuals have replaced straightforward explanations of anti-social behavior with such complex theories. For him, these theories are downright stupid.

In Africa, he saw true poverty. Yet people did not lose their work ethic, nor their dignity. Survival was itself an accomplishment to be proud of. By comparison, Dalrymple found that England’s slum-dwellers had lives “as saturated with arbitrary violence as that of the inhabitants of many a dictatorship.” The difference for Dalrymple? In England and in the West “the evil is freely chosen.” People in the West have no despots forcing them into their behavior. What, then, has happened? Western civility and values have declined because the ideas of intellectuals were absorbed willingly, without close examination, into the culture.

Theodore Dalrymple has now moved to France. The British welfare state takes care of so much in personal life that people have few options--television, shopping, sex. He considers the growth of social pathologies and the decline of cultural, moral and aesthetic standards in Britain more far-reaching and alarming than similar processes in the United States. It is happening in the States and is also a juggernaut. He does not deceive himself about France. A sign in the kitchen of his French home evokes the stiff-upper-lip Britain of yesteryear: Keep calm and carry on.

A doctor from Madras worked with Dalrymple at a London hospital. The physician was impressed with the medical care given all patients, the cleanliness, the know-how, but slowly he began to understand something else. A man over-dosed on heroin and was wheeled into intensive care where nurses and physicians cared for him around the clock. When he came to, his first words were "Get me a fuckin' roll-up." No gratitude, no courtesy, just demand for some weed.

The Indian doctor came to realize that a different kind of poverty existed in Dalrymple's country. "The squalor of England was not economic but spiritual, moral, and cultural."

Here is a review of his most recent book, Not With A Bang But A Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.
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Notes:

  • Dalrymple says this of John Money, who persuaded David Reimer's parents that the boy should be "sexually reassigned" and raised as girl because of genital damage during circumcision: "By 1994, John Money, perhaps the most influential academic sexologist of the last third of the twentieth century, was still able to write in all seriousness that we live in an anti-sexual and taboo-ridden society. Get rid of the remaining taboos, he implied, and human unhappiness will take care of itself." A creature of his era and its sexual revolution, Money "insisted on the 'infinite plasticity' of gender identity."

  • As to the sexual revolution, he says this: "A schoolteacher friend recently told me how she had comforted a seven-year-old who was in tears because a girl in his class had insulted him, calling him a virgin. She asked whether he knew what the word meant.

    'No,' replied the little boy. 'But I know it's something horrible.' "

  • On Kinsey's famous sex survey: "A survey of the kind [Kinsey] conducted into financial probity would surely have revealed that there is hardly a person in the world who has never in his life been dishonest—who has never taken so much as a paper clip or overestimated expenses on a tax return. No sensible person would conclude from this that the striving for honesty is a sham, that it is pointless to have any laws regarding financial conduct, that it is perfectly all right for shopkeepers to shortchange their customers and for their customers to steal from them. And yet this is precisely what the sexual revolutionaries, Kinsey foremost among them, have argued in the realm of sex."

  • (Variously from City Journal.)

    2/3/09

    Potpourri: Laughter, Cannibalism in Europe, Maria Doria Russell- God, Evil & Free Will, Why Does Music Affect Us?, Miles Davis & Theology

    A Potpourri Today:
  • Why Do We Laugh?
  • Medical Cannibalism in Europe
  • On God, Evil & Free Will
  • Why Does Music Affect Us So Powerfully?
  • Miles Davis and Theology
  • -------
  • A big mystery: Why do we laugh? Contrary to folk wisdom, most laughter is not about humor. Read about it here.

  • The rhinoceros faces extinction partly because in Asia its horn, when ground into powder, is believed to promote virility, or act as an aphrodisiac. In Europe, a different species was once regarded as having curative powers. Consider this by Johann Schröder, a German pharmacologist, who wrote these words in the 17th century. His recipe was to cut the meat into small pieces or slices, sprinkled with "myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe" and then let it soak in wine for a few days. The meat specifically required was the "cadaver of a reddish man ... of around 24 years old." More in Spiegel.

  • Mary Doria Russell, a paleoanthropologist turned novelist has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page--about God, evil, doubt, and free will. Listen at Speaking of Faith.

  • Why does music affect us so powerfully? Like language, are there universal interpretations of the emotions that various pieces of music expresses? Is it like art in that a community of appreciation gives its importance to us? Listen at Philosophy Talk

  • Jon Michael Spencer says that When he listens "to the cool jazz cuts on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue," he senses "that the music has something to do with the spiritual-realm." They aren't "like the bebop Davis was moving away from after a stint with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie 'Bird' Parker." Read at Theology Today. Look for January 1996 and "Miles Davis' Kind of Blue."
  • 2/2/09

    Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

    Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

    Dysrationalia—"the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence." Let's see, Bobbie Fischer and his mouth, Bill Clinton and his zipper, Richard Nixon with his White House Plumbers, and William James Sidis and his obsession with street car transfers. . . . It is a "disorder" affecting some of the smartest people you know.

    Natural selection evolved the brain to enable the human species to survive. In shorthand, aptitude as shown by an IQ test is not a measure of street smarts. (Include emotional intelligence with that.) To be sure, in a technologically advanced society, IQ can foster success despite relatively less street smarts. But bear in mind we're not talking CEOs here. They have to think on their feet. (At least that's the theory, and a theory that gives us pause after learning that John Thain gave bonuses amounting between $3 and $4 billion to his Merrill Lynch executives after getting a $15 billion dollar bailout for Bank of America from TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program.)

    As for IQ, the social class in which you were raised is claimed to affect your score by 12 to 18 points. But here is another term for you: intellectual capital. According to some, it is better than IQ as a predictor of academic success. Intellectual capital results from stimulation and support from the home, school and neighborhood for exploration and achievement. More at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

    Here is an explanation of dysrationalia and of intellectual capital.

    The list below reminds us of IQ and street smarts. In terms of dumb business practices have you heard of these?
    • The Heidelberg Electric Belt for the modern era of 1900. Think of it as a low-voltage jockstrap. It was supposed to cure what ailed you. Wife complained? Buy it to to cure impotence. Kidney stones? It was claimed to fry them. Insomnia? Well, I'm not quite sure how voltage jolts would put you to sleep.
    • Then there was the drink Beech-Nut sold as "100% pure apple juice." Beech-Nut's nose became beech wood. Like Pinocchio's, it grew long for that lie. The product had absolutely no apple juice.
    • Midas had a memorable ad. An old woman ripped open her blouse to show her "mufflers" to the shop mechanics.
    • Our dearly beloveds need your help. In London a video game maker had a stroke of brilliance. The company asked for volunteers to let the company advertise on the headstones of loved ones dead and gone.