Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 129
October 13, 2014
Is The American Political Novel Dead?
David Marcus ponders the question:
Since the 1960s, the political novel has gone abroad, into exile, journeying to those countries where politics is still a signifier for action. Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, J.M. Coetzee, André Brink became its English-language masters. Even when American novelists picked up the intrigues of political commitment, they often exported their novels abroad. Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer had to go to the fictional Central American country of Boca Grande, Don DeLillo’s The Names to junta-controlled Greece. Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate set its apocalyptic conspiracies in Jerusalem and Gaza and perhaps one of our finest political novels, Norman Rush’s Mortals, explored the desolation of political action in the dry, desert veld of Botswana. To be sure life is better, if perhaps more neurotic, on this side of a state of emergency and without the fear and upheaval, the violence and terror, of revolutionary politics. But how has it affected our political imaginations?
Keep Those Starry Eyes Peeled
Julian Baggini identifies a “highly contagious meme [that] is spreading around the world,” one that “takes serious ideas and turns them into play, packages big subjects into small parcels, and makes negativity the deadliest of sins.” The culprit? What he terms “Generation TED”:
To be progressive and radical once meant being sceptical and opposed to large corporations. For Generation TED, however, this is outdated thinking that leads only to cynicism and inertia. It’s time to grow up and accept that to do good things in a capitalist world you often need to tap the wealthy. In reality, this has always been true: think of Engels supporting Marx, or Beatrice and Sidney Webb funding Fabian Socialism with inherited wealth.
The rejection of cynicism, however, sometimes looks less like realism and more like naive, starry-eyed optimism.
In its mission statement, TED says: ‘We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world.’ It goes without saying that this change is supposed to be for the better. Viewers get to choose which adjective best describes the video they’ve watched: beautiful, courageous, funny, informative, ingenious, inspiring, fascinating, jaw-dropping, or persuasive. ‘Bullshit’ and ‘misleading’ are not on the list. Generation TED believes that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all.
He continues, “Generation TED does lack sufficient scepticism”:
Truly great ideas are sculpted with the chisel of critical thought, not created fully formed by spontaneous genius and good intent. We don’t need to wallow with postmodern irony in the contradictions and paradoxes of the modern world but nor should we ignore them. There are signs that Generation TED is learning this lesson. TED, for example, has added an asterisk to its strapline ‘Ideas worth spreading’, which leads to a series of wry footnotes including ‘and challenging’. It is as though even TED has realised that undiluted positivity is not enough and that critical, sceptical voices are needed too.
Previous Dish on TED skepticism here.
The Ingredients Of Innovation
In an excerpt from his new book, The Innovators: How A Group Of Hackers, Geniuses, And Geeks Created The Digital Revolution, Walter Isaacson argues that “the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences”:
They believed that beauty mattered. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” [Steve] Jobs told me when I embarked on his biography. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.
Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.
Speaking with Christina Pazzanese, Isaacson suggests that people in the arts would do well to learn about the sciences:
I do believe that it’s important for people to have an appreciation for the arts and humanities. But I also think that one problem is people who love the arts and humanities are too often intimidated by science and math, and they don’t appreciate the beauty of science and math. They’d be appalled if somebody didn’t know the difference between Hamlet and Macbeth, but they could happily brag that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a chromosome, or an integral and differential equation, or a transistor and a capacitor. So as much as I’d like to lecture the engineers that they should appreciate the humanities, I also think that people from the tradition of the humanities should embrace the beauty of engineering and science, as well.
October 12, 2014
A Poem For Sunday
Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:
Last week, the Poetry Society of America presented a reading by Kevin Simmonds and Ellen Bass at the very cool McNally Jackson bookstore in Soho as part of our ongoing series there. The poets are friends from San Francisco, and the reading had that radiant quality events do when the principles like and admire each other. In June, we featured poems from Kevin’s new book, Bend To It, so this week let’s take a turn with some of Ellen’s, from her marvelous new book Like a Beggar, published by Copper Canyon Press.
“Moth Orchids” by Ellen Bass:
If you are ill or can’t sleep, you can
watch them spread their wings—the hours
it might take for a baby to be born—
the furled sepals arching, until
the petals splay like a woman stretched, flung
open, blood blooming through her veins.
And then stillness, the white fans glisten
day after day like sunlit snow
tinged with a greeny kiss.
Intricate, curved labellum like bones
of a tiny pelvis and the slender tongue reaching out
to the air as though the parts of the body
could blend: mouth fused to hips, face to sex,
the swollen pad where the bee lands.
Here they float:
eleven creamy moths, eleven white egrets
suspended in flight, eleven babies in satin bonnets,
eleven brides stiff in lace, the waxy pools
of eleven white candles, eleven planets
burning in space.
(From Like a Beggar. © 2014 by Ellen Bass. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Jim Gifford)
A Story About Prayers And Pillow Talk
Elna Baker, who was raised as a Mormon, hilariously recounts a moment of truth she faced after falling in love with an atheist:
Elna subsequently left the faith a few years later, and shares that story, as well as how she came out to her parents about losing her virginity, here. The Glamour piece she refers to in that story is here. Baker also wrote a memoir, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, and has been an occasional contributor to This American Life.
The Sanity Of Francis Fukuyama
He’s long been a hero of mine – intellectually and politically. He broke with the neocons over the Iraq catastrophe and was subjected to the familiar payback of ostracism, but went on to produce scholarly work as impressive as his The End of History and The Last Man, specifically the magisterial and widely acclaimed books, The Origins of Political Order and his latest, Political Order and Political Decay. His sanity continues with his opposition to the current intervention in Syria and Iraq to do again what we tried to do last time, i.e. to defeat a Sunni insurgency on behalf of a hapless and largely useless Shiite government in Baghdad. It’s such a mug’s game you have to have the judgment of the man who picked Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential nominee to endorse it.
Unlike so many in our political elites, Fukuyama has also had the wisdom to reassess the question of Jihadist terrorism after 9/11 and come to a different conclusion than the hysterics in the media and the political opportunists in Washington. To wit, from a great new profile in the New Statesman:
“There was a really serious question: is this the wave of something generally new and important in world history, or was this just a really lucky blow they got in?” Fortunately for his academic consistency, he concluded it was the latter. “These are really marginal people who survive in countries where you don’t have strong states . . . Their ability to take over and run a serious country that can master technology and stay at the forefront of great-power politics is almost zero,” he says now.
As ISIS threatens Baghdad and the war-machine and neocons go into high gear demanding a full scale re-invasion, that’s worth keeping in mind. And his view of our current predicament in Mesopotamia is pretty close to my own:
When I suggest that half-hearted interference is likely to prolong conflict in the region, he comes close to agreeing with me. The wars engulfing the Middle East are essentially a Sunni-Shia war, he says, that “could go on as long as the Thirty Years War in Europe”, which raged between 1618 and 1648. “Under those circumstances, I think it’s a little hard to figure out how American power is going to settle that conflict. I don’t think we’ve got the wisdom to actually see our way towards a political settlement.”
Does he believe that the rise of Isis might have been avoided if the US had intervened militarily earlier on in the Syrian conflict? It is possible, but unlikely, he concludes. “The one thing that both the Iraq and Afghan wars should have taught us is that, even with a very heavy input in boots on the ground, and nation-building, and the trillions of resources poured into these countries, our ability to bring about a specific political result like democracy, or even basic stability, is very limited.”
Let me remind my readers: this is fundamentally a reality-based conservative position. Do not let the fanatics on the right persuade you otherwise. The neo in neoconservatism stands for war – always war. It is close to an end in itself.
The View From Your Window
Florence, Italy, 7 pm
The Neuroscience Of Being Liked
In an excerpt from Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, Matthew D. Lieberman investigates it:
Perhaps the most dramatic positive sign that we can get from another person — short of a marriage proposal — is to read something that person has written to express their deep affection for us. In a recent study, researchers asked participants’ friends, family members and significant others to compose two letters: one that contained unemotional statements of fact (“You have brown hair”) and one that expressed their positive emotional feelings for the participant (“You are the only person who has ever cared for me more than for yourself”).
Subjects would then lie in an MRI scanner while reading these letters written about them by several of the people they cared about the most. Our intuitive theories suggest there is something radically different about the kind of pleasure that comes from people saying nice things about us and the pleasure that comes from eating a scoop of our favorite ice cream. The former is intangible, both literally and figuratively, while the latter floods our senses. Although there are surely differences between physical and verbal sweets, this study suggested that the brain’s reward system seems to treat these experiences more similarly than we might expect. Being the object of such touching statements activates the ventral striatum in the same way that the other basic rewards in life — like ice cream — do.
Fake Limbs That Work Like Real Ones
They may be on the verge of reality:
Victoria Turk heralds this breakthrough:
A real-life patient now has a fully-implanted “mind-controlled” robotic prosthetic for the first time. A Swedish truck driver who had his arm amputated over a decade ago became the first to properly get the arm, which is surgically implanted so as to be controlled by his biological nerves and muscles.
That means that he can control the arm in a pretty natural way, with the nerves and muscles sending signals to the prosthetic in order to move it. It’s like you’d move your own arm—you don’t have to really think about it. … The device is “osseointegrated,” which means it’s attached directly to the skeleton. The user doesn’t have to wear it all the time, however, as only a titanium implant is actually integrated with the bone, and the arm attaches to that.
Other researchers are working on prosthetics that feel like the real deal:
Restoring sensation has practical uses.
Modern prostheses are able, by reading electrical signals from muscles using electrodes attached to the skin of the missing limb’s stump, to perform tasks such as picking things up. Delicate tasks, however, can be tricky, since the user must rely on a combination of sight and experience to work out how much pressure to apply. For example, when Dr [Daniel] Tan blindfolded his volunteers and asked them to pluck the stalks from cherries without crushing the fruit, they succeeded only 43% of the time. But when he connected pressure sensors attached to the protheses’s fingers to the signal-generating machine, and gave them appropriate feedback, the success rate jumped to 92%.
Intriguingly, one unexpected benefit was that the device’s feedback banished the phenomenon of phantom limbs, in which an amputee perceives that his missing appendage is still present. Without the computer-generated sensations, both volunteers reported that their prosthetic hands felt like external tools (one described it as like an artificial hand that he was holding with his phantom hand). Switching the sensations on made the hand feel like an integral part of the body.
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