Three statues, three photographs, three Berlins

BBC News – Minaret ban marks start of tough Swiss debate on Islam

via BBC News – Minaret ban marks start of tough Swiss debate on Islam.

 

 

 

 

The Swiss vote to ban the minarets is truly ironic… As the minarets are depicted as missiles in the Swiss public sphere, I have to remind the poem by Erdogan, in which he resembled minarets to bayonets.  This poem, narrated publicly some years ago,  cost him dearly as he was banned from politics for an extended period of time to the intellectual outrage of European intelligentsia on the grounds of freedom of speech.  What follows is even more frustrating.  BBC notes:

 

So concerned is the [Swiss] government by the decision that Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer Schlumpf, watching the results come in on Sunday afternoon, apparently told her advisers there ought to be some restrictions on what the general public can actually vote on.

This bring us to a natural follow-up of my previous post about the core-values of Europe. It is not really about “integrating” Islam into Europe.  It is about transforming its own population away from its very core xenophobic values.

The forgotten values of Europe

BBC – Gavin Hewitt’s Europe: Europe’s identity crisis.

It is fascinating, if painful, to watch Europe’s efforts to tackle the problem of the ‘alien’ cultures.  The problem, in fact, is simple:  The immigrants are not being assimilated into the “core values” of Europe.  Of course, there is the underlying assumption that the “core values” of Europe do exist and they are inherently better than the others.  I am not interested in the policy.  Instead, I am more fascinated (and concerned) by the inability of European intelligentsia to tackle the problem , without resorting to fascist (i.e., “They should leave”) or left-of-center  (i.e., ‘We respect their cultures, but they need to respect ours”) rhetoric.

I think, the reason for this intellectual ineptitude is not because the immigration problem is a hard one.   In fact, the problem is not about immigration at all.  It rather stems from the subconscious realization that the ”civilized” and “high-cultured” national identity has become obsolete in Europe as the neoliberal capitalism has taken over the global public sphere as the uncontested ideology.  Since European intellectuals cannot rationalize their national identities within capitalistic terms as United States does, they cannot contextualize immigration in a purely economical context. Instead, “cultural” differences becomes the major ‘breaking’ points (think of the membership discussions of Turkey into European Union).

The BBC article makes the point very clearly:

Initially one of the basic tenets of multiculturalism was that newcomers brought with them their own culture, which was respected. Increasingly, however, the mood is changing – migrants are expected to integrate and embrace a country’s basic values.

What is in the subtext is dirtier and, possibly more important, than the actual message.  The article reiterates the idea that there are distinct, eternal cultures that the “newcomers bring” to Europe, which has its own “core values”. If anything, looking into the history of Europe, the “core” values of Europe are war, violence, inequality, religious fundamentalism, ethnocentrism,  colonialism and sexism:  Everything that the “newcomers” were blamed to bring with them.  What the BBC article fails to recognize is that what makes Europe what it is now (and what I admire about it) is its very struggle and rebellion against these very core European values.  Unfortunately, this spirit of rebellion and, hence the contemporary European identity, is lost in a miserable acceptance of  the neoliberal capitalism “red in tooth and claw”, and a complete surrender to easy-to-consume mainstream intellectualism.

Icelandic genomics firm goes bankrupt : Nature News

Icelandic genomics firm goes bankrupt : Nature News.

Unfortunately, deCODE, an ambitious, if unrealistic enterprise declared bankruptcy.  It is a shame as only a few weeks ago, I saw Agnar Helgason, an anthropologist working for deCODE give a wonderful lecture.  He not only described  an enormous amount of data in anthropological context (thanks to famed database of deCODE), but also he offered a glimpse to a different way of conducting genetic research.  Think about it, a group of scientist with the hope to outline the “pedigree” of an entire nation. This is a bold and intellectually fascinating endevour.  Of course, reality bites as BBC coldly declares:

deCODE was founded in 1996 to find the genetic roots of common diseases such as schizophrenia, heart disease and cancer, and was wildly successful at this task… [However,] the business of turning genetic discoveries into cash has long been difficult, and many such firms have converted themselves into drug-discovery operations. Unfortunately for deCODE, it could not develop drugs quickly enough to satisfy investors.

The message is clear.  Science matters.  But, money matters more.

A not-so-brave nostalgic new world: Brought to you in youtube by the young kids of the American Suburbia

My generation, like many others before us, comprises an eclectic cacophony of subcultures.   Recently, I came across couple of interesting musicians, and they introduced me to a new subculture of oddly bohemian (as they are suburbian), a strangely disillusioned (as they are successful), ironically nostalgic (as their work disseminated through the cables and waves of the internet) and confusingly apolitical (as their success, I think, stems precisely from their escape from the mainstream) musicians.  A good example is Beirut.

This band that forms around the 23 year old Zachary Francis Condon of Santa Fe, NM.   A wonderful combination of French rhythms and accordion, with that of Balkan horns, their songs maintain a sophistication that you cannot deny. Dense lyrics with complex meanings hints a brilliance, without erudition.   A heartfelt, almost touchable sorrow keeps you hooked when the vocals shout:

If I was young, I’d flee this town.  I’d bury my dreams underground.  As did I, we drink to die, we drink tonight.

But, then, they are young and they did flee their town…  May be, what they are trying to say that all the dreams they have are already buried…  Not underground, but in the past… In 60’s France, or in an unknown “exotic” land called Balkans…

We are primates all the way down…

The amazing photograph in National Geographic Magazine is one of those not-so-rare instances that reminds me why I am working on human evolution.

For more NGM Blog Central – The Story Behind Our Photo of Grieving Chimps – National Geographic Magazine – NGM.com.

Creationism, Without a Young Earth, Emerges in the Islamic World

This NYT article focuses on creationist discourse in the Muslim world.  I am a little surprised, how uncritical the article was written.    The western world and, in particular United States, has a well-defined intellectual strata, where the intellectual elite can maintain a strong presence of evolutionary thinking within the public sphere.  The same cannot be said for the Muslim world, where teachers and professors seem to be preaching creationism and evolution has no plausible defenders.  I am afraid, the citizens of Muslim countries are being left out from the intellectual, economical and social developments happening around the advance of biological sciences.

Creationism, Without a Young Earth, Emerges in the Islamic World – NYTimes.com.

‘Tribe’ soup sells big

There has been recently quite a fuss raised in some blogs but also some books (such as this or this) about a new notion that can help us understand how people organize themselves. It appears that businesspeople are reinventing the wheel and telling all of us the good news: human social structure isn’t fundamentally based on a large, impersonal scaffolding, like a government, a country, or a corporation, but rather, on what they call a ‘tribe‘, i.e., a (small) aggregation of people who ‘know’ each other and are connected through something they share (but not blood or language). What exactly a ‘tribe’ is, they don’t really tell us in any meaningful way, such as by providing a definition. I would even venture to say that these people have never even bothered to read the dictionary definition of tribe. Instead, we are presented with some vague examples that make anyone with an analytical mind cry for help.

For instance, David Logan tells us that most people are members of more than one ‘tribe’ during their lives (i.e., they belong to various more or less ephemeral social groups depending on activities they participate in). In a TED talk at the level of kindergartners, Logan, a professor at  the USC business school, tells us that there are 5 hierarchically-organized levels of ‘tribe’ starting with, are you ready?, “level 1 – Life Sucks” (i.e., antisocial psychopats who want to connect with other antisocial psychopats – and presumably perform horrid antisocial acts of social bonding). Level 2 is labelled “My life sucks” (unhappy and bitching about your life around the office water cooler – this is, according to Logan, a “tribe”); level 3 is probes new depths of shallowness – “I’m great but you suck/your life sucks” (i.e., self-satisfaction with own achievement, connection is on a simply competitive level – but I’m not joking, this is the level of his TED talk). Level 4 is only mentioned briefly, as a level 3 ‘tribe’ that becomes aware of its own existence, and develops some kind of identity. Level 5 is where Logan would have us all reach if only we could just realize that “Life is great,” not just individuals. Wow. Thanks, David. To translate, I think what he means, when you strip away all the hand-waving and the cutsey ‘I’m your pal’ rhetoric, is that a stage 5 ‘tribe’ represents a group of individuals with a common cause/purpose, whose accomplishment represents an interest that is greater than any individual interest. This is the stuff of legends. This is how we shall build pyramids and reach the stars. This is what we need to strive for.

I was perplexed. What makes these things ‘tribes’?! I was failing to understand how recycling and giving a new meaning to a technical term in anthropology (see even this Wikipedia entry for  a meaning of the word in an anthropological sense) would explain something about human nature – especially as spontaneous formation of social bonding is a well-known phenomenon in the social sciences. How come this business professor presents it as if it had just been discovered? And how come TED invites a guy whose vocabulary is limited to “My life sucks but Life is great” to give a talk about tribes?!

But upon seeing the (admittedly much better) TED talk of Seth Godin, the answer became much clearer. The mechanisms that both Logan and Godin mention rather simplistically in their models are not new. They don’t mention that, but I think that’s because they don’t read any scholarly work on these matters, at least not if it’s not written by other professional bloggers or businesspeople. But what is new, and what they’ve picked up on, and probably what’s making their books sell so much, is that faster communication technologies allow people to create communities around ephemeral commonalities (such as hobbies or, most importantly for marketing people, alas!, shopping preferences!). So, the photographers who shoot Leica can all bond online, and even make free advertising for Leica – hey, this notion of ‘tribe’ is great, maybe Leica should call its customers ‘Leica tribesmen’! But even this isn’t new. Advertising has always tried to create an image associated with the product, (think of the Marlboro man), only that today, that image perdures more easily. Since people increasingly seem to bond by matching each other’s lists of personal attributes on Facebook or dating websites or whatever other fora, and since data about self-images is stored longer, these ‘communities’ that Logan and Godin like to call ‘tribes’ form fast and can become very active.

But fundamentally, as should be clear from the last few minutes of Godin’s talk, when he mentions overthrowing governments, the processes are nothing new. Interestingly, one would think that the internet would promote more political organization at the grassroots level and more and more governments would be overthrown. Instead, what we see is more and more communities of people who like sports-shoes or singles who shop at Whole Foods (this last one I witnessed with my own eyes in Philadelphia).

The Rise and Fall of Academic Abstention

Very interesting blog post by Stanley Fish…

The Rise and Fall of Academic Abstention – Stanley Fish Blog – NYTimes.com.

Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious – NYTimes.com

I know that I am writing about NY-Times articles a little too often.  However, this NY Times Magazine article by Sara Corbett   Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious was just to good to be skipped.  It is about the quest for the holy grail of the Jungians, the, “red book“

There are many things to say about Jung, more than anything as a counter-cultural icon, and the above-linked article says more than I could.  However, I want to draw attention to an odd parallel between Jung’s journey into his inner self and the the recent developments in the neuroscience.  A connection, I could not help but notice, when I read:

ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert, scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”

When we see inside our brains as Christopher deCharms claim, will we be able to “tap” into our consciousness?