Wade Davis: “If human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be and must be the facilitators of cultural survival.”
Video: Half of humanity’s intellectual, social, and spiritual legacy is being allowed to slip away
Monthly Archives: December 2012
Christmas for atheists
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes: [Darwin] was puzzled by a phenomenon that seemed to contradict his most basic thesis, that natural selection should favor the ruthless. Altruists, who risk their lives for others, should therefore usually die before passing on their genes to the next generation. Yet all societies value altruism, and something similar can be found among social animals, from chimpanzees to dolphins to leafcutter ants.
Neuroscientists have shown how this works. We have mirror neurons that lead us to feel pain when we see others suffering. We are hard-wired for empathy. We are moral animals.
The precise implications of Darwin’s answer are still being debated by his disciples — Harvard’s E. O. Wilson in one corner, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins in the other. To put it at its simplest, we hand on our genes as individuals but we survive as members of groups, and groups can exist only when individuals act not solely for their own advantage but for the sake of the group as a whole. Our unique advantage is that we form larger and more complex groups than any other life-form.
A result is that we have two patterns of reaction in the brain, one focusing on potential danger to us as individuals, the other, located in the prefrontal cortex, taking a more considered view of the consequences of our actions for us and others. The first is immediate, instinctive and emotive. The second is reflective and rational. We are caught, in the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrase, between thinking fast and slow.
The fast track helps us survive, but it can also lead us to acts that are impulsive and destructive. The slow track leads us to more considered behavior, but it is often overridden in the heat of the moment. We are sinners and saints, egotists and altruists, exactly as the prophets and philosophers have long maintained.
If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track. It reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct, through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray. It remains the most powerful community builder the world has known. Religion binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism, creating relationships of trust strong enough to defeat destructive emotions. Far from refuting religion, the Neo-Darwinists have helped us understand why it matters.
No one has shown this more elegantly than the political scientist Robert D. Putnam. In the 1990s he became famous for the phrase “bowling alone”: more people were going bowling, but fewer were joining bowling teams. Individualism was slowly destroying our capacity to form groups. A decade later, in his book “American Grace,” he showed that there was one place where social capital could still be found: religious communities.
While extolling the virtue of the altruistic tendencies of church- or synagogue-goers, Sacks misses an opportunity to make his message more ecumenically inclusive and include mosque-goers. That’s a strange omission given that charity is one of the pillars of Islam. Moreover, he seems to conflate religion and values — a distinction that is clear in most people’s minds since the drift away from organized religion much more often results from a rejection of religious beliefs than religious values.
The problem that we atheists face — and probably one of the many reasons religion survives — is that our disbelief gives us less to celebrate. Of course we can celebrate life, but we can’t so easily contrive occasions where, obedient to the passage of time, we come together and reaffirm our shared values. Religion provides such pretexts for social unity, without discussion, consensus building or the messy process of negotiation that secular, values-based, collective bonding would entail.
The virtue of ritual and celebration is that they invite a form of selfless participation. They are not burdened by association with individual inventors and thus remain untouched by the competing force of reinvention by innovators — those who might insist for instance that it really makes more sense to celebrate Christmas on December 21, the Winter Solstice.
Maybe at some point, secular traditions of celebration will emerge if, in accordance with Jeremy Rifkin’s hope, we succeed in constructing an empathic civilization — but I suspect that if this happens it will be the result of an incremental adaptation of religion and not because Richard Dawkins and others succeeded in persuading the religious to abandon their faith.
Video: Finding meaning in difficult times — an interview with Viktor Frankl
This is an interview which the Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, gave in South Africa in 1985.
Celebrating life on Earth
Video: Richard Dawkins on religion
Al Jazeera describes this as an interview but it’s more of a debate — the New Statesman‘s Mehdi Hasan doesn’t give Dawkins an easy ride.
The world’s most prominent militant atheist suffers from the same disease that afflicts all other evangelists: a lack of curiosity about the very people they hope to change.
The mission of the new atheists seems akin to wanting to eradicate smallpox yet having little interest in studying the virus.
No easy route if Assad opts to go, or to stay, in Syria
The New York Times reports: President Bashar al-Assad of Syria sits in his mountaintop palace as the tide of war licks at the cliffs below.
Explosions bloom over the Damascus suburbs. His country is plunging deeper into chaos. The United Nations’ top envoy for the Syrian crisis, Lakhdar Brahimi, met with Mr. Assad in the palace on Monday in an urgent effort to resolve the nearly two-year-old conflict.
How Mr. Assad might respond to Mr. Brahimi’s entreaty depends on his psychology, shaped by a strong sense of mission inherited from his iron-fisted father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad; his closest advisers, whom supporters describe as a hard-line politburo of his father’s gray-haired security men; and Mr. Assad’s assessment, known only to himself, about what awaits him if he stays — victory, or death at the hands of his people.
From his hilltop, Mr. Assad can gaze toward several possible futures.
East of the palace lies the airport and a possible dash to exile, a route that some say Mr. Assad’s mother and wife may have already taken. But the way is blocked, not just by bands of rebels, but by a belief that supporters say Mr. Assad shares with his advisers that fleeing would betray both his country and his father’s legacy.
He can stay in Damascus and cling to — even die for — his father’s aspirations, to impose a secular Syrian order and act as a pan-Arab leader on a regional and global stage.
Or he can head north to the coastal mountain heartland of his minority Alawite sect, ceding the rest of the country to the uprising led by the Sunni Muslim majority. That would mean a dramatic comedown: reverting to the smaller stature of his grandfather, a tribal leader of a marginalized minority concerned mainly with its own survival.
Mr. Brahimi was closemouthed about the details of his meeting, but has warned in recent weeks that without a political solution, Syria faces the collapse of the state and years of civil war that could dwarf the destruction already caused by the conflict that has taken more than 40,000 lives.
A Damascus-based diplomat said Monday that Mr. Assad, despite official denials, is “totally aware” that he must leave and was “looking for a way out,” though the timetable is unclear.
“More importantly,” said the diplomat, who is currently outside of Syria but whose responsibilities include the country, “powerful people in the upper circle of the ruling elite in Damascus are feeling that an exit must be found.”
Yet others close to Mr. Assad and his circle say any retreat would clash with his deep-seated sense of himself, and with the wishes of increasingly empowered security officials, whom one friend of the president’s has come to see as “hotheads.” [Continue reading…]
The Jewish police state
Amira Hass reports: The Shin Bet security service includes among its activities something it calls “delegitimization.” At least that’s what one can infer from a Shin Bet operative’s statements to a left-wing activist, Dr. Kobi Snitz, who was summoned for interrogation on Wednesday. The Shin Bet didn’t respond to Haaretz’s request to define “delegitimization” or to state how activities against it come under its purview, or under which section of which law.
Snitz, 41, is a mathematician employed by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. He was summoned for questioning by the Shin Bet for the first time two years ago. This time, “at the Rehovot police station there was the same Rona from last year,” Snitz said, referring to a Shin Bet investigator who has questioned and/or warned several left-wing activists.
Snitz has been taking part in demonstrations by Palestinian villagers against the West Bank separation fence for more than 13 years. He is also an active member of the Israeli organization Boycott From Within, which supports the Palestinian call for a boycott on Israel, divestment and sanctions.
“There was someone with Rona called, if I’m not mistaken, Mati, and he said he was a director or head of a department. He didn’t say which department, but I assume it was the Jewish department. He said he was currently working on the extreme left and delegitimization.
“Their behavior, in my experience and that of other activists who have told me about their interrogations, is fairly standard. The only new twist I noticed was the inclusion of ‘delegitimization.’ I didn’t ask what that meant, because I said in advance I wouldn’t talk or enter into any kind of discussion with them. Mati didn’t mention Boycott From Within but spoke generally about demonstrations that require a permit.
“He said soldiers had been injured and that I allegedly take part in violent demonstrations. He threatened me, more or less, saying he has been hearing my name too often and that if I don’t stop they’ll use far less pleasant means – he didn’t specify the means – and that they would put me on trial.”
Unlike Mati, Rona read from a printed sheet, “as though she were reading from the Torah,” said Snitz. “She handwrote on a page and read it to me: ‘We at the Shin Bet are following your activities; this is a democracy, but if one breaks the law … we will not let you break the law.'” [Continue reading…]
When U.S. drones kill civilians, Yemen’s government tries to conceal it
The Washington Post reports: A rickety Toyota truck packed with 14 people rumbled down a desert road from the town of Radda, Yemen, which al-Qaeda militants once controlled. Suddenly a missile hurtled from the sky and flipped the vehicle over.
Chaos. Flames. Corpses. Then, a second missile struck.
Within seconds, 11 of the passengers were dead, including a woman and her 7-year-old daughter. A 12-year-old boy also perished that day, and another man later died from his wounds.
The Yemeni government initially said that those killed were al-Qaeda militants and that its Soviet-era jets had carried out the Sept. 2 attack. But tribal leaders and Yemeni officials would later say that it was an American assault and that all the victims were civilians who lived in a village near Radda. U.S. officials last week acknowledged for the first time that it was an American strike.
“Their bodies were burning,” recalled Sultan Ahmed Mohammed, 27, who was riding on the hood of the truck and flew headfirst into a sandy expanse. “How could this happen? None of us were al-Qaeda.”
More than three months later, the incident offers a window into the Yemeni government’s efforts to conceal Washington’s mistakes and the unintended consequences of civilian deaths in American air assaults. In this case, the deaths have bolstered the popularity of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network’s Yemen affiliate, which has tried to stage attacks on U.S. soil several times.
Furious tribesmen tried to take the bodies to the gates of the presidential residence, forcing the government into the rare position of withdrawing its assertion that militants had been killed. The apparent target, Yemeni officials and tribal leaders said, was a senior regional al-Qaeda leader, Abdelrauf al-Dahab, who was thought to be in a car traveling on the same road.
U.S. airstrikes have killed numerous civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the world, and those governments have spoken against the attacks. But in Yemen, the government has often tried to hide civilian casualties from the public. It continues to insist in local media reports that its own aging jets attacked the truck.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has kept silent publicly, neither confirming nor denying any involvement, a standard practice with most U.S. airstrikes in its clandestine counterterrorism fight in this strategic Middle Eastern country. [Continue reading…]
Chuck Hagel and the trial-balloon method of a gutless president
David Bromwich writes: It looks as if Barack Obama is about to withdraw the idea of nominating Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense. To stick with Hagel against substantial (though at the beginning, surmountable) resistance would mean declaring one of his own apparent commitments to be unshakable. The pattern of Obama’s career and character, however, goes the other way. His preferred method has been (a) to give in silently and let the issue trail off; or (b) make an announcement of temporary surrender in the foreseeable future; or (c) string out negotiations until the farthest-out solution seems a possible but clearly dangerous option, and his own ratification of centrist conventional wisdom appears the result of profound reflection.
Of the three methods listed above, (a) was the protocol for announcing and a few months later scuttling the closure of Guantanamo, (b) was used to defer any action on global warming, and (c) for escalating the Afghanistan war after giving the generals the time and opportunity to leak their plans for a larger escalation. The apparent exception is the health care law whose passage lasted the long year between Obama’s inauguration and its signing in early 2010. But the exception proves the rule: after the signing, Obama said and did little to defend the Affordable Care Act, and according to his advisers he expected it to be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. (That expectation was itself, of course, a reason for his silence. Obama does not like to be seen to struggle against “reality.”)
Chuck Hagel would have been a superb secretary of defense. There is not another American of high reputation in public life who has proved himself so free of the disastrous illusions that led to the Global War on Terror. Is there any consolation in the loss? Obama’s first choices for state and defense were Susan Rice and Hagel. The sickly trial-balloon method — so susceptible to the gradual buildup of an intimidating opposition — has ended by sinking them both. They were, however, contradictory choices in what they stood for: much harder to reconcile than, say, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton. Rice is a careerist of the national security elite. Her only idiosyncrasy, if one can call it that, is excessive enthusiasm for “humanitarian intervention” and the remote-control wars that such enthusiasm breeds. Hagel, by contrast, is an independent thinker and a dissident, far more than the president himself — a man so alienated from the Republican war madness and other kinds of madness that he walked away from his party in 2008. A Kerry-Hagel team would have been interesting; but Obama’s original choice was the incoherent combination of Hagel and Rice. [Continue reading…]
Syrian Christian refugees have little to celebrate
Al-Monitor reports: A funeral mass many not sound like a festive occasion, but it is one of the initiatives by charities and churches to alleviate the suffering of Syria’s Christian refugees in Lebanon this Christmas. “Many people had to flee before being able to bury their dead,” says Issam John Darwish, archbishop of the Melkite Catholic diocese of Zahle. The funeral will commemorate more than 300 people.
The diocese is also distributing heating fuel and food packages to the 400 families that have registered with Zahle’s more than 130 local churches. Christian charities such as Caritas are distributing clothes to Syrian refugees to mark the holidays, and World Vision has organized Christmas plays through which refugees are encouraged to find the holiday spirit.
But many refugees say they have little to celebrate. “I don’t feel like there are any holidays,” says 24-year-old Talej Hallak. She fled the bombs falling on Qusayr, just across the Syrian border in March. It’s the first time she is experiencing Christmas outside her country and without her relatives. Her father died “during the war,” as she refers to the 22-month-old conflict, images of which flicker on the TV screen behind her. And there will be no gifts for 5-year-old Ibrahim or 2½-year old Pamela either; the family is scraping by on what her husband, Khoder, makes as a painter. [Continue reading…]
Russian military presence in Syria poses challenge to U.S.-led intervention
The Guardian reports: Russian military advisers are manning some of Syria’s more sophisticated air defences – something that would complicate any future US-led intervention, the Guardian has learned.
The advisers have been deployed with new surface-to-air systems and upgrades of old systems, which Moscow has supplied to the Assad regime since the Syrian revolution broke out 21 months ago.
The depth and complexity of Syria’s anti-aircraft defences mean that any direct western campaign, in support of a no-fly zone or in the form of punitive air strikes against the leadership, would be costly, protracted and risky. The possibility of Russian military casualties in such a campaign could have unpredictable geopolitical consequences.
Meanwhile, near-daily atrocities have kept western governments under pressure to act. A Syrian government air strike on a town near the central city of Hama on Sunday killed dozens of civilians queueing for bread, according to human rights activists.
Amateur footage from Halfaya showed mangled human remains strewn along a street where people had been blown off scooters and out of cars. One video showed a boy with his feet blown off. Piles of corpses could be seen beneath rubble outside a two-storey building the cameraman described as a bakery. It was unclear how many bodies were in the smoking ruins.
Human Rights Watch has previously accused the regime of targeting bakeries. The group warned the Assad regime that such targeted bombing of civilians represented war crimes. However, in the face of a Russian veto at the UN security council, the international criminal court has not had a mandate to investigate the atrocities committed by either side. The UN has put the death toll at more than 40,000 as the war continues to escalate. [Continue reading…]
Is Hagel too honest to serve in Obama’s cabinet?
Michael Hirsh reports: Besieged by criticism from right and left, and considerable skepticism from his former Senate colleagues, Chuck Hagel appears to be following the path of Susan Rice as a trial-balloon nominee who finds himself quickly losing altitude in Washington. And as happened with Rice, the White House is now signaling that it may soon puncture Hagel’s hopes.
Just as occurred with Rice, the U.N. ambassador whose prospective nomination as secretary of State — leaked to the media — flamed out in the face of widespread criticism of her, President Obama appears to be rethinking his choice for Defense secretary.
A senior administration official told National Journal on Sunday that it was “fair” to say Obama is considering candidates other than Hagel for Defense secretary, in particular Michele Flournoy, who was under secretary of Defense for policy in Obama’s first term, and Ashton Carter, the current deputy Defense secretary. Only a week ago, Bloomberg News reported that Hagel was Obama’s top choice.
The White House’s revised characterization of Hagel’s standing came after what was, for the former Republican senator, a particularly discouraging series of comments on the Sunday-morning talk shows. Outgoing Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that it would be “a very tough confirmation process,” while on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Hagel’s former fellow Republican in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, said Hagel’s would be “a challenging nomination.” Graham added: “I don’t think he’s going to get many Republican votes.”
While much of the criticism centers on questions of whether Hagel has been a strong enough supporter of Israel and tough enough on Iran — as well as past comments he made about gay people — he is also paying, in part, for his bluntness and bravery in advocating unpopular positions during his 12 years in the Senate. Hagel’s gutsy and prescient stand against his own party and President George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq invasion — and his criticism of the war’s management afterwards — all but cost him his political career, turning him from a possible GOP presidential contender into a pariah within his party. [Continue reading…]
Gun nuts petition to have Piers Morgan deported for using First Amendment
The Associated Press reports: Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition calling for British CNN host Piers Morgan to be deported from the U.S. over his gun control views.
Morgan has taken an aggressive stand for tighter U.S. gun laws in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting. Last week, he called a gun advocate appearing on his “Piers Morgan Tonight” show an “unbelievably stupid man.”
Now, gun rights activists are fighting back. A petition created Dec. 21 on the White House e-petition website by a user in Texas accuses Morgan of engaging in a “hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution” by targeting the Second Amendment. It demands he be deported immediately for “exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens.”
FBI investigated ‘Occupy’ as possible ‘terrorism’ threat, internal documents show
Huffington Post reports: According to internal documents newly released by the FBI, the agency spearheaded a nationwide law enforcement effort to investigate and monitor the Occupy Wall Street movement. In certain documents, divisions of the FBI refer to the Occupy Wall Street protests as a “criminal activity” or even “domestic terrorism.”
The internal papers were obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice fund via a Freedom of Information Act Request. The fund, a legal nonprofit that focuses on civil rights, says it believes the 112 pages of documents, available for public viewing on its website, are only “the tip of the iceberg.”
“This production … is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement,” wrote Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the fund’s executive director, in a press release Saturday.
According to the documents, the FBI coordinated extensively with private companies, including banks, that feared they could be affected by Occupy protests. Occupy, which took root in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in September 2011 and spread to cities across the country, targeted corporations and other forces it believed to perpetuate social inequality. The FBI’s investigation included the movement’s manifestations in New York; Milwaukee; Indianapolis; Anchorage, Alaska; Jacksonville, Fla.; Richmond, Va.; and Memphis, Tenn., among others. [Continue reading…]
Scientists report faster warming in Antarctica
The New York Times reports: West Antarctica has warmed much more than scientists had thought over the last half century, new research suggests, an ominous finding given that the huge ice sheet there may be vulnerable to long-term collapse, with potentially drastic effects on sea levels.
A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth.
“The surprises keep coming,” said Andrew J. Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who took part in the study. “When you see this type of warming, I think it’s alarming.”
Of course, warming in Antarctica is a relative concept. West Antarctica remains an exceedingly cold place, with average annual temperatures in the center of the ice sheet that are nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing.
But the temperature there does sometimes rise above freezing in the summer, and the new research raises the possibility that it might begin to happen more often, potentially weakening the ice sheet through surface melting. The ice sheet is already under attack at the edges by warmer ocean water, and scientists are on alert for any new threat.
A potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the long-term hazards that have led experts to worry about global warming. The base of the ice sheet sits below sea level, in a configuration that makes it especially vulnerable. Scientists say a breakup of the ice sheet, over a period that would presumably last at least several hundred years, could raise global sea levels by 10 feet, possibly more. [Continue reading…]
How our brains categorize and map everything we see
ExtremeTech: If not for our brains, our eyes wouldn’t be able to process anything. Considering how much time we spend with our eyes open, our brains are constantly dealing with an influx of visual data. The brain needs to store that data somewhere, and thanks to scientists over at the University of California, Berkeley, we now have our first map of not only where the brain puts all that information, but how our grey matter organizes it.
The study (PDF), led by neuroscience doctoral student Alexander Huth, had five participants watch two hours of movie trailers that contained over 1,700 categories of actions and objects. During that time, their brain activity was recorded using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), measuring blood flow in various spots in the brain. Using linear regression, the scientists were then able to analyze the collected data, and subsequently build a model showing how all of those actions and objects fit into around 30,000 locations within the cortex.
After that point the researchers translated the model to a visual form. Using principal component analysis – a mathematical procedure used to provide a synopsis for a large amount of data — the scientists were able to visualize those 1,700 categories and how they related to one another, creating the chart shown to the right.
The map is made [of] “semantic neighborhoods,” which are essentially just categories of things that the brain finds similar to each other. The researchers found that, for instance, the brain organizes the categories of “humans” and “animals” in a related manner, whereas “eyeball” and “car” are stored in completely different areas of the brain. Along with finding out how the brain organizes different categories of objects, the researchers also found out that different people’s brains organize things in similar ways. [Continue reading…]
The graphic above is not a representation of a neural network. It’s simply a visual representation of the WordNet semantic network from which the 1,700 categories used in this research were derived.
Israel’s colonial strangling of Bethlehem
Ben White writes: At the main checkpoint to enter Bethlehem there is a large sign placed on the Separation Wall by Israel’s ministry of tourism which says “Peace be with you”. An appropriate symbol for Israel’s colonial strangling of the “little town”, this propaganda for pilgrims is a crude microcosm of Israel’s habit of talking “co-existence” while pursuing apartheid.
Over decades of Israeli military rule, more and more land around the city has been annexed, expropriated and colonised, with 19 illegal settlements now in the governorate. Eighty percent of an estimated 22 square kilometre of land confiscated from the north of the Bethlehem region was annexed to the Jerusalem municipality in order to expand settlements (see this briefing).
Beit Sahour, home of the Shepherds’ Fields where it is said the angels announced the birth of Jesus, has been hit hard by Israel’s colonial regime, losing 17 percent of its land to the expansion of Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries. The Wall loops around 10 percent of the Bethlehem region’s land, and the UN estimates that only 13 percent of the governorate is available for Palestinian use. In and around the city, there are over 30 physical barriers to Palestinian freedom of movement imposed by the Israeli military. Bethlehem has been isolated and fragmented in a way that would devastate any town or community the world over. [Continue reading…]
Video: Gaza’s children haunted by nightmare of war