Recently in Epiphanies Category

I'd mentioned a while back that I'd been reading Three Who Made a Revolution, Bertram D. Wolfe's masterful account of the lives of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, and their efforts to save their country (and humanity) by blowing both up. It's a wonderful work -- if one doesn't understand the tactical intelligence of Lenin, or the appeal of Trotsky, or the horror of Stalin, this is the book to read.

I might start writing about Qutb and his influence on al Qaeda again (I reread the book with that purpose vaguely in mind), because I think and have always thought that Qutb was far more influenced by Russian revolutionary thought than he was by the Qur'an. Or rather, there was nothing in his attitude toward the Qur'an to distinguish him from millions of other Muslims; what made him unique was the bait and switch he performed, trying to dress up a Leninist revolutionary, terrorist organization in Qur'anic clothing.

In any case, as a sort of preface, I thought it worth quoting Wolfe quoting Trotsky's critique of Lenin's conception of the professional revolutionary party during one of many breaks between the two men:

...he portrayed Lenin as a caricature Robespierre, talking socialism but modeling himself on the dictatorial bourgeois revolutionary, setting up a pseudo-Jacobin dictatorship over the masses, installing a committee of public safety over the Party, using the "guillotine" to eliminate those he could not control, forming local organizations on the Cartesian principle: "I am confirmed by the Central Committee, therefore I am." Lenin's celebrated centrism, he said, was in reality an "egocentralism" and one day it would lead to a state of affairs in which:

The organization of the Party takes the place of the Party itself; the Central Committee takes the place of the organization; and finally the dictator takes the place of the Central Committee...

Enter Stalin...

Somewhere around here, I have a copy of Discipline & Punish...

Ezra Klein writes movingly in the L.A. Times that there's nothing funny about prison rape. I would hasten to add, there's nothing much funny about prison at all.

More later...

Hitchens on Kosovo:

It's a shame, in retrospect, that it took us so long to diagnose the pathology of Serbia's combination of arrogance and self-pity, in which what is theirs is theirs and what is anybody else's is negotiable.

The whole piece is well worth reading.

I couldn't help but think of Actaeon glimpsing Diana in her bath when I read this story in which some argue that astronomers glimpsing the secrets of the universe may very well have cursed, not just them, but all of us:

New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have caused the cosmos to revert to an earlier state when it was more likely to end. "Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe," Prof Krauss tells New Scientist.

Which is why, as Woody Allen once wrote, "if the girl in the office down the hall has some good points but perhaps not all the qualities you desire it's best to compromise."

I've been reading about quantum mechanics recently, and must admit that just as I am a classical liberal who questions whether my prejudices make the most sense, I am also a classicist when it comes to physics (the difference being that classical liberalism can prevail through arms--whether at Thermopylae, Yorktown, Gettysburg, Omaha Beach or Kabul: subatomic particles are indifferent to the fortunes of war). The notion that a single particle can be in two different places at the same instant is unsettling, to say the least (I'm reminded of a scene in David Lynch's Lost Highway, in which a very creepy Robert Blake is both at a party speaking with a guest and in the guest's home at exactly the same moment). In any case, I've yet to encounter this bit of Heisenberg gone wild:

quantum theory says that whenever we observe or measure something, we could stop it decaying due what is what is called the "quantum Zeno effect," which suggests that if an "observer" makes repeated, quick observations of a microscopic object undergoing change, the object can stop changing - just as a watched kettle never boils.

In this case however, it turns out that quantum mechanics implies that if an unstable system has survived for far longer than the average such system should, then the probability that it will continue to survive decreases more slowly than it otherwise would. By resetting the clock, the survival probability would now once again fall exponentially.

"The intriguing question is this," Prof Krauss told the Telegraph. "If we attempt to apply quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole, and if our present state is unstable, then what sets the clock that governs decay? Once we determine our current state by observations, have we reset the clock? If so, as incredible as it may seem, our detection of dark energy may have reduced the life expectancy of our universe."

Worse still, astronomers with their universe-guzzling Hubble telescopes might have done more damage:

This is not the only damage to the heavens that astronomers may have caused. Our cosmos is now significantly lighter than scientists had thought after an analysis of the amount of light given out by galaxies concluded that some shone from lightweight electrons, not heavyweight atoms. In all, the new analysis suggests that the universe has lost about one fifth of its overall mass.

I suspect socks lost in the laundry account for most of that mass...

It's easy to make jokes (perhaps preferable), but I'm reminded of a line from Borges: We don't know what the universe is. Like a child playing with an adult machine, we might well push some button, or undo some safety catch, that leads to disaster. That said, I'm with the child -- let's keep on peaking...

I suppose God didn't much care for us for the first 159,000 years or so. But we seemed to do all right:

Researchers found three hallmarks of modern life at Pinnacle Point overlooking the Indian Ocean near South Africa's Mossel Bay: harvested and cooked seafood, reddish pigment from ground rocks, and early tiny blade technology. Scientific optical dating techniques show that these hallmarks were from 164,000 years ago, plus or minus 12,000 years.

"Together as a package this looks like the archaeological record of a much later time period," said study author Curtis Marean, professor of anthropology at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.

This means humans were eating seafood about 40,000 years earlier than previously thought. And this is the earliest record of humans eating something other than what they caught or gathered on the land, Marean said. Most of what Marean found were the remnants of brown mussels, but he also found black mussels, small saltwater clams, sea snails and even a barnacle that indicates whale blubber or skin was brought into the cave.

Marean figured the early people, probably women, had to trudge two to three miles to where the mussels, clams and snails were harvested and to bring them back to the cave. Then they put them over hot rocks to cook. When the food was done, the shells popped open in a process similar to modern-day mussel-steaming, but without the pot....

Marean also found 57 pieces of ground-up rock that would have been reddish- or pinkish-brown. That would be used for self-decoration and sending social signals to other people, much the way makeup is used now, he said.

In Love and Death, Woody Allen suggested that God, if he exists, is an underachiever. When one reads of "'modern' living, humans 164,000 years ago" who "put on primitive makeup and hit the seashore for steaming mussels," and calculate that salvation only became a concern of God some 5,000, 2,000 or 1,400 years ago -- well, Woody Allen seems fairly profound...

Epiphany? One of the oddities of Sayyid Qutb's reading of history (Qutb of course is the knucklehead Islamist sometimes called the "brains of bin Laden") is his view of Christianity's history -- could he have been influenced by Edward Gibbon?

I realized today that I didn't know anything about what Sikhs believe.

I've just started reading about them, but it seems to be an amalgam of (or perhaps reaction to is a better term) Hinduism and Islam.

I vaguely recalled buying a book on the Sikhs a while back (I bought it after seeing an exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History; while I couldn't find it, I did find a half dozen books on Buddhism I've acquired over the years, none of which I've actually read.

That's too bad, and something I'll have to rectify. I am definitely not a Buddhist, but I often find that many (though definitely not all, including some important ones) of my attitudes are quite consistent with the tenets of Buddhism.

I enjoy reading stories like this one, suggesting a close genetic link between chickens and T-Rexes, and this one, on the sequencing of the rhesus macague genome, and its implications for human evolution; still, I can't help wondering whether at some point in the not too distant future such stories will be under attack from fundamentalists--Muslim fundamentalists--for contradicting Islam. And I wonder whether the defense of them will be more vigorous than was the defense of the Danish prophet cartoons...

Here is one I would like to contemplate at a future date: We should be worshipping the money changers in the temple.

This unfortunate story, in which a German judge ruled that a physically abused wife was beyond the protection of German law by virtue of being Muslim, reminds me of a book I came across in a university bookstore a while back.

The title escapes me, but the theme was that in the post-September 11 world, anthropology and anthropologists had to step up and prove their relevance, indeed, that what had gone wrong post-9/11 had been due, in no small measure, to the lack of attention to the expertise anthropologists had to offer.

Intelligence and perspective is always welcome, but I'm not sure that anthropology is well-suited to understanding conflicts among cultures (and I use among intentionally). I tend to think most anthropologists would be uncomfortable with the notion that Western standards of justice, ideas about the equality of women and marriage, should be applied universally to other cultures--even to immigrant groups living in the midst of another culture.

The husband in this case may well be acting consistent with the expectations of a man of his culture--but that is, by and large, a problem with anthropology can't address (and regrettably, that a German judge couldn't address).

Nevertheless, I think anthropology has a great deal of relevance, but it must be an anthropology with sharp elbows.