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...everything I believe is wrong. Well, except for that. Or to depersonalize and contextualize it, 100 percent of what humans have believed to be the truth about the big questions -- the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, as Douglas Adams put it -- is wrong, because the fractional percentage of things we've gotten right in the anywhere between 90,000 and 200,000 years ago is so exceedingly slight (and ephemeral--we have always been and still are incapable of knowing what's right) that it's far safer to assume any truth is absolutely wrong. Perhaps in Canaan 30 centuries ago, for one brief shining moment, a people worshiped the one true god -- Baal -- but were extinguished. We do know that Epicurus divined (I use the word ironically) that the stuff of the universe was made of tiny indivisible elements which much be so small as to be invisible; that insight was lost for thousands of years.

So I'm not particularly troubled by this story the New York Times ran the other day:

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

I thought things were probably like that ever since I read Julian Barnes' book The End of Time, though I am certain I am wrong about this.

I liked this bit from Times article:

In the same way the odds of a real word showing up when you shake a box of Scrabble letters are greater than a whole sentence or paragraph forming, these “regular” universes would be vastly outnumbered by weird ones, including flawed variations on our own all the way down to naked brains...

In an interview Dr. Linde described these brains as a form of reincarnation. Over the course of eternity, he said, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, he said, “it’s possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your table and your computer.”

But it’s more likely, he went on, that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain, without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, he said, “It’s cheaper.”

First, "Naked Brains" should be a band (probably already is), in which case "Cheap Naked Brains" would be a good alternative. Except that I'm probably wrong...

Physicist Martin Perl theorized that there had to be a lepton heavier than a Muon. Though his colleagues, Kenneth Ford tells us in his delightful book The Quantum World, doubted he'd find it--he was "guided only by curiosity and hope, not theory," Perl persisted, and ultimately identified the Tau particle. A worthy pursuit:

Addressing the question of the usefulness of the discoveries like that of the tau lepton, Perl said, "The use of the discovery of basic particles is indirect. We have found that everything of a complicated nature is made from three basic families of particles. Eventually, this will lead to an improved understanding of energy and time. From that we hope will come new ideas that lead to applications like a source of cheap energy which is truly safe."

I thought first of Martin Perl when I read, in this column on Hanukkah by Christopher Hitchens, the following passage:

And, of course and as ever, one stands aghast at the pathetic scale of the supposed "miracle." As a consequence of the successful Maccabean revolt against Hellenism, so it is said, a puddle of olive oil that should have lasted only for one day managed to burn for eight days. Wow! Certain proof, not just of an Almighty, but of an Almighty with a special fondness for fundamentalists. Epicurus and Democritus had brilliantly discovered that the world was made up of atoms, but who cares about a mere fact like that when there is miraculous oil to be goggled at by credulous peasants?

One can be repulsed by Hitchens' insensitivity to religious belief (I wonder whether his rhetorical approach is ultimately counterproductive to his aims: he seems sometimes to strive to insult more than persuade), but that should not deter us from noting his argument. The atom, as Epicurus defined it, was the indivisible, smallest constituent of matter. A sword is not just a sword, it is made of iron, and the tiniest bit of iron is an invisibly small particle of iron. There had to be such a particle, Epicurus reasoned, and it had to have certain properties to distinguish it from other properties. The process is the same as Perl's theorizing of the tau particle, and suggests that were it not for humanity's propensity to go down so many blind alleys, we'd be much closer to understanding what the universe is (something we still don't know...)

While pulling The Journey of Man off the shelf (I can never never remember the title), I noticed the thick whit spine of Julian Jaynes' work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I read it as an undergraduate in college, and reread it last year.

Then as now (well, as last year anway) I came away thinking that Jaynes' scholarship at times can be rather shoddy. He intereprets wall drawings or temple architecture of cultures that have left hardly any written records (certainly not enough to make sweeping pronouncements on the interpretation of ideofacts) and insists they prove his theory, which is that the early humans were not conscious in the way that we're conscious. Rather, voices from the right side of the brain guided the left side of the brain. Schizophrenia may represent nothing more than a vestigial human mental pattern. There's a pretty well done summary of his theory at Wikipedia--read it if you want to know more about it (and see here too for more).

To give an idea of Jaynes' method, one need look no farther than the photo above or the drawing (much clearer) below of the same rock carving from Yazilikaya, Turkey, in the 13th Century BC. It depicts the penultimate Hittite king Tudhaliya IV (the smaller figure) with the god Sharruma; Jaynes interprets this as an emblem of the bicameral mind rather than a political symbol suggesting that god and king stand together. I am not saying my interpretation is more likely correct than Jaynes's, but rather that it is very difficult to reconstruct the message that average Hittites derived from their art. I'm not saying that Jaynes is a kind of Eric von Däniken, by any means -- there is far more intellectual rigor -- but nonetheless, I'm not sure that either literature or art (both of which always have their conventions) are up to the task of proving that our ancestral mental apparatus involved right brain to left brain transmissions, until modern consciousness evolved (Jaynes sees it coming to age as a result of a number of calamities around 1100 or 1200 B.C. -- bicameral societies could only sustain so much complexity and frequently broke down; the crises--climactic, human induced, etc.--of the late 2nd millenium B.C. threw different populaitons together, who had to develop more sophisticated means of organizing themselves--thus introspection, self-awareness and the origins of true consciousness...).

This latter bit is what interests me. Homo Sapiens have been around for something like 130,000 years (perhaps longer, perhaps shorter). Yet we only find agriculture around 8,000 years bp (this is a generous date), writing around 3000 BC, metallurgy around the same time -- no disrespect intended (I can barely change the oil in my lawn mower), but it's not like our ancestors went from incandescent bulbs to iPhones in a century and change.

Jaynes is groping toward an explanation of that, and while I remain unpersuaded by his arguments, I am not entirely unconvinced by them. The notion, though, that we continue to evolve -- that our consciousness or the wiring of our brain becomes increasingly sophisticated -- is a very optimistic notion.

In the Berman quotations linked below, he writes, "Qutb shows no embarrassment at all in noting the seventh-century barbarities whenever they seem apropos--the cruel amputations and other punishments ordained by huddud, the penal code, which he carefully discusses ... The barbarous passages add a peculiar thrill to his writings, a frisson of the weird and the forbidden that seems all the more powerful because his tone of voice never changes: the tone of a man speaking with tranquility and confidence about things that are cosmically true."

This reminds me a bit of something Qutb wrote in Social Justice in Islam (described here), in which Qutb relates a hadith about a couple who confess their adultery to the prophet, begging to be purified (that is, stoned to death). This quote, from the seventh chapter of Qutb's Social Justice in Islam, pretty much describes what Berman is talking about. To set the scene, Ma'iz bin Malik has asked the prophet to purify him, the sin being adultery. Muhammad asks if he's drunk or a looney, knowing full well the punishment he'll have to inflict. Bin Malik continues to insist on his adultery, and he's stoned to death. Shortly thereafter, a woman comes:

Thereupon there came to him a woman of the Ghamidi clan of Azd, and said, "O Messenger of Allah, purify me." "Woe unto you," he said to her. "Go and ask pardon of Allah, and repent towards him." She said, "Do you intend to repulse me as you did Ma'iz ibn Malik? For I am with child by fornication with him." "You!" siad the Prophet and she answered, "Yes." Then he commanded her, "Wait till you have brought forth your child," and one of the Helpers volunteered to care for her unitl the time of the birth. When this happened, he came and told the Prophet, "The Ghamidi woman has had her child." Then said the Prophet, "We cannot stone her, and leave her helpless child without a nurse"; but one of the Helpers at once said, "I will be responsible for a nurse, O Prophet of Allah." So they stoned the woman to death."

I think this is the "peculiar thrill" of seventh century barbarity to which Berman refers; here is the lesson Qutb draws from the passage:

Now neither Ma'iz bin Malik nor his partner in crime were ignorant of the dreadful penalty that the would have to pay or of the shameful end that they would have to face. No one had seen them, to establish the fact of their crime. Nevertheless, they pressed the Messenger importunately, no matter what was dictated by his mercy and by that of Islam, to deny them the benefit of any doubt; they closed all possible ways against their own escape; indeed the woman even confronted Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah, with wanting to repulse her as he had repulsed Ma'iz. She almost accused Allah's Messenger of neglecting his own religion.

Why did they do these things? The answer lies in their request, "Purify me, O Messenger of Allah." This betrays the true impulse that was strong enough to overcome love of life -- a watchful conscience and a keen moral sense. It was the desire to be purified of a crime which none save Allah was cognizant; it was the shame of meeting Allah unpurified from a sin which they had committed.

This is Islam. Its keen moral perception appears in the conscience of the offender, and its profound mercy appears in Muhammad's repulsion of these two people and in his effort to provide a way to escape for them. Its resolution appears in the carrying out of the stipulated punishment when the charge had been proven, despite the nobility of the confession and the intensity of the repentance; for on this point the sinner and the Prophet find common ground -- that the faith must stand by its basic tenets.

I think another interpretation is possible, and perhaps preferable. Ma'iz bin Malik is put to death, not for adultery, but for talking about it in public, as is his paramour. If one thinks of the milieu of Mohammad -- a rough culture riven by blood feuds, in which violence and vendetta were a way of life -- the sin wasn't adultery (which was expected and normal and tolerated and perhaps even condoned) but rather openly avowing it. Mohammad makes no effort to discover who bin Malik had been sleeping with; if adultery were the sin, surely the Prophet would have, at the very least, asked him. Bin Malik is stoned to death by the community to prevent his being killed by, perhaps, a jealous husband or outraged father (either of or not of the Ghamidi clan), which in turn would have led to Bin Malik's family knocking off a Ghamidi, and so on. (Such blood feuds continue to the present day, suggesting the Islam wasn't quite the corrective Qutb argues it was.)

Why is it that so many divines are terrible economists, and so suspicious of technology? I intend to write much more on this, but to get started, here's a bit written by Eknath Easwaran in a commentary on the third "chapter" of the Dhammapada writes,

It may seem surprising that the Buddha devotes so much attention to suspending the operations of that very instrument that people associate with human progress. All of the major material accomplishments of our civilization--the development of the machine, the conquest of disease, the triumph of technology--stem from creative thought. However, no one today would claim that such exploits have taken humanity beyond suffering, much less that they can free a person from death: both of which, the Buddha claims, come when the mind is stilled.

Moreover, less laudable feats--the poisoning of the environment, the production of weapons powerful enough to destroy all of life--all can be traced to creative thought. So long as the mind is not under control, the Buddha says, destructive thoughts cannot be kept out, and selfish motives cannot help bringing undesirable results as well as desirable ones. ...

I don't mean to pick too much on Buddhism -- some of its non-metaphysical prescriptions strike me as being wise--though the stoics seem to get to pretty much the same place without all the mumbo jumbo -- and you can pick any religion and find commenters offering similar rejections of the worldly in favor of the something else that's not quite quantified. To borrow a bit from Adam Smith,
the self interest of the butcher, brewer and baker has undesirable consequences (providing others with supper?), and there is a coin of a higher realm that is to be preferred to their commerce.

But realistically, can't human progress be quantified? Aren't life expectancies up? Haven't hundreds of millions moved from lives of mindless toil to lives of often mindless, occasionally challenging mental toil in the last century? Hasn't human misery been reduced, in very real terms?

Yesterday, while sitting in a Seattle Starbucks at 6 a.m. their time (9 a.m. mine), I finished reading God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. It's a powerful book, worthy of the attention of believers, agnostics and nonbelievers alike. A few things, still back of the envelope, that occur to me:

1) The reader will find few (if any) qualifications noting that organized religions, through their organizations, can do good as well as evil, and have on some occasions actually done so. I may misunderstand Hitchens somewhat, but if I do understand him, I think the one qualification he offers is sufficient: The good done by religious organizations is properly credited to the humanity of those running them, and not to any religious creed. Some NFL players do charitable work, but from that one can't conclude that football is a charitable game.

2) Hitchens notes something that I've been persuaded of for some time: That the religious scriptures we have are uniformly wrong about the universe they describe, contain stories for which there is no corroborating archaeological or historical evidence (when there should be--for example, Egyptian references to a Jewish exodus or slave revolt; artifacts left by the Israelites while crossing the Sinai), and appear to have been written for a particular people in a particular era, and not as universal texts have applicability thousands of years into the future. (This explains the demand for theology: Imagine a religion whose texts consisted of a few Times editorials, a policy paper from Brookings on Urban Planning, a campaign platform for a Cincinnati city councilman. Giving them some kind of intellectual coherence once they're removed from their initial purpose -- polemical documents aimed at a specific audience at a specific time -- requires a good deal of intellectual effort.)

3) There is a problem which I find rather difficult to think about, which Hitchens actually does touch on in his introduction to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. First, let me note an early, paleo ideofact post in which I expressed some skepticism on this subject, the notion that demography is destiny (as Mark Steyn sometimes says). Simply put: does natural selection favor a culture in which it is expected that women have no rights, that their fathers marry them off at the earliest possible moment to harness their reproductive potential as soon as possible, producing more boys accustomed to the inferior position of their mothers and more girls with no hope of a better life -- the system held in place by the unalterable word of God himself? Or does it favor a culture in which the pursuit of individual economic, social and other goals by both men and women take precedence, where reproduction is deferred until other goals are met, in which fewer children are born?

Religions are all phony, but perhaps the advantages they offer -- from Islam to Mormonism, from Hinduism to Catholicism -- have to do with their superior capacity to harness the female womb for the productive work of creating more adherents.

In Borders today, I was pleasantly surprised to find a book of speeches by Robespierre, the man most responsible for the French terror. I've never read anything by Robespierre, so I bought the book.

The introduction, by one Slavoj Zizek, was something of a revelation. Here is Zizek on one of the four principles we must adopt to avoid (tellingly, I think) ecological catastrophe:

--and, last but not least, all this combined with trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the 'informer' who denounces the culprits to the authorities.

The whole introduction is an argument for terror--not of the freelance bin Laden sort, but rather state terror on a massive scale, operating on a "wager" that the people support it--or at least, that the informants do.

Lest we forget, sic semper tyrannis...

The Washington Post book section brought the happy news that Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems 1956-1998 is available. The review does a nice job of providing an introduction to Herbert's metier--

In a 1984 interview, Herbert discussed what distinguishes him from contemporaries like Milosz: "Writing -- and in this I disagree with everybody -- must teach men soberness," he said, adding emphatically: "to be awake." For Herbert, who knew along with Goya that the sleep of reason produces monsters and tyranny, "to be awake" means to refuse the witchcraft of reduction and rhetoric and to seek instead the beguiling magic of the mundane and close to hand...

...and then quotes the Pebble, which has always been among my favorite poems of Herberts. (An aside-- I think the photographer Joseph Sudek has the same sort of concern for soberness.)

The Post review suggests--inaccurately, I think--that Herbert was not interested in attacking ideologies or regimes in his work. He was, but within certain circumscribed limits (he noted that writing for the drawer was tiresome; his approach was well suited for getting by the official censors).

That he detested the deformities inflicted on mankind by the people's republics is unquestionable. Here is Herbert:

Social realism had sounded. I had no chance to publish what I was writing then, and by my withdrawal I think I anticipated a dismissal from the Union. It was like this: I was taken to observe an action to destroy kulaks. Armed bands of 'workers,' who were not workers at all, would come and loot the property of the foes of the proletariat. They took away everything. Grain was loaded on horse carts; and the carts would stand outside in the rain and the snow, the grain going to waste. It was the economic price of a historical experiment. I was a writer and could join a band to see for myself, in practice, not in the papers. I wanted to find out who was right, the spirit of the day or common sense. And conscience.

They took grain away from a woman, Malcowa, who worked for a kulak. She went wild with despair. What could one do? Give the woman a hundredweight of grain lest she and her son should die of starvation in the coming winter. I went to see the organizer of the action so that I could write a report and get them to give her a sack of grain. They explained that I did not understand the dialectic of history. Some time later I learned that Malcowa had hanged herself.

I unstuck my photo. I sent my membership card back to the Union. I went down to the bottom.

I went down to the bottom. I do not think it was an undifferentiated disenchantment with the vulgarity of the human heart that animated him, but rather with a very specific kind of human heart -- the kind that, in the name of history, would deprive a poor woman and her only child of enough food to eat.

Parapundit has a rather sobering post, quoting from this essay by Robert Conquest -- one of the sharper thinkers about and intellectual opponents of totalitarian government -- on the limits of democracy, which requires civic institutions, a culture of tolerance, etc. etc. to succeed -- that merely holding elections does not a democracy make (and indeed, no one in his right mind would think so). Parapundit doesn't quote it, but I wonder if this paragraph is the one that most resonated with him:

What we can hope for and work for is the emergence, in former rogue or ideomaniac states, of a beginning, a minimum. The new orders must be non-militant, non-expansionist, non-fanatical. And that goes with, or tends to go with, some level of internal tolerance, of plural order, with some real prospect of settling into habit or tradition.

The second half of that sounds, actually, rather like what is going on in Afghanistan -- although the thing Conquest seems to miss is that the "some level of internal tolerance, of plural order, with some real prospect of settling into habit or tradition" is not incompatible with nascent representative structures. And some of those, of course, can rely on the best aspects of both traditional culture even religion.

I don't know how often I have written it -- probably not often enough -- but I generally am of the opinion that Islam offers a good basis upon which to build a new, democratic Middle East. (Incidentally, this book, The Islamic Paradox, by Reuel Marc Gerecht, advances the rather odd thesis that it's not moderate Muslims but the more militant believers who are most likely to play the key role in this. I haven't read his book, and I'm not sure I'm going to get around to it anytime soon, but I came across it the other day and wanted to point it out.)

Now, to reiterate, there are democratic forms short of a fully functioning republic that can act as a bridge to representative government. Obviously a lot can go wrong, but I'm always willing to gamble on the people. That also means trusting the people, and assuming that, incredible as it may seem, not everyone everywhere will see things exactly as I do.

As I think I've also noted in the comments here on several occasions, I wouldn't expect a democratic government that's representative of a predominantly Muslim society to look precisely like ours -- that it would put, for example, legalizing gay marriage or railing against exposed breasts at sporting events at the top of its agenda. My hunch is that the first order of business would be dealing with the endemic corruption of the old regimes -- corruption that is, I would guess, among the main reasons for the economic stagnation in the region. It's worth noting that Islam is particularly tough on this sort of thing -- the ideals of the faith (which of course can be very different from practice, but let's leave that aside for the moment) preclude rulers from, say, enriching themselves while their people starve. Economic revitalization of the countries of the Middle East (which I believe ranks behind even Africa in terms of GDP growth). Forgive me for being so materialist here (although I don't think there's any reason to apologize) but if Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Arabians who for the next few years at most live under the Saudi boot, Iraqis et al begin to believe that their children will have a better life than they, that their labors are rewarded, that their voices are heard, then the institutions that preserve that sort of prosperity will supported and defended. The question is, do we really believe that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (however an individual defines it) are best achieved in democratic systems, and if so, will people risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to defend it? My hunch, as always, regardless of culture, is yes.

Oscar night -- such things don't interest me especially, since art is, after all, not a competition. Still, the circus around the Oscars is hard to resist. My favorite part is the endless discussions of the gowns of stars and starlets -- who made them, how they look and what they signify. (I can assure you -- there are shows in which someone's red dress at the Oscars signifies a coming of age, while someone else's red dress is an avatar of a career collapse, while a third red dress is an ironic jab at the roles Hollywood has for women.) Oddly -- or perhaps not, since we're talking about the one art form which most people actually see and a form of commerce in which billions changes hands -- such criticism actually makes sense to me, or is sensible in a way that much literary, dance or art criticism I've read does not. And, more broadly, it struck me the other day that I really enjoy the prose of Stephen Hunter, the Washington Post's film critic, and read him even if I have no interest in the movie he's reviewing. He's a good writer with a keen eye and the ability to convey to a reader something of the essence of an unseen film -- not a bad skill set for a critic to have. (I quite enjoyed his recent love letter to the trench coat.)

As to the parade on the red carpet, and the semiotics of evening gowns, I'm reminded of a passage from (who else?) Borges, in the short story The Zahir:

The Hebrews and the Chinese codified every conceivable human eventuality; it is written in the Mishnah that a tailor is not to go out into the street carrying a needle once the Sabbath twighlight has set in, and we read in the Book of Rites that a guest should assume a grave air when offered the first cup, and a respectfully contented air upon receiving the second. Something of this sort, though in much greater detail, was to be discerned in the uncompromising strictness which Clementina Villar demanded of herself. Like any Confucian adept or Talmudist, she strove for irreproachable correctness in every action; but her zeal was more admirable and more exigent than theirs because the tenets fo her creed were not eternal, but submitted to the shifting caprices of Paris or Hollywood. ...She was in search of the Absolute, like Flaubert; only hers was an Absolute of a moment's duration.

...like the moment an actress catches the cameras while making her entrance on the red carpet....