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The good thing about being delayed in writing certain essays is that one is spared having to do them in detail. Several recent unrelated topics, touching on my various chief points of disturbance, turn out to be categorizable under the basic problem of writing any ambitious work: figure out the consequences of your argument, and get your facts straight.
I am relieved that the new-genetics argument is now out in the open thanks to William Saletan's outrageously confrontational and apparently poorly researched piece in Slate. (See this morning's New York Times for details, plus of course Saletan's original outburst and the responses of his critics.) We are going to see this stuff slung around by various political forces in the years to come, and it is better to open up the argument while it can still be an argument instead of the vehemently opposing articles of faith that typically drive political discourse.
I had been thinking still further about my annoyance with Esalen optimism about the evolutionary potential of humanity...I've said before that it looks as though there is nothing inevitable about any single human life, just a different set of genetic predispositions that cultures the world over have found ways of behaviorally modifying, and a set of predispositions that does not seem to correlate clearly with any historically defined variable. I have tried to establish empirical claims that those predispositions may extend into possibilities that the more dogmatic among us are inclined to deny categorically. This does not change the fact that we all share the common drives and instincts that appear as lust, greed, envy, anger, sloth, gluttony, and, uh, pride? (I pride myself on never being able to remember the entire list of Seven Deadly Sins at any given moment, though I can usually come up with six of them, just never the same six.)
All of which seven were certainly in evidence in the post-Great War tangle of reshaping of Western Asia (as Gertrude Bell called it). Georgina Howell lectured at the Carlos Museum on Wednesday night, and I was led to read her book, as I had not been by Rory Stewart's brilliant critique of it in the October the whatevereth New York Review of Books. (Article available online by keywords.) Someone should write a comparative essay about Rory Stewart and Gertrude Bell, in terms of high modern and postmodern lives of adventurers. (I omit the vexed question of gender for the moment; it is enough to have a Yorkshirewoman and a Scotsman trekking in their respective decades right across forbidden terrain, and eventually ending up administering districts of Iraq to quite different ends: See Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes, which I believe has got a retitle in the American paperback edition, re his brief stint with the British occupation authority post-Gulf War II.) Bell really did tackle an absurd and impossible task, and outwitted some particularly thick Brits in the process. Stewart already realized what he was up against, and attempted his humane tasks more modestly and circumspectly, albeit confrontationally when it was called for.
Howell, as Stewart complains, is writing hagiography more than history. She seems to believe quite sincerely that Bell bequeathed Iraq thirty-seven years of a stable monarchy and honest government, whereas Stewart thinks the roots of the 1958 revolution were already there in the first election of Bell's favored candidate Faisal. And Howell finesses the question of how the Mosul vilayet ended up in Iraq...but.
The "but" in this case being my realization that running the story through Bell's perspective actually helped me straighten out who was doing what to whom and why, simply because other histories tend to take things one country at a time, or what was going on at Versailles, or whatever. Once you sort out the major players in terms of French intransigence over a subdivided Syrian mandate, Faisal demanding the Hashemites' fruits of the Arab Revolt at the same time that Ibn Saud was cranking up to kick the Hashemite dynasty out of the Hejax, with Winston Churchill aiming to accomplish the obsession of the postwar government, namely, to get the administrative costs under control by any means necessary, the dynamics seem much easier to understand. Whether Bell's romanticism bollixed things up or not is another, separate question from realizing that everyone was dealing with a multitude of contending issues all colliding at more or less the same moments. Mistakes were made. Stupidities were committed. And here we are in 2007.
Where the simmering situation in the Indian Frontier Provinces is about to be exacerbated again by the bamboo blossoms and the hordes of rats. I have read for years attempts to make sense of the Mizoram revolt in terms of Maoism, ethnic resentments, and the mass conversion of Mizo society by Baptist missionaries. None of it ever quite added up to something comprehensible.
It makes a great deal more sense to realize that fifty years ago the Mizos were trying to get government assistance for the impending famine, based on their longstanding knowledge that there were two or three types of famine that happened when the rat population exploded upon the 48-year flowering of the bamboo. It's a classic model of an ecosystem in balance through excess; when the bamboo yields fruit, the rats stop eating each other and start gorging on fruit. When that's gone, they eat every grain of rice in sight until that too is exhausted, after which they begin starving in the forest. Equilibrium resumes, after a comparable proportion of the human population has died off as an incidental result.
According to the Vanity Fair (yes, Vanity Fair) article, the Indian government of the 1950s dismissed all this as tribal superstition, and the ensuing famine led to the outbreak of the organized revolt, followed by wall-surrounded defensive villages that were a further impediment to rice growing. (Followed by those seemingly unintelligible reports from the field.) The current government has greater anthropological and ecological smarts. But nothing may be enough to offset the sheer magnitude of what is apparently starting to take place at this very moment.
The writer's lugubrious Malthusian meditations at the end of the essay are what you would expect from a journalist needing to end an essay, though the situation of our limited resources and the mass migration of peoples is a topic that I would insist on setting next to the incorrigible optimism of the Esalenites. (It's interesting that the current species of apocalyptic madness, the 2012'ers, is divided between those for whom 2012 will bring a fundamental alteration in human consciousness and global cooperation...optimist apocalypticism...and those who expect a total systems crash of the global ecosystem...pessimist apocalypticism. Versus those who think that all thing will continue, with surprises.)
I am fascinated by Vanity Fair's meticulously neutral or gossipy recitation of the lives of the superrich next to articles that set forth why the planet and the American economic order are going to hell in a handbasket for their own distinct reasons.
What all these topics have in common is the issue of right framing and right facts, when facts can be established at all. (I do not wish to get into the issue of whether a "fact" has any correlation with physical reality...it does. Those whose "facts" have no correlation at all with physical reality are usually exterminated by circumstances when the processes described by physics and biology take over the argument. The problem is that no "fact" can be framed in a neutral context, and we will always twist the evidence to fit our preferred prejudices...some of which could be justified by argument, if we were so inclined, which we seldom are.)
I am relieved that the new-genetics argument is now out in the open thanks to William Saletan's outrageously confrontational and apparently poorly researched piece in Slate. (See this morning's New York Times for details, plus of course Saletan's original outburst and the responses of his critics.) We are going to see this stuff slung around by various political forces in the years to come, and it is better to open up the argument while it can still be an argument instead of the vehemently opposing articles of faith that typically drive political discourse.
I had been thinking still further about my annoyance with Esalen optimism about the evolutionary potential of humanity...I've said before that it looks as though there is nothing inevitable about any single human life, just a different set of genetic predispositions that cultures the world over have found ways of behaviorally modifying, and a set of predispositions that does not seem to correlate clearly with any historically defined variable. I have tried to establish empirical claims that those predispositions may extend into possibilities that the more dogmatic among us are inclined to deny categorically. This does not change the fact that we all share the common drives and instincts that appear as lust, greed, envy, anger, sloth, gluttony, and, uh, pride? (I pride myself on never being able to remember the entire list of Seven Deadly Sins at any given moment, though I can usually come up with six of them, just never the same six.)
All of which seven were certainly in evidence in the post-Great War tangle of reshaping of Western Asia (as Gertrude Bell called it). Georgina Howell lectured at the Carlos Museum on Wednesday night, and I was led to read her book, as I had not been by Rory Stewart's brilliant critique of it in the October the whatevereth New York Review of Books. (Article available online by keywords.) Someone should write a comparative essay about Rory Stewart and Gertrude Bell, in terms of high modern and postmodern lives of adventurers. (I omit the vexed question of gender for the moment; it is enough to have a Yorkshirewoman and a Scotsman trekking in their respective decades right across forbidden terrain, and eventually ending up administering districts of Iraq to quite different ends: See Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes, which I believe has got a retitle in the American paperback edition, re his brief stint with the British occupation authority post-Gulf War II.) Bell really did tackle an absurd and impossible task, and outwitted some particularly thick Brits in the process. Stewart already realized what he was up against, and attempted his humane tasks more modestly and circumspectly, albeit confrontationally when it was called for.
Howell, as Stewart complains, is writing hagiography more than history. She seems to believe quite sincerely that Bell bequeathed Iraq thirty-seven years of a stable monarchy and honest government, whereas Stewart thinks the roots of the 1958 revolution were already there in the first election of Bell's favored candidate Faisal. And Howell finesses the question of how the Mosul vilayet ended up in Iraq...but.
The "but" in this case being my realization that running the story through Bell's perspective actually helped me straighten out who was doing what to whom and why, simply because other histories tend to take things one country at a time, or what was going on at Versailles, or whatever. Once you sort out the major players in terms of French intransigence over a subdivided Syrian mandate, Faisal demanding the Hashemites' fruits of the Arab Revolt at the same time that Ibn Saud was cranking up to kick the Hashemite dynasty out of the Hejax, with Winston Churchill aiming to accomplish the obsession of the postwar government, namely, to get the administrative costs under control by any means necessary, the dynamics seem much easier to understand. Whether Bell's romanticism bollixed things up or not is another, separate question from realizing that everyone was dealing with a multitude of contending issues all colliding at more or less the same moments. Mistakes were made. Stupidities were committed. And here we are in 2007.
Where the simmering situation in the Indian Frontier Provinces is about to be exacerbated again by the bamboo blossoms and the hordes of rats. I have read for years attempts to make sense of the Mizoram revolt in terms of Maoism, ethnic resentments, and the mass conversion of Mizo society by Baptist missionaries. None of it ever quite added up to something comprehensible.
It makes a great deal more sense to realize that fifty years ago the Mizos were trying to get government assistance for the impending famine, based on their longstanding knowledge that there were two or three types of famine that happened when the rat population exploded upon the 48-year flowering of the bamboo. It's a classic model of an ecosystem in balance through excess; when the bamboo yields fruit, the rats stop eating each other and start gorging on fruit. When that's gone, they eat every grain of rice in sight until that too is exhausted, after which they begin starving in the forest. Equilibrium resumes, after a comparable proportion of the human population has died off as an incidental result.
According to the Vanity Fair (yes, Vanity Fair) article, the Indian government of the 1950s dismissed all this as tribal superstition, and the ensuing famine led to the outbreak of the organized revolt, followed by wall-surrounded defensive villages that were a further impediment to rice growing. (Followed by those seemingly unintelligible reports from the field.) The current government has greater anthropological and ecological smarts. But nothing may be enough to offset the sheer magnitude of what is apparently starting to take place at this very moment.
The writer's lugubrious Malthusian meditations at the end of the essay are what you would expect from a journalist needing to end an essay, though the situation of our limited resources and the mass migration of peoples is a topic that I would insist on setting next to the incorrigible optimism of the Esalenites. (It's interesting that the current species of apocalyptic madness, the 2012'ers, is divided between those for whom 2012 will bring a fundamental alteration in human consciousness and global cooperation...optimist apocalypticism...and those who expect a total systems crash of the global ecosystem...pessimist apocalypticism. Versus those who think that all thing will continue, with surprises.)
I am fascinated by Vanity Fair's meticulously neutral or gossipy recitation of the lives of the superrich next to articles that set forth why the planet and the American economic order are going to hell in a handbasket for their own distinct reasons.
What all these topics have in common is the issue of right framing and right facts, when facts can be established at all. (I do not wish to get into the issue of whether a "fact" has any correlation with physical reality...it does. Those whose "facts" have no correlation at all with physical reality are usually exterminated by circumstances when the processes described by physics and biology take over the argument. The problem is that no "fact" can be framed in a neutral context, and we will always twist the evidence to fit our preferred prejudices...some of which could be justified by argument, if we were so inclined, which we seldom are.)
