Nick Harding

Expelled from 'Expelled'

2008-03-23T09:45:00.002-04:00

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/expelled.php

Taking Coal to Newcastle

2008-02-26T15:39:00.004-05:00

This story would be funnier, if I didn't know the gunwoman.

Armed Va. Woman Arrested After Scuffle With Guard
By Allison Klein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 23, 2008; Page B03

A Reston woman armed with a pistol walked into D.C. police headquarters Thursday afternoon and attempted to take a guard's gun before she was wrestled to the ground, authorities said.

Cynthia Nixon, 40, entered the building at 300 Indiana Ave. NW about 3:45 p.m. and pulled out a handgun, police said. She approached a private security officer who was guarding the door, demanding, "Give me your gun," according to charging papers filed yesterday.

Nixon then pointed her handgun at the guard and pulled the trigger, but the weapon did not fire, according to the charging documents.

The guard, who works for Hawk One, which provides security for the building, wrestled the weapon from her, the court papers show. At the same time, several D.C. police officers walked in the front door, saw what was happening and helped take her into custody. No one was hurt.

Nixon was charged with assaulting a police officer while armed, authorities said. She was ordered held without bond by a judge yesterday in D.C. Superior Court.

The charging papers quoted Nixon as telling police that her plan was to "rob a police officer of his weapon." Police found 36 rounds of ammunition, two bags of marijuana and two cigarettes filled with marijuana in a bag belonging to her, the charging documents said.

The police headquarters was equipped with metal detectors after a gunman
got into the building in November 1994 and fatally shot three law enforcement
officers and wounded another. The gunman, Bennie Lee Lawson Jr., had been
questioned a week earlier about a triple slaying in the city. After shooting the
officers, Lawson killed himself.

The building has since been renamed in honor of one of the victims that day, D.C. Police Sgt. Henry J. "Hank" Daly.

The Washington Post, 23 February 2008

Friendly Fire

2007-12-15T11:54:00.000-05:00

Most atheists are by definition open to uncomfortable truths, especially from one another. This was evident in the (mostly) enthusiastic response of the 2007 Atheist Alliance International conference to Sam Harris' call for atheists to supplement materialism with contemplation. But they ought not extend this forbearance to atheists who ventriloquize the religious establishment.

In a recent Nation article, Katha Pollitt attacks her fellow atheists without once addressing their arguments. Instead she imputes nefarious motives (fear of Muslim immigration) to both them and their readers. This is usually the strategy of theists, who prefer changing the subject to defending their beliefs. But it is surprising that The Nation published a piece reviewing what atheists might have said, only haven't.

She also indulges the theist chestnut of atheist futility in the face of entrenched religious majorities. In doing so, she is not so much discouraging radical minorities but outsiders. But this approach reveals it is Pollitt, and not another atheist, who differentiates Muslims from their fellow human beings. As Terence wrote, 'I think nothing human alien to me'.

Taking Historical Recreation Too Far

2007-10-19T11:07:00.000-04:00

I was dragged to too many historical residences, replete with tour guides in period costume, as a child. But I have always conceded the value of historical recreation, even if it assumes a weak imagination. But teachers at a Grambling, Louisiana, elementary school have taken it too far by 'lynching' some of their first graders.

Teachers were trying to explain an event in nearby Jena, where a vandal had dangled a noose from a tree on the grounds of a high school. But while students need to learn about lynching, they cannot do so by recreating it. First of all, no one survived lynching. And people were rarely lynched by members of the same race, let alone trusted teachers. But the students' expressions make you wonder if the latter description still applies. It is surprising that teachers touched their students (a virtual taboo) while simulating a violent historical act which is more likely to scare than educate first graders. When they are older, a better educational tool would be the book Without Sanctuary.

Second Thoughts about Suffrage

2007-10-06T18:30:00.000-04:00

Ann Coulter has called for an end to women's suffrage:

If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.

For a funnier take on the subject, watch girls unwittingly disenfranchise themselves.

Welcome Atheists!

2007-10-04T11:07:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Mojoey for listing me on the Atheist blogroll. For other members, check out the marquee on the sidebar.

Stupid and Proud

2007-09-21T20:20:00.001-04:00

Sorry I haven't been blogging in a while; my brother came all the way from Africa for my book party last weekend, and I've been enjoying his company.

Anyway, this entry's title refers to an event already some days old. One of the creationists on The View compounded her ignorance by expressing doubt about the shape of the Earth. Here's the clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNC117UYsHs

How does knowing the planet is round interfere with feeding her child?

Doubting Teresa

2007-08-26T11:34:00.000-04:00

Mother Teresa's diary reveals her crisis of faith
By Bruce Johnston in Rome
Last Updated: 7:41am BST 24/08/2007

Mother Teresa, who was put on the fast track to sainthood by the Pope after her death five years ago, was tormented by a crisis of belief for 50 years, her writings reveal.

Her letters and diaries present a completely different picture of the nun and Nobel peace prize winner from her public image as a woman confident of her faith.

Biographies would have to be rewritten to take the revelation into account, it was said in Rome yesterday.

The previously unpublished material is to be brought out as a volume in Italy. It was collected by Roman Catholic authorities in Calcutta after her death at the age of 87.

Mother Teresa, who worked for years among the poor of Calcutta, wrote in 1958: "My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains."

Because she was "forever smiling", people thought "my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing and that my intimacy with God and union with his will fill my heart. If only they knew . . ."

Mother Teresa, who was greatly admired by Diana, Princess of Wales, said in another letter: "The damned of Hell suffer eternal punishment because they experiment with the loss of God.

"In my own soul, I feel the terrible pain of this loss. I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not really exist."

Il Messeggero, Rome's popular daily newspaper, said: "The real Mother Teresa was one who for one year had visions and who for the next 50 had doubts - up until her death."

Her years of doubt coincided with the period when, after having visions, she decided to leave her teaching post at a privileged Calcutta school to help India's poor.

After her death the Pope waived the Vatican rule that prohibits investigation of the cause for beatification until five years after the subject's death. It was the first time the rule had been put aside in recent memory.

Mother Teresa's personal writings are being published next month as Il Segreto di Madre Teresa (Mother Teresa's Secret).

Daily Telegraph, 24 August 2007

Be Careful What You Wish For

2007-08-19T18:54:00.000-04:00

Risks in a Muslim Reformation
By Diana Muir
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Page B07

Salman Rushdie, Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof and Mansour al-Nogaidan are among the well-intentioned people who have called for an Islamic Reformation. They should be careful what they wish for.

The Protestant Reformation did precede the things these men admire about modernity in the West, including women's emancipation, political liberty, scientific breakthroughs, the wealth and opportunity created by the Industrial Revolution, and permission to think freely regarding God. But all this came later, and the Reformation was only part of what brought them about.

The Reformation was a time of intense focus on God and what He requires of people. As a movement, it was enthusiastic, narrow and far from tolerant. It and the Counter-Reformation brought two centuries of repression, war and massacre to the West. It's unlikely that anyone who lived through it would consider wishing a Reformation on Muslims.

And yet, even as some hope for such a turn of events -- presuming, it seems, a certain conclusion -- a Reformation is sweeping through the Muslim world. Westerners are generally aware that the Shiite and Sunni sects of Islam are struggling for dominance in Iraq. But more broadly, the words and doctrine promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis or Wahhabists are eerily similar to those of our 16th-century forebears.

Like the followers of Martin Luther and John Calvin, Islamic reformers reject the interpretations of generations of scholars in favor of seeking the word of God directly in scripture. Normative Islam follows one or another school of interpretation of scripture, known as a Madhab. Careful study leads students to understand that God's word is often nuanced. Nuance is not the stuff of reform. Salafi reformers argue that Muslims should ignore generations of sages, read the Koran and Hadith for themselves, and act on the truth they find. A popular Salafi quote from the early Islamic jurist Abu Hanifa reads: When a passage (Hadith) is found to be authentic (saheeh) then that is my path (Madhab).

As Luther put it: Sola scriptura (Scripture alone).

This is heady stuff. The conviction of having the Word direct from God can empower individuals to rebuke, to command and even to kill in His name. Protestant determination to follow the word of God straight from the Bible was accompanied by a desire to purify Christianity by emulating the beliefs and practices of the early church. Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; Sayyid Qutb, a leading Muslim Brotherhood thinker; and Ibn Wahab, the founder of modern Salafi, or Wahhabist, Islam, call upon Muslims to return to the uncorrupted beliefs and practices of early Islam and to become as pure as Salafis, or the first three generations of Muslims. To become, as it were, Puritans.

The call to purity appeals in part because in the Muslim world today corrupt holders of wealth and power resist moderate attempts at reform, much as the corrupt holders of wealth and power in the church and states in Luther's Europe resisted moderate reform.

Western pundits have debated whether Arabs who voted for Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood in the Palestinian and Egyptian parliamentary elections were voting for the Islamist religious program or voting against corruption. Surely it was a two-for-one deal. To vote for the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas is to vote against corruption and for returning to the purity of the days of the prophet Muhammad. This was a compelling idea when preached by Calvin. It is compelling still.

There are, of course, differences between the Protestant and Islamic reformations. In Islam today it is usually radical reformers who have reached first for the sword. In the European Reformation, things became tense when a determined minority demanded reform, but in general it was those church and state officials who held power who first resorted to violence.

In some European countries, the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation produced a rigid orthodoxy that stifled development for generations. In other countries the wars of religion were followed by the Enlightenment. Muslims might not follow a European course. They will choose whether they prefer societies shaped by Sayyid Qutb, who advocated closing the Islamic mind to everything but the ancient texts, or Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes), who preferred the open embrace of all knowledge.

In the near term, though, the Islamic Reformation will divide Muslim society as the Reformation divided Europe. A fervent minority in many countries is already pressing for narrow interpretations on issues such as veiling, whether to listen to music and replacing secular laws with religious codes. As we have seen in Europe and more recently in Afghanistan, Muslim Puritans are likely to take over communities where they are far from being the majority. Meanwhile, the majority has yet to construct an effective ideological defense of moderation.

Washington Post, 19 August 2007

Interdependence Day

2007-07-14T20:32:00.002-04:00

The 4th of July reminded me that I had not yet read The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. It's by my friend David Armitage, but I took a personal interest in it for another reason as well. The Declaration of Independence has always been my favorite founding document, as its bicentennial was celebrated during a formative period in my youth. Its natural-law affirmation of human equality facilitated, perhaps even determined, the evolution of my American patriotism into a more general cosmopolitanism.

Writing for a globalized readership, David speaks of a declaration of interdependence. He reminds today's commodity-conscious historians that the Declaration was printed on Dutch paper by an Irish publisher using a British printing press. David also documents over a hundred subsequent declarations of independence and declarations of rights inspired by the example of 1776. In one of his few factual errors, he misdates one of the latter; Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote her Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, not 1845.

Stanton's declaration is a reminder that the natural-law language of the second paragraph had a domestic as well as international context. Indeed, it primarily functioned to justify resistance to a sovereign. But as Americans were simultaneously separating from that sovereign, they had to establish their independence in international law. David builds upon J. G. A. Pocock's insight that the Declaration was 'performed in the discourse of the jus gentium', paying special attention to its last paragraph. This perspective subverts the parochial cliché that the Declaration has no legal force.

If John Locke inspired the second paragraph, then the godfather of the closing paragraph was the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. Vattel anticipated the late-eighteenth-century transition from natural law to positivism. Indeed it was only during this period that international law seemed distinct enough to merit its own name, coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1780.

But for all its novelty, international law was deeply establishmentarian. Americans would scarcely have aspired to independence if it hadn't guaranteed them the integrity accorded to sovereign states. David's approach effectively straddles the debate over the radicalism of the American Revolution.

Implicitly, he simultaneously enters the current fray over the legitimacy of interventionism. In ignorance of the Declaration's closing paragraph, the second paragraph's cosmopolitanism can appear to justify a messianic libertarianism. A more complete understanding of the text will hopefully temper Americans' love of freedom with a respect for peace.

My book is out!

2007-07-03T08:46:00.000-04:00

Amazon
Boydell & Brewer

How to Turn Man's Best Friend into Girl's Best Friend

2007-06-23T11:04:00.001-04:00

http://www.lifegem.com/secondary/beloved_pets_main2006.aspx

God Hitched

2007-06-12T20:16:00.000-04:00

I've been looking forward to God is not Great ever since I heard Christopher Hitchens was working on it. His attack on Mother Teresa, The Missionary Position, had thrilled me as a young atheist, and I later applauded when he gave Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger the same treatment. Puzzled by his recent apology for the overrated George Orwell, I expected that a return to skepticism would herald a return to form.

Hitchens delivers the sparkling rhetoric familiar to his connoisseurs. He has a particular knack for reviving worn formulations by inverting them. Mischievously, Hitchens describes Catholic education as 'no child's behind left'. And following Xenophanes and Feuerbach, he writes that 'God did not create man in his own image...it was the other way about'.

Paradoxically, this glibness reveals learning at every turn. Hitchens is more historically literate than the other cynosures of the 'new atheism', Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. This is particularly evident in his persuasive efforts to acquit atheism of Communist atrocities, and his countervailing attempt to secularize humanitarian movements -- such as abolitionism and the U. S. civil rights movement -- which were at least partly religious. He might have saved himself the trouble by admitting that it is an ill wind that blows no one any good.

Hitchens does not bother to secularize Mohandas Gandhi, of whom he is more critical. It is true that Gandhi injected spirituality into Indian nationalism, which exacerbated Hindu-Muslim tension in the prelude to partition. But Hitchens neglects Gandhi's ecumenicism, let alone the fact that he owed his ascent in the Indian National Congress to an alliance with Muslims.

Hitchens' greatest interpretive mistake is to compare the position of Arabic in Islam to that of Latin in medieval Catholicism. There are Muslims who don't speak Arabic, and the Koran must sound archaic to modern Arabs. But Arabic has never been exclusively clerical in the sense he means. This bad analogy is compounded by a factual error, the assumption that medieval Catholicism proscribed vernacular translations of the Bible. This policy was limited to Hitchens' native England, where it targeted the Lollard heresy.

Other factual errors, which might have been caught by a fact-checker, pile up. Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, not 2006. Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan (of Scopes trial fame) for president three times, not twice. Pat Robertson was not named for his father, Sen. Willis Robertson. Lucretius wrote De rerum natura before, not during, the reign of Augustus. But it would be churlish to hold these against a writer who ventriloquizes Socrates' admission that 'all he really "knew"...was the extent of his own ignorance'. The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

Hitchens mostly deploys his historical erudition against religion. But there is the positive case for atheism as well, appreciation for the beauty of the universe and relief at our insignificance within it. When Hitchens does get around to sketching an atheist cosmology, it feels perfunctory. Anyone looking for the consolations of atheism should listen to Julia Sweeney's one-woman show, Letting Go of God.

This is because God is not Great is a polemic. Some of it is so ironic as to be ephemeral, and Hitchens obviously struggled to adapt his essayist's style to the book he was writing. But if the result leaves the reader wanting more, it will have served its purpose.

Sharpton v. Hitchens

2007-06-02T13:14:00.000-04:00

This debate contained much more than Al Sharpton's controversial remarks about Mitt Romney's Mormonism. It was a provocative and often funny disquisition of religion and the cosmos. Here's the link:

http://www.slate.com/id/2166143/

Stay to the end for a cameo by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Jerry's Angels

2007-05-15T18:44:00.000-04:00

This funny press release speaks for itself:

LESBIANS CLAIM CREDIT FOR FALWELL DEMISE

The Lesbian Death Angels, concerned that Rev. Falwell's followers will misattribute the cause of their leader's demise to their antigod or to some weenie group like Soulforce, have announced that, in a mass worldwide action, they hexed at 10:30 am today and that the subject of their hex was the Rev. Jerry Falwell. In other words, they are claiming to be responsible for Jerry's death and wish the world to know that they are proud of it to boot.

"Falwell earned being hexed well into his next life with his post-9/11 comments on that event's cause made in a conversation with fellow telehatemonger Pat Robertson on Robertson's 700 Club broadcast", noted collective member Connie L. Ingus. "Too often when tyrants die -- particularly spiritual ones -- their past is glossed over into sweetness and light that doesn't begin to resemble the truth of what they did. Frankly, a heart attack hex was too nice. We should've added an addendum to make him come back as an innocent Muslim imam who gets ratted out by a rival faction and ends up in the U.S. rendition program, never to see the light of day again -- either that or as an out gay youth in Iran."

The LDA is the international body of pro-choice radical lesbians who meet in secret and not-so-secret cells, covens, and as individual practitioners each Tuesday morning to try to set the world back on its axis one hex at a time. Previous targets have included rapists who found themselves strangely compelled to walk into police stations and turn themselves in and others. This is one of the few successful hexes they have publicly taken credit for.

"Proselytizing is usually so rude", said Ms. Ingus. "Under normal circumstances, we're content just with the effects of our work. Lesbians who are meant to find us simply will. The Goddess is powerful enough to get that job done without our help."

The LDA feels no compunctions about the pain this announcement might cause the Reverend's family, as the Falwells have benefited from and participated in their patriarch's long campaign of hate without so much as a public hint of guilt for all the pain and death they have contributed to.

The LDA is still contemplating their next target for early karmic justice. The list of potentials is long. They wish to thank the Goddess for her swift response today.

http://www.bilerico.com/2007/05/003107.php

Televandalism

2007-05-13T17:54:00.000-04:00

I got excited yesterday when I heard Studio 360 interview Jonathan Miller about his upcoming PBS documentary A Brief History of Disbelief. It was something of a bait and switch technique, as I discovered that my local PBS affiliate had no immediate plans to televise it. While there are more books than ever promoting the so-called 'new atheism', the subject is still too hot for a metropolitan television audience. But I was delighted to find that someone had uploaded the British series onto youtube, and have spent the last two days watching it.

The documentary gets off to a rocky start, as Miller disavows the use of historical recreations. I don't much care for actors in period costume either, but he then attacked one of my favorite series by promising to avoid 'anything that you might be tempted to think of as Walking with Atheists'. Pondering why I felt differently about an animated series on paleontology, I realized that it might be because I am not an expert in the field and appreciated the condescension. Like pedagogies, documentaries will vary according to their audience. Miller's condemnation of recreations as 'vulgar' sits uncomfortably with his later praise for the popular and accessible deist, Tom Paine.

Curiously, Miller verges on hypocrisy by using an actor to vocalize famous freethinkers' quotations. The actor is not in period costume, but is shot from different angles depending on the figure he is ventriloquizing. The effect is very similar to that of a recreation, albeit on a smaller budget.

Miller also flirts with contradiction when justifying the need for his program. He begins with the truism that skepticism can limit the resurgent fundamentalism of recent years. But Miller undercuts this argument by observing that sections of European society (presumably those with few Muslim immigrants) are relatively indifferent to religion. He even goes so far as to envision a society in which atheism is simply taken for granted.

I was surprised to see an intellectual discourage reflection and historical inquiry, even though his remarks were limited to the subject of religion/cosmology. But here, as elsewhere, Miller is inconsistent. For the series is mostly given over to history, and this is its greatest strength. Both Miller and his distinguished guests are able to clarify devilishly complicated historical problems. For the most part they avoid error, although Miller puts the cart before the horse when calling Giordano Bruno a follower of Galileo.

Much of the program was new to me. I knew that Baron d'Holbach had been the first full throated atheist, but this was the first treatment which elevated him over his deist contemporaries Voltaire and Rousseau. And while I was familiar with the Epicureans' contributions to ancient science, I had been unaware of their impiety.

Nevertheless, Miller subverts the binary opposition of science and religion. Many scientists are religious, while many atheists know little about science. He does allow for one correlation, that modern science and technology have partially insulated us from the exigencies of the natural world which religion originally attempted to explain. But conscious atheism appears to have evolved, paradoxically enough, out of religious thought itself.

Paradise Lost

2007-04-09T20:07:00.000-04:00

The mass suicide at Jonestown was one of the first news stories to catch my attention. This was due not only to its body count, but the fact that other children were among the dead. It must have disturbed me, because I have not drunk Kool-Aid since. So I made sure to see Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple in the theater, and rewatched it tonight on PBS.

If you think you know the whole story, think again. I knew, for instance, that the Peoples Temple's size and discipline had rendered it influential in San Francisco politics. But I was surprised to see how high its reach extended, in pictures of Jones with Walter Mondale and Rosalynn Carter. Of course, politics was a double-edged sword; Congressman Leo Ryan's visit to Jonestown ended in his death, and that of 909 temple members.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the suicide itself. I had been under the impression that victims believed they were participating in a dry run which they would survive. But the audiotapes of Jones' delirious broadcasts over the compound's PA system make clear that the victims were witting and -- in many cases -- willing.

The tapes reveal Jones' megalomania, but also its limits. Needing to make a show of consulting his flock, Jones gave dissenters an opportunity to plead for their lives. Who could not be moved by Christine Miller, who argued that suicide would simply confirm the suspicions of the temple's detractors?

The film is all the more poignant for its matter-of-fact exposition. This is punctuated by ironic interludes, such as Jim Jones' sermon against family planning and euthanasia: 'who decides who lives and dies?' At points, Director Stanley Nelson verges on snark; why else did he play the temple choir's rendition of 'Something's Got a Hold of Me'? Amazingly, many of the survivors Nelson interviewed are able to laugh as well as cry.

I suspect that this film will have the last word on Jonestown. But given how much it altered my earlier impressions, I shall keep an open mind.

GENEsis

2007-04-07T11:56:00.000-04:00

Ever since I bought the Walking with Monsters DVD last autumn, I've been obsessed with paleozoic life. This week, my hobby finally progressed from DVDs to books. But when I got to Borders, there were just two books about the Permian-Triassic extinction and shelves of books about human evolution. At first I wondered at the futility of all that effort, given that most Americans believe God created humans in their present form. But perhaps modern science writers are simply trying to catch up to the even vaster creationist library. The book I bought, Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, seems to strive for a synthesis; quotations from Charles Darwin introduce chapters entitled 'Eden' and 'Exodus'.

Before the Dawn also synthesizes recent discoveries, another force driving the publication of books on evolution. Wade focuses upon genetics, which have put flesh on fossil bones. In certain cases, genes reveal almost as much information as do written records for later periods.

Most of Wade's account rests on two genomes, the Y chromosome and mitochrondrial DNA, which survive meiosis and conception intact. What differences they possess must result from mutations, which occur at a relatively predictable (and therefore datable) rate. Scientists have been able to trace these genomes, which are patrilineal and matrilineal respectively, back to a chromosomal Adam and mitochrondrial Eve. But in an inversion of Genesis, Eve antedated Adam by as much as 100,000 years.

The genetic clock also reveals our ancestors' whereabouts, because communities with the most mutations are also the oldest. Mitochrondrial and chromosomal DNA locate our ancestors' homeland in the Horn of Africa ('Eden'). But because this population was quite small, numbering as few as 5,000 people, migration is an important part of Wade's story.

Mitochondrial and chromosomal DNA reveal that the oldest distinct human populations are the San of southern Africa (sometimes called bushmen) and the Hadzabe of present-day Tanzania. Although their forbears left the ancestral East African homeland, it is likely that their click languages resemble those originally spoken there.

Language is important for Wade, who believes it was the competitive advantage which enabled humans to displace other hominids in Asia and Europe. About 50,000 years ago, a group of a few as 150 humans left Africa for southern Arabia. Amazingly, all non-African humans descend from this single cohort. Mitochondrial and chromosomal DNA have so discredited the rival theory, the 'multiregional hypothesis', that Wade doesn't even mention it.

But Wade interrogates other genes as well. For example, the gene which prompts hair of a certain length to fall out in other apes was inactivated 200,000 years ago. This allowed for long hair, which extended the scope for primate grooming and sociability. Appropriately enough, I happened to read this passage in the hair salon where my partner works. I'm not sure his boss appreciated it when I told her she belonged to the world's oldest profession.

The growth of head hair stood in stark contrast to the loss of body hair, which we can date to 1.2 million years ago. This was the last time Africans' gene for the skin pigment melanin changed in a significant way. Melanin protects us from the sun, just as our ancestors' body hair did previously. With the possible exception of Neanderthals, all humans had dark skin until recently as 10,000 years ago.

Another response to nakedness can be dated by a genome which isn't even human. The human body louse has evolved to grasp clothing as opposed to hair. A comparison of its genome to that of its relative, the head louse, indicates that people began to wear garments around 72,000 years ago.

The louse genome is a great example of how genetics can reveal information about human behavior. Wade also wants to show that genetic mutation can alter behavior, by way of subverting culture's dominance in accounts of change. But he sometimes risks an equally monocausal genetic determinism, which hardly fits with his emphasis upon language. My discomfort on this point may derive from my historical training, which couldn't measure genetic change even if it wanted to. But historians have documented countless instances of cultural change, where Wade struggles to fill a chapter about genes' influence during the last three millenia. While nature preceded nurture, the stately pace of the former contrasts greatly with the dynamic acceleration of the latter.

Look Away

2007-04-04T10:03:00.000-04:00

I'm reading an excellent book right now, which I'll review just as soon as I finish it. In the meantime, though, I'll continue to violate my self-denying ordinance on links. That said, this story does concern the putative focus of this blog -- history. Today's Washington Post contains a great article about the decline of Richmond's Museum of the Confederacy. Apparently, some of the museum's wounds have been self-inflicted; it failed to conduct a capital campaign for a long time, and paid routine expenses from its endowment. But more interestingly, from a social perspective, the museum's gate receipts are down. Part of this is due to competition from the American Civil War Center on the James River. The American Civil War Center weaves together Confederate, Union, and African-American points of view, whereas the Museum of the Confederacy has not been able to escape its origins as a shrine to the lost cause. The ACWC's success, and the MOC's decline, reflect changes in southern society. In part, both are a delayed reaction to the civil rights movement. The sector of society most responsive to civil rights was the business community, precisely the people who might have bailed the MOC out during a previous period. Civil rights has also presumably raised the consciousness of enough southern whites to depress gate receipts at the MOC. But more are increasingly indifferent. Surrounded by an unprecedented number of foreign immigrants and northern migrants, their Confederate nostalgia is atrophying.

Sex and Dad and Rock n' Roll

2007-04-03T16:22:00.000-04:00

Let's hope this is an April Fool's joke:

Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all.

In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Richards' father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.

MSNBC 3 April 2007

You Dropped a Bomb on Me

2007-03-29T22:51:00.000-04:00

I've been going to the National Zoo for years, but today was the first day I saw its O Line in use. This is the series of overhead platforms and cables which allow the zoo's orangutans to haul themselves between the Great Ape House and the Think Tank.

A crowd gathered to marvel at the illusion of freedom, but sighs yielded to snickers after one of the beasts relieved itself on the pedestrian walkway below. Later, a zoo employee told me that some visitors have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It gave a certain frisson to the zoo, which seems deceptively tame when crowded with preschoolers.

Reader's Block

2007-03-29T20:03:00.000-04:00

I haven't felt motivated to post, as I've been struggling to make progress with two titles: Robert C. Davis' Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters and Clive Holmes' Why Was Charles I Executed?. I may review them in the future, but am not making any promises. I shouldn't be bothered by this, as I've never subscribed to the 'clean your plate' theory of reading. But I'm scared that I might go off serious academic history, now that the pressures of teaching and writing are no longer there. Maybe that's why I started this blog, although you'll notice I have yet to review a muscular history.

So perhaps it is telling that I am more excited about Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation. I only recently heard her on 'This American Life', reviewing television portrayals of seventeenth-century New England (which was, she informed the listener, 'all situation and no comedy'). I'd say her enthusiasms (history and television) were infectious if I didn't already share them.

Anyway, an otherwise useless poster at my favorite message board suggested that I buy the audio book for her deadpan delivery. Indeed, she might have dispensed with the celebrities who read from original quotations. I just bought my first car with a CD player, and have been listening to Assassination Vacation while driving between my apartment and my parents' house. It is the first audio book I have bought since I listened to Margaret Thatcher's Path to Power on my way to a wedding in Charlottesville over ten years ago.

This time I decided to laugh with the author. She manages to combine ironic detachment with morbid obsession. So it isn't surprising to discover that that Assassination Vacation was inspired by a Stephen Sondheim musical. The subject, the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, gives wide scope for black humor. Particularly inspired was her description of Robert Todd Lincoln, who was present for all three assassinations, as a 'jinxed Zelig of doom'.

Another comic vein is furnished by the historical kitsch first satirized in the play Lettice and Lovage. In one hilarious episode a tourist bangs out 'Lean on Me' on the piano of Dr. Samuel Mudd, a distant relative of mine who treated John Wilkes Booth after he shot Abraham Lincoln. I blushed to remember my own impromptu performance, as a child, of 'The Entertainer' at Robert E. Lee's mansion on the grounds of Arlington Cemetery.

While I started off by contrasting Vowell with academic writing, this is pretty sophisticated as popular history goes. Indeed her book could fit comfortably under the rubric 'history of memory', a trendy field in academia. Surprisingly for a book on presidents, she references the farm team of American history -- people like Henry Adams and Emma Goldman (voiced by a man who seems to be channeling the Harvey Korman character Mother Marcus), who are staples of academic histories but little known to the general public. Garfield is scarcely more familiar, but emerges as a sympathetic bookworm. I particularly liked an 1880 speech, in which he warned Hiram College graduates to defend their leisure time against the demands of career. This admonition, which Vowell calls a 'slacker parable', stands nicely alongside similar pronouncements by John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell.

That said, Assassination Vacation ended on a sour note for me. This came when she criticized the Lincoln Memorial as I happened to drive by it. It didn't offend my local pride, as the Mall does in fact get uglier with each additional monument. And I also agree that the neo-classicism which dominated the early twentieth century was unimaginative. But to call it alien, and uphold the architecture of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright as more American, seems misguided on both empirical and aesthetic grounds. As Vowell herself admits, Wright celebrated the American prairie with a pastiche of foreign (Mayan, Japanese, etc.) designs. Worse, her analysis reeks of an artistic nationalism that is more tired than neo-classicism ever was. Sullivan helped to exorcise America's cultural cringe, but went too far in the direction of chauvinism. Our current situation requires us to identify, and perhaps even celebrate, linkages with other countries. Meanwhile, Vowell is now working on America's first exceptionalists, the Puritans of New England.

Elizabeth the Umpteenth

2007-03-24T16:51:00.000-04:00

It's become a truism that HBO has supplanted PBS in the purveyance of costume dramas. It's certainly surpassed public television in sex and gore, not to mention lavish sets. Watching Rome and now Elizabeth I, I have experienced a déjà vu specific to the 1970s -- when PBS aired I, Claudius and Elizabeth R. Beyond nostalgia, it's thrilling to see historical figures you've studied come to life. Having just watched Elizabeth I on demand, I thought I'd make it the subject of my first television review.

The first thing to catch my attention was the screenplay, which is Shakespearean. To be sure, the creators adapted actual quotations for their purposes. But it is nevertheless impressive that they were able to sustain such writing for three and a half hours. Some of it is also quite funny, such as the passage when Elizabeth notes that the homosexual Francis Bacon represents Middlesex in parliament.

The writers have a perfect vessel in Helen Mirren, in her best role since Gosford Park. She is the definitive Elizabeth. As others who have gone before her, she is imperious...but also impish. Mirren simply gives us a greater range of emotions than her illustrious predecessors. As one might expect, she can be vulnerable and hesitant. An important component of her portrayal is humor; one wonders if it wasn't also part of the original Elizabeth's popularity.

That said, Mirren's Elizabeth is upstaged by the earl of Essex. This has less to do with the acting and writing, and more to do with the actual history. Essex's chaotic style of vainglory is riveting, in any retelling of the story.

But as the movie makes clear, gallant grasshoppers are survived by dour ants. These ants write history, and point out the inaccuracies of costume dramas. These are minimal in Elizabeth I, and finessed when they happen. We know of no meetings between Elizabeth and her Scottish relatives, but these are explained by the secrecy with which they play out in the movie. The papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth, Regnans in excelsis, was dated sixteen years too late. Conversely, the abolition of individual monopolies comes a generation earlier than it did in history. But the movie is largely accurate, belying the sexist comparison of artworks to women; they can be both beautiful and truthful.

My only complaint about Elizabeth I is that it might have covered her whole life, as did Elizabeth R. The creators may have decided to avoid Elizabeth's early career, as this was the subject of Shekhar Kapur's film Elizabeth. But the latter was a campy melodrama, which even the prodigious talents of Cate Blanchett could not save. I am sad to report that Kapur and Blanchett are at work on a sequel. I can only hope that HBO and Mirren have stolen their thunder.

People will do anything for an upgrade!

2007-03-19T15:46:00.000-04:00

I didn't mean for this blog to become a clearinghouse for links, but this made me laugh. Maybe I should be ashamed of that...

BA PASSENGER SITS NEXT TO CORPSE
MY FIVE-HOUR HELL IN BA FIRST CLASS.. SITTING BY A CORPSE
By Stephen Moyes 19/03/2007

A PASSENGER has told how he spent five hours sitting next to a corpse while flying First Class on British Airways.

Paul Trinder, 54, woke at 30,000ft to discover cabin crew strapping the body of a woman, who died after the plane took off, into the seat across the aisle.

He watched in horror as the corpse repeatedly slid beneath the seatbelt on to the cabin floor of the Boeing 747.

He feared it was decomposing and giving off a foul smell. And, as if that was not enough, his peace was further wrecked by the wailing of grieving relatives of the dead passenger.

Building firm boss Paul, 54, a BA Gold Card holder who paid nearly £4,000 for the Delhi-Heathrow flight, said: "I woke to see cabin crew manoeuvring what looked like a sack of potatoes into the seat. Slowly, through the darkness, I realised it was a body. At first, I thought I was dreaming. Then I was convinced it was a big wind-up.

"The corpse was strapped into the seat but because of turbulence it kept slipping down on to the floor. It was horrific. The body had to be wedged in place with lots of pillows.

"Then the relatives were allowed to sit in First Class and spent the next five hours wailing and weeping."

Paul, from Brackley, Northants, said that initially he did not realise the body of the woman, who was in her 70s, was dead. He said: "I went to the galley and said, 'She doesn't look too well'. The crew told me, 'We put out a call to the doctor but it was too late. She's expired'. I asked if they knew what she'd died of. It could have been an infectious disease.

"You could see they'd never thought of it. They looked at each other open-mouthed. It was surreal.

"When I complained, I was told to 'get over it'. I was also told BA's corpse policy would remain 'unless I've got any better ideas'. In future, if I have a choice of airlines on a particular route I'll choose anyone but BA."

BA said the body was moved from Economy on the Boeing 747 because there was more space in First Class.

The airline said: "We apologise, but our crew were working in difficult circumstances and chose the option they thought would cause least disruption."

Daily Mirror, 19 March 2007

Nobels Oblige

2007-03-16T19:53:00.000-04:00

When I saw that Jimmy Carter had published a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, I felt gratified. I had, you see, made the same argument back in college, and taken some heat for it. And rightly so, because it was a bad analogy; it doesn't do justice to the relative proportions of Jews and Arabs west of the Jordan, or to the civil rights enjoyed by both within the boundaries of 1948. The combination of democracy, partition, and terror makes me think more often of twentieth-century Ireland. Nevertheless, I was cheered to see a former president take on the sacred cow of U. S. foreign policy.

I was also interested by the chorus of critics which pilloried the book upon its publication. I used to teach at Emory, where one of my former colleagues joined a considerable exodus (please indulge me) from the Carter Center. Refracted through the media, their complaints seemed pedantic: the book contained historical inaccuracies and a purloined map. Splitting hairs over detail, Carter's opponents seemingly conceded the justice of his larger argument.

But having read the book, I now see that the historical mistakes detract from Carter's overall point. At one point (p. 56), he suggests that Muslims lived in the Roman empire. On the next page Carter argues that Arab nationalism was a response to Zionism. But Arab nationalism preceded Zionist migration, inspiring an Egyptian revolt against austerity measures mandated by European investors in 1882. Carter could have rectified these mistakes with greater linguistic precision, or maybe he genuinely misunderstands the history. And while I don't think these inaccuracies are linked to his argument, I can see why others might think differently.

The book also evinced an unpleasant aspect of Carter that I rememberd from his administration: his narcissism. Perhaps his defeat in 1980 chastened him, for his retirement has been exemplary. I particularly applauded his opposition to the second Iraq war, which clinched the Nobel peace prize. But this last accolade appears to have revived his vanity. The book is structured around Carter's engagement with the Middle East. Some of this is an understandable attempt to simplify a complicated situation by personalizing it. But it can lead to non-sequiturs, where Carter inserts himself into episodes which didn't involve him at all. Describing the Lebanese civil war, he writes (on p. 60) that 'Syrian forces moved in to restore order in June 1976 (the year I was elected president)'.

Carter also takes an interest in the Middle East because of his religious background. This leads to hilarious recollections, such as his warning to Golda Meir that 'Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God' (p. 32). In Carter, American evangelicalism may be atoning for the years of uncritical support it has offered up to Israel.

It does seem churlish to question the motivation behind a gesture which is basically good. Carter's policy prescriptions are fairer than those of the present U. S. administration. But he doesn't press home the Apartheid analogy, even though Joseph Lelyveld thinks it justified in certain contexts. At one point he offers one that is more compelling, likening the Palestinians to the Creek Indians who once inhabited the lands he now farms (p. 28). But ultimately, the civic politics of the United States offer American Indians greater opportunities than Arabs can expect from an Israeli nation state. Moreover, the demographics ensure that Israelis will never have it as easy as frontier Americans; Zionist settlers harbored no pathogens unfamiliar to Palestinians. So the dynamic is one of uncertain coexistence; perhaps Ireland is the best parallel on this count too. Of course, Irish Protestants and their Afrikaner and American coreligionists partake in the Jewish tradition of divine election.

Which Wilson?

2007-03-12T12:00:00.000-04:00

Well, it didn't take long for me to break my embargo on contemporary American politics! In my defense, I can only plead that it comes from a historical perspective on the second war in Iraq. I've been reading Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism, and have responded with that rare feeling of recognition that comes when you read someone else writing (more or less) what you've been thinking. For me that moment came in a passage tracking changes in the aesthetics of war (p. 20). Where early-twentieth-century art juxtaposed technological progress with moral atavism, smart bombs now promise to sanitize war (at least when waged by their possessors). When Bacevich quoted Michael Ignatieff to the effect that war is now 'a spectacle', I remembered my own feeling that Bush-era war amounts to circuses without bread.

Bacevich recites a familiar indictment. In a justifiable overstatement, Bacevich argues (on p. 1) that rather 'than America's matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's arsenal of high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for'. Bacevich is also correct to stress how far our recent militarism represents a deviation from American tradition, which stigmatized a professional military on grounds of economy and liberty.

But The New American Militarism is more original for venturing beyond complaint, to explanation. Bacevich rightly eschews an ad hominem approach; Bush and Cheney are symptoms, not causes. He understands that this differentiates him from other critics of militarism (he singles out Chalmers Johnson, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Mann). But he overlooks the corresponding difference with its exponents, who routinely explain American imperialism with reference to dictatorial atrocities. By comparison, Bacevich's politicians are buffeted by the forces of Zetigeist and ideology.

So what is his explanation? Those of us who never bought Saddam's connection to 9/11 will not be surprised to find militarism's origins in an overcompensation for the loss in Vietnam and (to a lesser extent) 1930s appeasement. Bacevich retells his story from the perspective of generals, neoconservatives, and evangelicals. I might have liked something on defense contractors, the 'military-industrial complex' Eisenhower warned against. This might have disturbed the centrality of Vietnam, but Bacevich himself introduces at least one other precedent (Wilsonian interventionism). He also devotes time to an impulse which has determined the location, if not the intensity, of our recent militarism: the contradictory desire to secure both Israel and oil supplies.

Bacevich not only diagnoses, he prescribes. Befitting a comparatively recent problem, his solution is a return to first principles. This can be summarized by the concept of defense, which is not the offense suggested by modern casuists. Preemptive war is rightly dismissed; force should be a last resort. But while some retrenchment overseas seems sensible, a proposed evacuation of South Korea and Japan is at odds with the headlines. Bacevich also seeks to reconnect the armed services to the civilian population. This might improve the current situation, in which most Americans compensate for their failure to serve by idolizing the military caste. But his specific proposals sit awkwardly with his emphasis on Vietnam. He rejects the draft, which ended with that war. But he wants far-reaching reforms of the GI Bill and the military academies, which preceded Vietnam by decades.

I do have other, more general, questions. Bacevich prefaces his book with a potted autobiography stressing his service in Vietnam, an experience which apparently propelled him into political conservatism. Why the different response to Iraq the sequel? After all, the parallels are compelling: a Texan president misrepresents a casus belli to Congress, which authorizes him to commit troops without a UN Security Council resolution. To be sure, there are differences. Saddam was not tied to an anti-American network or ideology in the same way North Vietnam was. Anti-war protesters have supported our volunteer military, while hippies condemned draftees with little justice. Yet this recent respect for soldiers, even on the part of pacifists, is evidence for the very militarism Bacevich decries. I have wondered the same thing of my senator, Jim Webb, who served in and backed the war in Vietnam and has gone on to oppose the current war.

My biggest problem with the book is its uncritical use of the adjective, 'Wilsonian'. Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy was hopelessly inconsistent. Not only did his war fail to render the genre obsolete, but the very notion that it could was Orwellian avant la lettre. Wilson established the nation-state as the paradigmatic building block of Europe, even as he constructed a supernational brake on its powers in the League of Nations. If this was an attempt at checks and balances, it has failed. One straightforward sense of the word 'Wilsonian' refers to promotion of democracy abroad, and this is how Bacevich uses it. But he applies it to politicians who have betrayed another component of Wilson's agenda. How can George W. Bush, with his contempt for the United Nations, be 'the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself' (p. 12) ? I'm sure someone else has made this point, and I had to stop myself from going down to the Library of Congress to look it up. Perhaps someone will be so kind as to leave a reference in the comments section.

Perhaps we should forge a new vocabulary. If 'Wilsonianism' is usally contrasted with 'realism', then why not 'idealism'? This has problems too, in so far as the term 'realism' conceals idealisms of its own (the fetish for balance, to take one). My own preference is for 'messianism', whose religious connotations are eminently appropriate in the case of George W. Bush but are dispensable in the event that American imperialism becomes more secular. I hate to focus on something which is not essential to Bacevich's argument, but obviously Woodrow Wilson is a pet peeve of mine.

Why blog?

2007-03-10T21:25:00.000-05:00

I used to ask this question, back when I was a gainfully employed historian. Blogs have two problems. First, they aren't subject to peer review or professional editing. Second, they tend to rehash or reinterpret existing information rather than increasing human knowledge.

My misgivings on the first point have receded, in inverse relation to my publishing experience. Peer reviewers and editors are valuable; you want to have their input if you can. But the improvements they occasion never meet your wildest expectations. Moreover, I can edit a blog following publication. I hope this isn't too irritating, and will try to restrain myself if a change would render a comment incomprehensible.

The second point remains. But having failed to get a tenure track job, I no longer have the resources to pursue original research. While I have always been a cultural consumer, that role has almost completely eclipsed whatever identity I once had as a producer. This blog recognizes that fact, insofar as it will take its inspiration from the culture I am consuming. Whether my posts will be formal reviews or not remains to be seen.

The transition from producer to consumer has had one silver lining. I always resisted specialization, which may have contributed to my academic difficulties. Now I can read and think more widely than before. In a way, 'nothing left to lose' is another word for freedom.

Still, there will be limits. I do not intend to touch on contemporary American politics; this subject is oversubscribed and sterile. That said, I live near Washington and may not be able to resist an occasional reference to the local industry/spectator sport. I will not cover the visual arts, where I have always been a complete philistine. And I will likely avoid contemporary fiction, which leaves me somewhat cold. Everything else is fair game.