Hippie Hermeneutics July 22, 2008
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts.2 comments
If you are over 40, or exceptionally musically literate, you will probably find this video hilarious.
If you are under 40, you may not get it; but that will be your loss.
Ordnung Und Bier July 6, 2008
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts.4 comments
My apologies for the lack of blog posts recently. A looming book deadline and a two-week vacation in Germany had me otherwise occupied.
Germany is a beautiful and interesting country—gorgeous countryside, impressive castles and churches that date back to the medieval period, and a 2000 year history well preserved in their museums.
But what Germans like to do most is party. Germany is awash in beer! In Munich at 10:00 A.M, during the week, every café or beer garden will be full of people indulging in their late morning snack—weisswurst ( a veal sausage) and weissbier (a wheat beer, also called hefeweizen). And a 2000 year history provides them with endless opportunities for anniversaries that require celebration. Every city we visited seemed to have an anniversary celebration in their city squares, which were closed to traffic and lined with booths selling—well, more beer.
Our visit coincided with the European soccer championships that they take very seriously and provide an additional excuse for more parties. Imagine the atmosphere of the Super Bowl, except there is a game every 2 or 3 days. So every 2 or 3 days is an occasion for much of the population to gather in brew houses with high definition TV and—drink more beer.
The primary function of beer is to wash down huge portions of as many kinds of animal fats as will fit on one plate. Of course, fat is where the flavor is so the food is delicious and well prepared. (I highly recommend the pig’s knuckle and the boiled beef with horseradish sauce.) But occasionally we had to seek refuge from the lipids in an Italian or Turkish restaurant. (There are many ethnic restaurants in Germany).
Despite the calories they consume, we saw few excessively overweight people. That is probably because there is seldom parking to be found, so any trip requires a good walk.
Of course, we were traveling with beer connoisseurs on a mission (at one point I think we visited 4 brew houses in 2 hours in search of the perfect pils) so perhaps the population we sampled was heavily biased. But the beer culture there is truly impressive.
We caught a break from the beer in Germany’s wine country. I have always enjoyed the countryside in the Napa Valley but it does not compare to the Rhine River Valley—miles of hillsides covered with grapes, gently sloping to the river’s edge, and dotted with medieval castles and quaint villages. The boat trip down the Rhine sipping a fine Reisling spatlese (yes beer was available as well) was one of the highlights of the trip.
One winery we visited (in Franconia) was located in a hospital! As you enter the lobby of the hospital, the first thing to draw your attention is a display in the center of the room advertising the wines available that season. Somehow, I cannot picture that display in the United States.
With all the drinking and celebration, you would think public intoxication would be a problem. But not so. Despite the thousands of people milling about drinking beer at the anniversary celebrations, and after the soccer games when they were quite rowdy but not at all violent or destructive, we very seldom saw any police. In fact we went days without seeing a cop.
Germany’s reputation for order is well deserved. Even their drunks are well-behaved.
Philosophy of Soccer? June 25, 2008
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Culture, Nina Rosenstand's Posts.2 comments
I heard an interesting analysis on Danish public radio the other day about the political impact of soccer. So, in fond recollection of our interesting baseball debate (archived), I thought I’d share some of those ideas with you. An author and soccer expert, Joakim Jakobsen, was interviewed about a recent book, in which he speculates that soccer has accomplished what the United Nations and the European Union have failed to achieve: creating a universal form of communication. According to the author, soccer comprises both analytical and emotional thinking, and everyone can relate to the analysis aspect as well as the emotional highs and lows. So here is my first problem with that analysis: I grew up with soccer being played all around me, but I don’t understand much about the game, and I really don’t feel any emotional pull (not like baseball, which I have learned to love). So, I guess I’m on the outside there, not even looking in. For another thing, the author presents a phenomenon that is typical outside of the U.S., so if soccer is destined to be the universal language of communication, it is still in our future, not in our present.
The next interesting idea expressed on the show was that the universality of the soccer “language” has a tilt toward nationalism: prominent as well as smaller or emerging nations find a new identity once their teams start doing well, internationally—case in point, Turkey in the current European Cup games. Sometimes this takes the shape of aggression, and sometimes it is channeled into more congenial forms, but either way I see it as a nice little paradox of universality vs. group spirit. Interestingly, the analysts who are praising soccer as a unifying global force have to concede that a certain kind of radical nationalism may be a side product of it—a side product that, more often than not, erupts in violence among the fans, with occasional fatalities.
So what say you? Are you soccer fans? Is soccer to you really a language that transcends borders? Do you feel emotionally connected to humanity when watching/playing soccer, in a way that doesn’t happen when you engage in golf, baseball, or basketball? Or is your sense of group identity enhanced, at the cost of global connectivity?
God’s Software June 3, 2008
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Science.13 comments
There is a good deal of interest in evolutionary explanations of religious belief. This research project is using computer simulations to mimic an evolutionary process.
The computer model begins with assumption that some people have a genetic disposition to communicate unverifiable information to others and then compares the reproductive success of people who communicate real information with those who pass on unreal information.
“Under most scenarios, “believers in the unreal” went extinct. But when Dow [the writer of the program] included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished. ”
‘” Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them,’ Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious”.
So what is this clear signal? Why would non-believers have been touched by the faith of the religious? Could it perhaps be the sense of psychological certainty possessed by believers, facing conditions of real uncertainty, that made non-believers willing to communicate with believers.
Is Sensitivity Always Preferable? April 15, 2008
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Culture, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Teaching.14 comments
L.A. Times had an op-ed debate April 15 you may find interesting: Do students have a right not to be offended in college? Or should the college experience be challenging to the students’ preconceived notions? Greg Lukianoff (a constitutional lawyer and a blogger at the Huffington Post) and Michael Shermer (the publisher of Skeptic magazine) explore the issue: Lukianoff cites a number of cases where professors and students have been disciplined for “offensive” speech and actions, and concludes,
If you limit speech to only that which students and administrators find “comfortable” (a category that seems to get smaller daily), academic freedom and free speech on campus will die. If colleges and universities have any “customer service” obligation, it is to expose students to diverse views, not to censor them. Higher education’s function is to serve as a forum for serious debate, discussion and intellectual innovation. Done correctly, feelings will be hurt, beliefs will be challenged, and sacred cows will be barbecued. Being offended is what happens when you have your deepest beliefs challenged, and if you make it through college without ever having been offended, you should ask for your money back.
Shermer, on the other hand, argues that colleges and universities are marketplaces with the right to set up their own rules and speech codes:
I will make a free-market case for treating universities and colleges as corporations that offer products and services (education and diplomas) to potential customers (students). As such, each academic corporation sets up a mission statement about what it stands for, what it offers and especially what it expects from its customers when they are on company property; that is, its rules.
But is this telling the whole story? I think not. Marketplace dynamics is one thing—but what Lukianoff is talking about is not the right of colleges to shape their own standards, it is a questioning of a trend throughout all higher learning institutions today. I’d be curious to hear from our students: Many of your instructors have syllabi which prohibit offensive speech and actions in class (such as my own syllabi), and most of your instructors are mindful of the sensitivities of students. Do you favor this trend, or do you long for the old days of less politically correct speech on campus? Do you see those days as intellectually challenging, or simply offensive?
(The op-ed debate for April 14 was about political bias on campuses—no less interesting! Maybe we can return to that topic.)
Good Art Is Like Good Sex April 5, 2008
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Art and Music, Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Science.4 comments
Brian Boyd’s essay in the American Scholar on the evolutionary origin of art and narrative is speculative but nevertheless interesting on a variety of levels. He argues that art and storytelling are adaptations.
“Art is a form of cognitive play with pattern…Our adult compulsion for the cognitive play of art—from tribal work songs to tradesmen’s transistors to urbanites’ iPods—allows us to extend and refine the neural pathways that produce and process pattern in sonic, visual, and kinetic modes, and especially in sociality.”
Art makes us smarter, as a species, because it enhances our capacity for complex pattern recognition. The cognitive play of art—both its production and consumption—influences differential survival rates thus conferring a reproductive advantage on those who participate.
And why do we engage in this cognitive play? In a word, pleasure.
It’s the pursuit of pleasure, at least of the kind that is produced by pattern recognition, that explains the emergence of human intelligence—so much for Plato’s campaign against artists and religion’s campaign against pleasure.
Perhaps this is what Mill had in mind when he argued that the higher pleasures are to be valued more highly than the lower pleasures.
I guess good sex guided by the Kama Sutra must be better than unaided good sex.
Who is John Galt? Clay, or Pitt? March 29, 2008
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Culture, Film, Nina Rosenstand's Posts.4 comments
You may have seen bumper stickers around the country—not as many now as in previous decades, but I think we are likely to see more of them: “Who is John Galt?” Some of you will know that John Galt is one of the main characters in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s novel from 1957, and in the novel the question of John Galt’s identity is increasingly important as the plot develops. And perhaps, after more than 50 years, we will actually get to see a film based on Atlas Shrugged! Amazingly, this American classic hasn’t been officially visualized yet, but it isn’t for lack of trying: According to Wikipedia, attempts to boil the mammoth novel down to movie size have been underway since 1972, and Rand herself was working on the screenplay when she died ten years later. And now Lionsgate is striving to bring it to a theater near you in 2009, with (possibly) Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart. Can Jolie portray a literary hero of mythical stature? We shall see. I’d probably prefer someone else as Dagny, but I’ll watch it, and I plan on being magnanimous and ready to welcome an even partially good film. Reading about the production on the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) website made me curious: the elusive but all-important character of John Galt has two actors listed: Brad Pitt (“rumored,” it says), and an unknown, Jamie Clay. Now it isn’t likely that John Galt will be portrayed by two people, so what’s up? It turns out to be a prank: Jamie Clay is not an actor, but he is an Ayn Rand fan with friends who have a sense of humor, and they posted his name on IMDB as the new incarnation of John Galt. In this (supposedly authentic) letter posted on the Ayn Rand website The Atlasphere Clay tells the story, and claims they’d have to torture him to play John Galt. Apparently IMDB was informed that it was a prank, and the name disappeared, only to reappear again.
Now why is this worth blogging about? Because it is, in a sense, completely in the spirit of Ayn Rand, and Atlas Shrugged. In the novel the identity of John Galt is a mystery to all but a select few, and now the movie hype is reviving the Galt mystery, apparently inadvertently. In Old Hollywood of 50 years ago, such a mystery would have been created on purpose as part of the hype, and the tabloids would have been guessing as to the actor’s identity. Today the Internet picks up a story and it acquires a life of its own—free advertising for Lionsgate. Even so, it amuses this mostly cynical heart of mine; in a universe of conspiracies, I think Jamie Clay would probably be John Galt: Double disinformation. For those who really care, some Ayn Rand fans would rather see Christian Bale than Brad Pitt as John Galt…
American Anti-Intellectualism February 24, 2008
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Teaching.5 comments
In all the hand-wringing about our dysfunctional education system, the issue that is almost never discussed is that most Americans really do not value education as an intrinsic good. We value it only instrumentally– as a means to getting a job or improving one’s salary–but not something to be intensely pursued as something worthy in itself.
Susan Jacoby assembles evidence of American anti-intellectualism.
“According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”
That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.”
There is no regime of student testing, program of teacher training, or voucher system that will correct for this defiency. If we want to know why American students are falling behind the rest of the world in educational achievement, we need look no further than the idea that knowledge is nothing but a meal ticket.
What Not To Wear February 15, 2008
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Teaching.1 comment so far
Should anyone want to listen in on academics discussing fashion, here it is.
From the comments: “The same lack of style which marks one as a force to be reckoned with inside academia gets taken as evidence of mental deficiency outside.”
Students should be aware of the finely-honed sense of sartorial signalling we professors deploy each morning.
Hell is Freezing Over January 17, 2008
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts.2 comments
It snowed in Baghdad last week, and
