Tag Archives: evolution

What Is Mein Kampf about?

12 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by in History

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Adolf Hitler in Color

“Mein Kampf is fundamentally a text about nature. About what belongs in nature and what doesn’t belong in nature.

It describes nature as a conflict of races; everything else is incidental. The only things which truly exists in the human world are races, and the only thing they’re supposed to be doing is competing for land and resources.

In this text, the Jews figure not as a race — not as an inferior race, not as a superior race — but as something totally supernatural which has somehow come into the world and introduced evil.

The Jews have an ability which is, in effect, superhuman. They can do one thing that no one else can do, and that’s bring ways of thinking into the world.

So from Hitler’s point of view, the Jews are not actually subhuman. They’re more like superhuman, though that’s not quite right either. From Hitler’s point of view, and from the point of view of several leading Nazis, the Jews are not really human at all. They’re para-human: they only appear to be human, but are actually something else.

The evil that the Jews have introduced into the world — and this strikes me as very important — is ethical thinking. What the Jews have done which is so wrong, is to confuse our minds by introducing ideas which are not about racial struggle. They’ve introduced ethical life to the world.

So Hitler presents capitalism as Jewish; he presents communism as Jewish; he presents Christianity as Jewish.

Why? Because all of these ideas, different though they might seem, have the common feature that they allow people to see each other in non-racial terms. Whether I’m signing a contract with you, making a revolution with you, attending mass with you, it’s not race that matters. It’s some kind of other reciprocity.

Therefore Hitler could say, as he did say, that Saint Paul was basically the same person as Leon Trotsky…

Nature can only be pure if the Jews are gone, because Jews are the special, supernatural beings who make us something that we’re not.”

__________

Timothy Snyder, speaking in Krakow at the “Unimaginable” conference earlier this year. (He also touches on these themes around minute 20 in this 2013 talk at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.)

Snyder, who teaches history at Yale, has a new book out, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Writing. I can highly recommend not only his talks like the one above, but his written work, which is dynamic and crisp, and shows a true mastering of the broad political, cultural, and military forces of the early 20th century. His last effort, the highly acclaimed, subversive history of the second world war Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, has a place at the top of my shelf.

To get a condensed version of Snyder’s take on the ideology of the Reich, you can check out his article soon to be published in the New York Review of Books, “Hitler’s World”. In it, he gives depth to some of the concepts detailed above (Snyder has clearly been fixated on the project of clearing up Hitlerite ideology for some time). The following slice is among the most informative of the piece, and it lays bare the claims of those on both sides of the religious-atheist debate who try to claim the Führer as their opponents’ ally:

Hitler’s presentation of the Jewish threat revealed his particular amalgamation of religious and zoological ideas. If the Jew triumphs, Hitler wrote, “then his crown of victory will be the funeral wreath of the human species.” On the one hand, Hitler’s image of a universe without human beings accepted science’s verdict of an ancient planet on which humanity had evolved. After the Jewish victory, he wrote, “earth will once again wing its way through the universe entirely without humans, as was the case millions of years ago.” At the same time, as he made clear in the very same passage of My Struggle, this ancient earth of races and extermination was the Creation of God. “Therefore I believe myself to be acting according to the wishes of the Creator. Insofar as I restrain the Jew, I am defending the work of the Lord.”

Continue on topic:

Timothy Snyder

Charles Darwin Decides to Marry

30 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by in Biography, History

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Richmond - Charles Darwin J980057

In late July of 1838, a twenty-nine-year-old Charles Darwin, mulling over his charmed courtship of cousin Emma Wedgwood, split two pages of his journal for a cost-benefit analysis in which he jotted the following:

“This is the Question [whether to marry or not].

Marry:

Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (& friend in old age) — who will feel interested in one. Object to be beloved & played with — better than a dog anyhow. Home, & someone to take care of house. Charms of music & female chit-chat — these things good for one’s health. But terrible loss of time.

My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.

Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.,

Not Marry

Freedom to go where one liked. Choice of Society & little of it. Conversation of clever men at clubs. Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.— To have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling. Loss of time. — cannot read in
the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much.)

Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —

It being proved necessary to Marry.

Marry when? Soon or Late?

The Governor says soon for otherwise bad if one has children — one’s character is more flexible — one’s feelings more lively & if one does not marry soon, one misses so much good pure happiness.

But then if I married tomorrow: there would be an infinity of trouble & expense in getting & furnishing a house… Then how should I manage all my business if I were obliged to go every day walking with my wife.— Eheu!! I never should know French, or see the Continent, or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales — poor slave. — you will be worse than a negro. And then horrid poverty, (without one’s wife was better than an angel & had money). Never mind my boy —  Cheer up — One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in one’s face, already beginning to wrinkle. Never mind, trust to chance. Keep a sharp look out — there is many a happy slave.”

__________

Selections from the diaries of Charles Darwin, which you can find neatly summarized in Adam Gopnik’s short book Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Darwin, and the Birth of the Modern Age. And so the either-or above seemed to settle it. The Darwins were married on January 29th, 1829. 

Gopnik, a fluent, often funny writer and hyper-articulate storyteller, has produced several assessments of Darwin the man, the spouse, and the father. In his essay “Is There a Secret to a Happy Marriage?,” he hinges his theory of marriage on the relationship between Emma and Charles, opening:

Anyone who tells you their rules for a happy marriage doesn’t have one. There’s a truth universally acknowledged, or one that ought to be anyway.

Just as the people who write books about good sex are never people you would want to sleep with, and the academics who write articles about the disappearance of civility always sound ferociously angry, the people who write about the way to sustain a good marriage are usually on their third.

Gopnik goes on, quickly making his way to dissecting Darwin’s marriage:

What made it work? My theory is that happy marriages, from the Darwins on down, are made up of a steady, unchanging formula of lust, laughter and loyalty.

The Darwins had lust, certainly — 10 children in 17 years suggests as much anyway — and they had laughter. Emma loved to tease Charles about his passion, already evident in youth, for obsessive theorizing.

“After our marriage,” she wrote to him early on, “you will be forming theories about me, and if I am cross or out of temper you will only consider: ‘What does that prove?’ which will be a very philosophical way of considering it.”

And loyalty? Well, despite Emma’s Christian faith, she stood by him through all the evolutionary wars, and did for him the one thing only a loyal spouse can do — pretend he wasn’t in when German journalists came calling.

So, marriages are made of lust, laughter and loyalty — but the three have to be kept in constant passage, transitively, back and forth, so that as one subsides for a time, the others rise.

Read on:

Darwin Journal - Marry

A Part of Being Human: John Updike Explains His Christianity

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by in Interview, Religion

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John Updike

Questioner: Why do you think the theme of religion has played such a role in your writing?

John Updike: I was raised, without terrific ardor, as a Lutheran, and I’ve retained a grip on religion through several changes of denomination since. To me it is part of being human, and my own life would be the poorer if I believed nothing, or nothing of religious content. It also ties in – in a way – with the practice of fiction. Since, ultimately, why are we describing these unreal, imaginary lives, except to say that human life is important — it has a dimension to it that is beyond the animal and the mechanical…

Anyways, for all this, and being aware that there are some mysteries to the organic sciences, I don’t think the attempt to rest religious faith upon scientific observations is going to work. Scientific knowledge keeps shifting, as we learn more and more, and there’s less and less ground for religious belief, so that in the end those of us who are Christians have to believe as an act of faith and an act of will.

Questioner: I also remember reading that you saw that other belief-systems were religions of No, and you chose a religion of Yes.

John Updike: Yes, I did. And that terminology I got from Karl Barth, who I found of the twentieth century theologians to be the most comforting as well as the most uncompromising. He does dismiss all attempts to make theism naturalistic… He’s very definite that it’s Scripture and nothing else. I find this hard to swallow, but I like to see Barth’s swallowing it, and I like his tone of voice. He talks about the Yes and No of life, and says he loves Mozart more than Bach because Mozart expresses the Yes of life.

__________

John Updike, appearing on C-SPAN’s In Depth in 2005.

I recently read Updike’s twentieth novel Seek My Face, in which there is a winding paragraph about a Quaker service that is infused with the same tone and substance as the initial remarks from Updike above. It reads:

My mother, though, was quite Episcopalian, typically lukewarm, but she would never have called herself irreligious. We all went to meeting together a few times… I remember mostly the light, and the silence, all these grown-ups waiting for God to speak through one of them—suppressed coughs, shuffling feet, the creak of a bench. It upset me at first, you know how children are always getting embarrassed on behalf of adults. Then the quality of the silence changed, it turned a corner, like an angel passing, and I realized it was a benign sort of game.

As with the interview above, here his Updike’s mind at serious play. Although he penned these words as a septuagenarian, Updike not only remembered the restlessness of childhood churchgoing, he retained that benevolent and bemused sense of wonder well into adulthood. Filtered through his reading, experience, and intellect, it solidifies into his signature rich and dense storytelling.

In a recent interview, Ian McEwan said, among other things, “[Updike] was rather courtly, reticent; not an easy man to get to know. There was something of a polite mask there… I think he was the greatest novelist writing in English at the time of his death,” and “He could turn a sentence… He was very good on religious belief… and he understood about religious doubt. I mean he wrote beautifully on religious doubt.”

Watch the rest of the interview with McEwan, the novelist I’d nominate to be Updike’s successor as the strongest living prose writer in English, right here:

F*ck

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Psychology, Science

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Steven Pinker

Where does the word “fuck” come from?

The problem with tracing the origin of taboo words is that people don’t write them down, precisely because they’re taboo. So you have to do a lot of detective work.

In the case of “fuck,” for example, the earliest known usage in the English language was a bit of rude graffiti carved outside a monastery in a kind of pseudo-Latin. It’s the first written inscription of the word, and it’s from the fifteenth century. So it’s an old word.

But you can trace it back even further if you look for cognates in other languages. And there are similar words in Scandinavian tongues, and in German, Dutch, and so on.

By that means you can show that “fuck” comes from Scandinavian, and it originally means “to strike” or “to beat.” And that’s a little bit like some of our rude terms for sex, like “to bang.”

These call to mind a not very pleasing image of the sexual act — that of a man doing something violent to a woman, which we also see in some of the taboo phrases around sex: “they fucked him over,” “he got screwed.” These each allude to the underlying metaphor that to have sex is to exploit a woman.

That’s a conception that we all unconsciously recognize and acknowledge whenever we use an idiom like, “we got screwed,” but it’s something that we consider not fit for polite company.

And all of the acceptable terms for sex — like have sex, make love, go to bed with — hide that conceptualization…

And there’s something that feels misogynistic about swearing in general, curiously enough. Although women are swearing a lot more than they used to, swearing is still more of a guy thing. We have old notions like language that’s “appropriate for mixed company” – mixed meaning “men and women”; and expressions like “to swear like a sailor” or “locker room language,” all alluding to the fact that swearing is considered masculine, and that there’s something offensive to women about swearing.

And indeed many guidelines to sexual harassment include the telling of sexual jokes as a kind of harassment. Even though you’d think the topic of sex should be gender neutral… since it takes two.

And I believe this fact is rooted in a basic feature of human sexuality: that indiscriminate sex biologically works to the advantage of the male. And it’s because there’s a lot more at stake for women; she can get pregnant, and then she’s stuck with the child. Whereas the male can get away with just a few minutes of copulation, and in principle that can be the end of it.

So women in their behavior, in their emotions are more discriminating when it comes to sex. The casual use of sexual language, by connoting an atmosphere of licentiousness, is felt to work to the advantage of men more than women.

And in addition, as we’ve mentioned before, many sexual idioms have a rather unflattering image of sex as an act which damages or exploits a woman. Not only “we got screwed,” but “oh my printer is fucked up” – meaning broken, damaged.

So certainly over-use of sexual swearing can feel offensive to women. And as with any other aspect of language use, it’d be common sense and common courtesy to anticipate how the language will affect your audience, depending on whether it’s male or female, younger or older, and in a formal setting or more casual setting.

__________

From the writer that I consider to be the best living communicator of science, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, as interviewed by The Guardian about his groundbreaking book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

One Thing You Can’t Imagine

13 Monday May 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Science

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Stephen Cave“What sets us apart is, of course, our massive, highly connected brains. These too have evolved to help us perpetuate ourselves indefinitely, and they are enormously useful in the struggle to survive. Our awareness of ourselves, of the future and of alternative possibilities enables us to adapt and make sophisticated plans. But it also gives us a perspective on ourselves that is at the same time terrifying and baffling. On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living things around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This I will call the Mortality Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization…

We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. ‘Man has created death,’ wrote the poet W. B. Yeats. Other creatures blindly struggle on, knowing only life until their moment comes. ‘Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death,’ wrote the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. But we bring death into life: we see it coming for us in every storm or forest fire, snake or spider, illness or ill omen.

This is a central theme of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortals. It is represented in that most ancient and influential of stories, the book of Genesis: if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are told, they will die— mortality is the price of knowledge. Since we attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, ‘death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.’ No matter what we do, no matter how hard we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose.

But the second idea— and the other half of the Mortality Paradox— tells us quite the opposite: that our own obliteration is impossible. The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there— the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being.

We therefore cannot make death real to ourselves as thinking subjects. Our powerful imaginative faculties malfunction: it is not possible for the one doing the imagining to actively imagine the absence of the one doing the imagining. ‘It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators,’ wrote Sigmund Freud in 1915. He concluded from this that ‘at bottom no one believes in his own death . . . [for] in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.’ Or as the English Romantic poet Edward Young put it: ‘All men think all men mortal, but themselves.’

This applies no matter how far into the future we attempt to look: whether one or one thousand years from now, we cannot help but be present in what we see. There is no limit to just how far into the future we can project; it is not as if our imagination stops at a million years, or a billion. And so, to quote the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, God— or nature—‘has set eternity in the hearts of men.’ In our own minds, we are part of the very fabric of the universe, ineradicable, here forever. The great German writer Goethe is reported to have concluded that ‘in this sense everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.’ We cannot conceive of our own nonexistence, he reasoned, and therefore our nonexistence is impossible.”

__________

From Stephen Cave’s book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization.

I started reading this book late last night and got through about a third of it before falling asleep and into dreams about it. I’m convinced there is something very significant about this sort of software glitch in the human mind — this firewall that stands between us and the full picture of our own individual extinctions. (I’ve heard some people defiantly claim exception to Freud’s rule, but I’ve never found a convincing explanation as to what it looks like or how it’s conceptually possible.)

A fact that Cave doesn’t mention is that the second part of the Mortality Paradox applies even in our sleep. Strangely, even when our conscious minds are shut off and shut out from external sensory stimuli, we still cannot picture our own demise (you wake up at the moment you die in dreams). François de La Rochefoucauld coined a memorable epigram: “no man can look at the sun or his own death with a steady eye.” And it seems that’s true also when we’re asleep — when the sun is set.

Many poets have nodded to this strange feature of human cognition — that even when our conscious mind is shut off (like in REM sleep), we cannot die.

Ernest Dowson imagined our lives unfolding out of “a misty dream… within a dream” (isn’t that the plot of a Chris Nolan movie?)

Oscar Wilde complained, “reality is a dream that keeps me from sleeping”; a sentiment that sends a smirk to my face while on the bus most Monday mornings.

James Joyce — through his protagonist Stephen Dedalus — reflected soberly, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Define ‘Life’

02 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by in Philosophy, Science

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Earth

Define life.

“I’ll give two answers. The first as a scientist and the second as a religious person. The first answer is: life is an event in the history of the universe, which, so far as we know, occurred in only one place, at only one time, about five billion years ago. Life has never ended, although it is dependent on the death of lives. So, lives are mortal in that life will be able to persist through natural selection and the emergence of novelty through selection of variance. So, I would say, life is mortal, persistent, on this planet, and so far as we know unique in the universe. It is also the source of our brains. As Darwin said, ‘the mind is an excretion of our brains.’ And in our brains are ideas — ideas including notions of free will and notions of altruistic obligation to strangers, which seem to be free of any natural selective advantage. So, I would say, life as we know it is an historical event that has generated us, and through us, the burdens of free will…

Why do you muddy the problem of definition by postulating things for which you have no evidence? In the evidence we have, life is tragic. It began, it persists, it requires the death of all individuals, including individuals capable of self-awareness of their own death. It’s tragic therefore individually for us, and on the global scale, it’s tragic because every hundred million years or so, a disaster enters from outer space, which obliterates 90% of the families of living things, and provides a design space for the emergence of new novelty. That is not… that is not a difficult definition to make.

Life is the evanescent moment for the individual and the persistence of DNA replication with variation for the global definition. They don’t match up for anyone who is alive and self-aware. That’s the problem.”

__________

Dr. Robert Pollack’s answer to the question “How do you define life?” at the Philoctetes discussion on Origin, Evolution, and the Future of Life on Earth.

Sorry… I know it’s heavy stuff for a Saturday afternoon.

But if you’re in the mood, the entire discussion, starting with Pollack’s opening, is below.

Is There a Universal Human Nature?

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy, Psychology

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Noam ChomskyYou have argued that any stance one takes on political, economic, social or even personal issues is ultimately based on some conception of human nature. Why is this?

Any stance we take is based on some conception of what is good for people. This conception will tacitly presuppose a certain belief as to the constitution of human nature — human needs and human potential. You might as well bring them out as clearly as possible so that they can be discussed.

According to your view of human nature, all human beings possess certain biological functions endowing them with common mental capacities. How do you defend this position against postmodernist critics who argue that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all attempts to define it are guilty of reading other cultures in the light of Western perceptions and values?

Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate — this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any effect of human nature on our mental make-up — our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also makes no sense.

The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribes people she would have developed a completely different way of thinking. This is true. But we must then ask how a child could develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organizational component to the mind that is internal. We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in the area of morality.

For example, not long ago I talked to people in Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these values that we were able to interact — talking about real problems such as being forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.

Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?

In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone — Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates — creates stories of themselves where they interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings. Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications — even that they were acting in ‘self-defense’. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by saying ‘I’m doing this to maximize my own benefit and I don’t care what happens to anybody else’. That would be pathological.

But I think you would agree that not all cultures are equally viable from the standpoint of promoting human fulfillment and well-being? Are you wanting to argue that your understanding of human nature can give us a kind of objective understanding of the conditions of human flourishing?

Now we’re taking an essentialist position which the relativist would contradict. I’m not willing to go that far. We can develop a stronger conception of human nature through drawing on Enlightenment thinking on the issue.

This has support from some of the sciences, but is mainly founded on a philosophical investigation into our hopes, intuition and experience, and an examination of history and cultural variety. There are needs for conditions which allow the flourishing of human capacities. Insights from the Enlightenment show us that people need to exist in free association with others — not in isolation, and not in relations of domination. There is a need to replace social fetters with social bonds. Therefore any social structure that involves relations of domination — whether it’s the family, a transnational corporation, gender relations — has a very heavy burden of proof to bear. It must demonstrate that the benefits it provides outweigh the restrictions it imposes on human capacities. If it can’t demonstrate its legitimacy, it should be dismantled.

Do you think that different social and economic circumstances either block or reinforce certain dispositions — that, for example, whatever there might be in the way of a natural tendency towards selfish and aggressive behavior is reinforced by the capitalist market society?

There’s no doubt about it. Let’s take Germany, for example. In the early 20th century Germany was the most advanced area of Western culture — in music, the arts, science. In the passage of a few years, it entered the absolute depths of human history. Small changes in German society allowed people like Joseph Mengele to flourish rather than people like Einstein and Freud.

Granted the truth of what you say about our distinctively human capacities for freedom and co-operative action, how come we are so open to that kind of manipulation and deceit? How come we remain both globally and locally so caught up in oppression?

It’s a serious question. Why are we born free and end up enslaved?

Is there a case here for viewing social factors as more determinant than biological factors?

You can’t say which factor is more decisive. They interact. Take the example of puberty: small changes in nutrition can modify the onset of puberty by a factor of two, or even terminate it altogether. Or the visual system: in a kitten you can destroy the neural basis for vision simply by not presenting pattern stimulation in the first couple of weeks of its life. However, does this mean that the environment is the decisive force? No. Puberty is a process which human beings undergo at a particular stage of maturation because that’s the way they’ve been designed. You don’t undergo puberty because of peer pressure. Likewise, human limbs will not develop into wings rather than arms or legs. The genetic component determines strict limits within which variation is possible. I believe the same is true of our social and mental development.

How do you see the relationship between work and free time in a more liberated society?

Polls in the US, Germany and elsewhere have shown that people value free time over material goods. Therefore, there are major propaganda efforts to reverse this. One reason over a trillion dollars a year is spent on marketing in the USA is to try to undermine our natural tendency to want free, liberated time.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve just finished a few important books. One is Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, a penetrating and expert study showing how and why standard doctrines concerning economic development are dramatically refuted by the historical record and have caused severe harm when applied. Another is Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood. The “flood” is Lavalas, the popular movement in Haiti that won the first democratic election in this tragic country, a victim of French and US torture, and the savagery of a small elite, since it became the first free country of free men in the hemisphere. Hallward’s deeply informed account of what he sees as “neo-imperial sabotage” by the traditional torturers explores the background of the coup of 2004 and the persistence of “the flood” in a country that is a microcosm of imperial savagery and heroic resistance, however one interprets recent events.

What are you currently watching?

My wife and I used to be movie addicts, but I’m now pretty much reduced to what the grandchildren want to see. All-time favorite? The one movie I sat through twice was Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, so maybe that qualifies.

What are you currently listening to?

If some ancient equipment could be rehabilitated, I’d take out some wonderful old records of Axel Schiøtz singing Schubert Lieder and Pablo Casals playing Bach solo cello suites, reviving memories of more light-hearted days when my wife and I backpacked through Europe to the Prades festival, 60 years ago.

__________

From two interviews with Noam Chomsky — one from his website, the other from the Christian Science Monitor.