A new study reports that fMRI machines can roughly reconstruct the images of film clips that test subjects have been viewing.
What I found interesting was that the reconstructed images, while retaining the general shape of the original, seemed to replace the details with what to me seemed like the details of another image.
It looks like scores of Saudi women are challenging the absurd ban on them driving and are willing to bear the barbaric punishment for doing so, which consists of a lashing. I am not sure if any woman has actually received that punishment or whether fear of international embarrassment has prevented the government from actually carrying it out.
During the 2008 presidential election and for a brief time during the current election, there was a boomlet of support for billionaire mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and for windbag Donald Trump to run for president. They were part of an enduring pattern in American politics in which some people yearn for a rich man to ride in and save the nation. The thinking seems to be that since they are so rich, they must be smart and competent and also do not need to seek funding from big money sources and can thus be independent and not beholden to ‘special interests’.
A couple of decades ago, H. Ross Perot was the person that elements of a desperate nation turned their eyes to. The Perot phenomenon was a puzzle. Not the man himself, who seemed to be typical of the kind of person who has spent his life acquiring great wealth, used his subsequent power to push people around, and now, in the twilight of his career, wants more power, a bigger stage, and a greater share of the limelight. Nor is it puzzling to observe people with such blatantly autocratic tendencies constantly talking about how much they want to do ‘what the people want’. This kind of hypocrisy is so common in public life that it only causes surprise to the most naive of political observers. No, it is not Perot the person that was the enigma. It is the question of why so many millions of people, both in the 1992 presidential campaign and again in 1996, found him so attractive as a leader, just as they do Bloomberg or Trump now.
There is a possible explanation, one that is inspired by a typically lucid essay written by George Orwell over seventy years ago, titled simply Charles Dickens. Orwell analyzed the politics of Dickens as revealed in his writings. He pointed out that Dickens “attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached.” In that sense, Dickens “was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might truthfully say a rebel”. And yet, Orwell points out, Dickens managed to be a ruthless critic of many venerated aspects of English society without becoming personally disliked, becoming an English institution himself in his own lifetime. “Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody'” Orwell notes. How could this happen?
Orwell answers his own question by pointing out that Dickens’ real subject matter in his novels was that of the urban middle class, not the working class. While his protagonists suffered enormous hardships, Dickens seemed to imply that their problems were mainly due to the qualities and personalities of the people with wealth and power who controlled the institutions that impinged on his protagonists’ lives, and not because of the structure of the institutions themselves. In other words, Dickens’ criticism of society was almost exclusively moral, not structural. Orwell summarizes Dickens’ message as simply: If people would behave decently, the world would be decent.
Orwell supports this thesis by pointing out that the happy endings in Dickens’ books were largely achieved by the timely arrival of a wealthy person who solved all problems by scattering money around to the deserving. Dickens never seemed to explore the possibility that the institutions themselves, by their very nature, might tend to favor the rise of people with the very qualities he deplored. Dickens also ignored the question of how the rich benefactors who finally saved the day could remain so prosperous if they flouted the laws of the currently operating economic system by giving pay raises and gifts all around.
The huge success of Dickens’ books, even in his own lifetime, shows how appealing is his view of the world. It provides a simple explanation for society’s problems and, more importantly, provides hope that things could be improved quickly, provided the appropriate well-intentioned rich man shows up. The timelessness of that message was nowhere better illustrated than in the enthusiasm that billionaire H. Ross Perot generated. Journalists breathlessly reported on Perot’s activities and people all over the country responded enthusiastically to his candidacy. What is interesting is that the support for Perot came before people had even heard exactly what his message was or what he planned to do for the country. Somehow, that did not seem to matter. Perot, an inexhaustible fount of homespun phrases, was going to ‘look under the hood, figure out what was wrong, and fix it.’ It was that simple.
In many ways, Perot then and Bloomberg now fit the model of the classic Dickens savior, the rich person whose possibly dubious methods of acquisition of wealth are conveniently obscured by the haze of time. Perot liked to be portrayed as a disinterested rich man who was appalled by the way the country was run and simply wanted to make everything right and was willing to use his own money to do so. Even his lack of experience in politics and government was seen as a plus. Given Orwell’s analysis, it is perhaps not surprising that many members of the middle-class seized on his presence in politics as the one that provided the most hope for them. If Warren Buffett were twenty years younger, you would see likely similar enthusiasm for him to run for president too.
Ultimately, the most significant aspect of the periodic upsurges of enthusiasm for Perot then, and Bloomberg and Trump now, may be that they provide a measure of the number of voters who feel left out of the system, fearful for their future, and yet unable to see that the root cause of their problems lie with the nature of the institutions of power and the kind of people they nurture and produce. For such voters, the search is still going on for Dickens’ good, rich man, untainted by the evils of the system, who will solve all their problems.
Religions view each other with either condescension or suspicion. This can make for contentious public discourse and, as we all know, frequently escalates into open hostilities. In order to avoid having things get out of hand, one periodically finds attempts by well-meaning people who think that the problem is due to religious people being ignorant of other religions, and that if they understood each other better they would recognize enough similarities and deep commonalities to defuse the antagonisms. And so we have the emergence of ‘interfaith’ movements.
In the past, such movements brought together only people from different religions but in recent years, there is growing recognition that skeptics are a significant part of the population and so the umbrella has on occasion been extended to include them as well. But the label ‘interfaith’ poses a bit of a problem because once you include skeptics, you are no longer talking about faith-based organizations anymore. Atheists shun the word faith because its most common usage is associated with religious faith, which is the acceptance of beliefs that lack any evidentiary support and are even counter to evidence. In fact, the less the evidence in support of a religious belief, the supposedly more admirable that belief is. This is absolutely counter to the rational evidence-based approach promoted by skeptics. But I cannot think of a good word that would accommodate both faith and anti-faith groups.
These interfaith programs usually take two forms. One consists of dialogues to get different religious groups together to share information about what they believe and to clear up any misconceptions that others may have about them. I am all for increasing the general awareness about religious people’s beliefs. In fact, I think that the academic study of the world’s religions (as opposed to religious education that seeks to indoctrinate children about one particular religion) is a proper part of a school curriculum. I think skepticism and skeptic organizations can play an important role in such discussions, once we overcome the problematic ‘faith’ label.
The other kinds of programs often involve getting different religious organizations to work together on some community projects. Although well-meant, there is something fundamentally odd about such interfaith projects. Let’s face it, each religion thinks that it alone is true and all the others false. They are incompatible at a fundamental level. You cannot have real equality between religions simply because of their divergent truth claims.
These kinds of interfaith projects basically involve asking religious groups to set aside their religious beliefs in order to do worthwhile projects that have nothing to do with religion. So unlike in the case of interfaith dialogues where talk about religious beliefs is explicitly encouraged, when it comes to interfaith projects, people are expected to suppress their differing beliefs but simply work for the common good.
There is nothing at all wrong with that except why bring in the faith aspect at all if you are asking people to then suppress it? Why not invite people to take part in community service and challenge projects for their own sake simply because they are good things? You can send the invitation out to all organized groups (including religious ones) to publicize to their members or to even take part as a group but leave the issue of faith entirely out of it. The goal of getting differing religious groups to stop fighting and killing each other is surely a good thing but that does not have to be coupled with worthwhile non-religious projects.
What does religion add to such community projects, unless religious groups are taking part to show how virtuous they are because of their religion? (In my college days, I was a member of a Christian student group that used to get involved in community service projects and some of the more evangelical members of the group used the occasion to proselytize, basically telling the poor non-Christian people we helped “Look at us! We are doing good works because we are Christians so why don’t you become Christians too!” Even though I was a devout Christian in those days, this would drive me up the wall.)
My concerns apply only to the interfaith part of such projects. The other diversity elements such as including intercultural or interethnic groups suffer from no such contradiction since being a member of one ethnic or cultural group does not necessarily imply that one thinks that other ethnic or cultural groups are inferior. It is understood that these are mere accidents of one’s birth and thus not obstacles to true equality amongst them. In fact, secular democracies are based on that idea.
It is interesting to see how trailers have changed over time. I recall a few decades ago, they would have fairly long sequences but with a loud, urgent, voice-over narration in the annoying style of old newsreels. Take this one for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957).
These days that obnoxious narrator is gone, to be replaced by an occasional and more subdued voiceover. But now the trailers have annoying rapid-fire cuts that last for very short times. The goal these days seems to be to show a fraction of every scene of the entire film in the hope that at least something will appeal to the audience. I have got into the habit of playing a game in which I try to identify which bit comes from the climactic scene of the film. Here’s a trailer for one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films.
No doubt these trailers are the products of extensive market research but I wonder if showing a few scenes in more depth in the old style (but without the old narrator) might engage the viewer and cause them to want to see the film more than these scattershot montages.
It looks like the search for the elusive Higgs particle is getting close. The so-called Standard Model of particle led to the existence of the Higgs being proposed 1964 as an explanation of how elementary particles get their mass and it is the final particle of the model to be yet directly detected. If it is not found, that would require us to re-think some important theories of particle physics.
They are hoping for something definite to emerge within the next year. But if the Higgs is not found by then, the search may drag on longer because concluding that something is not there is more difficult than concluding that it is.
Whoever coined the phrase ‘the wisdom of crowds’ may have second thoughts about it after seeing the crowd reaction at the Republican debates. Most people do not watch political debates at such an early stage in the process, so what gets registered in the public consciousness is what the media and pundits focus on after each debate. So far, appalling audience reactions seem to have become the story and this cannot be good news for the Republican party.
In the first debate, there were loud cheers for the record number of executions carried out in Texas. In the second, what is remembered was the yelling out that the person without health insurance deserved to die. In the third debate, Rick Perry even got booed for standing by his policy of allowing the children of undocumented people to pay in-state tuition for college, saying “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.”
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