Andrew Sullivan

When The Morning Brings Madness

This weekend, Byliner has unlocked for Dish readers Simon Winchester’s memoir of his struggles with mental illness, The Man with the Electrified Brain. The first terrifying episode of his condition began the morning after he, then an Oxford undergraduate, stayed up late working on a paper and began reading Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage:

I began the volume—it weighed in at more than seven hundred pages, far too heavy for a casual bedtime read—with avid attention. I did so until I reached—unforgettably, and with the bookmark to be set in place for the next forty years or more—page 32. I fretted: poor Philip Carey, the novel’s thoroughly tested hero, now lame and lonely at the vicarage. What would happen next? But then it was three, and I knew I had a good deal to do the following day and so had to sleep. I put the book on the floor, said my nightly prayers—as I did back in those days, lying supine rather than kneeling at the bedside—and switched out the lamp.

When I woke five hours later, the whole world seemed to have changed, to have suddenly gone entirely and utterly mad.

That much was clear—to the extent that anything could be described as clear—from the moment I first opened my eyes. My tiny basement room was not wholly dark: dawn was filtering in through its scarlet curtains, and I could see the walls and the cheap paintings and posters with which I had decorated them. I could see the little sideboard, piled with the plates from last night’s tea, and there was the chair with my clothing thrown across its arm. My desk, with the essay papers in their folder, was laden with books. Closer to hand ticked my Westclox alarm, showing a little after eight, but with its ringer unset since this was a Saturday, no lectures on the schedule. On the door, my blue dressing gown hung from its hook, and beneath it the hem of my raincoat and the sleeve of my commoner’s gown, still to be worn were I to decide to dine in college hall. All of these things I could see, quite clearly—and yet all of it now looked, in some strange and menacing way, entirely unfamiliar.

Continue reading here. Purchase it as a Kindle Single here.

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

I first began reading W.S.Merwin’s poetry in 1970. I remember sitting at a counter at a Zum Zum’s coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts and wildly underlining poems from his book, The Moving Target. Twenty years later, he inscribed my tattered copy in my office at The New Yorker, where he had been publishing poems since 1955 and where, to my delight, I had become the poetry editor. W.S. Merwin has written more than two dozen collections of poems and eight books of prose. His memoir, Unframed Originals: Recollections is one of my favorite books and is still in print. He is also a famously gifted translator and his newest book, co-translated with Takako Lento is Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, who lived from 1716-1783, and is regarded on a level with Basho as one of Japan’s greatest poets.

Today and over the weekend, we will be posting poems and songs by Buson, beginning with three from a sequence he introduced as follows: “One day I set out for my old village to visit an old friend. As I crossed Yodo River and came to the Bank of Kema, I met a girl on her way back to her hometown. We traveled several miles, sometimes I went ahead of her, and sometimes she walked ahead of me. Once in a while we looked at each other and exchanged a word or two. She looked beautiful. Pity me for feeling attracted to her. I composed 18 songs, titled ‘Songs of Spring Breeze Over Kema Bank,’ in which I speak in her person, and express her feeling.’”

Our first selections from Yosa Buson (1716-1783):

On the way down the riverbank to pick flowers
thornbushes get in my way
why are they jealous of me
they tear at my kimono and scratch my thighs

*

Now I have seen three Springs
since I left my old place
and my little brother
I am like a plum blossom
on a twig grafted
onto a different tree
my roots forgotten

*

I think of my gentle mother
long long ago now
my gentle mother’s blossoms
from the spring of another world

(From Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, Translated by W.S. Merwin and Takako Lento. Copyright © 2013 by W.S. Merwin and Takako U. Lento. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC. All rights reserved. Photo of plum blossoms by John Morgan)

Crowd Control

Michael Bond rejects the idea of the “crazed crowd,” noting research that indicates “people in crowds define themselves according to who they are with at the time; their social identity determines how they behave”:

Years of field research have taught [researchers Clifford] Stott, [Stephen] Reicher and other social psychologists not only that mindless irrationality is rare within crowds, but also that co-operation and altruism are the norm when lives are at stake. …

At the University of Sussex, researchers led by the social psychologist John Drury have coined the term ‘collective resilience’, an attitude of mutual helping and unity in the midst of danger, to describe how crowds under duress often behave. There are many documented examples of this.

In 2008, Drury’s team interviewed survivors of 11 tragedies from the previous 40 years, including the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster when 96 Liverpool supporters died after being trapped in overcrowded pens, and the IRA bombing that killed six outside Harrods in London in 1983. In each case, most of Drury’s interviewees recalled feeling a strong sense of togetherness during the crisis, and an inclination to help strangers. Without such co-operation, the casualty rates could have been far higher, says Drury, who refers to crowds as ‘the fourth emergency service’ – an attitude not often shared by police. In Drury’s view, it is wrong-headed to blame crowd disasters on the behaviour of the crowd. More often the real problem is poor organisation – too many people in one place – or inadequate venue design.

Drury explains that a crisis, even a minor one such as a train breaking down in a tunnel, creates a ‘psychological crowd’ out of what was previously an aggregate of strangers. You suddenly share a common fate and your sphere of interest ramps up from the personal to the group.

Recent Dish on the Hillsborough 25th anniversary here.

The View From Your Window

Kenora, Ontario, 8.24 am

Science, Climate, and Skepticism, Ctd

Readers tackle a recent post:

I am a combustion researcher so I have the training to understand what the climate researchers have written. I have to say that I was a bit miffed by your statement, “I favor maximal skepticism toward scientific theories that might prompt us to change our lives.” Of course you should be skeptical! It goes without saying. That’s the scientific method! So many deniers say, “Scientists disagree.” Of course we do! It’s our job! We are always challenging each other; it’s a service we provide to each other, as a way to keep us from slipping up. Knowing that my community will be skeptical, that they will challenge me as soon as I open my mouth at a conference, forces me to be as accurate and careful as possible.

But there are also a lot of things we do not disagree about. We all accept Newtonian mechanics as a means to describe dynamics in the physical world. That “theory” is used all the time: to design the suspension on your car, to keep the office you sit in from plummeting to the ground, and so on. The Navier Stokes equations of fluid mechanics are used to design better airplanes. We all fly around in planes and trust the Navier Stokes equations to describe lift and drag. Anybody who visits a doctor is accepting scientific knowledge.

What we disagree about are the smaller things at the very leading edge. No computer is powerful enough to predict climate, so researchers are forced to make simplifying assumptions. They argue about that – which assumptions are least inaccurate and so on. The fundamentals are not in question; it’s the details.

You wrote, “And of course there’s always a chance that we’ll stumble upon some new evidence or theory that would throw this entire edifice into doubt (it happens).” Umm, no. Not like that. The basics are too solid. You also wrote, “I simply cannot see why any sane person would not wish to try and mitigate that change or prepare for such an eventuality. And conservatives, properly understood, attend to such contingent problems prudently.” Thank you for helping. To be honest; I view this as the absolute biggest issue facing us, and it is really disheartening to listen to Congress and pundits. This is not the time for such behavior.

Another reader mulls the origins of that behavior, contrasting it with an environmental victory in the ’80s that had broad support:

In previous decades, scientists discovered the damage to our ozone layer caused by CFCs.

The public and policymakers were skeptical at first, but as the data continued to pour in supporting the case, politicians built an international coalition to address it, ban CFCs, and repair the ozone layer. But not so with global warming. I’ve been wondering why that is, and, like you, I didn’t get it.

A few weeks ago, I met a man who is strongly skeptical of global warming. When I mentioned that over 90 percent of the scientific community believed it was happening, he replied that may be the case, but that he just could not agree with anything Al Gore said as a matter of principle. When Gore decided to champion the cause of global warming, he made it a political issue instead of a scientific one. And that’s why anyone looking rationally at the evidence concludes that the conservative position is “absolutely bonkers.” It’s not driven by science but by politics and by the deeply held belief among so many right-wingers that Democratic politicians are using whatever nefarious means they can to drive a stealth socialist/communist agenda. When looked at through that lens, global warming is just another excuse for bigger government.

I think if An Inconvenient Truth had been presented by a nonpolitical figure (David Attenborough? Neil deGrasse Tyson?), things might have turned out much differently.

Another reader, who just wrapped up a class on climate change as part of a master’s program in international science policy, offers his perspective:

I wrote my term paper on the prospects of innovation induced by environmental policy to actually grow the economy. The choice that Republicans seem to be offering here is this: Should we risk catastrophic climate change in order to grow the economy slowly, or mitigate that risk in order to grow the economy more quickly?

There is clearly no logic to their position. It is infuriating. Krauthammer used to be in favor of a carbon tax, although given his recent comments it would be rather odd for him to continue that support. The sad thing is that a carbon tax is easily the best mechanism (in combination with a few others, e.g., basic research and subsidies for battery technology) for producing the win-win situation above.

A carbon tax would also, if applied correctly, account for much of the emissions growth in China – who does he think is buying all of the shit that China has been producing for the past 10 to 20 years? Likewise, Boehner is going around saying this will cost jobs, but the OECD has released figures on the job sectors that contribute the most emissions, and they are all at the bottom end of the employment spectrum. But rather than pull from a great deal of economic research and data, these buffoons now rely on baldly nonsensical arguments to attack science and progress.

These people make a mockery of thought. They are 21st-century Luddites motivated by stupidity and greed.

Another turns the conversation toward conservative climate solutions:

Yes, the radical intellectual closure shown by George Will and Charles Krauthammer is deeply distressing. If there’s any issue that everyone left, right, and center should be fighting to address, it’s climate change, and the tagging of the science as a liberal plot by such undoubtedly intelligent men is far too tragic to be even darkly funny.

As it happens, though, just this week George Shultz agreed to join the advisory board for the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), thus throwing his support behind the establishment of a national carbon fee-and-dividend program. Fee-and-dividend is rooted in conservative principles, since it involves no new subsidies, relies entirely on the market to determine our future energy blend, and is 100-percent revenue-neutral (and thus doesn’t increase the size of government). As Schultz’s endorsement suggests, it’s precisely the kind of program that conservatives should be able to rally behind: no winners picked and no government growth, just a price on carbon that reflects the true costs of its retrieval and combustion.

I’d encourage you to check out CCL’s Legislative Proposal. I think you’ll find it in line with both your concerns and your desires for a broadly conservative, non-disruptive solution to the climate crisis.

Remote Robots

Leon Neyfakh describes his experience attending a conference in Toronto as a telepresent robot he controlled from his apartment in New York:

When I hit a clearing, a friendly young woman comes up to me, introduces herself as Leila, and asks where I am. I am very briefly confused by the question: We’re in Toronto, of course! But when I catch her drift and admit I am actually in New York, she doesn’t seem to hear me. Before long, it becomes clear that the volume on the People’s Bot just doesn’t go loud enough to carry my voice in this noisy hallway. To hear what I’m saying, Leila has to put her face right up against mine. This seems to work, and after a bit of basic back and forth, I ask her what it feels like to be talking to me. “Do I seem like a human or a robot to you?” Leila thinks this over, and after a moment, says something thrilling: “It’s like a hybrid of both. Like a cyborg!” …

Soon it is time for my meeting with Irene Rae, the researcher from the Wisconsin Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and her adviser, Bilge Mutlu. When Rae tracks me down, she says cautiously, leaning into the frame of my camera, “I think I’m supposed to be meeting you?”

It feels like we’re two strangers who have agreed to meet for lunch but have neglected to describe what we look like. When we find a quiet place to talk, Rae explains that robotic telepresence research is still in its early stages—that at this point, experts still don’t know exactly what is needed to make people feel physically present in a place where they are not, or how best to help them interact with people who are.

Mutlu, who has joined us, notes that this is not merely a question of technology, but of social norms as well. According to one study, people who are telepresent feel “violated” when people who are present-present move them around without their permission, or put their feet up on them as if they were furniture. Then there’s the question of how close people should get when they’re interacting with someone who is telepresent. “Right now,” Mutlu admits, “I’m getting very close to you, in order to hear you, and it feels a little uncomfortable for me.”

(Video: Edward Snowden appears, via telepresent robot, at a TED Talk in March)

Say What?

Ross Perlin is intrigued by the Dictionary of Untranslatables, a compendium of words with no direct equivalent in other languages:

[T]he Dictionary is revealing for the way it sketches, lexically, a set of parallel but alternate intellectual traditions. What language teachers call “false friends” are everywhere, inspiring a constant alertness to nuance.

Did you know that French classicisme summons up Versailles (which we’d call baroque) but it was German Klassizismus that crystallized our idea of the “neoclassical”? Or that the vital feminist distinction between “sex” and “gender,” current in English since the 1970s, was “nearly impossible to translate into any Romance language,” not to mention the problems posed by the German Geschlecht, as Judith Butler writes in the Dictionary? Further probing may even make us wonder whether the nature/culture distinction so sharply drawn (and now promoted) by the English idea of “sex” vs. “gender” is the right distinction—the languages of the world offer many other possibilities.

This is the kind of “philosophizing through languages” that the Dictionary’s editors have in mind, and they’re right: philosophy has always been about bending (and coining) words to work in particular ways, about consciously harnessing and creating abstraction out of linguistic systems already engaged willy-nilly in much the same task. A century ago, analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein saw the problems of philosophy as all boiling down to unclear language; contributors to the Dictionary lay a similar stress on words but revel in their contested indeterminacy.

Previous Dish on untranslatable words here, here, here, and here.

Your Friday Cry

It’s been a while since the Dish posted one of these beagle rescue videos that frequent the web – watch it and weep:

Via VideoSift:

There are about 75,000 Beagles used in labratories for their kind, forgiving nature. They live in cages their entire life subjected to test. Many never even get a glimpse of the outside world. The Beagle Freedom Project recently rescued nine Beagles from a laboratory in Nevada. These little ones had never known a kind touch, been loved or felt safe and now, they have loving, forever homes, a place to run and play.

They Wield More Than Hashtags

Nina Strochlic notes that Nigerians threatened by Boko Haram militants don’t count on the military or the police to protect them:

In northeastern Nigeria, where Boko Haram enjoys a stronghold, kills with impunity, and kidnapped more than 270 schoolgirls last month, young civilians have been taking protection and justice into their own hands. In June 2013, discontent with Nigeria’s official Joint Military Task Force (JTF) spawned an unofficial offshoot—widely dubbed the Civilian Joint Task Force—a loosely organized network of vigilantes facing down AK-47-wielding militants with axes, knives, and bows and arrows.

They’ve had, according to some accounts, remarkable success. On Tuesday morning a group of vigilante villagers from a town 150 miles from the capital reportedly fought off a major assault, killing 200 militants and arresting 10, with no villagers reported killed. Such claims are hard to confirm, but it may be true, as one local told the Associated Press, that “it is impossible” for Boko Haram to attack since the vigilante group was organized.

Laura Seay zooms in on the phenomenon:

Variation among vigilante groups operating in Nigeria is high on almost every metric. Some are officially registered with local police, with the tacit understanding that the vigilantes will respond to local crimes of a non-serious nature (like petty theft) while the police will be called in for more serious crimes like kidnapping or rape. Many vigilante groups operate under some form of accountability to local customary authorities, and as the membership in the vigilante groups are usually known to communities, they will be held accountable for any abuses by their fellow citizens as well. Other vigilantes operate on subscription-based models; if you have a problem with a crime committed against you and are a subscriber, you can call the vigilantes for help.

Vigilantism in Nigeria is an example of what scholars term hybrid forms of governance in weak states. These forms of governance are not fully undertaken by the state, but neither is the state completely uninvolved in regulating, overseeing or even partially providing the public services it cannot independently provide. The process of hybrid governance is seen in widely varying sectors around the world, from public trash collection by community organizations to public education systems run by religious actors.

End Scenes

For her series entitled “Death Wooed Us,” photographer Donna J. Wan focused on suicide locations:

The beauty of Wan’s newest series belies the dark associations that drew her to these vistas. “I’ve always loved the California coast,” she says. But she struggles to say that these are locations where people have taken their own lives. Wan is no stranger to these emotional lands, having grappled with thoughts of suicide in the depths of postpartum depression. Her research into these sites started at her lowest point, and has continued since. The project has changed in meaning as she’s recovered.

While photographing one site for the project, Wan overheard someone, having been told the site was the scene of several suicides, say “I can understand why, it’s so beautiful here.” It raised Wan’s hackles, because she understands the contradiction between the beauty of these locations and the violence of the deaths that occurred there. She wants to correct the misconception that jumping from a bridge is quick and painless. On the contrary, it results in multiple internal injuries and fractures, and the cause of death is often drowning or hypothermia.

See more of Wan’s work here.