The Dish

Nick Carr investigates what’s going on in our brains when we read deeply:

What is it about literary reading that gives it such sway over how we think and feel and maybe even who we are? Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question. Although our emotional and intellectual responses to events in literature mirror, at a neuronal level, the responses we would feel if we actually experienced those events, the mind we read with, Holland argues in his book Literature and the Brain, is a very different mind from the one we use to navigate the real world.

In our day-to-day routines, we are always trying to manipulate or otherwise act on our surroundings, whether it’s by turning a car’s steering wheel or frying an egg or tapping a button on a smartphone. But when we open a book, our expectations and our attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.” That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work. We read the author’s words with “poetic faith,” to borrow a phrase that the psychologically astute Samuel Coleridge used two centuries ago.

“We gain a special trance-like state of mind in which we become unaware of our bodies and our environment,” explains Holland. “We are ‘transported.’” It is only when we leave behind the incessant busyness of our lives in society that we open ourselves to literature’s regenerative power.

That doesn’t mean that reading is anti-social. The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations. Several studies have shown that reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others. A series of experiments by researchers at the New School for Social Research, reported in Science in 2013, showed that reading literary fiction, in particular, can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling. “Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience,” one of the researchers, David Comer Kidd, told The Guardian newspaper; “it is a social experience.” The reader withdraws in order to connect more deeply.

This week, after a nine-year court battle, former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim became the first person to successfully challenge her placement on a US government’s watch list:

Ibrahim’s saga began in 2005 when she was a visiting doctoral student in architecture and design from Malaysia. On her way to Kona, Hawaii to present a paper on affordable housing, Ibrahim was told she was on a watch list, detained, handcuffed and questioned for two hours at San Francisco International Airport. The month before, the FBI had visited the woman at her Stanford apartment, inquiring whether she had any connections to the Malaysian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, according to the woman’s videotaped deposition played in open court.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the government to either purge her name from the list, or certify that it has already been removed. Federal watch lists contain some 875,000 names.

Jeffrey Kahn comments:

Judge Alsup’s ruling is a game-changer for the Government, the latest in a series of reversals resulting directly from this litigation.

The Government’s previous positions, that the district court lacked subject matter jurisdiction over the No Fly List and that a foreign national such as the plaintiff was not entitled to make claims of constitutional injuries, were both rejected by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008 and 2012.  The Government has now also lost its core position that internal agency oversight, whether by the FBI (whose Terrorist Screening Center creates these lists) or by the Department of Homeland Security’s “TRIP” redress program, provides sufficient protection against erroneous deprivation of a variety of liberty interests.  According to Judge Alsup, “The government’s administrative remedies fall short of such relief and do not supply sufficient due process.”  A judicially enforced remedy is therefore required.

Scott Shackford examines the twisted logic behind the government’s position in this case:

The administration’s efforts to “vigorously” contest the case went so far as to ordering an airline to not let Ibrahim’s daughter board a flight to San Francisco in December to testify at the trial. Given the petty tactics used by the feds in this case, one wonders if they even have any reason other than “OMG! Terrorists!” to keep the order sealed. If, for example, you were an actual terrorist, wouldn’t you already know why you’re on the no-fly list and once you found out, wouldn’t you be able to figure out what information the feds would likely have on you to keep you from flying? Are the feds trying the argue that the average terrorist has so many balls in the air − like the evil mastermind in some television spy serial − that he or she needs to sue the government to find out which ones they’ve figured out? The existence of the no-fly list itself and the discovery that one is on it provides enough information to create concerns for any actual terrorist that the feds know something is going on.

Reflecting on the WV chemical spill, covered by the Dish here and here, James Salzman warns that “water systems present an impossibly big target to protect from intentional acts or accidents”:

Marc Tracy considers a Knesset bill that would ban the use of the word “Nazi”:

Nazi analogies are always fraught, their deployment frequently a sign of flailing desperation or ulterior motive on the part of the deployer; there’s a reason we have phrases like Godwin’s law (which states that Internet arguments, no matter the topic, are virtually certain to include Nazi analogies if they go on long enough) and reductio ad Hitlerum (coined, I learn from Wikipedia, by Leo Strauss!). In Israel, the comparison is problematic twice more: Because the Jews were in many ways the Nazis’ most important victims, and because the contingent circumstances of Israel’s founding cannot be understood without reference to the Holocaust.

But it seems to me that the Holocaust’s uniqueness should actually make it an extremely useful heuristic for understanding the world, even and especially in an Israeli context. We can use its special awfulness to wake up to events in our own time that might be less but still plenty awful. Reasonable adults, after all, understand that to compare someone to a Nazi—even, off-the-cuff, to call someone a Nazi—need not be an argument that the person in question is the equivalent of a Nazi. (As for unreasonable adults who do mean to argue such equivalence, they can be dismissed and disgraced. Again, see: free speech.) Similarly, reasonable Israelis might shun anti-Semites who are eager to paint the comparison while simultaneously appointing to themselves the burden not to resemble the Jews’ greatest persecutors. A healthy Israeli society would assimilate legitimate critiques and better itself.

Tom Wilson also opposes the bill on free speech grounds:

It may well be the case that Israel’s high-pitched political discourse has a problem with the flippancy with which unthinking accusations of Nazism are made, but the idea that the solution to the low quality of public debate is more laws to limit free speech is wrongheaded. The ease with which Haredi and far-left activists have the tendency to charge Nazism at centrist politicians who clearly have no such sympathies with any aspect of Nazi ideology is silly if not unforgivably offensive, but making it illegal is hardly a proportionate or well considered way of dealing with this practice. Irving Kristol was quite right when he explained that Israel’s young political culture lacked a certain intellectual depth and required the infusion of the greats of Western thought. Solving the problem of Israel’s troubled political discourse will be a long process, requiring a lot more than clumsy top-down legislation. Although, if this bill does pass Israelis will at least have to get far more inventive in the future. Perhaps Israel’s politicians can look forward to being compared to Pol Pot and Ceausescu from now on.

Abby Ohlheiser links the proposed ban to other Israeli laws governing speech:

As striking as the “Nazi” ban is, the measure would join a number of existing restrictions on free speech in the country. Israel already bans anyone who demeans Israel’s democratic character or its status as the “state of the Jewish people” from running for office, as the Forward points out, and a number of similar laws have been used to keep many Arab parties and politicians out of elected offices. In 2011, Israel banned all boycotts against the state or its settlements in the West Bank, a popular protest tool used by those who oppose Israel’s settlement building on land that Palestinians would like to use to build their own state in the future.

Eylon Aslan-Levy points out that the law would “jail half the cabinet”:

1. It would be illegal to refer to the Green Line as “Auschwitz borders”. Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin, Housing Minister Uri Ariel, Tourism Minister Uzi Landau and even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself could all find themselves behind bars for using Abba Eban’s provocative phrase to describe Israel’s borders before 1967.

2. It would be illegal to compare anyone to Goebbels. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was acquitted on corruption charges, but another prosecution beckons if he calls Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan “the successor to [Nazi propagandist] Joseph Goebbels” again; his comparison of a Palestinian Authority letter to the contents of Der Stürmer would also land him in hot water. [Update: Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz would also be guilty of accusing Channel 2 of broadcasting Goebbels-like “Nazi propaganda”.]

3. It would be illegal to compare Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to Hitler. Prime Minister Netanyahu (again!) could find himself in prison for repeating comments comparing the former Iranian president to the Nazi dictator. President Shimon Peres has made similar remarks, but at least he has presidential immunity to fall back on to avoid prosecution.

I don’t know. Maybe the ban wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Damon Linker argues against granting animals human rights:

I’m all in favor of treating animals decently, with special sensitivity to their pain and suffering. By all means, let’s pass stricter regulation of factory farming and laboratory experimentation. But the basis of these reforms should not be any quality we presume the animals themselves to possess. It should grow out of an expansion of the sphere of human concern and sympathy, along the lines of the old aristocratic ideal of noblesse oblige — the notion that one’s superiority obliges one to act nobly toward commoners. In other words, we should treat animals decently not because they’re just like human beings, but rather because they’re not.

The animal rights movement, by contrast, invariably takes the opposite tack — either reducing us to the level of animals or attempting to raise them up to ours. Both should be resisted. … [T]o demonstrate that it possesses inviolable rights, a chimp or bonobo would need to do nothing less than “stand up and, led by a love of justice and a sense of self-worth, insist that the world recognize and respect its dignity.” That’s what it would take to prove that the members of an animal species possess the same intrinsic moral worth as human beings. Anything short of that is an expression of human self-deception. And blindness about all that we are. Losing sight of that reality and truth in an act of advocacy-driven conceptual obfuscation is simply too high a price to pay, even for the promise of alleviating the suffering of our closest cousins in the animal kingdom.

Earlier Dish on giving human rights to chimps here and here.