A sea of stories

Frank Rose's thesis that new technologies enhance our immersion in stories looks worth serious attention, but my guess is that the San and the Homeric Greeks (not to mention Don Quixote) were no less deeply immersed in their stories.

A recent report from India even suggested traditional story telling is making a comeback there.

Demon-haunted

The ritual murder and dismemberment of children, and the mutiliation of living ones, is said to be on the rise in [northern?] Uganda. Practitioners believe that in doing so they will please the spirits and gain wealth and power in Uganda's relatively stable and growing economy.

James Nsaba Buturo, Minister of Ethics and Integrity in the government of Uganda, talked to Tim Whewell of the BBC:

Baturo: I believe that [the witch doctors] are directed by spirits, but remember we've got two types of spirits, the good spirits and the evil ones. It is the evil spirits which demand for human blood.

Whewell: Just to be clear then those evil spirits do exist?

Baturo: They do, my God, they do indeed! We accept they do in every society mind you, but we don't have to listen to them.

Whewell: ...shouldn't the government simply be saying there are no evil spirits full stop?

Baturo: If we were to do that, that would be false because they are there anyway. And people see it. They know, they see, and it's as well that we speak the truth about these matters. There is no merit at all you can attach to these spirits, but they are there.

More at Crossing Continents and Newsnight.

Last year Tom Holland recalled:

Tlaloc, [Aztec] god of the rains, the most primordial god of all...whose favour could be won only by the sacrifice of small children who had first been made to cry.

What is it I am like?

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

-- Steven Pinker attributes this remark to Anton Chekov. On a cursory search I cannot find the source, and would be glad to hear from anyone who can.

To understand what Man is like requires that one understand, among other things, how (s)he differs from other species. And this is only possible if we understand what they are like. Darwin's notebooks of 1838:

Origin of man now proved - Metaphysic must flourish - He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke...

[It is] hard to say what is instinct in animals & what [is] reason, in precisely the same way [it is] not possible to say what [is] habitual in men and what reasonable...as man has hereditary tendencies, therefore man’s mind is not so different from that of brutes.

In Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth write:

It has been hypothesized that humans differ from other apes not only in the sophistication of their theory of mind but also in their motivation to share their intentions, emotions and knowledge. Even very young children with only an implicit understanding other people’s minds are strongly motivated to share their ideas and empathize with others...

Because humans and chimpanzees differ strikingly in their theories of mind and their motivation to communicate what they know, we suggest that the evolutionary pressures favoring individual’s ability to represent other’s knowledge - the rudiments of which we see in modern chimps - created strong selective pressures favoring an ability to express this knowledge to others. In other words, having a theory of mind favored an ability to expand one’s vocabulary and combine words in sentences to combine novel meanings. Thought came first, speech and language appeared later, as its expression.

(Images: top by Bill Viola, bottom a Rhesus macaque)

Double monsters

Some monsters, though terrible, also have beneficent aspects. For example a Dzoonokwa, a giant of the forest:

eats children, stops people from fishing, and encourages war. In one story a young woman comes across a Dzoonokwa catching salmon; she kills her and her family and uses the mother's skull as a bath for her own daughter's ritual empowerment. They were not all evil though; when a Dzoonokwa came across young men she might give them supernatural gifts - a self-paddling canoe, or the water of life. [1]

But other imaginary monsters can be spectral, elusive and perhaps indifferent:

In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand...Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow of the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark. [2]

Refs:

[1] from First peoples, first contacts J.C.H. King (1999)

[2] from The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007)

Image: transformation mask, perhaps the sea monster Komokwa.

'The goddess must have blood'

In the main event, 250 appointed residents with traditional kukri knives began their task of decapitating more than 10,000 buffalo in a dusty enclosure guarded by high walls and armed police.

Frightened calves galloped around in vain as the men, wearing red bandanas and armbands, pursued them and chopped off their heads.

On beauty (2)

There seem to be certain constants which all cultures have found 'beautiful': among them -- certain flowers, trees, forms of rock, birds, animals, the moon, running water.

One is obliged to acknowledge a coincidence or perhaps a congruence. The evolution of natural forms and the evolution of human perception have coincided to produce the phenomenon of a potential recognition: what is and what we can see( and by seeing also feel) sometimes meet at a point of affirmation. This point, this coincidence, is two-faced: what has been seen is recognized and affirmed and, at the same time, the seer is affirmed by what he sees. For a brief moment one finds oneself -- without the pretensions of a creator -- in the position of God in the first chapter of Genesis...And he saw that it was good. The aesthetic emotion before nature derive, I believe, from this double affirmation.

Yet we de do not live in the first chapter of Genesis. We live...in a world of suffering in which evil is rampant, a world whose events do not confirm our Being, a world that has to be resisted. It is in this situation that the aesthetic moment offers hope...


...Art does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation, sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes simply to amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature. Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Are sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one.

-- from The White Bird by John Berger (1985)

Related: Nicholas Humphrey On beauty.

'There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been imagined'

How extraordinary, strange, and incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! The distorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes; the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to see which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind because they exhibit an absence of design. There is no idea in them.

....They are not inimical of intent towards man, not even the shark; but there the shark is, and that is enough. These miserably hideous things of the sea are not anti-human in the sense of persecution, they are outside, they are ultra and beyond. It is like looking into chaos, and it is vivid because these creatures, interred alive a hundred fathoms deep, are seldom seen; so that the mind sees them as if only that moment they had come into existence.

-- Richard Jefferies in The Story of My Heart (1883). Jefferies did not understand Darwin. The ‘design’, the ‘idea’ in all creatures, including those in the deep, is (it seems obvious to us) survival, and in this they obviously succeed.

But there’s insight here all the same. The shock Jefferies experiences and that we still feel today is real enough and probably comes from a joining together of things alike and unlike. Deeply programmed to respond to faces, we are fascinated and alienated by strange ‘masks’ never (before recent human meddling) seen in sunlight. We are drawn to them and yet they are not for our eyes.

The tension may relate to a larger one between, on the one hand, the transcendent rapture that Jefferies expresses so vividly in the book and, on the other, the non-human reality he also sees:

a great part, perhaps the whole, of nature and of the universe is distinctly anti-human. The term inhuman does not express my meaning, anti-human is better; outre-human, in the sense of beyond, outside, almost grotesque in its attitude towards, would nearly convey it.

or as he writes a little earlier:

Those who have been in an open boat at sea without water have proved the mercies of the sun, and of the deity who did not give them one drop of rain, dying in misery under the same rays that smile so beautifully on the flowers.

On beauty

Many things in nature were not made for us or anyone else to look at so what’s going on? I think the answer lies in remarkable convergence between features of art that we value because they provide evidence of human skill and the features of natural things that have evolved and persisted because these features have given them staying power and survivability. That’s to say there’s a convergence between our sense of aesthetically good form and nature’s selection of evolutionarily stable form.

In the case of animals and plants part of the reason for this is the ordinary working of natural selection. That the whole body grows in an ordered and harmonious way just is the best way of building a complete machine. So even without the added stimulation of sexual selection good form would prove to be evolutionarily adaptive.

-- from Beauty's Child: Sexual Selection, Nature Worship and the Love of God. Nicholas Humphrey on (Edge 300)


Humphrey summarises:

Why is being in the presence of beautiful things adaptive?

A. The things as such as are valuable to us

1. Beauty is a sign of something good (for us) about the object
2. Beauty is the thing that’s good for us about the object

B. The things as such have no value, but in approaching them we approach something else that has value

1. Safe environment
2. Good people.

Scape pig

David Steven at Global Dashboard on the consequences of hysteria in Egypt. The symbolism of burying the pigs alive is surely not lost on the country's Christians.

Egypt's total human population is currently growing by nearly 1.4 million per year.

A zabaleen: pictured in a 20 Sep NYT article on this topic.

The riddle of kindness

In On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor write:

If the religious question is: how can it be that people created by a good God can do cruel things? then the secular question...is: why should the human animal, created by no deity, driven by sex and survival, be kind?

Adherents to various religions will have their own answers. As for the secular question, the answer is not such a mystery: compassion and altruism are 'wired' into the behaviour of highly social animals such as humans (see Hrdy, de Waal etc). [1]

No, the real question is how to manage the kindness 'instinct' with reason and imagination. Adam Smith (a deist, perhaps) argued the limits were clear:

The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.

This may have seemed adequate in 1759 but it will not do today. Our comprehension may still be narrow but our responsibilities -- as a species profoundly impacting the biogeochemical cycle, extinguishing vast numbers of life forms and ready at a moment's notice to let slip the dogs of nuclear war -- are much increased. Our biggest challenge, perhaps, is to imagine more fully things we cannot directly see. [2]

Photo: Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst

Footnotes

[1] Marcus Aurelius got straight to the point: "Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one!"

[2] This includes longer-term trends underlying short term blips.

Visualisations

The goal of this project is to bring awareness to the millions of species that are under threat because of climate change. I created 26 different cards with various endangered species...

-- from one of the entries in a climate change as art contest. One comment was:

The entries are nice but do not strike me as compelling. To me, they do not connect with people who are not already in the choir. An example of what worked well was the campaign that started as "Keep Texas beautiful" in an attempt to decrease littering. This slogan had no effect. The slogan that slowed littering was "Don't mess with Texas."...

Escape from freedom

We will put our feet against the head of the enemy and crush the python spirit by stepping on the enemy's neck.

-- Max Blumenthal on an instructive moment in the rise of 'true believers' in the contemporary Republican Party: an occasion on which Bishop Muthee and another pastor led the Wasilla congregation in casting out witches.

The cook, the deep, rare life and it's smothered

On the 'Menú Planetary Discovery':

The roulade of wild boar and açaí is already on the slates, the yuzu-confit crocodile is being laid down and topped with perfect quenelles of bullfrog & wild eucalyptus mousse and tarantula tempura are being carefully scattered across the bed of smoked bamboo shoots. At this precise moment the forest caterpillar and manzanilla jus should appear at your left elbow...

-- Aidan Brooks.

(hat tip: Brian Hayes)

Dancing in the savannahs

Jonathan Balcombe describes warped perspectives in much of the scientific study of animal lives and behaviour. Barbara Ehrenreich sees a similar bias in the study of human psychology. Here's Balcombe (2006):

Nature is not nearly so grim as she is made out to be. A gazelle, like you or I, will die only once, and that death is usually a fairly fleeting affair compared to the life that goes before. A violent end on the African savannah typically lasts minutes, at most. Tens, hundreds or thousands of days precede it, few of which are punctuated by any serious threat....

Scientists would rather refer to ‘rewarding’ stimuli than to ‘pleasurable’ ones. In birds, kissing has been labeled ‘beak rubbing’, and open mouthed kissing as ‘false feeding’. It’s all rather sterile and businesslike. One might expect that a 1996 volume on partnerships in birds, many of which are lifelong, would disclose some examples of affectionate behaviour, but ‘affection’ doesn’t appear in the subject index, whereas there are more than 30 references to ‘aggression.’

And here's Ehrenreich (2007):

Not only was the science of psychology narrowly culture-bound; its emphasis on pathology largely precluded any careful study of the more pleasurable emotions, including the kind of joy - growing into ecstasy - that was the hallmark of so many ‘native’ rituals and celebrations In the psychological language of needs and drives, people do not freely and affirmatively search for pleasure; rather, they are ‘driven’ by cravings that resemble pain. To this day, and no doubt for good reasons, suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of professional psychology. Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy.

(Hat tip SH for Ehrenreich)

'The vast psychedelic drug enterprise of nature'

...beauty is beauty always and...nothing is so likely to determine the depths of a scientist's contribution as the aesthetic standards that are somehow set to work in him.

-- William Donald Hamilton. [1]


[1] This is from Between Shoreham and Downe: Seeking the Key to Natural Beauty (1996), reprinted in Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Vol 3: Last Words.

La vida es sueño

Dreams are not meaningless, and they are certainly not useless. For a start, they are crucial for processing emotions. "Dreams modulate the emotions - they keep them within a certain range," says Patrick McNamara of Boston University. New research has found that naps consolidate emotional memories - and the greater the amount of rapid-eye-movement (REM) dream sleep, the greater the processing of these memories.

-- from 10 Mysteries of you: dreams.

Julia Whitty notes that the Tibetan Buddhist Lama Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche advises us to look at our experience of sleep to discover whether we are truly awake. [1] She quotes this:

...every day ends the same. We shut our eyes and dissolve into darkness. We do so fearlessly, even as everything we know as "me" disappears. After a brief period, images arise and our sense of self arises with them. We exist again in the apparently limitless world of dream. Every night we participate in these most profound mysteries, moving from one dimension of experience to another, losing our sense of self and finding it again, and yet we take it all for granted. We wake in the morning and continue in "real" life, but in a sense we are still asleep and dreaming. The teachings tell us that we can continue in this deluded, dreamy state, day and night, or wake up to the truth

The Bon tradition, Whitty writes [2]:

teaches a yoga of dreams and sleep wherein, among other things, practioners learn to consciously dismantle the scaffolding. This work is done in the course of lucid dreaming, which students learn to cultivate at will. Since dreams are free of the rational mind, they reveal our true level of awareness and can provide an alternate and possibly speedier pathway to a clearer life. Although Western psychology believes dreams should not be tampered with, since they carry messages from the subconscious, Buddhists think differently. According to Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, "it is better for the aware dreamer to control the dream than for the dreamer to be dreamed".

As W.B. Yeats put it, "in dreams begins responsibility."



Footnotes

[1] The Fragile Edge, page 213

[2] ibid page 226

Hungry ghosts

...When we are greedy, the psychoanalyst Harold Boris writes, we are in a state of mind in which we "wish and hope to have everything all the time"; greed "wants everything, nothing less will do", and so "it cannot be satisfied". Appetite, he writes in a useful distinction, is inherently satisfiable. So the excess of appetite we call greed is actually a form of despair. Greed turns up when we lose faith in our appetites, when what we need is not available. In this view it is not that appetite is excessive; it is that our fear of frustration is excessive. Excess is a sign of frustration; we are only excessive wherever there is a frustration we are unaware of, and a fear we cannot bear...

...Perhaps the bad news that greed brings us is not that we are insatiable animals that need to control themselves, but that we are frustrated animals who can't easily identify what we need, and who are terrified of the experience of frustration...

-- from Insatiable Creatures by Adam Phillips


Image: delicacies from the penis emporium.

A more earth-frigged union

These images, from among 'best adverts to save the planet', are striking chimeras, combining unlikes to make something new. One might typically be described as a 'nightmare', the other as 'beautiful'. Both are 'strange'.

Communist bestiary

[In October 1916] Lenin creates the rudimentary rhetorical bestiary of the next seventy-five years of the Soviet regime:...capitalist hyenas, deviationist snakes, speculator crows and rabid nationalist dogs are born in a single flash of leninist thought. In the long metamorphosis of Lenin from man into icon, all his thoughts, not just his words, will become the sole preoccupation of a professional Soviet class dedicated to...[an] exegetic project [that] will implant the very brain of Lenin inside the brain of every Soviet man, woman and child, until...[they] will be able to think automatically like Lenin.

-- from The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu

Sympathy

"These mirror-neuron experiments are showing that, through and through, the brain is a dynamic system not only interacting with your skin receptors, up here" -- he pointed at his own head -- "but with [the guy sitting opposite you..."Your brain his hooked up to [his]! The only thing separating you from [him] and me is your bloody skin, right? So much for Eastern philosophy." He laughed, but he wasn't joking. Ramachandran has dubbed mirror neurons "Gandhi neurons" -- "because," he said, "they're dissolving the barrier between you and me".

-- from Brain Games by John Colapinto. [1]

The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist their own bodies as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.

-- from The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani

Footnote

[1] (added 26 May) but see Role of mirror neurons may need a rethink.