Revenge, violence, fear and risk

From the New Yorker

Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? by Jared Diamond.

Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. “If you die in a fight, you will be considered a hero, and people will remember you for a long time,” he said. “But if you die of a disease you will be remembered for only a day or a few weeks, and then you will be forgotten.” Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to “light elephants”: “They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”

I like this article for a number of reasons. It gives me even more ammunition against the idea of tradition for its own sake being a good thing. Tradition means only that someone has done it before. Women were banished to the special hut whilst having their period; men could only rise to the level that their fathers had risen to; and the “reasonable” occurrences of murder and torture were all too many. This article is more than just that though, it also explores the natural tendency toward revenge, the problems when justice does not seem to have taken place and the role of the state in all this.

See the video below of Stephen Pinker’s TED talk on how post violent we really are. Its not only an eye opener but a challenge to the fear based media propaganda that is so easy to buy into.

I would also recommend Dan Gardner’s book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.

Gardner not only makes quite clear that we are living in a golden age in our freedom from pain and violence but how much of our skewed and baseless perceptions of everyday dangers are fed by the media. Its both entertaining and enlightening reading. As a member of the media, he has seen first hand how reports of decreasing crime do not make the front page but a single odd and unrepresentative tragedy can blossom into misguided public panic and unneeded legislation at the expense of true dangers.

Worst dinner, old dinner, OMG have to eat that pronto!, and also a really big weiner.

Couple of interesting foodie items today:

From Chez Pim, a great new food blog discovery for me, a tale of possibly the worst dinner ever, though still a feast for the eyes. Make sure to scroll through the full gallery of pictures.

The chef, a brain surgeon by day, and obviously an anal retentive by night, has developed an edible microfilm that looks somewhat like saran wrap and apparently does not taste too much better, and has contrived to wrap absolutely everything in it.

And from kottke.org I was referred to this page of foods that were not available in Europe in the Middle Ages. Like potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, vanilla and more. Its was meant to be a guide for those trying for a historically authentic meal but just to think about it is amusing enough.

And then there is SmittenMitten:

It is a Caramel Walnut Upside Down Banana Cake, and there is now purpose to my life.

And finally via Hungry Mag, we have the Biggest Wiener in Chicago

And a hilarious write-up:

As promised here are my snaps of a ginormous wiener. While Sunday brunching with Best Gay Friend I happened to glance from our restaurant perch located at 900 North Michigan Avenue and shout:

“…My Gawd! That is one BIG wiener down there!”

Our waiter raced to the windows.

And the first comment on that blog posting is: Now if only it had a Scottish accent.

Wednesday gatherings

Just a few diversions while I prepare a new series: Strange Afflictions

From Dark Roasted Blend

Google Maps: I’m ready for my closeup

From Primordial Blog

Ass Kicking Women of Mythology - Monster Edition: another entry in a great series.

From Deputy-Dog

The world’s most controversial boardgames.

From Ferry Halim

Simply the most interesting game designer out there…post modern yet engaging. They are all
interesting and strange but try this one. Stacking the pigs.

Going to Waste

Its been some time since we’ve gone to the bowels (see fecal transplants), but the fascination never quite seems to wear off. In the January 2008 Harpers’, Frederick Kaufman writes a curious little article called Wasteland: a journey through the American cloaca. As intriguing the tale of modern waste management is, the orts scrounged from history was what caught my eye, tidbits of the veneration of excrement.

Among the verdant passes of the Himalayas, intrepid Jesuit missionaries discovered cult worship of multicolored powders and hand-fashioned pills produced from the dried and pulverized ejecta of the Grand Lama, which the Buddhists wore as amulets around their necks. Others consumed it as sacred snuff, still others as a rare condiment. “When they feast their friends,” noted one witness, they strew it upon their meat.”

Thank you but I just ate, but please, go ahead.

In the Scatalogic Rites of All Nations, Captain John Bourke wrote that in the distant past, “all excretions, solid or fluid, were invested with mystic properties,” an assertion that might go far in explaining why the creation myths of the Australian aborigines avowed that the great Bund-jil filled the oceans with his urine and the obscure deity Mingarope molded men and women from her feces.

Of the Kamchatkan deities, Kutka was the greatest. Kutka created the world and every living being - then fell in love with his excrement and wooed it back as his bride.

And now, a toast to the lovely couple!

Death to all smokers

Tank, an English publisher, has issued a few classics in these intriguing packages. In what seems like a rather foolish move, British American Tobacco has sued them on the basis that their product might negatively affect their brand. Though their lawyers indicate that they will pursue any unauthorized use of their brand, you’d think that they would see this as one worth ignoring. You’d think they jump at the possibility of being associated with the classics. You can get the full story here.

As far as I know the books are still on the market, and let’s hope that the crossover is addictiveness.

In other news, recently a tobacco control smokesman in Quebec took a stand against vanilla flavoured cigarettes. Because they smell better. And that will mislead people as to the health risks. This is insane. After all the complaining about cigarette smells, here is a product that is most beneficial to nonsmokers (because flavoured tobaccos always smell better to others than the smoker) and anti-smoking groups want to ban it.

I can’t say I never smoke and I certainly have in the past and but it has been a while and it never was all that regular. When I did I felt no solidarity with smokers and didn’t like smoky bars any better than most. I was in support of smoke free zones, eliminating tobacco advertising, taxing the hell out of it. But now the sheer aggressiveness of the anti-smoking groups have almost made me want to form a smoking resistance movement.

We all know smoking is about the worst thing you can do for your health. But we also know that apart from a few fires and a very small number of second hand smoke related death (an extremely overrated danger by the way) the effects of smoking are felt by the smoker.

One of my brothers, an ex-smoker, used to complain that as a non-driver he was a much better and cleaner citizen that those whose exhaust he had to breathe on his many long walks. I used to think he was just being defensive but I finally got it. The automobile culture is destructive to all forms of life on this planet, and yet do we vilify the driver? Not unless they are smoking it seems.

I used to hate the omnipresent smell of cigarette smoke but now I enjoy it purely because it is uncommon. Marlboros used to remind me of trips to the States, other cigarette smells of times at the public beach, and how I miss smelling pipes which oddly enough in the age of boutiquism have gone the way of the dinosaur.

To smell pipe tobacco in the autumn air was wonderful. I remember going a couple of blocks out of my way just to keep smelling it.

Its just that I get so annoyed about all this unwarranted moral rectitude when it comes to smoking. Make them go outside, then far away from the door, now lets look at them, point our fingers, and mutter. Maybe now that the anti-smoking crusaders have won this battle they could go after billboards, or idling vehicles, or people who talk loudly on cell phones. But it seems in their efforts to eradicate all traces of this pernicious habit, they are going after the historical record itself and removing the cigarettes from poster images of Sartre in France and smoking from cartoons. Hasn’t anyone told them about the rule about why history might repeat itself? Better run for it Selma!

We forget that apart from the fact that some people function much better with nicotine there are other positive roles smoking plays. It is socially cohesive. Smokers cross class boundaries. The little work group huddling together around their smokes in the wind come from all parts of the company, people who normally might not meet each other. Cigarettes also are bridges. Its easier to meet someone with a request for a match or a cigarette. And, what the hell, what’s so wrong with people just liking to smoke.

The point is that with it has been very easy to shuffle these people around with everyone including almost all smokers acquiescing and it does really come down to an issue of rights. If you can do that to smokers, why not Scotch drinkers? Why not fast food eaters? Why not any little habit you might enjoy that someone else doesn’t?

To end with something a little more amusing, in Britain, an artist and a composer, in reaction to a smoking ban, collaborated in a musical work in which all the performers will be smoking. I wonder if they will have to perform it over ten metres from any doorway?

The Edge 2008: Changing Minds

The latest edition of The Edge newsletter is rather remarkable. Each year they have posed a question to leading thinkers, this year 164 of them, (historians, scientists, artists , teachers, and more), and then posted the essays both long and short on their website. Previous questions included: What are you optimistic about (2007), What is your dangerous idea (2006);,and What do you believe is true even if you cannot prove it (2005). Among the contributors this year are: Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Dennett, Kevin Kelly, and Terence Sejnowski.

And the current question is What have you changed your mind about and why. Responses range from things like classicist James O’Donnell writing about why he stopped cheering for the Romans, neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux on how he revised his notion of how memory works, or media analyst Douglas Rushkoff reversing his initial position on the potential of the Internet changing consciousness.

Each entry is worth a day or two of reflection but the first that really caught my attention was archaeologist Timothy Taylor’s one called Relativism. Once in the camp of thinking that you could not judge without taking into the mindset of the ancient culture, he now feels, after studying Andean infant sacrifice, that we are justified in discriminating morally about past practices. His last paragraph reads:

We need relativism as an aid to understanding past cultural logic, but it does not free us from a duty to discriminate morally and to understand that there are regularities in the negatives of human behaviour as well as in its positives. In this case, it seeks to ignore what Victor Nell has described as ‘the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.’ By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of ‘the Other’, relativism steps away from logic into coherence.

All the years have been good but this question is particularly interesting to me. To change one’s mind, especially after investing years of inquiry, is a remarkable thing. It is momentous for any of us to actually turn on an issue once we’ve formed our initial position. I remember a comedian, I believe it was Rick Mercer, talking about how brave it was for a politician to change their mind to reflect the facts or changing conditions when the most likely effect would be people saying they were wishy washy.

My culture ravaged, my culture was ravaged..

I’ve just been rereading parts of Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals. The material had resurfaced in my mind while having a discussion about a book called 1491 which I have not read yet but am locating a copy of (its about the extensive indigenous population of the Americas before disease struck, a lesser known past it seems). What my friend and I had been talking about what the commonality of all cultures in both good and bad. Sowell was the one writer I ran across to challenge the noble and peaceful savage myth so prevalent in our culture.

——————–———————-

I was already primed for this book. I had always felt that humans were essentially the same the world over, and therefore their cultures as well. To be sure, there were differences but I knew that odds were pretty good that if my culture were rapacious; if it had enslaved or been enslaved, so had all other cultures. And it seems my instincts were on.

Sowell has a good chapter in the book about slavery and its an eye opener. Not only was this a global practice but rather than being a Western imperialist sin, the West was the first to discard slavery and the real force behind eradicating it. Britain used its power and resources without any recompense or any expectation of future advantage to force various nations to stop the practice. And in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, they were met with obstinacy and disbelief.

Now I suspect Sowell is no saint. I get the feeling that he’s a tinge defensive about Western culture but all in all he seems to be on the right track. Indigenous Americans were as violent and ecologically damaging as any tribal cultures the world over.

I always grated at the idea that Western culture was somehow more destructive than other cultures. Can anyone truly look the world over and think that? If anything it is one of the more respective cultures, certainly of human rights.

I also always had a problem when I heard complaints of either land appropriation or of ethnic disparities. I am non-Jewish Western European stock, and only two generations back my ancestors were the victims of pogroms, of massacres, and lost their properties. My grandfather watched his mother being put to the sword. Does this make me special? Not in the slightest. Its the way of the world. Dig into other people’s pasts, and the same sad story is there. Everyone gets their turn at the top and the bottom. Everybody’s land used to be someone else’s.

Sowell gets into a lot of interesting stuff in this grab bag of essays. One of his themes is the British origin of the Southern culture in the States. This particular culture was overly violent and indigent in the Isles and also in their new home. Lynchings apparently predated racial hatred as did cross burnings which came from burning Celtic crosses on your enemy’s property in the old country.

I love this kind of stuff because it flies in the face of common accepted knowledge. Part of the problem I have though is that this is an area I don’t know a lot about, so I have to accept his sources as face value. Yet, it seems to ring true.

I am planning on writing a post about common sense, at least in matters concerning epidemiology. General principles that can guide one through masses of complicated knowledge. Maybe tomorrow.

A picture is worth a thousand words..

Funny how a sentence can change your perception of a picture. Here is a outdoor sculpture at Versaille.

Classic male nude.

Now here is this from a book review of The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg. “Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.”

You can imagine the arguments that took place after that among the cleanup staff.

“Hey, I just cleaned up in here!” or

“No that can’t be more than three days old.”

Now, I am going to have to read the book to know more, and I am pretty damn curious about this, but was this some sort of accepted public activity? Was it common perhaps in mid conversation to drop em, squat and drop em, and just continue on as though nothing was out of the ordinary? Haven’t been to the place but the structure looks as though it consists of many long hallways, in other words, few corners to discretely duck around.

And what about before the decree?

We approach these magnificent structures with reverence and now there looms the image of the official opening, the chosen few entering, a few perhaps having eaten the wrong thing that day, stopping and undoing the belt, relieving themselves while all the while going “this is really nice, this is really something.”

Madrid: Day Five: Avila, Segovia

The window above was one of a number of rich stained glass windows in an old church in Avila. Below is another window about 25 paces from the other in the same church. There was a gift shop attached where you could also look at the finger bone of the sainted nun of the church and a few other relics. As you left these churches quite often there would be an old woman in black with pictures of her family and her hand out. For some reason these struck me as much more distasteful than your usual beggars.

That morning we decided to venture outside of Madrid and joined a day tour going to Avila and Segovia. Neither of us being particularly enamoured of tours, we still thought it was an easy way to manage our time that day. (For those considering this, and if we were doing it again, I would suggest planning it yourself; it will be quite a bit cheaper, the transportation is quite easy to arrange and the food has got to be better).

While waiting for the bus to arrive we watched a line of men passing bags of concrete from the main street down a sidestreet to a building being renovated. We saw this sort of third world work quite often in Madrid. My theory is that since the buildings are so close together and the streets so narrow, the only way to move materials is the old way. (A couple of days before we had watched six levels of men passing down planks one to the next as they dismantled some scaffolding.)

What struck us again in Avila was the size of churches in comparison to the populations. They were made so that the whole town or city could be inside at the same time. They also tended to double as part of the the defensive structure, forming part of the walls around the town.

From Avila we headed to Segovia and the aqueducts.

When you see these, its no wonder that the word classical can be substituted for beautiful.

This sphinx was in a square. Why do ruined faces and statues missing limbs seem so poignant? For some reason we translate this as common antiquity rather than dwelling on vandalism or erosion. The damage appears to be part of the intrinsic character or the piece rather than something that happened to it.

When we first approached it a young woman was getting her mother to take her picture near it. We had already seen her getting her mother and many others to document her time here. And you had the distinct impression that her purpose was to capture as many versions of her face as possible rather than what her face had been near. It was actually kind of funny; she seemed like a sprite of a sort, a self obsessed spirit.

The last thing we saw in Segovia was this Robin Hood type castle. Inside were all the accoutrements of the knighthood. A prince had ruled on this hilltop and one could easily imagine how this grand structure would have impressed anyone coming around the bend.

The food you ask? Well the bunch of us were herded into what I thought might be the described feast of rural Spanish cooking. The wine was not very good which must have taken a little work in this country of incredible reds but it was passable, and the bread was warm and rich. The food would have found a good home in a trough. Fatty pig parts in some sort of gravy sauce. And the requisite local band playing for the passed hat. The only fun part was us trying to talk to our companions from Mexico (Chihuahua) (he had a wonderful bandido moustache) in our butchered versions of the two languages.

Prague: Day Four, Part Two

This is the Iron Maiden, one of many edifying exhibits in the Museum of Torture Instruments. Its a quiet place. Not a lot of chatter. And quite educational. For instance the instrument above is designed so that the nails on the inside do not puncture any vital organs (on most people). What I learned among other things that torture was not quite the haphazard and uncontrolled thing I thought it was. I imagined an Igor like figure limping and lisping their way to some tool they had wanted to use for some time but just hadn’t, randomly selecting one or picking up some favourite, and yet the truth is that torture followed rules. Certain transgressions led to certain punishments. Don’t know if that makes me feel better about it all.

Another thing that became quite evident in these three floors of exhibits was the creativity of the inventors. I suspected that each time one of these contributors to human ingenuity and civilization felt a little twinge or discomfort from a chair or position rather than simply getting more comfortable (like us unimaginative ones would) they would exacerbate it a little, play with it, and think “I can use this!!”.

I also learned that here to the class system held. We all know about the guillotine but how many of you know that if you were of common birth, you did not get the merciful blade but rather your head was secured and then struck with a heavy mallet.

Overall though, its a sobering experience, depressing to think of how many suffered these horrors and yet it is ultimately a sign that the world is better than it was. Torture is not the given it was then and though it continues in some places, it is often surreptitious and no longer thought of as common.