Reviews and News:
One of the principal problems with gender studies is that it cannot account for difference: “When I recently asked a class of undergraduates at Oglethorpe University if any of them thought there were ‘no meaningful differences between men and women,’ two female students raised their hands. When I pointed to the obvious reproductive differences between males and females, which give young women the unique ability to conceive and bear children, they looked at me as if I had committed an act of hurtful bigotry.”
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Evolution and polygamy are—surprisingly—at odds, and attempts to bring them together, like in David P. Barash’s Out of Eden, require a leap in logic and a stubbornly simplistic view of human morality.
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The difference between the Crusades and jihad.
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The modern Olympics have always been a messy affair: “The true history of the Games is a far cry from the platitude-laden, sepia-toned nostalgia pumped out by the International Olympic Committee and Olympic sponsors. But as David Goldblatt tells us, little has changed in what is often a story of Olympic absurdity and its disconnect from reality. The Games is an exhaustively researched account of the modern Olympics, from Coubertin’s early follies to the clouds hanging over this summer’s events in Rio de Janeiro.”
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Love and pride in Shakespeare’s Trojan War play, Troilus and Cressida: “What unites the play is Shakespeare’s probing interest—like a physician of nature—in love and its pathologies. Disordered love of glory and honor, for example, dominates hearts on both sides. This love, as Hector acknowledges, is strong enough to overrule even the ‘moral laws of nature’ and sense of ‘truth’ that prompt him to surrender Helen and end the war. The play further reveals that pride—that inordinate and delicious love of oneself—often lies at the roots of human tragedy.”
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Tolkien’s dark, long poem The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun to be republished this fall.
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Essay of the Day:
In Standpoint, Jonathan Sacks argues that we cannot have freedom without virtue:
“I want tonight to look at one phenomenon that has shaped the West, leading it at first to greatness, but now to crisis. It can be summed up in one word: outsourcing. On the face of it, nothing could be more innocent or productive. It’s the basis of the modern economy. It’s Adam Smith’s division of labour and David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage that says, even if you are better than me at everything, still we both gain if you do what you’re best at and I do what I’m best at and we trade. The question is: are there limits? Are there things we can’t or shouldn’t outsource?
“The issue has arisen because of the new technologies and instantaneous global communication. So instead of outsourcing within an economy, we do it between economies. We’ve seen the outsourcing of production to low-wage countries. We’ve seen the outsourcing of services, so that you can be in one town in America, booking a hotel in another, unaware that your call is being taken in India. This seemed like a good idea at the time, as if the West was saying to the world: you do the producing and we’ll do the consuming. But is that sustainable in the long run?”Then banks began to outsource risk, lending far beyond their capacities in the belief that either property prices would go on rising forever, or more significantly, if they crashed, it would be someone else’s problem, not mine.”There is, though, one form of outsourcing that tends to be little noticed: the outsourcing of memory. Our computers and smartphones have developed larger and larger memories, from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, while our memories, and those of our children have got smaller and smaller. In fact, why bother to remember anything these days if you can look it up in a microsecond on Google or Wikipedia? “But here, I think, we made a mistake. We confused history and memory, which are not the same thing at all. History is an answer to the question, ‘What happened?’ Memory is an answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ History is about facts, memory is about identity. History is his-story. It happened to someone else, not me. Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity. And without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.
“Lacking memory we have forgotten one of the most important lessons to have emerged from the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th century and the new birth of freedom that followed. Even to say it sounds antiquarian but it is this: a free society is a moral achievement. Without self-restraint, without the capacity to defer the gratification of instinct, and without the habits of heart and deed that we call virtues, we will eventually lose our freedom.” Read the rest.
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Image of the Day: Alpine parrot
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Poem: Sankha Ghosh, “Which Side Are You On?” Translated by Ani Dasgupta
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