Daily Office:
Monday, 16 August 2010
Matins
¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Namit Arora writes about the caste system in today’s India, citing (and dismissing) manydim-witted objections to “reservations” (India’s affirmative action) that will be familiar to our readers but also distinguishing between the caste problem and our race problem.
Lauds
¶ An amusing, slightly flaky description of the art of lucid dreaming, made fashionable again by Inception. (Philosophistry)
Prime
¶ Chopstick math: why China’s government wants to put a stop to disposable utensils. But, also, why restaurants and consumers want to keep throwing chopsticks away.
Tierce
¶ At the Globe, Drake Bennett drops in on a conference of moral psychologists. What if our moral responses to things are merely “ornate rationalizations of what our emotions ineluctably drive us to do”? (Boston.com)
Toward the end of his piece, Mr Bennett contacts a critic of Paul Haidt, a researcher who believes that morality is “simply an after-the-fact story we create to explain our instinctive emotional reactions.”
“Incest, eating your dog — these are not the moral issues of today. The moral issues of today are the Gulf oil spill, the Iraq war, women’s rights in the Mideast, child malaria in Africa,” she says.
We wish that we could agree with Ms Killen, but we’re afraid that, if she were correct, there would no brouhaha about gay marriage.
Sext
¶ Over the weekend, we got wind of a British blog that’s kept by “a gentleman bookseller who works in a warehouse in Sussex processing lorryfuls of used books”: The Age of Uncertainty. It took a day or two to digest, but we are now members of the Cult of Derek. Derek (surname redacted) kept a diary for much of the second half of the last century, only to have it discarded by his heirs. Steerforth, the keeper of The Age of Uncertainty, has rescued it from oblivion. (via MetaFilter)
Nones
¶ We wonder why India bothered developing a nuclear arsenal when, all along, it controls Pakistan’s water supply. Notwithstanding the dreadful flooding that is currently crushing the lives of millions of Pakistanis, Steven Solomon reminds us that the country’s more fundamental water problem is shortage, not inundation. (NYT)
Vespers
¶ Rosecrans Baldwin, whose new novel, You Lost Me There, was published last week, began a “pre-publication diary” last March, and while most of the entries are a little bit too winning to be genuinely personal, there are plenty of nuggets of writerly insight. This is our favorite. (The Millions)
Compline
¶ We’re running this story at the end as a way of pointing out that, notwithstanding its title, Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain, it is not a scientific report. Rather it’s an almost blushing account of some hard-nosed research scientists waking up, in remote surroundings, to cognitive insights that most thinking people have long since ratified. (NYT)
Have a Look
¶ The ghostly town of Cheshire, Ohio. (Visual Science)
¶ Eric Patton visits Petra. (Sore Afraid)
Tierce: the conference of moral psychologists explores a juicy topic, indeed. The emotions entwined with disgust forming the foundation of moral judgment makes a lot of sense, although I believe there could be “intellectual disgust” — along the lines of which I’d include Ms. Killen’s list of topical indignities (Gulf oil spill, et al). We’re not as disgusted emotionally by the effects of war and the destruction of the environment as we are outraged by the acts of the men who allowed — or caused — them to happen. The story IS the source of the disgust, not the other way around. That is what is wrong with Ms. Killen’s theory.
Remember the article about swearing that you posted from howstuffworks.com? In it we learned that educated people react to poor grammar in the same emotionally reactionary region of the brain that most people react to swearing (whether saying or hearing). It is a conditioning where the impact of certain words — or egregious misuses — take up residence in a part of the brain that is more primitive, emotional, quick, and reactionary — the amygdala.
And this article points out, disgust can be defined for us in similar ways. We attune ourselves to an interpretation of something (blood is yucky) and we become disgusted. (Surgeons and nurses get over this.) I think gay marriage is a case in point. Unlike heterosexual matters, homosexual matters are differentiated around the sex act, thereby inviting one to imagine it. (I could be equally squeamish if I imagined six between two old people who got married, and they’re not getting married to reproduce, as the Bible would have it. Yet we spend NO time imagining their sex lives. At least I don’t.) Disgust with sex, as the article points out, involves those bodily fluids and “whole acts of sex” that people tend to be squeamish about in the first place. Add to that the worldview of mostly religious people who have given additional weight to the intellectual disgust aspect of gay marriage, and voila, you have an after-the-fact story (marriage is meant to be between only a man and a woman) to explain an emotional reaction (some whole acts of sex are disgusting, especially and maybe if you wish you could do it yourself and are disgusted, overall, by yourself. It happens.)
Then there are the holy men in India who drink their own urine.