Bozo Sapiens

Facing Up to the Other

Michael Kaplan — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:47:50 +0000

On this day in 1943, Heinrich Himmler declared that Europe's Gypsies were "to be put on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps." The order simply recognized a fait accompli: Nazis had been treating Romani people just as badly as they had the Jews since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. As the Holocaust closed in, both communities shared the same fate at the same times. The chronicler of the destruction of Warsaw's Jewry, Emmanuel Ringelblum, saw in this a visceral rejection of the Other, "to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened, and which anyway has to be destroyed." There was certainly no logic to it - particularly since, as even Nazi ethnologists had to admit, Romani are thoroughly Aryan: lineal descendants of Rajasthani mercenaries and entertainers, far closer to the well-spring of assumed genetic excellence than are mere Teutonic tribesmen. Such contradictions naturally confirm the idiocy of general theories of racial superiority, but they also underscore our natural propensity to loathe and fear the Other.

The most precious commodity for a social animal is trust, because it allows for division of labor. A primate band whose members can trust each other can also share food, or at least the knowledge of where food is abundant. The band does better than any individual or mother-child unit could do - and while it may not be immediately obvious why this helps any particular gene make it to the next generation, it buys time for all the group's genes to achieve their full potential. If we believe that our neighbor is "one of us," she and we all have better survival chances - assuming she reciprocates our trust.

There's the rub: trust by its nature opens the door to cheating. If our most significant adaptive advantage depends on a behavior that itself makes us vulnerable, we will be preternaturally aware of any threat from that direction - especially in a world with, as we always believe, too few good things to go around. Indeed, the economist Samuel Bowles has suggested that our altruistic behavior to those we consider in-group is a direct result of lethal competition for resources between groups or early humans - that Us first appeared as the response to a threat from Them. Even in the most comfortable modern life, there is that tickle of potential conflict for resources: if, before the sale opens, you save places in the line for your family or friends, you're being a good person, freeing them from the boredom of waiting - but the lady in front of you doing the same thing is cheating, holding you back in favor of her deadbeat companions who can't even be bothered to show up. We bond against as much as with.

So how do we know who They are? It's not always easy; ancient Israelites asked refugees to pronounce the word shibboleth; the Danish resistance in World War II preferred rødgrød med fløde (red berries with cream); Croat and Serb terror gangs checked the manner in which children crossed themselves - Orthodox right to left, Catholic left to right. At its most basic level our feeling of otherness is taken in with our first nourishment and is deeply intermingled with our sense of disgust. They eat revolting things: grubs, sheep's eyes, raw fish, tripe, pork, beef. They smell different. They inspire disgust, then rejection, then fear.

For instance: I don't know how you feel about the Pirese. I'm pretty tolerant. I enjoy a mixed neighborhood, I believe religion is a private matter, and as for immigration - well, like it or not, we need the skills. But these Pirese... I kind of draw the line there. I've got kids. Any Pirese can just keep moving on, as far as I'm concerned.

And I'm not alone: a 2006 Tárki Social Institute poll in Hungary revealed that Pirese refugees were hated even more than Romanians, Russians, Chinese or Arabs. It wasn't so much the things they had done - they don't leave much of a record - but what they were: dark, ugly, possessed of the evil eye, known to mix blood into their beer. And the worst of it is, they don't exist - they were just included in the questionnaire as a statistical control.

Not even existing: typical sneaky Pirese behavior.

If you enjoy these stories of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at Bozo Sapiens. See you there.

Signs and Portents: the Miracle of the Sun

Michael Kaplan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:26:30 +0000

"When Lucia cried, ‘Look at the sun!' the people responded. ... the sun was strangely spinning. It began to revolve more rapidly, more frighteningly. It began to cast off beams of many-colored lights in all directions. .... It is a story of wonder and of terror, too, as the great star challenges the discipline of all the ages it has known." On this day in 1917, at least seventy thousand people gathered for what would be the final miraculous event at Fatíma: another visit of the Lady of the Rosary to the three children at the center of the story - and then this display of celestial uncanniness to the whole assembled crowd. Believers and unbelievers, young and old, unlettered peasants and cynical journalists from the capital, all reported similar sights: the sun appearing as an opalescent disc, at which one could stare without pain; the world being bathed in stained-glass colors, now amethyst, now golden; the wayward star suddenly appearing to plunge toward a guilty earth in a zig-zag careen. People described it as "dancing."

What are we to make of this? True, the most-quoted eyewitness reports were gathered by a priest, but there were similar descriptions in anti-clerical newspapers: simple mass delusion seems unlikely. There are meteorological explanations, from a sun-dog to a stratospheric dust-cloud - and it was certainly a day of wild weather. The Catholic Church accepted the sun's dance as a genuine miracle in 1930, for the doctrinal reason that it was a "sign" serving to call people to faith, and the administrative justification that it was "inexplicable" by other means. It was later casually mentioned that Pope Pius XII regularly saw similar things in his garden at the Vatican.

Flash forward to recent times in the Bosnian village of Međugorje, where, starting in 1981, six Croat children were apparently granted daily visions of the Virgin Mary. Many among the 30 million pilgrims who have since visited report seeing exactly the same solar irregularities. Yet here is the opinion on the subject of the village's American confessor, Father Pavich: "That's a really spooky, sub-cultural spin-off: this craze to see the so-called miracle of the sun. Ain't no more miracle of the sun than the man in the moon! The sun ain't doing nothing up there. Your eyeball's doing it!" And indeed there have been several cases in the medical journals of retinal damage among Međugorje visionaries, acquired by staring at the sun. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, takes a cool– nay, chilly – view of the whole Bosnian phenomenon, due both to the sexual escapades of the priest at its origin and to the vast amounts of money made by those involved in its "faith-based tourism." So, as far as this particular miracle is concerned, it's Fatíma sim; Međugorje ne.

Seeing may be believing, but it's certainly not truth. As optical illusions demonstrate, our visual capacity is innately biased, with strong assumptions about how the world ought to look. This is unavoidable: without pre-suppositions, the firehose of sensory information would simply flood out our brains, leaving little processing power for living. People who, whether through savant disorders or the effect of drugs, do indeed sense the world in all its particularity and power find the experience overwhelming, almost painful. The rest of us edit the sensory world in terms of the normal, parcelling attention to where we expect it will be needed (thus missing, as participants in a famous experiment found, the gorilla crossing the room).

When we do see things out of the ordinary, that is itself a strong spiritual jolt; we stop and stare - and believe, because our previous beliefs have been shaken. It's possible in the lab to reproduce such powerful experiences as a haunting or an out-of-body experience using no more than a low-frequency sound generator and a closed-circuit TV system: all it takes is a tweak of the input, and our brains create a new, miraculous reality. This is what visionaries, poets, artists have always done for us; showing the unexpected glories we have been too busy to see, making us stare at things too powerful to withstand. Look! Look at the sun!

If oyu enjoy such tales of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com. See you there.

Goggling at the Box

Michael Kaplan — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:58:41 +0000

On this day in 1925, the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture of a face - not a living human face, but that of a ventriloquist's dummy named "Stooky Bill." Bill had been chosen as a performer for his uncomplaining character, even when the powerful lights that Baird's system needed set fire to his hair. Thanks to Bill's sacrifice, more than 3 billion people around the world now spend whole evenings staring into a corner of the room.

I have known sin and I have made television programs; the two have a good deal in common. For one thing, they promise more than they deliver: the lively exterior masks a soul of sawdust. Passively plunked before the little screen, we are neither drawn fully out of ourselves nor still in active possession of our reason; to the degree that we feel or think, these faculties are dulled. The picture hooks us in because, like all primates, we are suckers for certain images: ripe and glossy things, faces from our own species, landscapes and emotions, quick changes of scene. We can no more keep ourselves from watching than we could ignore a crying infant. This is not a good basis for rational thought.

This enforced passivity explains why television is so bad at conveying hard information: the attentive part of our brains has stopped working. Quiz your family about the content of that fascinating political documentary you saw last night and you'll find that an hour of dense exposition leaves but a minute of memory behind. Yet if the interviewees had told you their story face to face, you would know it in detail - because conversation makes us observant, engaged and active. This distinction highlights why, despite the best efforts of State broadcasters and the many millions of Walter Annenberg, "educational television" remains an oxymoron.

Passivity lowers standards: "there's nothing on" is rarely the signal for rising from the couch and going out for a brisk walk - it's the last protest of the drowning mind as the will flickers out and the eyes go rectangular. Broadcasters know and exploit this: as channels proliferate and production budgets plummet we now find ourselves spending long hours watching the private lives of people whom, in real life, we would cross a busy avenue to avoid. Junk entertainment, "prolefeed," has us in thrall.

There are, of course, exceptions: TV sports (with the sound turned off) gives us a better and more informed view than we could ever get from the box seats. The few dramas and comedies that pay for good writing and good acting show it is possible to reward the attentive mind - but in this they are less like television and more like little movies, just as the shows we celebrate as the Golden Age of Television were actually little plays. The essential problem is this: as a medium,TV is cheap; but as art, it remains fearsomely expensive. To be any good, it still requires the talent, experience and dedication of scores of people, from executive producer to make-up assistant, casting director to rewrite man, AD to best boy, gaffer to grip. When they are there, paying attention, you will, too - but the industry has discovered that you don't need to be paying attention to watch. No wonder Baird's son said that, had his father known what use would be made of it, he would have thrown his "Televisor" out the window.

If you enjoy such tales of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at my sister site, Bozo Sapiens. See you there.

Secret Conspiracy Revealed!

Michael Kaplan — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:50:51 +0000

This week in 1964, the Warren Commission made public its report into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It did so with many misgivings. Some members worried that issuing any judgement would merely reopen speculation about a deeply painful moment in American history; others feared that by announcing a conclusion without releasing the mountain of evidence on which it was based, the commission was inviting charges of a cover-up. In both apprehensions they were entirely correct.

Though many of its original actors have gone to a well-earned rest, the Kennedy assassination industry continues to churn and roil. At the latest count, the potentially responsible parties include: anti-Castro Cubans, pro-Castro Cubans, the Chicago Mafia and/or the New Orleans Mafia (supported by the Teamsters), the Soviets, the CIA (naturally), the Secret Service, the Israelis, Lyndon Johnson, and the Federal Reserve Bank. Key figures in these plots include the Three Tramps, the Man in Black Leather, the Second Oswald, and a pederastic ex-seminarian in a home-made wig and false eyebrows. Four separate people have confessed to being the assassin - although no two as part of the same conspiracy.

So far, no objection to the Warren Commission's judgement that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone has been conclusive. Every one of the alternative scenarios requires extra elements for which there is no necessity and no reliable evidence. William of Occam devised his razor to prevent medieval theologians from inventing new supernatural beings; it applies as surely here.

Why, then, do we keep returning to the subject? "Money" is the cynical answer - every theory shills its book (or, for Oliver Stone, his film). The better response goes deeper: if you have ever served on a jury, you will know what bad observers and reporters of fact people can be. This is not necessarily malicious, it's an unavoidable human trait: the high degree of randomness in real life renders it not just hard to remember, but hard to take in. We prefer a story with some internal logic, where the inputs are on the same scale as the output. We don't want the President to have to die just because some guy felt belittled by his wife - if we can't identify a suitably grand plot, we must at least assume that "they don't want us to know."

This desire to inject life's randomness with meaning goes as far as creating vivid memories out of nothing (for many examples of this, see the work of Elizabeth Loftus). Jean Hill was a few yards from Kennedy's limousine when the bullets hit. For forty years, she told a consistent, lively story of spotting and pursuing a possible assassin wearing a hat over the famous grassy knoll - yet filmed evidence from the time shows her sitting still, perhaps in shock, throughout the episode. She probably wasn't lying about her memory - but memory is not truth; it's simply a past we can live with.

All things are possible, but only one thing happens. History entertains countless likelihoods: plausible intentions with motive and opportunity - even, as we see, confession - that lack only the comparatively trivial distinction of having actually been acted on. So yes, Cubans of all stripes, Mafiosi, the CIA, and others may have plotted - that is, after all, their trade - but this does not put them in the sixth-floor window with the Carcano. We would prefer our leader not to be the victim of a loser, but if you scan the litany of actual or would-be Presidential assassins - Booth, Guiteau, Czogolcz, Fromme, Hinckley - "loser" tops the profile. Inelegant, unedifying, but true.

Just as we want our success to be the result of skill, not luck, we prefer to be the victims of conspiracy rather than chance (although if the Trilateral Commission really is in charge of everything, why doesn't more get done?). We go over the scene of trauma again and again, searching for redeeming clues. We cannot make it go away, but we can make it different, more portentous, more meaningful - the human mind's characteristic way of seeking relief.

If you enjoy such sketches of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at my sister site, Bozo Sapiens. See you there.

Pilgrim's Progress: One Man's Lost Battle with Authority

Michael Kaplan — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:05:46 +0000

It wasn't fair; it wasn't jolly well fair; it wasn't bleeding well fair. Edward Pilgrim, like any victim of perceived injustice, could not let the thing go. He had written to the town council, to the newspapers, the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister, and the Queen, to protest "the unfairness and unjust predicament one of her British subjects has been forced into," but he received no satisfaction. He spent the two days before September 26th, 1954 "wandering about looking at that land" - then strode back on to it, went into a builder's shed, and hanged himself: a martyr to bureaucracy.

Pilgrim was killed by the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, an attempt by the post-war government to tackle severe housing shortage while dealing a blow in the class war. It vested all development rights in the State, which would determine what could be built where and would acquire land to achieve these plans - compulsorily if necessary. The land would be bought, not at its value for development, but at the value for its current use - say, as pasture or forest - thus saving the government money and preventing "feudal" landowners from "exploiting" society's pressing needs. All apparently desirable goals, supported by a large majority of voters.

Pilgrim didn't know anything about that; a working man in the modest London suburb of Romford, he'd bought the vacant lot next door so that kids wouldn't play ball against his house. The price was surprisingly low, although he still had to get a mortgage for it. But you can't put a price on peace and quiet, can you?

The local council certainly could: it bought Pilgrim's lot compulsorily for a tenth of the money he'd paid and put up an apartment building tall enough to stop light from reaching his windows. His protests availed nothing: as far as the authorities were concerned, he was simply a property speculator too incompetent to read the small print. They wished he would go away - though not in the manner he chose.

Edward Pilgrim became a cause célèbre after death; Winston Churchill snapped briefly out of senility to accuse the Home Secretary of killing him. Promises were made to reform the system - though not retroactively, nor in Pilgrim's own case. His story provided the basis for that of Arthur Dent, protagonist of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, whose eviction notice was "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'." The dangers of over-reaching bureaucracy were strikingly clear.

So where stand things now? The same British state that victimized Pilgrim now mandates, not just what is built where, but who should get to go to college. It bans individuals from certain places or activities through "Anti-Social Behaviour Orders." It is creating a national database of all people who "come into regular contact" with children, from mothers who volunteer at school to visiting authors who come to do a reading. It monitors the population through closed-circuit television, with one camera for every fourteen people.

Whose fault is this? Ours - thanks to our mutable sense of "We" and "They." "We" are decent, law-abiding, self-sufficient people who ought to be allowed to go about our business without interference - except when we need to be protected from Them. "They" are interfering bureaucrats - except when They are overpaid fat cats, or feral youths, or immigrants, or snooty people who don't like our kids playing ball. Yet, when We are providing a service or trying to enforce regulations, They become the troublesome exceptions who complain, or don't cooperate, or (as the town clerk said of Pilgrim) "make a lot of fuss." This is a natural, if unadmirable, human instinct: we want unfettered freedom for ourselves, while others should be prevented from bothering us through repressive authority.

We will commit the least injustice when we can take the most responsibility for ourselves. So remember Edward Pilgrim the next time you catch yourself thinking "they ought to do something about it" - because They will.

If you enjoy such stories of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com. See you there.

To College with Lord Chesterfield

Michael Kaplan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:46:46 +0000

Dropping our only son off at college, I struggled for the perfect piece of essential advice, the ideal nudge that would somehow set his lone trajectory from this moment forward in exactly the right direction. I failed. "Live at least a winter with anyone you might marry" jostled around my mind with "remember to brush your teeth." "Be a true friend" ran up against "verify your references." "This above all..." I was turning into Polonius from Hamlet, so instantly recognizable as a comic character because so so many in Shakespeare's audience were students. Yes, that's me with the waggling chin-whiskers: dear, dumb old Dad.

Others have done a far better job than I could, even had the emotions of the moment not left me burbling nonsense. By common agreement, the best paternal advice is that of Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, who devoted his time off from government to writing letters of guidance to his illegitimate son. Clever, formal, cautious, distant, he unbuttoned himself in these notes; they seemed more a relief than a duty: "I wish to God that you had as much pleasure in following my advice, as I have in giving it to you."

What did he teach? The Great Bear of literature, Samuel Johnson said the letters convey "the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master," but this is unduly harsh. They mix three streams: the ancient Delphic philosophy of "nothing in excess;" the Stoic ideal of self-mastery; and political tips on judicious flattery and noncommittal trimming. He warned against faults like showing off or rudeness using the same three criteria: they were ugly; they were weak; and they could lose you favor. No wonder Johnson - that awkward, impulsive, un-ingratiating Johnson - found this repellent. It showed too clearly how the admirable virtues of the ancients might easily have sprung from the slippery dealings of their politics.

Chesterfield had never intended his letters to reach any eyes but those of his one, beloved child - but fate deals the same blows to good advice as to careful plans. Young Philip was neither knowledgeable, witty, nor a high-flyer, much though his father tried to put wind under his wings. His career in Parliament and in his country's diplomatic corps were blighted both by his bastardy and by an essentially forgettable character. Worse, he married, without Chesterfield's knowledge, a Miss Peters in Rome, "plain almost to ugliness," also illegitimate, and with whom he already had two sons. He died of dropsy aged only 36; his penniless wife then sold the letters to a publisher. So much for paternal guidance.

We say we form our children, but that is a comforting delusion. We may certainly cripple or pervert them, but no amount of squeezing, however skillful, can make another person fit an abstract ideal. The only useful advice we can give is something we adults so often fail to heed: "become your best self."

If you enjoy such tales of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at my sister site, Bozo Sapiens. See you there.

Message from a Bomber

Michael Kaplan — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:58:45 +0000

"In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people." This is not the usual way to break into the pages of the New York Times, but then this writer was exceptional: the terrorist called "Unabomber" by the FBI, whose meticulously hand-made bombs had killed three people and injured 22 over the previous eighteen years. Writing as the spokesman of a shadowy "Freedom Club," he was promising to give up his campaign if the Times and the Washington Post agreed to publish his 35,000-word opinion piece. It was not a request that editors could easily refuse. On this day in 1995, Industrial Society and its Future appeared in both papers; it did signal the end of the explosions, but not in the way it, or the bomber, expected.

It is, as he described it, a "sober essay," laying out in formal terms an argument about technology's innate tendency to restrict human freedom. Through 232 numbered paragraphs and one diagram, the writer outlines the pernicious effects of industrial society on the individual, disrupting the connection between personal goals and effort and promoting a "sense of purposelessness" that people can only relieve by deforming their personalities, creating a range of social ills from "excessive pleasure-seeking" to guilt and low self-esteem. It reads like a senior dissertation by someone at a major university, not - as it was - the work of a wild, unwashed man living in a 9 by 12-foot shack in the Montana mountains. It was this fastidious style that betrayed the bomber when his brother recognized its quirks and quibbles and led the authorities to the door of Ted Kaczynski.

Kaczynski clearly was - is - a man with strongly autistic characteristics. From early youth, he found noise unbearable, hated social occasions, retreated to his room for weeks, and responded to enquiries either by silence or by abrupt, often cutting, remarks. His parents, children of Polish immigrants, were devoted and attentive to their children, involving them in their own passionate commitment to further education, politics, and love of the outdoors. In Kaczynski's brother David, all these fit well together, producing a man with an unusually warm and rounded character. In Ted, they remained walled off from each other in separate compartments. For a time, his obsession was mathematics: he went to Harvard at 16, published original work while a graduate student, and became a tenure-track professor at Berkeley by 26 - then suddenly left and went off to live in the woods. Even the limited social life of a math department was too much for him.

Some admirers have cast Kaczynski as an eco-anarchist, fighting to protect a lovely and nurturing nature. This seems a romantic fiction: what he sought in the mountains was not nature's beauty but its essential indifference. It allowed him to follow his obsessions (finding wild food, tinkering with handmade weapons) without interference. It rewarded or punished his efforts, but in an entirely impersonal way. Yet the general quiet of Montana only amplified his anger at any intrusion. When a road appeared through virgin forest, when airliners flew overhead at night, they became impossible to ignore. Industrial society changed from being the hum outside the window to the fly in the room.

"We are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not." One compartment in Kaczynski's mind contained a desire for personal vengeance against individuals, often for perceived slights of which they were unaware. Over time, this evolved into a grievance against a the inventors and promoters of a world that would not leave him alone: computer scientists; behavior-modification psychologists; PR, airline, and forestry executives. His cabin became a wooden box filled with destructive intent, echoed in the explosive boxes he sent and left around the country.

There was a certain comfort in seeing Kaczynski's mug shot: if anyone fitted the sterotype of a mad bomber, he did; but some ideas in his manifesto are not so easily dismissed. Even those he loathed as "computer nerds," such as Ray Kurzweil, find his claim that we are becoming the "domestic animals" of our own technology disturbingly likely. You don't have to be an autist to see how systems work to smooth out behavior, increasingly requiring of the public little more than to consume and obey.

Ted Kaczynski will spend the rest of his life in the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: a vast concrete bunker where the inmates spend 23 hours a day in solitary. His freedom has been taken from him completely, but, oddly, so has his most intense grievance: Florence is very, very quiet.

If you enjoy such stories of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com. See you there.

Holy Places, Profane Practices

Michael Kaplan — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:26:01 +0000

Remarkably for a species that lived successfully as nomads for so many thousands of years, humans have a strong propensity for designating areas of sacred ground, from St. Peter's in Rome to the bleachers at Fenway Park. These spots can seem very ordinary (the Heart of Midlothian, celebrated by Walter Scott, is now merely one gum-encrusted cobblestone among many others) but, once designated, become the focus of powerful emotions and rituals (all true Scots, passing that cobblestone, must spit on it).

Evolutionary psychologists would argue that the sense of sacred ground is a necessary corollary to our nomadic past, when our lives depended on a just appreciation of the Place of Good Berries, even in the off-season. Dispassionate valuation has never been our style, though. We prefer to swing between indifference and reverence, so most hunter-gatherers' mental maps cover, not just the physical landscape, but the boundaries of powerful spiritual dominions. Paleontologists would go further, pointing out that the reservation of particular spots for certain behavior (defecation, for instance) is something we share with the lizards - which may explain why the profanation of sacred places calls up such basic reptilian responses as fear and aggression.

This day in AD 70, the Roman Army finally reconquered Jerusalem from its determined Jewish defenders. Titus, son of the Emperor, set about reducing the whole place to ground level, leaving only three isolated towers so that later visitors could know how mighty a city had yielded to him. And indeed it was mighty: King Herod, a well-travelled man, had turned Jerusalem into the Dubai of his time, a new-built gleaming capital to impress the increasingly numerous Graeco-Roman tourists. All was now humbled: Herod's palace, the quarter of the Saducees - and the Temple, seat of the living presence, tabernacle of the almighty, cast down and dispersed so that no man might say where it had stood.

That is now the problem, because an indeterminate sacred spot leaves itself open to the interpretations of self-interest. The whole of what had been Herod's Temple Mount is now under the control of a Muslim foundation responsible for the upkeep of two places sacred to Islam: the Dome of the Rock, scene of Abraham's sacrifice, and Al-Aqsa mosque, furthermost terminus of the Prophet's mystical night ride to the seventh heaven. Opinion has been divided as to which of these occupies the site of the Temple, but the assumption on all sides has been that any reconstruction of Judaism's most holy place, whose loss has been mourned for nearly two thousand years, would involve desecration of Islam's third-most important sites. Since 1967, Jews and Muslims have fenced around this issue, seeking for openings and watchful for provocations.

This may be unnecessary: an ingenious body of recent archaeological work by a Tel-Aviv architect, Tugia Sagiv, using the eyewitness observations of the fall of Jerusalem, knowledge of priestly practice, and non-intrusive ground scanning, places the Temple site on an open section of the mount, aligned with the Western (ex-Wailing) Wall. The Dome of the Rock occupies the position of a late temple to Jupiter, itself overlying a pagan tower to Astarte. Al-Aqsa covers a storeroom for vestments and a general gathering place, the Court of the Gentiles, that was open to all (even moneychangers). For once in the Middle East, history seems to offer a way out of an intractable problem.

Will anyone take it? Of course not; for more than half the point of a sacred spot is keeping others out of it. And if any Christians among you are shaking your heads at the petty intolerance of this, be reminded of the current state of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where a ladder put out for necessary repairs sometime before 1852 has stayed there (the repairs still undone) because each group of monks refuses to let the others out onto that particular ledge. The last major fistfight among the Christians was this November at the Feast of the Holy Cross; things have been so bad for so long that the church's hereditary caretakers are Muslim. Though we take off our hats or our shoes, we still bring our bad habits into the place of worship.

If you enjoy these moments of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at my sister site, http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com. See you there.

!00% Unamerican!

Michael Kaplan — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:53:00 +0000

"Honey, I'm bored. There's nothing to do tonight." "I know! Why don't we try some un-American activities?" What actually is un-American activity? I've had someone accuse me of it for disparaging pro wrestling, but I'm not sure that qualifies. If we were being strictly constructionist about this, we might say that "making laws respecting an establishment of religion" was un-American; or taking the militia's cannon away. Or taxing tea: that's definitely un-American.

"Un-American" implies a body of Americanness that we can isolate from its opposite - but this raises a fundamental problem: America is only a political contract; it has never been a nation in the conventional sense of the term, where ancestry, culture and politics help to mutually define each other. The Germans still legally recognize "blood nationality," which automatically confers a devotion to precision engineering, currywurst, and the songs of David Hasselhoff. France gives its citizens an entire culture and history in flat-pack form which, when assembled, provides them with limitless savoir vivre - and Gaulish ancestors, even if their parents came from Senegal. We have only the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Super Bowl. On that basis, almost everything is un-American.

The question arises because this week in 1948 marks the first appearance on America's television screens of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, now known by its dyslexic acronym, HUAC. Initially proposed by a Vilnius-born Jewish congressman (himself, remarkably, on the Soviets' NKVD payroll) as part of the fight against fascism, its job was to investigate Nazi infiltration of bodies like the KKK (although not to investigate the KKK itself; that, according to a committee member, was "an old American institution.") When the war ended and the Cold War began, HUAC was ready and eager to expose the Communist menace in our midst.

Was there such a menace? Well, yes, actually - or at least there had been. Soviet intelligence had been remarkably successful in cultivating idealistic young Americans during the 1930s, when the Great Depression seemed to prove the failure of capitalist institutions. In the face of America-First isolationism, only the Communists openly opposed the rise of the Nazis. Many recruits were children of Russian immigrants, retaining a romantic notion of the old country's youthful revolutionary ardor; others liked the excitement of joining something clandestine - and, of course, there were always the pleasures of sleeping with new and exotic people in a good cause. The result was that significant intelligence, from atom-bomb details to plans for postwar Europe, reached Moscow from spies in U.S. government departments. Sadly for the many honest Americans who supported them, it now seems clear that Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, and Harry Dexter White really did what they were accused of. The State Department, Treasury, OSS, and other agencies did employ people who passed secrets to the Soviets - until 1946, that is, when the defection to the FBI of Elizabeth Bentley, reported to Moscow by the British traitor Kim Philby, effectively shut down most of the network.

The disappearance of this genuine threat left HUAC with little to talk about - never a pleasant position for a congressman - so it turned its attention to an easier target: Hollywood. The hunt after "subversive elements" and "Red propagandists" drew on such good old (though not uniquely American) traditions as distrust of the alien, anti-semitism, hatred of smart-alecks, and belief that the people need to be protected from dangerous ideas. As this involved the entertainment industry, we all have heard a lot about this phase of the affair: the blacklisting, the finger-pointing; Lillian Hellman's bravery and Elia Kazan's cravenness; the damage to Arthur Miller's career and the boost to John Wayne's. Hundreds of people lost their jobs; the American Legion and private communist-hunting consultants told the studios whom to shun. It was appalling and embarrassing - in part because it was so trivial compared to the real damage done. Stalin, ever a keen follower of the arts, must have been chuckling into his mustache.

Through its ham-fisted attempts to confine a great country into a narrow ideological compass, HUAC eventually made itself contemptible and irrelevant. But some of the disgraceful practices it pursued in the name of patriotism still survive. Cynically magnifying trivialities; bluster and innuendo; guilt by association; shameless grandstanding... wouldn't it be nice if these were considered un-American activities?

If you enjoy such tales of human fallibility, you can find a new one every day on my sister site (http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com). See you there.

Monsters from the Deep

Michael Kaplan — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:28:54 +0000

"When the blessed man was living for some days in the province of the Picts, he was obliged to cross the river Ness; and when he reached the bank of the river, he saw some of the inhabitants burying an unfortunate man, who… was a short time before seized, as he was swimming, and bitten most severely by a monster that lived in the water." Yes, you're right: it's the first recorded account of the Loch Ness monster, ascribed to this date in AD 565. The "blessed man," St.Columba, quickly subdued the beast using the sign of the Cross, but it has come back intermittently, particularly during the 20th century, to star in films, photographs, and sonar displays - baffling visitors and boosting tourist revenues for this beautiful but remote spot.

True, St. Columba was on the river Ness, a sea estuary where killer whales are not unknown. True, plenty of early medieval saints' legends feature quelling of water monsters; and almost all sightings of "Nessie" involve some degree of error, fraud, or essential fuzziness. What's interesting, though, is not the monster itself - it's our disappointment at the thought that it might not really be there.

Our favorite outdoor illusions - Nessie, Bigfoot, big cats, dragons - show that we are fundamentally naturalists, and that our brains have never really left the forest. Although our lives are increasingly dominated by the inanimate, from cars through computers to microwave ovens, their designers must still work hard to imbue all this dumb stuff with subtly biological characteristics - "happy" grilles, silky skin textures, chirpy alert tones, softly yielding buttons or shift-sticks - because our brains respond differently to animals than to other moving objects.

In a 2007 test, people shown pairs of slightly-differing photographs were much better able to spot the changes if they involved an animal than a van, even though the van occupied much more of the picture. We can infer animal motion from remarkably few clues: a shifting pattern of white dots on a black background. When these dots mark the joints of a walking person, the observer spots it immediately and can even specify the size, sex, and indeed mood of that person with surprising accuracy. Within the brain, the sight of moving people or animals activates non-visual responses that are not activated by, say, the sight of trees or water: memory, spatial perception, emotions. So nuanced is this response that the computer-animation industry has largely given up trying to mimic human motion with software physics engines, and instead makes cartoon characters credible through "motion capture:" filming an actor in a suit with white spots on it.

In a risky world, when we still roamed the jungle, it was wise to assume that every indistinct shape was an animate being and that it meant us no good. It would be suicide to maintain skepticism as the tiger creeps ever closer - so we bolster our assumptions to the point of certainty. Our brains, after all, are not machines for discerning truth, but for providing answers. It is better to take any decision than none, because it is better to be wrong than lunch.

So it is not necessarily a sign of schizophrenia to see figures in the shadowy woods or hear voices in the babbling stream. This is just our senses doing their job - inferring significance - if perhaps a little too well. When the illusion is broken and we see the truth, the world loses a little meaning for us. We laugh as the tension loosens, but deep down we are slightly disappointed. The quest for mysterious beasts is not a disreputable branch of zoology, but instead a fascinating and legitimate tool of psychology; it is on the brain's map that we should mark, "here be dragons."

If you enjoy these tales of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day on my sister site (http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com). See you there.