When Norenzayan became a student of psychology in 1994, four years after his family had moved from Lebanon to America, he was excited to study the effect of religion on human psychology. “I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”Norenzayan became interested in how certain religious beliefs, handed down through generations, may have shaped human psychology to make possible the creation of large-scale societies. He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations. To be cooperative in large groups of relative strangers, in other words, might have required the shared belief that an all-powerful being was forever watching over your shoulder.
On every campus we need large, highly visible vegetable gardens that are tended by everyone who likes to eat; cafeterias that provide, insofar as they can, only local foods; compost heaps steaming next to these cafeterias to remind us to pay our debt to the soil. We need administrators committed to dismantling, not enlarging, our vast system of technological dependencies, and professors committed to living defensibly and responsibly and competently before their students. Our foreign studies programs must become local studies programs. Our new buildings must be made to run on energy sources that will still be available when the buildings turn fifty or a hundred. We can’t ignore the problem of ecological illiteracy any longer. It must become a prominent curricular concern all across higher education. And no one should graduate who doesn’t know what oil has done for us—and especially what it has done to us: made us fat, lazy, stupid, and incompetent. This won’t cut it.
Achebe can only fulfill his cultural responsibility by recounting as faithfully as he can the collapse of Igbo tradition — and, as a part of that recounting, the multiple causes which brought about the collapse. He too could have told a story in which his people are merely victims who contribute nothing to their own destruction; but that was not, as he understood it, wie es eigentlich gewesen, though it contains most of the truth. The mores of academic post-colonial discourse, which (for good reason) focus our attention on the cruelties of the colonial powers, do not encourage us to note the complexity of Achebe’s responses to the colonial situation. Achebe’s attacks on Western cultural imperialism, especially when he is speaking to a Western audience, can be righteously indignant and appropriately scathing; but it is only by honestly detailing the internal contradictions that beset Igbo culture that he can point to the possible future re-integration of that culture.And one of the ways that he seeks to prompt that re-integration is by reminding his people that it must be a collective task. They must share in the work of interpretation and discernment that Ezeulu heroically took on all by himself: they cannot merely rely upon a griot or priest to tell them how they should interpret their cultural situation. And in insisting upon this point, Achebe is following an old storyteller’s path. In his collection African Folktales, Roger Abrahams includes a section of “Stories to Discuss and Even Argue About.” These stories are divided into two groups. In one group, says Abrahams, are “profound moral examples, stories that explicate a lesson, or answer a central question.” Stories of this type, Abrahams goes on, are typically recounted “in those situations in which a purportedly wiser person speaks to those less knowledgeable in the ways of the world.” But in the other group are “dilemma tales, tales without an end” — by which Abrahams means tales that do not offer answers or resolutions. Many of them in fact end with questions. These stories, Abrahams explains, are told “among cohorts of equal experience and power.” So the wisdom which Achebe offers in Arrow of God is not the wisdom of answer and explication: it is the wisdom of knowing what task confronts his people — coupled with the determination to proclaim this most difficult kind of knowledge. Achebe refuses the easy virtue of one-sided readings, instead presenting the Igbo people with the challenge of interpretation: “This is what has befallen us; now what do we make of it?”
The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards — each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. Do you hear me? …So why do I say the story is chief among his fellow? The same reason I think that our people sometimes will give the name Nkolika to their daughters — Recalling-is-Greatest. Why? Because it is only the story that can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters. It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus-fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind. Does the blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbours.
[Richard] Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members—and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the “creative class” strategy, he notes, “flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,” since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see “disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.” His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”
Privately, however, De Quincey often gave accounts of his addiction that were no doubt designed in part to elicit the sympathy of friends or buy more time from anxious publishers, but that also presented the terrors of the drug in more unvarnished and unnerving terms than the stylized descriptions of the Confessions. “If I take no laudanum, I am in a state of semi-distraction — and cannot arrange my old thoughts, still less pursue fresh trains of thought,” he explained to his publisher J. A. Hessey: “ — on the other hand, if I take even 12 or 15 drops of laudanum — a violent indigestion comes on in 2 or 3 hours, and after that a return of bilious symptoms.” To his close friend John Wilson he observed that “one consequence of my Opium has been that the sensibility of my stomach is so much diminished, that even now…nothing ever stimulates my animal system into any pleasure. Suffer I do not any longer: but my condition is pretty uniformly = 0.” In a letter to Alfred Tennyson’s brother-in-law Edward Lushington, De Quincey describes the ways in which his addiction has undone him. “The nexus is wanting, and life and the central principle which should bind together all the parts at the centre…are wanting,” he asserts. “Infinite incoherence, ropes of sand, gloomy incapacity of vital pervasion by some one plastic principle, that is the hideous incubus upon my mind always.”
Arnold Newman’s portrait of Stravinsky, “published” version
“There’s a reason so many of Newman’s portraits have become the iconic images of artists such as Stravinsky and Picasso. Entering their space, Newman managed to capture something of these artists’ inner lives.”
Read the Austin American-Statesman’s review of “Arnold Newman: Masterclass.”Caption: Arnold Newman, Igor Stravinsky, 1945. Contact sheet of four negatives with Newman’s marks and cropping lines.
To understand why female lawyers, doctors, bankers, academics, high-tech executives and other, often expensively pedigreed, professionals quit work to stay home, you need not search their souls for ambivalence or nostalgia. In fact, searching their souls guarantees that you won’t get the story, because it’s not to be found in individual decisions and personal stories, which are always complicated and hard to parse, but in the structural realities of the American workplace. And by this I don’t just mean the family-unfriendly policies of the kind Marissa Mayer is accused of advancing—though refusing to let workers telecommute doesn’t help, and let’s not even talk about how few American companies have on-site child care or adequate parental leave. I mean that among the professional and managerial classes, success at work requires more hours in the office, more hours on the computer at home, more trips out of town, and a much less predictable schedule than it did in Betty Friedan’s day. The life of a Joan or a Peggy at an advertising agency looks almost easy by comparison….When I meet young female undergraduates and graduate students today, which I do when I speak at universities, I don’t find them neo-traditionalist or lacking in aspiration. They don’t seem to want to stay home with their kids. They have every intention of using their formidable educations to achieve professional success, just as I did when I was in college. And like me back then, they don’t really grasp what that will require.
Happy Birthday to abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann! Born March, 21, 1880, Hofmann would have been 133 today.