“You know about Mojave rattlesnakes?” Cormac McCarthy asks. The question has come up over lunch in Mesilla, N.M., because the hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America, wants to steer conversation away from himself, and he seems to think that a story about a recent trip he took near the Texas-Mexico border will offer some camouflage. A writer who renders the brutal actions of men in excruciating detail, seldom applying the anesthetic of psychology, McCarthy would much rather orate than confide. And he is the sort of silver-tongued raconteur who relishes peculiar sidetracks; he leans over his plate and fairly croons the particulars in his soft Tennessee accent.

“Mojave rattlesnakes have a neurotoxic poison, almost like a cobra’s,” he explains, giving a natural-history lesson on the animal’s two color phases and its map of distribution in the West. He had come upon the creature while traveling along an empty road in his 1978 Ford pickup near Big Bend National Park. McCarthy doesn’t write about places he hasn’t visited, and he has made dozens of similar scouting forays to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and across the Rio Grande into Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila. The vast blankness of the Southwest desert served as a metaphor for the nihilistic violence in his last novel, “Blood Meridian,” published in 1985. And this unpopulated, scuffed-up terrain again dominates the background in “All the Pretty Horses,” which will appear next month from Knopf.

“It’s very interesting to see an animal out in the wild that can kill you graveyard dead,” he says with a smile. “The only thing I had seen that answered that description was a grizzly bear in Alaska. And that’s an odd feeling, because there’s no fence, and you know that after he gets tired of chasing marmots he’s going to move in some other direction, which could be yours.”

Keeping a respectful distance from the rattlesnake, poking it with a stick, he coaxed it into the grass and drove off. Two park rangers he met later that day seemed reluctant to discuss lethal vipers among the backpackers. But another, clearly McCarthy’s kind of man, put the matter in perspective. “We don’t know how dangerous they are,” he said. “We’ve never had anyone bitten. We just assume you wouldn’t survive.”

Finished off with one of his twinkly-eyed laughs, this mealtime anecdote has a more jocular tone than McCarthy’s venomous fiction, but the same elements are there. The tense encounter in a forbidding landscape, the dark humor in the face of facts, the good chance of a painful quietus. Each of his five previous novels has been marked by intense natural observation, a kind of morbid realism. His characters are often outcasts — destitute or criminals, or both. Homeless or squatting in hovels without electricity, they scrape by in the backwoods of East Tennessee or on horseback in the dry, vacant spaces of the desert. Death, which announces itself often, reaches down from the open sky, abruptly, with a slashed throat or a bullet in the face. The abyss opens up at any misstep.

McCarthy appreciates wildness — in animals, landscapes and people — and although he is a well-born, well-spoken, well-read man of 58 years, he has spent most of his adult life outside the ring of the campfire. It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview. None of his novels have sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. For most of his career, he did not even have an agent.

But among a small fraternity of writers and academics, McCarthy has a standing second to none, far out of proportion to his name recognition or sales. A cult figure with a reputation as a writer’s writer, especially in the South and in England, McCarthy has sometimes been compared with Joyce and Faulkner. Saul Bellow, who sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, exclaims over his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.” Says the historian and novelist Shelby Foote: “McCarthy is the one writer younger than myself who has excited me. I told the MacArthur people that he would be honoring them as much as they were honoring him.”

A man’s novelist whose apocalyptic vision rarely focuses on women, McCarthy doesn’t write about sex, love or domestic issues. “All the Pretty Horses,” an adventure story about a Texas boy who rides off to Mexico with his buddy, is unusually sweet-tempered for him — like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on horseback. The earnest nature of the young characters and the lean, swift story, reminiscent of early Hemingway, should bring McCarthy a wider audience at the same time it secures his masculine mystique.

But whatever it has lacked in thematic range, McCarthy’s prose restores the terror and grandeur of the physical world with a biblical gravity that can shatter a reader. A page from any of his books — minimally punctuated, without quotation marks, avoiding apostrophes, colons or semicolons — has a stylized spareness that magnifies the force and precision of his words. Unimaginable cruelty and the simplest things, the sound of a tap on a door, exist side by side, as in this typical passage from “Blood Meridian” on the unmourned death of a pack animal:

“The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was.”

Rightful heir to the Southern Gothic tradition, McCarthy is a radical conservative who still believes that the novel can, in his words, “encompass all the various disciplines and interests of humanity.” And with his recent forays into the history of the United States and Mexico, he has cut a solitary path into the violent heart of the Old West. There isn’t anyone remotely like him in contemporary American literature.

A COMPACT UNIT, SHY OF 6 feet even in cowboy boots, McCarthy walks with a bounce, like someone who is also a good dancer. Clean-cut and handsome as he grays, he has a Celtic’s blue-green eyes set deep into a high-domed forehead. “He gives an impression of strength and vitality and poetry,” says Bellow, who describes him as “crammed into his own person.”

For such an obstinate loner, McCarthy is an engaging figure, a world-class talker, funny, opinionated, quick to laugh. Unlike his illiterate characters, who tend to be terse and crude, he speaks with an amused, ironic manner. His involved syntax has a relaxed elegance, as if he had easy control over the direction and agreement of his thoughts. Once he had agreed to an interview — after long negotiations with his agent in New York, Amanda Urban of International Creative Management, who promised he wouldn’t have to do another for many years — he seemed happy to entertain company for a few days.

Since 1976 he has lived mainly in El Paso, which sprawls along the concrete-lined Rio Grande, across the border from Juarez, Mexico. A gregarious recluse, McCarthy has lots of friends who know that he likes to be left alone. A few years ago The El Paso Herald-Post held a dinner in his honor. He politely warned them that he wouldn’t attend, and didn’t. The plaque now hangs in the office of his lawyer.

For many years he had no walls to hang anything on. When he heard the news about his MacArthur, he was living in a motel in Knoxville, Tenn. Such accommodations have been his home so routinely that he has learned to travel with a high-watt light bulb in a lens case to assure better illumination for reading and writing. In 1982 he bought a tiny, whitewashed stone cottage behind a shopping center in El Paso. But he wouldn’t take me inside. Renovation, which began a few years ago, has stopped for lack of funds. “It’s barely habitable,” he says. He cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.

McCarthy estimates that he owns about 7,000 books, nearly all of them in storage lockers. “He has more intellectual interests than anyone I’ve ever met,” says the director Richard Pearce, who tracked down McCarthy in 1974 and remains one of his few “artistic” friends. Pearce asked him to write the screenplay for “The Gardener’s Son,” a television drama about the murder of a South Carolina mill owner in the 1870′s by a disturbed boy with a wooden leg. In typical McCarthy style, the amputation of the boy’s leg and his slow execution by hanging are the moments from the show that linger in the mind.

McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. “We lived in total poverty,” says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. “We were bathing in the lake,” she says with some nostalgia. “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

McCarthy would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, Wittgenstein — anything — than himself or his books. “Of all the subjects I’m interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn’t,” he growls. “Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.”

His hostility to the literary world seems both genuine (“teaching writing is a hustle”) and a tactic to screen out distractions. At the MacArthur reunions he spends his time with scientists, like the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the whale biologist Roger Payne, rather than other writers. One of the few he acknowledges having known at all was the novelist and ecological crusader Edward Abbey. Shortly before Abbey’s death in 1989, they discussed a covert operation to reintroduce the wolf to southern Arizona.

McCarthy’s silence about himself has spawned a host of legends about his background and whereabouts. Esquire magazine recently printed a list of rumors, including one that had him living under an oil derrick. For many years the sum of hard-core information about his early life could be found in an author’s note to his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” published in 1965. It stated that he was born in Rhode Island in 1933; grew up outside Knoxville; attended parochial schools; entered the University of Tennessee, which he dropped out of; joined the Air Force in 1953 for four years; returned to the university, which he dropped out of again, and began to write novels in 1959. Add the publication dates of his books and awards, the marriages and divorces, a son born in 1962 and the move to the Southwest in 1974, and the relevant facts of his biography are complete.

The oldest son of an eminent lawyer, formerly with the Tennessee Valley Authority, McCarthy is Charles Jr., with five brothers and sisters. Cormac, the Gaelic equivalent of Charles, was an old family nickname bestowed on his father by Irish aunts.

It seems to have been a comfortable upbringing that bears no resemblance to the wretched lives of his characters. The large white house of his youth had acreage and woods nearby, and was staffed with maids. “We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks,” he says. What went on in these shacks, and in Knoxville’s nether world, seems to have fueled his imagination more than anything that happened inside his own family. Only his novel “Suttree,” which has a paralyzing father-son conflict, seems strongly autobiographical.

“I was not what they had in mind,” McCarthy says of childhood discord with his parents. “I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen. I hated school from the day I set foot in it.” Pressed to explain his sense of alienation, he has an odd moment of heated reflection. “I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies, and I had every hobby there was. There was no hobby I didn’t have, name anything, no matter how esoteric, I had found it and dabbled in it. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.” WRITING AND READING seem to be the only interests that the teen-age McCarthy never considered. Not until he was about 23, during his second quarrel with schooling, did he discover literature. To kill the tedium of the Air Force, which sent him to Alaska, he began reading in the barracks. “I read a lot of books very quickly,” he says, vague about his self-administered syllabus.

McCarthy’s style owes much to Faulkner’s — in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world — a debt McCarthy doesn’t dispute. “The ugly fact is books are made out of books,” he says. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” His list of those whom he calls the “good writers” — Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner — precludes anyone who doesn’t “deal with issues of life and death.” Proust and Henry James don’t make the cut. “I don’t understand them,” he says. “To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”

“The Orchard Keeper,” however Faulknerian in its themes, characters, language and structure, is no pastiche. The story of a boy and two old men who weave in and out of his young life, it has a gnarliness and a gloom all its own. Set in the hill country of Tennessee, the allusive narrative memorializes, without a trace of sentimentality, a vanishing way of life in the woods. An affection for coon hounds binds the fate of the characters, who wander unaware of any kinship. The boy never learns that a decomposing body he sees in a leafy pit may be his father.

McCarthy began the book in college and finished it in Chicago, where he worked part time in an auto-parts warehouse. “I never had any doubts about my abilities,” he says. “I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.” In 1961 he married Lee Holleman, whom he had met at college; they had a son, Cullen (now an architecture student at Princeton), and quickly divorced, the yet-unpublished writer taking off for Asheville, N.C., and New Orleans. Asked if he had ever paid alimony, McCarthy snorts. “With what?” He recalls his expulsion from a $40-a-month room in the French Quarter for nonpayment of rent.

After three years of writing, he packed off the manuscript to Random House — “it was the only publisher I had heard of.” Eventually it reached the desk of the legendary Albert Erskine, who had been Faulkner’s last editor as well as the sponsor for “Under the Volcano” by Malcolm Lowry and “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. Erskine recognized McCarthy as a writer of the same caliber and, in the sort of relationship that scarcely exists anymore in American publishing, edited him for the next 20 years. “There is a father-son feeling,” says Erskine, despite the fact, as he sheepishly admits, that “we never sold any of his books.”

For years McCarthy seems to have subsisted on awards money he earned for “The Orchard Keeper” — including grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the William Faulkner Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Some of these funds went toward a trip to Europe in 1967, where he met DeLisle, an English pop singer, who became his second wife. They settled for many months on the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where he wrote “Outer Dark,” published in 1968, a twisted Nativity story about a girl’s search for her baby, the product of incest with her brother. At the end of their independent wanderings through the rural South the brother witnesses, in one of McCarthy’s most appalling scenes, the death of his child at the hands of three mysterious killers around a campfire: “Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly.”

“Child of God,” published in 1973 after he and DeLisle returned to Tennessee, tested new extremes. The main character, Lester Ballard — a mass murderer and necrophiliac — lives with his victims in a series of underground caves. He is based on newspaper reports of such a figure in Sevier County, Tenn. Somehow, McCarthy finds compassion for and humor in Ballard, while never asking the reader to forgive his crimes. No social or psychological theory is offered that might explain him away.

In a long review of the book in The New Yorker, Robert Coles called McCarthy a “novelist of religious feeling,” comparing him with the Greek dramatists and medieval moralists. And in a prescient observation he noted the novelist’s “stubborn refusal to bend his writing to the literary and intellectual demands of our era,” calling him a writer “whose fate is to be relatively unknown and often misinterpreted.”

“MOST OF MY FRIENDS FROM those days are dead,” McCarthy says. We are sitting in a bar in Juarez, discussing “Suttree,” his longest, funniest book, a celebration of the crazies and ne’er-do-wells he knew in Knoxville’s dirty bars and poolrooms. McCarthy doesn’t drink anymore — he quit 16 years ago in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends — and “Suttree” reads like a farewell to that life. “The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,” he says. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”

Written over about 20 years and published in 1979, “Suttree” has a sensitive and mature protagonist, unlike any other in McCarthy’s work, who ekes out a living on a houseboat, fishing in the polluted city river, in defiance of his stern, successful father. A literary conceit — part Stephen Daedalus, part Prince Hal — he is also McCarthy, the willful outcast. Many of the brawlers and drunkards in the book are his former real-life companions. “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous life style,” he says. Residents of the city are said to compete to find themselves in the text, which has displaced “A Death in the Family” by James Agee as Knoxville’s novel.

McCarthy began “Blood Meridian” after he had moved to the Southwest, without DeLisle. “He always thought he would write the great American western,” says a still-smarting DeLisle, who typed “Suttree” for him — “twice, all 800 pages.” Against all odds, they remain friends. If “Suttree” strives to be “Ulysses,” “Blood Meridian” has distinct echoes of “Moby-Dick,” McCarthy’s favorite book. A mad hairless giant named Judge Holden makes florid speeches not unlike Captain Ahab’s. Based on historical events in the Southwest in 1849-50 (McCarthy learned Spanish to research it), the book follows the life of a mythic character called “the kid” as he rides around with John Glanton, who was the leader of a ferocious gang of scalp hunters. The collision between the inflated prose of the 19th-century novel and nasty reality gives “Blood Meridian” its strange, hellish character. It may be the bloodiest book since “The Iliad.”

“I’ve always been interested in the Southwest,” McCarthy says blandly. “There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.”

More profoundly, the book explores the nature of evil and the allure of violence. Page after page, it presents the regular, and often senseless, slaughter that went on among white, Hispanic and Indian groups. There are no heroes in this vision of the American frontier.

“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy says philosophically. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

This tooth-and-claw view of reality would seem not to accept the largesse of philanthropies. Then again, McCarthy is no typical reactionary. Like Flannery O’Conner, he sides with the misfits and anachronisms of modern life against “progress.” His play, “The Stonemason,” written a few years ago and scheduled to be performed this fall at the Arena Stage in Washington, is based on a Southern black family he worked with for many months. The breakdown of the family in the play mirrors the recent disappearance of stoneworking as a craft.

“Stacking up stone is the oldest trade there is,” he says, sipping a Coke. “Not even prostitution can come close to its antiquity. It’s older than anything, older than fire. And in the last 50 years, with hydraulic cement, it’s vanishing. I find that rather interesting.”

BY COMPARISON WITH the sonority and carnage of “Blood Meridian,” the world of “All the Pretty Horses” is less risky — repressed but sane. The main character, a teen-ager named John Grady Cole, leaves his home in West Texas in 1949 after the death of his grandfather and during his parents’ divorce, convincing his friend Lacey Rawlins they should ride off to Mexico.

Dialogue rather than description predominates, and the comical exchanges between the young men have a bleak music, as though their words had been whittled down by the wind off the desert:

They rode. You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you’re someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you’d be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasn’t supposed to be and didnt know it? What the hell’s wrong with you? I dont know. Nothin. I believe I’ll sing. He did.

A linear tale of boyish episodes — they meet vaqueros, are joined by a hapless companion, break horses on a hacienda and are thrown in jail — the book has a sustained innocence and a lucidity new in McCarthy’s work. There is even a budding love story.

“You haven’t come to the end yet,” says McCarthy, when asked about the low body count. “This may be nothing but a snare and a delusion to draw you in, thinking that all will be well.”

The book is, in fact, the first volume of a trilogy; the third part has existed for more than 10 years as a screenplay. He and Richard Pearce have come close to making the film — Sean Penn was interested — but producers always became skittish about the plot, which has as its central relationship John Grady Cole’s love for a teen-age Mexican prostitute.

Knopf is revving up the publicity engines for a campaign that they hope will bring McCarthy his overdue recognition. Vintage will reissue “Suttree” and “Blood Meridian” next month, and the rest of his work shortly thereafter. McCarthy, however, won’t be making the book-signing circuit. During my visit he was at work in the mornings on Volume 2 of the trilogy, which will require another extended trip through Mexico.

“The great thing about Cormac is that he’s in no rush,” Pearce says. “He is absolutely at peace with his own rhythms and has complete confidence in his own powers.”

In a pool hall one afternoon, a loud and youthful establishment in one of El Paso’s ubiquitous malls, McCarthy ignores the video games and rock-and-roll and patiently runs out the table. A skillful player, he was a member of a team at this place, an incongruous setting for a man of his conservative demeanor. But more than one of his friends describes McCarthy as a “chameleon, able to adjust easily to any surroundings and company because he seems so secure in what he will and will not do.”

“Everything’s interesting,” McCarthy says. “I don’t think I’ve been bored in 50 years. I’ve forgotten what it was like.”

He bangs away in his stone house or in motels on an Olivetti manual. “It’s a messy business,” he says about his novel-building. “You wind up with shoe boxes of scrap paper.” He likes computers. “But not to write on.” That’s about all he will discuss about his process of writing. Who types his final drafts now he doesn’t say.

Having saved enough money to leave El Paso, McCarthy may take off again soon, probably for several years in Spain. His son, with whom he has lately re-established a strong bond, is to be married there this year. “Three moves is as good as a fire,” he says in praise of homelessness.

The psychic cost of such an independent life, to himself and others, is tough to gauge. Aware that gifted American writers don’t have to endure the kind of neglect and hardship that have been his, McCarthy has chosen to be hardheaded about the terms of his success. As he commemorates what is passing from memory — the lore, people and language of a pre-modern age — he seems immensely proud to be the kind of writer who has almost ceased to exist.

I stumbled upon the following… no words can describe how awesome this is:

I had an unusually long conversation with my daughter Georgia (also now a Goodreader) once when she was seven years old (she’s now 14) and the matter of eschatology came up, so I asked her directly – well, what does happen when you die? So she laid out what she thinks happens, and I was so taken by the stuff she came out with that I wrote it down. As it’s a variety of religious experience I thought it appropriate to include here.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE

Heaven has different parts to it. In one part there are monsters, but they’re good. In another part they’re like orcs but they’re good. In the third part there are dinosaurs, and they’re bad.
Jesus is not in heaven. He is above heaven. He was a normal man but he went on the cross and died and he became magic. He was alive again and turned into an angel. Now he can listen to anyone on the earth just by thinking of their name.
When people die they all go to heaven. It could be the good part or the bad part. When you die you turn into a zombie, but then quite quickly you turn into a skeleton and that’s when you go to heaven. The skeletons in heaven can’t see the Earth at all, but to the good orcs Earth appears like the brightest star in the sky. But they have to look down to see it, because they are all upside down.
If you are cremated your ashes float up and turn into your soul. It goes up into a purple porthole. It meets a sorter who asks you what age you want to be and that’s what you stay at from then on. In this world everything is slightly see-through. You only spend 1000 years here and then you go to the graveyard and sleep. But one day in each 10 years you come alive again. But this world is not heaven so jesus is not there. The bad people who die become good. For five years out of 1000 they are punished in a house sized prison cell by having to eat all the food they really hate and listen to all the music they really hate.
There is a feather of truth and a catch up course, but I can’t remember what they are for.
People have gone into space in rockets but they haven’t seen heaven because it is very small.
When animals die, if it’s on concrete they fade away and become invisible. If it’s on soil, they sink bit by bit into the earth and they become animal zombies. Our hamster Lucy became an animal zombie, but all animal zombies are good, not bad.

Note : don’t blame me for any of this, I never allowed her to watch any zombie films intil she was 12! I don’t know where she’s got any of this stuff apart from orcs

I’m currently reading William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. William James, for those who don’t know him, was an early psychologist and an early pragmatist. He’s also the brother of Henry James. The book concerns the nature of religion and the neglect of science, in James’ view, in the academic study of religion. I’m only 1/3 of the way through, but I started reading up on it on the internet, and came upon a neat commentary that I thought I’d share.

[note: I also want to point out how similar William James and (the late) Christopher Hitchens are: while they had very different professions, they were both academics, highly literate, very eloquent, and are famous in part for their interest in religion (although they share opposite views). Finally, although they're both very academic and argue from an objective standpoint, they both seem to have their personal reasons for taking the views they have: James may have put off insanity with biblical passages (see below), and Chris's mother killed herself in a suicide pact with a former Anglican minister (and embraced the teachings of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the same guru who had earlier bewitched the Beatles. *)]

The following comes from here (50 Spiritual Classics: 50 Great Books of Inner Discovery, Enlightenment and Purpose, Tom Butler-Bowdon, 2005 (London & Boston: Nicholas Brealey):

To prepare for the talks, Harvard psychologist William James had read widely in the religious classics, including the personal accounts of various saints and mystics.

His decision to look at spiritual experience from a psychological point of view seemed very new at the time, even blasphemous. Mountains of books were still being churned out on the finer points of dogma and theology, but James was more interested in individual experience. His purpose in writing the book was to convince the reader that although religion itself often seemed absurd, the spiritual impulse was what made us human. James wanted to know why man was a religious animal, and what practical benefits spirituality brought us, assuming that we would not engage in it if it did not do us some good.

The book’s insights are wrapped in prose as elegant and forceful as anything written by his novelist brother Henry James, and it was recognized as a classic virtually from the day of publication. The book’s great service was to make the religious reader see spiritual matters from a more rational, objective perspective, and to persuade the scientifically-minded that religious experience had its value and was a ‘fact’.

James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience at the end of a century of scientific advance that reacted against the unthinking faith of earlier times. In this milieu, the Bible was newly appreciated as just a collection of stories, and in the new science of psychology, religious experience could be explained away as a creation of the mind. Yet James was skeptical of the idea that all religious experience could be reduced to states of the brain, what he calls the ‘Nothing-but’ view of spirituality.

James wrote that spiritual ideas should be judged on three criteria: 1) Immediate luminousness; 2) Philosophical reasonableness; and 3) Moral helpfulness. Put simply, do they enlighten us, do they make sense, are they a good guide to living?

He quotes a passage from St Teresa of Avila’s autobiography, in which she talks about her visions. At the time some suspected she was seeing the devil, not God, but she protested that what she saw could not be just the work of the imagination, since it had made her a much better person (“uprooting my vices, and filling me with a masculine courage”) – and her confessors confirmed it. Teresa also made a distinction between imaginings and spiritual reality, pointing out that while pure imagination weakens the mind and soul, ‘genuine heavenly vision’ revitalizes and strengthens the subject. In Teresa’s case, she felt that her visitations guided her towards the reform of the Carmelite order, of which she was a member.

This was the practical effect of religious experience that James was so fascinated by. These ‘visitations’ may have come from inside a saint’s own mind, or they may indeed have been from God. But as the cases such as St Paul’s, St Augustine’s or Teresa’s demonstrated, what was sure was that they could transform a life.

James offered the idea that religion does not have to be worship of a God. It can be simply the belief in an unseen order, to which our task was to ‘harmoniously adjust ourselves’. He notes that, “Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion?” Under this appreciation, atheism could be a religion. The fervor with which some atheists attack Christianity, he noted, is religious in nature. People take on religion for personal reasons, James argues – it must serve them in some way. He quotes J H Leuba, an early psychologist of religion: “God is not known, he is not understood; he is used.”

The religious attitude, though, is normally associated with a willingness to leave the self behind in the cause of something greater e.g. God, country. This denial of the self is what makes the religious impulse different from all other types of happiness, and so uniquely uplifting. A religious feeling can be distinguished from other feelings because it ennobles the feeler, giving them the sense that they live according to larger forces, laws or designs.

We all want to connect with something ‘more’, whether that is something great inside us or an external Higher Power, and religion provides a framework for people to experience the better things which come from living by faith instead of our more natural state of fear. “Not God”, James states, “but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion.”

Inserted into the text of The Varieties of Religious Experience is the mention of a man who managed to save himself from insanity by anchoring his mind to powerful statements from the Bible. It so happens that this person, referred to as a ‘French correspondent’, was the author himself.

James’ conclusion was that a state of faith could transform a life utterly, even though what is believed strictly speaking may not exist. Religion can genuinely heal a person, integrating what before was fragmented. For the author, who fell in and out of depression and endured a sense of alienation for many of his years, this alone justified religious activity. While he admitted to being far from spiritually advanced himself, it was clear to him that belief in the Unseen had unleashed in many the great forces of individuality and purpose.

James acknowledged that science would be forever trying to blow away the obscuring mists of religion, but in doing so it would totally miss the point. Science could only ever talk in the abstract, but personal spiritual experience was the more powerful precisely because it is subjective. Spirituality is about the emotions and the imagination and the soul – and to a human being these are everything.

This is (in my opinion) a great article by the pop-culture write Chuck Klosterman about how daunting of a task it would be to have a revolution in America. Written in 2007, I feel it’s very relevant today…what with all the occupy brouhaha.

Here it is, in all it’s glory (stolen from here):

I do not want to overthrow the government. In case you misread that, I am going to type it again, this time more slowly: I. Do. Not. Want. To. Overthrow the government. I don’t want black helicopters landing on the roof of my apartment building, and I don’t want to be hunted by death squads through the jungles of Bolivia. I always pay my taxes. I think paying taxes is fun! If someone asks me if I enjoy the music of Rage Against the Machine, I usually say, “Oh, they were only okay.” Whenever I see people using the metric system, I punch them in the pancreas.

However…

Something has been occupying my mind as of late, and I can’t tell if this thought is reassuring or terrifying: I’ve been thinking about the possibility of revolution, or–more accurately–the impossibility of revolution. I’ve started wondering what would have to happen before the American populace would try to overthrow its own government, and how such a coup would play itself out. My conclusions are that a) nothing could make this happen, and b) no one would know what to do if it somehow did. The country is too large, its social systems are too complex, and its people are too complacent, too reasonable, and too confused. I’ve decided that the U. S. government is (for lack of a better, preexisting term) “unoverthrowable.” And this would probably make a man like Patrick Henry profoundly depressed, were it not for the fact that he’s been dead for 207 years.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, and his thoughts were far from unique: Almost all of the Founding Fathers were obsessed with the potential for insurgency on U. S. soil. “Future citizens will need muskets to assassinate their oppressive viceroys,” James Madison might have hypothetically remarked during the intermission of a slave auction. “In fact, this is probably the second most important freedom any of us will be able to come up with. Somebody should write this shit down.” Superficially, such preemptive legislation worked perfectly: There are now roughly two hundred million guns in America, and that’s only counting the NBA’s Eastern Conference. We have enough privately owned firepower to instantly kill a billion grizzly bears, plus a few dozen prostitutes. But it’s hard to imagine these weapons employed in any kind of popular uprising, even if a majority of American adults unilaterally agreed that such an event was necessary. Whom would they presumably shoot? Probably no one, and possibly one another.

The central issue here, I suppose, is impetus: Americans are not particularly motivated to overthrow their government. But what if they were motivated? Would that even matter? In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, countless media whores criticized the government for not doing enough for the people of Louisiana. But let’s imagine that the government had done even less; let’s imagine that the president and most of Congress decided that New Orleans was a lost cause, barricaded all the roads into the city, and gave up. Let’s pretend they made no attempts to relocate the survivors or deliver aid, and New Orleans was allowed to devolve into a rogue dystopia that was no longer recognized as part of the union. One assumes this would prompt cataclysmic outrage; it would be no different from the state-sponsored execution of random poor people, which seems like a revolt-worthy offense. Yet if such a nightmare scenario had actually happened, what could the average middle-class resident of Boise, Idaho (or anywhere else), have done? He’d lose faith in the democratic process, and he’d possibly update his blog. But that’s about it. He has no options. He’s twenty-two hundred miles from the ruins of Bourbon Street, he’s twenty-four hundred miles from Washington, D. C., and he’s got to be at work by 9:00 A.M., because he has a house (and he likes his house).

But–just for the sake of argument–let’s assume this man still wants to push the envelope. Let’s assume this patriot is beyond outraged. Maybe he just rented The Bourne Supremacy, and maybe he thinks the time for blogging has passed. Maybe he’s ready to make some really bad choices for some really ethical principles. Maybe Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues” comes on his iTunes, so he loads the .30-30 he just bought at Wal-Mart and walks into the street. What now? My aforementioned question remains unresolved: Whom, exactly, is this man supposed to shoot? A cop? The mayor of Boise? A FEMA employee? Whom would he be revolting against? Is it even possible for the modern man to know?

When trying to overthrow a regime, all those unanswerable questions matter. But then again, maybe they don’t. I doubt most Americans would participate in a revolution, even if they understood (and supported) its cause completely. I was recently discussing this with a colleague of mine over lunch; we were trying to come up with conditions that could ignite a people’s uprising we’d actively involve ourselves with. These possibilities ranged from “massive water shortage” (which could happen in India in the coming decade) to “political infiltration by flesh-eating panda zombies” (which happened in Nepal in 2005). My associate offered this scenario: “Suppose we had evidence that the federal government engineered 9/11,” he said. “Suppose we had indisputable proof that we paid the Saudis to blow up the World Trade Center, and members from both political parties had signed off on it. And the day after this proof emerged, George W. Bush announced that he would give a speech at ground zero explaining why this decision was made. If this happened, I assume there would be a protest rally during his speech. And perhaps some people would start throwing rocks, and perhaps I’d be caught up in the frenzy, and perhaps I would start throwing rocks, too.”

“So you would take part in the revolution’s inception,” I responded. “You would throw rocks at a corrupt president.”

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe. Or maybe not. Probably not. Who knows? I’m not really a rock-throwing kind of guy.”

I’m not a rock-throwing kind of guy, either. Moreover, I assume the type of person who hurls rocks in public is not the type of person I would agree with about anything. Modernity has created a cosmic difference between intellect and action, even when both are driven by the same motives; as such, the only people qualified to lead a present-day revolution would never actually do so. Contemporary leaders are not rock-throwing guys. And this is a problem, because it’s the rock throwers who get things done.

Here again, my feelings are mixed; maybe I shouldn’t have used the word problem in my previous sentence. Perhaps I should have used the word luxury. I’m pretty sure there are numerous countries in this world where citizens dream of a society too rational to be influenced by rock throwers.1 Security has a way of making philosophy irrelevant, and anyone who disagrees is either a liar or a tenured professor. But there’s still something ominous about the reality of our sanctuary. It seems weird that this is the country and there’s nothing we can do about it, beyond participating in the system that’s already in place. It would not matter what the government did or to whom they did it–nobody knows how to change things in any meaningful way, and the only people who’d try are dangerous and insane. We have reached a point where the reinvention of America is impossible, even if that were what we wanted. Even if that were what everybody wanted.

You might think the government is corrupt, and you might be right. But I’m surprised it isn’t worse. I’m surprised they don’t shoot us in the street. It’s not like we could do anything about it, except maybe die.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/chuck-klostermans-america/ESQ0107revolution#ixzz1fOcEDxf2

I am an unabashed fan of the practical philosopher Peter Singer. Recently I found an article he wrote for Harper’s, titled Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets. Essentially it’s about reverse Big Brother – instead of the future becoming a world where only the government sees our every move, technology (cell phones) have made it such that everyone is watching everyone, including the people watching the government.

I’m sure Singer isn’t the first to notice the trend…I know I’ve talked about this drunkenly at a party. On a similar note, I guess I should talk about another of my drunken party ideas now in order to cement it’s place in history so that, when it becomes a genius idea in the future, I can point to this post and say “I thought of that way back in 2011″. The idea is simply that, before the 1920s or 30s [edit: oi, I was about 100 years off: this should say 1820s or 30s. Thanks Richard!], there wasn’t film or photography, and thus there was never an instant snapshot in time, that could capture a moment and serve as evidence of a moment in the past. And we’ve had that ever since, with video surveillance helping to catch criminals in the act. However, what will happen in the future when computer technology becomes so good (Avatar, District 9) that ordinary citizens can create footage that looks identical to real footage? Would all video surveillance and other video evidence no longer be able to be used, since the defence would cite the fact that the video could have been faked? Are we now living through a brief moment in human history where we had legitimate evidence of moments in time, that we never had before, and we may never have again? I think that’s a cool idea.

Anyways, the Singer article is really good, so I’ve posted it in full below. I’ve also added my own running commentary [in square brackets and italics]. Enjoy:

In 1787, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed the construction of a “Panopticon,” a circular building with cells along the outer walls and, at the center, a watchtower or “inspector’s lodge” from which all the cells could be seen but no one would know, at any given moment, due to a system of blinds and partitions, whether he was actually being observed. Bentham thought this design would be particularly suited to prisons but suggested it could also be applied to factories, hospitals, mental asylums, and schools. Not only would prisoners, workers, the ill, the insane, and students be subject to observation, but also—if the person in charge of the facility visited the inspector’s area—the warders, supervisors, caregivers, and teachers. The gradual adoption of this “inspection principle,” would, Bentham predicted, create “a new scene of things,” transforming the world into a place with “morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction dif- fused, public burdens lightened.”

[this is essentially the whole thrust of Foucault's concept of power and biopolitics...am I wrong?]

The modern Panopticon is not a physical building, and it doesn’t require the threat of an inspector’s presence to be effective. Technological breakthroughs have made it easy to collect, store, and disseminate data on individuals, corporations, and even the government. With surveillance technology like closed-circuit television cameras and digital cameras now linked to the Internet, we have the means to implement Bentham’s inspection principle on a much vaster scale. What’s more, we have helped construct this new Panopticon, voluntarily giving up troves of personal information. We blog, tweet, and post what we are doing, thinking, and feeling. We allow friends and contacts, and even strangers, to know where we are at any time. We sign away our privacy in exchange for the conveniences of modern living, giving corporations access to information about our financial circumstances and our spending habits, which will then be used to target us for ads or to analyze our consumer habits.

Then there is the information collected without our consent. Since 2001, the number of U.S. government organizations involved in spying on our own citizens, both at home and abroad, has grown rapidly. Every day, the National Security Agency intercepts 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, instant messages, bulletin-board postings, and other communications. This system houses information on thousands of U.S. citizens, many of them not accused of any wrongdoing. Not long ago, when traffic police stopped a driver they had to radio the station and wait while someone checked records. Now, handheld devices instantly call up a person’s Social Security number and license status, records of out- standing warrants, and even mug shots. The FBI can also cross-check your fingerprints against its digital archive of 96 million sets.

Yet the guarded have also struck back, in a sense, against their guardians, using organizations like WikiLeaks, which, according to its founder Julian Assange, has released more classified documents than the rest of the world’s media combined,

[that is one of the single most cool facts I've ever heard about any major event that has happened in my lifetime]

to keep tabs on governments and corporations. When Assange gave the Guardian 250,000 confidential cables, he did so on a USB drive the size of your little finger. Efforts to close down the WikiLeaks website have proven futile, because the files are mirrored on hundreds of other sites. And in any case, WikiLeaks isn’t the only site revealing private information. An array of groups are able to release information anonymously. Governments, corporations, and other organizations interested in protecting privacy will strive to increase security, but they will also have to reckon with the likelihood that such measures are sometimes going to fail.

New technology has made greater openness possible, but has this openness made us better off? For those who think privacy is an inalienable right, the modern surveillance culture is a means of controlling behavior and stifling dissent. But perhaps the inspection principle, universally applied, could also be the perfection of democracy, the device that allows us to know what our governments are really doing, that keeps tabs on corporate abuses, and that protects our individual freedoms just as it subjects our personal lives to public scrutiny. In other words, will this technology be a form of tyranny or will it free us from tyranny? Will it upend democracy or strengthen it?

The standards of what we want to keep private and what we want to make public are constantly evolving. Over the course of Western history, we’ve developed a desire for more privacy, quite possibly as a status symbol, since an impoverished peasant could not afford a house with separate rooms. Today’s affluent Americans display their status not only by having a bedroom for each member of the family, plus one for guests, but also by having a bathroom for every bedroom, plus one for visitors so that they do not have to see the family’s personal effects. It wasn’t always this way. A seventeenth-century Japanese shunga depicts a man making love with his wife while their daughter kneels on the floor nearby, practicing calligraphy. The people of Tikopia, a Pacific island inhabited by Polynesians, “find it good to sleep side by side crowding each other, next to their children or their parents or their brothers and sisters, mixing sexes and generations,” according to the anthropologist Dorothy Lee. “[A]nd if a widow finds herself alone in her one-room house, she may adopt a child or a brother to allay her intolerable privacy.” The Gebusi people in New Guinea live in communal longhouses and are said to “shun privacy,” even showing reluctance to look at photos in which they are on their own.

With some social standards, the more people do something, the less risky it becomes for each individual.

The first women to wear dresses that did not reach their knees were no doubt looked upon with disapproval, and may have risked unwanted sexual attention; but once many women were revealing more of their legs, the risks dissipated. So too with privacy: when millions of people are prepared to post personal information, doing so becomes less risky for everyone. And those collective, large-scale forfeitures of personal privacy have other benefits as well, as tens of thousands of Egyptians showed when they openly became fans of the Facebook page “We are all Khaled Said,” named after a young man who was beaten to death by police in Alexandria. The page became the online hub for the protests that forced the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

Whether Facebook and similar sites are reflecting a change in social norms about privacy or are actually driving that change, that half a billion are now on Facebook suggests that people believe the benefits of connecting with others, sharing information, networking, self-promoting, flirting, and bragging outweigh breaches of privacy that accompany such behavior.

More difficult questions arise when the loss of privacy is not in any sense a choice. Bentham’s Panopticon has become a symbol of totalitarian intrusion. Michel Foucault described it as “the perfection of power.” We all know that the police can obtain phone records when seeking evidence of involvement in a crime, but most of us would be surprised by the frequency of such requests. Verizon alone receives 90,000 demands for information from law-enforcement agencies annually. Abuses have undoubtedly accompanied the recent increase in government surveillance. One glaring example is the case of Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon attorney and convert to Islam who was jailed on suspicion of involvement in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. After his arrest, Mayfield sued the government and persuaded a federal judge to declare the provision of the Patriot Act that the FBI used in investigating him unconstitutional. But as with most excesses of state power, the cause is not so much the investigative authority of the state as the state’s erroneous interpretation of the information it uncovers and the unwarranted detentions that come about as a result. If those same powers were used to foil another 9/11, most Americans would likely applaud.

There is always a danger that the information collected will be misused—whether by regimes seeking to silence opposition or by corporations seeking to profit from more detailed knowledge of their potential customers. The scale and technological sophistication of this data-gathering enterprise allow the government to intercept and store far more information than was possible for secret police of even the most totalitarian states of an earlier era, and the large number of people who have access to sensitive information increases the potential for misuse.(1) As with any large-scale human activity, if enough people are involved eventually someone will do something corrupt or malicious. That’s a drawback to having more data gathered, but one that may well be outweighed by the benefits. We don’t really know how many terrorist plots have been foiled because of all this data-gathering.(2) We have even less idea how many innocent Americans were initially suspected of terrorism but not arrested because the enhanced data-gathering permitted under the Patriot Act convinced law-enforcement agents of their innocence.

The degree to which a government is repressive does not turn on the methods by which it acquires information about its citizens, or the amount of data it retains. When regimes want to harass their opponents or suppress opposition, they find ways to do it, with or without electronic data. Under President Nixon, the administration used tax audits to harass those on his “enemies list.” That was mild compared with how “enemies” were handled during the dirty wars in Argentina, Guatemala, and Chile, and by the Stasi in East Germany.

[I must admit I'm not completely familiar with what he's referencing right here...I suppose I have more reading to do...]

These repressive governments “disappeared” tens of thousands of dissidents, and they targeted their political enemies with what now seem impossibly cumbersome methods of collecting, storing, and sorting data. If such forms of abuse are rare in the United States, it is not because we have prevented the state from gathering electronic data about us. The crucial step in preventing a repressive government from misusing information is to have alert and well-informed citizens with a strong sense of right and wrong who work to keep the government democratic, open, just, and under the rule of law. The technological innovations used by governments and corporations to monitor citizens must be harnessed to monitor those very governments and corporations.

[Fuch yeah!]

One of the first victories for citizen surveillance came in 1991, when George Holliday videotaped Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. Without that video, yet another LAPD assault on a black man would have passed unnoticed. Instead, racism and violence in police departments became a national issue, two officers went to prison, and King received $3.8 million in civil damages. Since then, videos and photographs, many of them taken on mobile phones, have captured innumerable crimes and injustices. Inverse surveillance— what Steve Mann, professor of computer engineering and proponent of wearing imaging devices, terms “sousveillance”—has become an effective way of informing the world of abuses of power.

We have seen the usefulness of sousveillance again this year in the Middle East, where the disclosure of thousands of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks helped encourage the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, as well as the protest movements that spread to neighboring countries.

[I was not aware that WikiLeaks was such an integral part of that movement...]

Yet most government officials vehemently condemned the disclosure of state secrets. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that WikiLeaks’ revelations “tear at the fabric of the proper function of responsible government.” In February of this year, at George Washington University, she went further, saying that WikiLeaks had endangered human rights activists who had been in contact with U.S. diplomats, and rejecting the view that governments should conduct their work in full view of their citizens. As a counterexample, she pointed to U.S. efforts to secure nuclear material in the former Soviet states. Here, she claimed, confidentiality was necessary in order to avoid making it easier for terrorists or criminals to find the materials and steal them.

[this reminds me of a book my friend told me about, called The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind, which is about "how knowledge sequestration and commoditization are destroying [or can destroy] individuals’ intellectual and creative potential, thus harming society as a whole. For example, intellectual property law [i.e. knowledge restriction law] has expanded exponentially since the 1970s. More particularly, many forms of technical knowledge have actually been outlawed, with knowledge of nuclear technology being the prime example and test case. There is a very real danger, which Laughlin suggests is already manifest among young scientists today, that our most brilliant minds will be left impotent by a legal framework that disallows them from understanding the world around them, or from even attempting to understand it.” I can’t remember if my friend said it was a good book. The concept sounds interesting…]

Clinton is right that it is not a good idea to make public the location of insecurely stored nuclear materials, but how much of diplomacy is like that? There may be some justifiable state secrets, but they certainly are few. For nearly all other dealings between nations, openness should be the norm. In any case, Clinton’s claim that WikiLeaks releases documents “without regard for the consequences” is, if not deliberately misleading, woefully ignorant. Assange and his colleagues have consistently stated that they are motivated by a belief that a more transparent government will bring better consequences for all, and that leaking information has an inherent tendency toward greater justice, a view Assange laid out on his blog in December 2006, the month in which WikiLeaks published its first document:

“The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie…. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.”(3)

Assange could now claim that WikiLeaks’ disclosures have confirmed his theory. For instance, in 2007, months before a national election, WikiLeaks posted a report on corruption commissioned but not released by the Kenyan government. According to Assange, a Kenyan intelligence official found that the leaked report changed the minds of 10 percent of Kenyan voters, enough to shift the outcome of the election.

[Holy crow! Another thing I never knew about...]

Two years later, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, WikiLeaks released documents on dealings by Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank, showing that the institution made multibillion-dollar loans, in some cases unsecured, to its major shareholders shortly before it collapsed. Kaupthing’s successor, then known as New Kaupthing, obtained an injunction to prevent Iceland’s national television network from reporting on the leaked documents but failed to prevent their dissemination. WikiLeaks’ revelations stirred an uproar in the Icelandic parliament, which then voted unanimously to strengthen free speech and establish an international prize for freedom of expression. Senior officials of the bank are now facing criminal charges.

And of course, in April 2010, WikiLeaks released thirty-eight minutes of classified cockpit-video footage of two U.S. Army helicopters over a Baghdad suburb. The video showed the helicopter crews engaging in an attack on civilians that killed eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two children. Ever since the attack took place, in 2007, Reuters had unsuccessfully sought a U.S. military inquiry into the deaths of its two employees, as well as access to the cockpit video under the Freedom of Information Act. The United States had claimed that the two journalists were killed during a firefight. Although no action has been taken against the soldiers involved, if the military is ever going to exercise greater restraint when civilian lives are at risk, it will have been compelled to do so through the release of material like this.

Months before the Arab Spring began, Assange was asked whether he would release the trove of secret diplomatic cables that he was rumored to have obtained. Assange said he would, and gave this reason: “These sort of things reveal what the true state of, say, Arab governments are like, the true human rights abuses in those governments.” As one young Tunisian wrote to the Guardian, his countrymen had known for many years that their leaders were corrupt, but that was not the same as reading the full details of particular incidents, rounded off with statements by American diplomats that corruption was keeping domestic investment low and unemployment high. The success of Tunisia’s revolution undoubtedly influenced the rest of the Arab world, putting U.S. diplomats in an uncomfortable predicament. A mere three months after condemning WikiLeaks for releasing stolen documents “without regard to the consequences,” Secretary Clinton found herself speaking warmly about one of those outcomes: the movement for reform in the Middle East.

WikiLeaks’ revelations have had profound ramifications, but as with any event of this scale, it is not easy to judge whether those consequences are, on the whole, desirable. Assange himself admitted to the Guardian that as a result of the leaked corruption report in Kenya, and the violence that swept the country during its elections, 1,300 people were killed and 350,000 displaced; but, he added, 40,000 Kenyan children die every year from malaria, and these and many more are dying because of the role corruption plays in keeping Kenyans poor.(4) The Kenyan people, Assange believes, had a right to the information in the leaked report because “decision­making that is based upon lies or ignorance can’t lead to a good conclusion.”

In making that claim, Assange aligned himself with a widely held view in democratic theory, and a standard argument for freedom of speech: elections can express the will of the people only if the people are reasonably well informed about the issues on which they base their votes. That does not mean that decision­making based on the truth always leads to better outcomes than decision­making based on ignorance. There is no reason for Assange to be committed to that claim, any more than a supporter of democracy must be committed to the claim that democratic forms of government always reach better decisions than authoritarian regimes. Nor does a belief in the benefits of transparency imply that people must know the truth about every­ thing; but it does suggest that more information is generally better, and so provides grounds for a presumption against withholding the truth.

What of Clinton’s claims that the leaks have endangered human rights activists who gave information to American diplomats? When WikiLeaks released 70,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan, in July 2010, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Assange had blood on his hands, yet no casualties resulting from the leaks have been reported—unless you count the ambassadors forced to step down due to embarrassing revelations. Four months after the docu­ments were released, a senior NATO official told CNN that there had not been a single case of an Afghan needing protection because of the leaks. Of course, that may have been “just pure luck,” as Daniel Domscheit­Berg, a WikiLeaks defector, told the New York Times in February. Assange himself has admitted that he cannot guarantee that the leaks will not cost lives, but in his view the likelihood that they will save lives justifies the risk.

WikiLeaks has never released the kind of information that Clinton pointed to in defending the need for secrecy. Still, there are other groups out there, such as the Russian anti­corruption site Rospil.info, the European Union site BrusselsLeaks, the Czech PirateLeaks, Anonymous, and so on, that release leaked materials with less scrupulousness. It is entirely possible that there will be leaks that everyone will regret. Yet given that the leaked materials on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq show tens of thousands of civilian lives lost due to the needless, reckless, and even callous actions of members of the U.S. military, it is impossible to listen to U.S. leaders blame WikiLeaks for endangering innocent lives without hearing the tinkle of shattering glass houses.

In the Panopticon, of course, transparency would not be limited to governments. Animal rights advocates have long said that if slaughter­ houses had glass walls, more people would become vegetarian, and seeing the factory farms in which most of the meat, eggs, and milk we consume are produced would be more shocking even than the slaughterhouses. And why should restaurant customers have to rely on occasional visits by health inspectors? Webcams in food­preparation areas could provide additional opportunities for checking on the sanitary conditions of the food we are about to eat.

[This would be sooo cool! Unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever see that. However, that does create an interesting idea: surveillance cameras hooked up to the web... Who wouldn't watch that?]

Bentham may have been right when he suggested that if we all knew that we were, at any time, liable to be observed, our morals would be reformed. Melissa Bateson and her colleagues at England’s Newcastle University tested this theory when they put a poster with a pair of eyes above a canteen honesty box. People taking a hot drink put almost three times as much money in the box with the eyes present as they did when the eyes were replaced by a poster of flowers. The mere suggestion that someone was watching encouraged greater honesty. (Assuming that the eyes did not lead people to overpay, the study also implies a disturbing level of routine dishonesty.)

We might also become more altruistic. Dale Miller, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, has pointed out that Americans assume a “norm of self­ interest” that makes acting altruistically seem odd or even irrational. Yet Americans perform altruistic acts all the time, and bringing those acts to light might break down the norm that curtails our generosity. Consistent with that hypothesis, re searchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that people are likely to give more to listener ­sponsored radio stations when they are told that other callers are giving above­ average donations. Similarly, when utility companies send customers a comparison of their energy use with the average in their neighborhood, customers with above ­average use reduce their consumption.

The world before WikiLeaks and Facebook may have seemed a more secure place, but to say whether it was a better world is much more difficult. Will fewer children ultimately die from poverty in Kenya because WikiLeaks released the report on corruption? Will life in the Middle East improve as a result of the revolutions to which WikiLeaks and social media contributed? As the Chinese communist leader Zhou Enlai responded when asked his opinion of the French Revolution of 1789, it is too soon to say. The way we answer the question will depend on whether we share Assange’s belief that decision­making leads to better outcomes when based on the truth than when based on lies and ignorance.

1 Including those involved in international operations relating to homeland security and intelligence, 854,000 people currently hold top-secret security clearances, according to the Washington Post.

2 In 2003, FBI director Robert Mueller claimed that the number of thwarted plots was more than one hundred.

3 Robert Manne, a professor of politics at Australia’s La Trobe University and the author of a detailed examination of Assange’s writings that appeared recently in The Monthly, comments: “There are few original ideas in politics. In the creation of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was responsible for one.”

4 The United Nations claimed that as many as 600,000 Kenyans were displaced after the election.

I thought I had written on this before, but it turns out I just wrote about the history of the scientific method. Dang…

The TEDtalks description of the video:
“Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they’re right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry.”

Oh my goodness! I didn’t write anything during all of October? Oh my.
Well, to those who were expecting a post in October, I apologize. I guess I’ve just been busy (one conference in Europe and one convention in Vancouver, plus my PhD stuff).

I don’t know what to talk about today, really, but seeing as I haven’t written anything in so long, I thought I’d just ramble.

I love reading. Like, a lot. I think that, really, I have a warm fire in my heart that comes from knowing that I’ll always be generally happy…since, I’ll probably always be able to read, and that’s one of the things that I know I’ll always enjoy. So that makes me happy. Usually I read an equal amounts of fiction and non-fiction. Recently I haven’t been able to get into any fiction. I read Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which I didn’t really care for. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that man can write, but I just didn’t really get into it, even as I finished the last page. Oh well. [note: oh, I also read Jilenek's The Piano Teacher. I know that that kind of book isn't for everyone, but I really liked that this book was about a character who has been sexually repressed and doesn't know what it means to love someone and be loved by someone, and she ultimately finds someone who thinks she's a freak, and she doesn't know how to react....and it ultimately ends in sadness... Check it out, if you can handle an unrelentingly sad novel...]

As I’m always reading two books at once, one fiction and one non-fiction, I’ve been reading a lot [note: actually, only 2 (3 if you count both of Levi's books), but I plan on reading many more] of non-fictional first person accounts of survival of genocides and atrocities in the place of my fictional book. Needless to say, it’s been pretty depressing.

I read Primo Levi‘s Surviving Auschwitz. I’ve written about Primo Levi before (I think). I read his Periodic Table, which was an autobiography in which each chapter was an element that he related to a time in his life. It wasn’t very good. However, his Auschwitz account was very good. The first part was not very interesting, but his account of his last 10 days is incredible. He became sick shortly before the Russians invaded and the Nazis took all the healthy prisoners and marched them in retreat. Levi describes how he feels he was extraordinarily lucky to have gotten sick when he did, because he says he is certain he would have died on those marches. Levi goes on to describe how he and other sick inmates had to search out for food, wood, a stove, etc. in an attempt to save himself and others. The camp quickly goes to shit, almost literally: since so many were sick, most essentially lost control of their bowels everywhere. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was winter and freezing cold, he says that they would have all been dead (since all the shit would freeze).

The other book I read was First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung, a child survivor from Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took over. This poor girl was five when Pol Pot took over, and ends up losing her Mother, her Father, two siblings, becomes a child soldier, is almost raped, continuously starves, and more, and throughout is able to describe all these events as they appear to a child. One of the most interesting parts is when she describes stealing rice from the family food store, and from that point forward feels guilty that her younger sister is so skinny and malnourished. The story ends with her escaping to Thailand (if my memory serves me) and eventually making it to the US (when she’s..10? I can’t remember).

Next I want to read The Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov, a survivor of a siberian gulag in Soviet Russia; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the most famous account of a gulag survivor; and The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang, which, I know isn’t a first person account, but still, an account nonetheless. OH, I also want to read Haruki Murakami’s historical fiction book on the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway called Underground. 

If you’ve never read a first person account of any of the atrocities that took place in the 20th century, other than Anne Frank’s diary, I strongly suggest that you pick one up. As much as it’s nice to know all the facts and statistics about all the horrible things that happened (and are happening), it’s hard to connect unless you read a person’s actual account of the events. It’s truly incredible.

I just finished watching a great documentary about the history of colonialism and neocolonialism. Essentially how the west won all its affluence and lifestyle by taking from the poor. Its a powerful doc, and a must watch, even if you know the story: it never hurts to be reminded.

Here’s a brief description from the site:

Global poverty did not just happen. It began with military conquest, slavery and colonization that resulted in the seizure of land, minerals and forced labor. Today, the problem persists because of unfair debt, trade and tax policies — in other words, wealthy countries taking advantage of poor, developing countries. Renowned actor and activist, Martin Sheen, narrates THE END OF POVERTY?, a feature-length documentary directed by award-winning director, Philippe Diaz, which explains how today’s financial crisis is a direct consequence of these unchallenged policies that have lasted centuries. Consider that 20% of the planet’s population uses 80% of its resources and consumes 30% more than the planet can regenerate. At this rate, to maintain our lifestyle means more and more people will sink below the poverty line. Filmed in the slums of Africa and the barrios of Latin America, THE END OF POVERTY? features expert insights from: Nobel prize winners in Economics, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; acclaimed authors Susan George, Eric Toussaint, John Perkins, Chalmers Johnson; university professors William Easterly and Michael Watts; government ministers such as Bolivia’s Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera and the leaders of social movements in Brazil, Venezuela, Kenya and Tanzania. It is produced by Cinema Libre Studio in collaboration with the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. Can we really end poverty within our current economic system? Think again.

Watch it for free on Youtube (after the bump):

I sort of wish they had gone over more of the solutions to the current problem. Near the end, the one guy (Clifford Cobb) talks about some of them: relief of third world debt (the least we could do, considering the injustices that took place to put those countries into that debt in the first place); putting tax emphasis on property ownership, not on wages or purchases; ownership of natural resources by the people; and some more.

I found this list of the 10 things to end poverty on the website:

10 Solutions to End Poverty

We The People Demand:

1. The full equality between men and women in public as well as private areas of life, a worldwide minimum wage of $20 per day and the end of child labor under the age of 16 with the creation of a subsidy for scholarship.

2. The guarantee of shelter, healthcare, education, food and drinking water as basic human rights that must be provided free to all.

3. A total redistribution of idle lands to landless farmers and the imposition of a 50% cap on arable land devoted to products for export per country, with the creation of a worldwide subsidy for organic agriculture.

4. An end to private monopoly ownership over natural resources, with a minimum of 51% local communal ownership in corporations, which control such resources as well as the termination of intellectual property rights on pharmaceutical drugs.

5. The cancellation of third world debt with no reciprocal obligations attached and the payment of compensation to Third World countries for historical as well as ecological debt.

6. An obligation of total transparency for any corporation with more than 100 employees and a 1% tax on all benefits distributed to shareholders of corporations to create unemployment funds.

7. The termination of tax havens around the world as well as free flow of capital in developing countries.

8. The cancellation of taxes on labor and basic consumption, the creation of a 2% worldwide tax on property ownership (expect basic habitation for the poor) and the implementation of a global 0.5% flat tax on all financial transactions with a total prohibition of speculation on food products.

9. An equal voting for developing countries in international organizations such as IMF, World Bank, WTO, and the termination of veto right for the permanent members of the UN Security Counsel.

10. A commitment by industrialized countries to decrease carbon emission by 50% over a ten-year period as well as reducing by 25% each developed country’s consumption of natural resources.

There’s a petition you can sign, if you agree with the above.
[note: I am signatory 205. That's pathetic. If you agree with the above, please take the time to sign it]

I find it funny (read: utterly sad and demoralizing), that the things that they talk about in the video, where powerful governments have completely controlled how other countries are run (either directly: colonisalism, or through dictators that they themselves put in, or through the washington consensus (IMF, WTO, World Bank), are in no way doubted by most academics, and yet I see more people getting their underwear in a knot from baloney things like 9/11 was an inside job.

Other topics that they touched on that I find interesting is the concept of de-progress, or a-progress, or de-growth or a-growth. That is, with the affluent countries using up SO many resources, how are we going to cut back on it?

As I’ve said previously, right now I’m reading Rising Up and Rising Down,  and Vollmann touches on the french revolution, the american revolution, the October revolution, etc. etc. The theme running through all those are, the rich who kept taking, and thought they knew how to control the populace, were overthrown and slaughtered (The Terror, the royal russian family). Or another example of sorts would be Easter island, where the people over-consumed their land till they killed themselves. Obviously those two are different: one is about inequality, and the other is over-consumption of our natural resources. Although they’re different, I suspect that the solution to both would be found in creating more equality (forms of socialism, communism, anarcho-syndicalism, a Rawlsian form of capitalism (if such a thing could exist)).

OK OK, so what? Isn’t this the same thing we’ve all suspected? Even if we all agreed that this were true, then what? Sign a petition? How do we (each one of us as individuals or collectively as people) make change in this world? Voting? A quiet revolution through… strong community and union relations? A bloody revolution when things get really bad (that’s usually, and unfortunately, when people decide to act)? This last question is what I’m most interested in: is our current system of democratic representation good enough? If so, then all we have to do is educate, get people to know the problems, and then get them to vote. That would mean a change of consciousness: get people less concerned with social status and consumerism, and more about politics, justice, and education. If we could accomplish that, then we could also accomplish a more direct form of democracy: some form of participatory democracy, where everyone’s voice is heard (anarcho-syndicalism is the example I can thing of).

I guess my answer then is: education (which is what this film is doing), keep participating/voting in electoral politics till a better version can come along, and greater participation in my community. Sigh. I just wish there were a more direct/easy/short-term way of fixing the world.

I was walking with a friend of mine last night, and we were talking about what we wanted to do with our lives. I’ve, for a while now, had this romantic idea of becoming a factotum, someone who has a lot of different jobs. For instance, I would like to at one point: work on a boat for a year; repel from a helicopter and put out forest fires; work in or near the arctic; bring food, water, medicine, or education to rural areas ALL round the world; work with adorable and strange animals; live in a tree (arborist?); fly some sort of flying machine (helicopter would be best); etc. One thing though, that we had in common, was that we both wanted to do good, somehow. Travel the world and do good, whatever that means in practical application. At this point I commented on just how difficult it is to actually do good in the world. For instance, some forms of aid are bad, because it makes people dependent, and when the aid stops, the people may be in a worse position than at first. On the other hand, there’s nothing I (believe I) deplore more than ideas without action. That is, I hope I don’t ever become pessimistic or cynical to the point of never acting: I hope that action rather than passivity is more likely to do good, even though sometimes it does worse.

Here though, to illustrate my point about how difficult all this can be, is an example. A while ago (back in April) I read this fantastic book about how women are treated these days all around the world (human trafficking, honour killings, abortion and infanticide of girls, no education for girls, abuse, etc.) called Half the Sky. I highly recommend it.
Anyways, at the back of the book, the author’s give suggestions on ways that you can help. One of these suggestions is called microfinancing, where someone lends a small amount of money to someone who can’t afford to take out a loan from the bank, and that person uses that money to start up a small business. When they’ve made enough money, they then give you the money you loaned back. It sounds like a great thing: you’re giving aid, but at the same time, you’re empowering the person since they must create their own business to pay you back. Plus, then you can just reloan the money! In the book (note: this is from memory, and so I may have some things wrong), they talk about how successful this has been, contrary to what most economists thought would have happened.

Unfortunately, it may not be as good as the author’s made it out to be. I was watching a TED video, where the guy talked about how microfinancing was causing epidemic suicides because people had taken out so many loans, but couldn’t pay them back.
I found a 2010 BBC article on it, here.

Now, it may be that the company who was carrying out the micro-financing was doing a poor job, and that situations like these can be avoided.  But my point, for the moment, is that sometimes things that look so good, and that I want to donate to, turn out to be bad.

Another example is Greg Mortenson, whose books Three Cups of Tea, and Stones into Schools,  and charity organization Central Asia Institute, seemed too good to be true: building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so that they could learn, and one day empower themselves, help their community, reduce abuse and overpopulation, etc. etc. But, as I already pointed out, that guy may actually be a lying sack of shit, who syphons the money from his organization to himself.

Another example is Mother Theresa. Did her belief that suffering brought someone closer to Christ help? Was it a good thing that she didn’t actually help the poor, she just gave them a place to suffer? Or that she took money from donators (including Charles Keating who was known at the time to have obtained the money from a savings and loans scandal) and put it into creating convents? (this, again, is from memory. See my original post here.)

Again, I should stress that it would be a damn shame to let people like the ones above to make me into a cynic, and decide to do nothing. Focusing on the bad, when it may be that most action does good, would be a damn shame. My only point is that it can be very frustrating…

I’ve been reading a lot lately. Not so much fiction, unfortunately.

I’m currently reading William T. Vollmann‘s abridged version (~700 pages) of his original seven-volume (3,000+ page) tome Rising Up and Rising Down book dedicated to the attempt to establish a moral calculus to consider the causes, effects, and ethics of violence. So far the book is pretty great. The first section, “Three Meditations on Death”, I strongly suggest reading….but so far can’t find a link online…

I mention this book, 1. because I’m currently reading it, but also 2. because this ‘meditations on death’ comes at an apt time for me. In April a friend of mine committed suicide, and since then I’ve known two people who are very close to me who very nearly killed themselves as well. I’m very grateful they decided against that…

I wrote about that experience back in May…although, in my own way, I really just talked about Edouard Leve and his fantastic book.

However, those aren’t the only deaths I’ve had on my mind recently. My dad had a heart attack about a week ago. This is his third. Of all the three, this is the most mild, which, in one respect is great, but in another just reminds us that this is only leading up to the next big one. I very much expect my dad not to be alive sometime in the next 5 years. This is definitely sad… at least, I know I should feel that way. But somehow I don’t. I don’t have much in the way of a relationship with my dad. It’s just kind of non existent…which is sort of the same relationship he seems to have with everyone in his life. I won’t go on about it, but it is odd to know how you should feel, and not feel that way.

[note: I just want to point out that an update is in order from a previous post of mine. Back in December, I decided to give up drinking, for various reasons: hangovers, blackouts, money, health, and the fact that my dad is sort of a functional alcoholic. That is, the man gets his job done, and so is functional, but a lot of times when I would visit home, he would be so drunk he couldn't talk. I think things have been better since then for the both of us: for the last 9 months I haven't been drunk (except for once at an airport where we decided to drink since we had to wait till 5am to catch our flight), and my dad has become obsessed with the climate change crisis (which, I imagine, he must be sober to devour the amount of books he's gone through recently)]

Another ‘death’ that’s on my mind is not one typically associated with death, but, in practical terms, is the same thing: losing one’s mind. Not my own, mind you, not yet. I’m talking about my mom. Every time I go up to visit my family, I get the eerie sensation that she is slowly losing touch with reality. This, to me, is very sad. I really like my mom, I think she’s a pretty cool lady, and I don’t know how I’m going to handle a slow descent into senility for her.

Maybe Vollmann’s ‘tough and sentimental’ writing will help me out…