Category: ideas

Why are people who pride themselves on being educated and up on the latest books, movies, and even art, so uninterested and uneducated in serious music? “There is a startling ignorance about music among contemporary intellectuals who value the latest literary and philosophical thinking. It was not always like this. Gradually music has become more and more marginal to intellectual endeavour, and this separation may be traced to the first half of the 20th century. Until this time, writers and thinkers saw reflection on music as a culturally central consideration, a view that can be traced right back through the works of Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, St Augustine, Galileo, Newton, Goethe and Nietzsche…”

“There is much we don’t know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country’s gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, ‘You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale’? Nor do we know who did it. Was this a final act of national rape by Saddam loyalists? Was it what Philippe de Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum, calls the ‘pure Hollywood’ scenario — a clever scheme commissioned in advance by shadowy international art thieves? Was it simple opportunism by an unhinged mob? Or some combination thereof? Whatever the answers to those questions, none of them can mitigate the pieces of the damning jigsaw puzzle that have emerged with absolute certainty. The Pentagon was repeatedly warned of the possibility of this catastrophe in advance of the war, and some of its officials were on the case. But at the highest levels at the White House, the Pentagon and central command — where the real clout is — no one cared.”

“Whether the commercialization of higher education has reached the crisis point probably is a matter of definition, but there can be no doubt that it is at least headed there.” A new book by former Harvard president Derek Bok argues that the rising influence of commercial interests on campus puts universities on a road lined with compromises…

Many philosophers have divided us up into thinking and emotional sides – each often at war with the other. But “for more than a decade, neuroscientists armed with brain scans have been chipping away at the Cartesian façade. Gone is Descartes’ lofty Cogito, reasoning in pristine detachment from the physical world. Fading fast are its sophisticated modern incarnations, including the once-popular ‘computational model,’ according to which the mind is like a software program and the brain like a hard drive. Lately, scientists have begun to approach consciousness in more Spinozist terms: as a complex and indivisible mind-brain-body system. The philosopher anticipated one of brain science’s most important recent discoveries: the critical role of the emotions in ensuring our survival and allowing us to think. Feeling, it turns out, is not the enemy of reason, but, as Spinoza saw it, an indispensable accomplice.”

Many of the ancient artifacts in today’s museums were removed from their places of origin before countries declared bans on the exports of cultural heritage. But those artifacts are protected in the museums. Is there a way for the free market to give collectors incentives to find and protect artifacts and shut down looting? “Archaeologists like taking the high moral ground against selling antiquities, but it doesn’t solve the problem of looting. I would like to use market solutions. Sell very common objects, like oil lamps or little pots, and use the money to pay for professional excavations.”

For much of the past 25 years, academic humanists have lived in a world of theory. But theory has had less and less impact on the direction of our culture, and some academics are wondering if a new direction is called for. So recently, an intellectual “town hall” was convened in Chicago to talk things over. “Has theory forsaken ‘sociopolitical engagement’ for a ‘therapeutic turn’ to ethics and the care of the psyche? Should humanists devote themselves to securing ‘some space for the aesthetic in the face of the overwhelming forces of mass culture and entertainment’? Have the Internet and biotechnology rendered both human nature and printed dissertations obsolete?”

War is awful of course. But “war can produce gorgeous images and striking effects that furnish the raw material for sublime works of art. To anyone who has experienced war’s ravages firsthand, that idea may sound naive, grotesque, even absurd. Yet over centuries of human brutality, the aesthetic has seldom been at odds with the horrific…”

It happens in every city, particularly in North America: things disappear. They become other things, or sometimes they become nothing. But they disappear, either because no one wanted them, or they were dated, or dilapidated, or just plain ugly. Eventually, you walk past something that was once something else, and you can’t even remember what it used to be. And that moment, says Geoff Pevere, is one of the saddest aspects of modern urban existence.

Turns out you can tell who’s important in a group of people by tracking the email traffic within the group. “Researchers have developed a way to use e-mail exchanges to build a map of the structure of an organization. The map shows the teams in which people actually work, as opposed to those they are assigned to. The technique can also reveal who is at the heart of each sub-group. These people often correspond with company-designated leaders such as project managers. But unofficial de facto leaders can also emerge. The approach might even help to pinpoint the heads of criminal or terrorist networks.”