Author: Ophelia Benson

I’ve been thinking about things like this lately, so it interests me a lot. Though it probably would even if I hadn’t been thinking about it – it probably would have started me thinking about it.

Humans are born time travelers. We may not be able to send our bodies into the past or the future, at least not yet, but we can send our minds. We can relive events that happened long ago or envision ourselves in the future. New studies suggest that the two directions of temporal travel are intimately entwined in the human brain. A number of psychologists argue that re-experiencing the past evolved in our ancestors as a way to plan for the future and that the rise of mental time travel was crucial to our species’ success. But some experts on animal behavior do not think we are unique in this respect. They point to several recent experiments suggesting that animals can visit the past and future as well.

They have to go by themselves though. That’s what I was thinking about recently – the fact that they can’t discuss the past with anyone, or inform anyone about it, or be informed about it.

Endel Tulving, a Canadian psychologist, defined episodic memory as the ability to recall the details of personal experiences: what happened, where it happened, when it happened and so on…Episodic memory was also unique to our species, Dr. Tulving maintained. For one thing, he argued that episodic memory required self-awareness. You can’t remember yourself if you don’t know you exist. He also argued that there was no evidence animals could recollect experiences, even if those experiences left an impression on them.

Some researchers are skeptical, and have done experiments that they take to indicate something like episodic memory; other researchers are skeptical.

“Information is not really what characterizes mental time travel,” Dr. Suddendorf said…Episodic memory also depends on many other faculties that have only been clearly documented in the human mind, Dr. Suddendorf argues. He said he believes it evolved after our ancestors branched off from other apes. The advantage lay not in knowing the past, however, but in providing “an advantage for predicting the future,” he said…Daniel Schacter, a psychologist, and his colleagues at Harvard University recently studied how brains function as people think about past experiences and imagine future ones.

That interests me because I’ve long been interested in the fact that there is no real difference between remembering something and imagining it – no phenomenological difference. It’s interesting if remembering past experiences and imagining future ones are essentially the same adaptation.

Constructing an episodic memory causes a distinctive network of brain regions to become active. As a person then adds details to the memory, the network changes, as some regions quiet down and others fire up. The researchers then had their subjects think about themselves in the future. Many parts of the episodic memory network became active again.

There you go. And that’s why memory is so unreliable – it gets mixed up with imagining, and we not only don’t know how to disentangle them, we don’t even know when they’re tangled.

Bad.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is maneuvering to fundamentally weaken the Endangered Species Act, its strategy laid out in an internal 117-page draft proposal obtained by Salon. The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining…Many Fish and Wildlife Service employees believe the draft is not based on “defensible science,” says a federal employee who asked to remain anonymous…[T]he proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act should come as no surprise. President Bush has hardly been one of its fans. Under his reign, the administration has granted 57 species endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a lawsuit. That’s fewer than in any other administration in history…Furthermore, during this administration, nearly half of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees who work with endangered species reported that they had been directed by their superiors to ignore scientific evidence that would result in recommendations for the protection of species, according to a 2005 survey of more than 1,400 service biologists, ecologists and botanists conducted by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit organization.

Also bad.

A top-ranking official overseeing the Fish and Wildlife Service at the Interior Department rode roughshod over agency scientists…Ms. MacDonald, an engineer by training, has provoked complaints from some wildlife biologists and lawyers in the agency for aggressive advocacy for industries’ views of the science that underlies agency decisions…The report, citing a lawyer in the Sacramento office, noted that Ms. MacDonald lobbied for a decision to combine three different populations of the California tiger salamander into one, thus excluding it from the endangered-species list, and making the decision legally vulnerable. A federal district judge overturned it in 2005., saying the decision was made “without even a semblance of agency reasoning.”…The inspector general also found that Ms. MacDonald had sent internal government documents by e-mail to a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation — a property-rights group that frequently challenges endangered-species decisions.

And so on, and so on. The Republican War on Science rages on. Bastards.

If you get tired of Butler and Spivak – this is better.

The most astute argument presented by Postel is his revelatory account of how Western leftists, by prioritising their own opposition to American imperialism, have abandoned Iranian liberals in their fight for freedom and democracy. Postel vehemently renounces the argument that support for pro-democracy interests in Iran somehow amounts to supporting the neo-conservative agenda. He presents engaging ideas as to how Iranian liberals have accomplished this very task. He relates in detail how Iranian human rights activists such as Akbar Ganji shun any contact with the United States government when visiting the country and focus solely on engaging with scholars, human rights organisations and civil society groups. Postel recounts an incident in which Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, during a visit to the U.S., was confronted by an anti-war protester who suggested that she stop talking about human rights abuses in Iran because her arguments could be appropriated by the neo-conservatives. Ebadi’s response was clear and unequivocal: “Any anti-war movement that advocates silence in the face of tyranny can count me out.” Iranian intellectuals, despite being in the direct line of fire of the neo-conservative military agenda, are demonstrating that fighting the expansionist military agendas of the Bush administration does not require silence about the injustices perpetrated by the Iranian regime.

And not only does it not require silence, but Iranian intellectuals and liberals and feminists and secularists don’t want silence. They urgently, badly, energetically don’t want it; they want the opposite; they want noise. Noise from us. Noise from the left, noise from liberals, noise from people who oppose tyranny and injustice and oppression of women. They do not feel pleased and grateful when large swathes of the Western left are silent about all that, much less when those large swathes throw metaphorical rotten eggs and squashy tomatoes at people who are not silent about all that; they feel displeased and ungrateful and angry. The large swathes of the Western left who are silent about all that and congratulate themselves on their silence are under a very serious misapprehension.

This same conundrum confounds Western liberals. They, as Postel documents, have been silent in the face of repeated student protests in Iran, imprisonment of Iranian activists and numerous other human rights violations that should have logically attracted their support. They are so locked in the singular prism of anti-imperialism that they are unable to make peace with the idea that it is liberalism rather than radicalism that is the true fighting creed in Iran. They are even less amenable to the reality that “the denunciations of U.S. Empire in Iran today are the rhetorical dominion of the Iranian Right, not the Left”. As Postel states, “it is the reactionary clergy who wield the idiom of anti-imperialism and regime hardliners [who] legitimate the suppression of Iranian students”. This aversion to recognising reality in Iran has exacted a huge cost; it has delegitimised the Western left and exposed its disinterest in championing the cause of Iranian liberals and pro-democracy fighters who suffer daily at the hands of an increasingly repressive regime. Postel exposes how the insistent prioritisation of anti-imperialism over all else has produced a repugnant inversion of itself – a new form of imperialism equally blind in its U.S.-centric perspective as its ugly counterpart…This book is a timely indictment of the Western left’s apathy, which justifies itself by constructing a deceptively dualistic model of Western engagement with the world. The time has come for the emergence of a new “radical” liberalism that rejects such misguided political perversions and reclaims the right to both engage with the struggles of human rights defenders and pro-democracy activists in Iran and elsewhere, and denounce the Bush administration’s tyrannical politics of military intervention.

Damn right.

I wish I could have been here. I’m excited that I can listen or watch now (although I’m not absolutely sure that I ever will, somehow), but that’s not quite the same.

The conference was organized by graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. Participants were invited to address the term “state” and to consider the effect of the “global” on discourses of knowledge and power, literary analysis, and theories of subjectivity. The conference sought to reconceptualize the global by delineating states of sentiment, desire, and affect, and examining their deployment on – or relation to – the global scene of political and economic states. In their dialogue, Butler and Spivak discuss alternative subjectivities and state forms in a “global state.” In arguing for the possibilities afforded by forms of belonging that are unauthorized yet exist within the state, Judith Butler suggests that the “right” to rights arises in the form of social discourse – calling for freedom is already an exercise of freedom. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak disarticulates the identity of state and nation and develops the concept of critical regionalisms as a new analytics of power that rethinks territoriality and sovereignty.

Harmless enough; I know, I know. It’s just that – who cares what departments of comparative literature think about these huge subjects that they take on so lightly? Who cares what Judy Butler and Gayatri Spivak have to say about economics, politics, rights, globalization, state, nation, power, territory, sovereignty and so on? Who cares what comp lit teachers have to say about such things? And if comp lit teachers are busying themselves with omniscience on subjects that normally take whole teams of economists and political theorists to think about, then who is teaching actual comp lit? When did comp lit in fact become economics plus sociology plus political theory plus psychology plus philosophy plus law? Who are these people and how did they get to know everything? Who are the people who sit at their feet in the conviction that they know everything? What does it all mean?

I think I know, but I’ll keep it to myself.

So, like the pope with his fond references to hell and eternal punishment, that German judge made some things clear.

[T]he case brought before Frankfurt’s family court was that of a 26-year-old German woman of Moroccan origin who was terrified of her violent Moroccan husband, a man who had continued to threaten her despite having been ordered to stay away by the authorities. He had beaten his wife and he had allegedly threatened to kill her…According to the judge, there was no evidence of “an unreasonable hardship” that would make it necessary to dissolve the marriage immediately. Instead, the judge argued, the woman should have “expected” that her husband, who had grown up in a country influenced by Islamic tradition, would exercise the “right to use corporal punishment” his religion grants him. The judge even went so far as to quote the Koran in the grounds for her decision.

The woman should have expected it, therefore there was no rush about getting a divorce. That’s an interesting idea. You would think she’d married a grizzly bear, not an adult human being. And if she had married a grizzly bear who kept devouring pieces of her, would a judge say she should have expected it and that there was no rush about getting a divorce?

Germany’s only minister of integration at the state level…sees the Frankfurt ruling as the “last link, for the time being, in a chain of horrific rulings handed down by German courts” – rulings in which, for example, so-called honor killings have been treated as manslaughter and not murder. This, says Berlin family attorney and prominent women’s rights activist Seyran Ates, is part of the reason one should “be almost thankful that (judge Datz-Winter) made such a clear reference to the Koran. All she did was bring to the surface an undercurrent that already exists in our courts.” Out of a sense of misguided tolerance, says Ates, judges treat the values of Muslim subcultures as a mitigating circumstance and, in doing so, are helping pave the way for a gradual encroachment of fundamentalist Islam in Germany’s parallel Muslim world. It’s an issue Ates often runs up against in her cases.

It started awhile ago.

a few years earlier, an Islamic legal opinion dubbed the “camel fatwa” had been added to the professional literature. Amir Zaidan, the then chairman of the Islamic Religious Community in the state of Hesse, wrote the opinion. He argued that a Muslim woman could travel no more than 81 kilometers (50 miles) from the home of her husband or parents without being accompanied by a male blood relative. The opinion came to be known as the “camel fatwa,” because this was the distance a camel caravan could travel within 24 hours in the days of the Prophet Mohammed. Zaidan even defended this position at a 2001 conference of Germany’s protestant churches in Frankfurt. His argument was that a woman who traveled farther would run the risk of being raped.

Well that’s quite a good argument. Clearly a woman who travels 80 kilometers from home runs no risk of being raped, because there is a magic energy-zone around her which disintegrates when she crosses the 81st kilometer. Also clearly it is up to the law to imprison women to prevent them from running any risks. Also clearly it is up to men to decide what risks women can be allowed to take. Und so weiter.

It is by no means unusual for people put on trial for honor killings in Germany to be convicted on the lesser charge of manslaughter in the end. In 2003 the Frankfurt District Court handed down a mild sentence against a Turkish-born man who had stabbed his German-born wife to death. She had disobeyed him and was even insolent enough to demand a divorce. The court argued that one could not automatically assume that the man’s motives were contemptible. He had, after all, acted “out of an excessive rage and sense of outrage against his wife” — who he had regularly beaten in the past — “based on his foreign socio-cultural moral concepts.” According to the court’s decision, the divorce would have violated “his family and male honor derived from his Anatolian moral concepts.”

And yet – one hears often that no one ever says that honour killing is acceptable because it’s ‘their culture.’ Well, yes, someone ever does say that, and throngs of other people don’t say that but are mysteriously and profoundly silent about such things – except when they summon up the energy to say that no one ever says that honour killing is acceptable because it’s ‘their culture.’ It is not the case that there are no well-meaning people out there who make this mistake.