antikoan

 |::| Tuesday, July 09, 2002

 |::| The Curse of Civilizationalism  12:19:30 PM 

A current thread on MetaFilter brings to mind the piece by Amartya Sen in the June 10 New Republic (no link available), in which Sen argued that approaches which focused on the idea of "civilizations" were fundamentally mistaken: We are not 'civlizations', Sen argued; we are people. We do not march lockstep to a single beat. All Americans are not wealthy corporate greedmongers; all Palestinians are not baby bombers. To argue about things such as a "clash of civilizations" is to dangerously reify a concept which is suspicious to begin with.

Huntington (quoted here from Stanley Kurtz in Policy Review) sees "civilizations" as clearly delineated entities:

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture.

Let's try an experiement. Let's replace a few words in Huntington's original:

The underlying problem for Islam is not Christian fundamentalism. It is America, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

So Huntington could as easily be describing christianity. As a (no doubt) Christian believer, he's just probably not aware of it.

Civilizations, it seems, for Huntington and his ilk (and I suspect Fukayama is not immune here) have definable boundary conditions ("fault lines") that will inevitably produce conflict. They are discrete; they are organisms. There's some merit to that view, if it's taken as a guide to understanding, and not as a basis for theory. If the author, as it were, took the basic trouble to read a little Geertz. But that's right out, I'm sure; it would mean surrendering the intellectual territory to another discipline.

This is a view of culture that was rejected in Anthropology in the 1960s, and rightly so. It's remarkable that a modern historian could espouse it. Certainly, cultures are self-reinforcing, but they are not inviolate, and especially not in the 21st century. Media penetrate to every corner of the globe, to every outpost of culture, and only especially pure outposts, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, or American conservative Christians in their own parallel universe of Christian culture. Modern American Christians can, if they so choose, exist in a world dominated by their own film, their own literature, their own "science", even their own highly subjective interpretations of the political landscape, without ever having to be seriously subjected to any contravening opinions. So should they, like the islamic extremists that we've identified, be permitted to define American culture?

In the end, as Sen points out, these "civilizationalist" approaches get us nowhere but deeper into conflict. They solve nothing. They persist, though, because they are readily deployed to the ends of powerful groups, such as islamic or christian fundamentalists, or American neo-oligarchs like Dick Cheney.

Mefi Reference:

posted by MiguelCardoso » July 9 5:45 AM | 0 comments. The World Politics Heavyweight Fight: Huntington vs. Fukuyama: Which of these two now classic approaches offers a more plausible vision of the world's future? Huntington's Culture Clash[Foreign Affairs, 1993] or Fukuyama's Pax Democratia[National Interest, 1989]? In an updating mode, Stanley Kurtz[Policy Review, 2002] measures their chances from a political viewpoint. On the same front,Jack Miles[Cross Currents, 2002] offers a refreshingly liberal and optimistic theological perspective. Yep, it's still all about East meeting West, the Muslims and the rest of the us. Or even increasingly... [MetaFilter]

 |::| Blogchalking  11:43:11 AM 

Late onto the bus as usual, I've finally gotten around to looking into Blogchalking (DayPop refs). It's an extension of the ideas behing warchalking (DayPop refs), and inspired by the geographic listing at NYC Bloggers. Daniel Padua is trying to start a grass-roots convention that would make it easy for anybody to find the bloggers their (demo- or geographic) locality.

I've used a form at http://www.blogchalking.tk/ to generate a blogchalk for me that "shows" locality, gender, and age, along with helpful meta-tag (here...) and post insert ("Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Rochester, NY, Park Avenue, Eric, Male, 36-40!"). (I've added a "TITLE" attribute, since ALT doesn't pop up in a lot of things other than NN4.x and IE.)

I don't know if this will catch on, but it's interesting. It's at a much more meta-level than warchalking, inasmuch as its primary goal is to facilitate searching, not to show the information at a glance.

And the admonition to put the text-body tag into a post is mistaken: It makes more sense to code it into the template, with everyone else. If Google or Daypop are actually looking for the information embedded in a post, then put it in the template in an HTML wrapper than simulates a post. It might make sense to use a real post in order to create blogchalked RSS feeds; but it would make more sense to include the blogchalking string in the description field of the RSS file.

Curious to see where this goes...

 |::| Liquid Light  11:28:38 AM 

New Scientist reports a really, really, genuinely fascinating idea: Liquid Light. (See links to this on DayPop.)

Here's the three-para dumb-down:

You really can think of light as a gas, says Humberto Michinel's team at the University of Vigo in Ourense. And like any gas, it can be made to condense into a liquid.

The researchers have been working on "non-linear" materials, which slow light down by an amount that depends on the intensity of the beam rather than simply a fixed amount, as happens in water or glass. In most non-linear materials, the more intense the light, the more it is slowed down. That means the inside of a beam slows more than the outside, as if it were passing through a convex lens, and the beam is focused to a point, rather than transmitted as you'd want in an optical computer.

But this doesn't have to happen, Michinel realised. If you have a material in which the light slows less when the intensity of the beam gets very high, then a high-energy laser beam could be concentrated into a tight column instead. This column behaves just like a liquid, says group member Jose Ramon Salguiero at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

There are problems, of course. Naturally, since this is all based on simulations (and the nature of non-linear phenomena is such that they tend to eventually defy simulation), nobody knows for sure if it would work. And, furthermore, the materials that the researchers hope to use to demonstrate the phenomenon physically may well not be up to the task.

That said, if the phenomenon can be validated, it could have ramifications far beyond the obvious ones, for optical computing and signal transmission. Every time a new paradigm for interacting with a fundamental physical aspect is validated, it gives visionaries a new axis on which to pursue visions. If only for that reason -- and even if the computing applications are not practical -- I hope this proves out.

 |::| Start off the day with something fun...  8:29:24 AM 

... or scary, depending on how you look at it. A "new" [ahem!] view of Our Vice President, courtesy of YoohaNews*:

Vice President Dick Cheney holds a knife as he prepares to slice off his own penis and flush it down the toilet January 30, 2002. "It is written in Bible that if a part of your body distances you from God, and makes you commit a sin, you should cut it off," Cheney told reporters. According to urologist Aerton Barbosa Neves, who operated on Cheney, he will now have to urinate through a tube, but can still impregnate someone, "albeit only with medical assistance." (Dick LaWaque/Reuters)

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*Get it before it's injuncted!