Blog — February, 2008

I know: Stumble upon a fascinating thread about the possible invention of the bow-and-arrow, while researching the prehistoric manufacture and uses of rope. (Yes, rope. You know, the thing that shamans climb to get up to the sky in their initiations and "flights.")

You may recall that Steven Dutch voiced some concern about the veracity of Jared Diamond's facts, as related in the latter's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel:

Jared Diamond admires the hunter-gatherers he knows from New Guinea, noting that whenever they travel to a new area, they note new plants and sometimes dig them up to transplant at home. But what they are doing is simply a variation on a theme they already know well. He doesn't cite any cases of anyone wondering why certain plants grow in some places but not others, or wondering how a seed develops into a plant.

In his chapter "Necessity's Mother," Diamond argues that most inventions arose from initially useless discoveries produced by constant tinkering. (This chapter is the weakest in his whole book. It's full of nagging minor errors, omissions, and misconceptions that made me wonder how many similar faults are lurking elsewhere that I didn't catch because the chapters are outside my expertise. For example, he cites early internal combustion engines as being unsuitable for automobiles, apparently unaware that the first internal combustion engines were intended as stationary power sources running off piped gas.)

Turns out that the Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall has a few concerns too:

Academics with an idée fixe say strange things. Take Professor Jared Diamond for example. Desperately anxious to explain why Australian Aborigines kept no domestic animals other than dogs, and fearful we will think the worse of them for this, he announced in Guns, Germs, and Steel that Australia "had no domesticable native mammals" before the arrival of Europeans.

That sounded odd. Should we assume he mistook the wombat sitting next to him on the couch for a cushion? I would have thought that potentially domesticable animals were quite common in Australia. If raised from infancy in human company wallabys and kangaroos will hang around hoping to be fed, even though no special effort has been made to tame them....

Yet Jared Diamond tells us that Australia had no suitable domesticable animals that might have been raised for meat. If for some reason he imagines that the wild boars of late Ice Age Eurasia, or the fiercely horned bulls of the Minoans, would actually have been easier to domesticate than emus or wallabys ... well, what can one say?....

It gets better....

There's also a Wikipedia page devoted to the book, and criticisms thereof. Good luck trying to figure out who's telling (more of) the truth there, though ... you know, without block quotes from both sides to show you who's bullshitting about what.

Diamond responds (in 2005) to some of his critics here. Sort of. Sort of nebulously dismissive and Wilber-like, actually, down to the, erm, "fascinating" details of his research process and ability to speed-read through books. ("I've learned how to read fast and extract what I want and not to waste time on the other stuff.") Well, at least he, unlike kw, takes notes as he reads. And yet—

[Diamond's] argument about Inuit survival while the Norse in Greenland starved was out of date when he wrote it. Far from having any taboos about fish eating or not exploiting the maritime wealth around them, "from the 1300s the Greenland Norse had 50-80% of their diet from the marine food chain."

Shades of Wilber's (mis)use of Jane Goodall's and Konrad Lorenz's (outdated) research, no?

This review doesn't help, either.

If, by any chance, you missed the Oscar telecast on Sunday evening, you owe it to yourself to watch the real-life couple of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová performing one of the most stunningly beautiful lovesongs you'll ever hear, from the film Once:

Falling Slowly (lyrics here, movie version of the song here).

Ooh, and the phenomenal Oscar-nominated short film, I Met the Walrus. Canadian, don'tcha know?

Maybe you already knew this, but the Beatles' song I Am the Walrus references the Lewis Carroll poem (in Through the Looking-Glass), The Walrus and the Carpenter.

John Lennon was a big Carroll fan—the "looking-glass ties" phrase in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds comes from that same book.

In turn, the hominid fossil Lucy got her name from the Fab Four's music:

[I]n November 1974, taking part in an expedition at Hadar in Ethiopia, [Donald Johanson] and a colleague discovered the most complete hominid skeleton that had yet been found. The young men were euphoric. "There was tape recorder in the camp," Johanson has recalled, "and a tape of the Beatles song 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' went belting out into the night sky, and was played at full volume over and over again our of sheer exuberance." At some stage during the celebrations that evening, the new fossil was christened Lucy. (Kuper, The Chosen Primate)

The things you learn on this blog, eh?

P.S. The new Encyclopedia of Life.

Hmm, interesting info regarding Guruphiliac's Jody Radzik—himself a former Fan Of Ken. Here and here.

Some—or maybe even most—of which, you know, may even be true. Notwithstanding that you can't believe everything bad you hear about guru-debunkers ... even when you can believe what they say about themselves:

I do a short arati before bed with incense to pictures of Ramakrishna, Ma Kali as envisioned by Sudha Ma Mookerjee, and Sri Sarada Devi. While I feel a personal interaction with each of these "characters," I'm fully cognizant of the fact that I've simply chosen symbols I find apt given my personal characteristics, and the fact that I'm an initiated tantric shakta in the lineage of Ramakrishna.

Me, I'm still most bothered by Radzik's connection with (and support of) Jeffrey Kripal, and his belief that Ramakrishna was actually an enlightened being (albeit a pedophile). Oh, and that Adi Da may likewise be Highly Realized, but simply have his behaviors "patterned by partying instincts" ... or something like that.

Beyond that, though, by all means "Eat, drink, rave, and be merry." More power to ye.

P.S. Sadly, I don't appear to have merited inclusion on the Anti-Sai Activists list—not even out there on the "Lunatic Fringe"—in spite of my best attempts. Or maybe they just couldn't find any dirt on me? Or any contradictions between my private and public/blog faces, to try and embarrass me with? (You know, for being "potty-mouthed" in both!)

Or maybe I'm just such a Small Potato as to not be worth harvesting?

P.P.S. Good to see that the people at Rick Ross's online Cult Education Forum have recently discovered the Butterflies & Wheels website, too. "Great minds think alike," eh? ;)

Ooh, and she (Ophelia Benson) also gets the relation of Zimbardo's prison study to religious/cult environments:

This also sheds some light on the cruelty of the pope and his assistants, and the nuns at Goldenbridge. Group pressures, authority symbols, dehumanization of others, dominant ideologies—they had it all [in Zimbardo's study]. Maybe even the "imposed anonymity"—because they wore habits; they looked much alike. So: yet another lesson in what we keep learning and re-learning: beware of group pressures, authority symbols, dehumanization of others, imposed anonymity, dominant ideologies.

And this:

I've just been re-reading Derek Freeman's book on the subject, as well as a brilliant long article on Franz Boas in The New Yorker last year (not online, unfortunately) by Claudia Roth Pierpont. It's an interesting and somewhat conflict-inducing subject—because Boas was so right, from a moral and political view; he was so admirable, and often so isolated. And yet. From an epistemic point of view, he did get things backward. And yet—what else can one do in a situation like that? When racist "eugenic" ideas are sweeping the intellectual landscape and you're convinced they're both harmful and false, what can you do but look for evidence to back up your conviction? And yet—if you do that, you are getting things the wrong way around, and you are very likely—you may indeed be consciously determined—to ignore any evidence you don't want. Politically, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do (and I'm sure I do it all the time); in terms of inquiry, it's just not the way to go.

Assorted bits and pieces of Ophelia Benson's fantastic observations at her Butterflies & Wheels blog:

[T]he religious side is always the [politically] left side because The People are religious and The Scientists are an elite so therefore a good lefty always has to side with religion....

"Tolerance" of course is only relevant when we're talking about opinion. It's silly to talk about tolerance when you actually want to get at the truth of something—tolerance comes in handy when the subject is a human invented story that people want to believe is literally true but realize they can't actually demonstrate is literally true. It becomes a matter of "I'll tolerate your myth if you'll tolerate my myth and that way neither of us will have to confront the likelihood that both myths are just myths and not literally true."

Or, as I once put it:

In the transpersonal and integral worlds [one finds] a "covenant of lunatics," whereby it is implicitly agreed that, if I take your "imaginary friend" (i.e., spiritual experiences and theories) as being real, you will in turn take seriously my delusions and elevation of perfectly normal phenomena to the status of paranormality. And neither of us will ever properly criticize the other, because "it's all good."

And this, from her blog:

We're skeptical about new religions and cults, but the ones that have been around for centuries, that's different, because, well because they've been around for centuries. But they've only been around for centuries because they've been getting away with it; so we keep letting them get away with it because they've been getting away with it. At some point that begins to seem like a not very good reason.

And this:

I'm for free inquiry—open, fearless, unashamed, uninhibited inquiry. That means inquiry that is not expected to be deferential to majority opinion or belief; inquiry that follows the evidence wherever it goes without worrying about what the neighbours or bosses or "moderate believers" will think.

I'm for telling the truth, on the whole, especially in public discourse. (That means no, I'm not for telling people they're ugly or boring or fat or old, even if they are. I'm not for telling cruel personal truth, but that's a different subject, and not relevant here.) I'm for telling the truth more than I'm for manipulating or wheedling. I realize ... that that doesn't always work in politics, but that's one reason I wouldn't want to go into politics: because I am for telling the truth more than I am for manipulating or wheedling.

And about the "hack" Einstein "scholar" Andrea Gabor.

And this:

Democracy is not the same thing as justice or human rights or fairness or equal treatment or compassion or anything like that. It doesn't imply them or presuppose them or (necessarily) bring them about. The majority is not always or automatically right, and it's certainly not always fair or merciful or scrupulous. Sometimes laws are better than the popular will—that's one reason laws exist.

And this:

[I]n practice multiculturalism is defended sometimes in the name of cultural freedom, but other times in the name of other things—anti-racism, or identity, or authenticity, or (undefined) diversity, or all those patched together as needed. So these terrible stultifying confining effects are overlooked, as so often happens when definitions change at convenience. That's the work definition-changing does—it promotes confusion in the service of obscuring important problems.

And Amartya Sen, quoted on the same blog:

The vocal defense of multiculturalism that we frequently hear these days is very often nothing more than a plea for plural monoculturalism. If a young girl in a conservative immigrant family wants to go out on a date with an English boy, that would certainly be a multicultural initiative. In contrast, the attempt by her guardians to stop her from doing this (a common enough occurrence) is hardly a multicultural move, since it seeks to keep the cultures separate. And yet it is the parents' prohibition, which contributes to plural monoculturalism, that seems to garner the loudest and most vocal defense from alleged multiculturalists, on the ground of the importance of honoring traditional cultures—as if the cultural freedom of the young woman were of no relevance whatever, and as if the distinct cultures must somehow remain in secluded boxes.

See? Like I was saying, "Love/Sex will conquer all." And in doing so, it will produce very nearly the exact opposite of (formal/official) multiculturalism (a.k.a. "plural monoculturalism").

So, if you were maybe thinking that I was way off-base (or worse) for my recently voiced opposition to official policies of multiculturalism, I hope you're feeling pretty sheepish right now.

And Anthony Grayling, quoted on the same blog:

In the face of the failure of multiculturalism, with the awful example of faith-divided schooling in Northern Ireland over decades, with news of Deobandi control of half of British mosques where hostility to the host community is preached, the government is choosing to continue to fly in the face of all reason and experience, and to design and pay for—with our tax money—greater future divisiveness and trouble [via "faith" schools]. It is staggering.

A month or two ago, I saw a religious activist on a local TV station in Toronto, pushing for continued funding for Catholic schools in Ontario. The "funny" thing was, her "reasoning" against one sensible call-in critic was that Catholics, too, are part of the "cultural mosaic," so that a funding of their private schools was not only consistent with our official federal policy of multiculturalism, it was damn near required.

Personally, I'm firmly opposed to giving public money to any cult, even a "safely" overgrown virgin-worshiping, cannibalistic (cf. Eucharist) one.

Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish Britons can rightly complain that the state has long funded Church of England and Roman Catholic schools. But the proper remedy is not to extend state patronage from Christianity to other superstitions; rather, it is to implement a complete separation of church from state, and more generally to insist that taxpayer-funded institutions have no business propagating dogmas unsupported by evidence. (Alan Sokal, Taking Evidence Seriously)

Also, as quoted on B&W, this is from the Dutch newspaper editor Flemming Rose:

The history of the left, for instance, is a history of confronting authority—be it religious or political authority—and always challenging religious symbols and figures.... I think the left is in a deep crisis in Europe because of their lack of willingness to confront the racist ideology of Islamism. They somehow view the Koran as a new version of Das Kapital and are willing to ignore everything else, as long as they continue to see the Muslims of Europe as a new proletariat.

You may have noticed that Benson's writing style (i.e., block-quote and saucy/sassy response) is very similar to my own. I don't think that's entirely a coincidence, i.e., the quoting is just what you have to do if you want to leave no doubt that you're not misrepresenting your sources/opponents. (Of course, it's typically done that way on message boards too, somewhat; but I, at least, didn't pick it up from there.)

Also like me, she not only block-quotes things she disagrees with, but also stuff she fully supports. Any idiot can paraphrase, after all—Fritjof Capra, for one, made a career out of rehashing other people's ideas in his own words. (Did he ever have a correct, original idea himself?) But what's the point in "reinventing the wheel" (or the butterfly) if someone else has already expressed the ideas as well as, or better than, you could have?

Finally, this:

The motion "We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values" was proposed by the author Ibn Warraq. He contrasted the West's openness and flexibility with the ossified "closed book" culture of Islam. "Easterners flock to collect their degrees from Oxbridge, Harvard and the Sorbonne," he said. Traffic in the other direction is minimal. Rejecting the "mind-numbing certainties" of Islam in favour of the "liberating doubt" of Bertrand Russell, he asked us if Islam would tolerate an equivalent of The Life of Brian.

I wish the values had been called liberal rather than Western, because 1) that is what was meant 2) they are universalizable rather than parochial and they are not unknown outside the West 3) "the West" hasn't always lived by liberal values, as people of course lost no time in pointing out 4) the point is surely not hemispheric loyalty but merit and 5) the very idea of prancing around asserting the superiority of Western values makes me feel like a prize turkey. But, all the same, the hemispheric aspect is not completely irrelevant, as Ibn Warraq's comment above highlights....

The winning majority howled with pleasure when Ibn Warraq summed up the debate: "I don't want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery."

In all seriousness, I haven't found a single thing Ms Benson has posted on that site that I can disagree with. Benson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are the type of people who can restore your faith in humanity, for valuing reason and reality over any "wish list" about what the universe "must be like."

The truth or falsity question is primary and everything else is secondary.... (Benson)

Just so. When it comes to our world's "professional victims" and their sometimes-real, sometimes-imagined oppressors, neither side is actually interested in treating the other fairly, nor will either side ever be satisfied regardless of how much power it gains. (Not to mention that when you can easily find feminists who can "prove" that women are superior to men, you are obviously dealing with people there who are every bit as despicable and sexist as are their male counterparts: You don't get to be anything resembling a decent human being by making exactly the same mistakes, just from the "other side of the fence.")

In exactly the same way, the world needs unions not for any noble point of ideology, but rather just to keep our Scrooge-like corporations in check—i.e., to counter one set of exaggerated half-truths and lies with another set, in the hope of finding a happy, pragmatic medium somewhere between socialism and trickle-down economics. You know, where one side fucks Our Lady Truth up the ass, the other side fucks her up the front, and the only thing that really suffers in that dynamic interplay is ... well, truth.

The world needs (and will always need) feminists like Benson and Hirsi Ali for quite different and much more noble reasons than it needs such merely pragmatic, truth-fucking ones.

The saucy tone (from Benson, I mean) on top of all that is just a bonus. :)

By "feminism," I mean the belief that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognized as having human dignity equally with men, and the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can. (Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?)

Well, then color me a proud feminist. Always have been, always will be.

But, of course, there's much more to the situation, in practice, than Okin mentions above.

Bet you didn't know, for example, that vegetarianism, too, oppresses women. Well, according to this book, it inadvertently does, being based on "a male physiological norm and ideal." Of course, according to other feminists, the use of eggs and dairy items is itself yet another product of patriarchal oppression (in the commoditization of female reproductive processes); so whichever way you go, you're sure to be wrong, right?

Christina Hoff Summers brings up some additional disturbing points:

Feminists ideologues have falsely accused men of being wildly abusive to women on Super Bowl Sunday. They have held men responsible for 150,000 anorexia deaths each year. They have called men the primary cause of birth defects. These falsehoods were repeated over and over again in newspaper stories, in book after book.

Any time you're devoting much time and energy to eradicating one or another form of evil from the world, you need to be very careful that (i) you are not simply projecting your own psychological shadow out into the world, to see in the Evil Other either a "Red under every bed" or a patriarchal oppressor in every heterosexual bed; and (ii) you don't slip into becoming exactly that which you set out to eradicate. For example, if men have too often compared women and minorities to children or animals, as a means of denigration and exclusion, you would not, as a feminist, want to slip into the same name-calling dismissal or stereotyping of others who disagree with your ideology.

The late physicist Richard Feynman is delightful in any context ... especially when being hassled by feminists for supposedly being a "sexist pig." From his What Do You Care What Other People Think?:

A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-woman because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the woman look stupid.

The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery.

The letter claimed that I was saying a woman is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions.

I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, man!"

Needless to say, that didn't work too well. Another letter came: "Your response to our letter of September 29th is unsatisfactory ..."—blah, blah, blah. This letter warned that if I didn't get the publisher to revise the things they objected to, there would be trouble.

I ignored the letter and forgot about it.

A year or so later, the American Association of Physics Teachers awarded me a prize for writing those books, and asked me to speak at their meeting in San Francisco. My sister, Joan, lived in Palo Alto—an hour's drive away—so I stayed with her the night before and we went to the meeting together.

As we approached the lecture hall, we found people standing there giving out handbills to everybody going in. We each took one, and glanced at it. At the top it said, "A PROTEST." Then it showed excerpts from the letters they sent me, and my response (in full). It concluded in large letters: "FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG!"

Joan stopped suddenly and rushed back: "These are interesting," she said to the protester. "I'd like some more of them!"

When she caught up with me, she said, "Gee whiz, Richard; what did you do?"

I told her what had happened as we walked into the hall.

At the front of the hall, near the stage, were two prominent women in the American Association of Physics Teachers. One was in charge of women's affairs for the organization, and the other way Fay Ajzenberg, a professor of physics I knew, from Pennsylvania. They saw me coming down towards the stage accompanied by this woman with a fistful of handbills, talking to me. Fay walked up to her and said, "Do you realize that Professor Feynman has a sister that he encouraged to go into physics, and that she has a Ph.D. in physics?"

"Of course I do," said Joan. "I'm that sister!"

Fay and her associate explained to me that the protesters were a group—led by a man, ironically—who were always disrupting meetings in Berkeley. "We'll sit on either side of you to show our solidarity, and just before you speak, I'll get up and say something to quiet the protesters," Fay said.

Because there was another talk before mine, I had time to think of something to say. I thanked Fay but declined her offer.

As soon as I got up to speak, half a dozen protesters marched down to the front of the lecture hall and paraded right below the stage, holding their picket signs high, chanting, "Feynman sexist pig! Feynman sexist pig!"

I began my talk by telling the protesters, "I'm sorry that my short answer to your letter brought you here unnecessarily. There are more serious places to direct one's attention towards improving the status of women in physics than these relatively trivial mistakes—if that's what you want to call them—in a textbook. But perhaps, after all, it's good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them."

The protesters looked at one another. Their picket signs began to come slowly down, like sails in a dying wind.

I continued: "Even though the American Association of Physics Teachers has given me an award for teaching, I must confess I don't now how to teach. Therefore, I have nothing to say about teaching. Instead, I would like to talk about something that will be especially interesting to the women in the audience: I would like to talk about the structure of the proton."

The protesters put their picket signs down and walked off. My hosts told me later that the man and his group of protesters had never been defeated so easily....

After my talk, some of the protesters came up to press me about the woman-driver story. "Why did it have to be a woman driver?" they said. "You are implying that all women are bad drivers."

"But the woman makes the cop look bad," I said. "Why aren't you concerned about the cop?"

"That's what you expect from cops!" one of the protesters said. "They're all pigs!"

"But you should be concerned," I said. "I forgot to say in the story that the cop was a woman!"

P.S. I also really like Steven Pinker's "dangerous idea," for the simple reason that you can't do anything resembling science by a priori dictating that certain questions must never be asked, just because you're afraid that the answers which come out might not be the ones you want to hear.

There may or may not always be a political agenda behind the asking of questions concerning potential racial and sexual (esp. cognitive) differences. But one thing is certain: There is always a political reason for disallowing the asking of those same questions. Which, of course, should only make one more determined to find out the real answers.

From Paramahansa Yogananda's Man's Eternal Quest:

There is a case on record, in the files of French and other European doctors, of a man named Sadhu Haridas—in the court of Emperor Ranjit Singh of India—who was able to separate his energy and consciousness from his body and then connect the two again after several months. His body was buried underground and watch was kept over the spot, day and night, for months. At the end of this time, his body was exhumed and examined by the European doctors, who pronounced him dead. After a few minutes, however, he opened his eyes and regained control over all the functions of his body; and lived for many years more. He had learned, by practice, how to control all the involuntary functions of his body and mind. (p. 214)

We know that the soul is not a puff of breath, because there are persons [e.g., Haridas] who have lived long in the suspended-animation state without breathing at all, showing that the soul cannot be bound by breath. (p. 391)

Clearly enamored of that verified demonstration of "yogic powers," Yogananda repeats the claims about Haridas in The Second Coming of Christ, Scientific Healing Affirmations, and Journey to Self-Realization, in the latter calling it a "miracle of Raja Yoga."

From Milbourne Christopher's ESP, Seers & Psychics (p. 222-4, 232):

Haridas preferred not to be buried in the earth. Should a swarm of hungry ants attack him while he was in a trance, he could not defend himself. He sat cross-legged on a large piece of linen which was wrapped around him after he completed his ritual to suspend his animation and was locked, while in a sitting position, in a box with one of the Maharajah's padlocks. This took place, reported a Dr. McGregor, who was serving in the Punjab with the British Horse Artillery, "in a small apartment below the middle of the ground." The door to the garden house above the chamber was locked, and the entrance to a tall wall which enclosed the garden house was sealed with bricks and mud. Guards were posted by the wall on a twenty-four hour alert and the long wait began....

Haridas was disinterred forty days later—not quite the "several months" claimed by Yogananda, but perhaps close enough, all things considered. Christopher continues:

Though the people of the Punjab seemed to accept the fakir's miracle without question, the Scottish physician was dubious. If the man had been where he could be observed rather than shut in an inaccessible place, McGregor might have shared their wonder. As it was, he believed the fakir had access to food and drink, though as to how this was managed he would not "hazard a guess"....

Haridas' life above ground was not one of holy self-denial. So many complaints about his roisterous behavior reached Ranjit Singh that the Maharajah planned to issue orders that the fakir leave Lahore and never return. Haridas beat him to the punch. He took off to the mountains with an attractive woman and lived in the Himalayas until he died and his body was burned....

In the past, performers in India and elsewhere survived long burials by having their assistants secretly tunnel under the ground to the burial spot. In some cases the tunnels were made days beforehand. The box was lowered in a pit which had only a thin earthen wall between the lower end of the passageway and the end of the box. A panel that swung inward permitted the fakir to get out, dig through the barrier and crawl up to the ground. The far end of the tunnel was some distance from the burial pit, masked by a clump of vegetation or a nearby house. The mystic could live in comparative comfort, amply supplied with food and drink until the time came for him to burrow back and assume the trance position before the box was hauled up to the surface.

... And then I stumbled on this:

There was also a follow-up point made by Daniel Dennett, that he does not dismiss the value of studying mystical experiences for either understanding how our brains compose our sense of self, or for personally helping one to achieve a sense of peace and contentment. In fact, Dennett said, he himself meditates and finds it very beneficial. He just disagrees that it gives someone insight into the nature of how the entire universe works, vs. into the nature of how the mind works. People who have spent years and years meditating don't come up with anything interesting beyond themselves ... or something like that.

Of course, if Dennett was more "second-tier" and not mired in flatland ontology, he'd see that navel-gazing does indeed grant "insight into the nature of how the entire universe/Kosmos works" ... wouldn't he? :)

Sam Harris is much closer to that perspective:

[T]he future looks rather like the past.... We may live to see the technological perfection of all the visionary strands of traditional mysticism: shamanism (Siberian or South American), Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism), and all the other Byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in every guise of its conception. But all these approaches to spirituality are born of a longing for esoteric knowledge and a desire to excavate the visionary state of the mind—in dreams, or trance, or psychedelic swoon—in search of the sacred. While I have no doubt that remarkable experiences are lying in wait for the initiate down each of these byways, the fact that consciousness is always the prior context and condition of every visionary experience is a great clarifying truth....

And you wonder how Harris ended up guesting on Integral Naked? Even if, you know, he hadn't referenced Wilber's work in the endnotes of TEoF:

[A] process of increasing individuation clearly occurs from birth onward. See K. Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), for a criticism of the false equation between what he calls the pre-rational and the trans-rational. As Wilber points out, there is no reason to romanticize childhood in spiritual terms. Indeed, if our children appear to inhabit the kingdom of heaven, why stop with them? We might as well direct our envy at our primate cousins, for they—when they are not too overcome by the pleasures of cannibalism, gang rape, and infanticide to seem so—are the most gleeful children of all.

When even one of the Four Horsemen is so clearly fooled by kw's drivel, what hope is there for this world?

Nothing is more sacred than the facts. No one, therefore, should win any points in our discourse for deluding himself. (Harris, The End of Faith)

Thus spake a man who thinks Ken Wilber's ideas are valid, when in reality The Bald Cult-Leading Bastard's theories do nothing but fuck the facts right up the integral ass.

As the real rationalist Meera Nanda has rightly noted,

Sam Harris is not all that far apart from Mahesh Yogi, Deepak Chopra and others who claim that spiritual practitioners have the most objective view of the world because they can see it "directly," just the way it is, completely "shorn of the self," and the many biases and dogmas that "I-ness" brings....

He loads spiritual practices with metaphysical baggage, all the while claiming to stand up for reason and evidence. By the end of the book, I could not help thinking of him as a Trojan horse for the New Age.

Harris really didn't have to "lower himself" at all to swim with kw and his minions in the "integral cesspool"; he was already there.

He's right about at least one thing, though:

Am I saying that overt opposition to a wrong is the ethical standard? Yes, when the stakes are high, I think that it is. One can always make the argument that covert resistance in particularly dangerous situations—where open opposition would be to forfeit one's life—is the best possible course.... But simply making room for human evil, or sidestepping it, doesn't seem an ethically auspicious option.

Needless to say, that approach can't be restricted to merely exposing cult leaders and pandits for their lies and abuses. Rather, it needs to be applied just as much to every other group which misrepresents the truth (whether through ignorance or deliberate deception) for its own advantage.

Sadly, while doing that one quickly discovers the validity in the old saying that if you were to get up one morning and simply tell the truth at every point during the day, by sunset you wouldn't have a job, friends, or spouse left to call your own.

On the bright side, there is no one freer (to tell the truth, etc.) than a man who has nothing left to lose.

P.S. Very interesting interview with one of the authors of Higher Superstition. In fact, the whole Butterflies and Wheels website is an amazing find, which I just stumbled on this morning. You could do worse things with your afternoon than spend it reading all of Nanda's articles posted there, as I just have.

Also interesting to stumble across the CounterCultSearch.com website ... which happened to turn up this link.

And the real Ada Lovelace.

And skeptic Robert Sheaffer's review, The Goddess Has No Clothes.

And the very funny Jesus and Mo cartoon.

And The Poetry of Roger Clemens.

Finally, this would be a fantastic parody ... except that it appears to be intended for serious consumption: Three Little Pigs "too offensive".

From Sam Harris's The End of Faith:

It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources.... Our recent history offers much evidence of our own development on these fronts, and a corresponding change in our morality. A visit to New York in the summer of 1863 would have found the streets ruled by roving gangs of thugs; blacks, where not owned outright by white slaveholders, were regularly lynched and burned. Is there any doubt that many New Yorkers of the nineteenth century were barbarians by our present standards? To say of another culture that it lags a hundred and fifty years behind our own in social development is a terrible criticism indeed, given how far we've come in that time....

[W]e must now confront whole societies whose moral and political development—in their approach to criminal justice, and in their very intuitions about what constitutes cruelty—lags behind our own. This may seem like an unscientific and potentially racist thing to say, but it is neither. It is not in the least racist, since it is not at all likely that there are biological reasons for the disparities here, and it is unscientific only because science has not yet addressed the moral sphere in a systematic way....

Can we say that Middle Eastern men who are murderously obsessed with female sexual purity actually love their wives, daughters, and sisters less than American or European men do? Of course, we can. And what is truly incredible about the state of our discourse is that such a claim is not only controversial but actually unutterable in most contexts....

At this point, many anthropologists will want to argue for the importance of cultural context. These murderers are not murderers in the usual sense. They are ordinary, even loving gentlemen who have become the pawns of tribal custom. Taken to its logical conclusion, this view suggests that any behavior is compatible with any mental state. Perhaps there is a culture in which you are expected to flay your firstborn child alive as an expression of "love." But unless everyone in such a culture wants to be flayed alive, this behavior is simply incompatible with love as we know it.

From David Berreby's Us And Them:

Suppose the suggestion [is correct] that reminders of death spark an Us-Them surge of anger at outsiders? What if the outsiders' very presence was a reminder of death? Other people might then feel the anger, the uneasiness of that association, without realizing its exact cause....

Today the world's democracies do not force particular classes or ethnic groups to tan hides and haul corpses (though we do make uneasy jokes about undertakers). Nonetheless, that death association remains effective. Here, for example, is the late feminist writer Andrea Dworkin on the male gender: "Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder."

And that stereotyping and brutal smearing surprises you?

Since the early 1970s, multiculturalism has been an official policy of the Canadian government.

Why?

The bill which brought that policy into law was really just a ploy by our fox-in-the-henhouse Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (when his flower-girl wife wasn't busy partying with the Rolling Stones) to diminish the "distinct society" claims of the French-speakers in Quebec, by encouraging/enshrining the distinctiveness of all cultures. Trudeau actually thought so little of the "accomplishment" that he didn't even mention it in his memoirs. (I'm doing that mostly from memory, based on Bissoondath's and Stoffman's books on the flaws of multiculturalism and Canada's immigration policy. Incidentally, since the mid-1980s, our Immigration Review Board has approved 90% of the "refugee" claims made to it. The global average is 15%. A lot of the "refugees" who wind up in Canada, then, not only are not fleeing for their lives from oppression, they're just using Canada as an easy way to enter the United States: Show up with no documentation, claim refugee status, maybe draw welfare for awhile, and then head south to plot how to blow up Washington, DC. If you wonder why Canada is indeed a "safe haven for terrorists," that's the reason. Don't blame me, though: I didn't vote for the lying bastard who screwed this country over just to reward some political buddies of his with six-figure patronage appointments, in creating the IRB. If I recall correctly, Canada is actually the only country in the world today that accepts refugee claims for people "fleeing" from the United States!)

The American "melting pot" idea was always a better way of doing things, even if it only "really worked" for WASPs immigrating to the U.S., and even then for much lower annual percentages of immigration than the United States and Canada currently have, forcing people to assimilate and learn English rather than taking easy refuge in their transplanted "traditional" communities. But neither approach can work to produce an integrated society if the country's level of immigration is too high, as Canada's is, at ~1% annually. (In Vancouver right now, there are Chinese enclaves where the parents commute to work in other parts of the city, being very well integrated into the existing society. But their children still all go to the local school, where they talk to each other only in Chinese. So, we have second-generation Canadians growing up today who aren't learning English in school. What kind of future do they have in this country ... unless they want to try and grow that Chinese-only enclave even larger?)

Our Liberal Party supports high levels of immigration because they think it ups their voter base. The Conservative Party supports high levels because it drives wages down. And the feel-good, socialist/union-supporting New Democratic Party likes it because they're so economically incompetent they don't even realize that companies will contract-out to cheap labor rather than deal with unions full of people who are too stupid and too lazy to work real jobs for a competitive wage. (If there's one group I can't stand even more than lazy, stupid, overpaid union members and their leaders ... it would have to be upper management, i.e., MBAs and CEOs. At least they're not typically lazy, though. Incompetent, yes; in spades. But at least they're not Toronto [TTC] bus drivers making an average of $46K per year, while computer programmers—including myself—get paid less.)

So, it's not just the I.T. industry in Canada that's gotten fucked by our politicians; it's happening right across the board. In fact, only around 30% of new immigrants to Canada today are skilled workers; the rest are unskilled family and grandparents ("family reunification"), etc. And if you factor out the percentage of Ph.D.'s who end up driving cabs—meaning not that they're not being given a fair chance to be employed in their areas of expertise, but rather that the market for their skills is already saturated, so they obviously should never have been allowed to enter the country to work in the first place....

If you want to know why multiculturalism, even in principle, creates conflict rather than tolerance among its groups, just read up on Sherif's Robbers Cave experiment:

In 1954, Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif studied the origin of prejudice in social groups in a classic study called the Robbers Cave Experiment. He conducted his research in a 200 acre (0.8 km²) Boy Scouts of America camp which was completely surrounded by Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma.

During the study, Sherif posed as a camp janitor. The study team screened a group of 22 eleven year-old boys with similar backgrounds. They were picked up by two buses carrying eleven boys each. Neither group knew of the other's existence. The boys were assigned to two living areas far enough apart that each group remained ignorant of the other's presence for the first few days. The Sherifs had broken up pre-existing friendships to the extent they could, so that each boy's identification with his new group could happen faster. Asked to choose names for their groups, one chose "The Rattlers", the other "The Eagles." Within two or three days, the two groups spontaneously developed internal social hierarchies.

The experiment was broken into three phases.

• In-group formation, as described above.
• A Friction Phase, which included first contact between groups, sports competitions, etc.
• An Integration Phase (reducing friction).

None of the boys were previously acquainted before the experiment, but hostility between the groups was observed within days of first contact. Phase Two activities proceeded as planned, but soon proved overly successful. Hostility between the groups escalated to the point where the study team concluded the friction-producing activities could not continue safely. Phase Two was terminated and Phase Three commenced.

To lessen friction and promote unity between the Rattlers and Eagles, Sherif devised and introduced tasks that required cooperation between the two groups. These tasks are referred to in the study as superordinate goals. A superordinate goal is a desire, challenge, predicament or peril that both parties in a conflict need to get resolved, and that neither party can resolve alone. Challenges set up by the Sherifs included a water shortage problem, a "broken down" camp truck that needed enough "man" power to be pulled back to camp, and finding a movie to show. These and other necessary collaborations caused hostile behavior to subside. The groups bonded to the point that, by the end of the experiment, the boys unanimously insisted they all ride back home on the same bus.

As David Berreby then notes, in Us And Them:

Even though they had never heard of Rattlers and Eagles until they invented the names, the boys attached a full array of moral feelings to the human kinds they'd made. At the height of their war, campers in each group saw their enemies as cheaters and cowards—not as kids from another team but as kids from a different morality....

Robbers Cave was a microcosmic version of twentieth-century political life, its two cabins arranged like the two races of America's color line or the two sides of the Cold War.

All you have to do is replace the "Rattlers" and "Eagles" groups with "Red and Yellow, Black and White" ones, to see how little sense it makes to encourage them to retain their group-identities as points of pride, when that will only create conflict. That has nothing to do with race or ethnicity or culture as such; it's just inherent in-group/out-group dynamics. (Any racial, ethnic or cultural tensions will certainly make the situation worse, but it was already more than bad enough in Sherif's experiment even just with a couple of groups of Boy Scouts!) All of that has been known since the mid-1950s!

It is said that the British Labour party [formed in 1906] was born only after representatives of its warring factions spent an hour moving their conference table into a larger room. (Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions)

See? People working together to achieve a common goal where everyone wins, rather than styling themselves as "warring factions," each out to maximize the benefits for their particular "group" at the expense of the others. (Of course, there it was presumably just a bunch of white males cooperating, so they didn't need to face any additional hurdles in racial or sexual diversity.)

Yet, there's still more to it than that:

[In the 1950s, Gordon] Allport proposed that prejudices could be reduced if people from different human kinds met as equals, had some shared goal to work for, and had support—or at least no opposition—from the law....

Allport never said mere "goodwill contact" could overcome prejudice; in fact, he said exactly the opposite, warning that successful contact required the conditions he specified. Nonetheless, his idea led to today's conventional wisdom that contact among different human kinds—diversity—is in itself good for mind and soul.

Yet scholars now agree the contact hypothesis is a muddle. Some studies suggest that prejudice goes down with contact, but others find the opposite. Actual contact sometimes makes people more prejudiced. On many American college campuses, for example, the emphasis on diversity has led students to join one of these diverse human kinds and shun much contact with the others....

More successful than telling children not to be prejudiced against, say, the Christian kids, is persuading them not to see Christian kids, because another set of human kinds—say, Blue Ghosts and Red Genies—is more relevant. In the 1970s, the American social psychologist Elliot Aronson devised the "Jigsaw classroom." His approach places students in small groups and forces them to work together on tasks, for example, learning about twentieth-century history. Racial, ethnic, gender, and school-clique boundaries don't count for the task: The kids must work together to master their subject. The idea is that these preclass human kinds fade in importance and the kids' shared work comes to the fore....

In long-standing political conflicts, exactly the opposite happens. Life is organized in a number of ways to prevent alternative human kinds [i.e., alternative group-boundary drawings] from forming in anyone's mind. (Berreby, Us And Them)

One of the few places in this world where you get an approximately "Jigsaw classroom" approach is on the sports field—where no one on any given team can win unless everyone on that team does well, and where people are seen foremost as the human-kind of "football players," etc., and only secondarily in terms of their ethnic background or otherwise. (That outward show of cooperation of course neglects the fact that the second-stringers on a team can't really be completely hoping that the first-stringers do well, as the latter's success would only decrease their own playing time. Still, among the players on the field at any given time, you can't win the game if other members of your team play poorly.) That sort of thing is the only way to reliably build cooperation rather than in-group/out-group competition.

If you want to find the landmarks in racial integral in North America, look for when the color bar was broken in each of the major sports. That may even have begun as just a rich white team-owner figuring out that he could win more games with the best (e.g.) second-baseman from the Negro Leagues this season than with the old, marginally skilled white guy at the same position. (Dodgers' manager Leo Durocher: "I don't care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin' zebra. I'm the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What's more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you can't use the money, I'll see that you are all traded.") But it also brought the sports fans (and what male in North America isn't a fan of some sport?) into a position where, if their team was to win, the "black guy at second base" had to do his job well—so, to cheer against him, or hope for him to fail, would have been a case of them "cutting off their noses to spite their face." They had to hope that the black guy did well, if their team was going to win. The nation-wide effects of that cooperation (and of "our team" human-kind-categorizing among both the players and the fans) on the sports field cannot be overestimated.

In contrast to the Jigsaw classroom and the sports field, and far from teaching us not to see Christians, Jews, blacks, Chinese and Muslim people (etc.) in the world around us, one of the essential points of multiculturalism (as also in "long-standing political conflicts") is that we should see each one of those groups ... and then simply appreciate/tolerate/celebrate (or make war on) them all equally. Well, good luck with that dream! Obviously, it's not going to work!

Equally obviously, one could draw the in-group/out-group boundary based on any shared/excluded characteristic. But the very first impressions we get about others typically come through our sense of vision—we see them on the street or across the room before we hear, smell, touch or (after a few dates, if all goes well) taste them—and include their skin color, ethnic group, sex, and body type. And when your country has an official policy which actually encourages you to see and celebrate others in terms of any of those shallow attributes, it is basically a policy of "first impressions," which immediately gets in the way of looking beyond those external characteristics to see an individual rather than a stereotypical member of a group:

A person meeting a stranger can feel, because of the signs the stranger displays, that this unknown person is one of "us." His skin is the same color as ours, even if he doesn't speak our language. He speaks our language, even though his skin is a different color. He is not of our color or language, but look, he's carrying a soccer ball. He's playing our game.... [cf. this]

Sherif ... suggests that we don't believe in racial and religious and national divisions because we're told to but rather because our daily experiences are organized to make those categories relevant and useful—and to make other ways of sorting people useless [or at least less useful]. (Berreby, Us And Them)

Of course, in an officially multicultural society we are told to believe in racial and religious divisions; but that only reinforces our de facto way of "sorting people." You're not even "Canadian," you're rather "Chinese-Canadian" or "Caribbean-Canadian," i.e., it's based on your ethnicity (which you can't do anything about, even if you wanted to), not your nationality. Cf. this:

Nationalism must have been a much punier thing before cheap rapid travel, because whatever you were was the default thing to be.

Paradoxically, it meant less (i.e., it was "punier") for being your default identity, which you couldn't do much about unless you wanted to emigrate to somewhere else and "start over"; but (in other contexts) it also meant more, precisely for being something you could fall back on even when all other shifting "identities" and in-groups failed.

Ah, and here's another completely predictable outcome of multicultural policy coupled with excessive levels of immigration:

[A]ccording to a 2007 University of Toronto study, many recent non-white citizens [esp. from China, South Asia and the Caribbean] do not identify themselves as being "Canadian." (Wikipedia)

And what follows next from that?

Canada, long considered a model of integration, won't be forever immune from the kind of social disruption that has plagued Europe, where marginalized immigrant communities have erupted in discontent, with riots in the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005. (Globe & Mail)

To which one can only wonder out loud: "What Would Ann Coulter Do?"

Honestly, when new minority immigrants are being encouraged to retain their traditional "Rattler" cultural identities in the midst of a majority "Eagle" group at our national "summer camp," rather than to identify as all being "Camp Woebegoners," how much knowledge of half-century-old social psychology does it take to predict that they'll end up feeling excluded and marginalized? Out-group exclusion and marginalization are significant enough problems with human beings in any context. But when your country's official policy can only act to support those same dynamics, you really are asking for trouble.

In the world as it stands today, levels of immigration approaching 1% per year (i.e., a whopping 23% over 25 years, or roughly one generation, in Canada) are a guaranteed way to end up with a very conflicted and non-integrated society, particularly when the bulk of new immigrants are sadly unskilled. (Canada has the highest per-capita immigration rate in the world, but the "23%" above is actually a deceptively low figure, since most new immigrants move to only one of three major cities: Vancouver, Montreal, or Toronto ... with 43% of immigrants moving to the Greater Toronto Area, thus simultaneously driving housing prices up, and wages down for both skilled and unskilled workers.)

[I]n the early 1990s, the old [right-wing] Reform Party was branded "racist" for suggesting that immigration levels be lowered from 250,000 to 150,000.

Yeah, but you know what? The Party was absolutely right to make that suggestion. And the country would have been wise to act on it, rather than screaming hysterically about the supposed "racism" of a Very Sensible And Much-Needed Idea. (Never mind that such a reduction would surely have applied as much to Caucasians coming here from England, etc.—such as the one who took over my job [for lower wages] as a programmer back in the middle of 2003—as to other races from elsewhere.) "Road to hell, good intentions, bleeding-heart liberals," etc.

In the long run, though, as the very entertaining Canadian comedian Russell Peters has observed, there won't be any white-skinned or black-skinned or yellow-skinned people anymore. Rather, the whole species will end up as a pleasing shade of light brown (like the Anglo-Indian Peters himself!). That is, over the next few hundred years intermarriage will rightfully dissolve the whole idea of distinct cultures and races; thus ironically producing, in its own way, the precise opposite of multiculturalism.

Consider the actress Vanessa Hudgens: "Hudgens's father is an American of Irish and Native American descent, and her mother, who grew up in Manila, is a Filipino-born of Filipino, Spanish and Chinese ancestry." With what "distinct culture" could Hudgens possibly identify? And with what traditional culture or race or even cuisine could her children possibly identify?

So you see, once again, "Love will conquer all." Or at least, sex will. You can see that on any warm summer evening on the streets around the U of Toronto campus, where testosterone and estrogen rightfully matter far more than do skin color or ethnic background.

"Darwin would have wanted it that way."

I was reading the Now Magazine 2008 Sex Survey.

Question #24: What's your idea of romance?

Survey Answer: A game of Scrabble and a take-away curry.

CUT TO: A Simpson's Valentine's Day special. Marge chats with Apu at the checkout counter of the Kwik-E-Mart.

     MARGE
What's your idea of romance?

     APU
A game of Scrabble and a take-away curry with Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilon. Oh, she was a hot one back in the day.

     MARGE
Why Apu, I've never seen this side of you before. I'm sure Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilon thinks you're hot, too.

She GIGGLES and WALKS OUT of the store.

     APU
I was talking about the curry.

In November 2007, the charity campaigns which Bono is involved with were criticized by Jobs Selasie, head of the charity African Aid Action. Selasie claims that these charities have increased corruption and dependency in Africa because they have failed to work with African entrepreneurs and grassroots organizations, and as a result, Africa has become more dependent on international handouts. (Wikipedia)

That's the same Paul Theroux, of course, whose revealing conversations with African politicians are quoted with approval by Roger Sandall, and whose conclusions are quite consistent with Selasie's criticisms, above. To the extent to which Bono is trashing Theroux in his response, above—as a "crank"??!—he couldn't be more wrong.

Regardless, as always, the road to hell is paved with good intentions ... and with someone else's tax dollars.

From James Randi's most recent Swift newsletter:

While I believe that the Maharishi had the best of intentions when he began in 1959, it seems evident [??!] that his organization was taken over by the management he allowed to move in, and they literally took it from his control.

Good fucking Lord! Anyone who could propose such a scenario with a straight face has no business even having an opinion about how cults work! And how is Randi's link to Hagelin any sort of "evidence" of that supposed coup? It wasn't as though Hagelin foisted his wacky QM-and-consciousness ideas on TM against MMY's wishes!

Hint: From the link within that linked page, where Randi gives his opinions about the announcement of MMY's retirement:

Here are the words of John Hagelin, known to his followers as "Jai Guru Dev, Raja of Invincible America." No comment is needed.

On the contrary, comment is needed, simply because Randi is obviously conflating the "Jai Guru Dev" in Hagelin's signoff or e-signature—which is simply him "bowing before MMY"—with part of Hagelin's title! Hagelin is indeed known as "Raja of Invincible America"; but the Maharishi (and MMY's own guru, back in India) was the only one who was ever referred to as "Guru Dev"!

That such a laughable and inexcusable misreading (i.e., of Hagelin supposedly elevating himself to the status of guru, after MMY's retirement), which exists only in Randi's own mind, could be taken by him as "evidence" of the TM organization being "taken over by" Hagelin or any other of his (MMY's) followers, is about as believable as are the claims of UFO abductions which the Amazing One regularly debunks! You don't even need to know any "mystical language" to see that; all you need to be able to do is to competently read and understand a simple press release or business letter!

Rajneesh's apologists, incidentally, make a comparable claim, i.e., that it was only Sheela and her clique who turned his Oregon ashram from a "meditation retreat" into a "concentration camp," with the guru supposedly not even knowing what was going on underneath his very own nose.

Even if that were true (and I don't think for a minute that it is), when you surround yourself with "yes-men," as every power-mad guru eventually does, and they end up shielding you from what is really going on in your "kingdom," whose bloody fault is that?! In a very real sense, they're just doing the jobs that you (as the guru) gave them to do! So also was, and is, Hagelin, in the TM movement.

So James: Take your inexcusably foolish and utterly unsubstantiated idea that the Maharishi was betrayed by his own worshipful staff, and stuff it in the same hat where you keep that tricky rabbit....

If you want an easy read to confirm that the MMY was the same "God in the flesh" as all gurus are to their loyal disciples, Geoff Gilpin recently published his autobiographical book, The Maharishi Effect. I read it around a month ago. If MMY was ever unhappy about how the "management" which he put into place there was handling his organization, all he had to do was lift a finger, and the loyal minions would have tarred-and-feathered Hagelin or any other mere "higher follower" of their "divine" guru.

Another "funny" thing: I finally sent an email to the Indian Skeptic people a week ago, to try and get ahold of half a dozen of Basava Premanand's books. (I wanted to confirm the total cost before sending the money via Western Union.) Still haven't heard back from them.

Either these are people who have no more idea about how to run a business than Randi has about how cults work ... or they just don't want to sell their books to me. I find the former much easier to believe than the latter; but then, if I've learned one thing from Elias....

From Roger Sandall's An Australian Dilemma:

In [a] tribal society, when inexplicable disaster strikes, there is always an answer, it is invariably made up to fit the situation, and its first and sometimes its only priority is to fix the blame. Witches, sorcerers, and the invisible but malign motives of one's enemies are the ever-present and universal agents of misfortune. In all this the motive of vengeance is paramount[:] "Someone's going to pay for this" is the attitude which overrides all matters of fact....

[I]t is perfectly true that cognitive absurdity is to be found at all levels of social evolution....

[W]hat distinguishes the West from the rest is that its political, judicial, and scientific institutions obey rules and procedures designed to circumvent the frailties and follies of individual minds and to get at the facts....

[T]he whole emphasis of tribalism is on the control, restriction, and withholding of information. Only specific categories of people are allowed access, and this restriction is inseparable from the wish to preserve distinctions of status, power and prestige. Thus the role of "secret knowledge" possessed only by a chief or priest or elder—which, translated into plain English, means information strategically doled out or withheld for political purposes....

Okay, so that's maybe not really so far from how our own Western political "chiefs" behave as one might like it to be.

Try and imagine how the Orcadians would have managed under the policies advocated in Australia today. Would they have made much progress after 1770, if instead of being able to respond to various incentives for modernization, there had been a state-sponsored structure of disincentives to cultural change? If they had been told that their ancient ways were fine—just fine—and that their main priority should be to hold fast to their culture and be proud?

If whenever somebody tried to introduce improvements, they were warned that this might undermine their true identity? If instead of learning to add and subtract and keep their accounts, they were warned against the linear thinking of the dreadful Sassenachs? If instead of adopting scientific health procedures, they indulged a taste for old-time Caledonian cures? If they were at all times encouraged, despite the visible deterioration of many island communities into lawless sociopathic disarray, to fall back on the slogan, "My culture, right or wrong"?

In Viking days some Orcadians were slaves; and over the succeeding centuries they were several times overrun and slaughtered by invading forces. No doubt this caused much temporary misery. But what if this were then treated as a ubiquitous exculpation clause, the Orkney Islanders being urged to indiscriminately invoke these historic misfortunes as an excuse for the delinquency of their barns, for their love of whisky, for their derelict windowless cottages and Lord knows what else?

What progress would the Orcadians have made if the Scottish Parliament had espoused the principle, not that each citizen of the realm was an equal bearer of rights and duties, but that the Orcadians, by virtue of their belonging to a distinct culture, and as historic victims of dispossession, were collectively entitled to a range of rewards and immunities and exemptions with no complementary duties attached?....

The source of the foregoing collection of sedulously cultivated grievances, delusions of grandeur, fantasies of political autonomy, and demands to be treated both as equal and more than equal (while at the same time being exempt from the standards applied to everyone else) is of course the doctrine of "multiculturalism" in word and deed.

Intended-irony warning:

Diversity is a Good Thing in itself. Ergo, a thousand false beliefs (about witchcraft for example) are actually better than one true belief about it. All cultural "blueprints for survival" are equally creative and worthwhile. Ergo, comparing and contrasting the "creative and worthwhile" moral premises of Nazi totalitarian culture with English parliamentary culture is not allowed.

All cultures are equally "valid." Well, if that's true we can all relax, for it obviously follows that western culture is okay too, and we don't have to feel apologetic about Darwin and Einstein or making a trip to the moon.

But that's not how it works at all. All cultures are equally valid—but some are more valid than others.

I don't even recall how I stumbled onto Roger Sandall's website a couple of days ago, i.e., whether it just happened to turn up in a Google search, or via a link from a culture-related page on Wikipedia. What I do know is that his writings are an absolute gold mine of refreshingly, obviously correct ideas and insights, comparable to Steven Dutch's site, but focused mostly on anthropology (though with a fine understanding of science and anti-science superstitions, too).

A few of Sandall's hidden (archived) gems:

• The New Stone Age

• Face-Lifting the Stone Age

• The Politics of Oxymoron

• Anthropology and Farce

And just when you think it can't get any better, there's this:

A belief in the infinite power of the merely verbal, a conviction that he who masters the word masters the world is central to that realm of idle phrases known as "post-modernism" (hereafter PM) an utterly misleading term which means exactly the opposite of what it says. The entire thrust of postmodernism is premodern, prescientific, and both pre and anti-maths....

Taking a cue from PM's literary analysts, who spend their lives fussing over the meanings of words, the feminist critique of science minutely examines the writings and thoughts of scientists for sinister metaphors, or omens of the writer's intent, or psychological clues of the kind which so hideously [they say] deform the work of Francis Bacon. Four hundred years ago Bacon had rashly described his experimental method as a way of "forcing nature to give up her secrets."

Well we all know about force don't we? Especially when a "her" is involved. Force means violence. Violence means rape. And when (say the augurers) the father of Western science, Francis Bacon, writes of scientific experiments designed to "force nature to yield her secrets" only a fool could mistake his intention.

Believe it or not nothing more substantial than this allows Sandra Harding, for example, in her popular and widely used The Science Question in Feminism, to ask "why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton's law as 'Newton's rape manual' as it is to call them 'Newton's mechanics'?"....

[F]antastic extrapolations from figures of speech are central to feminist science critique. Metaphor-mongering is endemic. It is of paramount interest to the authors of "The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology" that in scientific accounts of fertilization "the fertilizing sperm is a hero who survives while others perish ... Whereas the ovum is a passive victim, a whore, and finally, a proper lady whose fulfillment is attained."

Ah, and then there's Catharine MacKinnon:

"[S]exual intercourse under conditions of gender inequality ... [is] an issue of forced sex," MacKinnon wrote in 1983. In fact, MacKinnon seemed to doubt even the possibility of consensual heterosexual sex, involving as it does the "penile invasion of the vagina." Penetration is probably synonymous with rape: It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that penetration itself is known [by women] to be a violation and that women's sexuality, our gender definition, is itself stigmatic. (Christopher Finan, Catharine A. MacKinnon: The Rise of a Feminist Censor)

And Andrea Dworkin:

Penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent.

Sex is inherently violent? You might as well say that eating food is inherently violent and criminal. After all, not only do you have to kill the animals and plants (or at least steal the latter's seeds "without permission" from the shrub or tree) to satisfy your wanton and unending biological needs, but the act of mastication is inherently cruel and pain-inducing ... as you'd know if anyone ever tried to masticate you.

I said "mastication." Why, what did you think I said?

Old Benny Hill joke:

Hot Babe Girl: Grape! Grape!!

Benny: Don't you mean, "rape"?

Hot Babe Girl: No, there was a bunch of 'em.

P.S. I've done a lot of rewriting of the Sharia entry, below, since discovering Sandall's site. "Writing is rewriting," right?

• The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert are often held out as a relatively peaceful people, and so they are, compared with other foragers: their murder rate is only as high as Detroit's. A linguist friend of mine who studies the Wari in the Amazon rainforest learned that their language has a term for edible beings, which includes anyone who isn't a Wari. (Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works)

• The Gebusi number only some 450 individuals. They make a living from hunting, foraging, growing bananas in unfenced gardens, and their few semi-domesticated pigs. There is no land shortage, and little competition for natural resources. Interpersonal relationships are uncompetitive; people try to be self-effacing and display mutual deference.

  Nevertheless, the Gebusi have one of the highest ever recorded homicide rates. In the immediate pre-contact period, their homicide rate was nearly 700 per 100,000 of population per year, and even in the period 1963–1982, the rate was 419 per 100,000. This compares to a rate of 4.8 per 100,000 in the United States, and 0.5 per 100,000 in Britain. (Adam Kuper, The Chosen Primate)

• The Fore people of New Guinea ... besides being enthusiastic cannibals, exacted a gruesome revenge upon suspected sorcerers:

  Besides attending public meetings, Fore men also hunted down men they believed to be sorcerers and killed them in reprisal. The hunters used a specialized attack called tukabu against sorcerers: they ruptured their kidneys, crushed their genitals and broke their thigh bones with stone axes, bit into their necks and tore out their tracheas, jammed bamboo splinters into their veins to bleed them.

  No doubt each of these gestures held metaphysical significance. This behavior seems to have been commonplace among the Fore at least until the 1960s. (Sam Harris, The End of Faith)

• In nearly every village [of the central African Bemba in the late nineteenth century] are to be seen men and women whose eyes have been gouged out; the removal of one eye and one hand is hardly worthy of remark. Men and women are seen whose ears, nose and lips have been sliced off and both hands amputated. The cutting off of breasts of women has been extensively practiced as a punishment for adultery but ... some of the victims ... are mere children ... Indeed these mutilations were inflicted with the utmost callousness; every chief for instance has a retinue of good singers and drummers who invariably have their eyes gouged out to prevent them running away. (H. Ling Roth, in Roger Sandall's Out of Africa: Always the same thing)

• Altars [of the African Benin] covered with streams of dried human blood, the stench of which was awful ... huge pits, forty to fifty feet deep, were found filled with human bodies, dead and dying, and a few wretched captives were rescued alive ... everywhere sacrificial trees on which were the corpses of the latest victims—everywhere, on each path, were newly sacrificed corpses. On the principal sacrificial tree, facing the main gate of the King's Compound, there were two crucified bodies, at the foot of the tree seventeen newly decapitated bodies and forty-three more in various stages of decomposition. On another tree a wretched woman was found crucified, whilst at its foot were four more decapitated bodies. To the westward of the King's house was a large open space, about three hundred yards in length, simply covered with the remains of some hundreds of human sacrifices in all stages of decomposition. The same sights were met with all over the city. (H. Ling Roth, in Sandall's Out of Africa: Always the same thing)

• [The Tupinamba peoples] loved human flesh. Prestige and power centered on the ritual slaughtering of prisoners.... [T]he killing and eating of these prisoners (who were fattened for the purpose) "were joyful events which provided these Indians with the opportunity for merrymaking, aesthetic displays, and other emotional outlets." [The following] took place at a cannibal feast after the victim's skull was shattered:

  Old women rushed to drink the warm blood, and children were invited to dip their hands in it. Mothers would smear their nipples with blood so that even babies could have a taste of it. The body, cut into quarters, was roasted on a barbecue, and the old women, who were the most eager for human flesh, licked the grease running along the sticks. Some portions, reputed to be delicacies or sacred, such as the fingers of the grease around the liver or heart, were allotted to distinguished guests. (Sandall, What Native Peoples Deserve)

• Captives [of the Mayan Indians] were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming of the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating, sometimes years later, in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple. (Jared Diamond, in Sandall's Collapsing The Maya)

• "Nose tombs" in Japan still contain the noses cut off of 20,000 Koreans and brought to Japan as trophies of a 16th-century Japanese invasion of that country. Not surprisingly, loathing of the Japanese is widespread in Korea, and contempt for Koreans is widespread in Japan. (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel [2005 edition], p. 429)

• [T]he Japanese Army's Unit 731 ... performed biological warfare experiments, including vivisections, on prisoners during World War II.... (David Berreby, Us And Them)

• In a British television documentary from the 1970s, a young Mehinacu woman was asked what would happen if she were to glimpse, even accidentally, the sacred flutes played by the men. She would be gang-raped, she replied, smiling sadly as if in recognition that in the genteel world of her white interviewer, such sexual punishments—culturally authorized, approved, indeed mandatory—were unthinkable. (Sandall, What Native Peoples Deserve)

• British banks, in collusion with the Arana clan and other laissez-faire operators, financed wholesale use of terror, intimidation, and murder to force the Indians of the deep [Amazon rain]forest to harvest wild rubber.

  In 1911, up to twenty thousand Indians gave their lives to push that [La Chorrera to Rio Putumayo] trail through the jungle. Indians who refused to work had the bottoms of their feet and their buttocks removed by machete. (Terence McKenna, True Hallucinations)

• [An employee of a rubber company tied a Cinta Larga] Indian girl up and hung her head downward from a tree, legs apart, and chopped her in half right down the middle with his machete. Almost with a single chop I'd say. The village was like a slaughterhouse. (quoted in Sandall's What Native Peoples Deserve)

Repeat after me, class: "Noble savages" ... "Honorable Japanese" ... "Noble Brits."

There will be a test....

(Excuse me for a moment, I have to vomit. And cry. Yes, a long, good cry.)

For extra credit, read Sandall's The Dereliction Express. And his In Bluebeard's Castles. Plus, if you've got a strong stomach, his A White Wedding. (Or, if you want to have real nightmares on a completely different topic, try Doctor Death. Personally, I had to take a break halfway through, and read something else.) And his 10,000 Years of Nostalgia:

[In] pre-state, preliterate, precivilized tribal societies: 65% were at war continuously, while 55% were at war every year. As to massacres: at the site of Crow Creek in South Dakota, in what seems to be the year 1325 according to archaeological dating, more than 500 men, women, and children were slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated, and all this well before anything remotely resembling civilization was available locally—and long before Columbus. Regarding the toll of dead and injured, Keeley writes that "the proportion of war casualties in primitive societies almost always exceeds that suffered by even the most bellicose or war-torn modern states."

Finally, on the lighter side, Sandall's See Here, Ms Truss. From which:

When the Reverend Thomas Baker arrived in a Fijian village in 1867 he was received with the greatest hospitality, and so far as we know the night he spent there was comfortable. Next morning, when seated on the floor of the chief's house with his host, he produced a comb, attended to his hair, and without giving the matter a moment's thought laid the comb on the mat before him. The chief then picked up the comb and stuck it in his own hair. Some items like this were treated as communal property; and in any case Mr. Baker should have understood that it was a compliment for a prestigious host to adopt a visitor's comb as his own.

But he didn't. Rudely snatching back the comb from the chief's hair, the Reverend Baker sealed his own fate. For this outrage he was promptly knocked on the head, and dragged away, reappearing some time later as Missionary Pie. "We ate everything but his boots" a villager said.

From Dan Schneider's interview with Steven Pinker:

It's a mistake to think that there must be a dominant group of animals "ruling the earth," as the old museum exhibits used to say. As E. O. Wilson has pointed out if any group of animals is the dominant force on the planet today, it's the insects. Intelligence is a gadget that is selected when its benefits (in particular, outsmarting the defenses of other plants and animals) outweigh the costs (a big, injury-prone, birth-complicating, metabolically expensive organ bobbling on top of your neck). And that probably happens only for certain kinds of organisms in certain ecologically circumstances. It isn't a general goal of evolution, or else we'd see humanlike intelligence repeatedly evolving. Since elephants and humans have not been primary ecological competitors for most of the evolutionary history of the elephant, it's unlikely that they've been waiting for humans to get out of the way before getting smarter. It's more likely that they are at an adaptive plateau in which still-better brains aren't worth the cost.

Hmm, yeah: If Eros was really behind it all, pushing intelligence to emerge in all species, why wouldn't elephants have evolved the same (or greater) cognitive capacities as humans have? Why would it have pushed our particular species harder, to develop a more complex brain? If the Goal of the Kosmos was to express Divine Intelligence, why wouldn't elephants have evolved to be literal Ganeshes? What was stopping them?

Maybe it's because they're content to work for peanuts?

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk....

Seriously, though, it's not that their heads aren't large enough to accommodate a big brain, because that's exactly what they've evolved:

With a mass just over 5 kg (11 lb), elephant brains are larger than those of any land animal, and although the largest whales have body masses twentyfold those of a typical elephant, whale brains are barely twice the mass of an elephant's. A wide variety of behaviour, including those associated with grief, making music, art, altruism, allomothering, play, use of tools, compassion and self-awareness evidence a highly intelligent species on par with cetaceans and primates. (Wikipedia)

Big, but still only monkey-smart. (By comparison, the human brain weighs around 3.5 pounds.)

Every organism alive today has had the same amount of time to evolve since the origin of life—the amoeba, the platypus, the rhesus macaque....

In many lineages, of course, animals have become more complex. Life began simple, so the complexity of the most complex creature alive on earth at any time has to increase over the eons. But in many lineages they have not. The organisms reach an optimum and stay put, often for hundreds of millions of years. And those that do becomes more complex don't always becomes smarter.... Evolution is about ends, not means; becoming smart [via the interconnections and algorithms of a complex network of neurons, called a brain] is just one option....

Organisms don't evolve toward every imaginable advantage. If they did, every creature would be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. An organism that devotes some of its matter and energy to one organ must take it away from another. It must have thinner bones or less muscle or fewer eggs. Organs evolve only when their benefits outweigh their costs. (Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works)

Compare that with Wilber's half-a-wit (mis)understandings of the basic nature of evolution:

I am fully aware that selection carries forth each previous selection (which still has problems in itself—as you point out, why would a half wing make running easier???), but even if you give that to the evolutionists (which I am willing to do), it still has this gaping hole in it.

The fact that having half a wing does make running easier is just lucky happenstance in this context; what is more relevant is that there is no reason why both of those skills (i.e., flying and running) should be simultaneously maximized in any species, much less that any single attribute/mutation should increase the ability to do both of them. Obviously, all that's needed for a mutation to be retained by the species is for the net effect of it to yield a slight survival advantage.

That point, however, is fully lost on both Wilber and his addled integral correspondent, Sandy Astin. Indeed, the fact that kw fallaciously sees a "gaping hole" in such a basic and obviously valid point of evolutionary theory shows how truly incompetent and uninformed he is on the subject of "Evolution 101."

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world's Anglicans, said on Thursday the introduction of some aspects of Islamic Sharia law in Britain was unavoidable....

A Church of England bishop sought police assistance this month after receiving death threats over an article which claimed Islamist radicals had turned some parts of the country into hostile "no-go areas" for non-Muslims. (more)

In Canada, the possible introduction of sharia family courts became a contentious issue, and received much media attention. (Wikipedia)

If that doesn't scare the living shit out of you and make you think twice about the effects of