In Memoriam: Muni Basman: May 29, 1934--December 12, 2010

In Memoriam: my few words at the unveiling today, September 25, 2011, for my brother Muni Basman, May 29, 1934-December 12, 2010, who died at the altogether too young age of 76.In the Jewish tradition there is an ancient custom to memorialize and honour the dead. Following this custom we place a monument, a headstone, covered with a cloth over the grave and then we lift the cloth off the headstone. The stone marks where the dead lie and where we come to remember, mourn and grieve, commune and nurture our bonds with the dead.

This is the unveiling.

It is meant to be part of the grieving and healing.

The gravestone evokes in us a complex sense of awe: awe at the permanence and irrevocability of death but coexisting with our living memory of the dead, awe in our glimpse into the mysteriousness of life and death.

The name on this stone brings everything down to who is it is that lies here, Muni Basman. He lies here, in a sense, forever, in the sense that as long we all breathe and think, he will be for us as a presence and an absence.

We look at the stone. We look around us. We look at who is here with us. We consider where we are. We consider why we are here now. And, so, we are directed inside of ourselves, into our hearts and minds. We remember Muni, each in our own way. We remember the smallest of details and the largest of his accomplishments and meanings for us. We remember all things in between of whatever dimension.

In the tradition there is to be a brief eulogy marking the most important and distinguishing things about the deceased.

I’ve thought about how briefly to do this. I’m not going to sing a Yiddish leidel. I’m not going to quote from Shakespeare or some other heavy hitter like Osip Mandlestam. No, rather, I’m going to read to you the lyrics of an American country song written by Mark D. Sanders and Tia Sillers and recorded by the great Lee Ann Womack. I’ll be the first to admit that this song is not exactly Muni’s style, it being a little bit country and a little bit corny. But it feels right to me.

And, maybe, you can imagine that their own version of this song might have been said or sung by Muni’s parents, our mother and father, Basha and Leibel, to their first born son, a baby born with one foot shorter than the other and turned out, which is to say, a club foot.

I Hope You Dance

I hope you never lose your sense of wonder
You get your fill to eat
But always keep that hunger
May you never take one single breath for granted
God forbid love ever leave you empty handed
I hope you still feel small
When you stand by the ocean
Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens
Promise me you'll give faith a fighting chance

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
I hope you dance

I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance
Never settle for the path of least resistance
Living might mean taking chances
But they're worth taking
Lovin' might be a mistake
But it's worth making
Don't let some hell bent heart
Leave you bitter
When you come close to selling out
Reconsider
Give the heavens above
More than just a passing glance

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
(Time is a real and constant motion always)
I hope you dance
(Rolling us along)
I hope you dance
(Tell me who)
I hope you dance
(Wants to look back on their youth and wonder)
(Where those years have gone)

I hope you still feel small
When you stand by the ocean
Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens
Promise me you'll give faith a fighting chance

And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
Dance

I hope you dance
I hope you dance
(Time is a real and constant motion always)
I hope you dance
(Rolling us along)
I hope you dance
(Tell me who)
(Wants to look back on their youth and wonder)
I hope you dance
(Where those years have gone)

(Tell me who)
I hope you dance
(Wants to look back on their youth and wonder)
(Where those years have gone)

I will say this about my brother Muni, born with one foot shorter than the other and turned out: he danced; he danced; he danced!

Science In The Humanities

A Response to W. P. Seeley, “What Is the Cognitive Science of Art . . . and Why Should We Care

Roger Seamon

The science of art is as relevant to art as artistic representations are to science. Artistic representations contain an expressive dimension, in which the artist expresses, and the audience judges, the attitudes taken to what is portrayed. But art is only one way in which we express our attitudes to science, and it is not the most important, if for no other reason than that not many works represent science and its workings.

Similarly, science illuminates art very fitfully. E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion remains the classic example of showing how artists exploit aspects of our perceptual systems, and how perceptual facts can have art historical consequences, but it made the point, which can only be repeated (and is, when we read in Seeley’s essay that Mark Rollins argues that artists’ “strategies work by virtue of the fact that artists’ formal and compositional strategies tend naturally to become tuned to [in fact they live by exploiting] the operations of perceptual systems” (p. 2).

Every painter exploits the fact that we relentlessly make what we see on a plane into something three dimensional, and we do so in a limited number of ways.(Of course some made careers out of trying to defeat that propensity.) The physiology of that process is of scientific, but not aesthetic interest.

What matters, what we ultimately care about, is how well the artist exploits that fact, and about that science has nothing to say. Criticism and the philosophy of art try to sort that out. Similarly, An Enemy of the People, Arrowsmith, and Galileo can help us refine our attitudes to science (really sci-tech, that potent combination). Artists and their audiences need science roughly as much as scientists need artistic representations. In neither case is it very much.

This is very different from the way that science relates to, for example, my body (which includes my brain). My body can go wrong in many ways and science has proved quite simply miraculous in the power it has given us to control what nature does only pretty well, i.e., heal us when something goes wrong. Science also gives us immense power over nature, which also ameliorates our condition in astounding ways. (Yes, it also poses threats, and works of art can express attitudes to the dilemma.) But science has been, and I believe always must be, powerless to help us make better art, to heal art when it goes wrong, or to refine our taste.

Of course it might, in its miraculous way, bring back the vision of a blinded artist or viewer, but that is not what the science of art is about. It might also inspire artists to make works of art, just as Galileo might stiffen the resolve of someone whose science was threatened by authority. But that is not what claims for the importance of science for art are about, as those claims are almost wholly about the perceptual systems upon which art is based, not about art as such.

Art just provides vivid, well-known examples of perceptual systems being adapted to for certain ends, and the claim that something is being said about art as such serves a rhetorical function for the program of cognitive science in the beleaguered humanities, just as science offered Zola and others the hope of making art that would make society better. Zola’s use of science was also rhetorical, as it helped strengthen a progressive world view. However, we do not value Zola as an improver of society, but for whatever makes good novels. We do, of course, admire books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin that changed things, but there are very few of them

Art and sci-tech are two independent achievements. The former deals with our attitudes to the world, the latter with how the world works and how we can control it. Art does not determine our attitudes to science, though it is a small part of the story, and science is only tangentially connected to the making and appreciation of art. We should, therefore, be wary of the current wave of enthusiasm for sciences of art. The history of aesthetics is littered with them, and they are rightly paid no attention. I believe that will also be the fate of the current fashion. The future of art lies with artists and audiences. That is not true of doctors and patients. Their future lies, if we are sensible, in the hands of the scientists.

Finally, an oddity. Why is it that we think brain imaging will tell us something about art but not about science? Suppose that we succeed in taking very good pictures of the brain at work when someone reads “On the Standard of Taste.” Do we think that Hume’s argument will be illuminated, or that we will better understand arguments, or what? Hume’s essay has a beginning, middle, and end and it evokes emotions of assent and dissent and puzzlement, but the idea of looking at the brains of readers of philosophy seems very odd indeed.

Stories also have beginnings, middles, and end, and we follow them. Indeed plots were once called arguments. I think we should bring our intuition that cognitive science will not reveal Hume’s secret to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and drop the effort to (finally) really understand art through science.

Our problem is the place of the arts in the academic curriculum, and there is something Laputish in current efforts to save the humanities by going scientfic. Cognitive science in the humanities is an effort to meet the academic imperative of new knowledge, while the humanities is largely and properly a matter of (merely) passing on traditions, and we should not, in the effort to rescue humanistic study, follow a path that has led and will lead nowhere. We should go down swinging rather than deciding that getting to first isn’t really what it’s all about.

Me:

This all sounds right to me. It tracks the argument that how we come to mind from the processes of the brain somehow tells us the content of mind.

I wonder what "Laputish" is?

Nice Mild Portrait of Richard Dawkins

September 19, 2011

A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy

By MICHAEL POWELL//NYT

OXFORD, England —You walk out of a soft-falling rain into the living room of an Oxford don, with great walls of books, handsome art and, on the far side of the room, graceful windows onto a luxuriant garden.

Does this man, arguably the world’s most influential evolutionary biologist, spend most of his time here or in the field? Prof. Richard Dawkins smiles faintly. He did not find fame spending dusty days picking at shale in search of ancient trilobites. Nor has he traipsed the African bush charting the sex life of wildebeests.

He gets little charge from such exertions.

“My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side,” he says, listing the essential questions that drive him. “Why do we exist, why are we here, what is it all about?”

It is in no fashion to diminish Professor Dawkins, a youthful 70, to say that his greatest accomplishment has come as a profoundly original thinker, synthesizer and writer. His epiphanies follow on the heels of long sessions of reading and thought, and a bit of procrastination. He is an elegant stylist with a taste for metaphor. And he has a knack, a predisposition even, for assailing orthodoxy.

In his landmark 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene,” he looked at evolution through a novel lens: that of a gene. With this, he built on the work of fellow scientists and flipped the prevailing view of evolution and natural selection on its head.

He has written a string of best sellers, many detailing his view of evolution as progressing toward greater complexity. (His first children’s book, “The Magic of Reality,” appears this fall.) With an intellectual pugilist’s taste for the right cross, he rarely sidesteps debate, least of all with his fellow evolutionary biologists.

Although he is a political liberal, he has taken on more than a few leftists in his writings — particularly those who read his theory of genes as sanctioning rapacious and selfish behavior.

Of late he has taken up the cudgel for atheism, writing “The God Delusion,” an international best seller. When Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, recently accepted a prize from the John Templeton Foundation, which promotes a dialogue between science and religion, Professor Dawkins was unforgiving. Dr. Rees, he wrote, is a “compliant quisling,” a traitor to science. Dr. Rees declined to counterpunch.

Professor Dawkins often declines to talk in San Francisco and New York; these cities are too gloriously godless, as far as he is concerned. “As an atheistic lecturer, you are rather wasting your time,” he says. He prefers the Bible Belt, where controversy is raw.

He insists he frets before each lecture. This is difficult to imagine. He is characteristically English in his fluid command of words written and spoken. (Perhaps this is an evolutionary adaptation — all those cold, clammy English days firing an adjectival and syntactical genius?)

He is gracious without being gregarious. Ask him to explore an idea and he’ll rummage happily. But he keeps the door to his private life firmly latched.

(Briefly, he has a daughter, who is a doctor. He is married for the third time, to the actress Lalla Ward. He is on friendly enough terms with his first wife, the zoologist Marian Stamp Dawkins, that she wrote an essay for a 2006 book celebrating her former husband’s lifetime of accomplishment.)

African Roots

Clinton Richard Dawkins was born in Kenya, where his father was an agricultural specialist with the colonial service. He later returned with his parents to England and in due course arrived at Oxford, an intelligent enough boy. “I didn’t have a very starry school career,” he says. “I was medium to above average, nothing special.”

He lighted his own intellectual fire at a university peculiarly suited to his temperament. Oxford relies on the tutorial system, in which students burrow into original texts rather than textbooks.

“I loved it; I become easily temporarily obsessed,” Professor Dawkins says. “I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.”

(From that experience he drew a dislike of the current establishment insistence — bordering on mania — for standardized tests and curriculums. He views this as antithetical to true learning.)

After graduating in 1962, he studied with Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Nobel-winning scientist, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Oxford in 1971. He was working out his thoughts on sociobiology, which took form a few years later in “The Selfish Gene.”

At the time, the predominant popular view of evolution was that animals and insects worked together, albeit unconsciously, and that natural selection acted on individuals to do what was good for their species. Cooperation, again unconscious, seemed woven into nature.

Professor Dawkins’s voice slides playfully into High David Attenborough style as he mimics the mellifluous tone of BBC documentaries of the time: “The dung beetle is the refuse collector of the natural system, and where would we be without them? And male deer fight but take care not to kill each other.”

He stops. “That sort of thinking was pretty dominant in the culture.” Artful pause. “And it’s plain wrong. I wanted to correct that ubiquitous misunderstanding.”

Genes, he says, try to maximize their chance of survival. The successful ones crawl down through the generations. The losers, and their hosts, die off. A gene for helping the group could not persist if it endangered the survival of the individual.

Such insights were in the intellectual air by the mid-1960s. But Professor Dawkins grasped the power of metaphor — that selfish gene — and so made the idea come alive. Andrew Read, a professor of natural history at Penn State, recalls reading “The Selfish Gene” and feeling his world change.

“Gone in a stroke was the intellectually barren ‘it just is’ hypothesis,” he wrote in an essay. “ ‘The Selfish Gene’ crystallized it and made it impossible to ignore.”

Not everyone bought the argument. The moral implications proved deeply troubling, suggesting that altruism disguised selfish, gene-driven behavior. “Many readers experienced the book as a psychic trauma,” wrote Dr. Randolph Nesse, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan. “It turned their moral worlds upside down.”

Prominent scientists and intellectuals cast Professor Dawkins as the herald angel of a selfish culture, accusing him and his fellow sociobiologists of setting the cultural stage for the “I got mine” age of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, a man of the political left, painted a picture out of a George Orwell novel. “If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes,” he wrote with two other scientists, “then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers.”

To Professor Dawkins, this badly distorted his science and his political leanings, which are resolutely liberal. (He opposed the Vietnam and Iraq wars, admires President Obama and votes most often with Labor. More recently, he voted for the Liberal Party in his district, as he admired the fact that the member of Parliament was insistently secular. The member lost in 2010, to an evangelical Conservative.) He was writing about the behavior of genes, not about psychological and emotional states.

Our glory as a species is that we can overcome our genetic impulses, he says, acknowledging that the book’s title “perhaps lent itself to misunderstanding.”

“It’s not the selfish individual, and certainly not the selfish species,” he says. “My book could have just as easily been called ‘The Altruistic Individual.’ ”

But true to himself, he does not stop at this concession. “What would our critics have had us do, falsify the algebra?” he asks, and says of the criticism, “It was irritatingly stupid, actually.”

Progressive Evolution?

Professor Dawkins’s great intellectual conviction is that evolution is progressive, and tends to lead to more and more complexity. Species, in his view, often arrive at similar solutions to evolutionary puzzles — the need for ears, eyes, arms or an octopus’s tentacle. And, often although not invariably, bigger brains. So the saber-toothed tiger shows up as a cat in Europe and Asia, and as a marsupial in South America. Different species seized on the same carnivorous solution. (He most certainly does not, however, view evolution as progressing toward us, that is humans — were we to disappear, some other species most likely would fill our evolutionary niche.)

“There are endless progressions in evolution,” he says. “When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.

“What you are looking at is the progressive evolutionary product of an arms race.”

So it would be no great surprise if the interior lives of animals turned out to be rather complex. Do dogs, for example, experience consciousness? Are they aware of themselves as autonomous animals in their surroundings?

“Consciousness has to be there, hasn’t it?” Professor Dawkins replies. “It’s an evolved, emergent quality of brains. It’s very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.”

(He has embraced the Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer’s Great Ape Project, which would accord legal rights to apes, including a prohibition against torture.)

His theory of progressive evolution, it should be said, is controversial. Professor Dawkins had a single great rival in writing about evolutionary biology: Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard.

Professor Gould, who died in 2002, was adamant that evolution was contingent — that while a species might progress in leaps and bounds, it was equally likely that it might reach a dead end, or regress. If a meteorite hit Earth and destroyed all intelligent life, he argued, the chances are vanishingly small that complex, intelligent life would evolve again.

As the writer Scott Rosenberg put it, Professor Gould saw our species as “simply a tiny accident occurring on a minor side-branch of the evolutionary tree.”

The two evolutionary biologists had well-armored egos, their intellectual battles were spectacular, and they did not share laughs over pints afterward. Professor Dawkins acknowledged their prickly relationship in writing an appreciation of his rival, who died of cancer: “Gould and I did not tire the sun with talking and send him down in the sky.”

Professor Dawkins feels more than a tinge of regret that he and Professor Gould did not appreciate each other more.

“Gould wanted to downgrade the conceit that it all progressed towards us, towards humans, and I fully approved of that,” he says now, even as he makes sure to add, “But evolution most certainly is progressive.”

There is a final cosmic joke to be had here.

The two men quarreled about everything save their shared atheism. But Professor Dawkins’s closest intellectual ally on progressive evolution and convergence is Simon Conway Morris, the renowned Cambridge evolutionary paleontologist.

And Professor Morris, as it happens, is an Anglican and a fervent believer in a personal God. He sees convergence as hinting at a teleology, or intelligent architecture, in the universe.

Ask Professor Dawkins about his intellectual bedfellow, and his smile thins. “Yes, well, Simon and I have converged on the science,” he says. “I should think in the world there are not two evolutionary scientists who could rival each other in their enthusiasm for convergence.”

As to Professor Morris’s religious faith? “I just don’t get it.”

Impatience With Religion

Aren’t the theologian’s questions — Why are we here? Is there something larger than us? Why do we die? — central to the human project?

Professor Dawkins shakes his head before the question is out. His impatience with religion is palpable, almost wriggling alive inside him. Belief in the supernatural strikes him as incurious, which is perhaps the worst insult he can imagine.

“Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers,” he says. “It’s a sort of crime against childhood.”

And please spare him talk of spiritualism, as if that were the only way to meditate on the wonder of the universe. “If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself,” he says. “And it is. But it’s not supernatural.”

It is a measure of Britain’s more resolutely secular culture that Professor Dawkins can pursue his atheism and probing, provocative views of Islam and Christianity in several prime-time television documentaries. In one, he interviewed young women in a Muslim school that receives state funds.

“One said her ambition was to be a doctor. But she explicitly said if there is a contradiction between science and the Koran, then the Koran was right,” he says. “They were lovely girls, but utterly brainwashed.”

Critics grow impatient with Professor Dawkins’s atheism. They accuse him of avoiding the great theological debates that enrich religion and philosophy, and so simplifying the complex. He concocts “vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince,” wrote Terry Eagleton, regarded as one of Britain’s foremost literary critics. “What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus?”

Put that charge to Professor Dawkins and he more or less pleads guilty. To suggest he study theology seems akin to suggesting he study fairies. Nor is he convinced that the ecumenical Anglican, the moderate imam, the Catholic priest with the well-developed sense of irony, is religion’s truest representative.

“I’ve had perfectly wonderful conversations with Anglican bishops, and I rather suspect if you asked in a candid moment, they’d say they don’t believe in the virgin birth,” he says. “But for every one of them, four others would tell a child she’ll rot in hell for doubting.”

That, he says, explains why he is writing a book for children. He wants to raise questions — Why is there a sun? What is an earthquake? What about rainbows? — and provide clever, rational answers. He has toyed with opening his own state-sponsored school, though under the British system he would have to come up with matching money.

But it would not be a school for atheists. The idea horrifies him. A child should skip down an idiosyncratic intellectual path. “I am almost pathologically afraid of indoctrinating children,” he says. “It would be a ‘Think for Yourself Academy.’ ”

Human Gods

After two hours of conversation, Professor Dawkins walks far afield. He talks of the possibility that we might co-evolve with computers, a silicon destiny. And he’s intrigued by the playful, even soul-stirring writings of Freeman Dyson, the theoretical physicist.

In one essay, Professor Dyson casts millions of speculative years into the future. Our galaxy is dying and humans have evolved into something like bolts of superpowerful intelligent and moral energy.

Doesn’t that description sound an awful lot like God?

“Certainly,” Professor Dawkins replies. “It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures.”

He raises his hand, just in case a reader thinks he’s gone around a religious bend. “It’s very important to understand that these Gods came into being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.”

Could they be immortal? The professor shrugs.

“Probably not.” He smiles and adds, “But I wouldn’t want to be too dogmatic about that.”

Conrad Black and the Dialectic

I watched Conrad Black interviewed by Allan Gregg on Gregg And Company last night. Black is impressive. Highly articulate, acutely intelligent, charismatic, a natural aristocrat, a force of nature--these qualities I was already familiar with. But I sensed a new personal synthesis in Black, the combination of these already prevalent qualties with a chastened, somewhat battered by experience Black, synthesized into wisdom which blends strikingly strength and humility.

Liberalism and Anti-Semitism

Ruth Wisse wrote, in a specific context to be sure, “Anti-Semitism perverts the ideal of a mutually tolerant campus. The faculty and administration, and students who wish to uphold that ideal, will have to exercise their free speech to address the function and the roots of this virulent phenomenon.”

What she wrote gets at what I'm trying to suggest.

As usual, things come down to needing to start with some defining. Liberalism is distinguishable from left wing/liberal and progressive politics. It’s a political philosophy and a way of thinking about the world and as the latter it’s in part procedural, a rational methodology exemplifed by how science tries to proceed.

Liberalism is exemplified by America’s creedal liberties, by a commitment to the ideals of equality (better understood as equality of opportunity) and liberty, even as the inevitable clash between the two creates problems and tensions and by a habit of mind that, in the words of Alexander Meiklejohn, himself a bastion of civil liberties, believes and doubts, that “…indicates a pattern of culture which criticizes itself... It has customs and standards of behaviour. But it also has...the attitude of...questioning its own dominant beliefs and standards... The liberal both believes and doubts...and... if an individual or a group will hold fast both to custom and intelligence, then its experience will inevitably be paradoxical and divided against itself. The being who seeks intelligence is a divided personality.”

So understood, neither anti-Semite, nor any other like hater, can, I’d argue, truly wear liberalism’s mantle even though he might believe otherwise. In his hating, in his deep-going biases, he repudiates the fundamental precepts he imagines define him.

Stanley Kauffmann on The Misfits

February 20, 1961 12:00 am/TNR

Arthur Miller, in his plays, has done some representative worrying for all of us about certain defects and defeats in contemporary life. Now he has broken a five-year silence with a screenplay called The Misfits in which he expresses further concern.

The premise is promising: a Chicago girl goes to Reno for a divorce, and there meets three Western men. She is desperate for reliable human relationships, they are in a last-ditch fight against the diminution of large-scale life. She lives with one of them, then the other two pursue her; after a mustang-hunting expedition which acts as a touchstone, she elects to remain with the first man.

It is pointless, if not offensive, to underscore that this screenplay is, in idea and much of its execution, several universes above most American films. But The Misfits is finally unsuccessful both in its treatment of its subject and as a use of the film form; and it is a cheerless task, because of respect for Miller and agreement with his concerns, to examine the reasons.

The film moves with Roslyn, the girl: she is one of the two chief searchers for truth and she is the cause of the revelation of truth to Gay, Her lover. But what does her search consist of? In the beginning we are shown a highly insecure, neurotic girl. ("The trouble is I'm always back where I started". . . . "Maybe you're not supposed to believe anything people say. Maybe it's not even fair to them," etc.) Then, although she has just told Gay she doesn't feel "that way" about him, she moves in with him; and the first time they are visited by their friends, one of them tells her "You found yourself, haven't you?", and the other says, "You have the gift of life." Where did she get it? From then on this girl, but lately nervous and restless, is treated as the Eternal Feminine, in tune with the universe ("hooked in" with the stars). What produced this fantastic change? A few weeks of bliss with Gay? Can Miller seriously believe that?

And how does she effect a resolution in Gay? Through her extreme revulsion against pain--specifically against hunting. She won't let him kill a rabbit (although she never bats an eye when he tells her that their friend Guido goes eagle-killing in his plane); and on the horse-hunting trip, when she learns that the mustangs are to be killed for dog-food, she becomes so frenzied that Gay gives up the hunt and hunting and decides to change his mode of living. But how has this made him realize that the straitening of contemporary life is inevitable? He has known for some time that mustang-hunting is less than it was when he first did it to get stock for breeding and riding. Her hysteria is not persuasive as a reason for his seeing these facts more clearly. She would presumably have been equally hysterical in 1850 if he had been killing deer to feed himself and her. Her outburst is unrelated to the modern debasement of his mustanging, as such.

The author seems bemused by Roslyn, rather than perceptive about her. She is a night-club performer, who had an unsettled childhood and now makes her living by scantily clad "interpretive" dancing. We have no reason to believe her more than a good-hearted, highly sentimental showgirl, like hundreds of others, but the longer Miller looks at her, the more rich and mysterious qualities he sees in her. It is something like a man becoming infatuated with an attractive but undistinguished girl and, out of a sense of guilt, investing her with qualities which the world simply doesn't see.

This infatuation leads to some embarrassingly bathetic instances in her dialogue. "Birds must be brave to live out here. Especially at night. . .." Or when the drunken Guido starts working on his unfinished house in the middle of the night: "He's just trying to say hello. . . . " Or, after an emotional scene, looking at the sky, "Help."

Miller has often had surprising lumps in his generally true dialogue. (In Death of a Salesman the vernacular Biff apologizes to his mother: "I've been remiss.") Here the mixture is as before. There is much acute and vivid writing; a phone-call to his mother by Perce, the third man, is a brilliant character sketch. Then we get literary utterances like Guido's "We're all blind bombardiers . . . Droppin' a bomb is like tellin' a lie - makes everything so quiet afterwards."

In form this screenplay is basically uncomfortable because Miller is a theater-writer who has a generally orthodox and socially utilitarian view of theatrical art. Dialectical dialogue is its bloodstream. It is an honorable tradition, and The Crucible ornaments it; but it is not film-writing. Miller knows this and has tried to compensate for the verbal quality of this film by including some graphic visual elements, like the rodeo and the hunt. But essentially the story is "talked out." Indeed, these uncommonly loquacious Westerners almost seem to be competing for the girl by offering her their troubled souls. And when Gay and Roslyn go off together at the end, we get a fast, almost synoptic talking-into-final-shape of the theme. And this ending, after all the candid confrontation of harsh facts in our world, is as suddenly and incredibly "up-beat" as anything by the late Oscar Hammerstein.

John Huston's direction is his best in years, well-knit and hard, at times even recalling The Treasure of Sierra Madre. Too bad that his camera occasionally peers lubriciously down the girl's bodice or elsewhere to remind us that Roslyn is really Marilyn Monroe.

Miss Monroe, complete with hushed, monotonous voice and with eye makeup even after a night in the mountains, copes more successfully with the neurotic than with the "elemental" qualities in her part. But at her best we sense that she has been coached and primed in thirty-second segments, which wouldn't matter if we weren't aware of it. Her hysterical scene near the end will seem virtuoso acting to those who are overwhelmed by the fact that she has been induced to shout.

In his last film Clark Gable has his best part since Rhett Butler and demonstrates why, although he was a transparently mechanical actor, he was a world-bestriding star. He radiates likeable, decent-roguish masculinity.

Eli Wallach, as Guido the ex-Army pilot, sounds less bronco-hunter than Bronx. There is something vulgar in this gifted actor's reliance on vulgarity as a metier. Montgomery Clift, who was last seen as a Westerner (unconvincingly) in Red River, here brings moving life to Perce, the battered young exile, who has nothing to live on but his willingness to get thrown off bucking horses.

A Great Essay by Paul Berman: Do Ideas Matter? (Spoiler Alert: Yes!)

http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/magazine/94145/september-11-do-ideas-matter

willjames7:

One of the most intriguing insights in Berman's article is the notion that places like the London School of Economics and Columbia University may be more crucial to the diffusion of Islamist ideology than the madrassas in rural Pakistan. If so, the battle of ideas within Western media and institutions of higher learning would be much more important than we assume it to be.

It would seem that liberalism needs to find a voice that is as compelling and inspiring as the intoxicating deliriums of the totalitarian ideologies.

Me:

...It would seem that liberalism needs to find a voice that is as compelling and inspiring as the intoxicating deliriums of the totalitarian ideologies...

I can't see that happening. By its nature liberalism is balancing, critical and self critical minded and double minded view of reality. To quote Alexander Meiklejohn:

...liberalism...indicates a pattern of culture which criticizes itself... It has customs and standards of behaviour. But it also has...the attitude of...questioning its own dominant beliefs and standards... The liberal both believes and doubts...and... if an individual or a group will hold fast both to custom and intelligence, then its experience will inevitably be paradoxical and divided against itself. The being who seeks intelligence is a divided personality...

Not much basis for a compelling voice as inspiring as intoxicating deliriums to be found in this mess of divided mindfulness, I wouldn't think.

willjames7:

Basman, I couldn't agree more. But it doesn't make me feel any better. What I'm trying to address is the disparity between the compelling, inspiring, visionary leadership offered by totalitarian ideologues and the thoughtful, hesitant critiques of their pluralistic opponents.

One the primary reasons that the Islamists are so successful in seizing power is because their rhetoric stirs the soul and moves the masses to action and self-sacrifice. If we can't come up with a more vigorous response than divided mindfulness, we will wind up as so many Hamlets in the kingdom of Claudius.

Me:

Here's Berman's colloquy with himself about what he argues is the conflation of Islam and Islamism:

...According to the first criticism, analyses like mine vastly underestimated the danger posed by groups such as Al Qaeda. The enemy, according to the critics, was not a splinter group, nor a mass movement called Islamism. The problem was infinitely huger, and this was Islam itself, the ancient religion. According to this criticism, the Islamists, mainstream and ultras alike, were merely pious Muslims who had properly understood their own religion and were putting it into practice, and Islam was a dreadful thing, and ideas like mine amounted to a politically correct effort to deny reality.

This argument struck me as slightly medieval, or anyway as simple-minded. I could understand why someone who had grown up in an Islamist atmosphere might decide to condemn the whole religion. (I can understand, for that matter, why anybody at all might condemn his own religion, or might turn against religion altogether: atheism is not among the world’s mysteries.) Still, the history of Islam was not a tale of unrelenting dreadfulness. Islam over the centuries had gone through every possible phase and its opposite, the magnificent and the miserable, and it had generated thinkers and counter-thinkers of every sort, which meant that, like the members of any large confession, Muslims were forever doomed to disputation with one another over whose interpretation was properly authentic. Anyway, Islamism seemed to me more of a political movement than a religious upsurge—a “religionized politics,” in Bassam Tibi’s phrase...

As to Berman's argument in his essay, it is not, as suggested on some posts on this thread, that ideas matter solely and alone or even predominately, as I read him, it’s that they matter plenty when delivered by charismatic men (and women) of history in conditions primed for their receptivity, partly by unpredictable confluences of events--so, to some extent, by accident--and not as the result of mere material factors, given Berman's definition of materialism--and so, in a sense, autonomously: "...ideas sometimes have an autonomous force of their own..."

As others have said, Berman makes a persuasive case for his thesis.

Finally, WillJames7, regardless of my view that Hamlet isn't the template for "divided mindfulness" as that nice phrase might apply to liberalism's deliberativeness as opposed to his rationalizing so as not to act, save at times of crisis or of electrifying historical moments, or of the necessary mobilizations for great struggles and like extra ordinaries, it's hard me for to conceive of the compelling voice you wish for as part of the ongoing discourse of our ordinary, liberal democratic lives.

For Islamists, by contrast, jihad informs the very substance of what they do and say as their lives' mission. For them there is a kind of equation between everyday life and--as you put it well--" the intoxicating deliriums of the totalitarian ideologies."

If you have thoughts as to what form and context the voice you wish for might take, I'd be obliged to hear about it. For, it seems to me, that we living our normal, every day lives--unlike the driven few amongst us-- generally seek not so much more, I don't think, than stability, convenience and ordinariness, keeping our reverences and excitements cordoned off from political life and in our private spheres. For Islamists sharia is the essence of the collapse between public and private space