The Humanities - The Heart of the Matter

We all like to make fun of English majors (and humanities students in general) from time to time (which is fine, no one should be exempt from a little mockery every now and then). The usual charge is that odious, unenlightened, ignorant, superficial, condescending question: what is a humanities major good for? Such a question implies that the only real value of an education is instrumental: what kind of job is it going to lead to? But this point of view gets it all backwards: money is good only insofar as it makes your life better and worth living, and living for the sake of money is to confuse the means for the end.

The slightly more respectable charge against the humanities, though still embarrassingly shallow, tends to come from those who espouse scientism, the idea that the only thing that matters is scientific knowledge. The reasoning in this case is that since the humanities do not lead to such knowledge, and the only kind of real knowledge is scientific, the humanities must be ultimately worthless. Now, I am perfectly well aware that, due particularly to the embarrassing intellectual and moral history associated with religious fundamentalism, many people are suspicious of questions of meaning, value, purpose and so on. And there really is something to be said for skepticism and suspicion with regard to these questions, but to deny the value of the humanities in general because one particular subject decided to take over the humanities for a long time, or even because some of its adherents tend to wax mystical and new-agey,  is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you wanted to get rid of a cockroach in your house, you wouldn't burn your house down, would you?

In any case, here are a bunch of people you may know and admire (actors, musicians, artists, film-makers, social commentators, documentary makers, writers, etc.) who have a little something to say about the personal and existential importance of the humanities, which is ultimately the heart of the matter...

"The sciences are the 'how,' and the humanities are the 'why.' -George Lucas.

With some reservations, I like that quote a lot.

Despite how much I like him, someone like Richard Dawkins might object and say that either why-questions are reducible to how-questions, or that why-questions are just silly questions. Of course, if you ask him WHY he thinks this, he would either tell you how the brain processes information (which is scientific, but irrelevant), or he would lead you to a question-begging infinite regress: if you ask him why that's a silly question, he would have to say, by his own reasoning: that's a silly question. But why is that a silly question? That's a silly question. But why is that a silly question? That's a silly question... The lesson, of course, is that at least some why questions are perfectly legitimate and meaningful, but if so, we're right back to having to agree that there must be some kind of value to the humanities...

And yes, sometimes there really can be reasonable disagreements about the difference between the humanities and social sciences, but still... :)

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Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis

130 years ago today, in a world which no longer could be seriously understood as the effect or providence of the deliberate choice of a deity with a comprehensible, or even a coherent plan, one of the first men to viscerally understand and feel the essence of the absurdity of existence was born. His name was Franz Kafka. You may have heard of him...

Though not a philosopher himself, Kafka has become a literary icon and an inspiration to many philosophers, especially those of the existentialist persuasion. And to celebrate his birthday, here's one of his most famous and celebrated short works: The Metamorphosis

To get a sense of the absurdity of existence, you could hardly do better than stop by the Franz Kafka International Airport, previously described by The Onion as quite possibly the most alienating place in the world :)

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Walt Whitman - Song of Myself

The poetic style of free verse was born from the iconoclastic mind of Walt Whitman, an American poet who embodied the concepts of individualism and defiance to his core.

On the one hand, the invention of free verse made it possible for geniuses such as William Butler Yeats, T.S. Elliot, Wallace Stevens and Thomas Hardy to explore and harvest a fascinating literary space previously uncharted. On the other hand, and because of its apparent lack of constraint, free style may have also marked the slow death and collapse of poetry as a fine art: just look at much of what passes for "poetry" today.

However you may feel about free verse, though, it is hard to deny Walt Whitman's  brilliance, which we get to celebrate today (this being his birthday) with a short excerpt from his famous poem "Song of Myself," read by none other than Darth Va... I mean James Earl Jones

Go ahead and contradict yourself, Walt, it's your birthday :)

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Lucretius - De Rerum Natura - Matter and Void

In his fascinating book, The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt tells the gripping story of the rediscovery, during the Middle Ages, of one of the philosophical masterpieces of the Classical period in Rome: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), an epic exploration and development of Epicurus' materialist, empiricist and soteriologically hedonistic philosophy, all set to the most beautiful of Latin poetry.

Greenblatt shows how the Christian obsession with asceticism, suffering and self-righteousness came perilously close to annihilating any traces of a philosophy that eschews the supernatural, and that celebrates life and sees it as worth living and enjoying. It was by sheer chance that an Italian humanist scholar, Gian Francesco Poggio, discovered Lucretius in a palimpsest and started circulating it. In Greenblatt's opinion, the dissemination of this beautiful work of antiquity (measured by the famous thinkers who managed to get their hands on and were inspired by it), may have been one of the leading factors that gave rise to modernity.

In the following audio rendition, read by the inimitable Charlton Griffin, you'll get a sense of the piercing power of Lucretius' philosophy and poetry as he sets down the basics of Epicurus' metaphysical materialism and his fight against religion. They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but in Lucretius' hands, it's more like a nuclear bomb!

This is just the beginning... stay tuned for more excerpts from this fascinating work!

And if you're interested in the text of the above excerpt, you can find a copy here.

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Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

If you believe in reincarnation, you could reasonably believe that Kurt Vonnegut was the reincarnated soul of Mark Twain. With their brief and minimalist styles, as well as their no-holes-barred aphorisms, these two authors managed to drive American literature to a place where substance could take a front seat in our collective consciousness in a way that's rarely accessible through other authors. In the process, they got us to question many of the sacred cows we usually take for granted. In the following reading of an excerpt from Breakfast of Champions, we get to see Vonnegut touch, in his uniquely hilarious way, on the American experience of racism, capitalism, free will, family values, patriotism, religion, parenthood and personhood. Best of all, we get to see that he was so funny he could make himself crack up :)

How awesome was that? :)

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"To This Day" ... for the Bullied and Beautiful

The saying goes that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me... I've broken my bones before, a couple of ribs, but there are forms of pain that are orders of magnitude worse, and which leave scars that last much longer, but that no one can see because they are not branded in your body; they are branded in your memory and soul...

Despite the amazing things that we have in this world, and despite the amazing things people do to help and inspire each other, there is still a very large amount of cruelty inflicted on people, especially the ones least able to cope with it. And even when we're not directly cruel, we are often indifferent, apathetic, and we blind ourselves to the cries of help that people who are drowning are barely able to make audible.

This poem, by Shane Koyczan, is dedicated to those people:

Sometimes, when the pain is too much, people jump off the cliff... but sometimes they fall because they've been brought to the brink and got pushed off by cruelty and indifference...

Do your part to bring light and laughter to people's lives...

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An Illustrated Interview with Maurice Sendak

You may remember from last year a two-part interview that Stephen Colbert did with author Maurice Sendak. Unfortunately, soon after the interview, Sendak shed his mortal coil and went the way of the dodo.

But it seems that recently someone illustrated an interview Sendak did with NPR's Fresh Air hostess, Terry Gross. Now, I'm not her biggest fan... her questions tend to bore and frustrate me, but it seems that Sendak liked her a lot, and the next excerpt is enough to break your heart...

If you don't have knots in your throat, you're probably not human...

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Samuel Jackson - 'Wake the F++k Up' for Obama

Children's bedtimes stories used to bore me to tears (maybe that's the point?) until I finally came across one that really resonates with the reality of parenting: Go the F**k to Sleep. And if the book itself wasn't already awesome all on its own, the audio version was read by none other than Samuel Jackson. If you haven't heard it yet, have a listen here.

Well, last time he wanted his child to go the fuck to sleep, but he wants you to wake the fuck up because if you don't, and Romney/Ryan get elected, your dreams are probably going to turn into nightmares.

I'm not all that comfortable with having children in political advertisements, but I do love me some swearing, so it's all good :)

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Quit Your Technology Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities

As a student of philosophy, and as someone who has chosen to dedicate his life to the pursuit and sharing of wisdom, you might call me biased, but I really believe that the world would be a better place (intellectually, morally, politically, culturally, scientifically, aesthetically, etc.) if we had more philosophy in our lives.

And I'm not alone in this position. If you remember Damon Horowitz (from one of the best TEDTalks of all time), he's the philosopher-in-residence at Google, doing some groundbreaking work with them in a way that most technologists wouldn't be able to. And he manages to do this, he claims, because the humanities have taught him profound valuable lessons about cognition, language, humanity, meaning, and all the aspects relevant to the human condition that go far beyond what mainstream courses in computer programming and artificial intelligence could ever possibly imagine.

So, in the following presentation delivered at Stanford University, Horowitz makes a very compelling case for the importance of pursuing a higher level of education in the humanities

And if you're a little more practically-minded, there's still every reason to pursue a higher education degree in philosophy, even if you end up doing something else. Philosophy will give you the kind of training that will make you stand out from the crowd and create something great and valuable.

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If Fifty Shades of Grey Is Not Dirty Enough for Your Taste, Try The Bible, But Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

When I was a little boy, the Bible was one of my favorite books. No, it's not because I was a goodie-two-shoes... it was because I loved the story of Sampson and how he would kick major ass and cause havoc wherever he went. I also liked the apocalyptic stuff... now I'm starting to wonder how I ended up so well-adjusted :)

And now that psychopathic and experienced men taking advantage of, abusing and humiliating inexperienced young girls are all the rage, well, Fifty Shades of Grey is just not extreme enough. For sadomasochistic and bondage connoisseurs, almost nothing gets filthier than the Bible...

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Woody Allen reads "My (Socratic) Apologies"

If you follow me on Google+, you may have noticed that there was recently a new trial for Socrates in which the previous verdict of guilty was overturned (by an impressively small margin). Philosophy was just barely vindicated by the new ruling. And people say we don't make progress :)

If that's too much seriousness, however, you may enjoy the following short story, written and read by none other than that philosophically-minded comic, Woody Allen, about certain dreams he's been having recently:

Hat tip to Tony!

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Richard Feynman - The Essence of Science (in one minute)

I'm shamelessly stealing this from Robert Krulwich's blog, and verbatim at that (remember, shamelessly), but simply because the original is so eloquent and poetic that I would not presume to improve upon it:

"Here it is, in a nutshell: The logic of science boiled down to one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, who wrote it on the blackboard during a class at Cornell in 1964.

Think about what he saying. Science is our way of describing — as best we can — how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important difference. It is out there, being the world. We are locked in, busy in our minds. And when our minds make a guess about what's happening out there, if we put our guess to the test, and we don't get the results we expect, as Feynman says, there can be only one conclusion: we're wrong.

The world knows. Our minds guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins. It doesn't matter, Feynman tells the class, "how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong."

This view is based on an almost sacred belief that the ways of the world are unshakeable, ordered by laws that have no moods, no variance, that what's "Out There" has no mind. And that we, creatures of imagination, colored by our ability to tell stories, to predict, to empathize, to remember — that we are a separate domain, creatures different from the order around us. We live, full of mind, in a mindless place. The world, says the great poet Wislawa Szymborska, is "inhuman." It doesn't work on hope, or beauty or dreams. It just...is.""

View with a Grain of Sand 

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched,
and that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world,
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelssly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news
but that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

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Billy Collins - Everyday Moments Caught in Time

I've had a weird relationship with the poetry of Billy Collins since I was a freshman in college: I found some of it to be great, interesting, eloquent, disciplined, musical writing, and some of it not even to merit the appellation of poetry at all. And don't get me started on his Marginalia and the stupid egg salad... but I digress.

I don't know whether he really deserved to be the American Poet Laureate or whether we couldn't find anyone else at the time (can you tell I'm bitter?), but if there is at least one good thing I can say about the man is that he promotes poetry and writing wherever he goes, and so it is time that he finally made it to the TED stage and shared some of his writings, which are accompanied by some beautiful and artistic animation. Oh, and the last poem, the one that's not animated, is probably one that all of you parents are going to love :)

And if you need some lullabies or bedtime stories, maybe Samuel Jackson and Tim Minchin are what you've been looking for :)

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History of the English Language, Animated

Have you ever tried to make sense of the English language? If you've taken courses on linguistics, logic or philosophy of language, you've learned that grammar is supposed to give us a formal understanding of the structure underlying any particular language. To a surprisingly large extent, the rules of grammar do a pretty good job of organizing this formal structure, especially for languages like Latin or its romance derivations.

But the English language is kind of an unruly child, partly because it is, more so than many other languages, an amalgamation of disparate historical and geographic linguistic influences (Anglo-Saxon, Latin, German, French, Norse, etc.), as the following funny and educational 10-minute animation makes clear:

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Sex: An Unnatural History - Love

If you know anything about biology, you know that sex has existed for a long time. It's the vehicle through which organisms reproduce; we wouldn't be here without it. Somewhere along the line, however, and quite recently in fact, a new phenomenon seems to have evolved: love. And that's thrown a wrench into what previously used to be a pretty straightforward instinct.

The relationship between love and sex is complicated. You'd have to be blind not to see the differences, subtlety and complexity behind the relationship between these two instincts. Yes, often love and sex go together like peas in a pod, but there are times when you can have one without the other, times when you can use one to get the other, and times when you can use one to destroy the other. It's a mess.

Continuing her exploration of Sex: An Unnatural History, Julia Zemiro explores in today's episode the reasons we fall in love, what maintains it, why this emotion confounds even the greatest of minds, whether human are wired for monogamy, and whether there is a new horizon opening up for us or whether we are trapped in the struggle between these two all-pervasive biological tidal forces.

Oh yeah, happy Valentine's Day...

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Colbert and Maurice Sendak on Children's Books

If you have kids, I hope you've been smart enough to realize that most children's books are written by idiots and celebrities (a distinction usually without a difference) who most likely write for children because they certainly would not be able to read for intelligent and literate adults without getting laughed at. Same goes for plenty of elementary and middle school teachers who diminish from the quality and impact of those teachers who are passionate and dedicated to education.

Of course, I don't know too much about children books myself, especially since I tend to prefer books like Go the F**k to Sleep or lullabies a-la Tim Minchin, but it seems, from the following Stephen Colbert interview below, that Maurice Sendak, author of such classics as Where the Wild Things Are, agrees wholeheartedly:

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"And now, the dramatic.... more of it:"

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Don't forget to check out the literature tag.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

There are many things to like about this Oscar Wilde classic (adapted and animated below), what with the witty aphorisms and one-liners, but if there's something that can only be described as haunting about this tale, it's not the supernatural nature of the portrait nor the exchange of one's soul for the promise of everlasting physical beauty, but the question of whether one can bear to see one's reflection.

Can you look fairly at the choices you've made, including those that have affected and hurt others, and still like and respect the person that looks back at you?

Find other classics and thought-provoking stories in the literature tag.

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Go the F**k to Sleep, read by Samuel L. Jackson

I have no kids of my own... that I know of :), but I have been around enough new parents to know that the happily-ever-after fairy tales adults tell themselves before having children are never quite what they anticipated... for better and worse.

And it is with sympathy for the sake of parents in the real world that Adam Mansbach has just published a hilarious children's book for grown-ups, which you get to hear today as Samuel L. Jackson reads it the way only he can.

If I ever become a parent, someone'd better get me this book!!!

But if reading stories is not your thing, Tim Minchin has a great lullaby to capture the same basic experience:

And if you want to understand more about the science of parenting, and how it relates to happiness and fulfillment, check out Jennifer Senior's New York Magazine excellent article All Joy and No Fun.

Hat tip to Heidi and Tony!

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The Ten Commandments - Funny Decalogue Edition

If you listened to Christopher Hitchens' analysis of the Ten Commandments a few days ago, you might remember he made reference to Arthur Hugh Clough's famous swiftian Decalogue.

Well, as luck would have it, it just so happens that I started reading Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary yesterday, and I came upon his own hilarious version of the Decalogue, which surpasses the biblical version both in style and wisdom:

Thou shalt no God but me adore:
'Twere too expensive to have more.

No images nor idols make
For Roger Ingersoll to break.

Take not God's name in vain: select
A time when it will have effect.

Work not on Sabbath days at all,
But go to see the teams play ball.

Honor thy parents. That creates
For life insurance lower rates.

Kill not, abet not those who kill;
Thou shalt not pay thy butcher's bill.

Kiss not thy neighbor's wife, unless
Thine own thy neighbor doth caress.

Don't steal; thou'lt never thus compete
Successfully in business. Cheat.

Bear not false witness--that is low--
But "hear 'tis rumored so and so."

Covet thou naught that thou hast got
By hook or crook, or somehow, got.

Now, if you're not familiar with the original Clough Decalogue, here it is in its pragmatic entirety:

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?

No graven images may be
Worshiped, except the currency:

Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:

At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:

Honour thy parents, that is, all
From whom advancement may befall;

Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:

Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:

Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat:

Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:

Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

And here is Ambrose Bierce's parody of that too:

Have but one God: thy knees were sore
If bent in prayer to three or four.

Adore no images save those
The coinage of thy country shows.

Take not the Name in vain. Direct
Thy swearing unto some effect.

Thy hand from Sunday work be held-
Work not at all unless compelled.

Honor thy parents, and perchance
Their wills thy fortunes may advance.

Kill not-death liberates thy foe
From persecution's constant woe.

Kiss not thy neighbor's wife. Of course
There's no objection to divorce.

To steal were folly, for 'tis plain
In cheating there is greater pain.

Bear not false witness.
Shake your head
And say that you have 'heard it said.'

Who stays to covet ne'er will catch
An opportunity to snatch.

RAmen... :)
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Oedipus Veg

Ok, so maybe this is not exactly what Sophocles had in mind when he wrote the quintessential classic tragedy, but you have to admit that once you learn this classic story is being performed by a bunch of very talented vegetables, you're going to let your curiosity get the better of you :)

Imagine what Freud would have thought if he had seen this short film!!!

And now you also know where Ketchup comes from :)
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