A paper that caught my eye by Bernard Faure
Can (and Should) Neuroscience Naturalize Buddhism?
A paper that caught my eye by Bernard Faure
India meets NOLA
As a Brit living in North America if ever there were a cuisine that I have regular cravings for it is Indian, Indian long-since becoming the national cuisine, a most welcome antidote to the grimness of the then-British cuisine of the early ’70s. Inevitably, there is so much schlock out there or if one goes to a supposedly high-end restaurant, the flavours have still been severely muted for “gringo”. Finally, there is an Indian restaurant in NOLA that is garnering some excellent reviews — Saffron NOLA. Note, their deployment of the word “evolution” in effect says that “cultural appropriation” fundamentalist fuckwits really are pissing in the wind. The food scene in N.O. is distinctively driven by a threefold inextricably linked dynamic: (a) food is an active highly qualic non-utilitarian cultural pillar to everyone’s daily life; (b) it is hyper-competitive not only because of (a) but because of the relatively small geographical proximity; and (c) because of (a) and (b) cuisines in NOLA partake in a conversation with each other in an adventurous way (Saffron’s cocktails a case in point). Saffron also provides a vital N.O. “morning after” Sunday brunch. I look forward to eating there: aside from the not so standard accoutrements (truffle naan!/I don’t see chutneys, pickles and papadums listed), what caught me eye was:
Here are a selection of reviews:
- Indian merges with New Orleans cuisine at Saffron NOLA
- Saffron NOLA explores Indian food with a contemporary focus
- Indian evolution: Behind boldly modern Saffron NOLA, a different path for a New Orleans restaurant family
- Indian Fusion
Theology + Geometry: A Gentleman’s Worldview 4
Classic from issue 16. So far as I’m concerned the most important item from The Chap Manifesto is number 8: “THOU SHALT NEVER WEAR PLIMSOLLS WHEN NOT DOING SPORT. Nor even when doing sport. Which you shouldn’t be doing anyway. Except cricket”. (In common parlance, those hideous and disposable artificial fibered walking billboards known as trainers, in great part sweatshop manufactured, ubiquitous even amongst anti-capitalistic regressives). Anyway, back to larynxial decoration: I’m pleased to report that my wonderful friend and collaborator is of The Splendid variety which he assures me is worn primarily for tactical reasons to outwit bureaucraps.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Pinker’s forthcoming bestseller which I’m expecting Taleb to eventually rip into. Despite Pinker ostensibly being a classical liberal his implicit progressivist ebullience is suspect. Epistemic humility is not seen as a cultural virtue: it is the zeitgeist of the modern age that we exist in a (misperceived) linear trajectory of progress, progress here taken to be coextensive with improvement – morally, socially, technologically, economically and scientifically. Progressivism thus conceived is clearly a “grand narrative” notion which on closer scrutiny is subject to all the weaknesses of such constructions. It is impossible to determine whether a change for the better in one part or aspect of the system is progressive for the system overall since there is no Archimedean point from which progress can be assessed. Every change alters some state of affairs, destroying or modifying it – that much one can accept. Musil captures this idea in The Man Without Qualities:
“It seems to me,” Ulrich said, “that every progressive step is also a retrogressive step. Progress exists always in one particular sense. And since our life as a whole has no sense, there is as a whole no progress either.”
Leo Fischel lowered his newspaper. “Do you think it better to be able to cross the Atlantic in six days or to have to spend six week on it?”
“I should probably say it’s definitely progress to be able to do both . . .”
Or as Chesterton put it:
Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth remarking, in passing that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote—“Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”
He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.
The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible. The theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.
Granted we live, in some real sense, the best of times (for example, reductions in child mortality, vaccine-preventable diseases, access to safe water and sanitation, malaria prevention and control, prevention and control of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis control and declining poverty – World Health Organization, 1998). But we also live in the worst of times – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Holodomor, Cambodia and more besides – the dark side to technocracy.
Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory
The latest from the culture and cognition reading group at Macquarie University. Worth checking out one of the articles already cited along with one that wasn’t.
Haidt and Peterson: The Dream Team
Glad someone noted my tweet sometime back. :) This wasn’t as engaging as I’d hoped but I have every faith that they will do this again.
Where We Are: The State of Britain Now
Published today. Below is Roger’s preface.
New Orleans: The first 300 years
Here are details of the programme that accompanies the book of the same title with a foreword by none other than the very excellent Lawrence Powell whose masterful history was reviewed here.
Peter Boettke: Gordon Tullock and the Rational Choice Commitment
Symposium on Tullock led by Peter Boettke with Michael Munger, David Levy (whom I recently had the pleasure of meeting) and Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard. Click here for the discussion.
The Fordist Academic
Scathing assessment of prevailing academia by Binoy Kampmark, well and truly caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, higher education institutions are encouraged to be functional to market requirements (ROI, translational research); while on the other hand, so much of the university is given over to ideological indoctrination, activism masquerading as disinterested inquiry—i.e. the emphasis being on not how to think but what to think, underwritten by an ever expanding bureaucratic slum. The first quote from Kampmark reminds me of Taleb’s observation that these academics are merely rent-seeking parasites.
The Fordist academic is a spineless, compromised product, an offspring cowardly in meetings, a lazy collaborator seeking to maximise production gains with minimal effort and one suspicious of individuality.
The Fordist academic, insecure and compromised, loathes individual aptitude and sterling initiative and loves the sharply cut corner, the quick fix, the rapid option.
Take “digital humanities” with its vaguely grounded offshoots such as “digital criminology”, “digital ethnography”, “digital bollocks”.
One of the most conspicuous casualties of the Fordist academic are students, designated as clients and consumers rather than learning pupils with curious minds.
manwithoutqualities 