Humanities: The Unity of Knowledge

On nearly a daily basis I am making connections between what I'm reading or studying and what I'm hearing on the radio, perusing on the web, or seeing on television news, so I've decided it's time to put all those observations into a more permanent framework. Through the lens of my studies in the fields of literature, philosophy, and history I hope over the course of these posts to be trying to get you to think about how so many things going on in our world are interconnected. My basic ideal is that posited in E.O. Wilson's Consilience. We are entering a new age, where the different disciplines of study must once again come together into a new studia humanitatis that provides to those who want to learn the tools necessary for understanding their world and becoming better citizens within it. I saw a quote today on a Starbucks "The Way I See It" cup that admirably summed up this last idea: "Our species' survival depends on how fast we embrace the moral shift from "patriot" to "global citizen."

Buddha Art Found in Nepal Cliff

This is so cool. A shepherd in Nepal recently led researchers to an isolated cave complex set 14,000 feet up a sheer cliff in the Himalayas and filled with long-lost Buddhist art, including a 55-panel mural of Buddha's life. The art dates to the 12th century or earlier and includes, in addition to paintings, other artifacts and Tibetan manuscripts. The shepherd had found the caves while looking for shelter from a storm decades ago, but only recently told scientists. Limited excavations of the site are planned for the near future, and the site is being kept secret to prevent looting.

End of the Little Red Book

Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books - New York Times

"Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette."

I remember my 7th grade Social Studies class which focused one semester each on the two then most significant enemies of the U.S.: the Soviet Union and China. My instructor was a Vietnam veteran who had become disillusioned with American policy, so the class was by no means a harangue against the evils of communism, but it was nonetheless something that instilled a fear of the powerful enemies ranged against us. For my class project I used a faux-leather menu cover from The Apple Grove Inn where my mother worked to make a Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. Who would have thought then that the whole subject of that class would all be insignificant just 30 years later? Lends credence to the Buddhist notion that our focus on what we think is permanent is in fact the thing that creates much unnecessary suffering.

Breast Augmentation Anyone?

I just stumbled upon the work of Philip Toledano who is a remarkably inventive

photographer who makes you look at the world in whole new ways. As he suggests through these images, "Hope and Fear is the External Manifestation of the External Desires and Paranoia that are Adrift in America."

Extinctions, Global Warming, are "part of the natural course of things" not something WE do!

Tim Johnston, International Herald Tribune

SYDNEY: Scientists in Australia say they have found a trove of prehistoric animal bones — including those of a large marsupial lion — that provides strong evidence that it was human beings and not climate change that killed 90 percent of the continent's largest animals about 45,000 years ago.

Professor Richard Roberts, a geochemist at the University of Wollongong who dated the bones, said that by comparing the dates of the remains with evidence of rainfall at the time, the scientists established that different species had managed to survive relatively major changes in the climate.

They argue that if the Nullarbor animals were well adapted to dry conditions for at least 400,000 years before they disappeared, then it is unlikely they succumbed to Ice Age aridity.
Their conclusions deal a blow to the longstanding argument that the extinction of Australia's giant native fauna, the so-called megafauna, was caused by natural changes in the environment and not humans. "I think we can forget about that as an explanation, because they had already survived the worst that nature could throw at them," Roberts said. "But what they hadn't counted on is the arrival of a completely new species that would eat them."
He added, "The only new element was us: man."

The major extinction of Australia's megafauna between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago also coincided with the arrival of humans.

Roberts dismissed the argument that the relatively small number of people, armed with only the most basic of weapons, could not have inflicted so much damage to so many species. He said low-level hunting of animals with slow reproductive cycles, combined with the widespread use of fire to clear ground and drive animals into traps, would have been sufficient to push animal populations below a number needed to keep species viable.

Among the casualties of the megafauna were 3-meter, or 10-foot, kangaroos, Thylacoleo carnifex, or marsupial lions, the Dromornis stirtoni, the largest bird ever known — it weighed half a ton — and the rhino- sized herbivore Diprotodon optatum.

Anxiety of Influence

It's not yet out on stands, but Harper's Magazine has two very interesting articles this month (Feb) on the appropriation of art by other artists who then use it to create something new. One is called "On the Rights of Molotov Man" based on an symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities entitled "Comedies of Fair U$e." The article is an excerpt from a dialogue between the painter Joy Garnett, whose series on Riots featured a man throwing a Molotov cocktail, and the photographer Susan Meiselas, who took the original photograph of a Nicaraguan Sandinista. Joy Garnett had not asked for Susan Meiselas' permission before appropriating her work from the internet and using it as the basis for transforming it into the centerpiece painting of her series. The two argue over whether art's purpose is to decontextual or contextualize, the role of technology in helping to further decontextualization, and who owns the rights to subject material. The article immediately following is Jonathan Letham's "The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism." Letham argues that source plagiarism is the essence of the artistic endeavor and that the arts do not operate according to the same principles of commodity exchange that other goods do. Art and culture, he argues, are a public commons and should not be restricted (especially by big corporations like the Disney Co. who have themselves liberally lifted from previous culture). Both articles, in light of the issues raised very recently over the plagiarism of historians, memoirists, and novelists, are pertinent and enlightening.

[image: Rene Magritte's, La reproduction interdite (Copying Prohibited), 1937 - Rotterdam Museum]

Secret: I have been asleep

Where have I been? I just stumbled upon this gem on Amazon.com: At the beginning of 2005, Frank Warren launched a new blog called PostSecret as an experiment in community art, inviting strangers to mail him anonymous postcards that made art out of their innermost secrets and then posting a selection of the cards every week on his blog. Within a year, his blog was one of the five most popular in the world, and his first book, PostSecret, was one of the surprise bestsellers of 2005. Time Magazine voted his blog as one of the "50 Coolest Websites of 2005." For My Secret, a collectible, paper-over-board book that includes a page of vibrant, decorative stickers, Warren has personally selected never-before-seen anonymous postcards created by teens and college students from across the country. Each card bears an intimate and powerful secret—at turns inspirational, shocking, hilarious, and poetic—that is told through original illustrations, photographs, collages, and other creative means.