الجديد فى عالم المعرفة

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon, by Daniel C Dennett
Divine designs in mind

Published: 10 March 2006

To the dismay and bewilderment of secularists, a couple of centuries of scientific reason have not produced the changes they expected in the climate of belief. Some varieties of religion have dried up in the light of reason, but the global effect has been increased and ominous turbulence. Even the godless now fear what may come down from the skies. This sense of crisis underlies the programme that the philosopher Daniel Dennett seeks to introduce in his new book. Having failed to neutralise religion by indirect influence, scientific reason must be brought directly to bear on it. The benefits and costs of religious belief must be weighed scientifically; scientists must develop accounts of how religion arises from the way the mind works.
While Dennett sees an urgent need to analyse religion as a natural phenomenon, he sees little point in pursuing the question of whether it is a supernatural one as well. He is already a convinced atheist, and a self-proclaimed "bright" - a term intended to do for non-believers what "gay" has done for homosexuals, combining positive connotations with a sense of assertiveness and commitment. Believers, he suggests, might like to call themselves "supers", a similarly positive tag that refers to the supernatural.
They are unlikely to welcome his offering, or to mistake it for a genuine token of respect. Dennett is happy to let his disdain for religion show through the framework of inquiry, insistent that it is disinterested. His opening sally compares the Word of God to a parasite that infects ants' brains. That is the view of religion articulated by Richard Dawkins, who sees faiths as "viruses of the mind".
Though Dennett is evidently in sympathy with his English comrade, he differs crucially in strategy. Dawkins takes a polemical position and wages frank war on God. Dennett's engine of rational inquiry insists that hypotheses must remain on the table until settled according to scientific procedure.
He proposes that religious ideas may be parasitic, harming the hosts whose minds they occupy, or may have mutually beneficial relationships with their host, or may be "along for the ride". Deciding between these possibilities is a goal of the research programme he urges.
To some ears this may sound like overweening scientism, a vain belief in science as a superior form of religion. But the impression left by Dennett's strategic compromise between sentiment and inquiry is closer to managerial politics than any grand vision of enlightenment. His studiedly open set of options resembles one of those consultation exercises that local authorities like to conduct, whose wording offers clues to which policy the authority has already decided to pursue.
The book's title looks like a clue. "Breaking the spell" suggests the removal of an external influence, probably a malign one. Dennett argues convincingly that the human readiness to believe in supernatural entities may have arisen from the evolved capacity to understand that other individuals have intentions.
This understanding provides a basis for empathy and a defence against deception as well as a means to anticipate others' behaviour. These capacities proved so valuable that people came to assume that intentions lay behind all events, and conjured up supernatural beings to account for intentions which could not be ascribed to humans or animals. These entities, or rather ideas of them, have evolved and multiplied in human minds.
In the course of their evolution they have imposed immense costs on their hosts. As Dennett points out, "To an evolutionist, rituals stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade". To an evolutionist, the extravagance of a peacock's fan insists it must confer benefits that outweigh its costs. To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrill's bottom that religion may be adaptive. It might also suggest that, as costly signals are hard to fake and tend to be reliable, these advantages may relate to the establishment of trust, turning groups into communities.
But here, as throughout Breaking the Spell, the revving of a powerful analytical engine is followed by the sound of it slipping out of gear. Dennett suggests that rituals may be a means of ensuring that the ideas behind them are reproduced faithfully. The possibility that rituals benefit the individuals performing them disappears behind the focus on what may be in it for the ideas themselves.
Dennett is not alone among Darwinians in his reluctance to explore the possibility that religion is adaptive. Only a few evolutionary thinkers have taken up the study of religion, and evolutionary psychology has failed to incorporate religion with the same enthusiasm it has applied to other universal forms of human behaviour, despite its keen interest in the evolution of morality.
Dennett's reference to anthropologists' and historians' "blinkered perspectives" smacks of pots and kettles. Towards the end, he does declare that "scientists have much to learn from the historians and cultural anthropologists", but by that stage it evokes the distinction he draws earlier between what people profess and what they actually believe.
This absence may also reflect Dennett's intellectual preference, as a philosopher, for abstraction rather than detail. The minutiae of anthropologists' field observations or the archaeological record do not detain him on his way to his discussion of religion today, where past form can be dismissed. Even if religion was the foundation of human society, you could say the same about hunting and gathering, and we're not going back to that. People nowadays can live moral lives and sustain decent communities without religious faith, although it seems only fair to acknowledge that these moral frameworks are secularised versions of earlier religious ones.
Dennett insists that a sense of reverence for the sacred is not a necessary qualification for the analysis of religion. But the project does require passion, which is why Dawkins's essayistic voice is convincing even if not found persuasive. Breaking the Spell reads like an exercise in fulfilling a disagreeable obligation. It takes a hundred pages to justify itself, drops interesting ideas no sooner than it has picked them up, and we're still waiting for it to hit its stride when we run into the appendices. The style is familiar but the effect very different from a book such as Darwin's Dangerous Idea, where Dennett's voice is filled by something he really believes in.
To make real progress his project must engage with religion both as a natural phenomenon and a social one. It is in the latter terms that we can best make sense of why a populist Christian movement arose in America, insisting that the earth is just a few thousand years old, a good century after educated Britons had come to accept that the planet is far older than the Bible suggests. Scientists trying to comprehend religion don't just need to learn from historians and anthropologists; they need to learn how to make their fellow scholars into allies.
Marek Kohn's A Reason for Everything is published by Faber
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article350262.ece

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067003472X/103-8427570...59?v=glance&n=283155

لسماع الحوار مع Daniel Dennett مؤلف الكتاب فى راديو 4 حول الكتاب فى برنامج بداية الاسبوع Start the week

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek_20060313.shtml

الفيلم الحائز على جائزة الاوسكار كأفضل فيلم أجنبى
Tsotsi (2005)

http://indie.imdb.com/title/tt0468565/

Unforgettable

Tsotsi is gorgeous, riveting, poignant, and thrilling. Not only is it a first-rate piece of storytelling, but it also takes the viewer into a world of South African poverty and crime that he has never seen before. Director/writer Gavin Hood offers us a tale of tragic redemption and uncommon poetry in a subculture of the most abject immorality. Truly unforgettable.

The only work in recent times to which this movie can be compared is City of God. There, too, the viewer is brought into a world of poverty and crime he probably never knew existed. It is a world so bleak that it forces the viewer to examine his own morality and wonder how much of the civility he takes for granted in his life is merely the luxury of the well fed and comfortable. These characters live on the edge and their primary passion is survival.

What makes Tsotsi, in the end, a finer film than City of God is that it offers a more complex sense of hope; it reminds us in an honest and unsentimental way that inside even the hardest cases there is a soul, which is never beyond redemption

فيلم منا أخراج جورج كلونى عن حملة ماكارثى فى الخمسينات
Good Night and Good Luck. (2005)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433383/

Synopsis:
"Good Night, And, Good Luck." takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950's America. It chronicles the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. With a desire to report the facts and enlighten the public, Murrow, and his dedicated staff - headed by his producer Fred Friendly and Joe Wershba in the CBS newsroom - defy corporate and sponsorship pressures to examine the lies and scaremongering tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his communist 'witch-hunts'. A very public feud develops when the Senator responds by accusing the anchor of being a communist. In this climate of fear and reprisal, the CBS crew carries on and their tenacity will prove historic and monumental.




Mind-bending films

Russian Ark (2002)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318034/

Review
In the history of cinema, it is the Russians who are generally credited with elevating film editing to a modern art form. It is ironic, and strangely fitting, therefore, that it should be the Russians who, almost a full century later, have now produced the first full-length feature film ever to be composed of a single unedited shot running uninterrupted from first moment to last (Hitchcock came close with `Rope,' but he did include a few `cuts' in the course of the film). Even Sergei Eisenstein, who, in films like `Potemkin' and `Ten Days That Shook the World' spent his career developing and demonstrating the power of editing, would, I dare say, be impressed by `Russian Ark,' a film every bit as innovative and challenging as those earlier seminal works.

For their bravura, awe-inspiring cinematic tour-de-force, director Alexander Sokurov and cinematographer Tilman Buttner take us into the famed Hermitage Museum and Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, providing us with a grand tour not only of the opulent rooms and famous artwork contained therein, but of 300 years of Russian history as well, as various vignettes involving famous people (from Peter and Catherine the Great to Nicholas and Alexandra) and events are played out within the glorious gilded walls.

`Russian Ark' is a bold and audacious project that is the cinematic equivalent of a breathlessly performed high wire juggling act. We know that one false move on the part of the actors or the cameraman, one missed cue or accident of fate could bring the whole delicately poised enterprise crashing down around them. How often, one wonders, did a perfectionist like Sukorov have to resist the temptation to yell `Cut!' to his actors and crew? It's truly amazing to see just how beautifully planned and flawlessly executed the final product turns out to be, especially the ball sequence at the end which features hundreds of dancers and spectators who are set in beautifully choreographed and constantly whirling motion. What's most remarkable is how much of a participant the camera itself is in the proceedings. Not content to stand idly by and observe the scene like some passive onlooker, the camera moves right into the center of the action, gliding in and out of the crowds with utmost grace and precision. Visually, the film is stunning, with exquisite costumes and furnishings as far as the eye can see. Indeed, `Russian Ark' is, among other things, a veritable feast for the eyes, the likes of which we have rarely seen on film before.

`Russian Ark' does have something of a `plot,' involving a narrator whom we never see, a 21st Century filmmaker – we assume it's Sukorov himself - who's found himself inexplicably caught in some type of time warp and magically transported to this strange spectral world. There's also a bizarre European `ghost' figure from the unspecified past who comments - and occasionally attempts to intrude – on the actions taking place around him. But these two characters are of far less interest to the audience than the aural and visual delights of the film itself.

`Russian Ark' is a wonder to behold, for it is much more than just an `exercise,' a `gimmick,' or even an `antithesis' to Eisenstein; it is a vibrant work of art that challenges the limits of its medium and reminds us of just what it is about movies that we love so much.


Timecode

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220100/

Review

Mike Figgis does a Robert Altman. Except, instead of creating a large narrative of interconnecting plot strands, he puts them all on four split screens. Is this therefore more subversive than Altman? I don't think so - Altman's method is an attack on Hollywood linearity, on conventional methods of 'connection'; his characters exist is the same space but are emotionally etc. miles apart. The characters in 'Short Cuts', like the city of L.A. itself, are a mass without a centre. Figgis, for all the supposed diffusion of his visual strands, actually reunites, glues together Altman's ruptures. In this way it might seem a more optimistic kind of film. It isn't.

'timecode' is being touted as a revolution in cinema, a new way of watching films. Instead of watching one screen and being led by a director, we are given four, and asked to make our choices. I was surprised at how panicked I was at this in the first 20 minutes, darting between scenes, wondering which one I should follow. This forced me out of the film much more disturbingly than anything by Fassbinder or Godard. But this alienation is deceptive. Firstly we are not really bombarded by four narratives - put 'pierrot le fou', 'diary of a country priest', 'vampyr' and 'branded to kill' on four screens, then you'd be confused. Figgis leads you all the way, gives you an illusion of choice, but rarely fulfils it. The focus is on one screen at a time - either the soundtrack is turned up loudest, the plot is more interesting, whatever. For long periods of time, you can safely ignore other scenes because there is nothing going on - for about 20 minutes, for example, Lauren sits in a limousine listening to a bug planted on Rose; this leaves us free to watch another screen and see what she's listening to. Other scenes are merely tedious - eg Emma droning to her shrink (a nod to Godard's 'week end', that famous end of cinema?) - so that you gladly look elsewhere. It is possible to listen to one scene, and flit around at the others to catch up on what's going on.

What I'm saying is, 'timecode' is not a difficult experience - after the initial adjustment, you watch the film as you would any other, especially as all the stories converge and are really only one story. Even at the beginning, the feeling is less one of Brechtian alienation than akin to being a security guard faced with a grid of screens - you rarely think about the physical processes of film or performance, as you would in a Dogme or Godard film.

So if 'timecode' is less revolutionary than it seems, that doesn't mean it isn't a brilliant film, a real purse in a pig's ear of a year (or whatever the expression is). One reason for this is the four-screen structure: I would have to watch it a few more times, but I was very conscious of the orchestration of the screens, the way compositions, or camera movements, or close-ups etc., in one screen were echoed, reflected, distorted in the others - a true understanding of this miraculous formal apparatus would, I think, give us the heart of the film, and bely the improvised nature of the content. Figgis is also a musician - he co-composed the score - and the movement here, its fugues and variations are truly virtuosic, almost worthy of my earlier Altman comparison.

But the content is great fun too. At first I was disappointed at the self-absorbed drabness of the material, the idea that we shouldn't be made to work too hard because we've enough to deal with the four screens. And, it is true, that the stories rarely transcend cliche. But, such is the enthusiasm of the performers (people like Salma Hayek obviously relishing slightly more useful roles than the bilge they're usually stuck in); the precision of the structure; the mixture of comedy and pathos, and the way the style facilitates both, that you're convinced you're watching a masterpiece. Quentin's massaging and Ana's pitch are two of the funniest things I've seen in ages, while Stellan Skarsgard's rich performance stands out all the more for its brittle surroundings

And life created continents...
24 March 2006
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
Myles McLeod



A solid startLIFE on Earth may have driven the evolution of the planet itself. The idea is that ancient microbes provided the chemical energy to create the Earth's continents - a nod to the Gaia hypothesis, in which life helps create the conditions it needs to survive.

The theory would solve the puzzle of why the Earth's continental crust appeared when it did, and explain the presence of granite, a substance not found anywhere else in our solar system.

The Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, coalescing as a homogeneous mass that in time separated into the discrete layers we know today: the core, mantle and crust, plus oceans and atmosphere. However, during the first 600 to 800 million years of Earth's existence there were no stable continents. The oldest vestiges of continental crust, which date from the Archaean aeon about 4 billion years ago, are in Acasta in north-west Canada.

These rocks are made from granite or a similar material, which is unique to Earth. It is created when basalt rock melts and reforms, becoming enriched in silica, aluminium and certain metals as it reacts with compounds in water. Granitic rocks are less dense than basalt, so they rise to the surface, forming a stable continental crust.

The ingredients for granite were there before the Acasta rocks, yet in all that time it didn't form. Now a team of geologists led by Minik Rosing of the Geological Museum and the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, says the appearance of photosynthetic life might have given this process the kick-start it needed.

Rosing's team was struck by how the appearance of the continental crust coincided with the rise of photosynthesis. The fossil record for the time is patchy at best, because microbes are small and fragile, but there is some geological evidence that photosynthesis might have arisen 3.8 billion years ago. Today, photosynthetic organisms, which convert solar energy into usable chemical energy, contribute three times as much energy to the Earth's overall geochemical energy cycle as geological activity driven by the Earth's interior.

The first photosynthetic life forms would have made solar energy available for chemical changes, cranking up the Earth's energy cycle and altering its geochemistry, Rosing's team believes (Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, vol 232, p 99). "The energy capture from photosynthesis is used to keep oceans and atmosphere out of chemical equilibrium with the rock," says Rosing.

This tension enhances weathering cycles, causing more chemical breakdown in the crust compared with physical processes or the limited impact of more obscure organisms, such as microbes that thrive around thermal vents. Such breakdown of basalt produces smectite and illite clays, which in turn play a role in the creation of granite.

"The key point is that melting of basalt makes basalt again, while the melting of weathered basalt produces a small amount of granite," says Rosing. "Life might, in the end, be responsible for the presence of continents on Earth."

Other geologists agree that this is a novel and imaginative idea. But, they say, the evidence is still weak. For instance, the apparent rarity of granite may be due to other factors, says Martin Line of the University of Tasmania, Australia, such as the size of the Earth, the relative abundance of water on the Earth's surface, or simply because we have only sampled a few rocks on other solar bodies, such as the moon or other planets.
source
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18925444.200-and-...ated-continents.html

The man who changed his mind. Francis Fukuyama, displaying his usual knack for capturing the zeitgeist, has abandoned the neocons and recanted his support for war in Iraq. But do his latest prescriptions for US foreign policy add up? By Anatol Lieven
Book Reviews
Anatol Lieven
Monday 27th March 2006


After the Neocons: America at the crossroads
Francis Fukuyama Profile Books, 226pp, £12.99
ISBN 1861979223

Like an aristocrat in reduced circumstances, Francis Fukuyama carries around a title that is a source of both prestige and ridicule. The title belongs to his most notorious work, The End of History (1992). To be fair, the thesis that it describes is considerably wiser and more interesting than the title suggests, and Gramscian rather than Leninist in the style of its liberal capitalist teleology.

When The End of History was published, Fukuyama's views fitted perfectly with the general triumphalism that followed the end of the cold war. Now he has managed once again to insert himself into the American zeitgeist, but a very different one. His latest book displays no triumphalism, but chimes equally well with the growing sense of unease in America about where the Bush administration's reckless policies are leading the country. These are policies that Fukuyama formerly supported, but has since publicly disowned.

George W Bush is currently facing the lowest public approval ratings of his presidency. According to recent polls, Americans want a Democrat-controlled Congress, as opposed to a Republican one, by a margin of 50 to 37 per cent; 67 per cent of Americans think that the Iraq war "was not necessary for the defence of the United States"; and 59 per cent believe that US resources would have been better used to pursue al-Qaeda and help Afghanistan.

Confronted with such figures, the propaganda bulwarks of the Bush administration have, in recent months, often vanished from view behind the mass of intellectuals and journalists try- ing to jump off them. A rabble of former public advocates of war in Iraq has belatedly condemned the US government for how that war has been conducted. In what the American Prospect has rightly termed "the incompetence dodge", they have explained that they could not have been expected to know how badly the Bush administration and the US military would carry out the brilliant strategy for which they had argued so shrilly in the run-up to war.

Another tactic has been to blame the war exclusively on the neoconservatives, as if it had not been supported by numerous public figures - Democrats as well as Republicans - from outside that movement. In fact, some of the harshest and most unscrupulous advocacy of the war came from intellectuals attached to the leadership of the Democratic Party. None the less, the charge against the neocons is fair enough in itself and, given the way things are going in Iraq, seems likely to sink them not just in the eyes of history but also, much more importantly (from the perspective of would-be intellectual apparatchiks), in the eyes of future government employers.

To be fair to Fukuyama, if he was among the first to call for war in Iraq, he was also among the first to jump ship. He advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein both before and immediately after 9/11, but as war approached he became increasingly worried. Before the 2004 elections he declared that, in view of Bush's record, he would not vote for him again as president.

Today, Fukuyama clearly hopes to play a leading role in shaping a new US foreign-policy consensus in the remaining years of Bush's lame-duck presidency and the agonisingly slow run-up to the next presidential elections. To that end, he has been instrumental in helping set up a new foreign-policy magazine, the American Interest.

In After the Neocons, based on lectures given at Yale University last year, Fukuyama formally breaks with the present neocon- servative grouping, though not wholly with the neoconservative tradition: "I have concluded that neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something that I can no longer support . . . rather than attempting the feckless task of reclaiming the term, it seems to me better to abandon the label and articulate an altogether distinct foreign-policy position."

Fukuyama's new book, as well as his claim to shape US foreign policy, therefore stands or falls by the answers to two linked questions. First, has he really broken with neoconservative thought or has he only cast off a "label" that has become politically inconvenient? Second, has he really crafted a foreign-policy position that is not only "altogether distinct" from that of the neoconservatives but offers something genuinely new and useful to the US debate?

The answer to the first question is that Fukuyama has significantly broken with the neocons. Although he continues to argue for "the use of American power to achieve moral purposes", his arguments also now contain traditional conservative elements - scepticism, stewardship, prudence - that have been absent from the neoconservative lexicon, at least since the end of the cold war.

Fukuyama strongly criticises the unreal expectations and the lack of knowledge and research that led to the dreadful failures of analysis and planning in Iraq. He makes a number of highly cogent criticisms of weaknesses that have in recent years affected the thinking not merely of neoconservatives, but of the US establishment as a whole.

Among these is what he calls the "universalisation of the experience of the east Europeans [during and after the collapse of the Soviet empire] to other parts of the world". This outlook ignores the unique circumstances that made possible the east European combination of rapid democratisation, successful economic reform and pro-US foreign policy.



Fukuyama also makes one very useful recommendation, in an area that has once again been neglected by the US establishment. This is the need to accompany attempts at spreading democracy with a vastly greater commitment to international development. As Fukuyama rightly says, development policy needs to be directed not only at strengthening economies, but also at building up the state institutions that are necessary for stable economic growth to take place and for democracies to take root in the long term. He calls this "realistic Wilsonianism".

All of this is eminently sensible, and indeed - if I may say so with what I hope is pardonable bitterness - many have been arguing these positions for considerably longer than Fukuyama. But when it comes to crafting a new US foreign policy, his work suffers from a severe disability - one that affects all too many American commentators.

This is its lack of detail concerning controversial questions. Fukuyama wisely advocates a limited, "Bismarckian" approach to the exercise of US power. But what does that mean in practice when it comes to the defence of Taiwan, the expansion of Nato into the former Soviet Union and a choice of war or détente with Iran? Above all, what settlement does he advocate for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Fukuyama has a powerful intellect, and has been responsible for some interesting and valuable contributions to contemporary thought, especially concerning the origins and conditions of economic development. But until he and other leading public figures in the US are prepared to take tough and unpopular stands on critical issues, all the intellectual brilliance in the world won't save their country from sliding into one disaster after another.

Anatol Lieven is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. His latest book, America Right or Wrong: an anatomy of American nationalism, is published by HarperCollins