Matins

¶ A forceful leader in this week’s Economist connects the dots between secular reform of the Roman Catholic Church and the debate about cultural self-determiantion that Islamic immigrants have brought to politics.

At the same time, with stunning insensitivity, it was declared that “attempting to ordain a woman” as a priest would be treated as a serious offence.

To put it kindly, whoever crafted those statements must be out of touch with the reality that is now catching up with the quasi-theocratic regimes (in other words, situations where religion is immune from state power, and has power of its own) which persist across Europe. In Ireland a point of no return was reached in November when a report found police collusion in covering up clerical misdeeds. Irish citizens, including pious ones, will never again treat the church as untouchable. In June Belgium’s authorities virtually dissolved an internal church inquiry into sex abuse by seizing files and detaining the country’s bishops for several hours. In Germany cosy ties between religious and political authorities have been shaken by news of abuse at prestigious Catholic schools and monasteries. In Italy the church still enjoys a sort of immunity, for cultural reasons, but Italians will surely one day insist that their religion should be answerable to the law of the land. That principle is especially important at a time when Western democracies are struggling to work out what place, if any, they can accord to subcultures that wish to regulate their family affairs under the laws of Islam, or some other minority faith.

Lauds

¶ If you can find a longer, more fleshed out version of this story, please let us know: Chinese state administrator for cultural heritage, Shan Jixiang, is complaining about excessive demolition. Is he on his own here, or is this part of a coordinated goernment attempt to cool down the housing market? (Guardian; via Arts Journal )

The outspoken remarks from Shan, head of the state administration for cultural heritage, echo growing concern about the destruction of buildings which date back centuries.

“Much traditional architecture that could have been passed down for generations as the most valuable memories of a city has been relentlessly torn down,” he said. He warned that without support, much of China’s heritage would be extinguished.

The China Daily reported that in Beijing alone, 4.43m square metres (1,100 acres) of old courtyards had been demolished since 1990 – equivalent to around 40% of the downtown area.

Another planned development will require razing large swaths of land around the capital’s Drum and Bell towers, until now a largely untouched district.

Prime

¶ Simon Johnson holds Timothy Geithner and the Treasury Department to the fire, for their do-nothing disinclination to put some regulatory teeth into the version of the Volcker Rule that was recently enacted, and their equally passive hope that Basel III will make banks safe. (The Baseline Scenario)

The latest details on the international negotiations for higher capital requirements – to which Mr. Geithner continually defers – are not any more encouraging. All the indications from the so-called Basel 3 process are that banks are fighting back hard against having to hold substantially stronger buffers against future losses. The Treasury may not have conceded all the ground on this issue, but it is in retreat – with the Secretary insisting on Tuesday that raising capital requirements could damage growth, despite all the evidence to the contrary (reviewed here last week).

Given this context, we should worry and wonder about the “financial innovation” to which the secretary alludes. Again, this sounds good in principle, but in practice the benefits are elusive, if not illusory – other than for people in privileged positions within the financial sector. Mr. Geithner wants the financial sector to be able to take more risk – but to what end, from the point of view of society as a whole?

Tierce

¶ Why Wrongology is our most needed science: We have seen the rational animal and he is — a talk radio host. The indispensable Jonah Lehrer:

The larger moral is that our metaphors for reasoning are all wrong. We like to believe that the gift of human reason lets us think like scientists, so that our conscious thoughts lead us closer to the truth. But here’s the paradox: all that reasoning and confabulation can often lead us astray, so that we end up knowing less about what jams/cars/jelly beans we actually prefer. So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host. That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality. Instead, it only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false. (Put another way, we’re not being rational – we’re rationalizing.) While it’s easy to read these crazy blog comments and feel smug, secure in our own sober thinking, it’s also worth remembering that we’re all vulnerable to sloppy reasoning and the confirmation bias. Everybody has a blowhard inside them. And this is why it’s so important to be aware of our cognitive limitations. Unless we take our innate flaws into account, the blessing of human reason can easily become a curse.

Men have always known themselves to be capable of gross error. Only recently, however, have we dared to lift the woeful trunkline that leads from reason to error. (The Frontal Cortex)

Sext

¶ At BLDBLOG, a project that sounds almost preposterously meta — until you get to the end of Geoff Manaugh’s entry. The Columbia University students describe their project thus: “By focusing on the space of the document, we can avoid simplistic predictions of the future while creating a database of potential evidence which can be analyzed and interpreted by a wider audience of designers.” Mind-numbing! But here’s what it means:

I only say this here because it is extraordinarily exciting to see a project like this, that out-fictionalizes the contemporary novel and even puts much of Hollywood to shame—to realize, once again, that architecture students routinely trade in ideas that could reinvigorate the film industry and the publishing industry, which is all the more important if the world of private commissions and construction firms remains unresponsive or financially out of reach. The Nesin Map alone, given a screenwriter and a dialogue coach, could supply the plot of a film or a thousand comic books—and rogue concrete mixtures put to use by nefarious underground militaries in Baghdad is an idea that could be optioned right now for release in summer 2013. HBO should produce this immediately.

My point is not that architecture students should somehow be expected to stop doing the very thing they are in school for—i.e. to learn how artificial enclosures are designed and constructed. I just mean that they should never overlook the interest of their own preliminary ideas, notes, sketches, and scenarios. After all, with just a well-timed email or elevator pitch, all of that stuff—all those bulletin boards, browser tabs, sketchbooks, notes from late-night conversations, site maps, and more—needn’t become just more crap to get filed away in your parents’ house somewhere, but could actually be turned into the seed of a film, novel, game, or comic book in another cultural field entirely.

Nones

¶ We would never say the extent of social and structural dysfunction in Pakistan couldn’t surprise us, but when it does, we’re — surprised. At the Guardian, Kamila Shamsie writes about — ready? — Pakistan’s timber mafia.

One of the most powerful and ruthless organisations within Pakistan, the timber mafia engages in illegal logging, which is estimated to be worth billions of rupees each year – the group’s connection to politicians at the local and federal level has been commented on in the media for years. The constant warnings about the timber mafia almost always include mention of the increased susceptibility of de-forested regions to flooding, landslides and soil erosion. But, in the way that horror tends to pile on horror in Pakistan, not only has the flooding been intense in areas where the timber mafia is active but the felled trees, hidden in ravines prior to smuggling them onwards, have caused havoc. Dislodged by torrents of water, they have swept away bridges and people and anything else in their path.

There has been some suggestion that the high volume of timber transported along the rivers has been a factor in the weakening of the dams and retaining walls that are supposed to protect the land from flooding but have proved unequal to the task. Their failure to function has also brought up comparisons to the poor construction that resulted in collapsed government schools during the 2005 earthquake; then, blame landed on corrupt practices and lack of oversight by the authorities in the allocation of construction contracts.

That the timber mafia reportedly gave active support to the Pakistan Taliban when they controlled Swat seems to have done nothing to diminish their influence with the state. Corruption transcends political difference. Where action is taken against the timber mafia it is often in the form of local villagers coming out to defend their trees. Pakistan’s citizens, time and again, find it falls to them to fill in the vacuum where there should be a state.

Vespers

¶ At Survival of the Book, Brian is reading Jason Epstein’s Book business, a book that we’ve decided that everyone interested in books and their contents ought to read (so, yes, we’ve ordered a copy, even though we’ve read what Mr Epstein has had so say upon the subject at The New York Review of Books. The inexorable truth that remains to be accepted is that big business will never make a success in publishing.

(NB: Brian’s somewhat infelicitous phrase, “crap consumers,” means the opposite of “consumers of crap.”)

My point is, this is so much to ask of a book. People that love books aren’t sharks. People who like reading books are by their nature kind of slow movers, and maybe that’s not so bad. In fact, if more shit hits the fan, the world will most likely need people who are patient and thoughtful and attentive to figure out how to fix some major problems. But we can be crap consumers. We like libraries, and used bookstores, and we hold onto books we love for far too long. You can’t get us to buy a stupid gift card to give out on someone’s birthday, because instead we pick out a book we love that makes us think of the birthday boy. We probably don’t have much money anyhow – we work in things like publishing, we teach, we write, maybe we work in a cubical 9 – 5 but daydream during work about what we’re going to read on the train heading home. That won’t get us a big promotion and big raise, now will it?

But these big industries and these rich shareholders are staring at us and saying they want more from us. Well too bad. So leave us be. And for those of us who got jobs at Random House and B&N and Holt thinking, well, it’s not ideal but I get to read here and be involved so I can overlook the evil… we’ll have to use the skills elsewhere, because the writing’s on the wall. The dinosaurs are falling, they’re crippled. They may not recover. That big fat publisher could be one 12 year old pop star away from landing on his face and not getting up again.

Compline

¶ Imagine that a major factor in choosing where to live was proximity to other people in your line of work, people with whom you could meet productively while commuting to the office. Sounds nuts, right? But it’s no crazier than this country’s suburban experiment itself. This is the wild re-alignment of planning priorities that’s envisioned in Melissa Lafsky’s piece at The Infrastructurist inspired by — natch — creative types in Barcelona.

One notion that’s being shaken up is the idea that work must take place in designated work spaces, and cannot be combined with transportation. The above video shows a business meeting taking place on the Barcelona metro. The idea was created by a social and digital innovation firm called Citilab, which describes itself as an “incubator for business and social initiatives.”

Granted, the idea has a few snags — unless you and all your relevant co-workers are taking the same train, coordinating meetings on public transit may be difficult. And what about all the commuters who still doggedly rely on cars? Presenting Powerpoints while driving isn’t really an option. Still, as the developing world continues to expand exponentially, it’s worth asking these questions sooner rather than later.

Have a Look

¶ Comparing New York City (Manhattan, really) to California’s Bay Area, Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s dyspeptic but amusing anti-Gotham tirade reminds us of the problem that Edith Wharton faced: In Boston, she was found too fashionable to be intelligent; in New York, too intelligent to be fashionable. (Adgrok; via Marginal Revolution)

We have fed lots of out-of-towners home-cooked meals.

¶ The Tiger Oil memos have resurfaced at Letters of Note. Weekend fun!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, August 6th, 2010 at 10:30 am.