Stimuli For Your Moral Taste Buds
The food-for-thought menu includes: Fumigating Books, Heterodox Thinkers, China’s America, The Gezi Protests, Philosopher Gareth Evans, and Culture, Tradition and State
Note: A few extra elements are included in today's list of stimuli around the end of the blog. Don’t miss it.
The Care/Harm Moral Taste Bud: Panic at the Library
Sample this:
“The Principal Household Insects of the United States (1896), bookworms are actually “partial to pepper.” The United States Bureau of Entomology responded to Iiams’ query by admitting it had “never made a thorough study of insects affecting books.” It had, however, fumigated libraries with hydrocyanic acid gas, but mainly to destroy “such external feeding pests as cockroaches and silverfish and such nuisances as bedbugs.” As one epidemic after another swept through increasingly densely populated urban areas in the early twentieth century, public health officials newly empowered by a broader acceptance of germ theory sent notices to libraries when outbreaks occurred. These edicts forced libraries to close in some cases, to fumigate books in others, or even to burn books loaned to borrowers infected with yellow fever, spinal meningitis, scarlet fever, or bubonic plague. In 1908 Pasadena librarians took the precaution of fumigating 1,200 of the most circulated books. Several years later, they would begin fumigating all of the library’s books as a matter of course. After trying a couple of other poison gases, and with the help of scientists at the California Institute of Technology, Iiams settled on a mixture of ethylene oxide and carbon dioxide that came to be known on the fumigant market as “carboxide.” He went on to treat not only the infested volumes but all of the rare books in the Huntington’s collection, all “foreign” books that entered its collections, and some of the pope’s bookworm-ravaged stacks in the Vatican.”
The Fairness/Cheating Moral Taste Bud: The Perils of Heterodoxy
Sample this:
“But it can be a short hop from reasonable scepticism of official sources to the uncritical acceptance of misinformation from completely unreliable ones. Misinformation on the 2020 presidential election led people to attack the US Capitol in January 2021. Misinformation on Russia led to the bizarre coalition of far-left and far-right commentators who have either excused or even cheered on Vladimir Putin’s indefensible invasion of Ukraine. And most tragically, misinformation on vaccines has led to thousands of preventable deaths from Covid-19. First, unless you come to a complex field with a solid understanding of the basics, your research is unlikely to be particularly good. It is pointless, for example, to attempt to understand climatology without first studying the underlying physics and chemistry, or to come to a view on vaccines without a working knowledge of virology. Social media, however, is full of uniformed, confident amateurs.”
The Liberty/Oppression Moral Taste Bud: The Rise And Fall Of Chimerica
To comprehend how China thinks about the United States Wang Huning's 1991 book America Against America is a must read. Here’s a passage from the book:
“H. S. Commager was a leading American historian and critic. The shelves of American university libraries are generally stocked with his works. He is regarded as a master of American studies. His book, The Growth of the United States of America, is well established in Chinese scholarship. The Spirit of America, his book released in 1950, was so well received by the community that it was reprinted more than 20 times. I read the Chinese version translated by Nanmu and others. I brought it with me from Shanghai to the United States, a long way. It is indeed an essential book for understanding the American spirit. According to H. S. Commager, Europe, with its long tradition of feudalism and nationalism, the local transcended the total, while in the United States, having matured during the Industrial Revolution and not recognizing the strong local tradition that had to be broken, the total transcended the local. He raises a question worth pondering: the extraordinary complexity of the American racial origin, the differences in climate and soil conditions everywhere, and yet the tendency to develop a distinct and stable national character, which not only makes it difficult for critics to anticipate, but also unexplainable by history and experience as a whole. Everyone who wants to understand America is, above all, prepared to think about this question.”
The Loyalty/Betrayal Moral Taste Bud: Visibility And Power: The Changing Nature Of Public Space In The Beyoğlu District Of Istanbul
Sample this:
“After the Crimean War (1853-1856), ten thousand Levantines settled in Beyoğlu just as the Tanzimat Reforms (1839-1876) eliminated the legal distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, and Ottoman administrators embraced European organizational models and dress, as well as closer relations with Europe. Sultans Abdülmecit and Abdülaziz were spotted in the audience at Theater Nayum. One of the leading operas of Europe, Nayum was merely one more venue in this district of theaters, eateries, dance halls, and night clubs. An occidental outpost in a Muslim empire, where revelers poured into the cobbled streets, skirting the tables of singing and drinking diners. Alcohol consumption was one of the freedoms enjoyed by non-Muslim communities. It was officially proscribed for Muslims until 1926, and available everywhere in Beyoğlu […] The Gezi protests changed Beyoğlu.”
The Authority/Subversion Moral Taste Bud: Gareth Evans — philosophy’s lost prodigy
Here is an excerpt from The Varieties of References, a 430 page philosophical study written by Gareth Evans and published posthumously using his drafts:
“Things which appear similar to ordinary observation, and which behave similarly for ordinary purposes, are frequently called by the same name. When people acquire the methods for more detailed observation, and an interest in the construction of theories, many of these groupings have to be revised. Whales do not really belong with the fish they superficially resemble, since the similarity of form and behaviour conceals radical differences of structure and function. Now it may well be that our intuitive semantic classifications stand in need of a similar revision. 'What do you mean?', 'Who are you talking about?', 'That's not what you said','That’s not true' are ready semantic concepts of the market-place, which have been used and refined by the many different people, philosophers, grammarians, and teachers who have been obliged to reflect on the operations of their own language.”
The Sanctity/Degradation Moral Taste Bud: The Problem of Culture Transmission
Sample this:
“Most countries of the West and many metropolitan cities of even ancient civilizations like India are at a stage where even the nuclear family and marriage is no more and individuals are truly individuals. Parents have no time for their children. Let alone grandparents, even parents can’t bring their children up as both of the spouses have to ‘work’.
It is virtually the institutions of the State and the corporate which ‘bring up’ the children, right from the time they are just six months old. The crèche, the kindergarten, the school, the college and the workspace claim and consume the children which are in a way ‘produced’ by individuals but then brought by the forces of the State and the market.
The mechanisms for transfer of culture, are thus, no more. As the grandmothers disappear from home, culture disappears from society. It is no longer being transferred. It is no longer continuous.”
Additional features on today’s menu include:
An interesting article to think about nothing:
How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything
“The vacuum has become a bedrock concept in physics, the foundation of any theory of something. Von Guericke’s vacuum was an absence of air. The electromagnetic vacuum is the absence of a medium that can slow down light. And a gravitational vacuum lacks any matter or energy capable of bending space. In each case the specific variety of nothing depends on what sort of something physicists intend to describe.”
An Indian mainstream global blockbuster movie called RRR bridges the American left-of-center’s colonizer-colonized view of the world and gun rights advocates of the right-of-center to take the US box office by a storm and forces Hollywood filmmakers to reevaluate their screenplays for mainstream extravaganza:
Quote of the month:
"What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order."
— Auguste Préault