Review: "The God Delusion" by R. Dawkins

I would not have bought this book had I not read The Selfish Gene. In other words, Dawkins probably wrote this book because he knew he could surf the wave of his 1976 bestseller to voice some of his opinions, or just plainly cash in on some windfall royalties.

For me, this book preached to the choir and hardly thought me anything new. In fact, I doubt anybody can learn anything fundamentally new from this book. For atheists, it will be at best an eloquently articulated rehash of their (non-)belief. For mild deists and die-hard bigots alike, it will just be derided as the "narrow minded", "intolerant", and "nihilistic" rant of an arrogant academic craving attention from the spotlight of his literary fame.

For Dawkins, religion isn't just the quixotic belief in a mighty and just god, it is instead a horrendous institution of obscurantism and violence that inoculates its members from one generation to the next via the self-replicating memes of bigotry. His prompt dismissal of the idea that religion could be a source of social communion and well-being seems a artificial, be it only for its overly-assertive and unrelenting confident tone.

Towards the middle of the book, Dawkins indulges in painfully pedantic arguments proving the non-existence of god. He formulated page after page a tedious reasoning concluding that god has to be such an extremely complicated being that his existence would be (nearly) impossible. Not only was this argument utterly boring, it was also unconvincing. He could very well have restricted himself to the slew of concise yet withering arguments that point to the non-existence of god instead of getting the reader bogged down in a tiresome probabilistic analysis. (Such arguments, incidentally, can be welled from either the realm of science or that of moral logic.)

To be fair, though this book cannot claim the "must-read" label of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins should be credited for being one of the most prominent scientists to encapsulate his loathing of religion from the often-underestimated perspective of evolutionary biology. Up to now, positivism and secular humanism have often been promoted from closed and hermetic philosophical circles with very little resort to scientific observations. This brings me to the last (and most interesting) chapters of the book where religion is hypothesized to be an archaic by-product of evolutionary forces. For those who were looking at a scientific understanding of the origin of religion, Dawkins gives us a good starting point. (It is incidentally, the only part of the book backed with readable citations, namely a reference to Daniel Dennet's work.)

Review: "Failed States" by N. Chomsky

My first remark about this book is that Chomsky isn't really making an audit of the American democracy based the usual benchmarks: transparent elections, freedom of speech and assembly, and a vibrant civil society. The title "Failed State" can hardly be applied to the United States in a literal sense, at least not comparatively to other failed states like, say, Haiti, Afghanistan, Palestine, or more recently Iraq. But I gather that this is the whole point that the author is trying to make: these four countries have all one thing in common in that they have all been at some point in their history used and abused by American meddling in their internal affairs. The hypocritical, hegemonic, and routinely brutal nature of American foreign policy is exposed from the early days of the Confederation, to the Cuba crisis, to Bosnia, to the messianic "war on terror" of post-9/11. Unfortunately, if one is to look for an actual assessment of (domestic) democracy, it will not be found until to the last chapter (titled "Democracy Promotion at Home").

Another criticism I have of Chomsky's work in general is that he consistently portrays, admittedly with very solid arguments, that the US government is out there to deceive the people. Sure, one can find a slew of such brazen attempts at deceiving the average citizen, not the least (nor last?) of which is the hyped-up claim that Iraq had an flourishing arsenal of WMDs just waiting to be tapped into by Al Qaeda. (Recall the 2003 parade of "proofs" trotted out by Rice and Powell that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were conspiring an imminent pandemonium of biological and chemical warfare.) But the question Chomsky does not answer is: who got W. Bush to the White House if not the American electorate? No real criticism of the electoral system per se is articulated anywhere in his reasoning. Instead the political elite is denounced as if it were parachuted to positions of power by unknown nebulae of corporate predators with the sole purpose to deceive the nice and gullible American citizen. This does not make sense. Here is an example: the latest movements in favor of "Intelligent Design" (which Chomsky describes as actively instigated in a top-down manner from the evangelist-in-chief, Bush himself) are after all a grassroots movement that is rampant within the largest and most organized chunk of the American electorate: the church-going, god-fearing, gun-clutching middle-class rednecks of degenerated WASP descent. Why can't Chomsky admit that the White House and all it's policies, foreign and domestic, are nothing but the result of the layman's gullible and politically-illiterate vote who hoist these neocon cliques and PR puppets to positions of supreme power? No matter how powerful and insidious the corporate, evangelical, or Zionist lobbies may be, they are not the ones that put G.W. Bush in office (not once mind you, but twice!).

The widespread analysis of the Iraq war within scholarly circles is that it was motivated by a belief among strategic planners that democracy can and should be exported, or otherwise forcibly implanted in potentially "subversive" countries. As Chomsky reminds us, Vietnam, Haiti, and pretty much every Latin American country have been "gratified" by democracy made in the USA via military intervention on their soil. This scholarly thesis, voiced by Chomsky (albeit with a different tone) in his "spreading virus" model is the following: Strategic planners export "democracy" because if any foreign regime were to be left with its own brand of homegrown self-governance, these parochial schools of self-determinacy would spread to neighboring zones and thereby impede the homogeneous and standardized World Order headquartered in Washington.

But then here comes the contradiction. Chomsky goes on to say that if "Iraq were exporting lettuce" instead of oil, the war would never had happened. In bringing oil into the picture, Chomsky has undermined his argument that the invasion was primarily motivated by Democracy^TM _{made in the USA} promotion. This is for me one the main conundrums I am grappling with in understanding American foreign policy: Was the Iraq war (or pretty much any other military intervention of the US for that matter) motivated by economic predation (oil) or by ideological coercion and preventive ideological vaccination (democracy export). The two concepts are mutually exclusive and the answer, if there is any, may very well be a combination of both. Given the thinly veiled interest that the USA has in Iraqi oil fields, the notion of economic predation seems much more viable (indeed, a political motivation would lead us to ask why the US has not invaded other "undemocratic" and "subversive" regimes such as Zimbabwe or Belarus). But then again this "economic predation model" does not explain what lead the US to Vietnam or Haiti (no oil to loot there) and the political explanation becomes the only alternative.

Anyways, this book, like most of Chomsky's writings, uses a proof-by-example type of reasoning and does not deal with the abstractions of political theory. The author has in fact put together and very well researched prosecution case against his own government. He essentially proved through an empirical methodology what Thomas Carothers, head of the Democracy and Law project of the Carnegie Endowment, had succinctly formulated: that the White House supports democracy if and only if it conforms to strategic and economic interests of its corporate patronage. It's an excellent book with an otherwise very misleading title. "Failed Electorate" would much better capture the essence of the problem.

Hide and Seek

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Latter-day escapism

I recently attempted to temporarily ward off the boredom of a long solitary vacation by by a visit to the movie theater. That very idea was a sign that I was desperately in need of some distraction since I'm usually not into mainstream works of fiction. Wavering between the movie posters, I finally settled for 10,000 BC knowing deep inside it was going to be a waste of money. And it indeed it was, but I appreciate the self-inflicted reminder that Hollywood productions, or rather their consumers, still haven't reached a certain level of intellectual maturity (me included in this case for the sake of completeness). The reason I chose 10,000 BC is that, me being a paleo-anything junkie, I expected to glimpse at least some "artistic" rendering of what the late Mesolithic could be like. That said, I was prudent enough to allow for some distortions of historical reality to keep the proles entertained. I was overly optimistic. Beside the computer simulations of woolly mammoth and the barren landscapes vaguely reminiscent of a the late ice age, everything else turned out to be a grotesque jumble of anthropology (Egyptian pyramids -- too early by 5000 yrs), zoology (Phorusrhacids -- too late by 2 Myrs), and climate (from ice to tropical jungle in less than 50 km). All in all, the movie shamelessly tramples the most basic concepts of chronology and certainly added to the confusion of those still wondering if Adam and Eve ever ran around with dinosaurs. To add insult to injury, the movie rehashed the usual Hollywoodian spiel of the alpha-male delivering a beautiful girl from bad [read non-European] guy. And if that weren't enough, they topped the film with a scene of resuscitation that could only be found, pardonably, in toddlers' fairy tales.

What I don't understand about 10,000 BC is that the producer may very well have made a good movie which could have been both entertaining and historically accurate. But for some reason which eludes me, he instead engaged in the sleazy enterprise of an animated pulp fiction. 10,000 BC is just an example. Had I been an assiduous moviegoer, I would probably have found a plethora of such brainless kitsch streaming from movie studios everywhere. (A notorious example that drags archeology in the dirt is Indiana Jones. Another is The Mummy from 1999 which was positively ignoble and hardly short of racist.)

Having said that, there is nothing wrong with "quality" fiction in parsimonious amounts. I simply deplore that it all too often debilitates and impoverishes our imagination in precisely the opposite way of what is expected of it. I think many fiction books can be funny (Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn) or can provide food for thought which may have timely connections with reality (George Orwell's 1984 seems to me to be the best example, or as far as movies are concerned, Das Leben der Anderen on Stasi Germany). Fortunately, every now and then, some odd movie pops out of Hollywood unscathed by the alpha-male stereotype while still recounting a self-contained beautiful story with no collateral damage to the intellect (Forrest Gump comes to mind).

I say, burn'em all tabloids and gaudy paperbacks. Our ancestors talked about fairies and gods to nurture the imagination of the young. They could not know better for they themselves did not understand the universe. We now significantly know more about the origins of life and the confines of the cosmos to be able to release the beautiful yarn of Science from the stern and unimaginative fetters of academia. It's high time to blend story-telling and scientific accuracy for indeed, reality surpasses fiction.

Human diversity

The diversity of mankind and its phenotypes of unimaginable richness have sadly turned into arcane curiosities in a world built by and around European ethnocentrism. For example, very few people know that blond phenotypes occur frequently among Australian aborigines. It is to boot heart wrenching that many of us have the initial reaction to dismiss these occurrences of blond straight hair among black people as pathological idiosyncrasies.

The Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands

The Sentinelese is the last human tribe to be completely isolated from civilization... up to this day. They are truly fascinating folk confined in an island of the Indian Ocean. They still haven't learned to make fire and their language has never been decoded. Although they have some rudimentary canoes, they are far from being seasoned seafarers and how they winded up on Andaman adds a shroud of mystery to their already obscure origins. It is however likely that they are key actors in the age-old saga of the human colonization of Australasia.
The lifestyle of these beautiful jet-black people, who number in the hundreds at most, is remarkable in that they have consistently been hostile to any foreign intrusion. Even the most friendly gestures from foreigners have been met with a hail of arrows. They have been described in a delightful book by Adam Goodheart (an excerpt can be read here). An exclusive video of one the rare encounters they've had with the exterior world is available from survival-international.org.

Our Lady of Flores

18000 years ago isn't that much on an evolutionary scale. The climate has changed, many species have disappeared, but none have really evolved. The last contender to the status of Human, the Neanderthal, was by -18000 long gone and forgotten. And so, not content to consider great apes as our relatives, we were left alone at the onset of history. Or... were we really alone?

I recently stumbled on a set of articles on Nature that left me flabbergasted. Up until 18000 years ago, there used to be a species of dwarf hominids to which an advanced level of tool-making was attributed and who may very likely have had a language of their own. This discovery was made in the southern Malay Archipelago, on the island of Flores. These little men and women of the jungle fed on dwarf elephants and giant rats. They had no chin and unusually long arms. The Indonesian folktale of the Ebu Gogo, a legendary hobbit-like peoples with hairy chests and a mumbling speech, may be the folk memory of Homo Floresiensis from a time of cohabitation between the two species of humans.

Did they too disappear at the hands of Homo Sapiens? In what way would we perceive our navels had the Lady of Flores survived to this day? The implication would have been profound since there would then be two species of humans capable of speech.