Experiments in Desultoriness

- Criticism is a word that too many people cringe at hearing, even though these themselves would rarely hesitate in commending, confusedly, the act of critical thinking. I remember reading a blog in which the editor was bemoaning the self censorship he has to constantly impose on his own writings so as to minimize the odds of receiving some unflattering comment. Not only him, but, he continues to enlighten us, this is also the reason why his ilk of free thinkers self-restrain. His rational was that when someone criticizes others’ opinions, then she is in a way infringing on their freedom of expression. You’d expect a person who had long passed adolescence to have a slightly more sophisticated conception of this freedom of expression stuff.

The one and only creative process of all the mental processes that a human mind can muster on its own is criticism of one sort or another. Actually, when someone is listed as an influence of somebody else, then what is really being meant is that the former’s opinions and contributions supplied raw material for the latter to produce her own in turn, chiefly by subjecting them to - you guessed it - criticism. Else, the influenced would have ended up only as the explicator of the influencer’s works or as her biographer.

- In a medium rife with plagiarism and regurgitated opinions, happening upon an original and nuanced opinion is a source of joy, whether or not one agrees with the writer. But the story does not usually end as happily as it starts. It is likely to occur that some commentators given to excessive compartmentalizing will begin heatedly discussing which side of two the author is really on, and what reasons are behind her paying lip service to the other!

Something within urges you to explain to them, in words of one syllable, that life resides mainly in its gradations and shades. But something else, within also, tells you that this would be of a futility equal to that of teaching an irrecoverably ponderous person how to dance ballet.

- One also stumbles upon appalling stuff while rambling online - like that is surprising news. Two memories of such occasions come rushing back to me at this thought. In one of them, a “prominent” male writer condescends to explain to our simple minds why “female bloggers” are superior. How did he go about accomplishing that feat? By stacking up nonsense that even in a state of stupor one would not, no, make that can't, buy. My gripe with that though was not the writer himself, an old fart out of step with the world, but rather with the females who were intimately and gratefully thanking him - as if he had granted each her indulgence - for saying nothing more than “Listen women, I honestly have nary a positive thing to say about you, and that is mainly because I can’t get over my patriarchal mindset. But here is a clichéd cheap trick that I learned in the past and I hope it will please you”. He then conjured an equally meaningless thing called “male bloggers”, and started thrashing them indiscriminately.

In the other occasion, a person was supposedly trying to use literature to deal the phenomenon of honor crimes its just lot. He starts the story by describing his soon-to-be-raped heroine. The girl never leaves home unless necessary. During her freshmen year she never talked to any person at the university, not even females. If you are wondering what she was doing with all that free time, then the answer is that the author does not make it clear, but you can rest assured that she partly spent it observing other girls to see who of them abided by her high standards of morals and honor, so that she makes a few select of them her friends in the coming years. Her shyness of men is deliberately made to smack of phobia or disdain. She never… easy there lad! What is it that you are trying to achieve?

It might be said that he was bending over backwards to win the conservative to his side. But that is effectively stepping backwards, retrograding. If it is not so obvious, the term “Honor Crimes” consists of two words: honor and crimes. This entails that the fight against those crimes is not a one to save lives only, but is also a struggle to emancipate, and that the two should go side by side, neither of them gaining any priority over the other at any point. The women who lost their lives on such grounds lost them not so much out of boredom on the side of the perpetrators, as out of trying to depart from the iniquitous norms of their respective societies. In this light, affirming and maintaining these norms and images become only that, affirming and maintaining. I can see the good intentions behind the guy’s attempt though.

While at it, I also have something to note about the current discourse on honor killings in the developing countries. At the moment, the pervading anti-honor-crimes rhetoric is that of brandishing the cases were the victims were raped or turned out to be “innocent”, while staying scandalously reticent on the ones where there were real sexual affairs. Here too concessions are not acceptable, because surely no one sober enough will ever endorse the act of extinguishing a soul for nothing. What is being argued over then? Thinking along these lines, it becomes apparent that any such concessions will be understood at the opposite side as a sign of their own victory, and a victory to be smug about at that. If any compromises are to be made, then maybe in the criminality of having a sexual affair, on two conditions; first that the punishment should not be sever by any sensibly humane standards - at the expense of deliberation, these are not the same standards that were judged for us to be so by some mythical being, in his mercy - and that it should befall both “aggressors”, regardless of what their loins are like. That is a concession much easier to swallow, but not indefinitely.

- A fad is an interesting thing to observe as it replaces another, waxes, wanes and then gives way to the one next, in a never ending cycle. They serve as a constant reminder of how tightly linked we are to people that we’ve never even seen or heard of before, in that same vein of the popular “six degrees of separation”. But there are more practical conclusions that they can help us reach. Here I am talking about a very specific type of fads; that of what fills the “about” sections in online profiles. A quick look at this will often prove to be a fast and granted way to judge the cogitative abilities of the profile owner.

At the moment, one of the most fashionable expressions for describing one’s self online is “citizen of the world”. Every time I read this, I find myself laughing in ridicule. Can’t these people hear the “city” in the “citizen”? It will be said that what the word conveys today is not related to cities anymore. No denying. But to make my point, we need to explain the origins of the term. It probably dates back to the age of what we now call city-states. Back then the word was used to denote a specific type of inhabitants in any given state, viz. those who were entitled to a specific set of advantages (e.g. voting, protection abroad,... etc.) over any other type of dwellers in that city. Not much has changed ever since in this usage, except that now it is more likely for a state to comprise a group of cities instead of one only.

Having made the point, it becomes evident that calling one’s self a citizen of the world is as revealing as saying that somebody is a Brazilian of the world. The great Feynman himself would be in a bind to explain to us what is being said here. Along to the rescue may come the language evolution argument in its most risible form: "language evolves and we can’t stop it from this". But that is stark devolution. And regardless of how you look at it, there is no lack of suitable words to use instead. Why not a resident? What about inhabitant? Or even the neologism of netizen? That last one does sound quite smart, given that it captures the reality of our current times. It is the internet that melted the boundaries worldwide, if that is what they are so keen on telling us.

But no. It appears that humanity had long ago took an oath on itself to always appear as stupid as it can manage, and clearly it can manage a lot.

The Hidden History of Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean

It is safe to say that the Palestinian cause has never had its own functional and independent intelligentsia or academia, as their members have always been either co-opted to endow a corrupt liberation organization, and later the authority it spawned, with validity, or assigned titular positions at some "western" institutes or NGOs to offset their hard-earned reputation for being unconditionally biased toward Israel.

But then among the few who opted, and still opt out of becoming stooges for either side, there was Edward Said, who not only bore the brunt of fending for the Palestinians and their rights in some of the most elite intellectual circles in the "west", but also was a founder of post-colonial studies, therefore creating a space for the once-colonized, non-European nations worldwide to fight back the Eurocentric mode prevailing in the fields of humanities; a final battle to round off a process of decolonization that is thought to have been less than immaculate.

The void left by Edward might be hard to fill, but some Palestinian scholars are already proving themselves worthy successors, such as this Al-Quds University Professor of the name Basem L. Ra’ad, a historian who brings his knowledge, especially of the nineteenth century travel writing and other relatively recent historical discoveries, to bear in mounting a devastating critique, in the form of a book titled "Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean", that undermines much of what is widely taken to be the genuine history of the Levant, and, therefrom, the Zionist claims to Palestine.

The book is divided into two equal parts, "Ancient Myths, Religions, And Cultures" and "Modern Myths and (De)Colonized History", but the division bears very little significance to what you might expect from the content in each, and that can be equally said about the ten chapters (eleven if you consider the epilogue to be a one) making up the book. In fact the purport of Dr. Basem's arguments is presented in a rather peculiar way, where by arbitrarily reading through any set of subsequent pages, the reader would still get something of every major thing the book has to offer, an experience that was oddly enough reminiscent of zooming in on a fractal. This was clearly manifest, for one of many examples, as the most recurring refrain in the book, which took the form of "(for more: see chapter A, chapter B, and note D on chapter C)" where A, B and C could be any seemingly unrelated chapters. 

That was quite irksome at the beginning, and I kept wondering whether this was the best way to convey the critique, which is already written in a terse, hence hard, language. However, towards the end of the first division I figured out that the style was not entirely gratuitous. Almost all of the arguments in the book were made of different combinations of four major distinct, but interdependent strands, namely; the history of the Levant as seen through solid archaeological proofs in contrast to through the traditions of the three monolithic religions, the precursors to the rise of the Zionist ideology in the "west", the Zionist movement evolution and adaptive strategies to circumvent the accruing evidence in the face of its claims' legitimacy, and the question of identity for the Palestinians, the answer to which should, according to the author, strike a delicate balance between a requirement to enable an effective resistance against a multifaceted occupation, and, simultaneously, to preclude a rise of fanatic nationalism.

Indeed, as I was going through the book I could not help thinking about the depth of the identity quandary into which the Palestinians had fallen. The complexity of the situation is captured in the text by the description of their real history as a "Palimpsest", a metaphorical mot juste. Oxforddictionaries.com defines a palimpsest as:

"noun

• a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing.

• something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form."

The complexity stems largely from the fact that the Palestinians themselves partake in and subscribe to the altered history upon which Zionism is founded; the Christians among them believe that "their arrival" with the Roman Empire some 2000 years ago grants them the status of nativity today, while the Muslim ones hold that their ownership of Palestine for 1400 years is more than enough to render annulled the Jewish proprietorship, when in all reality none of them came from anywhere else. They have always been the natives of the land, as continuity in their culture, embroidery, dialects and myths, among many others, shows, a continuity that stretches back to 3500 BC at least, i.e. the dawn of recorded human history.

The reason they identify themselves distinctively today - what the author terms self-colonizing - is that their respective ancestors simply had to convert out of duress; once Pagans, now Jews, Christians, or Muslims. Of course, there are "exogenous" - the quotes are meant to express the irony the word brims with in this context - sources to this quandary. Palestinians were always part of a larger, at-all-levels unity; the Levant (historically known as Canaan). But with newly born, out of this unity, three independent nations, each singed up to its very own blinkered notion of identity, the Palestinians are one more time at a loss to figure out their true history.

I always avoid the must-read ethos, and replace it with the highly-recommended one. However I will make an exception for this book. It is a must read for anyone who calls the Levant home, or who is simply interested in the history of the region and I can even say humanity. And here is why. In the not so distant past, Palestine was to me largely the stuff of slushy literature and mawkish orations. After I was introduced to Edward Said by a lovely person, things began to change. But soon I hit a hitch. Edward's approach had Arabism for a framework. That can be quite misleading in the contemporary discourse on the Middle East.


Equating Palestinians with Arabs is equal to saying that their existence in the "holy land" amounts to nothing more than a short historical stint. And now that the original owners of this land have returned, the squatters should pack their stuff and go back home, i.e. the Arabian Peninsula. But Dr. Basem's approach on the other hand is nothing other than the first mile of steps in the right direction; people of the East Mediterranean, what I have been referring to as the Levant thus far, and regardless of the traditions they profess to, should finally awake and understand who they truly are.

[One of the illustrations in the book Hidden Histories. A reader whose knowledge of the Middle East goes beyond crude stereotypes, might be wondering rightly what on earth a photo from so distant a region as America is doing in here. The answer is that the river in the picture is purported to be the Jordan, and those "savages" are Arabs, as "encountered" some 150 years ago! It originally appeared in a book that recounts the details of a conspicuously made up journey along the aforementioned river by a British explorer called John MacGregor. This was introduced in the book to give a taste for the environment in which Zionism started growing.]

Happy Darwin Day

It is probably a mild hyperbole saying that almost any of the several pieces of Darwin’s writings that I came across were radiating with an overwhelming intellectual presence, of the kind that intrudes into the deepest and most private corners of your mind without permission, imposing awe and eliciting recognition of his far-reaching genius, in the highest sense of both words.

This impression stays at first inexplicable. But in taking few steps back from any of these texts, considering it in a wider context, reengaging it and disengaging again, then repeating as needed, the conundrum suddenly gives way. The answer put simply, but aptly conveying the most sobering of its implications, is that a distinguished flair for writing is only second nature to profound thinkers. In a letter to his father, Darwin seems to have been well aware of this talent when he wrote "Whenever I enjoy anything, I always either look forward to writing it down, either in my log-book, or in a letter". Yet he also showed diffidence and harshly practiced self criticism when in his correspondence with others he would occasional write things like "I find it unutterably difficult to write clearly", "I am disgusted with my bad writing", or "How I could have written so badly is quite inconceivable".

Darwin's opinion notwithstanding, two of his books, in particular, stand out together as a most vivid and exhilarating incarnation of the whole spectrum of the higher order mental processes, which are: The Voyage of the Beagle, and his magnus opus, On the Origins of Species.

The Voyage of the Beagle can be thought of as a stereoscopic visualization of Charles’ trenchant faculty for perception. This can be realized by superposing a context in which the book is a travels-journal only and another where it is viewed as a herald of the theory of natural selection. In the former, this faculty expresses itself in a unique ability to efficiently winnow down a drowning range of details that could have certainly stupefied the senses of any other naturalist. But with the eventual emergence of natural selection added to the backdrop, the token of a frightening capacity to intuit becomes the salient feature of this work.

In producing The Origins, Darwin established himself as one of the finest virtuosi of the thought process to have ever existed. Throughout the text you would find him busy not only weaving line after another of cogent arguments, preempting much of the debate spurred by its publication, but you would also find him confidently pointing out where his reasoning might go awry, acknowledging his own wants of knowledge, or describing what might constitute a destructive counter-observation to his theory.

The most telling feature of this book though is its striking consistency. This might sound odd, since a consistent structure is a strict prerequisite that any explanatory effort should satisfy before it can be taken seriously. But it is that the coherence in Darwin’s arguments can’t be a mere happenstance, rather, only the product of a mental construct of the original phenomenon that undergirded his thinking in its regards. And since the conceptual scaffold for Darwin’s original formulation of the theory had passed largely unscathed into the modern evolutionary synthesis, we can easily infer the veracity of this mental model. Therefore, given the crippling lack of knowledge about heredity’s real substance and mechanisms that was characteristic of his time, one is bound to be overwhelmed while she is reading the book!

Put in another way, The Origins, just like its predecessor, can’t be fully appreciated without the advantage of hindsight. Darwin might have known close to nothing about the DNA, but with an unusually keen mind, he captured many of its features, even if in crude terms, and embedded them into the core of his theory. This is clearly the reason why out of all the different accounts of natural selection that were advanced by others in its wake, Darwinism was the only one conducive to the modern synthesis; with the rediscovery of Mendel’s genetic laws, and the successive conciliatory efforts of several bright minds, most notably those of Fisher's, the birth of neo-Darwinism was only a matter of course.

Since this is in a sense a celebration of a person, an extraordinary person, perhaps something about his idiosyncrasies is due. A strong affinity with science and nature ran like a dominating gene in Darwin's family, which spawned 10 fellows of the Royal Society, him included, and beginning with his parental grandfather, Erasmus, who himself was a theorist of evolution. The first expressions of this gene in Charles took the form of reveling in beetles collecting, and a more extreme one of his founding a club at Cambridge University for the sole purpose of consuming birds and animals "unknown to human palate" before. According to Darwin’s autobiography, this was the reason behind his father's utterly failed prediction when he once reproached him saying: "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family".

But judging by this sample of his early life, it might be justifiable to claim that if it was not for the Beagle, this day would have passed unobserved. However, this celebrated expedition was not all bless on Charles. Little after its return to England, he started suffering a mysterious debilitating illness that haunted him, with frequent respites, until his death. The nature of this affliction was never diagnosed during his life, a thing that later gave rise to much speculation about its origin.

To make things more complicated, there is enough evidence in literature to substantiate many different explanations for this illness. For instance, the proponents of a physical cause like to cite Darwin's descriptions of his potentially morbid encounters with disease vectors, such as the "Benchuca", or his granddaughter's memoir, Gwen Raverat, in which she notes that "it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill [in Charles' home]", possibly indicating an underling genetic disorder. On the other side, advocates of a psychological root have at their disposal an adequate repertoire of accounts on Darwin's antisocial and phobic behavior to draw on. But since this is not a crucial point anymore, there seems to be an emerging general consensus converging on a multifactorial origin of the ailment, a blend of physical and psychiatric etiologies.

I will end this on a somewhat different but related note. Natural selection has become hopelessly embroiled in the polemics of religion and science from its very first days, with the undesired corollary of a negative bias in its priorities as a part of a more general endeavor for progress in thought. This had unfortunately eclipsed much of its unmatched versatility, and sometimes even turned it into a tool for hectoring and suppressing any deviant thoughts or perspectives at either end of the debate. And while I find this to be quite typical of faith oriented establishments, I am surprised by the ubiquity of such practices in renowned intellectual circles.

On the bright side, we are lucky enough that some contemporary great thinkers did not let themselves be trammeled by this less important debate, and as an expected consequence, significantly furthered our understanding of how nature might be operating, Noam Chomsky and his contributions to language acquisition by children being the best example in this regard, insofar as I know.

The kernel is that a more appropriate celebration of Darwin would be to carry on with his unique philosophy of inquiry and science, rather than obsessing with how pseudoscientists might interpret, or use to the advantage of their cause, a scientific critique of his theory.

Source: www.darwinday.org (image adapted)

Amman the Morbid City

There is no denying that all modern cities are morbid to one degree or another, but morbidity is of a particularly “fine” and ancient pedigree in the case of Amman.

I had previously came across few non-academic historians who puzzled over the brisk cycle of civilization rise and fall, common to all the communities that once populated this city. Several of them propounded seismic activities as the answer to this question. But in thinking that other enduring cities (Damascus, Beirut or Jericho for instance) were subject to those same disruptive forces, this proposition is weakened if not ruled out.

A more convincing hypothesis alternatively points the finger at the bodies of water that once covered Amman's surfaces. Allured by a varied profile of water sources, from eddying rivulets to crystal clear ponds, many unsuspecting settlers met dreadful ends at contracting lethal waterborne pathogens that those waters were teeming with. This might come as a surprise to most of Amman’s contemporary denizens, but what can be even more surprising is that she was dubbed “The City of Waters” during past epochs. Such a name was equally valid during the early stages of the current cycle, i.e. 40s and 50s of the 20^th Century, echoes of which still reverberate in the modern Ammani vernacular, attesting to this fact.

In current times, despite being a parched stretch of land, Amman still wields the weapon of water against her inhabitants as skilfully as she always did, albeit in different ways. Few days ago I was wandering outside my home when I noticed that the pain I had in my limbs due to a blowing cold wind was not the usual pins and needles type, but had a rather smouldering quality to it. Suspecting this was due to low relative humidity, I checked a weather forecast application expecting a reading of about 20%. But I was taken aback on learning it was a nadir of 12%. It is not the type of pain that bothers me, nor the fact that the skin around my left hand knuckles is more shrivelled than my mother’s octogenarian aunt’s, not that much. It is only the cracked bleeding skin I get if I fail to apply a moisturizing lotion the night before; a problem that I know for sure plagues many other fellow Ammanis.

The city gets even more creative with that favourite weapon of her. She also capitalizes on the fact that no water means no or very little greenery. According to evolutionary psychology, in assessing the hostility or hospitality of a certain environment, humans are most sensitive to its state of vegetation. If that was scant, some mechanism, so to speak, ensues, which in turn induces the secretion of stress hormones in the perceivers. This produces a feeling of angst that serves the purpose of urging them to move away in a bid for survival. However, since the business of survival in the Amman of our times is not related to its colors anymore, this mechanism joins the long list of misplaced, backfiring evolutionary endowments. I think this partly explains the stressful modes of interaction dominating in this city. But there is more to that than having to deal with pissed off people all day, and night, long. Prolonged stress also deprives our bodily repair mechanisms and immunity system of energy essential for their proper functioning, leaving our bodies debilitated and exposed before all kinds of sickening things, animate and inanimate.

Still, no matter how ruthless the rendition has been so far, outdoor Amman is a merciful mother when compared to its indoor manifestation. This conviction I formed during a couple of courses I took on the subject of built environment, and a subsequent short lived career in the same field. Under the rubric “Sick Building Syndrome” among some others, I learned about the havoc an ill-designed enclosed space can inflict on the well being of those who occupy it over lengthy periods. And through practicing I was introduced to the “standards” of Jordan’s construction contractors and designers.

I remember the troubles I used to get into for pointing out the necessity of sticking to the ASHRAE standards in designing indoor environments. Almost all of the seniors scoffed at the idea, and the few who did not take it as an insult to their “long careers that began before I was even born”, bantered that those standards were only for “the pansy people of the first world”, which I think was their rather churlish way of referring to the relatively pristine health states that citizens of the developed countries usually enjoy. Ironically enough though, if the ASHRAE standards were to be modified accordingly, then they should be made tighter and stricter for people living in developing countries, since they are more prone to illness and are of less robust constitutions, as research on socioeconomic pressures is already showing.

I also remember laying my hands on the HVAC schematics – pronounced “h vak” and is shorthand for heating ventilation and air conditioning – of a major mall in Amman. What I saw was so horrible that I immediately took a decision to never go there again. Since I can’t name it, due to some ethical obligations, I will only hint that it is probably the largest one in Amman, and few minutes into entering it you are likely to feel giddy and start yawning, both because of hypoxia. A caveat is due here. The presence or absences of these signs alone is not adequate to judge if the place was ill or well designed. If air filters were not replaced per the right recommendations, for an example, they become a major source of contamination, and the first sign will most likely be a sore throat the day following exposure.

To be fair though, malls are not to be worried about as much as homes, since it seems to me that the concept of a comfortable house environment in Jordan never evolved from a rudimentary one of warm during winters, and cool in summers. There is no reckoning of humidity regulation and ventilation, despite the fact that a built space without proper air renewal and circulation can be 1000 times more polluted than the outdoors. Almost everything inside a typical compartment, including walls, generates unwholesome volatile grains that are likely to precipitate in your lungs for good, and this is probably responsible for the varied assortment of pulmonary disorders rife in Jordan.

It would be interesting to calculate the economic burden of Amman’s inappropriately designed spaces. Naturally this should include both the energy and health bills. But since this post is about morbidity, I find it more appropriate to focus on the later. However the dearth of data on the subject makes it impossible to even draw a sound conjecture, but by thinking in terms of a well defined phenomenon, such as seasonal allergies, we might come close to appreciating the fiscal strains that Jordan faces as a consequence.

From personal experience I know that a reasonable treatment for pollen allergy costs around 35 JOD per person (actually a bottle of efficient nasal spray costs around 48 JOD). Assuming 3% of the total population is afflicted with this ailment and seeks treatment, the annual cost stands at 6.3 million JOD. This type of allergy probably comprises no more than a fraction of the total aggregate of diseases, respiratory and others, caused by contaminated air. But it at least helps us imagine the total taxation on Jordan’s GDP due to our local engineers unprofessionalism.

For all of what preceded, I sometimes think that since Beirut is a variant of Aphrodite's & Adonis' daughter's name, Amman should have been the name of Eris' and Apollo's daughter, never born since they never copulated in the first place, and Amman never fall under a pure Greek hegemony for that matter. Still, I find this dark and malevolent image more appealing than that of a bride in a white wedding dress.

As We Wade Through a Morass of Modernity

As is his wont, a friend surprised me with a most mundane remark and not before long deduced from it an intuitive and practical generalization, which he put forward in a reasonably eloquent manner.

Some of his work colleagues, he recently discovered, read books! Ergo, he continued, each human being has limited mental resources that are either squandered on frivolous acts, such as gossiping and the likes, or harnessed effectively to climb the career ladder at rapid rates. Regardless of the narrow and compartmentalizing context in which he decided to express his generalization, a thing I still find to be interesting in its own right, it is hard to fully disagree.

But not a one to miss out on any chance to conduct an irony, life, as if sentient, led both of us later through a chain of germane antecedents to contend over the value of a certain TED video. At one end, the talk was highly applauded, while on the other it was dismissed as a derivative oratory, based on unfounded claims and propped by weak arguments of the much more solid work of Jim Collins et al. When the latter position was adequately substantiated, my friend, trying to secure a draw, retorted that I still can't deny the educative value of TED Talks as a whole. To his dismay, I disagreed, but not in the categorical sense of the word.

TED’s philosophy of unfolding the principles underling a given technology in a simple and endearing way is entertaining at its climax, benign at worst. But substitute abstract ideas and success stories for technologies, and the platform starts pandering, more often than not, to the educative morality of oversimplification and entertaining. Alas, ubiquitous in our days, when it should be loathed for the mental obtuseness it encourages. - I find this moment most appropriate to point out that the matter at hand is much more deeper and trickier than it might have sounded thus far, or at least this is how I feel. At any rate, I find it only behooving to approach the crux deviously, while keeping my fingers crossed that the path I chose will depict a sufficiently alarming portion of the real problem.

Historically, the notion of educating the masses can be traced back to the Enlightenment period, as intellectuals back then had unwavering faith in the emancipating capacities of logic and, by extension, thinking. But perhaps they simultaneously held that issuing from the arms of serfdom must be the concerned individual’s effort only. As such, access to all sorts of knowledge was made as easy as it could be, but it was regarded as solely the less privileged job to come to grips with tomes of inscrutable nature, on the premise that liberty is most appreciated when it is hard-earned. Alternatively, it could be that scholars of the time were still too overawed by their perceived sanctity of knowledge to have had "peddled it". Either way, the ideals were too quixotic to have yielded any fruits or any immediate general ones at least.

Humanity would have to wait until the first twenty years of the previous century had passed for the first successful movement of knowledge humanization to take place, starting in the Anglo-American world. – There might be similar successful movements anterior to this one, but the purpose here is not writing history proper, or drawing on its authority, rather the historical context is meant to serve the function of a backbone to the argument. – Professors would finally deign, or knuckle under the economic pressures of the period, to write in intelligible manner. Yet the readers were still expected to exert some mental effort and meet the writer somewhere along the way, even if it was the writer who covered the longest distance to this meeting point.

Thus a profusion of books that try to recapitulate vast branches of knowledge or systems of thought poured (e.g. the now classic H. G. Wells' "The Outline of History"). Professors were only too aware of the inevitability of errors in any account written in a synoptic vein, which led many of them to criticize the project from early on. But some maintained the arguably tenable argument that dividends were being repaid in whetting the average intellect of the public and in nurturing their faculty for criticism and discerning, viz., far from reinforcing parochial penchants with scholasticism, the purpose of education is to liberate people from such tendencies; hence the term "Liberal Education".

However, this form began falling out of fashion toward the end of the thirties, which might be a corollary of its very success, for after all a secular project’s ultimate achievement is attained in rendering itself obsolete. The respective trends from this point onward are harder to demarcate with precision, for any number of reasons, but generally speaking, knowledge was no longer the rarefied domain of experts, in more than just one way.

One aspect of this was most clearly exemplified in the counterculture of the 60s and the subsequent cultural wars, which at the educational level yielded a long list of concessions from the side of universities, the most triumphal of which was introducing studies that had been scandalously suppressed until those times (e.g. studies of gender, equity, environment, cultures... et cetera). That makes this period's enduring contribution to humanity, aside from evincing what kind of effects a liberal education can have on the masses, a new realization of the term humanization of knowledge.

In juxtaposition with this cursory historical tour, our time seems to be extremely dichotomous. Radical scrutinized educative initiatives and open access high quality knowledge dissemination projects are proliferating ceaselessly (e.g. the OpenCourseWare concept, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Cornell's CyberTower and if I am allowed to add something from outside the cyber realm, the extremely affordable Very Short Introduction series by Oxford, to name only a few), carrying through the trend of bridging the chasm between the academic and the public spheres. 

In parallel, education seems to be constantly degenerating in the minds of the public to nothing more than a set of trivially simplified formulas for success, which is reflected in how enamored they are becoming with quotes, and which is, the success that is, being narrowly associated with the amelioration of economic status. But if we suppose that “something” used to prick the conscience of people from time to time in the past, prodding them to grab a worthy book and read it, halting this degeneration as result. Could it be that the contemporary unprecedented flow of information we are exposed to is masquerading as education, and in the process neutralizing this “something”?

If so, a litmus test might be needed then. Could this be that true education is never a thing done in passing, or as an activity of a primary entertaining value, but is rather hard and time consuming, albeit rewarding and elating in the end? Fogyish, if you'd like, but definitely on the right track.

Relativity is Intact, Our Pride is in Jeopardy

Few Fridays ago, early in the morning, I received an SMS from my science apotheosizing dear friend, conveying news to the effect that the light speed barrier was shattered at the CERN. That was very interesting, but insufficient; was it, at a more precise level, the discovery of a superluminal particle, or accelerating a particle across the infamous "c" threshold? A little bit later I learned it was a possibility of the former and not the latter.

That does not defy Relativity. Yet most of the articles I read, written on popular news sites, in a most critical time to the understanding of the public, were claiming the nullifying of Einstein's theory in case the reported results were corroborated. So much for science journalism due diligence and responsibility.

The theory of Relativity does not strictly impose an upper speed limit on motion. It sets, however, a speed barrier that is not allowed to be crossed by particles with velocities on either of its sides. This means that a particle found to be always traveling at speeds higher than that of light is not, according to the theory, allowed to slow down to speeds lower than the speed of light, and vice versa.

Actually the tachyon was conceptually born as soon as Special Relativity's foundations were laid, as a theoretically predicted class of particles that might be found to exhibit superluminal velocities. But it was quickly and deliberately pushed under the table of scientific discourse because of the dilemma such particles pose for the very foundations of human consciousness, for they break away with causality. Such tenuous grounds for dismissal. But things, it seems, can get political even in physics.

To eschew the abstruse nature of proper technical language, and to express this in a more intelligible and exciting manner, superluminal particles open the possibility, at least in theory, for communications across time. An example that gets the point across effectively, even though it might not be fully sound in concept, would be downloading a file from the internet using faster than light signals. You hit "download" at this precise moment, and you got the file downloaded few hours ago. Reading this, any human being should hit a mental impasse.

What temporal standpoint should we adopt as our departure point in internalizing what happened? The second when we clicked on "download"? Or the past, when the file was already downloaded? Either way we will never comprehend such a reality. Why should I download a file when all out of a sudden I had it on my computer, brushing aside the concomitant astonishment? Yet according to the theory of concern here, you will do just that, like it or not, as under its laws the totality of reality is absolutely invariant, regardless of how you observe it. This gives you a hint about the basic motivation behind Physic's, may be partial, relinquishment of its child tachyon little after it was born.

Even though this denial of conclusions belies the spirit of discovery, that which fuels the endeavor of natural sciences, it is, by and large, expected. Modern science wise, we are only coming of age. Still dumbfounded by how it had radicalized our understanding of the universe in such a short period of time, and made too clumsy by our lack of wisdom and humility to handle with sufficient care the precarious hope it promises of furthering this comprehension. Fortunately though, the much older and wiser philosophy is there for our counsel and guidance.

A very satisfactory explanation of the aforementioned impasse was discussed some 250 years ago. A philosopher called Kant - personally, he is one intellectual I grit my teeth on the thought that I can't read any of his treatise in their original language of German - proposing to transcend the irreconcilability of two ajar schools of thought, stated reality as completely independent from the human consciousness. From that point, he proceeds to describe a set of what is known in philosophy's own parlance as a prior concepts of knowledge, which, according to Kant, are inescapably inherent in the structure of the human mind.

These a prior concepts are to our cerebration, more or less, what breathing is to our existence; both are subliminal, but essential to their relative processes. It is less than often that their existence crosses the threshold of our consciousness yet we can't conceive of a meaningful sentence that does not imply a sense of time and place, or the space and time a prior. Just as much, we can't construct even the most simple of construable statements without embedding into them some form of cause and effect, generally expressed through a subject and an object. This we call the causality a prior, and it is what pertains the most of these a prior concepts to the scope of this article.

Facing a reality where an effect precedes a cause, and Kant would nod on this, humans are somewhat like a cat in front of a highly sophisticated contraption. The cat gazes hard at the weird device trying to tease out a mate, a shelter, a predator, a prey, or a rolling ball of threads. Other higher aspects or functions of the mechanism are of no interest to the cat, simply because for it they don't exist.

But that is more indicative of the cat's inferiority than being a derogation to the splendors of reality, das ding an sich.

[Update: March, 16, 2012, a CERN press release reported that another experiment on a set of neutrinos found them to be travelling at speeds consistent with that of light. Almost a month before, a press release indicated the possibility that the superluminal speeds announced last September had originated in a couple of faulty components in the detector setup. However, with the testaments of more than four experiments, the adjudication is expected to be heard this coming May.]

The Type of Honor Crimes That Goes Unreported

There is a subtler aspect of our Jordanian notion of honor, through which it proves yet another time how distorted it is, and through which also, and most importantly, it seems to be seeking an extension in its operating brief to include fraying the very fabric of the society itself beyond that which it is most notorious for, i.e. wrecking havoc on personal and familial spheres.

It seems that gender based susceptibility to "desecrating one's own family's honor" is not the only bias. Faith, apparently, is also a major deciding factor in how prone a person is to committing such "desecrating conducts" as well as being "insensitive to them". This aspect revealed itself clearly, and in its most abhorrent form, when I heard some saying things like "she is feigning chastity when she is a [Christian surname]? She is a Christian!". In other cases I heard some recasting this, which seems to stand as an invariable fact in these ignorant heads, in the less pungent terms of personal liberty, terms, nevertheless, that are still to my knowledge suffused with negative connotations for the vast majority of Jordanians.

I perceive this to be an undercurrent flowing in the society, and not merely a few isolated cases. From hearing women correlating bare shoulders with an increased probability in the girl "flaunting" them being a Christine, to a school teacher whom I vividly recall describing the mixed sex Church organized Christian youth excursions as orgy parties, never mind the fact that he was lecturing a coed class, to some other related incidents the frequency of which precludes anomaly as an explanation, I think calling this an undercurrent is justified.

This does not imply an impending religious strife in Jordan, for none exists, or looms in the horizon for that matter, nor does it negate the state of our society as an epitome of coexistence. But this is to spotlight an unfavorable tendency that might amount from its current latent state to become a generator of some sort of unrest when social structures shift in favor of a malignant fissiparousness, and there is much to learn from the contemporary history of Mount Lebanon in this regard.

Numerous sects and faiths had harmoniously abutted on the slopes of this mountain for many centuries, but all of this was set asunder overnight and a ferocious civil war ensued. A chance, it is likely, had presented itself for some pernicious undercurrents to surface and intensify, and history took a violent course, regardless of how peaceful it was hitherto. This is not limited to Lebanon. Such patterns can be discerned to varying degrees wherever you look at in history, with a rate of recurrence that tempts one to view peaceful periods as nothing more than times when conflicts are not feasible. But despite the stench of nihilism that this view reeks of, I believe it goads us to work as hard as we can on quashing any such undercurrents and tendencies when we are allotted the time and chance to.

On another level I also reckon that the tendency to debase the different other, who shares the same space in a given context, using the most circulated social currency of value, this being honor in Jordan, is a universal phenomenon. It might be a consequence of a default reflection that we are born with as humans, acquiring its content as we grow, and it seems that our society constantly fails at educating or eliminating it. On a second thought, it is nurtured and heavily drawn upon in conceiving of other biases. In times of growing hostility against Iran in Jordan, for instance, you are likely to come across someone falsely, yet boldly claiming that for a Shi'ite it is of a great honor to give any of his female relatives as a concubine for a visiting Mullah.

There is also another rich and telling fold in all of this. In a conservative society where any form of sexual expression is heavily repressed, save for inadequate few, people will still find ways to go around such circumscriptions, and do so by means that are detrimental to the well being of the society. Contempt of the different becomes prurient, and the hatred and violence it begets will be all the more so, if allowed the needed space to grow. The aforementioned teacher description is obviously an interplay of hidden desires and a rooted false sense of the inferiority of a certain other. If not rooted, then at least it came in handy for a convoluted and mischievous expression or venting of fantasies. Ironically, this repression purports, brazenly, protecting us from the decadence it induces in the first place.

Personally, I think that any effective way to obviate the unfriendly consequences that this social phenomenon might surprise Jordan with in the future, should incorporate putting an end to many of the social sensibilities, which are besetting any action aiming at social change; just like a field of mines, each waiting to be stepped on, no matter how lightly, to explode and cripple the efforts. In this particular case, this may translate to discussing such aspects of our society openly, and introducing courses and classes that provide a neutral point of view on the different cultural constituents of it, away from the ones threatening, with a god's raging fire, those who don't abide by their notions. This is directed to Jordanians from all stripes without discriminating.