Anil's Reflections

2014-08-27T06:47:00.003-07:00

We will honor Anil K. Malhotra tomorrow - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - at the Pumphrey Funeral Home, 7557 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, MD with a viewing starting at 9AM, with a funeral service following at 9:45AM.

Happiness

2014-08-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

I have always wondered if there is more to happiness than we realize. I see that the most creative people seem to be those who are profoundly unhappy or have lives that lead them to despair! So are happiness and creativeness incompatible?

Aristotle claimed that happiness is always the ultimate purpose of life. Aristotle’s argument is that if you ask anyone “why do you do what you do?”, and you keep asking the question “yes, but why do you do X” to their answer X, then ultimately they will say “because it makes me happy”. It is the only purpose that appears to be an end in itself.

As far as happiness goes, most people can be categorized as follows:

1. Unhappy (small number of people)

2. Mildly Content (majority of people)

3. Extreme Happiness or Ecstasy (small number of people)

Research shows that for “Mildly Content” people their happiness is relatively stable over time. But people who experience extreme happiness are more likely in a years time to be unhappy. Intensely happy people often have a roller coaster ride to happiness with intense highs and intense lows.

Thus one can argue that the first secret to happiness is not to pursue intense happiness but to pursue mild contentment. Advertising and the media want to promote intense happy experiences to get our attention. They are encouraging us to be extremely happy and are ultimately causing our unhappiness.

There are two main types of happiness

1. Hedonistic based happiness (type 1 happiness). For example the feeling you get after a glass of wine, or after watching a great movie. Its relatively short lived and roughly lasts about 15 minutes.

2. Satisfaction/Accomplishment based happiness. (type 2 happiness). For example looking back over your accomplishments and getting that feeling of satisfaction. e.g. People who devote their lives to a cause. It is a more long lasting type of happiness in general.

The second secret to happiness is to pursue experiential happiness and also accomplishment based happiness at the same time”. Happiness has a lot to do with who we compare ourselves with. Some research at the Barcelona Olympic games found that bronze medal winners were more happy on average than the silver medal winners. It is explained by who the medal winners were comparing themselves to. Bronze medal winners compare themselves with the people who didn’t get medals. Whereas the silver medal winners were comparing themselves with the gold winners. Therefore the bronze winners felt happier than the silver winners. Similarly a lot of advertising is directed at getting us to compare our possessions with the possessions of others e.g. Your neighbor has a Porsche but you don’. The “close shave” focuses your thinking into “what might of been” thinking i.e. a comparison. Psychologists called this “counter factual thinking”. It’s is another form of comparison to others.

The third secret to happiness is “beware and mindful of your ‘what might have been’ thinking as it will impact your happiness”. Imagination is one of the things that probably separates us from animals e.g. we can think “what might have been”. Imagination is something we probably inherited as the result of evolution, because happiness motivates us to do all the things that ensure our survival. It’s a reward mechanism for survival behaviors that have an evolutionary purpose e.g. eating, sex, competing with others for survival. It also explains why there is a point to “unhappiness”. Anxiety, fear and other “unhappy” emotions actually made a lot of evolutionary sense in the past when we were also prey. Evolution effectively says that the continuation of life itself is the purpose of life. So both happiness and unhappiness are both useful emotions to ensure life prevails.

But in recent years there are some who argue that we are now suffering from an excess of it. Coming out as “depressed” has become all the rage—among cricketers, footballers, even surfers. This spread of depression is partly a side-effect of our addiction to happiness. Conversely, understanding why we are so miserable should liberate us from being too miserable about it. We can feel good about feeling bad. In other words, we need a decent philosophy of failure to save everyone from thinking what failures they are.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud argues that there are three reasons we are so miserable and they all have something to do with disappointed expectations. His enemies of happiness are: (a) religion, especially Christianity for pushing the idea of heaven; (b) 18th-century voyages of discovery—for raising unrealistic expectations of heaven on earth; (c) finally (so self-critically!) psychoanalysis itself, which seems to dangle in front of you the notion that everything can be fixed. One could add another: (d) the pharmaceutical industry (and illicit chemical cocktails similarly).

The notion that happiness is actually attainable belongs to the second half of the 18th century. Previously there had been a general consensus that no one can be called happy until he carries his happiness down to the grave in peace. Paradiso was strictly for the pages of Dante. In Greenland, for example, the Greenlanders bought into Christianity on account of its persuasive description of pain and suffering. The vale of tears was real. Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde (1771) stresses two things. First, that the Tahitians live a life of wellbeing, and don’t have to work too hard either. Second, that the women—and to some extent the men too—throw themselves willingly at French sailors, which adds significantly to the happiness of French sailors. There are of course darker strands to the narrative—Bougainville mentions at least one murder, and hints that in fact sexual bliss may actually have been obtained in exchange for a few nails or other useful items. But nevertheless, one can say that Bougainville was concerned less with the pursuit of happiness itself, than with the fact it had finally been located and lived out in the southern hemisphere. It was just a question of transporting the south back into the north. These traveller’s tales of transcendence had a powerful impact on subsequent thinkers. Freud, for one. His theory of the id and the ego transposes the 18th century map of the world, specifically the north/south divide, onto the map of the human psyche. The “southern” id was having all the fun—the pleasure principle—while the more northerly ego was reining in the hedonistic savage self with a good dose of the “reality principle.”

Charles Fourier, the great utopian philosopher who provided the blueprint for the communist society of the future, looked forward to unfaltering happiness and an age of “harmony” in the “phalanstery,” with mass adultery, public orgies and a sexual AA call-out service for anyone who is still really desperate.

Albert Camus was equally alert to the tyranny of happiness. In his early work, The Myth of Sisyphus, he satirises the figure of Don Juan and the concept of the orgy, but in the very last line of the essay he asks us to imagine that Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock up the mountain, is “happy.” Conversely, he suggests (in his Carnets) that “we have to fall in love if only to provide an alibi for the random despair we were going to feel anyway”’ Whether you play football or go swimming or rock-rolling—or even write, something always goes wrong. Or, as Sartre, his long-time comrade and adversary, put it: “everything always goes wrong” (tout est voué à l’échec).

From Voltaire to Wittgenstein, the point of philosophy has been to pop the balloon of excessive optimism. “Many happy returns!” said his landlady to Wittgenstein on his birthday as he lay dying of cancer. “No there aren’t,” he replied tersely. Therefore, angst, despair, nausea: welcome! Get thee behind me Church of perpetual wellbeing (the “Wellness Syndrome,” as Carl Cederström puts it).

We all want to be happy and spend a lot of time and energy to avoid the pain that stems from sadness and suffering. Go to any book shop and you will see hundreds of books all dedicated to helping us to avoid pain and suffering. There are also thousands of blogs and gurus providing just as many ways to “true happiness”. But you ever stopped to think about the cost of happiness, the most important being the loss of creativity. As Eric Wilson points out: “Creating doesn’t make us unhappy; unhappiness makes us creative.”

In his book “Against Happiness”, he argues that without sadness there would no creativity, inventiveness, imagination, or philosophic thought. Without melancholy society would lose it’s soul as people would not have the desire to look beyond their “happy state” to find new meaning in life in new experiences and as yet un-imagined existential states. Professor Wilson argues that we need to embrace melancholia as a necessary and healthy state of life.

There are hundreds of examples of exceptionally creative melancholics throughout time– Abraham Lincoln, Cary Grant, Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill to name a few. Many writers and artists created their greatest works during times of melancholy and depression. For example singer Joni Mitchell once said: “Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it”. Recognizing the darker parts of herself was essential to recognizing the good.

Psychologist Carl Jung studied an ancient Taoist work called “The Secret of the Golden Flower” and concluded that two things that often appear to be opposites may actually be “independent manifestations of the same principle.” For Jung, the underlying principle was the unconscious.

· Ying and Yang

· Darkness and Light

· Female and Male

To Jung melancholy and sadness often lead to greater understanding, and are a necessary catalyst for insight and self-awareness. There can be no “shaping of identity” without melancholy.

· Doubt breeds knowledge

· Brooding breeds enlightenment

· Fear breeds strength

· Worry breeds action

· Melancholy breeds creativity

Melancholia allows us to see true beauty. As Keats points out “Pain is the muse of beauty.” Without it we would not be able to differentiate it from what is merely pretty.

A lot of our aversion to pain and suffering stems from our fear of death. Connecting to our melancholy helps us to recognize that everything is temporary and fleeting. Instead of escaping our fear of death we should confront it and explore it. By doing so we can more appreciate life’s beauty, brilliance and possibility. We become energized to live more fully and creatively. It brings us back in touch with reality, but with a open mind of questioning, introspection, and invention.

In conclusion, constant happiness could be argued to be artificial and delusional. To truly experience life we must embrace the dualities of Life’s natural cycles of both darkness and light.

This was the last blog written by Anil K. Malhotra. Our husband and father expired on August 22, 2014.

On his behalf we thank all of his readers for their support and encouragement.

-- the Malhotra family

A review of menus

2014-08-14T10:30:00.004-07:00

Jen Doll describes the present fad of food descriptions and status anxiety:

"In 1919 the Hotel Pennsylvania, in New York, opened its first restaurant, with offerings notable for their descriptive simplicity: “lamb,” “potatoes: boiled,” and so on. Nearly 100 years later, the Statler Grill, one of the hotel’s current restaurants, offers updated takes, from a “lollipop Colorado lamb chop” to “buttered mashed potatoes (Idaho potatoes with butter & a touch of cream, whipped to perfection).”

You needn’t be a linguist to note changes in the language of menus, but Stanford’s Dan Jurafsky has written a book doing just that. In The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, Jurafsky describes how he and some colleagues analyzed a database of 6,500 restaurant menus describing 650,000 dishes from across the U.S. Among their findings: fancy restaurants, not surprisingly, use fancier—and longer—words than cheaper restaurants do (think accompaniments and decaffeinated coffee, not sides and decaf). Jurafsky writes that “every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 69 cents in the price of that dish.” Compared with inexpensive restaurants, the expensive ones are “three times less likely to talk about the diner’s choice” (your way, etc.) and “seven times more likely to talk about the chef’s choice.”

Lower-priced restaurants, meanwhile, rely on “linguistic fillers”: subjective words like delicious, flaky, and fluffy. These are the empty calories of menus, less indicative of flavor than of low prices. Cheaper establishments also use terms like ripe and fresh, which Jurafsky calls “status anxiety” words. Thomas Keller’s Per Se, after all, would never use fresh—that much is taken for granted—but Subway would. Per Se does, however, engage in the trendy habit of adding provenance to descriptions of ingredients (Island Creek oysters, Frog Hollow’s peaches). According to Jurafsky, very expensive restaurants “mention the origins of the food more than 15 times as often as inexpensive restaurants.”

Not that the signature elements of a fancy menu are likely to stay exclusive. Food terms—like food trends—have a way of traveling full circle, from rarefied to mainstream to passé and back again. Take the word macaroni, which rich Americans originally borrowed from Italy. In 1900, Jurafsky explains, it was found mainly on high-end menus but “slowly became more and more common,” ending up the purview of all-night diners. Until, that is, top chefs began reclaiming mac and cheese, mixing in delicacies like truffles, or, in the case of Keller’s deconstructed version, lobster.

Already, provenance-oriented menu language is spreading outward from the finer restaurants to the Subways and Applebee’s of the world. The first franchise to take provenance seriously was Chipotle, says the food developer Barb Stuckey. (“They’ve always menued Niman Ranch pork.”) Now some McDonald’s burgers are served not on “buns” but on “artisan rolls,” and TGI Fridays boasts of “vine-ripened tomatoes.”
In turn, high-end food purveyors may head in a different direction. “As this stuff trickles down, the rich need a way to be different again,” says Jurafsky, who notes the burgeoning menu trend of extreme minimalism, seen at the Michelin-starred San Francisco spot Saison, where the set price starts at $248 and the menu comes after the meal, as a souvenir. In some ways, this is “a return to 200 years ago, when you’d say, ‘Give me dinner,’ and they’d just give you what they’d cooked,” Jurafsky says.

Imagine what this could do for the speed of the drive-through lane."

Organizing in the future - some thoughts

2014-08-13T14:35:00.001-07:00

In the late 1970s, we were thrilled by the ability to send and receive messages through the revolutionary medium then known as “electronic mail.” At about the same time we wrote books and messages on a computer and stored them electronically rather than on cards or papers stuffed into filing cabinets.

With each new year and each new Moore’s Law–enabled boost in processor speed, transmission rates, storage capacity, and other elements of the information infrastructure, ever more data has come at us, ever faster. Appointments, assignments, driving directions—everything has become part of the expanding cloud of “personal information” necessary for our work and home lives.

Fortunately year by year tools for coping with the onslaught have also been improving—but more slowly. Electronic calendars, online collaboration systems, search engines and archives, and the converging technologies that make up the smartphone revolution did something, but never quite enough, to put people in control of information. “I sometimes wonder whether, with all this data, people have just given up,” said Mitch Kapor, a personal-software pioneer. “They may just have resigned themselves to living in this infinite sea of information.” Kapor first became famous as the founder of the software company Lotus and the designer of the spreadsheet application Lotus 1-2-3, and also the creator of the brilliant early personal-information program Lotus Agenda.

Individually and collectively, the experts comments boiled down to: We’ve been through the worst. The next stage in information technology will put people back in control, or closer to it, they all foretold. More specifically:

1. The beginning of an end to the e‑mail nightmare

E-mail is indispensable, and unendurable. That is because it does not scale. Every message, represents a task—something to read, a query to answer, a meeting to schedule, a bill to pay, a request to fulfill or deny. Thus senders can generate more tasks than recipients could possibly perform. Clearly the reader’s time is free to the sender, which is a huge market inefficiency.

Dyson says that some market mechanism will reset the balance. One way or another, senders will pay a premium for recipients’ time and attention—as they did in the pre-e‑mail days, by having to request appointments or make sales calls or, at the very least, pay for postage. Phil Libin says improved filtering systems are already solving the problem. “I have 100,000 e‑mails I haven’t answered,” he said. “I know that I can’t even open 90 percent of the e‑mail I get. Am I missing something important I should see? Sure, but rarely.” The remaining challenge is to reduce “the error rate”—that is, the share of important e‑mails that he does miss. And this, Libin said, should be “an easily solvable” problem, with the help of systems that learn whom he wants to hear from, and whom he doesn’t.

2. The spread of anticipatory intelligence

Computers work best when you’re least aware that they’re working at all. Modern cars, for instance, contain the processing power of dozens of early mainframe computers. But most of the time they discreetly scan for problems and alert the driver only if they detect something—engine trouble, poor traction on slippery roads, low gas—the driver might need to address. Someday, car computers might even be powerful enough to detect texting at the wheel on the basis of irregularities in driving patterns.

There are already counterparts in the personal-information world, as simple as smartphones that shift time zones as you travel or that adjust GPS routings as traffic problems emerge. “Computing will become a lot more anticipatory,” Libin says. “You won’t have to search for things. They will come up almost magically. The periods in the day during which you’re exposed to some sort of digital intelligence will increase until there is no time when you’re not exposed to it, in little bursts, as necessary.”

3. Better ways of getting information in, and out

“We still live in a world where if you’re serious about doing work, you have to get from your phone to a keyboard,” Kapor said. “We’re just beginning to get usable software for a small screen.”

He and Libin emphasized that jokes about Apple’s current, fallible Siri system have kept people from realizing how close voice-recognition technology is to being truly usable, and how fast the remaining gap is likely to close. “There will seem to be relatively little progress until all of a sudden it just works, and that time is coming soon,” Libin said.

Kapor expects that the spoken word will also be more and more important in conveying information in the other direction, from computer to user. “There has been a lot made of Google Glass, but they may be dealing with the wrong human sense,” he said. “The ubiquitous device may not be something that you see but something that whispers in your ear—a kind of reading glass for the ear that tells you what you need to know.”

4. The big picture at a glance, via map or dashboard

David Allen’s software goal, which he is now working toward with partners, is a “trusted orientation map” of the obligations, possibilities, information, and reminders relevant to each person at each moment of the day. A quick look would reveal the main tasks or challenges and then, Allen says, “I could zoom in or out to whatever level of detail or macro view I want.”

Mark Bernstein, who has applied some of Allen’s principles in his Tinderbox software, emphasizes the importance of combining big-picture and detailed views. “I think this is David Allen’s core lesson,” he wrote. “You don’t want a constant litany of the thousands of things you want to get done, but you need to be able to look over the whole list from time to time. Finding ways to make your information visible without letting it get underfoot is the big challenge.”

Are such challenges too great? The world is full of sorrows, but these people sounded confident that in their own corner of the world, prospects were bright.

“It is well known in cognitive science that if you are pessimistic, you sound ‘smarter,’ ” says Libin,“That’s why people are more likely to listen to and repeat pessimistic assessments. But pessimism about the effects of technology is mainly a failure of imagination. We can see all of the problems but can’t imagine the new possibilities.

“I am not being naive,” Libin, who was born in Russia, said. “But the long arc of technology bends toward the more awesome.”

A Brief Chronicle of Personal Organization

History

2600 b.c.: Ancient Egyptians develop the first practical calendar, marking festivals and agricultural events.

1760s: The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus invents the index card.

1880s: Filing cabinets become a popular way of storing documents.

1971: The first e-mail is sent (unfortunately, its contents have been forgotten).

1993: The term PDA is coined to describe Apple’s Newton MessagePad.

2006: The total volume of paper mail sent through the U.S. Postal Service peaks.

Prediction

2024: Personal devices feature voice-recognition technology that actually works.

The worlds oldest religion

2014-08-13T14:35:00.000-07:00

They are scared of lettuce. They abhor pumpkins. They practise maybe the oldest religion in the world. And now, after at least 6,000 years, they are finally being exterminated in Iraq.

So who are these Yazidi?

The Yazidi are a Kurdish ethno-religious community, representing an ancient religion that is linked to Zoroastrianism. They live primarily in the Nineveh Province of northern Iraq. Additional communities in Armenia, Georgia and Syria have been in decline since the 1990s, their members having emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany. The Yazidi believe in God as creator of the world, which he placed under the care of seven holy beings or angels, the chief of whom is Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel.

Yazidism is much older than Islam, and much older than Christianity. It is also deeply peculiar. The Yazidi honour sacred trees. Women must not cut their hair. Marriage is forbidden in April. They avoid wearing dark blue because it is "too holy".

They are divided strictly into castes, who cannot marry each other. The upper castes are polygamous. Anyone of the faith who marries a non-Yazidi risks ostracism, or worse. Yazidism is syncretistic: it combines elements of many faiths. Like Hindus, they believe in reincarnation. Like ancient Mithraists, they sacrifice bulls. They practise baptism, like Christians. When they pray, they face the sun – like Zoroastrians. There are also strong links with Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.

Then there is the devil worship: arguably, the Yazidi worship what Christians or Muslims might call “Satan”, though the Yazidi call him “Melek Taus”, and he appears in the form of a peacock angel.

Why might Melek Taus be “the devil”? For a start, the Yazidi believe the peacock angel led a rebellion in heaven: clearly echoing the story of Lucifer, cast into Hell by the Christian God. Also, the very word "Melek" is cognate with "Moloch", the name of a Biblical demon – who demanded human sacrifice.

The avian imagery of Melek Taus likewise indicates a demonic aspect. The Yazidi come from the ancient lands of Sumeria and Assyria, in modern-day Turkey, Iraq and Kurdistan. Sumerian gods were often cruel, and equipped with beaks and wings. Birdlike. Three thousand years ago the Assyrians worshipped flying demons, spirits of the desert wind. One was the scaly-winged demon in The Exorcist: Pazuzu.

The Yazidi reverence for birds – and snakes – also appears to be extremely old. Excavations at ancient Catalhoyuk, in Turkey, show that the people there revered bird-gods as long ago as 7000BC. Even older is Gobekli Tepe, a megalithic site near Sanliurfa, in Kurdish Turkey (Sanliurfa was once a stronghold of Yazidism). The extraordinary temple of Gobekli Tepe boasts carvings of winged birdmen, and images of buzzards and serpents.

Taking all this evidence into account, a fair guess is that Yazidism is a vastly ancient form of bird-worship, that could date back 6,000 years o r more. If this is right, it means that Yazidism is therefore the Ur-religion, the mother ship of Middle Eastern faiths, and it is us who have incorporated Yazidi myths and beliefs into our religions, of Christianity and Islam and Judaism.

The 40,000 Iraqis stranded on a mountain and facing possible genocide at the hands of surrounding Islamic State fighters are the last surviving community in their ancestral homeland of the Yazidis, long misunderstood by the outside world as "Devil-worshippers".

One of the most persecuted minorities in the Middle East, the Yazidis in fact find even the mention of the word "Satan" profoundly offensive, and have kept their ancient religion alive despite centuries of oppression.

The Yazidis mark themselves out as different. They never wear the colour blue. They are not allowed to eat lettuce. Many of the men wear their hair in long plaits that make them resemble nothing so much as Asterix and Obelix.

They believe one of their holy books, the Black Book, was stolen by the British in colonial times and is being kept somewhere in London.

But in their home town of Sinjar, from where they have now fled to the mountains above, they were welcoming in a way that belied their fearsome reputation as Satanists.

For ordinary Iraqis, they are bogeymen to frighten children with. But for religious extremists through the centuries, they have been Devil-worshippers to be slaughtered.

The misidentification came about because the Yazidis worship a fallen angel, the Malek Tawwus, or Peacock Angel. But, unlike Lucifer, the Yazidis' fallen angel was forgiven by God and restored to heaven.

Their religion is not just an offshoot of Christianity or Islam. They do not believe in heaven or hell, but in reincarnation, which they describe as the soul "changing its clothes".

They have kept their religion alive through the Talkers, men who are taught the entire text of their missing holy book by memory as children, and who in turn pass it on to their own sons.

The Yazidis once lived in a wide area, across Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Georgia and Armenia. But they have been driven from their homelands, and most have fled to Australia, Canada and Germany. Against all the odds, Iraq is the one place in the Middle East where a sizeable community remains.

They have been persecuted both for their religious beliefs, and for their ethnicity. In Turkey, they faced double discrimination as both non-Muslims and Kurds, and were forced to carry identity cards that listed their religion as "XXX". In Georgia and Armenia, they fell foul of nationalist movements after the fall of the Soviets.

The Yazidis speak Kurdish – they claim theirs is the ancient Kurdish religion – but they have a troubled history with their Kurdish neighbours too.

Their traditions make them highly visible as a separate community. The Yazidis do not practise arranged marriage, like other communities in the region. They have a formal system of elopement, where a man must "kidnap" his bride. If the woman is willing, the parents have to accept the match.

There are darker sides to the Yazidis. They have a tradition of killing any of their members who leave the religion, and 2007 it was reported that Du'a Khalil Aswad, a Yazidi woman, was stoned to death for converting to Islam and marrying a Muslim man.

The Yazidis say they have survived 72 genocides. Now there are fears the last community of them in the Middle East is facing another. And now, in the dusty cities of northern Iraq, Yazidism is finally dying. Moloch has returned to devour the gentle and peaceful Yazidi people, in the form of hateful, virulent, sadistic Islamism. Put it another way, the devil has revealed a sense of irony, even as the rest of us sit back, and passively watch the most ancient culture in the world being erased from human history.

The just war in Gaza?

2014-08-07T17:17:00.005-07:00

This article by Jeff McMahan raises issues that all of us should be asking ourselves.

"Is Israel fighting a just war in Gaza"

"Thus far in the war in Gaza, more than 1800 Palestinians have been killed, most of them apparently civilians. Sixty three Israeli soldiers, two Israeli civilians, and one foreign worker in Israel have also been killed." he writes. " The great disparity between the casualties on the two sides raises the question of whether Israeli military action has been disproportionate. This question remains important even if the war is now coming to an end."

Despite the bombings of two Palestinian schools that the UN had designated civilian sanctuaries, let us assume that Israeli forces have not been attacking civilians intentionally. It is possible that the killing of Palestinian civilians is a foreseeable but the unintended side effect of defensive military action has been disproportionate in relation to the aim of protecting Israeli civilians and soldiers from attacks by Palestinian fighters.

To preempt misunderstanding, let us accept that Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel are wrong, as are its storing weapons in schools, private homes, and mosques, its locating entrances to tunnels in the same places, and its firing missiles from civilian areas in a way that attracts Israeli retaliatory fire to those areas. But he believes that Palestinian resistance to Israel’s unjust quarantine of Gaza and unjust occupation and settlement of the West Bank ought, for both moral and prudential reasons, is nonviolent in character.

One might think that it requires no argument to show that the killing of Palestinian civilians has been disproportionate, since no Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas in 2013 or 2014 before Israel began bombing Gaza earlier this summer in response to the killing—not, apparently, under the direct orders of Hamas—of three Israeli teenagers. But proportionality in defence does not depend on a comparison between harms one has suffered in the past and harms one causes in response. That is something different: proportionality in reprisal. Proportionality in defence is instead a relation between harms one causes and harms one seeks to avert in the future. And granting that Israel’s war has been defensive rather than retaliatory or punitive in its aims and that Israel’s main aims have been to prevent further rocket attacks from Gaza and to destroy the tunnels that have enabled Palestinian fighters to enter Israel to kill or abduct Israeli soldiers, the issue of proportionality still remains.

In the effort to achieve these aims, Israeli policy has been to give near-absolute priority to the protection of its own civilians and soldiers over the avoidance of killing Palestinian civilians. The permissibility of giving priority to the protection of one’s own soldiers (“force protection”) was advocated in articles by certain Israeli just-war theorists in the middle of the last decade and these seem to have influenced the conduct of the invasion of Gaza in 2008-2009, which in turn set the precedent for the way the current invasion is being conducted. Thus the New York Times reported on 1st August that, as Israeli forces have advanced, “they have pummeled neighborhoods with heavy artillery, which analysts said was militarily necessary to safeguard soldiers. … ‘In a dense urban environment, you need to use aggressive force to save soldiers’ lives,’ [Amos] Harel, the military affairs analyst, said.”

There are thus two questions:

(1) Are the killings of Palestinian civilians proportionate in relation to the aim of protecting Israeli civilians?

(2) Are the killings of Palestinian civilians proportionate in relation to the aim of protecting Israeli soldiers?

These questions are distinct, for it is arguable that the standard of proportionality is more demanding in the second case.

It is true that the government of Israel has a duty to protect its civilian citizens, the vast majority of whom are not legitimate targets for Hamas fighters. Also the vast majority of Palestinians are not legitimate targets Israeli forces. The main issue is whether the killing of Palestinian civilians as a side effect is proportionate in relation to the threat to Israeli civilians that the invasion has been intended to eliminate.

" One can begin to understand the nature of proportionality by considering the morality of individual self-defence. Suppose your life is threatened by a culpable aggressor but your only effective means of defence will kill an innocent bystander as a side effect. Most philosophers believe that it would be impermissible to save yourself at the cost of killing this innocent person. This is mainly because the moral reason not to kill a person is stronger than the reason to save a person. It is therefore generally impermissible to kill one person to save another, even if the killing would be unintended. This is particularly clear in the case of third party defence of another person. Suppose, for example, that you are unable to defend yourself against the culpable aggressor but that an unrelated third party can defend you, though only at the cost of killing the innocent bystander. Virtually everyone agrees that it would be wrong for the third party to do this."

Some philosophers have argued, however, that self-defence is different from defence by a third party, in that when it is you who are under threat, you have what might be called a “self-preference permission” to give your life some degree of priority over that of another equally innocent person. Hence you may save your life by killing the innocent bystander as a side effect, even though a third party would not be permitted to save you at that cost. Even so, the priority that you are entitled to give to your own life is limited. While it may be permissible for you to kill one innocent bystander as a side effect of saving your life, it is probably not permissible to kill two, and certainly impermissible to kill three.

Next consider what third parties are permitted to do in defence of others. In general, a third party may cause no more harm to innocent bystanders in the course of defending another person than that person would be permitted to cause in defending himself. This is certainly true of third parties who are unrelated to the person they defend, and it is also true even of most third parties who are specially related to that person. If, for example, you hire a bodyguard to protect you, he would not be permitted to cause more harm to innocent bystanders in defending you than you would be permitted to cause them in defending yourself.

Some philosophers who claim that individuals are permitted to give a certain degree of priority to their own life also contend that this permission can be extended to certain others as well. These philosophers suggest, for example, that you can transfer your self-preference permission to your bodyguard, so that it becomes permissible for him to give your life the same priority that you are entitled to give it. But this is controversial. If individuals have a self-preference permission but it does not extend to others, it is then in general impermissible for third parties to cause as much harm to bystanders in defending others as those others would be permitted to cause in their own defence.

With these claims about the killing of innocent bystanders in mind, return now to the issue of proportionality in Gaza. The assumptions that are most favourable to the view that Israeli action has been proportionate are that individuals have a self-preference permission and that that permission extends to the soldiers who defend them. According to the first assumption, an Israeli civilian would be permitted to kill one or perhaps even two innocent bystanders if that were an unavoidable side effect of defending herself against a lethal threat. According to the second assumption, an Israeli soldier would be permitted to do the same—though no more—in the civilian’s defence.

" Suppose for the sake of argument that of the 1800 Palestinians killed so far by Israeli soldiers, a thousand have been civilian bystanders—probably a significant underestimate. Given the two assumptions just stated, these killings have been proportionate only if they were unavoidable side effects of action necessary to save at least 500 Israeli civilians. If we were also to take into account the number of Palestinians that have been seriously injured—which greatly exceeds the number that have been killed—the number of Israeli civilians saved would have to be even greater for the killings and injuries to be proportionate. Yet it is extremely unlikely that the invasion has prevented more than 500 Israeli civilians from being killed. Hamas’s rockets are in general small and inaccurate, while Israel’s anti-missile system is highly effective, which explains why virtually all of the several thousand rockets launched by Hamas have either been intercepted or landed in uninhabited areas. The tunnels are nothing more than means of individual entry into Israeli territory—an instance of the sort of physical vulnerability shared by every state that borders on another."

"Next consider the pair of assumptions I suggested are actually more plausible—namely, that individuals have no “self-preference” permission to kill an innocent bystander as a side effect of self-defence, and that third parties may cause no more harm to innocent bystanders in defending others than those others would be permitted to cause in their own defence. Given these assumptions, it would not be permissible for Israeli soldiers to kill two Palestinian civilians, or even a single Palestinian civilian, as a side effect of preventing the killing of one Israeli civilian. It might, of course, be permissible for them to kill a Palestinian civilian if that were an unavoidable side effect of saving some larger number of Israeli civilians. But assuming that the duty not to kill is stronger than the duty to save, the number of Israeli civilians that would be saved must presumably be greater than two. Suppose, for example, that a police officer could prevent two innocent people from being killed only by acting in a way that would kill one innocent bystander as a side effect. It is doubtful that it would be permissible for him to do this.But let us again make an assumption favourable to the proportionality of the Israeli military action—namely, that it is permissible for Israeli soldiers to kill one Palestinian civilian if that is an unavoidable side effect of saving two or more Israeli civilians. Again assuming that 1000 of the Palestinians killed by Israeli forces have been civilians, the invasion must have prevented the killing of over 2000 Israeli civilians to have been proportionate in the harm it has inflicted on Palestinian civilians thus far. For the reasons given earlier, that is highly implausible."

Some defenders of the invasion deny that those whom Israeli forces are killing are innocent bystanders and claim instead that they are legitimate targets. Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner, for example, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, recently addressed a cheering crowd of 10,000 people outside the UN with these words:

“When you are part of an election process that asks for a terrorist organisation which proclaims, in word and in deed, that their primary objective is to destroy their neighbouring country and not to build schools or commerce or jobs, you are complicit and you are not a civilian casualty. When you fail to heed the pamphlets, the phone calls, the text messages, and the warning shots [from the Israeli army] telling you to evacuate a building, and instead use yourself as a shield and use your innocent children as a shield, you are not collateral damage. When you ignore those very moral warnings and align yourself with Hamas, you are a combatant.”

It is reassuring when men of different faiths agree. In his 2002 “Letter to America,” Osama bin Laden also affirmed that voting is a basis of liability to be killed. He suggested that Americans might challenge the claim that they have done something that might

“justify aggression against civilians. [But] the American people are the ones who choose their government [and] have the ability and the choice to refuse the policies of the Government and even to change it if they want. … This is why the American people cannot be innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.”

The difference is that Kirshner’s view goes beyond bin Laden’s in recognising more numerous grounds for finding people morally liable to be killed. On his view, for example, an elderly Palestinian becomes liable to be killed if she chooses to be unable to afford a mobile phone, or chooses to be too ill to leave home, and thus dares Israeli forces to kill her by failing to heed their very moral warning that they are about to blow up her house.

No doubt there are some Palestinian civilians who have actively aided Hamas in smuggling in and storing rockets, or in building tunnels into Israel. If these particular civilians are harmed as a side effect during the effort to destroy the rockets and tunnels, they may have no legitimate complaint. But the vast majority of civilians in Gaza are neither terrorists nor terrorist supporters. They are normal human beings who would like to live normal lives, but are caught between the IDF, who will not let them leave Gaza, and Hamas militants, who use them as shields. Significantly fewer than half the Gazans who voted in 2006 voted for Hamas, and many of those did so for reasons of domestic policy, as Fatah and the PLO had become notoriously corrupt and incompetent. Approximately half the residents of Gaza are children, who are ineligible to vote.

"For defensive killing to be permissible" argues Jeff, "it must be not only proportionate but also necessary, in the sense that there is no equally effective but less harmful way of achieving the defensive aim. In the present case, the question is whether the killings in Gaza are necessary to protect Israeli civilians from Hamas. The war is necessary for defence only if Israel continues to quarantine the citizens of Gaza and to occupy and maintain settlements in the West Bank. If Israel were to abandon the aim of controlling territories to which it has no right, and to respect the right of Palestinians to a fully self-determining life in the lands allotted to them in the UN settlement of 1948, those who now fire rockets into Israel and conduct raids on Israeli forces would lose what sway they now have over the Palestinian people. Ordinary Palestinians want what other people want: to live with dignity, free from domination and oppression by others, to be secure and self-determining, and thus to have the opportunity to flourish in their own way."

Modesty the virtue none reveres

2014-08-07T17:07:00.000-07:00

When one is universally lauded for a well deserved achievement, it is fascinating to observe how people close to you react. Surprisingly not all of them join the chorus of adulation and praise! Some say "don't be boastful"or "be quiet so that others won't hate your good fortune. Others are genuinely conflicted. A lifetime of modesty has left them unable to revel in the success of their near and dear ones. There are some who believe in keeping " a low profile" lest someone knows of their good fortune and profits from it. Others are innately modest and so shun the limelight. But is modesty really such a virtue?

The nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt declared modesty “the lowest of the virtues.” “He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others,” he declared. If you have exceptional talent, why should you hide your successes merely to not give others an inferiority complex, I ask.

Exceptional demonstrations of false modesty is far more pervasive than its true counterpart, even if genuine modesty is a virtue best practiced by the genuinely talented.

Modesty might appear to be on the decline because of its association with another supposedly decaying art: manners. Modesty is central to the cultivation of good manners, according to the inimitable Judith Martin, a.k.a. “Miss Manners.” Modesty, writes Miss Manners, “requires decently covering one’s midriff and one’s achievements when not among intimates who find them exciting.”

But modesty need not mean prudishness, either in attire or behavior. In her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even the radical Mary Wollstonecraft deemed modesty the “sacred offspring of sensibility and reason.” What might a reasonable contemporary approach to modesty be? Consider which is more extreme – a culture that nurtures modesty and restraint, or one that glorifies hedonistic and immodest excess?

Traditionally, modesty is a virtue that has posed particular challenges for women – at least for women who flout its directives. The “gentleness, modesty, and sweetness” of Fanny Price’s character in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is judged “so essential a part of every woman’s worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent.”

Modesty is not limited to bodily propriety, however. It can encompass our approach to learning, it can inform our exercise of power, and it can even influence our understanding of artistic achievement. Genuine modesty springs from an honest assessment of the limits of one’s own knowledge, and in no field is such an awareness more important than in science, according to Robert Hazen. In delineating what we can and cannot know about the natural world, Hazen argues, science offers a useful proving ground for modesty. Scientists who ignore modesty’s boundaries fall victim to that virtue’s opposite: hubris.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued that to be effective in the world, nations need “a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom, and power available to us” and “a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities."

In academia and elsewhere, the contrast between the ideal of modesty and a reality that is frequently immodest is often stark; it is the difference between Thoreau’s humble abode on Walden Pond and Trump Tower; the contrast between the acclaim given the dedicated public servant and that offered to the debauched celebrity.

We can locate no simple recipe for reclaiming modesty for modern times. But perhaps the modest explorations of virtue in here will help close the distance between those ideals we hope to live by and the everyday world that unceasingly challenges them.

Modesty may be a virtue but an excess of it may well be a vice. So rejoice in your good fortune when it befalls you, modesty be damned!

Finally, a rabbi speaks out

2014-08-06T13:38:00.002-07:00

Two issues dominate the headlines nowadays - the republican cries for impeachment of president Obama and deportation of children and the incessant pounding of civilians in Gaza by the Israelis. In one case, one can take some action, by contributing to the democratic side but in the other one can only pray for demographics and morality to bring them to some peaceful resolution of the conflict. The actions of both parties are the actions of a bully using his superior power to inflict damage on the weak under the guise of some overarching objectives - the defence of the constitution in one case and the defense of the Jewish state in the other. But both arguments are specious unfortunately encouraged by pacifist onlookers. It reminds one of the schoolyard bully who always preyed on the weak and helpless. How did we deal with these bullies? Because we did deal with them, eventually. One way we did not deal with them was by averting our eyes and walking away. We need to confront these bullying tendencies in the national and international arena by not keeping silent. One wonders why the rabbis and the high priests of Christianity do not speak out. To his credit Pope Francis has spoken out eloquently but what about the chief rabbi of Israel or the archbishop of Christianity? Where are they and where do they stand? For it is at these times that we seek some moral leadership from them. If they are silent now perhaps then they have forfeited all claims to any superior wisdom or moral leadership.

As I was writing this, my attention was drawn to a piece by Michael Lerner, a rabbi which is both eloquent and heartfelt. May many more be encouraged by these two religious leaders to come out forthrightly in these perilous times.

He writes :" Israel has broken my heart: I’m a rabbi in mourning for a Judaism being murdered by Israel. My belief began to wane in the past eight years when ISRAEL, faced with a Palestinian Authority that promoted nonviolence and sought reconciliation and peace, ignored the Saudi Arabian-led peace initiative that would have granted Israel the recognition that it had long sought, an end to hostilities, and a recognized place in the Middle East, refused toSTOP its expansion of settlements in the West Bank and imposed an economically crushing blockade on Gaza. Even Hamas, whose hateful charter called for Israel’s destruction, had decided to accept the reality of Israel’s existence, and while unable to embrace its “right” to exist, nevertheless agreed to reconcile with the Palestinian Authority and in that context live within the terms that the PA would negotiate with Israel.

Yet far from embracing this new possibility for peace, the Israeli government used that as its reason to break off the peace negotiations, and then, in an unbelievably cynical move, let the brutal and disgusting kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens (by a rogue element in Hamas that itself was trying to undermine the reconciliation-with-Israel factions of Hamas by creating new fears in Israel) become the pretext for a wild assault on West BANKcivilians, arresting hundreds of Hamas sympathizers, and escalating drone attacks on Hamas operatives inside Gaza. When Hamas responded by starting to send its (guaranteed to be ineffective and hence merely symbolic in light of Israel’s Iron Shield) missiles toward civilian targets in Israel, the Netanyahu government used that as its excuse to launch a brutal assault on Gaza.

But it is the brutality of that assault that finally has broken me into tears and heartbreak. While claiming that it is only interested in uprooting tunnels that could be used to attack Israel, the IDF has engaged in the same criminal behavior that the world condemns in other struggles: the intentional targeting of civilians (the same crime that Hamas has been engaged in over the years, which correctly has earned it the label as a terrorist organization). Using the excuse that Hamas is using civilians as “human shields” and placing its war material in civilian apartments, Israel has managed to kill MORE than 1,000 civilians and wounded thousands. The stories that have emerged from eyewitness accounts of hundreds of children being killed by Israel’s indiscriminate destructiveness, the shelling of United Nations schools and public hospitals, and finally the destruction of Gaza’s water and electricity, guaranteeing deaths from typhoid and other diseases as well as widespread hunger among the million and a half Gazans most of whom have had nothing to do with Hamas, highlights to the world an Israel that is rivaling some of the most oppressive and brutal regimes in the contemporary world.

In my book “Embracing Israel/Palestine” I have argued that both Israelis and Palestinians are victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. I have a great deal of compassion for both peoples, particularly for my own Jewish people who have gone through traumas that have inevitably distorted future generations. Those traumas don’t exonerate Israel’s behavior or that of Hamas, but they are relevant for those of us seeking a path to social healing and transformation.

Yet that healing is impossible until those who are victims of PTSD are willing to work on overcoming it.

And this is precisely where the American Jewish community and Jews around the world have taken a turn that is disastrous, by turning the Israeli nation state into “the Jewish state” and making Israel into an idol to be worshiped rather than a political entity like any other political entity, with strengths and deep flaws. Despairing of spiritual salvation after GodFAILED to show up and save us from the Holocaust, increasing numbers of Jews have abandoned the religion of compassion and identification with the most oppressed that was championed by our biblical prophets, and instead come to worship power and to rejoice in Israel’s ability to become the most militarily powerful state in the Middle East. If a Jew today goes into any synagogue in the U.S. or around the world and says, “I don’t believe in God or Torah and I don’t follow the commandments,” most will still welcome you in and urge you to become involved. But say, “I don’t support the State of Israel,” and you are likely to be labeled a “self-hating Jew” or anti-Semite, scorned and dismissed. As Aaron said of the Golden Calf in the Desert, “These are your Gods, O Israel.”

The worship of the state makes it necessary for Jews to turn Judaism into an auxiliary of ultra-nationalist blindness. Every act of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people is seen as sanctioned by God. Each Sabbath Jews in synagogues around the world are offered prayers for the well-being of the State of Israel but not for our Arab cousins. The very suggestion that we should be praying for the Palestinian people’s welfare is seen as heresy and proof of being “self-hating Jews.”

The worship of power is precisely what Judaism came into being to challenge. We were the slaves, the powerless, and though the Torah talks of God using a strong arm to redeem the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, it simultaneously insists, over and over again, that when Jews go into their promised land in Canaan (not Palestine) they must “love the stranger/the Other,” have one law for the stranger and for the native born, and warns “do not oppress the stranger/the Other.” Remember, Torah reminds us, “that you were strangers/the Other in the land of Egypt” and “you know the heart of the stranger.” Later sources in Judaism even insist that a person without compassion who claims to be Jewish cannot be considered Jewish. A spirit of generosity is so integral to Torah consciousness that when Jews are told to let the land lie fallow once every seven years (the societal-wide Sabbatical Year), they must allow that which grows spontaneously from past plantings be shared with the Other/the stranger.

The Jews are not unique in this. The basic reality is that most of humanity has always heard a voice inside themselves telling them that the best path to security and safety is to love others and show generosity, and a counter voice that tells us that the only path to security is domination and control over others. This struggle between the voice of fear and the voice of love, the voice of domination/power-over and the voice of compassion, empathy and generosity, have played out throughout history and shape contemporary political debates around the world. Because almost every single one of us hears both voices, we are often torn between them, oscillating in our communal policies and our personal behavior between these two worldviews and ways of engaging others. As the competitive and me-first ethos of the capitalist marketplace has grown increasingly powerful and increasingly reflected in the culture and worldviews of the contemporary era, more and more people bring the worldview of fear, domination and manipulation of others into personal lives, teaching people that the rationality of the marketplace with its injunction to see other human beings primarily in terms of how they can serve our own needs and as instrumental for our own purposes, rather than as being deserving of care and respect just for who they are and not for what they can deliver for us, this ethos has weakened friendships and created the instability in family life that the right has so effectively manipulated (a theme I develop most fully in reporting in my book “The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right” on my years as a psychotherapist and principal investigator of an NIMH study of stress and the psychodynamics of daily life in Western societies).

No wonder that Jews and Judaism have had these conflicting streams within our religion as well. In the 2,000 years of relative powerlessness when Jews were the oppressed minorities of the Western and Islamic societies, the validation of images of a powerful God who could fight for the oppressed Jews was a powerful psychological boon to offset the potential internalizing of the demonization that we faced from the majority cultures. But now when Jews enjoy military power in Israel and economic and political power in the U.S. and to some extent in many other Western societies, one would have expected that the theme of love and generosity, always a major voice even in a Jewish people that were being brutalized, would now emerge as the dominant theme of the Judaism of the 21st century.

No wonder, then, that I’m heartbroken to see the Judaism of love and compassion being dismissed as “unrealistic” by so many of my fellow Jews and fellow rabbis. Wasn’t the central message of Torah that the world was ruled by a force that made possible the transformation from “that which is” to “that which can and should be” and wasn’t our task to teach the world that nothing was fixed, that even the mountains could skip like young rams and the seas could flee from before the triumph of justice in the world? Instead of this hopeful message, too many of the rabbis and rabbinical institutions are preaching a Judaism that hopes more in the Israeli army than in the capacity of human beings (including Palestinians), all created in the image of God and hence capable of transformation, to once again become embodiments of love and generosity. They scoff at the possibility that we atTIKKUN and our Network of Spiritual Progressives have been preaching (not only for the Middle East, but for the U.S. as well) that if we act from a loving and generous place, that the icebergs of anger and hate (some of which our behavior helped to create) can melt away and people’s hearts can once again turn toward love and justice for all. In an America that at this very moment has its president calling for sending tens of thousands of children refugees back to the countries they risked their lives to escape, in an America that refused to provide Medicare for All, in an America that serves the interests of its richest 1 percent while largely ignoring the needs of its large working middle class, these ideas may sound naively utopian. But for Judaism, belief in God was precisely a belief that love and justice could and should prevail, and that our task is to embody that message in our communities and promote that message to the world.

It is this love, compassion, justice and peace-oriented Judaism that the State of Israel is murdering. The worshipers of Israel have fallen into a deep cynicism about the possibility of the world that the prophets called for in which nations shall not lift up the sword against each other and they will no longer learn war, and everyone will live in peace. True, that world is not already here, but the Jewish people’s task was to teach people that this world could be brought into being, and that each step we take is either a step toward that world or a step away from it. The Israel worshipers are running away from the world, making it far less possible, and then call their behavior Judaism and Israel “the Jewish state.”

No wonder, then, that I mourn for the Judaism of love and kindness, peace and generosity that Israel worshipers dismiss as utopian fantasy. To my fellow Jews, I issue the following invitation: use Tisha B’av (the traditional fast-day mourning the destruction of Jewish life in the past, and starting Monday night Aug. 4 till dark Aug. 5) to mourn for the Judaism of love and generosity that is being murdered by Israel and its worshipers around the world, the same kind of idol-worshipers who, pretending to be Jewish but actually assimilated into the world of power, helped destroy our previous two Jewish commonwealths and our temples of the past. We may have to renew our Judaism by creating a Liberatory, Emancipatory, Transformative Love-Oriented Judaism outside the synagogues and traditional institutions, because inside the existing Jewish community the best we can do is repeat what the Jewish exiles in Babylonia said in Psalm 137, “How can we sing the songs of the Transformative Power YHVH in a strange land?” And let us this year turn Yom Kippur into a time of repentance for the sins of our people who have given Israel a blank check and full permission to be brutal in the name of Judaism and the Jewish people (even as we celebrate those Jews with the courage to publicly critique Israel in a loving but stern way).

For our non-Jewish allies, the following plea: Do not let the organized Jewish community intimidate you with charges that any criticism of Israel’s brutality toward the Palestinian people proves that you are anti-Semites. Stop allowing your very justified guilt at the history of oppression your ancestors enacted on Jews to be the reason you fail to speak out vigorously against the current immoral policies of the State of Israel. The way to become real friends of the Jewish people is to side with those Jews who are trying to get Israel back on track toward its highest values, knowing full well that there is no future for a Jewish state surrounded by a billion Muslims except through friendship and cooperation. The temporary alliance of brutal dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and various Arab emirates that give Israel support against Hamas will ultimately collapse, but the memory of humiliation at the hands of the State of Israel will not, and Israel’s current policies will endanger Jews both in the Middle East and around the world for many decades after the people of Israel have regained their senses. Real friends don’t let their friends pursue a self-destructive path, so it’s time for you too to speak up and to support those of us in the Jewish world who are champions of peace and justice, and who will not be silent in the face of the destruction of Judaism.

And that gets to my last point. Younger Jews, like many of their non-Jewish peers, are becoming increasingly alienated from Israel and from the Judaism that too many Jews claim to be the foundation of this supposedly Jewish state. They see Israel as what Judaism is in practice, not knowing how very opposite its policies are to the traditional worldviews most Jews have embraced through the years. It is these coming generations of young people whose parents claimed to be Jewish but celebrated the power of the current State of Israel and never bothered to critique it when it was acting immorally, as it is today in Gaza, who will leave Judaism in droves, making it all the more the province of the Israel-worshipers with their persistent denial of the God of love and justice and their embrace of a God of vengeance and hate. I won’t blame them for that choice, but I wish they knew that there is a different strand of Judaism that has been the major strand for much of Jewish history, and that it needs their active engagement in order to reestablish it as the 21st century continuation of the Jewish tradition. That I have to go to non-Jewish sources to seek to have this message printed is a further testimony to how much there is to mourn over the dying body of the Judaism of love, pleading for Jews who privately feel the way I do to come out of their closets and help us rebuild the Jewish world in which the tikkun (healing and transformation) needed becomes the first agenda item.

Above all else, I grieve for all the unnecessary suffering on this planet, including the Israeli victims of terrorism, the Palestinian victims of Israeli terror and repression, the victims of America’s misguided wars from Vietnam through Afghanistan and Iraq and the apparently endless war on terrorism, the victims of so many other struggles around the world, and the less visible but real victims of a global capitalist order in which according to the U.N. some 8,000-10,000 children under the age of 5 die every day from malnutrition or diseases related to malnutrition. And yet I affirm that there is still the possibility of a different kind of world, if only enough of us would believe in it and then work together to create it.

Rabbi MICHAEL LERNER is editor of Tikkun Magazine, chair of the interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives, www.spiritualprogressives.org and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without Walls in San Francisco and Berkeley, California.

Why being a goofball may be good for you!!

2014-07-25T11:25:00.002-07:00

THE ADULT HUMAN is a serious animal: a worker, a thinker, a problem solver. He or she strives for focus and efficiency, resisting frivolity in the name of being a grown-up and staying on task.

This may not always be true. If it were, there probably wouldn’t be Ping-Pong tables popping up in America’s trendiest office buildings or karaoke nights in downtown Boston. And there probably wouldn’t be so many funny dog videos on Facebook or such a premium placed in social situations on making other people laugh.

The fact is, even the most responsible adults occasionally indulge in what can only be described as playfulness: pursuing delight in all its forms, engaging in friendly, low-stakes competition, and investing precious resources in amusing themselves and others. While it’s easy enough to say from personal experience that we do this stuff because it’s fun, scientists who specialize in the psychology of play have only recently started getting a grip on what it is that makes otherwise self-possessed, mature adults inclined toward fooling around and being silly—and what long-term benefits they get out of it.

“Adults are playful—that’s a fact,” said René Proyer, a psychologist at the University of Zurich who has written more than a dozen papers on adult playfulness over the past three years. “[But] psychologists haven’t thought much about this, probably because it wasn’t deemed worthy enough.”

What Proyer and the other researchers are discovering is that playfulness, as a personality trait, is not only complex but consequential. People who exhibit high levels of playfulness—those who are predisposed to being spontaneous, outgoing, creative, fun-loving, and lighthearted—appear to be better at coping with stress, more likely to report leading active lifestyles, and more likely to succeed academically. According to a group of researchers at Pennsylvania State University, playfulness makes both men and women more attractive to the opposite sex.

But wait: Before you run to the store to buy a yo-yo and a pair of roller skates in hopes of nailing your next exam or upping your romantic game, you should know that the whole endeavor of researching playfulness in adults involves a conundrum. As British researchers Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin argue in their 2013 book, “Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation,” it’s crucial to distinguish between engaging in behavior that is technically play—battling it out in an intense game of tennis, for instance, or wasting time on an addictive iPhone game—and doing it in a way that is actually playful, which means being “cheerful, frisky, frolicsome, good-natured, joyous, merry, rollicking, spirited, sprightly [and/or] vivacious.”

“Playfulness is something even laypeople can recognize when they see it,” said Xiangyou Sharon Shen, a research consultant with a PhD in leisure studies from Penn State who has developed a psychological instrument to determine a person’s predisposition toward playfulness. “But playfulness research is still in its infancy, in that there’s a lot of confusion and disagreement surrounding what playfulness even is, and how to measure it.”

It might seem ironic, even counterproductive, to try to nail down and analyze something as ineffable as “playfulness” as though it were a dead insect on a pin. But as researchers learn more about how it fits into the structure of human personality, it raises the hope that we can not only define playfulness scientifically, but actually teach ourselves to incorporate it into our lives, long after we’ve put our toys away.

Some of history’s great minds, including Charles Darwin, who was curious about the mechanics of tickling, and Sigmund Freud, who wrote about the role of play in emotional development,have been attracted with playfulness. With few exceptions, however, psychologists interested in play have focused on children rather than adults. Over the years, a wealth of research has suggested that child’s play is an important part of growing up—that, among other things, it helps kids “practice” for the real world by prompting them to solve problems and deal with emotions they might encounter later in life.

Playfulness in adults did not become a significant area of research until recently—perhaps because play tends to become less central as people get older. One of the first researchers to break with this tradition was Mary Ann Glynn, now a professor at Boston College, published a paper in the early 1990s that described adult playfulness as “a predisposition to define and engage in activities in a nonserious or fanciful manner to increase enjoyment.” Based on a series of lab experiments and surveys, Glynn and Webster concluded that playfulness in adults was linked to “innovative attitudes” and “intrinsic motivational orientation,” meaning playful people were more likely to do things without regard for their practical purpose.

There are now four separate psychological “scales” designed to measure people’s inclination toward playful thinking and behavior. Multiple conferences have been held to discuss the value of play in the past several years. There is even a 10-hour documentary TV series being developed called “Now Playing,” about “the vital importance of play to our happiness, well-being, and the future of life.”

One of the most interesting findings so far is that playful people perform better academically. “The more playful the students were, the better the grades were,” he said. Another intriguing finding is that playful people are less likely to encounter stress in their lives, and that when they do, they’re better at coping with it. “People who are playful don’t run away from stress, they deal with it—they don’t do avoidance,” Barnett said.

In a separate study, Barnett found that people who scored high on her playfulness test were much better at entertaining themselves when forced to sit in an empty, boring room than people who didn’t. “The low-playfulness people hated it. They couldn’t wait to get out of there,” said Barnett. The high-playfulness test subjects, on the other hand, actively enjoyed being in the boring room, even though surveillance camera footage showed that they didn’t do anything but sit still while they were in there. “They were just in their heads—they entertained themselves.,” she said.

Another study, coauthored by Penn State professor Garry Chick, found that when asked about qualities they looked for in potential romantic partners, participants said they preferred playful people. Chick theorizes that this has evolutionary roots: Playfulness makes men seem less threatening to women, and women seem younger to men—and thus more fertile. A separate study conducted at Penn State, this one focused on the elderly, showed that playfulness in later life is associated with better cognitive and emotional functioning.

Playful people have a better time. But are you stuck with the level of playfulness that comes naturally to you, or is it something you can knowingly cultivate? “It’s the 64 million dollar question,” said Barnett, noting that the one relevant study she’s aware of, in which researchers tried to train children to become better at pretend-play, ended in failure. Even those researchers who do think of playfulness as a personality trait—a way of being in the world that persists over time and across situations—suspect it’s a malleable one, which people can develop in themselves if they want to.

A lot of playfulness is spontaneity, unpredictability, just being adventurous. As soon as you employ your more rational cognitive faculties, you interfere with it. That doesn’t mean that adults—even the most goal-oriented among us—can’t ever be truly playful in the way we used to be as children. It just means we need to allow ourselves to indulge in the pleasures of pointless or sheerly enjoyable activity, whether that means board games, dancing, pulling pranks, or making other people laugh. Growing up, in other words, doesn’t have to mean cutting fun and lightheartedness out of our lives. On the contrary, it may mean realizing that engaging in such childishness is an excellent use of our time.

A birthday to remember

2014-07-25T11:08:00.002-07:00

I recently celebrated my 75th birthday. It was a joyous occasion when we had dinner together with our oldest and dearest friends. It was especially a happy time since my son, Akhil had brought his son, my two and half year old grandson Nikhil, with him from Vietnam to celebrate this occasion. Another special gift was a birthday presentation book that my daughter, Shibani and son, Akhil had compiled and printed. Besides photos of long forgotten days, it contained messages and remembrances from old friends and associates, college mates and family members. Apparently my children had written to all my friends about the book and asked for their memories and many had very generously responded.

Here are a few excerpts from the book:

" This book is dedicated to a visionary, a father, a husband, a grandfather, a friend, a mentor. For all whom he has inspired, and continues to inspire.

"Anil was a legend in IIT.."

"..We informally voted him as the "one person from IIT who should and could Prime Minister of India.."

"..He was a great debater and orator at IIT.."

" .. I don't know if Anil regards himself as spiritual but he is one of the most spiritual people I know. To take the joy and sorrow in his stride, to meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same is one of the first lesson from Gita..There is so much wisdom to be distilled from his blogs which speak matter of factly on impending death or his first novel completed in record time or his adorable grandson.."

"..I loved that ability to engage, enthuse and energize others ..surely on of the great qualities that made you a star on whatever planet you landed....so with unending gratitude for a friendship rare and greatly cherished..."

"..Of all the things you've given me over the years, your belief in me has been the most invaluable. I cannot imagine a world without you, your wisdom, guidance and support.."

"I cannot imagine this world without you and I am so happy that after everything we are celebrating your 75th. It has been an incredible journey and there is still much more to come.."

A few of these memories got left out in the hurry to have the book ready for the birthday but the authors tell me that they intend to include all the memories in the final book and also to find a way for all to look at it on the internet.

All I can say is that this is a very precious gift that cheers me up when I am in the doldrums and inspires me when I need a lift. So thanks to all of you generous people.

In defence of procrastination

2014-07-23T08:59:00.002-07:00

The tendency to procrastinate dates back to the very beginnings of civilization. As early as 1400 B.C., ancient Egyptians were struggling with basic time management. “Friend, stop putting off work and allow us to go home in good time,” read some hieroglyphs. Six hundred years later, in 800 B.C., the early Greek poet Hesiod voiced a similar feeling,warning us not to “put your work off till tomorrow and the day after, for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work.” In 44 B.C., Cicero deemed “slowness and procrastination” always “hateful.”

The sentiment survived intact through more recent times. In 1751, Samuel Johnson remarked, “The folly of allowing ourselves to delay what we know cannot be finally escaped is one of the general weaknesses which, in spite of the instruction of moralists, and the remonstrances of reason, prevail to a greater or lesser degree in every mind; even they who most steadily withstand it find it, if not the most violent, the most pertinacious of their passions, always renewing its attacks, and, though often vanquished, never destroyed.” He concluded that it was “natural,” if not praiseworthy or desirable, “to have particular regard to the time present.”

The twenty-first century seems no different. Students procrastinate instead of doing their schoolwork. In one study, thirty-two per cent of surveyed university students were found to be severe procrastinators—meaning that their procrastination had gone from being an annoyance to an actual problem—while only one per cent claimed that they never procrastinated at all. Employees procrastinate instead of taking care of their office tasks.The average employee, one survey found, spends about an hour and twenty minutes each day putting off work; that time, in turn, translates to a loss of about nine thousand dollars per worker per year. In a study conducted in 2007, about a quarter of surveyed adults reported that procrastination was one of their defining personality traits.

It seems that procrastination is a common pulse of humanity. We’ve all likely experienced the feeling: there’s that project we have to finish, that email we have to send, that phone call we need to make. But somehow, despite our best intentions, we never seem to get any closer to doing it. Strangely the one thing that defines procrastination isn’t a lack of intention to work, it's the difficulty of following through on that intention. For most of us, procrastination isn’t a pleasant experience. It’s not like blowing off a meeting or a class and feeling the freedom of rebellion; it’s a feeling of growing pressure—of knowing we’ll have to deal eventually with whatever it is we’re putting off.

About ninety five percent of people who procrastinate wish they could reduce that tendency because procrastination leads to lower over-all well-being, worse health, and lower salaries. Why, then, is procrastination such a common phenomenon? If we don’t particularly want to procrastinate, and it causes us discomfort to do so, why do we persist in doing it? Ah! there's rub!

Various studies show that one finding in particular is common : excessive procrastinators were worse at self-regulating. In fact, self-regulation—the ability to exercise self-control and delay immediate rewards for future benefits—explained seventy per cent of the observed procrastination behaviors. What if procrastination was simply the flip side of impulsivity? Just as impulsivity is a failure of our self-control mechanisms—we should wait, but instead we act now—so, too, is procrastination: we should act now, but instead we wait.

If we think of procrastination as the flip side of impulsivity—as a failure of self-control rather than a failure of ambition—then the way we approach it shifts. When it comes to self-control, one trick that tends to work well is to reframe broad, ambitious goals in concrete, manageable, immediate chunks, and the same goes for procrastination. “We know there is a lot of naturally occurring motivation as deadlines approach,” Dr. Piers Steel,one of the world’s leading researchers and speakers on the science of motivation and procrastination, pointed out. “Can you create artificial deadlines to mimic the same thing?”

Thus what procrastinators can do is to make their targets as small, immediate, and specific as possible. For instance, Steel uses timed ten-minute sessions to get started on tasks that he doesn’t quite want to do. “The problem with a goal we’re avoiding is that we’ve already built into our minds how awful it’s going to be,” he said. “So it’s like diving into a cold pool: the first few seconds are terrible, but soon it feels great.” So, set the goal of working on a task for a short time, and then reassess. Often, you’ll be able to stay on task once you’ve overcome that initial jump. “You don’t say, ‘I am going to write.’ You say, ‘I will complete four hundred words by two o’clock,’ ” Steel says. “The more specific, the more powerful. That’s what gets us going.”

The other part is to identify the “hot” conditions for impulse control—those moments when you’re most prone to give in to distraction—and find ways to deal with them directly. “One of the easiest things to do is to realize that maybe it’s your distractions, not your goals, that are the problem,” said Steel. “So you make the distractions harder to get to. Make them less obvious.” He points to an Android app that makes it more difficult for people to access the games on their phones.

Of course, if you are an excessive procrastinator you may be unlikely to install such a program. “The ironic thing is that procrastinators put off dealing with their procrastination,” Steel said. So instead of doing whatever you’re supposed to be doing right now, take a test! That is sure to delay everything!

Knowing the enemy- the shadow commander

2014-07-22T04:07:00.000-07:00

Dexter Wilkins writes a disturbing portrait of the most fearsome commander of our time- Qassem Suleimani.

"Last February, some of Iran’s most influential leaders gathered at the Amir al-Momenin Mosque, in northeast Tehran, inside a gated community reserved for officers of the Revolutionary Guard. They had come to pay their last respects to a fallen comrade. Hassan Shateri, a veteran of Iran’s covert wars throughout the Middle East and South Asia, was a senior commander in a powerful, élite branch of the Revolutionary Guard called the Quds Force...

The force is the sharp instrument of Iranian foreign policy, roughly analogous to a combined C.I.A. and Special Forces; its name comes from the Persian word for Jerusalem, which its fighters have promised to liberate. Since 1979, its goal has been to subvert Iran’s enemies and extend the country’s influence across the Middle East. At the funeral was the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Qassem, dressed in green fatigues; a member of the plot to murder four exiled opposition leaders in a Berlin restaurant in 1992; and the father of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah commander believed to be responsible for the bombings that killed more than two hundred and fifty Americans in Beirut in 1983. ..

Major General Qassem Suleimani, the Quds Force’s leader is a small man of fifty-six, with silver hair, a close-cropped beard, and a look of intense self-containment. It was Suleimani who had sent Shateri, an old and trusted friend, to his death. As Revolutionary Guard commanders, he and Shateri belonged to a small fraternity formed during the Sacred Defense, the name given to the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988 and left as many as a million people dead. It was a catastrophic fight, but for Iran it was the beginning of a three-decade project to build a Shiite sphere of influence, stretching across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. Along with its allies in Syria and Lebanon, Iran forms an Axis of Resistance, arrayed against the region’s dominant Sunni powers and the West. ..

Suleimani took command of the Quds Force fifteen years ago, and in that time he has sought to reshape the Middle East in Iran’s favor, working as a power broker and as a military force: assassinating rivals, arming allies, and, for most of a decade, directing a network of militant groups that killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned Suleimani for his role in supporting the Assad regime, and for abetting terrorism. And yet he has remained mostly invisible to the outside world, even as he runs agents and directs operations.

When Suleimani appears in public—often to speak at veterans’ events or to meet with Khamenei—he carries himself inconspicuously and rarely raises his voice, exhibiting a trait that Arabs call khilib, or understated charisma.

“He is so short, but he has this presence,” a former senior Iraqi official told me. “There will be ten people in a room, and when Suleimani walks in he doesn’t come and sit with you. He sits over there on the other side of room, by himself, in a very quiet way. Doesn’t speak, doesn’t comment, just sits and listens. And so of course everyone is thinking only about him.”

For Suleimani, saving Assad seemed a matter of pride, especially if it meant distinguishing himself from the Americans. “Suleimani told us the Iranians would do whatever was necessary,” a former Iraqi leader told me. “He said, ‘We’re not like the Americans. We don’t abandon our friends.’ ”

Last year, Suleimani asked Kurdish leaders in Iraq to allow him to open a supply route across northern Iraq and into Syria. For years, he had bullied and bribed the Kurds into coöperating with his plans, but this time they rebuffed him. Worse, Assad’s soldiers wouldn’t fight—or, when they did, they mostly butchered civilians, driving the populace to the rebels. “The Syrian Army is useless!” Suleimani told an Iraqi politician. He longed for the Basij, the Iranian militia whose fighters crushed the popular uprisings against the regime in 2009. “Give me one brigade of the Basij, and I could conquer the whole country,” he said.

Finally, Suleimani began flying into Damascus frequently so that he could assume personal control of the Iranian intervention. In Damascus, he is said to work out of a heavily fortified command post in a nondescript building, where he has installed a multinational array of officers: the heads of the Syrian military, a Hezbollah commander, and a coördinator of Iraqi Shiite militias, which Suleimani mobilized and brought to the fight. If Suleimani couldn’t have the Basij, he settled for the next best thing: Brigadier General Hossein Hamedani, the Basij’s former deputy commander. Hamedani, another comrade from the Iran-Iraq War, was experienced in running the kind of irregular militias that the Iranians were assembling, in order to keep on fighting if Assad fell...

A turning point came in April, after rebels captured the Syrian town of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border. To retake the town, Suleimani called on Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, to send in more than two thousand fighters. It wasn’t a difficult sell. Qusayr sits at the entrance to the Bekaa Valley, the main conduit for missiles and other matériel to Hezbollah; if it was closed, Hezbollah would find it difficult to survive. Suleimani and Nasrallah are old friends, having coöperated for years in Lebanon and in the many places around the world where Hezbollah operatives have performed terrorist missions at the Iranians’ behest. According to Will Fulton, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, Hezbollah fighters encircled Qusayr, cutting off the roads, then moved in. Dozens of them were killed, as were at least eight Iranian officers. On June 5th, the town fell. “The whole operation was orchestrated by Suleimani,” Maguire, who is still active in the region, said. “It was a great victory for him.”

Despite all of Suleimani’s rough work, his image among Iran’s faithful is that of an irreproachable war hero—a decorated veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, in which he became a division commander while still in his twenties. In public, he is almost theatrically modest. During a recent appearance, he described himself as “the smallest soldier,” and, according to the Iranian press, rebuffed members of the audience who tried to kiss his hand. His power comes mostly from his close relationship with Khamenei, who provides the guiding vision for Iranian society. The Supreme Leader, who usually reserves his highest praise for fallen soldiers, has referred to Suleimani as “a living martyr of the revolution.” Suleimani is a hard-line supporter of Iran’s authoritarian system. In July, 1999, at the height of student protests, he signed, with other Revolutionary Guard commanders, a letter warning the reformist President Mohammad Khatami that if he didn’t put down the revolt the military would—perhaps deposing Khatami in the process. “Our patience has run out,” the generals wrote. The police crushed the demonstrators, as they did again, a decade later.

Iran’s government is intensely fractious, and there are many figures around Khamenei who help shape foreign policy, including Revolutionary Guard commanders, senior clerics, and Foreign Ministry officials. But Suleimani has been given a remarkably free hand in implementing Khamenei’s vision. He has ties to every corner of the system. Officials describe him as a believer in Islam and in the revolution; while many senior figures in the Revolutionary Guard have grown wealthy through the Guard’s control over key Iranian industries, Suleimani has been endowed with a personal fortune by the Supreme Leader. “He’s well taken care of,” Maguire said.

Suleimani lives in Tehran, and appears to lead the home life of a bureaucrat in middle age. “He gets up at four every morning, and he’s in bed by nine-thirty every night,” the Iraqi politician said, who has known him for many years, shaking his head in disbelief. Suleimani has a bad prostate and recurring back pain. He’s “respectful of his wife,” he has three sons and two daughters, and is evidently a strict but loving father. He is said to be especially worried about his daughter Nargis, who lives in Malaysia. “She is deviating from the ways of Islam,” the Middle Eastern official said.

Suleimani has little formal education, but “he is a very shrewd, frighteningly intelligent strategist.” His tools include payoffs for politicians across the Middle East, intimidation when it is needed, and murder as a last resort. Over the years, the Quds Force has built an international network of assets, some of them drawn from the Iranian diaspora, who can be called on to support missions. “They’re everywhere,” a second Middle Eastern security official said. In 2010, according to Western officials, the Quds Force and Hezbollah launched a new campaign against American and Israeli targets—in apparent retaliation for the covert effort to slow down the Iranian nuclear program, which has included cyber attacks and assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

Since then, Suleimani has orchestrated attacks in places as far flung as Thailand, New Delhi, Lagos, and Nairobi—at least thirty attempts in the past two years alone. The most notorious was a scheme, in 2011, to hire a Mexican drug cartel to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to the United States as he sat down to eat at a restaurant a few miles from the White House. The cartel member approached by Suleimani’s agent turned out to be an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. (The Quds Force appears to be more effective close to home, and a number of the remote plans have gone awry.) Still, after the plot collapsed, two former American officials told a congressional committee that Suleimani should be assassinated. “Suleimani travels a lot,” one said. “He is all over the place. Go get him. Either try to capture him or kill him.” In Iran, more than two hundred dignitaries signed an outraged letter in his defense; a social-media campaign proclaimed, “We are all Qassem Suleimani.”

Among spies in the West, he appears to exist in a special category, an enemy both hated and admired: a Middle Eastern equivalent of Karla, the elusive Soviet master spy in John le Carré’s novels.

In March, 2009, on the eve of the Iranian New Year, Suleimani led a group of Iran-Iraq War veterans to the Paa-Alam Heights, a barren, rocky promontory on the Iraqi border. In 1986, Paa-Alam was the scene of one of the terrible battles over the Faw Peninsula, where tens of thousands of men died while hardly advancing a step. A video recording from the visit shows Suleimani standing on a mountaintop, recounting the battle to his old comrades. In a gentle voice, he speaks over a soundtrack of music and prayers.

“This is the Dasht-e-Abbas Road,” Suleimani says, pointing into the valley below. “This area stood between us and the enemy.” Later, Suleimani and the group stand on the banks of a creek, where he reads aloud the names of fallen Iranian soldiers, his voice trembling with emotion. During a break, he speaks with an interviewer, and describes the fighting in near-mystical terms. “The battlefield is mankind’s lost paradise—the paradise in which morality and human conduct are at their highest,” he says. “One type of paradise that men imagine is about streams, beautiful maidens, and lush landscape. But there is another kind of paradise—the battlefield.”

Suleimani was born in Rabor, an impoverished mountain village in eastern Iran. When he was a boy, his father, like many other farmers, took out an agricultural loan from the government of the Shah. He owed nine hundred toman—about a hundred dollars at the time—and couldn’t pay it back. In a brief memoir, Suleimani wrote of leaving home with a young relative named Ahmad Suleimani, who was in a similar situation. “At night, we couldn’t fall asleep with the sadness of thinking that government agents were coming to arrest our fathers,” he wrote. Together, they travelled to Kerman, the nearest city, to try to clear their family’s debt. The place was unwelcoming. “We were only thirteen, and our bodies were so tiny, wherever we went, they wouldn’t hire us,” he wrote. “Until one day, when we were hired as laborers at a school construction site on Khajoo Street, which was where the city ended. They paid us two toman per day.” After eight months, they had saved enough money to bring home, but the winter snow was too deep. ”

As a young man, Suleimani gave few signs of greater ambition. According to Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, he had only a high-school education, and worked for Kerman’s municipal water department. But it was a revolutionary time, and the country’s gathering unrest was making itself felt. Away from work, Suleimani spent hours lifting weights in local gyms, which, like many in the Middle East, offered physical training and inspiration for the warrior spirit. During Ramadan, he attended sermons by a travelling preacher named Hojjat Kamyab—a protégé of Khamenei’s—and it was there that he became inspired by the possibility of Islamic revolution. In 1979, when Suleimani was twenty-two, the Shah fell to a popular uprising led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the name of Islam. Swept up in the fervor, Suleimani joined the Revolutionary Guard, a force established by Iran’s new clerical leadership to prevent the military from mounting a coup. Though he received little training—perhaps only a forty-five-day course—he advanced rapidly. As a young guardsman, Suleimani was dispatched to northwestern Iran, where he helped crush an uprising by ethnic Kurds.

When the revolution was eighteen months old, Saddam Hussein sent the Iraqi Army sweeping across the border, hoping to take advantage of the internal chaos. Instead, the invasion solidified Khomeini’s leadership and unified the country in resistance, starting a brutal, entrenched war. Suleimani was sent to the front with a simple task, to supply water to the soldiers there, and he never left. “I entered the war on a fifteen-day mission, and ended up staying until the end,” he has said. A photograph from that time shows the young Suleimani dressed in green fatigues, with no insignia of rank, his black eyes focussed on a far horizon. “We were all young and wanted to serve the revolution,” he told an interviewer in 2005.

Suleimani earned a reputation for bravery and élan, especially as a result of reconnaissance missions he undertook behind Iraqi lines. He returned from several missions bearing a goat, which his soldiers slaughtered and grilled. “Even the Iraqis, our enemy, admired him for this,” a former Revolutionary Guard officer who defected to the United States told me. On Iraqi radio, Suleimani became known as “the goat thief.” In recognition of his effectiveness, Alfoneh said, he was put in charge of a brigade from Kerman, with men from the gyms where he lifted weights.

The Iranian Army was badly overmatched, and its commanders resorted to crude and costly tactics. In “human wave” assaults, they sent thousands of young men directly into the Iraqi lines, often to clear minefields, and soldiers died at a precipitous rate. Suleimani seemed distressed by the loss of life. Before sending his men into battle, he would embrace each one and bid him goodbye; in speeches, he praised martyred soldiers and begged their forgiveness for not being martyred himself. When Suleimani’s superiors announced plans to attack the Faw Peninsula, he dismissed them as wasteful and foolhardy. The former Revolutionary Guard officer recalled seeing Suleimani in 1985, after a battle in which his brigade had suffered many dead and wounded. He was sitting alone in a corner of a tent. “He was very silent, thinking about the people he’d lost,” the officer said.

Once asked if Suleimani was especially religious. The answer was “Not really,” “He attends mosque periodically. Religion doesn’t drive him. Nationalism drives him, and the love of the fight.”

Iran’s leaders took two lessons from the Iran-Iraq War. The first was that Iran was surrounded by enemies, near and far. To the regime, the invasion was not so much an Iraqi plot as a Western one. American officials were aware of Saddam’s preparations to invade Iran in 1980, and they later provided him with targeting information used in chemical-weapons attacks; the weapons themselves were built with the help of Western European firms. The memory of these attacks is an especially bitter one. “Do you know how many people are still suffering from the effects of chemical weapons?” Mehdi Khalaji, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. “Thousands of former soldiers. They believe these were Western weapons given to Saddam.” In 1987, during a battle with the Iraqi Army, a division under Suleimani’s command was attacked by artillery shells containing chemical weapons. More than a hundred of his men suffered the effects.

The other lesson drawn from the Iran-Iraq War was the futility of fighting a head-to-head confrontation. In 1982, after the Iranians expelled the Iraqi forces, Khomeini ordered his men to keep going, to “liberate” Iraq and push on to Jerusalem. Six years and hundreds of thousands of lives later, he agreed to a ceasefire. According to Alfoneh, many of the generals of Suleimani’s generation believe they could have succeeded had the clerics not flinched. “Many of them feel like they were stabbed in the back,” he said. “They have nurtured this myth for nearly thirty years.” But Iran’s leaders did not want another bloodbath. Instead, they had to build the capacity to wage asymmetrical warfare—attacking stronger powers indirectly, outside of Iran.

The Quds Force was an ideal tool. Khomeini had created the prototype for the force in 1979, with the goal of protecting Iran and exporting the Islamic Revolution. The first big opportunity came in Lebanon, where Revolutionary Guard officers were dispatched in 1982 to help organize Shiite militias in the many-sided Lebanese civil war. Those efforts resulted in the creation of Hezbollah, which developed under Iranian guidance. Hezbollah’s military commander, the brilliant and murderous Imad Mughniyeh, helped form what became known as the Special Security Apparatus, a wing of Hezbollah that works closely with the Quds Force. With assistance from Iran, Hezbollah helped orchestrate attacks on the American Embassy and on French and American military barracks. “In the early days, when Hezbollah was totally dependent on Iranian help, Mughniyeh and others were basically willing Iranian assets,” David Crist, a historian for the U.S. military and the author of “The Twilight War,” says.

For all of the Iranian regime’s aggressiveness, some of its religious zeal seemed to burn out. In 1989, Khomeini stopped urging Iranians to spread the revolution, and called instead for expediency to preserve its gains. Persian self-interest was the order of the day, even if it was indistinguishable from revolutionary fervor. In those years, Suleimani worked along Iran’s eastern frontier, aiding Afghan rebels who were holding out against the Taliban. The Iranian regime regarded the Taliban with intense hostility, in large part because of their persecution of Afghanistan’s minority Shiite population. (At one point, the two countries nearly went to war; Iran mobilized a quarter of a million troops, and its leaders denounced the Taliban as an affront to Islam.) In an area that breeds corruption, Suleimani made a name for himself battling opium smugglers along the Afghan border.

In 1998, Suleimani was named the head of the Quds Force, taking over an agency that had already built a lethal résumé: American and Argentine officials believe that the Iranian regime helped Hezbollah orchestrate the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, which killed twenty-nine people, and the attack on the Jewish center in the same city two years later, which killed eighty-five. Suleimani has built the Quds Force into an organization with extraordinary reach, with branches focussed on intelligence, finance, politics, sabotage, and special operations. With a base in the former U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran, the force has between ten thousand and twenty thousand members, divided between combatants and those who train and oversee foreign assets. Its members are picked for their skill and their allegiance to the doctrine of the Islamic Revolution (as well as, in some cases, their family connections). According to the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, fighters are recruited throughout the region, trained in Shiraz and Tehran, indoctrinated at the Jerusalem Operation College, in Qom, and then “sent on months-long missions to Afghanistan and Iraq to gain experience in field operational work. They usually travel under the guise of Iranian construction workers.”

After taking command, Suleimani strengthened relationships in Lebanon, with Mughniyeh and with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief. By then, the Israeli military had occupied southern Lebanon for sixteen years, and Hezbollah was eager to take control of the country, so Suleimani sent in Quds Force operatives to help. “They had a huge presence—training, advising, planning,” Crocker said. In 2000, the Israelis withdrew, exhausted by relentless Hezbollah attacks. It was a signal victory for the Shiites, and, Crocker said, “another example of how countries like Syria and Iran can play a long game, knowing that we can’t.”

“No one in Tehran started out with a master plan to build the Axis of Resistance, but opportunities presented themselves,” a Western diplomat in Baghdad said. “In each case, Suleimani was smarter, faster, and better resourced than anyone else in the region. By grasping at opportunities as they came, he built the thing, slowly but surely.”

It seemed clear to Crocker that the Iranians were answering to Suleimani, whom they referred to as “Haji Qassem,” and that they were eager to help the United States destroy their mutual enemy, the Taliban. Although the United States and Iran broke off diplomatic relations in 1980, after American diplomats in Tehran were taken hostage, Crocker wasn’t surprised to find that Suleimani was flexible. “You don’t live through eight years of brutal war without being pretty pragmatic,” he said. Sometimes Suleimani passed messages to Crocker, but he avoided putting anything in writing. “Haji Qassem’s way too smart for that,” Crocker said. “He’s not going to leave paper trails for the Americans.”

After Saddam’s regime collapsed, Crocker was dispatched to Baghdad to organize a fledgling government, called the Iraqi Governing Council. He realized that many Iraqi politicians were flying to Tehran for consultations, and he jumped at the chance to negotiate indirectly with Suleimani. In the course of the summer, Crocker passed him the names of prospective Shiite candidates, and the two men vetted each one. Crocker did not offer veto power, but he abandoned candidates whom Suleimani found especially objectionable. “The formation of the governing council was in its essence a negotiation between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

For years, Suleimani had sent operatives into Iraq to cultivate Shiite militias, so, when Saddam fell, he already had a fighting force in place: the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of a Shiite political party called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Party’s leaders so thoroughly identified with the Iranian revolution that Badr’s militiamen had fought alongside Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq War. The Badr Brigade spent much of its time carrying out revenge killings against Baathists, and largely held its fire against the Americans. But another Iranian-backed militia—the Mahdi Army, headed by the populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr—began confronting the Americans early.

Suleimani found Sadr unpredictable and difficult to manage, so the Quds Force began to organize other militias that were willing to attack the Americans. Its operatives trained fighters in Iran, sometimes helped by their comrades in Hezbollah. Suleimani’s control over some of the Iraqi militias at times appeared to be total. At one point, a senior Iraqi official, on a trip to Washington, publicly blamed the Supreme Leader for escalating the violence in Iraq. Soon after returning to Baghdad, he received messages from the leaders of two Iraqi Shiite militias. Both posed the same question: Do you want to die?

In 2004, the Quds Force began flooding Iraq with lethal roadside bombs that the Americans referred to as E.F.P.s, for “explosively formed projectiles.” The E.F.P.s, which fire a molten copper slug able to penetrate armor, began to wreak havoc on American troops, accounting for nearly twenty per cent of combat deaths. E.F.P.s could be made only by skilled technicians, and they were often triggered by sophisticated motion sensors. “There was zero question where they were coming from,” General Stanley McChrystal, who at the time was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, aid “We knew where all the factories were in Iran. The E.F.P.s killed hundreds of Americans.”

Suleimani’s campaign against the United States crossed the Sunni-Shiite divide, which he has always been willing to set aside for a larger purpose. Early in the war, Suleimani encouraged the head of intelligence for the Assad regime to facilitate the movement of Sunni extremists through Syria to fight the Americans. In many cases, Al Qaeda was also allowed a degree of freedom in Iran as well.

As it turned out, the Iranian strategy of abetting Sunni extremists backfired horrendously: shortly after the occupation began, the same extremists began attacking Shiite civilians and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. It was a preview of the civil war to come. “Welcome to the Middle East,” the Western diplomat in Baghdad said. “Suleimani wanted to bleed the Americans, so he invited in the jihadis, and things got out of control.”

Still, Iran’s policy toward the Americans in Iraq was not entirely hostile—both countries, after all, were trying to empower Iraq’s Shiite majority—and so Suleimani alternated between bargaining with the Americans and killing them. Throughout the war, he summoned Iraqi leaders to Tehran to broker deals, usually intended to maximize Shiite power. At least once, he even travelled into the heart of American power in Baghdad.

As both sides sought an advantage, the shifting allegiances led to uncomfortable, sometimes bizarre encounters. The leaders of the two main Kurdish parties, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, met regularly with both Suleimani and the Americans. While the Kurds’ relationship with the U.S. was usually warm, their ties to Iranian leaders like Suleimani were deeper and more complex; the Iranian regime had sheltered Iraq’s Kurds during their war with Saddam. But it was never an equal relationship. Kurdish leaders say that Suleimani’s objective has always been to keep Iraq’s political parties divided and unstable, insuring that the country stayed weak: the Iran-Iraq War was never far from his mind. “It is very difficult for us to say no to Suleimani,” a senior Kurdish official told me. “When we say no, he makes trouble for us. Bombings. Shootings. The Iranians are our neighbors. They’ve always been there, and they always will be. We have to deal with them.”

In the years after the invasion, General McChrystal concentrated on defeating Sunni insurgents, and, like other American commanders in Iraq, he largely refrained from pursuing Quds Force agents. Provoking Iran would only exacerbate the conflict, and, in any case, many of the agents operated under the protection of diplomatic cover. But, as the war dragged on, the Iranian-backed militias loomed ever larger. In late 2006, McChrystal told me, he formed a task force to kill and capture Iranian-backed insurgents, as well as Quds Force operatives.

Around the same time, Suleimani struck up a correspondence with senior American officials, sending messages through intermediaries—sometimes seeking to reassure the Americans, sometimes to extract something. One of the first came in early 2008, when the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, handed a cell phone with a text message to General David Petraeus, who had taken over the year before as the commander of American forces. “Dear General Petraeus,” the text read, “you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.” After the five American soldiers were killed in Karbala, Suleimani sent a message to the American Ambassador. “I swear on the grave of Khomeini I haven’t authorized a bullet against the U.S.,” Suleimani said. None of the Americans believed him.

In a report to the White House, Petraeus wrote that Suleimani was “truly evil.” Yet at times the two men were all but negotiating. According to diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks, Petraeus sent messages through Iraqi officials to Suleimani, asking him to call off rocket attacks on the American Embassy and on U.S. bases. In 2008, the Americans and the Iraqi Army were pressing an offensive against the Mahdi Army—Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia—and, in retribution, the militia was bombarding the Green Zone regularly. Suleimani, who sensed a political opening, sent Petraeus a message lamenting the situation and saying that he had assigned men to apprehend the attackers. Petraeus replied, “I was born on a Sunday, but it wasn’t last Sunday.” Eventually, Suleimani brokered a ceasefire between Sadr and the government.

At times, Suleimani seemed to take pleasure in taunting his American counterparts, and stories of his exploits spread. In the summer of 2006, during the thirty-four-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the violence in Baghdad appeared to ebb. When the fighting ended, the Iraqi politician told me, Suleimani supposedly sent a message to the American command. “I hope you have been enjoying the peace and quiet in Baghdad,” it read. “I’ve been busy in Beirut!”

In a speech in 1990, Khamenei said that the mission of the Quds Force is to “establish popular Hezbollah cells all over the world.” Although that goal has not been met, Hezbollah has become the most influential force in Lebanon—a military power and a political party that nearly supersedes the state. Some experts on the region believe that it has grown less dependent on Iran as it has matured. But, at a dinner in Beirut last year, Walid Joumblatt, a Lebanese politician, complained that Hezbollah’s leaders were still in thrall to Tehran. “You have to sit and talk with them, but what do you say?” he said to me. “They don’t decide. It’s Khamenei and Qassem Suleimani who decide.”

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has endorsed the concept of Velayat-e Faqih, which recognizes Iran’s Supreme Leader as the ultimate authority, and he has acknowledged the presence of Quds Force operatives in Lebanon. From 2000 to 2006, Iran contributed a hundred million dollars a year to Hezbollah. Its fighters are attractive proxies: unlike the Iranians, they speak Arabic, making them better equipped to operate in Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world. Working with the Iranians, they have either launched or prepared to launch attacks in Cyprus, Azerbaijan, and Turkey.

They don’t always act together. After a Hezbollah operative attacked a tour bus filled with Israelis in Bulgaria, last July, American authorities learned that Suleimani had asked his subordinates, “Does anyone know about this?” No one did. “Hezbollah acted on its own in that one,” an American defense official told me. Nonetheless, the Quds Force appears to have been involved in a number of the most significant moments in Lebanon’s recent history. In 2006, Nasrallah ordered a group of his fighters to kidnap Israeli soldiers—an operation that the Middle Eastern security official told me was carried out with Suleimani’s help. A brief but fierce war ensued, in which the Israel Defense Forces destroyed much of Lebanon. “I don’t think Suleimani expected that reaction,” the official said.

The question of Iranian influence in Lebanon resurfaced in 2011, when the United Nations-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon charged four senior members of Hezbollah with assassinating the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, in 2005. Hariri, a Sunni, had been trying to take Lebanon out of the Iranian-Syrian orbit. On Valentine’s Day, he was killed by a suicide truck bomb whose payload weighed more than five thousand pounds.

Prosecutors identified the alleged Hezbollah assassins by means of “co-location analysis”—matching disposable cell phones used at the time of the murder with other phones that belonged to the suspects. They refrained from indicting Syrian officials, but, they said, they had convincing evidence that Assad’s government was involved in Hariri’s killing. A senior investigator for the Special Tribunal told me that there was also reason to suspect the Iranians: “Our theory of the case was that Hezbollah pulled the trigger, but could not and would not have done so without the blessing and logistical support from both Syria and Iran.” One of the phones believed to have been used by the killers had made at least a dozen calls to Iran before and after the assassination. But investigators told me that they didn’t know who in Iran was called, and that they couldn’t persuade Western intelligence agencies to help them. As it turned out, the agencies knew quite a bit. The senior intelligence officer told me that Iranian operatives were overheard talking minutes before the assassination. “There were Iranians on the phones directing the attack,” he said. Robert Baer, a former senior C.I.A. official, told me, “If indeed Iran was involved, Suleimani was undoubtedly at the center of this.”

What Jeffrey and Austin didn’t say was that the crucial deal that brought the Iraqi government together was made not by them but by Suleimani. In the months before, according to several Iraqi and Western officials, Suleimani invited senior Shiite and Kurdish leaders to meet with him in Tehran and Qom, and extracted from them a promise to support Maliki, his preferred candidate. The deal had a complex array of enticements. Maliki and Assad disliked each other; Suleimani brought them together by forging an agreement to build a lucrative oil pipeline from Iraq to the Syrian border. In order to bring the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in line, Suleimani agreed to place his men in the Iraqi service ministries.

Most remarkable, according to the Iraqi and Western officials, were the two conditions that Suleimani imposed on the Iraqis. The first was that Jalal Talabani, a longtime friend of the Iranian regime, become President. The second was that Maliki and his coalition partners insist that all American troops leave the country. “Suleimani said: no Americans,” the former Iraqi leader told me. “A ten-year relationship, down the drain.”

Iraqi officials told me that, at the time of Jeffrey’s announcement, the Americans knew that Suleimani had pushed them out of the country but were too embarrassed to admit it in public. “We were laughing at the Americans,” the former Iraqi leader told me, growing angry as he recalled the situation. “Fuck it! Fuck it!” he said. “Suleimani completely outmaneuvered them, and in public they were congratulating themselves for putting the government together.”

According to American and Iraqi former officials, Suleimani exerts leverage over Iraqi politics by paying officials, by subsidizing newspapers and television stations, and, when necessary, by intimidation. Few are immune to his enticements. “I have yet to see one Shia political party not taking money from Qassem Suleimani,” the former senior Iraqi official told me. “He’s the most powerful man in Iraq, without question.”

Even Maliki often feels like a prisoner of the Iranians. Exiled by Saddam, Maliki lived for a short time in Iran, but then moved to Syria—in part to escape Iranian influence, Iraqis who know him say. Crocker said that Maliki once told him, “You can’t know what arrogance is until you are an Iraqi Arab forced to take refuge with the Iranians.” The Iraqi politician, who is close to both men, told me that Maliki resents Suleimani, and that the feeling is mutual. “Maliki says Suleimani doesn’t listen,” he told me. “Suleimani says Maliki just lies.”

Still, Maliki may be amply repaying Suleimani for his efforts to make him Prime Minister. According to the former senior intelligence officer, Maliki’s government is presiding over a number of schemes, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, to help the Iranian regime outwit Western economic sanctions. A prominent Iraqi businessman told me that Iranian-backed agents regularly use the Iraqi banking system to undertake fraudulent transactions that allow them to sell Iraqi currency at a huge profit. “If the banks refuse, they are shut down by the government,” he said.

The other main source of revenue for the Iranians is oil, officials say: Maliki’s government sets aside the equivalent of two hundred thousand barrels of oil a day—about twenty million dollars’ worth, at current prices—and sends the money to Suleimani. In this way, the Quds Force has made itself immune to the economic pressures of Western sanctions. “It’s a self-funding covert-action program,” the former senior intelligence officer said. “Suleimani doesn’t even need the Iranian budget to fund his operations.”

Suleimani’s sentiments about the ethics of chemical weapons are unknown. During the Iran-Iraq War, thousands of Iranian soldiers suffered from chemical attacks, and the survivors still speak publicly of the trauma. But some American officials believe that his efforts to restrain Assad had a more pragmatic inspiration: the fear of provoking American military intervention. “Both the Russians and the Iranians have said to Assad, ‘We can’t support you in the court of world opinion if you use this stuff,’ ” a former senior American military official said.

The regime is believed to have used chemical weapons at least fourteen times since last year. Yet even after the enormous sarin attack on August 21st, which killed fourteen hundred civilians, Suleimani’s support for Syria has been unbending. To save Assad, Suleimani has called on every asset he built since taking over the Quds Force: Hezbollah fighters, Shiite militiamen from around the Arab world, and all the money and matériel he could squeeze out of his own besieged government.

Suleimani’s greatest achievement may be persuading his proxies in the Iraqi government to allow Iran to use its airspace to fly men and munitions to Damascus. General James Mattis, who until March was the commander of all American military forces in the Middle East, told me that without this aid the Assad regime would have collapsed months ago. The flights are overseen by the Iraqi transportation minister, Hadi al-Amri, who is an old ally of Suleimani’s—the former head of the Badr Brigade, and a soldier on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq War. In an interview in Baghdad, Amri denied that the Iranians were using Iraqi airspace to send weapons. But he made clear his affection for his former commander. “I love Qassem Suleimani!” he said, pounding the table. “He is my dearest friend.”

“Maliki dislikes the Iranians, and he loathes Assad, but he hates Al Nusra,” Crocker told me. “He doesn’t want an Al Qaeda government in Damascus.”

This kind of starkly sectarian atmosphere may be Suleimani’s most lasting impact on the Middle East. To save his Iranian empire in Syria and Lebanon, he has helped fuel a Sunni-Shiite conflict that threatens to engulf the region for years to come—a war that he appears happy to wage. “He has every reason to believe that Iran is the rising power in the region,” Mattis told me. “We’ve never dealt him a body blow.”

In June, a new, moderate President, Hassan Rouhani, was elected in Iran, promising to end the sanctions, which have exhausted the country and demolished its middle class. Hopes have risen in the West that Khamenei might allow Rouhani to strike a deal. Although Rouhani is a moderate only by Iranian standards—he is a Shiite cleric and a longtime adherent of the revolution—his new administration has made a series of good-will gestures, including the release of eleven political prisoners and an exchange of letters with President Obama.

Many in the West are hoping that Iran will also help find an end to the grinding war in Syria. Assad’s deputy prime minister recently offered the possibility of a cease-fire, saying, “Let nobody have any fear that the regime in its present form will continue.” But he did not say that Assad would step down, which the rebels have said is a necessary condition of negotiations. There have been hints from powerful Iranians that Assad isn’t worth holding on to. In a recent speech, the former President Hashemi Rafsanjani said, “The people have been the target of chemical attacks by their own government.”

But a less sympathetic regime in Syria would split the Axis of Resistance, and radically complicate Iran’s partnership with Hezbollah. In any case, the Iranian regime may be too fragmented to come to a consensus. “Anytime you see a statement coming out of the government, just remember there’s a rat’s nest of people fighting underneath the surface,” Kevan Harris, a sociologist at Princeton who has studied Iran extensively, told me. As Rouhani tries to engage the West, he will have to contend with the hard-liners, including Suleimani and his comrades, who for more than a decade have defined their foreign policy as a covert war on the U.S. and Israel. “They don’t trust the other side,” Harris said. “They feel that any concession they make will be seen by the West as a sign of weakness.”

For Suleimani, giving up Assad would mean abandoning the project of expansion that has occupied him for fifteen years. In a recent speech before the Assembly of Experts—the clerics who choose the Supreme Leader—he spoke about Syria in fiercely determined language. “We do not pay attention to the propaganda of the enemy, because Syria is the front line of the resistance and this reality is undeniable,’’ he said. “We have a duty to defend Muslims because they are under pressure and oppression.” Suleimani was fighting the same war, against the same foes, that he’d been fighting his entire life; for him, it seemed, the compromises of statecraft could not compare with the paradise of the battlefield. “We will support Syria to the end,” he said.
♦

The two sides....

2014-07-22T04:06:00.002-07:00

James fallows writes

His column began with the powerful note from an American rabbi in Jerusalem, about his gratitude for Iron Dome protection as Hamas rockets were falling". I have received enough mail since then to be reminded that there is an inexhaustible supply of passionate but irreconcilable, and familiar, statements of who is "more to blame" for the escalating violence and who originally wronged whom."

For a sobering example, consider this recent CNN exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Israeli Economics Minister Naftali Bennett. I have heard from people in Israel, America, and Europe who say that Bennett is speaking tough, plain, necessary truths. I have heard from others in those same places who think, as I do, that Bennett sounds appallingly callous about other people's loss of life—in this case, the deaths of the four little boys on the beach. Wolf Blitzer himself seems taken aback by what he is hearing. ....I know that Bennett is not "representative," and that his fiercest critics are within Israel itself. I can name lots of American public figures I agree with even less. I know that there are plenty of people in the region and elsewhere who hatefully urge death to Israelis or Jews. But I mention this video because watching it reminded me, through its absence, of the quality of moral breadth, compassion, and bravery that distinguishes people willing to take risks for peace.

As a young staffer on the periphery, I saw this quality from both Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at the Camp David negotiations in 1978 (not to mention Jimmy Carter's role, as recently portrayed by my friend Lawrence Wright in the play Camp David). The lasting tragedy of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination (like Sadat's) is that he also had great courage and breadth, and unassailable credentials as a patriot who was strong enough to compromise. I am no one's idea of a Middle East expert, but I see no such figures on any side now.

With that, two further messages about the political and social ramifications of Iron Dome, both from people in Jerusalem.

First, from a woman who agrees with the rabbi:

"I have lived in Israel for 21 years and in Jerusalem for the past 14. I long for peace and would vote tomorrow to give up the West Bank and Gaza for a Palestinian state that would accept the existence of Israel and live in real peace with us.

I (literally) cry over the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians. But your reference to "rocket exchanges" obscures the fact that the Hamas - an Islamic terrorist group whose stated goal is to drive out (or worse) the Jews living in the entire territory of Israel - including the area within the Green line - started firing rockets at Israeli civilians and Israel's response was defensive. You can argue about the intensity of the response, but not about the need for a response and a forceful one.

As for Iron Dome, I too am grateful to all who designed, funded, built and operated it and I know that the Hamas leaders are in luxury hotels in Doha and Cairo or in underground bunkers while they leave their people exposed to Israeli air strikes.

When you write that many "vastly more Palestinian families have been killed..because of differences in offensive weaponry and defensive systems and other factors" you might mention that the "other factors" included the Hamas government's refusal to build shelters and defensive systems to protect their people, as well as their use of civilians as shields to hide behind when they shoot rockets at Israeli civilians."

Now, from Dr. Hillel Ben Sasson of Jerusalem, who has explicitly asked me to identify him. ("I indeed wish to be mentioned by name, as I believe in the veracity of my claims and am willing to defend them.") He is director of programs for Molad, an Israeli think tank. His message is personally very critical of the rabbi, which I know will be wounding. But since I have kept his (the American rabbi's) identity confidential, and since Dr. Sasson is taking responsibility for his critical views by name, and mainly since his statement is so powerfully argued, it seems fair to give him his say.

Hillel Ben Sasson writes:

"Reading the words of the anonymous rabbi in recounting his fear in face the warning sirens alerting Jerusalemites of Hamas rockets, I was both enraged and ashamed.

I was enraged by the lack of comprehension he showed to the situation in which we - Israelis and Palestinians - have been living for as long as we remember. I was born in Jerusalem in 1979 and lived here for most of my life. An officer in the IDF still fulfilling my reserve duty, I have lived through three wars (Lebanon I - 1982; Gulf I - 1991; Lebanon II - 2006), two Intifada uprisings of the occupied Palestinians (1987; 2000) and three military operations in Gaza (Cast Lead - 2008; Pillar of Defense - 2012; Protective Edge - 2014). Some of these I experienced in uniform. I am also raising two young children in Jerusalem.

For us living here, the current military operation and the ongoing drizzle of rockets are neither unbearable nor threatening in an existential way. Iron Dome has enabled Israelis to continue with their normal lives neither terrified nor terrorized. While the Gazans are rained with high-precision ton-heavy bombs falling with no sirens or alert system, we in Jerusalem have heard three sirens in the past nine days, and witnessed no rocket falling.

When the siren went off in that Saturday afternoon mentioned by the rabbi, I was sitting with my family in a park right across to the Shalom Hartman Institute, compared in his narrative to an U-Boat under attack. From the park where we were picnicking, as it happened, I could see the rocket being intercepted several miles south to Jerusalem, above Hebron, and in contrast to the rabbi's Dresdenian depiction.

In a cross check with a senior Haaretz correspondent, it turns out that none of the rockets even got close to central Jerusalem - hits were located only around Hebron and Ramat Raziel (a village miles to the west of the city) probably a result of shrapnel from Iron Dome's interceptions. This gets nowhere near WWII (the very comparison is preposterous if not offensive to survivors of that terrible war).

I am enraged because the rabbi is presumably a tourist in my city and country, yet in the name of his spiritual and cultural connection to the holy land he feels free to act as its spokesman. By generalizing his personal sense of fear and acting as a spokesman for those who actually carry the burden of living in Israel, the rabbi grossly exaggerated the impact of Hamas terror on Jerusalem and portrayed it with unduly epic dimensions. In so doing, he distorts the actual power imbalance in this tragic situation, in addition to victimizing me and my fellow Israeli citizens.

As a society, we are a (powerful) side in this conflict, not a helpless victim. To avoid any misunderstanding, I would like to clarify that I am far from disregarding the fear and anxiety felt by many Israelis who are in the line of fire day after day. Writing about Jerusalem however - a city that witnessed three sirens and not even one hit of a rocket - in the way that the rabbi adopted is simply absurd. This absurdity might indicate that his experience is influenced less by concrete reality and more by his already existing perception of victimhood. And this brings me to shame.

The blinding victimhood embodied in the rabbi's comments is shameful because it points at an abject moral, spiritual and leadership failure. In the very same Jerusalem and on the very same days, young religious Jews have burnt alive an innocent Palestinian teenager, in the name of national revenge. In this very city, racist Jewish hooligans are marching every night, seeking Arab scapegoats, cracking down on other Jews who dare answer back to them, shouting slogans such as "death to the Arabs" and "A Jew has a Soul, and Arab is a son of a whore".

Where is the cry of this anonymous rabbi against these far more worrisome threats to our existence and future? How dare American rabbis who keep silent these days continue and call themselves religious shepherds? As an observant Jew, I am ashamed at how few were the courageous voices who took into heart the words of Rabbi A. J. Heschel who marched at Selma with Martin Luther King Jr.: "Few might be guilty - but all are responsible".

The rabbi's anonymity, it turns out, is but a metaphor for his inacceptable silence on the real enemies of the Jewish society in Israel - the extremist hateful enemies from within.

No, rabbi, you got it wrong. The rockets are not really scary nor are they a true existential threat. Racism, radicalism, and religious intoxication from brute power has become an imminent danger to our old and beloved peoplehood. When people are accustomed to hearing that they are perpetual innocent victims of Palestinian aggression, they eventually translate they frustration into rage and start seeking justice in revenge. If you continue looking up to the sky, you will not notice that the house is already burning from within."

Anil

The Art of the Epigraph

2014-07-20T10:33:00.000-07:00

The epigraph is a funny literary convention: excerpting lines of someone else’s work — or quotes, adages, lines of verse, lyrics, snippets of conversation, etc — to put before your own. The effect varies: often the epigraph serves as a sort of thematic gatekeeper, or simply sets the mood for the prose to come, sometimes it gives the reader a glimpse into the author’s intentions or inspirations, or it may serve as a joke or warning. They may seem a trivial part of the work they come attached to, but we think, if done properly, they can be very illuminating are more than mere pontification.

Writers don’t use them to boast. They are less like some wine and entrée pairing and more like the first lesson in a long class. Writers must teach a reader how to read their book. They must instruct the tone, the pace, the ostensible project of a given work. An epigraph is an opportunity to situate a novel, a story, or an essay, and, more importantly, to orient the reader to the book’s intentions. A good epigraph establishes the theme, but when it works best it does more than this. A theme can be represented in an infinity of ways, so it is the particular selection of quotation that should do the most work.

Here are some great examples of epigraphs:

"When we are not sure, we are alive." — Graham Greene (from Reality Hunger by David Shields)

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." — G.K. Chesterson (from Coraline by Neil Gaiman)

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once". — Charles Lamb (from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)

"In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones." — Sufi proverb (from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood)

"Vengeance is mine; I will repay." — Deuteronomy 32:35 (from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy)

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime." — Balzac (from The Godfather by Mario Puzo)

And my personal favorite is the one by Mark Twain:

"NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance." (from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain)

Of course you can’t write something simply because you’ve found the perfect epigraph, the perfect title, the perfect premise –– there has to be a greater need, a desire that you can’t stymie. Charles Baxter once wrote, “Art that is overcontrolled by its meaning may start to go a bit dead.” The same is true of art overcontrolled by anything other than the inexplicable urge to put story to paper.

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.

Sometimes, though, epigraphs offer a different kind of poignancy Christopher Hitchens’s last collection of essays, Arguably, opens with this:

"Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to."–– Lambert Strether, in The Ambassadors

Hitchens, by the time Arguably was published, had already been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He knew he was dying. This epigraph stands as Hitchens’s final assertion of his unwavering worldview. Even more retrospectively moving are the epigraphs of Hitch-22, a memoir he wrote before the doctors told him the news. One of these passages is the wonderful, remarkable opening of Hitchens’s friend Richard Dawkins’s book Unweaving the Rainbow:

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, who are here."

Epigraphs are, ultimately, like many components of art, in that they can pretty much accomplish anything the writer wants them to. They can support a theme or contradict it. They can prepare readers or mislead them. They can situate a book into its intended company or they can renounce any relationship with the past. And when used effectively, they can be just as vital to a novel’s meaning as the title, the themes, the prose. An epigraph may not make or break a book, but it can certainly enhance its richness. Each new novel, each new story, not only adds to the great well of work, it actually reaches back into the past and changes the static text. It alters how we see the past. The giant conversation of literature knows no restrictions to time or geography, and epigraphs are a big part of it. Writers continuously resurrect the dead, salute the present and, like epigraphs, hint at what’s to come in the future.

Recent social science findings

2014-07-15T08:48:00.005-07:00

Most social science research confirms the blindingly obvious. But sometimes it reveals things nobody had thought of, or suggests that the things we thought were true are actually false.

Here is a sampling of recent findings:

Working moms sometimes raise smarter students. Caitlin McPherran Lombardi and Rebekah Levine Coley studied the children of mothers who work and those of mothers who don’t. They found the children of working mothers were just as ready for school as other children. Furthermore, among families where the father’s income was lower, the children of working mothers demonstrated higher cognitive skills and fewer conduct problems than the children of nonworking mothers. As with all this work, no one study is dispositive, but here is some more support for the idea that mothers who work are not hurting their kids.

The office is often a more relaxing place than the home. Sarah Damaske, Joshua Smyth and Matthew Zawadzki found that people are more likely to have lower values of the stress hormone cortisol when they are at work than when at home. Maybe that’s because parenting small kids is so demanding. But, on the contrary: Having children around was correlated with less relative stress at home.

Winning hearts and minds may be a myth. Armies fighting counterinsurgency campaigns spend a lot of effort trying to win over the hearts and minds of the local populations. But Raphael Cohen looked at polling data from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and found that public opinion is a poor predictor of strategic victory. Public opinion is not that malleable, and its swings are more an effect than a cause. That is, counterinsurgency armies get more popular as they win victories; they don’t get popular and then use that popularity to win.

Attractive children attract less empathy than unattractive children. Robert Fisher and Yu Ma studied how much help children received from unrelated adults when they were experiencing difficulties. People perceive that attractive children are more socially competent and, therefore, are less likely to help them, as long as the need is not severe. So, if you are creating an ad to get people to donate to your hospital or charity, you might avoid child models who are winners in the looks department.

Too much talent can be as bad as too little talent. Most people assume there is a linear relationship between talent and team performance. But Roderick Swaab and others studied team performance in basketball and found that more talent is better up to a point — after which more talent just means worse teamwork and ultimately worse performance. In baseball, more talent did lead to better team performance straight up the line, but in activities like basketball, which require more intra-team coordination, too much talent can tear apart teamwork.

Sports participation effects social outcomes . Phoebe Clarke and Ian Ayres studied the effect of sports on social outcomes. They found that a 10 percentage point increase in state level female sports participation generated a 5 or 6 percentage point rise in the rate of female secularism, a 5 point rise in the proportion of women who are mothers and a 6 point rise in the percentage who are single mothers. It could be that sports participation is correlated with greater independence from traditional institutions, with good and bad effects.

Moral stories don’t necessarily make more moral children. Kang Lee, Victoria Talwar and others studied the effectiveness of classic moral stories in promoting honesty among 3- to 7-year-olds. They found stories like “Pinocchio” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” failed to reduce lying in children. However, the story of “George Washington and the Cherry Tree” significantly increased truth-telling. Stories that emphasized the bad effects of lying had no effect, but stories that emphasized the good effects of telling the truth did have an effect.

Good fences make good neighbors. When ethnic groups clash, we usually try to encourage peace by integrating them. Let them get to know one another or perform a joint activity. This may be the wrong approach. Alex Rutherford, Dion Harmon and others studied ethnically diverse areas and came to a different conclusion. Peace is not the result of integrated coexistence. It is the result of well-defined geographic and political boundaries. For example, Switzerland is an ethnically diverse place, but mountains and lakes clearly define each group’s spot. Even in the former Yugoslavia, amid widespread ethnic violence, peace prevailed where there were clear boundaries.

Organic foods may make you less generous. In a study published in Social Psychology and Personality Science, Kendall J. Eskine had people look at organic foods, comfort foods or a group of control foods. Those who viewed organic foods subsequently volunteered less time to help a needy stranger and they judged moral transgressions more harshly.

Men are dumber around women. Thijs Verwijmeren, Vera Rommeswinkel and Johan C. Karremans gave men cognitive tests after they had interacted with a woman via computer. In the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the male cognitive performance declined after the interaction, or even after the men merely anticipated an interaction with a woman.

Women inhibit their own performance. In a study published in Self and Identity, Shen Zhang, Toni Schmader and William M. Hall gave women a series of math tests. On some tests they signed their real name, on others they signed a fictitious name. The women scored better on the fictitious name tests, when their own reputation was not at risk.

People filter language through their fingers. In a study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto asked people to rate real words, fictitious words and neologisms. Words composed of letters on the right side of the QWERTY keyboard were viewed more positively than words composed of letters from the left side.

We communicate, process and feel emotions by mimicking the facial expressions of the people around us. For a study in Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Paula M. Niedenthal, Maria Augustinova and others studied young adults who had used pacifiers as babies, and who thus could not mimic as easily. They found that pacifier use correlated with less emotional intelligence in males, though it did not predict emotional processing skills in girls.

Judges are toughest around election time. Judges in Washington State are elected and re-elected into office. In a study for The Review of Economic Statistics, Carlos Berdejó and Noam Yuchtman found that these judges issue sentences that are 10 percent longer at their end of the political cycle than at the beginning.

New fathers pay less. In a study for the Administrative Science Quarterly, Michael Dahl, Cristian Dezso and David Gaddis Ross studied male Danish C.E.O.’s before and after their wives gave birth to children. They found that male C.E.O.’s generally pay their employees less generously after fathering a child. The effect is stronger after a son is born. Female employees are less affected than male employees. C.E.O.’s also tend to pay themselves more after the birth of a child.

Affluent neighborhoods challenge mental equilibrium. In a study for the Journal of Research on Adolescence, Terese J. Lund and Eric Dearing found that boys reported higher levels of delinquency and girls reported higher levels of anxiety and depression when they lived in affluent neighborhoods compared with middle-class neighborhoods. Boys’ delinquency and girls’ anxiety-depression levels were lowest when they were from affluent families living in middle-class neighborhoods.

Premarital doubts are significant. In a study in the Journal of Family Psychology, Justin Lavner, Benjamin Karney and Thomas Bradbury found that women who had cold feet before marriage had significantly higher divorce rates four years later. Male premarital doubts did not correlate with more divorce.

Women use red to impress men. In a study for the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Andrew Elliot, Tobias Greitemeyer and Adam Pazda found that women expecting to converse with an attractive man were more likely to select a red versus green shirt than women expecting to converse with an unattractive man or another woman.

Birth date affects corporate success. In a study for Economics Letters, Qianqian Du, Huasheng Gao and Maurice Levi found that C.E.O.’s are disproportionately less likely to be born in June and July.

Female mammals tend to avoid close male relatives during moments of peak fertility in order to avoid inbreeding. For the journal Psychological Science, Debra Lieberman, Elizabeth Pillsworth and Martie Haselton tracked young women's cell phone calls. They found that these women had fewer and shorter calls with their fathers during peak fertility days, but not with female relatives.

The more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them. David Gal and Derek Rucker published a study in Psychological Science in which they presented some research subjects with evidence that undermined their core convictions. The subjects who were forced to confront the counter evidence went on to more forcefully advocate their original beliefs, thus confirming the earlier findings.

Physical contact improves team performance. For the journal Emotion, Michael Kraus, Cassey Huang and Dacher Keltner measured how frequently members of NBA teams touched each other. Teams that touched each other frequently early in the 2008-2009 season did better than teams that touched less frequently, even after accounting for player status, preseason expectations and early season performance.

Self-control consumes glucose in the brain. For an article in the journal Aggressive Behavior, Nathan DeWall, Timothy Deckman, Matthew Gaillot and Brad Bushman found that research subjects who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than subjects who drank a placebo beverage. They found an indirect relationship between diabetes (a disorder marked by low glucose levels) and low self-control. States with high diabetes rates also had high crime rates. Countries with a different condition that leads to low glucose levels had higher killing rates, both during wartime and during peacetime.

We tend to admire extroverted leaders. But Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David Hofmann have added a wrinkle to this bias in an article in The Academy of Management Journal. They found that extraverted leaders perform best when their employees are passive, but this effect is reversed when the employees are proactive. In these cases, the extroverted leaders are less receptive to their employees' initiatives.

Beautiful women should take up chess. Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark wrote a Stockholm University working paper in which they found that male chess players pursue riskier strategies when they're facing attractive female opponents, even though the risk-taking didn't improve their performance.

People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts.

Home teams win more than visiting teams in just about every sport, and the advantage is astoundingly stable over time. So what explains the phenomenon? It's not because players perform better when their own fans are cheering them on. In basketball, free-throw percentages are the same home and away. In baseball, a pitcher's strike-to-ball ratio is the same home and away. Neither is it the rigors of travel disadvantaging the away team. Teams from the same metro area lose at the same rate as teams from across the country when playing in their rival's stadium. No, the real difference is the officiating. The refs and umpires don't like to get booed. So even if they are not aware of it, they call fewer fouls on home teams in crucial situations. They call more strikes on away batters in tight games in the late innings. Moskowitz and Wertheim show that the larger, louder and closer a crowd is, the more the refs favor the home team. It's not a conscious decision. They just naturally conform a bit to the emotional vibes radiating from those around them.

They say you only hurt the ones you love. That may not be strictly true, but in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Johanna Peetz and Lara Kammrath find that people are more likely to break promises made to people they love. That's because they are driven by affection to make lavish promises in the first place. They really mean it at the time, but lavish promises are the least likely to be kept.

It's best to motivate groups, not individuals. Organize your people into a group; reward everybody when the group achieves its goals. Susan Helper, Morris Kleiner and Yingchun Wang confirm this insight in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. They compared compensation schemes in different manufacturing settings and found that group incentive pay and hourly pay motivate workers more effectively than individual incentive pay.

What sorts of people are good at reading emotion? Age may play some role here. Jamin Halberstadt has a paper coming out in the journal Psychology and Aging that suggests that the young may on average read emotional cues more sensitively than the old. Halberstadt showed various people videos of someone committing a faux pas. Younger viewers were able to better discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Older subjects also performed worse on emotion recognition tests. Taste may play a role, too. For the journal Psychological Science, Kendall Eskine, Natalie Kacinik and Jesse Prinz gave people sweet-tasting, bitter-tasting and neutral-tasting drinks and then asked them to rate a variety of moral transgressions. As expected, people who had tasted the bitter drink were more likely to register moral disgust, suggesting that having Cherry Coke in the jury room may be a smart move for good defense lawyers.

Are new immigrants weakening the social fabric? By one measure they are not. In fact, America seems to be corrupting them. In the journal Addictive Behaviors, Mildred Maldonado-Moline, Jennifer Reingle, Wesley Jennings and Guillermo Prado looked at drunk driving arrests among new immigrants and U.S.-born young adults. The recent immigrants had low DUI arrest rates. Second generation Americans had higher arrest rates than first generation Americans and third generation had higher rates than the second generation. The same pattern applied to arrests for marijuana use.

Best and Brightest . If you could move anywhere in the world, where would you go? In the journal Israel Affairs, Yinon Cohen, Yitchak Haberfeld and Irena Kogan looked at the immigration patterns of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. They found that the most skilled emigrants went to the United States, where labor markets are more flexible and return on skills are higher. The less skilled moved to Germany or Israel. The U.S. still seems to be attracting the Best and the Brightest.

Empathy’s Decline. Young people today have a more expanded sense of self than young people a generation ago. The meaner way of saying this is that they are more narcissistic. Scientific American recently reported on research by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan who looked at surveys in which students were asked to rate their own empathy. She found that self-reported empathy has declined sharply over the past decade. Almost 75 percent of the students today rate themselves as less empathetic than the average student 30 years ago.

There is a link between reading and empathy (stories give you practice in experiencing other people’s emotions) and for the first time in recent memory, fewer than 50 percent of Americans now say they read for pleasure.

Knowledge Corrupts. when people hold high office they change a zillion different ways. They have power, with all the attendant corruptions. They become the center of every room they enter, with all the attendant narcissism. They also have inside information, and often leap to the conclusion that people who don’t have this information are simply not worth listening to.

Forgiveness has a down side. James McNulty had a paper in the Journal of Family Psychology last year suggesting that forgiveness may increase the chances that those who are forgiven will offend again. McNulty studied family diaries and found that newlywed partners were more likely to report misbehavior on days after they were forgiven for something else. It should be added that forgiveness is still a good thing to do. The downside probably doesn’t outweigh the positive effects.

Writing about stress before a test improves your performance on it. In the journal Science, Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock had students sit for a bit and describe their anxieties before they took a big exam. That brief assignment significantly improved their test scores. Maybe in baseball, hitters should be writing little essays on the on-deck circle.

The Thrill of Victory. In a forthcoming study for the journal Computers in Human Behavior, Patrick Markey and Charlotte Markey compared Internet searches in red and blue states after the 2006 and 2010 elections. They found that the number of searchers for pornography was much higher right after the 2010 election (a big G.O.P. year) than after 2006 (a big Democratic year). Conversely, people in blue states searched for porn at much higher rates after 2006 than after 2010. One explanation is this: After winning a vicarious status competition, people tend to seek out pornography.

Modern Status. Characters in Jane Austen novels made incredibly fine distinctions between the different layers of the British aristocracy. In our age, we make incredibly fine distinctions between colleges and universities, measuring, say, whether Princeton is better than the University of Miami, or whether Swarthmore College is better than Rhodes College. Scholars have also been trying to tease out differences, at least when it comes to something they can measure — future income. Recently Stacy Dale and Alan Kreuger came out with a study suggesting that the college you attend makes little difference when it comes to how much money you’ll earn. A self-confident student who gets a 1400 on her SATs will have the same income whether she goes to a super top university or merely a good one.

What do elite employers look for when they recruit. In a forthcoming issue of the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Lauren Rivera tried to find out what elite employers look for when they recruit. It turns out they look for students who went to the top five universities. They attribute superior intellectual, moral and cultural qualities to people who can get into those places. That makes sense. A consultant wants to be able to tell a potential client they have eight Harvard grads working on their account — as a marker of high-level brainpower. Rivera also found that employers don’t care much about grades or academic accomplishments, but they do care about extracurricular activities. They are looking for out-of-school activities that they take to be signs of social and moral character. What’s interesting here is how employers try to peer into the academic world to pick out traits they value in the professional world. Employers aren’t looking for genius as much as energy and clubbability. They want people who are energetic enough to get good grades in high school and still drive themselves to be captain of this team or launch that tutoring program. Then in college they want them to display the same relentless drive. The message, which one does detect on elite campuses, is that the actual academic content to be found in these places is secondary. Colleges are distinguished most importantly by their cultures and personalities, not by anything that can be ranked by neat status rules.

What is the most important change of your lifetime?. We spend a lot of our time debating political events and the choices leaders make. But the most important changes are the shifts in culture, ideas and mentalities that people usually don’t even notice until after the fact. In 1960, it would have been absurd for most colleges to have co-ed dorms. A short time later, they were unremarkable.

It’s always worth emphasizing that no one study is dispositive. Many, many studies do not replicate. Still, these sorts of studies do remind us that we are influenced by a thousand breezes permeating the unconscious layers of our minds. They remind us of the power of social context.

(Kevin Lewis’s blog at National Affairs provides links to hundreds of academic studies a year from which these selections have been drawn.)

Uncovering an Untapped World of Energy

2014-07-15T08:11:00.004-07:00

Untapped energy is all around us -- it's just a matter of finding creative solutions for harnessing it.

When you ask the average person about where energy comes from, they likely think of the standard sources. Oil. Coal. Natural gas. Solar and wind. Even geothermal or hydropower, perhaps. These sources provide the foundation for how we fuel our everyday lives. But energy is much more than just power plants. Around the world, a diverse set of creative problem solvers are discovering ways to produce energy that go far beyond the conventional. The world’s population continues to grow at a rapid clip. As more people are packing into already-dense areas, power will need to come from sources that embrace efficiency. For the cities of the future to thrive, it’s vital that we identify sources of power to meet a demand that will increase rapidly over the next quarter-century and beyond.

Here are some technological innovations are changing the way we think about producing power:

sOccket, a plug-in soccer ball that captures energy during a game and uses it to charge LEDs and batteries.Uncharted Play’s SOCCKET ball also uses them to create energy. The soccer ball, which uses a similar process to convert human activity into usable energy, has immense potential to bring electricity to rural areas which lie off the conventional electricity grid. The SOCCKET has even drawn the admiration of President Barack Obama, who hailed the product for turning “one of the most popular games...into a source of electricity and progress.”

Powering your phone with your feet. Imagine if producing energy was as simple as walking to a field and kicking a ball. Turns out, it can be. Pavegen and Uncharted Play are two companies specializing in the development of advanced technology that converts the kinetic energy of human movement to storable, usable electricity.This March, Pavegen installed 14 of its innovative sidewalk tiles outside a train station in Saint Omer, France. The tiles, which create energy as people walk on top of them, will illuminate LED bench lighting and fuel two USB ports within the station — allowing patrons to literally power their electronic devices with their feet.

One man’s waste, one city’s treasure. Often, the waste we produce has just as much potential to bring more energy to more people.For example, think about the coffee grounds you toss away every day. Those grounds contain more than just the remnants of your morning caffeine fix — they can produce significant energy. Biobean, a firm based in London, discovered that coffee shops in its metropolis throw away over 200,000 tons of grounds per year. Now, they process those grounds through a unique recycling process, converting them into carbon-neutral biofuel. Businesses in London then use that fuel to power buildings and transportation, completing the cycle.
In the United States, biomass, a sustainable, natural source of energy derived from natural material, is making the most of waste. Consider the city of Milwaukee, where companies process food waste in landfills — like bones from dinner plates and excess yeast from brewing — into methane gas, powering tens of thousands of households. In rural areas biofuels can be used in mechanised milling and small scale electrification systems. In cities, they are widely used for transport, thereby reducing the damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Discovering the hidden properties of di erent materials is the key to developing technology that is more energy efficient. We may not be able to wave goodbye to power-hungry technology any time soon but, by uncovering new ways to power our phones and computers, synchrotron light could be the spark that sets off the next generation of energy-efficient gadgets.

The common thread in each of these examples: A dedication to finding a new way. The energy challenges the world will face over the next 50 years might not have easy answers, but there are people determined to solve them, reversing what the creators of the SOCCKET ball have dubbed “the Empower problem.”

An Annual Indian ideas festival

2014-07-15T07:56:00.003-07:00

Reading the Indian newspapers heralding the advent of a new prime minister, one thing strikes you- the paucity of new ideas and strategies. The old hackneyed shibboleths are trotted out yet again as gospel truth and few offer striking new paths. There is no one to say:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

What we need today is to create a premier gathering place for leaders from around the country, and across many disciplines, to engage in deep and inquisitive discussion of the ideas and issues that will both shape our lives and challenge our times. Imagine some of the most inspired and provocative thinkers, writers, artists, business people, teachers, and other leaders drawn from myriad fields and from across the country and around the world – all gathered in a single place, ready to teach, speak, lead, question and answer – all interacting with an audience of thoughtful people who have stepped back from their day-to-day routines to delve deeply into a world of ideas, thought and technology.

We need to look forward. What will the next ten years bring? What innovations will wow us in health and medicine, robotics and biotechnology? What form will climate changes take? What dynamics will shape our societies at home and abroad? What will education and the arts look like? Will we be more attuned to the power of creativity? We need to engage a broader audience in a discussion of some of the significant ideas and issues that touch all parts of our society as found in the arts, science, culture, religion, philosophy, economics, and politics. And we need to imagine what 2024 will look like.

We need only to go back through history to appreciate the potential and power derived from gatherings of thinkers, leaders, and citizens to debate, learn, and grapple with the ideas that confront their societies. Since 1857, when Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and publisher Moses Dresser Phillips convened with colleagues for their usual Saturday meetings to “read poetry, condemn slavery, and ponder new ways to enlighten the masses,” Americans have sponsored these conclaves. There is even an institute that sponsors these conclaves today. The Aspen Institute has been the the nation's premier gathering place for leaders from around the globe and across many disciplines to engage in deep and inquisitive discussion of the ideas and issues that both shape our lives and challenge our times.

What are the ideas such a Indian festival may cover?

New approaches to warring neighbours
Unconventional energy
Honesty in public life
Mobilizing funds the Obama way
Using internet for clean procurement
Promoting creativity in our youth

Will some industrialist step up to create an Indian Aspen Institute and sponsor our own Ideas festival?

PS
Here are some of the subjects that the Aspen Institute covered:

2014

Higher education policy report card
A New cold war with Russia?
The supreme court, the future and you
Beyond the hype:does it really pay to invest in girls?
Who will US be?
When experts disagree: the art of medical decision making
Health by design:the fight for good food
Womens health, the unfinished revolution
Allies in public health
Balancing instruments for power in a multipolar world
Unlocking opportunity through trade

2013

Pakistan at a Crossroads
Are we Safe
Al Jazeeras Big Play and Cybersecurity Threat
Democracy in the Middle East: Islamists, Liberals, and the Battle for the Heart of the Arab Revolutions
A City as Startup Zappos and Downtown Project
Can We All Be Activists in the Cause for Womens Health
Cooking and Eating Your Way to a New Community
Far Out, Up Close Visualizing the Invisible
Reimagining the Way Teachers Teach and Students Learn
The “Big Bang” in Learning: Brain Changes and Childhood Learning
Fear and Hope: Climate Change and Policy Solutions

Thoughts on turning seventy five

2014-07-15T07:35:00.003-07:00

Two weeks ago I turned seventy five. And as often happens, as ones life reaches beyond its biblical allotted three scores and ten, your thoughts turn inevitably to the past. What has life taught, what surprised you, what gave you unalloyed joy and what brought grief?

The foremost is the love of your family. The love of family is life's greatest blessing.

Achievements. You may have been a success in your life but all you remember often are its high and low points, forgetting the misfortunes in the midst of them all. And when your friends honor you, it gives you a special joy that warms your heart.

Kindness is a surprisingly powerful emotion. A kind word or action sometimes has consequences that you never imagined. It may be a simple gesture- once trapped in Hanoi in the early days when hotel rooms were scarce, I offered to share my room with a colleague. I thought nothing of it, but he didn't and remained a loyal friend for the rest of our careers.

Surprisingly, an unkind word seems to rankle for a surprisingly long time.A friend who was staying in my house remarked casually that in Canada Indians were the most hated and despised group. I remembered that insult for a very long time especially since he said it in front of my family implying a superiority for his kind and a not so subtle put down of my kind.

Friendship is a rare gem to be won and treasured - I have a few friends that have been with me for over five decades and each one is a treasure.

Health. Your physical health comes back to haunt you in your old age if you have not kept it well.

Reading and writing -if that is your gift- brings a new world to you.

Gentle tolerance- little things that used to irritate you - you learn to brush aside.

Peacefulness. Happiness can only be achieved by looking inward & learning to enjoy whatever life has given you.

The gentle art of silence. Oftentimes all it needs is a period of silent contemplation. Sitting on my terrace looking at the fiery red sunsets in the west, the sounds of whirring medical helicopters on way to the nearest hospital. Just sitting at peace with the world forgetting the painful past and refusing to muse on the future. Just sitting quietly in the present till sadness slowly dissolves and so that I can think of the good fortune god has seen fit to bestow on me.

New beginings. The last few weeks I have had the good fortune to spend time with my two and half year old grandson. His insatiable curiousity, his love for new things, his perpetual"Why" has taught me many a lesson. Life has so much left to teach you. Indeed so many have started their lives anew at seventy. I started writing when I turned seventy. In the past five years I have written over 500 columns and blogs.I have written nine books and am now venturing on my first novel. I am even toying with penning a murder mystery.

All inspired by the poet Longfellow

“Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
It is the waning, not the crescent moon;
The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon;
It is not strength, but weakness; not desire,
But its surcease; not the fierce heat of fire,
The burning and consuming element,
But that of ashes and of embers spent,
In which some living sparks we still discern,
Enough to warm, but not enough to burn. “

And yet Longfellow says, “nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his Characters of Men.
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past."

These are indeed exceptions; but they show
" How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow
Into the arctic regions of our lives.
Where little else than life itself survives.”

In any case, what choice do we have as old age approaches? As the poet says:

“Shall we sit idly down and say
The night hath come; it is no longer day?"

Or shall we say instead that"

" the night hath not yet come; we are not quite
C"ut off from labor by the failing light;
Something remains for us to do or dare;
Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear;
Not Oedipus Coloneus, or Greek Ode,
Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode
Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn,
But other something, would we but begin;
For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. “

I remembered what I had written about the conquest of old age blues and the old. And about the people who had encountered old age with dignity and courage. Even while they suffered physically as most of us do as we age, they rarely talked or bemoaned their physical ailments; while they were proud of their past achievements, they rarely dwelt overmuch on them; while they regretted the loss of sensory delights of youth, they compensated the quantity of the past with the quality of the present; they did not shy away from discussing death but once they had taken care of all of its implications on their loved ones, they rarely mentioned it again. But what consumed them all was their latest passion – be it writing, teaching, volunteering, and learning the latest in science and technology. Contrary to all religious precepts about detachment in old age, these were people who were full of passion and passionate intensity. None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

They were also the people who wanted “to die young at a ripe old age”.

A birthday to remember

2014-07-12T08:29:00.003-07:00

It is my 75 th birthday today. I am surprised that I have lived so long, much beyond the allocated span of three scores and ten that the Bible specifies for us.

On these occasions, one of the biggest problems facing my family is what to give me as a present.

“ We have already given him an ipad and iphone and all the latest gadgets that he could possibly want.” I can imagine my children arguing as they go through the various options. "What can we possibly give him now."

And as often happens when their imagination falters, they appeal to their mother for help.

“Mom, tell us what we should give him for his birthday," they beg her, " for if you don’t we will just give him a tie” they threaten.

Much confabulations accrue. I know because everytime I walk into the room they would stop talking or change the subject to something innocuous like the weather.

Well, friends, they obviously came to a decision because the talking about the birthday suddenly stopped. I was curious as hell as what they had settled on but none would share that secret with me.

Finally, it was my birthday. I was opening my birthday greeting cards from friends when I heard the front door bell ring. I was sure it was my son who was flying in from Vietnam for my birthday and so I rose to let him in. And lo and behold I saw my birthday present!

And it was the best birthday present any man could ever want. Nestled in my sons arms was my two and half year old grandson, Nikhil! My son had undertaken this twenty hour journey with his son because he knew that I would be delighted to see his son. Of course I talked to him almost every day for ten to twenty minutes on the Ipad, but the feeling I got when he cuddled in my arms was out of this world.

Then on my birthday morning he toddled into my room,” good morning dada,” he said, “ happy birthday to you” and sang the ditty or as much of it as he could remember!

But it was enough. They really had found me the perfect gift for my birthday. And it promises to be a birthday that I will always remember and cherish.

Resume virtues and eulogy virtues

2014-07-12T08:14:00.005-07:00

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, asserts that American culture is too centered around attaining happiness, at the expense of "a different goal in life that is deeper than happiness and more important than happiness." We're not only obsessed with happiness. argues that we focus on accumulating power, material wealth, and professional achievements instead of cultivating the kinds of qualities that will be discussed at our funerals. As Brooks phrases it, we emphasize "resume virtues" over "eulogy virtues."

Brook's wants to fashion a path to "inner depth." In a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he wove together various philosophical, theological, and biographical threads to define what it means to be "deep," and how to lead a life of depth. As Brooks sees it, resume virtues and eulogy virtues represent two sides of human nature.

In a 1965 essay, the American rabbi and philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik developed a dichotomy to capture this phenomenon. He distinguished between "Adam I" and "Adam II. "Adam I is the external Adam, it's the resume Adam," Brooks explained. "Adam I wants to build, create, use, start things. Adam II is the internal Adam. Adam II wants to embody certain moral qualities, to have a serene inner character, not only to do good but to be good. To live and be is to transcend the truth and have an inner coherence of soul. Adam I, the resume Adam, wants to conquer the world…. Adam II wants to obey a calling and serve the world. Adam I asks how things work, Adam II asks why things exist and what ultimately we're here for."

Soloveitchik actually conceived of Adam I and Adam II as a way to reconcile the fact that Genesis offers two accounts of how God created man. As an Orthodox Jew who believed in the "divine character" of the Bible, Soloveitchik didn't accept the explanation that the stories sprang from different authors and sources. Instead, he argued, they existed to illustrate "dual man." In the first account, in which man is created "in the image of God," Adam is tasked with "filling" and "subduing" the earth. In the second account, in which man is created out of dust and God's breath, Adam is charged with "serving" and "keeping" the Garden of Eden.

"We live in a culture that nurtures Adam I," Brooks said. "We're taught to be assertive and master skills, to broadcast our brains. To get likes. To get followers." Being deep doesn't preclude you from being, well, shallow, he added. "Some days we want to be externally successful, some days we want to be internally good. The question is whether your life is in balance."

So how do we nourish Adam II—the deep Adam? For that matter, what does it even mean to be deep?

"I think we mean that that person is capable of experiencing large and sonorous emotions, they have a profound spiritual presence," Brooks said. "In the realm of emotion they have a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect, they have a set, permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action, they have commitments to projects that can't be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality, they have a certain consistency and rigor that's almost perfect."

Deep people also tend to be old.

"The things that lead you astray, those things are fast: lust, fear, vanity, gluttony," Brooks observed, in religiously inflected language. "The things that we admire most—honesty, humility, self-control, courage—those things take some time and they accumulate slowly." Albert Schweitzer, Dorothy Day, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa. These are deep people, according to Brooks.

What qualities spur us to plumb the depths of our being? Brooks outlined five:

1. Love
The love Brooks has in mind is of the transformational, unconditional variety. "It could be love for a cause, usually it's love for a person, it could be love for God," he said. Love issues the humbling reminder that "we're not in control of ourselves," and also "de-centers the self"—a "person in love finds the center of himself is outside himself." It “complicates the distinction between giving and receiving, because two selves are so intermingled in love that the person giving is giving to him or herself." Brooks cited the French writer Michel de Montaigne, who, when asked why he had such strong affection for a friend, replied, simply, "because I was I, and he was he."

2. Suffering
"When people look forward, when they plan their lives, they say, 'How can I plan ... [to] make me happy?'" Brooks noted. "But when people look backward at the things that made them who they are, they usually don't talk about moments when they were happy. They usually talk about moments of suffering or healing. So we plan for happiness, but we're formed by suffering." Like love, suffering exposes our lack of control over our lives. But it also encourages deep introspection and equips people with a moral calling. "They're not masters of their pain, they can't control their pain, but you do have a responsibility to respond to your pain," Brooks explained. He gave the example of Franklin Roosevelt, whose character was forged through his battle with polio.

3. Internal struggle

"Here, I don't mean the struggle involved in winning a championship, starting a company, or making a lot of money," Brooks cautioned. Those who have depth are "aware that while they have great strength, great dignity, they also have great weakness. And they are engaged in an internal struggle with themselves." Consider Dwight Eisenhower, who constantly tangled with his bad temper. "Internal struggles are the logic by which we build character," Brooks said.

4. Obedience
Brooks took aim at the common message in commencement speeches that students should turn inward to discover their passion and vocation. "If you look at the people who are deep, often they don't look inside themselves. Something calls to them from outside themselves," he said. They obey a cause. Brooks mentioned Frances Perkins, who watched in horror as people leaped to their deaths during the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, and then devoted her life to workers' safety (she eventually became FDR's labor secretary).

5. Acceptance
Brooks also calls this "admittance," seeking to shake the word's association with exclusivity (think a nightclub or college). He likens the concept to the religious notion of "grace." It is "unmerited, unearned admittance"—belonging to "some sort of human transcendent community." Whereas Adam I wants to "work" and "sweat," Adam II "simply accepts the fact that he's accepted. Adam II, the spiritual side of our nature, stands against the whole ethos of self-cultivation, which is the resume side of our world. The ethos of scrambling, working, climbing." Just as the journalist and activist Dorothy Day brimmed with gratefulness after the birth of her child, acceptance energizes the accepted. "They want to honor the people who gave them that gift and they want to pass on the gift that they didn't deserve," Brooks said.

What's perhaps most interesting about Brooks's schema is how it inverts the reigning culture of self-help in this country. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People this is not. Rather than suggesting depth-seekers take control of their lives, Brooks is urging them to surrender control to external forces, at least to a degree.

With the exception of "internal struggle," we can't readily act on his advice. We don't necessarily choose when we fall in love, or whom or what we fall in love with. We don't decide when suffering is visited upon us. Obedience and admittance, by Brooks's definitions, cannot be willed into existence.

The most we can do is accept invitations to a more meaningful life, whenever and wherever they arise.

A paean to IITs

2014-07-02T09:03:00.001-07:00

It’s often said you could appreciate the status of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in India if you put together the status of Harvard, MIT and Princeton. The IITs—with seven campuses, in Mumbai, Kanpur, Delhi, Kharagpur, Chennai, Roorkee and Guwahati, and a few more in the pipeline—are probably the hardest school in the world to get into. Years of preparation, a six-hour entrance exam, the month-long wait for the results—after that, only the best and brightest are admitted. This is the single biggest reason for the success of IIT alumni.

What the US and western countries import when they roll out the red carpet for IITians is really smart people. IIT undergrads leave their American counterparts way behind, and are favoured over almost everyone else, for the IIT degree carries pre-assigned credibility. It isn’t just tech firms that recruit them. Consulting and software firms, bankers—all come to pick the best talent in India, on the IIT campuses.

If you think engineering grads are nerds, not particularly bold or creative, IIT breaks that mould too. It converts students into risk-takers and leaders. Some of the smartest, most successful and most influential Indians who have migrated to the US seem to share a common credential—they are all IIT grads. The IITs prepare students for an analytical career, which, coupled with years of experience in different environments, produces real success stories. Microsoft, Intel, Sun Microsystems—you name it and IIT grads have played a leading role everywhere. The IIT brand is synonymous with Indian excellence.

For me, the IIT experience was one of the richest and most valuable I have had. It gave me the opportunity to interact with extremely smart people, sometimes a humbling experience. IITs prepare you to work cross-culturally and do diverse things. From my batchmates, one runs a hedge fund in New York, another is a successful trader on Wall Street and yet another a professor of computer science at MIT.


	When the best companies in the world come to seek out the best tech-trained talent in India that has consistently proved itself in diverse fields, they go to the IITs.

The IITs have contributed to almost every field: Jairam Ramesh from the UPA government and Manohar Parrikar from the NDA both graduated from IIT Bombay. Infocian Nandan Nilekani, who went on to head the UIDAI project, also graduated from IIT Bombay. Victor Menezes, who retired as senior vice-president of Citibank and co-chairs the American India Foundation, and Raghuman Rajan, the current governor of the Reserve Bank of India, all share the IIT DNA. Narayana Murthy and Chetan Bhagat, names that need no introduction, are also from IIT. The list of IITians and their stellar contribution to not just the economy or their chosen vocation but to nation-building is endless. It was IIT that encouraged the entrepreneurial streak in me. Many IITians have become entrepreneurs in India and overseas, making significant contributions to the growth of the Indian economy.

Having said that, the IITs alone aren’t the repository of talent in India. There are other institutes of repute, such as BITS Pilani, the Manipal Institute of Technology and other regional engineering colleges that prepare students to reach the top. This is also an indicator that Indian students are exceptionally capable individuals, ready to take on the world.

I must confess to the readers that I am an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, the first of the many IITs.

Anglo Indians

2014-06-30T09:01:00.005-07:00

India's Anglo-Indian community – a legacy of British rule on the subcontinent – is fighting for its survival as increasing numbers of their young men and women marry Indian partners.

There are an estimated 500,000 Anglo-Indians throughout the world – including in Britain, Canada, Australia and Pakistan – but in India itself their population has dipped to an estimated 150,000. At the time of India's independence in 1947 there were half a million Anglo-Indians in the country.

The community developed from mixed marriages between British officers, squaddies, tea planters and railway workers and local Indian women in the 19th century. Since then they have developed a unique hybrid culture which carefully preserves a pre-War sense of English identity. This largely Christian community has traditionally centred on some of India's largest cities, including Calcutta, Madras, Bangalore, New Delhi and the Kolar Gold Fields of Karnataka.

Many of its leading figures have thrived in India's armed forces, where the current Air Chief Marshal N. A. K Browne is an Anglo-Indian, and in the country's extensive railways, which they once dominated. The actor Ben Kingsley, entertainers Sir Cliff Richard and Engelburt Humperdink, and the former Olympic athlete Sebastian Coe, are claimed by the community as some of their highest achievers.

Recent DNA tests show that the Duke of Cambridge 'has Indian ancestry'. The Duke of Cambridge may be heir to the throne and born to wealth and privilege, but he is also a member of
racial minority - that he is an Anglo-indian. A geneticist at Edinburgh University has confirmed that DNA tests from members of his family have proved he has an Indian descendent on his mother’s side. Six generations before him, Eliza Kewark, a housekeeper, had a relationship with one of his mother Princess Diana’s ancestors, Thoedore Forbes, and bore him several children, including a daughter, Katherine, in 1812. Ms Kewark has, until now, always been thought to have been an Armenian living in India, where she met Theodore Forbes, a Scottish noble working for the East India Company which then ruled much of India. But DNA testing on saliva samples from William’s relatives by Jim Wilson, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, and the company Britain’s DNA have established beyond doubt that she was in fact an Indian. The clinching evidence is a rare type of DNA, R30b, found so far in only 14 others, all Indian except for one person, from neighbouring Nepal. Their discovery makes William one of the world’s dwindling number of Anglo-Indians.

Anglo-Indians were discriminated against by the British during the Raj because of racism and many were consigned to work on India’s railways where they continued to work after independence. Many were the result of secret affairs between tea planters and Indian pickers on their estates or relationships between British soldiers and local girls. Because of this they were also discriminated against by many Indians. Their women were often referred to in derogatory terms as ‘Chutney Marys'.

Now this marginalised community which has lived in the overlap between British and Indian society has a new royal patron.

Leading Indian commentator Swapan Dasgupta said the discovery of Indian DNA in the prince had righted an historical wrong. Most of India’s invaders and occupiers, including the Aryans and the Mughals, had eventually become Indian, except the British. “They came as foreigners but got absorbed. I’m happy the Indian strain remains in the British monarchy. India may have been lost to Britain, but an Indian remains,” he said.

The largest group of European Indians, however, are descendants of British men, generally from the colonial service and the military, and lower-caste Hindu or Muslim women. From some time in the nineteenth century, both the British and the Indian societies rejected the offspring of these unions, and so the Anglo-Indians, as they became known, sought marriage partners among other Anglo Indians. Over time this group developed a number of caste-like features and acquired a special occupational niche in the railroad, postal, and customs services. A number of factors fostered a strong sense of community among Anglo-Indians. The school system focused on English language and culture and was virtually segregated, as were Anglo-Indian social clubs; the group's adherence to Christianity also set members apart from most other Indians; and distinctive manners, diet, dress, and speech contributed to their segregation.

During the independence movement, many Anglo-Indians identified (or were assumed to identify) with British rule, and, therefore, incurred the distrust and hostility of Indian nationalists. Their position at independence was difficult. They felt a loyalty to a British "home" that most had never seen and where they would gain little social acceptance. They felt insecure in an India that put a premium on participation in the independence movement as a prerequisite for important government positions. Some Anglo-Indians left the country in 1947, hoping to make a new life in Britain or elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Nations, such as Australia or Canada. Many of these people returned to India after unsuccessful attempts to find a place in "alien" societies. Most Anglo-Indians, however, opted to stay in India and made whatever adjustments they deemed necessary.

Like the Parsis, the Anglo-Indians are essentially urban dwellers. But Unlike the Parsis, relatively few have attained high levels of education, amassed great wealth, or achieved more than subordinate government positions. In the 1990s, Anglo-Indians remained scattered throughout the country in the larger cities and those smaller towns serving as railroad junctions and communications centers.

Constitutional guarantees of the rights of communities and religious and linguistic minorities have permitted Anglo-Indians to maintain their own schools and to use English as the medium of instruction. There is no official discrimination against Anglo-Indians in terms of current government employment. Indeed a few have risen to high posts; some are high-ranking officers in the military, and a few are judges. In occupational terms, at least, the assimilation of Anglo-Indians into the mainstream of Indian life was well under way by the 1990s. Nevertheless, the group will probably remain socially distinct as long as its members marry only other Anglo-Indians and its European descent. Breakfast tea from a cup and saucer, Agatha Christie murder mysteries and Mills & Boon romances, a weekly visit from the hairdresser, who sets a dowager’s delicate hair in a 1940s-style wave are still part of their lifestyle. Sometimes, a tailor comes to make the old-style garments like floral tea dresses, beloved by Anglo-Indian women of a certain age. The culture lives on, somewhat, in Anglo-Indian dishes like country chicken, a tangy dish seasoned with garlic and ginger, and pepper water, a spicy tomato-chili sauce, ladled on rice with meat on the side.

In some respects, Anglo-Indians tended to be socially progressive. By the early 20th century, many Anglo-Indian women worked outside the home, at a time when few middle-class Indian women did. They established an English-language education system, financed by the British, and a vast network of social clubs. Along with educational and social benefits, Anglo-Indians received preferential pay during British rule. In the 1940s a British train engineer earned around 300 rupees a month, while an Anglo-Indian would earn 200 and an Indian 100.

The demise of the British Raj was a shock from which the Anglo-Indian community took decades to recover. Many of the better off and more highly skilled left for new lives overseas. Those who stayed lost the privileges to which they had become accustomed. Government financing for separate Anglo-Indian schools, for instance, stopped in 1961. After hiring quotas for Anglo-Indians were abolished, their inability to speak Hindi and other Indian languages took a toll on their employment opportunities. Today, though, the fortunes of younger Anglo-Indians are generally rising because of their English skills and what Ms. Andrews, the anthropologist, describes as their “Western bearing” made them attractive employees for multinationals and Indian outsourcing companies.

“You go for a job interview in a multinational with a name like O’Brien, and, well, it all flows pretty easily for our children these days,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’s their fluency in English that makes it easy for them to get positions in multinationals and customer care positions in call centers,”.

The term "Anglo-Indian" was first used by Warren Hastings in the eighteenth century to describe both the British in India and their Indian-born children. In the nineteenth century the British in India still separated themselves from coloured people but accepted fairer (and often wealthier) people of dual heritage as "Anglo-Indian". Darker (and usually poorer) people were given the name "Eurasian". Today (apart from literature still alluding to the British who have lived in India for a long time as "Anglo-Indian" the term rightly signifies a world minority who have settled in Canada, New Zealand, the United States of Americas the United Kingdom and Australia. The East India Company directors in the seventeenth century paid one pagoda or gold mohur for each child born to an Indian mother and a European father, as family allowance. Children with British or European fathers and Indian mothers were called "country-born" and included those with Portuguese, Dutch or French fathers. These offspring were amalgamated into the Anglo-Indian community, forming a bulwark for the British Raj, a buffer but also a bridge between rulers and subjects. These Westernised people, their culture inherited from their male ancestors but enriched by the spirit of India, have descended from all classes, from both Indian and European aristocrats, from missionaries and naval men, and from traders and soldiers. By 1750 they outnumbered the often transient British.

The Anglo-Indians, were, however, more "Anglo" than "Indian". Their mother-tongue was English, and so was their religious upbringing, as were their customs and traditions. While most of them married within their own Anglo-Indian circle, there were many who continued to marry expatriate Englishmen. Very few, if any, married Indians. The same rigid social barriers that the British erected between themselves and the Anglo-Indians, also existed to isolate the Anglo-Indians from the vast majority of Indians. Neither the British nor the Anglo-Indians made any attempt at appreciating Indian music, art, dance, literature or drama. The "natives" were seen as idol worshippers, and not particularly clean ones at that, with their habits of blowing their noses, spitting and defecating in public. Not to mention eating with their fingers while sitting cross legged on the ground. The aloofness between themselves and their Indian subjects were of little concern to the British, and even less so now that they were going ‘home’. But the Anglo-Indians, left in a twilight zone of uncertainty, felt a bitter sense of betrayal – and dismay at the fact that Britain made no effort to offer her swarthier sons any hospitality in the land where their forefathers had been born.

But the Anglo-Indian identity is disappearing fast. Those who have found new lives abroad have merged into the mainstream. Other than the nostalgic reminiscences of an older generation (much of it irrelevant to the busy day-to-day concerns of their children and grand-children) their Indian past has all but faded into oblivion. In India, the Community are indistinguishable from their Indian friends and neighbours. The women wear saris or salwar kameez, the kids disco enthusiastically to Hindi film hits and watch Bollywood movies. Although English remains their first language, they speak the local vernacular with ease and fluency. It is a culture known for its good cheer, its generous hospitality and its ideals of keen sportsmanship.

Greg Francis, a 30-year-old Anglo-Indian from Calcutta, where his forefathers worked on the railroads, works for I.B.M.’s call center division in Gurgaon, a high-rise satellite city on Delhi’s edge where many multinationals have their headquarters where he trains Indians on dealing with Westerners said, " he could not shake the idea that his people’s best days were in the past."

“I feel kind of homesick for those old times although I never knew them.”

Wait, wait - whats your hurry?

2014-06-30T08:46:00.002-07:00

I belong to a family of procrastinators or at least to the half that is not a procrastinator. My wife and son however are definitely charter members of the tribe. The important thing about them though is that they are very very creative in the excuses they come up with for delaying actions- from the phases of the moon being not just right to genetic predispositions or emotional trauma suffered early in life. The common part of these explanations is that it is the gods that are really responsible and that they have no control over their actions in the face of forces beyond their ken.

Alexendra Petri explains the rationale behind procrastination in this fun piece in a recent Washington Post article.

" I have, in theory, been working on this piece," she says," about How Not To Procrastinate for the past month. In theory. I would have finished it earlier, but I wandered off to eat a sandwich and do some laundry that had been piling up for weeks, and then YouTube suddenly became very interesting, and then it was 3 a.m. and I had accomplished nothing."

But according to her it the struggle is what counts. " In my defense, I procrastinate only on really important things. I live by the John Perry-Robert Benchley theory of structured procrastination, which states that the most effective way of appearing to get a lot of things done is to always be procrastinating on one big project. “Anyone can do any amount of work,” said Benchley, “provided it is not the work that he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

" This has always worked for me" she explains. "The trouble is that sometimes I need to finish an actually big project, and the only way of doing that is to commit myself to something even bigger. I am, for instance, working on a book. It has, comfortably, been the largest thing I have had to do for the whole year, and in consequence I have been able to write all kinds of other things. Plays. Screenplays. Graffiti. Unnecessarily thorough Yelp reviews. As the deadline crawls closer, I have been possessed by the creeping terror that in order to finish everything on time, I will have to agree to an even more gigantic commitment, by, say, adopting a small child. There is no other way. This is just how I have always lived."

Apparently one of the most effective ways of procrastinating is by convincing yourself that what you are doing is not procrastinating, but working. In order to be in a good mood to write, you tell yourself, you need to have an iced coffee, peruse your facebook page on the internet, do research for your work. As Burton Rascoe said, “What no wife of a writer ever understands is that a writer is working when he’s staring out the window.”

Before the Internet, you had to put real work into procrastinating. Benchley had to subscribe to illustrated magazines so that he could look at pictures of Animals Doing Cute Things. But he still did it, because procrastinators have their own professional pride.

Being a procrastinator, like being late, is a sign of optimism. It is because you have confidence in your powers. Most people would have to start this project weeks ago to do it well,” you tell yourself. “But not me, because I am Captain America.” Superheroes, you reflect, are always saving the day at the last minute. You never see the Avengers come to a burning building six hours before it gets set on fire to evacuate everyone in an orderly manner. No, they always show up just when it’s almost too late. That’s what makes it impressive.

“A good writer is a good reader,” you remind yourself, as you read through the Huffington Post and other miscellanous web sites while waiting for the creative inspiration to strike.

You can also procrastinate by hunting online for Ways to Stop Procrastinating! Unfortunately,most of these suggestions boil down to: “So, you want to quit procrastinating? Here’s a suggestion! Try not putting things off until the last minute!” which is roughly the same as saying, “You want to not be late? Try showing up to things on time!”

Then there are Web sites for procratinators- kind of AAA for the usually late. Admittedly, a Web site that discourages you from procrastinating is like a T-shirt promoting nudism. There is even one called WriteOrDie that literally eats your words if you do not type fast enough. Then there are apps “iWillNotProcrastinate,” or "There’s EndProcrastination Hypnosis", which boasts that “Hypnosis is proven to be the most effective method to eliminate procrastination and get more done. Do you avoid important tasks until the last possible minute? Are you a master of finding unimportant activities to do so you can delay doing the important ones? By changing your subconscious thoughts, the End Procrastination Hypnosis promises it will help you get things done on time. After listening for just one to three weeks, you’ll begin to notice how liberating it is to complete important tasks quickly and easily", the site claims.

However, few people actually finish the course. They have more important things to do!

Paul - the modern day seer

2014-06-30T08:37:00.003-07:00

It is well known that from ancient times men have sought divine intervention to predict their future. Greeks went to the oracles of Delphi, Romans to their seers, Indians go to their astrologers. But now faced with a tense World Cup soccer, Germans have found a new seer - Paul.

Paul is an octopus who supposedly accurately predicted the results of the past association football matches. He also made several accurate predictions in the 2010 World Cup which brought him worldwide attention as an animal oracle.

During divinations, Paul's keepers would present him with two boxes containing food. Each box was identical except for the fact that they were decorated with the different team flags of the competitors of an upcoming football match. Whichever box Paul ate from first would be considered his prediction for which team would win the match.

His keepers at the Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany, mainly tasked him with predicting the outcomes of international matches in which the German national football team was playing. Paul correctly chose the winning team in several of Germany's six Euro 2008 matches, and all seven of their matches in the 2010 World Cup—including Germany's third place play-off win over Uruguay on 10 July. Following these predictions, his success rate rose to 85 percent, with an overall record of 11 out of 13 correct predictions.Aside from his predictions involving Germany, Paul also foretold Spain's win against the Netherlands in the 2010 World Cup Final by eating a mussel from the box with the Spanish flag on it.

Experts have proposed several scientific theories to explain Paul's seemingly prescient behaviour, ranging from pure luck to the possibility that he was attracted to the appearance or smell of one box over another. But nobody really knows the secret of his success.

Paul was hatched in January 2008 from an egg at the Sea Life Centre in Weymouth, England, then moved to a tank at one of the chain's centres at Oberhausen in Germany. His name derives from the title of a poem by the German children's writer Boy Lornsen: Der Tintenfisch Paul Oktopus. According to Sea Life's entertainment director, Daniel Fey, Paul demonstrated intelligence early in life: ″There was something about the way he looked at our visitors when they came close to the tank. It was so unusual, so we tried to find out what his special talents were.″

The species Octopus vulgaris is almost certainly colour blind; neither behavioural studies nor electroretinogram experiments show any discrimination of a colour's hue. Nonetheless, individuals can distinguish brightness as well as an object's size, shape, and orientation. Shelagh Malham of Bangor University states that they are drawn to horizontal shapes, and indeed, there are horizontal stripes on the flags he has chosen. The flag of Germany, a bold tricolour consisting of three equal horizontal bands of black, red and gold, was Paul's usual favorite. But the flag of Spain, with its broad yellow stripe, and the flag of Serbia, with its contrast of blue and white, are more vivid still, possibly explaining why Paul picked those countries over Germany. Octopus vulgaris is also equipped with sensitive chemoreceptors on its tentacles, which are used to taste food and "smell" the water. According to Paul's keepers, there were holes in the jars to help him choose.

His prediction that Argentina would lose prompted Argentine chef Nicolas Bedorrou to post an Octopus recipe on Facebook. " There are always people who want to eat our octopus but he is not shy and we are here to protect him as well. He will survive" said Oliver Walenciak (Paul's keeper)

Paul correctly predicted the outcome of the semi-final, by choosing the food in the box marked with the Spanish flag. The prediction led to death threats as German fans called for Paul to be cooked and eaten. In response, Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero offered to send Paul official state protection, and the Industry Minister Miguel Sebastian called for Paul to be given safe haven in Spain.

The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, criticised Paul, accusing him of being a symbol of Western decadence and decay.

Doubts were expressed, notably in the German press, as to whether "Paul" was actually the same octopus in 2010 as in 2008. Here are some facts about the oracle Paul

1. He's originally from Weymouth. Although he now resides at the Aquarium Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen, Germany, Paul was actually born in Weymouth and moved from the town's Sea Life Park in 2006.

2. He's a wanted man. Argentine chef Nicolas Bedorrou was so angry after Paul correctly predicted his team would lose its quarter-final clash with Germany, that he suggested a way to cook the octopus.
He posted on Facebook: "We will chase him and put him on some paper. We will then beat him (but correctly!) in order to keep the meat tender and then put it in boiling water."

3. He's big news. Paul's predictions have gained so much popularity that German news channel NTV has started to broadcast his predictions live, with two reporters situated next to his tank so they can bring their viewers all the latest goings on.

4. He's the biggest celebrity in Oberhausen. Having wowed the world's media with his predictions, Paul has put the mundane Germany city of Oberhausen on the map.

5. He's got a good track record. Paul began to predict Germany's results during the Euro 2008 tournament, correctly choosing the winner in four of Germany's six matches. He predicted Germany to win every match but was wrong when they lost to Croatia and in the final to Spain. So far at the World Cup 2010, Paul has correctly predicted the winner of each of Germany's five matches.

6. He could have made you a packet. Having correctly tipped the winner of Germany's five World Cup matches, backing Paul's tips could have netted you a few squid. A £1 accumulator bet on all five results would have won you £131, which could comfortably buy you a few bags of mussels.

7. He's an intelligent creature. Octopuses are highly intelligent animals and have been proven to have a strong short and long-term memory. Fiona Smith, head of animal care at Weymouth Sea Life Park said: “Common octopuses like Paul are very intelligent. We equate their intelligence with that of a dog and they love problem solving and figuring things out."

8. He's a Twitter and Facebook sensation. Paul has become an online phenomenon over recent weeks and is now one of the most talked about topics on the web.

9. He doesn't cheat. Paul predicts results by opening one of the two flag-covered plastic food containers in his tank.

10. And finally he's not scared of death threats. According to his keeper, Oliver Walenciak, Paul is unfazed by a series of death threats sent by Argentinian supporters who blame the octopus for their World Cup exit. He said: "There are always people who want to eat our octopus but he is not shy and we are here to protect him as well. He will survive."

Paul was last checked by staff on 25 October 2010, and was in good health, but the following morning he was found dead. He was aged two-and-a-half, a normal lifespan for the species. On 17 June 2014, during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Paul was featured in a Google "doodle". He was represented as in heaven, perched on a billowy bed of clouds and adorned with a halo; when animated, he appeared to vacillate in his predictions for the day's matches.

A theory of jerks

2014-06-24T09:05:00.004-07:00

"Are you surrounded by fools? Are you the only reasonable person around? Then maybe you’re the one with the jerkitude" writes Eric Schwitzgebel a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside.

To understand them you must picture the world through the eyes of the jerk: The line of people in the post office is a mass of unimportant fools; it’s a felt injustice that you must wait while they bumble with their requests. The flight attendant is not a potentially interesting person with her own cares and struggles but instead the most available face of a corporation that stupidly insists you shut your phone. Custodians and secretaries are lazy complainers who rightly get the scut work. The person who disagrees with you at the staff meeting is an idiot to be shot down. Entering a subway is an exercise in nudging past the dumb schmoes.

We need a theory of jerks. We need such a theory because, first, it can help us achieve a calm, clinical understanding when confronting such a creature in the wild. Imagine the nature-documentary voice-over: ‘Here we see the jerk in his natural environment. Notice how he subtly adjusts his dominance display to the Italian restaurant situation…’ And second – well, I don’t want to say what the second reason is quite yet.

As it happens,Eric does have such a theory. The word ‘jerk’ can refer to two different types of person. The older use of ‘jerk’ designates a kind of chump or an ignorant fool, though not a morally odious one. When Weird Al Yankovic sang, in 2006, ‘I sued Fruit of the Loom ’cause when I wear their tightie-whities on my head I look like a jerk’, or when, on 1 March 1959, Willard Temple wrote in a short story in the Los Angeles Times: ‘He could have married the campus queen… Instead the poor jerk fell for a snub-nosed, skinny little broad’, it’s clear it’s the chump they have in mind.

The jerk-as-fool usage seems to have begun as a derisive reference to the unsophisticated people of a ‘jerkwater town’: that is, a town not rating a full-scale train station, requiring the boiler man to pull on a chain to water his engine. The term expresses the travelling troupe’s disdain. Over time, however, ‘jerk’ shifted from being primarily a class-based insult to its second, now dominant, sense as a term of moral condemnation. And it is the immoral jerk who concerns us here.

Why, you might be wondering, should a philosopher make it his business to analyse colloquial terms of abuse? Doesn’t Urban Dictionary cover that kind of thing quite adequately? Shouldn’t you confine yourself to truth, or beauty, or knowledge, or why there is something rather than nothing (to which the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser answered: ‘If there was nothing you’d still be complaining’)? Doesn't our taste in vulgarity reveals our values.

The unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers. This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship. The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests. The bumpkin ignorance captured in the earlier use of ‘jerk’ has changed into a type of moral ignorance.

Some related traits are already well-known in psychology and philosophy – the ‘dark triad’ of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. The asshole, James says, is someone who allows himself to enjoy special advantages out of an entrenched sense of entitlement. That is one important dimension of jerkitude, but not the whole story. The callous psychopath, though cousin to the jerk, has an impulsivity and love of risk-taking that need be no part of the jerk’s character. Neither does the jerk have to be as thoroughly self-involved as the narcissist or as self-consciously cynical as the Machiavellian, though narcissism and Machiavellianism are common enough jerkish attributes.

The opposite of the jerk is the sweetheart. The sweetheart sees others around him, even strangers, as individually distinctive people with valuable perspectives, whose desires and opinions, interests and goals are worthy of attention and respect. The sweetheart yields his place in line to the hurried shopper, stops to help the person who dropped her papers, calls an acquaintance with an embarrassed apology after having been unintentionally rude. In a debate, the sweetheart sees how he might be wrong and the other person right.

The moral and emotional failure of the jerk is obvious. The intellectual failure is obvious, too: no one is as right about everything as the jerk thinks he is. He would learn by listening. And one of the things he might learn is the true scope of his jerkitude – a fact that the all-out jerk is inevitably ignorant.

But first some clarifications and caveats:

First, no one is a perfect jerk or a perfect sweetheart. Human behaviour – of course! – varies hugely with context. Different situations (sales-team meetings, travelling in close quarters) might bring out the jerk in some and the sweetie in others.

Second, the jerk is someone who culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him. Young children and people with severe mental disabilities aren’t capable of appreciating others’ perspectives, so they can’t be blamed for their failure and aren’t jerks. Also, not all perspectives deserve equal treatment. Failure to appreciate the outlook of a neo-Nazi, for example, is not sign of jerkitude – though the true sweetheart might bend over backwards to try.

The Washington University psychologist Simine Vazire has argued that we tend to know our own characteristics quite well when the relevant traits are evaluatively neutral and straightforwardly observable, and badly when they are loaded with value judgments and not straightforwardly observable. If you ask someone how talkative she is, or whether she is relatively high-strung or relatively mellow, and then you ask her friends to rate her along the same dimensions, the self-rating and the peer ratings usually correlate quite well – and both sets of ratings also tend to line up with psychologists’ best attempts to measure such traits objectively.

Why? Presumably because it’s more or less fine to be talkative and more or less fine to be quiet; OK to be a bouncing bunny and OK instead to keep it low-key, and such traits are hard to miss in any case. But few of us want to be inflexible, stupid, unfair or low in creativity. And if you don’t want to see yourself that way, it’s easy enough to dismiss the signs. Such characteristics are, after all, connected to outward behaviour in somewhat complicated ways; we can always cling to the idea that we have been misunderstood. Thus we overlook our own faults.

With Vazire’s model of self-knowledge in mind, one could conjecture a correlation of approximately zero between how one would rate oneself in relative jerkitude and one’s actual true jerkitude. The term is morally loaded, and rationalisation is so tempting and easy! Why did you just treat that cashier so harshly? Well, she deserved it – and anyway, I’ve been having a rough day. Why did you just cut into that line of cars at the last minute, not waiting your turn to exit? Well, that’s just good tactical driving – and anyway, I’m in a hurry! Why did you seem to relish failing that student for submitting her essay an hour late? Well, the rules were clearly stated; it’s only fair to the students who worked hard to submit their essays on time – and that was a grimace not a smile.

Since the most effective way to learn about defects in one’s character is to listen to frank feedback from people whose opinions you respect, the jerk faces special obstacles on the road to self-knowledge, beyond even what Vazire’s model would lead us to expect. By definition, he fails to respect the perspectives of others around him. He’s much more likely to dismiss critics as fools – or as jerks themselves – than to take the criticism to heart.

Still, it’s entirely possible for a picture-perfect jerk to acknowledge, in a superficial way, that he is a jerk. ‘So what, yeah, I’m a jerk,’ he might say. Provided this label carries no real sting of self-disapprobation, the jerk’s moral self-ignorance remains. Part of what it is to fail to appreciate the perspectives of others is to fail to see your jerkishly dismissive attitude toward their ideas and concerns as inappropriate.

Ironically, it is the sweetheart who worries that he has just behaved inappropriately, that he might have acted too jerkishly, and who feels driven to make amends. Such distress is impossible if you don’t take others’ perspectives seriously into account. Indeed, the distress itself constitutes a deviation (in this one respect at least) from pure jerkitude: worrying about whether it might be so helps to make it less so. Then again, if you take comfort in that fact and cease worrying, you have undermined the very basis of your comfort.

All normal jerks distribute their jerkishness mostly down the social hierarchy, and to anonymous strangers. Waitresses, students, clerks, strangers on the road – these are the unfortunates who bear the brunt of it. With a modicum of self-control, the jerk, though he implicitly or explicitly regards himself as more important than most of the people around him, recognises that the perspectives of those above him in the hierarchy also deserve some consideration. Often, indeed, he feels sincere respect for his higher-ups. Perhaps respectful feelings are too deeply written in our natures to disappear entirely. Perhaps the jerk retains a vestigial kind of concern specifically for those whom it would benefit him, directly or indirectly, to win over. He is at least concerned enough about their opinion of him to display tactical respect while in their field of view. However it comes about, the classic jerk kisses up and kicks down. The company CEO rarely knows who the jerks are, though it’s no great mystery among the secretaries.

Because the jerk tends to disregard the perspectives of those below him in the hierarchy, he often has little idea how he appears to them. This leads to hypocrisies. He might rage against the smallest typo in a student’s or secretary’s document, while producing a torrent of errors himself; it just wouldn’t occur to him to apply the same standards to himself. He might insist on promptness, while always running late. He might freely reprimand other people, expecting them to take it with good grace, while any complaints directed against him earn his eternal enmity. Such failures of parity typify the jerk’s moral short-sightedness, flowing naturally from his disregard of others’ perspectives. These hypocrisies are immediately obvious if one genuinely imagines oneself in a subordinate’s shoes for anything other than selfish and self-rationalising ends, but this is exactly what the jerk habitually fails to do.

Embarrassment, too, becomes practically impossible for the jerk, at least in front of his underlings.

Embarrassment requires us to imagine being viewed negatively by people whose perspectives we care about. As the circle of people whom the jerk is willing to regard as true peers and superiors shrinks, so does his capacity for shame – and with it a crucial entry point for moral self-knowledge.

As one climbs the social hierarchy it is also easier to become a jerk. Here’s a characteristically jerkish thought: ‘I’m important, and I’m surrounded by idiots!’ Both halves of this proposition serve to conceal the jerk’s jerkitude from himself. Thinking yourself important is a pleasantly self-gratifying excuse for disregarding the interests and desires of others. Thinking that the people around you are idiots seems like a good reason to disregard their intellectual perspectives. As you ascend the hierarchy, you will find it easier to discover evidence of your relative importance (your big salary, your first-class seat) and of the relative idiocy of others (who have failed to ascend as high as you). Also, flatterers will tend to squeeze out frank, authentic critics.

This isn’t the only possible explanation for the prevalence of powerful jerks, of course. Maybe jerks are actually more likely to rise in business and academia than non-jerks – the truest sweethearts often suffer from an inability to advance their own projects over the projects of others. But I suspect the causal path runs at least as much in the other direction. Success might or might not favour the existing jerks, but I’m pretty sure it nurtures new ones.

The moralistic jerk is an animal worth special remark. Charles Dickens was a master painter of the type: his teachers, his preachers, his petty bureaucrats and self-satisfied businessmen, Scrooge condemning the poor as lazy, Mr Bumble shocked that Oliver Twist dares to ask for more, each dismissive of the opinions and desires of their social inferiors, each inflated with a proud self-image and ignorant of how they are rightly seen by those around them, and each rationalising this picture with a web of moralising ‘should’s.

Scrooge and Bumble are cartoons, and we can be pretty sure we aren’t as bad as them. Yet I see in myself and all those who are not pure sweethearts a tendency to rationalise my privilege with moralistic sham justifications. Here’s my reason for trying to dishonestly wheedle my daughter into the best school; my reason why the session chair should call on me rather than on the grad student who got her hand up earlier; my reason why it’s fine that I have 400 library books in my office…

The moralising jerk is apt to go badly wrong in his moral opinions. Partly this is because his morality tends to be self-serving, and partly it’s because his disrespect for others’ perspectives puts him at a general epistemic disadvantage. But there’s more to it than that. In failing to appreciate others’ perspectives, the jerk almost inevitably fails to appreciate the full range of human goods – the value of dancing, say, or of sports, nature, pets, local cultural rituals, and indeed anything that he doesn’t care for himself. Think of the aggressively rumpled scholar who can’t bear the thought that someone would waste her time getting a manicure. Or think of the manicured socialite who can’t see the value of dedicating one’s life to dusty Latin manuscripts. Whatever he’s into, the moralising jerk exudes a continuous aura of disdain for everything else.

Furthermore, mercy is near the heart of practical, lived morality. Virtually everything that everyone does falls short of perfection: one’s turn of phrase is less than perfect, one arrives a bit late, one’s clothes are tacky, one’s gesture irritable, one’s choice somewhat selfish, one’s coffee less than frugal, one’s melody trite. Practical mercy involves letting these imperfections pass forgiven or, better yet, entirely unnoticed. In contrast, the jerk appreciates neither others’ difficulties in attaining all the perfections that he attributes to himself, nor the possibility that some portion of what he regards as flawed is in fact blameless. Hard moralising principle therefore comes naturally to him. (Sympathetic mercy is natural to the sweetheart.) And on the rare occasions when the jerk is merciful, his indulgence is usually ill-tuned: the flaws he forgives are exactly the one he recognises in himself or has ulterior reasons to let slide. Consider another brilliant literary cartoon jerk: Severus Snape, the infuriating potions teacher in J K Rowling’s novels, always eager to drop the hammer on Harry Potter or anyone else who happens to annoy him, constantly bristling with indignation, but wildly off the mark – contrasted with the mercy and broad vision of Dumbledore.

Despite the jerk’s almost inevitable flaws in moral vision, the moralising jerk can sometimes happen to be right about some specific important issue – especially if he adopts a big social cause. He needn’t care only about money and prestige. Indeed, sometimes an abstract and general concern for moral or political principles serves as a kind of substitute for genuine concern about the people in his immediate field of view, possibly leading to substantial self-sacrifice. And in social battles, the sweetheart will always have some disadvantages: the sweetheart’s talent for seeing things from his opponent’s perspective deprives him of bold self-certainty, and he is less willing to trample others for his ends. Social movements sometimes do well when led by a moralising jerk.

How can you know your own moral character? You can try a label on for size: ‘lazy’, ‘jerk’, ‘unreliable’ – is that really me? Instead of introspection, try listening. Ideally, you will have a few people in your life who know you intimately, have integrity, and are concerned about your character. They can frankly and lovingly hold your flaws up to the light and insist that you look at them. Give them the space to do this, and prepare to be disappointed in yourself. Done well enough, this second-person approach could work fairly well for traits such as laziness and unreliability, especially if their scope is restricted: laziness-about-X, unreliability-about-Y.

To discover one’s degree of jerkitude, the best approach might be neither (first-person) direct reflection upon yourself nor (second-person) conversation with intimate critics, but rather something more third-person: looking in general at other people. Everywhere you turn, are you surrounded by fools, by boring nonentities, by faceless masses and foes and suckers and, indeed, jerks? Are you the only competent, reasonable person to be found? If your self-rationalising defences are low enough to feel a little pang of shame at the familiarity of that vision of the world, then you probably aren’t pure diamond-grade jerk.

But who is? We’re all somewhere in the middle. That’s what makes the jerk’s vision of the world so instantly recognisable. It’s our own vision. But, thankfully, only sometimes.