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It's the last scene of The Merchant of Venice and the Christians are celebrating. They have love, youth and wealth on their side. Best of all, they have outsmarted "the Jew". Not only does Shylock not get his pound of flesh, but he is forced to convert - his kippah brutally ripped off his head - and sign away his fortune to his daughter Jessica, who has turned her back on her family to elope.

While the group cavorts around the Sydney Opera House stage with giddy, ecstatic abandon, Jessica goes quiet. She bursts into tears, sinks to the floor and asks: "What have I done?"

As she weeps the others look on helplessly, even guiltily. Her husband kneels before her and tenderly tears apart the deed promising them her father's fortune. Then a translucent light descends. Portia whispers: "It is almost morning." A new dawn, this implies, is approaching, washing away blind intolerance with it.

It is a beautiful ending. There's just one problem: it isn't William Shakespeare's.

In the original, Jessica has no such qualms about the brutal treatment of her father; this is a woman, after all, who stole money from him and exchanged his turquoise ring, a gift to Shylock from her dead mother, for a monkey. In Shakespeare's play, the last we hear of Jessica is her whispering sweet nothings in Lorenzo's ear. There's no light-bulb moment of recognition, no repentance and no remorse.

With their electrifying production of Richard III and now The Merchant of Venice, the Australian theatre company Bell Shakespeare is on the rise after a spell of poor productions. To be clear, I found this Merchant of Venice - performed on a spartan stage, punctuated only by a single tree and leaves that fall from the sky like golden stars - profoundly affecting.

But I couldn't help but wonder: does it do a service to dramatically change the Bard's words at such a critical moment? As a Jewish person who has witnessed a rise in antisemitism, I'm not sure it helps to wash over the more rampant elements of prejudice in the play.

The director, Anne-Louise Sarks, certainly conjures up sympathy for Shylock, helped along by the actor, Mitchell Butel, who plays him with restrained grace and humility. The Jewish character's actions in this version are the result of debilitating hatred, enough to drive any man mad. Antonio spits at him viciously and when the baying Christians coerce him into conversion, Shylock is left spiritually beaten and bent, gripping his now naked head as if it were on fire.

After the court scene Shylock doesn't appear again in Shakespeare's version: a gaping absence. To address this, Sarks makes the clever move to keep all her actors on stage throughout, sitting on benches. The result is that we can't easily forget this Shylock, a man who, when he holds the knife aloft on Antonio's heart, shakes so hard we wonder if he can go through with it. His silenced, defeated figure - alone on the edges of the action - is still burned in my mind.

Decisions over the way the scenes play out are for a director to make, and Sarks should be applauded for hers. But adding in completely new phrases ("What have I done?") and passing it off as Shakespeare is another thing altogether. It is particularly worrying that the company doesn't note the change to the text in the program - and yet Bell Shakespeare claims their raison d'etre is education.

Like removing racist slurs from novels in the literary canon,, rewriting Shakespeare begs the question: isn't it more powerful to accept and acknowledge the prejudice of the past and confront it head on, rather than try to rewrite history?

Allowing Shakespeare to stand as it is - warts and all - has a purpose: it exposes the nastier side of antisemitic society and a past that we, in the 21st century, need to know about to ensure we don't repeat it. This was an era in Europe when the despised profession of moneylending was almost exclusively Jewish, when Jews were thought by some to use the blood of children for rituals, and when many, as in The Merchant of Venice, thought Jews were the "very devil incarnate".

There is no doubt that The Merchant of Venice - with its portrayal of Shylock as stubborn, bloodthirsty and merciless - is a problematic play. To combat this, some have resorted to suppressing the Bard's words. In 1981, for example, the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith, founded to fight antisemitism, requested that a BBC/Time-Life TV version be shut down. They said the play had "an inherent potential for harm". In a different letter they described Shylock as an "unhappy symbol of Jewish vindictiveness, malice and hatred".

Last year the writer Steve Frank argued in the Washington Post that the play shouldn't be performed at all. Staging it, he insisted, revived "ancient racial slurs" pounced on by the Nazis (The Merchant of Venice was a favourite of the Third Reich). For Sarks, no doubt well aware of these criticisms and pitfalls, relying on the famous speech: "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" was not enough. To soften the message, and the blow, she changed the text.

For me, that's a mistake. Bigotry won't be beaten by fudging meanings and words from yesteryear that we don't agree with today. Surely the most powerful way to combat discrimination is to embrace old texts, artworks and moviesas they stand - unadulterated - as artefacts of their time. Only then can we debate them, disagree with them and, finally, make a decision to accept or reject their ideas. To do anything else feels dangerously like censorship.

Is The Merchant of Venice a Jew-hating play? Or is it a play about Jew haters? The jury is still out and it always will be; that's where the genius lies, whatever side of the fence you fall on. Bell Shakespeare has put on a thought-provoking, brilliant production. But please, let's not whitewash the past. At the very least, give the audience a chance to hear and see Shakespeare's ending for what it was. And then let them make up their own minds.
* Bell Shakespeare's production of The Merchant of Venice runs until 26 November at Sydney Opera House

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If a Shakespeare play is racist or antisemitic, is it OK to change the ending?

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It's the last scene of The Merchant of Venice and the Christians are celebrating. They have love, youth and wealth on their side. Best of all, they have outsmarted "the Jew".

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"Worse, it was no longer clear what constituted a mathematical proof. The intuitive, geometry-based arguments of the previous two centuries seemed to be of little use. If mathematics tried to wave the monster away, it would stand firm. With one bizarre equation, Weierstrass had demonstrated that physical intuition was not a reliable foundation on which to build mathematical theories."

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Much like its creator, Karl Weierstrass' monster came from nowhere. After four years at university spent drinking and fencing, Weierstrass had left empty handed. He eventually took a teaching course and spent most of the 1850s as a schoolteacher in Braunsberg. He hated life in the small Prussian town, finding it a lonely existence. His only respites were the mathematical problems he worked on between classes. But he had nobody to talk to about mathematics, and no technical library to study in. Even his results failed to escape the confines of Braunsberg. Instead of publishing them in academic journals as a university researcher would, Weierstrass added them to articles in the school prospectus, baffling potential students with arcane equations.

Eventually Weierstrass submitted one of his papers to the respected Crelle's Journal. While his previous articles had made barely a ripple, this one created a flood of interest. Weierstrass had found a new way to deal with a fiendish class of equations known as Abelian functions. The paper only contained an outline of his methods, but it was enough to convince mathematicians they were dealing with a unique talent. Within a year, the University of Königsberg had given Weierstrass an honorary doctorate, and soon afterward the University of Berlin offered him a professorship. Despite having gone through the intellectual equivalent of a rags to riches story, many of his old habits remained. He would rarely publish papers, preferring instead to share his work among students. It was not just the publication process he had little regard for: He was also not afraid to target mathematics' sacred cows.

Weierstrass soon took aim at the research of Augustin-Louis Cauchy, one the century's most eminent mathematicians. Much of Cauchy's work focused on calculus and rates of change (or "derivatives"). He had created what was in essence a calculus dictionary, specifying the subject's most important concepts. But when Weierstrass read its definitions, he found them to be wordy and vague. There was too much hand waving, and not enough detail.

If Newton had known about such functions, he would have never created calculus.

He decided to revise Cauchy's dictionary by replacing the prose with logical conditions. Chief among this early work was the redefinition of a derivative. To calculate the gradient of a curve at a certain point-and hence its rate of change-Isaac Newton had originally considered a line that passed through the point of interest and a nearby point on the curve. He then moved that nearby point closer and closer, until the slope of the line was equal to the gradient of the curve. But it was difficult to define the concept mathematically. What dictated whether two points were "close" to each other?

In Cauchy's verbose definition, the gradient would "approach indefinitely to a fixed value, in a manner so as to end by differing from it by as little as one wishes." Weierstrass did not think this was clear enough. He wanted a more practical definition, so decided to convert the concept into a formula. Rather than manipulating abstract ideas, mathematicians would instead be able to rearrange equations. In doing so, he was laying the foundations for his monster.

At the time, mathematicians drew much of their inspiration from nature. When Newton first developed calculus, he'd been inspired by the physical world: the trajectory of a planet, the swinging of a pendulum, the motion of falling fruit. This thinking led to a geometrical intuition about mathematical structures. They should make sense in the same way that a physical object would. As a result, many mathematicians concentrated on "continuous" functions. Conceptually, these are functions that can be drawn without taking pen from paper. Plot the speed of a falling apple over time and it will be a solid line; there will be no gaps or sudden jumps. A continuous function was, it was thought, a natural one.

Conventional wisdom held that for any continuous curve, it was possible to find the gradient at all but a finite number of points. This seemed to match intuition: A line might have a few jagged bits, but there would always be a few sections that were "smooth." The French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère had even published a proof of this claim. His argument was built on the "intuitively evident" fact that a continuous curve must have sections that increase, decrease, or remain flat. Which meant that it must be possible to calculate the gradient in these regions. Ampère did not think about what happened when the sections became infinitely small, but he claimed that he didn't need to. His approach was general enough to avoid having to consider things that were " infiniment petits." Most mathematicians were happy with his reasoning: By the middle of the 19th century, almost every calculus textbook quoted Ampère's proof.

But during the 1860s, rumors started circulating about a strange creature, a mathematical function that contradicted Ampère's theorem. In Germany, the great Bernhard Riemann told his students that he knew of a continuous function that had no smooth sections, and for which it was impossible to calculate the derivative of the function at any point. Riemann did not publish a proof, and neither did Charles Cellérier at the University of Geneva, who-despite writing that he'd discovered something "very important and I think new"-stuffed the work into a folder that would only become public after his death decades later. Yet if the claims were to be believed, it meant a threat to the very foundations of calculus was forming. This creature threatened to tear apart the happy relationship between mathematical theory and the physical observation on which it was based. Calculus had always been the language of the planets and stars, but how could nature be a reliable inspiration if there were mathematical functions that contradicted the central ideas of the subject?

The monster was finally born in 1872, when Karl Weierstrass announced that he had found a function that was continuous and yet not smooth at any point. He had constructed it by adding together an infinitely long sequence of cosine functions:

As a function, it was ugly and awkward. It was not even clear what it would look like when plotted on a graph. But that didn't matter to Weierstrass. His proof consisted of equations rather than shapes, and this was what made his announcement so powerful. Not only had he created a monster, he'd built it from concrete logic. He had taken his new, rigorous definition of a derivative and shown it was impossible to calculate one for this new function.

The result threw the mathematics community into a state of shock. The French mathematician Émile Picard pointed out that if Newton had known about such functions, he would have never created calculus. Rather than harnessing ideas about the physics of nature, he would have been stuck trying to clamber over rigid mathematical obstacles. The monster also began to trample over previous research. Results that had been "proven" started to buckle. Ampère had used the vague definitions favored by Cauchy to prove his smoothness theorem. Now, his arguments began to collapse. The vague notions of the past were hopeless against the monster. Worse, it was no longer clear what constituted a mathematical proof. The intuitive, geometry-based arguments of the previous two centuries seemed to be of little use. If mathematics tried to wave the monster away, it would stand firm. With one bizarre equation, Weierstrass had demonstrated that physical intuition was not a reliable foundation on which to build mathematical theories.

Established mathematicians tried to brush the result aside, arguing that it was awkward and unnecessary. They feared that pedants and troublemakers were hijacking their beloved subject. At the Sorbonne, Charles Hermite wrote, "I turn with terror and horror from this lamentable scourge of functions with no derivatives." Henri Poincaré-who was the first to call such functions monsters-denounced Weierstrass' work as "an outrage against common sense." He claimed the functions were an arrogant distraction, and of little use to the subject. "They are invented on purpose to show our ancestors' reasoning is at fault," he said, "and we shall never get anything more out of them."

Many of the old guard wanted to leave Weierstrass' monster in the wilderness of mathematics. It didn't help that nobody could visualize the shape of the animal they were dealing with-only with the advent of computers did it become possible to plot it. Its hidden form made it hard for the mathematics community to grasp how such a function could exist. Weierstrass' style of proof was also unfamiliar to many mathematicians. His argument involved dozens of logical steps, and ran to several pages. The trail of ideas was subtle and technically demanding, with no real-life analogs to guide the way. The instinct was to avoid it.

Illustration by Shout

But monsters have a habit of finding their way in from the cold. Indeed many concepts that now seem obvious, even essential, were once monsters. Negative numbers were shunned by mathematicians for centuries. The ancient Greeks, who dealt chiefly with geometry, saw no need for them. Nor did the medieval academics who adopted Greek ideas. The shadow of this monster will occasionally still appear today, such as when a child asks why multiplying two negative numbers together produces a positive one. But overall the beast has been tamed; nobody would dream of exiling it again.

In a similar fashion, Weierstrass' monster began to find acceptance. In 1904, Albert Einstein introduced physicists to the idea of "Brownian motion": Particles in a liquid, he said, follow a random path because fluid molecules are constantly knocking them around. The collisions are so frequent (more than 10 ²¹ per second) that no matter how good the microscope, or how detailed the observation, the trajectories are never smooth. At the practical level, it is not possible to find a derivative. If researchers wanted to work with such problems, they would need to confront Weierstrass' monster-and that is exactly what Einstein did. His theory for Brownian motion used functions that were infinitely jagged. It set a longstanding precedent: Physicists have used non-smooth functions as a proxy for Brownian motion ever since.

Once it became clear that the so-called "Weierstrass function" was actually quite useful, researchers began to develop ways to handle non-smooth functions gracefully. Rather than trying to analyze the path of a single particle in a liquid, they would look at the average behavior of many particles. How far were they likely to travel? When might they reach a given point? Outside of Brownian motion, mathematicians also started to rethink the basic tools of calculus. Rates of change had always been defined in terms of distances, and areas under a curve measured geometrically. But when functions were not smooth, these ideas did not make sense.

At the University of Tokyo, Kiyoshi Itō found a way around the problem by thinking in terms of probabilities. It was an unorthodox, not to mention risky, tactic: During the 1940s, hardly anyone viewed probability theory as a rigorous subject. Yet Itō persevered. He treated functions like random processes, and translated Weierstrass' definitions into a new, probability-based language. Two random processes were "close" together, he said, if the expected outcomes were the same. He introduced a method for handling a mathematical function that depends on a non-smooth quantity-like Brownian motion-rather than a more traditional variable, like distance. Using his new methods, he derived "Itō's Lemma" to calculate how such a function changes over time.

By the 1970s, Itō's work had blossomed into a whole new area of mathematics, called stochastic calculus (mathematicians like calling things that are random "stochastic"). It came with a whole new set of tools and theorems, just as calculus had. Today, stochastic calculus is used to study all sorts of phenomena, from neurons firing in a brain to diseases spreading through a population. It is also at the heart of financial mathematics, where it helps banks estimate option prices. It can account for the bumpy behavior of a stock price, and hence reveal how the value of an option changes over time. The resulting equation, which is known as the Black-Scholes formula, is now used on trading floors around the world. Yet Itō was always puzzled when he won plaudits from bankers. As a pure mathematician, he hadn't expected his work to become famous for its applications.

The $1 million prize remains unclaimed. In many ways, it is a ransom.

Weierstrass' monster shook things up in geometry too. At the end of the 19th century, Swedish mathematician Helge von Koch had become interested in the idea of non-smooth functions, but he wanted to see their shape. He set out to build a shape (rather than a function) that was nowhere smooth, and hence show that the same monsters were lurking in both algebra and geometry. He might not be able to draw the Weierstrass function, but he would be able to picture its cousin. Working on the problem while hopping from one temporary job to another as a junior professor, von Koch found his creature in 1904. Constructed by taking an equilateral triangle, then adding three smaller triangles to each side, and continuing to do so indefinitely, it was a geometric shape that was continuous but had no derivatives. The shape's distinctive appearance meant it soon became known as the "Koch snowflake."

Koch had succeeded in extending Weierstrass' monster beyond the world of equations and functions. But there was something else noteworthy about his result. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that his snowflake had a curious self-similarity: Magnify one particular section of the snowflake and it would look similar to the zoomed-out shape. Many years later, it would become apparent that the Weierstrass function had the same property.

As time went on, this self-similarity began cropping up in all sorts of places. It would take Benoît Mandelbrot's seminal work during the 1980s to popularize the idea of "fractal" objects, which had shapes that were repeated at smaller and smaller length scales. From coastlines and clouds to plant and blood vessels, mathematicians discovered that fractals were ubiquitous in nature. Like Koch's snowflake, none were smooth. How could they be? If the shape had smooth sections, the pattern would disappear when magnified sufficiently. As Koch had found, the simplest way to obtain a non-smooth shape was to construct a fractal object. Perhaps it was inevitable that Weierstrass' work would guide mathematicians towards self-similar patterns, introducing researchers to a world of intricate, beautiful structures.

Weierstrass' monster continues its work in the present day. The Navier-Stokes equations describe the motion of a fluid and underpin modern fluid dynamics and aerodynamics, driving everything from aircraft design to weather prediction. However, although they were first developed in the 1840s, mathematicians still do not know if they can always be solved. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a $1 million prize to anyone that could show that the equations always have smooth solutions-or find an example to the contrary. The problem is considered among the six most important outstanding problems in mathematics because, despite the widespread use of the Navier-Stokes equations, mathematicians do not know whether the equations always produce physically plausible results. The $1 million prize remains unclaimed. In many ways it is a ransom, encouraging mathematicians to hunt for troublesome monsters.

From fluid dynamics to finance, creatures like the Weierstrass function have challenged our ideas about the relationship between mathematics and the natural world. Mathematicians around the time of Weierstrass used to believe that the most useful mathematics was inspired by nature, and that Weierstrass' work did not fit into that definition. But stochastic calculus and Mandelbrot's fractals have proven them wrong. It turns out that in the real world-the messy, complex real world-monsters are everywhere. "Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians," as Mandelbrot put it. Even Weierstrass himself fell victim to the trick. He created his function to argue that mathematics should not be based only on physical observations. His followers believed that Newton had been constrained by real-life intuition and that, once free of these limitations, there were vast, elegant new theories to be discovered. They thought that mathematics would no longer need nature. Yet Weierstrass' monster has revealed the opposite to be true. The relationship between nature and mathematics runs deeper than anyone ever imagined.
Adam Kucharski is a research fellow in mathematical epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. This article was originally published in our "Feedback" issue in April, 2014.

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london school of hygiene & tropical medicine

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Math's Beautiful Monsters - Issue 53: Monsters - Nautilus

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Much like its creator, Karl Weierstrass' monster came from nowhere. After four years at university spent drinking and fencing, Weierstrass had left empty handed. He eventually took a teaching course and spent most of the 1850s as a schoolteacher in Braunsberg. He hated life in the small Prussian town, finding it a lonely existence.

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KC: Historical analogies are simplistic, misleading—and absolutely essential.

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KC: Historical analogies are simplistic, misleading—and absolutely essential.

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Katherine Streeter for The Chronicle Review

The coming age is shadowed on the past,
As on a glass.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821

E very historian worries over presentism - the tendency for contemporary sentiment to distort the study of the past. Some call it projection. In graduate school, it's teleology, or what the French historian Marc Bloch dubbed "the most unpardonable of sins: anachronism." And so, lightly we tread, tippy-toed, when formulating a historical analogy: the likening of something then to something now.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. censured such allusive fare. Analogy rips historical example free of root, context, idiosyncrasy, and counterexample. Such evidence plucked from the past suffers from "confirmation bias," speciously corroborating contemporary-minded hypotheses for the already predisposed. "History by rationalization," Schlesinger damned.

Nonetheless, the historical analogy persists. And for it, Moshik Temkin, an associate professor of history and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, took a great many of his fellow historians to the woodshed. "Historians Shouldn't Be Pundits," Temkin proclaimed in an op-ed in The New York Times. The peddling of historical analogy to understand current events might earn TV spots, but such spotty practice belied the historian's process. It was "useless," even falsely "reassur[ing]," not just bad scholarship but possibly "dangerous."

As the kind of historian criticized by Temkin and the anti-allusionists, I was taken aback by his harsh column. So charged were Temkin's charges that mere hours later, in The Atlantic, Julian Zelizer and Morton Keller, historians at Princeton and Brandeis respectively, hit back with "Why (Some) Historians Should Be Pundits," coyly puzzling over the contradiction of Temkin's "argument about avoiding punditry" appearing on the Times op-ed page.

By some historical coincidence, that same day, The Washington Post unveiled a new section, Made by History. The Post editors promised, "in an era seemingly defined by the word unprecedented," to deliver a steady diet of exactly the kind of historical analysis - "grappling with parallels between the past and present" - that Temkin had just rejected so vociferously. The game, it seemed, was afoot.

I n the Age of Trump, historians have let historical analogies loose. Many have been the comparisons: Trump to Andrew Jackson, Trump to James Buchanan, Huey Long, George Wallace, Trump to Richard Nixon ( I was one of those historians), to Hugo Chávez, even to Biff Tannen from Back to the Future, and King Aerys II of the House Targaryen - the "Mad King." The more grotesque Trump's presidency appears, "the more historians are called on to make sense of it, often in 30-second blasts on cable news or in quick-take quotes in a news article," Temkin grimaced.

For centuries, from Thucydides to Livy, Polybius to Edward Gibbon, historians have wielded the analogy as an instrument for inquiry and instruction. As the renowned Yale professor A. Dwight Culler described, "virtually every historian of antiquity and the Renaissance" forwarded to some degree the claim that history, at its core, is "philosophy teaching by example." That is, our discipline aims to illuminate issues at hand by scouring for lessons from analogous predicaments in the past. Machiavelli stipulated simply, without condition: "Whoever with diligence examines past events, it is an easy thing to foresee the future in any Republic, and to apply those remedies which had been used by the ancients, or ... to think of new ones from the similarity of events."

Just because an analogy is flawed doesn't make it meaningless. For we compare to discover similarities and to dredge up differences.

There was, of course, a countertradition of skeptics and contrarians. Centuries after Machiavelli, Nietzsche warned, "Monumental history deceives through its analogies." In the late 18th and early 19th century, not in little part fueled by the fractious age of the French Revolution, the likes of Goethe and Herder emphasized change, not parallels, over time. Hegel and later Karl Marx stressed the crash of dialectics, creative destruction. And upheaval born from Charles Darwin's determinations pushed historians further and further toward rupture and transformation over historical continuity and the backward-looking analogy.

But analogies persist - and they can prove potent. Drawn from a shared past, they can serve as rhetorical weapons: Don't favor a war? It's the next Vietnam! Abhor your compatriots' military forbearance? Brand their hesitation a Munich moment! Don't like the president? He's a Tricky Dick. This matchy-matchy juvenilia may score quick points and spawn memes, but flimsy historical analogy can blind the historian from the grail he truly seeks. As the Viscount James Bryce, the one-time British ambassador to the United States, tut-tutted in his classic 1888 tract T he American Commonwealth,"the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies."

What Temkin and other critics really target is not so much historical analogy as an epidemic of bad ones. Temkin winces at the "rapid-fire, superficial" takes in the mass media. Once in front of the camera, leaning back pensively in their studio chairs, historian-heavyweights trade in their sweeping, exhaustive, and often beautiful scholarship for trivia-minded TV punditry. They hawk banality. Quizzed by anchors, boxed into panels, these academics have become cable contestants in a game of History-wood Squares.

"Sure, there are similarities," Temkin wrote of Trump and Long. Like Trump, the Kingfish "ran in the name of the 'people,' attacked the establishment." Both their opponents branded them "demagogues" and "fascists." But Temkin ably rehashes their fundamental dissimilarities: "Long was self-made, a genuine populist who took on powerful interests, and as governor was responsible for building roads, bridges, and hospitals and helping the poor." Trump may dream out loud of massive infrastructure projects, but he has yet to exhibit any of the skill and ingenuity to follow through with them.

And yet just because a historical analogy is flawed or even misleading does not make the exercise in historical comparison, in Temkin's word, "meaningless." For we compare to discover similarities, and we compare to dredge up differences. By studying the political minutiae, social and economic structures, and cultural milieu that made Long's projects work, we may be able to tease out the differences for what today makes Trump falter. From another angle, one possibly fruitful question from the Trump-Long analogy: However different, why did these two anti-elitist populists both become ensnared in allegations of profligate corruption?

When surrounded by a cavalcade of Trump-Nixon comparisons, the answer is not, as Temkin demands, to stand athwart historians, yelling "Stop," but to ask why, how so, and are we there yet? And as one Trump simile slips to another, as comparison after comparison lines up and then misfits, clanks, it is there we find the very peculiarity demanding study. The slipperiness of our subject is the historical question at hand. Why does our president appear so singular and yet so familiar? Like him and like him and like him ... but not ... no, not exactly ...

I n assailing today's purported presentists, Temkin holds up the work of the historian C. Vann Woodward, the éminence grise of postbellum Southern history. Temkin contends that Woodward "did not seek analogies from the past," that he wrote a purer history, untainted by presentist fetor. Woodward's was model scholarship that, if emulated, could help rescue today's faltering field of ersatz equivalence.

It's an odd selection. For in his day, Woodward was accused often of being a "presentist." In a 1981 piece in The New York Times Book Review, the Johns Hopkins historian Kenneth Lynn characterized Woodward's work on Southern history as "distinguished but rather too anxiously liberal." Too often, Lynn found, Woodward depicted anachronistically "forward-looking citizens," "militant feminist[s]" and aberrants with "prophetic qualities." Far from removing himself from the exigencies of his time, Woodward took aim at his contemporaries, unflinchingly, calling for "Southern historians [to] purge ... their minds of rancor and awaken ... out of [their] narrow parochialism."

Indeed, few historians' oeuvres have had such impact on contemporary debate in the last half-century. In his much-celebrated The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), Woodward located "Jim Crow" laws - the systemic codification of racial segregation in the South - as dating back only to the 1890s, three decades after the Civil War. It was a rejoinder to those Southern white supremacists calling for a separation of the races as a matter of "immutable 'folkways' of the South," a God-given order lasting time immemorial. "The effort to justify [racial segregation and disenfranchisement] as a consequence of Reconstruction and a necessity of the times," Woodward argued, "is embarrassed by the fact that they did not originate in those times. And the belief that they are immutable and unchangeable is not supported by history."

Woodward had helped prepare a 1953 brief for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People challenging segregation. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. But the court's mandate for enforcement of desegregation - "with all deliberate speed" - proved vague and unhelpful. Implementation sputtered. The battles over desegregation's execution raged. Woodward's research served as validation for the still-controversial decision that ruled segregation not as divinely sanctioned or "natural" but, instead, as a social particularity that was contingent on and limited by historical force, decision, and accident.

In Strange Career, Woodward advocated the employment of history, in all its discontinuity, for the comprehension of the present. And lest his already explicit historical analogy be overlooked, Woodward chose to refer to the years after the Civil War as the "Old Reconstruction" while designating the current years of difficult desegregation post- Brown as the "New Reconstruction." In a 1956 essay in Commentary, he urged readers "to assess the Court decision of 1954 in the perspective of history," to compare the failures of Old Reconstruction to the hesitant possibilities of a New Reconstruction.

Martin Luther King Jr. dubbed Strange Career "the historical bible of the civil rights movement," that is, a living text of not just stories but parables, lessons from the past for present consumption. In 1958 Woodward was recalled to Washington to give expert testimony on the erupting crises over school desegregation. It was then that Woodward's then-graduate student and now-professor emeritus at Princeton University, James M. McPherson, for the first time "thought about looking at an event in the American past that had that kind of direct relationship to the present." So impressed was he, McPherson added, that he wound up doing his doctoral dissertation on "the act of abolishing slavery" - or, as he called it, "the first civil rights act."

"We teach our students to be wary of analogies," Temkin observes. And yet we do so not because analogies are inherently useless but because we teach our students to be wary in general: of analogies, of stereotypes, of exceptionalism, of the forest, of the trees, of overidentification with one's subject, of callous disregard.

We use the past to understand the present (and vice versa). The analogy is not only of importance but inescapable in the analytic process. As Bloch charged, "No period and no topic can be understood except in relation to other periods or topics." John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of Cold War history, concurred: "We're bound to learn from the past whether or not we make the effort, since it's the only data base we have." The much-esteemed scholarly pair of Richard Neustadt and Ernest May upheld that historical analogizing was unavoidable, especially for decision makers. So, the scholars concluded, their aims were "akin to those of junior high school sex education. Since [decision makers] are bound to do what we talk about, later if not sooner, they ought to profit from a bit of forethought about ways and means."

The historical method is a dialectic of continuity and change, analogy and disruption. A one-dimensional rejection of historical analogy would be - to borrow a contemporary simile - like urging computer programmers to pepper their source code with 0s but steer clear of 1s. Analogy is necessary, even inevitable. And so we remain vigilant and evaluate our presentist biases best we can, bending back the warp of our lenses. For as Richard Fontaine and Vance Serchuk of the Center for a New American Security, mused, "It seems that those who remember history are condemned to invoke it."
Zachary Jonathan Jacobson received his Ph.D. in Cold War history from Northwestern University. You can find his work at his blog, , and on Twitter @zacharyjacobson.

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The coming age is shadowed on the past, As on a glass. - Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821 E very historian worries over presentism - the tendency for contemporary sentiment to distort the study of the past. Some call it projection. In graduate school, it's teleology, or what the French historian Marc Bloch dubbed "the most unpardonable of sins: anachronism."

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Reason and Religion"Our faith in science"New York Times article by the 14th Dalai Lama

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Reason and Religion"Our faith in science"New York Times article by the 14th Dalai Lama

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It is our discussions of neuroscience, however, that have proved particularly important. From these exchanges a vigorous research initiative has emerged, a collaboration between monks and neuroscientists, to explore how meditation might alter brain function.

The goal here is not to prove Buddhism right or wrong -- or even to bring people to Buddhism -- but rather to take these methods out of the traditional context, study their potential benefits, and share the findings with anyone who might find them helpful.

After all, if practices from my own tradition can be brought together with scientific methods, then we may be able to take another small step toward alleviating human suffering.

Already this collaboration has borne fruit. Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has published results from brain imaging studies of lamas meditating. He found that during meditation the regions of the brain thought to be related to happiness increase in activity. He also found that the longer a person has been a meditator, the greater the activity increase will be.

Other studies are under way. At Princeton University, Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a neuroscientist, is studying the effects of meditation on attention. At the University of California Medical School at San Francisco, Dr. Margaret Kemeny has been studying how meditation helps develop empathy in school teachers.

Whatever the results of this work, I am encouraged that it is taking place. You see, many people still consider science and religion to be in opposition. While I agree that certain religious concepts conflict with scientific facts and principles, I also feel that people from both worlds can have an intelligent discussion, one that has the power ultimately to generate a deeper understanding of challenges we face together in our interconnected world.

One of my first teachers of science was the German physicist Carl von Weizsäcker, who had been an apprentice to the quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg. Dr. Weizsäcker was kind enough to give me some formal tutorials on scientific topics. (I confess that while listening to him I would feel I could grasp the intricacies of the full argument, but when the sessions were over there was often not a great deal of his explanation left behind.)

What impressed me most deeply was how Dr. Weizsäcker worried about both the philosophical implications of quantum physics and the ethical consequences of science generally. He felt that science could benefit from exploring issues usually left to the humanities.

I believe that we must find a way to bring ethical considerations to bear upon the direction of scientific development, especially in the life sciences. By invoking fundamental ethical principles, I am not advocating a fusion of religious ethics and scientific inquiry.

Rather, I am speaking of what I call "secular ethics," which embrace the principles we share as human beings: compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers; they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths.

Today, our knowledge of the human brain and body at the cellular and genetic level has reached a new level of sophistication. Advances in genetic manipulation, for example, mean scientists can create new genetic entities -- like hybrid animal and plant species -- whose long-term consequences are unknown.

Sometimes when scientists concentrate on their own narrow fields, their keen focus obscures the larger effect their work might have. In my conversations with scientists I try to remind them of the larger goal behind what they do in their daily work.

This is more important than ever. It is all too evident that our moral thinking simply has not been able to keep pace with the speed of scientific advancement. Yet the ramifications of this progress are such that it is no longer adequate to say that the choice of what to do with this knowledge should be left in the hands of individuals.

This is a point I intend to make when I speak at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience today in Washington. I will suggest that how science relates to wider humanity is no longer of academic interest alone. This question must assume a sense of urgency for all those who are concerned about the fate of human existence.

A deeper dialogue between neuroscience and society -- indeed between all scientific fields and society -- could help deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and our responsibilities for the natural world we share with other sentient beings.

Just as the world of business has been paying renewed attention to ethics, the world of science would benefit from more deeply considering the implications of its own work. Scientists should be more than merely technically adept; they should be mindful of their own motivation and the larger goal of what they do: the betterment of humanity.

Op-Ed Contributor Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is the author of "The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality."

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It is our discussions of neuroscience, however, that have proved particularly important. From these exchanges a vigorous research initiative has emerged, a collaboration between monks and neuroscientists, to explore how meditation might alter brain function.

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Do those patterns exist independently of the human mind?

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Two academics have shocked themselves and the world of mathematics by discovering a pattern in prime numbers.

Primes - numbers greater than 1 that are divisible only by themselves and 1 - are considered the 'building blocks' of mathematics, because every number is either a prime or can be built by multiplying primes together - (84, for example, is 2x2x3x7).

Their properties have baffled number theorists for centuries, but mathematicians have usually felt safe working on the assumption they could treat primes as if they occur randomly.

Now, however, Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University in the US have discovered that when it comes to the last digit of prime numbers, there is a kind of pattern.

Apart from 2 and 5, all prime numbers have to end in 1, 3, 7 or 9 so that they can't be divided by 2 or 5. So if the numbers occurred randomly as expected, it wouldn't matter what the last digit of the previous prime was. Each of the four possibilities - 1, 3, 7, or 9 - should have an equal 25 per cent (one in four) chance of appearing at the end of the next prime number.

But after devising a computer programme to search for the first 400 billion primes, the two mathematicians found prime numbers tend to avoid having the same last digit as their immediate predecessor - as if, in the words of Dr Lemke Oliver they "really hate to repeat themselves."

A prime ending in 1 was followed by a prime ending in 1 only 18.5 per cent of the time, significantly less often than the expected 25 per cent. And, the pair found, primes ending in 3 tended be followed by primes ending in 9 more often than in 1 or 7.

The pattern - already being referred to as 'the conspiracy among primes' - has left mathematicians amazed that it could have remained undiscovered for so long. "I was floored," Ken Ono, a number theorist at Emory University in Atlanta, told Quanta Magazine. "I have to rethink how I teach my class in analytic number theory now."

Professor Soundararajan himself admitted to New Scientist: "It was very weird. It's like some painting you are very familiar with, and then suddenly you realise there is a figure in the painting you've never seen before."

Professor Soundararajan's friend Professor Andrew Granville, of University College, London, told The Independent that the Stanford man's surprise was such that he initially doubted his own discovery. "He asked me to 'look over' his paper four weeks ago, which is code for 'Am I kidding myself, or have I discovered something?'" Professor Granville added: "He did ask me in November whether I would believe anything like this. Apparently, I looked at him as if he was crazy."

The two US-based academics argue that the last-digit pattern they have discovered could be explained by the k-tuple conjecture, devised in the early 20th Century to predict how groupings of primes will appear. They also point out that as primes stretch to infinity, they eventually lose the last-digit pattern and start to appear in a random manner.

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Maths experts have just cracked a pattern for prime numbers

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Two academics have shocked themselves and the world of mathematics by discovering a pattern in prime numbers. Primes - numbers greater than 1 that are divisible only by themselves and 1 - are considered the 'building blocks' of mathematics, because every number is either a prime or can be built by multiplying primes together - (84, for example, is 2x2x3x7).

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Super-interesting bit of research re WOK SP (specifically re visual illusions of line segment length)

"However, cross-cultural studies revealed something surprising: perception of the illusion varies widely—and Westerners are outliers. When scientists measured how different the segments appeared to different groups of people, they found that Westerners saw the greatest distortion. The Zulu, Fang, and Ijaw people of Africa observed half as much. The San foragers of the Kalahari didn’t perceive the illusion at all: they recognized right away that a and b were the same length. People raised in Western countries literally don’t see things the same way as the foragers of the Kalahari. Your experience of the world changes what you take to be true, and vision is no exception."

The central KC, though:

"Scientists have struggled to find universals that permanently link our species. Although we come to the table with biological predispositions, a million years of bending, breaking and blending have diversified our species’ preferences. We are the products not only of biological evolution but also of cultural evolution. Although the idea of universal beauty is appealing, it doesn’t capture the multiplicity of creation across place and time. Beauty is not genetically preordained. As we explore creatively, we expand aesthetically: everything new that we view as beautiful adds to the word’s definition. That is why we sometimes look at great works of the past and find them unappealing, while we find splendor in objects that previous generations wouldn’t have accepted. What characterizes us as a species is not a particular aesthetic preference, but the multiple, meandering paths of creativity itself."

Maybe a link to the "uniformities" PT (this article arguing there are none in AOK Arts)?

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We're all human-so despite the vagaries of cultural context, might there exist a universal beauty that overrides the where and when? Might there be unchanging features of human nature that condition our creative choices, a timeless melody that guides the improvisations of the everyday? There has been a perpetual quest for such universals, because of their value as a North Star that could guide our creative choices.

One oft-cited candidate for universal beauty is visual symmetry. Consider the geometric patterns of Persian carpets and the ceilings of the Alhambra Palace in Spain, created in different places and historic periods.

Ksenia Palimski / Dreamstime.com

Jebulon

But the relationship between beauty and symmetry is not an absolute. The Rococo art that was popular in Europe in the 18th century was rarely symmetrical, and Zen gardens are prized for their lack of symmetry.

"The Triumph of Venus," by Francis Boucher (1740).

Cquest / Wikicommons

So perhaps one should look elsewhere for evidence of universal beauty. In 1973, the psychologist Gerda Smets ran experiments using electrodes on the scalp (known as electroencephalography, or EEG) to record the level of brain activity produced by exposure to different patterns. She noted that the brain shows the largest response to patterns with about a 20 percent level of complexity.

A set of stimuli from Gerda Smets' tests of visual complexity. The second row from the top shows approximately a 20 percent level of complexity.

Newborns will stare for longer at patterns with about 20 percent complexity than they will at others. The biologist E.O. Wilson suggested that this preference might give rise to a biologically-imposed universal beauty in human art:

It may be a coincidence (although I think not) that about the same degree of complexity is shared by a great deal of the art in friezes, grillwork, colophons, logographs, and flag designs...The same level of complexity characterizes part of what is considered attractive in primitive art and modern art and design.

But is Wilson right? Arousal may be a starting point for aesthetics, but it's not the whole story. We live in societies that chronically strive to surprise and inspire each other. Once 20 percent complexity becomes too much of a habit, it loses its shine, and humans reach out for other dimensions of novelty.

Consider two abstract canvases painted within a few years of each other by Wassily Kandinsky and his Russian compatriot Kazimir Malevich. The chaotic clash of colors in Kandinsky's "Composition VII" (1913) has high complexity whereas Malevich's preternaturally calm "White on White" (1918) has the visual consistency of a snow-covered landscape. Even with shared biological constraints (and working in the same cultural context at virtually the same time), Kandinsky and Malevich produced radically different art.

"Composition VII," by Vassily Kandinsky (1913).

"White on White," by Kasimir Malevich (1918).

So visual art is not doomed to follow any prescriptions. In fact, once Smets concluded her experiments, she asked participants which images they preferred. There she found no consensus. A larger brain response to 20 percent complexity did not predict anything about her subjects' aesthetic preferences, which were distributed across the spectrum. When it comes to judging visual beauty, there are no hard-and-fast biological rules.

In fact, the environment we live in can change the way we see. In the Müller-Lyer illusion (below), segment a is perceived as shorter than segment b, even though they are exactly the same length. For many years, scientists assumed this was a universal feature of human visual perception.

Muller-Lyer illusion

However, cross-cultural studies revealed something surprising: perception of the illusion varies widely-and Westerners are outliers. When scientists measured how different the segments appeared to different groups of people, they found that Westerners saw the greatest distortion. The Zulu, Fang, and Ijaw people of Africa observed half as much. The San foragers of the Kalahari didn't perceive the illusion at all: they recognized right away that a and b were the same length. People raised in Western countries literally don't see things the same way as the foragers of the Kalahari. Your experience of the world changes what you take to be true, and vision is no exception.

What characterizes us as a species is not a particular aesthetic preference, but the multiple, meandering paths of creativity itself.

What about music? Isn't that often referred to as a universal language? The music we hear daily seems to follow consistent norms. But a survey of indigenous music from around the world reveals great diversity in what we listen to and how we listen, ranging far beyond familiar Western practice. When Western parents want their baby to fall asleep they sing a soothing lullaby, gradually subsiding into a whisper-but Aka Pygmies sing louder, while patting their child on the neck. In Western classical music playing in tune is considered beautiful, but in traditional Javanese music, detuning is considered attractive. In the music of some indigenous cultures, everyone plays at his own speed; in others, such as Mongolian throat singing, the music has no recognizable melody; in others still, the music is played on unusual instruments, such as the water drummers of the Vanuatu Islands who beat rhythms on the waves. Western meters tend to emphasize every second, third, or fourth beat, but Bulgarian rhythms incorporate metric patterns of seven, 11, 13, and 15 beats, and there are Indian rhythmic cycles of more than 100 beats. Western-tempered tuning divides the octave into 12 equally spaced tones, while classical Indian music divides the octave into 22 tones that are unequally spaced. Western ears hear pitch as high and low, but even that turns out to be enculturated: to the Roma people of Serbia, pitches are "large" and "small;" to the Obaya-Menza tribe they are "fathers" and "sons;" and to the Shona people of Zimbabwe, they are "crocodiles" and "people who chase after crocodiles."

Despite these differences, are there underlying ties in music? What about a biological preference for how sounds are combined? Scientists proposed that we are all born loving consonance, so this was put to the test in infants. Because four- to six-month-olds can't tell us what they're thinking, one has to look for clues in their behavior. A research team set up a room with loudspeakers on either side. They played a Mozart minuet out of one speaker. Then they turned that speaker off and out of the other, they played a distorted version of the same minuet, in which Mozart's music was turned into a parade of grating dissonances. In the center of the room a baby sat on the parent's lap, and the researchers tracked how long the infant listened to each piece of music before turning away. The results? The babies paid attention for longer to the original Mozart than to the dissonant version. It seemed like compelling evidence that a preference for consonance is innate.

But then experts in music cognition began to question this conclusion. For one thing, some indigenous music, such as Bulgarian folk singing, is characterized by pervasive dissonance. Even within mainstream Western culture the sounds that are considered pleasing have changed over time: the simple consonant harmonies of Mozart's minuet would have startled a medieval monk.

So cognitive scientists Sandra Trehub and Judy Plantinga revisited the head-turning experiment. They found a surprising result: The babies listened longer to whichever sample they heard first. If the dissonant version led off, that held their attention just as well as if the consonant version had precedence. Their conclusion was that we are not born with an innate preference for consonance. As with visual beauty, the sounds we appreciate aren't locked in at birth.

Scientists have struggled to find universals that permanently link our species. Although we come to the table with biological predispositions, a million years of bending, breaking and blending have diversified our species' preferences. We are the products not only of biological evolution but also of cultural evolution. Although the idea of universal beauty is appealing, it doesn't capture the multiplicity of creation across place and time. Beauty is not genetically preordained. As we explore creatively, we expand aesthetically: everything new that we view as beautiful adds to the word's definition. That is why we sometimes look at great works of the past and find them unappealing, while we find splendor in objects that previous generations wouldn't have accepted. What characterizes us as a species is not a particular aesthetic preference, but the multiple, meandering paths of creativity itself.

The 17th-century playwright Ben Johnson hailed his contemporary Shakespeare as "not of an age, but for all time." It's hard to argue with him: the Bard has never been more popular than he is today. In 2016, the Royal Shakespeare Company completed a world tour, performing Hamlet in 196 countries. Shakespeare's plays are continually revived and retold. Educated adults throughout the world can quote him. Shakespeare is an inheritance that we proudly pass on to our children.

But not so fast, Ben. What if in 500 years we can plug in neural implants that give us direct access to someone else's feelings? It may turn out that the rich depth of brain-to-brain experience gives so much pleasure that watching a three-hour play on a stage (in which adults put on costumes and pretend to be someone else and feign to speak spontaneously) becomes just a matter of historical interest. What if the conflicts of Shakespeare's characters come to seem outdated, and instead we want plots about genetic engineering, cloning, endless youth and artificial intelligence? What if there is such an oversupply of information that humanity can no longer afford to look back more than a generation or two, or even a year or two?

A future in which Shakespeare is absent from the cultural playbill seems hard to imagine, but it is a price we might pay for our inexorable imaginations. The needs of the time change, the community moves on. We are constantly letting go, making room for the new. Even those creative works that are enshrined by culture pass from the spotlight. Aristotle was the most studied author in the European Middle Ages. We still revere him, but more as a figurehead than as a living voice. When it comes to creative output, "timeless" usually comes with an expiration date.

But Shakespeare will never be entirely gone: even if his plays become the province of specialists, the Bard will live on in the DNA of his culture. As far as immortality goes, that may be enough. In the face of the human thirst for novelty, if creative work survives for five or six centuries it has achieved something few manage. We honor our ancestors by living creatively in our own time, even if it means wearing away the past. Shakespeare may have wanted to be the greatest playwright of his time-but not, presumably, the last playwright for all time. His voice is still heard alongside those he has inspired. Some day, the playwright who wrote that "all men and women...have their exits and their entrances" may himself withdraw to the backstage of history. Impermanence and obsolescence are the price we pay for living in cultures that continually refashion themselves.
Anthony Brandt is a composer and professor at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music. He is also Artistic Director of the contemporary music ensemble Music, winner of two Awards for Adventurous Programming from Chamber Music America and ASCAP.
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, an adjunct professor at Stanford University, and the author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain and Sum: Tales from the Afterlives. He has written for The New York Times, Discover Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, Wired, and other publications.

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WATCH: Why some music sounds like noise to listeners.

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Why Beauty Is Not Universal - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

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We're all human-so despite the vagaries of cultural context, might there exist a universal beauty that overrides the where and when? Might there be unchanging features of human nature that condition our creative choices, a timeless melody that guides the improvisations of the everyday?

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Can we appreciate art even if it was created by someone who behaved deplorably?

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Can we appreciate art even if it was created by someone who behaved deplorably?

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To what extent does an artists preexisting predicament influence that value of their art?
What complicates the definition of art between the artist and the audience

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It's an age-old question, and it re-emerges with the revelations about sexual predations that men with power inflicted on women and, in some instances, other men: Can we appreciate art even if it was created by someone who behaved deplorably?

The actor Kevin Spacey is accused of sexually assaulting boys and young men. The political writer Mark Halperin faces allegations of past sexual misconduct with women under his authority at work. Similar accusations have been made against the actor Dustin Hoffman, who has apologized for bad behavior.

As a result, the following has happened: Netflix shut down the Spacey star vehicle "House of Cards" and shelved a film called "Gore," which was in postproduction and in which Mr. Spacey plays the writer Gore Vidal. HBO scrapped a planned mini-series and Penguin Press a book on the 2016 presidential election, which Mr. Halperin had written with his collaborator of recent years, John Heilemann. And suggestions have been made in print and pixels that Mr. Hoffman's films, past and present, should be boycotted.

No doubt, the corporate suits at Netflix, HBO and Penguin decided it was simply bad business to proceed with those projects, given how toxic the men are right now. That's understandable. But isn't it also reasonable to ask what ultimately should be the fate of these works (and not just because deep-sixing them hurts many others who also had a hand in creating them)?

Mr. Spacey is widely recognized as one of our most accomplished actors. Whatever his sins, many audiences would want to see how he portrays Vidal, one of our most controversial writers. The Halperin-Heilemann team, while not an art master, has produced important records of recent presidential elections. Its insight into the 2016 race would probably have qualified as a must-read. As for Mr. Hoffman, do the allegations against him negate his talent, including his starring role in "Tootsie," ranked No. 2 on the American Film Institute's list of the funniest American movies ever made?

It will come as no surprise if, in time, there's a reassessment of some of the men now justifiably shamed in the dock of public opinion. We have seen the phenomenon plenty of times. Many figures in the arts were people who committed terrible deeds or held reprehensible views, and yet came to be admired, even revered.

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Opinion | He's a Creep, but Wow, What an Artist!

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It's an age-old question, and it re-emerges with the revelations about sexual predations that men with power inflicted on women and, in some instances, other men: Can we appreciate art even if it was created by someone who behaved deplorably? The actor Kevin Spacey is accused of sexually assaulting boys and young men.

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Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we'll never stop. And what about the women? The list immediately becomes much more difficult and tentative: Anne Sexton? Joan Crawford? Sylvia Plath? Does self-harm count? Okay, well, it's back to the men I guess: Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector.

They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can't watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker's monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or ... we don't. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don't know what to do about them.

We've all been thinking about monsters in the Trump era. For me, it began a few years ago. I was researching Roman Polanski for a book I was writing and found myself awed by his monstrousness. It was monumental, like the Grand Canyon. And yet. When I watched his movies, their beauty was another kind of monument, impervious to my knowledge of his iniquities. I had exhaustively read about his rape of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey; I feel sure no detail on record remained unfamiliar to me. Despite this knowledge, I was still able to consume his work. Eager to. The more I researched Polanski, the more I became drawn to his films, and I watched them again and again-especially the major ones: Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does.

I wasn't supposed to love this work, or this man. He's the object of boycotts and lawsuits and outrage. In the public's mind, man and work seem to be the same thing. But are they? Ought we try to separate the art from the artist, the maker from the made? Do we undergo a willful forgetting when we want to listen to, say, Wagner's Ring cycle? (Forgetting is easier for some than others; Wagner's work has rarely been performed in Israel.) Or do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?

And how does our answer change from situation to situation? Certain pieces of art seem to have been rendered inconsumable by their maker's transgressions-how can one watch The Cosby Show after the rape allegations against Bill Cosby? I mean, obviously it's technically doable, but are we even watching the show? Or are we taking in the spectacle of our own lost innocence?

And is it simply a matter of pragmatics? Do we withhold our support if the person is alive and therefore might benefit financially from our consumption of their work? Do we vote with our wallets? If so, is it okay to stream, say, a Roman Polanski movie for free? Can we, um, watch it at a friend's house?

*

But hold up for a minute: Who is this "we" that's always turning up in critical writing anyway? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority. It's the voice of the middle-brow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say we, I mean I. I mean you.

*

I know Polanski is worse, whatever that means, and Cosby is more current. But for me the ur-monster is Woody Allen.

The men want to know why Woody Allen makes us so mad. Woody Allen slept with Soon-Yi Previn, the child of his life partner Mia Farrow. Soon-Yi was a very young adult the first time they slept together, and he the most famous film director in the world.

I took the fucking of Soon-Yi as a terrible betrayal of me personally. When I was young, I felt like Woody Allen. I intuited or believed he represented me on-screen. He was me. This is one of the peculiar aspects of his genius-this ability to stand in for the audience. The identification was exacerbated by the seeming powerlessness of his usual on-screen persona: skinny as a kid, short as a kid, confused by an uncaring, incomprehensible world. (Like Chaplin before him.) I felt closer to him than seems reasonable for a little girl to feel about a grown-up male filmmaker. In some mad way, I felt he belonged to me. I had always seen him as one of us, the powerless. Post-Soon-Yi, I saw him as a predator.

My response wasn't logical; it was emotional.

*

One rainy afternoon, in the spring of 2017, I flopped down on the living-room couch and committed an act of transgression. No, not that one. What I did was, I on-demanded Annie Hall. It was easy. I just clicked the OK button on my massive universal remote and then rummaged around in a bag of cookies while the opening credits rolled. As acts of transgression go, it was pretty undramatic.

I had watched the movie at least a dozen times before, but even so, it charmed me all over again. Annie Hall is a jeu d'esprit, an Astaire soft shoe, a helium balloon straining at its ribbon. It's a love story for people who don't believe in love: Annie and Alvy come together, pull apart, come together, and then break up for good. Their relationship was pointless all along, and entirely worthwhile. Annie's refrain of "la di da" is the governing spirit of the enterprise, the collection of nonsense syllables that give joyous expression to Allen's dime-store existentialism. "La di da" means, Nothing matters. It means, Let's have fun while we crash and burn. It means, Our hearts are going to break, isn't it a lark?

Annie Hall is the greatest comic film of the twentieth century-better than Bringing Up Baby, better even than Caddyshack-because it acknowledges the irrepressible nihilism that lurks at the center of all comedy. Also, it's really funny. To watch Annie Hall is to feel, for just a moment, that one belongs to humanity. Watching, you feel almost mugged by that sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself. And that's what we call great art. In case you were wondering.

Look, I don't get to go around feeling connected to humanity all the time. It's a rare pleasure. And I'm supposed to give it up just because Woody Allen misbehaved? It hardly seems fair.

*

When I mentioned in passing I was writing about Allen, my friend Sara reported that she'd seen a Little Free Library in her neighborhood absolutely crammed to its tiny rafters with books by and about Allen. It made us both laugh-the mental image of some furious, probably female, fan who just couldn't bear the sight of those books any longer and stuffed them all in the cute little house.

Then Sara grew wistful: "I don't know where to put all my feelings about Woody Allen," she said. Well, exactly.

*

I told another smart friend that I was writing about Woody Allen. "I have very many thoughts about Woody Allen!" she said, all excited to share. We were drinking wine on her porch and she settled in, the late afternoon light illuminating her face. "I'm so mad at him! I was already pissed at him over the Soon-Yi thing, and then came the-what's the kid's name-Dylan? Then came the Dylan allegations, and the horrible dismissive statements he made about that. And I hate the way he talks about Soon-Yi, always going on about how he's enriched her life."

This, I think, is what happens to so many of us when we consider the work of the monster geniuses-we tell ourselves we're having ethical thoughts when really what we're having is moral feelings. We put words around these feelings and call them opinions: "What Woody Allen did was very wrong." And feelings come from someplace more elemental than thought. The fact was this: I felt upset by the story of Woody and Soon-Yi. I wasn't thinking; I was feeling. I was affronted, personally somehow.

*

Here's how to have some complicated emotions: watch Manhattan.

Like many-many what? many women? many mothers? many former girls? many moral feelers?-I have been unable to watch Manhattan for years. A few months back, when I started thinking about Woody Allen qua monster, I watched nearly every other movie he's ever made before I faced the fact that I would, at some point, have to watch Manhattan.

And finally the day came. As I settled in on my nice couch in my comfortable living room, the Cosby trial was taking place. It was June of 2017. My husband, who has a Nordic flair for quiet drama, suggested I toggle between watching the Cosby trials and Manhattan so as to construct a kind of meta-narrative of monstrousness. But my husband's austere Northern European sense of showmanship came to naught, for the Cosby trial wasn't in fact televised.

Even so, it was out there happening.

The mood that summer was one of extreme discomfort. Just a general feeling of not-quite-rightness. People, and by people I mean women, were unsettled and unhappy. They met on the streets and looked at one another and shook their heads and walked away wordlessly. The women had had it. The women went on a giant fed-up march. The women were Facebooking and Tweeting, going for long furious walks, giving money to the ACLU, wondering why their partners and children didn't do the dishes more. The women were realizing the invidiousness of the dishwashing paradigm. The women were becoming radicalized, even though the women really didn't have the time to be radicalized. Arlie Russell Hochschild first published The Second Shift in 1989, and in 2017 the women were discovering that shit was truer than ever. In a couple of months would come the Harvey Weinstein accusations, and then the free-fall pig-pile of the #MeToo campaign.

As I wrote in my diary when I was a teen, "I don't feel great about men right now." I still didn't feel great about men in the summer of 2017, and a lot of other women didn't feel great about men either. A lot of men didn't feel great about men. Even the patriarchs were sick of patriarchy.

Despite this bolus of opinion, of feeling, of rage, I was determined to at least try to come to Manhattan with an open mind. After all, lots of people think of it as Allen's masterpiece, and I was ready to be swept away. And I was swept away during the opening credits-black and white, with jump-cuts timed perfectly, almost comically, to the triumphal strains of "Rhapsody in Blue." Moments later, we cut to Isaac (Allen's character), out to dinner with his friends Yale (are you fucking kidding me- Yale?) and Yale's wife, Emily. With them is Allen's date, seventeen-year-old high-school student Tracy, played by Mariel Hemingway.

The really astonishing thing about watching this scene is its nonchalance. NBD, I'm fucking a high schooler. Sure, he knows the relationship can't last, but he seems only casually troubled by its moral implications. Woody Allen's character Isaac is fucking that high schooler with what my mother would call a hey-nonny-nonny. Allen is fascinated with moral shading, except when it comes to this particular issue-the issue of middle-aged men fucking teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics-someone whose mid-career work can approach the Flaubertian-suddenly becomes a dummy (I always hear this word in Fred Sanford's voice: " dummeh!")

"In high school, even the ugly girls are beautiful." A (male) high-school teacher once said this to me.

Tracy's face, Mariel's face, is made of open flat planes that recall pioneers and plains of wheat and sunshine (it's an Idaho face, after all). Allen sees Tracy as good and pure in a way that the grown women in the film never can be. Tracy is wise, the way Allen has written her, but unlike the adults in the film she's entirely, miraculously untroubled by neurosis.

Heidegger has this notion of dasein and vorhandensein. Dasein means conscious presence, an entity aware of its own mortality-e.g., almost every character in every Woody Allen movie ever except Tracy. Vorhandensein, on the other hand, is a being that exists in itself; it just is-like an object, or an animal. Or Tracy. She's glorious simply by being: inert, object-like, vorhandensein. Like the great movie stars of old, she's a face, as Isaac so famously states in his litany of reasons to go on living: "Groucho Marx and Willie Mays; those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne; the crabs at Sam Wo's; uh, Tracy's face." (Watching the film for the first time in decades, I was struck by how much Isaac's list sounded like a Facebook gratitude post.)

Allen/Isaac can get closer to that ideal world, a world that has forgotten its knowledge of death, by fucking Tracy. Because he's Woody Allen-a great filmmaker-Tracy is allowed her say; she's not a nitwit. "Your concerns are my concerns," she says. "We have great sex." This works out well for Isaac: he gets to hoover up her beautiful embodied simplicity and he's absolved of guilt. The women in the film don't have that advantage.

The grown women in Manhattan are brittle and all too aware of death; they're aware of every goddamn thing. A thinking woman is stuck-distanced from the body, from beauty, from life itself.

For me, the most telling moment in the film is a throwaway line delivered in a high whine by a chic woman at a cocktail party: "I finally had an orgasm and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind." Isaac's (very funny) response: "You had the wrong kind? I've never had the wrong kind, ever. My worst one was right on the money."

Every woman watching the movie knows that it's the doctor who's an asshole, not the woman. But that's not how Woody/Isaac sees it.

If a woman can think, she can't come; if she can come, she can't think.

*

Just as Manhattan never authentically or fully examines the complexities of an old dude nailing a high schooler, Allen himself-an extremely well-spoken guy-becomes weirdly inarticulate when discussing Soon-Yi. In a 1992 interview with Walter Isaacson of Time, Allen delivered the line that became famous for its fatuous dismissal of his moral shortcomings:

"The heart wants what it wants."

It was one of those phrases that never leaves your head once you've heard it: we all immediately memorized it whether we wanted to our not. Its monstrous disregard for anything but the self. Its proud irrationality. Woody goes on: "There's no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that's that."
I moved on her like a bitch.
Things being what they were that summer, I had a difficult time getting through Manhattan-it took me a couple of sittings. I mentioned this difficulty on social media, this problem of watching Manhattan in the Trump moment. (I fervently hoped it was a moment). " Manhattan is a work of genius! I am done with you, Claire!" responded a writer guy I didn't know personally. This was a guy who had withstood many of my more outrageous social media pronouncements, some of which involved my desire to execute and chop up the male half of the species, Valerie-Solanas-like. But the minute I confessed to having a funny feeling when I watched Manhattan -I believe I said the film was making me "a little urpy"-this man stormed off my page, declaring himself done with me forevermore.

I had failed in what he saw as my task: the ability to overcome my own moralizing and pettifoggery-my own emotions- and do the work of appreciating genius. But who was in fact the more emotional person in this situation? He was the one storming from the virtual room.

I would have a repeat of this conversation with many men, smart and dumb, young and old, over the next months: "You must judge Manhattan on its aesthetics!" they said.

Another male writer and I discussed it over dinner one night. It was like a little play:

Female writer: "Um, it doesn't really hold up."

Male writer, sharply: "What do you mean?"

"Well, it all seems a tad blasé. I mean, Isaac doesn't really seem too worried she's in high school."

"No no no, he feels terrible about it."

"He cracks jokes about it, but he certainly does not feel terrible."

"You're just thinking about Soon-Yi-you're letting that color the movie. I thought you were better than that."

"I think it's creepy on its own merits, even without knowing about Soon-Yi."

"Get over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics."

"So what makes it objectively aesthetically good?"

Male writer says something smart-sounding about "balance and elegance."

I wish the female writer had delivered a coup de grâce here, but she did not. She doubted herself.

*

Which of us is seeing more clearly? The one who had the ability-some might say the privilege-to remain untroubled by the filmmaker's attitudes toward females and history with girls? Who had the ability to watch the art without committing the biographical fallacy? Or the one who couldn't help but notice the antipathies and urges that seemed to animate the project?

I'm really asking.

And were these proudly objective viewers really being as objective as they thought? Woody Allen's usual genius is one of self-indictment, and here is his one film where that self-indictment falters, and also he fucks a teenager, and that's the film that gets called a masterpiece?

What exactly are these guys defending? Is it the film? Or something else?

I think Manhattan and its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but we can't know, and there lies the very heart of the matter. Louis C.K.'s I Love You, Daddy -a tale of a father struggling to prevent his teenage daughter from hooking up with an older man-will meet a similar fate. It will be impossible to view outside the knowledge of Louis C.K.'s sexual misconduct-if it even gets seen. For now, distribution has been dropped and the film is not going to be released.

A great work of art brings us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says, No, not that feeling. You're having the wrong feeling. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience.

Me, I'm not ahistorical or immune to biography. That's for the winners of history (men) (so far).

The thing is, I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. But I'm the audience. And I'm just acknowledging the realities of the situation: the film Manhattan is disrupted by our knowledge of Soon-Yi; but it's also kinda gross in its own right; and it's also got a lot of things about it that are pretty great. All these things can be true at once. Simply being told by men that Allen's history shouldn't matter doesn't achieve the objective of making it not matter.

What do I do about the monster? Do I have a responsibility either way? To turn away, or to overcome my biographical distaste and watch, or read, or listen?

And why does the monster make us-make me -so mad in the first place?

*

The audience wants something to watch or read or hear. That's what makes it an audience. At the same time, at this particular historical moment, when we're awash in bitter revelation, the audience is outraged freshly by new monsters, over and over and over. The audience thrills to the drama of denouncing the monster. The audience turns on its heel and refuses to see another Kevin Spacey film ever again.

It could be that what the audience feels in its heart is pure and righteous and true. But there might be something else going on here.

When you're having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and weirdly exciting.

Reminder: not "you," not "we," but "I." Stop side-stepping ownership. I am the audience. And I can sense there's something entirely unacceptable lurking inside me. Even in the midst of my righteous indignation when I bitch about Woody and Soon-Yi, I know that, on some level, I'm not an entirely upstanding citizen myself. Sure, I'm attuned to my children and thoughtful with my friends; I keep a cozy house, listen to my husband, and am reasonably kind to my parents. In everyday deed and thought, I'm a decent-enough human. But I'm something else as well, something vaguely resembling a, well, monster. The Victorians understood this feeling; it's why they gave us the stark bifurcations of Dorian Gray, of Jekyll and Hyde. I suppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us-in me-chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.

The psychic theater of the public condemnation of monsters can be seen as a kind of elaborate misdirection: nothing to see here. I'm no monster. Meanwhile, hey, you might want to take a closer look at that guy over there.

*

Am I a monster? I've never killed anyone. Am I a monster? I've never promulgated fascism. Am I monster? I didn't molest a child. Am I a monster? I haven't been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them. Am I a monster? I don't beat my children. (YET.) Am I a monster? I'm not noted for my anti-Semitism. Am I a monster? I've never presided over a sex cult where I trapped young women in a gilded Atlanta mansion and forced them to do my bidding. Am I a monster? I didn't anally rape a thirteen-year-old.

Look at all the awful things I haven't done. Maybe I'm not a monster.

But here's a thing I have done: written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.

The critic Walter Benjamin said: "At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism." My own work could hardly be called major, but I do wonder: at the base of every minor work of art, is there a, you know, smaller pile of barbarism? A lump of barbarism? A skosh?

There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.

I have to wonder: maybe I'm not monstrous enough. I'm aware of my own failings as a writer-indeed I know the list to a fare-thee-well, and worse are the failures that I know I'm failing to know- but a little part of me has to ask: if I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?

Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them thinking it; it's almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That's the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: Is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.

Jenny Offill gets at this idea in a passage from her novel Dept. of Speculation -a passage much shared among the female writers and artists of my acquaintance: "My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him."

I mean, I hate licking stamps. An art monster, I thought when I read this. Yes, I'd like to be one of those. My friends felt the same way. Victoria, an artist, went around chanting "art monster" for a few days.

The female writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in off-hand, ha-ha-ha ways: "I wish I had a wife." What does that mean, really? It means you wish to abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.

In a way, I'd been asking this question privately, for years, of a couple male writer friends I believe to be actually great. I write them both charming emails, but really I am always trying to find out: how selfish are you? Or to put it another way: how selfish do I need to be, to become as great as you?

Plenty selfish, I learned as I observed these men from afar. Lock-the-door-against-your-kid-while-you're-working selfish. Work-every-day-including-Thanksgiving-and-Christmas selfish. Go-on-book-tour-for-weeks-at-a-time selfish. Sleep-with-other-women-at-conferences selfish. Whatever-it-takes selfish.

*

One recent evening, I was sitting in the chaotic, book-strewn living room of a younger writer and her husband, also a writer. Their kids were tucked into bed upstairs; the occasional yawp floated down from above.

My friend was in the throes of it: Her three kids were in grade school and her husband had a full-time job while she tried to carve out her career freelancing and writing books. A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little micro-climate. It was a work night; we all should've been in bed. Instead we were drinking wine and talking about work. The husband was charming to me, by which I mean he laughed at all my jokes. He was tightly wound and overly alert, perhaps because he was not having success with his writing. The wife on the other hand was having success-a lot of success-with her writing.

She mentioned a short story she'd just written and published.

"Oh, you mean the most recent occasion for your abandoning me and the kids?" asked the very smart, very charming husband.

The wife had been a monster, monster enough to finish the work. The husband had not.

This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always. The female monster is Doris Lessing leaving her children behind to go live the writer's life in London. The female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand. Never mind the bread and milk she set out for them, a kind of terrible poem unto itself. She dreamed of eating men like air, but what was truly monstrous was simply leaving her children motherless.

*

Maybe, as a female writer, you don't kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something, some nurturing part of yourself. When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children's homework left unchecked, parents left untelephoned, spousal sex unhad. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.

Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of a real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness-that of the artist who completes her work. Finishers are always monsters. Woody Allen doesn't just try to make a film a year; he tries to put out a film a year.

For me the particular monstrousness of completing my work has always closely resembled loneliness: Leaving behind the family, posting up in a borrowed cabin or a cheaply bought motel room. If I can't detach myself entirely, then I'm hiding in my chilly office, wrapped in scarves and fingerless gloves, a fur hat plopped upon my head, going hell-for-leather, just trying to finish.

Because the finishing is the part that makes the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.

My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That's not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I'm conflating two things-male predators and female finishers-in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.

*

Hemingway's girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn't think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. "A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being." (Well, I guess she would know.) She's saying if you're a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it. In a way, this is a feminist revision of all of art history; a history she turns with a single acid, brilliant line into a morality tale of compensation.

Either way, the questions remain:

What is to be done about monsters? Can and should we love their work? Are all ambitious artists monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]
*An earlier version of this article stated that Soon-Yi was a teenager under Woody Allen's care

Claire Dederer is the author of the memoir Love and Trouble. She's at work on a book about the relationship between bad behavior and good art.

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What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?

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They did or said something awful, and made something great. They are monster geniuses, and I don't know what to do about them.

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For Mr. Martin, "Theater of the World" was a continuation of his own curating style, which he said is quite similar to Mr. Walsh's.

"We came up with similar ideas differently," Mr. Martin said. "He started to collect works of art from different periods. The name of his museum says it all. He wanted to break the linear approach and make it more anthropological.

"I had similar ideas. I started to put them in shape and form in the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf with two artists there. I reorganized the permanent collection in a nonlinear way, not chronological or by technique."

Mr. Walsh, who rose from poverty to build a gambling empire in Australia and become a millionaire, has been drawn to art since his childhood, when he spent hours on Sundays at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, "instead of going to Mass," as he put it. He soaked up the history of his native land and became obsessed with great works from ancient Egypt through to Modern Art. His fortune has allowed him to amass hundreds of artworks, and his desire to share them with the public led to the opening of MONA in 2011.

Wedged into a cliffside on a peninsula on the Tasmanian coastline and sprawling across 9,000 square meters, or 97,000 square feet, much of it underground, MONA is far from the celebrity architect design of many new museums. Described by Mr. Walsh as a "subversive adult Disneyland," MONA is best known for its often outrageous collection, which largely focuses on sex and death. But perhaps its most distinguishing feature is that it does not have wall panels identifying each piece of artwork, or an obvious way in which pieces are grouped.

"Museums want to show off their trophies," he said. "When you enter most museums, you feel small in the greatness of the hall. What we are doing is bottom up, not top down. I don't give you visual cues at MONA that most museums give you."

If they prefer, visitors can carry an electronic device, created by a technology company that Mr. Walsh founded, which identifies each artwork. The seemingly random presentation is, in fact, Mr. Walsh's method. He sees art as being linked by association, not by category or chronology.

"The world sees art as a straight line from ancient Greece to Egypt to Rome to Abstractionism," Mr. Walsh said. "We think of this Victorian notion of the West creating the world. I love this idea that from antiquity to Giacometti, plenty of cultures were making beautiful things."

One example of how that is celebrated in "Theater of the World" is a room full of tapa cloths from native South Pacific islanders surrounding an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus that stands upright. At the other end of the room is a pencil-thin Giacometti bronze sculpture, "Femme Leoni" (1947). Mr. Walsh, in the audio guide, describes how human forms have been depicted over thousands of years.

Another room is devoted to the eye; yet another to the relationship between human and beast. A Picasso painting and a tribal shield share a space, and a Max Ernst sculpture sits atop an antique Peruvian mortar.

The 18 rooms are mostly being recreated for the show at La Maison Rouge, whose owner, Antoine de Galbert, a private art collector, set up the gallery in 2005. The show will omit a few items because the space is smaller, and a booklet, rather than the electronic device used at MONA, identifying each work of art will be distributed to visitors.

"When Mr. Galbert decided to open this space almost 10 years ago, he decided to show his own collection and other collections," said Paula Aisemberg, La Maison Rouge's director. "We don't show collections made by companies and advisers, but collections by one person who has, say, a vision."

For Mr. Martin, the chance to work with Mr. Walsh - they met when Mr. Walsh admired how Mr. Martin curated Artempo in Venice in 2007 - is a chance to merge their visions while challenging themselves, museumgoers and perhaps the way art is displayed.

"Museum curators have long thought that the public couldn't appreciate works of art if they didn't learn art history," Mr. Martin said. "My point of view is completely different. There is something very central in art that everyone can experience."

"You don't go to a concert just to learn about the history of music," he continued. "This is what I want to convey to people with exhibitions. There is much to learn just from seeing things. Knowledge is not something you absolutely need to appreciate a work of art."

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Paris Exhibition Presents the Art, Not the Artist

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For Mr. Martin, "Theater of the World" was a continuation of his own curating style, which he said is quite similar to Mr. Walsh's. "We came up with similar ideas differently," Mr. Martin said. "He started to collect works of art from different periods. The name of his museum says it all.

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Short Movies

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Black Robe Official Trailer #1 - August Schellenberg Movie (1991) HD

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Subscribe to TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/sxaw6h Subscribe to COMING SOON: http://bit.ly/H2vZUn Subscribe to CLASSIC TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/1u43jDe Like us on FACEBOOK: http://goo.gl/dHs73 Follow us on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/1ghOWmt Black Robe Trailer - Directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Lothaire Bluteau, Aden Young, August Schellenberg, Billy Two Rivers, Lawrence Bayne.

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Wade Davis: The worldwide web of belief and ritual

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The Indigenous world view vs. Western world view

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Unseen Tears: The Native American Boarding School Experience in Western New York Part 1

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Unseen Tears Native American boarding school documentary. Residential schools / boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada have had a lasting impact on Native communities. Native American families in Western New York and Ontario continue to feel the impact of the Thomas Indian School and the Mohawk Institute.

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Epic in its production, scope and revelations, Utopia represents a long journey through the 'secret country' of John Pilger's homeland. It is his fourth film about Indigenous Australia, the oldest, most enduring human presence on Earth. Released in 2013 and filmed over two years, Utopia breaks what amounts to a recurring national silence about the brutalising of Indigenous people. One of the film's striking elements is the trust given to Pilger by so many indigenous Australians to 'voice their voices'.

New footage is juxtaposed with that of his earlier films. The point is made that little has changed for many of those excluded from white Australia's wealth, regardless of an official apology for 'wrongs past and present'.

This Australian Tale of Two Cities contrasts the material comfort of the majority with the First Australians who die from Dickensian diseases in their 40s and are imprisoned at a rate six times that of blacks in apartheid South Africa. The state of Western Australia, the richest in the nation, has the highest incarceration rate of juveniles in the world - most of them Indigenous.

Pilger takes a road journey from million-dollar properties in Sydney and Canberra to the ironically named Northern Territory region of Utopia, where communities are without basic services, such as fresh running water. In Darwin, he shows shocking footage of police routinely mistreating a seriously ill Aboriginal man who is left to die in a cell, his cries for help unheeded. A former prisons minister unselfconsciously describes 'racking and stacking' Aboriginal prisoners. A shadow Labor Party minister becomes abusive when Pilger asks him why, after 30 years in Parliament, he has not alleviated the poverty of his black constituents. Utopia also reveals, shockingly, a new 'stolen generation' of children taken from their mothers.

Pilger returns to the 1981 death of Eddie Murray in custody featured in two of his previous documentaries. Eddie's parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, became close friends, but Leila is now dead, knowing no justice for her son. Arthur recalls a royal commission's damning verdict on the police officers who arrested Eddie, yet none was prosecuted. Pilger accompanies Arthur to Eddie's graveside, where Arthur speaks about his sadness and anger - and justice, which, it seems, is a utopian dream for Australia's first people.

This sequence ends poignantly with a still photograph of Arthur Murray and John Pilger taken on the riverbank at Wee Waa, where the family grew up. Beneath it are the dates of Arthur's life - he died shortly after the filming, having promised to 'keep going long enough, so I can speak up again'.

A centrepiece of the film is an analysis of 'the intervention', declared as a 'national emergency' in 2007 by Prime Minister John Howard, who sent the army into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Howard and his Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough justified this with lurid allegations of Indigenous paedophile gangs.

Communities that refused to hand over the leases of their land were denied basic services such as housing and sanitation, a government job scheme was virtually eliminated and legitimate benefits and pensions were restricted.

Pilger reports that the National Crime Authority, the Northern Territory Police and an investigation by doctors found no evidence to back the hysteria, which happened on the eve of an election. 'Whether it is Indigenous people or refugees,' says Pilger, 'the desperation of voiceless people has been long regarded by Australian politicians as an electorally valuable issue. The real issue, of course, is race, on whose myths and bigoted exploitation Australia was settled.'

Utopia describes how Australia's multi-billion-dollar mining industry has often ruled politically by ensuring that Aboriginal land claims are scuppered by governments. 'In 2010,' Pilger recalls, 'the mining industry spent A$22 million on a campaign to stop a proposed tax on their super-profits... Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard reduced the tax to almost nothing. The revenue lost is estimated at A$60 billion, enough to fund land rights and to end Aboriginal poverty.'

In the final sequence, as in his earlier films, Pilger calls for 'a genuine treaty that shares this rich country, its land, its resources and opportunities [with its first people]. The benefit then will be mutual, for, until we give back their nationhood, we can never claim our own.'

The response to Utopia was unprecedented. The Australian premiere was attended by more than 4,000 people who filled the open space at The Block in Redfern, in the centre of Sydney, and watched the film on a large screen. Indigenous people came from all over Australia, many speaking their own language. As the credits rolled, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians stood together. This was replicated in towns and remote communities across the country.

'The atmosphere wherever the film has been shown,' said associate producer and academic Paddy Gibson, 'has been electric.' In Perth, the Noongar elder Robert Eggington wrote, 'Utopia will live for ever and be like a fire stick in the darkness for all generations to come the more you view it, the more you see it, we are proud of you.' In the five years since Utopia was released, the long-suppressed issue of a treaty has returned, however tenuously, to a national political agenda.

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Our Generation - Full length version (2010, 73min)

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The original version of the ground-breaking Indigenous rights documentary Our Generation. Winner "Best Campaign Film" at London International Documentary Festival 2011. For more information, visit: www.ourgeneration.org.au

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Reflection

How did Mendeleev learn how to organize the Periodic Table? What insights did he stumble upon and how did it come to him? How did Mendeleev's breakthrough reshape our understanding of the elements and turn the proto-science of alchemy into an actual science: Chemistry? Finally, should a I.B. student consider Mendeleev a role model of the Learner Profile. Make a case for or against.

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To start some arguments in the classroom.

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To start some arguments in the classroom.

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KC: Prohibition of "cultural appropriation" inhibits our ability to create shared knowledge (perhaps especially with IKS) via WOK imagination.
it's good and can get to the heart of personal knowledge (if done right) and the KQ of TWE/how one knows "as a man" (or any other identity)

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Maqbool Fida Husain is perhaps India's greatest artist of the twentieth century. His work linked ancient and modern traditions and helped transform Indian modernism. But not everyone appreciated Husain's work. His depictions of Hindu deities, often naked, outraged Hindu nationalists who questioned his right, as someone of Muslim background, to depict figures sacred to Hindus, accusing him of 'hurting religious feelings'. His home and gallery were ransacked, many of his paintings destroyed. He faced law suits, including ones for 'promoting enmity between different groups'. The harassment spread beyond India's borders. In 2006, London's Asia House Gallery shut an exhibition of his work after protests and the defacement of two paintings. Husain, who died in 2011, was forced to live his last years in exile, in London and Qatar.

Were he still alive today, M.F. Husain's Hindu critics might well be accusing him not of sacrilege but of 'cultural appropriation' - the 'theft' of images and ideas that truly belong to another culture and that he had no right to take without permission.

The idea of cultural appropriation has, in recent years, moved from being an abstruse academic and legal concept to a mainstream political issue. From Beyonce's Bollywood outfits to Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till, and from the recent controversy surrounding Sam Durant's sculpture Scaffold (2012) to Omer Fast's recreation of an old Chinatown storefront at James Cohan Gallery, New York, there is barely a week in which controversies over cultural appropriation are not in the headlines.

The idea of cultural appropriation has, in recent years, moved from being an abstruse academic and legal concept to a mainstream political issue. From Beyonce's Bollywood outfits to Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till

So, what is cultural appropriation and why has it become such a contentious issue? Susan Scafidi, professor of law at Fordham University, defines it as 'taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artefacts from someone else's culture without permission'. This can include the 'unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.'

But what is it for knowledge or expression or a cuisine to 'belong' to a culture? And who gives permission for someone from another culture to use such knowledge or forms?

Appropriation suggests theft, and a process analogous to the seizure of land or artefacts. With artefacts and land the meaning of ownership is clear, even if in many cases disputed. But when it comes to what UNESCO calls 'intangible' cultural forms - ideas, language, folklore, cuisine, religious symbols and so on - the question of 'ownership' becomes far less meaningful and far more tortuous to define.

What really lies behind the debate about cultural appropriation is not ownership but gatekeeping - the making of rules or an etiquette to determine how a particular cultural form may be used and by whom. What critics of cultural appropriation want to establish is that certain people have the right to determine who can use such knowledge or forms, because at the heart of criticism of cultural appropriation is the relationship between gatekeeping and identity.

One of the key arguments of many such critics is that one speaks through one's identity; that one speaks, as writer Nesrine Malik has put it, 'as a': 'as a woman', 'as a Muslim', 'as an immigrant'. And those who are not 'as a' must take their cue from those who are, especially if they happen to be privileged by being white or male or straight. 'Lived experience', as Malik has put it, 'is on its way to becoming the superior and most veracious form of truth.' And as the novelist Kamila Shamsie has observed, 'What started as a thoughtful post-colonial critique of certain types of imperial texts somehow became a peculiar orthodoxy that essentially denies the possibility of imaginative engagement with anyone outside your little circle.'

What is really being appropriated, in other words, is not culture but the right to police cultures and experiences

What is really being appropriated, in other words, is not culture but the right to police cultures and experiences, a right appropriated by those who license themselves to be arbiters of the correct forms cultural borrowing. Such policing is deeply problematic, both artistically and politically. It deadens creativity and it assaults imagination. The importance of imagination is that we can take ourselves beyond where we are, beyond our own narrow perspectives, to imagine other peoples, other worlds, other experiences. Without the ability to do that, both artistic creativity and progressive politics shrivel.

Take the debate about Dana Schutz's Open Casket (2016), a painting derived from photographs of the body of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. Till's mother had urged the publication of photographs of her son's mutilated body as it lay in its coffin. Till's murder, and the photographs, played a major role in shaping the civil-rights movement and have acquired an almost sacred quality.

Schutz's painting caused little controversy until it was included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial Exhibition in New York. Many objected to a white painter depicting such a traumatic moment in black history, and for that depiction to receive the accolade of a Whitney Biennial presentation. The British artist Hannah Black even organised a petition to have the work destroyed.

In the same Whitney Biennial was a painting by Henry Taylor titled The Times They Ain't Changing, Fast Enough! (2017) which depicts the death of Philando Castile, an African American man horrifically shot dead in his car by a policeman, in 2016. Taylor's painting, unlike Schutz's, has received little criticism, but rather has been praised for its 'hauntingly vivid depiction' of the shooting of Castile.

In my view neither painting has significant artistic merit. For critics of cultural appropriation, however, the real difference is not aesthetic, but identitarian. Schutz is white and Taylor black.

To subsume aesthetic considerations to those of identity is to render art meaningless. It is also politically troubling. The campaign against Schutz's work, as the American critic Adam Shatz has observed, contains an 'implicit disavowal that acts of radical sympathy, and imaginative identification, are possible across racial lines'.

Or, as Shamsie tweeted (in response to the controversy over Lionel Shriver's defence of cultural appropriation at last year's Brisbane Writers Festival) '"You - other - are unimaginable" is a far more problematic attitude than "You are imaginable".'

Many critics of cultural appropriation insist that they are opposed not to cultural engagement, but to racism. They want to protect marginalised cultures and ensure that such cultures speak for themselves and are not simply to be seen through the eyes of more privileged groups. The American critic Briahna Joy Gray acknowledges that 'The idea that only black artists have the right to address Emmett Till's murder through art seems wrong.' But, she argues, critics of Dana Schutz 'have a point' about 'exploitation': 'Depicting Till is not a problem but using Till to garner profit and acclaim would be.'

It is true that cultural engagement does not take place on a level playing field, but is shaped by racism and inequality. Racism ensured that the great black pioneers of rock 'n' roll never received their due, whereas many white artists, from Elvis Presley onwards, were feted as cultural icons. Yet, as the poet Amiri Baraka once observed, the issue here is not that of cultural appropriation at all: 'The problem is that if The Beatles tell me that they learned everything they know from Blind Willie [Johnson], I want to know why Blind Willie is still running an elevator in Jackson, Mississippi. It's that kind of inequality that is abusive, not the actual appropriation of culture because that's normal.'

Preventing the Beatles from drawing on the work of Blind Willie Johnson or other black singers would have done little to improve black peoples' lives. It would not have overthrown Jim Crow laws in the 1950s. It would not rid America of discrimination in the labour market today. Nor will preventing Dana Schutz 'profiting' from painting Emmett Till protect the Emmett Tills of today.

Only mass social and political campaigns to transform the very structures of society - such as the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s - can bring about such change. Otherwise, social justice comes to be seen not as the erasure of exploitative structures but merely as the possibility of 'cultural fairness' within them. The campaigns against cultural appropriation are an implicit acceptance that the playing field cannot be levelled, and that the best we can do is fence off certain areas.

A key argument of those who abhor cultural appropriation is that if one does make use of ideas or images or objects from other cultures, one should do so only with 'respect'. 'We can enter other cultures', the Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally suggests, only 'as long as we... treat them with cultural respect'.

There are certainly many cases of the racist use of cultural forms, from minstrelsy onwards. Much art, though, is necessarily disrespectful, even contemptuous, of cultures and traditions.

The trouble with the notion of 'disrespect' is that it conflates several issues: from outright racism, to the unthinking but not necessarily racist use of 'exotic' cultural forms, to the deliberate challenge of cultural and religious beliefs and rules

In Chris Ofili's painting, The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), one of the Madonna's breasts is made of elephant dung and she is surrounded by collaged images of female genitalia, cut out from porn magazines, made to resemble butterflies or angels. When shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, the painting was denounced by many Christians, including the then mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, as 'sick' and as 'desecrating somebody else's religion'. William A Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, called for a picket of the show, claiming that Ofili's work 'induces revulsion'. Such responses were inevitable - the point of the painting was to challenge traditional portrayals of the Madonna.

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) was seen by many Muslims as blasphemous in its depiction of Islam, and it was. In its retelling of the story of the founding of Islam, and its portrayal of the Prophet and of his wives, the novel was inevitably, and deliberately, disrespectful of Islamic traditions.

M.F. Husain did not intend his paintings of Hindu deities to be disrespectful. But many Hindus certainly saw them as so, a disrespect made worse, in their eyes, by the fact that the artist was not Hindu himself.

The trouble with the notion of 'disrespect' is that it conflates several issues: from outright racism, to the unthinking but not necessarily racist use of 'exotic' cultural forms, to the deliberate challenge of cultural and religious beliefs and rules. It also conflates respect for people with respect for their cultures and traditions. Equality requires us to treat all people as autonomous moral beings with equal rights and dignity. But while that requires that we respect the right of others to hold different ideas and beliefs, it does not require us to treat all their ideas and beliefs and traditions with respect or deem all ideas and beliefs and traditions as being of equal worth.

The consequence of these two types of conflation is to make it easier for those who do not want their cultural beliefs to be challenged to dismiss all critiques as 'disrespectful' or 'racist'. 'Disrespect' is the contemporary secular version of 'blasphemy'. And its impact is as pernicious.

Every society has its gatekeepers, whose role is to protect certain institutions, maintain the privileges of particular groups and cordon off some beliefs from challenge. Such gatekeepers protect not the marginalised but the powerful. Racism itself is a form of gatekeeping, a means of denying racialised groups equal rights, access and opportunities.

In minority communities, the gatekeepers are usually self-appointed guardians whose power rests on their ability to define what is acceptable and what is beyond the bounds. This is true not just of debates about cultural appropriation, but of much wider controversies over minority communities and the arts.

Consider, for example, the case of Exhibit B, a show about 'human zoos' designed by South African Brett Bailey. It featured 12 'tableaux' in which motionless performers were exhibited as artefacts. These tableaux were drawn from nineteenth-century racist freak shows, which Exhibit B took as the starting point for an exploration of slavery, colonialism and present-day racism.

In 2014, the show was to have been staged by London's Barbican Centre but was closed down because of protests that it was racist. The actors in the show put out a statement insisting that 'we are proud to be black performers in this piece' and that, far from being racist, Exhibit B was 'a powerful tool in the fight against racism'. To which one of the critics, the sociologist Kehinde Andrews, in a debate with Exhibit B actor Stella Odunlami, replied, 'black artists do not have the authority to define what is and is not acceptable'. But black sociologists apparently do.

Cultures work not through appropriation but through messy interaction. Writers and artists, indeed all human beings, necessarily engage with the experiences of others. Nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one (or several)

The campaigns against cultural appropriation, like that against Exhibit B, empower not those suffer from racism or inequality but, in the acid words of the African-American critic Adolph Reed, 'the guild of Racial Spokespersonship', those who take it on themselves to be the guardians of the acceptable. Hannah Black's open letter to the Whitney Museum demanding the removal and destruction of Schutz's Open Casket insisted that 'if Black people are telling her that the painting has caused unnecessary hurt, she and you must accept the truth of this. The painting must go.' In fact, just as many black people opposed the closure of Exhibit B, so many African Americans, including artists such as Kara Walker and Jack Whitten, have defended Schutz. But, for the critics, only their voices constitute 'the truth'. Far from aiding the marginalised, such campaigns serve to close down dissent and debate.

The very term 'cultural appropriation' is inappropriate. Cultures work not through appropriation but through messy interaction. Writers and artists, indeed all human beings, necessarily engage with the experiences of others. Nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one (or several), and in inhabiting a culture, one finds the tools for reaching out to other cultures.

Cultural interaction is necessarily messy because the world is messy. Some of that messiness is good: the complexity and diversity of the world. Some of it is damaging: the racial, sexual and economic inequalities that disfigure our world.

Such damaging messiness will not be cleaned up by limiting cultural interaction, or by confining it within a particular etiquette. In reframing political and economic issues as cultural ones, or as issues of identity, campaigns against cultural appropriation obscure the roots of racism, and make it harder to challenge it. In constraining what Adam Shatz called 'acts of radical sympathy, and imaginative identification... across racial lines', they make such challenges more difficult still.

The campaigns against cultural appropriation are bad for creative art. And they are bad for progressive politics. They seek to police interaction and constrain imagination. For the sake of both of art and politics we need less policing and constraints, more interaction and imagination.

Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. His From Fatwa to Jihad: How the World Changed From the Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo was published in a paperback edition earlier this year. This article is an edited version of a talk given at Rich Mix, London on 10 November 2017
From the December 2017 issue of ArtReview

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The Truth About 'Cultural Appropriation', by Kenan Malik / ArtReview

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Maqbool Fida Husain is perhaps India's greatest artist of the twentieth century. His work linked ancient and modern traditions and helped transform Indian modernism. But not everyone appreciated Husain's work. His depictions of Hindu deities, often naked, outraged Hindu nationalists who questioned his right, as someone of Muslim background, to depict figures sacred to Hindus, accusing him of 'hurting religious feelings'.

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KQ: how does this translation (wok Lang) impact the rks derived from the text(s)?

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KQ: how does this translation (wok Lang) impact the rks derived from the text(s)?

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David Bentley Hart's text recaptures the awkward, multivoiced power of the original.

Jason Raish

In the beginning was ... well, what? A clap of the divine hands and a poetic shock wave? Or an itchy node of nothingness inconceivably scratching itself into somethingness? In the beginning was the Word, says the Gospel according to John-a lovely statement of the case, as it's always seemed to me. A pre-temporal syllable swelling to utterance in the mouth of the universe, spoken once and heard forever: God's power chord, if you like. For David Bentley Hart, however, whose mind-bending translation of the New Testament was published in October, the Word-as a word-does not suffice: He finds it to be "a curiously bland and impenetrable designation" for the heady concept expressed in the original Greek of the Gospels as Logos. The Chinese word Tao might get at it, Hart tells us, but English has nothing with quite the metaphysical flavor of Logos, the particular sense of a formative moral energy diffusing itself, without diminution, through space and time. So he throws up his hands and leaves it where it is: "In the origin there was the Logos ..."

From Our January/February 2018 Issue

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It's significant, this act of lexical surrender, because if you'd bet on anyone to come up with a fancy English word for Logos, it'd be David Bentley Hart. Vocabulary is not his problem, unless you think he has too much of it. A scholar, theologian, and cultural commentator, Hart is also a stylist; or rather, the prickly and slightly preening polemical exhibition that is his style is indivisible from his role as a scholarly and theologically oriented cultural commentator. Like G. K. Chesterton, he has one essential argument: that God is the foundation of our being and that every human life therefore has its beginning and its end in eternity. He rehearses this argument in numberless witty variations against whichever non-God ideology happens to slouch beneath his pen: materialism, scientism, consumerism, pornographism ... And he can sound a Chestertonian note. "My chief purpose," he wrote in 2013's The Experience of God, "is not to advise atheists on what I think they should believe; I want merely to make sure that they have a clear concept of what it is they claim not to believe."

Unlike Chesterton-and this is how you know he's an early-21st-century guy, someone with Wi-Fi-Hart is extremely rude. Richard Dawkins, "zoologist and tireless tractarian," has "an embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning"; Sam Harris's The End of Faith is "extravagantly callow"; and Dan Brown's heretical The Da Vinci Code is "surely the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate." (All this from the first one and a half pages of 2009's Atheist Delusions.) He once proposed, as a thought experiment, that bioethicists such as the late Joseph Fletcher ("almost comically vile") be purged from the gene pool: "Academic ethicists ... constitute perhaps the single most useless element in society. If reproduction is not a right but a social function, should any woman be allowed to bring such men into the world?"

Yale University Press

So what has he done to the New Testament, this bristling one-man band of a Christian literatus? The surprising aim, Hart tells us in his introduction, was to be as bare-bones and-where appropriate-unsqueamishly prosaic as he can. The New Testament, after all, is not a store of ancient wonders like the Hebrew Bible. It's a grab bag of reportage, rumor, folk memory, and on-the-hoof mysticism produced by regular people, everyday babblers and clunkers, under the pressure of a supremely irregular event-namely, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that, says Hart, is what it should sound like. "Again and again," he insists, "I have elected to produce an almost pitilessly literal translation; many of my departures from received practices are simply my efforts to make the original text as visible as possible through the palimpsest of its translation ... Where an author has written bad Greek ... I have written bad English." Herein lies the fascination of this thing: its deliberate, one might say defiant, rawness and lowbrow-ness, as produced by a decidedly overcooked highbrow.

Let's zoom in on Mark, the roughest and tersest of the Gospels. (Hippolytus of Rome, in the third century, called Mark "stump fingered"-possibly a physical descriptor but more likely, I think, a comment on his prose.) Here's how Monsignor Ronald Knox handled Mark 1:40-41 in his 1945 translation: "Then a leper came up to him, asking for his aid; he knelt at his feet and said, If it be thy will, thou hast power to make me clean. Jesus was moved with pity; he held out his hand and touched him, and said, It is my will; be thou made clean." Hart's version: "And a leper comes to him, imploring him and falling to his knees, saying to him, 'If you wish it, you are able to cleanse me.' And, moved inwardly with compassion, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and says to him, 'I wish it, be clean.' " There's a stumbling, almost rustically blundering urgency to this, the verb tenses tripping over one another; beside it the Knox translation feels smoothed out, falsely archaized, too rhetorical. In Hart we can hear more clearly both the leper's challenge- heal me! -and the quickness and intimacy of Jesus's response.

"The sole literary claim I make for my version," writes Hart, "is that my mulish stubbornness regarding the idiosyncrasies of the text allowed me to 'do the police in different voices,' so to speak." That's no small claim, actually, and it takes a little unpacking. The idea of "doing the police in different voices" is one of the genetic strands of early modernism: "You mightn't think it," says the virtuous Betty Higden of her foster son Sloppy in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, "but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices." T. S. Eliot took this last line-with its undertone of channelings and polyphonic possessions-as the working title for an early draft of The Waste Land. The life of Jesus in the New Testament reaches us via four voices, four accounts that overlap, diverge, corroborate, and destabilize one another. It's all very contingent and fractured, all very partial and mortal, all rather amazingly modern in technique. By putting us closer to these differences, to the distinctive sound of each voice-the heavy-breathing rush of Mark, or the bureaucratic polish of Luke-Hart is doing something important.

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This article appears in the January/February 2018 print edition with the headline "The New New Testament."
I hope I'm getting across the beautiful paradox of his New Testament-that it is simultaneously a kind of feline, Nabokovian modernist project, a meta-text in a matrix of eccentric scholarship, and a wild rush at the original upset, the original amazement, the earthshakingly bad grammar of the Good News. "And opening his mouth he taught them, saying: 'How blissful the destitute, abject in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of the heavens.' " This is from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus's gently administered program for pulling down thrones, decapitating idols, and jamming eternity into the present tense. Hart opted for blissful over the traditional blessed, he writes, because the original Greek, makarios, "suggested a special intensity of delight and freedom from care that the more shopworn renderings no longer quite capture." So now we hear it, and are shocked by it: not the ambiguous benediction of blessed, but the actual bliss, right now, of destitution, the emancipation of everything being stripped away. It comes at us like white light, this generosity of emptiness, and because we're not angels, we shield our eyes.

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A Mind-Bending Translation of the New Testament

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David Bentley Hart's text recaptures the awkward, multivoiced power of the original. In the beginning was ... well, what? A clap of the divine hands and a poetic shock wave? Or an itchy node of nothingness inconceivably scratching itself into somethingness?

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Most people learn to count when they are children. Yet surprisingly, not all languages have words for numbers. A recent study published in the journal of Cognitive Science shows that a few tongues lack number words and as a result, people in these cultures have a difficult time performing common quantitative tasks. The findings add new insight to the way people acquire knowledge, perception and reasoning.

The Piraha people of the Amazon are a group of about 700 semi-nomadic people living in small villages of about 10-15 adults, along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon. According to University of Miami (UM) anthropological linguist Caleb Everett, the Piraha are surprisingly unable to represent exact amounts. Their language contains just three imprecise words for quantities: Hòi means "small size or amount," hoì, means "somewhat larger amount," and baàgiso indicates to "cause to come together, or many." Linguists refer to languages that do not have number specific words as anumeric.

"The Piraha is a really fascinating group because they are really only one or two groups in the world that are totally anumeric," says Everett, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the UM College of Arts and Sciences. "This is maybe one of the most extreme cases of language actually restricting how people think."

His study "Quantity Recognition Among speakers of an Anumeric Language" demonstrates that number words are essential tools of thought required to solve even the simplest quantitative problems, such as one-to-one correspondence.

"I'm interested in how the language you speak affects the way that you think," says Everett. "The question here is what tools like number words really allows us to do and how they change the way we think about the world."

The work was motivated by contradictory results on the numerical performance of the Piraha. An earlier article reported the people incapable of performing simple numeric tasks with quantities greater than three, while another other showed they were capable of accomplishing such tasks.

Everett repeated all the field experiments of these two previous studies. The results indicated that the Piraha could not consistently perform simple mathematical tasks. For example, one test involved 14 adults in one village that were presented with lines of spools of thread and were asked to create a matching line of empty rubber balloons. The people were not able to do the one-to-one correspondence, when the numbers were greater than two or three.

The study provides a simple explanation for the controversy. Unbeknown to other researchers, the villagers that participated in one of the previous studies had received basic numerical training by Keren Madora, an American missionary that has worked with the indigenous people of the Amazon for 33 years, and co-author of this study. "Her knowledge of what had happened in that village was crucial. I understood then why they got the results that they did," Everett says.

Madora used the Piraha language to create number words. For instance she used the words "all the sons of the hand," to indicate the number four. The introduction of number words into the village provides a reasonable explanation for the disagreement in the previous studies.

The findings support the idea that language is a key component in processes of the mind. "When they've been introduced to those words, their performance improved, so it's clearly a linguistic effect, rather than a generally cultural factor," Everett says. The study highlights the unique insight we gain about people and society by studying mother languages.

"Preservation of mother tongues is important because languages can tell us about aspects of human history, human cognition, and human culture that we would not have access to if the languages are gone," he says. "From a scientific perspective I think it's important, but it's most important from the perspective of the people, because they lose a lot of their cultural heritage when their languages die."

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language acquisition; child development; literacy; math puzzles; hacking; artificial intelligence; anthropology; cultures; human evolution

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You can't do the math without the words: Amazonian tribe lacks words for numbers

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An anthropological linguist has shown that the language of the Piraha, an Amazonian tribe, lacks number words and as a result the people have a difficult time performing common quantitative tasks. The findings add new insight to the way people acquire knowledge, perception and reasoning.

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Religion is a controversial topic, and I'd like to preface this article by saying that it is not my aim to belittle or diminish anyone's beliefs. My problem is not with faith but with religion as an organization, which has been used as a means of control, to pit people against each other, and to incite terror and war. Religion in this context serves the purposes of many various global elitist agendas.

Religion is also confusing, to say the least; within several different religions exist different 'sects,' each with their own teachings and version of the 'truth' and how to live one's life. Within Christianity alone, there are multiple versions of the Bible, and teachings that contradict one another. What one religion says in one part of the world may directly oppose what another says in a different part of the world. This alone is a recipe for feelings of confusion and isolation for anybody who is seeking 'the truth.' If various religions preach different ways of life and truths, they all can't be correct, can they? I guess that's why they call it faith.

Below is a video of Jon Shelby Spong, a retired American bishop of the Episcopal Church, discussing these problems. He argues that religion is a business and it is used as a control mechanism (and he's not the first insider to do so). We can see this happening most clearly in the rise of Islamophobia. Islam has been turned into a scapegoat, a target at which we can direct all our fears and anger, and an excuse to invade other countries and create a more intense global national security state. But the truth is, Islam has nothing to do with violence or terrorism. These manufactured fears are all part and parcel of 'false flag' terrorism, which you can read more about here if you are unfamiliar with the concept.

In the video, Spong affirms that "religion is always in the control business, and that's something people don't really understand. It's in the guilt producing control business."

He then goes on to describe the problem with religion as an organization:

Every church I know claims that we are the true church, and they have some ultimate authority. . . . The idea that the truth of God can be bound in any human system by any human creed by any human book, is almost beyond imagination for me. God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu a Buddhist; all of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God.

He is describing the difference between faith and religion. I myself have explored multiple religions, and have discovered teachings within all of them that deeply resonate with me. I've also found teachings that don't resonate at all. I don't believe one religion has all the answers.

Using fear to coax people into a certain way of life or belief system, just like the Bishop mentions above, seems to be common practice in nearly every religion, and that certainly doesn't resonate with me.

The history of the church itself is problematic. Whether it be the church's role in the First Nations Genocide here in Canada, or the European crusades, the church has a history of forcing their views upon others and of condemning science and new discoveries.

Furthermore, as the Bishop says above, people need to accept responsibility for the world. If we simply leave global change in the hands of God, we remove our own responsibility and agency in this world. If we want to change the world, WE have to do it. After the Paris terrorist attacks, the Dalai Lamai expressed this as well, arguing that it's not enough to just pray. We must take responsibility for our planet.

We are also dealing with texts that are very old, and considering there are multiple versions of various texts, all of which have likely been manipulated, changed, and distorted over the years, I find it difficult to accept any one without question.

Another point that turns me away from religion is hypocrisy. Many people claim ties to their faith yet know very little about its tenets, and fail to follow what they claim to believe in. This is commonly seen within the 'spiritual' movement as well, which can be seen as another form of religion in itself.

When it comes to religion, I believe you have to do your own research; you have to read the books and examine the teachings for yourself. Use your own head and find what resonates with you instead of allowing yourself to be indoctrinated and letting someone else do your thinking for you. These texts are open to interpretation; it's up to you to find meaning in them and apply it to your life. You can still believe in God and not be religious. Religion is a manmade construct, and I think if God were to suddenly appear somewhere, he or she would have no idea what religion even was.

Religions as organizations are going to have to change. New discoveries are constantly being made that are challenging long-held belief systems. We cannot grow if we refuse to have an open mind and accept new possibilities about the nature of reality, and it's childish to hold on to old belief systems just because they are familiar.

I personally believe in the soul and other non-material phenomena, as well the idea that life does not end here on Earth, and I believe there is enough evidence in various forms, aside from my own intuition and gut feeling, to support this stance.

What about you? What do you believe? What it all boils down to, for me, is respect. We must learn to respect each other's viewpoints about 'what is.' We need to work with each other and accept our differences so we can focus on helping the planet, our shared home.

"It's a mark of an educated person to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it."

What do you think about religion and what Spong is saying in this video? Do you agree or disagree? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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American Bishop Explains How Religion Is 'Made Up' & Used To Control People

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Religion is a controversial topic, and I'd like to preface this article by saying that it is not my aim to belittle or diminish anyone's beliefs. My problem is not with faith but with religion as an organization, which has been used as a means of control, to pit people against each other, and to [...]

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The 1901 Dorland's Medical Dictionary defined heterosexuality as an "abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex." More than two decades later, in 1923, Merriam Webster's dictionary similarly defined it as "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex." It wasn't until 1934 that heterosexuality was graced with the meaning we're familiar with today: "manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality."

Whenever I tell this to people, they respond with dramatic incredulity. That can't be right! Well, it certainly doesn't feel right. It feels as if heterosexuality has always "just been there."

A few years ago, there began circulating a "man on the street" video, in which the creator asked people if they thought homosexuals were born with their sexual orientations. Responses were varied, with most saying something like, "It's a combination of nature and nurture." The interviewer then asked a follow-up question, which was crucial to the experiment: "When did you choose to be straight?" Most were taken back, confessing, rather sheepishly, never to have thought about it. Feeling that their prejudices had been exposed, they ended up swiftly conceding the videographer's obvious point: gay people were born gay just like straight people were born straight.

The video's takeaway seemed to suggest that all of our sexualities are "just there"; that we don't need an explanation for homosexuality just as we don't need one for heterosexuality. It seems not to have occurred to those who made the video, or the millions who shared it, that we actually need an explanation for both.

There's been a lot of good work, both scholarly and popular, on the social construction of homosexual desire and identity. As a result, few would bat an eye when there's talk of "the rise of the homosexual" - indeed, most of us have learned that homosexual identity did come into existence at a specific point in human history. What we're not taught, though, is that a similar phenomenon brought heterosexuality into its existence.

There are many reasons for this educational omission, including religious bias and other types of homophobia. But the biggest reason we don't interrogate heterosexuality's origins is probably because it seems so, well, natural. Normal. No need to question something that's "just there."

But heterosexuality has not always "just been there." And there's no reason to imagine it will always be.
When heterosexuality was abnormal
The first rebuttal to the claim that heterosexuality was invented usually involves an appeal to reproduction: it seems obvious that different-genital intercourse has existed for as long as humans have been around - indeed, we wouldn't have survived this long without it. But this rebuttal assumes that heterosexuality is the same thing as reproductive intercourse. It isn't.

"Sex has no history," writes queer theorist David Halperin at the University of Michigan, because it's "grounded in the functioning of the body." Sexuality, on the other hand, precisely because it's a "cultural production," does have a history. In other words, while sex is something that appears hardwired into most species, the naming and categorising of those acts, and those who practise those acts, is a historical phenomenon, and can and should be studied as such.

Or put another way: there have always been sexual instincts throughout the animal world (sex). But at a specific point in time, humans attached meaning to these instincts (sexuality). When humans talk about heterosexuality, we're talking about the second thing.

Hanne Blank offers a helpful way into this discussion in her book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality with an analogy from natural history. In 2007, the International Institute for Species Exploration listed the fish Electrolux addisoni as one of the year's "top 10 new species." But of course, the species didn't suddenly spring into existence 10 years ago - that's just when it was discovered and scientifically named. As Blank concludes: "Written documentation of a particular kind, by an authority figure of a particular kind, was what turned Electrolux from a thing that just was ... into a thing that was known."

Something remarkably similar happened with heterosexuals, who, at the end of the 19th Century, went from merely being there to being known. "Prior to 1868, there were no heterosexuals," writes Blank. Neither were there homosexuals. It hadn't yet occurred to humans that they might be "differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced." Sexual behaviours, of course, were identified and catalogued, and often times, forbidden. But the emphasis was always on the act, not the agent.

So what changed? Language.

In the late 1860s, Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined four terms to describe sexual experiences: heterosexual, homosexual, and two now forgotten terms to describe masturbation and bestiality; namely, monosexual and heterogenit. Kertbeny used the term "heterosexual" a decade later when he was asked to write a book chapter arguing for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The editor, Gustav Jager, decided not to publish it, but he ended up using Kertbeny's novel term in a book he later published in 1880.

The next time the word was published was in 1889, when Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing included the word in Psychopathia Sexualis, a catalogue of sexual disorders. But in almost 500 pages, the word "heterosexual" is used only 24 times, and isn't even indexed. That's because Krafft-Ebing is more interested in "contrary sexual instinct" ("perversions") than "sexual instinct," the latter being for him the "normal" sexual desire of humans.

"Normal" is a loaded word, of course, and it has been misused throughout history. Hierarchical ordering leading to slavery was at one time accepted as normal, as was a geocentric cosmology. It was only by questioning the foundations of the consensus view that "normal" phenomena were dethroned from their privileged positions.

The emphasis on procreation comes not primarily from Jewish or Christian Scriptures, but from Stoicism

For Krafft-Ebing, normal sexual desire was situated within a larger context of procreative utility, an idea that was in keeping with the dominant sexual theories of the West. In the Western world, long before sex acts were separated into the categories hetero/homo, there was a different ruling binary: procreative or non-procreative. The Bible, for instance, condemns homosexual intercourse for the same reason it condemns masturbation: because life-bearing seed is spilled in the act. While this ethic was largely taught, maintained, and enforced by the Catholic Church and later Christian offshoots, it's important to note that the ethic comes not primarily from Jewish or Christian Scriptures, but from Stoicism.

As Catholic ethicist Margaret Farley points out, Stoics "held strong views on the power of the human will to regulate emotion and on the desirability of such regulation for the sake of inner peace". Musonius Rufus, for example, argued in On Sexual Indulgence that individuals must protect themselves against self-indulgence, including sexual excess. To curb this sexual indulgence, notes theologian Todd Salzman, Rufus and other Stoics tried to situate it "in a larger context of human meaning" - arguing that sex could only be moral in the pursuit of procreation. Early Christian theologians took up this conjugal-reproductive ethic, and by the time of Augustine, reproductive sex was the only normal sex.

While Krafft-Ebing takes this procreative sexual ethic for granted, he does open it up in a major way. "In sexual love the real purpose of the instinct, the propagation of the species, does not enter into consciousness," he writes.

In other words, sexual instinct contains something like a hard-wired reproductive aim - an aim that is present even if those engaged in 'normal' sex aren't aware of it. Jonathan Ned Katz, in The Invention of Heterosexuality, notes the impact of Krafft-Ebing's move. "Placing the reproductive aside in the unconscious, Krafft-Ebing created a small, obscure space in which a new pleasure norm began to grow."

The importance of this shift - from reproductive instinct to erotic desire - can't be overstated, as it's crucial to modern notions of sexuality. When most people today think of heterosexuality, they might think of something like this: Billy understands from a very young age he is erotically attracted to girls. One day he focuses that erotic energy on Suzy, and he woos her. The pair fall in love, and give physical sexual expression to their erotic desire. And they live happily ever after.

Without Krafft-Ebing's work, this narrative might not have ever become thought of as "normal." There is no mention, however implicit, of procreation. Defining normal sexual instinct according to erotic desire was a fundamental revolution in thinking about sex. Krafft-Ebing's work laid the groundwork for the cultural shift that happened between the 1923 definition of heterosexuality as "morbid" and its 1934 definition as "normal."
Sex and the city
Ideas and words are often products of their time. That is certainly true of heterosexuality, which was borne out of a time when American life was becoming more regularised. As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class.

The invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class

In the late 19th Century, populations in European and North American cities began to explode. By 1900, for example, New York City had 3.4 million residents - 56 times its population just a century earlier. As people moved to urban centres, they brought their sexual perversions - prostitution, same-sex eroticism - with them. Or so it seemed. "By comparison to rural towns and villages," Blank writes, "the cities seemed like hotbeds of sexual misconduct and excess." When city populations were smaller, says Blank, it was easier to control such behaviour, just as it was easier to control when it took place in smaller, rural areas where neighbourly familiarity was a norm. Small-town gossip can be a profound motivator.

Because the increasing public awareness of these sexual practices paralleled the influx of lower classes into cities, "urban sexual misconduct was typically, if inaccurately, blamed" on the working class and poor, says Blank. It was important for an emerging middle class to differentiate itself from such excess. The bourgeois family needed a way to protect its members "from aristocratic decadence on the one side and the horrors of the teeming city on the other". This required "systematic, reproducible, universally applicable systems for social management that could be implemented on a large scale".

In the past, these systems could be based on religion, but "the new secular state required secular justification for its laws," says Blank. Enter sex experts like Krafft-Ebing, who wrote in the introduction to his first edition of Psychopathia that his work was designed "to reduce [humans] to their lawful conditions." Indeed, continues the preface, the present study "exercises a beneficent influence upon legislation and jurisprudence".

Krafft-Ebing's work chronicling sexual irregularity made it clear that the growing middle class could no longer treat deviation from normal (hetero) sexuality merely as sin, but as moral degeneracy - one of the worst labels a person could acquire. "Call a man a 'cad' and you've settled his social status," wrote Williams James in 1895. "Call him a 'degenerate' and you've grouped him with the most loathsome specimens of the human race." As Blank points out, sexual degeneracy became a yardstick to determine a person's measure.

Degeneracy, after all, was the reverse process of social Darwinism. If procreative sex was critical to the continuous evolution of the species, deviating from that norm was a threat to the entire social fabric. Luckily, such deviation could be reversed, if it was caught early enough, thought the experts.

The formation of "sexual inversion" occurred, for Krafft-Ebing, through several stages, and was curable in the first. Through his work, writes Ralph M Leck, author of Vita Sexualis, "Krafft-Ebing sent out a clarion call against degeneracy and perversion. All civic-minded people must take their turn on the social watch tower." And this was certainly a question of civics: most colonial personnel came from the middle class, which was large and growing.

Though some non-professionals were familiar with Krafft-Ebing's work, it was Freud who gave the public scientific ways to think about sexuality. While it's difficult to reduce the doctor's theories to a few sentences, his most enduring legacy is his psychosexual theory of development, which held that children develop their own sexualities via an elaborate psychological parental dance.

For Freud, heterosexuals weren't born this way, but made this way. As Katz points out, heterosexuality for Freud was an achievement; those who attained it successfully navigated their childhood development without being thrown off the straight and narrow.

And yet, as Katz notes, it takes an enormous imagination to frame this navigation in terms of normality:
According to Freud, the normal road to heterosexual normality is paved with the incestuous lust of boy and girl for parent of the other sex, with boy's and girl's desire to murder their same-sex parent-rival, and their wish to exterminate any little sibling-rivals. The road to heterosexuality is paved with blood-lusts... The invention of the heterosexual, in Freud's vision, is a deeply disturbed production.
That such an Oedipal vision endured for so long as the explanation for normal sexuality is "one more grand irony of heterosexual history," he says.

Still, Freud's explanation seemed to satisfy the majority of the public, who, continuing their obsession with standardising every aspect of life, happily accepted the new science of normal. Such attitudes found further scientific justification in the work of Alfred Kinsey, whose landmark 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male sought to rate the sexuality of men on a scale of zero (exclusively heterosexual) to six (exclusively homosexual). His findings led him to conclude that a large, if not majority, "portion of the male population has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age". While Kinsey's study did open up the categories homo/hetero to allow for a certain sexual continuum, it also "emphatically reaffirmed the idea of a sexuality divided between" the two poles, as Katz notes.
The future of heterosexuality
And those categories have lingered to this day. "No one knows exactly why heterosexuals and homosexuals ought to be different," wrote Wendell Ricketts, author of the 1984 study Biological Research on Homosexuality. The best answer we've got is something of a tautology: "heterosexuals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be divided into two groups on the basis of the belief that they can be divided into two groups."

Though the hetero/homo divide seems like an eternal, indestructible fact of nature, it simply isn't. It's merely one recent grammar humans have invented to talk about what sex means to us.

Heterosexuality, argues Katz, "is invented within discourse as that which is outside discourse. It's manufactured in a particular discourse as that which is universal... as that which is outside time." That is, it's a construction, but it pretends it isn't. As any French philosopher or child with a Lego set will tell you, anything that's been constructed can be deconstructed, as well. If heterosexuality didn't exist in the past, then it doesn't need to exist in the future.

I was recently caught off guard by Jane Ward, author of Not Gay, who, during an interview for a piece I wrote on sexual orientation, asked me to think about the future of sexuality. "What would it mean to think about people's capacity to cultivate their own sexual desires, in the same way we might cultivate a taste for food?" Though some might be wary of allowing for the possibility of sexual fluidity, it's important to realise that various Born This Way arguments aren't accepted by the most recent science. Researchers aren't sure what "causes" homosexuality, and they certainly reject any theories that posit a simple origin, such as a "gay gene." It's my opinion that sexual desires, like all our desires, shift and re-orient throughout our lives, and that as they do, they often suggest to us new identities. If this is true, then Ward's suggestion that we can cultivate sexual preferences seems fitting. (For more of the scientific evidence behind this argument, read BBC Future's 'I am gay - but I wasn't born this way'.)

Beyond Ward's question is a subtle challenge: If we're uncomfortable with considering whether and how much power we have over our sexualities, why might that be? Similarly, why might we be uncomfortable with challenging the belief that homosexuality, and by extension heterosexuality, are eternal truths of nature?

In an interview with the journalist Richard Goldstein, the novelist and playwright James Baldwin admitted to having good and bad fantasies of the future. One of the good ones was that "No one will have to call themselves gay," a term Baldwin admits to having no patience for. "It answers a false argument, a false accusation."

Which is what?

"Which is that you have no right to be here, that you have to prove your right to be here. I'm saying I have nothing to prove. The world also belongs to me."

Fewer than half British 18-24 year-olds identify as being 100% heterosexual

Once upon a time, heterosexuality was necessary because modern humans needed to prove who they were and why they were, and they needed to defend their right to be where they were. As time wears on, though, that label seems to actually limit the myriad ways we humans understand our desires and loves and fears. Perhaps that is one reason a recent UK poll found that fewer than half of those aged 18-24 identify as "100% heterosexual." That isn't to suggest a majority of those young respondents regularly practise bisexuality or homosexuality; rather it shows that they don't seem to have the same need for the word "heterosexual" as their 20th-Century forebears.

Debates about sexual orientation have tended to focus on a badly defined concept of "nature." Because different sex intercourse generally results in the propagation of the species, we award it a special moral status. But "nature" doesn't reveal to us our moral obligations - we are responsible for determining those, even when we aren't aware we're doing so. To leap from an observation of how nature is to a prescription of nature ought to be is, as philosopher David Hume noted, to commit a logical fallacy.

Why judge what is natural and ethical to a human being by his or her animal nature? Many of the things human beings value, such as medicine and art, are egregiously unnatural. At the same time, humans detest many things that actually are eminently natural, like disease and death. If we consider some naturally occurring phenomena ethical and others unethical, that means our minds (the things looking) are determining what to make of nature (the things being looked at). Nature doesn't exist somewhere "out there," independently of us - we're always already interpreting it from the inside.

Until this point in our Earth's history, the human species has been furthered by different-sex reproductive intercourse. About a century ago, we attached specific meanings to this kind of intercourse, partly because we wanted to encourage it. But our world is very different now than what it was. Technologies like preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and in vitro fertilisation (IVF) are only improving. In 2013, more than 63,000 babies were conceived via IVF. In fact, more than five million children have been born through assisted reproductive technologies. Granted, this number still keeps such reproduction in the slim minority, but all technological advances start out with the numbers against them.

Socially, too, heterosexuality is losing its "high ground," as it were. If there was a time when homosexual indiscretions were the scandals du jour, we've since moved on to another world, one riddled with the heterosexual affairs of politicians and celebrities, complete with pictures, text messages, and more than a few video tapes. Popular culture is replete with images of dysfunctional straight relationships and marriages. Further, between 1960 and 1980, Katz notes, the divorce rate rose 90%. And while it's dropped considerably over the past three decades, it hasn't recovered so much that anyone can claim "relationship instability" is something exclusive to homosexuality, as Katz shrewdly notes.

The line between heterosexuality and homosexuality isn't just blurry, as some take Kinsey's research to imply - it's an invention, a myth, and an outdated one. Men and women will continue to have different-genital sex with each other until the human species is no more. But heterosexuality - as a social marker, as a way of life, as an identity - may well die out long before then.

--
Brandon Ambrosino has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Politico, Economist, and other publications. He lives in Delaware, and is a graduate student in theology at Villanova University.
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The 1901 Dorland's Medical Dictionary defined heterosexuality as an "abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex." More than two decades later, in 1923, Merriam Webster's dictionary similarly defined it as "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex."

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From New York to Cape Town to Sydney, the bronze body doubles of the white men of empire-Columbus, Rhodes, Cook-have lately been pelted with feces, sprayed with graffiti, had their hands painted red. Some have been toppled. The fate of these statues-and those representing white men of a different era, in Charlottesville and elsewhere -has ignited debate about the political act of publicly memorializing historical figures responsible for atrocities. But when the statues come down, how might the atrocities themselves be publicly commemorated, rather than repressed?

In the course of her long career, the historian Lyndall Ryan has thought about little else. In the late nineties and early aughts, Ryan found herself on the front lines of what came to be known, in Australia, as the History Wars: skirmishes fought with words, source by disputed source, often in the national media. At stake was whether the evidence existed to prove-as Ryan and others had argued, and conservative historians and politicians refused to accept-that Indigenous Australians had been massacred in enormous numbers during colonization, from late in the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Even among those who grudgingly accepted that there had been widespread killings, there were still bitter, and, in some cases, ongoing, fights over the exact number of Indigenous people killed, the strength of their resistance to British settlement, and the reliability of oral versus written history. A truce has never been reached in what the Indigenous writer Alexis Wright calls Australia's entrenched "storytelling war." (In October, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull rejected the core recommendations of the government-appointed Referendum Council, which, after six months of deliberative dialogue across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, had called for establishing an Indigenous voice to Parliament, and a process of "truth-telling about our history.")

In 2005, in the midst of the public disputes over Australia's history, Ryan came across the work of the French sociologist Jacques Sémelin. After the Srebrenica massacre, in 1995, there was renewed interest from European scholars in understanding massacre as a phenomenon. Sémelin defined a massacre as the indiscriminate killing of innocent, unarmed people over a limited period of time, and he characterized massacres as being carefully planned-i.e., not done in the heat of the moment or the fog of war-and deliberately shrouded in secrecy by the systematic disposal of bodies and the intimidation of witnesses. Sémelin's typology prompted Ryan to reconsider her own earlier scholarship on the Tasmanian War, which was waged between British colonists and Aboriginal people early in the nineteenth century. This time, Ryan concluded that there were not four massacres of Indigenous people but, in fact, more than forty.

"Most historians of my generation were brought up with the idea that Aboriginal people were killed in ones or twos, similar to how settlers were killed when there'd been a dispute over stock, or women," Ryan told me recently, at an art gallery in Sydney's vibrant neighborhood of Kings Cross, where she was about to give a talk. Ryan, who is seventy-four, has short-cropped white hair and a slow, deliberate way of speaking that belies a very quick mind. She realized, once she'd started researching massacres, how many of her peers were still deeply in denial about the past. "People would say to me, 'We will never know how many massacres there were, or how many Aboriginal people were killed, so what's the point in trying to find out?' But they would never say that about World War One or Two."

Ryan is based at the Centre for the History of Violence at Newcastle University, up the coast from Sydney. A few years ago, she applied for a research grant to embark on a hugely ambitious undertaking: to map the site of every Australian colonial frontier massacre on an interactive Web site. Ryan defines a massacre, in this context, as the indiscriminate killing of six or more undefended people. Since Aboriginal communities tended to live together in camps of about twenty people, losing six or more people in one killing-a "fractal" massacre-usually led to the whole community collapsing.

Four years of painstaking research later, with the grant depleted, Ryan's map is nowhere near finished. So far, it includes more than a hundred and seventy massacres of Indigenous people in eastern Australia, as well as six recorded massacres of settlers, from the period of 1788 to 1872. She estimates that there were more than five hundred massacres of Indigenous people over all, and that massacres of settlers numbered fewer than ten. (Ryan has not yet researched any massacres of Torres Strait Islander people, who are culturally distinct from mainland Aboriginal groups but share their history of colonization.) In July, Ryan and her tiny team decided it was time to release the partially completed map online. Since its launch, the site has had more than sixty thousand visitors. Contrary to Ryan's fears, it was widely and mostly respectfully covered in the Australian media, and, at least for now, there has been no public response from conservative figures.

At the gallery in Kings Cross, the lights were turned off, and a map appeared, projected onto a large screen, showing Australia's unmistakable outline-the continent declared by the British on their arrival to be terra nullius, land considered to belong to nobody, and thus ripe for the taking. Spread across the eastern states were dozens of yellow dots, often clustered together. Each one represented the site of a massacre of Aboriginal people.

The map's data management still needs improvement-a consequence, in part, of limited funding, and also of Ryan's admitted mistake in thinking she should do all the research first, before getting input from the project's digital cartographer, Mark Brown, and digital-humanities specialist, Bill Pascoe. Even so, its power is undeniable. Ryan clicked on the yellow dot representing one of five massacres in the region of Jack Smith Lake, in eastern Victoria. On a fresh page, an aerial snapshot from ArcGIS, the geographic-information system, showed a slice of green and brown farmland and bush bordering a long, thin line of sand beside the ocean. A small square section was shaded yellow, delineating a five-kilometre radius around the site of the killings. The exact coördinates of the massacres are not identified, Ryan explained. "For many Aboriginal communities, the preference is not to pinpoint the actual site, out of respect for what is considered a taboo site of trauma. But also because sites tend to be desecrated if identified very specifically." Some sites are on private land, or mining properties; others are at the bottom of reservoirs, because so many of the massacres happened at campsites close to creeks.

On the left of the screen was a graph, cataloguing the details of this series of massacres carried out in 1843. Aboriginal Language Group: Brataualang. Aboriginal people killed: sixty (at each of the five sites). Colonists killed: zero. Weapons used: Double-barrelled Purdey. Attacker details: twenty horsemen, known as the "Highland Brigade," organized by Angus McMillan. In a box titled "Narrative," these fragments form a horrific tale. McMillan, a local settler, and his group of armed horsemen, all Scots, had, for years, been attacking Aboriginal camps with impunity. In this instance, they attacked five campsites over five days. At one camp, people jumped into the waterhole but were shot as soon as they resurfaced to breathe. One of the survivors, a young boy who'd been shot in the eye, was captured by the Brigade and forced to lead them to other camps. "Human bones have been found at each of these sites on several occasions," the text notes. "The rampage would fit the criteria of 'genocidal massacre.' "

Bruised by the History Wars, Ryan set herself strict criteria for including a massacre on the map. A key signals the strength of the evidence: three stars means that there is high-quality evidence drawn from disparate sources, while one or two stars indicates that there are only one or two reliable sources, respectively, with more corroboration welcome. Most of the evidence used for the map, she told the gathering, is from contemporaneous "white people's sources"-newspaper articles, official reports-rather than Indigenous sources, such as oral histories or social memory. (Some Aboriginal testimony is captured in those white textual sources, in the rare cases where survivors gave statements to officials or to missionaries. But Aboriginal people were for a long time prohibited from being called as witnesses in legal proceedings.) Many existing place names around the country are themselves a form of damning evidence, as the historian Ian Clark has noted in his own pioneering work on frontier massacres: Murderers Flat, Massacre Inlet, Murdering Gully, Haunted Creek, Slaughterhouse Gully.

Earlier this year, Ryan presented a draft version of the map at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, in Canberra. The feedback was largely positive, though she was advised to use a different color for the dots than red, which is considered sacred for many communities and shouldn't be associated only with death. As Ryan moves on to more recent massacres, she will increasingly draw on Aboriginal sources. She hopes the map will eventually be expanded to include massacres that aren't represented in written evidence but have been known about and passed down through memory and story by descendants of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Since the map was released, she's heard from more than five hundred people, black and white, many from rural areas, many with details of massacres not on the map. Pascoe told me that viewers, on first seeing the map, are sometimes so overwhelmed they have to look away, but to him this is the point of mapping this kind of trauma. "People whose ancestors were involved already know what happened. But it becomes personal for everyone, because you can see what happened in a place near you, or where you grew up."

Ryan's decision to focus, for now, on archival research rather than community consultations was driven by funding and time constraints, but she also believes that white Australians who are skeptical about widespread frontier massacres need to be confronted with the gruesome truths recorded by their own ancestors-the magistrates and crown-lands commissioners, the settlers who wrote about killing sprees in their journals or correspondence. In the History Wars, she noted, the denialists figured out ways of discounting all evidence of massacre, no matter its provenance. "They'd say things like, well, you can't trust evidence from a convict, they're born liars. Same with the Native Police. Women don't tell the truth. Soldiers who weren't officers clearly didn't know what was going on." This sort of thinking would leave only sources from the two categories of whites with the most to gain from covering up massacres: the officers who gave the orders, and the male settlers who often carried them out.

Ryan is also working with historians in South Africa, Canada, and the United States to consider massacres from a comparative perspective. The same men who were brutalized by mass warfare in Europe-during the Napoleonic wars, for example-became the brutal colonizers of the new world. (Angus McMillan fled Scotland during the Highland Clearances, when Highlander tenants were forcibly removed from their land.) In the eighteen-twenties, massacres in Tasmania and Victoria were usually carried out at dawn, to give the perpetrators-who used unreliable weapons, such as muskets, which often misfired-the advantage of surprise. When more sophisticated weapons, like the repeating rifles which were first manufactured around the time of the American Civil War, spread across the globe, the nature of frontier violence changed. By the eighteen-seventies, massacres were more often done in broad daylight. The awful intimacy of the violence is another shared feature of massacre, as is the divide-and-conquer strategy of recruiting Indigenous people into Native Police forces commanded by white officers and compelled to carry out killings.

While people milled around after Ryan's talk, I spoke to Aleshia Lonsdale, a young Wiradjuri artist from the country town of Mudgee, who was showing work in the gallery. Lonsdale, who has curly red hair and a gap-toothed smile, had created an assemblage of stone tools tightly bound in cling wrap. She told me about visiting her local museum, where stone tools were massed together, and feeling as if she were in a morgue. "There was nothing saying where the tools had come from, only who had donated them to the collection-you know, 'a stone tool donated by Mrs. Brown,' " she said. Mudgee is now a tourist town, but the massacres and forced removals that occurred there almost destroyed the Aboriginal community. "It's not just something in the history book, or dots on a map, it still impacts on people today," she said. "Even in terms of Aboriginal identity, and people not knowing who they are or where they're from-sometimes that can stem back to the massacres."

I asked her what she thought of Ryan's approach. "When I first heard about the map, I went online and had a look," she said. "I told people in my community about it. Some were taken aback. They wanted to know why their massacre wasn't on there. So, for me, it was helpful to hear from Lyndall today. Because there are a lot of massacre places that the community knows about that wouldn't fit those criteria." Lonsdale paused to greet a well-wisher. "Where some of the massacres happened, in my own country, there's still a bad feeling," she said to me. "There's certain roads people won't drive along. It's not just felt by Aboriginal people but by non-Aboriginal people as well. We need a place to go, to mourn or say sorry, but Aboriginal people need to determine what form that recognition takes."

Recently, the Indigenous Australian artist Judy Watson, who lives in Brisbane, débuted a different kind of massacres map. Watson, who is fifty-eight, is a descendant of the Waanyi people, of northwest Queensland; her great-great-grandmother Rosie hid under a windbreak to survive a massacre carried out by the Native Police at Lawn Hill. Watson has been researching and making art about the massacres for decades. Earlier this year, her multimedia, research-based art work "the names of places" was shown in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra. Superimposed on the shaky, ever-moving boundaries of a map of Australia is a scrolling, alphabetized list of hundreds of massacre sites and images of other work by Watson on the same theme-such as "pale slaughter," which lists weapons used (bayonets, revolvers), and "the names of men," which lists perpetrators. Next to this video, Watson set up a touch-screen map that people could use to bring up historical documents associated with different massacres. The map is now online for anybody to explore, and visitors can share information-including "hearsay"-about massacres in their own communities.

In many Indigenous communities, art works have long had dual functions as historical sources, as repositories of cultural or spiritual knowledge, and as maps of territory. There is an established tradition of mapping massacre sites through art, as in the acclaimed paintings by the Aboriginal artists Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, and Rusty Peters, among others. Watson wanted viewers of her video to be aware that any map is a slippery, contested artifact, and also to have a bodily response to the work. She told me the story of one of her relatives, who, after viewing the video, turned to her in anguish, saying, "Where wasn't there a massacre?"

Jonathan Richards, a historian based at the University of Queensland and an expert on the history of the Native Police, worked on both Watson's and Ryan's maps. The biggest technical challenge, he told me, was matching historical data with actual G.P.S. coördinates. "I am conscious of the fact that we might identify a massacre site that nowadays is somebody's home or backyard, and they have no connection with the violence," he said. "So a little caution was crucial." The online version of Watson's map is somewhat unwieldy-again a function of limited funding, and of the enormous amount of time that both the historical and technical work of mapping requires. (She, too, has a very small team.) But, taken together, the two maps allow for "a welling up of this aspect of our shared history," as Watson put it when I spoke with her over the phone. If the funding allows, she hopes to hire a historian to travel with "the names of places" video as it tours around Australia, and meet with communities at each location to gather massacre stories. Richards told me that his research has permanently changed the way he sees the landscape. "In fact, the drive from Brisbane to Cairns these days is really, for me, just a linked pathway of brutal massacre sites."

There are about twenty, mostly very small, physical memorials to Aboriginal massacre sites across Australia, according to Genevieve Grieves, an Indigenous artist who is writing a Ph.D. on the memorialization of frontier violence. The majority, Grieves says, are community-created and landscape-based: a sculpture trail or a plaque on a single boulder, for instance. Watson and Ryan hope that their maps might act as digital memorials, which can circulate fluidly and are not as vulnerable to desecration. For, while the statues of white men have been targeted lately, the few public memorials commemorating Aboriginal history have been vandalized repeatedly for years. In Perth, there is a bronze statue of the Noongar resistance fighter Yagan, whose head was sent to England after he was killed by white settlers, in 1833. In 1997, his head was repatriated to Australia; soon after, a vandal used an angle grinder to behead the statue. It was repaired, but later beheaded again. (The 1997 beheading inspired Archie Weller to write a short story, later turned into a film, "Confessions of a Headhunter," in which two Noongar men travel across the country, taking off the heads of every bronze colonial statue they find, and finally melting them down to create a sculpture of an Aboriginal mother and her children looking out to sea at Botany Bay, where Captain Cook landed.)

One of the memorials often held up as exemplary is the Myall Creek Massacre and Memorial Site, at the top of a bluff in northern New South Wales. It was established, in 2000, after years of advocacy work by Sue Blacklock, a descendant of one of the survivors, in collaboration with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members of the local community. In 1838, on the farmland visible below the hill, thirty Wirrayaraay people were massacred, and their bodies burned, in what Ryan calls an "opportunity massacre." It's an extremely unusual case: afterward, some of the white perpetrators were arrested and tried in court, and seven of them were hanged. As the site's heritage listing notes, it was "the first and last attempt by the colonial administration to use the law to control frontier conflict." This memorial, too, has been subject to vandalism: in 2005, the words "murder" and "women and children" were hammered out of the metal plaques.

Each June, a ceremony is held at the site, bringing together the descendants of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Watson attended this year. When she told me about the experience, her voice broke with emotion. She filmed the descendants' interactions, and Greg Hooper, her technical collaborator and sound designer, put a contact microphone (similar to a stethoscope) "against one of the ancient trees that had stood witness to the events in the valley below, and captured a sound like gurgling water deep within it." School children stood at each of the plaques on the path up the hill, reading aloud. The descendant of a perpetrator got up with his grandson to speak, saying how sorry he was for what had happened. "It was like watching history slowly unravelling," Watson said. "We all take a thread and pull it, and, as it tightens, we start to see what is there."

Ceridwen Dovey is the author of the short-story collection " Only the Animals" and the novels " Blood Kin" and " In the Garden of the Fugitives."
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From New York to Cape Town to Sydney, the bronze body doubles of the white men of empire-Columbus, Rhodes, Cook-have lately been pelted with feces, sprayed with graffiti, had their hands painted red. Some have been toppled.