Profesor Stanley Fish sobre literature y moral

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July 13, 2008, 8:32 pm
Happy Birthday, Milton


LONDON, July 11 — I am writing from London where I am attending the Ninth International Milton Symposium which also marks John Milton’s quatercentenary. (He was born December 9, 1608, and died in 1674.) In a sense it’s just a big birthday party for a big birthday, although none of us is likely be honored by a party at which some 200 people from all around the world give papers celebrating our achievements, either during our lifetimes or after we have been dead for centuries.
This is a gathering not of Milton fans (although the attendees are that, too), but of Milton professionals, that is, of people who read Milton for a living. Why do we do it? What sustains our interest over the length of a career?
I have been going around asking, and the answers have come quickly and spontaneously. Nigel Smith of Princeton, whose published work is more historical than literary, set the tone when he told me, “It’s the beauty of the thing; the poetry is just gorgeous; it makes me want to cry.” John Leonard of the University of Western Ontario seconded him: “It’s the way he works with words; what keeps me coming back is the sheer sound of the poetry, ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate.’” (Milton’s own characterization).
But it’s more than that, as both Leonard and Smith agreed. Leonard: “More than anyone else, Milton captures the disjunction between the way things are and the way they should be.” Smith: “It’s the combination of amazing poetry and an insistence on principle.” Rather than being employed for its own sake, the poetry is always in the service of ideas and moral commitments, and it is always demanding that its readers measure themselves against the judgments it repeatedly makes – judgments about the nature of virtue, about the proper mode of civil and domestic behavior, about the true shape of heroism, about the self-parodying bluster of military action, about the criteria of aesthetic excellence, about the uses of leisure, about one’s duties to man and God, about the scope and limitations of reason, about the primacy of faith, about everything.
Milton’s poetry never lets you relax . Even when one of the famous similes wanders down what appears to be a desultory path of mythical allusions and idealized landscapes, it always returns you in the end to the moral perspective that had only apparently been suspended. So after rehearsing the story of Mulciber’s leisurely fall from heaven “like a fallen star,” Milton’s narrator says, “thus they relate, erring,” with the harsh judgment of “erring” now attached to any reader who had been entranced by the “fable” put forth by the devils. (”Paradise Lost, I”, 740-747).
Reading a poetry full of moments like this, moments when a poetic effect cannot be separated from the pressure of ideological choice, is at once exhausting and exhilarating. Rachel Trubowitz of the University of New Hampshire put it this way: “Milton’s poetry is good to think with. It’s a good workout. You feel really great and fit when you’ve finished. Maybe that’s what he meant by the ‘fit reader.’”
This may make the poetry sound unpleasantly medicinal, like an exercise regime you engage in dutifully, but do not enjoy. (Samuel Johnson famously remarked of “Paradise Lost” that no one ever wished it longer.) But in fact it is this quality of the poetry – its issuing of challenge after challenge -– that makes it so teachable to undergraduates. Any number of conference-goers reported the same experience -– students who were in a class only because it fulfilled a requirement or because it was given at a convenient time, students who assumed that they were going to be either bored or made to feel inadequate by an impossibly allusive verse written in an alien, Latinate language. And then, on about the third or fourth week, these same students were fully engaged, arguing with the poetry and with each other about everything under the sun and a few things above it. No matter what the students came in believing or disbelieving, no matter how hard they tried to remain detached, they were drawn in, and once drawn in they were absolutely hooked.
All of this was predicted in 1674 by Samuel Barrow who said to the future readers of the poem, “You who read “Paradise Lost”… what do you read but everything? This book contains all things and the origins of all things, and their destinies and final ends.” How did the world begin? Why were men and women created in the first place? How did evil come into the world? What were the causes of Adam’s and Eve’s Fall? If they could fall, were they not already fallen and isn’t God the cause? If God is the cause, and we are the heirs of the original sin, are we not absolved of the responsibility for the sins we commit? Can there be free will in a world presided over by an omniscient creator? Is the moral deck stacked? Is Satan a hero? A rebel? An apostate? An instrument of a Machiavellian and manipulative deity? Are women weaker and more vulnerable than men? Is Adam right to prefer Eve to God? What would you have done in his place? Wherever you step in the poetry, you will meet with something that asks you to take a stand, and when you do (you can’t help it) you will be enmeshed in the issues that are being dramatized.
Shakespeare is not like that, and his large shadow hung over the conference. Miltonists are like Avis Rent-a-Car; they know they’re second (or their man is) and they try harder. One of the speakers, Andrew McCarthy of Washington State University, referred at the beginning of his talk to “the greatest of English poets,” but then acknowledged the specter of Shakespeare. Nigel Smith’s most recent book is entitled “Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare?” The title is a publisher’s teaser and the answer to the question (as Smith knows) is, No, he’s different. And the difference is that after reading or seeing a Shakespeare play you want to sit down and discuss the glories of Shakespeare, whereas after reading a Milton poem you want to sit down and discuss the ideas and imperatives he has thrust at you. Jonathan Rosen was getting at something like this when he said in a recent New Yorker piece, “No one would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work.” (The exception is the theological treatise “On Christian Doctrine,” the authorship of which has been a matter of controversy.)
Shakespeare does many voices but identifies with none of them. (His, as Keats said, is a negative capability.) He’s hard to find, as his would-be biographers well know. Milton has many characters, but they all speak with one voice — his. You don’t have look for him; you can’t get away from him. Despite the variety of scenes and genres there’s always just one guy talking to you; the conversation goes on and on and it is a conversation in which, as Barrow first said, everything is at stake. This is a poetry that reads you.
The same conversation is the content of Milton studies, although the requirements for entering it include a mastery of vast bodies of literary, theological, historical, political and economic materials. But even when the conversation is arcane as it was in a paper surveying the practices of publishers who, by listing titles by other clients at the back or front of each book, worked to create a community of like-minded readers (much as Amazon does when it tells you that if you’re interested in this book, here’s five more you’d also like), in the end the most technical and apparently remote discussion winds its way back to the great issues Milton raises. Peter Lindenbaum of Indiana University, the author of that paper, remarked to me that “There’s no point keeping up with Milton criticism because it keeps repeating itself.” But that is the point; the questions posed by the poetry are few, a finite set, but the ways of answering them are infinite, and because they are the ultimate questions, we want always to be returning to them. Sure we’ve heard them before, but we haven’t quite got it right, so we’re eager to give it another try. At the end of one session Tom Luxon of Dartmouth said, “That’s what it’s all about, keeping the conversation going.”
I did my bit by giving a paper on the first day and then I listened to 25 others having their say. I guess I should be sated , but to tell the truth, I want more.

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Teoría de la evolución y la teoría del Diseño inteligente

Read an extended version of this article, and many more evolution myths, in our online special

When asked what would disprove evolution, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane famously growled: "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." What he meant was that evolution predicts a progressive change over time in the millions of fossils unearthed around the world: multicellular organisms should come after unicellular ones; jawed fish should come after jawless ones, and so on. All it would take is one or two exceptions to challenge the theory. If the first fossil amphibians were older than the first fossil fish, for example, it would show that amphibians could not have evolved from fish. No such exceptions have ever been found anywhere.

The discovery of a mammal-bird hybrid, such as a feathered rabbit, could also disprove evolution. There are animals with a mixture of mammalian and reptilian features - such as the spiny anteater - and there are fossils with a mixture of bird and reptilian features, such as the toothy archaeopteryx. But no animals have a mixture of mammalian and bird features. This is exactly what you would expect if birds and mammals evolved from separate groups of reptiles, whereas there is no reason why a "designer" would not have mixed up these features, creating mammals with feathers and bird-like lungs, or furry, breastfeeding ostriches.

“Why are there no feathered mammals or furry, breastfeeding ostriches?”A young Earth would also be a problem for evolution, since evolution by natural selection requires vast stretches of time - "deep time" - as Darwin realised. Some thought evolution had been falsified in the 19th century when physicist William Thomson calculated that the Earth was just 30 million years old. In fact, several lines of evidence, such as lead isotopes, show the Earth is far older than even Darwin imagined - about 4.5 billion years old.

Suppose for a moment that life was designed rather than having evolved. In that case, organisms that appear similar might have very different internal workings, just as an LCD screen has a quite different mechanism to a plasma screen. The explosion of genomic research, however, has revealed that all living creatures work in essentially the same way: they store and translate information using the same genetic code, with only a few minor variations in the most primitive organisms. Huge chunks of this information are identical or differ only slightly even between species that appear very different.

What's more, the genomes of complex creatures reveal a lack of any intelligence or foresight. Your DNA consists largely of millions of defunct copies of parasitic DNA. The inescapable conclusion is that if life was designed, the designer was lazy, stupid and cruel.

Not only that, if organisms had been designed for particular roles, they might be unable to adapt to changing conditions. Instead, countless experiments, both planned and unplanned, show that organisms of all kinds evolve when their environment is altered, provided the changes are not too abrupt. In the laboratory, tweaking organisms' environments has enabled researchers to produce bacteria, plants and animals with all kinds of novel characteristics - even entirely new species. In the wild, human activity is reshaping many species: urban birds are diverging from their country cousins, some fish are getting smaller because fishermen keep only big fish, and trophy hunting is turning bighorn sheep into smallhorns, for instance.

The online version of this special, with lots of extra content and links, can be found at www.newscientist.com/evolutionmyths. This is the archive version of what appeared in the print magazine

From issue 2652 of New Scientist magazine, 19 April 2008, page 26

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África del norte renace

The Mediterranean economy

Club Med

Jul 10th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The Mediterranean, north and south, is forming a single economic unit: Europe should make it a powerful one

UNDER imperial Rome, the roads in cold, wet Britannia were no straighter than those in sweltering north Africa. The same sestertius could buy a lampful of oil. Across the southern Mediterranean and northern Europe alike, Latin was the lingua franca—1,500 years before anyone had coined the term. Under the Treaty of Rome, however, the European Union has behaved as if the Med were a frontier, rather than an organising principle. As often as not, it has turned its back on the crescent that stretches from Morocco to Turkey, as a cradle of instability and terrorism. Sometimes the southern Med’s main export has seemed to be boatloads of illegal immigrants.

This weekend at a summit in Paris France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, wants to heal the rift. Some 40 heads of state and government from the EU and the southern and eastern Mediterranean will meet to create a new club, called the Union for the Mediterranean. Despite Mr Sarkozy’s bombast, Club Med will have a modest start: the French propose a secretariat, which they will jointly head with Egypt, and money to help finance ventures on solar energy, anti-terrorism and the inevitable cultural exchanges.

Beyond the platitudes and projects lies the germ of a brilliant idea. Something is stirring around the Med as globalisation takes root. Growth and investment have leapt. There is a new openness to trade and foreign money. The members of Club Med no longer need to glower across the table at each other. Instead, there is the prospect of the youth and vigour of the southern Mediterranean combining with a rich, ageing north. Despite the recent surge, the southern Med still takes less than 10% of all the FDI from the EU. This offers a tantalising prospect—though one reason why Club Med matters is that it is fraught with dangers.

Dido’s cement

The EU has looked south before, in an initiative called the Barcelona Process, which dates back 13 years and failed to live up to its promises. Hopes are higher today, however, because the politicians gathering in Paris are following a path that is increasingly well trodden by business (see article). FDI in the countries along the Mediterranean shore, from Morocco to Turkey, has grown six times since the turn of the century, to $59 billion in 2006—ahead of Latin America’s Mercosur ($25 billion) and not far short of China ($69 billion). At the same time, the growth in the region’s GDP is running at 4.4% a year—slow by China’s standards, admittedly, but it has been accelerating as Europe has slowed.

Although Turkey, Israel and Egypt still dominate, most of the region has shared in this prosperity. Oil and gas are partly to thank, but investment is spread among financial services, telecoms, retailing and construction. Look at the car factory Renault and Nissan are planning in Morocco. Or the new container port outside Tangiers that will soon be bigger than Long Beach, on America’s west coast. Much of the money comes from Europe, as did the €8.8 billion ($12.9 billion) France’s Lafarge invested in Egyptian cement. But Americans are making aerospace parts; Arabs are spending petrodollars on property and construction; Brazilians are investing in fertilisers and textiles; Indians in IT and pharmaceuticals.

There is strength in such diversity, and there needs to be. The resurgent Med has a lot still to overcome. With exceptions, notably Israel, the region is plagued by poor infrastructure, an ill-educated workforce and unemployment. Unlike eastern Europe, which built trading links under communism, the Med countries barely trade with each other, so they lose the benefits of specialisation. And then there is the politics. The Europeans are right to look askance at the looming crisis of succession in Egypt, beleaguered Israel, unborn Palestine, divided Lebanon, fundamentalist Islam in Morocco, bombs in Algeria, Muammar Qaddafi’s bizarre Libyan autocracy, the risk that the Turkish courts declare the ruling party unconstitutional. That unfinished list is already depressingly long.

The EU is not free of troubles either. Those who favour Turkey’s membership of the EU fear that Club Med is designed to fob it off with second-class citizenship. At first Mr Sarkozy schemed to include only the EU countries with a Mediterranean coast—a ploy to create a French-dominated counterbalance to the apparently German-dominated east. After a vicious row with Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, Mr Sarkozy agreed to include the entire EU. That was right, if only because Germany pays much of the EU’s bills.

Sunday’s summit matters, because it is a step towards healing such wounds—and because it sets the tone. Will the Mediterranean union seize the moment, or will it be strangled by southern politics and European squabbles?

Mare nostrums

The first test is whether Mr Sarkozy is willing to see Club Med as more than a scheme to burnish French glory. If he wants the new union to thrive, he will have to accept that it is for everyone’s benefit, and let business do its work. This means a free-trade area that opens the EU to goods and services from the south—including the farm produce that France is making a fuss over in the world trade talks.

The second is for the EU to use its patronage to boost spending on infrastructure, promote trade in the region and clean up politics. One lesson from eastern Europe is that, with incentives, countries will start to sort themselves out. For the Mediterranean, those incentives should include access to funds and markets. The logic of enlargement is that it could even include the faint possibility of membership of the EU itself (if the union were to admit non-Europeans). But none of that will count for much unless the southern Med chooses prosperity.

The world sometimes writes off Europe as the old continent, well past the vigour of youth and doomed to gentle decline; at the same time it condemns many of the teeming economies of the southern Med as chaotic backwaters. Old and young can make a powerful combination. The creation of the Union for the Mediterranean is hardly the rebirth of imperial Rome, but it may just be the start of something exciting.

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Qué pasaría si todos los inmigrantes ilegales se furan?

What if we threw out all the illegal immigrants?

Overnight, some industries would become desperate for workers. The biggest beneficiaries would be low-skilled American workers. The big losers might surprise you.

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By Shirley Skeel

This is one in an occasional series on financial what-ifs.

At least 12 million illegal immigrants live in the U.S. Most pick crops, wash dishes, build houses, cut lawns and do other jobs for between $6 and $15 an hour. They make up about 5% of the total U.S. work force. But …

What if we threw them all out?

Lettuce and strawberries would rot in the fields. Dirty dishes would pile up in restaurants. Thousands of farmers and builders would go bust. Predator aircraft drones would prowl the Mexican border. And chunks of Los Angeles and Houston would look like ghost towns.

The biggest losers would be middle-class families with two working parents, living in high-immigrant states such as California, Texas, Florida or New York. Why? They would pay more for food, housing, entertainment and child care as a shortage of low-skilled workers drove up some wages, and therefore, some prices. Meantime, their own pay would remain the same. What's more, the ripple effect of thousands of businesses shrinking or closing for lack of staff might put one of the parents out of a job. Not to mention the garbage collection going to pot and no one to polish the missus' nails.

The winners, for a change, would be the low-skilled unemployed, living just about anywhere -- if they were willing to move. Of the 12 million illegal immigrants, about 8 million are employed, mostly in low-skill jobs. The U.S., meantime, has about 22 million less-educated jobless adults, many of them blacks and legalized Hispanics, according to a 2008 report from the Center for Immigration Studies, a research group based in Washington, D.C.

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Economists say if these people agreed to bone meat or install insulation, they could earn 6% to 10% more than the deported workers, as wages rose to lure new workers. That could mean $18,000 to $30,000 in pay a year.

And the economy? Short term, the effect of lost manpower and spending by illegal immigrants would be "devastating" or cause "some temporary dislocation," depending on whom you ask.

Are Americans willing to do these jobs?

Ray Perryman, the president of The Perryman Group, an economic analysis firm in Waco, Texas, calculates our $14 trillion economy would suffer $652 billion in lost output -- a dramatic 4.6% slice off gross domestic product. He predicts tens of thousands of businesses would close. Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, predicts perhaps a 1% slip in GDP.

Illegal population by state
State	Estimate	State	Estimate
California	2,830,000	Georgia	490,000
Texas	1,640,000	New Jersey	430,000
Florida	980,000	North Carolina	370,000
Illinois	550,000	Washington	280,000
New York	540,000	All other states	2,950,000
Arizona	500,000	Total	11,560,000

Source: Department of Homeland Security

Why the big difference in opinion? Because people are hard to predict.

Just how quickly would Americans fill the vacated jobs? And at what pay rate? Perryman points to Texas, where he says there are more than 1 million illegal workers, but only 450,000 unemployed residents. "If you do the math, it just doesn't work," he says. He doubts that many needy Virginians would move to Texas for often-grueling, low-paying jobs.

Rector disagrees. He says it would take time for "Cousin Fred" in Texas to phone up his jobless mates in Virginia, but, "There are a lot of people who work for less than $20,000 a year." And they would move for a job.

Video on MSN Money

Apples and immigrants
The immigration debate is raging around apples, with CNBCs Jane Wells.

Still, until the unemployed did jump in their Hyundais to head south, several industries in high-immigrant states would have a terrible time. Some are listed below. The figures in parentheses show the percentage of illegal workers in each industry's work force, as calculated by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington. The figures are nationwide; in some localities, they would be far higher.

• Home help (21%): Los Angeles would still have its sunshine, but there'd be far fewer helping hands to clean floors, cook dinner and shush the kids. Not to mention in New York, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Miami. Some working parents might have to quit their jobs to care for the kids or break the family piggy bank to attract a housekeeper from a neighbor.

• Farming (13%): "Agriculture would come to a screeching halt," says Nicole Rothfleisch, executive director of the Imperial County Farm Bureau in Southern California. She says El Centro, the county seat, has the highest unemployment in the state (18%). But farmers can never find enough local help. Pay is $9 an hour, and the summer temperatures can hit 110 degrees. The locals, she says, "want cushy jobs with air conditioning." Economists say many farmers would go broke as billions of dollars' worth of crops lay unpicked. Farms would merge and switch to crops that can be picked mechanically, like round lettuce or oranges used solely for juice.

Continued: Food manufacturing

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Liberal Professors Retire?

The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: July 3, 2008

MADISON, Wis. — When Michael Olneck was standing, arms linked with other protesters, singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” in front of Columbia University’s library in 1968, Sara Goldrick-Rab had not yet been born.

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Andy Manis for The New York Times

Sara Goldrick-Rab and Michael Olneck, both at the University of Wisconsin, represent contrasting generations of professors, as younger faculty members tend to be more politically moderate.

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When he won tenure at the University of Wisconsin here in 1980, she was 3. And in January, when he retires at 62, Ms. Goldrick-Rab will be just across the hall, working to earn a permanent spot on the same faculty from which he is departing.

Together, these Midwestern academics, one leaving the professoriate and another working her way up, are part of a vast generational change that is likely to profoundly alter the culture at American universities and colleges over the next decade.

Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.

“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.”

Individual colleges and organizations like the American Association of University Professors are already bracing for what has been labeled the graying of the faculty. More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969. How many will actually retire in the next decade or so depends on personal preferences and health, as well as how their pensions fare in the financial markets.

Yet already there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade. At Stanford a divided anthropology department reunited last year after a bitter split in 1998 broke it into two entities, one focusing on culture, the other on biology. At Amherst, where military recruiters were kicked out in 1987, students crammed into a lecture hall this year to listen as alumni who served in Iraq urged them to join the military.

In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce. But a new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.

When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.

“These findings with regard to age provide further support for the idea that, in recent years, the trend has been toward increasing moderatism,” the study says.

The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old. But as educators have noted, the generation coming up appears less interested in ideological confrontations, summoning Barack Obama’s statement about the elections of 2000 and 2004: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

With more than 675,000 professors at the nation’s more than 4,100 four-year and two-year institutions, it is easy to find faculty members, young and old, who defy any mold. Still, this move to the middle is “certainly the conventional wisdom,” said Jack H. Schuster, who along with Martin J. Finkelstein, wrote “The American Faculty,” a comprehensive analysis of existing data on the profession. “The agenda is different now than what it had been.”

With previous battles already settled, like the creation of women’s and ethnic studies departments, moderation can be found at both ends of the political spectrum. David DesRosiers, executive director of the Veritas Fund for Higher Education Reform, which contributes to conservative activities on campuses, said impending retirements present an opportunity. However, he added, “we’re not looking for fights,” but rather “a civil dialogue.” His model? A seminar on great books at Princeton jointly taught by two philosophers, the left-wing Cornel West and the right-wing Robert P. George.

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