The War Prayer by Mark Twain

Today, being independence day in the US, will see a huge outpouring of patriotic fervor, with parades and bands and flag waving. Coming at a time when the mood of the country is being whipped up to mobilize and support yet another attack on another country (this time Iran) I thought it might be appropriate to read one of Mark Twain’s lesser known works.

I came across it during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I was surprised by the fact that I had never even heard of it before, even though I have read quite a lot of Twain’s work and about Twain himself. Tomorrow I will look at what Twain is trying to say in this piece and the background to it. For today, I’ll let this remarkable piece of writing speak for itself.
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The devil in the details

In one of the classic Peanuts cartoons, Linus says that when he grows up he wants to become a great doctor and rid the world of illness. His sister Lucy tells him he can’t because he doesn’t care enough about humanity. An indignant Linus responds, “I love humanity! It’s people I can’t stand!”

I remembered that cartoon as I was writing the recent series of posts about the difficulties with believing that the mind/soul is a non-material entity that can exist independently of the material body and brain. I wrote about how Descartes struggled with how to understand the actual working of the model.
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Algeria and Iraq

I just saw a remarkable film The Battle of Algiers. Made in black and white (French with English subtitles) in 1966 by the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, the story is about the Algerian struggle for independence and the battle between the rebels and the French colonial powers in the capital city of Algiers in the period 1954-1960.

In order to deal with the increasing violence during this period, the French government sends in elite paratroopers led by Colonel Mathieu. Mathieu sets about ruthlessly identifying the structure of the insurgent network, capturing and torturing members to get information on others, and killing and blowing up buildings in his pursuit of the rebels even if it contains civilians. And yet, he is not portrayed as a monster. In one great scene where he is giving a press conference, he is asked about his methods of getting information and the allegations of torture. He replies quite frankly that the French people must decide if they want to stay in Algeria or leave, and if they want to halt the violence against them or let it continue. He says that if they want to stay and stop the violence, then they must be prepared to live with the consequences of how that is achieved. It is the French people’s choice.

One gets the sense that Mathieu does not torture and kill suspects because he enjoys it. He is simply an amoral man, who has been given a job to do and he will get it done using whatever means he deems necessary. This is the kind of military person that political leaders want. They don’t want people who worry about the niceties of human rights and human dignity. But when you train people to deny their normal human feelings, then you get the kind of people who carry out the tortures described in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and who are even surprised when there is an outcry that what they did was wrong.

And Mathieu does succeed in his task, at least in the short run. By his ruthless methods he destroys the rebel network. But all that this buys is some time. After a lull in the violence for a couple of years, a sudden eruption of mass protests results in Algeria becoming independent in 1962. The French win the battle of Algiers but lose the war of independence.

The film gives a remarkably balanced look at the battle, avoiding the temptation to fall into easy clichés about good and evil. It shows the FLN (National Liberation Front) using women and children to carry out its bombing campaign against French civilians living in the French areas of the city. In one memorable sequence, three young Muslim women remove their veils, cut their hair, put on makeup, and dress like French women to enable them to carry bombs in their bags and pass through military checkpoints that surround the Muslim sector of the city (the Casbah). They place those bombs in a dance hall, coffee shop and Air France office, bombs that explode with deadly effect killing scores of civilians who just happen to be there.

In one scene:

Pontecorvo deals with the issue of the killing of innocents by an army vs. such killing by an irregular force. During a press conference, a reporter asks a captured official of the FLN: “Isn’t it a dirty thing to use women’s baskets to carry bombs to kill innocent people?” To which the official answers, “And you? Doesn’t it seem even dirtier to you to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages with thousands of innocent victims? It would be a lot easier for us if we had planes. Give us your bombers, and we’ll give you our baskets.”

The parallels of Algeria and Iraq are striking, so much so that it is reported that the US policy makers and military viewed this film with a view to hoping to learn how to combat the Iraq insurgency.

As in Iraq, the rebels are Muslims and the objections they have to being ruled by non-Muslims plays an important role in their motivation to revolt. The French had just humiliatingly lost in Vietnam in 1954 and their military was anxious to rehabilitate their reputations by winning elsewhere. In other words, they had their own ‘Vietnam syndrome’ to deal with, just like the US.

In the film, you see how the ability of the insurgents to blend in with the urban population enables them to move around and carry out attacks on the French police and citizenry, with women and children playing important roles. We see how the privileged and western lifestyle of the French people in Algeria makes them easy targets for attacks. We see how the attacks on French people and soldiers in Algeria causes great fury amongst the French citizenry, causing them to condone the torture and killing and other brutal methods of the French troops.

One major difference between the French involvement in Algeria and US involvement is Iraq is that Algeria had been occupied by the French for 130 years, since 1830. They had been there for so long that they considered it part of France and refused to consider the possibility of independence. The long occupation also resulted in a significant number of French people living in the city of Algiers, thus making them vulnerable targets. In Iraq, there are very few US civilians and almost all of them are in the heavily fortified so-called ‘green zone.’

The film takes a balanced look at what an urban guerilla war looks like and those who wish to see what might be currently happening in cities like Ramadi and Falluja and Baghdad can get a good idea by seeing this film. The scenes of mass protest by huge crowds of Algerians and their suppression by the occupying French forces are so realistic that the filmmakers put a disclaimer at the beginning stating that no documentary or newsreel footage had been used. And amazingly, this realism was achieved with all novice actors, people who were selected off the streets of Algiers. Only the French Colonel Mathieu was played by a professional actor, but you would not believe it from just seeing the film since the actors give such natural and polished performances, surely a sign of a great director.

For a good analysis of the film and background on its director, see here. The film is available at the Kelvin Smith Library.

POST SCRIPT: Documentary about Rajini Rajasingham-Thiranagama

Today at 10:00 pm WVIZ Channel 25 in Cleveland is showing No More Tears Sister. I wrote about this documentary earlier.

The strange game of cricket

I am a lifelong fan of cricket and spent an enormous amount of my youth devoted (many would say wasted) to the game. As a boy, much of my free time was spent playing it, reading about it, watching it, or listening to it on the radio. I was such a devoted fan that I would set the alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to listen to crackly and indistinct short wave radio commentary of the games from distant time zones in England, Australia, and West Indies. Such was my fanaticism towards the game that I was going to all this trouble to listen to games involving other countries, Sri Lanka achieving international Test playing status only in 1981. And now with the internet, I have been able to renew my interest in the game since the lack of coverage in the US media is no longer a hindrance, so the time wasting has begun anew.
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Cricket and the politics of class

Whenever I read the novels of (say) Jane Austen or P. G. Wodehouse, that deal with the life of the British upper classes around the dawn of the twentieth century, one thing that always strikes me is that the characters who inhabit those books never seem to do any work. Beneficiaries of a class-ridden feudal system, they seem to live on inherited income and property that enables them to spend their days not having to worry about actually making a living. There is rarely any description of people’s jobs. Work seems to be something that the lower classes do and is vaguely disreputable. Even in Charles Dickens’ novel, which often dealt with characters who were desperately poor, the happy ending usually took the form of the hero obtaining wealth by means of an inheritance or otherwise, and then promptly stopping work and hanging around at home, even if they were still young.
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Lagaan and the Bollywood film tradition

In watching Lagaan, I was reminded of the increasing interest in the west in Bollywood films. For those not familiar with it, ‘Bollywood’ is a generic term for films produced mostly in the prolific studios of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), an industry that rivals Hollywood in size. But a Bollywood film is not merely defined by where it is produced but also by the nature of its content. (A caveat: I have never been a fan of Bollywood films and my following comments should not be too taken seriously because I have not seen many such films, and the few I did see were many, many years ago when I was an undergraduate in Sri Lanka. It is quite possible that my perceptions are out of date and that these films have changed and improved considerably over time.)
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Lagaan

I recently watched the film Lagaan (2001) (Hindi and English with English subtitles) on DVD and was very impressed. Although the film is very long (3 hours, 45 minutes!) it did not drag at all which, for me, puts its director (Ashutosh Gowarikar) in the same class as David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai) as one of those rare filmmakers who can make me overcome my feeling that films should not exceed two hours, and preferably should be 90 minutes.

Lagaan takes place in a remote village region in India in 1893 during British colonial rule. The area has been hit by a drought for several years and the impoverished villagers are unable to pay the tax (‘lagaan’) to their British military rulers.
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Free will

Belief in a god rests on a foundation that requires one to postulate the existence of a mind/soul that can exist independently of the body (after all, the soul is assumed to live on after the physical death of the body) and freely make decisions. The idea that the brain is all there is, that is creates our consciousness and that the mind/soul are auxiliary products of that overall consciousness, strikes at the very root of belief in god.
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What the neuroscience community thinks about the mind/brain relationship

The idea that the mind is purely a product of the material in the brain has profound consequences for religious beliefs, which depend on the idea of the mind as an independent controlling force. The very concept of ‘faith’ implies an act of free will. So the person who believes in a god is pretty much forced to reject the idea that the mind is purely a creation of the brain. As the article Religion on the Brain (subscription required) in the May 26, 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (Volume 52, Issue 38, Page A14) says:

Pope John Paul II struck a similar theme in a 1996 address focusing on science, in which he said theories of evolution that “consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person.”

As I wrote yesterday, the flagging intelligent design creationism (IDC) movement seems to be hoping for some fresh energy to emerge from the work of psychiatric researcher Dr. Schwartz. Or at the very least they may be hoping that they can persuade the public that the mind does exist independently of the brain. But they are going to have a hard time getting traction for this idea within the neurobiology community. There seems to be a greater degree of unanimity among them about the material basis of the mind than there is among biologists about the sufficiency of natural selection.

Stephen F. Heinemann, president of the Society for Neuroscience and a professor in the molecular-neurobiology lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, Calif., echoed many scientists’ reactions when he said in an e-mail message, “I think the concept of the mind outside the brain is absurd.”

But the ability of the neurobiology community to do their work unfettered by religious scrutiny may be coming to an end as increasing numbers of people become aware of the consequences of accepting the idea that the mind is purely a product of the brain. People might reject this idea (and be attracted to the work of Dr. Schwartz), not because they have examined and rejected the scientific evidence in support of it, but because it threatens their religious views. As I discussed in an earlier posting, people who want to preserve a belief system will accept almost any evidence, however slender or dubious, if it seems to provide them with an option of retaining it. As the article says:

Though Dr. Schwartz’s theory has not won over many scientists, some neurobiologists worry that this kind of argument might resonate with the general public, for whom the concept of a soul, free will, and God seems to require something beyond the physical brain. “The truly radical and still maturing view in the neuroscience community that the mind is entirely the product of the brain presents the ultimate challenge to nearly all religions,” wrote Kenneth S. Kosik, a professor of neuroscience research at the University of California at Santa Barbara, in a letter to the journal Nature in January.
. . .
Dr. Kosik argues that the topic of the mind has the potential to cause much more conflict between scientists and the general public than does the issue of evolution. Many people of faith can easily accept the tenets of Darwinian evolution, but it is much harder for them to swallow the assumption of a mind that arises solely from the brain, he says. That issue he calls a “potential eruption.”

When researchers study the nature of consciousness, they find nothing that persuades them that the mind is anything but a product of the brain.

The reigning paradigm among researchers reduces every mental experience to the level of cross talk between neurons in our brains. From the perspective of mainstream science, the electrical and chemical communication among nerve cells gives rise to every thought, whether we are savoring a cup of coffee or contemplating the ineffable.
. . .
Mr. [Christof] Koch [a professor of cognitive and behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology] collaborated for nearly two decades with the late Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, to produce a framework for understanding consciousness. The key, he says, is to look for the neural correlates of consciousness – the specific patterns of brain activity that correspond to particular conscious perceptions. Like Crick, Mr. Koch follows a strictly materialist paradigm that nerve interactions are responsible for mental states. In other words, he says, “no matter, never mind.”

Crick summed up the materialist theory in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Scribner, 1994). He described that hypothesis as the idea that “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

What many people may find ‘astonishing’ about Crick’s hypothesis is that among neurobiologists it is anything but astonishing. It is simply taken for granted as the way things are. Is it surprising that religious believers find such a conclusion unsettling?

Next: What does “free will” mean at a microscopic level?

POST SCRIPT: Why invading Iraq was morally and legally wrong

Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation has written a powerful essay that lays out very clearly the case of why the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is morally and legally indefensible, and why it has inevitably led to the atrocities that we are seeing there now, where reports are increasingly emerging of civilians being killed by US forces. Hornberger writes “I do know one thing: killing Iraqi children and other such “collateral damage” has long been acceptable and even “worth it” to U.S. officials as part of their long-time foreign policy toward Iraq.”

The article is well worth reading.

IDC gets on board the brain train

An article titled Religion on the Brain (subscription required) in the May 26, 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (Volume 52, Issue 38, Page A14) examined what neuroscientists are discovering about religion and the brain. It is a curious article. The author (Richard Monastersky) seems to be trying very hard to find evidence in support of the idea that brain research is pointing to the independent existence of a soul/mind, but it is clear on reading it that he comes up short and that there is no such evidence, only the hopes of a very small minority of scientists.
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