The Impossible Country Rear Guard Scientists

The THE NEWSPAPER OF THE LITERARY ARTS Volume 4, N umber 5 September 1994 Ithaca, New York The Impossible Country Nicolas Vaczek In spring and summer of 1991, Ithaca’s Brian Hall traveled through the former Yugoslavia, witnessing the onset of civil war. One of the last foreigners to have traveled there unhindered, Hall in his new book, The Impossible Country (David R. Godine), has captured the voices o f the prominent and the unknown, from Slo bodan Milosevic to a wide variety of “real, likeable people” throughout Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. In addition, the book provides indispensable historical background, showing how Yugoslavia was formed after World War I, and explaining why every attempt at polit ical compromise has been met with suspicion and resis tance. Nicolas Vaczek recently interviewed Brian Hall in Ithaca. NV: Anyone writing in the travel mode on Yugoslavia has Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon to contend with. BH: Yes. It’s a fabulous book. One of the greatest travel books ever written. She was there in 1937, though it’s not clear how much time she spent. If you read between the lines it doesn’t seem long. World War II is on the way. She’s writing from 1939 to 1940, and then she could retroactively put in some of her awareness. By 1940, she’s getting bombed in London by the Germans. By that time, Yugoslavia has become for her the symbol of a certain kind of decent civilization, represented by the Serbs under siege by the barbaric Germans. By the time I started writing my book, the war had begun in Bosnia. I would write during the day and listen to the news at night. The things I chose from my notes were affected by what I was hearing every day. Since it takes a while to write, things that happen later affect the way you write. Writers try not to do this dishonestly. see Impossible Country, page 10 Photograph: Ron Haviv Sarajevan demonstrators take cover from Serbian Snipers tiring from the windows of the nearby Holiday Inn. Rear Guard Scientists Inside be an artifact of unreconstructed ness, rattle the absolutists and H ig h er Superstition : primate behavior—an institution gnaw away at their authority. Even T he Academic Left and Its somehow less likely to inspire a leaving aside the world-shaking • Dan Finlay on Helen Prejean’s Q uarrels Wit h Science catch in the throat when observed properties of its by-product, tech Dead Man Walking: An Eye Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt in our closest relatives, the chim nology, science’s awesome powers witness Account of the Death Johns Hopkins University Press panzees. Science storms the of demystification have toppled Penalty in the United States 3 14 pages, $25.95 palaces of our pretensions and more princes, freed more slaves drags us, kicking and screaming, and emptied more churches than • Robert Rebein on Cormac Ann Druyan from the center of the universe all the armies of bandilleroed McCarthy’s The Crossing where we feel comfortable and zealots combined. Science has no equal as a revolu large, to the galactic boondocks Hierarchy, superstition, ethno- • Nicholas Nicastro on tionary force in human experience. where we really have been all centrism, racism, sexism; these “Spartacus” Under its unblinking gaze, the along. These Great Demotions, mainstays of the right-wing owe “divine right of kings” is revealed to these intimations of our true tiny- see Scientists, page 2 page 2 1116 BOOKPRESS oeptemDer, iyy4 Scientists continued from page 1 in science today, at least in the American Superstition. It goes in its entirety, “To our universities?...the only widespread, obvi wives, our children, and our students, with no debt to science. Our ancestors were ous discrimination today is against white gratitude.” Is it my imagination or does guilty of all of the above long before we males.” this sound less like a loving tribute and walked upright. But the goals of social and So that’s it. more like the passenger manifest of a economic equality, human rights, interna Recent attempts to redress the inequities Scythian royal tomb? The possessive tionalism, and the perspective of our and exclusions of millennia have loosed a refrain and the generic quality transforms species not as the crown of creation, but as new species of kvetch on the land, of the dedicatees into so many anonymous a part of the greater fabric of life, are as which this book is a prime, but hardly retainers. It smacks of the same paternal much a by-product of the Scientific unique, specimen. They frequently begin, ism that mars the substance of this book. Life Before Birth Enlightenment as the telescope and the as do Gross and Levitt, anxious to establish The notion that there might be some and pendulum clock. bona fides for reason and fairness. Yes, thing to be learned from “feminism and the A Time To Be Born Peter W. Nathanielsz, M.D., Ph.D. That is why the central thesis of “Higher slavery and segregation must have been history of science" strikes them as being so Discover the fascinating wonders of our Superstition” comes as something of a sur awful. Don’t get them wrong. Excluding ludicrous, it curdles their very typography prenatal origins, and the challenges prise. “To put it bluntly,” Gross, a profes women from virtually every profession or from roman into italic. Italics abound in of Independent life. sor of life sciences at the University of Vir from having any say in their own fates was this high-pitched polemic and there are Prom ethean Press ISBN: 0-916859-55-X unjust. All that ridicule and ostracism of more exclamation points than are usually ginia, and Levitt, a mathematics professor Available from a bookstore near you. at Rutgers, write, “the academic left dis the homosexual or the halt and the lame found in a kidnapping note. likes science.” were probably harrowing. But, once that’s We may ask: Against what grave threat When I read this I found myself wonder out of the way, lip service duly paid, they do these authors sound so strident and pan ing how Karl Marx would have reacted to launch into a tirade against the notion that icky an alarm? What juggernaut approach it. His earliest scholarly writings were these acknowledgments of longstanding es? Sloppy scholarship and trendy thinking PIANOS about the pre-Socratic philosophers, the injustice should have any operational con in academe? Can these distinguished histo inventors of the scientific method. When sequences. rians of thought actually believe this is Rebuilt he wrote “One law for science and another Proposals to compensate these inequali something new? Or peculiar to the left? Reconstructed for life is a priori a lie “ he was acknowl ties or to heighten sensitivities are, these Doesn’t the much more lavishly funded, Bought Sold days, often derided under the rubric of more widely heard antipathy to science of edging the wellspring of his inspiration. It M oved was his intention to dedicate “Das Kapital” political correctness. They are dismissed the Christian fundamentalists and the rest Tuned to someone he revered as an even greater with bitter scorn. I’m not making a pitch of the radical right pose a graver danger to Rented troublemaker—Charles Darwin. for humorlessness here. But if relatively our society? Have they never heard Rush Who, exactly, then, are Gross and Levitt small, mostly symbolic steps in the direc Limbaugh on the environment or Pat talking about? “We are using academic tion of a more equitable society can evoke Robertson on evolution? Could the authors left," the authors state, “to designate those such shrillness, it makes you wonder how have been caught off guard by the very people whose doctrinal idiosyncracies sus Gross and Levitt and the like-minded human resentment of those who have been tain the misreadings of science, its meth would react if actually forced to walk in systematically excluded from science? Are ods, and its conceptual foundations that the pinching shoes of the oppressed. they really surprised that some of the have generated what nowadays passes for a The meanness of spirit in this book is a aggrieved make unsubstantiated boasts politically progressive critique of it.” Oh. pity when you consider how knowl- that this or that great scientific or techno Ithaca Piano Rebuilders As convoluted as the preceding quota edgable, talented and perceptive its authors logical achievement really belongs to (607) 272-6547 tion is, the next chapter, one on the history sometimes are. Gross and Levitt do some them? Can Levitt and Gross have failed to 310 4th St., Ithaca (Off Hancock St. 2 blocks from Rt. 13) of science and political philosophy, begins persuasive debunking of deconstruction. anticipate the far extremum of the pendu Complete rebuilding services. as a little gem, a model of clarity and Higher Superstition is richly embroidered lum’s arc? No job too big or too small. Call us. scholarship. Gross and Levitt’s poetic with entertaining references to Goethe and I share their impatience with the anti-sci —powers reach their height here, as they Blake. I appreciate the way they don’t entific. But I cannot sympathize with their glide from Freemasonry to Newtonian allow their love of science to blind them to anguish and resentment over these small physics. We’re soaring along with them, its misuse. There is much here that is tren and imperfect remedies to bring about a until boom, suddenly we’re brought down chant and free of self-interest. And yet, long overdue inclusion—especially in mid-flight by ugly mutterings about “the despite their erudition and ambitious use of because it was their beloved scientific Publisher: Jack Goldman changing demography of the American language, like Dr.

Load more