Over two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or obese, and over one-third are obese, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2003–2006 and 2007–2008.

And according to the Social Worker, not a single one of them can help it.

A belated cheer for Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi’s book combines memoir with an intimate account of reading for survival in the Mullahs’ Iran.  Nafisi is an academic specialising in fiction. She believes passionately in ‘art as a human complication’ (James’s phrase). Complication as we encounter it in the best Western fiction is always intolerable to the orthodox. Some of us have lived through this conflict – in very comfortable circumstances – in respect to the absolutism of the Left, and later of the women’s movement (Ti-Grace Atkinson’s ‘burn all the books’).

Nafisi describes how, in a class discussion of Daisy Miller, one Islamist declares simply:  Daisy is immoral and ought to be killed. In this milieu, ambiguity and irony become heretical, to suspend judgment immoral, to doubt, a crime.

Nafisi teaches out of commitment to those values and is sacked because of them. Before finally leaving Iran she retreats into private life where she reads to sustain herself, then forms a small group of gifted former students, a cell of freedom.

It’s a humbling experience to read this book. It makes me angry to remember Frederic Jamison’s (representative) claim that there is no space outside ideology.  Stand on Mars and that might be a passable remark. Here there is still a distinction to be made between Popper’s ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies, here we need to remember how the Left in Iran joined forces with the mullahs to oust the liberals and the liberal Shiite clerics. Here on earth there is a choice to be made between a society in which books, films and TV can provide a ‘human complication’ and a society which tries to derive totalising laws from dumb faith.

The question of the fucked chicken, for example. The Ayatollah approved of chicken-fucking as a sexual outlet for single men. He was then asked whether such a chicken could be eaten.

The best review I’ve found online is Hannes Stein’s for Die Welt (in German). The Anglosphere publisher sees fit to quote Geraldine Brooks on the front cover of the paperback.

Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book.

Open societies have their own problems.

“I am not saying that Correne did not do this, but in any kind of process the circumstances and the context will make a difference,” Ms Crawford said.

“This is a highly politicised matter. But this should not mean that we have a teacher hung, drawn and quartered without justice.”

Ms Crawford said Ms Woolmer had found this year’s NAPLAN testing “particularly stressful” because of the essential place it now had in assessing school performance.

As it happened, I had just been reading about Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison in which the US military humiliated, maltreated and just plain tortured some prisoners. The prison was

a besieged, sweltering, stinking hell-hole under daily mortar attack that lacked interpreters, interrogators, guards, detainee uniforms and just about everything else, including edible food, and that, at its height, was staggering under an impossible prisoner-to-guard ratio of 75 to 1 …

Mark Danner, Stripping Bare the Body, Black Inc, 2009, p. 387.

There’s more: an incompetent prison director, lack of training, vague and contradictory instructions, 12-hour shifts. But none of it staved off the sentences handed down to the  military police.

There’s something odd about the way we think about mitigation. It seems there might be two straight line relationships, one between the force of external circumstances and the degree of mitigation, and a second, derived from the first, between the degree of mitigation and the gravity of the offence.  But while the first might be  straight, I suspect the second is not. We tend to become less convinced by mitigation as the severity of the crime increases.

External circumstances, again, even if they could be measured, act on different people in different ways. Most people didn’t cheat on the NAPLAN tests: some people did. Perhaps they are  more frail than others, less able to withstand pressure. Or perhaps they are following some law they regard as higher. We don’t know.

Who’d be a judge?

Moving of the earth brings fears and harms
Men reckon what it did and meant

They did in Donne’s time and in Voltaire’s and in Kleist’s (The Earthquake in Chile). Candide is a response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Such events used to challenge people to make sense of them.

Am I right to think that apart from moral brutes  (“God’s judgment!”)  we don’t?   We do what we can, of course: Chile had better building codes than Haiti, and more money to build, and these things saved lives.

We have an answer to Why? (platelets) but no control and scant capacity to predict. Perhaps we now accept something like the ancient belief in blind fortune.

The grand music of Louis XIV’s time -that deliberate, sustained trumpet-and-drum stuff -  fares better because of the much weaker link between music and empirical meanings. Only flint-eyed materialists find nothing but court propaganda in Lully; for most people, the stately processions and rituals invoked by the music might as well take place in Ruritania.
But of course to listen to a Te Deum on the radio while doing the gardening is something less than the experience of those who crowded the church to welcome home Louis from one of his homicidal trips abroad.

Is there such a thing as authentic, guilt-free grandeur in music? I hope so. I’m not contemplating  a Hymn to Social Inclusiveness, or an Ode to the Health Care Reform Bill.

Here’s the last minute or so of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony #4. Out of context, it just sounds like lots and lots of E major, too much maybe.

NielsenIViv

In context, that’s grand, I reckon.

Formally, Nielsen’s symphony can be summed up as the process of getting from D minor to E major the hard way. Here’s how it begins.

NielsenIVi

Throughout the work, the music arouses those feeling-states of stress, confusion, agitation and states of calm, assurance and clarity. (And lots of other less determinate states of feeling, but let’s keep it manageable.) It places these passages in a a drama of overcoming. E major is worked towards, fallen away from, briefly established, more firmly established and finally speaks unequivocally to close the symphony. A completely abstract and arbitrary structure of key centres becomes a physical, emotional and intellectual experience.

Whereas the music of Lully’s time was designed to impress the listener with the might and dignity of the king and his court (by extension, the glory of France) this symphonic grandeur invites every listener to go on the journey, work through the struggle and to exult in the feeling of achievement. In that sense, it is a document of democracy. Behind Nielsen of course stands Beethoven. The “Inextinguishable” bears a family resemblance to Beethoven’s Fifth, Brahms’s First and all the other 19th century works that progress from stormy minor-key first movements to triumphant endings. But I seem to find a particular satisfaction in the works written late in the symphonic tradition, In Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen, Magnard – even Elgar.

But why not donate direct to one of those two organisations? In the words of the website

When donating via Non-Believers Giving Aid, you are helping to counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.

You are also helping to promote aggressive bigotry. Assisting hypocritical opportunists. Oh and because neither Doctors without Borders or International Red Cross is a development agency you are making a default choice about effective help – Haiti’s needs will not go away any time soon.

But it’s your money.

Sceptics can take this comfort: they now make up the biggest denomination, followed by Catholics and then Anglicans. But this puts Australia only about midway in a list of the top 50 non-believing nations.

All the same, we’re getting there. Agnostics and atheists together = 30%, a figure that in my youth would have astonished my parents’ generation – and delighted my father.

63%, however, believe in miracles, a large increase over earlier surveys. I would guess that global threats like planetary warming, the energy crisis and terrorism would partly account for that. But the Vatican as ever is busy fanning the flames. This week Australia acquired its first bona fide saint and miracle-worker, Mary McKillop.

Her second and clinching ‘miracle’ was to cure a woman’s ‘incurable’ cancer from beyond the grave. The woman prayed to Mary McKillop; the cancer went into remission; ergo, according to the Vatican, a miracle. But spontaneous remission from cancer is well-documented (Anthony Campbell discusses the literature.) How is it possible to demonstrate that only supernatural intervention is the cause? Theology, that’s how.

There are (secular) saints. Raymond Gaita has an excellent account of how, when we meet some people, there is no other or better word for the qualities we perceive in them. And as my late friend Lizzie liked to aver, martyrs are made every day.  Young people confront tanks in Tianamen Square or the Revolutionary Guard in Teheran ; if their deaths advance the cause of justice by inspiring others to work for it, then ‘martyr’ fits. If not, they remain victims. It’s not a question of their inner purity, nor need it be adjudged by a panel of geriatric celibates. It’s whether or not others with similar convictions put in the work.

Rather than throw out the whole apparatus of Christianity, I always want to reclaim what is useable – which makes me one of those ‘cultural Christians’ David Marr talks about in the article linked earlier.  I guess the Theses on Feuerbach are still working away somewhere.

On a similar theme, have a look at Ben Goldacre’s (much better) piece on diarrhea and AIDS.

“The central government should understand the need for green turtles as part of traditional ceremonies because it relates to our faith,” Sudiana said. “Prohibiting it will hurt Balinese people.”

Up to five turtles are needed for sacrifice at each of the 100 to 150 large ceremonies a year in Hindu temples around Bali, he said.

Turtles were traditionally decapitated. But since they became protected in 1999, ceremonies in many temples have changed with turtles being symbolically sacrificed through their release to the sea alive.

Go turtles.

? university leaders are focussing their attention on post-crash curriculum reform.

What leadership role might higher education play in the ethical retooling of the professions and the broader society?

Let’s hope they remember the plumbers.