Household archaeology has a long history of anthropological inquiry. Archaeological investigations of the household serve as a microcosm for the greater social universe. The household serves as a space for socialization processes. Household archaeology focuses on the household as a social unit, and involves research on the household’s dwelling and other related architecture, material culture, features, and larger sociopolitical organizations that are associated with a specific culture. Household social relationships have been associated as serving as an “atom” for society. Therefore, household studied effectively convey information pertaining to flexible economic and ecological conditions Household activity encompasses spheres of activity related to function and how people act. Household archaeology redefines the notion of the household and the domestic by challenging notions of what households are, how they operate and the social implications of such analysis. The material culture provides information about such activities. Households are families, domestic groups, and co-habitations. Households function in a variety of fashions.

History of Theoretical Background

Household archaeology involves archaeological investigations of household activities. It encompasses social formation processes, family or co-residential organization and the material culture associated with such activities. Scholarly inquiry into household studies began in the 1960s with research emphasis upon a micro-scale analysis of social groups. Households are commonly referred to as the most basic social unit. Households operate within social and economic processes aimed to structure general conditions of social life. “Household” and “family” are social phenomena. According to Bender, these constructions are “logically distinct and, under certain circumstances, vary independently of each other.” The household has three elements: the social (demographic), the material (possessions and dwellings) and the behavioral (activities). Household membership employs a variety of strategies and behaviors. Household archaeology is concerned with the material culture remaining from basic activity patterns as a result of human behavior.

Via Wikipedia

Rob Bryanton made his first record at twelve, and was host of a regional CBC-TV music series at twenty. He is the President of Talking Dog Studios (www.talkingdogstudios.com) in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, which specializes in music and sound for film and television. He has been nominated eight times in the last eight years for Canada’s prestigious Gemini Awards, four times in the category “Best Original Music Score for a Dramatic Series”, and four times for “Best Sound for a Dramatic Program”. Recent projects to which Rob has contributed his talents as a composer and sound mixer include the hugely popular CTV series “Corner Gas”, plus the historical mini-series “Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story” (CBC-TV). Rob is also responsible for the theme and underscoring on CBC’s Canadian Antiques Roadshow. While Rob has had poems and song lyrics published in several anthologies over the past decade, “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” is his first book. It represents the culmination of a lifelong fascination with science, philosophy, and the nature of reality which, as he tells in the book, began at the age of seven. Rob is also the current President of the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Association, and is an active volunteer in his community. A typical stubborn prairie boy, he is proud to have built a career for himself as a composer and sound mixer in his home town, and to have been a part of Saskatchewan’s burgeoning film and television industry for the past 30 years. Rob lives in Regina with his wife Gail and their dog Buddy. Gail and Rob have two sons, Todd and Mark. Text taken from Amazon

Radiolab: Stochasticity (a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness), may be at the very foundation of our lives. To understand how big a role it plays, we look at chance and patterns in sports, lottery tickets, and even the cells in our own body. Along the way, we talk to a woman suddenly consumed by a frenzied gambling addiction, meet two friends whose meeting seems to defy pure chance, and take a close look at some very noisy bacteria. Listen to podcast HERE

Germany’s famous Bauhaus school from 1919 to 1933 forged new boundaries in the art and design world and remains highly influential today. But its brand and legacy has been under threat for five decades from a large German-Swiss home goods retailer that took the title and trademark “Bauhaus” in 1960 and now has 190 stores around Europe.

Architect Walter Gropius and his group of communal craftsmen put a radical stamp on architecture, design and art education during Germany’s Weimar Period between the two world wars. He even claims he coined the term “Bauhaus” as the name for his atypical art school.

Along the way, though, he forgot an important thing: to protect the name.

As a result, up to 40 companies in Germany and myriad others abroad have taken the word “Bauhaus” as a brand or title. The imitators include a furniture label in the United States, a rumored bordello in Japan, a chocolate variety that touts its form and function, a real estate company and the early British gothic band led by Peter Murphy.

“Bauhaus sells,” says Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive Museum in Berlin. “That’s the point.” When someone is copying you or your name in a corporate context, she says, “then you see that you really have a brand.”

But the greatest squatter of the moniker is a do-it-yourself retailer based in Mannheim, which trademarked the Bauhaus during postwar divided Germany. It happened before Gropius and others moved to established archives and museums — in Dessau and Weimar (in the former east) and Berlin — to explain and protect the historical Bauhaus and its legacy. Now, it’s causing confusion to the general public and frustration to Bauhaus design aficionados.

Written by Paul Glader at the Spiegel. Continue HERE

In 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the mental collapse that ended his career, he was virtually unknown. Yet by the time of his death in 1900 at the age of 55, he had become the philosophical celebrity of his age. From Russia to America, admirers echoed his estimation of himself as a titanic figure who could alter the course of history: “I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.” His origins were humble for the role. The son of a small-town Lutheran minister, he steeped himself in classical literature while growing up in eastern Germany. When he was 24, he secured a professorship in Basel, Switzerland, and a few years later published his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy.” Against the common view of the ancient Greeks as the epitome of serene equipoise, Nietzsche emphasized the “Dionysian” excess and frenzy that complemented the “Apollonian” virtues of clarity and repose. The book’s success was limited, and its author was mocked by one leading classicist as an atavist run amok who should “gather tigers and panthers about his knees, but not the youth of Germany.”

Written by ALEXANDER STAR at The New York Times. Continue HERE

John Watkins predicted Americans would be taller, tanks would exist and C, X and Q would no longer feature in our everyday alphabet

In 1900, an American civil engineer called John Elfreth Watkins made a number of predictions about what the world would be like in 2000. How did he do?

As is customary at the start of a new year, the media have been full of predictions about what may happen in the months ahead.

But a much longer forecast made in 1900 by a relatively unknown engineer has been recirculating in the past few days.

In December of that year, at the start of the 20th Century, John Elfreth Watkins wrote a piece published on page eight of an American women’s magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, entitled What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years.

He began the article with the words: “These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible,” explaining that he had consulted the country’s “greatest institutions of science and learning” for their opinions on 29 topics.

Watkins was a writer for the Journal’s sister magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, based in Indianapolis.

The Post brought this article to a modern audience last week when its history editor Jeff Nilsson wrote a feature praising Watkins’ accuracy. It was picked up and caused some excitement on Twitter. So what did Watkins get right – and wrong?

Written by By Tom Geoghegan at BBC News Magazine. Continue HERE

Are we hurting our noggins? Internationally, are there social customs, diseases, pollutants, school policies, parental choices, drugs, diets and philosophies that cause, or are correlated with, decreased intelligence?

Here are fourscore-and-a-trio of the mind-mangling menaces. A preponderance of the fearsome factors have undergone scientific scrutiny, with statistics filed in the massive archives of pubmed.gov.

Prenatal – Damaged before you’re delivered

Cousin Marriages – “Consanguineous” marriages between cousins or relatives more than triples the rate of mental retardation. One study shows an average IQ drop of 7 points; another reveals a loss of 11.2 points.

Avoiding PreNatal Diagnosis - Fetal Screening can determine if fetuses have birth defects or genetic diseases that cause cognitive damage. Recommended for older parents and those carrying genes of genetic disorders.

Prenatal Iodine Deficiency – The World Health Organization says iodine deficiency is the “single greatest preventable cause of mental retardation.” Average deduction is 10-17 IQ points.

Prenatal Folic Acid Deficiency - Infants with neural tube defects suffer a loss of 15 IQ points.

Prenatal Choline Deficiency – Can wreck spatial memory and hippocampal plasticity in adulthood.

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Heavy Alcohol Exposure) - Children afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome have an average IQ of 75.

Moderate Prenatal Alcohol Exposure - Gestating women who imbibe two alcoholic drinks per day hamper their child’s IQ with a 7-point loss.

Pesticide Exposure - Prenatal (and postnatal) exposure to organophosphate pesticides can cause a deficit of 7.0 IQ points.

Prenatal Cigarette Exposure - Loss of IQ is reported as 3.3, 6.2, and 15 points in various studies.

Prenatal Hydrocarbons (Smog) Exposure - Two studies showed IQ losses of 4.31 and 3.8 points.

Prenatal Cocaine Exposure - Boys exposed to cocaine had lower IQs at 4, 6, and 9 years of age.

Prenatal Methamphetamine Exposure – Meth exposure leads to weakened verbal memory, and damage to visual motor integration, attention, and long-term spatial memory.

Embryonic Malnutrition - Multiple infants sharing a womb are at risk of suboptimal nutrition. Lighter twins have verbal IQ that’s 7.5 points lower than heavier twins.

Maternal Stress – Children exposed to high cortisol levels in the womb, caused by maternal stress, suffer an average verbal IQ loss of 3.83 points.

Prenatal Valproate Exposure - Embryos exposed to Valproate have IQ scores up to 9 points lower than children exposed to other anti-epileptic medications.

Prenatal Excess Mercury Exposure - Reports vary, but one study concluded that excessive prenatal intake of mercury in fish costs children 1.5 points in IQ.

Prenatal Radiation Exposure – Embryos exposed to radiation had more speech-language disorders, emotional disorders, and borderline IQ.

Premature Birth - Babies delivered before 40 weeks have smaller heads and an IQ 4.9 points lower than infants delivered after 40+ weeks.

Breech Birth - Males born via breech birth have a 7-point lower IQ than boys who were born in cephalic presentation.

Compiled by Hank Pellissier. Continue at The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Australian network SBS aired Sex: An Unnatural History over the course of six weeks. ‘Sex: An Unnatural History’ is a six-part factual series exploring the last 50 years of Australia’s sexual landscape. Presenter Julia Zemiro brings her wit, intellect and humor to each episode starting with an exploration of why we started having sex and how we became hardwired to monogamy.

Humans started copulating to procreate but if we can make a baby in a test tube and even get someone else to carry it for us where does that leave sex? Is it now just purely about pleasure?

The introduction of the pill sparked a revolution that is still happening, but where are we headed? Julia explores what taboos are still left to us and why societies require sexual boundaries. We’re moving towards more liberated attitudes about marriage, homosexuality and personal fetishes but is everything up for grabs? When it comes to fashion many of us use what we wear to signal what we are looking for, but what does fashion also tell us about the sexual attitudes of the day? And how are our sexual lives affected by our churches?

Julia delves into the complex world of how and why the Catholic Church became so fixated with what we do between the sheets and how one little pill may have led to the demise of confession.

Julia takes a look at how and why humans fall in love and what role chemicals play when Cupid’s arrow strikes. But isn’t there more to it than neurotransmitters and serotonin? Isn’t it all about the romance? How can we explain the metaphysical aspect of love and how it transforms not only our sex lives but also every other part of our lives?

We end the series with a look at sex and the future. All sorts of people have opinions on what sex will be like in 2060. Sure, we can imagine robot lovers, virtual partners and sex without gravity but will we ever invent something better than a condom?

Episode 1: The Revolution

The 1960s was an era that heralded the birth of feminism, civil rights, free love and gay liberation – a sexual revolution that changed our attitudes towards sex and relationships forever.

Episode 3: Fashion

Does how we dress tell us what we’re like in the bedroom? If you see someone wandering around in fetish gear it’s safe to say they’re doing so to attract potential mates of like minds. But what else can fashion tell us about sex? A lot, it seems.

Episode 4: The Church

Why do people cry out “oh God!” during sex? Is it because sex transcends our mind and bodies? Religion has been getting between the sheets since it became organized, but it was the sexual revolution of the ’60s and birth control that brought matters to a head.

Episode 5: Love

Sex existed long before the idea of love but somewhere along the annals of history the two became entwined. Many humans then started selecting their partners based on this emotion.

Steve Pinker: My first edict as global overlord would be to impose the following rule on pundits: No one may bemoan a decay, decline, or degeneration without providing (1) a measure of the way the world is today; (2) a measure of the way the world was at some point in the past; (3) a demonstration that (1) is worse than (2).

This decree would, first of all, eliminate tedious jeremiads about the decline of the language. The genre has been around for centuries, and if the doomsayers were correct we would now be grunting like Tarzan. But not only do we see vast amounts of clear and competent prose in everyday outlets like Wikipedia and Amazon reviews, but a gusher of superb writing appearing daily, as anyone who has lost a morning to sites like The Browser and Arts and Letters Daily can attest.

Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language. A century ago editors issued fatwas against barbarous innovations such as “standpoint,” “bogus,” “to run a business,” and “to quit smoking.” Decades ago they fulminated against “six people” (as opposed to persons), “fix” (for repair), and the verbs “to contact” and “to finalize.” Today this linguistic contraband is unexceptionable, if not indispensable. Also vilified is the seepage of new technological jargon into the language (leverage, incentivise, synergy). Yet old technological jargon (proportional, placebo, false positive, trade-off) has made it easier for everyone to think about abstract concepts, and may even have contributed to the Flynn effect, the relentless increase in IQ scores during the 20th century.

And speaking of technology, today’s Luddites have a short memory. Parents who lament the iPods and mobile phones soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their bedroom telephones and transistor radios. The abbreviated prose in tweets and instant messages is no more likely to corrupt the language or shorten attention spans than the telegrams, radio ads, and advertising catchphrases of yesteryear. Email can seem like a curse, but who would go back to stamps, phone booths, carbon paper, and piles of phone messages? And now that dinner companions can fact-check any assertion on an iPhone, we are coming to realize how many of our everyday beliefs are false—a valuable lesson in the fallibility of memory.

But nowhere is the confusion of a data point with a trend more pernicious than in our understanding of violence. A terrorist bomb explodes, a sniper runs amok, an errant drone kills an innocent, and commentators ask “What is the world coming to?” Yet they seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” Continue HERE

Across disciplines academics and artists are researching and creating practices that are highly contextual (determined by the environment in which they are located), exploring ways of articulating specific environments, spaces or places. This conference examines a specific problematic that attends the dissemination of this work: how to engage with ‘being there’ when ‘there’ is not here?

We understand environment (social, built, natural, technological) as that which surrounds and informs us. Through our practice we influence our environment. What we create is shaped by our surroundings. We exist in a relation of mutual exchange; making ourselves other and incorporating that which is other in turn. This conference offers a forum for academics and creative practitioners to come together and engage with articulations of mutual formation: to discuss work as environment.

Such work often relies on direct, personal experience of a particular environment. Transfer and abstraction, necessary for the communication of this work beyond the specifics of this original environment, challenge the work. Negotiating publication or conference environment, for example, necessitates reformulation of the work, engendering changes in texture and experience, in adapting to alternative structures. What do such alterations, translations or transformations, mean for this work?

This conference aims to examine these questions on a very practical level. When it comes to considering environment, what is the relationship between the structures of dissemination and the environment our work seeks to convey? What is the relationship between our academic environment and the work we (aim to) produce? How do we utter our environment?

Poets and writers, artists, academics, social and environmental scientists, performers and musicians, among others, are invited to discuss ways of uttering environment. Organizers seek work that explores the phenomenological sense of speaking with environment. They encourage the use of a diverse range of media as part of this dialogue. Participants are invited to find new ways of expressing their research and/or artistic practice in a conference setting that reflects upon this process of adaptation as a process of practical enquiry.

Deadline for applications: 31st March
Conference: 1st-2nd September 2012

More info HERE

Leonardo Electronic Almanac in collaboration with The Samek Art Gallery and with Kasa Gallery announces a special issue titled: Not Here Not There. This issue arises out of the territory between two cultural streams.

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is inviting proposals for an issue on these themes with Senior Editors Lanfranco Aceti, Director of Kasa Gallery, Sabanci University and Richard Rinehart, Director of the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University. Artists that work with AR technology and curators and writers that work on issues related to AR, sited art in relation to new media, or site-specific interventions are particularly welcome to submit proposals for consideration.

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) will produce an online and printed issue, as well as host curated images and videos online.

Proposals:

a) Subject heading: Not Here Not There
b) 500 hundred word abstract for articles – submission of full articles preferred for this special issue by proposal deadline January 31, 2012
c) Deadline for proposal submission: January 31, 2012
d) Deadline for submission of full article: March 1, 2012
e) 2 images at 72 dpi resolution no larger than 700pixels width for artists
f) Links to previous work, videos or personal sites

Our publication formats allow for full-color throughout and we encourage rich pictorial content where relevant and possible. Note however that all material submitted must be copyright cleared (or due diligence must be evidenced). For online publication a wide variety of media content may be considered (animation, mp3, flash, java, etc…)

• For scholarly papers please submit the final paper ready for peer review. Your contribution will be reviewed by at least two members of the LEA board and revisions may be requested subject to review.
• For themed and pictorial essays please submit an abstract or outline for editorial consideration and further discussion.
• Please keep your news, announcements and hyperlinks brief and focused – include contact details and a link to an external site where relevant. We reserve the right to sub-edit your submissions in order to comply with LEA policies and formats. Where material is time-sensitive please include both embargo and expiry dates.
• In all cases specify special system considerations where these are necessary (platform, codecs, plug-ins, etc…)

They look forward to hearing from you!

More info at LEA

Darren Tofts essay has proved to be a really interesting reading, and I’m grateful to him for writing it. Ideas that were still dispersed and fragmentary in my mind found an order there. However, the essay left me with a couple of concerns, both related to the term “virtual”. I must confess that I’m allergic to labels in art, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not just that.

Tofts brilliantly addresses a whole line of thinking in Western culture, that goes from Henri Bergson to Philip K. Dick through Cicero and Baudrillard, in order to address a complex, layered reality of which the actual reality, for lack of a better term, is just one of the many manifestations (and dreams, “the palace of memory”, parallel universes, simulacra, the Matrix, Truman’s world, media spectacle and virtual environments are just a few of the others).

I’m wondering about the opportunity of reducing this extraordinary complexity, that Tofts knows and describes very well, to the classical, binary opposition “real vs virtual”. Contemporary life is already beyond this binary opposition: we live parallel lives in parallel worlds, some “real”, some simulated; we move fast from the one to the other, simply switching on and off our mobile phones. We kill monsters in videogames and help a disabled person to cross the street. We are kind here and perverse there. We adapt to different environments, different living conditions, different languages. We eat cheeseburgers every day, and drink Barolo during the summer holidays. We store our memories in tiny, well designed gadgets that we add to our key-case. What is real? And what is virtual?

Furthermore, and this brings me to my second argument, though having a long and honored history, the term “virtual” has strong roots, in our… ehm… memory, in the Eighties and Nineties technology and media theory. When I read it, I recall data-gloves and virtual reality; and when I read “Virtual Art”, I recall Frank Popper and Jeffrey Shaw. I find no way out of it. So, my question is: does it make any sense to rescue this term from its (un)glorious past? Why not use another term? Or simply call it “art”? If Tofts is right when he says “contemporary art is always already virtual”, why do add this prefix at all?

The answer, of course, can be that the term is needed by those who recognize themselves as “virtual artists” in order to promote their work against the limitations of the art system, against the requirements of the art market and outside of the tight borders of the art worlds. My opinion is that they don’t need it. They are already on the right way. As the “Manifesto of Virtual Art” proves, they have an understanding of the structures of contemporary life that is way more advanced than the one of most “traditional” fine artists. They understood that it’s not a matter of medium, but of understanding and picturing the world we are living in; but they are framing themselves in a way that will probably bring only artists using “virtual technologies” such as synthetic environments and augmented reality to join the crew. The binary opposition “real vs virtual”, if kept as such, can be a curse for them, and for a better understanding of their work.

I’m aware that I’m writing this in the columns of the inaugural edition of an ambitious editorial project called The Australian Journal of Virtual Art (AJVA), to which I wish long life and success. So, what I’m writing should not be intended as a critique, but as an invitation for my host to clarify its assets, and to answer some questions that, I’m sure, are not harassing my own mind only.

Written by Domenico Quaranta. Via The Australian Journal of Virtual Art

Duke University Press ends its influential Series Q this month. It has been an impressive ride since the first book in the series: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark 1993 collection of essays, Tendencies. Rereading her introduction, “Queer and Now,” I am reminded of the potent sense of possibility opened up 20 years ago by the idea of queer theory. The sense of a historical moment is strong in the essay, as its title underscores. Sedgwick’s optimism was far from naïve; the same introduction disclosed her diagnosis of breast cancer, which she lived with and against until her death in 2009. Fittingly, the last volume released by Series Q is a posthumous collection of her remaining essays, The Weather in Proust.

Taken together, Sedgwick’s death, the passage of time, and the news from Duke all seem to be occasions for taking stock. Even before the press’s decision, many in the field were already in a retrospective mood. A recent book in the same series, After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, asked leading queer theorists to look back on the great ferment of the last two decades. The title of the book seems to place queer theory firmly in the past, though the editors, Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, generously shift the emphasis in their introduction: “What has queer theory become now that it has a past?”

The answer depends on how much queer theory is defined by the speculative energy that the phrase itself generated in the 1990s. The label, after all, came into circulation only after the major theoretical innovations that defined it—in the work of Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Leo Bersani, the early Sedgwick, Judith Butler, as well as many others. Those writers had already developed an analysis of sexuality that looked to relations of power rather than to individual psychology or “orientation.” And they had already shown that sex, pleasure, and the formation of sexual cultures posed deep challenges to the normative frameworks by which some kinds of sex are legitimated and institutionalized as the proper form of sexuality. As several contributors to After Sex? point out, queer theory’s intellectual concerns have given rise to newer kinds of work, and are continued under other rubrics.

When Teresa de Lauretis and her colleagues at the University of California at Santa Cruz organized a conference called “Queer Theory” in 1990, it was manifestly provocative. The term “queer” in those days was not yet a cable-TV synonym for gay; it carried a high-voltage charge of insult and stigma. The term caught on because it seemed to catalyze many of the key insights of previous years and connect them to a range of politics and constituencies that were already developing outside academe, in a way that looked unpredictable from the start. At the 1991 Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Rutgers University at New Brunswick—the fifth to be held since John Boswell started the meetings at Yale University in 1987 and exponentially larger than its predecessors—the informal talk about “queer” was almost as frisky as the cruising.

A paper by Michael Warner at the The Chronicle Review. Continue HERE

‘This is a book for atheists’. Rosenberg makes this explicit in the preface. Atheism requires a whole view of the world based on science that is ‘demanding, rigorous, breathtaking.’ There’s a feeling you get when reading Rosenberg that he’s fed up with atheists who avoid facing up to the big persistent questions such as: ‘what is the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, and the meaning of life? Is there any rhyme or reason to the course of human history? Why am I here? Do I have a soul, and if so, how long will it last? What happens when we die? Do we have free will? Why should I be moral? What is love, and why is it usually inconvenient?’ Rosenberg demands that atheists just stop arguing with theists, for one because ‘contemporary religious belief is immune to rational objection’ but also because it eats into the time atheists should be taking to work through the implications of their own worldview. Atheists need to spend more time getting to grips with what they should know about the reality we inhabit because science reveals it is ‘stranger than even many atheists recognize.’

So he’s just not all that interested in going over the old arguments that keep getting reheated by lazy atheists who haven’t any news but do have a publishing deal. The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, Letter To A Christian Nation and so on are dull books that probably make more sense in the USA than from where I am but they bring nothing new to the table, play to a home crowd and change no one’s mind. Rosenberg is doing something different from being a cheerleader. He’s bringing a few home truths to the table. I suspect some atheists will not be able to swallow them whole and that just like the theists will also find ways of ducking the question.

So what are his answers to the persistent questions, as he calls them, the ones at the head of this article and his book, the ones we have that begin early in life, get crowded out by thoughts of sex in adolescence and then come steaming back afterwards? There is no God. Reality is what physics says (and evolutionary biology). There is no purpose to anything, anywhere. Never was, never will be. There is therefore no meaning to life. I’m here because of dumb luck. Prayer doesn’t work. There is no such thing as a soul. There is no freewill. When we die, everything stays the same except without us. There is no moral difference between good and bad, right and wrong. You should be good because it makes you feel better than being bad. Anything goes. Love is a solution to a strategic coordination problem. It’s automatic, programmed so there’s no need to go out looking for it. History has no purpose (see above) because the future is less and less like the past. Ditto economics. Technology makes predicting the future a guessing game and their rational choice theories are outrageously bad psychology.

Rosenberg argues that belief in free will and purpose and all that (see above) is belief in hokum of the same order as belief in God. The atheists’ self-image as the hero nihilist choosing her fate is condemned as being just as hopeless as the religious self image. This is why this is a book with some tough and strange lessons for the atheist. His book is a genuine guide, giving the reader a thorough reading list of the key texts that everyone should read, summarizing the main points quickly, smartly and expecting you to go away and do further work. He’s a teacher after all, a very, very smart professor who assumes you too can be even smarter if you sweat a little more and put in the hours. So he’s a good teacher with high aspirations for us all. But what reason does he have for his worldview? He argues for a naturalism that results in what he calls a ‘nice nihilism’. By this he means that atheists are not nihilists (although their scientific world view is) and that for good evolutionary reasons everyone tends to be nice.

A review by Richard Marshall at 3:AM Magazine. Continue HERE

Alex Rosenberg. Photo by Jim Wallace

The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions