Monthly Archives: March 2021

Brett Stevens unleashed Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity, a collection of writings about nihilism, in 2016.

This anti-enlightenment treatment of philosophy rejects the idea of universalism as an artifact of the ego, and points toward an extreme, human-feelings-denying realism which sees adaptation in the Darwinian sense as its ultimate goal. This is a blood and guts, war and pain, total death and full power interpretation of active nihilism which nonetheless exposes where and how values and even spirituality can exist.

Nihilism will not please the weak of heart, morality, aesthetics or mind. Deny the false, reject the herd, look within and the possibility of understanding reality emerges, red in tooth and claw.

Most people see the world in binary categories. They believe that there is either an inherent moral good that we must all obey, or there are no rules and life is pointless anarchy. Nihilism argues for a middle path: we lack inherent order but are defined by our choices, which means that we must start making smarter choices by understanding the reality in which we live more than the human social reality which we have used to replace it in our minds.

A work of philosophy in the continental tradition, Nihilism examines the human relationship with philosophical doubt through a series of essays designed to stimulate the ancient knowledge within us of what is right and what is real. Searching for a level of thought underneath the brain-destroying methods of politics and economics, the philosophy of nihilism approaches thought at its most basic level and highest degree of abstraction. It escapes the bias of human perspective and instructs our ability to perceive itself, unleashing a new level of critical thinking that side-steps the mental ghetto of modernity and the attendant problems of civilization decline and personal lassitude.

While many rail against nihilism as the death of culture and religion, the philosophy itself encourages a consequentialist, reality-based outlook that forms the basis for moral choice. Unlike the control-oriented systems of thought that form the basis of contemporary society, nihilism reverts the crux of moral thinking to the relationship between the individual and the effects of that individuals actions in reality. From this, a new range of choice expands, including the decision to affirm religious and moral truth as superior methods of Darwinistic adaptation to the question of human survival, which necessarily includes civilization.

Inspired by transcendentalist thinkers and the ancient traditions of both the West and the Far East, the philosophy of nihilism negates the false intermediate steps imposed on us by degenerated values systems. In the footsteps of philosopher Friedrich W. Nietzsche, who called for a re-evaluation of all values, nihilism subverts linguistic and social categorical thinking in order to achieve self-discipline of the mind. As part of this pursuit, Nihilism investigates thought from writers as diverse as William S. Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant. For those who seek the truth beyond the socially-convenient explanations that humans tell one another, nihilism is a philosophy both for a new age and for all time.

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Among the possibilities that scare humans the most, the potentiality of no meaning no inherent values, no innate truths, and no possibility of accurate communication unnerves us the most. It means that we are truly alone with nothing to rely on but ourselves for understanding this vast world and what we should do in it. This belief is called nihilism.

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. Alan Pratt, Nihilism, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/

In the 20th century, nihilism encompassed a variety of philosophical and aesthetic stances that, in one sense or another, denied the existence of genuine moral truths or values, rejected the possibility of knowledge or communication, and asserted the ultimate meaninglessness or purposelessness of life or of the universe. Nihilism, Encyclopedia Britannica, retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/nihilism

Nihilism rejects the ideas of universalism, rationalism and empiricism which have ruled the West for centuries. These ideas arise from our social impulses, or the desire to include others as a group and motivate them with what is perceived as objective truth.

Universalism holds that all people are essentially the same, and therefore that values are a matter of respecting the choices of each person, truth is what can be verified in a way a group can understand, and communication relies on words which have immutable meaning. Rationalism supposes that the workings our minds can tell us what is true in the world without testing, and implies universalism, or that the workings of our minds are all the same. Empiricism, now linked to its cousin logical positivism, states that truth is only found in observable and testable, replicable observations.

The essence of nihilism can be found in biology. In the tendency of human minds, many identical pieces work together to form agreement, and then act as one. In biology, abundant unequal pieces serve different roles without knowledge of a centralized plan but work together because they are united by very basic principles which cannot be deconstructed further, such as the need to feed, defend oneself, find shelter, and reproduce. Nihilism follows the organic model of different pieces of a larger puzzle working together because they share principles, but not form or the translation of those principles into specific methods. It adds a layer of abstraction to our understanding of how systems groups of parts producing an output together function.

This biological framework reveals a pattern language, or index of patterns that match functions, to both human thought and human individuals. We are not all alike, nor do we think alike, and many humans have unique roles they can serve where their proficiency makes them ideal candidates. Within the mind, we can identify patterns at a level below language or even consciousness that reveal our thought and how comparable it is to the reality in the external world. This allows us to use self-discipline to become better able to understand reality.

Without universal truth, we bypass the proxy of socially-defined goals and standards, and instead must judge our potential actions by their likely results in reality. This escapes us from the ghetto of human intent, where we judge our actions as if they were communications to others designed to show our value, instead of actions toward a purpose. We lose self-consciousness, which is really an awareness of ourselves as we appear to the social group, and replace it with world-consciousness.

The most difficult part (for modern people) involved with leaving behind universalism is that we now navigate between two poles: first, the wrong idea that there should be one rule and motivation for every person, and second, the wrong idea that avoiding the first pole means that everyone should do whatever they want. Nihilism is the death of should. Instead, there is merely is, as in each person is what he is and has the wants inherent to being that person. This means that people have different roles, of both vertical (proficiency) and horizontal (specialization) measurements, like animals and plants in an ecosystem. There is no universal role, only a shared mission, and the knowledge of what actions have produced which results in the past, from which we can derive general principles that fit our roles in the civilization ecosystem.

With this, we return to the Traditionalist idea of cause and effect with the cause being informational instead of physical. Pattern and idea dictate outcome more than the particular material elements or particularities of a time period. Consider the knowledge of man trying to start a fire:

Society would insert a third column between those for moral judgments, social feelings, personal desires and other chatter from the incessantly rationalizing mind, which seeks to find a justification for its feelings in the world and remove from itself the need to make hard decisions which remind it of existential questions like death, purpose and meaning.

When Braagh the caveman thinks about how he should proceed, he inverts the order of the two natural columns. He knows what he wants, or quickly will have to find out, and so he chooses the outcome that will fit his circumstances, and based on that, chooses the method he will use.

If Braagh is strong, he may choose to rub sticks. If he has not eaten and is tired, he may take a little more time to look for bark or flint. As a practical person, he may pray to Xuul because it makes him feel better, but he will nonetheless seek his own method of making fire (Xuul helps those who help themselves). Having bad past experiences getting very hungry waiting for lightning, he will discard that.

When his circumstances change, Braagh makes different decisions. If a thunderstorm has just passed over, he might take an hour to wander around looking for burning trees. If he is in a valley where there is abundant flint, he might go right to that method, almost bypassing choice entirely, which can be risky as he will then be oblivious to the downside of possible forest fires. If he is standing next to a tree with the right bark, the decision also seems to complete itself.

All of us have these columns in our mind, and varying degrees of the third column comprised of social and emotional thoughts. The strongest among us can balance the third column so that it fits in with the advantages and disadvantages of methods, like the possibility of forest fires. The weakest among us will think first of the third column, and then use that to choose the method, and will then rationalize from there that their choice is the best, a process called cognitive dissonance.

Nihilism rejects the third column by recognizing the emptiness of shared experience. Some experiences unify us, like love or comradeship in war, but for the most part, we are alone. What we know cannot be communicated unless the other person is willing to analyze it and us enough to know what we are nattering on about. As far as truth, there are accurate perceptions, but these are not shared among people, not in the least because most people do not care about accuracy.

Suppose that Braagh becomes a member of a troupe of cavepeople. They wander the fields and forests, foraging for food and hunting what bush meat they can conquer. Then they retreat to their cave where they feel safe. Braagh wants to make a fire, but the others either do not or are apathetic. He cannot argue with them, objectively or subjectively, that fire is needed. After all, they have fruits, berries, roots and bush meat which they can dry in the sun and eat, and they will be just fine.

But Braagh, he has a dream. In this dream, there are big hunts once a week and then the food is cooked and preserved, so that they will have more free time and do not have to go foraging every day. Perhaps Braagh wants to write the great cave novel, or dream of gods in the sky, or otherwise discover the world. For him, time is more important than convenience. This is not so for the others, and nothing he can say will logically compel them to share his vision.

If he demonstrates his idea by slaughtering a caribou, making a fire and roasting the meat and handing it out to others, they may partake. They might not, however, see the utility in this approach, because it is harder and riskier than gathering roots and killing squirrels with rocks. There is no universal standard for all of them.

Suppose that Braagh is a burly caveman who instead of arguing for his idea, simply forces others to do it by beating senseless the dissenters. Soon the troupe of cavepeople are hunting and following his path, and he heaves rocks into the skulls of those who thwart the activity. Over time, the survivors are those who share his vision, and the genes for those who are otherwise inclined have passed into history.

In ten thousand years, a civilization may arise in the place where Braagh bashed skulls. It will be based on the idea that some risk and effort that achieves a better result (second column) is worth enduring the harder activity (first column). Applying that principle, the cavepeople will start domesticating caribou and planting crops, giving them even more free time. They will invent language, writing and early technology.

After another ten thousand years, the civilization will encounter its first troubles. The people will take for granted that they will always have civilization and stop bashing in the heads of those who cannot direct themselves toward that purpose. Those, who by nature are less focused, will devote their time to the pleasures of the flesh, and become fruitful and multiplicative. Over time, they will outnumber the others.

The civilization will now take a dark turn. It will abandon the original nihilistic principle, which is that some are of the caliber of Braagh and must lead by bashing skulls, and instead turn to the principle of universalism. Everyone is welcome and all are celebrated; in fact, they like to say that they are all one. Quantity replaces quality. Realistic vision is lost. The civilization begins to die.

A strange thing will have happened to the people in this civilization. They will live almost exclusively in the third column, thinking about what others think of them, with the world beyond the ego and the human social circle unknown to them. If someone explains nihilism to them, using the language which sprung up as if out of the ground once it was needed, they will retreat in fear, like monkeys flinging faeces at a feared totem. To them, there can only be one rule for everyone the rule of the third column or life has become bad and evil.

Nihilism remains controversial for this reason. It connects us to the nothingness in life, and the necessity of sacrifice in order to achieve quality-enhancing results, which naturally brings up the question of mortality that almost all people (except pasty Goths in black) would rather not discuss. People would rather decrease quality and increase quantity, meaning that all actions would be seen as equal, because this is more emotionally convenient for them. Nihilism erases any importance granted to this emotional state.

The modern West finds itself at a crossroads. The path we are on leads to eventual death and a form of entropy that returns us to the state of the cavepeople before Braagh and his vision of fire. A new path beckons which will take us higher than the greatness of the past, continuing the idea that seized Braagh as he was wandering the veldt. For us to accept the possibility of the new path, we must first strip away the human-only mental prison in which we exist because of social influences and peer pressure.

Nihilism leads to idealism for this reason. When we remove the over-dominance of the methods we use to interact with the world, we see the importance of pattern and arranging ourselves and material according to the idea we seek. This connects to a primal idea, which is that existence itself is biological, and that life extends past the physical into the metaphysical. In short, idea is all; material including the third column is a false goal that causes us to rationalize and become confused.

In this sense, nihilism shows us the value of transcendental thought. By facing the darkness of life directly and allowing the cold wind of the abyss to lick our faces, nihilism creates acceptance of the world as it is, and then embarks on a search for meaning that is not social meaning because it is interpreted according to the individual based on the capacity of that individual. Nihilism is esoteric in that it rejects the idea of a truth that can be communicated to everyone, but by freeing us from the idea that whatever truths we encounter must include everyone, allows for lone explorers to delve deeper and climb higher, if they have the biological requirements for the mental ability involved.

For this reason, nihilism is transformative. We go into it as equal members of the modern zombie automaton cult, convinced that there is objective truth and we have subjective preferences. We come out realizing that our preferences are entirely a function of our abilities and biology, and that objective truth is as much an idol as the Golden Calf of Moses time: a fiction and consensual reality created to keep a troupe of slightly smarter than average monkeys working together. Nihilism transforms us from human into beast, and from that, to something which can reach for the stars.

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In Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness and Eternity, your author explores the possibilities of leaving behind the path to death and choosing the new path instead. This cannot be approached directly, because the path is an effect of a cause, which is our willingness to abandon the solipsistic tendencies of our minds and strive for something greater. It appeals to the Braaghs of the world, and not those whose skulls were smitten by his rocks.

Through the course of essays composed in the wilderness over the course of two decades, Nihilism unearths the first steps toward the wisdom of the past. It shows a path to clearing the mental confusion of this time from the mind, and seeing the value of nihilism as a gateway to re-understanding the world in a new light. While it is not for all, if humanity has a future, it is through a thought process like the journey on which it takes its readers.

In contrast to accepted doctrine, this book shows that the lack of meaning in modern society came not from the fall of gods and heroes, but from the insatiable human ego and its collectivized counterpart, peer pressure or social control. What remains of the old religion is only the idea of universal truth, and that has been reconfigured into an assumption that all that is human is good, and that nature and metaphysics are irrelevant.

Nihilism remains a terrifying topic because it removes the illusions on which our current worldview is based, but that outlook is rapidly failing. In this alternate view, the tripartite illusion universal truth among humans, equality-based values, and exoteric communication based on universal tokens has broken and died, and those who wish to rebuild civilization can use nihilism to detach from it and form the groundwork of a new era.

Touching on ideas from both the occult and mainstream religion as well as philosophies ranging from Germanic idealism to perennialism, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness and Eternity explores nihilism as a fully-developed philosophy instead of the melange of anarchy and self-centeredness by which it is portrayed in most literature. In doing so, it discovers a way out of our landlocked modern thought, uniting both wisdom of the past and possibilities for the future into a single vision.

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Nihilism

Tamara Lindeman had a feeling that The Weather Stations new album was pretty good. Recorded in 2019, and finally released in February 2021, Ignorance felt like a nice change of pace in her critically acclaimed discography of intricate, delicate folk rock. Sure, the move to disco-inspired rhythms and beefy basslines was a sharp departure from the 70s British guitar lines she brought to her debut, 2015s Loyalty. But the critical response was deafening: 9.0 and Best New Music from Pitchfork, and a 4-star review from Rolling Stone.

Honestly, it's overwhelming. I'm kind of shocked, Lindeman told GQ from her home in Toronto. Obviously, we worked very hard on the record but I would not have expected the response at all from the world, she adds. Thats not to say that Lindemans previous albums werent well received. But listening to Ignorance is like listening to a new band entirely: The acoustic guitars are traded in for icy synths, and her voice bites like the Canadian cold she experiences daily. I thought my very sweet British folk fans are not going to be stoked on this record, but I'll make another record, life is long, she says.

The Weather Station is a project deeply informed by the climate crisis, and Lindeman began writing Ignorance after a particularly intense year of studying the depressing numbers around it. What emerged wasnt nihilism, but a confidence in communal action: The odds are still against us, but Lidenman feels less alone than ever before. Lots of people are talking about this and lots of people are sharing these feelings. I don't feel crazy anymore, she explains. Looking the future of humanity right in the eye is a daunting task, but studying activism helped Lindeman function as a better bandleader. I'm not a good leader. I prefer to be sitting in the corner, listening, and not having to speak. It was hard, but activism helped me find my voice, she says. Her perspective is jaded by stasis but hopeful that decisive action is on the horizon. With The Weather Station and with our planet, Tamara Lindeman isnt satisfied with the same old, same old.

GQ: How are you feeling about the way people are responding to the record?

Tamara Lindeman: It's strange because I'm still under lockdown here in Toronto, so it's very surreal to experience this broad global response to something I've made while still under a stay at home order, not seeing any human beings. It's kind of metaphysical. It's very interesting because normally as a musician, you have the physical reality of playing a show and people respond to it. Now, it's all very theoretical, but it's astonishing. I just did not think people would have this response.

Have you been able to interrogate why people responded to this record more than your previous albums?

It has a lot to do with the production. It's a much more approachable record, sonically. It's more in line with the way music tends to sound in the modern time, which was a complicated undertaking because my taste is not that. I had to find a way where my taste could align with that, where I felt like it would still be mine. My records in the past have always been slightly esoteric in sound, because I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I'm often chasing a sound that is not considered the norm. I understand that the sound of this record is much more approachable in some sonic sense.

Beyond that, there were things in the record that spoke to a communal experience. Sometimes my songs come from my surroundings. I'm not always sure whether it's my feelings or the feelings around me that I'm writing about. On this album, I did actively think a lot about how music moves in the world and what it does. I was actively thinking about giving voice to things in this blunt, emotional way, in a way that music through time often has done.

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How The Weather Station Learned to Cope With Climate Change - GQ

To get a sense of the breadth and depth of Boston Universitys faculty, one has only to look at the 19 faculty who have just been promoted to the rank of full professor on the Charles River Campus. Their disciplines range from anthropology to business, child health to marine sciences, music performance to speech, and language to hearing sciences.

BU has managed to come out of a very challenging year having made remarkable gains in research, teaching, and innovation. The faculty members we recognize with these promotions are at the heart of that progress, says Jean Morrison, University provost and chief academic officer. These colleagues are excelling and leading. They are discovering solutions to pressing societal challenges, opening entirely new fields of inquiry, and training and inspiring new generations of scholars and rising professionals. We are proud of their accomplishments and excited to support their continued success.

Margaret Beck, College of Arts & Sciences professor of mathematics and statistics, specializes in partial differential equations and dynamical systems, working to develop theoretical tools for understanding the longtime behavior of solutions to such systems. This includes analyzing the existence, bifurcation, and stability of nonlinear waves and coherent structures. She is a past Sloan Research Fellow and 2019 winner of the J. D. Crawford Prize, the premier international award for rising researchers in nonlinear science. Supported by an active grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), she has presented at two of the worlds top conferences on dynamical systems theory and has authored numerous articles in leading mathematical publications.

David Carballo, CAS professor of archaeology, anthropology, and Latin American studies, is a scholar of Mesoamerican archaeology, focusing specifically on the pre-Hispanic civilizations of central Mexico. His current projects at the ancient city of Teotihuacan seek to better understand urbanization, neighborhood organization, the daily life of commoners, and the citys political economy. In addition to his professorial work, he serves as the Universitys assistant provost for general education, overseeing the BU Hub. He has authored three booksincluding, most recently, Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain (Oxford University Press, 2020)edited three others, and published dozens of book chapters and articles in leading archaeological reviews.

Michael Dietze, CAS professor of earth and environment, develops methods for better understanding and predicting ecological systems, studying the ways in which iterative forecasts can improve and accelerate basic environmental science, while at the same time making that science more directly relevant to society. He is the author of Ecological Forecasting (Princeton University Press, 2017), the only existing book exploring this topic, and has received numerous major grants from NASA and NSF, among others, to support his research. He is a past NSF Distinguished Lecturer and has written dozens of articles and peer-reviewed papers in leading scientific publications.

Robinson Wally Fulweiler, CAS professor of earth and environment and of biology, is a marine geochemist who explores the impact of human activity on marine systems, including questions about energy flow and biogeochemical cycling of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and silica), carbon, and oxygen in a variety of environments. She was among the first Sloan Fellows in ocean science, is a past winner of BUs Metcalf Cup and Prize and the CAS Neu Family Award for Excellence in Teaching, and has received numerous grants for research on climate change and evolving ecosystems. A frequent conference presenter, she has published five book chapters and dozens of widely cited papers and articles in top scientific journals.

Shahla Haeri, CAS professor of anthropology, is a scholar of Iranian anthropology who addresses questions of gender, marriage, religion, and womens authority in the Muslim world. Recognized among the pioneers in her field, she has produced cutting-edge ethnographies throughout her career exploring Iranian and Pakistani culture. She has published three books, including The Unforgettable Queens of Islam: Succession, Authority, Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which examines the lives and legacies of Muslim women sovereigns throughout history. She is a past director of the CAS Womens, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and in addition to her books, has authored 11 book chapters and numerous journal articles and media productions on gender relations in Muslim societies.

Lucy Hutyra, CAS professor of earth and environment, specializes in terrestrial ecology, with particular focus on the impact of humans on the carbon cycle. A recognized leader in the fields of urban carbon ecology and carbon cycle science, she has garnered significant support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, US Department of Agriculture, and NSF (including a CAREER Award) for uniquely innovative approaches that integrate atmospheric, biometric, and climatological information to produce new findings. She is a past National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow and winner of the CAS Templeton Award for Excellence in Student Advising. She has delivered dozens of invited presentations and published extensively in leading journals, including Science.

Samuel Isaacson, CAS professor of mathematics and statistics, specializes in mathematical biology, numerical analysis, and mathematical physics, developing computational and mathematical approaches to address problems in molecular cell biology. His recent research has focused on the modeling of biochemical systems at the scale of a single biological cell. Regarded among the top innovators in his field, he is a past Simons Foundation Fellow of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, has published dozens of articles in top journals, and has garnered considerable grant funding, including an NSF CAREER Award, to support his research in biophysical modeling.

Paul Katsafanas, CAS professor of philosophy, is a scholar of Friedrich Nietzsche, applying the 19th-century German philosophers thinking to contemporary examinations of agency and metaethics, moral psychology, and the conception of the self. Recent work explores Nietzsches view on the connection between sacred values, nihilism, and happiness, as well as roots of fanaticism in psychological and evaluative fragility. He has published three acclaimed books, including The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious (Oxford University Press, 2016), along with 17 book chapters, and serves on both the executive committee of the North American Nietzsche Society and the editorial board of the History of Philosophy Quarterly.

Pankaj Mehta, CAS professor of physics, is a theoretical physicist whose research seeks to understand how large-scale, collective behaviors of biological systems emerge from the interaction of many individual componentswork that has applications to biology, data science/machine learning, and quantum optimization. A founding member of BUs Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, he has published extensively in top scientific journals and is a past Sloan Research Fellow in physics, a Simons Investigator in the Simons Foundations Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems program, and corecipient of BUs first Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology. He additionally serves as an active member of the BU Bioinformatics Program, and BUs Center for Regenerative Medicine and Biological Design Center.

Donna Pincus, CAS professor of psychological and brain sciences, specializes in the development of effective, evidence-based treatments for anxiety and related disorders in children and adolescents. A nationally recognized leader in child and family therapy, she is director of the Child and Adolescent Fear and Anxiety Treatment Program at BUs Center for Anxiety & Related Disorders and a 2020 recipient of the American Psychological Associations Florence Halpern Award for distinguished contributions to clinical psychology. She has secured considerable grant support to advance her clinical and home-based research, has authored 5 books, 21 book chapters, and over 90 widely cited articles in top journals, and has presented at dozens of national and international conferences.

Ayse Coskun, College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering, specializes in computer systemsfrom chip to data center designand the development of novel methods to increase energy efficiency, power, and temperature management. She is recognized internationally for algorithmic advances that synchronize software performance, hardware activity, and thermal balance to optimize system performance. A past NSF CAREER Award winner and recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Ernest S. Kuh Early Career Award, she is PI or co-PI on three major ongoing NSF and Sandia National Laboratories grants. She holds six patents, has edited a book, and has authored five book chapters and dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceeding publications.

James Galagan, ENG and School of Medicine professor of biomedical engineering and of microbiology, develops computational and experimental methods to better understand the systems biology of microbial organismsknowledge that is then translated into biomedical applications, including biosensors and wearables. In addition to his professorial work, he is associate director for systems biology at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) and associate director of BUs Precision Diagnostics Center. A past ENG Distinguished Faculty Fellow, he is PI or co-PI on several major ongoing grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US Department of Defense and has published 2 book chapters and nearly 100 journal articles and papers on genomics, molecular and computational biology, electrical engineering, and technology development.

Lucia Lin, College of Fine Arts professor of violin, is a concert violinist of the highest rank among her peers and a past concertmaster with the London Symphony Orchestra. As an artist-teacher at BU, she blends studio teaching with current literature and repertoires of orchestral performance in the training of rising orchestral musicians. She is a past winner of the Tchaikovsky International Violin Competition (considered the Nobel Prize of music) and recipient of three Grammy Awards for recordings produced with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Her 2020 recording with Gloria Dei Cantores of Stabat Mater by Arvo Prt debuted at number 5 on the Billboard Classical Albums Chart. At BU, she is a regular performer with the Muir String Quartet and continues to play with the BSO.

Irena Vodenska, Metropolitan College professor of administrative sciences, is an expert in network theory and complexity science in macroeconomics, using quantitative approaches to model and better understand the dynamics of financial networks and predict market volatility. Recognized as a trailblazer in the use of artificial intelligenceincluding neural networks and deep learning methodologies for natural language processingto analyze corporate performance and global economic trends, she has secured interdisciplinary grants from the European Union, the US Army Research Office, and the NSF to support her research. She has published a book and a book chapter, written extensively in top economic and scientific journals, and is a regularly invited speaker at international conferences.

Michel Anteby, Questrom School of Business professor of management and organizations, examines how individuals relate to their occupations and the organizations to which they belong, with particular focus on how work practices help or hamper efforts to sustain their chosen cultures or identities. He has gained international recognition for his theoretical contributions and field-based studies, is a past Questrom Deans Scholar, and winner of the Academy of Management Annals best paper award. A frequent conference presenter, he has published 2 books, including Manufacturing Morals: The Values of Silence in Business School Education (University of Chicago Press, 2013), as well as 4 book chapters and over 25 articles in respected academic journals.

Paul Carlile, Questrom professor of information systems, explores the relationship between knowledge and innovation in organizations, particularly on breaking down boundaries between areas of expertise to enhance collaboration and innovation. Recognized among the worlds leading experts in this space, he has partnered extensively with the private sector to deliver workplace solutions in the automotive, software, aerospace, and pharmaceutical industries. He is Questroms senior associate dean for online learning and is a past winner of the schools Allen and Kelli Questrom Award for Institutional Leadership. He has published 3 books, including Reimagining Business Education: Insights and Actions from the Business Education Jam (Emerald Publishing, 2016), along with 15 book chapters, and numerous articles in premier business journals.

Cara Stepp, College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences, specializes in the treatment of voice, speech, and swallowing disorders, integrating speech science, computer science, and engineeringamong several other disciplinesto improve diagnosis and rehabilitation of communication-based challenges. A fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, she is editor of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and in 2019 received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She is a past Peter Paul Career Development Professor and NSF CAREER Award recipient, with multiple active federal grants supporting her research. A frequent presenter at conferences, she has published 2 book chapters and 88 articles in science and health journals.

Hyeouk Chris Hahm, School of Social Work professor of social research, bridges epidemiology, theory building, intervention development, and testing to help better understand the causes of depression, self-harm, and suicidal behaviors among Asian American women. A fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research and a member of several editorial boards, she is the chair of her department and has earned national recognition for developing the Asian Womens Action for Resilience and Empowerment (AWARE) program to test interventions and reduce mental health problems in nonclinical populations. She has received major grants from NIH and NSF to support her research, has coedited a book, Asian American Parenting: Family Process and Intervention (Springer, 2017) and over 50 journal articles, and is a past winner of the Outstanding Mentor Award from BUs Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

Kathleen Corriveau, Wheelock College of Education & Human Development professor of applied human development, specializes in early childhood learning, focusing on childrens cognitive and social development and how they discern trustworthy sources of information. A past NSF CAREER Award winner and Peter Paul Career Development Professor, among other honors, she is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, which named her a Rising Star in 2015. Her research has received extensive national media coverage, and she is a PI or co-PI on several major grants from the NSF and the John Templeton Foundation. She coedited the book The Questioning Child: Insights from Psychology and Education (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and has additionally published 11 book chapters and nearly 70 articles in child psychology and development journals.

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Meet the 19 Charles River Campus Faculty Promoted to Full Professorship - BU Today

PARIS IN THE EARLY 1980s: 68 is in the rear-view and the soixante-huitards are running the show. Mitterrand is president; the welfare state is being expanded. Meanwhile, Frances former colonial subjects are existing in a state of perpetual subalternity, destined to prepare the takeout food and deliver the drugs of their white counterparts.

This is the reality that the memorable unnamed narrator of The Sympathizer steps into at the start of Viet Thanh Nguyens new novel. A refugee several times over, hes fleeing both Vietnam, where he was brutally tortured by his own allies in a reeducation camp, and the United States, which has rejected him in its own fashion. With The Committed, the captain now sets his sights on the contradictions of another colonial empire. If you thought the US was a warmongering, racist hypocrite of epic proportions, just wait until you hear about France!

Nguyen is a perceptive, scathing, and genuinely funny writer, qualities which suffused The Sympathizer and are somewhat more unevenly on display here. Other artists (Marie NDiaye, Michael Haneke, Kamel Daoud) who have explored the long and brutal legacy of the French Empire have done it more subtly and to more devastating effect. In comparison, the captains observations as he arrives to his new place of refuge feel, well, American: obvious and somewhat oversimplified. There are near-constant comparisons between the two countries ways of doing colonialism. I felt a little like I was reading Adam Gopnik if hed been sent to a reeducation camp and forced to mainline Fanon.

What these observations are not, though, is sanitized or sentimental. There are no rose-colored glasses to be found here: the captains Paris is the Paris of pervasive dog shit, filthy bistros, pigeons, drunks, casual police brutality, and the priphrie. Forced to clean toilets at the worst Asian restaurant in Paris, he takes to selling drugs, disguising himself as a Japanese tourist to bypass suspicion as he goes to visit his clients. It works on the street, the cops look right past him, their attentions focused on Black and Arab immigrants instead. Nguyen accurately and convincingly depicts a city that both leans on and marginalizes its immigrant and refugee populations. He also illustrates what the contours of that city might feel like to someone who is unwanted in the uncanny way that Parisians make any outsider feel unwanted, but also unwanted because he is Vietnamese, a refugee, a boat person, as one of the supposedly liberal friends of his aunt reminds him.

Over the course of the novel, the narrators already divided consciousness splinters further. Here more commonly referred to as Crazy Bastard, hes haunted by visions of people more ideologically committed than he: the two men he killed in Los Angeles; Bon, still living, who hates communists with such a fervor that he will not hesitate to kill his own best friend; and the communist agent who was gang-raped as he watched and did nothing to stop it, in what remains the most nauseating depiction of sexual violence that I have read. Wracked by guilt, our narrator tries to atone for these sins by doing things like reading Julia Kristeva, performing cunnilingus, and saving the life of a rival drug dealer, which mostly feel like embarrassingly insufficient acts of restitution. But he is also cracking up, the controlled interplay between his two selves that Nguyen explored in The Sympathizer collapsing and dissolving.

The insistence on cycling between pronouns to depict this disintegration often feels more like a gimmick than a convincing literary device. Still, Crazy Bastard remains a fascinating narrator: mordant, impotent but lascivious, filled with shame and rancor, attuned to absurdity, and prone to long bouts of philosophical rumination. He spends much of this novel in pursuit of oblivion, which he courts via dope, cognac, the cheeky use of an alias, V Danh, which means anonymous in Vietnamese, the mindless comforts of a high-class sanatorium, and an extended torture session that nearly delivers him. Though The Sympathizer planted the seeds for this nihilism, that novel ended on a surprising note of hope. The death drive has clearly won out here. The novels epigraph is Nothings more real than nothing, a line from the Franco-Cambodian filmmaker and Killing Fields survivor Rithy Panh, and repetitions on that theme abound.

Then there are the supporting players: a lawyer who defends war criminals and sleeps with the narrators aunt, to his confusion and titillation; a Senegalese bouncer obsessed with Aim Csaire; a troupe of diminutive and fiendishly scatological sidekicks called the seven dwarves; a bourgeois socialist politician, and someone described simply as the Maoist PhD. I cant quite make up my mind about these characters. No matter how richly drawn, most of them remain types, designed to say things about power, war, race, gender, and colonialism, or merely to provide comic relief. As the novel progresses, the socialist politician reveals himself to be a virulent racist rather than the initially assumed run-of-the-mill paternalist; otherwise, there is little in the way of meaningful character development.

But Nguyen is also articulating a perverse truth here about the corrosive effect of nation-states, political ideology, and imperialism on the individual. In a world where colonial empires have manufactured and enshrined racial difference, people are never really just people. At one point, the narrator tries to give a lecture to a pair of Algerian drug dealers about banding together to fight against their common colonial overlord and ends up barely escaping with his life. Im sorry I dont know any racial slurs for you, Crazy Bastard politely tells one of them later.

Nguyen is a maximalist par excellence, and the furious pace of this novel rarely lets up. The Committed includes one seven-page sentence that begins with the narrator getting beaten up in a park and ends with him trying heroin, and a scene in which a Corsican business associate of his waxes philosophic while cycling through various positions of the Kama Sutra. We move from torture session to brothel and back again. The narrator is often sobbing. There is an orgy involving cartoonishly racist costumes (a funny riff on the libidinal power of race) and a truly disgusting series of interludes revolving around a clogged toilet. Nguyen relishes in articulating the essential scumminess of humans of all stripes, and he has a particular knack for revealing just how pathetic and vile our supposed masters of the universe are. No stone revealing human filth is left unturned.

There is almost no respite from this, and thus almost no room for the reader to feel the full weight of the horror that underlies this world one where ideological allegiances cleave the oldest and dearest of friendships, and the children of colonized nations fight to the death for a drug route while their actual oppressors stay comfortably high, shielded from the violence their indulgences have produced. That may be the real nihilistic point that this novel is making: that centuries of colonial pillage and subjugation have created a world in which solidarity does not and cannot exist. Im not sure if I agree, but the point hits home regardless.

The moments of pause, when they do come, testify powerfully to this reverberating violence, and to Nguyens considerable skills as a novelist. I was struck by a scene where the narrator wakes up at a brothel to encounter Madeleine, the Cambodian sex worker assigned him, distraught over a newspaper headline exposing mass graves in her home country. He is surprised to find that she blames him for the news, or at least what he represents: Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 and occupied the country for a decade, though the Vietnamese are not responsible for this particular atrocity.

The night before, Madeleine was all artifice, perfectly playing the role of doting, hyperfeminine mistress. Now, in the cold light of morning, she is revealed: alone and far from home, surviving on what she can, and every bit as haunted as the narrator. He tells her goodbye, but shes closed her eyes against him. Coffee and a hashish cigarette serve as Madeleines madeleine, transporting her back into a past that will never exist again. [S]he was undoubtedly watching a movie only she could see, the narrator thinks, the rickety reel of memories in which everyone she knew was still alive.

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Where Solidarity Cannot Exist: On Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Committed - lareviewofbooks