PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

Bugün Peter'ın yeni başlayacağı travelblogla ilgili konuşurken bana şimdiye kadar okuduğum seyahatnameleri sordu. Bu soruya verilebilicek en zayıf yanıtı vermiş olduğumu Peter'a aynı soruyu yönelttiğimde aldığım cevapla birlikte direk fark ettim. Bana patagonya seyahatim öncesi verilebilicek en güzel tavsiyeyi verdi. Birincisi Bruce Chatwin'in 1977'de Patagonya'ya yaptığı seyahate ait notları , ikincisi de tabiki Patrick Leigh Fermor'ın A time of Gifts'i. Peter'ın traveolblogunu sabırsızlıkla beklerken yine onun bana kitap öncesi tavsiye ettiği makaleye göz gezdirdim. Patrick L. Fermor'ın hayatıyla ilgili kısa bir özet niteliği taşıyan bu makale- söyleşiyi okuduktan sonra tabiki de kendimi alamayıp başka bir sürü makale okudum ve şu an bu inanılmaz adamla ilgili daha önceden hiç bir şey duymamış olmamı feci garipsiyorum. Düzenli bir National Geographics okuyucusu olmamama bağlıyorum, yarın ilk işim patrick leigh fermor'ın a time of gifts'ini almak olucak.Şimdilik telegraph'ta çıkan söyleşiyle idare edelim, yakın zamanda kitabı okur okumaz ve bbc'nin bu beyle ilgili yaptığı belgeseli izler izlemez daha detaylı bir şeyler karalayacağım.

İşte telgraph'ta çıkan söyleşi

At 18 he left home to walk the length of Europe; at 25, as an SOE agent, he kidnapped the German commander of Crete; now at 93, Patrick Leigh Fermor, arguably the greatest living travel writer, is publishing the nearest he may come to an autobiography - and finally learning to type. William Dalrymple meets him at home in Greece

'You've got to bellow a bit,' Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor said, inclining his face in my direction, and cupping his ear. 'He's become an economist? Well, thank God for that. I thought you said he'd become a Communist.'

He took a swig of retsina and returned to his lemon chicken.

'I'm deaf,' he continued. 'That's the awful truth. That's why I'm leaning towards you in this rather eerie fashion. I do have a hearing aid, but when I go swimming I always forget about it until I'm two strokes out, and then it starts singing at me. I get out and suck it, and with luck all is well. But both of them have gone now, and that's one reason why I am off to London next week. Glasses, too. Running out of those very quickly. Occasionally, the one that is lost is found, but their numbers slowly diminish…'

He trailed off. 'The amount that can go wrong at this age - you've no idea. This year I've acquired something called tunnel vision. Very odd, and sometimes quite interesting. When I look at someone I can see four eyes, one of them huge and stuck to the side of the mouth. Everyone starts looking a bit like a Picasso painting.'

He paused and considered for a moment, as if confronted by the condition for the first time. 'And, to be honest, my memory is not in very good shape either. Anything like a date or a proper name just takes wing, and quite often never comes back. Winston Churchill - couldn't remember his name last week.

'Even swimming is a bit of a trial now,' he continued, 'thanks to this bloody clock thing they've put in me - what d'they call it? A pacemaker. It doesn't mind the swimming. But it doesn't like the steps on the way down. Terrific nuisance.'


We were sitting eating supper in the moonlight in the arcaded L-shaped cloister that forms the core of Leigh Fermor's beautiful house in Mani in southern Greece. Since the death of his beloved wife Joan in 2003, Leigh Fermor, known to everyone as Leigh Fermor, has lived here alone in his own Elysium with only an ever-growing clowder of darting, mewing, paw-licking cats for company. He is cooked for and looked after by his housekeeper, Elpida, the daughter of the inn-keeper who was his original landlord when he came to Mani for the first time in 1962.

It is the most perfect writer's house imaginable, designed and partially built by Leigh Fermor himself in an old olive grove overlooking a secluded Mediterranean bay. It is easy to see why, despite growing visibly frailer, he would never want to leave. Buttressed by the old retaining walls of the olive terraces, the whitewashed rooms are cool and airy and lined with books; old copies of the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books lie scattered around on tables between Attic vases, Indian sculptures and bottles of local ouzo.

A study filled with reference books and old photographs lies across a shady courtyard. There are cicadas grinding in the cypresses, and a wonderful view of the peaks of the Taygetus falling down to the blue waters of the Aegean, which are so clear it is said that in some places you can still see the wrecks of Ottoman galleys lying on the seabed far below.

There is a warm smell of wild rosemary and cypress resin in the air; and from below comes the crash of the sea on the pebbles of the foreshore. Yet there is something unmistakably melancholy in the air: a great traveller even partially immobilised is as sad a sight as an artist with failing vision or a composer grown hard of hearing.

I had driven down from Athens that morning, through slopes of olives charred and blackened by last year's forest fires. I arrived at Kardamyli late in the evening. Although the area is now almost metropolitan in feel compared to what it was when Leigh Fermor moved here in the 1960s (at that time he had to move the honey-coloured Taygetus stone for his house to its site by mule as there was no road) it still feels wonderfully remote and almost untouched by the modern world.

When Leigh Fermor first arrived in Mani in 1962 he was known principally as a dashing commando. At the age of 25, as a young agent of Special Operations Executive (SOE), he had kidnapped the German commander in Crete, General Kreipe, and returned home to a Distinguished Service Order and movie version of his exploits, Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) with Dirk Bogarde playing him as a handsome black-shirted guerrilla.

It was in this house that Leigh Fermor made the startling transformation - unique in his generation - from war hero to literary genius. To meet, Leigh Fermor may still have the speech patterns and formal manners of a British officer of a previous generation; but on the page he is a soaring prose virtuoso with hardly a single living equal

It was here in the isolation and beauty of Kardamyli that Leigh Fermor developed his sublime prose style, and here that he wrote most of the books that have made him widely regarded as the world's greatest travel writer, as well as arguably our finest living prose-poet. While his densely literary and cadent prose style is beyond imitation, his books have become sacred texts for several generations of British writers of non-fiction, including Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Philip Marsden, Nicholas Crane and Rory Stewart, all of whom have been inspired by the persona he created of the bookish wanderer: the footloose scholar in the wilds, scrambling through remote mountains, a knapsack full of books on his shoulder.

As Anthony Lane put it in the New Yorker, Leigh Fermor 'was, and remains, an Englishman, with so much living to his credit that the lives conducted by the rest of us seem barely sentient - pinched and paltry things, laughably provincial in their scope… We fret about our kids' Sats, whereas this man, when he was barely more than a kid himself, walked from Rotterdam to Istanbul. In his sixties he swam the Hellespont, in homage to Lord Byron - his hero, and to some extent his template. In between he has joined a cavalry charge, observed a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, and plunged into a love affair with a princess. He has feasted atop a moonlit tower, with wine and roast lamb hauled up by rope. He has dwelt soundlessly among Trappist monks.'

For myself, it was the reading of his travel books while at Cambridge that inspired me to attempt to follow in his footsteps. With a paperback of Leigh Fermor's in my backpack, I set off to Jerusalem following the route of the Crusaders during my first summer vacation. Meeting my hero for the first time at Bruce Chatwin's house, just before the publication of my first book in 1989, was the nearest thing I have had to a formal graduation ceremony as a writer, the moment when you suddenly feel that maybe you really have passed out of your novitiate.

Foremost among Leigh Fermor's books are his two glorious Greek travelogues, Mani and Roumeli; an exquisite short study of monasticism, A Time to Keep Silence; and most celebrated of all, an account of his journey in the early 1930s, travelling on foot, sleeping in hayricks and castles 'like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar', from Holland to Constantinople. On and off for nearly 70 years Fermor has been working on a trilogy about this epic walk. The first volume - and many would say his masterpiece - A Time of Gifts was finally published in 1977. The second, Between the Woods and the Water, followed nine years later. Since then, 22 years have passed with no sign of volume three, the book that should take us to the gates of Byzantium.

In the Paras
Patrick Leigh Fermor was a major in the Paras during the Second World War

Leigh Fermor is now 93 and his fans are getting anxious. But travel writers have longer professional life expectancies than most - Norman Lewis, for example, produced four books between his 88th birthday and his death five years later - so we should not give up hope. Indeed, on a low table when Leigh Fermor showed me into his study, lay an 8in-high pile of manuscript, some of it ring-bound, and some in folders, on which was scribbled in red felt-tip: Vol 3.

In the meantime, Fermor fans have a small savoury to keep them going until the final course is served. This week John Murray is bringing out In Tearing Haste, a volume of letters between Leigh Fermor and the last surviving member of the Mitford sisterhood: Debo Devonshire, his close friend for nearly half a century. The letters are the nearest thing Leigh Fermor may ever get to writing an autobiography, faithfully chronicling his movements since the mid-1950s with the same detailed, painterly, highly written style that he uses in his travelogues.

Though inevitably slighter than his more polished work, the book includes wonderful accounts of some of his most celebrated adventures, such as his disastrous visit to Somerset Maugham at Cap Ferrat. Here he describes the elderly Maugham's face as 'so discoloured and green that it looks as though he has been rotting in the Bastille, or chained to a bench of a galley, or inside an iron mask for half a century'.

Having committed the faux-pas of appearing to draw attention to Maugham's stammer at dinner, Leigh Fermor, who had initially been invited to stay for a week, was approached by his host at the end of the evening who offered him 'a hand as cold as a toad, with the words "W-w-well I'll s-s-say g-good-b-b-bye now in c-case I'm not up b-by the t-time y-you l-leave."?'


It emerged that Leigh Fermor's proof of the book had yet to reach the Peloponnese, so after supper I produced my own copy. He frowned: there had been a disagreement between the authors and their publisher over the cover produced by the artist John Craxton, who has illustrated all Leigh Fermor's book since the 1950s, and the book was now covered with something more sketchy, and clearly not at all to Leigh Fermor's liking. 'Debo and I complained,' he said, holding the book almost to the end of his nose and peering disapprovingly at the illustration, 'but they kept on about business trends or some such jargon. What was it now? Market forces, that's it. Well I never…'

As he flicked through the proof, I asked if the rumours were true: that after a lifetime of writing in longhand, he was now finally learning to type, the quicker to finish the third volume of his masterpiece.

'Well, not exactly,' he replied. 'At the moment I seem to be collecting typewriters. I've got four now. People keep giving me their old ones. But it is true, I am planning to take typing lessons in Evesham this September.' He paused, before adding, 'In truth, I am absolutely longing to get down to it, before my sight gets any worse.'


Patrick Leigh Fermor was born in London in 1915 to Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, the director general of the Geological Survey of India, and the 'sophisticated and wild' Eileen Ambler. His mother was a bohemian and highly literate woman, who loved reading to her children and encouraging them to learn poetry by heart. She had been brought up in the wilds of Bihar, as a result of which Leigh Fermor can still sing, It's a Long Way to Tipperary in Hindi. 'Although I was brought up in England,' he remembered, 'India was a presence in the household, like voices in the next room.'

Almost immediately Leigh Fermor was deserted by his parents. It was the war, and they had to return to India; given the threat of U-boats, it was decided to leave the young Leigh Fermor in England so that someone would survive if the ship were torpedoed. The boy was sent to a farm in Northamptonshire where he was allowed to run free. 'I think it formed me, you know,' he said. 'Made me restless and curious. I was constantly climbing trees and hayricks.'

When his mother and sister returned to collect him three and half years later, he ran away from these 'beautiful strangers'. In retrospect, Leigh Fermor thinks the experience of 'those marvellously lawless years unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint', something that marked the rest of his career, especially at school, where he was expelled from a variety of establishments until finding happiness at 'a co-educational and very advanced school for difficult children'.

After that school was closed down due to a series of 'vaguely guessed at improprieties', Leigh Fermor moved on to the King's School Canterbury. He liked the fact it was founded during the reign of Justinian 'when fragments of Thor and Odin had barely stopped smouldering in the Kentish woods'; but his teachers were less sure about their new pupil: 'He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness,' his housemaster wrote, shortly before expelling him. Unqualified to join Sandhurst, the direction in which his family had been pushing him, he attended crammers in London where he began to write poetry and to read voraciously.

One of the books he chanced across was The Station, Robert Byron's newly published book about his travels through the monasteries of Mount Athos. A subsequent meeting with Byron in a 'blurred and saxophone-haunted nightclub' made Leigh Fermor, aged 18, ache to follow in the author's footsteps and visit 'serpent-haunted dragon-green Byzantium'. He had also read George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933. With nothing to keep him in Britain he set off, having first borrowed a knapsack that had accompanied Byron to Athos, aiming to walk to that living fragment of Byzantium while living as cheaply as Orwell: 'I loved the idea of roughing it.'

On the wet afternoon of December 9, 1933, the year that Hitler came to power, as 'a thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats', Leigh Fermor left London, boarding a Dutch steamer at Irongate Wharf. His rucksack contained pencils, drawing pads, notebooks, The Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace. He would not lay eyes on Britain again until January 1937, when he returned 'for better or for worse, utterly changed by my travels'.

'I thought I'd keep a diary and turn it into a book, which of course is what I did,' he said. 'Except I am still writing that book more than 70 years later.' It was not just that the journey gave Leigh Fermor the subject for his lifework, it 'broadened my mind, taught me history, literature and languages. It opened everything up: the world, civilisation and Europe. It also gave me a capacity for solitude and a sense of purpose. It taught me to read and to look at things. It was a great education. I didn't go to university, I went travelling instead.'
Deborah Devonshire

Deborah Devonshire in 1941. Letters between her and Leigh Fermor are the subject of his new book

The journey also led him to meeting one of the two great loves of his life, a beautiful Byzantine princess named Balasha Cantacuzene. Leigh Fermor met Balasha in Athens, to which he walked after finally reaching Athos in early 1937. She was 12 years older than him, and had just separated from her husband, a Spanish diplomat. 'She was 32, and I was 20. We met at just the right time and fell into each other's arms. It was instant, we clicked immediately. We went off together and lived in a watermill in the Peloponnese for five months. I was writing, she was painting. It was heavenly.'

From there the couple moved back to Balasha's rambling country estate in the dales of Moldavia, where they moved in with Balasha's sister. Leigh Fermor has written that the two sisters were 'good, beautiful, courageous, gifted, imaginative, immersed in literature and the arts, kind, funny, unconventional; everybody loved them and so did I.'

For Leigh Fermor, this was one of the happiest periods of his life. For two years he lived there, savouring the last remnants of a world that was just about to disappear: 'Her family was part of an old-fashioned, French-speaking, Tolstoyan, land-owning world: country-dwelling noblesse of the sort described by Turgenev. They were intensely civilised people. The house was an old manor house, not grand, but delightful and full of pictures and books.

There was a butler who was always a bit tight, and no electricity, so we read with lamps and wicks. I spent the time reading my way through the whole of French literature and playing chess - when I wasn't making a hash of writing this book.' He paused, then added, 'Of course I wanted to marry her, but she said, "Don't be ridiculous - I'm much older than you."?'

Both the romance and the world in which it was set were ended for ever by the war. 'We were aware that war clouds were looming, but didn't realise how serious it was. We were out on a picnic, some of us on horseback and some in open carriages, when someone shouted across the fields that the Germans had gone into Poland. I made the decision at once: if war had broken out I had to join the Army. I thought it would be over in six months.'

In the event, Leigh Fermor did not lay eyes on Balasha again for a quarter of a century. With the end of the war came the Iron Curtain, and Balasha could no more get out of Romania than Leigh Fermor could get in. When he eventually managed to find a way to get in as a journalist, he found Balasha living in poverty in a Bucharest garret, surviving by teaching English, French and painting. 'We sat up and scarcely went to bed for 48 hours, laughing the whole time: "Do you remember?" By this time I was with Joan. Balasha took it all in such a philosophical and charming way. She was an extraordinary person.'

It emerged that the Cantacuzenes had been branded 'elements of putrid background' and Balasha's lands had been confiscated soon after the end of the war. She had lost everything. The day Ceausescu's commissar turned up she and her sister had been given quarter of an hour to pack. The house had subsequently been turned into a lunatic asylum. In Leigh Fermor's account of the reunion, he wrote how he 'found them in their attic.

In spite of the interval, the fine looks of my friends, the thoughtful clear glance and the humour were all intact; it was as though we had parted a few months ago, instead of 26 years… [But] early thoughts of leaving Romania lapsed in the end, and they resisted the idea partly from feeling it was too late in the day; secretly, perhaps they also shrank from being a burden to anyone. One by one the same dread illness carried them away.'

The same war that destroyed Leigh Fermor's great love affair also made his name as a man of action. From Moldavia he returned to Britain and enlisted in the Irish Guards. As a fluent Greek speaker he was soon singled out for intelligence work, and was sent first to Albania and then to Greece as a liaison officer working with the Greek army. After the fall of Greece he found his way to Crete just in time to fight in vain against the Nazi invasion. From there he was evacuated to Alexandria where he set up house with several other young intelligence agents and a refugee Polish countess, Sophie Tarnowska, who moved in with her few possessions: 'a bathing costume, an evening gown, a uniform and two pet mongooses'.

Before long Leigh Fermor was sent back into Crete to work with the Cretan resistance. He and an odd collection of recently enlisted Greek-speaking classical scholars and archaeologists were parachuted into the occupied island disguised as shepherds and established a troglodyte existence under the stalactites of mountain caves, commanded by a Fellow of All Souls. The port from which Leigh Fermor set off was captured by Rommel's advancing Afrika Korps the day after he left. 'It was a low moment in the war: the Germans seemed to be advancing in triumph in all directions.' It was partly for this reason that Leigh Fermor's bosses gave permission for his wild scheme to raise morale: kidnapping the German commander of the island.

In Leigh Fermor's own account of the abduction of General Kreipe, the climax comes not as the general's staff car is stopped at night by a British SOE partly dressed in stolen German uniforms, nor as the Cretan partisans help smuggle the general into the highlands and hence to a waiting British submarine; but instead as 'a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida'.

'We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the general, half to himself, slowly said, "Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte". It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off… The general's blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain top to mine - and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" It was very strange. "Ja, Herr General." As though for a moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.'

It is an archetypal Leigh Fermor anecdote: fabulously erudite and romantic, and just a little showy. For his greatest virtues as a writer are also his greatest vices: his incantational love of great waterfalls of words, combined with the wild scholarly enthusiasms of a brilliant autodidact. On the rare occasions he gets it wrong, Leigh Fermor has been responsible for some of the most brightly coloured purple passages in travel literature. But at his best he is sublime, unbeatable.

Back in Egypt, Leigh Fermor met his future wife, and the companion for the second half of his life. Joan Eyres Monsell was then working for the intelligence department as a cipher clerk. 'She had a house near the Ibn Tulun mosque, and was very go-ahead,' Leigh Fermor remembers. 'She was a nurse when the war broke out, and had lived in Spain and Algiers before Cairo. We met at a party and hit it off very quickly.'

Leigh Fermor in Greece
Leigh Fermor has lived in the town of Kardamyli in southern Greece since 1962

When the war was over, Joan and Leigh Fermor remained in Greece, wandering the country and initially finding work in the British Council, whose Athens office was then run by the other great British philhellene of that generation, Sir Steven Runciman. But as ever, Leigh Fermor's wanderlust soon got the better of him, and before long he had resigned. In 1949 they caught a ship to the Caribbean, a trip that resulted in two books: a travelogue, The Traveller's Tree, and a fine novel, The Violins of St Jacques. Both were written partially in Trappist monasteries, an experience that Leigh Fermor turned into his third and most tightly written book, A Time to Keep Silence.

It was in the early 1960s that Leigh Fermor married Joan and settled down with her in Kardamyli, to continue his life of writing travel books, interspersed with weekly book reviews for Cyril Connolly's Sunday Times book pages. It is this more settled phase of life that is so well captured in the new book of letters between Leigh Fermor and Deborah Devonshire. There are lovely descriptions of Leigh Fermor and Joan finding the bay at Kardamyli; the struggles to finish A Time of Gifts; Leigh Fermor's surprise and pleasure at its rapturous reception; and the slow writing of its sequel.

The final 50 pages of the book have a more melancholy tone, as their friends begin to die, one by one: the English ones often of cancer, the Cretans, more dramatically, falling from precipices, and the like. Finally come the deaths of both Debo's husband, Andrew, and of Joan Leigh Fermor: 'The cats miss Joan bitterly,' Leigh Fermor writes at the end of the book. 'They are not the only ones… I keep thinking of things I must remember to tell Joan at lunch, knowing they could make her laugh. Letters addressed to her still arrive from distant parts, but even they are dying out now, and increasingly it's only subscriptions to be renewed.'

Leigh Fermor enjoys a two-hour siesta after lunch - 'Egyptian PT' as he calls it. But on my last day in Kardamyli he emerged at 4pm, smiling from ear to ear. 'Didn't sleep a wink,' he said. 'Got quite carried away reading the book. I was rather dreading it, but was pleasantly surprised.' He held up the proof approvingly. 'Some passages are really awfully good.'

After our lunch we went up the mountain beside the house to see the Byzantine chapel around which the ashes of his friend Bruce Chatwin had been scattered. The chapel was very small - only a little larger than a big garden shed. It had a domed red-tiled roof and round arcaded windows. It lay in the rocky fields near the village of Exchori, high above Kardamyli, and was built from stone the colour of halloumi cheese.

The sun was slowly sinking over the hills at the end of a hot day; from the higher slopes, the tinkle of goat bells cut through the drowsy background whirr of cicadas as shepherd children led their flocks back for the night. It is perfect, beautiful, a peaceful place for anyone to end their days, and as we headed back I asked Leigh Fermor whether he would like to be buried there, too.

'Oh no,' he replied instantly. 'Joan is in Dumbleton. I'd rather like to end up there.'

It's a characteristic of so many of the greatest English travellers that they come back home in the end. TE Lawrence, for example, finally recognised 'that I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin', and the same is true of Leigh Fermor. For all his years in Greece, he remains almost the archetypal Englishman, in its best possible form: 'My heart is in both,' he said as we headed downhill. 'England is not a foreign country to me.' He paused and looked down over the Aegean, glinting now like broken glass far below us: 'I do love both countries,' he said as we headed on home. 'I really do.'

ECONOMY 101

Üniversitenin ilk senesinde almak zorunda olduğum macro , micro ekonomi derslerini ilk defa ders programımda görünce başta hayata küsmüştüm , benim gibi sayılarla hiç bir şekilde arası iyi olmayan,gazetenin ekonomi sayfalarını çay altılığı yapan birinin ekonomi hakkında bir şeyler öğrenmek zorunda kalması , o zamanki değerlendirmeme göre kaçınılmaz bir felaketti. Felaketlerin bazen mucizelere dönüştüğü kanısına çoğunlukla katılmasamda şu son dört sene içerisinde , en sevmediğim ve felaket olarak değerlendirdiğim ve zamanla mucize olarak değerlendirdiğim iki şeyden biri , ekonomi , diğeri ise çok alakasız olucak ama kereviz. Kerevizde ---hayatımda babaannemle ilişkilendirdiğim ötürü ---çoğu zaman felaketle sonuçlanan mide spazmlarına yol açıyordu , çiya , borsa ve kanaat sağolsun İstanbul'da geçirdiğim dört sene içerisinde mucizevi bir tada dönüştü. Kerevizi bir kenara bırakıp ekonomiye geçiyorum . Hiç bir şey anlamadığım her grafik yorumlayışımda arz-talep ilişkilerini birbirine karıştırışım başta beni beklediğim bir bunalıma sürükledi .Daha sonra arkadaşlarımın notlarından ve copy centerdaki ezber grafik yorumlarından hiç bir şey anlayamayacağımı fark ettiğimde en azından ilk dönemin yarısındaydım . İlk işim hocamı değiştirmek oldu. Asaf Savaş Akat'ın ayağının altında kedilerin dolandığı o garip kalın ve boğuk sesinin anfinin son koltuklarında uyuklayanlara ninni gibi geldiği derslerine girmeye başladım. İlk başta umutsuzdum, en basit terimleri , mesela kullanmayı çok sevdiğim fırsat maliyetini dahi anlamaya mecalim yoktu. Üstünden defalarca keçeli kalemlerle geçtiğim notlarım , kapkalın ekonomi kitabım , adeta bu işi kotaramayacağımın en zarif örnekleri olarak benimle dersten derse sürüklendiler. Daha sonra gerçekten Asaf Hoca'yı dinlemeye çalıştım , Özal'la ilgili yaptığı espiriler , çinlilerle ilgili verdiği örnekler , defalarca usanmadan anlattığı kocaman kocaman şemalar işe yaradı , gayet iyi notlarla saçmasapan fotokopilere muhtaç kalmadan geçmeyi başardım.Daha sonra her IR öğrencisi gibi üç sene içerisinde bölge politikalarında ve Avrupa siyasi tarihinde ekonominin sınıfsal gelişimlerde ve devrimlerde ve savaşlardaki etkileri ki biliyorum bunu derken çok büyük bir şeyden bahsediyorum ama emin olun oldukça üstü kapalı bir şekilde bahsedilir, etkisini incelemek dışında ekonomiyle herhangi bir ekonomi ,veya finans öğrencisinin muhattab olmak zorunda olduğu kadar içli dışlı olmak zorunda kalmadım. Kalmadığım için sevindiğim zamanlar oldu ama çoğunlukla bir şeylerin temel oluşssa bile eksik kaldığından emindim , çünkü ilk sene aldığım ekonomi derslerini nerdeyse medschoolda bile zorunlu hale getirecekler o kadar temel kavramlardan bahsediyoruz. Yine de usanmadım , son seneme gelene kadar Economist'e göz atmaya devam ettim yılmadım diyebilirim, yinede anlamadığım bir çok şey var. Hala Ntvde Asaf ve Taner hoca bir şeylerden bahsederken boşboş baktığım zamanların çoğunlukta olduğunu düşünüyorum. Okulun son senesi Soli Hoca'dan aldığım American Foreign Policy ,sanırım ,bu temel kavramların ilk defa yerli yerine oturması ve ekonomi ve siyasetin arasındaki gerilimli ilişkiyi kafamda dahada netleştirmem açısından benim için çok faydalı oldu. Amerikan siyasi tarihiyle ilgili neredeyse yaptığım her okumada seçilen başkanlar ve ekonomi politikaları ,dış politikada bazılarına göre çok büyük sapmaların olduğu ki ---herşeyin sonunda ben asla böyle düşünmüyorum , daha ilk kurulduğu günden itibaren manifest destiny le başlayarak ekonomi'nin ABD dış politikasındaki önemi arasında kurulan sıkı bağı fark ettikten sonra--- , ekonominin bundan sonraki akademik hayatımda asla esgeçemeyeceğim bir konu olduğunu fark ettim. Buraya geldiğimden beri Flacso'yla olan her görüşmem de okumam gereken makale ve kitapları alacağım dersleri gördükçe bunun bir tahminden ibaret olmadığını da kısa süre de anladım. Son bir kaç haftadır ABD'de Great Slop sonrası yaşanan en feci ekonomik krizin benim gibi uluslararası ilişkiler öğrencilerine çok canlı bir şekilde her gazete başlığından kolaylıkla görüldüğü üzere öğreticek çok şeyi var. Ve bu şeyleri doğru haber kaynaklarından objektif bir şekilde analiz edebilme kabiliyetine sahip ekonomistlerden öğrenmek şart. Diğer türlü ideolojilerin etkisi altında , günlük kar kaygısı güden yüzeysel analizlere yer veren ekonomi haberlerinin dayanılmaz hafifliği altında ezilebiliriz. Bunun önüne geçmek için benim Soli Hocanın tavsiyesiyle başvurduğum ilk isim Paul Krugman. Krugman , başta Amerikan siyaseti ve ekonomisi arasındaki bağlantıyı ve daha sonra uluslararası ekonomik sistemi kavramamda en çok etkili olan isim diyebilirim. Her ne kadar şu ana kadar akademik hiç bir makalesini okumasam da benim gibi bu konuya çok dar bir çerçeveden bakan insanların bile anlayabiliceği bir düzeyde oldukça net analizleri yaptığı kitaplarını hepsini okuma şansım oldu. Sene içerisinde Toronto'dan bir arkadaşımın getirdiği son kitabı The Conscience of a Liberal , Amerikan iç siyasetinin ve şimdiye kadar Herbert Hoover'dan itibaren bu ülkeyi yönetmiş bütün liderlerin özellikle FDR ve sonrasındakilerin ekonomi programlarına yönelik inanılmaz bir analiz. Ve tabiki yazarın yaşı ve deneyimleri de göz önünde bulundurulursa soğuk savaş sonrası ülkeyi yönetenlerin sebep olduğu ekonomik çalkantılara değişimlere yönelik yapılmış eleştirileri daha da dikkat çekiyor. Paul Krugman'ının bütün kitaplarında özellikle, The Great Unrevaling de ve The Conscience of a Liberal da , FDR'ın yarattığı ve Reagan'nın bozguna uğrattığı New Deal akımıyla temelleri atılan Amerikan Orta Sınıfının perspektifinden bir şeyler bulmak mümkün. Geçen hafta başkanlık münazaraları sırasında bir çok amerikalının dış politikadaki gelişmelerden çok daha fazla önem verdiği taxcut/health insurance problemi iki başkan adayı tarafından da farklı şekillerde çözüm önerileriyle çok tartışıldı. Krugman'nın özellikle son kitabında ayrı bir bölüm olarak incelediği bu içinden çıkılmaz problem , bugün dünyada bir çok ülke tarafından kolay olmasada aşılmışa benziyor. Krugman'nın Amerika için önerisi tabiki de Obama'nın "orta sınıfı" lehine işleyecek bir plana daha yakın. Bu yüzden şu anki ekonomik çıkmaz içerisinde Mccain'nin önerdiği üzere vergilerin düşürülmesi ve özel sigortapazarına canlılık getiricek kendi sigortanı kendin al kampanyası ne yazık ki felaketle sonuçlanabilir.Bunu daha iyi anlamak için yine Krugman'nın analizlerinin bu konuda bir numara olduğunu düşünerek New York Times'taki son yazısını buraya koyuyorum. Krugman'nın ayrıca bütün makalelerine ulaşılabilen bir sitesi ve sürekli yenilenen bir bloguda mevcut. Son olarak belirtmeden geçemeyeceğim Krugman'a ve Kereviz'e olan inancım sonsuz.

Paul Krugman official webpage:http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/

ve New York Times'taki son makalesi :

Op-Ed Columnist
Health Care Destruction

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 5, 2008


Sarah Palin ended her debate performance last Thursday with a slightly garbled quote from Ronald Reagan about how, if we aren’t vigilant, we’ll end up “telling our children and our children’s children” about the days when America was free. It was a revealing choice.
You see, when Reagan said this he wasn’t warning about Soviet aggression. He was warning against legislation that would guarantee health care for older Americans — the program now known as Medicare.

Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (that’s what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they haven’t been able to pull that off.

So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead.

Most Americans under 65 currently get health insurance through their employers. That’s largely because the tax code favors such insurance: your employer’s contribution to insurance premiums isn’t considered taxable income, as long as the employer’s health plan follows certain rules. In particular, the same plan has to be available to all employees, regardless of the size of their paycheck or the state of their health.

This system does a fairly effective job of protecting those it reaches, but it leaves many Americans out in the cold. Workers whose employers don’t offer coverage are forced to seek individual health insurance, often in vain. For one thing, insurance companies offering “nongroup” coverage generally refuse to cover anyone with a pre-existing medical condition. And individual insurance is very expensive, because insurers spend large sums weeding out “high-risk” applicants — that is, anyone who seems likely to actually need the insurance.

So what should be done? Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector. His plan falls short of universal coverage, but it would sharply reduce the number of uninsured.

Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative.

Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.

As compensation, the McCain plan would give people a tax credit — $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family — that could be used to buy health insurance in the individual market. At the same time, Mr. McCain would deregulate insurance, leaving insurance companies free to deny coverage to those with health problems — and his proposal for a “high-risk pool” for hard cases would provide little help.

So what would happen?

The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan.

But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).

Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.

And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.

In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.

THE END

Bugün Flacso'daki maceramdan sonra Poli'yle çakma chinatownda tıkınırken feci bir depresyona girdiğimi fark ettim , dün gece çok iyi uyuyamadım , buradaki iki taksicinin ısrarla küresel ısınmadan kaynaklandığını söylediği kuşların mevsimleri karıştırıp olması gerektiğinden çok daha erken bir vakitte , şehri basması ve ötmeye başlamaları , uykumu mahvetti. Aslında kuş sesi ya da balina sesi , dalga sesi eşliğinde uyumanızı sağlayan makinalar var , ve hatta ben hep dalga sesi çıkaranlarından istemekteydim, ne kadar imkansız olduğunu dünkü egzotik amazon deneyimimle fark ettim. Evim bir ph bu yüzden bir sürü bitki ağaç var , avluda var ve en güzeli terasta var, tabiki ağaçlar bitkiler küçük mavi acayip kuşları da çekiyor, geliyorlar tünüyorlar ve susmuyorlar. Bütün bunları anlatmamın sebebine gelince

1. Kuşlar ilk önce ötmeye başlayınca kendimi çok iyi hissettim
2. Hatta uyumadığım ve dinlediğim için mutlu bile oldum
3. On dakika sonra sıkıldığımı fark ettim / halbuki beş dakika önce sonsuza kadar bu sesle uyuyabiliceğimi ne kadar şanslı olduğumu vs gibi romantik düşüncelere dalmıştım
4. Kuşların ötmeye devam etmesi , ve duyduğum seslerin hiç bir harmonisi olmaması , beni derin varoluşsal düşüncelere itti.
5. İşte tam bu noktada, küçüklüğümden beri genelde geceleri nükseden , ölünce ne olucak , bana ne olucak , annem ölürse ne olucak , ne olucak başlıklı oldukça yoğun bir sorgulama süreci başladı.
6. Ve sabahın ilk saatlerine kadar en sonunda adrian 'nın kütüphanesinde bulduğum barthes'in toplama röportajlarını bulana kadar devam etti.

Ama bugün Belgrano'da çakma chinatown da tarçınlı fortune cookieleri denerken , yine nüksetti, ve 168 nolu collectivo'da gördüğüm en acaip giyimli bolivyalı adamların taşıdıkları kumaş poşetlerine bakarken , doruk noktasına vardı.

Ve eve gelince rahatlamak için maillara ve sitelere bakarken , new shelton wet & dry'da scintiific american mind'de yayınlanmış bir makaleyi okurken bütün bunların bir tesadüf olmadığını fark ettim. Ya da öyle inanmak için çok uygun bir sebep buldum diyebilirim. Bu makaleyi buraya koyuyorum " the end" le ilgili yaşadığım ruhsal çöküntüyü netleştirsin diye. Çözsün diye değil .


------------------

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death
Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die
By Jesse Bering

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in “Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?

And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.

According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)

Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

Curiously Immortal
The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist:

Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”

Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man.

Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard’s state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?”

You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet most gave answers indicative of “psychological continuity reasoning,” in which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.

What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read: “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numbskull for even asking. But just as well—he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he is dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard sees that now.

So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.

For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”

Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Clark puts it this way (emphasis mine): “We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”

If psychological immortality represents the intuitive, natural way of thinking about death, then we might expect young children to be particularly inclined to reason in this way. As an eight-year-old, I watched as the remains of our family’s golden retriever, Sam, were buried in the woods behind our house. Still, I thought Sam had a mind capable of knowing I loved her and I was sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye. That Sam’s spirit lived on was not something my parents or anyone else ever explicitly pointed out to me. Although she had been reduced to no more than a few ounces of dust, which was in turn sealed in a now waterlogged box, it never even occurred to me that it was a strange idea.

Yet if you were to have asked me what Sam was experiencing, I probably would have muttered something like the type of answers Gerald P. Koocher reported hearing in a 1973 study published in Developmental Psychology. Koocher, then a doctoral student at the University of Missouri–Columbia and later president of the American Psychological Association, asked six- to 15-year-olds what happens when you die. Consistent with the simulation-constraint hypothesis, many answers relied on everyday experience to describe death, “with references to sleeping, feeling ‘peaceful,’ or simply ‘being very dizzy.’ ”

A Mind-Body Disconnect
But Koocher’s study in itself doesn’t tell us where such ideas come from. The simulation-constraint hypothesis posits that this type of thinking is innate and unlearned. Fortunately, this hypothesis is falsifiable. If afterlife beliefs are a product of cultural indoctrination, with children picking up such ideas through religious teachings, through the media, or informally through family and friends, then one should rationally predict that psychological-continuity reasoning increases with age. Aside from becoming more aware of their own mortality, after all, older kids have had a longer period of exposure to the concept of an afterlife.

In fact, recent findings show the opposite developmental trend. In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. “Just then,” we told them, “he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.”

Just like the adults from the previously mentioned study, the children were asked about dead Baby Mouse’s psychological functioning. “Does Baby Mouse still want to go home?” we asked them. “Does he still feel sick?” “Can he still smell the flowers?” The youngest children in the study, the three- to five-year-olds, were significantly more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than children from the two older age groups were.

But here’s the really curious part. Even the preschoolers had a solid grasp on biological cessation; they knew, for example, that dead Baby Mouse didn’t need food or water anymore. They knew he wouldn’t grow up to be an adult mouse. Heck, 85 percent of the youngest kids even told us that his brain no longer worked. Yet most of these very young children then told us that dead Baby Mouse was hungry or thirsty, that he felt better or that he was still angry at his brother.

One couldn’t say that the preschoolers lacked a concept of death, therefore, because nearly all of the kids realized that biological imperatives no longer applied after death. Rather they seemed to have trouble using this knowledge to theorize about related mental functions.

From an evolutionary perspective, a coherent theory about psychological death is not necessarily vital. Anthropologist H. Clark Barrett of the University of California, Los Angeles, believes instead that understanding the cessation of “agency” (for example, that a dead creature isn’t going to suddenly leap up and bite you) is probably what saved lives (and thus genes). According to Barrett, comprehending the cessation of the mind, on the other hand, has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary sense, unnecessary.

In a 2005 study published in the journal Cognition, Barrett and psychologist Tanya Behne of the University of Manchester in England reported that city-dwelling four-year-olds from Berlin were just as good at distinguishing sleeping animals from dead ones as hunter-horticulturalist children from the Shuar region of Ecuador were. Even today’s urban children appear tuned in to perceptual cues signaling death. A “violation of the body envelope” (in other words, a mutilated carcass) is a pretty good sign that one needn’t worry about tiptoeing around.

The Culture Factor
On the one hand, then, from a very early age, children realize that dead bodies are not coming back to life. On the other hand, also from a very early age, kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions. So where do culture and religious teaching come into the mix, if at all?

In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.

In support of the idea that culture influences our natural tendency to deny the death of the mind, Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris and researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain showed that when the wording in interviews is tweaked to include medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In this 2005 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, seven- to 11-year-old children in Madrid who heard a story about a priest telling a child that his grandmother “is with God” were more likely to attribute ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who heard the identical story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.”

And in a 2005 replication of the Baby Mouse experiment published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, psychologist David Bjorklund and I teamed with psychologist Carlos Hernández Blasi of Jaume I University in Spain to compare children in a Catholic school with those attending a public secular school in Castellón, Spain. As in the previous study, an overwhelming majority of the youngest children—five- to six-year-olds—from both educational backgrounds said that Baby Mouse’s mental states survived. The type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing age, however, culture becomes a factor—the kids attending Catholic school were more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were those at the secular school. There was even a smattering of young extinctivists in the latter camp.

Free Spirits
The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our innate sense
of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see the soul unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy. Yet almost nobody has such a belief.

Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she does routinely.

As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.

And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their dead lives.

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "The End?"

JAMES C SCOTT /TOPLUM MUHENDISLIĞI

Geçen sene tezden bunaldığım dönemlerde kafamı dağıtan iki şey vardı biri thai tea latte diğeri de james c scott textleri , scott'ı çok sevmemin tek sebebi modern devlet dediğimiz aygıtın ve onun sayesinde var olan diğer organizmaların toplum mühendisliği adı altında toplum hayatında ne tür felaketlere yol açtıklarını çok net bir şekilde anlatması. Kitabı elimden bırakamamın sebeplerinden biri de avrupa'daki nation building process lerin başlangıçlarından beri kullanılan methodların ne kadar yanlış olduğunu teker teker örneklerle anlatması. Bu yüzden Arjantin'e getirdiğim bir kaç kitaptan birisi de Seeing like a state oldu . Bugün bu kitabı kitaplığımda gören bir arkadaşım , kitabı kendisinin de okuduğunu ve çok beğendiğini söyledikten sonra beğendiği yerler üzerine tartıştık. Benim kitabı okurken hiç dikkat etmediğim bir çok şeyi onun ne kadar farklı bir şekilde değerlendirdiğini görünce bugün bu yazıyı yazmak farz oldu. Scott'ın urban planning üzerine yaptığı eleştirileri üzerine konuşurken arkadaşım volume dergisinde scott 'ın yeni röportajından bahsetti bunu da yazıya ekliyorum . Ultra modernistlere ateş püskürdüğü brasiliayla ilgili kısımı da ekleyıp kendimle birazcık çelişicem sanırım. Corbusier ve scott'ı aynı anda sevebilen ultra geniş yürekli bir insan olarak ...

High Modernism in Urban Planning

Scott's critique of "high modernism" as a mode of urban planning focuses on Brazil's capital, the now more than one generation-old planned city of Brasilia. As far as they possibly could, the designers of Brasilia tried to achieve the spatial segregation of different aspects of life--housing in a different place from work, recreation, traffic, public administration in different districts as well--as high-modernist guru Le Corbusier had commanded.

The consequences of the plan--as far as it could be carried out--are insane. As Scott writes of the central square of Brasilia:

...what a square! The vast, monumental Plaza of the Three Powers, flanked by the Esplanade of the Ministries, is of such a scale as to dwarf even a military parade... In comparison, [Beijing's] Tien-an-Men Square and [Moscow's] Red Square [both of which are too large a scale for the foot and vehicle traffic through them on a normal day] are positively cozy and intimate.... If one were to arrange to meet a friend there, it would be rather like trying to meet someone in the middle of the Gobi desert. And if one did meet up with one's friend, there would be nothing to do.... This plaza is a symbolic center for the state; the only activity that goes on around it is the work of the ministries... (p. 121)

Scott draws heavily on the excellent work of Jane Jacobs to criticize this planned, surprise-free, every-apartment-building-looks-the-same high-modernist order of pre-planned Brasilia. Jacobs argued that rigid spatial segregation of functions made for visual regularity from the bird's-eye view of the architect but made the city damn hard to live in. By contrast, it is the mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces that makes an urban neighborhood interesting--and livable. And this urban diversity of uses cannot be planned by the high-modernist architect. At best it can be planned for--by the government providing a framework and infrastructure for urban development instead of specifying land use down to the last square centimeter.

As Scott argues, even planners who recognize diversity will never plan it. You cannot spend your life at the office, and bureaucratic budgets are limited. Thus:

...the logic of uniformity and regimentation is well-nigh inexorable [in comprehensive urban planning]. Cost effectiveness contributes to this tendency. Just as it saves a prison trouble and money if all prisoners wear uniforms of the same material, color, and size, every concession to diversity [in the urban plan] is likely to entail a corresponding increase in administrative time and budgetary costs.... [T]he one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail (pp. 141-2).


bu yazı J Bradford Delong 'ın James Scott'ın Seeig like a state kitabı üzerine yazdığı eleştiriden.

Erik Gerritsen'nın Volume için Scott'la yaptığı röportaj :


author: Scott, James C.


Scott is one of the most profound critics of high-modernist human development planning. He believes that the process of state-building, leading to what he calls the legibility and standardization of society, fosters control and domination rather than enlightenment and freedom. Scott started his academic career studying small village communities in the forests of Malaysia. When he left the rain forest he took with him a number of vital observations on how nation states organize their society. His monumental book, Seeing Like A State (1998)[1], became the basis for a fundamental and elaborate critique of how governmental planning for the advancement of society can go utterly wrong: compulsory villages in Tanzania, scientific forestry in Prussia, high-modernist Brasilia, industrial agricultural planning in the USSR and its modern day variant the Millennium Development Goals. According to Scott, these are all examples of rational-utopian blueprint thinking that proved fatal.


Erik Gerritsen: How did you reach the conclusion that society cannot be engineered?


James C. Scott:
During my research in South East Asia I was confronted with the dramatic failures of development projects. I found that successful rural communities were all but destroyed in the wake of well- intended development aid and I tried to understand the deeper causes of these failures. It occurred to me that in order to have ambitious plans for a society, to change it and intervene in any way at all, the state had to create a certain kind of society that could then be manipulated. It had to create citizens with identities. It had to create citizens with names that could be recorded, with matching addresses, put down in cadastral surveys. I found myself mesmerized by the fact that part of the struggle of state-making in early modern Europe was to create a legible society that could be understood before it was possible to intervene. And it also occurred to me that in the process of making society legible it changed it radically. They way early-modern states changed the society they governed is very much comparable to the way the World Bank is changing the Third World nowadays.
The example I give in the book is that of scientific forestry. This was a form of transforming the forest so it would produce a single product, neglecting everything else about the forest. It ended up creating a forest that violated the natural processes of forest regeneration. It was an abject failure, but not before becoming the world standard of scientific forestry. I was intrigued by that insight and tried to apply it to the well-intended planning fiasco of Brasilia and compulsory villagization in Tanzania in which seven million people were moved into villages that didn't work. Finally, I looked into the industrialization and collectivization policies of Soviet agriculture.
I worked out a critique of what I call high- modernist planning. That is, the nineteenth century ideology grounded in the believe that a scientific- technical trained elite could take responsibility for the social planning. The high-modernists claimed to know how parents should bathe their children, how they prepare their food and the design of their houses. The hubris of the high-modernist led them to believe in unitary and singular answers to all social problems and that solutions to them could be either imposed on the public or a public could be persuaded that these schemes were in their own interest.


EG: Since you published Seeing Like a State in 1998, the world seems to have profoundly changed. Making society 'legible' through standardization has now been implemented on a global scale. Are we witnessing the building of another, higher level of state? A world state?


JCS: In a way. The World Bank tries to control devel - opment processes in the Third World and by doing so is fundamentally changing those societies. This is comparable to what we saw in early modern Europe. The World Trade Organization, the IMF and the World Bank try to implant the institutions of North Atlantic liberal capitalism and liberal democracy throughout the rest of the world. Just look at the massive emphasis on the development of central banks, the creation of private property, the protection of intellectual property, the repatriation of profits, and also what I call 'cadasterization' and the collection of statistics according to UN-standards. The wonderfully accurate word they use for this development is harmonization.
It is all a magnificent piece of propaganda. Of course it means making sure that the institutions match one another and comply. What's interesting to me is that these institutions are the peculiar, odd, vernacular institutions of North Atlantic capitalism around the turn of the century. They are now traveling back to the Third World as a universal standard, being imposed by these large multinational institutions. The logic of their projects is that a businessman from, let's say, the Netherlands, can get off of a plane in Assuncion or Kinshasa and find a perfectly familiar world of institutions and structures. They are familiar because they are the institutions from the world which this businessman came from in the first place. We must never forget that these are vernacular institutions which represent themselves as universal, but they carry all the cultural baggage of their particular history.
These tendencies may point to an irreversible path towards the global village, very much along the lines I described in my book. Luckily, reality is more complex. For example, a World Bank program of rural development ends up being colonized by the counter- planning of thousands local farmers who find that the scheme doesn't quite serve their needs. They start deforming it and twist the grand scheme to suit them. Although there's no way they can resist this conditionality, the actual projects in the Third World often have very little resemblance to their original design. The sad part is that most of the deviation is a con sequence of a particular government's effort to increase its own power and project it into the countryside.
Another relevant development in this respect is the enormous increase in financial capital and the volume and pace of communication. These techniques make a kind of detailed control possible that was not possible earlier. But it also makes collective failures both instantaneous and widespread; we have just witnessed how the American sub-prime mortgage crisis was instantaneously ramified throughout the world. It seems that the speed and volume of things which can spin out of control is just as fast as the speed with which they are the subject of new forms of control.


EG: From the state to the world to the city. What is your take on big city engineering and the extent to which planners and people can actually bring change to the city?


JCS: It happens that I teach in a city, New Haven, Connecticut, which has the highest per capita government grants for urban renewal in the entire United States. It implemented those plans to the point that they actually destroyed the city. In twenty years of urban planning they've moved people two and three times. New Haven is almost a test case of urban government planning gone bad. There was a saying in Victorian times 'three moves equal a death'. Once you pick people up from a neighborhood where they have roots and friends and routines, even if it's not the best neighborhood in the world, such a move comes at great social costs. If you move people several times, some react by not putting down roots at all because it's too painful to pull them up again.
Jane Jacobs wrote a brilliant book on this subject in 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She tried to work out the principles of a successful community: not a community created by urban planners, but a community that over time had created a successful neighborhood that was safe, prosperous and in which people wanted to stay. Jacobs introduced the concept 'un-slumming'. Rather than 'slum clearance' the way high-modernist would just bull - doze an area and rebuild it from the ground up, she saw the 'un-slumming' capacity of neighborhoods. She argued that if people were permitted to stay in an area where they wanted to stay and made sure there was a stable job environment and credits to improve their homes, this neighborhood would 'un-slum' itself. Unfortunately, most communities don't have the time for slow regeneration.
No city planner has ever created a successful neighborhood. Ever. The best a city planner can hope for is to identify the workings of successful neighborhoods and to preserve them, rather than destroy them by getting in their way.

EG: Your critique on the engineering of society has
been judged as a plea for the free market. Yet you
are a self-acclaimed anarchist. Could you explain?

JCS :Some consider Seeing Like a State a right-wing book because I had an occasional good word to say about people like Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. My answer to that charge is that I'd like to write a book about the ways in which large capitalist firms rely on standardization in exactly the same way as do nation states. Take a look at McDonalds and their tools of management and control. The only difference with a nation state is that they have to make the standardization pay in terms of profit.
On the other hand, there are people who would like to pin me down on anarchism. I'm the kind of anarchist who is very impressed with the anarchist point about mutuality without hierarchy, about the accomplishments of very complex collective coordination over time without any state involvement. Take for example the creation of agricultural terraces all around South-East Asia. Personally, I live by what I once described to students as 'Scott's law of anarchist callisthenics'. The idea is that at some point in your life you're going to be called upon to break a big law and everything will depend on it. In order to be ready for that moment, you have to stay in shape. So I dedicate myself to breaking a law every day or two.


EG: You are currently researching why the state has always been hostile towards non-sedentary people. To what extent can this be seen as a new chapter in research into the limits of social engineering?

JCS: States seem to be completely unequipped to deal with people who've chosen alternative lives. Whether the people in question were Berbers, Bedouins, gypsies or homeless, they interfered with the oldest state project sedentarization.
I had a student not so long ago who had broken his leg and decided he would use the time to live as a homeless person in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For two weeks he followed an elderly homeless person who collected things from dumpsters. My student was greatly impressed with life as an urban hunter-gatherer. The homeless man was not just a sad alcoholic living on the streets, but a man with unbelievable survival skills from whom you can learn a tremendous amount about the city.
If you're interested in successful social engineering, I guess you want to take this approach seriously. If you're in charge of urban services for the poor and homeless of a city, you ought to do something like this. Live on the street for a few weeks. And have everyone who works at your department do it as well.

EG: You research, you write...and you farm sheep. What do they teach you?

JCS: Sheep are used as a metaphor for mindlessness and obedience. We talk about people being sheep if they do what they're told, behave in crowds and don't have any individuality. But anyone who has ever seen a wild sheep in action knows they are unbelievably individualistic by nature. We've been breeding sheep for 8000 years and selecting for docility. Now, having accomplished that, we have the nerve to insult sheep for becoming what we turned them into! We get the sheep we deserve!

Pedro Lasch - Guias de Ruta

AN ATLAS OF RADICAL CARTOGRAPHY'DEN
have always felt that the terms "Latino" and "Latina" could denote something other than an identity. Latinidad is an abstraction more abstract than that of nationality or race; and it is not the traditional denomination of any ethnic or kin group. If Latinidad names anything, it names the possibility - and no more than that! - of exchanges among people of varying nationalities, subjected to different racializations, bearing the histories of many ethnicities and kinships.

Nietzsche writes "When the morning sun does rise, glowing like a god of wrath, and when the city does open, he may see in the faces of those who dwell there even more desert, filth, deceit, insecurity than there are outside the gates - and the day may be almost worse than the night."

The terms "Latino" and "Latina" are more interesting, more powerful, if they denote the possibility of conversations and coalitions among people marginalized in various ways - geopolitical, racial, linguistic, sexual, and so on. These forms of marginalization could be expressed poetico-philosophically in the image of a city-state with closed gates, of exposure to predators and the elements; but this image is also literal and exact for many Latino and Latina wanderers. Or, again, these forms of marginalization could be expressed in the image of the hostility of citizens all too comfortable in their own belonging, all too hostile to outsiders, travelers, wanderers - and, again, this image is literal and exact in our current situation.

[...]The physical, literally geographical exposure that these maps bear witness to does not go in the direction of a new centrality or universality for Latinidad. Rather, the maps suggest dispersal and difference, with the possibility of a conversation from margin to margin - the possibility of a freedom of reason so very urgent today, born from the wanderings of Latinos and Latinas across the continent.

Alejendro de Acosta


cumartesi gecesi temel fıkrası gibi bir madridli bir bolivyalı ve bir kolombiyalılının latinidad kavramı üzerine sarf ettikleri sözlerden sonra gerilimli dakikaları sonra erdiren madridli nin hardcore cümlesi üzerine bu yazıyı buraya koyuyorum.
" O zaman sömürgenin yaptığı yemeklerden yiyelim"

Louis Kahn

Dün akşam Poli'yle birlikte Montevideo daki Sociedad Central De Arquitectos'un kütüphanesine gittik , ben kendimi kaybedip Urbanisimle ilgili kitaplara daldım , Poli'de yeni aldığı projeyle ilgili bir sürü kitap ayırttırdı. Daha sonra Universidad Palermo'nun mimarlıkla ilgili düzenledikleri film festivaline göz atalım dedik. Şansımıza Nat Kahn'nın çok kısa bir süreliğine tanıma şansını yakaladığı babasıyla ilgili belgeseli vardı. Louis Kahn'nın şimdiye kadar yaptığı bütün binaları, müşterileriyle ve meslektaşlarıyla olan ilişkileri ve tabi oğlunun gözünden nasıl bir baba olduğunu veya olamadığına dair inanılmaz bir belgesel , Mi arquitecto. Şimdiye kadar hep bir mit olarak kalan bir baba figurünün gerçeğe dönüşmesi için tasarlanmış bir belgeseldi bence. Babasının bangledesh'ten iran'a dünyanın bir çok yerinde yaptığı müze, kütüphane, gemi, , kliseyi gezerek onu inşa ettiği binalar , kullandığı malzemeler, tuttuğu ders notları ve meslektaşlarıyla ve tabi kendisine üç yanlız çocuğa malolan üç ilişkisi üzerinden tanımlamaya çalışmış yönetmen babasını. Tabi herşeyin sonunda o da bunun imkansızlığını fark ediyor. Yine de filmin sonunda bütün bu ilişki yumağının bu iz sürme sürecinin boş yere olmadığını hissettiren çok yoğun ve çok sağlam bir gerçek var filmde. Binalar...


Fotodaki bina Salk Institute bütün binaları arasında benim en sevdiğim ...