A new edition of The Intellectual Devotional, this time with a focus on Modern Culture, will be available in stores on October 14. (Click here to pre-order your copy.) As well as continuing to expand on posts from the General Edition, “The Devoted Intellect” blog will introduce and expand on material from the Modern Culture devotional. Today’s entry on Glasnost is from the “Ideas and Trends” section.

At the end of today’s entry in the new Modern Culture edition of the Devotional on glasnost — Mikhail Gorbachev’s series of reforms meant to encourage greater “openness” in Soviet society — there is a brief mention of the economic counterpart to Gorbachev’s cultural policies: perestroika, or “restructuring.” As with glasnost, the consequences of perestroika were far wider-reaching than anybody could have imagined.

Gorbachev’s program of economic restructuring began modestly, like his program of “openness,” but soon took on a momentum of their own and could not be contained to the confines he had initially envisioned for hem. However, looking at the fundamental components of perestroika are a shocking reminder of just how different the Soviet system was from capitalism. The Law on State Enterprises, for instance, stipulated that businesses could determine output levels based on consumer demand, and allowed businesses with costs that exceeded revenues to fail rather than receive state support. This is nothing but the most basic application of “supply and demand” economics and competitive business practices, but it was a huge shock to the Soviet system. As it happened, it was a fatal shock. As with glasnost, the small fissure opened up by perestroika eventually became a torrent that swept away the Soviet Union and nullified the Warsaw Pact. Introduce a little “openness” into a system founded on having none, many commented at the time, and it should come as no surprise that the entire structure would falter. (Though, of course, it came as a surprise to nearly everyone.)

But, then again, at nearly the same time that Gorbachev was restructuring the Soviet Union’s economy, Deng Xiaoping, leader of the Chinese Communist Party, was doing precisely the same thing. But while the U.S.S.R. was obliterated by Gorbachev’s reforms, China’s growth still has not abated.

What do you think?

The minimum wage is now 70 years old, and any sort of opposition to it is dismissed these days as curmudgeonly nonsense, the sort of thing one finds on the lunatic fringe of the far right. One figure who is often unfairly placed in that category is the economist Milton Friedman. Yes, Friedman was about as much of a free market absolutist as you could hope to find, and, yes, he did support Conservative Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 run for the presidency.(Incidentally, that run is often considered the beginning of the Conservative Movement in America, which many think may have ended with the recent presidential campaign of Goldwater’s successor as Senator from Arizona—John McCain.)

But, when the Nobel Laureate was asked what his most important achievements were, he listed two causes not often associated with conservatism: his contribution to ending the compulsory military draft, and his opposition to the criminalization of drugs. Perhaps Friedman’s argument against the minimum wage is worth considering after all.

On December 7, 1975, Friedman appeared on the television program The Open Mind with Richard D. Heffner (read the entire transcript here) and made the astonishing claim that the minimum wage was a disaster for poor people and, in particular, a disaster for black Americans. His reasoning is as calm and simple as his claim is shocking: if employers don’t believe that somebody is worth the minimum wage, they aren’t going to pay them that amount. That would be charity—a perfectly wonderful thing, but not something many employers can afford. Instead, they simply won’t hire that person at all. Friedman’s conclusion is that the minimum wage leads to greater unemployment and hurts exactly the people it is meant to help.

Watch him making the claim, and see what you think:

Philip Glass is best known for his innovative “Minimalist” compositions, though he prefers to be thought of as a classical composer or, more specifically, a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” He’s one of the most listened-to modern classical composers in the world, though many members of his audience don’t necessarily know that they’re listening to him. That’s because Glass has also made a name for himself as a composer of movie scores; his most famous score &mdash for The Hours — earned him an Oscar nomination. More intriguingly, Glass has written music, entire operas in fact, for films made long before his musical career began. The three operas composed between 1991 and 1996 were based on three films by the French poet, novelist, painter and film-maker Jean Cocteau - Orphée (Orpheus, 1949), La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946), and Les Enfants Terribles (1950). Live performances of these works are rare events these days, but the opera of La Belle et la Bête is available to anyone with a DVD player.

The new Modern Culture edition of the Intellectual Devotional includes an entire section on the great Films of the twentieth century. Many of those films are available in wonderful editions from the Criterion Collection, filled with commentaries and special features. One of the films available in the collection is Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, and it contains one of the most interesting special features we’ve ever seen on a DVD: you can switch the audio between the original soundtrack and Glass’ opera, carefully synced to the actors’ movements. Glass wanted his operas to be performed with the film being projected, and with this DVD, you can experience his vision without having to wait for a revival performance, not to mention being able to stick with sweats rather than fancy opera furs.

Want to see Cocteau’s film and hear Glass’ opera? Buy it here, or add it to your Netflix queue here.

The Bay of Pigs, a poorly thought-out, poorly planned and poorly executed invasion of Cuba organized by the CIA in 1960, is one of the less-inspiring episodes in American history. The poor thinking: it was assumed that an invasion of Cuba would spark a popular uprising against Fidel Castro. The poor planning: rather than depending on military specialists, Kennedy insisted on choosing the spot of the landing himself, a spot so disadvantageous to an invasion that Castro had a hard time believing his luck when he learned of it. The poor execution: having given the green light for an invasion, Kennedy did not provide air support, and the invasion failed. But bad as this was, it’s nothing compared to other ideas that the CIA cooked up for dealing with the Bearded One.

Following the Watergate scandal, the Senate and House of Representatives took a closer look into American intelligence operations than Congress ever had. The “Church Committee” published its findings in 14 volumes, but the most shocking revelations came in its “Interim Report”: “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.” The report outlined alleged plots involving United States intelligence services to assassinate Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujilo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Rene Schneider of Chile (all of whom were killed) and Fidel Castro of Cuba. The plots against Castro included development of a potion that would cause his beard to fall off; poisoning his wet suit and cigars; and involving the U.S. Mafia (which lost many of its gambling interests to the 1959 Cuban Revolution) in a “hit” on a foreign leader. Seems there weren’t many Devoted Intellectuals in the CIA back then.

These revelations prompted the journalist I. F. Stone to propose “A New Solution for the CIA”:

Stalin did establish one useful precedent. He made it a practice to bump off whoever served as head of his secret police. He never let anybody stay in the job too long. As a successful dictator, Stalin seems to have felt that anybody who had collected so many secrets would be a No. 1 menace to security if he ever went sour. Stalin thought it safer not to wait.

I think we ought to take Stalin’s example one step further. I think we ought to get rid of the CIA altogether, lock, stock, and burglar’s kit.

What do you think?

When novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace committed suicide earlier this year, The Onion responded with one of their characteristically brilliant headlines. They claimed that, in honor of the author of Infinite Jest, a 1079-page-long novel (with footnotes) about a film so entertaining that everyone who watches it becomes enraptured and cannot do anything but watch it endlessly for the rest of their lives, “NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace’s Death.” Not likely, but, then again, mentioning Wallace in the same breath as Rush Limbaugh isn’t so likely either.

As it happens, Wallace had extremely Catholic tastes, and, despite a nearly complete difference in temperament and political outlook, he could appreciate Limbaugh’s accomplishments. In face, he referred to Limbaugh as “a host of extraordinary, once-in-a-generation talent and charisma—bright, loquacious, witty, complexly authoritative—whose show’s blend of news, entertainment, and partisan analysis became the model for legions of imitators.” This isn’t the list of adjectives that would occur to the workaday liberal when considering the person and phenomenon that is Rush Limbaugh, but Wallace could appreciate something unique when he saw it. Could you do what Limbaugh does? Here’s how Wallace describes the job:

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier…

This passage occurs in a remarkable 2005 article that Wallace published in The Atlantic magazine about talk radio, and republished, in expanded form, in his essay collection Consider the Lobster. It’s entitled “Host,” and it’s one of his great essays, showcasing his particular talent remarkably well: following a thought that may occur to most of us as a fleeting consideration with unbelievable tenacity, teasing out every nuance. Read the whole thing here.

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the most famous religious texts in the world. In 700 verses, it recounts a conversation between the god and charioteer Krishna and the Pandava prince and archer Arjuna. The conversation takes place on a battlefield at Kurukshetra, right before the fighting begins. Unsure that he should continue with the battle that would kill so many, Arjuna argues to Krishna that he should not fight. Krishna responds with an argument in favor of action and duty. For thousands of years, massive commentaries have been written on this short text, purporting to find a complete philosophy of life and the afterlife in it. But none of those commentaries is nearly as massive as the work in which the Bhagavad Gita is contained. That work is the great Hindu epic known as the Mahabharata. It is 74,000 verses long, ten times longer than both Homeric Epics - The Iliad and The Odyssey - combined. The Gita, tucked away in the middle of Box Six of the Mahabharata is less than one percent of the total.

The Mahabharata is the epic tale of Iron Age (or “Vedic”) India, and focuses on the Kurukshetra war—a conflict between the clans of Kauravas and the Pandavas for the throne of Hastinapura. A number of translations of this work are available or in progress. The poet P. Lai has recently completed a verse translation, and two prose translations are currently in progress. One, by the University of Chicago Press, was begun in the early 1980’s by the scholar J. A. B. van Buitenen, but was put on hold for 20 years after he died in 1983. The press has recently begun releasing new volumes again. In addition, a complete translation of the Mahabharata is going to be included in the Clay Sanskrit Library from New York University Press. The Clay Library aims to be the Sanskrit equivalent of Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library. The Loeb Library, published in small green hardcovers, provides Greek and Latin texts with facing page translations of the major works of Ancient Greece and Rome. In addition to the Mahabharata, the Clay Library is producing a complete translation of the other major Hindu epic — the Ramayana — as well as other religious, poetic and philosophical works. It promises to be a great resource for Devoted Intellectuals everywhere. Visit it here.

Between 1910 and 1913, the Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published one of the landmark works of Analytic philosophy: the Principia Mathematica. Over the course of three volumes Russell and Whitehead purport to derive all of the major principles of mathematics from a series of simple axioms, and logical proofs leading from these simple beginnings to greater and greater complexity. They propose a self-contained system of mathematics that admits of no error and no paradox. It was one of the great landmarks of philosophy, mathematics, and logic, and in 1931 a 25-year-old German mathematician named Kurt Gödel proved the whole thing wrong.

Russell and Whitehead attempted to build mathematics into a self-contained logical system. Gödel didn’t simply find an error or inconsistency in their work—that could have been corrected easily enough. Gödel went much, much farther: he proved that every formal system has inherent limitations, the Principia among many others.

The fundamental idea behind Gödel’s proof is that every logical system contains a version of the paradoxical statement “This sentence is false.” (Think that one through for a minute.) Therefore, deriving a complete system of mathematics from a set of axioms (the goal of the Principia) is inherently impossible. This is a very important result to philosophers, logicians and mathematicians, but in 1999 it became a pop culture phenomena. Douglas Hofstadter made the idea famous in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s a brilliant and long-ranging book, delving into the illusions you can see in M. C. Escher’s prints (like the one above), the complexities you can hear in J. S. Bach’s fugues, and the paradoxes of Gödel’s proof. I heartily recommend it to all Devoted Intellectuals. However, I’d start by reading another book first. Hofstadter claims that he first became entranced with Gödel’s proof when he read an explanation of it written by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman at the age of fourteen. After the success of his book, Nagel and Newman’s work was republished with an introduction by Hofstadter. It’s tough going at times (The Devoted Intellectual is still confused about “Gödel Numbers”), but Gödel’s Proof is a project every Devoted Intellectual should tackle.