The Economist’s Inferno

Leave it to the venerable Economist to continue to scoop the Internet through sheer ingenuity. Who but The Economist would run a cover story on entitled  “A Rough Guide to Hell,” in its year-end double issue (December 22-January 4). The story is full of wonderful facts and locutions. We learn that “Hell has many mansions. Hinduism has 22 main hells…Sinhalese Buddhism has 136 and Burmese Buddhism 40040, one for each particular sin—including noisiness, chicken selling and eating sweets with rice.” And the torture is increased since “the fire of Hell…did not consume what it burned.” And since the soul was immortal there was no escape.” Within the cartography provided— in a piece that analyzes hell with all the journalistic acuity that The Economist might devote to Greece’s economic problems (another hell)— are some memorable locutions. “Hell itself seemed poised uneasily on the very edge of time. Milton, like Hesiod thought that all beginnings and all ends contended just beyond Hellgate, and that night and day met there.” When Descartes “declared that the soul was immaterial," he drove a spike in Hell’s heart and though it doesn’t quite go so far as Sartre’s, “hell is other people,” the article which actually functions for its reader like Virgil did for Dante, leaves us on the verge of modernity quoting Milton “The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” and Blake “Hell is being shut up in the possession of corporeal desires.” “A Rough Guide to Hell” is investigative journalism at its highest or shall we say lowest level.

Towards a Unified Theory

The February 12-18 edition of The Economist reports on a technological advance that will have revolutionary implications for the production of almost everything. “Just as nobody could have predicted the impact of the steam engine in 1750—or the printing press in 1450 or the transistor in 1950—it is impossible to foresee the long-term impact of 3D printing” (“Print Me a Stradivarius,” The Economist, 2/12/11). The article outlines an “additive approach” in which  “mass production” is replaced by “mass customization.” This sea change in the classic economies of scale by which capitalist enterprise functions will, according to The Economist, affect everything from urbanization to outsourcing and intellectual property. “When objects can be described in a digital file,” the article explains, “they become much easier to copy and distribute…” So, let’s say you have the idea for a new Halloween mask. Let’s say you call it “The Unified Theory” (patent pending) and let’s say “The Unified Theory” is based on Linda Blair’s head doing a 360 in The Exorcist. What a windfall! What a triumph of modern innovation! A mixture of the hell William Friedkin depicted in his cinematic version of the William Peter Blatty novel and everyone’s experience of an old fashioned Upper West Side literary party filled with wannabe intelligentsia. Here, in a form of prolepsis, you anticipate the wandering eyes of the person you are talking to by producing a facsimile of your own head— which is capable of doing a 360. Thanks to the wonders of 3D, you end up freaking out your potential tormentor before he has a chance to display his indifference to your very existence.