by Brooks Riley
The Perils of Majoritarianism
By Namit Arora
(On the ethnic history and politics of Sri Lanka and a review of Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War. A shorter version appeared in the Times Literary Supplement earlier this month. Below is the original long version—the director’s cut.)
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Few places in the world, of similar size, offer a more bracing human spectacle than the beautiful island of Sri Lanka. It abounds in deep history and cultural diversity, ancient cities and sublime art, ingenuity and human folly, wars and lately, even genocide. It has produced a medley of identities based on language (Sinhala, Tamil, English, many creoles), religion (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, animism), and geographic origin (Indian, Malaysian, European, Arab, indigenous), alongside divisions of caste and class. Rare for a country its size are the many divergent accounts of itself, fused at the hip with the politics of ethnic identities—a taste of which I got during my month-long travel on the island in early 2014.
The Sri Lankan experience has been more traumatic lately, owing to its 26-year civil war that ended with genocide in 2009. The country’s three main ethnic groups—Sinhalese (75 percent), Tamil (18 percent), and Muslim (7 percent)—now live with deep distrust of each other. One way to understand Sri Lankan society and its colossal tragedy is to study the causes and events that led to the civil war. What historical currents preceded it? Did they perhaps make the war inevitable? What was at stake for those who waged it? What has been its human toll and impact on civic life? In his brave and insightful work of journalism, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, Samanth Subramanian attempts to answer such questions while bearing witness to many of its tragedies.
A Brief Social History of Sri Lanka
Around two-and-a-half millennia ago, waves of migrants from the Indian subcontinent overwhelmed the island’s indigenous hunter-gatherers, the Veddah (a few descendants still survive). Migrants arriving from modern day Bengal, speakers of Prakrit—an Indo-European language that evolved into Sinhala—intermixed with indigenous islanders to later become the Sinhalese. Other migrants from southern India, speakers of Tamil and other Dravidian languages and belonging mostly to the Saivite sect, also intermixed with the islanders to later become the Tamils of Sri Lanka. Which group of migrants arrived first, a question hotly pursued by the nationalists, lacks scholarly resolution. Both groups established themselves in different parts of the island: the Sinhalese in the center, south, and west, the Tamils in the north and east.
Monday, April 13, 2015
The Spectre of History: Thoughts on an Islamic Reformation
by Ali Minai
This article argues that seeking a religious reformation in Islam is neither feasible nor especially useful as a strategy for countering the current rise of Islamic militancy. While this militancy undoubtedly draws upon Islamic beliefs, groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda are emergent products of an underlying societal attitude, and until that attitude changes, such groups will continue to arise. Of course, it is critical to fight today's particular militants with every available tactic, but it is even more important to understand why such groups emerge and persist in Muslim societies today, and how this dynamic can be changed.
Proponents of “Islamic reformation” have often invoked the Protestant Reformation in 16th century Europe as an example of the radical change that's needed in Islam today. But as perceptive commentators have pointed out, this argument is fatally flawed: An illiberal and puritanical movement directed at a specific institution – the Roman Catholic Church – is a poor model for reforming an illiberal and puritanical system with no institutionalized clergy. Ultimately, the possibilities for change in Islam are constrained by its historical nature. More than an organized religion, it is a normative ideology defined implicitly by the attitudes of believers towards sacred texts and personages. Unlike Christianity, which is mainly about doctrine, Islam is mostly about history – past and future, personal and universal.
Through its first three centuries, Christianity was a faith without temporal power. This is reflected in the New Testament, which focuses almost entirely on spiritual, ethical and doctrinal matters. When Christianity finally achieved power under Constantine, it necessarily institutionalized a distinction, though not yet a separation, between Church and State – a recognition that God had His domain and Caesar had his, albeit with God's sanction. Notwithstanding the active participation of the Church in politics for centuries thereafter, the formal aim of Christianity has always been to shape souls, with personal Redemption and Salvation as core ideas. In contrast, Islam acquired temporal power during its earliest period, and developed a strong vision of itself, not only as the basis of individual piety, but also as the shaper of history and an organizer of societies.
To trim their sail to every wind that blows
by Carl Pierer
Introduction
The standard case of epistemic peer disagreement has two people going regularly to a café, where they regularly drink and eat. Sometimes A has to pay more, sometimes B. Often, they disagree about who has to pay how much – sometimes A gets it right, sometimes B. This time, A calculates that she has to pay £14, while B thinks A has to pay £12. Both are equally smart, they have access to the same information and because of the stipulated regularity, neither of them is particularly likely to get it right on this occasion. They are so called epistemic peers on this question. What should A do now, in light of the further information that B disagrees with her sum of £14?
Suggestions for what ought to be done when disagreement arises between epistemic peers (EPs) fall either under conformism (backing off the initial confidence) or non-conformism (remaining unmoved). I am not aware that anybody suggested opportunism (losing confidence altogether and taking the opponent's view). All three positions work with the following definition:
Epistemic Peers: A&B are EPs iff:
(i) A&B are cognitive equals (equally smart, diligent, thorough, etc.)
(ii) A&B have access to the same evidence. Whether or not this just means same amount of evidence or exactly the same evidence is disputed, but irrelevant for the present discussion.
(iii) There is no reason to suppose that one of them is particularly apt to figure out the right response in D.
Call such a disagreement between EPs an epistemic-peer disagreement (EPD).
In this essay I will argue that, without a telos in relation to which we hold and modify our views, opportunism cannot be ruled out. First, I outline the arguments for conformism and suggest these cannot exclude opportunism. Second, I present the non-conformist argument, thereby illustrating that an analogous argument supports opportunism. Third, I suggest that only with an agreed telos for our views can opportunism be rejected.
The Evolutionary Debunking of Moral Realism
by Michael Lopresto
Moral realism is sometimes challenged on scientific grounds, namely that we can't fit value into a scientific world view. I've addressed this concern before, as part of a distinctively philosophical project often described as reconciling the manifest image with the scientific image. However, moral realism has recently come under a new sort of attack on scientific grounds, put most forcefully and ingeniously by Sharon Street. The argument begins from the empirical premise that evolutionary forces have influenced our moral beliefs, something that is plainly true, to a sceptical conclusion that our moral beliefs are unjustified. So the argument is essentially that since moral beliefs were not caused by moral facts, we have no reason to think that our moral beliefs could be true.
Firstly, some clarifications are in order. What distinguishes the evolutionary debunker from other anti-realists is that she is not trying to show that there are no moral facts, but rather that there is no moral knowledge. Furthermore, what distinguishes the evolutionary debunker is that her premises are empirical, and that such empirical premises entail that our moral beliefs have a highly suspect origin. So this is an epistemological argument for moral scepticism. However, this may also be taken as a reductio of moral realism, since moral realism would be rather useless indeed if no moral facts could ever be known.
So let's examine the premise that the origins of a belief could undermine its justification. In good cases of belief formation, our beliefs are often caused by the things that they are about. For example, I currently believe that there are about three dozen books in front of me. This belief is caused by my perception of the books themselves, and as far as I know, my perceptual faculties are working pretty well. But consider a case where I take a hallucinogenic drug and start hallucinating books in front of me without even knowing it. I would have the exact same belief, that there about three dozen books in front of me, but rather than being caused by the books themselves, the belief is caused by the drug. Therefore, the belief is not justified because it's not caused in the right way, even if the belief is true just by chance.
Playing House
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Nevertheless, some of my most striking memories of “im”permanence are of the housed I inhabited, especially during the time I conducted fieldwork in the city of Pune. Over the course of a year and a half, I moved three times across four houses. For the first three months, I was a paying guest at the house of a friend. She had a beautiful home on the outskirts of the city. While the location was hardly convenient, the pleasure of her company and the promise of good food kept me rooted to the place. I had a lovely first floor room with its own bathroom, a bed, and a carved wooden desk. Her two dogs were an added joy. She had glass baubles in the windows, classical music wafting out of her room in the mornings, and a kitchen stuffed with interesting chutneys and condiments. Eclectic crystal and glassware dotted the cupboard in her dining room, and we spent many evenings conjuring cocktails and sipping wine.
The house was my respite from the frustrations of fieldwork, and its objects were sources of contemplation when the city offered none. Even the light filtering through its corner windows seemed imbued with its own enchantments and possibilities. It smelled of a delightful comfort.
It was, of course, too good to last.
After three months, I commenced nighttime work at a place far away from her home and it was time for me to find a new place. She came to my rescue however, and suggested that I meet her sister who lived in another part of the city and had a studio apartment to rent. The catch was that I would have to fend for myself for two months before the current tenants were ready to leave.
The two houses I inhabited for the two months that I was ungrounded were remarkable in the ways that they evoked emotions that can only be said to be in opposite quadrants of the affective pantheon.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Do we really value thinking for oneself?
by Emrys Westacott
Why do we choose to do what we think is right even when it goes against our inclinations or interests? This is one of the oldest and toughest questions in moral psychology. Knowing the good clearly does not entail that we will do the good. So what carries us from the former to the latter?
One philosopher who wrestled with this question long and hard was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He considered it profoundly mysterious that we often choose to do overrid our interests or desires and do our duty purely because we consider ourselves dutybound. (Nietzsche expresses a similar sense of wonder when he asks, “How did nature manage to breed an animal with the right to make promises?”) Kant's explanation is that we are moved by what he calls moral feeling.[1] And he identifies two main kinds of moral feeling: respect for morality, and disgust for what is contrary to morality. Discussing these in his lectures on ethics, he says that you cannot make yourself or anyone else have these feelings. But you can inculcate them, or something that will serve the same purpose, in a child through proper training. The following passage is especially noteworthy:
We should instill an immediate abhorrence for an action from early youth onwards . . . we must represent an action, not as forbidden or harmful, but as inwardly abhorrent in itself. For example, a child who tells lies must not be punished, but shamed; we must cultivate an abhorrence, a contempt for this act, and by frequent repetition we can arouse in him such an abhorrence of the vice as becomes ahabitus with him.[2]
I imagine this bit of moral pedagogy will strike many readers as morally suspect. But why?
THE FERMI PARADOX, MASS EFFECT, AND TRANSHUMANISM
by Charlie Huenemann
The Fermi Paradox
The story is that sometime in the early 1950s, four physicists were walking to lunch and discussing flying saucers. The place was Los Alamos, and the lunch group included Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York. None of them believed in flying saucers, of course, but – and this is just the way such conversations go – the discussion turned to the possibility of faster-than-light space travel and the probability of life cropping up elsewhere in the galaxy. Fermi had a hunch that life shouldn’t be all that rare – it should be common, really – and that there was at least a ten percent “miracle chance” that supraluminal travel should prove possible. This led him to raise an exasperated question that drew laughter from the others: “Where is everybody?”
Thus the Fermi paradox: in all this space, and all this time, there should be plenty of advanced alien civilizations – but we haven’t heard from any of them. How come?
The most conservative resolution of the paradox is to claim that the universe is in fact SO very big and SO very old that not only has intelligent life evolved all over the place, but the spaces and times separating them from one another are SO very vast that they can never be crossed. It would be like two children in Cuba and China releasing their balloons at the same time and expecting them to bump into each other.
But there are other possible and more tantalizing resolutions to the paradox. Maybe the aliens have checked us out already and decided to put us in galactic time-out; maybe they already walk among us; maybe tomorrow we will indeed make contact; maybe alien governments always decide to cut funding for alien NASA programs; maybe in fact we live in an alien-created virtual reality – and so on, down the long line of fantastic sci-fi literature. But I would like to focus on one resolution that, whether likely or not, raises in my mind some interesting philosophical questions. Maybe, by the time any civilization reaches the point at which they can reach out to other planets, they also have developed super-intelligent machines, and that is when all hell breaks lose.
Monday, April 6, 2015
An Atheist Considers God’s Plan
by Akim Reinhardt
That's bad enough. But I go a little nuts whenever someone says: “Everything happens for a reason.”
After all, if you actually believe that we're all just mortal puppets dancing on a divine string, then there's really no point in us having an adult conversation about cause and effect.
But unlike God's plan, “Everything happens for a reason” does not suggest a deep detachment from reality, which is precisely what makes it far more exasperating than assertions of, say, childhood leukemia being an important cog in God's grand machinations.
Rather than embracing wild delusion or concocting a fantastic blend of paternal benevolence and cruelty, “everything happens for a reason” suggests a far murkier and depressing version of surrendering reality. Like the “God's plan” adage, it indicates the speaker just can't live up to the horrors of life, and is wont to soothe oneself with the balm of inevitability. But it also leads me to suspect that while the speaker is sane enough to dismiss sadistically intricate divine plans, s/he has been reduced to hiding behind the gauze of unstated and unknowable “reasons.”
Everything happens for a reason.
In other words, even the worst of it can be justified, even if we don't know how.
To say childhood leukemia is part of God's plan is to give that reason a name. Specifically, God's plan is how one justifies the horror. That's pretty awful.
But to say childhood leukemia happens for a vague, unnamed reason is to accept that it's justified in some way, but to not know what the justification is. That seems even worse.
Both proverbs, to my mind, are patently dishonest sentiments. But while I can easily dismiss the former as delusion in the face of pain, the latter reveals just enough self-awareness to anger me.
God's plan is the refuge of those who, unable to face up to harsh realities, opt for fantasy. But to recognize that childhood-leukemia-as-God's-plan is a form of lunacy, yet hide your own weak-kneed desperation behind claims of “reason,” is really insulting. It's one thing to dismiss rational thought altogether when attempting to face life's horrors. It's quite another to bastardize and mangle rational thought to create a shield against life's horrors.
Or so it seemed to me when I first considered these aphorisms.
Pygmalion and Supersymmetry
by Tasneem Zehra Husain
After a two year pause, the LHC is turning on again. Once more, beams of protons will run circles around the giant ring, miles under Geneva, speeding up with each lap, until they are made to collide head-on, unleashing energies to rival those that prevailed seconds after the Big Bang. In the earlier run, when the Higgs boson was discovered, the LHC attained collision energies in the 7 – 8 TeV range. This time, the goal is to reach the 13 – 14 TeV range, and explore realms that have never before been accessible. Couched within the excitement of probing the unknown, are our desires for what we want to see emerge from the data. There are several theories we would like to see proved, but if I had to choose a single contender, I'd vote for supersymmetry (SUSY; pronounced Susie) – as would many others. There are, of course some dissenting voices in the crowd; those who say we have already hung on to the hope of supersymmetry for too long, that some experimental evidence of it should have turned up by now, if the theory was correct. These critics level the allegation that supersymmetry is in fact just a theoretical construction, but that some of us are so enamored of its beauty, and so keen to see this mathematical model ‘come to life', that we have lost touch with reality.
The fact that most physicists do tend to wax lyrical about this theory, is indisputable. “I love supersymmetry. It is a very canonical theory”, says Fabiola Gianotti, the soon to be Director General of CERN. Peter Higgs, after whom the famous boson was named, has declared himself “a fan” and Stephen Hawking, one of the most recognizable icons of our time, says we might see traces of supersymmetry at the LHC, if we're lucky, and that “the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles revolutionize our understanding of the universe.” In short, so many physicists want so desperately to see this theory realized, that one could perhaps be excused for wondering if we are contemporary Pygmalions, and SUSY our Galatea. Are we trying to bring it into being by sheer force of will?
Rosemary tea, miso butter, and other kitchen snippets
by Rishidev Chaudhuri
As I grow older and worldlier, and as the world itself grows more worldly, an increasingly wide range of ingredients and techniques and flavors take up residence in my kitchen. The flavors of my childhood were primarily those of the subcontinent, dominated by the Indian Ocean cities of Calcutta, Colombo and Bombay, and by European food mediated through England, Calcutta and the colonial mixing. And it is sobering to contemplate that there was a point when soy sauce didn’t consistently inhabit my kitchen (a few years in a vegetarian co-op in Massachusetts and a semester in Japan changed that), or to remember that fish sauce and various vinegars didn’t always occupy prominent roles in my culinary imagination. I’ve always known about chilies, of course; I imagine that growing up in another culinary tradition and discovering chilies must be like discovering some fundamental metaphysical truth about the world, perhaps one that you’d always known must exist, perhaps one that must exist in all possible worlds.
Some will lament the loss of local particularity that goes with such increasing cosmopolitanism, and that is indeed worth a mournful moment of silence. But, inevitably, these world-traveling ingredients strike up conversations and more in the pantry (I discovered the herring passionately intertwined with the curry leaves one long lazy afternoon), and spark improbable but delightful culinary revelations.
The combination of fermented soy beans and butter is a revelation. It is not traditional and, depending on the vividness of your imagination, might seem transgressive. At the least, the cultures that love them are separate, with soy sauce, miso and the fermented bean pastes concentrated in East Asia, and butter spread through the rest of the world with a special concentration in parts of Europe and India[1]. They are also distinctive and easily identifiable as foundational elements of their associated cuisines: “butter” and “soy” are almost caricatures of how one might describe, say, the opposition between French and Chinese food.
Give The Pentagon Budget To The People: A Wish That One Day Will Be Fulfilled
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Like why don't we taxpayers sue Walmart for the $6.2 billion we have to supply to their workers in foodstamps and other help because Walmart doesn't pay its employees enough to live on?
Or why doesn't Obama, instead of paying out unemployment insurance, use that money to give to the unemployed some well-paid government jobs — to say, fix our crumbling infrastructure (bridges, roads, energy grid, etc.) or install solar panels on all our buildings to make us less dependent on oil?
Or why don't we as a country get rid of student debt by simply writing it off? And then find the money for free college education for everyone who want to go to college.
Where would we find that money to pay for free college for all Americans?
Well, by means of my latest foray into wish-fulfillment thinking: why don't we take the entire Pentagon budget that gets spent on new weaponry and divert it to pay for college educations for everyone or for free pre-K education to kids or something equally worthwhile?
Or why don't we reduce the entire Pentagon budget by 80% and use that money for socially useful purposes?
Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and The Ethics of Memory
by Leanne Ogasawara
And what is made even worse than being on a quest where you can't keep the facts straight is that each wonders whether their loss of memory will not mark the end of their marriage–for without shared memories, what will be left to bind them together? The elderly wife wonders. But at the same time, she also cannot help but worry whether in reality they are not better off not remembering?
In the early pages of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, I assumed it would be a very different story. Like this reviewer here, at first I was sure the book would be about the sadness of a life ending in memory loss; about dementia in the elderly and love falling apart. But then (also just like the reviewer) I wondered if the novel wasn't actually some kind of exploration about the myth-making we do collectively –for indeed, it is not just the elderly couple but all the characters in the book who are suffering from memory loss as they struggle to recall what it means, for example, to be a Christian Briton or pagan Saxon, in the wake of the Roman withdrawal.
Is it glorious King Arthur or Arthur the mass murderer?
It all depends on how you remember things, right?
A coincidence (or maybe he is reading the same book) but a friend on Facebook (deliciously literary Mikhail Iossel) today wrote this:
We all know, or at least suspect, that many of the memories dearest to our hearts have never happened. To a considerable degree, our lives are the products of our own imagination — for that's what memory is, by and large: an introspective, inward-bound imagination.
It's true, but then what to do in the face of trauma? Ishiguro in several interviews wrote of wanting to write about Rwanda or Yugoslavia. He wondered how it was possible that groups of people, who up till then had been living in relative harmony, turn so savagely upon each other? What kinds of repressed hatred had to be cultivated over the years (or generations) within them, he asks. And likewise, what of our personal traumas?
The Magic of the Bell and a Glimpse of Spirits
by Bill Benzon
Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the sixteenth century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break,” before the odd invention of matter.
—Bruno Latour, An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”
This essay starts with an experience I had some years ago in a basement in Troy, New York, while rehearsing with three colleagues: Ade (who had toured with Gil Scott-Heron in his youth), Druis, and Fonda. We were each of us playing bells when at some point we heard high-pitched twittering sounds that none of us were playing. Where did they come from? What were they?
I can easily imagine how someone might think they were hearing a spirit or spirits. The Western scientific impulse is quite different. We know that spirits do not exist and therefore there must be some other, some physically plausible, account of those twittering sounds. My purpose here is not to reject the physical account. On the contrary, I believe it to be foundational. But I also believe that, carefully considered, it points to a way of making sense of the idea of spirit.
Instrument and Player
It is well known that B.B. King’s guitar is named Lucille. Why is it named at all? Perhaps it’s a gesture of affection. The guitar, after all, is very close to him. It is one of his voices; it is, in some sense, part of him.
It may be more than that. The name may well reflect the subtle intricacy of King’s relationship to his guitar, his instrument. To play an instrument well, one must learn to yield to its physicality, to blend with it. You cannot dominate it. Well, you can try, and you CAN succeed. But you pay a cost. Your musicianship suffers.
As I’m not a guitar player, however, I can’t tell you what it means to yield to a guitar. I suppose I could talk about the trumpet—I’ve been playing one for half a century—but that’s just a little complex. And my point really isn’t about complexity. It’s about subtlety.
Let us begin by talking about playing a very simple instrument, the claves.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Strained Analogies Between Recently Released Films and Current Events: Get Hard and Religious Freedom
by Matt McKenna
Get Hard stars Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart in a movie of which producers thought so little, they named it after the film's worst joke: a cheap double entendre that refers to both becoming emotionally tough and forming an erection. One good litmus test for whether or not you'll like this film is if you think it might be amusing to watch Ferrell and Hart repeatedly say “get hard” as if they're unaware of the sexual half of the phrase's meaning. I did not find it amusing.
The film's plot is simple: Will Ferrell's character whose name I can't remember is a Wall Street genius and a moron. Lest you think there is social commentary implied here, rest assured that there is not. Ferrell is accused of embezzling money from his clients and is subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison, a place where multiple characters in the film promise he will be raped. Of course, Ferrell didn't commit the crime of which he's accused, but instead of trying to prove his innocence during the thirty days of freedom he's afforded to put his affairs in order, he enlists Kevin Hart's character whose name I also can't remember to train him to not get raped in jail. In a twist that has implications later in the film, it so happens that Hart's character has never been to jail, but since he's black, Ferrell's character assumes he has. Another good litmus test for whether or not you'll like the movie is if you think it might be fun to watch Ferrell say racist things as if he's unaware they're racist. I did not find it fun.
Ségur
by Eric Byrd
Questioning Tradition
by Josh Yarden
The ‘four questions’ are among the most memorable readings in the traditional Passover Haggadah. The answers are not particularly interesting, however, especially if we let them suffice as our children transition to adulthood. Unless we dig deep below the surface of why we ask these questions, and unless we search for new ways to answer them, the exercise of reading the Haggadah is merely about providing predetermined correct answers to standardized questions. Our children may well leave them behind as they search for meaning in their lives.
The Haggadah is a book of answers for a night of questions. It tells a rather limited version of the emancipation of the Hebrew slaves, one that is quite different from the Book of Exodus. It tells a certain story about oppression, miracles and memory, but the rituals prescribed in the traditional Haggadah do not raise—let alone answer—the most meaningful questions we might ask concerning our liberation. In fact, it rather blatantly avoids asking any questions about securing our liberty or grappling with oppression in the future. Those questions may not have answers, which is precisely why we need to ask them.
We can re-interpret the annual ritual of retelling the Exodus narrative so that it can be a recurring act of learning to ask meaningful questions and searching together for liberating answers. Not all questions or answers can serve that purpose. There are basically three kinds of questions: 1) Simple questions are about requesting information. They are the questions we ask when we want assistance or permission. 2) There are more involved questions, which require more detailed explanations. They are the questions we ask when we are curious, confused or unsatisfied with what we know. 3) Then there are truly liberating questions, the type we pose when we have come to understand that the answers we have are the cause of our discontent, and we demand legitimate answers. These are the questions which investigate why things are as they are, how they got that way, and whose interests are being served. They are the questions we ask on a quest for the meaning of liberty and justice.
Let’s ask some difficult questions that don’t have clear answers. The environment, for example, is one topic that reveals our dire need for constructive answers to increasingly challenging questions. Let's take a moment to consider how deeply the theme of sustainability is embedded in the holiday of Passover and really in all of human history.
According to the Book of Genesis, drought and then famine in the region brought Joseph to prominence as an economic planner who anticipated a climate crisis and prepared the nation to withstand it. His brothers later went down to Egypt where food was more plentiful, and their descendants ending up enslaved there in later generations. (Beware of the law of unintended consequences!)
After the emancipation from slavery, experiencing freedom meant enduring life in the desert. The Exodus narrative has several references to the problems of finding sufficient food and clean water, and the return to Canaan was described as going not only to the “Promised Land,” but also to a land of plenty.
Fast forward a couple of millennia, and so many of our parents and grandparents left the countries of their homes escaping anti-semitism and also searching for a more comfortable life in the “Golden Medina,” America – where the streets were supposedly “paved with gold.” The Exodus doesn’t quite repeat itself, but much of our history is about the waves of immigrants looking for safe places where they can be free of oppression, and places where they will find sustenance.
Here are three simple sustainability questions about our people and our planet.
1) What might a leader like Joseph ask in our day?
He might begin by wondering what crises we should be planning for in the foreseeable future so that we can sustain our society in the face of drought, famine, scarcity and conflicts over resources.
2) What might a leader like Miriam ask in our day?
She might begin by asking how we can sustain our resources to ensure that everyone in the world will have enough water to drink.
3) What might a leader like Moses ask in our day?
He might begin by asking how one individual can resist injustice in the world, but he'll have to ask and answer many more questions if he is to bring about any sustainable change. In each case, we can dig deeper to reveal more probing questions and meaningful answers. Whose interests are being served by the current state of affairs? How do we engage the people responsible for the problems in generating the solutions? What is the right combination of freedom and responsibility we need to establish and to sustain a just society in the face of the threats we face?
Remember teenage Joseph, sitting in the bottom of a water cistern, imprisoned by his own brothers. He had no idea that future Joseph would end up in Egypt, where he would discover that he was prepared to lead in a time of crisis. And Miriam had no idea as a young girl that she would be the one to save Moses' life and work with her baby brother to lead their people. And Moses the fugitive had no idea that he would return to Egypt to lead the emancipation of the People of Israel. Until each of them came face to face with the dilemmas that pushed them to make difficult decisions, they were unaware of their own potential to become transformational leaders.
A set of the most important questions cannot be complete if it looks only to the past or examines only the actions of others. The stories of these biblical archetypes and others suggest that anyone might come face to face with a momentous decision in a moment of critical awakening. While most of us fade anonymously into the crowd most of the time, there are countless instances when the actions of individuals shape the futures of families, communities and entire societies. When such a moment arrives, will you be prepared to ask the fourth and most important question?
4) How will I change the world?
Begin by asking yourself, “What will I question?” And demand an answer.
Monday, March 30, 2015
The Puzzle of Political Debate
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
To be sure, the images that dominate the landscape of political communication are mere images. Popular tropes such as “the no spin zone,” “fair and balanced” reporting, “straight talk,” “real clear politics,” and so on are merely slogans. And, similarly, the dominant “debate” format of television news is mostly political theater. However, these images and practices prevail. And they prevail because they are effective as marketing tools. So one must ask why citizens should demand that political views come packaged in this way. Here's an answer: an unavoidable fact about us is that we need to see ourselves as reasoners, debaters, and thinkers; and we need to see our own views regarding pressing social and political matters are the products of epistemically proper practice.
Consequently, any vision of democracy that prizes public discourse and civic debate must be supplemented by a properly social epistemology, an account of the ways in which people should go about forming, maintaining, and revising their political views, and a corresponding view of how democratic political institutions can aid or obstruct these processes. In providing a normative account of such matters, a social epistemology can also serve as a critical tool for assessing our present conditions.