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Have you ever had a situation where you had two good friends, that you never saw together, and never really thought of together, and then it turns out they know each other better than they know you? That was sort of how I felt when I received today's SojoMail, the e-mailing from Jim Wallis, a left-leaning religious politics pundit well-known in the US. The segment was titled Someone You Should Know, but it turned out to be about someone I know (of) very well, and in fact had been thinking about most of the day - Gordon Brown! It was strange, because the piece was obviously aimed at Americans (real Americans, not phony ex-pats like me) and it presumed the reader had heard little or nothing about Gordon Brown; whereas I had been bemoaning the fact that I was so busy at work, I had still not found out who was on his new cabinet at 8 pm tonight.
Just a quick link here, because I don't need to add anything to this insightful piece by Diana Butler Bass on the Sojourners-related Blog, God's Politics. She talks of Reinhold Niebuhr's definition of irony in the context of American Protestantism and how conspicuous is its absence in the "theology of glory" espoused by a lot of religious conservatives. Deep but worth it.
Wikipedia: The tragedy of the commons is a class of social trap that involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. The term derives originally from a parable published by William Forster Lloyd in his 1833 book on population. It was then popularized and extended by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons". However, the theory itself is as old as Aristotle who said: "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it". I have been accused by DH, who is very literate, fairly widely-read, and by no means ill-educated (although he is a university dropout, and he tends to zone out whenever a conversation takes a philosophical turn) of elitist language in using the phrase "tragedy of the commons" in my WWW article below. I would appreciate feedback on this, as I thought it was a fairly well-known concept but maybe I really do live in my own little ivory tower as my dear Mum always said. I have edited the article to place the possibly offending phrase in quotes.
I have just discovered this great new blog: Dave Pollard's How to Save the World. There is a post there with the title A Crime of Stupefying Proportions, with a really gruesome picture from a slaughterhouse. The post, riffing off of a reading of J. M. Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello, is a long and thoughtful piece about how to react to the overwhelming evil in the world. Here is a longish quote:
"Our world, past and present and probably future, is full of these horrors, this massive tide of suffering and blood. When we show pictures of malnourished children, when we give them money and food to prolong their lives until the next famine or crippling disease, when I force you to look at the picture at the top of this post and tell you that all of these horrors happen millions of times every day, in every neighbourhood on Earth, is that a wake-up call, probably repulsive and probably ineffective but an important service nevertheless, or is it an obscenity, something no one wants or needs to see or hear or learn about?"
I had to bring this up because when I posted about the California fire I was tempted to post pictures, many of which are awe-inspiring, but a little voice kept whispering "disaster porn" in my ear and I just couldn't use the sufferings of others to give my blog some visual punch.
In a related but different dilemma, there is a widely circulating photo of Miss Afghanistan in a bikini. I would really like to post that picture with the question "Is this what the liberation of women looks like?" I would love to get the debate out there, raise a little consciousness. The problem is, my own answer is a resounding "No" so I would be feeding the very flame I want to put out.
But to get back to Dave's original question, I don't have an answer to that either.
From George Bernard Shaw, 1921:
"...powers of destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of romantic schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by education ignoramuses, dupes, snobs and sportsmen to whom fighting is a religion and killing an accomplishment...Essentially the rulers are all defectives who wield irresistible powers of physical coercion"
Borrowed without permission but with gratitude from Bar Room Philosophy.
In Karen Armstrong's article Believers in the lost Ark in the Guardian, I found the best explanation yet for the difference between logos and mythos. It is very frustrating in the modern world to be one of those who "believes in myths". To the modern mind, blinded by science, this is tantamount to believing in lies or crediting obvious falseness. So completely is the meaning between "truth" and "fact" conflated that it is impossible to talk of "two kinds of truth", one physical and one metaphysical. This article is an attempt to tease the meanings apart again, and explain to the modern mind why we need mythos.
I have a philosophical theory that has been in development for about three decades. It's nothing new, really, the only added value I can claim is, perhaps, emphasis, and a few original applications or examples. The nugget of the theory is : ignorance causes more suffering than malice. Yeah, that's not very original, it sounds sort of Buddhist, but I came to this belief by a route entirely independent of Eastern systems (in fact, within the context of pious but humanist Christianity.) There is a corollary : the main cause of ignorance is the learned tendency towards binary thought patterns. That sounds a bit more technical. Other names for binary thought patterns : black-and-white, either-or, (false or not) dichotomy or "diabolical reasoning." This last one is courtesy M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled, etc.) and stems from a day-long lecture of his that I attended in the mid-1980s, posing as the wife of my Methodist pastor. (Yes, it is an interesting story but I don't have time to go into it here.)
I was reminded of this line of thought when I read this very good commentary about the GM food controversy by Nick Cohen. Not necessarily conscious of following my philosophy but essentially guided by its spirit, I find myself without a side to be on in the GM controversy, just as I have been in the US abortion-rights controversy for many years before.
I like to think of myself as a believer in reason, of a sort of 17th or 18th century type, to be sure. Because it appears to me that sometime in the 20th century, reason, in the popular sense, became irreversibly polluted by diabolical thinking. Now, I happen to believe that genetic modification, after appropriate testing, might be OK in the case of golden rice. I would even eat it myself, not that I need it, being in no danger of nutritional deficiency. But I believe that no amount of testing (not that there has ever been any) will make Monsanto's Round-up Ready soybean, or a terminator gene in any food crop, ethical. By the same token, as a pro-choice partisan in 1970s and 1980s America, I was not allowed to say that late-term abortions do have harmful psychological effects on many who have them. And in the matter of training doctors to perform abortions, there were only two allowable positions: pro-choice - all doctors should be forced to be trained, regardless of their beliefs (and of course training means performing abortions as a student); or pro-life - student doctors will be discouraged from taking the optional training in abortion by the handy and effective means of death threats (which is just one of the many ironies implicit in these people calling themselves "pro-life").
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