Global Day of Action on Climate Crisis

Next week the world's leaders will gather at Copenhagen to discuss climate change. Today, in light of the fact that "the people hit hardest by the climate change crisis -- the global poor -- will continue to be systematically excluded from formal discussions of how to address problems like water shortages and crop failures stemming from global warming" activists have organized the Global Day of Action on Climate Crisis.

I would like to see this continue. Such a concerted effort to maintain such a grassroots, bottom-up, approach to climate change is admirable.

Update: George Monbiot criticizes Canada's record on climate protection.

Read here as well.

George Orwell on the fact that emotions determine our beliefs and our actions more than rationality can ever hope to:

"The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action."

Very interesting discussion on the differing thinking styles of the globe's western and eastern people and how this may determine their respective adaptability to future problems.

Interesting article on journalism and philosophy.

William Blake:

"Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones
He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars
General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars"

Global food production

Currently something like a billion people live in extreme poverty and, with climate change and population growth, that number will rise unless we find innovative approaches to food production. The subject is something I know very little about, but I intend to look into it. People need to eat; that much is obvious. Read here for now.

Book Review

Here's my review of Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion by Melanye T. Price.

Jamaica Kincaid on colonialism, from her book "A Small Place":

"I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions. All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal's point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me.”

How to write about Africa.

A character study of Abraham Lincoln:

"It is significant that he was not precocious. The touching picture, preserved in several memories — the lonely, illiterate boy with a passion for reading, indulging the passion at night by a cabin fire — this picture has nothing of early cleverness. Of the qualities that appear after his advent, it is the moral not the mental ones that were clearly foreshadowed in his youth. The simplicity, the kindliness, the courage, the moderation of the matured man have their evident beginnings in the boy. His purely mental characteristics appeared so gradually, so unostentatiously, that his neighbours did not note their coming. Today, seen in the perspective of his career, their approach is more discernible. To one who goes carefully through the twelve volumes of the chronological edition of Lincoln’s writings, though the transition from characterlessness to individuality is nowhere sudden, the consciousness of a steady progress in mental power, of a subtle evolution of the literary sense, is unmistakable. The revelation gains in celerity as one proceeds. But there is no sunburst, no sudden change of direction. And yet, for all the equivocality of the early years, one ends by wondering why the process has seemed vague. It is like that type of play whose secret is not disclosed until just before the curtain but which, once disclosed, brings all preceding it into harmony."

William Butler Yeats:

"I had three interests; interest in a form of literature, in a form of philosophy, and a belief in nationality. None of these seemed to have anything to do with the other, but gradually my love of literature and my belief in nationality came together. Then for years I said to myself that these two had nothing to do with my form of philosophy....Now all three are, I think, one, or rather all three are a discrete expression of a single conviction."

David Foster Wallace:

"If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."

Book Review

Here's my review of Beasts of no Nation by Uzodinma Iweala.

Terry Eagleton:

"It is also because one cannot accept that this - the world we see groaning in agony around us - is the only way things could be, though empirically speaking this might certainly prove to be the case; because one gazes with wondering bemusement on those hard-headed types from whom all this, given a reformist tweak or two, is as good as it gets; because to back down from this vision would be to betray what one feels are the most precious powers and capacities of human beings; because however hard one tries, one simply cannot shake off the primitive conviction that this is not how it is supposed to be."

Karl Jaspers on the concept of metaphysical guilt:

"There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, I am an accomplice in them. If I have not risked my life in order to prevent the murder of other men, if I have stood silent, I feel guilty in a sense that cannot in any adequate fashion be understood juridically, or politically, or morally...That I am still alive after such things have been done weighs on me as a guilt that cannot be expiated.

Somewhere in the heart of human relations an absolute command imposes itself: In case of criminal attack or of living conditions that threaten physical being, accept life only for all together, otherwise not at all."

Book Review

Here's my review of What is the What: A Novel by Valentino Achak Deng and Dave Eggers.

Book Review

Here's my review of Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila.

Book Review

Here's my review of Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 by James T. Campbell.

The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James

Here are my thoughts on William James's book on religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

James’s method assumes that “a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep”. The book, in turn, is full of examples of religious experience from a variety of sources. His discussion of religion does not centre on the dogmas of established religions, but on “the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.” He is concerned primarily with the visionaries whose passionate and novel experiences were the seeds of their religion’s growth; as well as the personal and subjective experiences of other religiously devout people, without spending much time on the various religious institutions and their creeds. In light of this special emphasis on the individual and his subjective experiences, religion is something subtly different for James than it is in normal conversation. It consists of “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”

In the opening chapter, Religion and Neurology, James addresses what he called “medical materialism”. This is the supposition that mental states are caused by biological phenomena. Often this relationship will be raised to dismiss the truth of religious experiences. “Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic,” writes James. There’s definitely something to this argument. If it can be shown that a religious experience, or any kind of mental state, owes its cause to some physical occurrence it would be reasonable to doubt the truth of the subjective experience. James’s response is inspired. If something like medical materialism (the dependence of mental states on some physical correlate) is true, then why stop at mental states of a spiritual nature? “Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see ‘the liver’ determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul.” Every single one of our thoughts is conditioned by some physical, or biological, occurrence, so we’re left with one of two options: we can discard all our beliefs and consider every mental state untrue, or we can free ourselves from this test of truth. A certain state of mind is true, James argues, because there is “an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life.” I’ll get back to this counter-intuitive point a little later.

We should address a particularly refreshing point in the book. When James writes of the “divine” which forms the basis of the religious experience he is not limiting the term to systems of thought that assume the existence of either a supernatural realm or a God. Buddhism, for one, does not presuppose the existence of God and, yet, for James its members count as the religiously devout, connected, as they are, to something they consider divine. In James’s framework, one can worship nothing but abstract moral laws and still find themselves in the grips of something reminiscent of religious feeling. “We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds ‘religions’; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to ‘what he considers the divine,’ we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.” And also: “In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as God; but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or inner visions of holiness or right may also be felt as the true lords and enlargers of our life”.

In the chapter The Reality of the Unseen, James argues that both abstract ideas – like the conceptual nouns of ‘goodness’, ‘beauty’, ‘strength’, ‘justice’, etc. - and concrete facts are as inextricably tied to one another as are rules of grammar and discrete words. Without the one, the others would be fundamentally senseless. This, James believes, proves that the “unseen” exists. Though intangible and experientially unverifiable, they are as present as any concrete object. I’ll quote James at length here: “The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims…in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance…Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its ‘nature,’ as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is ‘what’ it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception.”

James’s real project is to figure out whether an individual’s sense of connection to this unseen and divine abstract realm has any practical worth to the individual. Setting aside the unfortunately common practice of petitional prayer (the act of asking God to either give you something or to help see you through troubled times), James asks how prayer of a wider sense may ennoble man. In short, real prayer, or the practice of putting oneself into an active relationship with something larger than the particulars of life – to abstract principles, for instance – improves a person in some distinct ways. The typical desires, inhibitions, and pettiness fall out of consideration when one’s mind is on something as large as either religious or abstract ideals. “The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our high indignations are elicited,” James writes. In yet another beautiful turn of phrase, such checks are “Severed like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun”. As one’s sense of scope and sense of what’s importance broadens, so does his asceticism. He becomes less concerned with his own comfort and welfare - if it distracts from an ideal held. And he becomes inclined towards tenderness for humanity. Whether one considers more conventional objects, like God, or something like a set of moral ideals as warranting their devotion, the effects are the same. “Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder, cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule,” James writes. Of course, the practical implication of genuine tenderness for humanity is a preparedness to fight (both metaphorically and literally) those who choose to win victories, however fleeting, at the expense of others. So let’s not confuse tenderness and compassion with weakness of will.

Around this point of the book, I still felt that James had not dealt adequately enough with the question of whether or not the beliefs of such religiously and ethically inclined individuals are actually true! His argument is as follows. The attempt to put religious belief on the foundation of logical argument is a waste of time. It will do nothing but confirm the beliefs of the faithful and prove empty, disingenuous, and cold to those who are not so inclined. It gets wrong a basic fact about the human condition: “the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand.”

Ultimately, the existence, or truth, of religion and other abstract ideas lies in its practical use. If he is changed for the better by his new beliefs, as far as we know those beliefs correspond to some facts of the world – or the universe. Let me explain a little further. James is what philosophers call a pragmatist. For them, a belief is like a plan of action. A person has a belief insofar as that thought informs the way he behaves in the world. Consequently we can tease out the meaning of a belief by looking at how one would behave if the belief were held. If belief is so disconnected from our lives, from action, completely disembodied and wingless, then it is, functionally at least, meaningless. James’s argument, from what I can tell, is as follows: it’s as if religion were true because, from our experiences of people who are genuinely involved in it, their belief in it seems to cause some identifiable effects in them. And because the effects are real, the belief must be meaningful and, hence, true. This pragmatic argument for the existence of the divine realm may seem a little unconvincing. I’m not entirely sure I’m convinced myself. I will say that the book is worth the time and effort and, hopefully with some maturation, I’ll be able to tackle it again more effectively. Perhaps by then I will have changed from what I am - an irreligious person without a connection to, or even a coherent belief in, the divine - to something very different. As James puts it in one of his many beautiful sentences: "Even late in life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the man's hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling."

Round-up

Interesting argument in favour of scraping summer vacation for students. It’s good for international competition; the summer vacation itself is the product of outdated needs; and ridding ourselves of the lengthy break may be an act of egalitarianism. It would, that is, level the playing field between the rich and the poor students: “…wealthy parents can afford to give their children all sorts of edifying summer experiences that downscale parents cannot. And this, as researchers at Johns Hopkins have found, leads to backsliding: Educational advancement across classes tends to be fairly even during the school year. But downscale students actually decline in educational achievement over the course of the summer, while upscale students remain relatively stable.” This reminds me of Nicholas D. Kristof’s op-ed for the New York Times yesterday. He restated the common point that success is the product of education and opportunity – and not of innate talent. We should keep this in mind and consider seriously whatever policies might make the education of the poor and the rich more alike.

Here’s an account of the conditions in which Pakistanis displaced by the fighting between government forces and militants are living. There are approximately 2 million of them in just over a month of fighting.

Warfare among early humans may have helped midwife the development of altruism.