Domingo no mundo (72)

Issei Suda, Ajigawa, Ibaraki, 1977.

To bring about justice

Crucially, in calling conscience ‘unpolitical’, Arendt does not mean that it is useless. In fact, she believed that the voice of conscience was often vitally important. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), for example, she argues that it was the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann’s lack of ethical introspection that enabled his participation in the unimaginable evils of the Holocaust. Arendt knew from the experience of Fascism that conscience could prevent subjects from actively advancing profound injustice, but she saw that as a kind of moral bare minimum. The rules of conscience, she argues, ‘do not say what to do; they say what not to do’. In other words: personal conscience can sometimes prevent us from aiding and abetting evil but it does not require us to undertake positive political action to bring about justice. 

Katie Fitzpatrick, Change the world, not yourself.

Domingo no mundo (71)

Claude Monet, Le Printemps, 1872.

Finais Felizes

Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays (as today’s moral tales insistently advertise, though it doesn’t necessarily turn out that way in real life), but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned. And it’s funny, it’s just plain funny! 

Wislawa Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces.

The sociality of the conflict

It may be that sheer scale endangers the high ideals of having open platforms, and that a historically unprecedented inundation of speech warps the overall experience of communication in ways that we are not suited to handle. “When the human condition was marked by hunger and famine, it made perfect sense to crave condensed calories and salt,” Zeynep Tufekci writes in Wired. “Now we live in a food glut environment, and we have few genetic, cultural, or psychological defenses against this novel threat to our health. Similarly, we have few defenses against these novel and potent threats to the ideals of democratic speech, even as we drown in more speech than ever.” 

A platform is worthless without users posting on it. Facebook, Twitter and others have recently taken significant hits to their stock price on revelations of slowed user growth. Users create the value on which these platforms’ stock prices are based, and users bear the costs of the toxicity on those platforms. 

The crisis social media users contend with stems from an outdated fantasy about how people want to use these platforms, and how people behave more generally: solipsistically self-interested, infinitely rational, and divorced from any larger movement or context. Recognizing the sociality of the conflict is the first step toward making these spaces healthier for good faith discourse. Such a shift would require platforms to surrender their neutral pose. With billions of users at stake, social media companies are loath to make major changes to their foundations, but if they don’t, they risk watching whole structures crumble under their own weight.

Adam Clair, War of words.

Domingo no mundo (70)

Josef Albers, In open air, 1936.

O mercado da atenção

In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail. 

[...] 

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners — Occasional Prose. 

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

When economic inequality evolves into class separation – by neighbourhood, school, workplace, lifestyle, culture – the seeds of destruction for relational inequality are planted. Rather than looking the less fortunate ‘squarely in the eye’, the elite might instead come to look at them down their nose: ‘deplorables’ (Hillary Clinton), ‘they cling to guns or religion’ (Barack Obama, 2008), an ‘underclass’ (Bill Clinton, 1996) characterised by fecklessness, irresponsibility and idleness – not worthy, in fact, of our respect.  

Using word-association tests, researchers from Kansas State and Rice universities have attempted to gauge how Americans view the poor. Their average respondent described poor people as 39 per cent more ‘unpleasant’, 95 per cent more ‘unmotivated’, and twice as ‘dirty’ as middle-class Americans. As John A Powell, the director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, and Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in 2017: ‘[I]t is reasonable to conclude that middle-class and wealthy Americans’ social distance from people in poverty exists in a mutually reinforcing cycle with the contempt they feel towards them.’  

According to a poll by the Los Angeles Times in 2016, most of those who are not poor themselves think that welfare benefits ‘make poor people dependent and encourage them to stay poor’ (61 per cent) rather than giving ‘poor people a chance to stand on their own two feet and get started again’ (31 per cent). Meanwhile, those in poverty themselves were divided equally on the question (41 per cent). Most poor Americans (71 per cent) think it is ‘very hard for poor people to find work’, compared with just 25 per cent who think ‘there are plenty of jobs available for poor people/anyone who is willing to work’.  

The less successful are now returning the favour. Respect for ‘the elite’ among ordinary Americans has declined sharply in recent decades, as work by scholars such as Joan Williams and Arlie Russell Hochschild demonstrates. This has potentially profound political consequences, including the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. One of the reasons that Trump won is that working-class and middle-class white Americans felt that he was on their side, and was not condescending to them. In short, that he showed them a little respect.

Richard V. Reeves, The respect deficit. 

Ora bem

(...) em Portugal não há universidades (...) 

Não existem mesmo, há uns barracões, uns mais horrendos do que os outros, como é o caso da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas ali na Avenida de Berna, que mais parece uma prisão com grades espetadas para empalar os alunos que queiram fugir. Uma universidade é uma comunidade, e aí sou obsoleta porque defendo o espírito da universidade que vem da Idade Média: onde acontece uma conversa entre pessoas que se interessam pela cultura e pelo saber, independentemente do mercado. As universidades são tidas em todo o mundo como escolas profissionais em que os estudos clássicos são marginalizados, quando esses, bem como a História, são fundamentais para as pessoas olharem o mundo e saberem tomar decisões. Tanto um engenheiro como um ministro têm de saber o que pensaram os gregos para se comportarem e agirem melhor, o que não está a acontecer.

Maria Filomena Mónica, em entrevista ao DN. 

Domingo no mundo (69)

Thomas Rowlandson, Venus bathing, 1790.

Aprender com o corpo, aprender com a mente

Many adults appreciate the power of computers and the internet, and think that children should have access to them as soon as possible. Yet screen learning displaces other, more tactile ways to discover the world. Human beings learn with their eyes, yes, but also their ears, nose, mouth, skin, heart, hands, feet. The more time kids spend on computers, the less time they have to go on field trips, build model airplanes, have recess, hold a book in their hands, or talk with teachers and friends. In the 21st century, schools should not get with the times, as it were, and place children on computers for even more of their days. Instead, schools should provide children with rich experiences that engage their entire bodies. 

(...) 

According to Merleau-Ponty, European philosophy has long prioritised ‘seeing’ over ‘doing’ as a path to understanding. Plato, René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant: each, in different ways, posits a gap between the mind and the world, the subject and the object, the thinking self and physical things. Philosophers take for granted that the mind sees things from a distance. When Descartes announced ‘I think therefore I am’, he was positing a fundamental gulf between the thinking self and the physical body. Despite the novelty of digital media, Merleau-Ponty would contend that Western thought has long assumed that the mind, not the body, is the site of thinking and learning. 

According to Merleau-Ponty, however, ‘consciousness is originally not an “I think that”, but rather an “I can”’. In other words, human thinking emerges out of lived experience, and what we can do with our bodies profoundly shapes what philosophers think or scientists discover. ‘The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world,’ he wrote. Phenomenology of Perception aimed to help readers better appreciate the connection between the lived world and consciousness. Philosophers are in the habit of saying that we ‘have’ a body. But as Merleau-Ponty points out: ‘I am not in front of my body, I am in my body, or rather I am my body.’  

This simple correction carries important implications about learning. What does it mean to say that I am my body? The mind is not somehow outside of time and space. Instead, the body thinks, feels, desires, hurts, has a history, and looks ahead. Merleau-Ponty invented the term ‘intentional arc’ to describe how consciousness connects ‘our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation’. He makes readers attend to the countless aspects of the world that permeate our thinking.  

Merleau-Ponty challenges us to stop believing that the human mind transcends the rest of nature. Humans are thinking animals whose thinking is always infused with our animality. As the cognitive scientist Alan Jasanoff explains in a recent Aeon essay, it is even misleading to idealise the brain independent of the rest of the viscera. The learning process happens when an embodied mind ‘gears’ into the world.

Nicholas Scampio, Look up from your screen. 

The persistence of bias

In the ancient world, sortition and the casting of dice or lots (procedures grouped under the heading of cleromancy) were in use at some of the most important points in personal and political life. Election by lots was an integral part of the democratic process in ancient Greece — above all, in Athens. In the Hellenic and Hebraic paradigms alike, the randomness of the outcome was seen as an expression of divine will, which could take care of the future much better, more successfully and wisely than humans with their finite knowledge. Chance stood for a higher necessity, inaccessible to our faulty reasoning and dim awareness of causes and their effects. The Roman goddess Justitia, who later became Lady Justice, was depicted blindfolded, suggesting not freedom from prejudice but that only divine indifference could neutralize the biases as well as the familial, affective, and other attachments that inevitably persist in human decision-making. 

One can imagine a modern instantiation of sortition in public life: electoral tie-breaks decided by casting lots, for instance, or the randomization of waiting lists for organ donations. More often, however, our hopes of deliverance from bias are transferred onto algorithmic decision-making systems, which have been broadly implemented across contemporary societies, ostensibly in hopes of making employment, financial, legal, and other decisions fairer. Many human resource managers, for instance, now resort to data-driven algorithms in order to sift through the pools of job candidates and make appropriate hiring decisions. The gods of old have been carried over into the present and the future in the shape of computational thinking, artificial intelligence, and technological innovation. Though many critics have pointed out how algorithmic systems often conserve rather than eradicate bias, stubborn faith in their superhuman ability to correct an essential flaw in our human condition persists. They allow people to “recuse” themselves from decision-making processes and avoid making sense of causal relationships and phenomena when these are too complex to parse. As a result, human actors believe they have mitigated their biases, as though prejudiced thinking could not be transmitted to and engrained in an automated process. 

Excessive reliance on algorithms not only masks the persistence of bias, but also threatens to make human experience itself appear totally random. It is as though the milestones of your existence, such as getting a job or receiving a rejection letter, befell you out of the blue, with no rhyme or reason, with no one to blame, to praise, or to hold responsible. Would you like to live in a world where everything happened without a why and a because? How would life feel, were you to perceive it, including every major and minor occurrence it was woven of, as part of a strange lottery? How would you string together the story of such a life? What, if anything, would there be to narrate? Where would the descriptors “good” and “bad,” “just” and “unjust,” belong in this mess? Does justice have any meaning outside of human deliberation?

 Michael Marder, Just Randomness ou da divindade do algoritmo.