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.

Domingo no mundo (68)

Alfredo Roque Gameiro, Retrato de Sua Mãe, 1904.

Silêncio:
na ravina inacessível
o prado em flor.

José Tolentino de Mendonça, A Papoila e o Monge.

Domingo no mundo (67)

Paul César Helleu, num verão de outro século.

Vice-versa

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. 

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

Ideas are dangerous

A few years ago I discovered that my friend Tom was a white supremacist. This put me in a strange position: I am a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants. I am a member of one of the so-called invading groups that Tom fears and resents. He broadcasts his views from his social media accounts, which are a catalogue of aggrieved far-Right anger. One post warns ‘the Muslim invaders to keep their filthy hands off our women’. Another features a montage of black faces above the headline: ‘This is the white race after “diversity”.’ Underpinning this is a desperate resentment of ‘liberal Leftie attempts to control free speech’. 

Tom has never mentioned any of these ideas to me; on the contrary, in person he is consistently warm and friendly. He vents his convictions only online, and it seems unlikely that he would ever translate them into violent actions. And yet much the same was once said of Thomas Mair, the 52-year-old from Birstall, a village in northern England, who spent time helping elderly neighbours tend to their gardens, and who in 2016 murdered the pro-immigration MP Jo Cox, while shouting: ‘This is for Britain!’ His actions were found to have been inspired by white supremacist ideology. 

James Baldwin was right to say that ideas are dangerous. Ideas force people to confront the gap between their ideals and their manifestation in the world, prompting action. Ideas can prompt change for better or for worse – and often both at the same time. But attempts to create change are always charged with danger: to act in new ways is to erode old limits on our behaviour. In the forging of new territory – and the sense of danger that accompanies it – actions that might once have been deemed excessive can come to seem not merely necessary but normal. 

(...) 

‘Loneliness is the common ground of terror’ – and not just the terror of totalitarian governments, of which Hannah Arendt was thinking when she wrote those words in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It also generates the sort of psychic terror that can creep up on a perfectly ordinary individual, cloaking everything in a mist of urgent fear and uncertainty. 

By ‘loneliness’ Arendt did not simply mean solitude, in which – as she points out – you have your own self for consolation. In the solitude of our minds, we engage in an internal dialogue. We speak in two voices. It is this internal dialogue that allows us to achieve independent and creative thought – to weigh strong competing imperatives against each other. You engage in it every time you grapple with a moral dilemma. Every clash of interests, every instance of human difference evokes it. True thought, for Arendt, involved the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. True loneliness, therefore, was the opposite. It involved the abrupt halting of this internal dialogue: ‘the loss of one’s own self’ – or rather, the loss of trust in oneself as the partner of one’s thoughts. True loneliness means being cut off from a sense of human commonality and therefore conscience. You are left adrift in a sea of insecurity and ambiguity, with no way of navigating the storms.

Obrigatório ler Nabeelah Jaffer, In extremis.

Domingo no mundo (66)

Alfred Sisley, Margens do Sena em Argenteuil, 1876.

Uma laranja p'la manhã

With or without jet-lag, I do like to start the day listening to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (usually played by Andras Schiff). It provides an orderliness and deep calm which is a good basis from which to start a day which will almost certainly lack those qualities.

O violoncelista Steven Isserlis, no Twitter.

Domingo no mundo (65)

Vincent Van Gogh, Interior de um restaurante, Junho-Julho de 1887.