Domingo no mundo (74)

Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Cap d'Antibes, 1943.

Para difíceis contas

Domingo no mundo (73)

Gustav Adolph Henning, Girl reading, 1828.

It looked just the way it should

I remember the book itself—it looked just the way it should, having come down through a couple of generations. It was missing its tide page and cover, the pages had frayed edges and bore the yellowed prints of many fingers; it held a dried violet, a fly flattened over time, sums done in the margins and doodles executed in crayon by some child I didn’t know.

Wislawa Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces.

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.