After lengthy discussions, the dogmas of the Pope's primacy over the universal Church and of the infallibility of the papal magisterium were approved at Vatican Council I. What is the significance of these dogmas of the Church?

By Sergio Centofanti

One hundred fifty years ago, on 18 July 1870, the Constitution Pastor Aeternus, which defined the two dogmas of the primacy of the Pope and papal infallibility, was promulgated.

The Dogmatic Constitution was approved unanimously by the 535 Council Fathers present after long, fierce, and heated discussions, as Paul VI said during a general audience in 1969. He described that day as a dramatic page in the life of the Church, but for all that, no less clear and definitive. Eighty-three Council Fathers did not take part in the vote. The approval of the text came on the last day of the First Vatican Council, which was suspended the following day because of the start of the Franco-Prussian war. Following the capture of Rome by Italian troops on 20 September 1870 which effectively marked the end of the Pontifical States the Council was prorogued sine die.The conflicts that emerged during the Council led to the schism of the so-called Old Catholics.

The two dogmas of Pastor Aeternus were proclaimed after the dogmas concerning the rationality and the supernatural character of the faith contained in Dei Filius, the other Dogmatic Constitution of Vatican I, which was promulgated on 24 April 1870. The text states that God, the beginning and end of all things, may be certainly known by the natural light of human reason, by means of created things (Rom 1:20).

This dogma, as Paul VI explained in the Audience of 1969, recognises that reason, by its own power alone, can reach certain knowledge of the Creator through creatures. The Church thus, in the age of rationalism, defends the value of reason, maintaining, on the one hand, the superiority of revelation and of faith over reason and its capacities; but declaring, on the other, that there can be no opposition between the truth of faith and the truth of reason, God being the source of both.

In the encyclical Fides et ratio, published in 1998, Pope John Paul II affirms, Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truthin a word, to know himselfso that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

In Pastor Aeternus, Pope Pius IX, before the proclamation of the dogma on primacy, recalls Jesuss prayer to the Father that His disciples might be one: Peter and his successors are the abiding principle and visible foundation of the unity of the Church. He solemnly affirms:

We teach and declare that, according to the Gospel evidence, a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole church of God was immediately and directly promised to the blessed apostle Peter and conferred on him by Christ the Lord. That which our lord Jesus Christ, the Prince of shepherds and great shepherd of the sheep, established in the blessed Apostle Peter, for the continual salvation and permanent benefit of the Church, must of necessity remain for ever, by Christs authority, in the Church which, founded as it is upon a rock, will stand firm until the end of time

"Therefore, whoever succeeds to the Chair of Peter obtains by the institution of Christ himself, the Primacy of Peter over the whole Church Both clergy and faithful, of whatever rite and dignity, both singly and collectively, are bound to submit to this power by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, and this not only in matters concerning faith and morals, but also in those which regard the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world. In this way, by unity with the Roman Pontiff in communion and in profession of the same faith, the Church of Christ becomes one flock under one supreme shepherd. This is the teaching of the catholic truth, and no one can depart from it without endangering his faith and salvation.

In the primacy of the Pope, writes Pius IX, the supreme power of teaching is also included. This power was conferred on Peter and his successors for the salvation of all, as the constant tradition of the Church confirms. He continues:

But since in this very age when the salutary effectiveness of the Apostolic office is most especially needed, not a few are to be found who disparage its authority, we judge it absolutely necessary to affirm solemnly the prerogative which the only-begotten Son of God was pleased to attach to the supreme pastoral office.

"Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith, to the glory of God our Saviour, for the exaltation of the Catholic religion and for the salvation of the Christian people, with the approval of the sacred Council, we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed His Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable.

Pope John Paul II explained the meaning and limits of infallibility in the General Audience of 24 March 1993:

Infallibilityis not given to the Roman Pontiff as a private person, but inasmuch as he fulfils the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians. He also does not exercise it as having authority in himself and by himself, but by his supreme apostolic authority and by the divine assistance promised to him in Blessed Peter. Finally, he does not possess it as if he could dispose of it or count on it in every circumstance, but only when he speaks from the chair, and only in a doctrinal field limited to the truths of faith and morals and those closely connected with them (...) the Pope must act as pastor and doctor of all Christians, pronouncing on truths concerning faith and morals, in terms which clearly express his intention to define a certain truth and to demand the definitive adherence to it by all Christians.

"This is what happened, for example, in the definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, about which Pius IX affirmed: It is a doctrine revealed by God and must, for this reason, be firmly and constantly believed by all the faithful; or also in the definition of the Assumption of Mary Most Holy, when Pius XII said: By the authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our authority, we declare and define as divinely revealed dogma... etc. Under these conditions one can speak of extraordinary papal magisterium, whose definitions are irreformable of themselves, not by the consent of the Church (...) The Supreme Pontiffs can exercise this form of magisterium. And this has in fact happened. Many Popes, however, have not exercised it.

The International Theological Commission, in a document entitled The Interpretation of Dogma (published in 1990 when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was head of the institution), explains that infallibility does not mean falling into a fundamental remaining in the truth, since it must be understood in the context of the living and dynamic character of Tradition, as Dei Verbum affirms:

This tradition which comes from the Apostles develop in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down. This happens through the contemplation and study made by believers, who treasure these things in their hearts (see Luke, 2:19, 51) through a penetrating understanding of the spiritual realities which they experience, and through the preaching of those who have received through Episcopal succession the sure gift of truth (DV, 8).

John Paul II is thus able to observe, in the General Audience cited above, that the exercise of the Magisterium makes concrete and manifests the contribution of the Roman Pontiff to the development of doctrine in the Church.

Paul VI, in the Audience of 1969, defended the relevance of the First Vatican Council and its connection with its successor, Vatican II: The two Vatican Councils, the First and the Second, are complementary even if they differ greatly for many reasons. So, the attention paid to the prerogatives of the Pope in Vatican I were extended in Vatican II to the whole People of God, with the concepts of collegiality and communion. At the same time, the focus on the unity of the Church, which has Peter as its point of visible reference, is developed in a strong commitment to ecumenical dialogue so much so that John Paul II, in Ut unum sint, was able to launch an appeal to the various Christian communities to find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation.

And Pope Francis, in Evangelii gaudium, speaks of a conversion of the papacy. He notes that the Second Vatican Council stated that, like the ancient patriarchal Churches, episcopal conferences are in a position to contribute in many and fruitful ways to the concrete realization of the collegial spirit. Yet this desire has not been fully realized, since a juridical status of episcopal conferences which would see them as subjects of specific attributions, including genuine doctrinal authority, has not yet been sufficiently elaborated. Excessive centralization, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Churchs life and her missionary outreach.

And it should be remembered, too, that, according to Vatican II, the infallibility promised to the Church resides also in the body of Bishops, when that body exercises the supreme magisterium with the successor of Peter (Lumen gentium, 25).

Going beyond adherence to dogmas, Pope St Pius X recalled, in an audience in 1912, the necessity of loving the Pope and of obeying him and said he was grieved when this did not happen.

Saint John Bosco encouraged his collaborators and the young boys he helped to always preserve in their hearts three white loves: the Eucharist, Our Lady, and the Pope.

And Benedict XVI, speaking in Krakow on 27 May 2006 with young people who had grown up with John Paul II, explained in simple words what was affirmed in those truths of faith proclaimed long ago in 1870:

Do not be afraid to build your life on the Church and with the Church. You are all proud of the love you have for Peter and for the Church entrusted to him. Do not be fooled by those who want to play Christ against the Church. There is one foundation on which it is worthwhile to build a house. This foundation is Christ. There is only one rock on which it is worthwhile to place everything. This rock is the one to whom Christ said: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church (Mt 16:18).

"Young people, you know well the Rock of our times. Accordingly, do not forget that neither that Peter who is watching our gathering from the window of God the Father, nor this Peter who is now standing in front of you, nor any successive Peter will ever be opposed to you or the building of a lasting house on the rock. Indeed, he will offer his heart and his hands to help you construct a life on Christ and with Christ.

This is a working translation from the Italian original.

Read more here:

Primacy and infallibility: 150 years after Vatican I - Vatican News

In an article he posted on his Facebook account titled "Facts Regarding the Superiority of the Jewish Mind over the Arab Mind,"Egyptian researcher and intellectual Ahmed Saad Zayed wondered why the Jews, who number only 14 million worldwide, "control the world,"while the Muslims, who number 1.5 billion, lag behind. Presenting a long list of pioneering Jewish figures, such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, who are globally renowned for their accomplishments, and comparing the number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners to the number of Arab ones,[1] he argued that the gap is not the result of a conspiracy or of any special favor enjoyed by the Jews, as many Arabs believe. Rather, it is the result of the Jews'pursuit of excellence and the high value they place on knowledge and education, compared to the Arabs. This is evident, he said, from the small number and poor quality of universities in the Arab world, compared to the universities in the West in general and in Israel in particular. He called on the Muslims to stop blaming others for their failures and to start developing their capacity to gain and spread knowledge and to innovate.

Ahmed Saad Zayed (Source: Facebook.com/aszayedtv/)

The following are translated excerpts from the article:[2]

"The facts reflecting the superiority of the Jewish mind over the Arab mind are they due to a Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-atheist-Jewish plot, or to a failure of the Arabs and of their tall tales? Or perhaps the reason is the rationalism and secularity of the Jews, most of whom especially the well-educated among them, such as Einstein and Freud were not dervishes who believed in superstitions like many of the Arabs?

"The question thus remains: Why do the Jews control our world today? Let us examine the facts and figures. The Jews of the world number 14 million [whereas] Muslims number 1.5 billion In other words, one-fifth of the world population is Muslims, and there are 107 Muslims for every Jew. Despite this, 14 million Jews are more powerful than a billion and a half Muslims. Why?

"Let's continue with the facts and statistics. [Lets look at] the most prominent names in modern history: Albert Einstein Jewish; Sigmund Freud Jewish; Karl Marx Jewish; Paul Samuelson Jewish; Milton Friedman Jewish. The most important medical inventors: inventor of the medical syringe [bifurcated vaccination needle], Benjamin Rubin Jewish; inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk Jewish; inventor of the cure for syphilis, Paul Ehrlich Jewish; developer of the field of immunology, Ilya Ilyich Jewish; the most prominent researcher of the endocrine system, Andrew Schally Jewish; the most prominent researcher in the field of cognitive treatment, Aaron Beck Jewish; inventor of the birth control pill, Gregory Pincus Jewish; the most prominent researcher of the human eye and retina, George Wald Jewish; the most prominent researcher of cancer treatments, Stanley Cohen Jewish

"Inventors whose innovations changed the world: [micro]processor developer, Stanley Mazor Jewish; inventor of the nuclear reactor, Leo Szilard Jewish; inventor of fiber optics, Peter Schultz Jewish; inventor of the traffic light, Charles Adler Jewish; inventor of stainless steel, Benno Strauss Jewish; inventor of the soundtrack, Theodore Case Jewish; inventor of the microphone and gramophone, Emil Berliner Jewish; inventor of the videotape recorder, Charles Ginsburg Jewish.

"Manufacturers of international brands: Polo by Ralph Lauren Jewish; Levis jeans by Levi Strauss Jewish; Starbucks, owned by Howard Schultz Jewish; Google co-founder Sergey Brin Jewish; Oracle Corporation co-founder Larry Ellison Jewish; DKNY by Donna Karan Jewish; Baskin-Robbins co-founder Irv Robbins Jewish; Dunkin' Donuts founder William Rosenberg Jewish.

"Politicians and decision-makers: [former] U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger Jewish; [former] president of Yale University Richard Levin Jewish; [former] chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan Jewish; [former] U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright Jewish; American politician Joseph [Joe] Lieberman Jewish; [former] U.S. defense secretary Caspar Weinberger Jewish; [former] Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov Jewish; [former] prime minister of New Zealand John Kay Jewish; [former] chief minister of Singapore David Marshall Jewish; [former] Australia chief governor Sir Isaac Isaacs Jewish; [former] British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli Jewish; [former] president of Portugal Jorge Sampaio Jewish; [former] deputy prime minister of Canada Herbert Gray Jewish; [former] president of Frances Council of Ministers Pierre Mendes Jewish; prominent economic and financial speculator George Soros Jewish; American businessman and philanthropist Walter Annenberg Jewish.

"Influential media figures: Wolf Blitzer, CNN Jewish; Barbara Walters, ABC News Jewish; Eugene Meyer, The Washington Post Jewish; Catherine Graham, The Washington Post Jewish; Joseph Lelyveld, The New York Times Jewish; Max Frankel, The New York Times Jewish.

"These names are just a sampling of influential Jews and their accomplishments, which benefit humanity on a day-to-day basis. A few more facts from the last 105 years: 180 of [the worlds] 14 million Jews won Nobel Prizes. During the same period, [the worlds] 1.3 billion Muslims produced three Nobel Prize winners. That is, the Jews have one Nobel Prize for every 77,778 people [whereas the Muslims have] one Nobel Prize for every 500 million people. Had the Jews ratio of winners been the same as the Muslims, they would have won 0.028 Nobel Prizes in the last 105 years, namely, less than one third of a prize [sic]. And had the Muslims ratio of winners been the same as the Jews, they would have won 19,289 Nobel Prizes in the last 105 years Is this cognitive superiority of the Jews incidental? Is [the result of] fraud, conspiracy or favoritism? And why dont Muslims attain this level, these positions and this ability to bring about change, despite their huge advantage [in numbers]?

"Here are some facts that may answer this question. The entire Muslim world has only 500 universities, [whereas] the U.S. alone has 5,758, and India has 8,407! Not one of these Muslim universities is on the list of the worlds best 500 universities, whereas six Israeli universities are on it

"The conclusion is that the Islamic countries lack the capacity to produce knowledge, they lack the capacity to dispense imported knowledge, they lack the capacity to manufacture high-tech gear and they lack the capacity to use it. So let us acknowledge reality, without shame and without burying our heads in the sand. The truth is clear and requires no proof or statistics. But there are some among us who contradict themselves and deny what is as clear as day. Yes, the Jews made all these accomplishments because they embraced excellence and knowledge and instilled this [value] in their children. The [people whose] names were listed above were not born that way. They had good training. They encountered many difficulties before accomplishing what they did. They were not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. We all know the story of Einstein who failed math, and of [Thomas] Edison who was expelled because he was [judged] unfit for school, and other stories. Lets stop deluding ourselves that the Jews control the world just because they are Jews or because the West loves them. The Jews took over the world through studying, planning and ingenious foresight They set out their goals, first among them [attaining] excellence in the field of knowledge: the ability to create and discover knowledge, and then to dispense it to others while claiming credit and respect for illuminating the path for the world. [That is why] the Jews dominate the world of economy, medicine, technology and media. As for the claim that the West loves the Jews, have you noticed that the greatest Western comedians are Jewish? Even at humor they excel.

"And where are we in all of this? It is easy to read these lines and place the blame on the government, on generations of Arab opportunists and leaders, or on the long years of oppression, imperialism and occupation. But by doing so, you add yet another drop to the ocean of Islamic passivity that brought us to this state. Stop being bitter and passive and blaming others. Start with yourself. Have you ever thought of spreading knowledge? Do you have knowledge that nobody else has? Why not share it with everyone?"

[1] It should be noted that this list was not complied by Zayed, but appears in several sources, such as an article published over a decade ago by Pakistani writer Dr. Farouq Salim, titled "Why Are the Jews So Powerful?"(for an English translation of this article, see ibnmahadi.wordpress.com, January 12, 2009). Since then it has been quoted by several Arab writers. For example, it appeared in a July 27, 2009 article titled "How the Jews Took Over the World"on the Hamas-affiliated website palinfo.com, and in an October 27, 2009 article on the liberal website Elaph.com. Zayed himself states at the end of his article that the source for his information is "the encyclopedia on Jews, Judaism and Zionism by the late 'Abd Al-Wahhab Al-Masiri"(published in 1999), quoted on "the page of [his] friend Suleiman Muhammadi."

[2] Facebook.com/aszayedtv, July 2, 2020.

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Egyptian Intellectual: Instead Of Complaining That The Jews 'Control The World,' The Muslims Should Follow Their Example And Pursue Excellence -...

Not to be confused with Rationality, which simply refers to the process of being reasonable.

Rationalism is a philosophy in which a high regard is given to reason (specifically logic) and to empirical observation.

From the strict philosophical standpoint, rationalism is the view that all or most truth is deductive and a priori, deriving logically from a set of axioms gained by intuition or inherent knowledge (and not from studying the world around us empirically).[1] However, the term is not very often used so strictly, so this form of rationalism is generally known in English-speaking philosophy as continental rationalism or Cartesian rationalism, as its original proponents, such as Ren Descartes, were largely situated in continental Europe.[2]

The term is more commonly used to refer to a synthesis of continental rationalism with its former rival philosophy, empiricism. This looser rationalism holds that empirical observation is more useful than intuition for gaining one's starting axioms, but one can use deductive reasoning from these axioms just as well. The best embodiment of this way of gaining knowledge is the scientific method; hence, rationalists tend to give high regard to science, designating it as the primary or sole proper source of truth.

RationalWiki is devoted to this sort of rational analysis of empirical evidence to form conclusions; most RationalWiki editors are very skeptical of other ways of knowing.

The idea of being "rational" is distinct and broader than the philosophy of rationalism. To be "rational" is synonymous with a "sane" or "functional" way of thinking. If one is "rational," then in common parlance this means that one can think clearly and is capable of intelligently assessing new ideas when presented.

The opposite term, "irrational," is used to signify someone who cannot or will not think clearly. If a thought or action is irrational, it signifies something that is not just incorrect, but perverse, insane, or beneath consideration.

Rationalism was first formulated in classical times by philosophers such as Socrates and Plato. Many of the Socratic dialogues would use a conversational process to work out logical inconsistencies in ideas that were held by contemporaries to be "common sense," such as the definition of "the good." In this historical sense Rationalism was distinct and separate from Empiricism (see below), as these early Rationalists didn't deem it necessary to use observation - in the modern use, Rationalists who would combine both the logical reasoning of Rationalism with the observational checks of Empiricism.

But at the time, virtually everyone even the great philosophers believed that various things were known by people inherently. Aside from a few schools of thought which suggested that nothing could ever be known as true (pyrrhonism), few thought to discard a priori beliefs and start from scratch with only that which was known to be true. Thus, at this point historical Rationalism closely resembled the way philosophers still define the philosophy.

The 16th century philosopher Descartes, however, attempted to create a whole philosophy through pure reason in his Discourse on Method and its succeeding works: he began with the only thing of which he thought he could be certain, that there was an "I" that was thinking - often rendered in the Latin of cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am."). His process ushered in a new era in rationalism, concurrent with the greater Enlightenment. At that time the philosophy began to resemble modern empiricism more than its own ancient ancestor, especially during the era of Romanticism when Enlightenment ideas were challenged and sensory perception was given more of a hearing.

Loose use in the time since has led to the fuzzy state of the term today, particularly when combined with the similar but much broader notion of being rational.

Rationalism in psychology is identified with the philosophical tradition of the same name and refers to the school of thought that sees certain elements of cognition as innate. For this reason, it is sometimes used synonymously with the terms "innatism" or "nativism" though the synonymy is not particularly deep as "innatism" or "nativism" sees them as innate in the thicker sense of that one at least can be born with them preset exactly in a certain, perhaps permanent, way (whether this ever actually happens is beside the point) and Rationalism sees them as innate in the thinner sense that one is simply born with them waiting to be set more exactly as one is psychologically prepares to understand what they are about and perhaps never completely fixable once set for the first time. During the 20th century, Noam Chomsky became associated with rationalism due to his positing the concept of an innate "language acquisition device."[3]

Rationalism, or "economic rationalism," is also a term of art in economics. It is generally used today in Australia to refer to the local brand of neoliberal economic and political policy, though it was also used by scholars such as Max Weber in reference to the Protestant work ethic.[4]

Rationalism is also used as a self-descriptor by followers of Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the community that has grown up around him (in particular the website LessWrong).[5] Scott Alexander argues that, in this context, it refers less to a particular set of beliefs (an ideology), but more to the social community those beliefs support, a "tribe".[5]

Another straightforward conception of rationality is that an individual acts rationally if they act in the way that, on reflection, they believe best suits achievement of their aims. This conception, naturally, gives rise to the common conception when on reflection it is believed that the aim of truth can best be achieved through factual analysis and the scientific method.

This approach, however, is problematic, as it denies the existence of any sort of objective logic independent of human perception. Many, on reflection, believe that astrology, Scientology, homeopathy and other ridiculous nonsense best suits achievement of their aims. If these people are to be held to be irrational, a new criterion must be put in the place of on reflection. Usually the criterion is modified such that the rational person must reasonably believe they have a methodology to achieve their aims, leaving question of what it means to reasonably believe that a methodology will achieve certain aims.[6]

Alvin Plantinga's concept of rationalism neatly distinguishes reason from "raving madness" by conceiving of reason as "not raving mad".[7] Of course Plantinga has to give us a good idea of what is not "raving mad", which he does with his concept of "proper function". Just as a clock, functioning properly, is a reliable indicator of the time, human senses, functioning properly, are reliable indicators of the world. Acting in accordance with the proper function of our faculties is rational.

The problem of what constitutes function, and proper function at that, is more than a question of what our faculties do (a fast clock tells the incorrect time, but this is not its function). Both function and proper function have an element of what things should be doing. As should is a difficult concept to introduce in a mechanistic description of how things happen to be, Plantinga sources the "should", the "purpose" of our faculties in a concept of God.

Critical rationalism ( Karl Popper) differentiates from the above conceptions of rationality by rejecting any positive content in reason. Reason, critical rationalism holds, does not provide 'reasons': it does not give positive recommendations about what beliefs should be held. Reason operates negatively, restricting the beliefs that can be held. It does this through criticism, subjecting pre-adopted beliefs to tests in an effort to refute them.

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

Rationalists generally develop their view in two ways. First, they argue that there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they construct accounts of how reason in some form or other provides that additional information about the world. Empiricists present complementary lines of thought. First, they develop accounts of how experience provides the information that rationalists cite, insofar as we have it in the first place. (Empiricists will at times opt for skepticism as an alternative to rationalism: if experience cannot provide the concepts or knowledge the rationalists cite, then we don't have them.) Second, empiricists attack the rationalists' accounts of how reason is a source of concepts or knowledge.

A serious problem for the Innate Knowledge thesis remains, however. We know a proposition only if it is true, we believe it and our belief is warranted. Rationalists who assert the existence of innate knowledge are not just claiming that, as a matter of human evolution, God's design or some other factor, at a particular point in our development, certain sorts of experiences trigger our belief in particular propositions in a way that does not involve our learning them from the experiences. Their claim is even bolder: In at least some of these cases, our empirically triggered, but not empirically warranted, belief is nonetheless warranted and so known. How can these beliefs be warranted if they do not gain their warrant from the experiences that cause us to have them or from intuition and deduction?

Some rationalists think that a reliabilist account of warrant provides the answer. According to Reliabilism, beliefs are warranted if they are formed by a process that generally produces true beliefs rather than false ones. The true beliefs that constitute our innate knowledge are warranted, then, because they are formed as the result of a reliable belief-forming process. Carruthers maintains that Innate beliefs will count as known provided that the process through which they come to be innate is a reliable one (provided, that is, that the process tends to generate beliefs that are true) (1992, p. 77). He argues that natural selection results in the formation of some beliefs and is a truth-reliable process.

An appeal to Reliabilism, or a similar causal theory of warrant, may well be the best way for rationalists to develop the Innate Knowledge thesis. They have a difficult row to hoe, however. First, such accounts of warrant are themselves quite controversial. Second, rationalists must give an account of innate knowledge that maintains and explains the distinction between innate knowledge and a posteriori knowledge, and it is not clear that they will be able to do so within such an account of warrant. Suppose for the sake of argument that we have innate knowledge of some proposition, P. What makes our knowledge that P innate? To sharpen the question, what difference between our knowledge that P and a clear case of a posteriori knowledge, say our knowledge that something is red based on our current visual experience of a red table, makes the former innate and the latter not innate? In each case, we have a true, warranted belief. In each case, presumably, our belief gains its warrant from the fact that it meets a particular causal condition, e.g., it is produced by a reliable process. In each case, the causal process is one in which an experience causes us to believe the proposition at hand (that P; that something is red), for, as defenders of innate knowledge admit, our belief that P is triggered by an experience, as is our belief that something is red. The insight behind the Innate Knowledge thesis seems to be that the difference between our innate and a posteriori knowledge lies in the relation between our experience and our belief in each case. The experience that causes our belief that P does not contain the information that P, while our visual experience of a red table does contain the information that something is red. Yet, exactly what is the nature of this containment relation between our experiences, on the one hand, and what we believe, on the other, that is missing in the one case but present in the other? The nature of the experience-belief relation seems quite similar in each. The causal relation between the experience that triggers our belief that P and our belief that P is contingent, as is the fact that the belief-forming process is reliable. The same is true of our experience of a red table and our belief that something is red. The causal relation between the experience and our belief is again contingent. We might have been so constructed that the experience we describe as being appeared to redly caused us to believe, not that something is red, but that something is hot. The process that takes us from the experience to our belief is also only contingently reliable. Moreover, if our experience of a red table contains the information that something is red, then that fact, not the existence of a reliable belief-forming process between the two, should be the reason why the experience warrants our belief. By appealing to Reliablism, or some other causal theory of warrant, rationalists may obtain a way to explain how innate knowledge can be warranted. They still need to show how their explanation supports an account of the difference between innate knowledge and a posteriori knowledge.

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Rationalism - RationalWiki

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(Latin, ratio reason, the faculty of the mind which forms the ground of calculation, i.e. discursive reason. See APOLOGETICS; ATHEISM; BIBLE; DEISM; EMPIRICISM; ETHICS; BIBLICAL EXEGESIS; FAITH; MATERIALISM; MIRACLE; REVELATION).

The term is used: (1) in an exact sense, to designate a particular moment in the development of Protestant thought in Germany; (2) in a broader, and more usual, sense to cover the view (in relation to which many schools may be classed as rationalistic) that the human reason, or understanding, is the sole source and final test of all truth. It has further: (3) occasionally been applied to the method of treating revealed truth theologically, by casting it into a reasoned form, and employing philosophical Categories in its elaboration. These three uses of the term will be discussed in the present article.

The German school of theological Rationalism formed a part of the more general movement of the eighteenth-century "Enlightenment". It may be said to owe its immediate origin to the philosophical system of Christian Wolff (1679-1754), which was a modification, with Aristotelean features, of that of Leibniz, especially characterized by its spiritualism, determinism, and dogmatism. This philosophy and its method exerted a profound influence upon contemporaneous German religious thought, providing it with a rationalistic point of view in theology and exegesis. German philosophy in the eighteenth century was, as a whole, tributary to Leibniz, whose "Thodice" was written principally against the Rationalism of Bayle: it was marked by an infiltration of English Deism and French Materialism, to which the Rationalism at present considered had great affinity, and towards which it progressively developed: and it was vulgarized by its union with popular literature. Wolff himself was expelled from his chair at the University of Halle on account of the Rationalistic nature of his teaching, principally owing to the action of Lange (1670-1774; cf. "Causa Dei et religionis naturalis adversus atheismum", and "Modesta Disputatio", Halle, 1723). Retiring to Marburg, he taught there until 1740, when he was recalled to Halle by Frederick II. Wolff's attempt to demonstrate natural religion rationally was in no sense an attack upon revelation. As a "supranaturalist" he admitted truths above reason, and he attempted to support by reason the supernatural truths contained in Holy Scripture. But his attempt, while it incensed the pietistic school and was readily welcomed by the more liberal and moderate among the orthodox Lutherans, in reality turned out to be strongly in favour of the Naturalism that he wished to condemn. Natural religion, he asserted, is demonstrable; revealed religion is to be found in the Bible alone. But in his method of proof of the authority of Scripture recourse was had to reason, and thus the human mind became, logically, the ultimate arbiter in the case of both. Supranaturalism in theology, which it was Wolff's intention to uphold, proved incompatible with such a philosophical position, and Rationalism took its place. This, however, is to be distinguished from pure Naturalism, to which it led, but with which it never became theoretically identified. Revelation was not denied by the Rationalists; though, as a matter of fact, if not of theory, it was quietly suppressed by the claim, with its ever-increasing application, that reason is the competent judge of all truth. Naturalists, on the other hand, denied the fact of revelation. As with Deism and Materialism, the German Rationalism invaded the department of Biblical exegesis. Here a destructive criticism, very similar to that of the Deists, was levelled against the miracles recorded in, and the authenticity of the Holy Scripture. Nevertheless, the distinction between Rationalism and Naturalism still obtained. The great Biblical critic Semler (1725-91), who is one of the principal representatives of the school, was a strong opponent of the latter; in company with Teller (1734-1804) and others he endeavoured to show that the records of the Bible have no more than a local and temporary character, thus attempting to safeguard the deeper revelation, while sacrificing to the critics its superficial vehicle. He makes the distinction between theology and religion (by which he signifies ethics).

The distinction made between natural and revealed religion necessitated a closer definition of the latter. For Supernaturalists and Rationalists alike religion was held to be "a way of knowing and worshipping the Deity", but consisting chiefly, for the Rationalists, in the observance of God's law. This identification of religion with morals, which at the time was utilitarian in character (see UTILITARIANISM), led to further developments in the conceptions of the nature of religion, the meaning of revelation, and the value of the Bible as a collection of inspired writings. The earlier orthodox Protestant view of religion as a body of truths published and taught by God to man in revelation was in process of disintegration. In Semler's distinction between religion (ethics) on the one hand and theology on the other, with Herder's similar separation of religion from theological opinions and religious usages, the cause of the Christian religion, as they conceived it, seemed to be put beyond the reach of the shock of criticism, which, by destroying the foundations upon which it claimed to rest, had gone so far to discredit the older form of Lutheranism. Kant's (1724-1804) criticism of the reason, however, formed a turning-point in the development of Rationalism. For a full understanding of his attitude, the reader must be acquainted with the nature of his pietistic upbringing and later scientific and philosophical formation in the Leibniz-Wolff school of thought (see PHILOSOPHY OF KANT). As far as concerns the point that occupies us at present, Kant was a Rationalist. For him religion was coextensive, with natural, though not utilitarian, morals. When he met with the criticisms of Hume and undertook his famous "Kritik", his preoccupation was to safeguard his religious opinions, his rigorous morality, from the danger of criticism. This he did, not by means of the old Rationalism, but by throwing discredit upon metaphysics. The accepted proofs of the existence of God, immortality, and liberty were thus, in his opinion, overthrown, and the well-known set of postulates of the "categoric imperative" put forward in their place. This, obviously, was the end of Rationalism in its earlier form, in which the fundamental truths of religion were set out as demonstrable by reason. But, despite the shifting of the burden of religion from the pure to the practical reason, Kant himself never seems to have reached the view --; to which all his work pointed --; that religion is not mere ethics, "conceiving moral laws as divine commands", no matter how far removed from Utilitarianism --; not an affair of the mind, but of the heart and will; and that revelation does not reach man by way of an exterior promulgation, but consists in a personal adaptation towards God. This conception was reached gradually with the advance of the theory that man possesses a religious sense, or faculty, distinct from the rational (Fries, 1773-1843; Jacobi, 1743-1819; Herder, 1744-1803; all opposed to the Intellectualism of Kant), and ultimately found expression with Schleiermacher (1768-1834), for whom religion is to be found neither in knowledge nor in action, but in a peculiar attitude of mind which consists in the consciousness of absolute dependence upon God. Here the older distinction between natural and revealed religion disappears. All that can be called religion the consciousness of dependence is at the same time revelational, and all religion is of the same character. There is no special revelation in the older Protestant (the Catholic) sense, but merely this attitude of dependence brought into being in the individual by the teaching of various great personalities who, from time to time, have manifested an extraordinary sense of the religious. Schleiermacher was a contemporary of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, whose philosophical speculations had influence, with his own, in ultimately subverting Rationalism as here dealt with. The movement may be said to have ended with him in the opinion of Teller "the greatest theologian that the Protestant Church has had since the period of the Reformation". The majority of modern Protestant theologians accept his views, not, however, to the exclusion of knowledge as a basis of religion.

Parallel with the development of the philosophical and theological views as to the nature of religion and the worth of revelation, which provided it with its critical principles, took place an exegetical evolution. The first phase consisted in replacing the orthodox Protestant doctrine (i.e. that the Sacred Scriptures are the Word of God) by a distinction between the Word of God contained in the Bible and the Bible itself (Tllner, Herder), though the Rationalists still held that the purer source of revelation lies rather in the written than in the traditional word. This distinction led inevitably to the destruction, of the rigid view of inspiration, and prepared the ground for the second phase. The principle of accommodation was now employed to explain the difficulties raised by the Scripture records of miraculous events and demoniacal manifestations (Senf, Vogel), and arbitrary methods of exegesis were also used to the same end (Paulus, Eichhorn). In the third phase Rationalists had reached the point of allowing the possibility of mistakes having been made by Christ and the Apostles, at any rate with regard to non-essential parts of religion. All the devices of exegesis were employed vainly; and, in the end, Rationalists found themselves forced to admit that the authors of the New Testament must have written from a point of view different from that which a modern theologian would adopt (Henke, Wegseheider). This principle, which is sufficiently elastic to admit of usage by nearly every variety of opinion, was admitted by several of the Supernaturalists (Reinhard, Storr), and is very generally accepted by modern Protestant divines, in the rejection of verbal inspiration. Herder is very clear on the distinction the truly inspired must be discerned from that which is not; and de Wette lays down as the canon of interpretation "the religious perception of the divine operation, or of the Holy Spirit, in the sacred writers as regards their belief and inspiration, but not respecting their faculty of forming ideas. . ." In an extreme form it may be seen employed in such works as Strauss's "Leben Jesu", where the hypothesis of the mythical nature of miracles is developed to a greater extent than by Schleiermacher or de Wette.

Rationalism, in the broader, popular meaning of the term, is used to designate any mode of thought in which human reason holds the place of supreme criterion of truth; in this sense, it is especially applied to such modes of thought as contrasted with faith. Thus Atheism, Materialism, Naturalism, Pantheism, Scepticism, etc., fall under the head of rationalistic systems. As such, the rationalistic tendency has always existed in philosophy, and has generally shown itself powerful in all the critical schools. As has been noted in the preceding paragraph, German Rationalism had strong affinities with English Deism and French Materialism, two historic forms in which the tendency has manifested itself. But with the vulgarization of the ideas contained in the various systems that composed these movements, Rationalism has degenerated. It has become connected in the popular mind with the shallow and misleading philosophy frequently put forward in the name of science, so that a double confusion has arisen, in which;

This Rationalism is now rather a spirit, or attitude, ready to seize upon any arguments, from any source and of any or no value, to urge against the doctrines and practices of faith. Beside this crude and popular form it has taken, for which the publication of cheap reprints and a vigorous propaganda are mainly responsible, there runs the deeper and more thoughtful current of critical-philosophical Rationalism, which either rejects religion and revelation altogether or treats them in much the same manner as did the Germans. Its various manifestations have little in common in method or content, save the general appeal to reason as supreme. No better description of the position can be given than the statements of the objects of the Rationalist Press Association. Among these are: "To stimulate the habits of reflection and inquiry and the free exercise of individual intellect . . . and generally to assert the supremacy of reason as the natural and necessary means to all such knowledge and wisdom as man can achieve". A perusal of the publications of the same will show in what sense this representative body interprets the above statement. It may be said finally, that Rationalism is the direct and logical outcome of the principles of Protestantism; and that the intermediary form, in which assent is given to revealed truth as possessing the imprimatur of reason, is only a phase in the evolution of ideas towards general disbelief. Official condemnations of the various forms of Rationalism, absolute and mitigated, are to be found in the Syllabus of Pius IX.

The term Rationalism is perhaps not usually applied to the theological method of the Catholic Church. All forms of theological statement, however, and pre-eminently the dialectical form of Catholic theology, are rationalistic in the truest sense. Indeed, the claim of such Rationalism as is dealt with above is directly met by the counter claim of the Church: that it is at best but a mutilated and unreasonable Rationalism, not worthy of the name, while that of the Church is rationally complete, and integrated, moreover, with super-rational truth. In this sense Catholic theology presupposes the certain truths of natural reason as the preambula fidei, philosophy (the ancilla theologi) is employed in the defence of revealed truth (see APOLOGETICS), and the content of Divine revelation is treated and systematized in the categories of natural thought. This systematization is carried out both in dogmatic and moral theology. It is a process contemporaneous with the first attempt at a scientific statement of religious truth, comes to perfection of method in the works of such writers as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Alphonsus, and is consistently employed and developed in the Schools.

HAGENBACH, Kirchengesch. des 18. Jahrhunderts in Vorlesungen ber Wesen u. Gesch. der Reformation in Deutschland etc., V-VI (Leipzig, 1834-43); IDEM (tr. BUCH), Compendium of the History of Doctrines (Edinburgh, 1846); HASE, Kirchengesch. (Leipzig, 1886); HENKE, Rationalismus u. Traditionalismus im 19. Jahrh. (Halle, 1864); HURST, History of Rationalism (New York, 1882); LERMINIER, De l'influence de la philosophie du XVIIIe sicle (Paris, 1833); SAINTES, Hist. critique du rationalisme en Allemagne (Paris, 1841); SCHLEIERMACHER, Der christl. Glaube nach der Grundstzen der evangelischen Kirche (Berlin, 1821-22): SEMLER, Von freier Untersuchung des Kanons (Halle, 1771-75); IDEM, Institutio ad doctrinam christianam liberaliter discendam (Halle, 1774); IDEM, Versuch einer freier theologischen Lehrart (Halle, 1777); STADLIN, Gesch. des Rationalismus u. Supranaturalismus (Gttingen, 1826); THOLUCK, Vorgesch. des Rationalismus (Halle, 1853-62); BENN, History of Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1906).

APA citation. Aveling, F. (1911). Rationalism. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12652a.htm

MLA citation. Aveling, Francis. "Rationalism." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 12. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12652a.htm>.

Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Douglas J. Potter. Dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ.

Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. June 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.

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CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Rationalism

PUBLISHED: 09:00 12 July 2020

Emma Luck

The modern architecture concert hall Auditorio de Tenerife in Santa Cruz. Picture: Getty Images

2011 EyesWideOpen

For many, Tenerife is synonymous with beachside package holidays. But, as EMMA LUCK explains, thats only half the islands story.

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So vast is the tourism industry that has sprung up on Tenerife that it can at least from afar obscure a quite different side to the island.

But as this domineering sector has grown and utterly transformed the largest of the Canary Islands, so have efforts been made to safeguard its distinctive historical and cultural identity. The solution has been to effectively split the island in two.

This has seen the southern end establish itself as one of Europes most popular destinations, where visitors primarily from the north of the continent flock year-round to enjoy the warm climate and home-from-home facilities. This tourist boom has, of course, generated phenomenal revenues but the south has paid a high price by losing an element of its own Spanish identity to cater to its visitors, with more generic activities such as water sports, boat trips and theme parks.

The north, meanwhile, has been quietly getting on with a cultural evolution of a more Canarian nature. It has managed to establish a more successful symbiosis and its own cultural relevance hasnt been surrendered to the might of tourism.

There is no epic distance between the lower and upper portions of Tenerife. Only 47 miles separate the jam-packed beaches and giant hotels of Playa de las Americas and the capital Santa Cruz but there is minimal crossover, and the one feels a world away from the other.

It was not always thus. Before tourism came to dominate, the island was a much more homogenous entity, united by a very specific culture which stretched back through the centuries.

It was the fair-haired Guanches and their legendary mencey (kings) who first really stamped their mark on Tenerife. They arrived on the archipelago during the first millennium BC and are descended from the Berber tribes of North Africa.

The Guanches ruled over the Atlantic and established trade routes with the Romans. Their religion was polytheistic although the cult of the dead was also prominent; their practices included the mummification of the deceased, excellent examples of which can be found in the islands museums.

Their long rule finally ended in 1496 when, after four years of conflict, the Guanche kings and their warriors were finally overwhelmed by the Spanish. Tenerife had been the last of the Canary Islands to be conquered and had taken the longest to submit to the Castilian troops.

Conquest meant a new era for the island. San Cristbal de la Laguna, widely held to be the islands most beautiful city, was established at this time and became the capital. Declared a World Heritage site in 1999, the northern city has the pick of the historic sites, including the 16th century Royal Sanctuary Church and the 1904 Cathedral of San Cristbal de La Laguna. The city is also home to the University of La Laguna, the establishment of which made it the archipelagos first university city.

It yielded to Santa Cruz, also in the north of the island, in the 1700s due to a declining economy and population, and the port city eventually became the capital of Tenerife and the Canary Islands, a status which it now shares with Las Palmas, on Gran Canaria.

During these centuries, the island was well placed to capitalise on the bountiful trade routes that crisscrossed the surrounding ocean. Its strategic position also made it a tempting target for Spains enemies. Lord Nelson lost an arm during an unsuccessful attempt to take Tenerife during the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797. And the great man was not alone in failing to wrest the island from its inhabitants. A task force led by Sir Walter Raleigh had come up short a century earlier.

This independent spirit and arms length rule from Spain which lay several days sailing away may have been a factor in the burgeoning cultural scene for which Tenerife became known. Many of the islands earliest creatives benefitted from a greater level of freedom than their counterparts in mainland Spain who were caught more directly in the gaze of the all-powerful Catholic monarchy.

As the more developed part of the island closer to Spain and those vital trade routes, and an altogether more hospitable location than the drier, more arid south, the undefended coast of which was vulnerable to pirates the northern area became its cultural epicentre.

The first centre for painting was in La Laguna, with the earliest protagonists setting up their easels there in the 16th century. As the movement developed, other schools opened in La Orotava, Puerto de la Cruz and Santa Cruz, which became a key hub not only for the exchange not only of goods but of ideas and culture, thanks to its port.

Valentin Sanz, born in Santa Cruz in 1849, was the earliest known landscape painter in the Canary Islands. Yet his career shows that while a remote and isolated island location can foster artistic talent, that same remoteness and isolation can also be a limiting factor. Like many Tinerfenos, Sanz had to leave the region to drive his career forward. He studied in Seville and Madrid, and worked as a professor in the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Cuba. His work tackles the issue of light and colour with great character, closing in on impressionism. Some of his work is displayed at the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts of Santa Cruz, including El Paisaje de La Laguna (The Landscape of La Laguna).

The close of the 19th century saw Realism and Impressionism cohabiting with strains of Romanticism that could still be seen in the works of some artists on the island. The first recorded impressionist painter on the island was Juan Rodriguez Botas (1880-1917).

He progressed from the early work done by Sanz and adopted the style that was then sweeping France. Santa Cruz-born Francisco Bonnn Guern (1874-1963), on the other hand, was a master of watercolours to such an extent that he created his own school of landscape painting and founded the influential Association of Canary Watercolour Painters, many of whose members followed his technique and won awards.

As for the most famous of the islands artists, that title sits well upon the shoulders of Oscar Dominguez (1906-1957). Considered one of Spains greatest surrealist painters after Mir, Dal and Picasso, Dominguez left a large and highly personal collection of work which is displayed throughout the island. Although he ended up in Paris, his work is heavily influenced by his Tinerfeno heritage and is peppered with Canarian references such as mountains and the native dragon tree.

Alongside its distinct artistic heritage, Tenerife also developed its own literary culture. This emerged from an oral storytelling tradition in the mid-15th century, which evolved over time towards different genres such as epic poetry, Baroque aesthetics, Neoclassical prose and Romanticism. In this evolution, it was slightly behind the curve of European artistic trends, due primarily to the sheer distance it lay from the rest of the continent.

Despite this, Tenerifes rich literary seam has produced several notable authors. Antonio de Viana was born in La Laguna in 1578 and his epic poem Antiguedades de las Islas Afortunadas (Antiques of the Fortunate Islands) was an ode to the Guanches and tells of the conquest of Tenerife by Spain. It offers a wealth of historical information about this pivotal period.

Later, in the 18th century, the enlightenment saw a vibrant cultural movement spring up on the island which lasted into the 20th century and beyond.

Many of its members were united by the fact that they found themselves in conflict with the Catholic church or central government over their beliefs:

Writer Jose Viera y Clavijo (1731-1813) established himself at the heart of this creative movement where he was able to reconcile his faith and personal beliefs with the reality as described by science. Also a priest, his rationalism led him to clash with the church. His work covers all literary genres but he spent two decades working on his masterpiece Noticias (News), a wide-ranging history of the Canary Islands which described the origin, character and customs of its ancient inhabitants and their conquest by the Europeans.

Neoclassical writer, poet and native of Puerto de la Cruz, Tomas de Iriarte (1750-1791), was one of the first dramatists to bring the Neoclassical style to a wider audience. Universally celebrated as the author of Fabulas literarias (Literary fables) his later years were dogged by controversy and in 1786 he was reported to the Inquisition for his sympathies with the French philosophers.

Considered the father of Catalan theatre, Santa Cruz-born playwright ngel Guimer (1845-1924) was nominated a staggering 23 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature but never won due to political pressure from Spains central government. After moving back to his fathers birthplace in Catalonia, he wrote a number of plays including Tierra baja (Lowlands) and Mar y cielo (Sea and Sky) which were translated into other languages and performed abroad. He proved to be instrumental in the revival of Catalan as a literary language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His birthplace paid tribute by naming the main theatre of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the oldest on the Canary Islands, after him.

By the age of 14, La Laguna-born novelist, dramatist and poet Mercedes Pinto had made a name for herself, becoming known as the Canarian Poetess. Her most famous work, the semi-autobigraphical l (This Strange Passion), was adapted for the big screen by the film-maker Luis Buuel. Her pursuit of a feminist agenda led to conflict with the Catholic church and she was forced to live most of her life outside Spain.

These themes of art and literature clashing with conservatism are not unique to Tenerife, or to Spain, of course. And the island has not managed to escape the most destructive forces of reaction. The Canary Islands fell to the nationalists in 1936 and a mass execution of Francos opponents in Tenerife followed, an atrocity that led many Tinerfeos to relocate to Latin America.

Francos dictatorship had a suppressive effect on Tenerifes cultural life, but did not snuff it out. The years of his rule also saw significant advances in the islands tourism industry.

Its attraction to overseas visitors was nothing new. Back in the late 1800s, tourism had been centred on northern Tenerife, with well-heeled Europeans heading there to escape their freezing winters.

With very little seasonal variation, the year-round mild climate and clear air were promoted as offering a variety of health benefits. It quickly became the main source of revenue with Puerto de la Cruz the first city to develop as a leisure destination as the earliest visitors arrived by steamer into the port at Santa Cruz.

During her visit in 1927 when she fled to the island two months after her infamous 11-day disappearance, Agatha Christie, was inspired to finish her novels The Mystery of the Blue Train and The Mysterious Mr Quinn.

As travel was revolutionised in the second half of the 20th century, however, the focus moved dramatically from the north to the south of the island.

The northern end has a noticeably higher rainfall because of its proximity to Mount Teide, Tenerifes own volcano. The hotter, drier south was therefore more attractive for the new generation of jet-setting tourists who were able to arrive at, and move around, the island more easily than in the past. Whats more, the area was far less developed than the north, so offered greater opportunities for the construction of mega resorts such as Playa de Las Americas and Los Cristianos.

George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney helped put the island on the tourism map when they went on holiday in Tenerife after releasing their first album in 1963. They blended happily into the crowds of foreign visitors and were able to enjoy their last holiday undisturbed by bodyguards, fans and the press.

As the number of visitors grew, the often fog-bound Los Rodeos (Tenerife North) airport was under great strain. In 1977, 583 people were killed when two Boeing 747 jets collided on a foggy runway, in the deadliest accident in aviation history.

The following year, Reina Sofia airport (Tenerife South) opened. It now handles around 90% of visitors to the island, dwarfing its northern counterpart, and has cemented the separation of Tenerifes north and south and utterly transformed its tourism economy.

The sector may have threatened, at times since, to overwhelm the islands cultural character, but it has never succeeded. Indeed, in recent years, the distinct artistic identity of the northern end of the island has been further strengthened by a wave of architectural innovation that is apparent in many major art and music venues.

The dramatic white building on Santa Cruzs waterfront is unmissable. Its roof soars 58 metres over the main auditorium and then curves downwards, narrowing to a point like a crashing Atlantic wave. This is the Tenerife Concert Hall, a focal point for the norths lively arts programme. It is home to the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra and has welcomed guest soloists of the calibre of Plcido Domingo to cement its reputation as a national and international benchmark orchestra. The renowned pera de Tenerife is also based there.

Tucked alongside the Barranco de Santos ravine in Santa Cruz stands the Tenerife Arts Centre (TEA -Tenerife Espacio de las Artes). It works effectively as a catalyst, connecting the daily life of Santa Cruz with the islands art and culture. It houses a permanent exhibition of the works of Tenerifes own scar Domnguez and has exhibited pieces by Andy Warhol and Henry Moore.

The buildings diagonal elements and sloping floors showcase a contemporary space designed by the Canaries-born Virgilio Gutirrez Herreros and Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron who were responsible for Londons Tate Modern.

Today, the island seems to have made peace with its informal divide. It reaps the financial benefits from its southern resorts while maintaining its identity and historical narrative via its cultural stronghold in the north. Could this offer a blueprint for tourism elsewhere and avoid cultural heritage being lost forever to a fast tourist buck...?

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Tenerife: A tale of two islands - The New European

By HRH Appolus Chu

There is a battle raging in the life of every human being today. It is a battle that has lasted since the beginning of time. This battle affects every family, neighbourhood, community, society, and nation. Walk into any organization or gathering of people, and the battle is there. Friends and loved ones may smile at one another; but they are all locked in this fierce battle.

It is the battle of the mind.

What is the Mind?

Defining the mind and its location is one problem that has lasted for thousands of years, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophers who saw the mind as Nous or controller of all things. By the 1600s, French Mathematician, Rene Descartes perhaps influenced by the religious bent of his time defined the mind as the real person with his now famous quote, I think therefore I exist.

Descartes position opened the gates to a new wave of questions about mind and body, appearance and reality, rationalism and empiricism. Today, scientists (who are empirical in their study), argue that the mind is nothing more than brain processes. They say these processes come from what we see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and other non-sensory impulses from the cells of our bodies.

Just as there is no single definition of what the mind is, so too there is no agreement about the location of the mind. Is it in the brain, heart, cells of the body or somewhere outside the body? No one knows for sure. No human eye has ever seen the mind. No microscope, x-ray or scanning machine, no matter how powerful and sophisticated, can see it.

Despite the complications in defining the mind and pinpointing its exact location, one thing that scientists, philosophers and religious theorists agree on is that the mind does exist. The mind is the thinking, conscious part of the human being and every one of us has a mind.

The mind is as wide and complex as the universe, with billions of information travelling through it like countless stars and galaxies travelling through the universe. The mind constantly receives different and usually conflicting or opposing thoughts on any and every subject. It is the clash of these conflicting thoughts (the mental debates about which thought to choose), that is referred to as the battle of the mind.

In other words, the battle of the mind is the struggle that goes on in our minds about the choices we should make in every given situation.

If we make the right choice, we manifest right actions. If we choose wrongly, we manifest wrong actions. What we call choices begin as thoughts in our minds. It is in the mind that we struggle between good and bad thoughts, right or wrong choices.

The Mind and the Will

The human mind is also the seat of the will, and Dr. Myles Munroe once said, The will is the greatest and most dangerous gift given to you, by God. It is your will that determines the choices you make. Your ability to choose is what makes you uniquely human.

Your power of choice is what distinguishes you from a machine or an animal. Machines, including robots and computers, can do great and amazing things; yet they can do nothing without being programmed or commanded. They cannot choose what they do. Animals, on the other hand, may act without being programmed like machines, but they also do not have the power of choice. Animals are motivated to act by their appetites and emotions. They eat when they are hungry, sleep when they are sleepy, and mate when it is their season to do so.

You are different.

Yes, you have emotions and appetites, like animals; but you also have the ability to choose to do the opposite of whatever your appetites and emotions suggest, at any given time. As important as your appetites and emotions may be, it is the choices you make, choices which stem from your will controlled by your mind that determine the course of your life. So, it is your mind that controls your life.

Indeed, everything around us all the great inventions that make life worth living, as well as the wars and violence that threaten to destroy the world are products of the mind. That is because the mind has the ability to accommodate and stimulate many things, both good and bad.

Where do Thoughts come from?

The mind is the generating station for our thoughts. Thinking is done in the mind. It is also in the mind that we have our consciousness, and form ideas, opinions, impressions about anything. When our thoughts stir us strongly enough they can stimulate our emotions, and our stimulated emotions have the power to spur us into action. Action can be positive or negative. Our actions, whether positive or negative, have corresponding effect on society.

So, thoughts are generated in the mind, but they can be stimulated by one or all of the following:

Words: Words are the foods that nourish the mind. Words are powerful. The words you hear and the people you listen to, will determine the course of your life. So, never underestimate the words of a person. Many lives have been ruined because of the words they heard and the people they listened to. Some young people are locked away in prison because of the friends they kept and the words those friends kept feeding into their minds.

Words convey ideas and information, and the mind has the ability to quickly soak up information like a sponge soaks up water. In this age of Information Technology, high-speed Internet connectivity, and 24-hour cable television, the mind is constantly being stimulated by words from all angles like a receiver-station, receiving both good and bad information from everywhere. So, watch what you hear!

What you hear will make you or destroy you. It will elevate you or demote you. People sit in classrooms, listening to professors and teachers for years, and they graduate as lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, accountants, and the like. It is the words they listened to that made them so. Sports men and women may be talented at what they do, but hardly does any talented athlete go on to become a champion or Olympic winner without listening to, and training in line with the words of their coaches.

Other people sat around criminals, drug dealers and addicts, alcoholics and today they are wondering why they are in jail while their former childhood friends are career professionals and sport stars.

Countries, businesses, and communities are great or mediocre, poor or rich, as a result of the words of their leaders. The story is often told of how, upon inauguration as President of the United States, the late John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that they would work to put a man on the moon within ten years. President Kennedy did not live through his first tenure as president, but within eight years of speaking those words, Neil Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon.

Which words are you listening to? Never take any word that anybody speaks for granted, because words are seeds and seeds never die. You may lock up a seed in a bottle for years and years, but the moment you expose it to favourable environment, it will begin to grow. Some strange actions that you are exhibiting now, may be the effect of words that you have stored up in your mind for years.

Images: Apart from the words you hear, your thoughts can also come from the images you see from billboards, television and real life. For example, a person may see a flashy car on the road, and that image sends an instant message to the mind. The person begins to desire to own that very car or one like it. If the desire for the car gets so strong that the person begins to think of doing anything including crime to get the car, that is wrong.

Another thought will arise in the persons mind to counteract that first negative thought of doing anything to get the car. That clash of thoughts is what the battle of the mind is about. That battle would not have arisen if the person never saw the car in the first place.

You need to be careful about the things you see. Discerning parents know this, and so they do their best to control the kinds of things especially movies that their children see. If they notice certain images or scenes on the screen, they quickly switch off the television set or ask the children to leave the environment. That is because they do not want to expose the tender minds of their young children to information that can poison the mind.

The Environment: The environment where a person lives, the people the person mixes with, can also influence the thoughts of the person. The environment exerts influence on the mind in two ways the things children learn from observing their parents (or the young from the old), and the need to be like our friends (or peer pressure).

Terrorism is a big problem in the world today. Young people are joining militant groups and perpetrating all sorts of atrocities. That is because of the environmental influences controlling and shaping their minds. Lots of people have been brain-washed into actions that are inimical to their own welfare as a result of negative indoctrination. Why would a person willingly become a suicide bomber, if not for the negative indoctrination the mind of such a person has received from the environment?

Those who keep the company of smokers, alcoholics, drug addicts and peddlers or prostitutes, sometimes end up doing those same things. That is because were in environments where the friends and people they spent time with, engaged in such acts. They may have started out struggling against doing such things, but because they remained in that environment, they eventually succumbed to its negative influence.

The Nigerian society is today plagued with insecurity from the actions of Boko Haram, Killer Herdsmen, motorcycle bandits, ritual killers and kidnappers. We complain that our elections are not free and fair as a result of electoral violence, snatching of ballot boxes, and rigging of votes. Fraudsters, armed robbers, rapists, and other classes of criminals harass society on a daily basis. Some public officers loot the public treasury, greedy government officials look for means to extort money from people; cult members, gang members and thugs, look for ways to subvert the law for their own selfish interests. All these fall into the category of people who were brain-washed into making wrong choices by the environments they exposed themselves to.

What a person hears, sees, and imbibes from the environment can either nourish or poison the mind. That poisoning can be against his brother or sister, employers or job. A persons mind can even be poisoned against his or her own self. It all depends on the kind of information that is allowed to influence the mind. A poisoned mind is a danger to the individual, the family, and the society at large.

Control your Mind by Controlling your Consciousness

If you must avoid the negative influences of words, images and the environment on your mind, you need to learn how to control your mind. The term, mind control, is often used negatively to imply brain-washing a person or getting the person to do what someone else wants.

To subdue a fierce, violent, and very angry person all you need to do is subdue his mind. In the same way a calm and gentle person who does not look capable of hurting a fly, can suddenly become wild by the messages fed into the persons mind. If you want to provoke any kind of response in a person whether to become wild and aggressive or mild and submissive all you need to do is control the mind of the person.

A practical example of the importance of mind control can be seen in construction sites. Before the work of the day commences, the company assembles the workers and gives them health, security and safety induction. They do not assume that because they told the workers what they needed to know yesterday, they have no need for the information today. No! They tell them the same things over and over again. By so doing, they help to ensure that the workers are always cautious and conscious of whatever they are doing on the site. The management of the company does not toy with such daily induction. They know that without it the workers may forget what they need to know about safety on site, work procedure, and other requirements for their safety and operational success. Without such daily induction the minds of the workers could easily become occupied with other things resulting in damage to the project with the possibility of harm to the personnel.

Despite that negative connotation associated with mind control, the fact remains that it is only by consciously controlling or grooming your mind that you can ensure that your thoughts and corresponding actions are always right. So, how can you control your mind?

To control your mind, you have to consciously stabilize your thoughts by focusing on what you really desire. In other words, it is by being conscious (hence mindful) of the right things at all times and doing your best to do them. Your consciousness helps build a wall around or control your mind, so that you do not give in to the excesses of the mind. Your consciousness helps you direct your mind aright. A mind that is not controlled by consciousness is exposed to danger. Consciousness, which breeds self-discipline, is a sure means of controlling the mind and leading it to right decisions and in the right direction.

Religious faiths and organizations across the world need to be praised for regularly engaging their adherents with programmes geared towards helping them control their minds aright. These programmes can be likened to inductions, which equip the people small and big, rich and poor, old and young, high and low with tools for controlling their minds.

So, religion is all about putting the mind under control so that the individual can live a life that is meaningful to self, society, and humanity.

If religion helps people control their own minds so they dont tilt towards negative thoughts and choices, rehabilitation is one way of helping those who have derailed to once again regain control of their minds. That is why people whose minds have been captured by one addiction or the other are checked into rehabilitation homes. The aim of such rehabilitation is to expose the persons to information and environments that would help them regain control of their minds so they dont end up lost to society and themselves.

Prisons are a type of rehabilitation centres. Prisons are not only places to punish and correct criminals, but also where they can be helped to regain right control of their consciousness so as to be able to win the battle of the mind.

Groom your Consciousness to Maturity

A person whose consciousness is alive and strong is able to caution his or herself to avoid or stay away from environments, words and images that could corrupt, pollute or poison the mind. Those who are able to control their own minds are the ones we refer to as being mature.

Mature leaders do not divulge every kind of information to their communities or followers. They know that it isnt everyone in the community or among their followers who has the mental capacity to handle certain information. They know that giving certain information to the immature is a sure way of throwing the whole community into panic and confusion. All information is not meant for everybody. Some information is classified and meant for only a particular person or group. There is information that the president of a country can never share with a spouse or cabinet members, much less the general public.

The thoughts of the mind in the wrong direction are responsible for all the evils around us. An assassin, for example, is a person who has consistently chosen to give in to the negative thoughts to kill people. In the same way, all the great inventions, scientific innovations, exploitation of the resources of the earth for the betterment of man, great buildings like sky-scrappers that solve mans housing needs, are products of the thoughts of the mind in the right direction.

The world is a clash of good and evil. While the good are thinking of improving the many, the evil are consumed with thoughts of how a few can conquer the many for their own selfish ends. If the minds of the evil are not brought into control, they could do great havoc to humanity.

It is for that reason that governments, everywhere, have established security systems and laws to help control the excesses of the evil ones. Laws and security apparatus do not tell people not to commit crimes. They only show the people what awaits them if they choose to commit crime.

The law on its own does not stop a kidnapper from operating. But the kidnapper will have to face the consequences of his choice when caught. So the law, policies of state and security apparatus are designed to help citizens make the right choices, thereby controlling their minds, by becoming conscious of the consequences of their actions.

Some people have trained their minds towards being a help to society. They do their best to render assistance to others whenever they can. Initially, its a battle because the natural instinct of man is self-first. It is natural for human beings to think of their own wellbeing and self-satisfaction before considering others if they bother to consider others at all. But always putting oneself first, breeds problems for society and is not conducive for social wellbeing.

The mature ones who understand this fact fight to conquer those thoughts of selfishness in their minds and replace them with thoughts of selflessness. When they win that battle between thoughts of selfishness versus selflessness, it manifests in the altruistic and good deeds they do for others. These people strive to do good at all times.

If they serve in establishments, they serve without expecting favours from anyone, but for the betterment of the establishment and the people they interact with. If their job is to process peoples files for jobs or promotion, they do it speedily and without any inducement from the people involved.

Such people shy away from doing anything that would inflict pain on others. By persisting in doing good to others, they conquer that part of their minds that longs to be selfish, or bad towards others.

Like the good learns to conquer the negative, selfish and wrong thoughts of their minds with good thoughts; the evil also learn to conquer the positive, selfless and right thoughts of their minds with wrong thoughts.

Also, by persisting in their wrong doing they have come to love, enjoy and grow passionate in doing evil. Secretly, they may admire the good people and wish to be like them, but their minds have become clouded by their selfish and evil thoughts. They have lost the battle of the mind and degenerated to the point where their minds are totally dominated by selfishness. In fact, they no longer see themselves or their thoughts and actions as selfish. Even when the whole society frowns at their actions, they do not see what society is seeing, because they have been blinded by their evil minds.

The mind is the bargaining ground for different and opposing thoughts. The mind is always busy. Even when the body is asleep, the mind is working. It is the working of the mind when the body is asleep that we call dreams. Some dreams are extensions of the thoughts that troubled the mind while the body was awake. As the body sleeps, the mind begins to unravel those thoughts and make decisions about them, because the mind is full of activities.

Some Diseases are By-products of the Battle of the Mind

Sometimes, the battle of the mind degenerates into medical conditions that affect the body adversely. For example, when the mind of a parent is stressed and overtasked by thoughts of the waywardness of a child, it can easily result in high blood pressure in the body of the parent. Some people have developed stroke and become paralyzed because of the different thoughts and worries that clouded their minds about business, family or finance. Others have lost their life-savings to fraudsters and suffered severe heart attacks while thinking about such losses.

These scenarios can be described as the mind exerting undue pressure, heat, tension and strain on the body. The body cracks and breaks down under such pressure. It is such crack and break down that is manifested in those different health conditions.

The body may break down, but the mind continues to think.

The physical actions we see exhibited by people are mere expressions, results of the intense battle that had raged in their minds between two different thoughts. It is after the mind has chosen a particular thought over the other that it transmits corresponding impulses, in the form of emotions, to the body for eventual manifestation.

A Provoked Mind is Dangerous

The human mind is probably the most mysterious and unfathomable thing after God. That is why we say the mind is deep. It is the mind of a selfish person that motivates him to take actions that hurt other people or make them angry.

When a person tells you that he or she is not happy or angry with you, never take such a word lightly. Do everything you can to make peace with the person. You do not know the depth to which the mind of the person is willing to go to seek redress. It is cheaper to drop your pride and engage in peace dialogue with a person you have hurt than to go about with the mentality that they cannot do anything to you. The mind is unsearchable.

In May 2020, another wave of Black Lives Matter protests hit the United States of America and the world at large. This followed the senseless killing of a black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in the process of arresting Mr. Floyd.

Two police men already had the unarmed black man handcuffed and pinned to the ground, when one of the officers pressed his knee down on the neck of the black man, choking him. Mr. Floyd kept begging the police to lift him up, saying, I cant breathe. Yet the officer who had his knee on Mr. Floyds neck ignored his plea and continued to exert pressure on the knee until George Floyd died.

That police man was motivated to his actions because his mind probably told him nobody would do anything against him because of his uniform and status as a law enforcement officer. He was wrong. His action provoked the minds of so many people, leading to clashes between the people and police in which some police officers were killed, police stations were set on fire, and thousands of people took to the streets of major US cities and countries across the world in protest against the continued racial discrimination of blacks by white law enforcement officers.

Who are you suffocating by your selfish actions? The pains your actions are inflicting on them might provoke them to counter measures if you are not careful.

When you are hurting people and they dont retaliate, do not think that it is because they are afraid of you or that they are cowards. No! Rather, their calmness is because they have not been pushed to the point where they can no longer tolerate you or control themselves. When you persist in mounting pressure on them, eventually you will drive them to the point where they lose their mind and damn the consequences. At that point they will certainly retaliate. And often, that retaliation can be very disastrous for you.

Some people cannot tolerate. The moment you hurt them, they get back at you immediately. Some of such people can go as far as personally committing murder or hiring assassins to kill those who hurt them. Sometimes for things that may even appear trivial.

Whatever the case and whoever you are, when you do something to someone and they tell you that you have hurt them, let that statement serve as a warning to you. Quickly look for ways to make amends and pacify them. Put aside your pride and make peace with the person, because you dont know what their mind is capable of. Dont think that the other person can do nothing against you because of your power, money or position.

History is full of accounts of great generals, political leaders, kings and presidents who despite the sophisticated security apparatus and military might under their command were assassinated by ordinary, harmless-looking people who felt aggrieved by the actions of such great people and were driven to counter actions by their minds. Wives have killed husbands and husbands have killed wives. Children have risen against parents and parents against children. Friends have killed friends. It all depends on the minds of the people involved.

So, if you have been arrogantly oppressing others, hurting them and getting away with it, dont think that the other person lacks the ability to do anything against you. They are merely tolerating you because they have not taken it to mind or conceived the thought to kill or hurt you.

Dont push them to the wall!

Conclusion

Make it a habit to expose yourself to only the right words and words that will stimulate your mind positively. Discipline yourself to make sure that you take only the right images into your mind. Surround yourself with people, books, messages that will feed your mind with positive information.

You may have to tune off some TV stations, block some Internet sites, exit from some social media platforms, and dissociate from some friends in order to save your mind from exposure to negative and damaging information. Do it quickly!

Remember, every battle has a winner and a loser. It is usually the side with the best strategy and superior weapons that wins. If you are going to win the battle of the mind and become a person who adds to the progress and greatness of your society and nation, you will have to adopt strategies and build up a mental arsenal that will ensure that you constantly feed your mind with the right information, while blocking out wrong ones.

If you must win the battle of the mind, therefore, you must be committed to nurturing your mind with the right information from what you hear, see and your environment.

Right information nourishes your mind. A well-nourished mind produces right thoughts. Right thoughts will stimulate right choices. Right choices lead to right emotions. Right emotions will activate right actions. Right actions build up society.

Winners are those who make it a habit of always producing right actions and I know you have all it takes to be a winner!

*HRH (Dr) Appolus Chu is the Egbere Emere Okori and Oneh Eh Nchia, Eleme

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The Battle of the Mind - THISDAY Newspapers

DiAngelos White Fragility article was, in a sense, an epistemological exercise. It examined white not-knowing. When it was published in 2011 in The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, it reached the publications niche audience. But three years later it was quoted in Seattles alternative newspaper The Stranger, during a fierce debate with white defensiveness on full view about the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Societys casting of white actors as Asians in a production of The Mikado. That changed my life, she said. The phrase white fragility went viral, and requests to speak started to soar; she expanded the article into a book and during the year preceding Covid-19 gave eight to 10 presentations a month, sometimes pro bono but mostly at up to $15,000 per event.

The language she coined caught on just weeks before Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, and just as Black Lives Matter gained momentum. White liberals were growing more determined to be allies in the cause of racial justice or at least, as DiAngelo always cautions, to look and feel like allies: She has only tenuous faith that white people, whatever their politics, are genuinely willing to surrender their racialized rungs on societys ladders. And then Trumps election stoked white liberals into an even more heightened receptivity, she said, to the critique of their failings that she laid out in her book and workshops. Institutions, too, began to be desperate to prove good intentions. For almost everyone, she assumes, there is a mingling of motives, a wish for easy affirmation (they can say they heard Robin DiAngelo speak) and a measure of moral hunger.

Last September, I joined a two-day workshop, run by Singletons Courageous Conversation, for teachers, staff and administrators from four Connecticut school districts. From the front of a hotel conference room in Hartford, Marcus Moore, a Courageous Conversation trainer, said that his mother is a white woman from Germany, that his biological father was a Black man from Jamaica and that he identifies as Black. (The father who raised him, he let me know later, was a Black former sharecropper from Mississippi.) He projected a sequence of slides showing the persistence and degree of the academic achievement gap between Black and white students throughout the country, and asked us, at our racially mixed tables, to discuss the reasons behind these bar graphs.

At my table, Malik Pemberton, a Black racial-equity coach at a middle school, who had been a teenage father, wanted to talk, he said in the softest of voices, about accountability, about how it starts inside the household in terms of how the child is going to interpret and value education, about what can happen in schools without consequences, where they cant suspend. He wasnt suggesting this line of thought as the only explanation but as something to grapple with. One of Courageous Conversations affiliate trainers, stationed at the table, immediately rerouted the conversation, and minutes later Moore drew all eyes back to him and pronounced, The cause of racial disparities is racism. If I show you data thats about race, we need to be talking about racism. Dont get caught up in detours. He wasnt referring to racisms legacy. He meant that current systemic racism is the explanation for devastating differences in learning, that the prevailing white culture will not permit Black kids to succeed in school.

The theme of what white culture does not allow, of white societys not only supreme but also almost-absolute power, is common to todays antiracism teaching and runs throughout Singletons and DiAngelos programs. One of the varied ways DiAngelo imparts the lesson is through the story of Jackie Robinson. She tells her audiences whether in person or, now, online to alter the language of the narrative about the Brooklyn Dodgers star. Rather than he broke through the color line, a phrase that highlights Robinsons triumph, we should say, Jackie Robinson, the first Black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball. Robinson fades, agency ablated; whiteness occupies the forefront.

Running slightly beneath or openly on the surface of DiAngelos and Singletons teaching is a set of related ideas about the essence and elements of white culture. For DiAngelo, the elements include the ideology of individualism, which insists that meritocracy is mostly real, that hard work and talent will be justly rewarded. White culture, for her, is all about habits of oppressive thought that are taken for granted and rarely perceived, let alone questioned. One unnamed logic of Whiteness, she wrote with her frequent co-author, the education professor Ozlem Sensoy, in a 2017 paper published in The Harvard Educational Review, is the presumed neutrality of White European Enlightenment epistemology. The paper is an attempt to persuade universities that if they want to diversify their faculties, they should put less weight on conventional hiring criteria. The modern university, it says, with its experts and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom) has validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges. Such academic prose isnt the language of DiAngelos workshops or book, but the idea of a society rigged at its intellectual core underpins her lessons.

Singleton, who holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, and who did stints in advertising and college admissions before founding whats now known as Courageous Conversation in 1992, talks about white culture in similar ways. There is the myth of meritocracy. And valuing written communication over other forms, he told me, is a hallmark of whiteness, which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another hallmark is scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect. He said, Theres this whole group of people who are named the scientists. Thats where you get into this whole idea that if its not codified in scientific thought that it cant be valid. He spoke about how the ancient Egyptians had ideas about how humanity works that never had that scientific-hypothesis construction and so arent recognized. This is a good way of dismissing people. And this, he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, is one of the challenges in the diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way that is scientific numbers and that kind of thing what people feel when theyre feeling marginalized? For Singleton, societys primary intellectual values are bound up with this marginalization.

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White Fragility Is Everywhere. But Does Anti-Bias Training Work? - The New York Times

Chiles President Sebastin Piera delivers a speech in Santiago, Chile, January 29, 2020.(Edgard Garrido/Reuters)In the midst of a pandemic, the possibility of a government led by experts looks more attractive than ever. But the Chilean experience should make us weary of technocratic promises.

On paper, Chile is Latin Americas most developed economy and most stable democracy. In less than 40 years, the country went from being one of the poorest nations in the region to having the highest GDP per capita on the continent. Unlike many of its South American counterparts, the Chilean government has embraced free markets and implemented business-friendly tax and labor-market reforms. While these policies have exacerbated inequalities, the proportion of the population living below the poverty line has decreased from 52 percent in 1987 to less than 5 percent in 2019. In short, until recently at least, Chile was a shiny example of successful modernization, efficient neoliberalism, and competent governance.

This state of affairs might be due to the composition of Chiles government. After the fall of military dictator Augusto Pinochet, the country moved away from totalitarianism and adopted broadly liberal norms. When Chilean President Sebastin Piera began his second term in 2018, he made sure to assemble a cabinet that would look just like him. Piera, a Harvard-educated economist and billionaire, gathered a team of foreign-educated technocrats ready to address the countrys most pressing challenges with tact and data. Welcoming the influence of renowned academics, Piera even partnered with American political theorist John Tomasi, a brilliant professor at Brown University whose research focuses on the intersection between social justice and free markets. In his work Free Market Fairness, Tomasi draws on moral insights from defenders of economic liberty such as F. A. Hayek and advocates of social justice such as John Rawls. Synthesising the two antagonistic traditions, Tomasi presents a new theory of justice. This theory, free-market fairness, is committed to both limited government and the material betterment of the poor. For Piera, Tomasis innovative conception of bleeding-heart libertarianism represented an ideal to be attained.

And Piera did manage to reconcile efficiency and equity in the first few years of his presidency. Consider the example of the Chilean education system, which Pinochet had decentralized and largely privatized. In 2011, Piera upheld the countrys reliance on school choice and per-student subsidies (vouchers) to promote competition among schools. Weary of growing inequalities, however, the Chilean president founded a $4 billion fund to increase the availability of university scholarships and ease interest rates on government-backed student loans. The results were clear: Test scores improved for students from all socio-economic groups, even if privileged students benefited the most. Yet the government failed to defend its reforms before the Chilean people. Despite Pieras empirical success, the country was torn apart by a series of riots and demonstrations demanding radical changes in education policy.

This failure marked the beginning of a pattern. One after the other, Pieras reforms proved efficient but disproportionally beneficial to the wealthy. Naturally, inequality need not matter as long as the rising tide lifts all boats; to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, only the most ardent socialists would rather have the poor poorer provided the rich were less rich. But this growing sense of disparity required a strong response on the part of the Chilean government. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan managed to handle concerns surrounding growing inequalities because they were fine rhetoricians who defended the workings of the invisible hand with fire and tact. Unfortunately, Piera and his cabinet were no firebrand statesmen; they were a pack of academics, experts, and technocrats who thought that numbers would eventually speak for themselves.

But they did not. At the end of 2019, to the great astonishment of virtually every foreign commentator, Chile descended into a state of chaos. As had happened many times elsewhere in South America, an increase in public-transportation fees provoked a wave of public outrage, one that quickly degenerated into a series of protests and riots. But this particular reaction was remarkable insofar as its causes did not seem to warrant the violence. The 3.75 percent fee increase was only marginally higher than inflation, and wages had been going up consistently for 10 years. Further, while transportation did represent up to 20 percent of yearly expenses for the poorest Chileans, this percentage had been going down for more than a decade. As for the general state of the economy, the government had kept inflation under control, stimulated job creation, and maintained a GDP growth of about 3 percent.

Once more, the only tangible cause of the unrest was the Chilean governments total inability to move beyond spreadsheets and talk to its people. Not only did the transportation minister take more than a week to respond, but her eventual intervention was filled with technical details about macroeconomics and long-run cost-benefit analyses. By the end of the week, the Chilean people realized what their government was really made of namely, a panoply of English-speaking upper-middle-class intellectuals and business leaders who had no fraternal ties to the populace.

Why would a people choose to revolt against a government that has made their nation better off than at any time in its history? Perhaps because politics is not what John Stuart Mill called a marketplace of ideas, that is, an antechamber of objectivity where perfectly rational human beings engage in Enlightenment-style discourse. Despite Mills best efforts, man is not a rational animal. In fact, we could draw parallels between the failures of the Chilean government and Edmund Burkes astringent portrayal of the French National Assembly after the 1789 Revolution. For Burke, the French parliament was filled with lawyers and technocrats devoid of practical experience who would turn politics into a set of theoretical abstractions. The 18th-century statesman and philosopher reiterated this point in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs:

Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence.

Burke understood that politics is a world filled with indignation and uproar, a universe of shouting, growling, and protesting. Perceived inequalities matter at least as much as actual inequalities, and the fundamental role of the statesman is to master popular perceptions, control their excesses, and temper the disenchantment of the populace with care and prudence. No matter how brilliant and needed technocrats may be, they will never fulfil the demands of Burkean prudence. Experts such as Piera and his neoliberal companions suffer from years of isolation within the well-insulated walls of academia and airport business lounges. And to say as much need not make one an avid admirer of populists. Real statesmanship lies between demagoguery and detached rationalism, between hyperbolic injunctions and jargon-heavy analyses, between personality-based politics and non-existent leadership.

Chiles response to the coronavirus further illustrates the statesmantechnocrat distinction. Four months ago, the world lauded Chile for its surgical approach to the pandemic. Leaving the matter in the hands of experts, Pieras government implemented wide-ranging testing programs and strict neighborhood lockdowns. In appearance, Pieras calculations were impeccable; strong measures would rapidly vanquish the virus, and the economy would re-start in peace. But the Chilean government rapidly encountered a simple problem: Trapped in overpopulated neighborhoods, Chiles poor could not afford to stay in their houses. In the end, poverty, overcrowding, and a massive off-the-books workforce overcame the governments response. Today, Chile has one of the worlds highest rates of per-capita infections, and its once-praised health minister has been forced to resign.

But what is most interesting about the Chilean situation is that Pieras government, despite conducting a myriad of data-driven studies, did not have the common sense required to realize that its response to the pandemic was incompatible with the day-to-day life of most Chileans. Responding to Bloombergs reporters, Diego Pardow, executive president of the Espacio Pblico think tank, declared: If the government is going to make decisions about a world it doesnt know, then it should include people from that world in the decision-making process. The problem with this government is that it just surrounds itself with its own people.

Naturally, this type of criticism could apply to any kind of disconnected elite. But there is a world of difference between Pieras government and, say, the 18th-century landed aristocracy that Burke praises in his Reflections. While traditional elites were grounded in local traditions and community-specific bonds, Piera embodies a new kind of technocratic establishment that is neither culturally nor socio-economically close to the people it governs. While the pandemic should certainly make us reflect upon the importance of scientific leadership, Chiles dreadful state of affairs acts as a handy reminder that behind the veil of graphs and spreadsheets, governance remains a deeply political matter that requires statesmanship, not abstract competence.

In the Republic, Plato proposes to raise the sons and daughters of the citys guardians along with everybody elses children; this way, Plato argues, subjects and rulers will share common cultural references and life experiences. While we need not agree with what Karl Popper called Platos totalitarian blueprint, the Greek philosophers aspiration to form generations of leaders rooted in the traditions of their community should inspire us to do away with all kinds of technocratic dreams.

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Chile and the Perils of Technocracy - National Review

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Its just after 8am on the Nunniong Plains in Victorias high country when professional horse-breaker Lewis Benedetti, atop a big grey thoroughbred named Stones, trots out of the bush leading a raggedy black foal on a rope.

Were on an open plain of snow grass and tussock, five hours east of Melbourne, and the wind is unforgivingly cold. A frigid stream cuts through the field, gurgling under a layer of ice as thick as toast.

The little black horse a wild or feral horse, Equus caballus, also known as a brumby tugs at the rope Benedetti tossed around his neck mere moments ago. Its a skill the 30-year-old horseman honed in nearby Buchan as a child from when he was nine, lassoing his letterbox after school.

The captured foal whinnies, nostrils huffing mountain air. And he bucks clumsily, jumping at everything and nothing, like an obstinate puppy. Hes furrier than you might imagine. Fluffy almost, with a white rectangle on his forehead.

Professional horse-breaker Lewis Benedetti emerges from the Nunniong Plains bush with a wild colt. Credit:Josh Robenstone

For retraining, this is the size you want, brother! Benedetti hollers from the saddle. He comes to state forest areas like this in his spare time to go brumby running chasing wild horses to domesticate and rehome. When theyre too old, mate, theyre too hard to train. But hes just right.

Weve been up for hours, eyeing mobs of mares in the darkness, and three black stallions at dawn. Benedetti found this colt in a glade between snow gums. Caught him like you would not believe. Easy as piss, he says, grinning. Lets get him back to camp, eh.

Around the fire now, Benedetti pours his coffee, scalding hot from the billy, and the morning sun melts away the last of the crunchy overnight frost. Why do I do this? he asks, nonplussed. The adrenalin is unreal. To catch a wild horse pretty good feeling, eh? Youve gotta get set, be fit, have your horse fit, know what youre doing. Then come back for a feed at the fire. What better life is there than that?

As I stoke the coals and our eggs sizzle in popping bacon fat, its hard to argue. But there is, however, another more urgent reason Benedetti is here. Hes catching brumbies today not just for recreation but because of what might happen this winter.

That little pony will make someone really happy, says Benedetti, who might be able to sell this pretty brumby for $500, or just give it away. But see, theres only two options for him now. He can come home with me, or he can stay here and get shot.

This is not an exaggeration. A brumby cull is coming. Its long overdue.

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Thousands of wild horses are trampling the alpine wilderness of Victoria and NSW wreaking havoc on heritage-listed ecosystems, pugging up fragile water catchment areas and threatening the habitats of native species. Theyve been doing so for more than a century, of course, but the fight to be rid of these horses which are, technically, non-native ungulate pests has intensified in recent years.

In May 2018, NSW deputy premier John Barilaro introduced his brumby bill (The Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Bill), which formally recognised the historical significance of the brumbies, protecting them from slaughter. (It became law the following month.)

Later that year, a brumby advocacy group launched a Federal Court action to prevent a trapping and culling program by Parks Victoria. Those two actions produced a two-year stay of execution an amnesty in which the animals multiplied. Current estimates put their population at 25,000 in the alps of both states alarming, given the vast swaths of national park that burnt last summer.

Demography is destiny. Numbers are everything. And its going to get to the stage where without culling the problem is unsolvable, says retired CSIRO botanist Dick Williams. The situation demands a dramatic correction, he says, quoting a maxim often attributed to British economist John Maynard Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

Parks Victoria decided enough was enough. Having finally won its case in May, an immediate plan was announced to cull hundreds of horses using expert ground snipers with thermal imaging and noise suppressors.

It provoked an emotional outcry, and Andrew Cox of Australias Invasive Species Council understands why. Nobody wants to shoot horses, Cox says. People plead, There must be a better way because its horrible, yes. But Im sorry, there is no better way.

A problem with no easy solution, the brumby conundrum raises complicated questions of environmental science and agricultural management, while skirting delicate facets of animal welfare and our own colonial mythology.

Benedetti plans to train the young brumby, and either sell it or give it away. That little pony will make someone really happy.Credit:Josh Robenstone

Naturally, the issue has become yet another skirmish in the culture wars, pitting greenie against grazier, science against lore, rationalism against ideology. There are two irreconcilable and intractable sides to explore in this debate, but lets start with the horsemen in the high country.

In mid-May I head to the sleepy hamlet of Omeo, an hour north-west of Nunniong, to visit Jim Flannagan, 87, whose family has been farming the region since 1856. We shelter from a biting rain in his lounge room, near his rodeo trophies and show ribbons. He wears denim and flannel and has huge hands with waxen skin. I was a very capable horseman, he says, tipping his head. I dont mind an old boast on that one.

On the issue of brumbies theres no hysteria: merely a few points he wants to get off his chest. Theyve bred up to the extent that they are overpopulated, Flannagan concedes. No matter what the animal, youve gotta have a culling rate. But you do it humanely. Trap them, he says, and take them out of the park, even down to the knackery in nearby Maffra. Better that than leaving corpses in the bush for the wild dogs or feral pigs to eat. Shoot a horse, and a sow with nine piglets will have a feast, he says. Its gonna make them real healthy. Then youve got another problem.

Flannagan has that enviable rural pragmatism, but I want to hear the romantic history, riding into the hills as a young man to catch buckjumpers and maneaters. There are beautiful black-and-white films of such musters, and Flannagan was the star of one: the 1965 documentary Buckrunners about a world of canvas swags and yodelling mountain music.

Away youd go on a Friday afternoon, up the bush. It was big-time fun. Big-time! he says, closing his eyes. It was glorious country. Riding up onto the Bogong High Plains on a beautiful day, you grow to 10 foot tall. Waiting by makeshift stockyards, the anticipation built before he heard the hooves. Here they come, whispers Flannagan. Sound carries a long way up there, and the horse youre sitting on hello he can sense it, too. His ears prick up, he trembles. He knows the actions on.

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I want to see this for myself, so I leave Flannagan and drive north-west for an hour to the Bundara River in Anglers Rest, where Victorian Liberal MP Bill Tilley is waiting by his caravan. Hes here to support an audacious plan to save the brumbies by catching them, then giving them sanctuary on private land until theres a change of government.

As night falls, Tilley clarifies: This plan to go out and indiscriminately slaughter horses without proper consultation is why people are outraged. Theres a deep mistrust here says the member for Benambra, without irony of government. You cannot manage our parks from a desktop in Nicholson Street, Melbourne. Youve gotta resource people on the ground, and communicate and consult, with those who live it and breathe it every day.

The brumby thus becomes a cause to be harnessed in the fight against change imposed from the state capital. To members of the resistance, the expanding ski resort at nearby Mt Hotham is a scar on the hill, a proposed mountain bike trail in Omeo is a misuse of grazing property, and keeping cattle out of national parks is locking up the land.

You want to talk about destruction? Look at people, pleads Ensay farmer Carol Faithfull. Walking tracks of wood and steel. Ripping up tracks with four-wheel drives. Campsite areas that are just trashed. I camp later with Faithfull and her partner, Charles Connley, in forest to the south. People believe this is a disaster area, but we dont believe that, Connley says. Look around you.

A brook bubbles nearby. Thin moss clings to mottled branches. Im sipping beer and eating a crispy sausage with my fingers, while a fire pit crackles with mountain ash, the embers floating up into the dark where that old chandelier the Milky Way galaxy dazzles down. Theres a tall tree with a plaque in memory of an old bushie who used to chase brumbies here. Nailed to the trunk is a cross with an upturned horseshoe and a carved message: Living the dream.

People here fear that getting rid of the brumby is just the first step in something bigger, warns Connley. We think what they want to do is get rid of recreational riding, and remove the horses from the landscape altogether.

Yet perhaps the biggest point of contention is the brumby population estimate, which was based on a 2019 aerial survey covering 7443 square kilometres of Victoria and NSW, and used statistical modelling to determine brumby density. Opponents believe such estimates are compromised that the bushfires last summer would have dramatically thinned the population.

In search of brumbies: a survey estimates the Victorian and NSW wild horse population to be more than 25,000.Credit:Josh Robenstone

Many celebrity brumbies have already disappeared, like the magnificent stallion Paleface and his son Bogong, and their herds in the Kiandra region. The survey spotters also only laid eyes on 1748 actual brumbies, so the estimated total (25,318) includes what the sceptics call an imaginary 23,570 wild horses.

Connley puts it best: If you wanted to guess the population of Victoria, you wouldnt fly over the MCG on grand final day, and extrapolate your numbers from the people gathered on one acre in Melbourne.

It might snow tonight, 1497 metres above sea level on the Bogong High Plains, but Philip Maguire, who owns land below us, leans back in a camp chair, cloaked in his Drizabone, and comfortably holds court, reciting his own poetry.

I was born here in the mountains, where the life is wild and free, And I love the rugged beauty, theres just nowhere else for me. From their snowy peaks in winter to the summer sunlit plains, The splendour of the flowers in the gentle soaking rains.

He continues, deeper and deeper into a ballad of joyous unrestricted gallops and whistling winds, all from memory. But nearing the end his tone shifts, abruptly, to a lament. Traditions are under threat. Malevolent forces are pushing horsemen off the hills.

The next generations, they too have a right, To a life riding free, same as us. Not to be lackeys and carry the bags, when the tourists arrive in a bus. I can tame a wild stallion or face a wild bull, I can handle a wild rushing mob. But arguing politics isnt my game, I just cant handle the job.

Its a salty last line, but not quite true. Maguire, you see, is a political animal. A former journalist for the Sunday Herald Sun, he wrote that poem in 1984, when he was a senior adviser to Peter Ross-Edwards then leader of the Victorian National Party the same year he helped organise the famous protest in which 304 mounted graziers converged on Melbournes Parliament House.

Anti-culling activist Philip Maguire, who is taking the brumby cause to the High Court. Credit:Josh Robenstone

Some people disparage the 60-year-old as a showman or a milk bar cowboy, but to the brumby cause he is a volatile messiah, with huge support, not least through the Rural Resistance Facebook page he established where many of the 23,000 members refer to him as the leader of The Maguire Army. He launched his own 11th-hour Supreme Court injunction a few weeks ago to prevent the cull, claiming a lack of community consultation. The Victorian court swiftly dismissed his appeal, but his supporters see him as a man who acts. He has already solicited $250,000 in donations to keep fighting, all the way to the High Court.

There is a touch of PT Barnum in him, too. This plan to give wild horses sanctuary was his, and it brought me up here as well as the ABC, the Herald Sun and The New York Times. When I told one old bushie the plan, at first he laughed. Phil? Phils a bloody hopeless horseman! Couldnt ride a black horse out of sight at midnight! he roared. Then he turned reflective: But he knows how to get people interested.

Theyll have an uprising on their hands. Were not going to stand for it any more.

We go for a walk the next day, and come to the ancient stockyard where farmers used to muster cattle and brumbies. Its all charred now, and Maguire blames the Labor government for cultural vandalism and not managing the land (by allowing grazing up here, to reduce fuel load). If I had Daniel Andrews here right now, Id fing deck him, Maguire spits. Id drop him.

That has nothing to do with the brumby, of course, but up here grievances past and present grow entangled as one. Maguire is gathering names for a petition, for instance, with thousands of people stating that they no longer recognise Parks Victoria as a legitimate authority. Theyll have an uprising on their hands, he broods. Were not gonna stand for it any more.

This is not specific to Maguire. Exasperated advocates for the brumby cause often turn to opprobrium, rumour and conspiracy theory. If brumby sightings are down in a given week? Culls probably begun. If they see disturbed earth? Could be a mass grave.

To some, particularly online, the reason for the cull is obvious: Dictator Dan is trying to drive all horsemen off the land in a shadowy scheme to sell public land for a ski resort owned by Chinese nationals. On a recent morning after The Age printed a look at the science behind the issue, a lobbyist emailed me in a rage. Why has your colleague produced such a one-sided bullshit article? she wrote. Its propaganda shit again.

The Maguire family emerge out of the regrowth at the back of the property in the Bogong High Plains. Credit:Josh Robenstone

The Great Alpine Road unspools slowly, patiently hugging the hills, leaping Swifts Creek and the Haunted Stream. Five hours later Im in Melbourne, where Ive come to meet more brumby huggers in Treasury Gardens. A demonstration is in full swing, protesters holding posters of big-eyed brumbies in rifle crosshairs, because #brumbylivesmatter.

The crowd of about 200 is 95 per cent female, which one woman at the rally attributes to Black Beauty and My Little Pony. Horse-breaker Angel Tanner from Narrandera, NSW, thinks there are simply two ways of tackling the same problem. Theres the romance of The Man from Snowy River, and the cracks and cowboys the fantasy, says Tanner, who has thin dreadlocks and a nose ring. And then theres the women presenting and petitioning in a peaceful manner.

Jill Pickering, 73, surveys the scene from her mobility scooter. It doesnt buck, she jokes in a British accent. Pickering grew up in Woking, in south-west England, and contracted polio at nine. Horse-riding was part of the regimen used to build strength in her legs. She was 60 when she saw her first brumby, on a horseback trek in Victoria. I was just captivated, she says, blue eyes gleaming. It was incredible.

Brumby advocate Jill Pickering. She was 60 when she saw her first brumby, on a horseback trek in Victoria. I was just captivated.Credit:Josh Robenstone

Saving this part of our national psyche became a calling. She helped found the Australian Brumby Alliance to bring together disparate advocacy bodies, became president, and in late 2018 launched the Federal Court action to save the animals. We speak the week after that case is lost, costing her about $400,000. Shes devastated. But like any worthy cause, you just have to keep pushing, she says. Its like the brumbies are my children anyway my inheritance is their inheritance.

She introduces me at the rally to Colleen OBrien, who runs Brumby Junction a sanctuary solely for brumbies, two hours west of Melbourne in Glenlogie. Its a prohibitively expensive passion project. Ive been a full-time volunteer for 12 years, OBrien says. My husband thankfully is CEO of an international synthetic textiles manufacturer, and he funds all of this.

One of her main causes and cause for disappointment is a rejected plan to sterilise the brumbies. OBrien has made trips to the United States, investigating successful fertility control programs for mustangs in Nevada, Wyoming and Colorado. You do it with a dart gun, then 12 months later you dart them a second time, and they wont have a foal for two years, she says. In Wyoming theres a woman whos 80, named Ada. She pulls out her deck chair, sets herself up with her thermos of tea, waits for the mustangs, and just picks them off as they pass.

Colleen OBrien, who runs Brumby Junction a sanctuary solely for brumbies, two hours west of Melbourne in Glenlogie at a Save The Brumby protest at Parliment House in Melbourne.Credit:Josh Robenstone

OBrien took this plan to Parks Victoria, offering to cover costs, volunteer staffing, and research engagement, but was turned down. She sees this as ideologically driven stubbornness, and it leaves her doubting the experts. I didnt realise how subjective science could be, she muses. It can go either way, a bit like the Bible. Is it An eye for an eye? Or is it Thou shalt not kill?

Its for that reason that the pro-brumby team found its own scientist. David Berman is a research fellow in sustainable agriculture at the University of Southern Queensland, and has written extensively on feral horses. This year he began a longitudinal study on horses in the Victorian high country, examining 16 sites from a previous survey, counting horse-dung mounds and measuring stream bank damage.

It wont be finished until 2024, but the impact he recorded was limited and isolated. The other research seemed to focus on areas where there was impact, where it was concentrated, Berman says, and it distorts the reality of the damage.

Berman is a horseman, however a showjumper since he was a child and admits that in these circumstances he is trying to be a scientist: objective within an emotional conflict. His contribution was dismissed in Federal Court by Justice Michael OBryan, who described his testimony as idiosyncratic conjecture: The evidence presented by Dr Berman was not supported by scientific studies and was not persuasive.

Botanist Dick Williams. He says it's the denial of science that "irks him most". Credit:Josh Robenstone

One scientist whose work the court did find persuasive, however, is botanist Dick Williams. We meet one brisk morning at Elwood Beach, as he strides out of Port Phillip Bay in fluorescent Speedos not exactly the ivory-tower egghead his opponents might imagine. Mate, were bushies, Williams says, clenching fists. We get out and up there, and are as tough and self-sufficient as anybody. Weve gotta be, because we spend long periods of time in the alps.

He loves the place, and the people, too. But science has to work hard against tales passed down from one farmer to the next, and the deep sense of proprietorship those stories engender. While I was in the high country, for instance, I watched in horror as a local grazier named Sonia Buckley filming a documentary about brumbies tore strips off a Good Weekend photographer over the most minor imagined slight.

Im a fifth-generation high-country cattlewoman! she barked, pointing a finger. And we dont need people from the city coming up here, treating us with disrespect. So f off home!

Williams nods. Thats their branding, he says. But we have that heritage, too. Alpine science started in the 1850s with Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, and from there you can draw a research lineage through Alfred Howitt in the 1870s, Richard Helms in the 1890s, then Professor John Turner, who supervised David Ashton, who in turn supervised Williams himself. Williams has mentored scientists of his own, who are now supervising students of their own. In a way, he says, Im an academic grandfather.

Energised by his winter dip, Williams is ready to offer rebuttals. I point out how cattlemen often dismiss the value of moss beds and sphagnum whatevers, or mock the broad-toothed rat, whose existence is threatened by the brumby along with the stocky galaxias fish and the southern corroboree frog. Theyre not as flashy as a horse jumping over a log, says Williams, but these species have their own intrinsic value, and some are as rare as rocking-horse poo.

But the denial of science is what irks him most. If we ran agriculture, transport or medicine according to the dismissive, anecdotal logic being used here, wed starve, planes would fall from the sky, and the hospitals would be full. Its like the ludicrous notions of anti-vaxxers theyre immune to evidence. Australians produce 2 per cent of the worlds science, which is punching massively above our weight. Were smarter than saying, Green tops and white-coaters dont know anything about the bush. Were better than that.

Im not sure we are. The image of a man on horseback, pinching the front of his Akubra, seems to pack more punch than any peer-reviewed paper, which is why someone like Professor Don Driscoll, director of the Centre for Integrative Ecology at Melbournes Deakin University, finds himself constantly retelling grim anecdotes like the tale of the cannibal horses.

Driscoll was hiking a snowy peak in 2014, in Kosciuszko National Park, when he stumbled upon a gruesome tableau at the aptly named Dead Horse Gap. Horses often get trapped above the snowline and starve to death, so its not uncommon to see a dead brumby. Then he saw three emaciated horses gathered around the carcass. I thought they were nuzzling it, pining for a loved one, Driscoll says. But their heads were actually inside the abdominal cavity of the dead one, up to their ears. I think they were after the semi-digested grass still inside.

I point out how many high-country people reject such descriptions: there are no starving masses or trampled flora in their alps. Its very insulting, Driscoll says. One cattleman claimed there couldnt be more than 3500 horses in the alps, and thats based on what? Riding your horse around and looking? Its laughable rubbish.

Yet there are places in which brumby advocates have legitimate cause for outrage, including Parks Victorias Feral Horse Strategic Action Plan (2018-2021). The document carefully details a government plan to remove up to 400 horses per year by passive trapping, and specifically notes in bold font that shooting will not be used to control free-ranging feral horses. The plan makes an allowance to revisit that latter policy but explicitly promises further public consultation and dialogue. No such consultation has happened so far.

Phil Ingamells is head of the Victorian National Parks Associations Park Protection Project, and has been involved in endless meetings between graziers and brumby runners, RSPCA staff and ecologists, in which he says every option has been discussed, ad nauseum. Short of putting a 10-page advertisement in every newspaper, someones always going to say, No one asked me! Parks Victoria is no longer really obliged to consult.

What about the argument that deer are more prolific than horses, or that pig wallows are a more intrusive form of destruction, or that the wild dog and feral cat problem is ignored in favour of the scapegoat brumby? Its called the Look over there! argument, Ingamells says. When the cattlemen had cattle in the high country, they pointed at the brumbies as causing the damage. Now when you try to deal with the brumbies, they want you to focus on the deer. And rest assured, deer are definitely in the gunsights. More than 1500 deer, pigs and wild goats have been shot in aerial culls this year, while fox baiting continues. But theres been no aerial shooting of horses in the alps, and there will not be.

Thats an important point. Aerial culling has a bad reputation, owing largely to the infamous killing of 606 horses 20 years ago, in the NSW Guy Fawkes National Park. Fiona Carruthers, author of The Horse in Australia, saw the aftermath of the 2000 cull. She flew overhead and remembers the smell.

What was so appalling was that some of those brumbies had up to 10 bullet holes through the rump, thigh, neck not a clean kill straight into the eyes or heart. A couple of the brumbies killed were mares, and one had started foaling, and her carcass was there with the foals head dead sticking out.

An official report cleared the operation as appropriate and successful, with evidence of only one horse suffering a prolonged death, but few on the ground believe this. Aerial culling of horses has been shelved ever since. Carruthers, however, notes that we freely shoot from above to kill kangaroos and camels, and no one makes a fuss. People caring more about the horses makes me think of Animal Farm, she says. Are some animals more equal than others?

Wild brumbies spotted in the early morning on the Nunniong Plains.Credit:Josh Robenstone

Mobs of wild horses have roamed the Australian alps for more than 150 years, having either escaped or been set free from pastoral properties, while some are said to carry the bloodline of the Waler, horses bred to meet the vast cavalry needs of the Australian Light Horse in World War I a popular origin story that connects the courageous brumby to the ANZAC legend. But the fact is they have no particular genetic heritage thats worth preserving, Deakin Universitys Driscoll says. The evidence available says that a horse is a horse.

Extensively inbred, many brumbies today look mangy and small, with pencil necks and pot bellies, and they were regarded as a worthless scourge long ago. In 1889, the Richmond River Herald described how mobs were driven into trap lanes, where a man stood waiting with a keen knife: As each animal passed, its jugular vein was severed, and the bleeding creature tore madly away into its native scrub, only to stagger and die from loss of blood.

Literature helped render a more flattering portrait, particularly the wildly popular Silver Brumby novels of Elyne Mitchell. Yet Mitchell also wrote two lesser-known non-fiction books Speak to the Earth and Soil and Civilisation about protecting the Australian bush.

The Man From Snowy River by Banjo Paterson has the most resonance, of course, but the poem doesnt use the word brumby even once. Patersons wild bush horses are little more than a prop for the bloody chase after a millionaires thoroughbred, which makes sense coming from a lawyer in blue-ribbon Yass, who mixed with skiers and Sydney doctors. Paterson was a hopeless romantic, too, and was mercilessly lampooned by his great rival, Henry Lawson, a miserable cuss and alcoholic who produced verse that was distinctly more gloomy and accurate arguing that Paterson was blinded to the real.

Apparently we all are, too. In a random survey of community attitudes, 78 per cent of Victorians didnt know that brumbies are listed as a pest animal, despite the fact that weve spent more than a century treating them as something to be chased, shot and chopped into pet food.

Thats not the goal, though. I dont think its even possible to eradicate horses from the alps, says Matthew Jackson, the CEO of Parks Victoria. And we havent said we aim to eradicate them. But we want these parks to be pristine, and we have obligations not only ethically but legally under acts to maintain these cultural assets.

They also have no plans, he says, to lock out recreational riders. For some members of the community, horses in the high country are paramount to their lives. Taking that away is simply not on the table.

Rehoming the animals would be wonderful, but Parks Victoria advertised five expressions of interest in the past year and could only rehome 15 brumbies. The sterilisation option proposed by OBrien? The inaccessibility of our alps, says Jackson, means the Australian and American settings arent an apple-to-apple comparison.

In 2018, the CSIRO published a study Could current fertility control methods be effective for landscape-scale management of populations of wild horses (Equus caballus) in Australia? and the short, resounding answer was no.

Jackson understands the squeamish resistance to shooting horses, but what he finds unacceptable are the attacks on his department. We refer those to Victoria Police, he says. Its inappropriate for people to be threatened at work or online, on the phone or in the street. Whether in jest or joking, we take it seriously.

So does Richard Swain, 50, a Wiradjuri man of the Dabee clan who grew up near where he now lives, in Cooma, NSW. Swain runs Alpine River Adventures in nearby Jindabyne, but has put the business second to protecting his country. When I call the night before he heads out bush to undertake a feral-cat trapping program (protecting the smoky mouse and mountain pygmy possum) he sounds defeated. Barilaros brumby bill was his breaking point. It was like taking a sledgehammer to a baby; like killing the last bit of the Barrier Reef.

Being Australian to them is Vegemite, or a Holden car, or Bradmans average. I want to shame them into caring for country.

Swain takes people on Indigenous walking tours, educating them about the way the land has been disrespected and desecrated, and last year held a ceremony to sing healing back into the land. His message is not being met well. Online he has been mocked as a half-caste wanker, while opponents have used fake social media accounts to discredit him and online notice boards to rubbish his business.

He was walking in the bush recently with his 83-year-old mother when an opponent screamed at them: Go suck a dick! His wife often finds her car plastered with Save the Brumby stickers. Hes started getting flat tyres, punctured with nails.

Im completely fed up. I now call them Aussies by name and not by nature. But its a broader cultural issue, Swain says. Being Australian to them is Vegemite, or a Holden car, or Bradmans average. They belligerently dont want to form a connection. I want to shame them into caring for country.

Lewis Benedetti says he will keep coming up to the high country, pulling the big horse float he hopes to fill with sturdy little hooves.Credit:Josh Robenstone

Some of them already care deeply for country, of course, even if their perspectives diverge. Benedetti, the horse-breaker, is one. He says he will keep coming up to the high country in the near future, pulling the big horse float he hopes to fill with sturdy little hooves. Im gonna give this winter a hard crack, says Benedetti. Id like to save a few from the rifle, and have a brumby sale in spring. A couple of dozen.

In the weeks after I leave, he roams our landscape alone, catching mares and foals, posting luminous photos of the shimmering Snowy River, and fresh green pick on the steep side of Mt Kosciuszko. But I remember him best in my final moments on the Nunnet Plains, an expanse of thick grass and dead gums silvering in the sun.

He sees a mob before him, but the dozen blacks and bays and greys twig to his presence early, and charge away. The crack rider follows light in the saddle, digging spurs and clutching reins and he closes as the tree line nears.

A brutal silent wind whips across the land now, and the pursuit vanishes into the bush. As the familiar chase continues, dark cloud shadows creep over the plains. The brumbies are on the run.

Originally posted here:

The imminent brumby cull in the Australian alps - Sydney Morning Herald

As the United States sank into its halfhearted quarantine this spring, we all seemed to turn at once to framework building and normalcy preserving. Social media feeds swelled with color-coded schedules for children suddenly home from school, advice for those working from home and the laid off alike, and a thousand options for joining in what had been group activitiesworkouts, meditation, worship, prayerfrom the relative safety of our living rooms. And with this tide of what-we-talk-about-when-we-dont-talk-about-COVID-19 came salvos by big names published in big outlets, including N. T. Wright in Time and James Martin in the New York Times, about how a Christian ought to respond to a pandemic.

This pandemic has brought with it a great deal about which we might desire some clarity and for which Christianity, the most powerful religion in the country and the one most nonreligious people are likely to no longer believe, might be asked to answer: more than 100,000 Americans dead and more dying; death dealt not evenly but along the familiar lines of race and income; hospitals, emergency medical services, morgues, and funeral homes stretched well past the breaking point; triage protocols that determine who dies and who gets a shot at living; millions out of work with hunger and eviction looming; half a million people with no homes in which to shelter in place. Its a disaster.

And Wright and Martin indeed offered faithful responses to disaster. Martin reminded us that we cannot answer the question why but can follow Jesus, while Wright said that beyond pat answers lies the biblical tradition of lament. Both were right to observe that in the face of catastrophe, neatness and simplicity are at best red herrings.

Then, 12 weeks after we first settled in, we exploded: days and nights of protests, marches, damage to property, chants, downed statues, arrests, tear gas, and rubber-coated bullets, as thousands of people took to the streets in outrage at the killing of yet more unarmed black Americans by police. The same debates we have had in the wake of the killing of other black peoplewhere do good protests end and bad ones begin? what of property? how should a police force respond?are taking place again. The catastrophe has been compounded. Are lament and open wondering the best Christians have to offer?

Martin, like many, rejects any ideas of divine testing or punishmentthey make God out to be a monster. Wright sees divine punishment or any other explanation as a knee-jerk reaction from a culture suffering from the rationalist demand to explain everything. (In fact, divine judgment and punishment for sin were first-line explanations for Christians centuries before the rise of rationalism.) Yet in the same gesture with which they reached to leave open uncertainty and invite truthful emotional response, both writers neatly and simply shut the door on the elephant in the room: the question of divine judgment. There is much to explore, much to wonder about, and much to lament in a disasterbut it seems one must not for a moment think that God had anything to do with it.

I would likecarefully, with fear and tremblingto face the elephant. God knows that judgment has been used both clumsily and callously, as poor comfort and as a cudgel, and that no one should rush to declare the judgment of God without full knowledge that they will come under that judgment as well. Martin and others have rightly noted that in Johns account of the man born blind and Lukes of those killed by the collapsing tower of Siloam, Jesus thoroughly troubles any sense of correspondence between individual sin and individual calamity. But to say that judgment is entirely canceled, as it were, is to misread the texts. Both stories scrap punishment, but judgment remains: the inexorable outworking of what has been happening all along.

It seems that one is not allowed to wonder whether God had anything to do with a disaster.

The self-preserving cruelty of the community leaders who drive out the healed man is, along with that mans faith, itself the judgment for which Jesus tells the man he came into the world, namely, that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind. And to those who wonder whether the tower fell where it did because those people were especially bad, Jesus says, essentially, Look to yourself: they werent worse than anyone else, and such a fate may well await you. To the damaged image of God in us just judgment holds up a mirror.

Jesus takes away the folly of a straight line between a sin and its punishment. But what we have instead is the truth that, should God judge, we would be liable to it. I do not judge, Jesus tells his critics, yet even if I do judge, my judgment is valid. This is a sticking point for many, especially those of us Christians who eschew the image of a primarily wrathful God never more than a breath away from consigning the lot of us to the flames of hell. If we have rejected God as smiter, why would we accept God as judge? Original sin is out of fashion, and most of us are doing the best we can.

But over this twofold objectionGod doesnt do that, and if God did, we wouldnt deserve itmust come the cries of the suffering. Am I my brothers keeper? asks one of the first humans, and the whole Bible proceeds to answer yes. Yet weand by we I mean especially white Christiansare little more willing now to accept our deep and abiding responsibility for the well-being of other people, how profoundly we are bound up together, than Cain was.

We care, of coursebut responsibility is not reducible to care. This is important and easy to miss. Many of us care very much about other people, even and especially the vulnerable and suffering, who are especially dear to God. But the notion that we bear real responsibility for others states, that their suffering can meaningfully redound to our guilt, runs so counter to our cultures emphasis on individual responsibility for individual outcomes that even recognition of systemic causes often stops short of recognition of shared accountability for systemic effects.

Yet the Bible takes this bound-up-ness as a matter of course. Jesus mourns over Jerusalem as a whole without sifting out who, precisely, has stoned the ones sent to it and refused to be gathered under his wings. Isaiah declares Gods refusal of the offerings of a people who oppress workers, who quarrel and fight, without giving a roll call of who is guilty and who is not. God has counted every hair on each of our heads, but living is still a group project. Scripture provides little warrant for the comfortable among us to believe that we will not be called to account for the hardship and distress of others. And rare indeed these days is the comfort that does not come at someone elses cost.

This is the judgment, says John 3, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. The judgment is that, given the option, people go with what they have already been going with. That given the option, we choose not to see. That, given the option, we build towers that will fall. That, given the option, we do not wish to be made well, and so are not.

We have all seen the calls to let a certain portion of the population die for the sake of the economy, our favorite god. We have seen calls for war with another country on which we wish to pin the blame for the many thousands who have died in our undersupplied hospitals, who have been stacked in refrigerated trucks waiting to be buried wherever there is space, without family to mourn them. We have seen more and better-articulated horror at the sight of a burning police precinct building or the shattered storefronts of chain stores than at the records of police brutality against unarmed people or the redlining legacy that forms the neighborhoods where we now live, safe because of the unsafety of others.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the cell phone cameras of ordinary people have brutally illuminated the shambles we call a societyand the strong national preference, as expressed by our leaders, has been to cut the lights, bring in the troops, call evil good and good evil, and resuscitate the Dow. Certainly many of us disagree, yes. But disagreement does not opt us out of our connection with others.

COVID-19 deaths and death at the hands of police are not judgments on those who die. This we know. But to fail or to refuse to see both the pandemics shape and the glass in the streets of every major US city as judgment on the nation we have been building for 400 years and on the ways this nation has shaped the world is to lose the chance to repent for our most constant sin: our ethos has always considered some human livesindigenous, enslaved, black, brown, poor, sickexpendable. Each preventable death is precious in the sight of God and accrues to the guilt of those of us who are shielded by our race and our class from the harm built into our way of life.

This is judgment as literal apocalypse: exposure of how thoroughly sin structures all we know. The light has come into the world, but we have preferred darkness.

Of course there is grace to be found. Every town has its mutual aid society, every sewer his or her pile of masks. School systems are working to feed students. Demands that would have been dismissed as utopian only a month ago, like defunding police forces and completely reimagining community safety, have found surprising political traction. Christ has risen; there is still welcome for the sinner and more graces for the good, as the hymn goes.

But still, our most essential workers are paid the least and protected little if at all. All 50 states are in some stage of reopening, even as COVID-19 case numbers rise. The police who shot Breonna Taylor in her bed cannot be fired until the investigation is completean investigation that was not ordered for more than two months after her death. And on, and on, and on. For those with eyes to see, the judgment is clear. The greatest mercy is being given this chance to turn from it, to turn toward each other, and live.

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title A time of judgment.

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Maybe this really is a time of divine judgment - The Christian Century

Richard Ebeling is a professor of economics at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan.

One of the new fashionable phrases has become cancel culture, the idea that ideas, institutions, and people of the present as well of the past must be overturned and dethroned from legitimacy and acceptance in society, so as to expunge the injustices, cruelties, and insensitivities existing in current life and lingering over from history. The question is: what exactly is the culture in America that is to be cancelled?

Elements of the cancel culture mindset and movement have been seen in the tearing down of statues, demands for removing from buildings and other monuments the names and imageries of various people, and the ostracizing of certain individuals, living or dead, who are accused of and condemned for racist, sexist, and other politically incorrect words or deeds at any time during their life.

White racists of the past used to say that one drop of black blood disqualified any person from having status as a member of the superior white race, and, instead, relegated you to the lower category of being an inferior being. Now we see another variation on the same type of theme: One word or deed, no matter how innocent or innocuous, no matter how long ago or in the context of an earlier less enlightened time, and no matter how much of a higher consciousness you have had ever since, or how publicly apologetic you may be for that sin of the past, none of this can save you from banishment, seemingly for all time, from good woke society.

You are cast out to the nether regions of human existence. Erased from the record of humankind. And all because everything American, past and present, should be seen as the essence of all things evil and immoral. Because what the country has stood for and done represents the worst in human history.

Of course, endless examples and instances of such racist attitudes and behaviors can be offered from the pages of American history. For instance, historian John B. McMaster (1852-1932) detailed the racist actions of white prospectors and fortune-hunters in California, following the gold discoveries in 1848, in hisHistory of the People of the United States 1850-1861, Vol. 8 (1913):

Hatred of the greaser was early and strongly developed, and in the northern and central mining regions Chileans, Peruvians, even Frenchmen were driven from the placers. Here and there some resistance was made; but in most instances they quietly submitted and went off to the valley of the San Joaquin. Germans, English, Irish were not disturbed, for it was against the dark-skinned races, Malays, Kanakas, Spaniards, and above all Mexicans and South Americans that feeling ran high . . .

The greasers having been driven from the State, the wrath of the native Americans fell next on the Chinese . . . At first the Celestials, the China boys, met a warm welcome, and in San Francisco on more than one occasion were the object of public attention . . . In the mining camps, on the other hand, the feeling against the Chinese ran high, and meetings were held, and resolutions passed calling for their expulsion . . . A few days later some sixty American miners came down the north fork of the American River, drove away two hundred Chinese, and destroyed their tents. (pp. 60-63)

The classical liberal author and essayist, Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), penned a piece that appeared in theAmerican Magazine(February 1913) on, What We Stand For (reprinted in,The State of the Union: Essays in Social Criticismby Albert Jay Nock [1991]) He asked what America was really about when a black man could be dragged from a hospital bed by a mob, and then burned alive:

On Sunday evening, August 13, 1911, at the hour when churches dismiss their congregations, a human being named Zack Walker was taken by violence out of a hospital at Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where he lay chained to an iron bedstead, in the custody of the law, suffering from a shot-wound, apparently self-inflicted.

The bedstead was broken in half, and the man, still chained to the lower half, was dragged half a mile along the ground, thrown upon a pile of wood, drenched with oil, and burned alive. Other human beings to the number of several hundred looked on in approval. When Walker with superhuman strength burst his bonds and tried to escape, they drove him back into the flames with pitchforks and fence-rails and held him there until his body was burned to ashes. Those who could get fragments of his charred bones took them off as souvenirs. (p. 139)

Nock wondered what this told us about human beings in modern, supposedly civilized society, whether in America or anywhere, who would act in such ways?

The cancel culture proponents, and most certainly the more activist and radical among them, would insist that such episodes tell us all we need to know about America, and that the America of the mid-19thand early 20thcenturies, about which historian, John B. McMaster, and essayist, Albert Jay Nock, wrote, is the same America today.

Is that what American culture is, and always has been about? I would beg to differ. If it was, let me suggest that we would not have seen the improvements in racial and social circumstances and conditions that have happened over the last century. Segregation laws are long gone, and, if anything, laws have been introduced to impose and police compulsory integration under federal anti-discrimination laws.

Employments, professions, and occupations that had been long reserved for whites only went out with the Jim Crow statutes in the South, and to the extent that social distancing was practiced by many whites due to personal and peer-pressure prejudices, over the last half century these have radically disappeared in an amazing array of social and interpersonal settings.

The civil liberties expressed in the Bill of Rights no longer apply to some while not to others. Where violations, abuses, and any other willful acts may occur, legal defenses, advocacy groups, and general public opinion in the age of mass and social media try to limit or turn a bright light onto such conduct in most instances today; and pressures are made for the introduction of reforms that would make such behavior less frequent, if not impossible, and not to go unpunished.

I have no wish to sound Panglossian, that the world we are in is the best of all worlds. It is certainly not. And as a classical liberal who believes in and cares deeply about the rights and dignity of the individual human being, all such infringements, denials, and abuses are unacceptable affronts to what I consider the moral principles upon which any good and decent society should and can be based.

Classical liberalism is not simply a political philosophy of economic freedom. The right to honestly acquired private property, the right to freedom of association in the competitive marketplace of supply and demand, the right to produce, buy and sell whatever individuals choose to on the peaceful and non-fraudulent terms to which the participants agree, are essential elements to any consistent practice of liberty in society.

But for most classical liberals and libertarians, the starting premise and principle from which economic liberty is derived is the broader right of the individual to be viewed as having the most basic and fundamental property right: to himself. Each individual is a self-governing person, having sovereignty over his life, liberty, and the external properties that he has acquired with either his own direct efforts of production or through the free and honest exchange entered into with others.

Freedoms of speech, the press, and of religion; the right of association for any and all peaceful purposes, to be secure in ones person and papers and other properties from those in political power without legal warrant and due process of equal and impartial rule of law; these and other such rights captured in the U.S. Constitution and complementary legal bases, means the of securing and protecting the civil liberties and rights that are inseparable threads along with economic freedom in the tightly woven single tapestry of human liberty. To abuse or abridge any one of them is a threat and a warning signal to all other sides of liberty.

This is what makes the principles and founding documents of the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution impossible to be viewed as defenses of slavery or legal segregation and discrimination, or institutional racism. The American founding runs counter to all such conduct in its vision, hope and promise for a society based on the sanctity, dignity, and respect for the individual and his rights from the violent betrayal of either private persons or those in political power.

David J. Brewer (1837-1910) served as an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court for 20 years, from 1889 to 1910. He strongly advocated equal rights and respect for women, worked for equal opportunities for black Americans, and supported freedom of association among workers. In a series of lectures delivered at Yale University onAmerican Citizenship(1902), Justice Brewer explained what it meant to be an American in terms of defining beliefs and ideas:

This is a government of and by and for the people. It rests upon the thought that to each individual belong the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It affirms that the nation exists not for the benefit of one man, or set of men, but to secure to each and all the fullest opportunity for personal development. It stands against the governments of the Old World in that there the thought is that the individual lives for the nation; here the nation exists for the individual . . .

Far be it for me to affirm that we have lived up to our ideals. I am making no Fourth of July speech. On the contrary, our history has disclosed many shortcomings. We have not been free from the weaknesses of human nature. But, notwithstanding all our failures, nowhere has there been a closer living to the ideals of popular government, and nowhere are the possibilities of future success greater.

If, therefore, the chief object of national existence is to secure to each individual the fullest protection in all inalienable rights and the fullest opportunity for personal advancement, and if this nation has come nearer than any other to the realization of this ideal, and if by virtue of its situation, its population, and its development, it has the greatest promise of full realization of this ideal in the future, surely it must be that the obligations of its citizens to it are nowhere surpassed. (pp. 14, 17-18)

The obligation of an American citizen was to live up to this ideal of a land dedicated to the liberty and rights of each and every individual. To strive to practice what was preached. Clearly, to overcome those weaknesses in human nature that resulted in a failure to fully respect and live by the idea of human freedom, a society in which the government exists to protect the individual in his rights and not to make the individual a subject to those in political power for their own purposes, whether those in power was one, or a few, or even many.

Sometimes, moments of great political and ideological crisis place things in more essential defining clarity. Certainly, the rise of totalitarianism in the years between the two World Wars was such a time, which reached its climax in the Second World War. In the eyes of many, the crisis of that time was between two conceptions of man, society and government. Communism and Nazism represented a reactionary turn toward a comprehensive and cruel collectivism that would envelop and crush the individual in the rush for making new men based on Marxian-imagined social class or National Socialist biological race.

On the other side was the ideal of free men in a free society, without human beings reduced to cogs in the wheels of political tyranny and social terror. America, in the eyes of many at that time, represented the alternative to the totalitarian threats. One of them was historian Hans Kohn (1891-1971), a recognized leading scholar on the idea and history of nationalism in the modern age.

Born in Prague in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, he became a determined Zionist in his 20s. Kohn served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army when the First World War began in 1914, but was captured by the Russians in 1915 on the Eastern Front, and spent five years in Russia as a prisoner of war, witnessing both the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the three years of bitter and brutal Civil War that followed before in Russia before returning home to Prague.

Kohn spent several years in Palestine in the 1920s but became disillusioned with a political and nationalist Zionism that showed little regard for the rights of the Palestinians with whom the immigrant European Jews were increasingly living. He came to the United States in the early 1930s and remained in America for the remainder of his life, devoting his scholarly efforts to analyzing and understanding the nature and consequences of nationalism versus the liberal and free society in general.

In Hans Kohns view, in that world crisis between freedom and liberalism versus totalitarian tyranny, America held a unique philosophical position. He explained this in one of his wartime works,World Order in Historical Perspective(1942):

All the great currents of the Western liberal development of the 17th and 18th centuries were able to ripen to fruition under the especially favorable circumstances of the English colonies in North America and in the wake of their revolutionary movement.

Here, more than anywhere else, emerge the Western man; not as a race, because he was a mixture of many races, but as a social and intellectual type, professing a deep faith in man and his potentialities, and trying to build a civilization on the basis of rationalism, optimism, and individualism. The American society more than any other is a product of the 18th century, of the faith in freedom and in ultimate harmony; a typical middle-class society with its ultimately pacifist ideal . . .

No wonder that Europeans looked longingly toward the vast spaces of North America, where they saw the possibility of establishing a society without kings or nobles, a society founded upon the philosophy of the century. Though the Americans had come from Europe, they seemed to be changed men, as if the air of America were filled with liberty and were able to transform mens minds and hearts . . .

Among the realities of national life, the image which a nation forms of itself and in which it mirrors itself is one of the most important. Though the everyday reality, in many ways, does not correspond to the image and falls far short of its ideal perfection sometimes even contradicts it in the countless and conflicting trends of the complex actuality nevertheless, this image, woven of elements of reality, tradition, imagination, and aspiration is one of the most influential agents in forming the national character. It helps to mold national life; if it does not always act in a positive direction, it acts at least as a constant brake (pp. 9-10, 17-18)

This inspiration and aspiration of a society of free men, based as Kohn said, on rationalism, optimism, and an individualism of liberty was and is real. It has not been a fabrication, a false consciousness to hide a reality of oppression, discrimination, and racism. There have been oppressions, discriminations and racisms. But the fact that they ran contrary to what the country has stood for in terms of its own image of what an American is supposed to be and stand for, and which has been that mirror, as Kohn suggested, that reflects back on the actualities of mens words and deeds, that has made Americans, however slowly and sometimes grudgingly, move more in the direction of those ideals, without which there really is no reason or rationale for an America.

That racism was a deep and deadly wound in the American reality was not lost or deemphasized by Hans Kohn. In a contribution to theEncyclopedia of the Social Sciences(1938) on Race Conflicts, he said and warned that racial inequality and mistreatment, epitomized by the brutality of the lynching of black men was, conducive not only to the destruction of democracy and liberty, but also to the undermining of justice and law.

The cancel culture radicals, made up of the politically correct, the identity politics warriors, and democratic socialists, who all are dreaming dreams of a new tribal collectivism of mind control, political planning, and the social engineering of their own versions of a new person, want to wipe out any knowledge, memory, or belief in that American ideal about which people like Justice David J. Brewer or historian Hans Kohn attempted to explain both what it was and to argue its importance for Americans and all of humankind. (See my articles,The Meaning and Mind of an AmericanandAd Hominems Against FreedomandLiberty is the Theme of the American Spirit.)

If the cancel culture destroyers win, then America will be no different than the rest of the world; a world filled with racial genocides, religious bigotries and wars, plundering despotisms, and political paternalisms that reduce human beings to expendable pawns on a great chessboard manipulated by others who arrogantly believe they know how we all should live and what each of us really deserves.

When the famous 19thcentury sociologist and laissez-faire liberal, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), visited the United States in 1882, he said to an American news reporter:

As one of your early statesmen said, The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. But it is far less against foreign aggressions upon national liberty that this vigilance is required than against insidious growth of domestic interferences with personal liberty . . .

The fact is, that free institutions can be properly worked only by men each of whom is jealous of his own rights and is also sympathetically jealous of the rights of others will neither himself aggress on his neighbors, in small things or great, nor tolerate aggression on them by others. The republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature a type nowhere at present existing. We [the British] have not grown to it, nor have you [the Americans].

But how can we hope to grow more into that type of person who is respectful and jealous for his own liberty and protective of that same liberty that rightfully belongs to all others including to be free from racist bigotries and political injustices that may flow from it that American culture of individualism, and personal, social, and economic liberty, and the ideal of a government of impartial rule of law devoted to securing each persons individual rights, if it is all cancelled through the destruction and the repression of all knowledge and understanding of the countrys history, the good and the bad? How shall that history be an inspiration and an aspiration for the next generations if it is all torn down and cast away? And most importantly, the denial and distortion of its founding ideals of a morality of a free people?

It is why all possible effort must be made to resist and rationally respond to a cancel culture that would erase the history and memory of America from the minds of humankind.

[Originally posted at the American Institute for Economic Research]

Save America From Cancel Culture was last modified: July 13th, 2020 by Richard Ebeling

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Save America From Cancel Culture - Somewhat Reasonable - Heartland Institute

The writer is an Islamabad-based columnist.

Theres a sense of deja vu when one looks at the growing discontent with the PTI government, which was inaugurated barely two years ago amid tremendous expectations.

Here is a leader who had adopted an iconoclastic stance on the economy and governance and promised to bring about a metamorphosis of the nations politico-economic landscape. But as prime minister, his popularity has nosedived; and in the eye of even many of his erstwhile staunch supporters, his governments acts of omission and commission have thrown the country into a tailspin. So what has gone wrong?

Romanticism and classicism represent the opposite poles in a perennial intellectual-cum-political divide. Classicism puts its faith in rationalism and empiricism as the reliable guide to travelling along the road to advancement and freedom. People are regarded as essentially similar everywhere, governed by the same universal laws. They only differ in how far they have travelled on the same linear road. Knowledge constitutes the only credible difference between nations or societies.

Romanticism ennobles will, sentiments, intuition or faith. In one sweep, the will can accomplish what intellect fails to do despite years of sweat and labour. Cultural differences are abiding; some nations or ethnic groups because of their inherent characteristics are destined to rule the rest.

For classicists, the fundamental condition in society is one of cooperation and consensus. Conflict and disagreement, whenever they arise, are underpinned primarily by lack of knowledge. Over time, and with pursuit of enlightened self-interest, all conflicts and all contradictions are resolved. For romanticism, by contrast, the fundamental condition in a society is one of conflict; the apparent consensus is contrived and maintained by power. Far from being an aberration of an otherwise society in concord, discord is the driving force of history and the engine of social change. Conflict is undergirded by systemic, and often irreconcilable, forces in which one side either decimates the other or gets decimated.

In politics, whereas classicism appeals to common principles, programmes and ideologies, romanticism draws strength from shared sentiments, narratives and myths. Classicism puts its trust in commonsense, natural or fundamental rights, democracy, incremental change, peaceful conflict resolution, the rule of law and institution building.

Romanticism upends this world of harmony and freedom. Democracy is regarded as a sign of decay and decadence, of senility and stupor, while the very notions of fundamental rights and equality are considered to be essentially destructive. The prime political virtue for the people is not freedom but loyalty; the principal qualification for the leader is not common sense but charisma. Rules and regulations, procedures and precedents throw a spanner in the leaders works and therefore must be set aside when needed. Debates and arguments are only wit and gossip a bourgeoisie notion in the terminology of revolutionary socialism. Its the indomitable will and emotional intelligence that make all the difference. Romantics look to men and women of destiny, who, in the words of political theorist Carl Schmitt, make decisions and create politics by defining the peoples enemies.

In both intellectual and political realms, the romantic-classic divide is unending and has produced towering figures on both sides. For every Bentham, theres a Coleridge; for every Hegel, theres a Schopenhauer; for every Churchill, theres a Hitler; and for every Chiang theres a Mao.

Where do Pakistans politics and society stand in this clash of the romantic impulse and the classic intellect? For all its shenanigans and shortcomings, Pakistan is a democracy, where at least in theory, the law of the land reigns supreme. At the same time, its a society whose infatuation with a sweeping change refuses to die down and where the cult of the personality commands a creed-like devotion. Not surprisingly, the emergence of a saviour whos capable of turning things around by sheer will and strength of character has remained a dominant theme in the socio-political narrative.

Over the years, such a narrative has produced quite a few saviours both in uniform and wearing the garb of democracy. Until a few years ago, the person who came closest to satisfying popular aspirations for the emergence of a saviour was Z A Bhutto, who sought to strike a compromise between revolutionary socialism and parliamentary democracy. The former found its expression in his flagship nationalization programme; while the latter was embodied in the 1973 constitution, which marked the continuation of the status quo. In a way, Bhutto represented a synthesis albeit a jerry-built of classic and romantic ideals. Chairman Bhutto would style himself as Pakistans Chairman Mao but he lacked the titanic personality of the founder of the Peoples Republic of China by a long way.

The fall of Bhutto in the late 1970s coincided with the advent of the Islamic revolution in Iran. The images of Ayatollah Khomeini triumphantly returning to his country having pulled down a mighty monarchy gave fresh impetus to hopes for a comparable revolutionary change in Pakistan. That said, none of Bhuttos contemporaries or successors was cast in a revolutionary mold. They might have coveted to rule with an untrammeled authority, and, as in case of Nawaz Sharif or Benazir Bhutto, might have put up a defiant face once or twice, but they didnt have the making of a revolutionary. They remained primarily concerned with saving their neck.

The rise of Imran Khan created the impression that at long last the much awaited saviour had arrived. Here was a leader who promised and seemed capable of uprooting the old, creaky, corrupt, and rotten-to-the core system; eschewing the politics of opportunism and the electables, redistributing wealth from the ultra-rich to those lying at the bottom of the economic heap, breaking the begging bowl once and for all, and making the nation stand on its feet all by his indomitable willpower and charisma.

With or without taking a leaf out of the book of Carl Schmitt, Imran Khan created politics primarily by defining the peoples enemies: the corrupt elite, which he called mafias, self-serving politicians, and rent-seeking businesspersons. Like a true romantic, he ruled out, and continues to do so, compromise with his foes. His stature both as a cricketer and a philanthropist may have helped him get a foot in the door of power. But it was the peoples disenchantment with the erstwhile political parties that provided a fertile ground for his rise. The youth impatient and impressionable as they are everywhere were particularly swept off their feet by his potent anti-corruption, anti-elite narrative. Their leader had clearly defined their enemies and it was up to them to strike the final blow.

But so far the expectations of national rejuvenation have turned out to be a pipedream. Whether its embracing the electables and the tried and tested, announcing a tax amnesty, shedding reliance on foreign credit, curbing the powers of mafias or frequent administrative reshuffle at the top, Imran Khan has come a cropper in leading politics or governance off the beaten track. Worse, the sharp deceleration of economic growth and a perennial narrow fiscal space have thrown a wrench into the works of the government relating to job creation, income generation and price control the ultimate test of a government in the eye of the electorate. All these have combined to make craters in the ruling partys popularity.

Imran Khans supporters defend the below par performance of his government by arguing that the system is too thoroughly out of whack as to be set right in a couple of years and that if the nation is patient enough the indefatigable will of their leader would do wonders and whup the common enemies. They may have a point. The problem, however, is that once the sentiments of the people are whipped up so and their expectations are raised sky high, expecting them to be patient, though it may sound logical, is a tall order. Remember, rationality is a perfect stranger in the land of the romantics. In such circumstances, the leaders popularity is bound to come down with a thud.

Both romanticism and classicism have their merits and demerits. The success of romanticism requires above all a titanic figure; and even such a figure may in the end fall. In a nation where pygmies are cast as giants, its better to put ones money on classic ideals: incremental change, institution building and rule of law. At the same time, fascination with romantic notions is difficult to cast aside for long. Lets wait with bated breath for the next saviour.

Email: [emailprotected]

Twitter: @hussainhzaidi

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Undying romantic impulse - The News International

In an interview with the trans charity Mermaids, the bisexual actress was asked about the move by the UK equalities minister Liz Truss to remove healthcare options for trans children. (Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Shorty Awards)

Mara Wilson, the former child star from Matilda, has opened up about her childhood mental health problems to show that trans kids are capable of making their own choices.

In an interview with the trans charity Mermaids, the bisexual actress and LGBT+ advocate was asked about the move by the UK equalities minister Liz Truss to remove healthcare options for transgender children.

Wilson explained her view that children should be able to make decisions about their own bodies, recalling how she was perfectly capable of advocating for herself at the age of 12.

I mean, the way that I see it, when I was 12 years old, I knew that I had a mental illness, she said. I knew that I was suffering terribly from anxiety and depression, and I read some books about obsessive compulsive disorder and immediately thought, This is it, this is what I have, and I want help for it.

So I went to my school counsellor and said, I think that I have this, I want to get treatment. And they sent me to a therapist and said, Do you want to go on medication? And I said I want to do what would help me, and I did. And I advocated for myself at 12.

I dont know if every child can do that, I but I knew at 12 and at 13 years old that that was the best move for me. I wouldve been suicidal if hadnt done that. I knew what the issue was.

She noted that its not an exact parallel because being transgender is an identity, not a mental illness, but added: I do think a lot of people know from a very young age that they are different, or that they are special, that they are affected in a certain way.

Mara Wilson acknowledged the concerns about putting children on medication, but recalled a doctor saying to her once: I wish they would just think about what helps.

And thats kind of how I feel as well, she said.

If children are able to know that this is not the body they want to be in or this is not the identity that they are I really wish people would just listen to children more in general, honestly.

The star also discussed the differences in opposition to trans rights between the UK and the US, admitting that she was baffled by British transphobia.

Personally I see a lot of it from public figures in the UK, [whereas] in the US its generally a religious thing, but its a very specific thing, its a religious thing that is tied in with a lot of conservative religious political power. And its a lot of scare tactics, she said.

She continued: I dont quite understand why I see it in the UK among prominent writers and musicians and people like that. I dont understand it and a lot of seems to be like, This is coming from knowledge and reason and rationalism, and its just like well, what about compassion? What about understanding?

Wilson concluded the interview with a message to cis people on how to be a good trans ally, stressing that it begins with the simple act of listening.

The most important thing is to listen to trans people to listen to non-binary people, to try to understand them and have compassion for them, she advised.

Even if you dont understand it right away, theres a lot of things you dont understand that you still have compassion and kindness for, and thats just the way that it is. Its not about being politically correct, its just being polite, and kind, and those are things that more people should be.

Host and Mermaids head of policy and legal, Lui Asquith, said: Interviewing Mara Wilson was a dream for me and an empowering moment for young trans and gender-diverse people in the UK suffering the dual anxiety of isolation compounded by the worry created by recent statements from Liz Truss MP.

Hearing Mara talk so honestly and with such kindness towards our families was a real moment of sunshine at a difficult time.

Read the original post:

Bisexual Matilda star candidly recounts childhood struggle with OCD to explain why we should all listen to trans kids - PinkNews

Chairs can you imagine living without one? One of the first things we need the moment we set up our home is the furniture we will use to rest ourselves. Over time, the shape, form, materials, design language everything has evolved except for our primary need to rest against a surface. Im sure that even as you read this, most of you are seated on a chair! Now give that chair a long hard look and think of the years of design practice that went into making the design what it is today. Inspiring, right? The iconic chair designs showcased here have played a part in our history from reflecting the needs of the world, merging art and design to even creating practices that transformed the manufacturing ideology, everyone should pay homage to these revolutionary designs.

Chair_ONE is constructed just like a football: a number of flat planes assembled at angles to each other, creating the three-dimensional form. I think my approach was a mixture of naivety and bluntness. Given the chance to work with aluminum casting I thought that I should take it all the way. The more we worked on the models the more we learned to understand the structural logic behind what we were doing. What began as a simple sketch, a series of cardboard models, prototypes, is now a real chair. says the designer Konstantin Grcic. The German industrial designer is known for having a pared-down aesthetic with his functional designs being characterized by geometric shapes and unexpected angles.

Tejo Remy works as a product, interior, and public space designer together with Rene Veenhuizen in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Where there is abundance of materials, there is also an abundance of waste. Considering everything as material, Remy incorporates existing information, circumstances, or found goods into new situations, or simply put, repurposes the products to give them a new life. The ideology behind this collection is elegantly simple, make your own world with what you encounter like Robinson Cruso created his own paradise on his island. says Tejo.

In 1984, at a Pratt Institute laboratory in Brooklyn, Italian designer Gaetano Pesce cast nine chairs using the same mold. For each, he changed the resin formula ever so slightly. The first, jiggly as Jell-O, collapsed immediately on the floor. The second stood up, but, with one touch, toppled over. The third, fourth, fifth, and so on, grew more and more sturdy, but the eighth and ninth were so rigid that they were uncomfortable for sitting. The reason for this experimentation? To prove that the difference between art and design is merely a slight alteration in the chemical formula. This narrative has been the core of his design practice for decades! Pesce explains, A chairyou sit in it, and its comfortable. But the same chair, when you change the rigidity, it becomes a sculpture. There is no difference. An architecture critic from Italy once made a book talking about how there is no difference between a spoon and the city. The spoon is small, the city is huge, but they are all objects. Architecture is just an object with a big scale; an object that you can enter inside.

With The Flag Halyard Chair, Hans Wegner acknowledges the early modernists such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer, and proves that he too masters designs in chromium-plated steel pipes. An iconic and dramatic lounge chair, this engineered stainless steel frame comes with a seat and back made of plaited flag halyard (A halyard is a line/rope that hoists or covers a sail.) However, the story behind the design is more than just a dialogue of art history. The shape of the chairs seat was conceived during a family holiday in rhus, Denmark. The story goes that Wegner conceived this design while on the beach towards the end of the 1940s. He supposedly modeled the grid-like seat in a sand dune, presumably with some old rope that lay close to hand. The chair went into production in the 1950s and its unlikely combination of rope, painted and chrome-plated steel, sheepskin, and linen are still landmark in the world of furniture design.

The Box chair was designed by Enzo Mari in 1971 for Castelli. This self-assembly chair consisted of an injection-molded seat and a collapsible tubular metal frame that came apart to fit into a box, hence the name! Enzo Mari is considered one of the most intellectually provocative Italian designers of the late 20th century, known for products, furniture, and puzzles alike. Mari adhered strictly to rational design constructed in a way that corresponds entirely to the purpose or function. Maris commitment to rationalism stood the test of time, gaining him work with giants like Muji and Thonet at the end of the century when minimal, user-friendly design made a comeback.

Charles Eames famously said, The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests. The couple that revolutionized American furniture design, Eames have created a universal response to what everyone wants from a chair: a simple, gracious form that fits any body and every place. Its what makes the chair a classic worthy of museum collectionsand living rooms, laundromats, lobbies, and cafs. With its unmistakable character, the Eames Wire Chair DKR is not just aesthetically charming but reminds us of the emergence in the 1950s of popular culture: a movement which in terms of furniture design brought decorative elements back to the forefront. With its cool, shiny steel wire and lascivious bikini shaped padding the Wire Chair Bikini represents more than most other furniture objects the decadent pop culture of 1950s America. Speaking of the 50s, Im glad to see those red Formica tables disappear!

This stunning chair was designed by Adolf Loos in 1898 to furnish that renowned Cafe Museum in Vienna. Its timeless allure comes from the refined curves of its silhouette, obtained with the signature steam-bent beechwood that creates stunning accents at the top of the legs and in the two parallel curves that grace the open backrest. The structure of the piece has an elliptical section that gives it lightness, making the design ageless.

How High The Moon by Shiro Kuramata is made of expanded mesh, thin sheets of which have been steel-cut and extruded. The chair has no interior frame or support yet provides the outline of a chair and its transparent structure retains the shape and silhouette of a traditional upholstered armchair. Freeing from gravity was one of the key themes for Kuramata throughout his entire career, and hence expanded mesh was an ideal material for the designer the chair appears light and vulnerable yet amply strong enough for use. This chairs appearance is the result of the overlapping hashing of the mesh sheets (it really does seem to buzz in the air)

A collection from Big Easy, the steel chair designed by Ron Arad in 1988 shows that a volume, as simple form, can be translated, without compromising the design principles, through a reinterpretation of materials and production processes. The model obtained from a constructive gesture showcases the visual softness and fullness of the volumes, promising comfort. Big Easy explores the rotational molding and the use of polyethylene as a material while its design language invites you to rest irrespective of the material used, proving the dominance of the form over materials in this case.

Hans Corays Landi Chair

Developed for the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition, the Landi Chair by Hans Coray occupies an important place in the history of twentieth-century design: this classical chair by Hans Coray established the new typology of a three-dimensionally molded seat shell on a separate base. The lightweight, stackable Landi Chair is robust and weather-resistant: its 91 holes allow water to flow. Technical innovation, systematic use of materials, minimalist forms, and understated elegance are the elements that have made the Landi Chair into a classic over the years, which looks as fresh and vital as ever.

This is a brief beginning to the history of one of the most iconic products used globally the humble chair. We will continue this series to showcase more of these designs and share the knowledge of how each chair is a description of the mood of the world in their time.

Link:

Chair Designs by legendary designers that transformed the world of design - Yanko Design

About this series

Will you be murdered by AI? What if AI were conscious? And will a religion based on an AI god inevitably rise?

In his second series about the state of Artificial Intelligence, Professor Yorick Wilks will examine some of the tougher questions about ethics for AI in war zones, whether (and when) we should care about AI as we do about animals, and the impact AI could have on religion. Are we getting AI right?

About this lecture

This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial superintelligence, were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us. Religious traditions historically assume that creations are well disposed to those who made them.

The lecture also looks at the recent US cults claiming to be ready to worship such a super-intelligence, if and when it emerges, as well as other futurist discourse on Transhumanism and its roots in 18th-century rationalism.

Professor Yorick Wilks

Yorick Wilks is Visiting Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Gresham College. He is also Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Senior Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Professor Wilks is especially interested in the fields of artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief. His current research focuses on the possibility of software agents having identifiable personalities.

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Gresham College: Prof. Yorick Wilks The State of AI: War,Ethics and Religion #3/3 Artificial Intelligence and Religion - stopthefud

Amidst a welter of commentary about how momentous this Thursday's Budget will be, how about this for a prediction? Prepare to be disappointed.

To those on the left, who hope the Government will have crafted a new, green utopia: forget it. Like the rest of us, they're still trying to work out what's hit them.

There will be plenty of nods in the direction of climate change resilience, but also plenty of new roads and fast-track resource management legislation to get the economy moving again.

To the promoters of so-called 'shovel-ready' projects, who hope $170 billion of aspiration can be jammed into maybe $5 billion to $10 billion of immediately available capital spending: forget it.

The list of possible projects is so long and the ability to fund them so inevitably limited that there will be disappointment aplenty.

To small and medium-sized business owners hoping there's more in the kitty for them: forget it. The wage subsidy scheme and the various cashflow measures to date - in particular, the almost haphazard conversion of the tax department into a bank of last resort - are probably as good as it's going to get.

HELP FOR TOURISM

The only likely exceptions to that: tourism operators and associated parts of hospitality and the events sector.

Even there, there is only so much a government can do when the reality for many is that their businesses will be either much smaller or unable to operate until international tourists return - whenever that may be.

Some of the help for these sectors will target retraining for the employees who must swiftly find a new trade.

Even trade unions, who have been closer to the emergency policy-making action than they have been for years during normal times, may not welcome Finance Minister Grant Robertson's enthusiasm for encouraging small, entrepreneurial businesses to flourish.

Disappointed, too, will be the modern monetary policy theorists who think central banks should simply fund everything that everybody wants out of thin air. It is tempting to think that's already happening, with the Reserve Bank pumping up financial market liquidity by buying government bonds at unprecedented levels.

But Robertson is no fan of that. He knows debt created today must, some day in some way, be paid back. And he values the fact that New Zealand has had its super-strong credit ratings reconfirmed in recent days. Maintaining that credibility - hard-won over the past four decades - remains important for a small, open economy.

However, Roger Douglas, who kicked off that path to credibility, will be disappointed too. Robertson delivered a curt "no" when asked last week whether he'd read the latest think-piece from the reforming Labour finance minister whose radical egalitarianism remains as chronically misunderstood as ever.

ON THE BACKBURNER

Perhaps most disappointed of all will be those who were looking forward to the progressive political investment agenda outlined in the Budget policy statement in December last year. Robertson was very clear last week: unless there are cost pressures that must be addressed, those priorities are shelved for now.

Nor will there be much, if anything, for anyone hoping for a fairer tax system. It is far too early to start raising taxes to pay for the current debt pile-up and it would be political suicide to broach the debate that must be revived about the taxation of wealth.

For taxpayers on middle incomes who are now paying the top income tax rate, there might be a skerrick of relief, but dealing to fiscal drag is something even governments with strong books resist. Now is not the time.

A UTILITARIAN SHORTLIST

Instead, this Budget is a first, inevitably imperfect attempt to get to grips with one of the biggest shocks the New Zealand economy has ever experienced, and which is not over yet.

So, rather than a utopian wishlist, how about a utilitarian shortlist of five key things to watch for in this Thursday's Budget?

1 - Budget surpluses

Firstly, will the word 'surplus' appear in the Budget documents? For all Robertson's rejection of Roger Douglas, it is an enduring Douglas legacy that New Zealand governments have both striven for and produced Budget surpluses whenever they could during the past 30 years.

In an interview last week, Robertson avoided the word, carefully defining his ambition as a "sustainable" fiscal position, with a focus more on the level of net Crown debt than whether income exceeds expenditure any time in the next decade.

That may simply be prudent. It's likely that current forecasts show Budget deficits as far as the eye can see because of the size of the economic crater made by covid-19.

However, the rhetorical ambition to return to surplus is a political as much as an economic totem. Its inclusion or exclusion will be significant in itself.

2 - Treasury forecasts

On Budget day, it will be exactly a month since the Treasury released its first set of scenarios outlining possible paths for the economy post-covid.

These were not forecasts but guesstimates based on various possible outcomes for the global and domestic economy. If anything, the scenarios given greatest credence were less apocalyptic than might have been expected. Unemployment was low, back under 5 percent, within four years and the economy bounces back strongly to be as large in 2022 as it was in 2019.

That picture will have changed in the intervening weeks, but by how much?

The important thing will be the direction rather than the extent of change. No one can accurately predict anything about the economy right now. The disruption is so great that Statistics New Zealand probably can't even be sure it's collecting all the right data at the moment.

Instead, it's the frequency of updates that matters. This week's forecasts are a way-station before the production of pre-election fiscal and economic updates in late August, assuming the election goes ahead on Sept. 19.

3 - Level 1 and the trans-Tasman travel bubble

The Australian government has so far been franker than ours about a timeline to something close to normal life, which includes the potential for open borders between Australia and New Zealand. Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison has talked about the bubble being in place by July. Being able to travel across the Ditch again is less significant than the powerful signal that such a relaxation will give, acting as both a fillip to confidence and as a proxy for confirmation that both countries have the virus under control.

Will our government chance its arm by nominating its own timetable, or maintain its currently more conservative stance?

4 - Articulation of a vision

Robertson talked last week about the opportunity to use covid-19 to "build back better." It should be far too early to give anything more than a verbal outline of what this means, with perhaps one or two symbolic but probably low-cost pointers.

However, the way the government talks about the role of government in this Budget is vital. If it says too little, it will be suspected of developing an agenda that it doesn't want to discuss before the election.

Equally, it must judge carefully how much and exactly what it says about these ambitions because they will be key to the themes of the election campaign. The government is already a far larger player in the economy than it was possible even to imagine two months ago.

For some, this is an opportunity to rebuild a fairer, better society and economy. For others, it threatens to march New Zealand backwards into a low productivity, state-directed future where capital is allocated politically and a generation of economic rationalism is unwound.

By the time the election rolls around, the covid-19 virus will be less the focus than the unemployment, business closures and hardship its impact will wreak. The competition of ideas for how best to get out of this mess will be intense. The Budget is the government's throat-clearing moment for that contest.

5 - How Simon Bridges reacts

The National Party leader has fallen twice at crucial hurdles - first when the initial level 4 lockdown was announced and second in reaction to the move to level 3.

The Budget is a third such hurdle.

If Simon Bridges pitches his tone wrong again this week, the chances of a reluctant but unavoidable attempt at a leadership coup will go through the roof.

- By Pattrick Smellie

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5 things to watch for in the Budget - Otago Daily Times

SEVERAL DECADES ON, the art of Donald Judd is still stunning. In the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that opened March 1, smartly curated by Ann Temkin, Yasmil Raymond, Tamar Margalit, and Erica Cooke, all the work looks fresh (kudos to the conservators), but the early paintings and objects are especially vivid. The intensity of the cadmium red, often made tactile by roughened surfaces of board and wood. The physicality of the specific shapes, such as a yellow oval affixed to the support or a tin pan embedded there. The first tentative move into actual space with a painting whose aluminum top and bottom curl outward toward us. And then the initial objects, cut in sharp geometries, set boldly on the floor without pedestal or plinth.

Also very impressive, the second gallery presents several pieces Judd exhibited in his first solo museum show in 1968 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. At this point, he had already begun to repeat elements, as in his stacks, which consist of identical shelves set on a wall at regular intervals from floor to ceiling, as well as in his channels, which are comprised of rectangular frames spaced on the floor so as to describe a perfect square. Represented here, too, are other familiar series, such as his progressions, which are made of box and bullnose units sized and arranged along horizontal bars according to mathematical orders like the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.). The second gallery marks a shift in production from the homemade work of the early 1960s, when his father, a skilled carpenter, assisted Judd, to the pieces fabricated later in the decade in iron, stainless steel, brass, aluminum, and Plexiglas by sheet-metal specialists. Some of these objects have a fragile finish that in the 70s Judd offset with pieces in unpainted plywood, which recovered the crafted hardiness of the early work and allowed him to go larger than he had heretofore.

Along with a few other templates, Judd turned these series into a basic language that he deployed in different materials, colors, and sizes for the next two decades of his life, excellent instances of which are displayed in the third gallery. The fourth gallery of the exhibition is dominated by pieces that represent a final twist in his practice. In 1984, Judd began to collaborate with a Swiss fabricator that helped him assemble long blocks of color units in enameled aluminum. This is Judd at his most pictorial (the blocks are often set on the wall); the random combinations of colors might call up the grids of Ellsworth Kelly or even the charts of Gerhard Richter. This is also Judd at his most free; the work has little of the asperity usually associated with late style, but then Judd died prematurely, felled by cancer in 1994 at the age of sixty-five.

With Judd it is impossible to separate the artist from the critic, and some of his words remain as forceful as most of his objects. Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture, he stated in the famous first lines of Specific Objects (1965). Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms. The use of three dimensions is an obvious alternative. Although Judd appeared to dismiss painting in totoThe main thing wrong with it, he remarked in his usual deadpan, is that it is a rectangular plane faced flat against the wallit was Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt who prompted his shift into three dimensions. Along with a commitment to large scale, unmodulated color, and emphatic materiality, their painting mandated a sense of singleness for Judd, who felt that this wholeness had a better future outside that medium.1

Judd didnt eliminate composition so much as he displaced it from the interior of the work to the exterior, where it became a matter of symmetry and proportion along a wall or on a floor. This was a radical move artistically but less so aesthetically, for first and last Judd held that ultimately one essential of art is unity, a traditional criterion indeed. Hence, unlike many of his peers, he had little interest in chance or any other device of the Duchampian avant-garde. Still, his shiftfrom an arrangement of parts within a painting or a sculpture to the wholeness of an object in actual spacewas misread by early critics, and Judd responded fiercely. I object to several popular ideas, he wrote already in 1966. I dont think anyones work is reductive. Far less was Minimalisma label Judd also abjuredan attack on art: Non-art, anti-art, non-art art, anti-art art are useless. If someone says his art is art, its art.

For all his resistance to anti-art, Judd articulated most of his motives in the negative. Above all, he was opposed to illusionism and rationalism, which, in his view, were closely linked. Three dimensions are real space, he wrote in Specific Objects. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism. Why did Judd object to this relic of European art so strongly? Again, his argument was not avant-gardistthat abstraction had voided illusionism once and for all (it hadnt, in any case). Rather, the problem was that illusionism was anthropomorphic, by which he meant not simply that it allowed for the representation of the human body, but that it assumed an a priori consciousness, whereby the subject always preceded the object. In short, like composition, illusionism was rationalistic, a vestige of an outmoded idealism in need of expunging. There is little of any of this in the new three-dimensional work, Judd insisted. The order is not rationalistic. . . . [It] is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.2

Of course, Judd also put forward positive values, especially the related ones of specificity and objectivity, but largely to counter the negative ones. Materials vary greatly and are simply materialsformica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglass, red and common brass, and so forth, he stated, in his laconic way, about several of his preferred substances. They are specific. If they are used directly they are more specific. Here specific means physically emphatic: His explicit materials and straightforward presentations were intended to make us focus on the intrinsic qualities of the former and on our reflexive perception of the latter. At the same time, at least for Judd, these substances were unburdened by associations, artistic or otherwise, and this lent them even more objectivity. In his view, this specificity and that objectivity supported the autonomy of the artwork, which he honored most of all.

These values are mostly materialist, but what kind of materialism, exactly? In an incisive critique from 1975, Karl Beveridge and Ian Burn, two members of the Art & Language camp of Conceptual art, called it middle-class materialism, one that put too much faith in the supposed objectivity of science.3 I leapt into the world an empiricist, Judd stated proudly, and his posture was indeed empiricist, according to which all knowledge is derived from sense experience, if not positivist, according to which all knowledge must be scientifically verified as well. (For a point of comparison, Frank Stella was positivist when he said of his painting of the early to mid-60s, What you see is what you see.4) Judd moderated his empiricism a little through a reading of pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, and there is also a trace of the transcendentalists in his writings, especially when he struck his recurrent note of Emersonian self-reliance.

Judd was limited philosophically, and I imagine he liked it that way: He thought what he thought, and defiantly so.

Although Judd was art-historically trainedhe did an MA under Meyer Schapiro at Columbia Universityhe was limited philosophically, and I imagine he liked it that way: He thought what he thought, and defiantly so. Judd believed, correctly, that, apart from other vices, European rationalism was too dependent on problematic binaries, not only of subject and object and mind and body, but also of thought and feeling, spirit and matter, and form and content, with the privilege granted to the first term in each pair. Yet, for the most part, he couldnt think his way through these oppositions: He didnt have enough Marx to dialecticize them (Judd mentioned Marx only twice in his texts), nor did he later possess any Derrida to deconstruct them. Arguably, his very insistence on the object removed it from the subject all the more. Clearly Beveridge and Burn thought so: They read the vaunted objectivity of his specific objects as so much alienability, equally divided between artwork and viewer. (This is what other viewers have long registered as the coldness or impersonality of Minimalism.5)

Judd didnt oppose the specific to the general; he believed in generalities, that of art above all (again, if someone says his art is art, its art). If the specific object lies beyond the discrete mediums of painting and sculpture, that realm is the realm of art in general, Art with a capital A, which was also the conclusion drawn by his Conceptual followers, of whom Judd mostly disapproved.6 Prominent critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried saw the situation quite differently. Far from autonomous art, the specific object was too close to a mere thing (like a door, a table, or a blank sheet of paper, Greenberg mocked), too caught up in mundane time (Fried famously termed Minimalist objecthood so much theater and opposed it to art in no uncertain terms).7 Yet Judd insisted on the autonomy of art every bit as much as Greenberg and Fried did, even if, as Beveridge and Burn alleged, his version initially required the art-institutional context of the gallery or the museum for it to be recognized as such. There is a further connection to his two great antagonists: Like Greenberg and Fried, Judd conformed to a conceptual framework that, far from being alien to European rationalism, might well be essential to it. In The Order of Things (1966), written in the same years that Minimalism was developed, Michel Foucault argued that modern man is a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, by which he meant that, however opposed they might appear, the epistemological orientations of empiricism and transcendentalism are actually bound up with each other.8 Greenberg and Fried put forward such a doubletmedium-specificity on the one hand, autonomous art on the otherand so did Judd with his empiricist attention to the object and his transcendental commitment to art in general.

To be sure, Judd helped to open up new possibilities for postwar art. The main thing for anyone now, he remarked in 1966 in the full flush of this expansion, is to invent their own means. Yet, again, he ruled out some devices from the start, such as chance operations la John Cage, and shied away from others, such as the found image or object. Ive lived in the shade of a coat hanger and a bed spread, Judd lamented in 1981 in a light swipe at Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Certainly, after his initial move into three dimensions, Judd did produce brilliant variations, but he held fast to his basic theme. I want a particular, definite object, he remarked in a 1969 text on Dan Flavin. I think Flavin wants, at least first or primarily, a particular phenomenon. One can distinguish Judd from his other peers in this differential way as well. Whereas Carl Andre insisted on given material units, and Robert Morris opted for direct bodily engagement, and Richard Serra ventured into emphatic spatial intervention, Judd stuck with his discrete specific object. By and large, he supported, even prepared, these other moves, but he didnt join them, not fully.

This point seems clear enough nowthe MoMA show helps in this respectbut it wasnt always evident to artists and critics (myself included). For all the visual power of the Judd oeuvreand often it has a haptic force, tooit doesnt often engage us deeply in a phenomenological way. That it was thought to do so was partly a projection onto his work from the practices of Morris and Serra, who were actually interested in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (Although Phenomenology of Perception was translated into English in 1962, Judd didnt mention Merleau-Ponty in his writings.) An involvement in phenomenology might have also led Judd to probe process and space more amply than he did; clearly, it nudged Morris and Serra in those directions.9 Judd was interested in the effects of fabrication more than the discoveries of process, in the drama of installation more than the articulation of space. In fact, with all its reflections, transparencies, and color interactions, the viewer can get caught up in the mesmeric surfaces and volumes of his work in a way that disembodies and dematerializes more than the opposite. Little was done until lately with the wide range of industrial products, Judd stated in Specific Objects. Almost nothing has been done with industrial techniques. He did a lot with the products, of course, but not so much with the techniquesa point that Serra has recently underscored with a distinction drawn between the shiny Minimalism of Judd and Flavin, centered on objects and phenomena, and the down and dirty Minimalism of his own cohort (among whom he names Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, and Eva Hesse), focused on processes and materials.10

For all the visual power of the Judd oeuvreand it has a haptic force, tooit doesnt often engage us deeply in a phenomenological way.

Is this a fair assessment of Judd, though, when it comes to space? Although his move into three dimensions was hardly the first, it did alter the relationship of art to architecture significantly: No one could see it any longer as a simple matter of rectangles on walls or things in galleries. More precisely, his Minimalism altered the geometry of viewing in art and made us newly alert to the nuances of installation.11 For some critics, however, this awareness had a downside; Beveridge and Burn complained that Judd programmed his viewers and choreographed his objects too much.12 At the same time, although many pieces are nicely site-adjustedincluding the stacks, the plywood pieces that extend across an entire wall, and multiple works in Marfa, Texasnot many are truly site-specific, at least in the rigorous sense given the term by Serra (to move the work is to destroy it). In this respect, Judd was also limited in his outdoor pieces, whose concrete geometries often seem more imposed on the landscape than fitted there.

I dont mean to be overly critical. Again, Judd set up crucial investigations of the 60s and 70s, and he shouldnt be judged according to subsequent criteria in any case. Nevertheless, one wonders why he didnt take his own radical move further. I have floated a few possible reasons; another concerns his historical resources. In a 1981 text titled Russian Art in Relation to Myself, Judd stated simply, I essentially missed the Russian work, by which he meant Constructivism above all. I would like to have known of that interest in the early 1960s, he added, with the culture of materials of Vladimir Tatlin in mind. Given his art-historical knowledge, did this work really escape his notice? Contemporaries such as Sol LeWitt, Andre, Stella, Flavin, and Serra were all aware of the basics of Constructivism, mostly through the 1962 book The Great Experiment: Russian Art 18631922, by Camilla Gray. (Judd claimed that he was also late to De Stijl, though given his primary colors, clean geometries, and scalar experiments, that too seems a little dubious.) In any case, Constructivism could have assisted Judd in his principal battles: Its insistence on construction would have supported his critique of composition, and its understanding of materialism would have deepened his critique of idealism (it might have also complicated his empiricism). The Constructivist principles of faktura, tectonics, and construction were dedicated to a Marxist undoing of bourgeois art forms; the aim was to defetishize the work of art via a new transparency of materials and production. Arguably, Judd often did much the opposite, fetishizing facture as techy surface and outsourcing construction as fabrication. Obviously, there was no sociopolitical context for any thorough recovery of Constructivism, but that didnt stop Andre, Serra, and others from a partial recuperation of its artistic principles.13

Perhaps the primary reason Judd held fast is that he rejected anything that looked like compromise, and, to him, a lot did: In his writings he often railed against wayward artists, obtuse critics, nefarious collectors, bureaucratic museums, untrustworthy foundations, and devious governments. His partial withdrawal to Marfa in the early 70s was also a defiant stand against any encroachment on his autonomy; it is where his liberal belief in self-reliance edged into a Texan brand of libertarianism (Dont tread on me). Yet, paradoxically, standing his ground also opened him up to some slippages, most of which werent his fault. For instance, if Judd didnt oppose the specific to the general, he did pit it against the generic, and what is more generic than the commodities that suffuse our everyday world? However, when repeated, as Judd did repeat his boxes, stacks, and other elements, the specific object became less specific and more serialone thing after another, indeed. In structural terms, then, the specific object began to approximate the commodity, and too often it is as shiny as any (other) product, which is far less the case with the down and dirty version of Minimalism. In this respect, too, Judd came to share a serial logic with his enemy twin, Andy Warhol (Judd disdained Pop). The difference is that Warhol owned that condition: Rather than deny it only to reproduce it, as Judd sometimes did, Warhol often exacerbated and so exposed it.

Judd rejected anything that looked like compromise, and, to him, a lot did.

Similarly, even though Judd insisted on the autonomy of art, he also designed furniture and architecture. That was his prerogative, to be sure, and he kept these ventures separateand they remain so in the MoMA retrospective, where only a few benches, settees, and tables appear, and these outside the exhibition proper. But, intentionally or not, this activity blurred the line between the specific object and the utilitarian thing, the very line that Greenberg condemned Minimalism for crossing. In what ways did Judd prepare the repurposing of Minimalism by commercial design, both high and low, from Design Within Reach to IKEA? Are his detractors wrong to compare his late blocks of aluminum colors to giant Rubiks Cubes? Whereas Minimalism once meant materially emphatic, formally rigorous, and perceptually precise, it now signifies differently: To some people it means sleek, expensive elegance, to others moral uplift via Kondo space management. This not-so-secret sharing between Minimalism and design is hardly all on Juddit is a matter less of production than of receptionand yet, just as Leo Steinberg once pointed to a connection between Color Field painting and Detroit automobile styling, it must be mooted nonetheless.14 Other possible crossings are no less problematic. For example, if Minimalism initiated a new geometry of viewing for art installation, it might also have paved the way for galleries and museums to entertain the immersive spectacles favored by the culture industry at large.

Finally, there is this turn, for which Judd is responsible. In Specific Objects, he declared matter-of-factly, A work needs only to be interesting. Here, consciously or not, he posed the open criterion of interest against the Greenbergian shibboleth of quality: Whereas quality was judged by reference to the standards of both the old masters and the great moderns, interest was prompted by the testing of aesthetic categories and the transgressing of traditional mediums. In 1984, two decades after Judd made that famous declaration, in a two-part essay with the unironic title A Long Discussion Not About Master-pieces but Why There Are So Few of Them, he stated the opposite: Quality . . . is nearly the definition of art. Why did he take it back? Given that Judd had ascended to great-modern status by then, did he simply want to defend old-master quality as the ultimate criterion? Or had he secretly held out for it all along? For those of us who even as we admired Judd were also quickened by feminist critique of the male genius in the early 80s, this was a real letdown. What happened to his caustic skepticism of traditional categories of art?

On the one hand, what Judd initiated is well-nigh epochal. Its not so far from the time of easel painting, he commented in 1982; its still the time of the museum, and the development of the new work is only in the middle of the beginning. Certainly, for my generation he was a key reference, not unlike Pollock for his own generation; in 1987, I went so far as to declare his Minimalism the crux of postwar art.15 On the other hand, how salient is his work for artists and critics today? The past never stays the same since it is always seen from a new time and place, Judd also wrote in 1987. The experience, the work, that once could not be seen from outside, is eventually, often sadly, given an outside. Has that outside come to his work as well? However fresh it might still look, has it reached that Hegelian status, at once grand and melancholy, of a thing of the past?

Hal Foster teaches at Princeton University. His bookWhat Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacleis published this month by Verso.

NOTES

1. This and all other Judd quotations are from Donald Judd Writings, ed. Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray (New York: Judd Foundation/David Zwirner Books, 2016).

2. Judd also advanced this notion in a 1966 conversation with Frank Stella: The qualities of European art so far . . . theyre linked up with a philosophyrationalism. . . . All that art is based on systems built beforehand, a priori systems; they express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of finding out what the worlds like. See Bruce Glaser, Questions to Stella and Judd, in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968), 151. Incidentally, Judd was resistant to conventional composition in his writing, too: His prose often has a paratactic (non)quality, somewhat akin to that of Gertrude Stein, with statements that are at once specific and serial, one sentence after another.

3. Karl Beveridge and Ian Burn, Don Judd, The Fox, no. 2 (1975): 131.

4. Glaser, Questions to Stella and Judd, 158.

5. Beveridge and Burn, Don Judd, 132. Judd wasnt immune to this sense of alienability. In fact, in one unpublished note dated January 3, 1976, it turned into a vision of nothingness: For a long time Ive considered time to be nothing. Any time that you think of is only the relation or sequence of events, how long a person lives, human biology, or how many times the earth goes around the sun. There is no other time than this. If you remove all of the events there is nothing. Space, also, is nothing. There are things in it, variously related. If you remove these and the means of measurement between them, their phenomena, most importantly light-years, there is nothing. For an argument about how the phenomenological plenitude of Minimalist installations can flip into the oppositea voiding of the viewersee Robert Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture Between War and Peace, 19471975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

6. This is an argument that Thierry de Duve has often reiterated.

7. Clement Greenberg, Recentness of Sculpture (1967), in Battcock, Minimal Art, 183; Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (1967), in Battcock, Minimal Art, 11647.

8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), 318. Foucault was concerned with Comtean positivism and Marxist eschatology in particular, but his point is far more capacious.

9. Also, unlike Morris and Serra, Judd didnt appear much impacted, at least in his art, by dance, even of the Judson Church sort, despite the fact that he was married to choreographer and dancer Julie Finch from 1964 to 1976.

10. See Richard Serra and Hal Foster, Conversations About Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 1938.

11. I owe this point to Charles Ray.

12. Beveridge and Burn, Don Judd, 132. Not all Judd shows were so calculated, and though the MoMA exhibition provides informed juxtapositions and powerful sight lines, it also lets us engage individual pieces on their own, which Judd would have appreciated.

13. The more salient precursor is Josef Albers, whom Judd did acknowledge. The two shared an interest in the ambiguity of appearances, the interaction of colors, and the variations that can be wrung from a series. Like Albers, too, Judd delved into illusionism far more than his official literalism might suggest. On this point, see my The Art-Architecture Complex (New York: Verso, 2011), 182214.

14. See Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 79.

15. See Hal Foster, The Crux of Minimalism, in Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 3570.

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Hal Foster on the art of Donald Judd - Artforum

When Shelley Klein moved back in with her father Beri after her mother died, she brought some old furniture with her. He didnt want it in the house: a Victorian chair would compromise the modernist vernacular, he said. He objected to her pots of herbs, too: putting them on the kitchen windowsill would ruin the rectangular symmetry. Theyd had these arguments since childhood, when he stopped her having a Christmas tree. To Beri, the house was a work of art, a gallery for living in, and nothing must detract from its aesthetic.

Designed by the architect Peter Womersley, who became a close family friend, High Sunderland sits in a pine forest on the Scottish borders. A single-storey series of interconnecting boxes, its defining feature is a generous use of glass, which seems to draw the surrounding landscape inside. Klein was born there in 1963, a few years after it was built. She feels hefted to the place and used to dread leaving it as a child. Despite travelling widely and spending years in Cornwall, she kept returning, even before her fathers last years. Her book is a homage to the house and to him.

She arranges it like a floor plan, taking us through it room by room: from the hallway, with its single piece of furniture, a Danish chair on which it was forbidden to sit or place coats, through the living room, as clean and well lit a space as a Nordic snowscape, to the kitchen, where her parents would argue how long roast beef should be cooked. She also shows us the garden, which to Beris annoyance was sometimes disfigured by molehills, which interrupted the flow of the lawns. Photos are included but this isnt a coffee table book for interior design buffs. Each room has particular memories for Klein. And her journey through them is also a psychological quest, an attempt to understand how the house shaped her personality and whether she can ever get free of her attachment.

She couldnt wear a Laura Ashley dress without him mocking her: 'You look like the inside of a Victorian toilet'

Her fathers strict orthodox Jewish upbringing in Yugoslavia might have led him to become a rabbi but then disenchantment set in during his religious studies in Jerusalem. A place at art school kept him safe there during the war, unlike his relatives murdered in Auschwitz. In 1945 he came to Leeds to study textile design, where he met his wife to be, Peggy. He felt like an alien, paprika in a large British stew, but being an outsider didnt hold him back. Having set up several mills in Scotland, he made fabrics for Chanel, Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. The house played its part in his success, hosting fashion shows and photography sessions with models striking poses against the Mondrian-style exteriors.

High Sunderland has no attic, no cellar and very few doors. A house without secrets or ghosts, a museum of rationalism, with everything out in the open: such was the intention. Reacting against the transparency, the young Shelley aspired to be opaque, clouded, un-see-able through or at least to have a door on her bedroom. Keeping things from Beri made her feel guilty but it was the only way not to be overwhelmed. Later she discovered that Peggy had a few secrets too, including a set of sherry glasses, hidden in the back of a wardrobe because their design and antiquity would have offended him. The memoir is suffused with grief at his death but honest about how exasperating he could be. The teenage Shelley couldnt even wear a Laura Ashley dress without him mocking her (You look like the inside of a Victorian toilet). Their arguments and banter, set out like dialogue in a playscript, are often hilarious.

Its a reviewers cliche to say of a book that the main protagonist isnt any of the characters but the place where its set. Here no such distinction can be drawn: My father was the house. The house was my father, Klein writes. Her dilemma, when he was alive, was finding room to be herself. As she realises when they are rowing over her having a puppy (The house isnt big enough, he tells her), High Sunderland was too small for anyone else because it was fully occupied. By him. Her dilemma, now hes gone, is whether she can bear to sell up. She had too good a start in life, a friend tells her, and she agrees: she has idealised her childhood, her father and the house so that nothing else compares. By the end she has worked out what to do. But its a difficult process, and this original, moving and bracingly honest book doesnt hide the pain of separation.

The See-Through House: My Father in Full Colour is published by Chatto (RRP 16.99).

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The See-Through House by Shelley Klein review a father's obsession - The Guardian

"If the pandemic response strategy was and is to keep itout and stamp it out, then the hard work we have had to do to stamp it out clearly shows that we materially failed to keep it out."

Prof Gorman said he stopped off in Singapore on his way back from the Middle East in February, and noticed that the military had been mobilised at Changi Airport and that thermal screenings were in place with people being closely monitored.

"By contrast, I arrived home to no meaningful management of passenger movement, hence my comment that I think we squandered our main advantage of geography."

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern closed the border to New Zealand except for returning Kiwis on March 19, as all of the cases of COVID-19 identified had related to people travelling and bringing the virus with them.

But not everyone returning to New Zealand was being quarantined, prompting National leader Simon Bridges to launch a petition signed by tens of thousands of people urging the Government to quarantine all arrivals, which was eventually adopted on April 9.

The Prime Minister defended the Government's response in a speech to Parliament, highlighting how the border was closed to all but returning Kiwis within 25 days of New Zealand's first case, compared to Germany which took 49 days and Australia 55.

But Prof Gorman said the pandemic has also underlined "significant problems" in the way New Zealand's health system is structured, governed and operated.

He said "systemic inefficiency" became evident as problems emerged in the supply of swabs, personal protective equipment (PPE) and influenza vaccine, as well as contact tracing inefficiency highlighted in an independent review.

"Ironically, the current situation also provides an opportunity to accelerate system reform... though I might suggest we temper our enthusiasm since the last comprehensive reform of our health system was in 1938."

He said the current 20 district health boards (DHBs) are largely autonomous, telling MPs: "What you're looking at is the success of provincialism over rationalism."

He said to get commissioning and purchasing of healthcare right, a fluid health system is needed where some services exist at a national level, some regional, some district, and some right down to people's homes.

Labour MP Liz Craig agreed that the pandemic has "started up the historic debate about how the Government should invest in public health infrastructure".

But she said there have been contrasting calls for more centralisation as Prof Gorman suggested and also calls for strengthening public health units - which were given a $55 million boost last week to improve contact tracing.

The Government invested $500 million into the healthcare sector in its initial COVID-19 response package unveiled in March.

"In the last few weeks we've put significant investment into central functions, but also strengthening that public health response in those units," Craig said.

Prof Gorman agreed that the public health units have been neglected and he acknowledged that there is no simple solution - but warned that if we don't get it right, a far worse pathogen could come along and push the health system to the edge.

"I think the COVID-19 pandemic gives us a chance to identify what we need to do better before we encounter a potentially much worse pandemic," he told the committee.

"Without being melodramatic, if we don't seize this opportunity, I think our children and our grandchildren have every right to judge us very harshly."

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Medical Professor urges health system reform in scathing review of COVID-19 response - Newshub

There seems to be a resurgence of the kind of genre in the contemporary world where religion, initially thought to be on the wane, is actually reasserting itself in various ways. One of the most conspicuous voices, for example, in contemporary America, is Marilynne Robinson, whose works are followed with keen interest. We however are sceptical that such themes can sustain writers in the long run, and will label them as genre writers. This seems to us as the return of the repressed, in the classical Freudian sense, in the sense that themes that were becoming increasingly repressed in secular societies are finding their way back into the public consciousness through the works of gifted contemporary novelists.

Literature is often a mirror of the period in which a work of art has been created. It is for this reason that we often frame literary texts within the time period that the texts are created. It is this assumption that we neatly categorise within the historical period that they were created. It is for this reason that we describe fictions as say, Victorian, Industrial Revolution, Edwardian, Modernist, and so on. This is particularly true of English literature. Other literary traditions have different ways of categorising literary productions. For example, postcolonial literatures are often categorised on the basis of the trauma of colonialism: pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial. Literatures of the Islamic Middle East have added categories such as post-Ottoman, pre-revolution, revolutionary, apart from the classical jahiliyya and post-jahiliyya periods.

An implicit but unspoken assumption in all these categorisations is that at a deep level, these literatures are underpinned by a certain spirituality, be this Christian, Islamic or Hindu. Behind this assumption is the given that the earliest forms of literary production were saturated with the mystery surrounding creation, institution building and the mores of society. These mysteries gave rise to the earliest forms of literature and mythology. Humans created stories to explain to themselves the incomprehensible and these stories at a certain point became the basis of religious beliefs and philosophical speculation. Without these stories, there would neither have been religious belief, philosophy nor science. The unstructured reality began to take shape only when mythology was created. The gods and goddesses that we created ourselves and then began to worship, were a step towards self-realisation. The earliest gods and goddesses had the same flaws as us human beings, they were assailed by the same weaknesses that we found in ourselves, and they became a sure mirror of the human person, with all his/her frailties. Later, the heroes, during the heroic age, again reflected our own wishful thinking.

With the rise of critical philosophy and the scientific method, there was no attempt to abandon the mythic in human history. It was assumed that, although now we started to think in more abstract terms, not everyone was capable of benefitting from this new worldview. It was taken as a given that, in human societies, there will be those among us who will be unable to make the mental leap from the concrete to the abstract, and for this reason, it was necessary to defend mythology as part of human heritage, a part that has its significance in transmitting ethic and moral values from one generation to the next. As such, discussions of such human values as virtue, justice, friendship, could only be transmitted through the silly stories of mythology. This is well articulated by Luc Brisson in How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical interpretation and Classical Mythology. This was ol time religion.

The Bible, the Quran and the Vedas brought new kinds of stories, whose underpinning was the construction of new moral orders. The new texts brought in their wake the new religions of Islam and Christianity, but Hinduism, Shintoism and Traditional African and Amerindian religions are still remnants of the primeval spiritual order. There has always been what the British Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks has called the Persistence of Faith throughout human history, to the present.

In the Western intellectual tradition, the Renaissance is hailed as a New Era, but in fact, it was no more than an attempt to reclaim through the back door the pagan spirituality deriving from Classical and Late Antiquity. The intellectuals of the period, be they artists, creative writers or philosophers, were weary of the stranglehold of Christianity on all aspects of society, and sought to liberate themselves from this straight-jacket. Other, non-Western, societies did the same by creating a discourse counter to that of the religious. That is how the Arabian Nights were born, from ancient India all the way to what is today the Middle East. This was something like a literary carnival, where imagination was allowed to run wild outside the orbit of religion. These were all attempts at circumventing the official discourse dominated by men of religion and sanctioned by the rulers. Contemporary World Literature is incomprehensible without this mythological, spiritual background, because whether we speak of Greek/Roman mythology, African, Hindu or Japanese or Amerindian mythologies, the Holy Scriptures of Christianity, Islam or Hinduism, these are part of the collective unconscious, and form an important part of the inter-textuality necessary to self-referentiality.

Creative writers have for centuries situated themselves within particular spiritual traditions while creating works of art. This is taken for granted in the West. The medieval period in the West is considered collective because all European societies, without a single exception, went through the long experience of Christianity, from the tenth century all the way to the early twentieth century, with intermission for the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Although writers are situated within particularistic traditions, some, because of their intellectual versatility, have dipped into traditions that are not primarily their own, and claimed them for themselves by taking allusions from those external traditions. For example, Dante borrowed from the story of the Ascension of Prophet Muhammad to Heaven as recounted in the Hadith of the Prophet to construct his Divine Comedy. Or, to take a more contemporary figure, in his novel Spiders House, Paul Bowles uses the story of the Prophet Muhammads anecdote about his being protected from his enemies by hiding in a cave on his way into exile in Medina. Spiders form a protective wall with their web which stops his enemies from pursuing him further. Or Salman Rushdies constant allusions to Hindu mythology in Midnights Children.

This cross-cultural enrichment does not necessarily mean that writers do not situate themselves solidly within their religious traditions. Indeed they do.

The two writers that we have chosen, Leila Aboulela, a Sudanese novelist currently based in Aberdeen, Scotland, and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, are examples of novelists who still stick to religion as their default mode of literary exposition. Both use fiction to advance their sectarian viewpoints without being offensive to secularists or the non-religious in general.

Leila Aboulela, throughout most of her fictions, novels and short stories, has tried to defend Islam as a spiritual religion, and not a political religion. That she should hold such a position is evident from her own background as a Sudanese. Mystical Islam, with its headquarters at Omdurman, is very much part of the Sudanese landscape. In fact, modern Sudan is dated at the point the Sudanese resisted British colonial encroachment under Lord Gordon Kitchener in the nineteenth century. Led by Muhammad al-Mahdi, Restorer of the Faith, the Sudanese rallied under his mystical brotherhood to push the British out, resulting in the death of Gordon. This millenarianism galvanized the Sudanese into a national consciousness embedded in Islam. Like much of West Africa, society in the Sudan is organised partly around belonging to a brotherhood. The brotherhoods double as communities of self-help and also as spiritual sanctuaries complete with an organisational structure. The main activities of these Sufi brotherhoods are centred on remembering Allah and his ubiquitous presence in the thoughts and actions of individuals.

Image of Leila Aboulela

It is important to stress that Sufi religiosity is based on individual accountability that is ultimately anchored in internal purification as prioritised before the practice of ritual. It tends to de-emphasise the legalistic aspects of the faith, unlike for the Salafis, for example, who give importance to the minutiae of ritual practice. This legalistic emphasis on the part of the Salafis pits them against the purely spiritual emphasis of the mystics.

Leila Aboulela, in her fictions, is at pains to point out that what is done in the name of Islam has nothing to do with Islam, and that those who are prone to violence only do so after they have politicised Islam by demanding, for example, the establishment of an Islamic state, the Khilafah, or Islamic Caliphate. Sufi immersion in God-consciousness is considered a form of escapism from the challenging political and economic realities of the Islamic world. On their part, the Sufis accuse the Salafis of sanctimonious ostentatiousness and consider themselves to be the real upholders of the prophetic message of peace and love, without at the same time holding to the highest standards set by the Prophet himself.

On reading Aboulelas fiction, one is left with the impression that she tries to compress the whole Islamic ethos and practice within her short fiction, where readers will not only enjoy the storyline, but at the same time gradually learn what the real Islam or Islamic practice is. In reading her fiction, we are taken through all the essential, but simple Islamic practices and beliefs without seeming to be coerced. The message is that Islam is such a practical and simple faith that it cannot be distorted or abused without exposing those who want to put the religion to their own nefarious uses. For example, Dr Nizar Fareed, a Salafi character in The Translator, is portrayed as well-intentioned but indoctrinated by rigid Salafi interpretations of the scripture and the practice of the Prophet. He emerges as inflexible, opinionated and self-righteous. He appears as some kind of cardboard character, uncritical and gullible, although kind and intelligent.

Leila Aboulela encapsulates the whole gamut of Islamic practice and belief in that short novel, The Translator

Leila Aboulela encapsulates the whole gamut of Islamic practice and belief in that short novel, The Translator. For example, she describes the cornerstone of Islamic belief as the absolute surrender to Allah in all ones actions, and believing that He is the one who proposes and disposes of the believers every action. They are helpless before His immense omnipotence. Although we may plan our actions, we must never lose sight of the fact that everything is preordained, and we should not be overly disappointed when things do not go our way. God consciousness entails our planning for the future, but not being deluded into believing that things will always go the way we have planned. This is the classical tawheed position, where, tawakkul, or total surrender to the will of God is the pure faith. Tawheed and tawakkul are the twin pillars on the road to sainthood. The fragility of human life makes it necessary for humans to acknowledge the presence of a force mightier than any human society can command. In fact, Sammar, the main protagonist in The Translator, is sustained in her grief by her total surrender to the will of Allah. Her strong faith sees her through unimaginable grief after the loss of her young doctor-husband in a tragic road accident in Aberdeen, Scotland, far from home, where she finds succour and help from absolute strangers whom she only knows through shared faith and belief in Islam. They take over the funeral arrangements, the washing of the body and its transportation to Khartoum for burial, without having known the deceased or the widow. They answer the call of Islam to help one another in a time of need, the true implementation of Islamic teachings. In a poignant scene, Aboulela, using Sammar as her mouthpiece, describes this communal involvement during the arrangements immediately after the death of her husband:

A whole week passed before she got him under the African soil. It had taken that long to arrange everything through the embassy in London: the quarantine, the flight. People helped her, took over. Strangers, women whom she kept calling by the wrong names, filled the flat, cooked for her and each other, watched the everwondering child so she could cry. They prayed, recited the Quran, spent the night on the couch and on the floor. They did not leave her alone, abandoned. She went between them dazed, thanking them, humbled by the awareness that they were stronger than her, more giving than her, though she thought of herself as more educated, better dressed.

Islamic teachings are inserted in a subtle way at appropriate places to create the desired effect. The Hadith of the Prophet are summarised and included as explanatory tropes to affirm Islamic teachings. For example, all the major issues at the core of Islam like tawheed, qadar, or predestination, prayers, charity, the apportionment of inheritance to both male and female inheritors, the etiquette of grieving for widows, are highlighted. These issues are introduced seamlessly without appearing as sermonising. As an illustration, Sammar tries to convince Rae, her new-found love, to recite the declaration of the intention to embrace Islam. She notes the simplicity of the creed itself by getting Yasmin, Sammars friend, to say that the creed has sometimes been abused or taken lightly, as some kind of fig leaf to mask relationships between a Muslim and a non-Muslim:

I have seen the kind of Scottish men who marry Muslim girls. Yasmin went on, The typical scenario: he is with an oil company sent to Malaysia or Singapore; she is this cute little thing in a mini-skirt whos out with him every night. Come marriage time, its by the way Im Muslim and my parents will not let you marry me until you convert. And how do I convert my darling, I love you, I cant live without you? Oh, its just a few words you have to say. Just say the Shahadah, its just a few words. I bear witness there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messanger of Allah. End of story. They get married, and she might as the years go by pray and fast or she might not, but it has nothing to do with him. Everything in his life is just the same as it was before.

On Tawakkul and destiny, Aboulela is also discreet in her explanation:

Her fate was etched out by a law that gave her a British passport, a point in time when the demand for people to translate Arabic into English was bigger than the supply. No, she reminded herself, that is not the real truth. My fate is etched out by Allah Almighty, if and who I will marry, what I eat, the work I find, my health, the day I will die are as He alone wants them to be. To think otherwise was to slip down, to feel the world narrowing, dreary and tight.

Further on in the novel, Sammar ascribes her steadfastness and hope to spiritual underpinnings. Her spirituality acts as a shield that protects her from hopelessness and resignation: She had been protected from all the extremes. Pills, break-down, attempts at suicide. A barrier was put between her and things like that, the balance that Rae [her love] admired.

Leila Aboulela compares the real rational position of Islam, based on transcendence and the rationalism of the empiricist and positivists of the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries. In the words of Rae, who hovers between positivism and doubt,

In this society, he said, in this secular society, the speculation is that God is out playing golf. With exceptions and apart from those who are self-convinced atheists, the speculation is that God has put up this elaborate solar system and left it to run itself. It does not need Him to maintain it or sustain it in any way. Mankind is self-sufficient . . .

The rational and plausible Islamic belief system is validated by the, until then, non-Muslim Rae. Having read Islamic religious and other literature, he is gradually won over by this rationality. But he validates Islamic tenets through a third party, Raes uncle who went native or in Tudor parlance, turned Turk. He quotes from Uncle Davids epistolary confession:

David never of course said that Islam was better than Christianity. He didnt use that word. Instead he said things like it was a step on, in the way that Christianity followed Judaism. He said that the Prophet Muhammad was the last in a line of prophets that stretched from Adam, to Abraham through Moses and Jesus. They were all Muslims, Jesus was a Muslim, in a sense that he surrendered to God. This did not go down very well in the letter nor in the essay.

Leila Aboulela takes the opportunity in her fiction to also explain how the Sacred Hadith, or what are better known as Hadith Qudsi, the second most important source of authority after the Quran, came about, while dictating to Rae, who gave her the assignment:

She sat on the floor of the landing and read out, over the phone, the notes she had made from the book. A definition given by the scholar al-Jurjani, A Sacred Hadith is, as to its meaning, from Allah Almighty; as to the wording, it is from the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him. It is that which Allah almighty has communicated to His Prophet through revelation or in dream and he, peace be upon him, has communicated it in his own words. Thus the Quran is superior to it because, besides being revealed, it is Allahs wording. In a definition given by a later scholar al-Qari, . . . Unlike the Holy Quran, Sacred Hadith are not acceptable for recitation in ones prayers, they are not forbidden to be touched or read by one who is in a state of ritual impurity . . . and they are not characterized by the attribute of immutability.

This is heavy stuff for the uninitiated, and requires extra work to understand this background, even for an average educated Muslim, let alone one who is completely unfamiliar with the Islamic intellectual tradition. This is the kind of intertextuality that is not easily accessible for western readers who mostly read texts from the Western intellectual tradition, and whose allusions are generally familiar. Postcolonial writers now demand that Western readers also exert themselves in order to benefit fully from their reading, just as non-Western readers have to immerse themselves in the Western intellectual tradition to fully enjoy literature emanating from the West. In a recent collection of essays, Can Non-Europeans Think? the Columbia University Iranian American scholar Hamid Dabashi decried the provincialism of Western intellectuals. He argues that rarely do Western intellectuals bother to educate themselves about the intellectual traditions of the others, although they will not shy away from making uninformed pronouncements about those societies that they know little about. He gave the example of Slavoj Zizek, who knows a lot about Marxism and the Western Intellectual tradition, but next to nothing about the Eastern ones. In his view, there is a lot of navel-gazing among them, unable to appreciate other traditions unless they are themselves area specialists churning out papers for policy think tanks, and regurgitating the same orientalist pieties.

Leila Aboulela assumes herself a conscientious and responsible Muslim, whose obligation it is to portray what she believes is the real image of Islam, untainted by its association with the Islamic lunatic fringe hell-bent on wreaking global terror, without any sectarian differentiation. It is through literature that she feels she can best serve her faith. She is conscious of the fact that as a liberal Muslim, she is under constant pressure, like all liberal Muslims to condemn acts of violence perpetrated in their name by their co-religionists. In a column in the British Guardian entitled Why Must Britains Young Muslims Live With Unjust Suspicion? she described the double jeopardy of these liberals:

The causes and solutions can be hotly debated but it makes little difference to the daily life of Muslims. Until this climate [of fear and suspicion] eases, the day-to-day anxiety, the feeling of being tainted, of being tested, will still be the same. Ironically, it is the liberal integrated Muslims who bear the brunt. On them lies the responsibility of explaining and apologising. If you live in the kind of ghetto where you never read newspapers, never make friends with non-Muslims, never participate in sports, you can feel safe and oblivious. Start to engage and you will immediately realise just how careful you need to be. Young British Muslims are being watched. This is not paranoia. This is just how things are after 9/11 and 7/7.

From the above it is clear that Leila Aboulela took it as her mission to explicate the tenets of Islam to a wider public as a contribution to mutual understanding between Muslims and people of other faiths and other worldviews. A hard sell this, the defence of Islamic values under the present climate of fear and suspicion. One may also wonder how much mileage she can extract from mining this theme, even under these trying circumstances.

Unlike in the fiction of other writers of Islamic faith, where Islam merely forms the background, as in Nuruddin Farahs later fictions The Closed Sesame and Crossbones, and Naguib Mahfouzs Cairo Trilogy, Leila Aboulela is deliberate in foregrounding Islamic belief system and practice. It is as if she was an author with an agenda, which she turns out to be in this particular fiction. In this regard, her creative work has more affinity with that of Marilynne Robinson who puts her creative energies to wearing her religion on her sleeve, as does Aboulela in The Translator.

Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who died in December 2015, is a Kenyan novelist of British descent and a lay Protestant missionary. She came to Kenya in 1954 to work for the Church Missionary Society, fell in love with the country and in 1960 married Dr. Daniel Oludhe Macgoye, a local doctor from the Luo tribe, one of the largest ethnic groups in the country, with whom she had four children. Over the years, she took all the necessary steps to become fully integrated into Kenyan society, and especially completely within the Luo culture; she learned the language to complete spoken and written fluency and accepted almost all aspects of Luo tradition, except those she deemed inimical to Christian values and virtues.

Image of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

Macgoye is a well-informed and conscientious novelist, having graduated with a degree in English literature from the Royal Holloway College, University of London, and later earned a Masters from Birkbeck College, University of London. Her grasp of Kenyan political history, and the social changes that she has witnessed personally throughout her extended stay in Kenya, put her in the same intellectual league as the most famous Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiongo. In fact, Macgoyes fiction covers the same terrain as that of Ngugi because they seem to have lived almost the same experiences of colonialism and post-colonialism, and their works are a mirror of contemporary history through their neo-realism.

Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye arrived in the country when she was barely in her mid-twenties, and lived the next sixty years mostly in Kenya, with a short interlude in Tanzania as the bookshop manager at the University of Dar es Salaam. During her long residence in Kenya, she witnessed almost all the major political events that shaped the nation: the Mau Mau insurgency, independence, the struggle to create a unified nation out of a welter of ethnicities, tribes, religions and political ideologies. As acute observers of the Kenyan political scene, both Ngugi and Macgoye write proletarian fictions populated by perplexed and dislocated rural masses and the lumpen proletariat who have washed up in the urban areas because of colonialism and post-independence mass migration.

Macgoyes fiction is populated mostly by female characters, strong women who struggle against all odds. They are mostly uneducated but pick up street smarts as they go through lifes trajectory. Female characters like Paulina and Amina are portrayed as strong characters, Amina with her strong entrepreneurial spirit, and Paulina gradually asserting her individuality in the face of constricting tradition.

The main theme in Macgoyes best known fiction, Coming to Birth, is the interrogation of anachronistic obsolescent cultural traditions

Perhaps the main theme in Macgoyes best known fiction, Coming to Birth, is the interrogation of anachronistic obsolescent cultural traditions. In fact, it appears that in the case of this particular novel, many aspects of Luo culture are held up to be antithetical to all that Christianity stands for. The novel critiques such time-honoured cultural practices as polygamy, levirate marriages, lavish and extravagant wake and funeral practices and the cultural sanctioning of domestic violence in the form of wife beating.

Although the Luo as an ethnic group is considered overwhelmingly Christian, this Christianity is more a veneer than actual substance. The Luo are portrayed as stuck in the cultural past more than many other ethnic and cultural groups. The Luo are held up and judged by the highest Christian practices and standards, and are ultimately found wanting. But in the tribal world of the Luo, cultural practices were considered more humane than the dictates or demands of Christianity. We see, for example, Paulina, the main protagonist in the novel, going through miscarriages, the harassment of being a childless woman in a society that believes in the strength of numbers, the grief of losing a child obtained outside the matrimonial bed, and the state of limbo that the husband keeps her in because, in Luo culture, once a woman is married, she is married for ever as her husband has a permanent claim on her, however cold the relationship throughout their lives. The husband is never sanctioned for shunning her, physically molesting her and completely neglecting her. Christian values are merely paid lip service. In fact, there is general apathy, if not outright cynicism, towards Christianity among the majority. Martins alienation from Christian practice is held up as the general religious malaise afflicting the new generations of post-independence Africans. The narrator notes of Martin that:

He did not regularly go to church any more, though he might go if there was a special speaker or if he felt particularly at odds with Paulinas having sometimes to work on a Sunday. The climate had changed from the days when you used to say, I am a Christian but I am not yet saved. To praise the Lord no longer helped you to get a job, and though the top people attended places of worship in surprising numbers they were eager for a quick getaway. It was another way in which light was going out. People talked about religion on buses, in queues, in cafes you heard them talking, but often as though it was something dull, outside themselves.

The celebratory ambience in Luo mourning practices is brought into sharp relief by Macgoye. By letting a comment slip off the mouth of a Kikuyu, a people who are noted for their industriousness in wealth accumulation, the macabre Luo enthusiasm for partying on such occasions is described with a pithy comment from a shopkeeper. In the words of the narrator:

Kano had kept the old hedged homesteads more exactly than the other locations, and also a bigger share of the old plumed headdresses: teams of male dancers bedecked with feathers and bells and intricate chalk patterns were often to be seen going off to the funerals and other public occasions like the Kisumu Festival. Okeyo used to get excited, chattering and pointing till she restrained him, so that the kikuyu shopkeeper remarked somberly, He is a real Luo: more keen on a funeral than anything else.

Okeyo was the child that Paulina had begotten outside her marriage with Simeon, a clansman of Martins, and who was fatefully killed by a stray bullet during the funeral procession of the legendary Kenyan politician, assassinated in broad day light, in one of Nairobis busiest streets, on a July day in 1969.

As a counterfoil to Christianity and Christians, Islam and Muslims are portrayed in a less than flattering light through the characters of Amina and Fauzia; as either whores or parents pimping for their own children for survival and livelihood. Both Amina and Fauzia are held responsible for the loosening ties between the rural import, Paulina and her urbanised Martin. Both Amina and Fauzia come out, not only as femmes fatales, but also as some kind of mercenaries out to fleece Martin and lure him to the temptation of sin in the form of nice food, nice dresses and perfumes. Pauline was later to see with her own eyes what Nikos Kazantzakis described these nubile nymphs as: This labyrinth of hesitation, this poison that tastes like honey. Pauline wanted to find out for herself what life for Martin was like in Aminas grip:

Amina proved unexpectedly expert with powder and feeding bottle and soon afterwards approached the pastor about baptism for the child but bowed to the rule that since there was no Christian parent, Joyce must make her own profession when she could read and write. The baby made a good pretext for Pauline to come and see Amina from time to time. Little by little she built up a picture of a world quite remote from her own, a world of gay wrappers and jingling bracelets and perfumes and spicy dishes, where slim men with bony features came and went, for what purpose one was not quite aware, and of town houses where these urbane traditions from the coast somehow collected themselves despite the bare crumbling walls and the outlandish cold . . .

Swahili culture is taken as a synecdoche for Islam and all that it stands for, what are perceived as its negative influences among the relatively recent native converts to Christianity. Fauzia was later to be warned of the possibility that he, Martin, might take another wife, but of a different kind:

And so he told her that when he took a second wife she must be a Christian who would leave her hair unplaited and her ears without ornament, who would dig in the fields and plaster walls and leave her children fat and naked. But she only laughed and said she must enjoy herself a while longer.

Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye seems to believe her duty is not to be even-handed when she has to confront the reality that Islam is a major religion and a rival to Christianity in Kenya. In this regard, she takes the opportunity to show what she considers the superiority of Christianity over Islam. She uses her fiction to re-affirm her own faith and its tenuous hold on the relatively new converts on the African continent. Her last work of fiction, Rebmann, is a celebration of the efforts of pioneer missionaries like Rebmann and Krapf, who ventured into Africa in the middle of the nineteenth century to win the flock for Jesus Christ in what was then unexplored terrain in the heart of Africa, or the Conradian Heart of Darkness, as Africa was perceived then. Macgoye was later to come to Kenya under the auspices of the same organisation that sponsored the German missionary, the Church Missionary Society.

Looking at name use in her Coming to Birth, there is a lingering feeling that Macgoyes ancestors, probably Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe who migrated to England from continental Europe to escape pogroms there, might have converted to the Anglican Christian rite upon their settlement. Female characters are given common scriptural names pointing to Old Testament antecedents, names like Paulina, Rebecca, and Rachel, names popular with people of Jewish background. Again, one of her more obscure fictions set in Kenya is A Farm Called Kishinev, described as a fairly comprehensive picture of Kenyan Jewish experience.

Marjorie Oludhe Macgoyes working class background and sympathies enable her to empathise with the plight of the African poor and downtrodden. Her descriptions of the African great unwashed is accurate in that it is described as a life of ceaseless want and deprivation. Nairobi is notorious for its parking boys, an expression that is a euphemism for abandoned and homeless kids, who are often orphaned and use their street-smarts to survive in a highly competitive and unforgiving environment. Their situation is so dire that they have to live off dustbins, and sometimes resort to using human waste as a weapon to extort money from passers-by threatening to smear them with it if they do not respond generously. The tough struggle for survival is described with pathos, in the words of one such street urchin:

So my dad said we couldnt go on to school for a while because he need all his money to get another woman to look after us. And when he was there she was alright to us, but she started going queer when she got her own baby: then she hated the sight of us and used to beat us for every little thing. And then last year she started saying that she didnt get married to come and live in a back-of beyond village with a load of kids, and not any rice or hair oil or nice soap like her friends had for their babies, and only seeing her man one day or two in the month, and then she started to drink. And then she didnt cook everyday, and never early in the morning, and started saying it was our fault that my dad didnt pay her attention. He only wanted his first wifes children and all that. In the end my little brother got so hurt he ran off to his granny: she doesnt have much, but she likes him and tells him stories. But my sister had to stay to look after the baby, so my dad said. But me, she said I didnt do anything around the place but eat, and so one day when she beat me worse than usual I ran to my friends big brother who is a conductor on a country bus, and he talked with his dad and put some ointment on the bad places and gave me a ride on the bus free. That was about two months ago.

He didnt know anything, put in Muhammad Ali. Lucky for him I found him wondering about. I showed him the temples, where they give you free food if there is celebration going on. And how to find the eating places, where good food sometimes gets thrown out when they close, and how- well, all sorts of things I showed him. He just didnt know how to stay alive.

Macgoye captures the spirit of anxiety and desperation among those living on the edge.

Both Leila Aboulaela and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye have used the art of fiction to push their religious agenda, using fiction to both affirm and defend their belief systems in a world that had increasingly come to see religion as dragging us to the medieval bloodletting that so characterised that period. But of late, there has been an upsurge in writers who have unashamedly proclaimed their fidelity to the time-honoured beliefs of their societies and the era in which they are living. This is also an era when we see the rise of militant atheism too, that is challenging the religious discourse and looking for a much wider space than they have ever been accorded. The problem with this kind of genre, where fiction is put at the service of religious sectarianism, is that it soon becomes tiresome in its self-righteousness and tiresome for the secular-minded; these are often people who are also set in their ways of thinking, determined to draw a line between the religious and public space.

Excerpt from:

MOHAMED BAKARI - The Return of the Repressed: Religion in the Fictions of Leila Aboulela and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye - The Elephant