Daily Archives: January 3, 2022

As an avid reader and supporter of The Port Washington Times, I am utterly dismayed that the Times would publish (Dec. 24, 2021) the long-winded and terribly inaccurate Readers Write letter titled Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump and Trump suckers. That letter, submitted by Alvin Goldberg of Great Neck, attempts to compare our former president, Donald Trump, to one of the most deranged and evil persons in all of recent history, Adolf Hitler.

Comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler is as inappropriate and wrongheaded, as it is inappropriate and wrongheaded to compare Andrew Cuomo (you remember him, dont you?) to Jesus Christ. I dont recall ever reading any prior letters from Mr. Goldberg in the Times, although I could be wrong about that. I can guess at why Mr. Goldbergs letter was unhesitatingly published by the Times, but I will have to go into that in another Readers Write letter to the Times if the Times will publish it.

Mr. Goldberg gives us a potted history of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler, but in his history, he gives us a number of half truths and some absolute untruths. Adolf Hitler had a deep understanding of mass psychology and mass propaganda. Hitler took pride in being a master salesman and showman. Where, Mr. Goldberg, did you ever read such things? But then, Mr. Goldberg goes on to tell us that Trump rejects rationalism, liberalism, democracy, the rule of law, human rights and all movements of international cooperation and peace.

Please, Mr. Goldberg, do tell us where you ever learned about all of those monumental failings of our former president and do you really believe that tens of millions of Americans could have all been fooled enough to vote for someone with all of those monumental failings? Of course, Mr. Goldberg shows us how little he really knows about recent world history in the very first sentence of his rant.

Mr. Goldberg tells us World War II ended when Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies in May 1945. Sorry, Mr. Goldberg, but World War II didnt end until four months later, when in early September 1945, the Imperial Japanese government and the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces, surrendered to the Allies aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. (Editors note: This error slipped through the editing process after it was marked to be corrected).

Why didnt Mr. Goldberg attempt to compare Donald Trump to the Emperor Hirohito or to the Generalissimo Tojo? Probably because at 6-feet-3 inches tall and at 260 pounds or more, President Trump just doesnt look the part of a Japanese and besides that, President Trump has let it be known that he just doesnt care for Japanese food, all that much. Of course, Mr. Goldberg may have forgotten that Imperial Japan participated in World War II and was responsible for numerous atrocities, crimes against humanity, before and during the war.

Mr. Goldberg ends his rant by urging us to Get smart and Help save America and Democracy. There is no doubt in my mind that the best way for us to do that is to reject completely the paths of turmoil and destruction offered by Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Smash and Grab, and the Biden/Harris led government.

Joel Katz

Port Washington

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Readers Write: Trump falsely compared to Hitler - Readers Write - The Island Now

IN 1746, the scientist Fr Jean-Antoine Nollet, future director of the Paris Acadmie des Sciences, arranged two hundred monks in a circle roughly a mile in circumference with pieces of iron wire connecting them. He then discharged a primitive battery (a Leyden jar) through the human chain observing that each brother reacted at virtually the same moment to the electric shock, and so establishing the speed of electricitys transmission to be very high. Arguably, Nollet thereby also demonstrated that 18th-century Enlightenment was, literally, a current running through Church and world alike.

Ritchie Robertsons Enlightenment overturns stereotypes about the era, including the notion that its leading thinkers were fundamentally hostile to faith. In the main, what Enlighteners sought was a purification of theism, not its destruction: scientific knowledge was the enemy of superstition, but not of religion: only of the false beliefs that often flourished under the aegis of religion.

Enlighteners problem with religion was less metaphysical than practical. Inevitably, there was friction between their pragmatic aim (referred to in the books subtitle) of achieving happiness in this world and the Churchs belief that happiness was essentially a matter of the hereafter.

Conflict between progressive thinkers and ecclesiastics often focused on the wielding of institutional power in academe and society. Even so, Enlightened thinking was embraced by many churchmen including not only Nollet, but also the reform-minded Pope Benedict XIVth (reigned 1740-58). The latter accepted that modern science explained many supposed supernatural phenomena, campaigned against superstition, and appointed the talented female scientist Laura Bassi to a university chair.

Misconceptions about the era, Robertson argues, spring overwhelmingly from Theodore Adornos and Max Horkheimers influential Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). The volume presented a polemical critique of the 18th centurys dominant intellectual currents as a dehumanising triumph of abstract rationality over natural feeling which resulted in human beings becoming viewed as means not ends.

Thus, Enlightenment, so this argument goes, presaged 20th-century totalitarian nightmares in which personal suffering was discounted before the severe geometric beauty of the perfected state order. Later critics alleged that the Enlightenment Project grounded the twisted logic of Nazi racial theory through erroneous scientific misapprehensions about biology, and also that its esteem for personal autonomy produced unhealthily atomised societies.

Robertson argues that such criticism anachronistically reads later attitudes into earlier texts and tendentiously mistakes parts for the whole. Enlightenment and Modernity, though related, are not co-terminous: much problematic Enlightenment legacy results, in fact, from highly selective ex post facto thematic development by thinkers as diverse as Marx and Nietzsche, not the actual ethos of the era. Those developments relate to tendencies understood by contemporaries as eccentric minority positions (such as Rousseaus radical political thought) or highly contested discourse (Kants essentialising view of race).

Robertson convincingly refutes the allegations of emotional aridity oft made against the Age of Reason. Indeed, by embracing the language of sensibility, Enlightenment thinkers such as Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713) and, later, David Hume (1711-76) sought to articulate the place of feeling within thought a riposte to 17th-century Cartesian rationalism.

AlamyJean-Antoine Nollet, the Enlightenment priest and scientist, teaching a physics course at the college of Navarre in 1754, in an illustration from Les Merveilles de la Science, published in 1870

The part played by emotion in cognition and thus its social value are affirmed in works such as Oliver Goldsmiths She Stoops to Conquer (1773), in which models of unfeeling masculinity are held up to ridicule. A theological outworking of this approach is evident in the Lutheran divine Joachim Spaldings Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The End of Man), 1748. Spalding re-established Christianity on the basis of feeling founding the religions credibility neither on rational argument nor on the self-authenticating character of revelation. Rather, Spalding appealed to Christianitys powerful emotive scope to answer humanitys innate urge towards goodness.

Robertsons analysis ranges from the conceptual Happiness, Reason and Passion (Chapter 1) through to the concrete, and bloody, Revolutions (Chapter 14), traversing Sociability (Chapter 7), Aesthetics (Chapter 9), for example. Readers may especially appreciate Chapters 3-5, covering, respectively, Toleration, The Religious Enlightenment, and Unbelief and Speculation.

Enlightenment is impressive, but overwhelming. The encyclopaedia was the 18th centurys literary product par excellence. At more than 1000 pages, this volume nods to that genre. Indeed, neat sub-chapters on topics such as Empire and Voltaire read like crisp dictionary entries. Readers might profitably approach Enlightenment as a reference work rather than a narrative history: this book is best enjoyed by dipping in rather than reading through.

The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.

The Enlightenment: The pursuit of happiness 1680-1790Ritchie RobertsonAllen Lane 40(978-0-241-00482-1)Church Times Bookshop 36

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The Enlightenment: The pursuit of happiness 1680-1790 by Ritchie Robertson - Church Times

Far from pushing for social and economic equality, the state is fanning systems and principles to strengthen the divide

The latest edition of the World Inequality Report (https://bit.ly/3Fx8vv4 and https://bit.ly/3EvazlY) has confirmed that the world continues to sprint down the path of inequality. Global multimillionaires have captured a disproportionate share of global wealth growth over the past several decades: the top 1% took 38% of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, whereas the bottom 50% captured just 2% of it. Indias case is particularly stark. The foreword by Nobel laureate economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, says, India is now among the most unequal countries in the world. This means that the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 50% is widest for India among the major economies in the world. The gap is wider in India than the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia and France.

The journey of this inequality over time reveals that socialist-inspired Five Year plans contributed to reducing the share of the top 10% who had 50% of the income under colonial rule, to 35%-40% in the early decades after Independence. However, since the mid-1980s, deregulation and liberalisation policies have led to one of the most extreme increases in income and wealth inequality observed in the world. While the top 1% has majorly profited from economic reforms, growth among low- and middle-income groups has been relatively slow, and poverty has persisted.

In recent years, on the economic front, India, post-2014, seems to have got into a phase of an even greater reliance on big business and privatisation to fix economics and the result has been to beget even more inequality. The latest World Inequality Report firmly concludes that the bottom 50% share has gone down to 13%. India stands out as a poor and very unequal country, with an affluent elite.

But beyond all this, what bears emphasis is the observation by Aunindyo Chakravarty, in The Tribune, about what was happening to the income of the bottom 50% in India since 1951. This grew at the rate of 2.2% per year between 1951 and 1981, but what is telling is that the growth rate remained exactly the same over the past 40 years. This makes it clear that irrespective of the economics or politics at play, the state of the bottom half of India barely changed, with an abysmal rate of income growth. That inequality in terms of the immobility of those at the bottom (at least one half of India) stood, irrespective of the economic policies adopted, is an irrefutable fact. It was because of the social conditions and constraints in India.

Clearly, the very social structure that underpinned India, encouraged and fanned this inequality. Plenty changed after Indias Constitution was adopted. In the Nehruvian years and after that too a bid was made to battle the basic absence of social democracy in India, but it remained confined to States and regions. Therefore, one sees a little more mobility and well-being in States such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Parts of Karnataka and Andhra also recorded attempts at smashing social structures that had pushed those at the bottom to a life in perpetual poverty and deprivation, and those attempts showed in better economic prospects. So, beyond these economic policies which have been fanning inequality, it is the ruling party tying faith directly into politics and backing of old social structures far from getting rid of them, strengthening them each day that should set alarm bells ringing. The linkages between our social structures and income inequality and poverty must be faced up to.

Globally, the economic transformation of people and particularly the lessening of inequality has never happened unless socially regressive mores have been challenged. Path-breaking research across 106 countries in 2018 tackled the elephant in the room when researchers from the Universities of Bristol in the U.K. and Tennessee in the U.S. used data from the World Values Survey to get a measure of the importance of religion spanning the entire 20th century (1900 to 2000) and found that secularisation precedes economic development.

Furthermore, the findings show that secularisation only predicts future economic development when it is accompanied by a respect and tolerance for individual rights. That can only happen when beyond sufferance of diversity or tolerance, a society is able to see all shades of humans, of varying castes, creeds, faith, colour, gender and choices as equal. The central aspect of secularisation is delinking of religion from public life. It leads to respect for each citizen irrespective of their faith and for science and rationalism. This is clear from the European experience over centuries or of Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, South Korea and others the old social structures need to be smashed and not resurrected.

The rapid movement of India in the reverse direction of secularisation, with the Union governments now-stated policy to prioritise members of one religion and one language, has severe economic consequences too and the widening income inequality only reflects that. The quick descent into a One size nation, does not fit its many diversities. The avenues available for all kinds of citizens to make a life, informal if not formal, is deeply inhibited by Indias social fabric being torn by the Governments new priorities and policies. Far from pushing for social and economic equality, which can be done by dismantling old shibboleths in which Indias rank social and economic inequalities are anchored, the state is now fanning systems and principles to further them. This fundamentally distorts the hard wiring that had made modern India possible.

Criminalising the freedom of religion and choices, which is what the Indian compact is based on, by hunting out the diverse, mixed or cosmopolitan as inauthentic has consequences, both social and economic. It was exactly this that B.R. Ambedkar had warned of: In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?

B.R. Ambedkar had issued a grim warning in 1949 that if we continue to deny social and economic inequality for long, we could blow up the structure of political democracy. We risk much more. There is no destiny of nations foretold. Choices are made and destinies created. By choosing to reverse the idea of modernisation, linking religion firmly into the public sphere, trying to unmake the modernity India had tried to set for itself as an ideal, we may be already setting ourselves on a narrow path which ends in places that scores of nations in the world and several in our neighbourhood have already arrived at, only to their peril and dismay.

Seema Chishti is a journalist-writer based in Delhi

Link:

The cold truth about India's income inequality - The Hindu

Ho, ho, ho. Merrybeginningof Christmas, you low Protestant plebs! In the spirit of the ongoing season, Id like to update this little corner with some thoughts on that touchiest of evergreen third-rail topics: Santa Claus.

Santa Claus has been enjoying some good press recently thanks to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who made a heavily ratioed Christmas Eve tweet reminding everyone that Santas reindeer would have been vaporized into oblivion long before they could complete a delivery trip around the planetin case we werent aware. Twitter had a romp with this, of course, in the grand Twitter tradition of mercilessly roasting Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Perhaps my favorite was a straight-faced reply thread calmly explaining that Neil is applying an outdated scientific framework to Santas sleigh, which requires a quantum physics analysis. You see, once Santa is observed by a child, the wave function collapses, which is why children can never catch him. The whole thing was delightful.

Still, glorious as it was to enjoy all this fun at Neil DeGrasse Tysons expense, I remain as personally crotchety as Ive always been on the merits of teaching your kids to believe in Santa Claus. Yes, insert grumpy Clint Eastwood GIF here. Im not a fan, guys, sorry to say. This might earn me some boos from certain quarters, which doesnt shock me. It seems that every year, without fail, some would-be Chesterton starts posting about why actually, parents who withhold the Santa Claus Myth from their kids are just being stick-in-the-mud fundie spoil-sports who dont understand the awesome power of Story. Jesus told parables, after all. Why are Christians so hung up about this, when Christians should be the first to throw themselves into an unfettered celebration of creative make-believe?

Recently, I caved and watched the original Miracle on 34th Streetfor the first time, a movie which seems to define the phrase having your cake and eating it too. For anyone who doesnt know the plot, its a charming fable aping the structure of Christs incarnation and rejection, but without anything so grim as a crucifixion to make the analogy complete. As the real Kris Kringle makes his benevolent way around New York, children are thrilled, adults skepticism is tested, and one little girl and her mother learn the true meaning of faith.

The movies adorable heroine, precocious 8-year-old Susie (Natalie Wood), has been thoroughly trained in cold rationalism. Shes That Kid, the one who priggishly spoils the fun for kids who are still in a state of suspended disbelief. And not only does she doubt Santa, she cant even play basic pretend games with her friends. When Kris teaches her how to imitate a monkey, its a revelation for her. All of this, we learn, is transferred jadedness from her mother Doris (Maureen OHara), a divorcee who has learned the hard way not to wait for wishes to come true. In the end, the mothers own faith is sweetly restored by the earnest young lawyer who vindicates Kris in court while falling in love with her. The lawyer also gets the movies famous one-line definition of faith: believing when common sense tells you not to.

The movie is emphatic that this is the real take-home message, even as an actual evidential case mounts for Kriss authenticity. A Lewisian trilemma could be applied, as Kris seems manifestly not to be a bad man in either sense of the word. Meanwhile, Susie suspects something is up when he takes a small Dutch girl on his knee and begins fluently chatting in her native tongue. Yet, curiously, the precise extent of Kriss powers is left in soft focus. We never see him perform a concrete miracle, although its hinted at the very end that he might have teleported from one place to another. His method of supplying gifts repeatedly seems to consist of giving the right parent the right store tip in the nick of time. Before the conclusion, Susies budding faith is momentarily shattered when Kris is unable to make the Cape Cod of her dreams materialize immediately. He tells her that he is sorry, that he tried his best but he just couldnt make it happen. Her mother tries to buoy her up by repeating that she has to keep believing anyway. You mean its like if at first you dont succeed, try, try again, Susie replies bitterly. I thought so.

This importantly blurs together two very different conceptions of faith. There is faith as defined in the tagline, meaning belief beyond evidence, beyond common sense. But then there is the kind of faith C. S. Lewis defines, while explicitly rejecting this definition. Faith isnotabout believing beyond what the evidence warrants. Rather, it is about holding on to what you know to be true in spite of shifting moods. That is a very different kind of thing. But for Susie, in her moment of disappointment, they are inextricably bound up together. Yet a couple scenes later, she can be found sitting forlornly on the couch, repeating under her breath, I believe, I believe, its silly but I believe.

In the end, Kris once again performs a non-miraculous nudge by giving young Fred the directions to Susies dream house, where Fred promises to buy it and proposes to Doris on the spot. In thinking back over these accumulated nudges, I was reminded of the way Michael Ruse frames Christs miracle of the loaves and fishesthat most likely the true miracle was not that Jesus literally multiplied the food, which would be the crudest form of jiggery-pokery, but that he inspired the crowds to bring out and share what they had with each other. In the same way, the makers of the film seem to want to avoid directly ascribing miraculous power to Kris, emphasizing that human love and brotherhood is the real reason for the season. Kris Kringle is a Christ figure, but only according to a watered-down modernist vision of ChristChrist by way of Tbingen. Let people have Christ, it seems to whisper, just as we let the children have Santa. Are they really so different?

This is the sort of subliminal cultural messaging that makes Christian parents uneasy with the Santa myth. Theyre not wrong to feel that discomfort. The messaging is unmistakably there. And C. S. Lewis isnt quite the ally some seem to think he is in making their case to the contrary.

Of course, theres more than one way to let the children have Santa. One can allow the fable to filter naturally to them by osmosis. One can make a game of it when theyre still too little to ask precocious questions. And, contra the strawman of rigid repressed Susie, one can nurture a childs imagination in all sorts of ways that dont involve elaborately blurring the distinction between fable and reality. But in the end, fables are meant to be held lightly, as no more than what they are. And faith, as the writer of Hebrews has it, should be presented not as a closing of the mind, but as the substance of things hoped for with good reason, from that place where heart and mind unite. It may not be a faith that is always easy to maintain, as Lewis well knows and recognizes. God may choose not to grant prayer, not to make wishes come true. But it is precisely because Christ and Kris Kringle are notone and the same that we are made able, even in these most painful moments, to keep saying, I believe. I believe. Its not silly, and I believe.

More here:

Will the Real Santa Claus Please Stand Up? - Patheos