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Javier E

Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...beyond-billboards.html

Christianity Christmas myth sin

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al
  • at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.
cvanderloo

Ending testing for New York City's gifted program may be another blow to Black and Lati... - 0 views

theconversation.com/ack-and-latino-students-157381

gifted racism oppression black latino students NYC education research

shared by cvanderloo on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The city’s Department of Education announced in February that it would stop testing students for its gifted program, which places top students in schools with curriculum designed for high academic achievement. Instead, preschool teachers will refer students for consideration.
  • Research has shown that teacher referrals tend to lead to fewer Black and Hispanic students’ qualifying for gifted programs, though Black teachers refer Black students more equitably.
  • gifted education is a vital service to help students with exceptional academic ability realize their full potential.
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  • For years, advocates for students in NYC have argued that using high-stakes tests on 4-year-olds to determine their school placement for the entire K-12 experience is unfair. It disadvantages students who didn’t attend academic-style pre-K or early enrichment programs.
  • Any test administered at age 4 will quickly cease to provide useful information, as students develop at different rates. Some accelerate during the elementary or high school years, while others who initially looked precocious settle into average achievement.
  • 3. It limited which students fully realize their potential
  • But research shows that many students start the school year performing well above grade level and are left to become bored and not reach their full potential.
  • By failing students with advanced academic needs who come from underrepresented groups, New York City’s Department of Education risks losing the entire gifted program.
  • An overhaul is possible, but it has to start with evidence-based practices, not quick fixes.
Javier E

The Structure of Gratitude - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-structure-of-gratitude.html

gratitude positive attitude psychology expectations

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Most people feel grateful some of the time — after someone saves you from a mistake or brings you food during an illness. But some people seem grateful dispositionally. They seem thankful practically all of the time.
  • As most people get on in life and earn more status, they often get used to more respect and nicer treatment. But people with dispositional gratitude take nothing for granted. They take a beginner’s thrill at a word of praise, at another’s good performance or at each sunny day. These people are present-minded and hyperresponsive.
  • This kind of dispositional gratitude is worth dissecting because it induces a mentality that stands in counterbalance to the mainstream threads of our culture.
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  • But people with grateful dispositions are attuned to the gift economy where people are motivated by sympathy as well as self-interest. In the gift economy intention matters. We’re grateful to people who tried to do us favors even when those favors didn’t work out. In the gift economy imaginative empathy matters. We’re grateful because some people showed they care about us more than we thought they did. We’re grateful when others took an imaginative leap and put themselves in our mind, even with no benefit to themselves.
  • But people with dispositional gratitude are hyperaware of their continual dependence on others. They treasure the way they have been fashioned by parents, friends and ancestors who were in some ways their superiors. They’re glad the ideal of individual autonomy is an illusion because if they were relying on themselves they’d be much worse off.
  • The basic logic of the capitalist meritocracy is that you get what you pay for, that you earn what you deserve.
  • But people with dispositional gratitude are continually struck by the fact that they are given far more than they pay for — and are much richer than they deserve. Their families, schools and summer camps put far more into them than they give back. There’s a lot of surplus goodness in daily life that can’t be explained by the logic of equal exchange.
  • Capitalism encourages us to see human beings as self-interested, utility-maximizing creatures.
  • We live in a capitalist meritocracy. This meritocracy encourages people to be self-sufficient — masters of their own fate.
  • Gratitude is also a form of social glue. In the capitalist economy, debt is to be repaid to the lender. But a debt of gratitude is repaid forward, to another person who also doesn’t deserve it.
  • each gift ripples outward and yokes circles of people in bonds of affection. It reminds us that a society isn’t just a contract based on mutual benefit, but an organic connection based on natural sympathy — connections that are nurtured not by self-interest but by loyalty and service.
  • If you think that human nature is good and powerful, then you go around frustrated because the perfect society has not yet been achieved
  • But if you go through life believing that our reason is not that great, our individual skills are not that impressive, and our goodness is severely mottled, then you’re sort of amazed life has managed to be as sweet as it is. You’re grateful for all the institutions our ancestors gave us, like the Constitution and our customs, which shape us to be better than we’d otherwise be. Appreciation becomes the first political virtue and the need to perfect the gifts of others is the first political task.
  • We live in a capitalist meritocracy that encourages individualism and utilitarianism, ambition and pride.
  • But this society would fall apart if not for another economy, one in which gifts surpass expectations, in which insufficiency is acknowledged and dependence celebrated.
  • People with grateful dispositions see their efforts grandly but not themselves. Life doesn’t surpass their dreams but it nicely surpasses their expectations.
Javier E

The Perks of Taking the High Road - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629495

response climate discussion generosity listening respect gift sharing boomerang disagreement research psychology language

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • hat is the point of arguing with someone who disagrees with you? Presumably, you would like them to change their mind. But that’s easier said than done
  • Research shows that changing minds, especially changing beliefs that are tied strongly to people’s identity, is extremely difficult
  • this personal attachment to beliefs encourages “competitive personal contests rather than collaborative searches for the truth.”
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  • The way that people tend to argue today, particularly online, makes things worse.
  • You wouldn’t blame anyone involved for feeling as if they’re under fire, and no one is likely to change their mind when they’re being attacked.
  • odds are that neither camp is having any effect on the other; on the contrary, the attacks make opponents dig in deeper.
  • If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon, and start offering them as a gift.
  • hilosophers and social scientists have long pondered the question of why people hold different beliefs and values
  • One of the most compelling explanations comes from Moral Foundations Theory, which has been popularized by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU. This theory proposes that humans share a common set of “intuitive ethics,” on top of which we build different narratives and institutions—and therefore beliefs—that vary by culture, community, and even person.
  • Extensive survey-based research has revealed that almost everyone shares at least two common values: Harming others without cause is bad, and fairness is good. Other moral values are less widely shared
  • political conservatives tend to value loyalty to a group, respect for authority, and purity—typically in a bodily sense, in terms of sexuality—more than liberals do.
  • Sometimes conflict arises because one group holds a moral foundation that the other simply doesn’t feel strongly about
  • even when two groups agree on a moral foundation, they can radically disagree on how it should be expressed
  • When people fail to live up to your moral values (or your expression of them), it is easy to conclude that they are immoral people.
  • Further, if you are deeply attached to your values, this difference can feel like a threat to your identity, leading you to lash out, which won’t convince anyone who disagrees with you.
  • research shows that if you insult someone in a disagreement, the odds are that they will harden their position against yours, a phenomenon called the boomerang effect.
  • so it is with our values. If we want any chance at persuasion, we must offer them happily. A weapon is an ugly thing, designed to frighten and coerce
  • effective missionaries present their beliefs as a gift. And sharing a gift is a joyful act, even if not everyone wants it.
  • he solution to this problem requires a change in the way we see and present our own values
  • A gift is something we believe to be good for the recipient, who, we hope, may accept it voluntarily, and do so with gratitude. That requires that we present it with love, not insults and hatred.
  • 1. Don’t “other” others.
  • Go out of your way to welcome those who disagree with you as valued voices, worthy of respect and attention. There is no “them,” only “us.”
  • 2. Don’t take rejection personally.
  • just as you are not your car or your house, you are not your beliefs. Unless someone says, “I hate you because of your views,” a repudiation is personal only if you make it so
  • 3. Listen more.
  • when it comes to changing someone’s mind, listening is more powerful than talking. They conducted experiments that compared polarizing arguments with a nonjudgmental exchange of views accompanied by deep listening. The former had no effect on viewpoints, whereas the latter reliably lowered exclusionary opinions.
  • when possible, listening and asking sensitive questions almost always has a more beneficial effect than talking.
  • howing others that you can be generous with them regardless of their values can help weaken their belief attachment, and thus make them more likely to consider your point of view
  • for your values to truly be a gift, you must weaken your own belief attachment first
  • we should all promise to ourselves, “I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.”
  • if I truly have the good of the world at heart, then I must not fall prey to the conceit of perfect knowledge, and must be willing to entertain new and better ways to serve my ultimate goal: creating a happier world
  • generosity and openness have a bigger chance of making the world better in the long run.
Javier E

Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Stree... - 1 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/74ec4c99e72deda4a64da10692a15bf6

economics history literature good evil theory philosophy philosophers Bible Gilgamesh Adam Smith

shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?
  • The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.
  • most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.
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  • He tries to break free of narrow specialization and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Expeditions beyond economics’ borders and its connection to history, philosophy, psychology, and ancient myths are not only refreshing, but necessary for understanding the world of the twenty-first century.
  • Reality is spun from stories, not from material. Zdeněk Neubauer
  • Before it was emancipated as a field, economics lived happily within subsets of philosophy—ethics, for example—miles away from today’s concept of economics as a mathematical-allocative science that views “soft sciences” with a scorn born from positivistic arrogance. But our thousand-year “education” is built on a deeper, broader, and oftentimes more solid base. It is worth knowing about.
  • Outside of our history, we have nothing more.
  • The study of the history of a certain field is not, as is commonly held, a useless display of its blind alleys or a collection of the field’s trials and errors (until we got it right), but history is the fullest possible scope of study of a menu that the given field can offer.
  • History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back.
  • “The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy, and the science itself dissolves into thin air, and so does the separation between science and non-science; differences between the scientific and unscientific are vanishing.”
  • we seek to chart the development of the economic ethos. We ask questions that come before any economic thinking can begin—both philosophically and, to a degree, historically. The area here lies at the very borders of economics—and often beyond. We may refer to this as protoeconomics (to borrow a term from protosociology) or, perhaps more fittingly, metaeconomics (to borrow a term from metaphysics).
  • stories; Adam Smith believed. As he puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”
  • “The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives … in turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story that we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework of our motivation. Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories. The same is true for confidence in a nation, a company, or an institution. Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.”
  • contrary to what our textbooks say, economics is predominantly a normative field. Economics not only describes the world but is frequently about how the world should be (it should be effective, we have an ideal of perfect competition, an ideal of high-GDP growth in low inflation, the effort to achieve high competitiveness …). To this end, we create models, modern parables,
  • I will try to show that mathematics, models, equations, and statistics are just the tip of the iceberg of economics; that the biggest part of the iceberg of economic knowledge consists of everything else; and that disputes in economics are rather a battle of stories and various metanarratives than anything else.
  • That is the reason for this book: to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics.
  • is a paradox that a field that primarily studies values wants to be value-free. One more paradox is this: A field that believes in the invisible hand of the market wants to be without mysteries.
  • Almost all of the key concepts by which economics operates, both consciously and unconsciously, have a long history, and their roots extend predominantly outside the range of economics, and often completely beyond that of science.
  • The History of Animal Spirits: Dreams Never Sleep
  • In this sense, “the study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insight, unless complemented and completed by a study of metaeconomics.”17
  • The more important elements of a culture or field of inquiry such as economics are found in fundamental assumptions that adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas.
  • I argue that economic questions were with mankind long before Adam Smith. I argue that the search for values in economics did not start with Adam Smith but culminated with him.
  • We should go beyond economics and study what beliefs are “behind the scenes,” ideas that have often become the dominant yet unspoken assumptions in our theories. Economics is surprisingly full of tautologies that economists are predominantly unaware of. I
  • argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics.
  • In a way, this is a study of the evolution of both homo economicus and, more importantly, the history of the animal spirits within him. This book tries to study the evolution of the rational as well as the emotional and irrational side of human beings.
  • I argue that his most influential contribution to economics was ethical. His other thoughts had been clearly expressed long before him, whether on specialization, or on the principle of the invisible hand of the market. I try to show that the principle of the invisible hand of the market is much more ancient and developed long before Adam Smith. Traces of it appear even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew thought, and in Christianity, and it is expressly stated by Aristophanes and Thomas Aquinas.
  • This is not a book on the thorough history of economic thought. The author aims instead to supplement certain chapters on the history of economic thought with a broader perspective and analysis of the influences that often escape the notice of economists and the wider public.
  • Progress (Naturalness and Civilization)
  • The Economy of Good and Evil
  • from his beginnings, man has been marked as a naturally unnatural creature, who for unique reasons surrounds himself with external possessions. Insatiability, both material and spiritual, are basic human metacharacteristics, which appear as early as the oldest myths and stories.
  • the Hebrews, with linear time, and later the Christians gave us the ideal (or amplified the Hebrew ideal) we now embrace. Then the classical economists secularized progress. How did we come to today’s progression of progress, and growth for growth’s sake?
  • The Need for Greed: The History of Consumption and Labor
  • Metamathematics From where did economics get the concept of numbers as the very foundation of the world?
  • mathematics at the core of economics, or is it just the icing of the cake, the tip of the iceberg of our field’s inquiry?
  • idea that we can manage to utilize our natural egoism, and that this evil is good for something, is an ancient philosophical and mythical concept. We will also look into the development of the ethos of homo economicus, the birth of “economic man.”
  • All of economics is, in the end, economics of good and evil. It is the telling of stories by people of people to people. Even the most sophisticated mathematical model is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us.
  • Masters of the Truth
  • Originally, truth was a domain of poems and stories, but today we perceive truth as something much more scientific, mathematical. Where does one go (to shop) for the truth? And who “has the truth” in our epoch?
  • Our animal spirits (something of a counterpart to rationality) are influenced by the archetype of the hero and our concept of what is good.
  • The entire history of ethics has been ruled by an effort to create a formula for the ethical rules of behavior. In the final chapter we will show the tautology of Max Utility, and we will discuss the concept of Max Good.
  • The History of the Invisible Hand of the Market and Homo Economicus
  • We understand “economics” to mean a broader field than just the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. We consider economics to be the study of human relations that are sometimes expressible in numbers, a study that deals with tradables, but one that also deals with nontradables (friendship, freedom, efficiency, growth).
  • When we mention economics in this book, we mean the mainstream perception of it, perhaps as best represented by Paul Samuelson.
  • By the term homo economicus, we mean the primary concept of economic anthropology. It comes from the concept of a rational individual, who, led by narrowly egotistical motives, sets out to maximize his benefit.
  • the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments (such as notes and bookkeeping) of our ancestors may have been about business and war, the first written story is mainly about great friendship and adventure.
  • there is no mention of either money or war; for example, not once does anyone in the whole epic sell or purchase something.5 No nation conquers another, and we do not encounter a mention even of the threat of violence.
  • is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, defiance, and the battle against the gods, and evil; an epic about wisdom, immortality, and also futility.
  • Gilgamesh becomes a hero not only due to his strength, but also due to discoveries and deeds whose importance were in large part economic—direct gaining of construction materials in the case of felling the cedar forest, stopping Enkidu from devastating Uruk’s economy, and discovering new desert routes during his expeditions.
  • Even today, we often consider the domain of humanity (human relations, love, friendship, beauty, art, etc.) to be unproductive;
  • Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things.
  • But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are frequently performed or created that together can altogether change the face of society.19 Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself or herself.
  • As Joseph Stiglitz says, One of the great “tricks” (some say “insights”) of neoclassical economics is to treat labour like any other factor of production. Output is written as a function of inputs—steel, machines, and labour. The mathematics treats labour like any other commodity, lulling one into thinking of labour like an ordinary commodity, such as steel or plastic.
  • Even the earliest cultures were aware of the value of cooperation on the working level—today we call this collegiality, fellowship, or, if you want to use a desecrated term, comradeship. These “lesser relationships” are useful and necessary for society and for companies because work can be done much faster and more effectively if people get along with each other on a human level
  • But true friendship, which becomes one of the central themes of the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from completely different material than teamwork. Friendship, as C. S. Lewis accurately describes it, is completely uneconomical, unbiological, unnecessary for civilization, and an unneeded relationship
  • Here we have a beautiful example of the power of friendship, one that knows how to transform (or break down) a system and change a person. Enkidu, sent to Gilgamesh as a punishment from the gods, in the end becomes his faithful friend, and together they set out against the gods. Gilgamesh would never have gathered the courage to do something like that on his own—nor would Enkidu.
  • Due to their friendship, Gilgamesh and Enkidu then intend to stand up to the gods themselves and turn a holy tree into mere (construction) material they can handle almost freely, thereby making it a part of the city-construct, part of the building material of civilization, thus “enslaving” that which originally was part of wild nature. This is a beautiful proto-example of the shifting of the borders between the sacred and profane (secular)—and to a certain extent also an early illustration of the idea that nature is there to provide cities and people with raw material and production resources.
  • started with Babylonians—rural nature becomes just a supplier of raw materials, resources (and humans the source of human resources). Nature is not the garden in which humans were created and placed, which they should care for and which they should reside in, but becomes a mere reservoir for natural (re)sources.
  • But labour is unlike any other commodity. The work environment is of no concern for steel; we do not care about steel’s well-being.16
  • Both heroes change—each from opposite poles—into humans. In this context, a psychological dimension to the story may be useful: “Enkidu (…) is Gilgamesh’s alter ego, the dark, animal side of his soul, the complement to his restless heart. When Gilgamesh found Enkidu, he changed from a hated tyrant into the protector of his city. (…)
  • To be human seems to be somewhere in between, or both of these two. We
  • this moment of rebirth from an animal to a human state, the world’s oldest preserved epic implicitly hints at something highly important. Here we see what early cultures considered the beginning of civilization. Here is depicted the difference between people and animals or, better, savages. Here the epic quietly describes birth, the awakening of a conscious, civilized human. We are witnesses to the emancipation of humanity from animals,
  • The entire history of culture is dominated by an effort to become as independent as possible from the whims of nature.39 The more developed a civilization is, the more an individual is protected from nature and natural influences and knows how to create around him a constant or controllable environment to his liking.
  • The price we pay for independence from the whims of nature is dependence on our societies and civilizations. The more sophisticated a given society is as a whole, the less its members are able to survive on their own as individuals, without society.
  • The epic captures one of the greatest leaps in the development of the division of labor. Uruk itself is one of the oldest cities of all, and in the epic it reflects a historic step forward in specialization—in the direction of a new social city arrangement. Because of the city wall, people in the city can devote themselves to things other than worrying about their own safety, and they can continue to specialize more deeply.
  • Human life in the city gains a new dimension and suddenly it seems more natural to take up issues going beyond the life span of an individual. “The city wall symbolizes as well as founds the permanence of the city as an institution which will remain forever and give its inhabitants the certainty of unlimited safety, allowing them to start investing with an outlook reaching far beyond the borders of individual life.
  • The wall around the city of Uruk is, among other things, a symbol of an internal distancing from nature, a symbol of revolts against submission to laws that do not come under the control of man and that man can at most discover and use to his benefit.
  • “The chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.”47
  • If a consumer buys something, theoretically it should rid him of one of his needs—and the aggregate of things they need should be decreased by one item. In reality, though, the aggregate of “I want to have” expands together with the growing aggregate of “I have.”
  • can be said that Enkidu was therefore happy in his natural state, because all of his needs were satiated. On the other hand, with people, it appears that the more a person has, the more developed and richer, the greater the number of his needs (including the unsaturated ones).
  • the Old Testament, this relationship is perceived completely differently. Man (humanity) is created in nature, in a garden. Man was supposed to care for the Garden of Eden and live in harmony with nature and the animals. Soon after creation, man walks naked and is not ashamed, de facto the same as the animals. What is characteristic is that man dresses (the natural state of creation itself is not enough for him), and he (literally and figuratively) covers52 himself—in shame after the fall.53
  • Nature is where one goes to hunt, collect crops, or gather the harvest. It is perceived as the saturator of our needs and nothing more. One goes back to the city to sleep and be “human.” On the contrary, evil resides in nature. Humbaba lives in the cedar forest, which also happens to be the reason to completely eradicate it.
  • Symbolically, then, we can view the entire issue from the standpoint of the epic in the following way: Our nature is insufficient, bad, evil, and good (humane) occurs only after emancipation from nature (from naturalness), through culturing and education. Humanity is considered as being in civilization.
  • The city was frequently (at least in older Jewish writings) a symbol of sin, degeneration, and decadence—nonhumanity. The Hebrews were originally a nomadic nation, one that avoided cities. It is no accident that the first important city57 mentioned in the Bible is proud Babylon,58 which God later turns to dust.
  • is enough, for example, to read the Book of Revelation to see how the vision of paradise developed from the deep Old Testament period, when paradise was a garden. John describes his vision of heaven as a city—paradise is in New Jerusalem, a city where the dimensions of the walls(!) are described in detail, as are the golden streets and gates of pearl.
  • Hebrews later also chose a king (despite the unanimous opposition of God’s prophets) and settled in cities, where they eventually founded the Lord’s Tabernacle and built a temple for Him. The city of Jerusalem later gained an illustrious position in all of religion.
  • this time Christianity (as well as the influence of the Greeks) does not consider human naturalness to be an unambiguous good, and it does not have such an idyllic relationship to nature as the Old Testament prophets.
  • If a tendency toward good is not naturally endowed in people, it must be imputed from above through violence or at least the threat of violence.
  • If we were to look at human naturalness as a good, then collective social actions need a much weaker ruling hand. If people themselves have a natural tendency (propensity) toward good, this role does not have to be supplied by the state, ruler, or, if you wish, Leviathan.
  • How does this affect economics?
  • us return for the last time to the humanization of the wild Enkidu, which is a process we can perceive with a bit of imagination as the first seed of the principle of the market’s invisible hand, and therefore the parallels with one of the central schematics of economic thinking.
  • Sometimes it is better to “harness the devil to the plow” than to fight with him. Instead of summoning up enormous energy in the fight against evil, it is better to use its own energy to reach a goal we desire; setting up a mill on the turbulent river instead of futile efforts to remove the current. This is also how Saint Prokop approached it in one of the oldest Czech legends.
  • Enkidu caused damage and it was impossible to fight against him. But with the help of a trap, trick, this evil was transformed into something that greatly benefited civilization.
  • By culturing and “domesticating” Enkidu, humanity tamed the uncontrollable wild and chaotic evil
  • Enkidu devastated the doings (the external, outside-the-walls) of the city. But he was later harnessed and fights at the side of civilization against nature, naturalness, the natural state of things.
  • A similar motif appears a thousand years after the reversal, which is well known even to noneconomists as the central idea of economics: the invisible hand of the market.
  • A similar story (reforming something animally wild and uncultivated in civilizational achievement) is used by Thomas Aquinas in his teachings. Several centuries later, this idea is fully emancipated in the hands of Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The economic and political aspects of this idea are—often incorrectly—ascribed to Adam Smith.
  • Here the individual does not try anymore to maximize his goods or profits, but what is important is writing his name in human memory in the form of heroic acts or deeds.
  • immortality, one connected with letters and the cult of the word: A name and especially a written name survives the body.”77
  • After this disappointment, he comes to the edge of the sea, where the innkeeper Siduri lives. As tonic for his sorrow, she offers him the garden of bliss, a sort of hedonistic fortress of carpe diem, where a person comes to terms with his mortality and at least in the course of the end of his life maximizes earthly pleasures, or earthly utility.
  • In the second stage, after finding his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh abandons the wall and sets out beyond the city to maximalize heroism. “In his (…) search of immortal life, Gilgamesh
  • The hero refuses hedonism in the sense of maximizing terrestrial pleasure and throws himself into things that will exceed his life. In the blink of an eye, the epic turns on its head the entire utility maximization role that mainstream economics has tirelessly tried to sew on people as a part of their nature.81
  • It is simpler to observe the main features of our civilization at a time when the picture was more readable—at a time when our civilization was just being born and was still “half-naked.” In other words, we have tried to dig down to the bedrock of our written civilization;
  • today remember Gilgamesh for his story of heroic friendship with Enkidu, not for his wall, which no longer reaches monumental heights.
  • the eleventh and final tablet, Gilgamesh again loses what he sought. Like Sisyphus, he misses his goal just before the climax
  • is there something from it that is valid today? Have we found in Gilgamesh certain archetypes that are in us to this day?
  • The very existence of questions similar to today’s economic ones can be considered as the first observation. The first written considerations of the people of that time were not so different from those today. In other words: The epic is understandable for us, and we can identify with it.
  • We have also been witnesses to the very beginnings of man’s culturing—a great drama based on a liberation and then a distancing from the natural state.
  • Let us take this as a memento in the direction of our restlessness, our inherited dissatisfaction and the volatility connected to it. Considering that they have lasted five thousand years and to this day we find ourselves in harmony with a certain feeling of futility, perhaps these characteristics are inherent in man.
  • Gilgamesh had a wall built that divided the city from wild nature and created a space for the first human culture. Nevertheless, “not even far-reaching works of civilization could satisfy human desire.”
  • Friendship shows us new, unsuspected adventures, gives us the opportunity to leave the wall and to become neither its builder nor its part—to not be another brick in the wall.
  • with the phenomenon of the creation of the city, we have seen how specialization and the accumulation of wealth was born, how holy nature was transformed into a secular supplier of resources, and also how humans’ individualistic ego was emancipated.
  • to change the system, to break down that which is standing and go on an expedition against the gods (to awaken, from naïveté to awakening) requires friendship.
  • For small acts (hunting together, work in a factory), small love is enough: Camaraderie. For great acts, however, great love is necessary, real love: Friendship. Friendship that eludes the economic understanding of quid pro quo. Friendship gives. One friend gives (fully) for the other. That is friendship for life and death,
  • The thought that humanity comes at the expense of efficiency is just as old as humanity itself—as we have shown, subjects without emotion are the ideal of many tyrants.
  • The epic later crashes this idea through the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Friendship—the biologically least essential love, which at first sight appears to be unnecessary
  • less a civilized, city person is dependent on nature, the more he or she is dependent on the rest of society. Like Enkidu, we have exchanged nature for society; harmony with (incalculable) nature for harmony with (incalculable) man.
  • human nature good or evil? To this day these questions are key for economic policy: If we believe that man is evil in his nature, therefore that a person himself is dog eat dog (animal), then the hard hand of a ruler is called for. If we believe that people in and of themselves, in their nature, gravitate toward good, then it is possible to loosen up the reins and live in a society that is more laissez-faire.
  • For a concept of historical progress, for the undeification of heroes, rulers, and nature, mankind had to wait for the Hebrews.
  • Because nature is not undeified, it is beyond consideration to explore it, let alone intervene in it (unless a person was a two-thirds god like Gilgamesh). It
  • They practiced money lending, traded in many assets (…) and especially were engaged in the trading of shares on capital markets, worked in currency exchange and frequently figured as mediators in financial transactions (…), they functioned as bankers and participated in emissions of all possible forms.
  • As regards modern capitalism (as opposed to the ancient and medieval periods) … there are activities in it which are, in certain forms, inherently (and completely necessarily) present—both from an economic and legal standpoint.7
  • As early as the “dark” ages, the Jews commonly used economic tools that were in many ways ahead of their time and that later became key elements of the modern economy:
  • Gilgamesh’s story ends where it began. There is a consistency in this with Greek myths and fables: At the end of the story, no progress occurs, no essential historic change; the story is set in indefinite time, something of a temporal limbo.
  • Jews believe in historical progress, and that progress is in this world.
  • For a nation originally based on nomadism, where did this Jewish business ethos come from? And can the Hebrews truly be considered as the architects of the values that set the direction of our civilization’s economic thought?
  • Hebrew religiosity is therefore strongly connected with this world, not with any abstract world, and those who take pleasure in worldly possessions are not a priori doing anything wrong.
  • PROGRESS: A SECULARIZED RELIGION One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end.
  • The observance of God’s Commandments in Judaism leads not to some ethereal other world, but to an abundance of material goods (Genesis 49:25–26, Leviticus 26:3–13, Deuteronomy 28:1–13) (…) There are no accusing fingers pointed at
  • There are no echoes of asceticism nor for the cleansing and spiritual effect of poverty. It is fitting therefore, that the founders of Judaism, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were all wealthy men.12
  • about due to a linear understanding of history. If history has a beginning as well as an end, and they are not the same point, then exploration suddenly makes sense in areas where the fruits are borne only in the next generation.
  • What’s more, economic progress has almost become an assumption of modern functional societies. We expect growth. We take it automatically. Today, if nothing “new” happens, if GDP does not grow (we say it stagnates) for several quarters, we consider it an anomaly.
  • however, the idea of progress itself underwent major changes, and today we perceive it very differently. As opposed to the original spiritual conceptions, today we perceive progress almost exclusively in an economic or scientific-technological sense.
  • Because care for the soul has today been replaced by care for external things,
  • This is why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth.
  • Only since the period of scientific-technological revolution (and at a time when economics was born as an independent field) is material progress automatically assumed.
  • Jewish thought is the most grounded, most realistic school of thought of all those that have influenced our culture.17 An abstract world of ideas was unknown to the Jews. To this day it is still forbidden to even depict God, people, and animals in symbols, paintings, statues, and drawings.
  • economists have become key figures of great importance in our time (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin [Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History]). They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the Promised Land—paradise on Earth.
  • REALISM AND ANTIASCETICISM Aside from ideas of progress, the Hebrews brought another very fundamental contribution to our culture: The desacralization of heroes, nature, and rulers.
  • Voltaire writes: “It certain fact is, that in his public laws he [Moses] never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present life.”21
  • As opposed to Christianity, the concept of an extraterrestrial paradise or heaven was not developed much in Hebrew thought.19 The paradise of the Israelites—Eden—was originally placed on Earth at a given place in Mesopotamia20 and at a given time,
  • The Hebrews consider the world to be real—not just a shadow reflection of a better world somewhere in the cloud of ideas, something the usual interpretation of history ascribes to Plato. The soul does not struggle against the body and is not its prisoner, as Augustine would write later.
  • The land, the world, the body, and material reality are for Jews the paramount setting for divine history, the pinnacle of creation. This idea is the conditio sine qua non of the development of economics, something of an utterly earthly making,
  • The mythology of the hero-king was strongly developed in that period, which Claire Lalouette summarizes into these basic characteristics: Beauty (a perfect face, on which it is “pleasant to look upon,” but also “beauty,” expressed in the Egyptian word nefer, not only means aesthetics, but contains moral qualities as well),
  • THE HERO AND HIS UNDEIFICATION: THE DREAM NEVER SLEEPS The concept of the hero is more important than it might appear. It may be the remote origin of Keynes’s animal spirits, or the desire to follow a kind of internal archetype that a given individual accepts as his own and that society values.
  • This internal animator of ours, our internal mover, this dream, never sleeps and it influences our behavior—including economic behavior—more than we want to realize.
  • manliness and strength,28 knowledge and intelligence,29 wisdom and understanding, vigilance and performance, fame and renown (fame which overcomes enemies because “a thousand men would not be able to stand firmly in his presence”);30 the hero is a good shepherd (who takes care of his subordinates), is a copper-clad rampart, the shield of the land, and the defender of heroes.
  • Each of us probably has a sort of “hero within”—a kind of internal role-model, template, an example that we (knowingly or not) follow. It is very important what kind of archetype it is, because its role is dominantly irrational and changes depending on time and the given civilization.
  • The oldest was the so-called Trickster—a fraudster; then the culture bearer—Rabbit; the musclebound hero called Redhorn; and finally the most developed form of hero: the Twins.
  • the Egyptian ruler, just as the Sumerian, was partly a god, or the son of a god.31
  • Jacob defrauds his father Isaac and steals his brother Esau’s blessing of the firstborn. Moses murders an Egyptian. King David seduces the wife of his military commander and then has him killed. In his old age, King Solomon turns to pagan idols, and so on.
  • Anthropology knows several archetypes of heroes. The Polish-born American anthropologist Paul Radin examined the myths of North American Indians and, for example, in his most influential book, The Trickster, he describes their four basic archetypes of heroes.
  • The Torah’s heroes (if that term can be used at all) frequently make mistakes and their mistakes are carefully recorded in the Bible—maybe precisely so that none of them could be deified.32
  • We do not have to go far for examples. Noah gets so drunk he becomes a disgrace; Lot lets his own daughters seduce him in a similar state of drunkenness. Abraham lies and (repeatedly) tries to sell his wife as a concubine.
  • the Hebrew heroes correspond most to the Tricksters, the Culture Bearers, and the Twins. The divine muscleman, that dominant symbol we think of when we say hero, is absent here.
  • To a certain extent it can be said that the Hebrews—and later Christianity—added another archetype, the archetype of the heroic Sufferer.35 Job
  • Undeification, however, does not mean a call to pillage or desecration; man was put here to take care of nature (see the story of the Garden of Eden or the symbolism of the naming of the animals). This protection and care of nature is also related to the idea of progress
  • For the heroes who moved our civilization to where it is today, the heroic archetypes of the cunning trickster, culture bearer, and sufferer are rather more appropriate.
  • the Old Testament strongly emphasizes the undeification of nature.37 Nature is God’s creation, which speaks of divinity but is not the domain of moody gods
  • This is very important for democratic capitalism, because the Jewish heroic archetype lays the groundwork much better for the development of the later phenomenon of the hero, which better suits life as we know it today. “The heroes laid down their arms and set about trading to become wealthy.”
  • in an Old Testament context, the pharaoh was a mere man (whom one could disagree with, and who could be resisted!).
  • RULERS ARE MERE MEN In a similar historical context, the Old Testament teachings carried out a similar desacralization of rulers, the so-called bearers of economic policy.
  • Ultimately the entire idea of a political ruler stood against the Lord’s will, which is explicitly presented in the Torah. The Lord unequivocally preferred the judge as the highest form of rule—an
  • The needs of future generations will have to be considered; after all humankind are the guardians of God’s world. Waste of natural resources, whether privately owned or nationally owned is forbidden.”39
  • Politics lost its character of divine infallibility, and political issues were subject to questioning. Economic policy could become a subject of examination.
  • 44 God first creates with the word and then on individual days He divides light from darkness, water from dry land, day from night, and so forth—and He gives order to things.45 The world is created orderly— it is wisely, reasonably put together. The way of the world is put together at least partially46 decipherably by any other wise and reasonable being who honors rational rules.
  • which for the methodology of science and economics is very important because disorder and chaos are difficult to examine scientifically.43 Faith in some kind of rational and logical order in a system (society, the economy) is a silent assumption of any (economic) examination.
  • THE PRAISE OF ORDER AND WISDOM: MAN AS A PERFECTER OF CREATION The created world has an order of sorts, an order recognizable by us as people,
  • From the very beginning, when God distances Himself from the entire idea, there is an anticipation that there is nothing holy, let alone divine, in politics. Rulers make mistakes, and it is possible to subject them to tough criticism—which frequently occurs indiscriminately through the prophets in the Old Testament.
  • Hebrew culture laid the foundations for the scientific examination of the world.
  • Examining the world is therefore an absolutely legitimate activity, and one that is even requested by God—it is a kind of participation in the Creator’s work.51 Man is called on to understand himself and his surroundings and to use his knowledge for good.
  • I was there when he set heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep (…) Then I was the craftsman at his side.47
  • There are more urgings to gain wisdom in the Old Testament. “Wisdom calls aloud in the street (…): ‘How long will you simple ones love your simple ways?’”49 Or several chapters later: “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”50
  • examination is not forbidden. The fact that order can be grasped by human reason is another unspoken assumption that serves as a cornerstone of any scientific examination.
  • then, my sons, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways (…) Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway. For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord.
  • the rational examination of nature has its roots, surprisingly, in religion.
  • The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began. When there were no oceans, I was given birth, when there were no springs abounding with water, before the mountains were settled in place,
  • The Book of Proverbs emphasizes specifically several times that it was wisdom that was present at the creation of the world. Wisdom personified calls out:
  • The last act, final stroke of the brush of creation, naming of the animals—this act is given to a human, it is not done by God, as one would expect. Man was given the task of completing the act of creation that the Lord began:
  • MAN AS A FINISHER OF CREATION The creation of the world, as it is explained in Jewish teachings, is described in the Book of Genesis. Here God (i) creates, (ii) separates, and (iii) names [my emphasis]:
  • Naming is a symbolic expression. In Jewish culture (and also in our culture to this day), the right to name meant sovereign rights and belonged, for example, to explorers (new places), inventors (new principles), or parents (children)—that is, to those who were there at the genesis, at the origin. This right was handed over by God to mankind.
  • The Naming itself (the capital N is appropriate) traditionally belongs to the crowning act of the Creator and represents a kind of grand finale of creation, the last move of the brush to complete the picture—a signature of the master.
  • Without naming, reality does not exist; it is created together with language. Wittgenstein tightly names this in his tractatus—the limits of our language are the limits of our world.53
  • He invented (fictitiously and completely abstractly!) a framework that was generally accepted and soon “made into” reality. Marx invented similarly; he created the notion of class exploitation. Through his idea, the perception of history and reality was changed for a large part of the world for nearly an entire century.
  • Reality is not a given; it is not passive. Perceiving reality and “facts” requires man’s active participation. It is man who must take the last step, an act (and we
  • How does this relate to economics? Reality itself, our “objective” world, is cocreated, man himself participates in the creation; creation, which is somewhat constantly being re-created.
  • Our scientific models put the finishing touches on reality, because (1) they interpret, (2) they give phenomena a name, (3) they enable us to classify the world and phenomena according to logical forms, and (4) through these models we de facto perceive reality.
  • When man finds a new linguistic framework or analytical model, or stops using the old one, he molds or remolds reality. Models are only in our heads; they are not “in objective reality.” In this sense, Newton invented (not merely discovered!) gravity.
  • A real-ization act on our part represents the creation of a construct, the imputation of sense and order (which is beautifully expressed by the biblical act of naming, or categorization, sorting, ordering).
  • Keynes enters into the history of economic thought from the same intellectual cadence; his greatest contribution to economics was precisely the resurrection of the imperceptible—for example in the form of animal spirits or uncertainty. The economist Piero Mini even ascribes Keynes’s doubting and rebellious approach to his almost Talmudic education.63
  • God connects man with the task of guarding and protecting the Garden of Eden, and thus man actually cocreates the cultural landscape. The Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer also describes this: “Such is reality, and it is so deep that it willingly crystallizes into worlds. Therefore I profess that reality is a creation and not a place of occurrence for objectively given phenomena.”61
  • in this viewpoint it is possible to see how Jewish thought is mystical—it admits the role of the incomprehensible. Therefore, through its groundedness, Jewish thought indulges mystery and defends itself against a mechanistic-causal explanation of the world: “The Jewish way of thinking, according to Veblen, emphasizes the spiritual, the miraculous, the intangible.
  • The Jews believed the exact opposite. The world is created by a good God, and evil appears in it as a result of immoral human acts. Evil, therefore, is induced by man.66 History unwinds according to the morality of human acts.
  • What’s more, history seems to be based on morals; morals seem to be the key determining factors of history. For the Hebrews, history proceeds according to how morally its actors behave.
  • The Sumerians believed in dualism—good and evil deities exist, and the earth of people becomes their passive battlefield.
  • GOOD AND EVIL IN US: A MORAL EXPLANATION OF WELL-BEING We have seen that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, good and evil are not yet addressed systematically on a moral level.
  • This was not about moral-human evil, but rather a kind of natural evil. It is as if good and evil were not touched by morality at all. Evil simply occurred. Period.
  • the epic, good and evil are not envisaged morally—they are not the result of an (a)moral act. Evil was not associated with free moral action or individual will.
  • Hebrew thought, on the other hand, deals intensively with moral good and evil. A moral dimension touches the core of its stories.65
  • discrepancy between savings and investment, and others are convinced of the monetary essence
  • The entire history of the Jewish nation is interpreted and perceived in terms of morality. Morality has become, so to speak, a mover and shaker of Hebrew history.
  • sunspots. The Hebrews came up with the idea that morals were behind good and bad years, behind the economic cycle. But we would be getting ahead of ourselves. Pharaoh’s Dream: Joseph and the First Business Cycle To
  • It is the Pharaoh’s well-known dream of seven fat and seven lean cows, which he told to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph interpreted the dream as a macroeconomic prediction of sorts: Seven years of abundance were to be followed by seven years of poverty, famine, and misery.
  • Self-Contradicting Prophecy Here, let’s make several observations on this: Through taxation74 on the level of one-fifth of a crop75 in good years to save the crop and then open granaries in bad years, the prophecy was de facto prevented (prosperous years were limited and hunger averted—through a predecessor of fiscal stabilization).
  • The Old Testament prophesies therefore were not any deterministic look into the future, but warnings and strategic variations of the possible, which demanded some kind of reaction. If the reaction was adequate, what was prophesied would frequently not occur at all.
  • This principle stands directly against the self-fulfilling prophecy,80 the well-known concept of social science. Certain prophecies become self-fulfilling when expressed (and believed) while others become self-contradicting prophecies when pronounced (and believed).
  • If the threat is anticipated, it is possible to totally or at least partially avoid it. Neither Joseph nor the pharaoh had the power to avoid bounty or crop failure (in this the dream interpretation was true and the appearance of the future mystical), but they avoided the impacts and implications of the prophecy (in this the interpretation of the dream was “false”)—famine did not ultimately occur in Egypt, and this was due to the application of reasonable and very intuitive economic policy.
  • Let us further note that the first “macroeconomic forecast” appears in a dream.
  • back to Torah: Later in this story we will notice that there is no reason offered as to why the cycle occurs (that will come later). Fat years will simply come, and then lean years after them.
  • Moral Explanation of a Business Cycle That is fundamentally different from later Hebrew interpretations, when the Jewish nation tries to offer reasons why the nation fared well or poorly. And those reasons are moral.
  • If you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them, then the Lord your God will keep his covenant of love with you, as he swore to your forefathers. He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers.
  • Only in recent times have some currents of economics again become aware of the importance of morals and trust in the form of measuring the quality of institutions, the level of justice, business ethics, corruption, and so forth, and examining their influence on the economy,
  • From today’s perspective, we can state that the moral dimension entirely disappeared from economic thought for a long time, especially due to the implementation of Mandeville’s concept of private vices that contrarily support the public welfare
  • Without being timid, we can say this is the first documented attempt to explain the economic cycle. The economic cycle, the explanation of which is to this day a mystery to economists, is explained morally in the Old Testament.
  • But how do we consolidate these two conflicting interpretations of the economic cycle: Can ethics be responsible for it or not? Can we influence reality around us through our acts?
  • it is not within the scope of this book to answer that question; justice has been done to the question if it manages to sketch out the main contours of possible searches for answers.
  • THE ECONOMICS OF GOOD AND EVIL: DOES GOOD PAY OFF? This is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.
  • Kant, the most important modern thinker in the area of ethics, answers on the contrary that if we carry out a “moral” act on the basis of economic calculus (therefore we carry out an hedonistic consideration; see below) in the expectation of later recompense, its morality is lost. Recompense, according to the strict Kant, annuls ethics.
  • Inquiring about the economics of good and evil, however, is not that easy. Where would Kant’s “moral dimension of ethics” go if ethics paid? If we do good for profit, the question of ethics becomes a mere question of rationality.
  • Job’s friends try to show that he must have sinned in some way and, in doing so, deserved God’s punishment. They are absolutely unable to imagine a situation in which Job, as a righteous man, would suffer without (moral) cause. Nevertheless, Job insists that he deserves no punishment because he has committed no offense: “God has wronged me and drawn his net around me.”94
  • But Job remains righteous, even though it does not pay to do so: Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.95 And till I die, I will not deny my integrity I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.96
  • He remains righteous, even if his only reward is death. What economic advantage could he have from that?
  • morals cannot be considered in the economic dimension of productivity and calculus. The role of the Hebrews was to do good, whether it paid off or not. If good (outgoing) is rewarded by incoming goodness, it is a bonus,99 not a reason to do outgoing good. Good and reward do not correlate to each other.
  • This reasoning takes on a dimension of its own in the Old Testament. Good (incoming) has already happened to us. We must do good (outgoing) out of gratitude for the good (incoming) shown to us in the past.
  • So why do good? After all, suffering is the fate of many biblical figures. The answer can only be: For good itself. Good has the power to be its own reward. In this sense, goodness gets its reward, which may or may not take on a material dimension.
  • the Hebrews offered an interesting compromise between the teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans. We will go into it in detail later, so only briefly
  • constraint. It calls for bounded optimalization (with limits). A kind of symbiosis existed between the legitimate search for one’s own utility (or enjoyment of life) and maintaining rules, which are not negotiable and which are not subject to optimalization.
  • In other words, clear (exogenously given) rules exist that must be observed and cannot be contravened. But within these borders it is absolutely possible, and even recommended, to increase utility.
  • the mining of enjoyment must not come at the expense of exogenously given rules. “Judaism comes therefore to train or educate the unbounded desire … for wealth, so that market activities and patterns of consumption operate within a God-given morality.”102
  • The Epicureans acted with the goal of maximizing utility without regard for rules (rules developed endogenously, from within the system, computed from that which increased utility—this was one of the main trumps of the Epicurean school; they did not need exogenously given norms, and argued that they could “calculate” ethics (what to do) for every given situation from the situation itself).
  • The Stoics could not seek their enjoyment—or, by another name, utility. They could not in any way look back on it, and in no way could they count on it. They could only live according to rules (the greatest weakness of this school was to defend where exogenously the given rules came from and whether they are universal) and take a indifferent stand to the results of their actions.
  • To Love the Law The Jews not only had to observe the law (perhaps the word covenant would be more appropriate), but they were to love it because it was good.
  • Their relationship to the law was not supposed to be one of duty,105 but one of gratitude, love. Hebrews were to do good (outgoing), because goodness (incoming) has already been done to them.
  • This is in stark contrast with today’s legal system, where, naturally, no mention of love or gratefulness exists. But God expects a full internalization of the commandments and their fulfillment with love, not as much duty. By no means was this on the basis of the cost-benefit analyses so widespread in economics today, which determines when it pays to break the law and when not to (calculated on the basis of probability of being caught and the amount of punishment vis-à-vis the possible gain).
  • And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? To the Lord your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord set his affection on your forefathers and loved them….
  • the principle of doing good (outgoing) on the basis of a priori demonstrated good (incoming) was also taken over by the New Testament. Atonement itself is based on an a priori principle; all our acts are preceded by good.
  • The Hebrews, originally a nomadic tribe, preferred to be unrestrained and grew up in constant freedom of motion.
  • Human laws, if they are in conflict with the responsibilities given by God, are subordinate to personal responsibility, and a Jew cannot simply join the majority, even if it is legally allowed. Ethics, the concept of good, is therefore always superior to all local laws, rules, and customs:
  • THE SHACKLES OF THE CITY Owing to the Hebrew’s liberation from Egyptian slavery, freedom and responsibility become the key values of Jewish thought.
  • Laws given by God are binding for Jews, and God is the absolute source of all values,
  • The Hebrew ideal is represented by the paradise of the Garden of Eden, not a city.116 The despised city civilization or the tendency to see in it a sinful and shackling way of life appears in glimpses and allusions in many places in the Old Testament.
  • The nomadic Jewish ethos is frequently derived from Abraham, who left the Chaldean city of Ur on the basis of a command:
  • In addition, they were aware of a thin two-way line between owner and owned. We own material assets, but—to a certain extent—they own us and tie us down. Once we become used to a certain material
  • This way of life had understandably immense economic impacts. First, such a society lived in much more connected relationships, where there was no doubt that everyone mutually depended on each other. Second, their frequent wanderings meant the inability to own more than they could carry; the gathering up of material assets did not have great weight—precisely because the physical weight (mass) of things was tied to one place.
  • One of Moses’s greatest deeds was that he managed to explain to his nation once and for all that it is better to remain hungry and liberated than to be a slave with food “at no cost.”
  • SOCIAL WELFARE: NOT TO ACT IN THE MANNER OF SODOM
  • regulations is developed in the Old Testament, one we hardly find in any other nation of the time. In Hebrew teachings, aside from individual utility, indications of the concept of maximalizing utility societywide appear for the first time as embodied in the Talmudic principle of Kofin al midat S´dom, which can be translated as “one is compelled not to act in the manner of Sodom” and to take care of the weaker members of society.
  • In a jubilee year, debts were to be forgiven,125 and Israelites who fell into slavery due to their indebtedness were to be set free.126
  • Such provisions can be seen as the antimonopoly and social measures of the time. The economic system even then had a clear tendency to converge toward asset concentration, and therefore power as well. It would appear that these provisions were supposed to prevent this process
  • Land at the time could be “sold,” and it was not sale, but rent. The price (rent) of real estate depended on how long there was until a forgiveness year. It was about the awareness that we may work the land, but in the last instance we are merely “aliens and strangers,” who have the land only rented to us for a fixed time. All land and riches came from the Lord.
  • These provisions express a conviction that freedom and inheritance should not be permanently taken away from any Israelite. Last but not least, this system reminds us that no ownership lasts forever and that the fields we plow are not ours but the Lord’s.
  • Glean Another social provision was the right to glean, which in Old Testament times ensured at least basic sustenance for the poorest. Anyone who owned a field had the responsibility not to harvest it to the last grain but to leave the remains in the field for the poor.
  • Tithes and Early Social Net Every Israelite also had the responsibility of levying a tithe from their entire crop. They had to be aware from whom all ownership comes and, by doing so, express their thanks.
  • “Since the community has an obligation to provide food, shelter, and basic economic goods for the needy, it has a moral right and duty to tax its members for this purpose. In line with this duty, it may have to regulate markets, prices and competition, to protect the interests of its weakest members.”135
  • In Judaism, charity is not perceived as a sign of goodness; it is more of a responsibility. Such a society then has the right to regulate its economy in such a way that the responsibility of charity is carried out to its satisfaction.
  • With a number of responsibilities, however, comes the difficulty of getting them into practice. Their fulfillment, then, in cases when it can be done, takes place gradually “in layers.” Charitable activities are classified in the Talmud according to several target groups with various priorities, classified according to, it could be said, rules of subsidiarity.
  • Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.140 As one can see, aside from widows and orphans, the Old Testament also includes immigrants in its area of social protection.141 The Israelites had to have the same rules apply for them as for themselves—they could not discriminate on the basis of their origin.
  • ABSTRACT MONEY, FORBIDDEN INTEREST, AND OUR DEBT AGE If it appears to us that today’s era is based on money and debt, and our time will be written into history as the “Debt age,” then it will certainly be interesting to follow how this development occurred.
  • Money is a social abstractum. It is a social agreement, an unwritten contract.
  • The first money came in the form of clay tablets from Mesopotamia, on which debts were written. These debts were transferable, so the debts became currency. In the end, “It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is ‘credo,’ the Latin for ‘I believe.’”
  • To a certain extent it could be said that credit, or trust, was the first currency. It can materialize, it can be embodied in coins, but what is certain is that “money is not metal,” even the rarest metal, “it is trust inscribed,”
  • Inseparably, with the original credit (money) goes interest. For the Hebrews, the problem of interest was a social issue: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”
  • there were also clearly set rules setting how far one could go in setting guarantees and the nonpayment of debts. No one should become indebted to the extent that they could lose the source of their livelihood:
  • In the end, the term “bank” comes from the Italian banci, or the benches that Jewish lenders sat on.157
  • Money is playing not only its classical roles (as a means of exchange, a holder of value, etc.) but also a much greater, stronger role: It can stimulate, drive (or slow down) the whole economy. Money plays a national economic role.
  • In the course of history, however, the role of loans changed, and the rich borrowed especially for investment purposes,
  • Today the position and significance of money and debt has gone so far and reached such a dominant position in society that operating with debts (fiscal policy) or interest or money supply (monetary policy) means that these can, to a certain extent, direct (or at least strongly influence) the whole economy and society.
  • In such a case a ban on interest did not have great ethical significance. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar (1225-1274), also considers similarly; in his time, the strict ban on lending with usurious interest was loosened, possibly due to him.
  • As a form of energy, money can travel in three dimensions, vertically (those who have capital lend to those who do not) and horizontally (speed and freedom in horizontal or geographic motion has become the by-product—or driving force?—of globalization). But money (as opposed to people) can also travel through time.
  • money is something like energy that can travel through time. And it is a very useful energy, but at the same time very dangerous as well. Wherever
  • Aristotle condemned interest162 not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons. Thomas Aquinas shared the same fear of interest and he too argued that time does not belong to us, and that is why we must not require interest.
  • MONEY AS ENERGY: TIME TRAVEL AND GROSS DEBT PRODUCT (GDP)
  • Due to this characteristic, we can energy-strip the future to the benefit of the present. Debt can transfer energy from the future to the present.163 On the other hand, saving can accumulate energy from the past and send it to the present.
  • labor was not considered degrading in the Old Testament. On the contrary, the subjugation of nature is even a mission from God that originally belonged to man’s very first blessings.
  • LABOR AND REST: THE SABBATH ECONOMY
  • The Jews as well as Aristotle behaved very guardedly toward loans. The issue of interest/usury became one of the first economic debates. Without having an inkling of the future role of economic policy (fiscal and monetary), the ancient Hebrews may have unwittingly felt that they were discovering in interest a very powerful weapon, one that can be a good servant, but (literally) an enslaving master as well.
  • It’s something like a dam. When we build one, we are preventing periods of drought and flooding in the valley; we are limiting nature’s whims and, to a large extent, avoiding its incalculable cycles. Using dams, we can regulate the flow of water to nearly a constant. With it we tame the river (and we can also gain
  • But if we do not regulate the water wisely, it may happen that we would overfill the dam and it would break. For the cities lying in the valley, their end would be worse than if a dam were never there.
  • If man lived in harmony with nature before, now, after the fall, he must fight; nature stands against him and he against it and the animals. From the Garden we have moved unto a (battle)field.
  • Only after man’s fall does labor turn into a curse.168 It could even be said that this is actually the only curse, the curse of the unpleasantness of labor, that the Lord places on Adam.
  • Both Plato and Aristotle consider labor to be necessary for survival, but that only the lower classes should devote themselves to it so that the elites would not have to be bothered with it and so that they could devote themselves to “purely spiritual matters—art, philosophy, and politics.”
  • Work is also not only a source of pleasure but a social standing; It is considered an honor. “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings.”170 None of the surrounding cultures appreciate work as much. The idea of the dignity of labor is unique in the Hebrew tradition.
  • Hebrew thinking is characterized by a strict separation of the sacred from the profane. In life, there are simply areas that are holy, and in which it is not allowed to economize, rationalize, or maximize efficiency.
  • good example is the commandment on the Sabbath. No one at all could work on this day, not even the ones who were subordinate to an observant Jew:
  • the message of the commandment on Saturday communicated that people were not primarily created for labor.
  • Paradoxically, it is precisely this commandment out of all ten that is probably the most violated today.
  • Aristotle even considers labor to be “a corrupted waste of time which only burdens people’s path to true honour.”
  • we have days when we must not toil connected (at least lexically) with the word meaning emptiness: the English term “vacation” (or emptying), as with the French term, les vacances, or German die Freizeit, meaning open time, free time, but also…
  • Translated into economic language: The meaning of utility is not to increase it permanently but to rest among existing gains. Why do we learn how to constantly increase gains but not how to…
  • This dimension has disappeared from today’s economics. Economic effort has no goal at which it would be possible to rest. Today we only know growth for growth’s sake, and if our company or country prospers, that does not…
  • Six-sevenths of time either be dissatisfied and reshape the world into your own image, man, but one-seventh you will rest and not change the creation. On the seventh day, enjoy creation and enjoy the work of your hands.
  • the purpose of creation was not just creating but that it had an end, a goal. The process was just a process, not a purpose. The whole of Being was created so…
  • Saturday was not established to increase efficiency. It was a real ontological break that followed the example of the Lord’s seventh day of creation. Just as the Lord did not rest due to tiredness or to regenerate strength; but because He was done. He was done with His work, so that He could enjoy it, to cherish in His creation.
  • If we believe in rest at all today, it is for different reasons. It is the rest of the exhausted machine, the rest of the weak, and the rest of those who can’t handle the tempo. It’s no wonder that the word “rest…
  • Related to this, we have studied the first mention of a business cycle with the pharaoh’s dream as well as seen a first attempt (that we may call…
  • We have tried to show that the quest for a heaven on Earth (similar to the Jewish one) has, in its desacralized form, actually also been the same quest for many of the…
  • We have also seen that the Hebrews tried to explain the business cycle with morality and ethics. For the Hebrews,…
  • ancient Greek economic ethos, we will examine two extreme approaches to laws and rules. While the Stoics considered laws to be absolutely valid, and utility had infinitesimal meaning in their philosophy, the Epicureans, at least in the usual historical explanation, placed utility and pleasure in first place—rules were to be made based on the principle of utility.
  • CONCLUSION: BETWEEN UTILITY AND PRINCIPLE The influence of Jewish thought on the development of market democracy cannot be overestimated. The key heritage for us was the lack of ascetic perception of the world, respect to law and private…
  • We have tried to show how the Torah desacralized three important areas in our lives: the earthly ruler, nature,…
  • What is the relationship between the good and evil that we do (outgoing) and the utility of disutility that we (expect to) get as a reward (incoming)? We have seen…
  • The Hebrews never despised material wealth; on contrary, the Jewish faith puts great responsibility on property management. Also the idea of progress and the linear perception of time gives our (economic)…
  • the Hebrews managed to find something of a happy compromise between both of these principles.
  • will not be able to completely understand the development of the modern notion of economics without understanding the disputes between the Epicureans and the Stoics;
  • poets actually went even further, and with their speech they shaped and established reality and truth. Honor, adventure, great deeds, and the acclaim connected with them played an important role in the establishment of the true, the real.
  • those who are famous will be remembered by people. They become more real, part of the story, and they start to be “realized,” “made real” in the lives of other people. That which is stored in memory is real; that which is forgotten is as if it never existed.
  • Today’s scientific truth is founded on the notion of exact and objective facts, but poetic truth stands on an interior (emotional) consonance with the story or poem. “It is not addressed first to the brain … [myth] talks directly to the feeling system.”
  • “epic and tragic poets were widely assumed to be the central ethical thinkers and teachers of Greece; nobody thought of their work as less serious, less aimed at truth, than the speculative prose treatises of historians and philosophers.”5 Truth and reality were hidden in speech, stories, and narration.
  • Ancient philosophy, just as science would later, tries to find constancy, constants, quantities, inalterabilities. Science seeks (creates?) order and neglects everything else as much as it can. In their own experiences, everyone knows that life is not like that,
  • Just as scientists do today, artists drew images of the world that were representative, and therefore symbolic, picturelike, and simplifying (but thus also misleading), just like scientific models, which often do not strive to be “realistic.”
  • general? In the end, poetry could be more sensitive to the truth than the philosophical method or, later, the scientific method. “Tragic poems, in virtue of their subject matter and their social function, are likely to confront and explore problems about human beings and luck that a philosophical text might be able to omit or avoid.”8
Javier E

Listening to Michael Jackson After 'Leaving Neverland' - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...585295

art morality

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The ancient question: What moral stain awaits us if we cannot abandon the art of a monster? None.
  • Michael Jackson’s art matters. It matters not because of any sociopolitical significance, although many of his songs bear uplifting messages. It matters not for its implications about race in America. It matters because of the simple fact that it is, in every sense, the gift revealed.
  • A generation ago, young people read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift to understand how to live meaningful lives by cultivating within themselves the ability to receive art: “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”
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  • You can cast away Picasso because Hannah Gadsby told you he was cruel to women. But can you cast away Guernica?
  • Art isn’t something mere; it doesn’t exist as the moral bona fides of the person who made it. That person is a supernumerary. Separate yourself from any art—even popular art; even art created simply as entertainment—and you separate yourself from all of it
Javier E

America Is Flunking Math - Persuasion - 1 views

www.persuasion.community/...ica-is-flunking-math-education

STEM math education math education anti-racism Critical Theory research Science bias

shared by Javier E on 17 May 21 - No Cached
  • One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.
  • The United States became the dominant force in the mathematical sciences in the wake of World War II, largely due to the disastrous genocidal policies of the Third Reich. The Nazis’ obsession with purging German science of what it viewed as nefarious Jewish influence led to a massive exodus of Jewish mathematicians and scientists to America
  • Indeed, academic institutions in the United States have thrived largely because of their ability to attract talented individuals from around the world.
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  • The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession.
  • Can Americans maintain this unmatched excellence in the future? There are worrisome signs that suggest not.
  • The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compares mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds by country worldwide. According to its 2018 report, America ranked 37th while China, America’s main competitor for world leadership, came in first.
  • This is despite the fact that the United States is the fifth-highest spender per pupil among the 37 developed OECD nations
  • This massive failure of our K-12 education system trickles through the STEM pipeline.
  • At the undergraduate level, too few American students are prepared for higher-level mathematics courses. These students are then unprepared for rigorous graduate-level work
  • According to our own experiences at the universities where we teach, an overwhelming majority of American students with strong math backgrounds are either foreign-born or first-generation students who have additional support from their education-conscious families. At all levels, STEM disciplines are more and more dependent on a constant flow of foreign talent.
  • There are many reasons for this failure, but the way that we educate and prepare teachers is particularly influential. The vast majority of K-12 math teachers are graduates of teacher-preparation programs that teach very little substantive mathematics
  • This has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down reforms. One of the latest fads is anti-racist mathematics. Promoted in several states, the bizarre doctrine threatens to further degrade the teaching of mathematics.
  • Another major concern is the twisted interpretation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
  • Under the banner of DEI, universities are abandoning the use of standardized tests like the SAT and GRE in admissions, and cities are considering scrapping academic tracking and various gifted programs in schools, which they deem “inequitable.”
  • such programs are particularly effective, when properly implemented, at discovering and encouraging talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
  • The new 2021 Mathematics Framework, currently under consideration by California’s Department of Education, does away “with all tracking, acceleration, gifted programs, or any instruction that involves clustering by individual differences, without expressing any awareness of the impact these drastic alterations would have in preparing STEM-ready candidates.”
  • These measures will not only hinder the progress of the generations of our future STEM workforce but also contribute to structural inequalities, as they are uniquely detrimental to students whose parents cannot send them to private schools or effective enrichment programs.
  • These are just a few examples of an unprecedented fervor for revolutionary change in the name of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a doctrine that views the world as a fierce battleground for the narratives of various identity groups.
  • This will only lead to a further widening of racial disparities in educational outcomes while lowering American children’s rankings in education internationally.
  • Ill-conceived DEI policies, often informed by CRT, and the declining standards of K-12 math education feed each other in a vicious circle
  • Regarding minorities, in particular, public K-12 education all too often produces students unprepared to compete, thus leading to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, and faculty positions. This disparity is then condemned as a manifestation of structural racism, resulting in administrative measures to lower the evaluation criteria. Lowering standards at all levels leads eventually to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, and so on in a downward spiral.
  • A case in point is the recent report by the American Mathematical Society that accuses the entire mathematics community, with the thinnest of specific evidence, of systemic racial discrimination. A major justification put forward for such a grave accusation is the lack of sufficient representation of Black mathematicians in the professio
  • the report, while raising awareness of several ugly facts from the long-ago past, makes little effort to address the real reasons for this, mainly the catastrophic failure of the K-12 mathematical educational system.
  • The National Science Foundation, a federal institution meant to support fundamental research, is now diverting some of its limited funding to various DEI initiatives of questionable benefit.
  • Meanwhile, other countries, especially China, are doing precisely the opposite, following the model of our past dedication to objective measures of excellence. How long before we will see a reverse exodus, away from the United States?
  • The present crisis can still be reversed by focusing on a few concrete actions:
  • Improve schools in urban areas and inner-city neighborhoods by following the most promising education programs. These programs demonstrate that inner-city children benefit if they are challenged by high standards and a nurturing environment.
  • Follow the lead of other highly successful rigorous programs such as BASIS schools and Math for America, which focus on rigorous STEM curricula, combined with 21st-century teaching methods, and recruit talented teachers to help them build on their STEM knowledge and teaching methods.
  • Increase, rather than eliminate, tailored instruction, both for accelerated and remedial math courses.
  • Reject the soft bigotry of low expectations, that Black children cannot do well in competitive mathematics programs and need dumbed-down ethnocentric versions of mathematics.
  • Uphold the objective selection process based on merit at all levels of education and research.
Javier E

I Actually Read Woody Allen's Memoir - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...612736

morality art censorship

shared by Javier E on 07 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • I’m a Woody Allen person, not because I disbelieve Dylan—in fact, I believe her. I’m a Woody Allen person because his movies helped shape me, and I can’t unsee them, the way I can’t un-read The Great Gatsby or un-hear “Gimme Shelter.” These are things that informed my sensibilities. All of them are part of me.
  • As to our opinion about his past, one thing is for sure: He couldn’t care less about it. “Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public,” he says in the final lines of the book, “I prefer to live on in my apartment.”Exit laughing.
  • the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which the Woody Allen character, distraught by his realization that there is no God and considering suicide, stumbles into a revival house to find the movie playing. He says in voice-over: The movie was a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and I always loved it. And I’m watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film. And I started to feel,  How can you even think of killing yourself? I mean, isn’t it so stupid? I mean, look at all the people up there on the screen. They’re real funny—and what if the worst is true? What if there’s no God and you only go around once and that’s it? Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? I did.I do.
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  • Can we still enjoy his work?  Of course we can, because the movies don’t really belong to Woody Allen any more than they do to you and me.
  • Some wrongs are so great that no legal or bureaucratic process can ever make things right. At some point, the only way to get unchained from a monster is through forgiveness. It would seem impossible for Geimer to be able to forgive Polanski, but she did—who understands how grace operates?—and has apparently been at peace ever since.
  • Woody Allen taught us that New York is the center of the world and L.A. is outer space. He installed himself in Elaine’s for a thousand dinners in the company of glittering figures of yesteryear (Norman Mailer! Liza Minnelli! Bill Bradley!) and made movie after movie and became one of the famous people the rest of the country associates most closely with the city.
  • He’s a 42-year-old guy with a 12th grade girlfriend, and if you want to understand the ’70s, maybe I have to tell you only that Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times made no particular note of this fact other than to describe Tracy—played by Mariel Hemingway—as “a beautiful, 17-year-old nymphet with a turned-down mouth.” Or I could tell you that Manhattan was nominated for two Academy Awards and was widely loved by the in-crowd.
  • Soon enough he was writing, directing, and then acting in his own movies. He developed a particular method of moviemaking that was in some regards reminiscent of the studio system: he worked fast, almost never rehearsed, and rarely shot multiple takes or engineered complex shots: “As long as you’re dealing with comedy, particularly broad comedy, all you want is the scene should be lit, loud and fast.”
  • Allen is one of the great storytellers of his time, completely original, and any version of his life—including this one, in which we are obviously in the hands of an unreliable narrator, although no more so than in any of his autobiographical movies—can only be riveting. In a matter of phrases, he accomplishes things it takes a lesser writer several chapters to establish
  • We have the damn thing. What are we going to do with it? I suppose we could start—why not?—by actually reading it. And within just a phrase or two, you realize why people were afraid of it: Allen is a matchless comic writer and one whose voice is so well known by his aging fans that it’s as though the book is pouring into you through a special receiver dedicated just to him. Woody Allen does a great Woody Allen.
Javier E

Opinion | How to be Human - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-skills-connection.html

listening conversation morality illuminator wisdom witness curiosity respect question company attention social skills community education psychology

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • I have learned something profound along the way. Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills
  • The real process of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete actions well: being curious about other people; disagreeing without poisoning relationships; revealing vulnerability at an appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
  • People want to connect. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their faces with love and acceptance
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  • we lack practical knowledge about how to give one another the attention we crave
  • Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.
  • If I can shine positive attention on others, I can help them to blossom. If I see potential in others, they may come to see potential in themselves. True understanding is one of the most generous gifts any of us can give to another.
  • I see the results, too, in the epidemic of invisibility I encounter as a journalist. I often find myself interviewing people who tell me they feel unseen and disrespected
  • I’ve been working on a book called “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” I wanted it to be a practical book — so that I would learn these skills myself, and also, I hope, teach people how to understand others, how to make them feel respected, valued and understood.
  • I wanted to learn these skills for utilitarian reasons
  • If I’m going to work with someone, I don’t just want to see his superficial technical abilities. I want to understand him more deeply — to know whether he is calm in a crisis, comfortable with uncertainty or generous to colleagues.
  • I wanted to learn these skills for moral reasons
  • Many of the most productive researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. Nyquist really listened to their challenges, got inside their heads, brought out the best in them. Nyquist, too, was an illuminator.
  • Finally, I wanted to learn these skills for reasons of national survival
  • We evolved to live with small bands of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist. We live in a brutalizing time.
  • In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators. Diminishers are so into themselves, they make others feel insignificant
  • They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.
  • Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people.
  • hey have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times — so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.
  • A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.
  • social clumsiness I encounter too frequently. I’ll be leaving a party or some gathering and I’ll realize: That whole time, nobody asked me a single question. I estimate that only 30 percent of the people in the world are good question askers. The rest are nice people, but they just don’t ask. I think it’s because they haven’t been taught to and so don’t display basic curiosity about others.
  • Many years ago, patent lawyers at Bell Labs were trying to figure out why some employees were much more productive than others.
  • Illuminators are a joy to be around
  • The gift of attention.
  • Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world. A person who radiates warmth will bring out the glowing sides of the people he meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: It creates, brings aspects of things into being.”
  • When Jimmy sees a person — any person — he is seeing a creature with infinite value and dignity, made in the image of God. He is seeing someone so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person.
  • Accompaniment.
  • Accompaniment is an other-centered way of being with people during the normal routines of life.
  • If we are going to accompany someone well, we need to abandon the efficiency mind-set. We need to take our time and simply delight in another person’s way of being
  • I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” These are the sorts of people who are just great company, who turn conversation into a form of play and encourage you to be yourself. It’s a great talent, to be lingerable.
  • Other times, a good accompanist does nothing more than practice the art of presence, just being there.
  • The art of conversation.
  • If you tell me something important and then I paraphrase it back to you, what psychologists call “looping,” we can correct any misimpressions that may exist between us.
  • Be a loud listener. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively you’re burning calories.
  • He’s continually responding to my comments with encouraging affirmations, with “amen,” “aha” and “yes!” I love talking to that guy.
  • I no longer ask people: What do you think about that? Instead, I ask: How did you come to believe that? That gets them talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values.
  • Storify whenever possible
  • People are much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories.
  • Do the looping, especially with adolescents
  • If you want to know how the people around you see the world, you have to ask them. Here are a few tips I’ve collected from experts on how to become a better conversationalist:
  • Turn your partner into a narrator
  • People don’t go into enough detail when they tell you a story. If you ask specific follow-up questions — Was your boss screaming or irritated when she said that to you? What was her tone of voice? — then they will revisit the moment in a more concrete way and tell a richer story
  • If somebody tells you he is having trouble with his teenager, don’t turn around and say: “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my own Susan.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself.
  • Don’t be a topper
  • Big questions.
  • The quality of your conversations will depend on the quality of your questions
  • As adults, we get more inhibited with our questions, if we even ask them at all. I’ve learned we’re generally too cautious. People are dying to tell you their stories. Very often, no one has ever asked about them.
  • So when I first meet people, I tend to ask them where they grew up. People are at their best when talking about their childhoods. Or I ask where they got their names. That gets them talking about their families and ethnic backgrounds.
  • After you’ve established trust with a person, it’s great to ask 30,000-foot questions, ones that lift people out of their daily vantage points and help them see themselves from above.
  • These are questions like: What crossroads are you at? Most people are in the middle of some life transition; this question encourages them to step back and describe theirs
  • I’ve learned it’s best to resist this temptation. My first job in any conversation across difference or inequality is to stand in other people’s standpoint and fully understand how the world looks to them. I’ve found it’s best to ask other people three separate times and in three different ways about what they have just said. “I want to understand as much as possible. What am I missing here?”
  • Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in? And: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Or: If you died today, what would you regret not doing?
  • “What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?
  • “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?”
  • “What is the gift you currently hold in exile?,” meaning, what talent are you not using
  • “Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who ran for school board? She wants to understand why a person felt the call of responsibility. She wants to understand motivation.
  • “How do your ancestors show up in your life?” But it led to a great conversation in which each of us talked about how we’d been formed by our family heritages and cultures. I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you’re asking good questions, you’re adopting a posture of humility, and you’re honoring the other person.
  • Stand in their standpoint
  • I used to feel the temptation to get defensive, to say: “You don’t know everything I’m dealing with. You don’t know that I’m one of the good guys here.”
  • If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is the chapter about?
  • every conversation takes place on two levels
  • The official conversation is represented by the words we are saying on whatever topic we are talking about. The actual conversations occur amid the ebb and flow of emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment I am showing you respect or disrespect, making you feel a little safer or a little more threatened.
  • If we let fear and a sense of threat build our conversation, then very quickly our motivations will deteriorate
  • If, on the other hand, I show persistent curiosity about your viewpoint, I show respect. And as the authors of “Crucial Conversations” observe, in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices it, and when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.
  • the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch argued that the essential moral skill is being considerate to others in the complex circumstances of everyday life. Morality is about how we interact with each other minute by minute.
  • I used to think the wise person was a lofty sage who doled out life-altering advice in the manner of Yoda or Dumbledore or Solomon. But now I think the wise person’s essential gift is tender receptivity.
  • The illuminators offer the privilege of witness. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations and episodes we tell and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life — intimacy versus independence, control versus freedom — and understand that our current selves are just where we are right now on our long continuum of growth.
  • The really good confidants — the people we go to when we are troubled — are more like coaches than philosopher kings.
  • They take in your story, accept it, but prod you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale.
  • They’re not here to fix you; they are here simply to help you edit your story so that it’s more honest and accurate. They’re here to call you by name, as beloved
  • They see who you are becoming before you do and provide you with a reputation you can then go live into.
  • there has been a comprehensive shift in my posture. I think I’m more approachable, vulnerable. I know more about human psychology than I used to. I have a long way to go, but I’m evidence that people can change, sometimes dramatically, even in middle and older age.
Duncan H

What to Do About 'Coming Apart' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-to-do-about-coming-apart

economics

shared by Duncan H on 13 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Murray has produced a book-length argument placing responsibility for rising inequality and declining mobility on widespread decay in the moral fiber of white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans, putting relatively less emphasis on a similar social breakdown among low-status, less-educated Americans of all races
  • Murray’s strength lies in his ability to raise issues that center-left policy makers and academics prefer, for the most part, to shy away from. His research methods, his statistical analyses and the conclusions he draws are subject to passionate debate. But by forcing taboo issues into the public arena, Murray has opened up for discussion politically salient issues that lurk at a subterranean level in the back-brains of many voters, issues that are rarely examined with the rigor necessary to affirm or deny their legitimacy.
  • The National Review and the Conservative Monitor cited “Losing Ground” as one of the ten books that most changed America. Murray’s bookseemed like a bolt of lightning in the middle of the night revealing what should have been plain as the light of day. The welfare state so carefully built up in the 1960s and 1970s created a system of disincentives for people to better their own lives. By paying welfare mothers to have children out of wedlock into a poor home, more of these births were encouraged. By doling out dollars at a rate that could not be matched by the economy, the system encouraged the poor to stay home.
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  • He contends in “Coming Apart” that there was far greater social cohesion across class lines 50 years ago because “the powerful norms of social and economic behavior in 1960 swept virtually everyone into their embrace,” adding in a Jan. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal thatOver the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.According to Murray, higher education has now become a proxy for higher IQ, as elite colleges become sorting mechanisms for finding, training and introducing to each other the most intellectually gifted young people. Fifty years into the education revolution, members of this elite are likely to be themselves the offspring of cognitively gifted parents, and to ultimately bear cognitively gifted children.
  • “Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere.”
  • Murray makes the case that cognitive ability is worth ever more in modern advanced, technologically complex hypercompetitive market economies. As an example, Murray quotes Bill Gates: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war or we won’t have a future.”
  • Murray alleges that those with higher IQs now exhibit personal and social behavioral choices in areas like marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity that allow them to enjoy secure and privileged lives. Whites in the lower social-economic strata are less cognitively able – in Murray’s view – and thus less well-equipped to resist the lure of the sexual revolution and doctrines of self-actualization so they succumb to higher rates of family dissolution, non-marital births, worklessness and criminality. This interaction between IQ and behavioral choice, in Murray’s framework, is what has led to the widening income and cultural gap.
  • Despised by the left, Murray has arguably done liberals a service by requiring them to deal with those whose values may seem alien, to examine the unintended consequences of their policies and to grapple with the political impact of assertions made by the right. He has also amassed substantial evidence to bolster his claims and at the same time elicited a formidable academic counter-attack.
  • To Murray, the overarching problem is that liberal elites, while themselves living lives of probity, have refused to proselytize for the bourgeois virtues to which they subscribe, thus leaving their less discerning fellow-citizens to flounder in the anti-bourgeois legacy of the counter-cultural 1960s.
  • “Great Civic Awakening” among the new upper class – an awakening that will lead to the kind of “moral rearmament” and paternalism characteristic of anti-poverty drives in the 19th century. To achieve this, Murray believes, the “new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”
  • The cognitive elites Murray cites are deeply committed to liberal norms of cultural tolerance and permissiveness. The antipathy to the moralism of the religious right has, in fact, been a major force driving these upscale, secular voters into the Democratic party.
  • changes in the world economy may be destructive in terms of the old social model, but they are profoundly liberating and benign in and of themselves. The family farm wasn’t dying because capitalism had failed or a Malthusian crisis was driving the world to starvation. The family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended.Mead continues:Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim. It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.The 21st century, Mead adds,must reinvent the American Dream. It must recast our economic, social, familial, educational and political systems for new challenges and new opportunities. Some hallowed practices and institutions will have to go under the bus. But in the end, the changes will make us richer, more free and more secure than we are now.Mead’s predictions may or may not prove prescient, but it his thinking, more than Murray’s, that reflects the underlying optimism that has sustained the United States for more than two centuries — a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially “intractable.” Mead’s way of looking at things is not only more inviting than Murray’s, it is also more on target.
Javier E

New Pope? I've Given Up Hope - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ew-pope-ive-given-up-hope.html

papacy church truth eternal

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • A gift for eternal truths is as dangerous as the gift of Midas’s touch. The pope cannot undo the eternal truths he has proclaimed.
  • How could Paul VI say that Pius XI, in his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, had misled the people in such a serious way? If he admitted it, what would happen to his own authority as moral arbiter in matters of heaven and hell? So Paul VI doubled down, adding another encyclical in 1968, Humanae Vitae, to the unrenounceable eternal truths that pile up around a moral monarch.
  • In 1859, John Henry Newman published an article that led to his denunciation in Rome as “the most dangerous man in England.” It was called “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” and it showed that in history the laity had been more true to the Gospel than the hierarchy.
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  • There were no priests in Peter’s time, and no popes. Paul never called himself or any of his co-workers priests. He did not offer sacrifice. Those ideas came in later, through weird arguments contained in the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews. The claim of priests and popes to be the sole conduits of grace is a remnant of the era of papal monarchy. We are watching that era fade.
Javier E

Rachel Dolezal's Unintended Gift to America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nintended-gift-to-america.html

race identity white role social

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • It is most unfortunate that Ms. Dolezal did not begin her television interviews on Tuesday by acknowledging that she should not have claimed to be black. She might have been forgiven if she had stated clearly that, while she may identify herself as black, by American society’s standards, her racial designation is white.
  • Ms. Dolezal’s view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society’s — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be “made” from what people believe and do. Race is performative. It is the memories that bind us, the stories passed down to us, the experiences that we share, the social forces that surround us.
  • Identities are never entirely our own, but does that mean that we should lose all control in determining who we are? Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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  • Even W. E. B. Du Bois had trouble formulating a theoretically accurate account of racial identity, so he put it simply: A black man is “a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” But his statement still leaves us with a puzzle: What would a black man be without Jim Crow to define him?
  • The historical evidence is overwhelming, then, that the color line has always been far more porous and fragile than one might assume. In some places, it was so brittle that it could buckle and break.
  • To say that race is socially constructed gives it an air of make-believe. Race is quite real to those who live with it. Ask the families of the black men and women who have lost their lives during tragic encounters with the police. The choices about “who” they were, were not their own.
  • There is no essentialized, fixed, “true identity” waiting just below the surface. Identities are contingent, elusive and, as the cultural theorist Stuart Hall argued, “always in process.
  • at the very least, perhaps we can use Ms. Dolezal’s story, puzzling as it is, as an opportunity to have a candid, lively, long-delayed, public conversation about the knotty meanings of race and racial identity, and how it has confounded our nation’s best aspirations. Perhaps we may yet move beyond the imprisoning boxes we have made.
nolan_delaney

Ken Robinson: How schools kill creativity | Talk Video | TED.com - 0 views

www.ted.com/...n_says_schools_kill_creativity

creativity schools tedtalk ken robinson education knowledge brain science psychology

shared by nolan_delaney on 01 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • nolan_delaney on 01 Apr 15
     
    Ted talk about education and creativity done by a former professor.  He is very funny, witty, and intelligent and a gifted speaker/communicator.  A long video, but entertaining on several fronts
Javier E

An Algorithm Isn't Always the Answer - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-algorithms-online-dating.html

algorithm love optimization psychology knowledge

shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • in just about every aspect of my life I seek order and safety.
  • Picture me on Tinder circa 2014.
  • Here are my search criteria: I’m looking for men in my area (no farther than three miles away, because traveling is such a hassle and I take too many cabs as it is) who are anywhere from two years younger than me up to 10 years older (going on the assumption that women mature more quickly than men). And for goodness’ sake, my friends would tell me, find a man who isn’t a writer — they’re way too emotionally unstable. Certainly if I could check most of those items off the checklist, I’d find love or some good enough approximation of it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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  • How did it go? I was absolutely miserable dating appropriate-age marketing associates who lived near me. I always wanted to be at home reading instead
  • Then one night I held a reading with some authors I admire at a bookstore, and I threw an after-party at my favorite dive bar. In walked a friend of a friend who I sort of knew from the internet but who I’d never met in real life. He is six years younger than I am (way too young for me) and he lived in Harlem (that’s a $40 cab fare from my home in Brooklyn) and he’s a writer/comedian (warning flags coming at me from every direction). But we talked and he charmed me. He was online dating, too, but I never would’ve found him on an app. He wasn’t on my metaphorical vision board, but he fit into my real life in ways I never could’ve imagined. He’s my husband now. (He likes David Foster Wallace.)
  • The internet is supposed to make it easier for us to find people and places and perfect gifts, and more profitable for companies that offer those services. And yet here I am, with my too-old dog and my too-young husband and my ever-growing book collection, happier than I could have predicted.
  • It’s risky not to have data, to be without numbers you can plug in when you’re looking for something or someone to love. We think we know exactly what we want. But I hope that our guts remain true to our hearts, and in this world measured by clicks and stars and highest customer reviews, we remember that some rules are made to be broken in the most delightful of ways.
sanderk

Is Pain a Construct of the Mind? - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...is-pain-construct-of-mind

pain mind science brain science emotions research

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Clear Lake found that Rogers could recruit an abnormally high number of muscle fibers. But was this ability because of a freak genetic mutation? Another possibility, which Rogers thinks is more likely, is the way he processes pain when he strains those muscles.
  • What if, instead of superpowered muscles, Rogers has a normal—though extremely well exercised—body, and his abilities arise because he can withstand more pain than most mere mortals?
  • Rogers reasons that, unlike in the dentist's office—where he has no control over the pain that is inflicted on him—he has direct executive control over pain that he inflicts on himself. “I know it's coming, I have an idea of what to expect and I can decide to ignore it,” he says. Confronted with severe pain, most people fear that they will damage their body permanently if they persist, so they stop well before they are in real danger, Rogers explains.
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  • Maybe Rogers's muscle cells are normal, and he experiences pain as most of us do but chooses to disregard it when he feels in command.
  • An illusion is a perception that does not match the physical reality. Is pain, then, as with illusions, a mind construct that some people can decide to turn off? As you will see in the studies that follow, pain varies as a function of mood, attentiveness and circumstances, lending support to the theory that pain is an emotion.
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    During practice, my coaches always say that I need to overcome pain but I never knew how. I found this article interesting because it says that pain is an emotion. I have never thought that pain could even be close to an emotion. It is interesting how the world's strongest man can just ignore the pain and keep doing these incredible feats. Controlling one's pain must either be a skill or just a natural-born gift. Like in TOK, we must practice skills such as controlling our emotions. If pain is an emotion, then theoretically, I could control it. I am going to test this out in my life and see if I can control my own pain during exercise.
Emily Horwitz

Nature Has A Formula That Tells Us When It's Time To Die : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...-tells-us-when-its-time-to-die

human sciences life death knowledge science formula

shared by Emily Horwitz on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Every living thing is a pulse. We quicken, then we fade. There is a deep beauty in this, but deeper down, inside every plant, every leaf, inside every living thing (us included) sits a secret.
  • Everything alive will eventually die, we know that, but now we can read the pattern and see death coming. We have recently learned its logic, which "You can put into mathematics," says physicist Geoffrey West. It shows up with "extraordinary regularity," not just in plants, but in all animals, from slugs to giraffes. Death, it seems, is intimately related to size.
  • Life is short for small creatures, longer in big ones.
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  • A 2007 paper checked 700 different kinds of plants, and almost every time they applied the formula, it correctly predicted lifespan. "This is universal. It cuts across the design of organisms," West says. "It applies to me, all mammals, and the trees sitting out there, even though we're completely different designs."
  • The formula is a simple quarter-power exercise: You take the mass of a plant or an animal, and its metabolic rate is equal to its mass taken to the three-fourths power.
  • It's hard to believe that creatures as different as jellyfish and cheetahs, daisies and bats, are governed by the same mathematical logic, but size seems to predict lifespan.
  • It tells animals for example, that there's a universal limit to life, that though they come in different sizes, they have roughly a billion and a half heart beats; elephant hearts beat slowly, hummingbird hearts beat fast, but when your count is up, you are over.
  • In any big creature, animal or plant, there are so many more pathways, moving parts, so much more work to do, the big guys could wear out very quickly. So Geoffrey West and his colleagues found that nature gives larger creatures a gift: more efficient cells. Literally.
Cecilia Ergueta

'The Art of the Qur'an,' a Rare Peek at Islam's Holy Text - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-peek-at-islams-holy-text.html

culture history religion islam art

shared by Cecilia Ergueta on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The Quran, like all foundational religious texts, is a tangle of ambiguities and mysteries, to which endless annotations can be, and are being, written.
  • So wide was the fame of the 11th-century Baghdad artist Ibn al-Bawwab (“son of the doorman”) that his signature was routinely forged
  • When a Mongol army laid waste to the city in 1258, his life was spared so that he could work for the new rulers,
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  • Spilling out of books onto wall tiles, ceramic vessels, glass lamps, textiles, mosque domes and building facades, it was both a sensual and ideological unifier, totalizingly utopian
  • Symbols were introduced to orchestrate the all-important recitation of its contents: indicators of where to pause, where to place emphasis, how to pronounce words.
  • Material preciousness became an end in itself, turning Qurans into prestige objects and political currency, valued as diplomatic gifts, as war booty and as pious, grace-earning donations to mosques and mausoleums.
  • I watched them as they looked intently at the manuscripts arrayed around us, and I knew they were seeing things I couldn’t see, and feeling things I couldn’t feel, because they could read the words.
  • I was aware — and this is an easy perception — of the larger barriers of unknowing that stand between art and understanding, and of the barriers that stand between cultures
nataliedepaulo1

Parting Words - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...obamas-memorable-parting-words

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • After eight years, few lines from Barack Obama’s Presidential speeches stay in mind. For all his literary and oratorical gifts, he didn’t coin the kinds of phrases that stick with repetition, as if his distaste for politics generally—the schmoozing, the fakery—extended to the fashioning of slogans. He rarely turned to figurative language, and he never stooped to “Read my lips,” or even “Ask not what your country can do for you.” His most memorable phrase, “Yes we can,” spoke to the audacious odds of his own run for the Presidency, not a clear political vision. He sought to persuade by explaining and reasoning, not by simplifying or dramatizing—a form of respect that the citizenry didn’t always deserve.
  • This aversion to rhetoric, like Obama’s aloofness from Congress, is a personal virtue that hurt him politically. It’s connected to his difficulty in sustaining public support for his program and his party. Even the President’s hero, Abraham Lincoln, was a master of the poetic sound bite.
  • This is the last week of the Obama Presidency. Historians will argue over its meaning and its merits. But, for democratic integrity, there’s no argument, no contest. Obama’s final speech wasn’t just a warning—it will stand as an emblem of what we have been and perhaps can be. 
sandrine_h

A Psychologist Analyzes Donald Trump's Personality - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...480771

shared by sandrine_h on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • From unsympathetic journalists to political rivals, Trump calls his opponents “disgusting” and writes them off as “losers.” By the standards of reality TV, Trump’s disagreeableness may not be so shocking. But political candidates who want people to vote for them rarely behave like this.
  • Trump seems capable of a similar toughness and strategic pragmatism, although the cool rationality does not always seem to fit, probably because Trump’s disagreeableness appears so strongly motivated by anger.
  • Research shows that people low in agreeableness are typically viewed as untrustworthy. Dishonesty and deceit brought down Nixon and damaged the institution of the presidency. It is generally believed today that all politicians lie, or at least dissemble, but Trump appears extreme in this regard. Assessing the truthfulness of the 2016 candidates’ campaign statements, PolitiFact recently calculated that only 2 percent of the claims made by Trump are true, 7 percent are mostly true, 15 percent are half true, 15 percent are mostly false, 42 percent are false, and 18 percent are “pants on fire.” Adding up the last three numbers (from mostly false to flagrantly so), Trump scores 75 percent. The corresponding figures for Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, respectively, are 66, 32, 31, and 29 percent.
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  • Combined with a gift for humor, anger lies at the heart of Trump’s charisma.
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