Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items matching "bible" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
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.
Javier E

Secrets of a Mind-Gamer - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mind-secrets.html

memory psychology tecnique learning

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • “What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,” Cooke said. He explained to me that mnemonic competitors saw themselves as “participants in an amateur research program” whose aim is to rescue a long-lost tradition of memory training.
  • it wasn’t so long ago that culture depended on individual memories. A trained memory was not just a handy tool but also a fundamental facet of any worldly mind. It was considered a form of character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics. Only through memorizing, the thinking went, could ideas be incorporated into your psyche and their values absorbed.
  • all the other mental athletes I met kept insisting that anyone could do what they do. It was simply a matter of learning to “think in more memorable ways,” using a set of mnemonic techniques almost all of which were invented in ancient Greece. These techniques existed not to memorize useless information like decks of playing cards but to etch into the brain foundational texts and ideas.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • not only did the brains of the mental athletes appear anatomically indistinguishable from those of the control subjects, but on every test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range.
  • There was, however, one telling difference between the brains of the mental athletes and those of the control subjects. When the researchers looked at the parts of the brain that were engaged when the subjects memorized, they found that the mental athletes were relying more heavily on regions known to be involved in spatial memory.
  • just about anything could be imprinted upon our memories, and kept in good order, simply by constructing a building in the imagination and filling it with imagery of what needed to be recalled. This imagined edifice could then be walked through at any time in the future. Such a building would later come to be called a memory palace.
  • Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember but how to remember it. In a world with few books, memory was sacrosanct.
  • In his essay “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading that occurred as printed books began to proliferate.
  • Until relatively recently, people read “intensively,” Darnton says. “They had only a few books — the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two — and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.” Today we read books “extensively,” often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading.
  • “Rhetorica ad Herennium” underscores the importance of purposeful attention by making a distinction between natural memory and artificial memory:
  • Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t need to recall phone numbers or word-for-word instructions from their bosses or the Advanced Placement U.S. history curriculum or (because they lived in relatively small, stable groups) the names of dozens of strangers at a cocktail party. What they did need to remember was where to find food and resources and the route home and which plants were edible and which were poisonous
  • What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many c
  • the three stages of acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the cognitive phase, we intellectualize the task and discover new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second
Javier E

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on Faith, Religion, Tolerance, Moderates, Bible, God, Islam, Atheism, Jesus, Christian Nation- Beliefnet.com - 0 views

www.beliefnet.com/...-Religion-Built-Upon-Lies.aspx

faith reason religion evidence rationality fundamentalism God

shared by Javier E on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism.
  • Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?
Javier E

Evolution and the American Myth of the Individual - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...merican-myth-of-the-individual

evolution myth American idea individualism Rousseau social contract

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • the country’s two main political parties have “fundamental philosophical differences.” But what exactly does that mean?
  • In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding.
  • Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual.
  • The irony here is that when it comes to our responsibilities to one another as human beings, religion and evolution nowadays are not necessarily on opposite sides of the fence.
  • in the eyes of many conservative Americans today, religion and evolution do not mix. You either accept what the Bible tells us or what Charles Darwin wrote, but not both
  • Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.
  • as Matthew D. Lieberman, a social neuroscience researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has written: “we think people are built to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following society’s norms.”
  • Why then did Rousseau and others make up stories about human history if they didn’t really believe them? The simple answer, at least during the Enlightenment, was that they wanted people to accept their claim that civilized life is based on social conventions, or contracts, drawn up at least figuratively speaking by free, sane and equal human beings — contracts that could and should be extended to cover the moral and working relationships that ought to pertain between rulers and the ruled.
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared in “The Social Contract” (1762) that each of us is born free and yet everywhere we are in chains. He did not mean physical chains. He meant social ones. We now know he was dead wrong. Human evolution has made us obligate social creatures. Even if some of us may choose sooner or later to disappear into the woods or sit on a mountaintop in deep meditation, we humans are able to do so only if before such individualistic anti-social resolve we have first been socially nurtured and socially taught survival arts by others. The distinction Rousseau and others tried to draw between “natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual” and “civil liberty, which is limited by the general will” is fanciful, not factual.
  • In short, their aims were political, not historical, scientific or religious.
  • what Rousseau and others crafted as arguments in favor of their ideas all had the earmarks of primitive mythology
  • Bronislaw Malinowski argued almost a century ago: “Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief, it safeguards and enforces morality, it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man.”
  • not all myths make good charters for faith and wisdom. The sanctification of the rights of individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals. There was never a time in history before civil society when we were each totally free to do whatever we elected to do. We have always been social and caring creatures. The thought that it is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous fabrication. This is not how we got to be the kind of species we are today.
  • Myths achieve this social function, he observed, by serving as guides, or charters, for moral values, social order and magical belief.
  • Nor is this what the world’s religions would ask us to believe.
kushnerha

BBC - Future - What Sherlock Holmes taught us about the mind - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...holmes-tells-us-about-the-mind

bbc sherlock holmes perception deduction reasoning logic

shared by kushnerha on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The century-old detective stories are being studied by today’s neurologists – but why? As it turns out, not even modern technology can replace their lessons in rational thinking.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician himself, and there is evidence that he modelled the character of Holmes on one of the leading doctors of the day, Joseph Bell of the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary. “I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr Bell treated disease,”
  • Conan Doyle may have also drawn some inspiration from other doctors, such as William Gowers, who wrote the Bible of Neurology
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Gowers often taught his students to begin their diagnosis from the moment a patient walked through the door
  • “Did you notice him as he came into the room? If you did not then you should have done so. One of the habits to be acquired and never omitted is to observe a patient as he enters the room; to note his aspect and his gait. If you did so, you would have seen that he seemed lame, and you may have been struck by that which must strike you now – an unusual tint of his face.”
  • the importance of the seemingly inconsequential that seems to inspire both men. “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important,” Conan Doyle wrote
  • Both Gowers and Holmes also warned against letting your preconceptions fog your judgement. For both men, cool, unprejudiced observation was the order of the day. It is for this reason that Holmes chastises Watson in The Scandal of Bohemia: “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”
  • Gowers: “The method you should adopt is this: Whenever you find yourself in the presence of a case that is not familiar to you in all its detail forget for a time all your types and all your names. Deal with the case as one that has never been seen before, and work it out as a new problem sui generis, to be investigated as such.”
  • both men “reasoned backwards”, for instance, dissecting all the possible paths that may have led to a particular disease (in Gowers’ case) or murder (in Holmes’)
  • Holmes’ most famous aphorism: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
  • the most important lesson to be learned, from both Gowers and Holmes, is the value of recognising your errors. “Gentlemen – It is always pleasant to be right, but it is generally a much more useful thing to be wrong,” wrote Gowers
  • This humility is key in beating the ‘curse of expertise’ that afflicts so many talented and intelligent people.
  • University College London has documented many instances in which apparent experts in both medicine and forensic science have allowed their own biases to cloud their judgements – sometimes even in life or death situations.
  • Even the most advanced technology can never replace the powers of simple observation and rational deduction.
Javier E

Skeptics read Jordan Peterson's '12 Rules for Life' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-conversation-between-skeptics

manliness plan rules life

shared by Javier E on 09 May 18 - No Cached
  • I do think that women tend to spend more time thinking about their lives, planning for the future, sort of sorting themselves out — and know how to do so. So they don’t need Peterson’s basic life advice as much as men do.
  • Emba: These days, young men seem far more lost than young women. And we’re seeing the results of that all over the place — men disappearing into video games, or pornography, or dropping out of the workforce, or succumbing to depression and despair. So maybe they need this more.
  • Rubin made it sound as though Peterson held some *hidden knowledge,* but there’s no secret to “stand up straight and make sure the people you keep around you pull you up rather than drag you down.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • I actually think Peterson was right to observe that it’s remarkable how many students at the universities where they tested some of his theories hadn’t been told these things. Though I thought it was interesting that he seemed to think that teaching this kind of thing was a job for the educational system rather than the parents
  • I think perhaps we’re both lucky in that though our backgrounds are different, we both come from relatively stable families with parents and surrounding adults who inculcated these “rules” intrinsically, from our youth on. So the Peterson gospel doesn’t feel new to us.
  • The fact that there are whole swaths of our generation who are advantaged by already knowing this information about how to make your life better, and another whole swath who is being left behind, character and life-formation wise, because they don’t. And they are left to rely on Jordan Peterson.
  • He is convinced of the importance and significance of these stories, these words — and religion, and its significance. At one point he stated that he didn’t have a materialist view of the world, but actually a “deeply religious” one.
  • One thing that’s definitely central to the book is telling people (particularly men) that life is hard, and you need to get it together.
  • largely the message you come away with is that if you don’t like the way things are going, it’s your fault and your fault alone. And that’s an easier message to believe when you’re a white male and systemic obstacles aren’t really a thing you run into.
  • Jordan Peterson professes not to be religious, but he is. His book is built on what he describes as archetypal myths from different cultures, but leans *very* heavily on Judeo-Christian ones especially — Cain and Abel and the stories of Jesus’s life, from his temptation in the desert to his death and resurrection.
  • This tendency was even more pronounced in his live lecture. Basically every line, every piece of advice he gave, was supported by a Bible verse. At one point, he quoted the gospel of Matthew: “Knock and the door will be opened to you” — and said, “This is how life works, ACTUALLY” — basically glaring at the crowd and daring them to disagree.
  • Just in the week or so I was reading “12 Rules,” I had several men my age come up to me on buses or in coffee shops and strike up conversations with me about Peterson — the one thing they all talked about right away was how the book had a lot of “hard truths” that they needed to hear
  • He’s not keeping great company. But I think his personal work and statements are generally benign, in many cases actually helpful, in that they urge young people to seek out a better-structured and more meaningful life.
  • I agree it’s inaccurate to label him as alt-right, though that is a low bar to clear. Frankly I see him more as a mainstream conservative. I think part of the reason people get this wrong is that there’s a big gap between what boosted his fame and what the central thrust of his book is
  • I think “traditionalist” is probably the best label for him — both because his views are traditionalist and because his worldview is so dependent on traditions (or at least what he sees as traditions.)
Javier E

The meaning of life in a world without work | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...y-religion-robots-sapiens-book

meaning life technology culture crisis work leisure automation psychology fiction religion virtual reality

shared by Javier E on 08 May 17 - No Cached
  • As artificial intelligence outperforms humans in more and more tasks, it will replace humans in more and more jobs.
  • Many new professions are likely to appear: virtual-world designers, for example. But such professions will probably require more creativity and flexibility, and it is unclear whether 40-year-old unemployed taxi drivers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers
  • The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The same technology that renders humans useless might also make it feasible to feed and support the unemployable masses through some scheme of universal basic income.
  • The real problem will then be to keep the masses occupied and content. People must engage in purposeful activities, or they go crazy. So what will the useless class do all day?
  • One answer might be computer games. Economically redundant people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual reality worlds, which would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the “real world” outside.
  • This, in fact, is a very old solution. For thousands of years, billions of people have found meaning in playing virtual reality games. In the past, we have called these virtual reality games “religions”.
  • Muslims and Christians go through life trying to gain points in their favorite virtual reality game. If you pray every day, you get points. If you forget to pray, you lose points. If by the end of your life you gain enough points, then after you die you go to the next level of the game (aka heaven).
  • As religions show us, the virtual reality need not be encased inside an isolated box. Rather, it can be superimposed on the physical reality. In the past this was done with the human imagination and with sacred books, and in the 21st century it can be done with smartphones.
  • Consumerism too is a virtual reality game. You gain points by acquiring new cars, buying expensive brands and taking vacations abroad, and if you have more points than everybody else, you tell yourself you won the game.
  • we saw two others kids on the street who were hunting the same Pokémon, and we almost got into a fight with them. It struck me how similar the situation was to the conflict between Jews and Muslims about the holy city of Jerusalem. When you look at the objective reality of Jerusalem, all you see are stones and buildings. There is no holiness anywhere. But when you look through the medium of smartbooks (such as the Bible and the Qur’an), you see holy places and angels everywhere.
  • In the end, the real action always takes place inside the human brain. Does it matter whether the neurons are stimulated by observing pixels on a computer screen, by looking outside the windows of a Caribbean resort, or by seeing heaven in our mind’s eyes?
  • Indeed, one particularly interesting section of Israeli society provides a unique laboratory for how to live a contented life in a post-work world. In Israel, a significant percentage of ultra-orthodox Jewish men never work. They spend their entire lives studying holy scriptures and performing religion rituals. They and their families don’t starve to death partly because the wives often work, and partly because the government provides them with generous subsidies. Though they usually live in poverty, government support means that they never lack for the basic necessities of life.
  • That’s universal basic income in action. Though they are poor and never work, in survey after survey these ultra-orthodox Jewish men report higher levels of life-satisfaction than any other section of Israeli society.
  • Hence virtual realities are likely to be key to providing meaning to the useless class of the post-work world. Maybe these virtual realities will be generated inside computers. Maybe they will be generated outside computers, in the shape of new religions and ideologies. Maybe it will be a combination of the two. The possibilities are endless
  • In any case, the end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working.
  • People in 2050 will probably be able to play deeper games and to construct more complex virtual worlds than in any previous time in history.
  • But what about truth? What about reality? Do we really want to live in a world in which billions of people are immersed in fantasies, pursuing make-believe goals and obeying imaginary laws? Well, like it or not, that’s the world we have been living in for thousands of years already.
cvanderloo

Why white supremacists and QAnon enthusiasts are obsessed - but very wrong - about the Byzantine Empire - 0 views

theconversation.com/ut-the-byzantine-empire-154994

quanon rome byzantine history research knowledge

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Byzantium – or more properly, the medieval Roman Empire – controlled much of the Mediterranean at the height of its territorial rule in the mid-sixth century.
  • His premise is that when Rome fell, the Byzantine Empire went on to preserve a white-European civilization. This isn’t true.
  • Mentions of Byzantium are scattered across message boards frequented by both white supremacists and QAnon enthusiasts – who spout conspiracy theories about a deep-state cabal of Satan-worshipping, blood-drinking pedophiles running the world.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “It all makes sense when you learn that the books of the bible are plagiarized copies of the chronology of Byzantium, and so is the mythical Roman Empire, that never existed in Italy but was in fact centered in Constantinople.”
  • In some renditions, Byzantium is, by way of some hazy illuminati connections, the origins of the “deep state” –
  • For many on the far right, talk of Byzantium is cloaked in Islamophobia – both online and in tragic real-life events.
  • This “reconquest” of Constantinople had even been tied in some online posts to the presidency of Donald Trump, with images circulated online seemingly prophesying that it would happen under his tenure.
  • No matter the provenance of the recent interest in Byzantium from America’s white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, one thing is clear: It is based on a very warped idea of the Byzantine Empire that has emerged out of the empire’s fraught place in our histories, caught between ancient and medieval, spirituality and bureaucracy.
jmfinizio

Harris to be sworn in as vice president by Justice Sonia Sotomayor - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

harris sotomayor

shared by jmfinizio on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Kamala Harris will be sworn in Wednesday as the next vice president of the United States by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor,
  • Harris will make history as the first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president, and she will be sworn in by the first Hispanic and third female justice in US Supreme Court history.
  • The vice president-elect will take her oath of office using two Bibles; one that previously belong to a former neighbor and family friend of Harris,' Regina Shelton, and another that belonged to Thurgood Marshall,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "In office and into the fight, I carry Mrs. Shelton with me always,"
  • "As a daughter of parents who were active in the civil rights movement, I knew that the fight for civil rights, the fight for equality, the fight for justice is going to take place in many ways, but one of the most significant ways (is) by lawyers understanding the power of their advocacy to make change and to make reform happen,"
  • "I think we cannot yield to those who would try and make us afraid of who we are."
Javier E

He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ics-greece-rome-whiteness.html

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Padilla laid out an indictment of his field. “If one were intentionally to design a discipline whose institutional organs and gatekeeping protocols were explicitly aimed at disavowing the legitimate status of scholars of color,” he said, “one could not do better than what classics has done.”
  • Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it. “Far from being extrinsic to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity,” he has written, “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of classics.”
  • Rather than kowtowing to criticism, Williams said, “maybe we should start defending our discipline.” She protested that it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • Williams ceded the microphone, and Padilla was able to speak. “Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
  • “I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
  • What he did find was a slim blue-and-white textbook titled “How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome.” “Western civilization was formed from the union of early Greek wisdom and the highly organized legal minds of early Rome,” the book began. “The Greek belief in a person’s ability to use his powers of reason, coupled with Roman faith in military strength, produced a result that has come to us as a legacy, or gift from the past.” Thirty years later, Padilla can still recite those opening lines.
  • In 2017, he published a paper in the journal Classical Antiquity that compared evidence from antiquity and the Black Atlantic to draw a more coherent picture of the religious life of the Roman enslaved. “It will not do merely to adopt a pose of ‘righteous indignation’ at the distortions and gaps in the archive,” he wrote. “There are tools available for the effective recovery of the religious experiences of the enslaved, provided we work with these tools carefully and honestly.”
  • Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me.
  • He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system o
  • In response to rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, Mary Beard, perhaps the most famous classicist alive, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the Romans “would have been puzzled by our modern problems with migration and asylum,” because the empire was founded on the “principles of incorporation and of the free movement of people.”
  • In November 2015, he wrote an essay for Eidolon, an online classics journal, clarifying that in Rome, as in the United States, paeans to multiculturalism coexisted with hatred of foreigners. Defending a client in court, Cicero argued that “denying foreigners access to our city is patently inhumane,” but ancient authors also recount the expulsions of whole “suspect” populations, including a roundup of Jews in 139 B.C., who were not considered “suitable enough to live alongside Romans.”
  • The job of classicists is not to “point out the howlers,” he said on a 2017 panel. “To simply take the position of the teacher, the qualified classicist who knows things and can point to these mistakes, is not sufficient.”
  • Dismantling structures of power that have been shored up by the classical tradition will require more than fact-checking; it will require writing an entirely new story about antiquity, and about who we are today
  • To find that story, Padilla is advocating reforms that would “explode the canon” and “overhaul the discipline from nuts to bolts,” including doing away with the label “classics” altogether.
  • . “What I want to be thinking about in the next few weeks,” he told them, “is how we can be telling the story of the early Roman Empire not just through a variety of sources but through a variety of persons.” He asked the students to consider the lives behind the identities he had assigned them, and the way those lives had been shaped by the machinery of empire, which, through military conquest, enslavement and trade, creates the conditions for the large-scale movement of human beings.
  • ultimately, he decided that leaving enslaved characters out of the role play was an act of care. “I’m not yet ready to turn to a student and say, ‘You are going to be a slave.’”
  • Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,”
  • “I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.”
  • In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike.
  • Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race
  • Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”
  • Classics as we know it today is a creation of the 18th and 19th centuries. During that period, as European universities emancipated themselves from the control of the church, the study of Greece and Rome gave the Continent its new, secular origin story. Greek and Latin writings emerged as a competitor to the Bible’s moral authority, which lent them a liberatory power
  • Historians stress that such ideas cannot be separated from the discourses of nationalism, colorism and progress that were taking shape during the modern colonial period, as Europeans came into contact with other peoples and their traditions. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” Winkelmann wrote.
  • While Renaissance scholars were fascinated by the multiplicity of cultures in the ancient world, Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below.
  • Jefferson, along with most wealthy young men of his time, studied classics at college, where students often spent half their time reading and translating Greek and Roman texts. “Next to Christianity,” writes Caroline Winterer, a historian at Stanford, “the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.
  • Of the 2.5 million people living in America in 1776, perhaps only 3,000 had gone to college, but that number included many of the founders
  • They saw classical civilization as uniquely educative — a “lamp of experience,” in the words of Patrick Henry, that could light the path to a more perfect union. However true it was, subsequent generations would come to believe, as Hannah Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” that “without the classical example … none of the men of the Revolution on either side of the Atlantic would have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be unprecedented action.”
  • Comparisons between the United States and the Roman Empire became popular as the country emerged as a global power. Even after Latin and Greek were struck from college-entrance exams, the proliferation of courses on “great books” and Western civilization, in which classical texts were read in translation, helped create a coherent national story after the shocks of industrialization and global warfare.
  • even as the classics were pulled apart, laughed at and transformed, they continued to form the raw material with which many artists shaped their visions of modernity.
  • Over the centuries, thinkers as disparate as John Adams and Simone Weil have likened classical antiquity to a mirror. Generations of intellectuals, among them feminist, queer and Black scholars, have seen something of themselves in classical texts, flashes of recognition that held a kind of liberatory promise
  • The language that is used to describe the presence of classical antiquity in the world today — the classical tradition, legacy or heritage — contains within it the idea of a special, quasi-genetic relationship. In his lecture “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization,” Kwame Anthony Appiah (this magazine’s Ethicist columnist) mockingly describes the belief in such a kinship as the belief in a “golden nugget” of insight — a precious birthright and shimmering sign of greatness — that white Americans and Europeans imagine has been passed down to them from the ancients.
  • To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves
  • Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression.
  • Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past.
  • if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”
  • One way to get rid of classics would be to dissolve its faculties and reassign their members to history, archaeology and language departments.
  • many classicists are advocating softer approaches to reforming the discipline, placing the emphasis on expanding its borders. Schools including Howard and Emory have integrated classics with Ancient Mediterranean studies, turning to look across the sea at Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa. The change is a declaration of purpose: to leave behind the hierarchies of the Enlightenment and to move back toward the Renaissance model of the ancient world as a place of diversity and mixture.
  • Ian Morris put it more bluntly. “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth,” Morris said to me. “Do we really want that sort of thing?”
  • There’s a more interesting story to be told about the history of what we call the West, the history of humanity, without valorizing particular cultures in it,” said Josephine Quinn, a professor of ancient history at Oxford. “It seems to me the really crucial mover in history is always the relationship between people, between cultures.”
  • “In some moods, I feel that this is just a moment of despair, and people are trying to find significance even if it only comes from self-accusation,” he told me. “I’m not sure that there is a discipline that is exempt from the fact that it is part of the history of this country. How distinctly wicked is classics? I don’t know that it is.”
  • “One of the dubious successes of my generation is that it did break the canon,” Richlin told me. “I don’t think we could believe at the time that we would be putting ourselves out of business, but we did.” She added: “If they blew up the classics departments, that would really be the end.”
  • Padilla, like Douglass, now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty.
  • “Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”
  • Last June, as racial-justice protests unfolded across the nation, Padilla turned his attention to arenas beyond classics. He and his co-authors — the astrophysicist Jenny Greene, the literary theorist Andrew Cole and the poet Tracy K. Smith — began writing their open letter to Princeton with 48 proposals for reform. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America,” the letter began. “Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of microaggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.”
  • Padilla believes that the uproar over free speech is misguided. “I don’t see things like free speech or the exchange of ideas as ends in themselves,” he told me. “I have to be honest about that. I see them as a means to the end of human flourishing.”
  • “There is a certain kind of classicist who will look on what transpired and say, ‘Oh, that’s not us,’” Padilla said when we spoke recently. “What is of interest to me is why is it so imperative for classicists of a certain stripe to make this discursive move? ‘This is not us.’
  • Joel Christensen, the Brandeis professor, now feels that it is his “moral and ethical and intellectual responsibility” to teach classics in a way that exposes its racist history. “Otherwise we’re just participating in propaganda,”
  • Christensen, who is 42, was in graduate school before he had his “crisis of faith,” and he understands the fear that many classicists may experience at being asked to rewrite the narrative of their life’s work. But, he warned, “that future is coming, with or without Dan-el.”
  • On Jan. 6, Padilla turned on the television minutes after the windows of the Capitol were broken. In the crowd, he saw a man in a Greek helmet with TRUMP 2020 painted in white. He saw a man in a T-shirt bearing a golden eagle on a fasces — symbols of Roman law and governance — below the logo 6MWE, which stands for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough,
Javier E

Netanyahu's Dark Worldview - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675406

netanyahu AI realism musk crisis

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • as Netanyahu soon made clear, when it comes to AI, he believes that bad outcomes are the likely outcomes. The Israeli leader interrogated OpenAI’s Brockman about the impact of his company’s creations on the job market. By replacing more and more workers, Netanyahu argued, AI threatens to “cannibalize a lot more jobs than you create,” leaving many people adrift and unable to contribute to the economy. When Brockman suggested that AI could usher in a world where people would not have to work, Netanyahu countered that the benefits of the technology were unlikely to accrue to most people, because the data, computational power, and engineering talent required for AI are concentrated in a few countries.
  • “You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”
  • The other panelists did not. Brockman briefly pivoted to talk about OpenAI’s Israeli employees before saying, “The world we should shoot for is one where all the boats are rising.” But other than mentioning the possibility of a universal basic income for people living in an AI-saturated society, Brockman agreed that “creative solutions” to this problem were needed—without providing any.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The AI boosters emphasized the incredible potential of their innovation, and Netanyahu raised practical objections to their enthusiasm. They cited futurists such as Ray Kurzweil to paint a bright picture of a post-AI world; Netanyahu cited the Bible and the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides to caution against upending human institutions and subordinating our existence to machines.
  • Musk matter-of-factly explained that the “very positive scenario of AI” is “actually in a lot of ways a description of heaven,” where “you can have whatever you want, you don’t need to work, you have no obligations, any illness you have can be cured,” and death is “a choice.” Netanyahu incredulously retorted, “You want this world?”
  • By the time the panel began to wind down, the Israeli leader had seemingly made up his mind. “This is like having nuclear technology in the Stone Age,” he said. “The pace of development [is] outpacing what solutions we need to put in place to maximize the benefits and limit the risks.”
  • Netanyahu was a naysayer about the Arab Spring, unwilling to join the rapturous ranks of hopeful politicians, activists, and democracy advocates. But he was also right.
  • This was less because he is a prophet and more because he is a pessimist. When it comes to grandiose predictions about a better tomorrow—whether through peace with the Palestinians, a nuclear deal with Iran, or the advent of artificial intelligence—Netanyahu always bets against. Informed by a dark reading of Jewish history, he is a cynic about human nature and a skeptic of human progress.
  • fter all, no matter how far civilization has advanced, it has always found ways to persecute the powerless, most notably, in his mind, the Jews. For Netanyahu, the arc of history is long, and it bends toward whoever is bending it.
  • This is why the Israeli leader puts little stock in utopian promises, whether they are made by progressive internationalists or Silicon Valley futurists, and places his trust in hard power instead
  • “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.”
  • To his many critics, myself included, Netanyahu’s refusal to envision a different future makes him a “creature of the bunker,” perpetually governed by fear. Although his pessimism may sometimes be vindicated, it also holds his country hostag
  • In other words, the same cynicism that drives Netanyahu’s reactionary politics is the thing that makes him an astute interrogator of AI and its promoters. Just as he doesn’t trust others not to use their power to endanger Jews, he doesn’t trust AI companies or AI itself to police its rapidly growing capabilities.
‹ Previous 21 - 31 of 31
Showing 20▼ items per page