Fabiano Souza
Published on Jan 26, 2014
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy.
Monthly Archives: May 2019
Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet
Vandana Shiva: We Must Fight Back Against the 1 Percent to Stop the Sixth Mass Extinction
New research finds at least a third of the Himalayan ice cap will melt by the end of the century due to climate change, even if the world’s most ambitious environmental reforms are implemented. A report released earlier this month by the Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment warns rising temperatures in the Himalayas could lead to mass population displacements, as well as catastrophic food and water insecurity. The glaciers are a vital water source for the 250 million people who live in the Hindu Kush Himalaya range, which spans from Afghanistan to Burma. More than a billion-and-a-half people depend on the rivers that flow from the Himalayan peaks. We speak with world-renowned environmental leader and ecologist Dr. Vandana Shiva about climate change, seed sovereignty and her new book, “Oneness vs. the 1%.” Shiva is an Indian scholar, physicist, and food sovereignty and seed freedom advocate. She was was born in Doon Valley in the Himalayan foothills. (democracynow.org
New Narratives for a New Time
New Narratives for a New Time from EARTHwise Centre on Vimeo.
Dr Jean Houston, Anneloes Smitsman, Lawrence Bloom, Dr Jude Currivan, Dr Ervin Laszlo, and Hereditary Chief Phil Lane Jr. talk about the New Narratives, the Promise, and the Prophecies of Initiation, Birth, and Emergence for a New Time and a Global Civilisation.
These conversations are part of the EARTHwise Leadership Quest for the Future Creatives, where each of these Evolutionary Leaders is a Quest contributor. For more information and to join the next online Quest, visit – earthwisecentre.org/the-leadership-quest
Barbara Marx Hubbard [1929-2019]
The community of Evolutionary Leaders worldwide was saddened by the loss on April 10th of one of our most beloved and inspiring pioneers, Barbara Marx Hubbard. Barbara was called “the voice for conscious evolution of our time,” by Dr. Deepak Chopra. She was 89 years old and had not slowed down in her infectious enthusiasm for her work as a futurist, prolific author, visionary, social innovator, educator and Evolutionary Leader. The co-founder and president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, her vision was vast, from running for Vice-President of the United States, to dreaming into the Wheel of Co-Creation, to bringing the concept of the Office for the Future to the United Nations, organizing the SYNCON process for supporting one another in synergystic convergence, and so much more.
Click here to see tributes to our amazing Barbara from more than 60 Evolutionary Leaders at www.evolutionaryleaders.net/barbaramarxhubbard.
Barbara, you will always be in our hearts.
The Genes of the Soul: Amin Maalouf on Belonging, Conflict, and How We Inhabit Our Identity
By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)
As a teenager in Bulgaria, the great joy of turning sixteen was finally qualifying for a passport. But this long-awaited event also marked my first brush with the violence of bureaucracy. One Friday morning, I stepped into a municipal office to apply for the coveted certificate of identity and lined up behind — or, rather, herded with, as is customary in Eastern Europe — a large lot of my fellow humans also in need of some government document. Across the mass of dejected strangers, resigned to countless hours at the mercilessness of bureaucrats, I spotted a boy from my high school. “It takes a lot to wrest identity out of nothing,”James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their extraordinary conversation on identity and belonging, and yet wrest we do when we must: The boy and I locked eyes in relieved recognition of affinity amid alienating otherness. Although we had never talked or otherwise acknowledged each other’s existence in the two years of sharing a campus, we suddenly felt that we belonged to the same tribe, united along this slim axis of affiliation as we faced a shared Other in the municipal bureaucrats and surrounding strangers.
As philosopher David Whyte aptly observed, “our sense of slight woundedness around not belonging is actually one of our core competencies.”
We spent the remainder of the day — Eastern European bureaucracy, for those fortunate enough not to have experienced it, operates on a wholly different time-scale — as the best of friends, talking about everything under the setting sun.
Illustration from Pool by JiHyeon Lee, a parable of how kindred spirits find one another.
Upon returning to school on Monday, we never saw or spoke to each other again — we had both resumed our respective tribal affinity amid the larger nation of the school. As the sameness of our shared predicament dissolved, each was once again an Other to the other.
Almost everyone has experienced some form of such disposable affinity — with an airplane seat mate, with a fellow patient at the dentist’s waiting room, with the other stray Dresden Dolls fan at a science conference. But the strange psychology undergirding our morphing sense of belonging is also the root of the destructive impulses that Tolstoy and Gandhi contemplated in exploring why we hurt each other. All violence requires an Other as its target, and the shifting boundaries of our own identity are what contours that otherness.
We each live with what pioneering psychologist Jerome Bruner called an “internal clamor of identities,” out of which spring both the bonds of belonging and the violence of difference, inflicted upon those whom we perceive as a threat to any one of our multiple identities of gender, race, religion, nationality, class, political affiliation, favorite sports team, and so forth.
Illustration by Olivier Tallec from Waterloo and Trafalgar
These fascinating, shape-shifting complexities of personhood are what Lebanese-born French writer Amin Maalouf explores in the superb 1996 book In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong (public library), translated by Barbara Bray — an immensely insightful exploration of difference, allegiance, and the underlying commonalities of the human experience, timelier than ever in our culture of divisive Otherness. What emerges is a reminder that only by acknowledging the multiplicity of our identity can we begin to simultaneously own our uniqueness and fully inhabit our ties to our fellow human beings.
Maalouf, who carries a number of such clamoring belongings within himself — born in Lebanon to Christian parents and raised with Arabic as his mother tongue, he emigrated to France in his twenties — writes:
Each individual’s identity is made up of a number of elements and these are clearly not restricted to the particulars set down in official records. Of course, for the great majority these factors include allegiance to a religious tradition; to a nationality — sometimes two; to a profession, an institution, or a particular social milieu. But the list is much longer than that; it is virtually unlimited.
[…]
Not all these allegiances are equally strong, at least at any given moment. But none is entirely insignificant, either. All are components of personality — we might almost call them “genes of the soul” so long as we remember that most of them are not innate.
While each of these elements may be found separately in many individuals, the same combination of them is never encountered in different people, and it’s this that gives every individual richness and value and makes each human being unique and irreplaceable.
Illustration by Mimmo Paladino for a rare edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
To underscore that identity is a dynamic interaction with life mores so than a static trait passed down from our ancestors, Maalouf adds:
In fact, he admonishes, adhering to a static and absolute framework of identity is the seedbed of trouble:
[…]
While there is always a certain hierarchy among the elements that go to make up individual identities, that hierarchy is not immutable; it changes with time, and in so doing brings about fundamental changes in behavior.
Illustration from The Sea by Marianne Dubuc.
Reflecting on his own belonging to a minority as a Christian Arab, Maalouf considers the dance between uniqueness and shared belonging:
[…]
Any person of goodwill trying to carry out his or her own “examination of identity” would soon, like me, discover that that identity is a special case. Mankind itself is made up of special cases. Life is a creator of differences… Every individual without exception possesses a composite identity.
Maalouf emphasizes this point as an important antidote to the perilous and prevalent attitude that demands of us to declare our identity along a single dimension — say, female or Bulgarian or queer or yogi — which becomes a violent constriction of our expansiveness. To further complicate the equation, personal identity changes over the course of life, and it is this enigmatic evolution that seeds the mystery of what makes you and your childhood self the same person.
Maalouf writes:
The same could be said of color. To be born black is a different matter according to whether you come in to the world in New York, Lagos, Pretoria or Luanda… For an infant who first sees the light of day in Nigeria, the operative factor as regards his identity is not whether he is black rather than white, but whether he is Yoruba, say, rather than Hausa… In the United States it’s of no consequence whether you have a Yoruba rather than a Hausa ancestor: it’s chiefly among the whites — the Italians, the English, the Irish and the rest — that ethnic origin has a determining effect on identity.
[…]
I mention these examples only to underline the fact that even color and sex are not “absolute” ingredients of identity. That being so, all the other ingredients are even more relative.
Photograph by Martine Franck, 1965
Maalouf considers the crucible of our identity:
[…]
But it is just as necessary to emphasize that identity is also singular, something that we experience as a complete whole. A person’s identity is not an assemblage of separate affiliations, nor a kind of loose patchwork; it is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.
Only by understanding the complexities of identity can we begin to understand what transforms this drum from a celebratory beat of belonging into a menacing rhythm that powers militant marches of violence. Echoing Margaret Mead’s assertion that “we’ve started to worry about identity since people began losing it,” Maalouf writes:
In the midst of any community that has been wounded agitators naturally arise… The scene is now set and the war can begin. Whatever happens “the others” will have deserved it.
[…]
What we conveniently call “murderous folly” is the propensity of our fellow-creatures to turn into butchers when they suspect that their “tribe” is being threatened. The emotions of fear or insecurity don’t always obey rational considerations. They may be exaggerated or even paranoid; but once a whole population is afraid, we are dealing with the reality of the fear rather than the reality of the threat.
Such complex problems, Maalouf is careful to point out, merit only befittingly nuanced solutions:
That’s precisely what Maalouf goes on to do in the remainder of the wholly excellent, urgently relevant In the Name of Identity. Complement it with Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s forgotten conversation about identity and Rebecca Goldstein on the mystery of personhood.
Thanks, Jacqueline
RELATED READING:
The Dark Age of American Thought
Why America Doesn’t Know How to Think Anymore
By now, you’ve seen the debacle — the New Yorker asked Steve Bannon to headline its Ideas Festival, and the internet exploded with rage and scorn. Good job, internet. It struck me, though, watching all this, that American thought is in something like a Dark Age. It doesn’t seem to know how to think anymore. What an idea is — or isn’t. Why ideas matter. What their purpose is. Bang! The mind of a nation winking out.
Does that seem like a strange thing to say? Like navel-gazing wankery? Perhaps, perhaps. Or maybe America’s proud, stubborn, age-old anti-intellectualism has culminated in a giant wave of imbecility proudly disguising itself as cleverness, folly masquerading as wisdom, which is one big reason why America’s in this mess. Let me explain, using the example of fascism.
Is fascism an “idea” that the world needs to be “exposed” to (as Malcolm Gladwell thinks)? The implication: that we must somehow debunk and “disprove” it, with the equivalent of rhetorical parlour games?
Fascism isn’t an idea. The most we can say is that is a failed ideology — easily history’s most catastrophic and ruinously failed one. And if we can’t say that much, we don’t know how to think at all. But if we are thinking well, it’s truer to say that fascism was never an idea at all — it is the destruction of the greatest ideas of all — and so to call it an “idea” devalues the idea of ideas. And that is ignorance of a laughable and dangerous kind. That’s subtle, maybe complex, so let me prove those points one by one.
An idea — in the genuine sense, not the casual, everyday one — is simply a theory that aspires to truth. It can be a theory about the natural world, the social world, people, or even things. But if I say “I want to break your legs”, that is not an idea. It is just an intention, a declaration, a threat, perhaps. Do you see the difference?
Now, let’s prove my definition of ideas. Einstein’s theory of relativity — a theory that aspires to truth: an idea. Newton’s gravity. True. But perhaps you think my definition is reductive. What about art, literature? Think of Rothko’s expressionism, those giant canvases with hazy rectangles. A theory that the ineffable experience of transcendence could be better had through abstraction than by painting halos and Buddhas and so on. It’s a great idea — millions have stood before those canvases — because it’s proven to be true. Do you see how an idea is a theory that aspires to truth?
Let’s think now about fascism. Instead of asking, like dummies, “What does Steve Bannon believe about it?!”, which is what the New Yorker and its ilk appear to want to do, let’s simply ask: what do we know about it?
Well, we know a very great deal. We know that fascism has been tested and tried in the real world many, many times — and it has always led to the same result. Not a glorious thousand years Reich. Never prosperity, peace, abundance, or plenty. But straight to atrocity and war, by way of demonization, exclusion, scapegoating, expropriation, disappearance, and violence. Whether in Germany, Argentina, Rwanda, or anywhere else — every single time that fascism has arisen, the results have been the same, so much so, that by now, every single educated human being on Planet Earth should be able to say this much: fascism is history’s greatest failure.
But in what sense, precisely? Well, if ideas are theories that test truths, then fascism tests the following truths. Some people are inherently superior, and some people are not people at all. The true and strong must therefore subjugate the weak, who are parasites and burdens upon them. They must eliminate them. That is the primary task of a society, and if it devotes itself to it, the result will be all that democracy couldn’t provide — prosperity, peace, and so on. It isn’t true, is it? It has been proven false, in the most ruinous, harmful, and poisoned ways. Fascism couldn’t be proven any more false, in fact.
(It is in this way that fascism is a failed ideology. We could go even further. The notion of “races” is a dubious one at best. So is the conceit that some people are weak and some are strong — we all are, in different ways, at different times. And of course the proposition that violence must be done to prove one’s moral worth is inherently absurd — it is immoral to begin with. The more that we examine it, the more of a failed ideology that fascism is.)
It isn’t just wrong to call fascism an “idea” — it is as foolish and strange to do that as it is backwards . If we wish to be accurate, we must say that it is a ruinously failed ideology, to begin with. It is a theory which has been disproven by history, time and again, in the most extreme ways imaginable.
So there’s no need to “debate” fascism intellectually. The debates have all been had — in the forms of war, atrocity, holocaust, and ruin. To pretend that an idea which is such a total and absolute failure is something for us to relitigate, as an abstraction, which the world has never been exposed to is simply to reveal one’s own stunning, shattering ignorance. To say that “fascism is an idea!” to say that one does not know how to think at all — it reveals one is, to put it bluntly, an idiot.
But if we are really thinking well, we’d go further still. Is fascism a failed ideology — or is it even something less than that? Does fascism even really qualify as an idea at all?
The central ideas of modernity are these. Personhood — that all people are legal, social, and cultural persons, with inherent rights, dignities, and worth. Equality — that all are equal in the precise sense that they are people. And liberty — the idea that because personhood is equal, you cannot infringe on, alienate, or erase mine: personhood cannot be taken away, by anyone, at any time, for any reason.
Now, that might sound trivial to you. “So what?” Ah, but it took human beings millennia to create such ideas — some would say to discover them. What was human history before these three ideas, personhood, equality, and liberty? It was an endless cycle of kings declaring wars with knights and peasants and serfs in order to seize land, women, and gold, from other kinds, over and over again — forever. History went precisely nowhere for the vast majority of humankind’s dismal, grim existence — until the three great ideas of modernity were painstakingly pioneered, revealed, created, discovered.
It was not easy work. Those who proposed them, debated them, fought for them, were put to the sword and burned at the stake. Kings and lords fought against them for a solid thousand years, until, at last, around the 1800s, we saw the emergence of nation-states, in which these three formative ideas were finally formally recognized as “true” — in constitutions, which ordered democracies to be made. In those democracies, a new era began. Human progress raced forward as if lit by a supernova. People could finally realize themselves — as scientists, artists, novelists, entrepreneurs — instead of being serfs fighting wars over gold for kings. Bang! Humankind began to write a new chapter, finally, in its story.
Fast forward two hundred years. Today, our ancestors wouldn’t know what to make of our world. Antibiotics, chemotherapies, the internet. But a person from 200BC would have been right at home in the world of 1200AD. Do you see how transformative these three ideas really were?
Now, let’s come back to fascism. What is it, really? It’s the destruction of the three greatest ideas in human history. Personhood, equality, and liberty. Fascism says that some people aren’t people — there goes personhood. Because some people aren’t people, subhumans must be subjugated — there goes equality. Because subhumans must be subjugated, that’s the primary task of every real person, and society, their job, their work, their employment — there goes liberty, too.
So the more that we think about it, the more fascism is revealed not be an idea at all. It is the destruction of ideas. The eraser, the wrecking ball, the fire. It take the three greatest ideas human beings have ever had — and undoes them. It is an absence, not a presence. Fascism is the absence of personhood, liberty, and equality.
But it is not much of an idea to destroy, damage, and ruin — we’ve already established that. “I want to break your legs” isn’t an idea. In the same way, fascism isn’t really an idea, at all — a theory that aspires to truth. It is simply the denial of the truth of the greatest ideas of all.
What did personhood, liberty, and equality do? Remember? The greatest era of progress in humankind’s long and dismal history. They are ideas have been proven to be true. We are better off, each and every one of us, for them. Fascism is the denial of precisely these greatest of truths — that free, equal, and human, we are all better off. And in that way, it cannot be an idea at all — because it denies what is already self-evidently true. In that way, it is empty, hollow, and false.
To dignify ideas with their destruction and ruin is therefore to commit a terrible mistake — to equate foolishness with wisdom. Any fool can say “let’s rewind to the Stone Age!” That is essentially what fascism is, in a simple way. But that isn’t an idea. We should never consider it an idea. It is the destruction, absence, and denial of the greatest and truest ideas human beings have ever had. And to confuse these things make us fools, or reveals that we always were, my friends.
What is the absence of ideas? It is ignorance, isn’t it? A mind that does not know many ideas — real ones, whether Newton’s gravity, Einstein’s relativity, personhood, liberty, and so on — is an ignorant one. In the same way, when we can call regress an “idea”, we are doing something genuinely stupid. We are devaluing ideas by placing them on par with their absence. We have made fools of ourselves.
That is, if you ask me, where America’s thinkers are today. Fools pretending they are wise men. They don’t seem to know even the basics of how to think at all anymore. What ideas are, intellectually. What they are made of, philosophically. Why they matter, historically. And what the job of a thinker really is: to defend the greatest and truest ideas, from those who wish to destroy them, and take us all back to an uglier, dumber, darker age.
Umair
August 2018
“I’m fat, but I identify as skinny.”
How to revive your belief in democracy
Civic evangelist Eric Liu shares a powerful way to rekindle the spirit of citizenship and the belief that democracy still works. Join him for a trip to “Civic Saturday” and learn more about how making civic engagement a weekly habit can help build communities based on shared values and a path to belonging.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Eric Liu · Civic evangelist, author
Eric Liu is working to spark a civic revival in the US and beyond.
The 25 largest robotics companies in the Bay Area are serving salads, doing surgery and more
By Ahalya Srikant Editorial Researcher, San Francisco Business Times
May 6, 2019 (bizjournals.com)
The robots have arrived, and they’re trying to ease your life in every way possible. These Bay Area companies are working to make automation more helpful and efficient. From health care to retail, cars to coffee, these robots are designed to make your life easier.
The San Francisco Business Times ranked the largest robotics companies in the region for the first time this year. Companies were ranked on the numbers of employees who work specifically on robotics technology in the Bay Area.
The larger companies were NVIDIA, a Silicon Valley stalwart, and Intuitive Surgical, known for its robotic da Vinci system that assists with surgical procedures. The list also includes smaller robotics employment specialists like Chowbotics, which makes getting your greens easier through its salad bot, and larger companies with small robotics staffs like Wave2Wave Technologies, which created a switch system for data processing.
Find the full list here:
Greater Bay Area Robotics Companies
Ranked by Number of local employees working on robotics technology