The New Institute is promoting a public forum on Religion in Political Life this coming Wednesday, 22 May, 7-8.30pm in the Newcastle Civic Hall's Hunter Room. The format will be a panel discussion with myself, Kathleen McPhillips and Terry Lovat discussing our work in the University of Newcastle's Religion in Political Life Research Program. Further details on the event can be found here.
“No matter how they answer the God question, generous-minded people could profit from adopting an attitude of critical sympathy towards religion and maybe even taking the odd dip into it – provided they heed Canon William Vanstone’s warning that the Church is like a public swimming pool, where most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”
"After God: What Can Atheists Learn from Believers?" New Statesman -http://bit.ly/10tPe3D
“It would be churlish to end on such a note. A good book—and Anti-Judaism is a very good one indeed—raises more questions than it answers. Nirenberg makes perfectly clear, with good reason, the questions that concern him most. Martin Luther’s onslaughts on the Jews were even more violent and destructive than those of his Catholic predecessors. Nirenberg shows that they arose in the first place from biblical interpretations hammered out in controversy with Luther’s theological antagonists. This, not actual conversions for which little real evidence exists, was the basis of his anxiety that the world was converting to Judaism. Nirenberg concludes, ‘I am not interested in contributing to arguments, so often dominated by apologetics and anachronism, about whether Martin Luther was an anti-Semite or an architect of the Holocaust. My point is that Luther’s reconceptualization of the ways in which language mediates between God and creation was achieved by thinking with, about, and against Jews and Judaism.’ Generalized to embrace the whole of Western intellectual history, this becomes a point of great importance. It will take some time to absorb its implications.”
"The Quarrels of Others: On Anti-Semitism" The Nation -http://bit.ly/YwqvQf
The Religion in Political Life Research Program continues its seminar series in 2013 with the following speakers:
Venue: Auchmuty Library Cultural Collections
Time: Thursdays 3-4.30pm, All welcome for tea, coffee and nibbles
Contact: Linda.Hutchinson@newcastle.edu.au, Executive Officer of the Humanities Research Institute, +61(0)2492 17915
An interesting article was just posted reviewing Ben Kafka's recent book The Demon of Paperwork: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. It's interesting in pointing out the bureaucratic nature of writing, and, more importantly its optimistic promise of the power of transparency in making governments accountable. Precisely here, the gordian knot of surveillance and citizenship is tied.
“The hope of some of the French revolutionaries was that paperwork would rationalize the state, that it would depersonalize power and destroy the corrupt networks of aristocratic influence.... While this desire can turn documentation into what Kafka calls a “technology of political representation” by which citizens can track whether the state is serving their interests, it also makes paperwork into a voracious medium that authorizes blanket surveillance of citizens and their reconstitution as vulnerable data sets as a condition of citizenship. You are no one without your permanent file. Part of Kafka’s achievement in The Demon of Paperwork is to show how readily revolutionary optimism is undone by administrative surveillance, even when it’s adopted in the revolution’s name. Revolution promises to wash away the most intractable social problems, but then paperwork rears itself to show that these problems have only been displaced to an impersonal and intractable medium.”
Paperwork Against the People" Dissent - http://bit.ly/Y4vCzZ
I was reading in philosophical hermeneutics this past month for something I was writing. I came across an excellent essay by Anthony Thiselton on "New Testament Interpretation in Historical Perspective." What jumped out at me was how much time political philosophers like Locke and Hobbes spent interpreting the bible to promote their own rationalist aims. Mark Lilla makes a similar point in his recent The Stillborn God. Whereas some secularists avoid theology for the sake of the political order, Lilla contends that the key to a healthy secular society is a certain degree of sophistication in political theology. He cites Hobbes in particular as a master at using political theology towards secularising ends. In any case, whether religious or not, theological literacy is valuable to thinking and engaging the claims of religion in public.
This March 21, Russell Blackford will be giving a Religion in Political Life seminar at the University of Newcastle's Cultural Collections. He'll discuss his new Blackwells Press book, Freedom of Religion and the Secular State, where he explicitly discusses Locke's proposal. In any case, here's how Thiselton puts it:
“There is a parallel to Locke in the response of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) to royalist appeals to Christian theology to support the divine right of kings and to parliamentarian appeals to a doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to support a more egalitarian political order. Locke and Hobbes approached theological issues independently against a theologically or ecclesially manipulative background. Locke produced a painstaking critical apparatus of notes on Paul to serve the single ‘plain meaning,’ which was to cut across all social and religious attempts to commandeer Pauline texts for manipulative purposes. His motivation was not a ‘secular worldview’ as such; he was a religious man. The issue was not an assimilation of Christian faith into his empirical or rationalist philosophy. Too often Locke has been seen through the eyes of the ecclesiastical writers of his own time who formulated counterattacks against his use of the common sense ‘reason’ and his appeals to the ‘plain sense’ of the Bible. But he appealed to reason, not against genuine faith as such, but against manipulative religion, whether from the political and religious left or from the political and religious right.”
Pope Benedict XVI resigned today and a few news programs in Australia wanted to discuss what it means. The first was a national radio program The Wire. The second was the local television network NBN, which aired a short comment on the 6pm news. Two things of note:
1. They were interested in the likelihood of a south american or african pope. On the one hand, the demographics support this. According to the numbers compiled recently by the Pew Forum, christianity is now a majority southern hemisphere religion. Pewforum.org has an excellent interactive map which compiles the numbers and allows you to easily see where the tradition is located. For instance, roughly 48% of roman catholics live in the americas, with 17% in the north and 31% in the south. Roughly 16% live in Africa (only 0.5% of those in the north), 12% in Asia Pacific, and roughly 24% live in Europe. So, if leadership represented the constituency you'd expect to see the americas play a part, and particular South America. But the actual politics of the Vatican can't be understood by the demographics. So, while some may speak of an Obama effect, where the leader represents a growing multicultural constituency, the likelihood is that it will be more of the Justin Welby effect, the new rather mainstay Archbishop of Canterbury in the Anglican Communion.
2. The other interest concerns Benedict XVI's legacy. I tend to think that he is likely to be remembered as a rather paradoxical pope. That is, he was a strange set of contradictions in a single person. For instance, he maintained all the symbolic power of the medieval papacy in a way rather out of sync with the modern age, e.g. the silk and gold vestments, the relics, and St. Peter's Basilica. At the same time, in the past few months he was seen tapping the first papal tweet into an iPad. The media became as interested in how many followers he had on Twitter as he did in the church at large. Whereas John Paul II integrated the media into the symbolic power of the papacy, Benedict XVI seemed to hold them apart. Another example is the 2006 Regensberg Address, on "Faith, Reason and the University." Here, he made a compelling argument for the relation between faith and reason. At the same time, he fumbled a negative citation from a 14th century Byzantine Emperor, deeply offending Muslims around the world. Lastly, whereas John Paul II integrated suffering and death into the papal witness itself, Benedect XVI seems to have held the office in tension with his frailty as an eighty-nine year old man, breaking with 600 years of tradition in his resignation.
In short, Christianity is fast becoming a southern hemisphere religion. How these demographics will play out in the next leader of the roman catholic church remains to be seen. In any case, the legacy of this particularly paradoxical pope may be the contradictions he held in tension. This, in the end, may be a vital lesson for the future of this institution.
A recent post in Oxford's "Practical Ethics" blog prompted me to think about some of my past work on surveillance. I've posted a few comments here.
“New York City contemplates using aerial drones for surveillance purposes, while North Korea buys thousands of cameras to spy on its impoverished population. Britain has so many cameras they cease being newsworthy. The stories multiply – it is trivial to note we are moving towards a surveillance society.
In an earlier post, I suggested surrendering on surveillance might be the least bad option – of all likely civil liberty encroachments, this seemed the less damaging and hardest to resist. But that’s an overly defensive way of phrasing it – if ubiquitous surveillance and lack of privacy are the trends of the future, we shouldn’t just begrudgingly accept them, but demand that society gets the most possible out of them. In this post, I’m not going to suggest how to achieve enlightened surveillance (a 360 degree surveillance would be a small start, for instance), but just outline some of the positive good we could get from it. We all know the negatives; but what good could come from corporations, governments and neighbours being able to peer continually into your bedroom (and efficiently process that data)? In the ideal case, how could we make it work for us?”
Stuart Armstrong, "Enlightened Surveillance," Practical Ethics, The University of Oxford - http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/?p=5487
There are two things about this post which I wanted to question briefly.
Firstly, yes, I think this is basically right, we are moving towards a surveillance society and the social and economic logics which are driving this move are seemingly inevitable. It's important to note however that although the electrification of surveillance is new, the practice of tracking and tracing citizens has a much longer history. Surveillance is linked to the history of writing, which begins not with poetry but with mesopotamian bureaucracy. Enlightenment scepticism about surveillance is rooted in a critique of this bureaucratic power. Current concerns about privacy and the integrity of individuals are only one symptom of this longer history. In this sense, surveillance is very old and public concern about its electronic and digital forms are a continuation of a longer engagement. Thinking about how to get the most out of surveillance is, then, a rather banal comment. It's a central concern of democratic cultures for the last three hundred years and is written into many of our constitutions.
Secondly, however, the author of this post passingly notes that "we all know the negatives." I disagree. Part of my previous research on this topic was to uncover some of the hidden costs and dynamics of a surveillance society. The key paradox I tried to show was that the very camera which is said to bring safety, simultaneously undermines it. The reason is that precisely by tracking an individual, it alienates them from their neighbour. We see this time and again in the way people live in highly surveillanced societies. The goal is not to get to know your neighbours, but rather to get a camera up in your neighbourhood, so that when they do something wrong they can be caught by somebody in power. This practice undermines the reciprocity of human relationships, the engagement and communitarian practices where people do not live in constant fear of who is lurking beyond their surveillanced boundaries. The very idea of total surveillance demonstrates the paradox. Human people cannot be completely surveyed. It is a practical impossibility to see all that a person is and is doing. More to the point, however, there is always an excess lurking beyond the data being tracked. This excess leaves citizens with an even more severe fear, of the "other" beyond the camera'd walls, or the "other" beyond the political reach of the particular state in power, or indeed, the various ways in which people always find ways to circumvent the surveillance apparatus. The farce of "360 degree surveillance" only perpetuates the possibility that such a goal may, in the end, produce the least safe society in human history.
A recent Brazilian film, Neighboring Sounds, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, explores this dynamic of safe, surveillanced building complexes in neighborhoods that are springing up all over the globe. The geographer Emanuel Castells' notion of a "space of flows" is relevant here, in that it is increasingly possible to land in any city in the world and enter a frictionless, glass walled pleasure ground just like the one you came from. All the while the makeshift rick-shacks of the have-nots and service class live just out of view. The film brilliantly captures the paradox of the safety these neighborhoods promise. The soundtrack and camera work both foster a sense of unheimlich, of terror. As the film critic A. O. Scott commented, "No one can quite see or hear what is coming, but something is out there, just on the other side of the whatever we think keeps us safe."
In the end, I agree that surveillance is an inevitable part of contemporary society and will continue. So too, the idea of enlightenment surveillance is redundant. Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, who promoted independent thought and self-governance were acutely aware of the power of governments to survey their citizens. However, this very recognition of the longer condition of surveillance should make us even more critical of its current uses and abuses. The "negatives" are not well known, and turn out to be far more problematic and paradoxical than a mere concern for privacy might suggest. A luddite response is impossible at this stage. We must think technology through.
Upon looking for a download of Rowan Williams' "Farewell to Canterbury" documentary on the BBC, I found this debate with Richard Dawkins, chaired by Anthony Kenny. I'm reminded again what a gracious interlocutor Williams was as Archbishop, a public voice who will be greatly missed in that capacity.
“Modern politicians—taking their cues from advertising and business—tend to use words which come attached with an aura of positive buzz, often without having a grip on what they actually mean. ‘Pragmatism’ is a classic example. In this case, however, the harm done goes beyond the annoyance caused to pedants and opponents of ‘political mumbo-jumbo.’ Rather, it allows politicians to subtly stifle dissent, and causes us to neglect the most fundamental questions about what our society ought to look like.
... Is a society ‘working’ if GDP rises steadily but citizens are drastically unequal? What about if people of different races and religions have different access to opportunities and goods? These questions are ineliminably moral, and must be answered in detail before we can have a useable notion of ‘what works.’ The attempt to find some value-neutral standpoint from which to assess what works—the aspiration for an escape from ideology altogether—is an impossible one. Deciding how to weigh up different social benefits and harms is hard; it goes to the core of what we want our society to be like. But these questions are just made harder by reducing a vast swathe of distinct and often competing considerations to a single, sweeping judgment of ‘what works.’”
Alex Worsnip, "Against Pragmatism" - http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=129556
“Lanier has another problem with the techno-utopians, though. It’s not just that they’ve crashed the economy, but that they’ve made a joke out of spirituality by creating, and worshiping, “the Singularity”—the “Nerd Rapture,” as it’s been called. The belief that increasing computer speed and processing power will shortly result in machines acquiring “artificial intelligence,” consciousness, and that we will be able to upload digital versions of ourselves into the machines and achieve immortality. Some say as early as 2020, others as late as 2045. One of its chief proponents, Ray Kurzweil, was on NPR recently talking about his plans to begin resurrecting his now dead father digitally.”
"What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?" Smithsonian Magazine - http://bit.ly/12SyHrU
Interesting short interview of Jürgen Habermas by Francis Fukuyama:
“Allow me to address the normative and empirical aspects of your question separately. The idea of “shared sovereignty” – shared between Europeans in their role as EU citizens and these same people in their role as members of one of the participating nation states – must be developed from the roots of the constitution-building process. This idea has an important implication for how we should conceive of the future shape of a democratized Political Union. If we are to cease shirking the question of the “finalité” of the unification process, we must lay down the correct parameters... For the purpose of democratic legitimation it would be sufficient that a European government be responsible in equal measure to the Parliament and the Council in which the national governments are represented. From an empirical perspective, your question puts a finger on a sore point. It is true that the citizens will always have closer ties to their nation state than to the European Union; however, the fact that, to date, insufficient mutual trust has developed among the European peoples is also a consequence of the failure of the political elites. The latter have so far evaded all European themes; in their national public arenas, they make “Europe” responsible for unpopular decisions in which they themselves have participated in Brussels.”
"The European Citizen: Just a Myth?" The Global Journal - http://bit.ly/VAVTEQ
“All things considered, we should not lose sight of the fact that what I’ve described above is only one way of conceiving the relation between a philosopher’s work and her life. While predominant among the ancient philosophers, as well as among some modern ones (Montaigne and Nietzsche, for example), the understanding of philosophy as an “art of living” is far from characterizing mainstream academic philosophy in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries... However, things are not always that simple. In 1927 Martin Heidegger published Sein und Zeit, one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century; some say the most important one. Only a few years later Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. His political involvement is often cited as one of the most serious mistakes a philosopher can ever make. We are shocked, and rightly so. And, yet, where does our shock come from? From the fact that some German called Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party or rather from the fact that a great philosopher by that name did it? If the latter, why exactly are we upset? Isn’t there at work, in our disappointment with Heidegger’s lamentable political options, an expectation, if an obscure one, that a philosopher’s life should be lead philosophically?”
Costica Bradatan, "Philosophy as an Art of Living," LA Review of Books - http://bit.ly/WOT6cD
“Not all of Derrida’s writing is to everyone’s taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: “What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this ‘I’ who speaks of speaking?”
Even so, the Cambridge backwoodsmen were wrong. Derrida, who died of cancer in 2004 urging his friends to affirm life, was no nihilist. Nor did he want to blow up western civilisation with a stick of conceptual dynamite. He simply wished to make us less arrogantly assured that when we speak of truth, love, identity and authority, we know exactly what we mean.”
Terry Eagleton, " Derrida: A Biography" The Guardian - http://gu.com/p/3bngv
“… contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.”
Archbishop of Canterbury's address to the Synod of Bishops in Rome - http://bit.ly/Q3kErr
“‘Our sense is that cities are responding to the increasing number of chronically or visibly homeless people due to the economic crisis,’ said Heather Maria Johnson, a civil rights lawyer for the group. ‘Rather than addressing the issue of homelessness, they are adapting measures that move homeless people out of downtowns, tourist areas or even out of a city.’”
“Prison is a good place to learn to really listen to your own mind and your own body. I’ve learned to read much more deeply, for instance. For four months, I had nothing to read but the Bible, so I read it for all four months—diligently, picking everything apart. Prison is like a monastery—it’s a place for ascetic practices. After a month here, I became a vegetarian. Walking in circles for an hour in that tiny dusty yard gets you into a pretty meditative state as well. We don’t get much in the way of the news. But enough to get inspired.”
"Pussy Riot: The Jailhouse Interview," GQ, http://gqm.ag/QswJuo
“While there is a widespread public awareness of religion there is a limited public vocabulary for the constructive exploration of issues and opportunities that religion and belief can raise.
Being religiously literate means knowing what questions to ask, how to ask them and understanding why they are important. By realising how religion, as a given or a chosen identity, is lived in a variety of ways by many thousands of staff and students, we can improve the quality of the learning experience and enrich the daily life of universities and colleges.”
“The particular furor over the dictionary—from which Skinner’s book takes its title—was partly due to a messy press release that declared “ain’t gets official recognition at last.” The press release left out that the dictionary also noted that ain’t was “disapproved of by many” and “substandard.” (“Ain’t” had also appeared in many earlier dictionaries.) Still, reviewers had a grand time with headlines such as “Ain’t Nothing Wrong With the Use of Ain’t” amidst a nationwide clutching of the pearls: gutter talk had invaded Webster’s! The New York Times called for the entire edition to be scrapped. Dwight Macdonald, seeing Webster’s Third as an incarnation of the middlebrow takeover of America’s intellectual culture, wrote a coruscating 20-page smackdown in The New Yorker.”
"The War of the Words: How to Update a Dictionary," - http://bit.ly/RKNZHr
"The Messianic Idea in Judaism Revisited," Philip Alexander, FBA, Emeritus Professor of Post-Biblical Jewish Literature, University of Manchester, http://bit.ly/Uk88Wh
