Marco Iacoboni, a leading neuroscientist whose work has been covered in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, explains the groundbreaking research into mirror neurons, the "smart cells" in our brain that allow us to understand others. From imitation to morality, from learning to addiction, from political affiliations to consumer choices, mirror neurons seem to have properties that are relevant to all these aspects of social cognition.
Marco Iacoboni is a neurologist and neuroscientist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He has appeared on Good Morning America, the Early Show, and Morning Edition, among other TV and radio programs.
This event took place on June 6, 2008, as a part of the Authors@Google series.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Authors@Google: Marco Iacoboni
June 10, 2008 | 20 likes, 1 dislikes
Conversations with History: Niall Ferguson
Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Harvard historian Niall Ferguson for a discussion of his book "The War of the World." Ferguson analyzes the role of ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and the decline of empires in making the twentieth century the most violent one in human history. Series: Conversations with History [12/2006] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 12082]
Journey From the Psychology of Evil to the Psychology of Heroism
October 9, 2008 lecture by Philip Zimbardo during the 2008 Reunion Homecoming Classes Without Quizzes program. Why do good people turn evil? In what sense are evil and heroism comparable? How could the little old Stanford prison experiment reveal parallels and insights about the abuses by military guards at Abu Ghraib?
Philip Zimbardo, professor of psychology, emeritus, is internationally recognized as a leading "voice and face of contemporary psychology" through his widely seen PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment.
Stanford University Alumni Association:
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/
Stanford University:
http://www.stanford.edu/
Class Day Lecture 2009: The Uniqueness of Humans
On June 13, 2009, Robert Sapolsky, world renowned professor of neurology, neurological sciences, neurosurgery and biological sciences gave the class day lecture in association with commencement weekend 2009. Having been selected to talk by the Stanford University graduating class, Sapolsky spoke about the uniqueness of humans in relation to the rest of the animal world. A few of the topics he spoke on include aggression, theory of mind, the golden rule and pleasure.
Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu
Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
In the Sweet By and By
http://ia311524.us.archive.org/3/items/2006-08-13_In_The_Sweet_By_And_By/In_The_Sweet_By_And_By_vbr.mp3
In The Sweet By And By by Artisan
In The Sweet By And By by Artisan
Play about Columbus
In 1962 Dario Fo's play about Christopher Columbus,
Isabella, Three Tall Ships, and a Con Man
was subject to violent attacks by fascist groups in Rome. On this occasion it was the Italian Communist Party which provided security for Dario Fo and Rame. This event is recounted by Dario Fo in the prologue of Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas.
Isabella, Three Tall Ships, and a Con Man
was subject to violent attacks by fascist groups in Rome. On this occasion it was the Italian Communist Party which provided security for Dario Fo and Rame. This event is recounted by Dario Fo in the prologue of Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas.
Gandhi by Rushdie
Mohandas Gandhi
By Salman Rushdie
A thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full color, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there's a slangily American injunction to "Think Different." Such is the present-day power of international Big Business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily be drafted into its image ad campaigns. Once, a half-century ago, this bony man shaped a nation's struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple. His thoughts don't really count in this new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be "on message," in line with the corporate philosophy of Apple.
The advertisement is odd enough to be worth dissecting a little. Obviously it is rich in unintentional comedy. M.K. Gandhi, as the photograph itself demonstrates, was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly have found it abhorrent. The very term word processor, with its overly technological ring, is unlikely to have found favor.
"Think Different." Gandhi, in his younger days a sophisticated and Westernized lawyer, did indeed change his thinking more radically than most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the merchant princes who backed him, once said, "He was more modern than I. But he made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages." This is not, presumably, the revolutionary new direction in thought that the good folks at Apple are seeking to encourage.
Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.
Richard Attenborough's much-Oscared movie Gandhi struck me, when it was first released, as an example of this type of unhistorical Western saintmaking. Here was Gandhi-as-guru, purveying that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi-as-Christ, dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that others might live. His philosophy of nonviolence seemed to work by embarrassing the British into leaving; freedom could be won, the film appeared to suggest, by being more moral than your oppressor, whose moral code could then oblige him to withdraw.
But such is the efficacy of this symbolic Gandhi that the film, for all its simplifications and Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and positive effect on many contemporary freedom struggles. South African antiapartheid campaigners and democratic voices all over South America have enthused to me about the film's galvanizing effects. This posthumous, exalted "international Gandhi" has apparently become a totem of real inspirational force.
The trouble with the idealized Gandhi is that he's so darned dull, little more than a dispenser of homilies and nostrums ("An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind") with just the odd flash of wit (asked what he thought of Western civilization, he gave the celebrated reply, "I think it would be a great idea"). The real man, if it is still possible to use such a term after the generations of hagiography and reinvention, was infinitely more interesting, one of the most complex and contradictory personalities of the century. His full name, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was memorably--and literally--translated into English by the novelist G.V. Desani as "Action-Slave Fascination-Moon Grocer," and he was as rich and devious a figure as that glorious name suggests.
Entirely unafraid of the British, he was nevertheless afraid of the dark, and always slept with a light burning by his bedside. He believed passionately in the unity of all the peoples of India, yet his failure to keep the Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah within the Indian National Congress's fold led to the partition of the country. (For all his vaunted selflessness and modesty, he made no move to object when Jinnah was attacked during a Congress session for calling him "Mr. Gandhi" instead of "Mahatma," and booed off the stage by Gandhi's supporters. Later, his withdrawal, under pressure from Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, of a last-ditch offer to Jinnah of the prime ministership itself, ended the last faint chance of avoiding partition.)
He was determined to live his life as an ascetic, but, as the poet Sarojini Naidu joked, it cost the nation a fortune to keep Gandhi living in poverty. His entire philosophy privileged the village way over that of the city, yet he was always financially dependent on the support of industrial billionaires like Birla. His hunger strikes could stop riots and massacres, but he also once went on a hunger strike to force one of his capitalist patrons' employees to break their strike against the harsh conditions of employment.
He sought to improve the conditions of the untouchables, yet in today's India, these peoples, now calling themselves Dalits and forming an increasingly well-organized and effective political grouping, have rallied around the memory of their own leader, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, an old rival of Gandhi's. As Ambedkar's star has risen among the Dalits, so Gandhi's stature has been reduced.
The creator of the political philosophies of passive resistance and constructive nonviolence, he spent much of his life far from the political arena, refining his more eccentric theories of vegetarianism, bowel movements and the beneficial properties of human excrement.
Forever scarred by the knowledge that, as a 16-year-old youth, he'd been making love to his wife Kasturba at the moment of his father's death, Gandhi later forswore sexual relations but went on into his old age with what he called his "brahmacharya experiments," during which naked young women would be asked to lie with him all night so that he could prove that he had mastered his physical urges. (He believed that total control over his "vital fluids" would enhance his spiritual powers.)
He, and he alone, was responsible for the transformation of the demand for independence into a nationwide mass movement that mobilized every class of society against the imperialist, yet the free India that came into being, divided and committed to a program of modernization and industrialization, was not the India of his dreams. His sometime disciple, Nehru, was the archproponent of modernization, and it was Nehru's vision, not Gandhi's, that was eventually--and perhaps inevitably--preferred.
Gandhi began by believing that the politics of passive resistance and nonviolence should be effective in any situation, at any time, even against a force as malign as Nazi Germany. Later, he was obliged to revise his opinion, and concluded that while the British had responded to such techniques because of their own nature, other oppressors might not.
Gandhian nonviolence is widely believed to be the method by which India gained independence. (The view is assiduously fostered inside India as well as outside it.) Yet the Indian revolution did indeed become violent, and this violence so disappointed Gandhi that he stayed away from the independence celebrations in protest. Moreover, the ruinous economic impact of World War II on Britain, and--as British writer Patrick French says in his book Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division--the gradual collapse of the Raj's bureaucratic hold over India from the mid-'30s onward did as much to bring about freedom as any action of Gandhi's. It is probable, in fact, that Gandhian techniques were not the key determinants of India's arrival at freedom. They gave independence its outward character and were its apparent cause, but darker and deeper historical forces produced the desired effect.
These days, few people pause to consider the complex character of Gandhi's personality, the ambiguous nature of his achievement and legacy, or even the real causes of Indian independence. These are hurried, sloganizing times, and we don't have the time or, worse, the inclination to assimilate many-sided truths. The harshest truth of all is that Gandhi is increasingly irrelevant in the country whose "little father"--Bapu--he was. As the analyst Sunil Khilnani has pointed out, India came into being as a secularized state, but Gandhi's vision was essentially religious. However, he "recoiled" from Hindu nationalism. His solution was to forge an Indian identity out of the shared body of ancient narratives. "He turned to the legends and stories from India's popular religious traditions, preferring their lessons to the supposed ones of history."
It didn't work. In today's India, Hindu nationalism is rampant in the form of Bharatiya Janata Party. During the recent elections, Gandhi and his ideas have scarcely been mentioned.
Twenty-one years ago, the writer Ved Mehta spoke to one of Gandhi's leading political associates, a former Governor-General of independent India, C. Rajagopalachari. His verdict on Gandhi's legacy is disenchanted, but in today's India, on the fast track to free-market capitalism, it still rings true: "The glamour of modern technology, money and power is so seductive that no one--I mean no one--can resist it. The handful of Gandhians who still believe in his philosophy of a simple life in a simple society are mostly cranks."
What, then, is greatness? In what does it reside? If a man's project fails, or survives only in irredeemably tarnished form, can the force of his example still merit the extreme accolade? For Jawaharlal Nehru, the defining image of Gandhi was "as I saw him marching, staff in hand, to Dandi on the Salt March in 1930. Here was the pilgrim on his quest of Truth, quiet, peaceful, determined and fearless, who would continue that quest and pilgrimage, regardless of consequences." Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi later said, "More than his words, his life was his message." These days, that message is better heeded outside India. Albert Einstein was one of many to praise Gandhi's achievement; Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama and all the world's peace movements have followed in his footsteps. Gandhi, who gave up cosmopolitanism to gain a country, has become, in his strange afterlife, a citizen of the world: his spirit may yet prove resilient, smart, tough, sneaky and, yes, ethical enough to avoid assimilation by global McCulture (and Mac culture too). Against this new empire, Gandhian intelligence is a better weapon than Gandhian piety. And passive resistance? We'll see.
Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, India, is the author of The Moor's Last Sigh
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988159,00.html
Copyright © 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
By Salman Rushdie
A thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full color, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there's a slangily American injunction to "Think Different." Such is the present-day power of international Big Business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily be drafted into its image ad campaigns. Once, a half-century ago, this bony man shaped a nation's struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple. His thoughts don't really count in this new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be "on message," in line with the corporate philosophy of Apple.
The advertisement is odd enough to be worth dissecting a little. Obviously it is rich in unintentional comedy. M.K. Gandhi, as the photograph itself demonstrates, was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, the plowed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he would almost certainly have found it abhorrent. The very term word processor, with its overly technological ring, is unlikely to have found favor.
"Think Different." Gandhi, in his younger days a sophisticated and Westernized lawyer, did indeed change his thinking more radically than most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the merchant princes who backed him, once said, "He was more modern than I. But he made a conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages." This is not, presumably, the revolutionary new direction in thought that the good folks at Apple are seeking to encourage.
Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth.
Richard Attenborough's much-Oscared movie Gandhi struck me, when it was first released, as an example of this type of unhistorical Western saintmaking. Here was Gandhi-as-guru, purveying that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi-as-Christ, dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that others might live. His philosophy of nonviolence seemed to work by embarrassing the British into leaving; freedom could be won, the film appeared to suggest, by being more moral than your oppressor, whose moral code could then oblige him to withdraw.
But such is the efficacy of this symbolic Gandhi that the film, for all its simplifications and Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and positive effect on many contemporary freedom struggles. South African antiapartheid campaigners and democratic voices all over South America have enthused to me about the film's galvanizing effects. This posthumous, exalted "international Gandhi" has apparently become a totem of real inspirational force.
The trouble with the idealized Gandhi is that he's so darned dull, little more than a dispenser of homilies and nostrums ("An eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind") with just the odd flash of wit (asked what he thought of Western civilization, he gave the celebrated reply, "I think it would be a great idea"). The real man, if it is still possible to use such a term after the generations of hagiography and reinvention, was infinitely more interesting, one of the most complex and contradictory personalities of the century. His full name, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, was memorably--and literally--translated into English by the novelist G.V. Desani as "Action-Slave Fascination-Moon Grocer," and he was as rich and devious a figure as that glorious name suggests.
Entirely unafraid of the British, he was nevertheless afraid of the dark, and always slept with a light burning by his bedside. He believed passionately in the unity of all the peoples of India, yet his failure to keep the Muslim leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah within the Indian National Congress's fold led to the partition of the country. (For all his vaunted selflessness and modesty, he made no move to object when Jinnah was attacked during a Congress session for calling him "Mr. Gandhi" instead of "Mahatma," and booed off the stage by Gandhi's supporters. Later, his withdrawal, under pressure from Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, of a last-ditch offer to Jinnah of the prime ministership itself, ended the last faint chance of avoiding partition.)
He was determined to live his life as an ascetic, but, as the poet Sarojini Naidu joked, it cost the nation a fortune to keep Gandhi living in poverty. His entire philosophy privileged the village way over that of the city, yet he was always financially dependent on the support of industrial billionaires like Birla. His hunger strikes could stop riots and massacres, but he also once went on a hunger strike to force one of his capitalist patrons' employees to break their strike against the harsh conditions of employment.
He sought to improve the conditions of the untouchables, yet in today's India, these peoples, now calling themselves Dalits and forming an increasingly well-organized and effective political grouping, have rallied around the memory of their own leader, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, an old rival of Gandhi's. As Ambedkar's star has risen among the Dalits, so Gandhi's stature has been reduced.
The creator of the political philosophies of passive resistance and constructive nonviolence, he spent much of his life far from the political arena, refining his more eccentric theories of vegetarianism, bowel movements and the beneficial properties of human excrement.
Forever scarred by the knowledge that, as a 16-year-old youth, he'd been making love to his wife Kasturba at the moment of his father's death, Gandhi later forswore sexual relations but went on into his old age with what he called his "brahmacharya experiments," during which naked young women would be asked to lie with him all night so that he could prove that he had mastered his physical urges. (He believed that total control over his "vital fluids" would enhance his spiritual powers.)
He, and he alone, was responsible for the transformation of the demand for independence into a nationwide mass movement that mobilized every class of society against the imperialist, yet the free India that came into being, divided and committed to a program of modernization and industrialization, was not the India of his dreams. His sometime disciple, Nehru, was the archproponent of modernization, and it was Nehru's vision, not Gandhi's, that was eventually--and perhaps inevitably--preferred.
Gandhi began by believing that the politics of passive resistance and nonviolence should be effective in any situation, at any time, even against a force as malign as Nazi Germany. Later, he was obliged to revise his opinion, and concluded that while the British had responded to such techniques because of their own nature, other oppressors might not.
Gandhian nonviolence is widely believed to be the method by which India gained independence. (The view is assiduously fostered inside India as well as outside it.) Yet the Indian revolution did indeed become violent, and this violence so disappointed Gandhi that he stayed away from the independence celebrations in protest. Moreover, the ruinous economic impact of World War II on Britain, and--as British writer Patrick French says in his book Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division--the gradual collapse of the Raj's bureaucratic hold over India from the mid-'30s onward did as much to bring about freedom as any action of Gandhi's. It is probable, in fact, that Gandhian techniques were not the key determinants of India's arrival at freedom. They gave independence its outward character and were its apparent cause, but darker and deeper historical forces produced the desired effect.
These days, few people pause to consider the complex character of Gandhi's personality, the ambiguous nature of his achievement and legacy, or even the real causes of Indian independence. These are hurried, sloganizing times, and we don't have the time or, worse, the inclination to assimilate many-sided truths. The harshest truth of all is that Gandhi is increasingly irrelevant in the country whose "little father"--Bapu--he was. As the analyst Sunil Khilnani has pointed out, India came into being as a secularized state, but Gandhi's vision was essentially religious. However, he "recoiled" from Hindu nationalism. His solution was to forge an Indian identity out of the shared body of ancient narratives. "He turned to the legends and stories from India's popular religious traditions, preferring their lessons to the supposed ones of history."
It didn't work. In today's India, Hindu nationalism is rampant in the form of Bharatiya Janata Party. During the recent elections, Gandhi and his ideas have scarcely been mentioned.
Twenty-one years ago, the writer Ved Mehta spoke to one of Gandhi's leading political associates, a former Governor-General of independent India, C. Rajagopalachari. His verdict on Gandhi's legacy is disenchanted, but in today's India, on the fast track to free-market capitalism, it still rings true: "The glamour of modern technology, money and power is so seductive that no one--I mean no one--can resist it. The handful of Gandhians who still believe in his philosophy of a simple life in a simple society are mostly cranks."
What, then, is greatness? In what does it reside? If a man's project fails, or survives only in irredeemably tarnished form, can the force of his example still merit the extreme accolade? For Jawaharlal Nehru, the defining image of Gandhi was "as I saw him marching, staff in hand, to Dandi on the Salt March in 1930. Here was the pilgrim on his quest of Truth, quiet, peaceful, determined and fearless, who would continue that quest and pilgrimage, regardless of consequences." Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi later said, "More than his words, his life was his message." These days, that message is better heeded outside India. Albert Einstein was one of many to praise Gandhi's achievement; Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama and all the world's peace movements have followed in his footsteps. Gandhi, who gave up cosmopolitanism to gain a country, has become, in his strange afterlife, a citizen of the world: his spirit may yet prove resilient, smart, tough, sneaky and, yes, ethical enough to avoid assimilation by global McCulture (and Mac culture too). Against this new empire, Gandhian intelligence is a better weapon than Gandhian piety. And passive resistance? We'll see.
Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, India, is the author of The Moor's Last Sigh
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988159,00.html
Copyright © 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
Salman Rushdie Essay
Imagine no heaven
The six billionth person was born this week into a world still plagued by religious conflict and oppression. Salman Rushdie has an important message for this new member of the human race
The Guardian, Saturday 16 October 1999
Dear little Six Billionth Living Person: As one of the newest members of a notoriously inquisitive species, it probably won't be too long before you start asking the two $64,000 questions with which the other 5,999,999,999 of us have been wrestling for some time:
How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?
Oddly - as if six billion of us weren't enough to be going on with - it will almost certainly be suggested to you that the answer to the question of origins requires you to believe in the existence of a further, invisible, ineffable Being "somewhere up there", an omnipotent creator whom we poor limited creatures are unable even to perceive, much less to understand. That is, you will be strongly encouraged to imagine a heaven, with at least one god in residence.
This sky god, it's said, made the universe by churning its matter in a giant pot. Or, he danced. Or, he vomited Creation out of himself. Or, he simply called it into being, and lo, it Was. In some of the more interesting creation stories, the single mighty sky god is subdivided into many lesser forces - junior deities, avatars, gigantic metamorphic "ancestors" whose adventures create the landscape, or the whimsical, wanton, meddling, cruel pantheons of the great polytheisms, whose wild doings will convince you that the real engine of creation was lust: for infinite power, for too easily broken human bodies, for clouds of glory. But it's only fair to add that there are also stories which offer the message that the primary creative impulse was, and is, love.
Many of these stories will strike you as extremely beautiful, and therefore seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of dead religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in "your" stories, and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them, must become a vital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity.
It is possible that they may at some point come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it's true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods. In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name.
As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker's dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
But here's something genuinely odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn't lessened the zeal of the devout in the least. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.
As a result of this faith, by the way, it has proved impossible, in many parts of the world, to prevent the human race's numbers from swelling alarmingly. Blame the overcrowded planet at least partly on the misguidedness of the race's spiritual guides. In your own lifetime, you may well witness the arrival of the nine billionth world citizen.
(If too many people are being born as a result, in part, of religious strictures against birth control, then too many people are also dying because religious culture, by refusing to face the facts of human sexuality, also refuses to fight against the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.)
There are those who say that the great wars of the new century will once again be wars of religion, jihads and crusades, as they were in the middle ages. I don't believe them, or not in the way they mean it. Take a took at the Muslim world, or rather the Islamist world, to use the word coined to describe Islam's present-day "political arm". The divisions between its great powers (Afghanistan vs lran vs Iraq vs Saudi Arabia vs Syria vs Egypt) are what strike you most forcefully. There's very little resembling a common purpose. Even after the non-Islamic Nato fought a war for the Muslim Kosovan Albanians, the Muslim world was slow in coming forward with much-needed humanitarian aid.
The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their "sphere of influence". They are wars of the godly against the largely defenceless - American fundamentalists against pro-choice doctors, Iranian mullahs against their country's Jewish minority, Hindu fundamentalists in Bombay against that city's increasingly fearful Muslims.
The victors in that war must not be the closed-minded, marching into battle with, as ever, God on their side. To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities. So, how did we get here? Don't look for the answer in storybooks. Imperfect human knowledge may be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it's the only road to wisdom worth taking. Virgil, who believed that the apiarist Aristaeus could spon taneously generate new bees from the rotting carcass of a cow, was closer to a truth about origins than all the revered old books.
The ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses. Live in your own time, use what we know, and as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you, and put aside childish things.
As the song says, "It's easy if you try."
As for mortality, the second great question - how to live? What is right action, and what wrong? - it comes down to your willingness to think for yourself. Only you can decide if you want to be handed down the law by priests, and accept that good and evil are somehow external to ourselves. To my mind religion, even at its most sophisticated, essentially infantilises our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us: the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.
How, then, are we to make ethical choices without a divine rulebook or judge? Is unbelief just the first step on the long slide into the brain death of cultural relativism, according to which many unbearable things - female circumcision, to name just one - can be excused on culturally specific grounds, and the universality of human rights, too, can be ignored? (This last piece of moral unmaking finds supporters in some of the world's most authoritarian regimes, and also, unnervingly, on the editorial page of the Daily Telegraph.)
Well, no, it isn't, but the reasons for saying so aren't clear-cut. Only hard-line ideology is clear-cut. Freedom, which is the word I use for the secular-ethical position, is inevitably fuzzier. Yes, freedom is that space in which contradiction can reign, it is a never-ending debate. It is not in itself the answer to the question of morals, but the conversation about that question. And it is much more than mere relativism, because it is not merely a never-ending talk show, but a place in which choices are made, values defined and defended. Intellectual freedom, in European history, has mostly meant freedom from the restraints of the Church, not the state.
This is the battle Voltaire was fighting, and it's also what all six billion of us could do for ourselves, the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part: once and for all we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behaviour. Once and for all we could put the stories back into the books, put the books back on the shelves, and see the world undogmatised and plain.
Imagine there's no heaven, my dear Six Billionth, and at once the sky's the limit.
• Extract from Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen, published in English by Uitgeverij Podium, Amsterdam. Copies available at Dutch internet bookshops includingwww.nl.bol.com and www.boeknet.nl
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/oct/16/salmanrushdie
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Friday, July 9, 2010
Sustainable Practices
Prodigal People have forgotten that we are only temporary guests here. If we want our descendants to enjoy the freedoms and plenty of which we had full benefit, we must take our responsibilities seriously.
Waste Not, Want Not
Prodigal People describes the generation of people who have squandered the assets of the Planet. Do you know who they are?
One definition of Steward iws one who manages property or other affairs for someone else.
This Blog will bring together some ideas for doing a better job of taking care of our home so the next generation has an Earth to inherit and an economy that is not in shambles.
One definition of Steward iws one who manages property or other affairs for someone else.
This Blog will bring together some ideas for doing a better job of taking care of our home so the next generation has an Earth to inherit and an economy that is not in shambles.
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