Thursday, March 17th, 2011 
Today, as we think about the developing catastrophe in Japan, we will consider the problem of distant suffering and the limits of human empathy with the help of Gary Alan Fine. We start in this post with Adam Smith’s reflections from his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, followed by Fine’s commentary on this classic passage. Later today, Fine will explore the odd, very human, relationship between horror, humor and the human condition. -Jeff
“Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, . . .
Read more: On Moral Sentiments in Shaky Times
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 
When I first read Elzbieta Matynia’s response to the massive earthquake in Japan, I respected the sincerity of her judgment, but thought that it was a bit much. It seemed to me that actually the news reports I was reading suggested a much more positive story than the one she seemed to be reading. The earthquake was the most severe in recorded Japanese history, much more powerful than the devastating ones in Haiti and Chile. Yet the death toll seemed to be quite modest, a little more than one hundred people. This suggested to me the wonders of modern technology. As the father of an architect, I was proud of what humans can do when they put their minds to it.
Then the reports began to come in about the tsunami, reminding me, reminding us, the limits of human power in the face of a massive natural force. My decision to introduce Elzbieta’s reflections with the suggestion that perhaps thousands have been killed, even though at the time the estimate was still between one and two hundred, were sadly justified. Now in the video reports we tremble in fear at the power the devastation reveals. This clearly puts us in our place.
But it is the third dimension of the disaster, human and not natural, that is the most humbling. While the wonders of technology are revealed in minimizing the effects of the earthquake, the dangers of our technology are revealed in the still escalating nuclear disaster. It reminds us that we are capable of destroying our world, demonstrating the deadly potential of atoms for peace, along with atoms for war.
Indian Point Energy Center © Daniel Case | Wikimedia Commons
I feel compassion, perhaps pity, for the victims in Japan, something that we will return to tomorrow in a post on distant suffering. But given the powers of modern media and given that I write these reflections a few miles downstream from the Indian . . .
Read more: Man versus Nature
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 
Yesterday, I opened my report on budget problems at my local community center. I showed that our local concerns were very much connected to global problems. Now I turn to how people took responsibility for the problems, or more accurately did not directly confront them, revealing a seamy side of politics as usual in America. The key figure is Town Supervisor Paul Feiner.
The supervisor was passionate about only one issue: the fact that there were inaccuracies on the unsigned flier announcing the meeting about proposed budget cuts of the Theodore D. Young Community Center. In Feiner’s response to the A&P closings in the primarily African American surrounding community and when it came to the budget of the center, he was the cool bureaucrat. He denounced the anonymous author of the flier, revealing real anger. On the defensive, he declared that the rumor that the center would close was absolutely not true. I was relieved. But when it came to details about the center’s budget, he was evasive, without passion, using clichés to deflect responsibility, stoking the anger of the community.
Feiner and the Town Board’s basic position: because of revenue short falls, the town was faced with a choice, there had to be either significant tax increases or program cuts to balance the budget. In order to rationally meet the challenge, the board was asking all the relevant commissioners to outline possible ways to cut programs. I am sure there was a target provided, but from the public discussion I didn’t catch it. The impact of proposed cuts would be weighed against their impact on programs by the board in the fall. Feiner emphasized that no program was being targeted and that the goal was to deliver lean and efficient good governance. Strikingly, he used procedure to evade answering any question about specific programs.
The seniors were particularly concerned about their group trips. The swim teams emphasized how important swimming was to them. A former director of . . .
Read more: Institutionalized Racism?
Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 
Recently, I went to a meeting concerning the budget of the Theodore D. Young Community Center. It revealed the tragedy of the cult of fiscal austerity during a prolonged economic downturn and high unemployment.
The Center is a special place for me. I swim there three or four times a week. I chat with my friends, most of whom I came to know during Barack Obama’s campaign to be President. The staff of the center and the community they serve are primarily African American, although there is a diverse cliental. I was the white guy who first canvassed the place for Obama, when most people at the center were still skeptical. For me, it’s a happy place, where I satisfy my exercise addiction, and where I can see the America that I imagine is emergent, multi-racial, multi-cultural, where people of different classes pursue happiness together, from the kids who go to after school programs and summer day camp to the senior citizens playing bingo, to teens roller skating and playing basketball, to the members of the Asian culture club, to the swimmers such as myself. It’s my American dream come true. Of course, as with all dreams, American and otherwise, there are disrupting realities that often force us to wake up. Such was the case with the budget meeting. I present my reflections on the meeting in two posts. First, this afternoon, I reflect on the context as I approached the meeting and as it opened. Tomorrow, I will report on the discussion about the community center, and its implications. I went to the meeting concerned. I left dismayed.
I read a flier announcing the event urging attendance. It warned of program cuts, highlighting many of the most popular, including the pool. Rumors were flying that the center was slated to be closed, which weren’t true. But in the age of government deficits and fiscal austerity, cuts sadly and irrationally seem inevitable.
I say irrationally because I know that this is not the time for spending cuts, despite the cutting frenzy in Washington D.C. and across the nation. It . . .
Read more: Community Center Cuts and the Closing of an A&P
Monday, March 14th, 2011 
Witnessing can be a significant act. Witnessing through art opens deliberate consideration, as is revealed in this post by DC regular, Vince Carducci. -Jeff
For more than 25 years, photographer John Ganis has been documenting the American landscape in lush panoramic color images that use the tools of photographic convention subversively in order to investigate the intersection of nature and culture, especially in places where the former is losing ground to the latter. In his book Consuming the American Landscape, he collected more than eighty images in which toxic waste dumps, strip mine tailings, and other scenes of environmental degradation are rendered with all of the grandeur characteristic of the work of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. This past summer Ganis turned his lens toward two of the most infamous examples in recent memory, the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a much-smaller yet still devastating pipeline leak into the Kalamazoo River in southwestern Michigan.Recently, his latest work was exhibited at the Swords Into Plowshares Peace Gallery in downtown Detroit.
In classic landscape photography, the wide-angle lens and high-resolution detail are devices that serve to convey the majesty of the environment and elicit awe for those parts of the world still seemingly untouched by humankind. In Ganis’ hands, these techniques suggest instead cognitive dissonance, a disparity between form and content: on the one hand the allure of the refined aesthetic with which the images are rendered and on other hand the revulsion at the recognition of what they are about.
In BP Oil Spill Containment Booms, Louisiana (all images 2010, courtesy of the artist), floating orange tubes meander back from the foreground to a horizon that bisects the picture plane. Watercraft of various configurations can be seen in the distance. The ocean in the bottom half of the picture reflects dappled light under the bright blue sky . . .
Read more: John Ganis: Ruptures and Reclamations
Saturday, March 12th, 2011
Responding to the disaster in Japan, Elzbieta Matynia reminded us that our politics and our conflicts all are overshadowed by our need for human solidarity in supporting our common world, which crucially includes our natural environment. Yet, this doesn’t mean turning away from politics. It’s through politics that such solidarity, rather than enforced unity, is constituted. It is through deliberate discussion, informed intelligent talk, that such politics becomes successful. Difficult issues must be discussed and acted upon. Action without discussion results in tyranny, with or without good intentions. DC is dedicated to informed discussion about exactly this issue, which we have considered from a number of different concerns and viewpoints this week.
Andrew Arato’s analysis of the democratic prospects in Egypt involved careful examination of the prospects for revolutionary change. His is a sober account, drawing upon years of research and political experience. When he notes that under dictatorship “revolutions rarely can bring about a democratic transformation,” yielding either mere coups or new forms of authoritarian rule, he is underscoring the dangers of monologic action. When he argues that “it is negotiated transitions based on compromise among many actors” that most likely will yield a constitutional democratic government, pointing to the successful endings of dictatorships of our recent past, he is showing how central deliberate discussion is. “It is very important that in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the East Germany and South Africa oppositions demanded not the fall of a government, but comprehensive negotiations concerning regime change: its timing, rules, procedures, and guarantees.”
As he did last week, Gary Alan Fine again provoked an interesting discussion, showing how humor can be a very serious matter. Drawing upon the insights of Pope Benedict XVI and Lenny Bruce, considering the cases of the Jewish complicity of the murder of Christ, Jared Lee Loughner, James Earl Ray and this week’s House investigation of American Muslim radicalization, he examines the relationship between collective guilt and individual responsibility, showing that this is not an easy issue. I found his argument both interesting and . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Talk is Not Cheap
Friday, March 11th, 2011
The powerful earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan and the resulting tsunami has killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people and caused widespread damage. We at Deliberately Considered mourn the losses.
Our colleague in South Africa, who is preparing to return to New York, sent the following note expressing her frame of mind. I post her thoughts as an expression of human solidarity. -Jeff
Pacific, this morning: Cry for Politics of the Earth
Whatever we have been arguing about recently, seems today like a petty politics. Forget about the petty politics within borders. Forget about the neighbor that might look different, and therefore feels distant. You and I and he and she need solidarity for the survival of humanity. I know that this sounds hopelessly pompous. Forget about it. Today’s news gives new meaning to the call to Save the Earth. It is a cry.
Today’s progressive politics should be about the right of the habitat not to be violated by its inhabitants — not to be destroyed — hence about the survival of the Earth and about a deep respect for the Earth, about the right to have a place to live and for it to be a livable place. We need a Contract with the Earth. It is a cry.
Thursday, March 10th, 2011 
Ahmad Sadri is Professor Sociology and James P. Gorter Chair of Islamic World Studies at Lake Forest College. Today he offers his reflections on the approaches to religion in Iran as the revolutions in the Arab world proceed. -Jeff
Iran’s religious tyranny is not the result of blind subservience to religious tradition. On the contrary, it was born of a bold innovation by the late Ayatollah Khomeini that reversed the quietist bent of the Shiite political philosophy. Khomeini claimed that in absence of the Mahdi (the occulted savior) Shiites must work to create a righteous state. After he was firmly established at the helm of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini went even further and argued that the qualified Islamic jurist is the all powerful Muslim Leviathan who can suspend even the principal beliefs and practices of Islam (including praying, fasting, going to Mecca and even monotheism) in the name of raison d’etat
Thirty years later a decisive majority of Iranians want out of that secret garden of medieval religious despotism, and they showed their collective will in the uprisings of the summer of 2009. The “Arab Spring” that is blossoming in the Middle East might have been inspired by that uprising, the “Green Movement,” but Iranians have not been able to emulate the Arab model by overthrowing their robed potentates. The Iranian religious autocrats possess both the means and the will to mow down potential crowds of protesters in the name of Khomeini’s powerful imperative to preserve the Islamic State.
As a result, the critique of religious government is slowly turning into the kind of radical anti-religious sentiment one could only find among eighteenth-century enlightenment philosophers, nineteenth-century Latin American positivists and twentieth-century Marxist Leninist countries. I fear a narrow minded secularism is replacing a narrow minded “religionism.”
Abdolkarim Soroush © Hessam M.Armandehi | Wikimedia Commons
Consider what happened last month. Abdolkarim Soroush, a renowned Islamic reformer who lives in exile, . . .
Read more: Religion, Tyranny and its Alternatives in Iran
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 
Last week Pope Benedict XVI brought delightful news for the Jews. In his new book the pope personally exonerated Jews for being responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, denying that Jews shared collective guilt for the death of Their Lord. In this, he reiterated the repudiation of collective guilt by the Vatican, nearly fifty years ago, in 1965. On this matter, at least, there is to be no retreat.
Those of us who can remember the earlier repudiation will also remember the brilliant conniptions of Lenny Bruce. As Bruce admitted, “Alright, I’ll clear the air once and for all, and confess. Yes, we did it. I did it, my family. I found a note in my basement. It said: “We killed him, signed, Morty.” Tonight Morty can rest serenely.
The debate over Jewish complicity in the death of Christ, in contrast to the complicity of certain Jews, is a matter of no small significance, even if, as Bruce slyly commented the statute of limitations should be running out. Ultimately the issue is not about Jews and Jesus, but about the assignment of blame for creating a climate of violence.
When I teach freshmen, I begin my seminar on Scandal and Reputation by explaining to these students that sociology is the most dangerous of disciplines. We are the academic subject that through its very birthright trades in stereotypes. Our lineage demands that we discuss race, class, and gender. We do not – or do not only – talk about one black barber, a wealthy stockbroker, a woman of ill-repute, or some malevolent rebbe. Our call is to talk about people, and not persons. Social psychologists push the discipline to gather data from persons, but we analyze what we gathered as if it came from people.
This means that when Jared Lee Loughner went on a shooting rampage, we asked how he got that way. And when Jesus was nailed, we ask who is responsible for a climate of crucifixion. As a sociologist, . . .
Read more: Jesus, King, and Collective Guilt
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 
On the occasion of International Women’s Day, contributing editor Esther Kreider-Verhalle reflects on some problems of daily life in New York City that she and many women (and men) face in our changing times. -Jeff
A couple of weeks ago, Jeff wrote how change is all around us, but doesn’t necessarily have an effect on the underlying realities of the human condition. The original French saying he used, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” the more things change, the more they stay the same, has been on my mind as I have been introduced into the rituals of applying for preschool in New York City. During this process, it was another saying that started haunting me: “the only thing constant is change.”
Next school year, my son will be eligible for preschool. Since the end of the 90s, New York State has offered free, voluntary pre-kindergarten classes for children age 4 and 5. While children are not required to attend school here until they are six, for many working parents, sending their kids to daycare, a nursery, preschool, or kindergarten is the logical thing to do.
Our parents, particularly my parents back in the Netherlands, may not relate to our issues. The dads worked while the moms stayed at home, caring for the kids. By the time we turned four, our mothers dropped us off at one of the local schools. There was no tuition or it was nominal. For sure, a lot less than the ten thousand dollars that is the yearly tuition at the private school in my neighborhood – and which preferably is prepaid before the beginning of the school year (ten percent off if you pay it well in advance!)
A generation ago, the school day also tended to be a longer, maybe not a full day, but certainly not the meager two and a half hours that NYC public preschools now offer. Who will pick up children after a couple of hours in one school, to chaperone them to another daycare facility, where the working parents can pick them up . . .
Read more: Things Change: Preschool in New York
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