Posts Tagged ‘diversity’
“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn”*…
Abigail Tulenko argues that folktales, like formal philosophy, unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world…
The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terrified and tantalised me as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the devil with string in order to discover important truths. These days, as a PhD student in philosophy, I sometimes worry I’ve done the same. I still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable demons.
The demons of academic philosophy come in familiar guises: exclusivity, hegemony and investment in the myth of individual genius. As the ethicist Jill Hernandez notes, philosophy has been slower to change than many of its sister disciplines in the humanities: ‘It may be a surprise to many … given that theology and, certainly, religious studies tend to be inclusive, but philosophy is mostly resistant toward including diverse voices.’ Simultaneously, philosophy has grown increasingly specialised due to the pressures of professionalisation. Academics zero in on narrower and narrower topics in order to establish unique niches and, in the process, what was once a discipline that sought answers to humanity’s most fundamental questions becomes a jargon-riddled puzzle for a narrow group of insiders.
In recent years, ‘canon-expansion’ has been a hot-button topic, as philosophers increasingly find the exclusivity of the field antithetical to its universal aspirations. As Jay Garfield remarks, it is as irrational ‘to ignore everything not written in the Eurosphere’ as it would be to ‘only read philosophy published on Tuesdays.’ And yet, academic philosophy largely has done just that. It is only in the past few decades that the mainstream has begun to engage seriously with the work of women and non-Western thinkers. Often, this endeavour involves looking beyond the confines of what, historically, has been called ‘philosophy’.
Expanding the canon generally isn’t so simple as resurfacing a ‘standard’ philosophical treatise in the style of white male contemporaries that happens to have been written by someone outside this demographic. Sometimes this does happen, as in the case of Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) whose work has attracted increased recognition in recent years. But Cavendish was the Duchess of Newcastle, a royalist whose political theory criticises social mobility as a threat to social order. She had access to instruction that was highly unusual for women outside her background, which lends her work a ‘standard’ style and structure. To find voices beyond this elite, we often have to look beyond this style and structure.
Texts formerly classified as squarely theological have been among the first to attract significant renewed interest. Female Catholic writers such as Teresa of Ávila or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose work had been largely ignored outside theological circles, are now being re-examined through a philosophical lens. Likewise, philosophy departments are gradually including more work by Buddhist philosophers such as Dignāga and Ratnakīrti, whose epistemological contributions have been of especial recent interest. Such thinkers may now sit on syllabi alongside Augustine or Aquinas who, despite their theological bent, have long been considered ‘worthy’ of philosophical engagement.
On the topic of ‘worthiness’, I am wary of using the term ‘philosophy’ as an honorific. It is crucial that our interest in expanding the canon does not involve the implication that the ‘philosophical’ confers a degree of rigour over the theological, literary, etc. To do so would be to engage in a myopic and uninteresting debate over academic borders. My motivating question is not what the label of ‘philosophy’ can confer upon these texts, but what these texts can bring to philosophy. If philosophy seeks insight into the nature of such universal topics as reality, morality, art and knowledge, it must seek input from those beyond a narrow few. Engaging with theology is a great start, but these authors still largely represent an elite literate demographic, and raise many of the same concerns regarding a hegemonic, exclusive and individualistic bent.
As Hernandez quips: ‘[W]e know white, Western men have not cornered the market on deeply human, philosophical questions.’ And furthermore, ‘we also know, prudentially, that philosophy as a discipline needs to (and must) undergo significant navel-gazing to survive … in an ever-increasingly difficult time for homogenous, exclusive academic disciplines.’ In light of our aforementioned demons, it appears that philosophy is in urgent need of an exorcism.
I propose that one avenue forward is to travel backward into childhood – to stories like Ibronka’s. Folklore is an overlooked repository of philosophical thinking from voices outside the traditional canon. As such, it provides a model for new approaches that are directly responsive to the problems facing academic philosophy today. If, like Ibronka, we find ourselves tied to the devil, one way to disentangle ourselves may be to spin a tale…
Wisdom is where we find it: “Folklore is philosophy,” in @aeonmag. Eminently worth reading in full.
Apposite: “Syncretic Past.”
* Mary Catherine Bateson
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As we update our understanding of understanding, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Michael Sandel; he was born on this date in 1953. A philosopher and professor of government theory at Harvard Law School (where his course Justice was the university’s first course to be made freely available online and on television, seen so far by tens of millions of people around the world), he is probably best known for his critique of John Rawls‘ A Theory of Justice (in Sandel’s book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice).
Sandel subscribes to a certain version of communitarianism (although he is uncomfortable with the label), and in this vein he is perhaps best known for his critique of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s argument depends on the assumption of the veil of ignorance, which Sandel argues commits Rawls to a view of people as “unencumbered selves”. Sandel’s view is that we are by nature encumbered to an extent that makes it impossible even hypothetically to have such a veil. Some examples of such ties are those with our families, which we do not make by conscious choice but are born with, already attached. Because they are not consciously acquired, it is impossible to separate oneself from such ties. Sandel believes that only a less-restrictive, looser version of the veil of ignorance should be postulated. Criticism such as Sandel’s inspired Rawls to subsequently argue that his theory of justice was not a “metaphysical” theory but a “political” one, a basis on which an overriding consensus could be formed among individuals and groups with many different moral and political views.
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“Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides”*…
Blake Smith on trail-blazing publisher Michael Denneny and his embodiment of his mentor’s– Hannah Arendt‘s– thought…
Michael Denneny, the recently deceased co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street , gay newspaper New York Native , and the gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently published collection of essays On Christopher Street with a quotation from his mentor, Hannah Arendt:
Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same.
Denneny’s career as a gay cultural activist was a way of putting into practice Arendt’s thought as condensed in this citation…
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Arendt argued throughout her work, although with critically shifting emphases, that the possibility of political freedom for society as whole depends on particular groups within it being able to constitute distinct “worlds” in which their members can exchange perspectives, debate their common interests, and face the wider “world” composed of other groups. That is, a healthy society is diverse in the sense of being made up of individual units like economic classes and religious and ethnic minorities (represented by associations, trade unions, churches etc.), which are themselves characterized by internal diversity and lively debate.
Diversity and debate prevent, in a logic familiar from Montesquieu and Madison, the emergence of a single all-powerful leader or stifling consensus. In such accounts, which form the basis for American political common sense today, we imagine minorities as homogenous interest groups, which, in the play of their rival ambitions, keep each other in check, through a kind of balance of power akin to that at work in international relations. Politicized minorities, each pursuing its collective interests, can, if their debates and rivalries are properly channeled, be a force for good in politics.
Arendt’s argument is substantively different. In her account, minorities are important not insofar as they are internally unified groups engaged in the play of countervailing interests and powers, but rather insofar as they are internally heterogeneous groups whose very diversity offers a sort of school in which citizens learn how to have judgment: the capacity to express and exchange ideas without appeal to fixed rules. Differences within “our own groups”—our everyday experiences of debates with other people “like us” in the spaces of our associational life (synagogues, union halls, gay bars, etc.) prepare us for the still more challenging experiences of disagreement in our wider political life, where we cannot necessarily trust that our interlocutors share our identities, experiences, and goals.
Indeed, the experience of uncertainty is constitutive of politics, as Arendt saw it. Politics is one of a number of domains, she argued, in which we cannot call upon, in the course of our mutual questioning about what is to be done, anything like a logical principle (2+2=4) that all rational beings might recognize or a universally agreed-upon norm that all, or nearly all, members of our community do recognize. In these domains we are obligated to, as she often says, “woo” each other, to practice the arts of rhetorical seduction—which does not mean in her account, that we are in debates over politics merely practicing sophistry.
Rather, we are—as we find ourselves constantly doing in our most quotidian, non-political conversations—appealing to each other to share perspectives (Look!, we say, don’t you see?), on the assumption that each of us is positioned differently, because of our experiences, knowledge, interests, etc., in relation to a field of objects to which we all refer. We assume, in other words, that our divergent perspectives are perspectives on something, on the same things, and that we can by discussing them, inviting our interlocutors into our position by rendering it in speech, and projecting ourselves through our imaginations into their own positions, come closer to a true picture of the situation…
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…there is a danger that we may [Arendt argued], in the very exchange of perspectives, be speaking not at all to each other, that is, to specific interlocutors whose perspectives—and ultimately whose agreement—we desire (and thus whose disagreement we must tolerate), but rather to an abstract universal media pseudo-conversation, to the empty signifier of an invisible authority [and] one must admit that this peril characterizes our idle chatter on Twitter no less than the talk at cocktail parties and banal book reviews Arendt lamented in her day. In that sense it is not necessarily such a disaster if, for the moment, the possibility of a “national conversation” in media and politics seems to be suspended. Indeed, the whole point of Arendt and Denneny’s insight is to remind us that if we are to learn again how to speak to each other (and not merely speak in each other’s—perhaps merely virtual—presence), then participation in the life of real, concrete, internally diverse groups will be our classrooms…
Hannah Arendt, Michael Denneny, and the real value of diversity: “Living in Arendt’s World.”
* Hannah Arendt
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As we explore empathy, we might recall that it was on this date in 2015 that Cecilia Bleasdale sent her daughter Grace photo of a dress she intended to wear to Grace’s wedding. Celia thought that the dress, blue with black lace, would be perfect; but her daughter saw a white dress with gold lace. Grace posted the photo to Facebook, and the debate– blue/black or white/gold– broadened.
Then a friend uploaded it to Tumblr… and the argument went global. That post saw up to 840,000 views per minute. The next day, the retailer, Roman Originals (which confirmed that the dress was, in fact, blue and black), sold out of the model within 30 minutes.
It spread further. Celebrities posted and reposted, tweeted and retweeted (e.g., Taylor Swift, who saw blue and black and said she was “confused and scared,” was retweeted 111,134 times and liked 154,188 times); morning news shows covered the controversy…
Science has yet adequately to explain the phenomenon.
“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”*…
And some of them were recently found in the woods near Boston…
Researchers have unearthed a trove of wonders in the soil of a Massachusetts forest: an assortment of giant viruses unlike anything scientists had ever seen. The find suggests this group of relatively massive parasites has an even greater ecological diversity and evolutionary importance than researchers knew.
Giant viruses can exceed 2 micrometers in diameter, on par with some bacteria. They can also harbor immense genomes, which reach 2.5 megabases—larger than the genomes of far more complex organisms. Between the discovery of these impressively sized viruses in algae and the culturing of amoeba-infecting Mimiviruses, most of the research on the group has focused on viruses that inhabit freshwater environments. But DNA sequencing has long indicated that giant viruses are diverse and abundant elsewhere, too—especially in sediments and soils, which are estimated to host some 97% of all the viral particles on Earth. Indeed, genomic sequencing of the soils of Harvard Forest—a roughly 16-square-kilometer area west of Boston—indicated the presence of numerous, novel giant viruses.
Now, electron microscopy has allowed scientists to see what others had only sequenced. The diversity of forms was astounding, they report in a bioRxiv preprint. Not only did the researchers see the 20-sided icosahedral shapes they expected, they spotted ones with myriad modifications—tails, altered points, and multilayered or channeled structures abounded. There were even viruses with long tubular appendages, which the team dubbed “Gorgon” morphology [photo above]. Furthermore, many of these putative viral particles were coated with almost hairlike projections, which varied in length, thickness, density, and shape.
The findings suggest virologists have much to discover about how giant viruses interact with their host cells. That likely means the ecological roles these viruses play in soils—and elsewhere they’re found—are woefully underappreciated…
Microbes come in a variety of shapes, hinting at undiscovered ecological diversity: “Alien-looking viruses discovered in Massachusetts forest,” in @ScienceMagazine.
* Shakespeare, Hamlet
As we marvel at multifariousness (and note that viruses, while generally considered to be non-living and thus not considered microorganisms, are colloquially lumped in with microbes), we might spare a thought for Sidney Walter Fox; he died on this date in 1998. A biochemist, he was responsible for a series of discoveries about the origin of life. Fox believed in the process of abiogenesis, by which life spontaneously organized itself from the colloquially known “primordial soup,” poolings of various simple organic molecules that existed during the time before life on Earth. In his experiments (which possessed, he believed, conditions like those of primordial Earth), he demonstrated that it is possible to create protein-like structures from inorganic molecules and thermal energy. Dr. Fox went on to create microspheres that he said closely resembled bacterial cells and concluded that they could be similar to the earliest forms of life or protocells.
“History repeats itself, in part because the genome repeats itself. And the genome repeats itself, in part because history does.”*…
The original Human Genome Project map of the human genome was largely based on the DNA of one mixed-race man from Buffalo, with inputs from a few dozen other individuals, mostly of European descent. Now, researchers have released draft results from an ongoing effort to capture the entirety of human genetic variation…
More than 20 years after the first draft genome from the landmark Human Genome Project was released, researchers have published a draft human ‘pangenome’ — a snapshot of what is poised to become a new reference for genetic research that captures more of human diversity than has been previously available. Geneticists have welcomed the milestone, while also highlighting key ethical considerations surrounding the effort to make genome research more inclusive…
The draft genome, published in Nature on 10 May, was produced by the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium. Launched in 2019, the international project aims to map the entirety of human genetic variation, to create a comprehensive reference against which geneticists will be able to compare other sequences. Such a reference would aid studies investigating potential links between genes and disease.
The draft pangenome follows the 2022 publication of the first complete sequence of the human genome, which filled gaps that had been left by the original Human Genome Project. But unlike the original draft human genome and its successor, both of which were derived mostly from the DNA of just one person, the draft pangenome represents a collection of sequences from a diverse selection of 47 people from around the globe, including individuals from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe…
More at “First human ‘pangenome’ aims to catalogue genetic diversity,” in @Nature.
See the paper on the Pangenome Project here; and for more background, “This new genome map tries to capture all human genetic variation.”
* Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
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As we go wide on genetics, we might send microscopic birthday greetings to Christian Anfinsen; he was born on this date in 1916. A biochemist, he won the 1972 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his research on the shape and primary structure of ribonuclease (the enzyme that hydrolyses RNA), in whihc he found that found that its shape and consequently its enzymatic power could be restored– leading him to conclude that ribonuclease must retain all of the information about its configuration within its amino acids.
“Society is unity in diversity”*…
In less than one year, the 2020 census will record just how much more racially diverse the nation has become, continuing the “diversity explosion” that punctuated the results of the 2010 census. While less authoritative than the once-a-decade national headcount, recently released U.S. Census Bureau estimates for 2018 make plain that racial minority populations—especially Hispanic, Asian and black Americans—continue to expand, leaving fewer parts of the country untouched by diversity…
From Brookings, a pre-2020 census look at the wide dispersal of the nation’s Hispanic, Asian and black populations: Six maps that reveal America’s expanding diversity.
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As we delight in difference, we might recall that it was on this date in 1814 that then 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key wrote “The Defense of Fort M’Henry,” a poem– which provided the lyrics for the U.S. national anthem– in which he described the bombardment of Fort McHenry by British ships of the Royal Navy in Baltimore Harbor during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. Key was inspired by the large U.S. flag, with 15 stars and 15 stripes, known as the Star-Spangled Banner, flying triumphantly above the fort during the U.S. victory.
Indeed, he wrote lyrics beyond those most of us have heard: a pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist campaigner, Key wrote a (now mostly omitted) third stanza that promises that “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.”
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