Posts Tagged ‘diversity’
“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities”*…
With the appearance of the first rays of the sun from Cerro Huantajaya in Alto Hospicio, northern Chile, people celebrate the arrival of the Aymara New Year, Machaq Mara, and the arrival of new energies.
For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future at their backs. But for the youngest generation of Aymara speakers – increasingly influenced by Spanish – the future lies ahead.
These are not just isolated changes. On all continents, even in the world’s remotest regions, indigenous people are swapping their distinctive ways of parsing the world for Western, globalised ones. As a result, human cognitive diversity is dwindling – and, sadly, those of us who study the mind had only just begun to appreciate it.
In 2010, a paper titled ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ gave the field of cognitive science a seismic shock. Its authors, led by the psychologist Joe Henrich at the University of British Columbia, made two fundamental points. The first was that researchers in the behavioural sciences had almost exclusively focused on a small sliver of humanity: people from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic societies. The second was that this sliver is not representative of the larger whole, but that people in London, Buenos Aires and Seattle were, in an acronym, WEIRD.
But there is a third fundamental point, and it was the psychologist Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania who made it. In his commentary on the 2010 article, Rozin noted that this same WEIRD slice of humanity was ‘a harbinger of the future of the world’. He had seen this trend in his own research. Where he found cross-cultural differences, they were more pronounced in older generations. The world’s young people, in other words, are converging. The signs are unmistakable: the age of global WEIRDing is upon us….
Are we breeding a global cultural and cognitive monoculture? More at: “What happens to cognitive diversity when everyone is more WEIRD?.”
* Stephen R. Covey
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As we delight in difference, we might send utilitarian birthday greetings to Jeremy Bentham; the author, jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer was born on this date in 1748. Bentham is considered a founder of modern Utilitarianism (via his own work, and that of his students, including James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill); he actively advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He argued for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty, and for the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children.
Bentham was involved in the founding of University College (then, the University of London), the first in England to admit all, regardless of race, creed, or political belief. On his death, he was dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture– as he specified in his will. Afterward– again, as Bentham’s will specified– the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the “Auto-icon”, with the skeleton stuffed out with hay and dressed in Bentham’s clothes. Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, preserved to resemble its appearance in life. But experimental efforts at mummification, though technically successful, left the head looking alarmingly macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull. So the Auto-icon was given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham’s own hair.
It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of University College. The real head was displayed in the same case as the Auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks, so is now locked away.
see a virtual, 360-degree rotatable version here
“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization”*…
The phrase confuses me. I was born in California. My mom was born in New York. “Go back where you came from.” Um, okay. I mean, I was headed home anyways. My house is just a few blocks away.
I grew up in a mostly non-Asian city, so I used to hear the phrase sometimes. Kids like to pick on the one who looks a little different. But these days, when I hear an adult say it to another adult, it catches me off guard. It doesn’t make sense.
You traverse an American’s family tree, and eventually you find an immigrant. And most of the time, you don’t have to go back that far.
So … what if everyone went back where they came from?
Find at at Nathan Yau‘s “If We All Left to ‘Go Back Where We Came From’.”
* Gandhi (who also observed, “No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.”)
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As we stir the melting pot, we might recall that today is the Feast Day of Lucifer– more properly, of St. Lucifer of Caligari. At least, it’s his feast day in Sardinia, where he’s venerated. Lucifer, who was a 4th century bishop fierce in his opposition to Arianism, is considered by some elsewhere to have been a stalwart (if minor) defender of the orthodoxy; but by more to have been an obnoxious fanatic.
“Lucifer” was in use at the time as a translation of the the Hebrew word, transliterated Hêlêl or Heylel (pron. as HAY-lale), which means “shining one, light-bearer.” It had been rendered in Greek as ἑωσφόρος (heōsphoros), a name, literally “bringer of dawn,” for the morning star. The name “Lucifer” was introduced in St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, roughly contemporaneously with St. Lucifer. But the positive spin of Lucifer of Caligari’s name was, even in it’s day, in tension with the received idea of “Lucifer”; the conflation of “Lucifer” with an altogether evil “Satan” had begun centuries earlier.
Indeed, Satan had undergone a pretty profound transition: “Satan” is from a Hebrew word, “Saithan,” meaning adversary or enemy; in original Jewish usage (see the book of Job); but Satan is the adversary, not of God, but of mankind; i.e., the angel charged by God with the task of proving mankind an unworthy creation. Thus Satan was originally not in opposition to God, but doing His will.
Later– during the Second Temple Period, when Jews were living in the Achaemenid Empire, and Judaism was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism— the concept of an evil power ruling an underground domain of punishment for the wicked became fixed in doctrine (mirroring Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian god of evil, darkness, and ignorance). Over time, elements of the Graeco-Roman god Pluto/Vulcan/Hephaestus, the Underworld, & various aspects of Nordic/Teutonic mythology also made their way into the Jewish, then Christian, understandings of Satan and his realm.
St. Lucifer of Calgari
Satan doing God’s work: The Examination of Job (c. 1821) by William Blake
“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength”*…
Since 1990, more than 90 percent of U.S. metro areas saw a decline in racial stratification, signaling a trend toward a more integrated America. Yet, while areas like Houston and Atlanta have undergone rapid demographic changes, cities like Detroit and Chicago still have large areas dominated by a single racial group.Some 50 years ago, policies like the Fair Housing Act and Voting Rights Act were enacted to increase integration, promote equity, combat discrimination and dismantle the lingering legacy of Jim Crow laws. But a Post analysis shows that some cities remain deeply segregated — even as the country itself becomes more diverse.
To explore these national changes, The Post analyzed census data from 1990, 2000, 2010 and the latest estimates from the 2016 five-year American Community Survey. Using this data, we generated detailed maps of the United States using six race categories: black, white, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American and multirace/other for the available years…
The United States is on track to be a majority-minority nation by 2044. But census data show most of our neighbors are the same race. Take stock of where there has been progress and where there has been none using the interactive (and zoomable to zip code level) map at “America is more diverse than ever — but still segregated.”
* Maya Angelou
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As we turn up the heat on the melting pot, we might recall that it was on this date in 1924 that 29 year old J. Edgar Hoover became the fifth Director of the Bureau of Investigation, which became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935; he remained the FBI’s first director until his death in 1972 at the age of 77.
Hoover has been credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. But especially later in his carer and since his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was found to have exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI, and to have used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists (especially civil rights activists; see here and here), to amass secret files on political leaders and to collect evidence using illegal methods.
“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength”*…
A new report from global management consulting firm McKinsey examined 1,000 companies in 12 countries, analyzing both financial data and the gender and ethnic makeup of their workforces. Researchers found that firms with diverse executive teams posted bigger profit margins in their respective sectors than companies lacking diversity.
Ethnic diversity was more important than gender diversity, according to the study. Companies that ranked in the top 25 percent in terms of the ethnic mix of their executive boards were 33 percent more likely to be profitable than firms in the bottom 25 percent for diversity.
Women-led companies still had an advantage, however…
See why defeating discrimination to achieve diversity isn’t just an ethical issue, but also an important economic concern: “Companies with Diverse Executive Teams Are More Profitable: McKinsey.” Read the McKinsey report here.
[See also: this.]
* Maya Angelou
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As we celebrate variety, we might send powerfully-painted birthday greetings to Alice Neel; she was born on this date in 1900. A painter of people, landscape, and still life– and a pioneer among women artists– she is probably best remembered for her expressionistic portraits. Indeed, Barry Walker, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, called her “one of the greatest portrait artists of the 20th century.”
“Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters”*…
Every year, the US Census Bureau releases data on the languages spoken in American homes. Usually it groups the languages in 39 major categories. Now it has released much more detailed figures, which show that Americans speak not 39, but more than 320 distinct languages.
The bureau collected the data from 2009 to 2013 as part of the American Community Survey, which asks Americans all kinds of questions to create highly granular estimates on various demographic indicators. The new data estimate that more than 60 million Americans speak a language other than English at home…
Learn more– and see the breakdown– at “All 300-plus languages spoken in American homes, and the number of people who speak them.”
* Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
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As we choose our words, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that Sesame Street premiered on public television in the U.S. In 2008, it was estimated that 77 million Americans had watched the series as children. By its 40th anniversary in 2009, Sesame Street was broadcast in over 120 countries, and 20 international versions had been produced. And as of 2014, Sesame Street has won 159 Emmy Awards and 8 Grammy Awards—more than any other children’s show. The show, which was itself based on mountainous research, has been the subject of, literally, thousands of studies on its effectiveness as a learning vehicle for children; it has been a keystone of English (and native) language learning in the U.S. and around the world.
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