"And very, very stupid," she adds.

"I did not know what I was doing. So I cut a hole in my finger with a scalpel, which is silly. You're not supposed to use a scalpel; you're supposed to use a needle. The scalpel I used hurt incredibly; it was excruciatingly painful. And then I had to hold the wound open - which I did with a sterilized potato peeler - to insert the magnet. That should have been an absolute septic disaster, but for some reason, it turned out to be fine," says Anonym.

She started her journey with RFID sensors, considered a transdermal temperature sensor (which was a disaster), began experimenting with homebred sensors, and now has a temperature sensor, which she says is the latest addition to her body.

Anonym is trying to work on North Paw, an anklet made by the biohacking group Sensebridgethat gives wearers the ability to navigate their surroundings. The anklet holds eight cellphone vibrator motors around your ankle.

A control unit in the haptic compass senses magnetic north and turns on and off the motors. A few years ago, she detailed plans to have the first South Paw created and implanted in her left leg. "I had a prototype in my ankle for a while, but not anymore. And that had to come out because I was concerned about corrosion," says Anonym.

The biggest questions raised would revolve around ethics and safety measures when it comes to implanting devices oneself.

DIY biohacking falls in a grey zone. With grinders moving into unforeseen territories, regulators are yet to keep up the pace. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration had issued a warning that biohacking procedures involving gene-editing products for self-administration were illegal.

In the United Kingdom, there are no regulationsaround self-implanted microchips as they do not fall under the purview of medical devices, as per theMedicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

However, Professor Tom Joyce, a biomedical engineer at Newcastle University, told Medical Device Networkthat biohacking raises questionsabout liability and responsibility in situations that go wrong.

For example, while a user might be held responsible for modifying an implant counter to the manufacturers instructions, the possibility of hacking the implant might be attributed to a security vulnerability for which the manufacturer might be liable, she says.

As for safety, researchers have notedthat modern body modifications can lead to complications that shouldn't be underestimated.

To Anonym, the ethics of biohacking lie in "a principle called bodily autonomy, wherein, in my opinion, everyone should have the right to alter their own body as they see fit, as long as that doesn't involve anyone else. And what I would find very unethical would be to alter anyone else's body, or to tell anyone else that you can or can't have this done," she says.

More:

A transhuman biohacker implanted over 50 chips and magnets in her body - Interesting Engineering

Radhika Ramaseshan

Senior journalist

Alargely unanticipated but significant transformation in Indias post-Independence polity has been the emergence, exponential growth and near hegemonic position attained by the BJP. If the Congress had an overarching influence over the polity for over four decades since 1947, the BJP is set to appropriate this status in the foreseeable future. But thats not how the BJPs saga started.

Seismic changes wrought by the BJP constitute the most significant political development after Independence.

The Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the BJPs forerunner, was founded four years after Indias Independence but barely left an imprint on the polity except when it assembled a coalition with the non-Congress entities from the socialist stream. The BJSs political philosophy contained elements of the BJP which were never fashioned into a coherent ideology. Its outlook was fuzzy because it subscribed to the concept of integral humanism and believed in social conservatism and swadeshi economics. It was recognisably embedded in the now reshaped and recognisable notions of an Akhand Bharat and the evolution of a single Bharatiya culture. The BJSs high point was trumping the Congress in the 1967 General Election, but only after it regrouped with the Bharatiya Kranti Dal, Samyukta Socialist Party and the Praja Socialist Party to form the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal governmnent.

In 1977, the BJS merged with the Janata Party in an experiment that was a disaster in hindsight but occasioned by the Emergency and Indira Gandhis decision to call a snap poll. Opposition unity was paramount and the BJSs ideological mentor, the RSS, had no issues making common cause even with the Left in the pursuit of powera hallmark of the Sanghs strategy. In 1980, the BJS pulled out of the Janata conglomeration and the BJP was founded.

In the second inning of its political progeny, the RSS assumed a more interventionist role, and was determined to let ideology become the cornerstone of the BJPs growth even as it was not averse to doing business with vaguely similar groupings which were opposed to the Congress. The BJP got off to a slow start, was nearly vanquished in the 1984-85 elections but shepherded by the Sangh, found its feet by 1989. The BJP played a critical role in shaping the National Front-Left Front government, led by VP Singh, but withdrew its external support once the message from the ground in northern and western India was articulated in clear terms. The movement to liberate the birthplace of Lord Ram in Ayodhya fired the imagination of a large part of the electorate and brought electoral dividends to the BJP. Its voters had no use for the minority-appeasement policies of the Congress, the Left and the socialists. Ayodhya symbolised the issues that had exercised sections of Hindus for a long time, notably the need for a common civil code that would nullify the privileges afforded by personal law and deny Kashmir a special status. The BJP played to the gallery. From there on, its rise was exponential.

The course it mapped culminated in the most significant transformations the polity saw after 1947. The changes the BJP wrought in the political structures and sub-structures were seismic and challenged, and eventually demolished some of the certitudes held dear for decades by political leaders. It was as though the party had mined the subliminal emotions of large sections of the majority community and channelled the sentiments into a hardcore agenda that fused hyper-nationalism with political Hinduism.

The BJPs rise proved the dictum that notwithstanding Indias diversity and plurality, its polity can centre round only one national pole. The Congress has ceased to be the axis around which politics revolved. The BJP and Congress cannot coexist as two opposing poles of commensurate strength. The BJPs acceleration ran parallel to the Congresss decline. If the Congress aimed to project itself as a robust foil to the BJP, it would have called for a sharp enunciation in word and deed of its founding principles of secularism and socialism. That was a big demand. As the BJP disseminated its version of Hinduism and found a ready audience for the rhetoric and practice of targeting the minorities and dissenters, the Congress was unable to defend what it stood for. The pre-Independence divide in its ranks on the issues of secularism and socialism got more sharply accentuated in a BJP-dominated era. The Congress ought to have owned up the success achieved by the Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh duo in bringing the economy back on track and gifting a horn of plenty to the middle and upper classes after economic liberalisation. Instead, the party could not bring itself to acknowledge the role of two individuals from outside the Gandhi family. The issue got muddled in successive debates over plenitude versus poverty which largely obliterated the genuine benefits of economic reforms. The BJP, meanwhile, enshrined reforms in its manifesto and policies after jettisoning the proponents of swadeshi economics in its rank. Pragmatism was the byword in its practice of politics under the garb of ideology which was unsheathed to get the votes.

The BJPs greatest success lay not just in undermining the Congress but presenting its divisive ideology as acceptable to regional forces that were once shy of uttering Hindutva. If a semblance of political opposition still exists, it is manifest in a few federal parties which struggle to retain their space against the BJPs onslaught. But there is little scope of consolidating an Opposition of the kind seen in the times when the Congress was dominant. The parties have none of the resilience and spontaneity which culminated in the anti-Congress experiments of the 70s and 80s.

A factor that cannot be ignored is the sway which the BJP and the Centre exercise over the institutional domain. Every instrument of the state, meant to coerce the Opposition and dissenters, is theirs for the asking. The Congress had abused such privileges in the past but the BJP has taken it to another level.

In engaging the BJP, the Opposition lacks a level playing field.

Read the original:

Phenomenal rise of BJP - The Tribune India

One of the sources of social discontent in post-apartheid South Africa is the legacy of white racism. This toxic legacy is evident in racialised poverty and inequality.

It is a historical fact that the economic prosperity of whites in South Africa is based on the racist exploitation and impoverishment of blacks.

The long history of racism enabled white South Africans to enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world by the 1970s. In his new book, titled Can We Unlearn Racism?, Jacob R Boersema, a New York University academic, shows that by the 21st century white South Africans lifetime work-related earnings on average are four times higher than for Africans.

Add to this corruption, rampant crime, frightening levels of gender based violence and failing political institutions: the outcome is a social horror show that produces misery for millions of black people. This is what former president Thabo Mbeki was referring to in his recent scathing critique of the governing African National Congress (ANC).

Mbeki also criticised the party for not being able to organise a racially diverse audience for the memorial service of the late ANC deputy secretary general Jessie Duarte. That, he said, showed that the ANC had failed to embody its fundamental value of non-racialism.

Read more: Pandemic underscores gross inequalities in South Africa, and the need to fix them

Mbekis thinking reveals deep confusion about race, racism, diversity and non-racialism. He falsely assumes that diversity means harmony.

Non-racialism is one of the unexamined dogmas of the ANC. It has its roots in the politics of Christian humanism that inspired the formation of the party in 1912. That humanism regarded Christianity as transcending race by offering an ultimate goal of inter-racial harmony based on the brotherhood of man.

Whatever solidarity there was between different racial groups in political structures like the Congress Alliance which drew up the ANCs Freedom Charter in 1955 did not translate to the social world outside politics.

The world outside politics was defined by racial segregation. That has not changed much. Apart from the workplace and in schools, ordinary blacks and whites continue to live racially segregated lives.

Read more: How South Africa's white liberals dodge honest debates about race

The ANC, since its formation, has been ideologically trapped in the 19th century black Cape politics of Victorian liberalism which advocated for loyalty to the British Crown. This resulted in blacks making moral appeals to white benevolence for justice and freedom, instead of making political demands. The ANC has never fully understood how white racism functions.

The ANCs establishment in 1912 was driven by an ideological blending of British liberalism and a Christian vision of non-racialism. This equipped it poorly to respond to and make sense of racism and modern South Africa.

For most of the early 20th century, the ANC thought it could defeat racism by appealing to Britains sense of common justice. In his presidential address to the South African Native Congress (now ANC) in 1912 which was published in the Christian Express, the Christian missionary journal published by the Lovedale Press Reverend John Dube encouraged black people to show deep and dutiful respect for the rulers whom God has placed over us because the

sense of common justice and love of freedom so innate in the British character (would) ultimately triumph over all other baser tendencies to colour prejudice and class tyranny.

Consequently, from its formation to the 1950s, when its leaders were subjected to government bans, the ANC failed to win a single political victory over white racism, as historians have pointed out.

From the 1950s, it moved away from black Victorianism and incorporated a Pan-Africanist worldview, as well as Das Kapital Karl Marxs critique of capitalism. The Marxists in the ANC argued that the aim of the struggle was to overthrow capitalism, which they saw in terms of class rather than race.

Black people thus focused their hostility on the apartheid government, and never on whites as such. Black people who dared to use race as an analytical category were eventually purged from the ANC.

By the turn of this century the ANC had rid itself of British liberalism and Christian politics. But it remained committed to the idea of non-racialism.And it has embraced capitalism in particular the capitalism entrenched in South Africa by white people.

There are three consequences.

Firstly, the ANC is an intellectually impoverished organisation that rewards incompetence and greed, and encourages individuals to strive to be the king of the rubbish pile.

Secondly, corruption and blatant disregard for the law have achieved ambient levels.

Thirdly, South Africa is dysfunctional and social cohesion has broken down.

Mbeki is one of the few ANC politicians to admit publicly that non-racialism has failed to unite South Africans. The black intellectual ecosystem has yet to develop a compelling analysis of the relationship between white wealth and black poverty.

The white narrative that blames the black elite for the persistence of racialised inequality erases white racism from post-apartheid South Africa.

According to Statistics South Africa:

The labour market experiences of different population groups in South Africa continue to diverge substantially, and still reflect the strongly persistent legacies of apartheid policies Thus, black African unemployment rates are between four and five times as high as they are amongst whites.

The black middle class remains largely an academic construct. It consists of a mere 4.2 million people whereas blacks make up 80% of the population of 60 million. Research shows no sign of a decrease in racialised wealth inequality since apartheid.

Read more: Why 'pro-poor' policies on their own won't shift inequality in South Africa

The ANCs failures mean that the vast majority of black people are trapped in poverty, with few prospects of escaping.

Thabo Mbeki is right to be worried. And it is not only the ANC that does not have the solution to the countrys problems.

Until black people break from the ideological capture of non-racialism, the legacy of white racism will never be dislodged.

Read the original:

Racism in South Africa: why the ANC has failed to dismantle patterns of white privilege - The Conversation Indonesia

Nigerian Academy of Letters is foremost Nigerias Academy of intellectuals at home and outside the shores of our country.

The members that make up the Academy are full professors who possess the required experience in terms of their years of Professorship which usually fall within the range of criteria that the founding fathers established decades ago. Of course, members of the Academy are drawn from every pertinent discipline of the Humanities.

The Academy also has a college of fellows composed of leading scholars, and professors, that is, in the respective disciplines of the Humanities literature, orature, language, foreign languages, linguistics, history, drama/theatre, music, religions, philosophy, culture, etc.

The college of fellows regulates and guides the Academy, if need be, on pertinent affairs/matters relating to the Academy. There are executive officers of the Academy who are responsible for making things happen in accordance with what the college of fellows agrees to after official deliberations.

The President (currently in the person of Professor Duro Oni of the University of Lagos), ably assisted by other voted-for officers, runs the affairs of the Academy in line with the Academys constitution as written by the founding fathers such as Emeritus Professor Ayo Bamgbose, Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo both of the University of Ibadan and other prominent and eminent Professors whose names I could not immediately recall when my nib set to work on this column.

Pioneers Fellows of the Academy included Professors Chinua Achebe, J. P. Clark (both of whom are now late) and Professor Wole Soyinka, our three pre-eminent writers and scholars. Other front-line scholars and professors such as Ayo Bamgbose, Ayo Banjo, Romanus Egudu, Dan Izevbaye, Munzali Jibril, Olu Obafemi, Francis Egbokhare (each of whom at one time or the other had been the President of the Academy), Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare, Union Edebiri, Duro Oni and Godwin Sogolo, Toyin Falola, Tanure Ojaide, Amechi Nicholas Akwanya, Ademola Da Sylva, Akachi Ezigbo, Mabel Osakwe, and several other reputable professors of quality are as today distinguished Fellows of the Academy (usually inducted every year of the Convocation when new Fellows and members are also accepted into the fold as shall happen next week).

Now I have dwelt at length on this longish beginning primarily to draw the attention of my readers and the public to this illustrious realm of intellectual and professional expertise that has not institutionally been divorced from our universities and our historical and social world since above twenty years ago. Our body of intellectual and professional humanists as far as I can discern from my limited key-hole perception (of the Academy) has over the years defended the virtues of liberal education and the precious pleasures of the humanities without betraying its essence and value to the central authority and its insurrectionary running a-ground today of your country my country our country. As far as I can tell, things have come to a head this year. The bombings and kidnappings and other political and criminal iniquities are in full course today threatening our existence as a nation of diverse and multi-ethnic peoples who have been living in brotherhood and in unity since time immemorial.

The Academys 24th Convocation which begins from August 10-12, 2022 at the J.F. Ajayi Hall/Theatre, University of Lagos will to a large degree meaningfully address our current colonial/post-colonial circumstances without, I presume, any particular sort of camouflage. The speakers at the event are from the United States of America and our public Higher Institutions that have been un-patriotically shut for six months or so now by our allegedly diabolical/demonic conciliator-instigator and confusion engineer in our central labour ministry. He was once upon a time a votary of the rebarbative Okeija deity. I have made a pertinent temporary digression which illustrates the inhumanity of all those within all the domains of our central governments political activities. They are savanna and forest and mangrove sloths.

Professor Simeon Olusegun Illesanmi of Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, North Carolina, USA will deliver the Convocation lecture entitled The Republic of Dignity: The Nigerian Common Humanity in a Culturally Heterogeneous Nigeria; at the scientific session of the event Professor Egodi Uchendu of University of Nigeria, Nsukka will speak on Historical Indications of Cultural Commonalities in Nigerias Heterogeneity while Professors Emmanuel S. Dandaura of Nasarawa State University, Keffi and Gideon Sunday Omachonu also of Nasarawa State University, Keffi will respectively speak on Navigating Nigerias Multiculturalism and the National Identity Question and Cultural Commonalities in Nigerias Heterogeneity: A Linguistic Perspective.

All the topics as they seem to me are quests for the absolute and I personally want to understand them in terms of their directions and purposes of my great wish to be present physically at the event. As a matter of fact, all readers of this column and all scholars in our lock-up and un-lock-up universities and higher institutions should journey happily to the University of Lagos to partake in the sipping or sucking of the milk of the event. But the existential actualities of human life that are so un-dignifying in your country my country our country now cannot but knock out the thought from our academic, critical and journalistic consciousness.

The more I think about the Convention the more I adore the Nigerian Academy of Letters. That the Academy could organize the Convention at this time of our post-colonial social, cultural, political and academic contamination says so much about the humanism of members Fellows and executive officers of the Academy. The Convention, against all the crushing oddities of our realities, is a powerful response to the formidable or over-riding complexities they generate in our age of seeming declining academic power. Professor (Mrs.) Mabel Evwiehoma, a Fellow of the Academy, who is of the University of Abuja, pertinently told me as follows in response to a question I journalistically threw at her relating to what delights or should delight the public about NALs academic principles and emotional stimulus:

It is the humanities (that NAL champions) that bear the courage to attest to all that is humane and seeks all that has value in people. Societies that show advancement in technology rose in the sector with much respect for their arts, languages, lores and literature. It is therefore imperative to commend the NAL, the first Academy in Nigeria even before the Nigerian Academy of Science, for its efforts in our complex society to extend the frontiers of humanity, liberty and development, all on the platform of humaneness, which is the pursuit of the good for social good. One cannot shy away from the governments efforts to disdain the arts. and the total state of the humanities in our citadels of learning . (Despite the challenges) NAL. is acclaimed for its role in shoring up the humanities.

Professor Evwierhomas argument cannot be countered by any sane person. I will give her a perfect nod with a request to the Nigerian Academy of Letters to continue to remain itself whether or not a government exists that catches its eye all right or whether or not a government exists that does not catch NALs perspective and eye all right. But I must end this column with an un-assailable argument put forward by Amiri Baraka (1934-2014, African-American writer of all the genres of literature, who was previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka): There are people who actually believe that politicians are more powerful than artists, what a bizarre lie.

What else do I say? The Nigerian Academy of Letters is inviting us all to the University of Lagos from August 10-12 to witness, and share the smell, the power of freedom, happiness, goodness, decency and of love that the humanities germinate in healthy minds and hearts. You can also join the train of the gathering through zoom.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.

See the original post:

On 24th convocation of Nigerian Academy of Letters Opinion The Guardian Nigeria News Nigeria and World News - Guardian Nigeria

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In an essay for MSNBCs website, columnistZeeshan Aleem calls for a new style of atheism that could address both the growing threat of Christian nationalism and the decline in community thats been hastened by people leaving organized religion.

The first point, about Christian nationalism, has been repeatedly discussed on this site. Its a very real, very troubling phenomenon that affects us all. Between Supreme Court rulings that favor religion over non-religionand Christianity over other religionsand government officials making no secret of their theocratic fantasies, we absolutely need to push back against the dangerous threat of Christian extremism and protect church/state separation.

The second point deserves elaboration, and heres what Aleem writes about why the fall of organized religion is bad for society:

there has been anaccelerating American driftaway from organized religion and most often towardnothing in particular.A rapidly increasing share of Americans aredetaching from religious communitiesthat provide purpose and forums for moral contemplation, and not necessarily finding anything in their stead. Theyredropping out of churchand survey data suggests theyre disproportionately likely to bechecked out from civic life. Their trajectory tracks with a broader decades-long trend of secular life defined byplunging social trust,faith in institutions, and participation in civil society.

Aleem isnt wrong there. People have been less inclined to be part of any community for a while now. (I feel like this is the right place for the obligatory mention of Robert Putnams Bowling Alone, written in 2000.) While traditional forms of civic engagement may be dying out, however, other forms of community have cropped up. Theres a much larger debate to be had about whether theyre substantively as useful, but its not like people leave church and ditch the concept of friendship and rallying around shared causes.

Aleem says a stronger atheist community could address many of these problems. Consider the legal side of things. Couldnt atheists spur a movement that fights back against Christian nationalism?

Aleem says:

An organized atheist community can help agitate for and finance a secularist equivalent of the Federalist Society the right-wing legal movement that helped populate the federal courts with hard right jurists andhelped get us into this mess to act as a bulwark against theocracy. There has been zero, and I meanzero, innovation in the doctrine of separation [of church and state] in the last 50 years, Jacques Berlinerblau, a scholar at Georgetown University and the author of Secularism: The Basics, told me. Atheists who consciously believe in their worldview have a particularly urgent interest in helping to lead a legal and political movement to protect against theocracy.

This kind of enterprise is not only for atheists. It should appeal to anyone with secular and liberal inclinations, and its a space where there is opportunity for coalitions with people of faith who dont think religion should shape American politics and laws. But atheists can play a key role in sounding the alarms if they articulate themselves as citizens whose rights must be respected.

The idea that atheists ought to create a liberal version of the Federalist Society is almost comical because:

But broad support for church/state separation is indeed popular, and guess what? There have been coalitions with people of faith!

The Bremerton case (involving the football coach who wanted to perform coercive prayers at midfield after games for a large audience) was supported by a wide array of religious, non-religious, and civil rights groups. Another recent case, Carson v. Makin, which was about the legality of state funding for private religious schools, saw a joint amicus brief written by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the ACLU, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the American Humanist Association, the Hindu American Foundation, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Sikh Coalition. Thats just one brief!

The point is: When it comes to our legal system, atheist groups routinely work with religious groups to advance their shared goals. This has been a regular practice for many, many years now. Atheist and church/state separation groups are allies of progressive religious organizations when it comes to defending actual religious freedom.

Thats not a pipe dream. Its happening right now.

What about the social aspects of religion? Aleem says we need secular spaces that provide the benefits of religion without God:

By putting together study groups, communities for secular meditation, and elucidating the meaning and joys of atheism without spewing venom toward all religion, atheists can build spaces for religion-skeptical people to find purpose, think about ethics, form community and consider more carefully how to build a better society.

Atheists should create deliberate communities, and this can take many forms. For example study groups for pursuing the great questions of existence by reading works of literature, philosophy and, yes, even religious texts.

Atheists should form secular meditation groups or explore something else that allows for contemplation if its not their cup of tea

I swear, Googles not that hard to use

Anyone whos paid attention to the world of organized atheism for the past two decades undoubtedly knows there have been attempts to do all this. Many of them are still ongoing. For a while, atheist churches like Sunday Assembly and Oasis received lots of media coverage (and several of those groups continue attracting lots of people). They focus on the positives of a secular outlook rather than tearing down religion.

There are also communities for secular meditation, and dealing with addiction without resorting to religion, and a network of secular therapists, and a charitable organization that does good without God.

They all exist! Theyve all been doing this work for years, if not decades. They need financial support. (Its a running theme here.)

Theres also, you may have heard, Secular Humanism.

Greg M. Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT, also took exception to the suggestion that atheists ought to do exactly what I just spent a decade working onand, more importantly, what dozens if not hundreds of wonderfulleaders I know are still working on. He added that the request being made of our movement is simply unfair:

After having personally spent well over 10,000 hours and well over a million dollars of donors money to help mobilize thousands of nonreligious people towards popular, positive, community-oriented programs, Ive come to the conclusion that its not really fair to ask us atheists, as social entrepreneurs, to turn water into wine. Yes, we do great work and its very important for people to continue to back that work, financially, and with time and moral support. But what Americareallyneeds: leaders and citizens who can learn to sacrifice for one another to build a more compassionate, inclusive and equitable society, honoring all rational beliefsreligious and secularalong the way.

So if the critique of atheism is that were not providing these resources, thats just not true. The resources are out there. They often lack the support they need to thrive, and sometimes, yes, they fail for other reasons as well. But they are out there.

Finally, Aleem says hes been disillusioned by the myopic focus of the New Atheist movement that got so much attention about 15 years ago. Thats why hed like to see a strong secular movement that goes much deeper than those writers did back then.

On the other hand, I found that the New Atheists caricatured religion, and neglected to consider all the nuances of religious belief and the positive role it could play in peoples lives.

This group was so fixated on religion as the root of all evil and Islam as the most evil of them all that it failed to understand how Islamist terrorism might not just be about religion but also the specific political agenda of a group of extremists. As a leftist activist, and as a person who knew many liberal and fairly secular Muslims one of whom spurred me to become an atheist I found this political tilt repugnant.

Thats a fair criticism. Its one thats been made many times by other atheists. But had Aleem explored the national organizations that serve atheists, he wouldve found secular leaders who dont take their cues from the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, etc. They are proudly diverse. They are much more inclusive of women and people of color. They work with religious groups when it comes to shared interests. They are less interested in tearing down religion than lifting up atheists who need their help. If you dont know the names of the people running these groups, thats because the movement in general is far less centralized around a handful of figureheads than it used to be, and thats a good thing.

In short, Aleems concerns are warranted, but its not like theyre being ignored. The work has been happening. And speaking with the people who do that work, instead of two philosophers who appear to pay no attention to it, wouldve revealed that.

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'A new kind of atheism' already exists in America (if you look closely) - OnlySky

It is, indeed, a great pleasure for me to avail myself the opportunity to say a few words on the occasion of the 100th birthday of the late Professor A. K. Nazmul Karim, who was my teacher, supervisor and colleague at the Department of Sociology, University of Dhaka since the mid-1960s. He taught me "Social Thought" and "Introduction to Sociology" at the undergraduate level during 1966-69 and "Theory of Social Change" at the Master's level during 1969-70.

Incidentally, he also took a course on "Theory of Social Change" with Professor Herbert Marcuse during 1952-53 at Columbia University, New York. However, in his course outline at the University of Dhaka, where he taught us the course, he did not introduce any strand of Marcuse or Frankfurt/Critical School. In that way, we missed a great opportunity to hear about Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) from one of Marcuse's students to whom we had easy access. Notwithstanding, Professor Karim's introduction to Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1930) in that course created a lasting impression on my nascent sociological imagination and I remained ever grateful to him for that.

Odd enough, when I returned to the University of Dhaka in 1986 after obtaining my PhD from York University, I was asked to teach Professor Karim's favourite course "Theory of Social Change" in his mortal absence. I felt strange. As of today, I am still teaching this course and I am grateful to the Department of Sociology, University of Dhaka to allow me to teach this course for the last 36 years at a stretch.

I also found a strange tie on another count: both Professor Karim and I had one common thesis supervisor, T. B. Bottomore, the leading British sociologist at that time. We also had an almost common thesis topic. He supervised Professor Karim's PhD thesis, "The Modern Muslim Political Elite in Bengal" (1964) at the London School of Economics & Political Science. After more than a decade, Professor Bottomore supervised my Master's thesis, "Political Elite in Bangladesh" (1976) at Dalhousie University.

During 1969-70, I was researching Swami Vivekananda as my Master's thesis at the University of Dhaka under the supervision of Professor Karim. At that time, he was the Head of two Departments, Sociology and Political Science. I found my friends from Political Science unhappy about this.

It was never easy to enter into a "communicative action" (to borrow a phrase from Habermas) with Professor Karim: he appeared to us as an intellectual high priest and we felt dwarfed by his physical presence. This produced a general fear and anxiety coupled with a feeling of intellectual inadequacy. In the still of the summer noon, his voice sounded like a Upanishadic rishi in his colonial-style office, and I tried my utmost to grasp his advice and comments.

The only fond memory that I have is my autumn evening appointment at his Isa Khan Road residence for a discussion on my thesis. I was offered plenty of snacks and we had a long and fruitful discussion. Probably that was the only fearless simulacrum I could construct across time. His insights thrown on me in his characteristic manner on the social structure of Bengal were immensely beneficial in understanding my research problem. I was motivated to explore the colonial social structure of Bengal. Finally, I could locate Vivekananda sociologically: he wrote the autobiography of his own age.

As a stroke of luck, I became Professor Karim's colleague at the Department in early 1973, after a year of post-liberation transitional teaching in a college in Dhaka. He routinised a weekly seminar presentation in his office followed by tea for the young teachers for their skill development. When my presentation caught his attention and I received a few comforting words from him, my years of cumulative trepidation and agony suddenly left me. Then I began to prepare for higher studies and upon receiving Fellowship and Teaching-Assistantship, left the University of Dhaka for Dalhousie University, Halifax. But I kept on communicating with him from Halifax and later, from Toronto. The news of his departed soul received in Toronto left me shocked. Myriad of images down the memory lane flashed and nostalgia gripped me. Cinematographically, I began to walk around the corridor of the Arts Building from where I began my journey to the world of learning.

My first impression of Professor Karim comes from his two articles, "Evolution of Religion and Marxism" (Aroni, Kolkata, 14 April 1944) and "Geography and God" (Dhaka University Annual, 1946). By that time, I finished reading R. M. MacIver and P. Sorokin and could see a strong influence of them in his ideas. The radical thinking reflected in those articles never found its expression in his later work, Changing Society in India and Pakistan: A Study in Social Change and Social Stratification (1956) and The Dynamics of Bangladesh Society (1980), which were his Master's and PhD theses respectively. Thus, in Changing Society, Karim described the nascent development of "class consciousness" in colonial India and Independent Pakistan. Later, he shifted to "political consciousness" of purposive associations and political parties to assert that political parties are the democratic translation of class struggle.

The non-development of class consciousness in our society is never explained theoretically. For the Western society, Gyrgy Lukcs emphasised on 'commodity fetishism' and 'reification' in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923) and Marcuse highlighted 'instrumental reason' in One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964). Similarly, in The Dynamics, Karim could continue his earlier radical tradition to show the relationships between class and elites as C. Wright Mills did in The Power Elite (1956).

His use of historical method in both works is extremely useful for the development of Bangladesh's social history, if not sociology. The utility of this method increases manifold and becomes sociologically essential, if combined with dialectics as in Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966) and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).

Established in 1957 with the assistance of UNESCO, the Department of Sociology was colonized by neocolonial Pakistan it was recommended by Claude Lvi-Strauss, UNESCO Commission Chief, first chaired by Pierre Bessaignet (1957-58), and taught by John Owen and Co Pot Land. The UNESCO assistance continued for a decade. Later, in neoliberal Bangladesh, to the utter disgust of its architect, the Department of Sociology has become completely NGOized in the general rubric of "commodification of knowledge" as asserted by Jean-Franois Lyotard. The failure of the Department of Sociology, University of Dhaka to decolonise pedagogy of the colonisers and bring about an epistemic shift in the form of European Enlightenment, is the fiasco of Bangladeshi sociologists to grasp the importance of historical method [dialectical added] for the study of sociological phenomena as emphasised by Professor Karim.

A. I. Mahbub Uddin Ahmed is a Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Dhaka.

See the article here:

In memory of my teacher - The Daily Star