Tapping into capital markets to fund infra projects is a smart move but shouldn't finance minister Dr Thomas Isaac have also used the Kerala budget he presented on Friday to bring down revenue expenditure? Is he split between mai-baap populism and Marxist rationalism, has the politician in him trumped the trained economist that he is?

The crucial and contentious part of the Kerala budget presented by finance minister Thomas Isaac on Friday in the state assembly, which the LDF government has touted as an "alternative development" path, lay buried in the fine print. In 201718, the state will receive loans worth Rs 21,227.95 crore from various agencies, but 75.6% of this - i.e., Rs 16,043.14 crore -will have to be spent to bridge the state's revenue deficit. A state which has to spend threefourths of the loan amount, meant for capital expenditure, to address revenue deficit is certainly not in the pink of economic health. Rather, it may be moving to an inexorable debt trap.

Isaac justified this state of affairs by citing the stagnation that has arisen as a result of demonetisation and the corresponding need on the part of the state government to increase its budget expenses considerably. He even drew a parallel with his own 2008 budget which was announced at the time of global recession.

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Thomas Isaac budget: Split between populism and Marxist rationalism - Times of India

British writer of immense learning, Pankaj Mishra has authored a new book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, that reflects an extraordinary breadth of reading. It opens as a conventional work of intellectual history in this case, the history of modernisation and its travails but soon becomes more of a collage of aperus organised around themes laid out by the path-breaking critic of modernity Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 1920s Iranian writer Jalal al-Ahmed and the Italian poet-cum-Duce Gabriel DAnnunzio, among many others.

For instance, Mishra pits Rousseaus finicky quest for authenticity against Voltaires heirs, the mimic men who try to replicate Anglo-French manners and mores. Mishra sees Voltaire as primarily a champion of enlightened despotism, while Rousseau is presented as a clear-eyed critic of liberal rationalism and cosmopolitan pretension. Mishra is sympathetic to al-Ahmeds obsession with the psychic damage or Westoxification imposed on the Islamic world by western colonialism. Hes fascinated by DAnnunzio, who, in the wake of the First World War, choreographed a disastrous fascist future that paved the way for Mussolini. DAnnunzio was the first Italian politician who decked out his supporters in black uniforms and stiff armed salutes. He cheered on the Italian armies as they conquered the Ottoman provinces that came to be called Libya and which, Mishra notes, suffered the worlds first aerial bombing in 1912. Libya became the testing ground for the New Man theorized by Nietzsche and Sorel.

Mishras loosely connected pearls of insight about belief, mindsets and outlooks are tied together by his anti-anti-Communism, an outlook echoed by todays anti-anti-Islamicism, exemplified in the pages of the British Guardian, which paints the Muslim world as the victim of western liberalism. Mishras disdain for the liberal ideals of progress and reasoned choice, understood as excesses of individualism, will be familiar to readers of Elie Kedourie on nationalism, Jacob Talmon on the creation of secular salvationism, Christopher Lasch and John Gray on the paradoxes of progress and William Pfaff on the pent-up violence of the modern world. But his discussion of the Nazi origins of Hindu nationalism will be eye-opening to many readers.

Mishras intermittent account of how the writings of Giuseppe Mazzini, the liberal nationalist founder of modern Italy, inspired nationalists in India and China places the problem of modernisation in an illuminating context. On a darker note, Mazzini influenced Georges Sorel, whose anti-liberal paeans to the power of myth excited would-be dictators on both right and left. Sorel saw in the working class the collective incarnation of the Nietzschean superman. Mussolini first read Sorels work on violence when he was a socialist, but he continued to incorporate his ideas as he moved to develop fascism.

Mishra is right to argue that attempts to modernise traditional cultures involve, as in Italy and Germany, considerable psychic dislocation. It can produce a burning anger fuelled by the emotional displacement of communal cultures fractured by the demands of economic individualism. But Mishra goes off the rails when he tries to assimilate the acquired insanity of Islamic jihad into the pains of modernisation. Modernization as in Iran offered an alternative to the meld of entitlements and resentments borne of Islamic claims to rule over infidels. Islam has always been a political theology of the sword. Muhammad wasnt responding to modernisation when he slaughtered the Jews of Medina.

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Pankaj Mishra's 'Age Of Anger' Is A Flawed But Fascinating Intellectual History - Swarajya

Throughout the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump blasted China for its protectionist trade policies, currency manipulation and a number of other accusations. Indeed, these accusations were not limited to Trump as China bashing is simply standard fare for anyone seeking elected office and on the campaign trail. Much of Trumps campaign was, however, met with derision. As the election process unfolded, the derision soon turned to snickers. As the election continued, the snickers turned downright somber while Trump sailed past his Republican opponents Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and others who had been deemed more likely to become the GOP nominee.

Among the intelligentsia, the mood has turned to alarm as now President Trump has set out to do exactly as he promised during his America First campaign. To show his sincerity to the campaign promise of bringing jobs back to the United States, he kicked off his first day in the Oval Office by issuing an Executive Order that cancelled American participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP was President Obamas signature trade deal. It created a free-trade zone with eleven other nations for approximately 40 percent of the worlds economy. Trump also threatened to impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods if China does not behave accordingly.

Since Trumps selection of Iowa governor Terry Branstad as his ambassador to China, the president may be backing away from some of his campaign promises. Still, the fact that Trump was elected based upon the use of these rhetorical devices suggests that there is a profound misunderstanding, if not complete lack of understanding, of the symbiotic relationship between the United States and China. It is also worth noting that, had his opponent Hillary Clinton won the election, she too would have won based upon some of the same anti-China trade rhetoric.

Is ignorance dangerous?

In his book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), Richard Hofstadter once wrote that after the 1952 election, the intellectual was now dismissed as an egghead, an oddity, [who] would be governed by a party which had little use for or understanding of him, and would be made the scapegoat for everything from the income tax to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Adding to that of Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger had remarked that anti-intellectualism (and anti-rationalism) has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman. It appears that America has set a new low bar, with an electorate that is smug in its ignorance. Yet, it prides itself on knowing who best should guide the myriad U.S. policiesfrom trade, investment and currency to geopolitical strategyto achieve the national interest.

Americans always admire those that are decisive and true to their word. But those qualities are only admirable when decisions and actions are based upon a clear and unvarnished understanding of the problem. That either candidate could win an election based on attacking a trade policy that has benefitted so many people on both sides of the Pacific for so long is at best disingenuous, and at worst, exploitation. Voters need to be more informed about the policies and agendas of their candidates and politicians need to stop pandering to a political base that subscribes to a zero-sum, take no prisoners theology. Both need to develop an understanding of the historical context between the two countries.

Philosopher Sren Kierkegaard remarked that Life can only be understood backwards . . . but it must be lived forwards. In developing sensible and pragmatic Sino-U.S. policies for the future, likely the most consequential relationship in the twenty-first century, voters and policymakers must have at least an understanding and appreciation of the past.

Partners in peace

The generally understood starting point for Americas trade relations with China begins in 1784 when the privateer Empress of China set sail from New York Harbor for Canton (Guangzhou). In fact, trade relations had already begun during the seventeenth century. However, while Chinoiserie did exist in America at that time, direct trade with China was limited by the English Parliaments Navigation Act of 1651. It was not until after the 1783 Treaty of Paris that the Patriot war financier Robert Morris decided to establish trade between the new Republic of the United States and China to encourage others in the adventurous pursuit of commerce. Free from the mercantilist policies of England, Morris sent the Empress of China on its maiden voyage to China. In doing so, a tectonic shift was created for the Republic as it severed its commercial obeisance to the United Kingdom and embarked on a new relationship with the Middle Kingdom.

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Why America Can't Afford to Get Into a Trade War with China - The National Interest Online

Whether the twenty-first century will be the most radical of times or the most reactionary will depend overwhelmingly upon the kind of social movement and program that social radicals create out of the theoretical, organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the past two centuries The direction we select may well determine the future of our species for centuries to come.

-- Murray Bookchin,The Communalist Project(2002)

In the aftermath of Donald Trump's election, devastating images and memories of the First and Second World Wars flood our minds. Anti-rationalism, racialized violence, scapegoating, misogyny and homophobia have been unleashed from the margins of society and brought into the political mainstream.

Meanwhile, humanity itself runs in a life-or-death race against time. The once-unthinkable turmoil of climate change is now becoming reality, and no serious attempts are being undertaken by powerful actors and institutions to holistically and effectively mitigate the catastrophe. As the tenuous and paradoxical era of American republicanism comes to an end, nature's experiment in such a creative, self-conscious creature as humanity reaches a perilous brink.

Precisely because these nightmares have become reality, now is the time to decisively face the task of creating a free and just political economic system. For the sake of humanity -- indeed for the sake of all complex life on earth as we know it -- we must countervail the fascism embodied today in nation-state capitalism and unravel a daunting complex of interlocking social, political, economic and ecological problems. But how?

As a solution tothe present situation, a growing number of people in the world are proposing "communalism": the usurpation of capitalism, the state, and social hierarchy by the way of town, village, and neighborhood assemblies and federations. Communalism is a living idea, one that builds upon a rich legacy of political history and social movements.

The Commune From Rojava to the Zapatistas

The term communalism originated from the revolutionary Parisian uprising of 1871 and was later revived bythelate-twentiethcentury political philosopherMurray Bookchin(1931-2006). Communalism is often used interchangeably with "municipalism", "libertarian municipalism" (a term also developed by Bookchin) and "democratic confederalism" (coined more recently bytheimprisoned Kurdish political leader Abdullah calan).

Although each of these terms attempt to describe direct, face-to-face democracy, communalism stresses its organic and lived dimensions. Face-to-face civic communities, historically called communes, are more than simply a structure or mode of management. Rather, they are social and ethical communities uniting diverse social and cultural groups. Communal life is a good in itself.

There are countless historical precedents that model communalism's institutional and ethical principles. Small-scale and tribal-based communities provide many suchexamples. In North America, the Six Nations Haudenasanee (Iroquis) Confederacy governed the Great Leaks region by confederal direct democracy for over 800 years. In coastal Panama, the Kuna continue to manage an economically vibrant island archipelago. Prior to the devastation of colonization and slavery, the Igbo of the Niger Delta practiced a highly cosmopolitan form of communal management. More recently, in Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatista Movement havereinventedpre-Columbian assembly politics through hundreds of autonomousmunicipiosand five regional capitals calledcaracoles(snails) whose spirals symbolize the joining of villages.

Communalist predecessors also emerge in large-scale urban communities.From classical Athens to the medieval Italian city-states, direct democracy has a home in the city. In 2015, the political movement Barcelona en Com won the Barcelona city mayorship based on a vast, richly layered collective of neighborhood assemblies. Today, they are the largest party in the city-council, and continue to design platforms and policies through collective assembly processes. In Northern Syria, the Kurdish Freedom Movement hasestablisheddemocratic confederalism, a network of people's assemblies and councils that govern alongside the Democratic Union Party (PYD).

These are just a few examples among countlesspolitical traditions thattestify to "the great theoretical, organizational and political wealth" that is available to empower people against naked authoritarianism.

Power, Administration and Citizenship

The most fundamental institution of communalism is the civicassembly.Civic assembliesare regular communal gatherings opentoall adults within a given municipality -- such as a town, village or city borough -- for the purpose of discussing, debating and making decisions about matters thatconcern the community as a whole.

In order to understand how civic assemblies function, one must understand the subtle, but crucial distinction between administration and decision-making power. Administration encompasses tasks and plans related to executing policy. The administration of a particular project may make minor decisions -- such as what kind of stone to use for a bridge.

Power, on the other hand, refers to the ability to actually make policy and major decisions -- whether or not to build a bridge. In communalism, power lies within this collective body, while smaller, mandated councils are delegated to execute them. Experts such as engineers, or public health practicioners play animportantrole in assemblies by informing citizens, but it is the collective body itself which is empowered to actuallymakedecisions.

With clear distinctions between administration and power, the nature of individual leadership changes dramatically. Leaders cultivate dialogue and execute the will of the community. The Zapatistas expresses this is through the termcargo, meaning the charge or burden. Council membership execute the will of their community, leadershipmeans"to obey and not to command, to represent and not to supplantto move down and not upwards."

A second critical distinction between professional-driven politics as usual and communalism is citizenship.By using the term "citizen", communalists deliberately contradict the restrictive and emptied notion of citizenship invoked by modern-day nation-states. In communal societies, citizenship is conferred to every adult who lives within the municipality.Everyadult who lives within the municipality is empowered to directly participate, vote and take a turn performing administrative roles. Rather, this radical idea of citizenship is based on residency and face-to-face relationships.

Civic assemblies are a living tradition that appear time and again throughout history.It is worth pausing here to consider the conceptual resources left to us by classicalAthenian democracy. Admittedly, Athenian society was far from perfect. Like the rest of the Mediterranean world at that time, Athens was built upon the backs of slaves and domesticated women. Nonetheless, Athenian democracy to this day is the most well-documented example of direct, communal self-management:

Agora: The common public square or meetinghouse where the assembly gathers. The agora is home to our public selves, where we go to make decisions, raise problems, and engage in public discussion.

Ekklesia: The general assembly, a community of citizens.

Boule: The administrative body of 500 citizens that rotated once every year.

Polis: The city itself. But here again, the term refers not to mere materiality, but rather to a rich, multi-species and material community. The polis is an entity and character unto itself.

Paeida: Ongoing political and ethical education individuals undergo to achieve arete, virtue or excellence.

The key insight of classical Athenian democracy is that assembly politics are organic. Far more than a mere structure or set of mechanisms, communalism is a synergy of elements and institutions that lead to a particular kind of community and process. Yet assemblies alone do not exhaust communal politics. Just as communities are socially, ecologically and economically inter-dependent, a truly free and ethical society must engage in robust inter-community dialogue and association. Confederation allows autonomous communities to"scale up" for coordination across aregional level.

Confederation differs from representative democracy because it isbased on recallable delegates rather than individually empowered representatives.Delegates cannot make decisions on behalf of a community. Rather, they bring proposals back down to the assembly.Charters articulate a confederacy's ethical principles and define expectations for membership. In this way, communities have a basis to hold themselves and one another accountable. Without clear principles, basis of debate to actions based on principles of reason, humanism and justice.

In the Kurdish Freedom Movement of Rojava, Northern Syria, the RojavaSocial Contractis based on "pillars" of feminism,ecology, moraleconomy and direct democracy. These principles resonate throughout the movement as a whole, tying together diverse organizations and communities on a shared basis of feminism, radical multi-culturalism and ecological stewardship.

A Free Society

There is no single blueprint for a municipal movement. Doubtlessly, however, the realization of such free political communities can only come about with fundamental changes in our social, cultural and economic fabric. The attitudes of racism and xenophobia, which have fueled the virulent rise of fascism today in places like the United States, must be combated by a radical humanism that celebrates ethnic, cultural and spiritual diversity. For millennia, sex and gender oppression have denigrated values and social forms attributed to women. These attitudes must be supplanted by a feminist ethic and sensibility of mutual care.

Nor can freedom cannot come about without economic stability. Capitalism along with all forms of economic exploitation must be abolished and replaced by systems of production and distribution for use and enjoyment rather than for profit and sale. The vast, concrete belts of "modern"industrialcities must be overhauled and rescaledintomeaningful, livable and sustainable urban spaces. We must deal meaningfully with problems of urban development, gentrification and inequality embodied within urban space.

Just as individuals cannot be separated from the broader political community of which they are a part, human society cannot be separated from our context within the natural world. The cooperative, humanistic politics of communalism thus work hand in hand with a radical ecological sensibility that recognizes human beings a unique, self-conscious part of nature.

While managing our own needs and desires, we have the capacity to be outward-thinking and future-oriented. The Haudenasaunee (Iroquis) Confederacy calls this the "Seven Generations Principle." According to the Seven Generations Principle, all political deliberations must be made on behalf of the present community -- which includes animals and the broader ecological community -- for the succeeding seven generations.

While even a brief sketch of all the social changes needed today far exceed the scope of a short essay,the many works of Murray Bookchin and other social ecologists provide rich discussions about the meaning of a directly democratic and ecological society. From the Green Movement, the Anti-Globalization Movement, Occupy Wall Street, to Chile and Spain's Indignados Movements, communalist ideals have also played a growing role in social and political struggles throughout the world. It is a growing movement in its own right.

Communalism is not a hard and rigid ideology, but rather a coherent, unfolding body of ideas built upon acoreset of principles and institutions. It is, by definition, a process -- one that is open and adaptable to virtually infinitecultural, historicaland ecological contexts. Indeed, communalism's historical precedents in tribal democracy and town/village assemblies can be found in nearly every corner of theearth.

The era ofprofessional-driven, state "politics" has come to an end. Only grassroots democracy at a global scale can successfully oppose the dystopian future ahead. All the necessary tools are at hand. A great wealth of resources have accumulated during humanity's many struggles. With it -- with communalism -- we might remake the world upon humanity's potential for reason, creativity and freedom.

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Reason, Creativity and Freedom: The Communalist Model - Truth-Out

BBC News

Serpents, owl men and demon dogs BBC News "In the 19th Century you had a high tide of rationalism and these horror stories, and these monsters, acted as a counterweight to the rationalism," he said. The devilish ne'er-do-well, who terrorised people and chased a gardener, according to a report ...

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Serpents, owl men and demon dogs - BBC News

Written by Prasanna A. Deshpande | Updated: March 3, 2017 8:22 am Factors like the charisma of the BJP campaign, the projection of the state governments accomplishments and the ever-operative Modi effect, have definitely had a role in turning the tide of votes towards the BJP.

The victory of the BJP in the municipal elections in Maharashtra is not just a vote against the NCP and Congress. It is also a rejection of the provincial progressivism of the social organisations nurtured by these parties. Factors like the charisma of the BJP campaign, the projection of the state governments accomplishments and the ever-operative Modi effect, have definitely had a role in turning the tide of votes towards the BJP. At another level, the social significance of the BJPs victory is that people of Maharashtra have voted against the provincial and imported theory of progressivism and liberalism that originated in the West. This homogenising progressivism used for political tokenism and as a tool for abusing the innocuous traditional and family values of the people of Maharashtra has cost the Congress-NCP their political presence.

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Western theories perceive progressivism as a process of avant-garde reasoning through a resistance to the institutionalised Semitic, monolithic society. Polity and politics are to be separated from the clutches of religious systems. This notion of democracy does not recognise the inherently liberal and inclusive culture of the people of India and in Maharashtras case, as a guiding principle of the state. The western idea of secularism demands an absolute ideological autonomy from spiritual and religious values because the Semitic philosophy is essentially expansionist. Hence, western intellectuals approach progressive politics as a critique of any subservience of the state to cultural traditions and resist reciprocal relations between them.

In India, our sensibilities and consciousness are distinct from the West. This distinction needs to be recognised and reflected in our polity. The so-called progressive brigade, on the contrary, adopted a derisive language against the culture of the people rooted in tradition. The Congress and NCP undertook a short-cut to create a rational society through an imposed aloofness towards popular beliefs and culture. This terminology of rationalism, vivekvaad, secularism, freedom of speech, Hindu terrorism, anti-superstition became the weapons of (mass) culture destruction.

The cultural politics of progressive activists, bound by NGOs indulging in festival-shaming, tradition-bashing, ritual-punching, faith-deriding and debunking popular culture, has always been supported by the Congress and NCP in the name of the progressive values. This culturally leftist activism was found by these parties to be a handy instrument of countering the pro-tradition, pro-nationalism image of the BJP. This insurgence was neither apolitical nor a genuine activism of the reformist type. These naysayers and why brigades had all the political ammunition save one: They did not use conscience. Their anti-tradition activism was directed against even those traditions which the people at large found indisputable. The liaison between Congress-NCP and this progressivist activism has not gone down well with the masses.

Another feature of this distorted progressivism is the ill-informed approach to the study and of the teachings of Chhatrapati Shahu, Jyotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar. The Shahu-Phule-Ambedkar phrase was made into an emblem of this alienating and provincial progressivism. The distorted appropriation of these thinkers established caste versus caste politics as the only tool for social awakening. This model of hate-mongering conveniently ignores the integrating aspects of the life, deeds, writings and teachings of the great social reformers. Shahu, Phule and Ambedkar did fight against inequalities but their writings did not disintegrate society and polarise individuals and communities into caste units and organisations. Rather, they offered ingenious solutions for nation-building through liberty, equality and fraternity. Theirs was a truly Indian progressivism, much broader and inclusive than the provincial progressivism of the dissenting gangs that revolutionise everything and change nothing.

The provinciality of their progressivism has cost political parties their political presence and brought into question the relevance of their divisive cultural activism. It is not about elections at a lower level or a higher level, it is about the relevance of ideas. The people of Maharashtra have voiced their rejection of the naysayers.

The writer is assistant professor, department of English, Fergusson College, Pune

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The ideas election | The Indian Express - The Indian Express

Architectures biggest award has gone not to a star, but to a group of three Spanish designers deeply committed to creating a sense ofplace.

The Hyatt Foundation announced Wednesday that Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta, who lead the Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes, had won the $100,000 (U.S.) Pritzker Architecture Prize. Often called architectures Nobel Prize, it has previously gone to many leading figures in architecture, among them Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano and the late ZahaHadid.

Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and RamonVilalta.

Javier LorenzoDomnguez

RCR are little-known outside of Spain; much of their work is in Catalonia, concentrated on their small hometown of Olot, where they set up shop in 1988. While several recent winners of the Pritzker have focused on humanitarian issues designing social housing or temporary shelters RCRs win signals a turn back to interests in craft and, in particular, site and culture. It is a victory for slowarchitecture.

All their works have a strong sense of place and are powerfully connected to the surrounding landscape, the award jury said in a statement. This connection comes from understanding history, the natural topography, customs and cultures, among other things and observing and experiencing light, shade, colours and theseasons.

Bell-Lloc Winery, Palams, Girona,Spain.

Hisao Suzuki

The Pritzker jury cited specific projects, including outdoor space at Les Cols Restaurant in Olot and the firms own office in a former foundry. These projects use the local volcanic rock; at the restaurant, it is in dialogue with pristine glass cubes that evoke minimalist sculpture and Japanese modern architecture, and berms of earth. The space is quite literally rooted in theground.

Similarly, their most recognized work, the Soulages Museum, is carved into the crest of a hill and forms a sort of sculpture in dialogue with landscape. The museum, in the southern French town of Rodez, is devoted to the work of the painter Pierre Soulages. It is a line of blocks clad in weathering steel, the material made famous by the artist Richard Serra. Yet it articulates the local geography, turning a face of glass towards a park and the historic centre of the town, while presenting a tougher, impermeable face toward modern commercialdevelopments.

La Lira Theater Public Open Space in Ripoll, Girona, Spain.(2011)

Hisao Suzuki

We are used to reading the site as of it had its own alphabet, Pigem says in documentary video produced by the Pritzker. And she says elsewhere, A great motivating force is to be able to discover the treasure of each place, or where the magicresides.

These traditional concerns of architecture were sometimes set aside by the Modernist movement of the 20th century in its push for rationalism and efficiency. The past three decades in architecture have been a dialogue between work that is driven by more personal agendas like Frank Gehrys and work that draws from its place. The latter tendency is a strength in Canada, where firms such as Shim-Sutcliffe, Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple and Patkau Architects have developed strong bodies of work that are somewhat local in theirapproaches.

Sant Antoni-Joan Oliver Library, Senior Citizens Center and Candida Perez Gardens in Barcelona, Spain.(2007)

Eugeni Pons

And then, more recently, architecture has taken a turn toward social concerns. The Pritzker has reflected that, beginning with the 2014 choice of the architect Shigeru Ban, whose work has bridged high design and humanitarian concerns. Last years award went to the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, best known for social housing that allows residents to contribute their own labour to the process. In social housing, there is no time for whats not strictly necessary, he told me. There is no arbitrariness. Aravenas win seemed to cement a shift in values for the prize to a type of design that aimed to change the world. It was an award for a set of values rather than pureaccomplishment.

Aranda, Pigem and Vilalta represent a gesture the other way, back toward architecture as a medium for subtle and slowcraft.

Row House in Olot, Girona, Spain(2012)

Hisao Suzuki

Their win also breaks ground in that there are three of them, and that one is a woman. Since its beginnings in 1979, the award has almost always gone to an individual, with only two exceptions, and only two winners have been women, which has generated contentious debate within a profession where women are underrepresented in many professional roles. In 1991, the Pritzker went to Robert Venturi, the American architect and theorist but not to Denise Scott Brown, who has been his lifelong collaborator in the office Venturi Scott Brown Associates. In 2013, a group of students at Harvard University organized a petition; they proposed that Venturis Pritzker should retroactively be shared with Scott Brown. The prizes organizers shot that ideadown.

Yet this years award recognizes the value ofcollaboration.

Ideas arrive from dialogue and collaboration by more than one person, says Vilalta in another video. Its almost a reaction against the contemporary world, which has promoted, in an exaggerated way, the value of theindividual.

Indeed architecture is, now more than ever, a collaborative art. And the Pritzkers newest laureates seem ready to confirm that in an atomized and globalized age, there is power in working together, and going slowly, and stayinghome.

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Architecture's Pritzker Prize lauds Spanish trio for 'a strong sense of place' - The Globe and Mail

13 Feb 2017, 12:34 p.m.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that has been defended by Mr Joyce's federal Liberal partners.

Prime Minister and Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull with Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop. Photo: Andrew Meares

Trade Minister Steven Ciobo has defended One Nation's record defending the government, while Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has warned the deal could cost the Liberal Party government in WA. Photo: Andrew Meares

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that is splitting opinion in the federal Coalition ranks.

Striking a different note to Liberal colleagues, former prime minister Tony Abbott agreed with the argument that One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was a "better person" today than when she was previously in Parliament but said the Nationals should be preferenced above all other parties.

While Mr Joyce described the deal as "disappointing", cabinet colleague and Trade Minister Steve Ciobosaidthe Liberal Party should put itself in the best position to govern and talked up Ms Hanson's right-wing populist party as displaying a "certain amount of economic rationalism" and support for government policy.

Mr Joyce said the conclusion "that the next best people to govern Western Australia after the Liberal Party are One Nation" needed to be reconsideredand the most successful governments in Australia were ones based on partnerships between the Liberals and Nationals.

"When you step away from that, there's one thing you can absolutely be assured of is that we are going to be in opposition," he told reporterson Monday morning.

"[WA Premier] Colin Barnett has been around thepoliticalgame a long while and he should seriously consider whether he thinks that this is a good idea or whether he's flirting with a concept that would put his own side and Liberal colleagues in opposition."

The deal will see Liberals preference One Nation above the Nationals in the upper house country regions in return for the party's support in all lower house seats at the March 11 election.

The alliance between the more independent WA branch of the Nationals and the Liberals is reportedly at breaking point over the deal, which could cost the smaller rural party a handful of seats.

"Pauline Hanson is a different and, I would say, better person today than she was 20 years ago. Certainly she's got a more, I think, nuanced approach to politics today," Mr Abbott told Sydney radio station 2GB.

"It's not up to me to decide where preference should go but, if it was, I'd certainly be putting One Nation ahead of Labor and I'd be putting the National Party ahead of everyone. Because the National Party are our Coalition partnersin Canberra and in most states and they are our alliance partners in Western Australia."

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to criticise the deal, stating that preference deals in the state election were a matter for the relevant division who "have got make their judgment based on their assessment of their electoral priorities".

Mr Ciobo joined the Prime Minister and other federal Liberal colleagues in defending the WA division's right to make its own decisions.

"What we've got to do is make decisions that put us in the best possible position to govern," he told ABC radio of the motivations of his own branch in Queensland.

After Industry Minister Arthur Sinodinos called the modern One Nation more "sophisticated" now, Mr Ciobo also praised the resurgent party.

"If you look at, for example, how Pauline Hanson's gone about putting her support in the Senate, you'll see that she's often voting in favour of government legislation.There's a certain amount of economic rationalism, a certain amount of approach that's reflective of what it is we are trying to do to govern Australia in a fiscally responsible way.One Nation has certainly signed up to that much more than Labor."

When in government, former Liberal prime minister John Howard declared that One Nation would always be put last on how-to-vote cards.

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The story Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation - Eyre Peninsula Tribune

In his latest bookTo Be a Machine, Mark OConnell probes the impulses, personalities, and technology of the people who believe the human body, particularly its stubborn insistence on dying and abdication of Moores law, is a system ripe for disruption. Meet the transhumanists.

OConnells book takes himdeep into the heartland of the professional disrupter class mostly the Bay Area and the cities, like Austin, eager to take in its spillover to meet with and discuss the ideas of everyone mostly men from billionaire tech CEOs and venture capitalists, to researchers at top-tier universities, to otherwise aimless loaners, apparently eager to extend their time in a world they scarcely seem to enjoy.

OConnell goes in as no diehard spokesman, and his report is not one of a jaunt through an imagined imminent utopia. Instead, its a journey that, like the books title, invites questionsWhat does it mean to be a machine? and speculative answers to them.

OConnell lives in Dublin. When I called him, we struggled at first to get a clear connection, an irony of relatively simple tech failure that was not lost. Once clearly connected, we discussed the possibility and consequences of a future where we are in some form machine and in some form potentially totally destroyed by machines.

SIGNATURE: You dont come out of the book as a devotee to transhumanism. When you started out, what were your thoughts on the movement?

MARK OCONNELL: My initial position was skeptical. At the same time, I never wanted to go in with a skeptical attitude and just come out with skepticism confirmed. I dont agree with the methods or ideology or the place where those transhumanist ideas come from, yet that almost childish horror that we get old and die, thats something I kind of share and I think a lot of people do as well. It is sort of basically unacceptable that we have this in our future. So there is something very compelling about the notion of people deludedly or otherwise thinking that this is a problem that can be solved.

SIG: A lot of it seems to be focused on this idea of not just overcoming death, but also overcoming general human inefficiency.

MO: When you talk to transhumanists most of them have a real, basic frustration with the human body and with the limitations of their sort of meat brains, thats the term you come across again and again. I suspect, it comes from an over-identification with computers. A lot of transhumanists are programmers and engineers and they spend a lot of time around computers, seeing systems, and thinking of efficiency and intelligence in a very machine-based way. Transhumanism makes perfect sense logically if you already think of yourself as a machine. It makes perfect sense to want to be a better machine, to want to be more efficient. It seems to me like being ultimately quite an insane way of thinking about human nature and thinking about what it means to be human. Thats really what interested me about transhumanism, is that it comes from this really strange notion of human existence that I think is kind of a confusion of the boundaries between the machines and the humans.

SIG: What do you see being lost in this view of man as machine?

MO: A sort of glib answer would be everything that doesnt involved a very narrow view of intelligence. Transhumanists have this battle cry that you hear over and over again that is optimized for intelligence and thats the bottom line for every metric of progress. Intelligence is the most important kind of value in the universe. I think thats a really narrow way of thinking about what it means to be human. It is also a very narrow view of what intelligence means, because when they talk about intelligence they tend to think about computational power. But I think being human is obviously a very messy, very inherently unquantifiable thing in terms of what makes it worthwhile. I suspect it has something to do with not being a machine and with not being ruthlessly efficient and productive and intelligent. But thats not a very good answer. As much time as I spent thinking about this stuff, and talking to these people, I never really came up with a satisfying answer to what it meant to be a human being.

SIG: One of the things that I was thinking about as I was reading the book, and you touch on it too, is that there is some similarity between transhumanism and millenerian thinking. The idea that since there is going to be this great reward at the end, that the contemporary world as it is now is kind of pointless. The problem of this, Ive always thought from the religious perspective, is that it deemphasizes solving the problems of today because its so focused on this thing that is going to come. I was wondering, did you find that transhumanists were very concerned about contemporary problems?

MO: The short answer is no. Because most of the time you are dealing with rationalists who are so extreme in their rationalism that it becomes insanity in a way. I wont say theyll dismiss things like climate change, but theyll say, oh yea climate change is a problem, but its fairly well served and there is a lot of people working on it and its not going to wipe out all of humanity, so lets not worry about it too much. They talk about it in terms of future lives. The lives of the people who are yet to be born are just as important or are given just as much weight in the moral calculus as people who already exists, which I guess as a utilitarian and sort of rigorously rationalist claim does make a kind of sense, but for most actually living human beings, it is kind of weird to think of things in that way, for me certainly. I find it hard to care about people who will be born in one-hundred years time as opposed to people who are alive now. Maybe thats wrong, maybe thats morally a bit dubious, but it seems to me strange to prioritize the lives of people who have yet to be born over those who are living and suffering now.

SIG: It seems like one obvious criticism of transhumanism is that if what they really want to do is extend human life, then they should be focusing on the things today that really shorten it like war and poverty and inadequate medical care.

MO: Yea. But to these folks like Aubrey de Grey, who I talked to for the book, you are just looking at it all wrong. To them, death is an ongoing holocaust that we deal with everyday and if we bring forward the cure of mortality by however many days, its thirty September 11ths a week that weve prevented. Its really hard to argue with that kind of extreme rationalism, I find, because youre kind of talking different languages altogether.

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Meet the Group of Extreme Rationalists Bent on Cheating Death - Signature Reads

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By Heartwood, Everett Public Library staff

Target in the Night by feted, recently deceased, Argentinian author Ricardo Piglia is a beautifully constructed novel featuring a number of interrelated stories, distinctly individualized characters, and stylish storytelling.

On its surface we have the murder of Tony Durn who came from the U.S. to a provincial town outside of Buenos Aires with lots of cash and a connection to the twin Belladona sisters. Attempting to solve Durns murder is Croce, the quixotic, Holmesian detective who has a long history of butting heads with local prosecutor Cueto.

The murder involved a knifing and the apparent use of a defunct dumbwaiter to lower down cash from the victims hotel room. The latter may also have provided the means of escape for a small person. Indeed the chief suspect is a Japanese jockey by the name of Yoshio, and his alleged act is being called a crime of passion. Other suspects include various members of the Belladona family, and a different jockey, who may have been paid to make the hit as he was in need of cash to buy a beloved, injured horse.

Woven into the story are scenes at the racetrack, the Belladona brothers and their fortress-like factory for cutting-edge automotive prototypes on the outskirts of town, a reporter (Renzi) from the city who has come to report on the murder, and a slowly unfolding history of the town and life on the Argentinian pampas that brings to mind Garca Mrquezs mythical town of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Belladona family are prominent citizens in the community but are described as being currently at war with each other. We learn of their family history in ways that are fascinating and add layers of intrigue. For example, Renzi has a long talk with the twin, Sophia (eventually leading to intimacy), which unfolds episodically throughout the novel. And Renzi discovers more details about the Belladonna family with the help of the towns efficient archivist, Rosa, revealing a family schism and the attempt to appropriate the Belladona factory and surrounding lands through a corporate takeover.

In addition to all this, Piglias various characters have peculiar interests that include a fascination with language and syntax, dreams and the work of Carl Jung, literature and philosophy, quasi-mysticism, rationalism, madness, perception and the ide fixe. Target in the Night is a wonderful amalgam of detective story and classical tragedy told in voices that vary from Chandler to Pynchon to Bolao. Readers in need of cleanly wrapped up narratives should probably look elsewhere, but for those who are open to ambiguity and enjoy finely realized characters, myriad subject matter, and punchy yet graceful writing definitely give this book a look.

Blanco nocturno (Target in the Night) was awarded the prestigious Rmulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in 2011. For more about the author see the Piglia Dossier in the first issue of the new journal, Latin American Literature Today.

Be sure to visit A Reading Life for more reviews and news of all things happening at the Everett Public Library.

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Review: 'Target in the Night' is punchy, graceful, ambiguous - The Daily Herald

13 Feb 2017, 12:34 p.m.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that has been defended by Mr Joyce's federal Liberal partners.

Prime Minister and Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull with Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop. Photo: Andrew Meares

Trade Minister Steven Ciobo has defended One Nation's record defending the government, while Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has warned the deal could cost the Liberal Party government in WA. Photo: Andrew Meares

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has condemned the Western Australian Liberal Party's unprecedented decision to preference One Nation ahead of the Nationals at the upcoming state election, a deal that is splitting opinion in the federal Coalition ranks.

Striking a different note to Liberal colleagues, former prime minister Tony Abbott agreed with the argument that One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was a "better person" today than when she was previously in Parliament but said the Nationals should be preferenced above all other parties.

While Mr Joyce described the deal as "disappointing", cabinet colleague and Trade Minister Steve Ciobosaidthe Liberal Party should put itself in the best position to govern and talked up Ms Hanson's right-wing populist party as displaying a "certain amount of economic rationalism" and support for government policy.

Mr Joyce said the conclusion "that the next best people to govern Western Australia after the Liberal Party are One Nation" needed to be reconsideredand the most successful governments in Australia were ones based on partnerships between the Liberals and Nationals.

"When you step away from that, there's one thing you can absolutely be assured of is that we are going to be in opposition," he told reporterson Monday morning.

"[WA Premier] Colin Barnett has been around thepoliticalgame a long while and he should seriously consider whether he thinks that this is a good idea or whether he's flirting with a concept that would put his own side and Liberal colleagues in opposition."

The deal will see Liberals preference One Nation above the Nationals in the upper house country regions in return for the party's support in all lower house seats at the March 11 election.

The alliance between the more independent WA branch of the Nationals and the Liberals is reportedly at breaking point over the deal, which could cost the smaller rural party a handful of seats.

"Pauline Hanson is a different and, I would say, better person today than she was 20 years ago. Certainly she's got a more, I think, nuanced approach to politics today," Mr Abbott told Sydney radio station 2GB.

"It's not up to me to decide where preference should go but, if it was, I'd certainly be putting One Nation ahead of Labor and I'd be putting the National Party ahead of everyone. Because the National Party are our Coalition partnersin Canberra and in most states and they are our alliance partners in Western Australia."

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to criticise the deal, stating that preference deals in the state election were a matter for the relevant division who "have got make their judgment based on their assessment of their electoral priorities".

Mr Ciobo joined the Prime Minister and other federal Liberal colleagues in defending the WA division's right to make its own decisions.

"What we've got to do is make decisions that put us in the best possible position to govern," he told ABC radio of the motivations of his own branch in Queensland.

After Industry Minister Arthur Sinodinos called the modern One Nation more "sophisticated" now, Mr Ciobo also praised the resurgent party.

"If you look at, for example, how Pauline Hanson's gone about putting her support in the Senate, you'll see that she's often voting in favour of government legislation.There's a certain amount of economic rationalism, a certain amount of approach that's reflective of what it is we are trying to do to govern Australia in a fiscally responsible way.One Nation has certainly signed up to that much more than Labor."

When in government, former Liberal prime minister John Howard declared that One Nation would always be put last on how-to-vote cards.

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The story Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Barnaby Joyce condemns WA Liberals' preference deal with One Nation - Whyalla News

Courtyard full of devotees didnt care that just over a week ago, a suicide blast killed 88 in that very place

SEHWAN SHARIF:In a world of logic and rationalism, there often occur moments which defy any explanation. Its the moment when a devotee glances at his place of worship, his spiritual guidefor the first time. Its the moment when a thing of beauty comes to life in front of your eyes like watching evolution give shape to the world, or looking into your firstborns eyes moments after birth. I had a similar experience on Saturday night when I visited the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan.

PHOTO:PUBLICITY

It involved neither God nor evolution, but rather something more powerful that abides within us: love and peace. I have lived over two decades with the mind of a cynic, questioning and making sense of the nonsense around me and it has only happened a few times that I stop and just feel things as they are, without any judgment. It happened when I was kayaking in a lake surrounded by mountains in Yeongwol, South Korea. It happened in the mountainous Buddhist temple of Naksan where Buddhas spirit lived in the winter fog and watched over his devotees. And it happened again in the ethereal presence of Qalandar.

Those fuelling anger over Sehwan tragedy accomplices of terrorists: Sindh CM

A courtyard full of devotees who did not care that just over a week ago, a suicide blast had killed 88 people in that very place. I was there, moving to the rhythm of Lal, whose four lamps never extinguish. I was there to light the fifth one.

PHOTO:PUBLICITY

Watching people go into a trance to the sound of dhamaal was a moving experience. What followed was a peace jam by Sounds of Kolachi and percussionist Abdul Aziz Qazi, marking the first time any band has performed inside the Qalandar shrine.

PHOTO:PUBLICITY

The heart-touching sound of Gul Muhammads sarangi combined with Ahsan Baris guitar, Qazis cajn, and Ahmeds vocals served as a call, an azaan of sorts. In no time, people gathered around to witness the manifestation of a peaceful gesture in the face of fear that had swallowed the world. In fact, it occurred to me that, apart from the tighter security at the entrance, the public did not even worry about the blast anymore. The power of peace had set into them so heavily that it wasnt going to stop them from visiting the pilgrimage site.

PHOTO:PUBLICITY

Each musical note and each expression of the people in witness exclaimed, No blasts or killings can conquer peace and love. The shrine was a canal, where musicians took inspiration from the people and gave them back through music an ecosystem, a cycle of peace. Its even more interesting that no person objected to it. Music was a whole another prayer, similar to what the regular devotees did at the shrine. To top it, two local musicians joined in with nagaras of their own like dervishes joining a group of dervishes in the dance of zikr.

In Memory Of Sehwan victims remembered

The performance, which lasted over 40 minutes, saw people even dancing to the rhythm in a trance-like state, as on the path to enlightenment. It reminded me of the Heart Sutra in Mahayana Buddhism, Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Swaha (Gone, gone, gone beyond altogether beyond, Awakening, fulfilled!).

PHOTO:PUBLICITY

It talks about love and mental peace where nothing, no worldly chatter and noise can touch you. One of the most important sutras in Buddhism, it talks of Bodhi, which is awakening. If the entire experience of Qalandars shrine can be summed up in one word, its awakening.

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When a guitar and Sarangi took over Qalandar's shrine - The Express Tribune

The Dalai Lama has been criticized by the Chinese government and Chinese students in the United States.

University of California-San Diegos decision to invite Dalai Lama for commencement is troubling, while the Chinese protesters opposed Free Speech and branded their blind patriotism

On Feb. 2, UC-San Diego made the official announcement that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, a well-known advocate of Tibetan independence from the Peoples Republic of China, will be speaking at the commencement ceremony. Waves of shock and anger swept through the Chinese international student communities in UCSD, and soon, Chinese international student communities across the US. A fierce debate ensued between the supporters and critics of the Dalai Lama, with much vitriol. As a Chinese international student myself, I feel obliged to share some of my thoughts on the controversy. But before that, I want to clarify that this article does not concern itself with the historical aspects of the legitimacy of Peoples Republic of Chinas territorial claim in Tibet, the complexity of which is only to be resolved through collective efforts.

The Dalai Lama has been a well-respected person across the political spectrum in the west, though he is not without critics. Christopher Hichens, in his 1998 article on the Dalai Lama His Material Holiness, wrote Chinas foul conduct in an occupied land, combined with a Hollywood cult that almost exceeds the power of Scientology, has fused with weightless Maharishi and Bhagwan-type babble to create an image of an idealized Tibet and of a saintly god-king. Indeed, the Dalai Lama, and the people who met with him and praise him, have been in a decades-long, cynical and opportunistic symbiosis of realpolitik, with a distinctive flavor of orientalism.

The Dalai Lama has been supportive of the assembling of thermonuclear arsenal by India in the 1990s, he has made the remark that any women successor to him has to be attractive, and he has not only stayed silent on former President Bushs illegitimate invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but said that he loved Bush. Countless incidents have lead people who had faith in liberal principles to doubt the Dalai Lamas commitment to his ideals, let alone his recent statement that he had no worries about thenpPresident-elect Donald Trump.

Maybe its my poor grasp of the Buddhist doctrine of inner peace, but I am very worried, as a foreigner in the US, about Trump (though that is another story). That is why the decision of UCSD to invite the Dalai Lama for a commencement speech is troubling. As a renowned institution in public education, UCSD should cherish genuine secular and liberal values, inviting people who are sincerely devoted to making the world a better place rather than shrewd political opportunists.

Even though UCSDs decision raised questions, the reaction by Chinese international student communities is a shameful one. One day after the announcement by UCSD, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at UCSD published a statement on WeChat denouncing the decision, and on its thumbnail it reads Whoever tries to sever my motherland must be destroyed regardless of propinquity (the original is in Chinese, and the translation is literal). The article tells the Chinese international students at UCSD to remain calm, and wait for and listen to the unified directives issued by the Chinese Embassy. The article also described the Dalai Lama as devoted to sabotaging the territorial integrity and ethnic solidarity of our mother country. In the end, the article expresses the determination of CSSA to take strong measures to protest the speech by the Dalai Lama.

This incident is just an add-on to a series of anti-free speech outbursts on UC campuses. Two years ago, students at Berkeley tried to remove the political polemicist Bill Maher from the commencement speech, and in early February prevented right-wing political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos from giving a speech. However, this time the protesters are motivated by a far more invidious sentiment than political correctnessblind patriotism.

The claim of the Dalai Lamas intention to sabotage racial harmony is highly dubious. It makes the strong assumption that there is an already established racial harmony, which requires strong evidence. But this is irrelevant here, as what is at stake is the core of liberal democracy: free speech. Free speech, in its broad sense, consists of both the tolerance for the right of others to speak, and the independence with which we think and speak. The whims of the Chinese Embassy and government should not dictate what Chinese international students think, and what Chinese international students think should not interfere with whether or not the Dalai Lama speaks at commencement.

Philosopher Karl Popper wrote in his famous The Open Society and its Enemies the conflict between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important intellectual, and perhaps even moral, issue of our time. Unfortunately, what Popper has said during the carnage of the Second World War is still true, if not truer, today. The most efficient way to promote rational thinking is by exchanging ideas, and the best way to expose lies is by having people utter them. To my fellow Chinese students: think independently whether you agree with the Dalai Lama or not, and most importantly, let him talk!

Fact is that to which there is no alternative. And facts can only be respected if we continue to champion secular and liberal values in university campuses, be open to new ideas, and dare to be challenged.

Runkun is a junior majoring in philosophy. Please send all comments, questions and concerns to opinion@dailycardinal.com.

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Outcry over Dalai Lama threatens free speech | The Daily Cardinal - The Daily Cardinal

Decades in the making, Martin Scorseses Silence, based on Shsaku Ends 1966 novel, about 17th-century Jesuit missionaries to Japan, is ambitious and alternately gorgeous and horrifying. It is surprising that a film of this magnitude would be all but completely snubbed for Oscar nominations, particularly in the now-expanded category of Best Picture, where the competition is soft indeed. Silences sole Oscar nomination is for cinematography, and that is well deserved. With its focus on valleys and mountains shrouded in fog, the film often has the look of the movies of the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

Commentary on the film has focused on the dilemma facing the two Jesuit priest protagonists, Father Cristvo Ferreira (Liam Neeson) and Father Sebastio Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield): Can renouncing faithever be a path of faith? Yet the commentary has tended to ignore a more striking issue and perhaps one more relevant to our own time: namely, what happens to religious faith in a totalitarian political environment that actively and violently repudiates any religion that is not perfectly consonant with the dictates of the political regime.

Sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries to Japan were for a time welcomed and had enormous success. Political changes in the country led to growing suspicion of foreign influences and to a fear that the allegiance of the Japanese people would be ssplit between nationalism and the new religion. The governmental response was ruthless and systematic. By the use of bribery and threats, it set ordinary citizens against one another and especially against any priests remaining in the country. The centerpiece of the elimination project was a very public form of repudiation of the faith: the so-called fumi-e (literally, to step on a picture), the stepping, and in some cases spitting, on an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary.

Around that ritual act, Japanese authorities construct a series of protracted, gruesome inducements to apostasy. Particularly terrifying is the threat that the torture of Japanese converts will cease only after the priests themselves publicly renounce their faith. Suppression was already underway when Father Rodrigues, a priest in Portugal, heard reports that his spiritual mentor, the missionary to Japan, Father Ferreira, had succumbed to Japanese terror and renounced his faith in Christ. Eager to be a missionary himself and to find out the truth about Ferreira, Rodrigues departs for Japan and immediately enters a world of systematic viciousness toward Christians, confronting a horror that he could never have imagined.

The only religious film that is remotely akin to Silence is Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ. Both are blood-soaked carnivals of torture that explore the way in which violence is the meeting point, the testing ground, in the contest between good and evil or, more precisely, between the witness of holiness and diabolical malevolence. Both films draw out to the point of excess the suffering of those who would maintain their faith in the face of betrayal and persecution. One slight weakness in the film is the performance of Andrew Garfield as the principal vehicle for the exploration of the trials undergone by the would-be faithful priest. With his performances in Silence and in Hacksaw Ridge, Garfield seems headed to stardom as a dramatic lead actor, but he is better suited to the role of the underestimated man of action in Ridge than he is to the brooding, anguished Jesuit in Silence.

The book and the film are much better at holding onto the tragic tensions in the character of Rodrigues than are many of the commentators. One of the films consultants, Father James Martin, S.J., editor of America, argues that the film underscores the inadequacy of black-and-white moral theology of the Jesuitpriests when confronted with a world of gray. But that observation only underscores the inadequacy of the banal categories of contemporary moral theology when applied to a great work of art. The world of Silence is not gray; it is surreal and nightmarish, and its dramatic depiction at the hands of Scorsese moves the film precariously close to the genre of horror.

While the priests are generous and sacrificial, they are also rightly accused of arrogance, of desiring primarily the esteem of the people they have come to serve. They are indeed focused on themselves and their tribulations. One of the key questions is whether Rodrigues hears a divine voice urging him, Trample! Jesus himself seems to speak from the icon placed before Rodrigues. If He does, then apostasy would seem to be a path of faith, not just an act of betrayal from which one can repent and return to grace. But it is far from clear how we are to interpret this scene.

This is a world where nothing is as it seems. The film leaves us with questions: Is this a divine voice? Or is it, given Rodriguess mentally strained condition, a hallucination? (How odd that God would break His apparently steadfast silence only to assuage the conscience of a Western Jesuit priest.) Or is it, as any Jesuit who had read Saint Ignatius carefully would know was possible, a communication not from the divine but from a malign spirit whose aim is to destroy souls? To seize, even in the spirit of advancing a moral theology of ambiguity, on any one of these interpretations would violate the tortured ambiguity of the film itself.

That is clearly the aim of the Japanese officials who, even as they expend enormous effort to extirpate the Catholic faith, taunt the priests for their failure to realize that Japan is a swamp in which Christianity cannot take root. That claim is belied both by the initial spread of the faith and by the lengths to which the Japanese go to rid their country of its presence.

While the lives of ordinary Japanese seem primitive indeed, the mechanisms that the officials deploy are far from crude. Instead, they exhibit a complex, diabolical rationality. The methods are totalitarian in both intent and form. The intent is to uproot completely any residue of Christian faith, to eliminate the presence of any force contrary to that of the government. Buddhism is praised but appears in the film only under the guise of a civil religion. The form is capacious, encompassing any expression of the faith, and sustained through time.

The instruments of torture and execution evince the power of totalitarian reason prior to, and in the absence of, modern technology. Torture is designed to work slowly over time and to be a kind of public display of the cost of belief. Public repudiation is as much about humiliation and mockery as it is about officially recanting. These methods deprive the potential martyr of any sense of glory. Both before and after their apostasy, priests are kept alive. Before their desecration of an icon, they are forced to witness the torture and murder of others, whose potential freedom rests, the priests are told, on the willingness of the priests to deny the faith. After their apostasy, the priests are kept around as examples of the falsity and cowardice of Christian leaders. They are given public roles, forced to break their vows, takes wives, and assist the government in its ongoing detection of forbidden Christian elements in the country.

What sort of religion can survive in this setting, where religious liberty is systematically denied? If anything endures, it is minimalist and completely privatized; indeed, what remains is so private that it cannot emerge from the interior of the soul. In everything external to ones thoughts and feelings, there must be complete conformity to the dictates of the state. Nothing less than public complicity with and docility toward the state is acceptable. If the film raises questions about the silence of God, it draws our attention equally to the silencing of religious speech and action.

In the service of a totalitarian ideal, government agents exhibit a kind of enlightenment rationalism. They are meticulous, patient, thorough, articulate, and confident in their control and ultimate victory. One of the more instructive characteristics of Japanese rule in the film is that it is not just a regime of terror, desecration, and destruction. The surrealist nightmare of isolation, torture, and death that it constructs for believers stands in contrast to the world enjoyed by apostates, to whom, the officials offer comfort, work, community, and the esteem of both the elites and the common people. The strategy is smartly designed to suppress memories of, and longing for, any higher calling, any end beyond the scope of the state.

Thomas S.Hibbs, the dean of the Honors College at Baylor University, is the author of Shows about Nothing.

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In Scorsese's adaptation of Endo's novel, a stark depiction of statism against religion - National Review

Age Of Anger: A History of the Present, by Pankaj Mishra (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp., $27)

ABritish writer of immense learning, Pankaj Mishra has authored a new book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, that reflects an extraordinary breadth of reading. It opens as a conventional work of intellectual historyin this case, the history of modernization and its travailsbut soon becomes more of a collage of aperus organized around themes laid out by the path-breaking critic of modernity Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 1920s Iranian writer Jalal al-Ahmed, and the Italian poet-cum-Duce Gabriel DAnnunzio, among many others.

For instance, Mishra pits Rousseaus finicky quest for authenticity against Voltaires heirs, the mimic men who try to replicate Anglo-French manners and mores. Mishra sees Voltaire as primarily a champion of enlightened despotism, while Rousseau is presented as a clear-eyed critic of liberal rationalism and cosmopolitan pretension. Mishra is sympathetic to al-Ahmeds obsession with the psychic damage or Westoxification imposed on the Islamic world by Western colonialism. Hes fascinated by DAnnunzio, who, in the wake of World War I, choreographed a disastrous fascist future that paved the way for Mussolini. DAnnunzio was the first Italian politician who decked out his supporters in black uniforms and stiff armed salutes. He cheered on the Italian armies as they conquered the Ottoman provinces that came to be called Libya and which, Mishra notes, suffered the worlds first aerial bombing in 1912. Libya became the testing ground for the New Man theorized by Nietzsche and Sorel.

Mishras loosely connected pearls of insight about belief, mindsets and outlooks are tied together by his anti-anti-Communism, an outlook echoed by todays anti-anti-Islamicism, exemplified in the pages of the British Guardian, which paints the Muslim world as the victim of Western liberalism. Mishras disdain for the liberal ideals of progress and reasoned choice, understood as excesses of individualism, will be familiar to readers of Elie Kedourie on nationalism, Jacob Talmon on the creation of secular salvationism, Christopher Lasch and John Gray on the paradoxes of progress, and William Pfaff on the pent-up violence of the modern world. But his discussion of the Nazi origins of Hindu nationalism will be eye-opening to many readers.

Mishras intermittent account of how the writings of Giuseppe Mazzini, the liberal nationalist founder of modern Italy, inspired nationalists in India and China places the problem of modernization in an illuminating context. On a darker note, Mazzini influenced Georges Sorel, whose anti-liberal paeans to the power of myth excited would-be dictators on both right and left. Sorel saw in the working class the collective incarnation of the Nietzschean superman. Mussolini first read Sorels work on violence when he was a socialist, but he continued to incorporate his ideas as he moved to develop fascism.

Mishra is right to argue that attempts to modernize traditional cultures involve, as in Italy and Germany, considerable psychic dislocation. It can produce a burning anger fueled by the emotional displacement of communal cultures fractured by the demands of economic individualism. But Mishra goes off the rails when he tries to assimilate the acquired insanity of Islamic jihad into the pains of modernization. Modernizationas in Iranoffered an alternative to the meld of entitlements and resentments borne of Islamic claims to rule over infidels. Islam has always been a political theology of the sword. Muhammad wasnt responding to modernization when he slaughtered the Jews of Medina.

The books failing is its lack of historical context and slipshod understanding of America. Mishra insists on seeing constitutionalist America, which had little interest in Britains Benthamism, as a utilitarian nation. He sees early twentieth-century social Darwinism as an American right-wing ideology when its appeal, as the great historian of liberalism Eric Goldman documented, was almost entirely to the liberal Left. Reading Mishras repeated references to Timothy McVeigh, one might think that the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber had inspired an army of imitators comparable in size and strength to al-Qaida. Mishra writes that centuries of civil war, imperial conquest and genocide in Europe and America has been downplayed in the West, which suffers from a lack of self-criticism. Its hard to take such an assertion seriously. Can Mishra really be unaware of the epidemic of political correctness and self-hatred infecting the universities and the broadsheet press?

Mishra disdains the new nationalism as an expression of irrationalist urges, concluding, in the words of Alan Bloom, that fascism has a future. But he has nothing to say about the E.U. autocracy thats governed Europe so ineptly. He seems unaware of the close connection between liberal nationalism and the practice of democracy. Hes similarly contemptuous of Donald Trump, proclaiming his administration a disaster even before the New York real-estate dealer took office. Trump may well turn out to be a failure, but Mishra seems not to grasp the connection between Barack Obamas insistence that Islamophobia is as great a problem as terrorisma view that Mishra sharesand Trumps rise to power. Similarly, the E.U., which proclaims itself an expiation of past nationalist excesses, has unwittingly midwifed a new nationalism.

A book lacking a conventional structure, Age of Anger repeatedly circles around the subject of modernization. Mishra doesnt so much conclude as exhaust his conceptual repetitions. Nonetheless, Age of Anger is well worth reading, even if its best approached like a rich buffet that should be selectively sampled.

Fred Siegelis aCity Journalcontributing editor, Scholar in Residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, and the author ofThe Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.

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Modernism and Its Rages - City Journal

Past popes knew well that Freemasonry is Satan's chosen instrument for attacking the Catholic Church. To this day itremains the most condemned belief system in the Church's history.

Pope Leo XIII wrote an encyclical on Freemasonry in 1890 titledDall'Alto Dell'Apostolico Seggiocondemning masonic sects.

They are already judged; their ends, their means, their doctrines, and their action, are all known with indisputable certainty. Possessed by the spirit of Satan, whose instrument they are, they burn like him with a deadly and implacable hatred of Jesus Christ and of His work; and they endeavor by every means to overthrow and fetter it.

The concerned pontiff spoke of previous papal condemnations of this secret society, which cloaks itself in charitable garb.

Many times have We sounded the alarm, to give warning of the danger; but We do not therefore think that We have done enough. In face of the continued and fiercer assaults that are made, We hear the voice of duty calling upon Us more powerfully than before to speak to you again.

In his encyclical, the venerable Holy Father touches on some of the perverted goals of this seemingly altruistic society:

The masons laid out even more insidious plans to directly attack the Church in their document Alta Vendita. It's been called a masonic blueprint for destroying the Catholic Church by plotting to capture the papacy. Their plans fell into the hands of Pope Gregory XVI and were subsequently published under the authority of both Pope Pius IX and Pope Leo XIII.

The manifesto declares, "Our final end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution, the destruction forever of Catholicism and even of the Christian idea, which, if left standing on the ruins of Rome, would be the resuscitation of Christianity later on."

The document calls for corrupting the young clergy and religious with fFeemasonry's secular humanist doctrines. This clergy would then go on to make revolutionary changes in the Church and select ill-formed leaders who would perpetuate the worldly errors.

Modern Freemasonry is thought to have originated in the Grand Lodge of London in 1717.Pope Clement XII in 1738 was the first Roman Pontiff to condemn Freemasonry with his papal bull, In Eminenti. Subsequent popes did likewise, namely, Benedict XIV, Pius VI, Leo XII, Pius VII, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX and Leo XIII.

The most recent statement against Freemasonry came from then-Cdl. Joseph Ratzinger as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Following the promulgation of the current Code of Canon Law, Cdl. Ratzinger in 1983 affirmed that it was still a mortal sin for Catholics to become masons.

"The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion," he declared.

Pope Leo XIII in his encyclicalProvidentissimus Deus, describes the rationalists of the Enlightenment, like Voltaire, as spawn of Martin Luther's Protestant Revolt. Describing the enemy as those who espouse private judgment of Scripture, Leo XIII calls Catholics to battle "rationalists, true children and inheritors of the older heretics, who, trusting in their turn to their own way of thinking, have rejected even the scraps and remnants of Christian belief. ... They deny that there is any such thing as revelation or inspiration or Holy Scripture at all."

Pope Pius XII gives freemasons credit for begetting rationalists, communists and secular humanists. In his 1958 address to the Seventh Week Pastoral Adaptation Conference in Italy, Pius XII related, "[T]he roots of modern apostasy lay in scientific atheism, dialectical materialism, rationalism, illuminism, laicism and Freemasonry which is the mother of them all."

The attacks on the Church by Communism alone are myriad. Dr. Alice von Hildebrand told Church Militant how one Communist, Bella Dodd, helped over a thousand Communist sympathizers become ordained priests. Their mission was to subvert the Church from within.

One such masonic French priest, who subsequently had a change of heart, revealed his marching orders stipulating how he was to adversely influence the Church. The plan was to encouragefellow Catholics to do the following:

Pope Leo XIII urged Catholics to ardently resist the multifaceted attacks of Freemasonry. The saintly Pope warned, "To shrink from seeing the gravity of this would be a fatal error." He admonished Catholics to fight the evil of this cult with all their might.

No means must be neglected that are in your power. All the resources of speech, every expedient in action, all the immense treasures of help and grace which the Church places in your hands, must be made use of, for the formation of a Clergy learned and full of the spirit of Jesus Christ, for the Christian education of youth, for the extirpation of evil doctrines, for the defence of Catholic truths, and for the maintenance of the Christian character and spirit of family life.

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(This comes from Rev. John Cooper, who isa Unitarian Universalist minister and a chaplain. His faith journey has led him on a wide path, including natural spirituality, rationalism, shamanism, Buddhist studies and Kung Fu.)

I have been struck by contrast today, a polarization of opposites. It is early spring (or maybe late winter) here in the desert highlands, and the very weather seems to speak of polarization. Yesterday, it was warm and clear enough for me to walk for an hour outside without a coat on, today, after a shift overnight, there is a dust of snow all over the mountains, melting into the ground in the valley. Just a few hundred feet above me, the snow is blocking roads and causing delays, whereas a few hundred feet below, it feels like a cool spring day.

I feel like the weather and political climate are synchronized. The weather moves back and forth between winter and early spring, thaws interrupted by moments of freeze. Cold snow still falling not far from where new buds of hope whisper throughout the valley.

When I look to the news, it seems to shift between springs of compassion and rhetoric of icy exclusion.

Erase Bullying. Photo from the Province of British Columbia (cc) 2013.

In the news today, it is Anti-Bullying or Pink Shirt Day in Canada and that struck a chord. As I watch political leadership that seems to have lost the ability to confront disagreement with polite kindness. A recent NY Times article The Culture of Nastiness laments the loss of civic disagreement, quoting Professor Andrew Reiner at Towson University about how people have come to believe, If I disagree with you, then I have to dislike you, so why should I go to a neighborhood meeting when its clear Im going to disagree with them?

The ability to disagree with one-another in kindness and respect is often a challenge for Unitarian Universalists in our congregations. We are a strong-willed, critically-minded, and gracious people who struggle to learn to share our diverse and powerful opinions and reflections with one-another in ways that are engaging, accepting, even welcoming of The Other. Civic disagreement is a spiritual practice for us. This is a place where our movement has something powerful to offer the larger world. Whether we come from Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, Humanist, Pagan or other religious roots and beliefs, when we enter into a shared UU community, we learn how to civically disagree with one-another, not only in the arena of faith, but in the areas of community administration, worship planning, religious education and more. Our way is to walk together in love and care for one-another, even when we disagree with one-another. It is our highest of callings; to welcome that which is different into our midst, to welcome it with a holy curiosity, and to treat it as a sacred stranger, to be fed, encouraged, uplifted and learned from, even when we disagree.

Not too long ago on Patheos, The Zen Pagan Time Swiss wrote about thesacred nature of hospitality, reminding us that it is not only the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) that treat hospitality as a sacred responsibility, but the ancient Celtic and Norse traditions as well. The Havamal, the Poetic Edda of Odins wisdom says Scoff not at guests nor to the gate chase them, But relieve the lonely and wretched. The call to be hospitable to the strange among us is ancient and profoundly spiritual.

I recently preached a sermon in my local UU congregation entitled Encountering Change: A Chaplains Perspective which would have been perhaps more aptly entitled Encountering the Other: A Chaplains Perspective. The key anecdote in the sermon was about how the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr talked about his white jailers in his infamous sermon The Drum Major Instinct (which is an amazing read, and an even better listen, if you have never heard it, go listen now wait finish reading this, then go listen).

During his stay in Birmingham, the Rev. Dr. King visited with his white jailers daily. They would approach to tell him how his views on integration and equality were wrong, he would debate, and then he would listen. Through those conversations, the Rev. Dr. King discovered that they were earning salaries similar to many of the people of color in his movement. That was a powerful realization that Rev. Dr. King came to discover because he was in conversation with The Other. His conversations with his white jailers helped to clarify for the Rev. Dr. King that he was struggling against not only racial injustice, but economic injustice as well. In his sermon, Rev. Dr. King said that he would preach first, calmly because they wanted to talk, and that it took two or three days of polite debate before they could listen to one-another. Two or three days of polite debate.

What I take from that is that polite disagreement, civil engagement, is a prerequisite for differing views to hear one-another. Like the flip back and forth between the seasons that I see today we humans cannot find common ground in our disagreements unless we can first move civically and politely back and forth through our seasons. It is how we are made. It is manifest in the creation I see around me. Like the transition from winter to spring, we have to shift between our differences with respect before we get to the part where we hear one-another.

Flags at 25 Beacon, photo by Chris Walton (cc)

As members of intentionally diverse Unitarian Universalist communities, I think that we have cultivated this practice perhaps more than our neighbors. This time is a time where we have an opportunity to lead in our places of work, our neighborhoods, the schools our children attend we members of the Unitarian Universalist movement have an opportunity to demonstrate and model how to disagree with one-another respectfully, in love, yet without losing sight of our own values and position. Perhaps through our spiritual practice of engaging that which is different with sacred curiosity and welcome, we can help this world around us, which grows ever ruder in its disagreement, to remember how to argue with civility. Maybe then, we can all get to the part, two or three days down the road, where we learn something new from one another.

We can get to the part where spring emerges from the conversation. Perhaps even to a warm summer.

Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have namedbut a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

Robert A. Heinlein,Friday

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Encountering Change: A Chaplain's Perspective - Patheos (blog)

I know -- everyone is tired of talking about identity politics -- and for good reason.

It's a poison pill in an already toxic landscape, a conch for the left and a stone in the shoe for the right. It's where political correctness goes to thrive or be smothered, a way to gaslight the opposition through slogans and smugness, hostility and populism.

(Photo: Pinkbadger via Getty Images)

How the hell did we get here? How did our politics mutate into such prolific and unabashed tribalism? Think about how the landscape looks like right now. The hard left have constructed a sort of boilerplate militancy; a method of attack towards anyone unwilling to abide by their version of modern decency, especially in the realm of identity politics. Meanwhile, the hard right act like science and their racist relatives don't even exist, all while using really bad wordplay to denigrate their political opposites.

In the gladiator arena of social justice, identity politics serves as a high-calibre weapon for progressives eager to force feed a perceived notion of fairness onto the populace, wielded by a hand determined to apply retribution inside the consciousness of the privileged class. To conservatives, identity politics is the ultimate propaganda tool; a vehicle for outrage spawned through university campuses by academic elites whose collective common sense has been replaced by stringent ideology.

Both sides are half right, half insane... and we do not have to choose either side.

The conventional wisdom in modern-day politics is to define these problems through polarization, but this mainstay idea relies on the suggestion of a split between the right and the left when the evidence suggests that we have been traditionally polarized for decades. There now exist two divisions and four total groups of people in the battle of ideas -- two fringe groups on the extreme right and left, and two groups desperately running from both fringes.

U.S. President Donald Trump invites a supporter onstage with him during a "Make America Great Again" rally in Melbourne, Florida, U.S. Feb. 18, 2017. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The irony is that we used to embrace moderation in politics through the tried-and-true blueprint of being socially liberal, fiscally conservative. Well, we now have the opportunity to merge these classic beliefs into a new construct, one less reliant on orthodoxy, willing to become an ambidextrous sect of voters who care more about actual societal progress than the fortunes of a singular political party.

And if they could ever summon the political will and organize, the two fringes will never control our politics again. Make no mistake, the fringes have taken over... but there is hope now that we have witnessed the damage they have done.

We have an opportunity to use the power of the middle effectively. Voter apathy is shrinking, awareness is growing, and the identity politics war is already dividing the wings. The regressive left and alt-right are destroying our sense of rationalism through violent protests and disgusting behaviour that would be almost unheard of just a short time ago. Most of us are afraid to go against the status quo, but maybe we need to pick up our swords rather than feeling pressured to fall on them.

Because we are better than this.

We are better than the labels we thrust upon one another. We just need to stop acting like we can read the minds and motivations of people who do not subscribe to our way of speaking, or our way of looking at the world. We can believe in universal health care and still be capitalists. Just because we do not attach the profit motive to life or death doesn't mean we want to bankrupt the system or get a free ride.

We can criticize someone from a different race, and not be a racist. We can discuss privilege and oppression, but know that we are not necessarily textbook examples of the oppressed or the oppressors.

We can adore our traditions and values, but understand the painful symbolism of things like the Confederate flag. We were not robbed of our heritage by lowering that flag. In fact, we enriched it by proving we understood why it belongs in a museum instead of the top of a courthouse.

We can be incredible supporters of gender equality and still not convict a defendant in a sexual assault case until the jury does. We can be Marie Henein instead of Lena Dunham, and that's OK.

Jian Ghomeshi, a former celebrity radio host who has been charged with multiple counts of sexual assault, leaves the courthouse after the first day of his trial alongside his lawyer Marie Henein (L), in Toronto, Feb. 1, 2016. (Photo: Mark Blinch/Reuters)

Because we can be fair, and just, and reasonable, and rational -- especially when we happen to disagree with each other.

We are more complex than the gatekeepers of ideologies. But those ideologies are becoming more and more mainstream. Certain concepts on both sides have been stitched into the fabric of our pop culture quilt, and we are afraid to challenge these ideas, all because we do not want to be bullied by the mobs.

But this fight is just beginning. The successful dismantling of extremists will not be easy, or finite. There will always be ideologues. But challenging the alt-right and regressive left has never been more dire; it's a critical component needed to inject a healthy dose of rationalism back into the ether, and with it a viable chance at escaping the gladiator arena unscathed.

Sure, it's a blood sport, but the coliseum is already crowded, and the people are no longer entertained.

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SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 28: Activists stage a rally against President Donald Trump's 90-days ban of entry on 7 Muslim-majority countries at the San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco USA on January 28, 2017. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 28: Activists stage a rally against President Donald Trump's 90-days ban of entry on 7 Muslim-majority countries at the San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco USA on January 28, 2017. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 28: Activists stage a rally against President Donald Trump's 90-days ban of entry on 7 Muslim-majority countries at the San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco USA on January 28, 2017. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 28: Activists stage a rally against President Donald Trump's 90-days ban of entry on 7 Muslim-majority countries at the San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco USA on January 28, 2017. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 28: Activists stage a rally against President Donald Trump's 90-days ban of entry on 7 Muslim-majority countries in the Fourth terminal of JFK airport in New York, U.S.A on January 28, 2017. (Photo by Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 28: Activists stage a rally against President Donald Trump's 90-days ban of entry on 7 Muslim-majority countries in the Fourth terminal of JFK airport in New York, U.S.A on January 28, 2017. (Photo by Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 28: Activists stage a rally against President Donald Trump's 90-days ban of entry on 7 Muslim-majority countries in the Fourth terminal of JFK airport in New York, U.S.A on January 28, 2017. (Photo by Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - JANUARY 28: Immigration activists stage a protest against President Donald Trump's 90-days ban of entry on 7 Muslim-majority countries in JFK airport in New York, U.S.A on January 28, 2017. (Photo by Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Police officers stand guard as protestors rally during a demonstration against the new immigration ban issued by President Donald Trump at John F. Kennedy International Airport on January 28, 2017 in New York City. President Trump signed the controversial executive order that halted refugees and residents from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.. (Photo by Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Hundreds protestor the Muslim Ban at Philadelphia International Airport on January 28th 2017 as a group of Government officials' attempt to negotiate the release of Syrian Refugees is going into the night with a standstill. A judge is expected to make a decision on Sunday Morning as two families are held by Federal Border Patrol after President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order restricting entry for many traveling from selected Middle Eastern countries. (Photo by Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Hundreds protestor the Muslim Ban at Philadelphia International Airport on January 28th 2017 as a group of Government officials' attempt to negotiate the release of Syrian Refugees is going into the night with a standstill. A judge is expected to make a decision on Sunday Morning as two families are held by Federal Border Patrol after President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order restricting entry for many traveling from selected Middle Eastern countries. (Photo by Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Hundreds protest the Muslim Ban of President Donald Trump at Philadelphia International Airport, in Philadelphia, PA, on January 28th, 2017. An attempt by local government representatives and ACLU lawyers to negotiate the release of a family of six Syrian refugees is going into the night with a standstill as a judge is expected to make a decision on Sunday Morning. (Photo by Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Hundreds protest the Muslim Ban of President Donald Trump at Philadelphia International Airport, in Philadelphia, PA, on January 28th, 2017. An attempt by local government representatives and ACLU lawyers to negotiate the release of a family of six Syrian refugees is going into the night with a standstill as a judge is expected to make a decision on Sunday Morning. (Photo by Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

DALLAS, TX - JANUARY 28: Keri Puckett hands out snacks and water to protesters gathered to denounce President Donald Trump's executive order that bans certain immigration, at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on January 28, 2017 in Dallas, Texas. President Trump signed the controversial executive order that halted refugees and residents from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. (Photo by G. Morty Ortega/Getty Images)

DALLAS, TX - JANUARY 28: Protesters gather to denounce President Donald Trump's executive order that bans certain immigration, at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on January 28, 2017 in Dallas, Texas. President Trump signed the controversial executive order that halted refugees and residents from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. (Photo by G. Morty Ortega/Getty Images)

DALLAS, TX - JANUARY 28: Texas Representative Marc Veasey (2nd L) speaks to a reporter at the entrance to international arrivals at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, at the site of a protest to denounce President Donald Trump's executive order that bans certain immigration, at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on January 28, 2017 in Dallas, Texas. President Trump signed the controversial executive order that halted refugees and residents from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. (Photo by G. Morty Ortega/Getty Images)

Demonstrators protest agaist President Trump's executive immigration ban at Chicago O'Hare International Airport on January 28, 2017. US President Donald Trump signed the controversial executive order that halted refugees and residents from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. Trump boasted Saturday that his 'very strict' crackdown on Muslim immigration was working 'very nicely,' amid mounting resistance to the order which has been branded by many as blatantly discriminatory. / AFP / Joshua LOTT (Photo credit should read JOSHUA LOTT/AFP/Getty Images)

Demonstrators protest agaist President Trump's executive immigration ban at Chicago O'Hare International Airport on January 28, 2017. US President Donald Trump signed the controversial executive order that halted refugees and residents from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. Trump boasted Saturday that his 'very strict' crackdown on Muslim immigration was working 'very nicely,' amid mounting resistance to the order which has been branded by many as blatantly discriminatory. / AFP / Joshua LOTT (Photo credit should read JOSHUA LOTT/AFP/Getty Images)

Demonstrators protest agaist President Trump's executive immigration ban at Chicago O'Hare International Airport on January 28, 2017. US President Donald Trump signed the controversial executive order that halted refugees and residents from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. Trump boasted Saturday that his 'very strict' crackdown on Muslim immigration was working 'very nicely,' amid mounting resistance to the order which has been branded by many as blatantly discriminatory. / AFP / Joshua LOTT (Photo credit should read JOSHUA LOTT/AFP/Getty Images)

Demonstrators protest agaist President Trump's executive immigration ban at Chicago O'Hare International Airport on January 28, 2017. US President Donald Trump signed the controversial executive order that halted refugees and residents from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. Trump boasted Saturday that his 'very strict' crackdown on Muslim immigration was working 'very nicely,' amid mounting resistance to the order which has been branded by many as blatantly discriminatory. / AFP / Joshua LOTT (Photo credit should read JOSHUA LOTT/AFP/Getty Images)

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You Don't Have To Choose Between Alt-Right And Regressive Left - Huffington Post Canada

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Letter to the Editor: Banning Immigrants on the Basis of Faith Has Hudson Valley Roots Patch.com The report of one of the Methodist Upper Iowa districts at the 1883 Conference contained the following concern about events in its district: Upon the river borders Catholicism and German rationalism press upon us. Rum and Rome and Rationalism ...

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Letter to the Editor: Banning Immigrants on the Basis of Faith Has Hudson Valley Roots - Patch.com

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One morning in the summer of 2015, I sat in a featureless office in Berkeley as a young computer programmer walked me through how he intended to save the world. The world needed saving, he insisted, not from climate change or from the rise of the far right, or the treacherous instability of global capitalism but from the advent of artificial superintelligence, which would almost certainly wipe humanity from the face of the earth unless certain preventative measures were put in place by a very small number of dedicated specialists such as himself, who alone understood the scale of the danger and the course of action necessary to protect against it.

This intense and deeply serious young programmer was Nate Soares, the executive director of MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the safe which is to say, non-humanity-obliterating development of artificial intelligence. As I listened to him speak, and as I struggled (and failed) to follow the algebraic abstractions he was scrawling on a whiteboard in illustration of his preferred doomsday scenario, I was suddenly hit by the full force of a paradox: The austere and inflexible rationalism of this mans worldview had led him into a grand and methodically reasoned absurdity.

In researching and reporting my book, To Be a Machine, I had spent much of the previous 18 months among the adherents of the transhumanist movement, a broad church comprising life-extension advocates, cryonicists, would-be cyborgs, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, neuroscientists looking to convert the human brain into code, and so forth all of whom were entirely convinced that science and technology would allow us to transcend the human condition. With many of these transhumanists (the vast majority of whom, it bears mentioning, were men), I had experienced some version of this weird cognitive dissonance, this apprehension of a logic-unto-madness. I had come across it so frequently, in fact, that I wound up giving it a name: magical rationalism.

The key thing about magical rationalism is that its approach to a given question always seems, and in most meaningful respects is, perfectly logical. To take our current example, the argument about AI posing an existential risk to our species seems, on one level, quite compelling. The basic gist is this: If and when we develop human-level artificial intelligence, its only a matter of time until this AI, by creating smarter and smarter iterations of itself, gives rise to a machine whose intelligence is as superior to our own as our intelligence currently is to that of other animal species. (Lets leave the cephalopods out of this for the moment, because who knows what the hell is going on with those guys.) Computers being what they are, though, theres a nontrivial risk of this superintelligent AI taking the commands its issued far too literally. You tell it, for instance, to eliminate cancer once and for all, and it takes the shortest and most logical route to that end by wiping out all life-forms in which abnormal cell division might potentially occur. (An example of the cure-worse-than-the-disease scenario so perfect that you would not survive long enough to appreciate its perfection.) As far as I can see, theres nothing about this scenario that is anything but logically sound, and yet here we are, taken to a place that most of us will agree feels deeply and intuitively batshit. (The obvious counterargument to this, of course, is that just because something feels intuitively batshit doesnt mean that its not going to happen. Its worth bearing in mind that the history of science is replete with examples of this principle.)

Magical rationalism arises out of a quasi-religious worldview, in which reason takes the place of the godhead, and whereby all of our human problems are soluble by means of its application. The power of rationalism, manifested in the form of technology the word made silicon has the potential to deliver us from all evils, up to and including death itself. This spiritual dimension is most clearly visible in the techno-millenarianism of the Singularity: the point on the near horizon of our future at which human beings will finally and irrevocably merge with technology, to become uploaded minds, disembodied beings of pure and immutable thought. (Nate Soares, in common with many of those working to eliminate the existential threat posed by AI, viewed this as the best-case scenario for the future, as the kingdom of heaven that would be ours if we could only avoid the annihilation of our species by AI. I myself found it hard to conceive of as anything other than a vision of deepest hell.)

In his book The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and director of engineering at Google, lays out the specifics of this post-human afterlife. The Singularity, he writes, will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever). We will fully understand human thinking and will vastly extend and expand its reach. By the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. This is magical rationalism in its purest form: It arises out of the same human terrors and desires as the major religions the terror of death, the desire to transcend it and proceeds toward the same kinds of visionary mythologizing.

This particular Singularitarian strain of magical rationalism could be glimpsed in Elon Musks widely reported recent comments at a conference in Dubai. Humans, he insisted, would need to merge with machines in order to avoid becoming obsolete. Its mostly about the bandwidth, he explained; computers were capable of processing information at a trillion bits per second, while we humans could input data into our devices at a mere ten bits per second, or thereabouts. From the point of view of narrow rationalism, Musks argument was sort of compelling if computers are going to beat us at our own game, wed better find ways to join them but it only really made sense if you thought of a human being as a kind of computer to begin with. (Were computers; were just rubbish at computing compared to actual computers these days.)

While writing To Be a Machine, I kept finding myself thinking about Flann OBriens surreal comic masterpiece The Third Policeman, in which everyone is unhealthily obsessed with bicycles, and men who spend too much time on their bicycles wind up themselves becoming bicycles via some kind of mysterious process of molecular transfer. Transhumanism a world as overwhelmingly male as OBriens rural Irish hellscape often seemed to me to be guided by a similar kind of overidentification with computers, a strange confusion of the distinct categories of human and machine. Because if computation is the ultimate value, the ultimate end of intelligence, then it makes absolute sense to become better versions of the computers we already are. We must optimize for intelligence, as transhumanists are fond of saying meaning by intelligence, in most cases, the exercise of pure reason. And this is the crux of magical rationalism: It is both an idealization of reason, of beautiful and rigorous abstraction, and a mode of thinking whereby reason is made to serve as the faithful handmaiden of absolute madness. Because reason is, among its other uses, a finely calibrated tool by which the human animal pursues its famously unreasonable ends.

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A trippy new video meme shoots across the web.

The company is moving fast following harassment allegations from a former employee.

No more tracking down a mysterious vending machine.

CEO Travis Kalanick promised to conduct an urgent investigation and fire anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is okay.

Several young women, one rat, and an incredible plot twist.

Raccoons day off.

Today marks day one.

No more waiting half a minute to get to your content.

Zuck finally grapples with the power of his creation.

So many white dudes. So little time.

The blob has suddenly become very popular among meme connoisseurs in Russia.

The YouTube star lashed out at The Wall Street Journal.

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The Magical Rationalism of Elon Musk and the Prophets of AI - New York Magazine