Monthly Archives: May 2017

Cairo The visit of Pope Francis I to the Grand Azhar in Egypt over the weekend came at a time of raging extremism. The meeting between the pontiff and Sheikh al-Azhar Dr. Ahmed al-Tayyeb can be seen as a humanitarian confrontation against extremism.

The image of the two religious leaders meeting reminded observers of the times of ideologically motivated wars that were launched in the Middle Ages between the East and West and between Muslims and Christians.

The Popes visit to Egypt is reminiscent of that of Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Order of Friars Minor, who visited the country in 1219. He came to the land to preach peace and reject the Crusades that had pitted Christian against Muslim. He met with Sultan al-Kamil al-Ayyoubi in what was seen as one of the earliest meetings between the two religions.

Will Pope Franciss modern day visit hold similar significance to the one 800 years ago?

We should recall French novelist Andre Marlaux, who once said: The 21st century will be religious or it will not be at all. There are some facts that we have to address to understand the major role clerics play in modern times.

There has been a marked difference in paths taken by religion in the East and West in the post-WWII era. In the West, religion took the back foot to modern technology, economy, capitalism and science. In the East, and for various reasons, a backwards way of thinking took over. This way of thought was bolstered by globalization and the fear of meeting the other.

Amid the emergence of the far right and the far left, the real purpose of religion appears to have been lost. It has instead been replaced with the banners of war and theories of confrontation.

Religion in its essence however allows man to grant his life meaning and a purpose from the time he is born to the time he dies. This concept of religion has started to gain ground. Will its true meaning be able to stand firmly against dark fundamentalism?

German thinker Heinz-Joachim Fischer said that religion can create a conviction born out of dialectic debates. Convictions, whether they are theoretical or practical, can be born of a persons internal religious leanings. These convictions can give way to the will to live. This will was honed during the age of enlightenment and later during the scientific advances of the past two-and-a-half centuries.

Religions therefore begin to reemerge as strengths and convictions that birth and nurture personalities away from fundamentalism.

Pope Francis viewed his recent trip to Egypt as that of friendship and appreciation to the people of Egypt and the region. Friendship is the way to pure hearts that seek coexistence away from isolation and eliminating the other that extremists feed on, he added ahead of his visit.

We can say that the purpose of the pontiffs visit differs from that of his predecessor 800 years ago. This should perhaps be a lesson to all of us Muslims in the East because the self-criticism that the Catholic Church had carried out in the past led it to produce advanced theses and visions that have been marked by all-encompassing humanitarianism.

The Islamic world is now pressed to follow in the footsteps of the enlightened Christians of the past.

The enlightenment of the Christians was no doubt met by some extremist voices of dissent from within, but the voices of modernity and moderation were able to overcome them in order to reach the real purpose of dialogue with the self and with the other.

Pope Francis visit came to defy the aims of those who bombed the churches in Tanta and Alexandria weeks earlier. He sought to defy the forces of hatred and the cancellation of the trip would have been a victory for the forces of evil.

The visit should serve as an opportunity to clear the dust off ties between East and West, especially between Islam and Christianity, and allow them to confront fundamentalism that is threatening to fatally cripple these ties and any prospect of reconciliation in the future.

The meetings between the worlds religious leaders are not required to produce jurisprudential and theological understandings, but they should agree that the future of the world hinges on different cultures and religious dialogue between them.

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From the Vatican to al-Azhar: Dialogue and Rationalism in Face of Terror and Extremism - Asharq Al-awsat English

1. It may surprise many, but all individual knowledge is remarkably shallow. So says a view-of-mind-altering book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, bySteven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.

2. Science (and life) keep hammering nails into the coffin of the rational individual"(Yuval Hararis review), but rationalism and individualism still haunt and systematically mislead.

3. Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. This division of cognitive labor is fundamental to the way cognition evolved and the way it works today.

4. You know how to use GPS because masses of others know things you dont (>key human trick is to not be limited by our own brains, or our own tool-making, tech is the materialized knowhow of others).

5. Thought extends beyond the skull"; your mind uses its brains + body + tools (physical and cognitive) + other minds + environment.

6. Hence the mind is not in the brain. Rather, the brain is in the mind (the extended mind).

7. Were unaware of most information we process. Deliberation is only a tiny part of cognition. Per Kahneman, most cognition is fast, intuitive, subconscious System 1, not slow, deliberative System 2.

8. Many experts are exorcising rationalist errors (>theory-induced blindness) to relearn the everywhere-evident fact that people often arent rational. But theres less progress on individualisms errors.

9. To plumb cognitive dependences depths, consider cultures where counting, counterintuitively, isnt intuitive. Caleb Everetts Numbers and the Making of Us covers cultures that label only one, two, three, and many.

10. Language is innate but numbers need painstaking training. That such basic-seeming cognitive tools are learned suggests useful extensions to Systems 1 and 2.

11. Measurable cognitive biases might not be in the machinery of cognition (e.g., need learned numeric skills). System 0 could label invariant traits vs System 1 culture-dependent ones (>arrow illusion). Roughly, System 0 is hardware and System 1 is low-level software (see individualism and human nature's software).

12. And since thought depends on extra-cranial resources, theres a System 3 that encompasses our collective physical and cognitive tools (>social cartesian capabilities embedded in language).

13. "You can't do much thinking with your bare brain." We evolved to acquire our cultures thinking tools with whatever biases they harbor (our first nature needs secondnatures, Words Are Thinking Tools).

14. You cant do much thinking without others. As Siri Hustvedt says Everyone's head is filled with other people (from before birth). And all ideas are received ideas (or they build on innumerable other-built thoughts).

15. No important part of human nature exists that isnt social (we're inalienably self-deficient).

16. Harari warns that faith in rational individuals (mythical creatures) weakens democracy and capitalism (>errors of the Enlightenment).

17. Hararis review is revealingly headlined: People Have Limited Knowledge. Whats the Remedy? Nobody Knows. There can be no remedy. Your knowledge cant be unlimited (> unbounded economics folly). And you cant not need others (to think or live).

18. Only forms of (paradoxical-seeming) collective individualism can work (see relational rationality). Rationally, youre only as fit as the collective(s) you need.

IllustrationbyJulia Suits,The New Yorkercartoonist & author ofThe Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions

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Why You Don't (and Can't) Think Alone - Big Think

Brexit is not the cause of Britain's renewed interest in its weird folk heritage, in the joys of cults and pagan sex. But the sudden veering into that world's darker side, where violence and groupthink and human sacrifice rule, seems guided by its anguish and sickly glee. Here's Michael Newton on the new flowering of folk horror.

Folk horror, which is the subject of a new season at the Barbican, presents the dark dreams Britain has of itself. The films pick up on folks association with the tribal and the rooted. And our tribe turns out to be a savage one: the countryside harbours forgotten cruelties, with the old ways untouched by modernity and marked by half-remembered rituals. ...

They may lurch into the ludicrous, but with surprising earnestness these films nonetheless play out a three-way philosophical debate: between enlightened rationalism, orthodox Christianity and renewed paganism. Sex is at the heart of this debate: just as these films both adore and recoil from natural beauty, so human loveliness entrances and repels them.

The anxiety comes from an unsettled telepathic quality of exurban British life, where eccentricity is adored so long as privacy is abdicated, and the heightened empathy of the village lurches to the crowd's destruction of individuals. Newton notes that a key theme of British folk horror is that the supernatural is never so vulgar as to show itself: the darkness is in people. And by the time you get to see it, you are thrillingly both participant and victim: "The pagan rite we are witnessing is the film itself."

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British folk horror flowering again / Boing Boing - Boing Boing