Marveling at Human Potential, Part 1

Posted on August 9, 2015 by ETW

It is easy today to find examples of things that are simply marvels of human invention and brilliance. The everyday cellphone today is a pretty amazing instrument, considering all that one can do. This past week, I had a chance to see an exhibit of replicas of the items that were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

A replica of the death mask of Tutankhamun.

What I find remarkable are the incredible effort, skill, and resources that were put into respecting Tutankhamun. At so early a period in history, people gathered and used a simply massive quantity of gold, masterfully designed and adorned, to pay homage to a ruler who died quite young, Tutankhamun. Tut’s tomb featured countless treasures (ok, there were a little over 700), besides the multiple nested shrines, each of which protected yet another shrine of gold-leaf covered wood. Ultimately, inside the larger gold-covered shrines there was an incredible whole piece of carved alabaster, which contained several solid gold nested sarcophagi.

When I try to imagine the skill of the craftsmen of Tut’s day, I marvel already at what people were able to do so many thousands of years ago. There are periods in human history when people were capable of simply amazing feats. The entombment of Tutankhamun is a great example of what people were capable of doing back when tools were at their most limited in recorded history.

On the one hand, the objects and artworks surrounding Tut are enormously enjoyable to look at and think about, given their beauty and the craftsmanship that had to go into them. For instance, it was amazing to see in the furniture included in Tut’s tomb some dovetail joints, that are still woodworking methods that we use today.

On the other hand, when you think about historical artworks, it is important to remember how many people died in their creation. Or, how people were taxed enormously without any kind of representative government, so that the people in power could fund wars, monuments, and solid-gold sarcophagi. It is hard to imagine such times — even if England does still have a queen.

Thousands of years ago, people were capable of creating outstandingly beautiful golden artworks, paying respect to a deceased ruler. It is hard not to marvel at what human beings were capable of accomplishing, even so long ago and with such modest, early tools.

Guest View: Don’t gut the Dewey Center

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

Eric Thomas Weber, first published in The Southern Illinoisan, April 26, 2015, 12A.

I am an alumnus of SIUC’s Ph.D. program in philosophy. I am writing to urge you to continue full support for the Center for Dewey Studies. I understand that the center has been asked to prepare a budgetary plan for a reduction of its support by 50 percent. Were that reduction to be applied, it would incapacitate the center. That would be a truly terrible mistake.

The Center for Dewey Studies is one of the jewels of SIUC. As I said in a recent interview with the Daily Egyptian, it is simply the best resource in the world of its kind. John Dewey’s work remains deeply important. Presently, Penguin Books is in contract negotiations with me to release a collection of Dewey’s public writings, in part because of help I received from the center, its director, and its relationship with the SIU Press. Dewey was America’s greatest public philosopher, and next year marks the 100th anniversary of his master work, Democracy and Education. There is also a burgeoning movement in public philosophy for which Dewey is the exemplar to whom people will be looking with increasing interest. This is not the time to cut support for the center, but to increase it.

The Center for Dewey Studies is one of the premier programs at SIUC. It’s the reason I came to SIU for graduate school when other places were making me competing offers. SIUC is special for its unique strengths in American philosophy, and it is known around the world for that reputation. The central reasons for that reputation are the work of the Center for Dewey Studies and the faculty’s remarkable strengths in that area, bolstered by the center. Compared with any other element of a university campus, the Center for Dewey Studies must be by an incredible margin the very cheapest initiative of profound excellence at the university. It would be immensely unwise to cripple the center with drastic cuts, when they are down to the bare budgetary essentials to keep afloat.

Please preserve this cherished resource at SIUC, which fundamentally depends on the Dewey Center staff. Materials do not preserve, catalog, edit, or collect themselves. The delicate and important work of the Center for Dewey Studies is priceless, even though the requested price tag is so small. The proposed savings would be minuscule already for a major research university. It cannot make sense to debilitate a remarkable center of excellence for a $20,000 savings at an institution whose operating budget exceeds $430 million. As you consider what is best for the university, the only sensible steps forward must include serious support for its truly excellent programs, like the Center for Dewey Studies.

“Converging on Culture”

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

Rorty, Rawls, and Dewey on Culture’s Role in Justice

This piece, published in 2014, represents an important early step in a book project in progress, titled A Culture of Justice.

Abstract

In this essay, I review the writings of three philosophers whose work con-verges on the insight that we must attend to and reconstruct culture for the sake of justice. John Rawls, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty help show some of the ways in which culture can enable or undermine the pursuit of justice. They also oﬀer resources for identifying tools for addressing the cultural impediments to justice. I reveal insights and challenges in Rawls’s philosophy as well as tools and solutions for building on and addressing them in Dewey’sand Rorty’s philosophy.

Read the paper on Academia.edu

Citation

Weber, Eric Thomas. “Converging on Culture: Rorty, Rawls, and Dewey on Culture’s Role in Justice.” Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 22, Issue 2 (2014): 231-261.

Racism Defies the “Greatest Commandment”

Posted on July 30, 2015 by ETW

Eric Thomas Weber, first published on The Second Breakdown, July 30, 2015.

In July 2015, University of Mississippi graduate, Adebanke Alabi invited me to comment on race and the Church for a series on her blog. The following is my piece, originally published on her page and reposted here with permission.

Preface: I am grateful to Adebanke (Buki) Alabi for calling me to comment on race and Christianity for the readers of her blog, The Second Breakdown: My Thoughts on Jesus and His Church.

Mississippi is still home to obstinate racism, even while in 2014 Gallup found it to be the most religious state in the United States. The vast majority of the 44 failing school districts’ enrollments in the state are majority- to almost totally made up of African American students. Some districts have been accused of not having desegregated. We have seen symbolic racism at the University of Mississippi, as well as troubling direct confrontations. Some young people planned and executed a racially motivated murder a few years ago in Jackson, MS.

Despite all of these disturbing cases of racism in Mississippi, many citizens and public officials continue to resist change even to symbols of racism. I have argued that falsely romanticizing heritage does us harm and that symbols, like the Confederate Battle Flag featured in the canton of MS’s state flag, contribute to the perpetuation of racism and injustice. What has gotten very little attention is the tragic inconsistency between the religious beliefs people say that they hold dear and the contradictory behaviors that we see here in Mississippi.

In a passage from the Republic, Plato’s Socrates tells us that leaders must convince their people that we are all born of the earth, children of the same parent – a mother, according to the story. When threats to security arise, if people do not care sufficiently about their neighbors, they will fail to act in others’ defense. Kinship motivates us to take care of our children and our brothers and sisters. People thinking of each other as kin is one of the most important needs for a society’s safety and unity, he argues. He thought the story was a lie, but a necessary one. Christians today do not think it is a lie, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory confirms humanity’s common kinship.

Plato lived about 400 years before Christ. When we look to the Christian religion, we see a related social aim to the kinship that Socrates called for. A basic Christian belief is that human beings are all children of the same parent – in this case, a Father. One might think that the belief that we are all brothers and sisters would motivate Christians to treat others accordingly.

People are very good at finding ways around what they ought to do, however. Some people divide humanity into categories of those who are fallen and those who are elect or saved. If there are children of God in one community, what do we call people from another community or belief system? Galatians 3:26 explains that people are all children of God in their shared faith in Christ. If that is true, does that mean that nonbelievers or those who profess different faiths are not children of God? That is not logically necessary: “All things red have color” doesn’t imply that other things don’t also have color.

Many Christians treat others in ways that are not neighborly, even in deeply religious places. The tragedy of this fact is that people in Mississippi share many religious beliefs – that we are all children of the same Father. In their faith in Christ, Scripture says, they should all see each other as children of God.

For many, the core of the Christian religion can be distilled, as Jesus is said to have done in Matthew 22:35-40, Mark 12:28-31, and Luke 10:25-28, into the Greatest Commandment, which has two parts. In addition to loving God, the first element, which people proclaim in word so commonly, Jesus calls for loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. This second element is far less often extolled in word, and evidence in deeds illustrates blatant defiance of the commandment.

It is time to call people out on this gross contradiction. How in a place like Mississippi people can resist symbolic change, let alone progress in deeds, even with respect to a symbol of the state’s defense of slavery, while claiming to be Christians, is deeply distressing. Some public figures recognize this and have courageously called for progress. It is time others who profess their faith own up to what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

Dr. Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of four books, including Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South (forthcoming in September 2015). He is representing only his own point of view. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter @erictweber.

Burning Man as a Commons

Posted on October 7, 2014 by David Bollier

The Burning Man festival held every year on the desolate salt flats of Nevada is usually associated with the culturally avant tech crowd of the Bay Area – an image that is accurate as far as it goes. But the event is really much richer in implication than that. Burning Man is a rare space in modern industrial culture that actually invites people to give expression to some of their deepest artistic impulses and cultural fantasies while requiring them to show significant self-responsibility, cooperation and social concern. It is an immersive enactment of a different spirit of living that actually carries over into "real life" after the event itself.

Burning Man is a one-week commons of 60,000-plus people that has occurred every year since 1986. The event is, as Peter Hirshberg puts it, “a pop-up city of self-governing individualists.” That’s the title of his chapter in a new book, From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Identity and Autonomy in a Digital Society, which I co-edited with John Henry Clippinger of ID3. (The chapter -- copied below -- is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike license 3.0 license. The book is available in print and ebook editions, and also at the ID3 website.)

Hirshberg is a former Apple executive and tech entrepreneur who is now chairman of Re:imagine Group and cofounder of the Gray Area Center for Arts and Technology in San Francisco. He’s also been a Burner for years.

When Hirshberg told me more about Burning Man (which I’ve never attended), I was astonished when I first read the “Ten Principles of Burning Man,” which cofounder Larry Harvey wrote in 2004 to convey the cultural ethos of the encampment. The ten principles have enormous moral and social appeal and serve as a functional blueprint for a better way of living. The principles (discussed at greater length below) call on all Burners to honor radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation and immediacy.

As you will see by reading Hirshberg’s chapter, the Burning Man principles are not idle abstractions; they are a lived reality for one week in the desert under extremely harsh natural conditions (heat, blowing sand, no water, only the stuff that you’ve brought along). The ten principles of Burning Man are a wonderfully vivid, passionate elaboration of some of the core design elements that sober-minded social scientists often ascribe to the commons.

Burning Man helps us remember that design principles of commons need not be MEGO experiences (“My Eyes Glaze Over”). They are the essence of what it means to be fully human.

Burning Man: The Pop-Up City of Self-Governing Individualists

By Peter Hirshberg

When friends first started telling me about Burning Man in the 1990s it made me nervous. This place in a harsh desert, where they wore strange clothes or perhaps none at all. Why? Whole swaths of my San Francisco community spent much of the year building massive works of art or collaborating on elaborate camps where they had to provide for every necessity. They were going to a place with no water, no electricity, no shade and no shelter. And they were completely passionate about going to this place to create a city out of nothing. To create a world they imagined – out of nothing. A world with rules, mores, traditions and principles, which they more or less made up, and then lived.

Poetry of the Commons

Posted on March 26, 2014 by David Bollier

I’ve always thought that the commons, in its attempt to achieve a holistic balance of relationships, is profoundly aesthetic and ethical. It aspires to a certain dynamic but disciplined shapeliness. How wonderful, then, to encounter Harris Webster’s Japanese-style poetry about the commons, inspired by his reading of The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State!

A few years ago, Webster, a retiree living in Montpelier, Vermont, heard a presentation on the commons by University of Vermont professor Gary Flomenhoft. Then he read a number of pieces on the commons in Kosmos journal and discovered The Wealth of the Commons.

Webster has a hobby of writing tanka poems, a genre of classical Japanese poetry akin to haiku. He had developed a taste for Japanese poetry in the course of several exchange visits with the prefecture of Tottori, Japan, as the representative of the Japan-American Society of Vermont. Webster decided that he wanted to capture the essence of some essays in The Wealth of Commons in the succinct, austere style of tanka. (Links to the original essays are embedded in the authors' names and essay titles.)

I hope you enjoy this wonderful poetic experiment as much as I do!

Introduction

Question: Should earth’s people share

our earth’s seven seas?

Answer: When some Somalians

lost their share of fishing grounds,

they became pirates.

Good church members are stewards

of the church commons,

its resources and culture.

Earth’s people should be stewards

of the earth’s Commons.

Unknown Elinor Ostrom

won a Nobel Prize

for research on the Commons

throughout our wide world.

May it be well known world wide!

The Commons looks at the ‘whole.’

resources, people, and norms,

(oceans, fishermen, and rules,)

nested together.

Do markets and government?

Do people value

good soil and fresh air?

Of course , but they are not priced,

advertised or for sale.

Is that why they’re uncommon?

How Will We Reclaim and Shape the Ambient Commons?

Posted on July 16, 2013 by David Bollier

When I pump gas in my car these days, there is a video screen on the pump that abruptly turns on and starts shouting an annoying advertisement in my face. It is so loud and obnoxious that it takes great restraint to not smash the damn screen with my car keys. (For the record, the gas station is a Cumberland Farms convenience store.)

Thanks to architecture professor Malcolm McCullough of the University of Michigan, I now have a vocabulary for talking about such vandalism against our shared mental environment. It is a desecration of the ambient commons. The ambient commons consists of all of those things in our built environment, especially in cities, that we take for granted as part of the landscape: architectural design, urban spaces, designs that guide and inform our travels, amenities for social conviviality. Professor McCullough explores these themes in his fascinating new book, Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information (MIT Press).

Not many peole have rigorously thought about how new information technologies are changing the ambient commons of cities. Nowadays media feeds are everywhere -- on building facades, billboards, hotel lobbies, restaurants, elevators and even gas pumps. About three in five of us carry around smartphones, which have radically changed how we navigate the city. GPS and Google Maps are a new form of annotated “wayfinding” that makes signage and tourist guidebooks less necessary. The Internet of Things – sensor-readable RFID tags on objects – make the cityscape more “digitally legible” in ways that previously required architectural design.

It has reached such a state that many retailers now use sensors on our smartphones to track our movements, behavior and moods during the course of browsing stores. Retailers want to assemble a database of in-store customer behavior (just as they collect data during our website visits) so that they can adjust product displays, signage and marketing in ways that maximize sales. This was described by a recent New York Times article and accompanying video, “Attention, Shoppers: Store is Tracking Your Cell."

The explosive growth in the “number, formats and contexts of situated images” in the city means that we now experience a cityscape in different ways. We identify our locations, find information, connect with each other and experience life in different ways. The embedded design elements of the ambient commons affect how we think, behave and orient ourselves to the world.

“We move around with and among displays,” writes McCullough notes. “Global rectangles have become part of the [urban] scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Sensors, processes and memory are found not only in chic smartphones but also into everyday objects.”

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