Articles 2.

2.1

What If We’re Wrong? - Heather Heying

“ What if the Earth isn’t the centre of everything? What if the ancestors of humans once looked like monkeys, or were single-celled organisms? What if the continents move?

These questions were once beyond the pale. They were not to be discussed in polite society, were outside the frame of the Overton window. None of that made them untrue, however, or unimportant.

Every idea that we now understand to be true was first realized by a human mind, unknown to anyone else. Before that moment, nobody in our species had had the thought. Our lack of knowledge limited us. And yet before any human had the thought, it was nevertheless true. Some person first conceived the idea, thought on it for a while, honed it, shaped it, and then shared it. Maybe the first person they shared it with thought it was a terrific idea. More likely, they thought the originator was wrong, maybe engaged in crazy talk. For a while, the idea may have even been considered dangerous, worthy of contempt and scorn. And for a long time thereafter, that idea—one that, in retrospect, we understand to be fundamental—was at the very least considered outside the range of acceptable and accepted thought. It was heterodox.“

2.2

The Darkness Visible in China - Andrew Sullivan

“The question at this point, therefore, is how we can or should react. The first priority, it seems to me, is not to look away. This is happening. It is evil.

The second priority is prudence. China, after all, is not a small and struggling country like Burma, where a similar genocidal campaign against the Muslim Rohingya has taken place. It isn’t in the heart of Europe, as Bosnia was, well within Western influence. It is the second greatest power on earth, an ancient and proud civilization, an economic behemoth, and a fast-rising military giant on the other side of the globe.

Unlike Germany in the 1930s, it has not been suffering under crushing Western reparations; in fact, its new economic power has been hugely enabled by the US-led trading systems. Equally, it is not the Soviet Union. China’s economic model of state-directed capitalism is far superior to Soviet backwardness, and it does not have an internationalist agenda of fomenting revolution across the globe. Fareed Zakaria notes that, in fact, 

[China] has not gone to war since 1979. It has not used lethal military force abroad since 1988. Nor has it funded or supported proxies or armed insurgents anywhere in the world since the early 1980s. Beijing is now the second-largest funder of the United Nations and the UN peacekeeping program. It has deployed 2,500 peacekeepers, more than all the other permanent members of the Security Council combined. Between 2000 and 2018, it supported 182 of 190 Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions on nations deemed to have violated international rules or norms.“

2.3

Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture? - Bertrand Cooper

“John McWhorter once shared that he was, early in his career, afraid to publicly debate Michael Eric Dyson because Dyson could claim ghetto origins and speaks like a pastor (he is a pastor) while McWhorter was born middle-class and raised without a “blaccent.” McWhorter knows himself to be Black, but he feared audiences would perceive him as too far from real Black to be legitimate if juxtaposed against Dyson. Ijeoma Oluo, being half Nigerian and raised by a white single mother in a white neighborhood, expressed similar feelings:

“…we felt that difference between the expectations of the type of Black we were supposed to be, and the type of Black we were—which was Black nerds raised by a white woman in a poor white neighborhood. And when middle school came around and suddenly there were a few dozen Black kids—real Black kids—we compared outfits and attitudes and knew that we, my brother and I, just didn’t measure up. I stayed invisible to both Black and white kids while my brother was teased mercilessly for ‘acting white’ with his love of jazz music.“

2.4

Masochistic Nationalism by Göran Adamson. Review. - Terri Murray

“Adamson concludes that both positive nationalists and masochistic nationalists fuel support for right-wing parties, even though the latter’s grandiloquent labels create the opposite impression. Certain influential global elites have pushed the notion that even moderately social conservative values at home, such as safety, family and social cohesion, are extreme right-wing values—but the general public is unconvinced. That line has been swallowed only by self-described left-wing antiracists (masochistic nationalists), but the sense of superiority that they convey and their categorical rejection of all western values have only boosted public support for right-wing parties and radicalised the European electorate. “

“The western empires of the early twentieth century forced legislation on overseas cultures. So imperialism must be categorically bad, right? Not according to positive or masochistic nationalists: to them, it depends on who’s doing the intruding. The idea that colonialism is bad is only a weapon that each group uses selectively to promote its own ideological self-interest. For example, masochistic nationalists do not tend to object to the spread of Islam’s political doctrines and sharia laws throughout the west: they only mind foreign intrusion into sovereign nations when westerners do it.

“Only those who already live where there is clean water, personal safety, self-determination, education and a reasonably accountable legal and political infrastructure can afford to downplay the importance of those benefits. And when they do that, it is as if they were having a food fight with caviar in front of a starving crowd. Given a choice, most women in traditional patriarchal cultures would much prefer to have western women’s resources, time, experience, money and solidarity instead of having westerners pay them the empty compliment of pretending that no culture is better off than any other.”

2.5

Why Slowing Down is the Key to Creativity - Alex Tzelnic

“ A coherent marketplace is a true market economy coupled with a diverse, open society online. People will be paid for their data and will pay for services that require data from others. Individuals’ attention will be guided by their self-defined interests rather than by manipulative plOften, the problem is not that we lack the time to, say, create a sculpture for pleasure, but that our culture persuades us that creating such a sculpture would be frivolous. Caught up in this culture, we may think, How can I possibly take time to engage in spiritual restoration when my inbox is full of unread messages?

Sociologist Liah Greenfeld points out that this mindset can be an obstacle to spiritual restoration:

We are busy, not because our physical and economic survival requires constant exertion on our part, leaving us little opportunity for spiritual restoration—relaxing, getting rid of the sense of busyness—but because we are incapable of perceiving and taking advantage of the opportunities for repose. We are restless. “

2.6

The New Puritans - Anne Applebaum

“Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument rWe read that story with a certain self-satisfaction: Such an old-fashioned tale! Even Hawthorne sneered at the Puritans, with their “sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned hats,” their strict conformism, their narrow minds and their hypocrisy. And today we are not just hip and modern; we live in a land governed by the rule of law; we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.

Except, of course, they aren’t. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.

…

Not that everyone really wants an apology. One former journalist told me that his ex-colleagues “don’t want to endorse the process of mistake/apology/understanding/forgiveness—they don’t want to forgive.” Instead, he said, they want “to punish and purify.” But the knowledge that whatever you say will never be enough is debilitating. “If you make an apology and you know in advance that your apology will not be accepted—that it is going to be considered a move in a psychological or cultural or political game—then the integrity of your introspection is being mocked and you feel permanently marooned in a world of unforgivingness,” one person told me. “And that is a truly unethical world.” Elder’s music publishers asked him to make a groveling apology—they even went so far as to write it for him—but he refused.

…

Worse, if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre. Democratic principles like the rule of law, the right to self-defense, the right to a just trial—even the right to be forgiven—will wither. There will be nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Hawthornes of the future to expose us. “