By Hector E. Garcia
All humans see only a small part of reality, which brings about a sense of insecurity (this is one of the assumptions of CC). Our tendency is to subconsciously allay anxiety by acting as if what our group sees in our time is all of the true reality; consequently, all other groups must be totally or partially wrong. Since all groups are doing the same, conflict easily develops and grows. We then try to validate our position, and often our aggression, by showing current and past evidence for that position. This is not difficult for any group to do since the present and the past hold multiple facts and human errors to pick from and take offense. (The time I have spent as a consultant has taught me that you can usually select from an abundance of facts to validate most positions you want to sell). Parties in conflict will continue to assign fault to each other until the more powerful one puts an end to the never-ending argument by exercising its power; as a victor, it will acquire the credibility to gain support for its position.
Read MoreBy Wang Yi
The Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era laid out in the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a major theoretical innovation by our Party, and the latest achievement and a significant advancement of adapting Marxism to the Chinese context. It provides a strong theoretical framework and guideline for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.
Read More“After three decades of dominance, liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds,” Matthew Rose writes in his powerful new book, “A World After Liberalism.”
Rose does not mean liberalism in the way we typically use the word. This is not about supporting universal health care or disagreeing with Justice Samuel Alito. Rose means liberalism as in the shared assumptions of the West: a belief in human dignity, universal rights, individual flourishing and the consent of the governed.
That liberalism has been battered by financial crises, the climate crisis, checkered pandemic responses, right-wing populists and a rising China. It seems exhausted, ground down, defined by the contradictions and broken promises that follow victory rather than the creativity and aspiration that attend struggle.
At least, it did.
Read MoreMason: The word “identity” keeps coming up, and this is a really crucial part of it. And remember that we have research about intergroup conflict, right? Don’t look at this as, like, a logical disagreement situation. We’re not disagreeing on what kind of tax structure we should have. We’re not just disagreeing about the role of the federal government in American society. What we’re disagreeing about is increasingly the basic status differences between groups of people that have existed in America for a very long time. One of the things that Nathan Kalmoe and I found in our forthcoming book is that if you look at Democrats and Republicans who really, really hate each other and call each other evil and say the other party is a threat to the United States, the best predictor of that is how they think about the traditional social hierarchy.
Read MoreTranscript: Ezra Klein Interviews Timothy Snyder
…So by the politics of inevitability, I mean the notion that sometimes goes under the heading of progress. I mean the idea that some kind of outside force is going to guarantee that the things that we desire and wish for are actually going to come about. And if that seems abstract, then what I mean in particular with reference to the United States after the end of communism in 1989 is the notion that there are no alternatives left in the world.
To quote Margaret Thatcher or to quote Frances Fukuyama, history is over. And it’s inevitable that a larger force, namely capitalism, is going to bring about the thing that we desire, namely, democracy and freedom. And that idea was in the air. That idea shaped everything else. And I think that idea has a lot to do with the crisis of democracy and freedom that we’re in right now.
Transcript: March 4, 2022
Fareed Zakaria Has a Better Way to Handle Russia — and China
The case for thinking strategically, not ideologically, about great power conflict.
I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
It is eerie knowing that you have lived through the end of an era and that you’re now witnessing the birth of another. For most of my life, foreign policy has not been dominated by great power conflict. And that is a defining characteristic of that period. There have been crises. There have been wars. There have been horrors. But America was too strong and other countries too weak to really worry about world wars or even cold wars, to see the world as this great power chessboard.
That’s changed….
Read MoreBeing in the flow with a partner is a great experience, but society undermines partnership by inflaming its dominate-or-submit culture. The Democratic and Republican parties reinforce these divisive tendencies. Undoing deeply embedded social conditioning and nurturing compassionate cooperation throughout society will require sustained effort and mutual support.
With true partners, you care for the other as much as you care for yourself. The more they benefit, the more you benefit. You listen, learn, understand, and respect each other. You make decisions together, as equals, perhaps switching roles and delegating responsibilities. You’re a team. No one dominates or considers themselves to be a superior human being.
Tight-knit teams flourish at work and school, in sports, with music and the arts, and in community organizations. Members cooperate to achieve collective goals. Whole nations unite to solve problems or deal with catastrophes. Study group members teach one another. Sports team members inspire each other. Highly skilled musicians improvise, taking the group to new territory. Every member is important. Team spirit elevates performance. Throughout society, while accepting justified social control, strong individuals and strong communities cultivate empowerment.
Unfortunately, however, Americans (as is the case with humans in general) have an arrogance problem.
Read MoreInterview with Robert Wright
So I wanted to have a foreign policy conversation that I’m not hearing with someone who stands outside of and critiques the Washington consensus on these issues. Robert Wright is a journalist and an author. He’s the founder of one of the great enduring institutions of the blogosphere, bloggingheads.tv. He writes on science, and religion, and human cooperation, and foreign policy — particularly foreign policy — in his excellent newsletter Nonzero. I’m a subscriber to that. I urge you to be one too.
In Nonzero, he really routinely examines the assumptions that drive America’s foreign policy conversation, the interest groups that drive it, the kind of collective social dynamics of what he and others call the blob, which is the Washington foreign policy establishment. And that’s what I wanted to talk to him about — the ideas about American power that get taken for granted, the history of failure and blowback that we often ignore, and the lessons we need to learn.
Our reckoning with not just the harm we have done, but I want to say this clearly — with the good we could achieve, the good we could do is long overdue.
Read MoreHow the politics of the 9/11 era produced Donald Trump.
I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” My guest today is somebody I’ve known almost as long as I’ve been in journalism. Spencer Ackerman is a leading national security reporter. He’s the author of the newsletter “Forever Wars,” he’s a contributing editor at The Daily Beast, and he’s a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that reported on Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations. But now he’s out with a new book, his first book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump.”
The core premise of “Reign [of] Terror” is that the policies and the politics of the 9/11 era, they didn’t only wreak havoc on the Middle East, but they transformed America itself. And they transformed us so profoundly that we’ve stopped seeing the way they’ve reshaped our country and culture. Now it’s just the water we swim in. In Spencer’s telling, the core of the war on terror itself was this narrative, a narrative of fear.
By Peniel E. Joseph
…“America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s,” by Elizabeth Hinton, a Yale University professor of law, history and African-American studies, and one of the country’s leading scholars of mass incarceration, offers a groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly heart-rending account of the origins of our national crisis of police violence against Black America….
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
In “Reconciliation,” the last chapter of Disciplines of the Spirit, the esteemed theologian, Howard Thurman, one of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s main mentors, presents a case for nonviolence as a way of life, not merely a tactic.
In the opening to the chapter, Thurman acknowledges that personal growth needs to develop within a structure and humans need to be cared for and understood “in general” as well as by others “in particular.” And he discusses “the need to be needed beyond the limits of her family.” In this way, with troubled souls, “the wildness (can be) gentled out of a personality at war with itself.”
Read MoreJohn Dewey and Citizen Politics
How Democracy Can Survive Artificial Intelligence and the Credo of Efficiency
Harry C. Boyte, 2017 John Dewey Society Lecture
San Antonio, April 27 2017
“Without some kind of oversight, the golem, not God, might emerge from machines…it is naïve to believe that government is competent, let alone in a position to control the development and deployment of robots, self-generating algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Business is self-interested and resists regulation. We, the people, are on our own here…”
Sue Halpern, “How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over”
“In the past the man has been first. In the future the System must be first.”
Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management
“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
From “Invictus,” Nelson Mandela’s favorite poem
Citizen politics, John Dewey, and the crisis in “modernity”
Can we become masters of our fate in an age of smart machines governed by an efficiency creed, with its conviction that “the system is the solution”? In this 2017 Dewey lecture I answer affirmatively the question raised by nine scientists in a Scientific American essay, “Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?” I argue that we need a different kind of politics, citizen-centered, educative, and empowering, as well as places to learn such politics and put it into practice. Drawing on Dewey, I use schools embedded in communities as a case study for developing civic power….
Read More
Systmic/Essay
Reflections on Elizabeth Anderson
By Wade Lee Hudson
NOTE: Following is the text used in my January 12, 2020 “Democratic Equality and Democratic Dialog” PowerPoint presentation at the Humanists and Non-Theists committee of the San Francisco Unitarian church.
The article that had the biggest impact on me last year was “The Philosopher Redefining Equality” in The New Yorker. The subtitle reads: “Elizabeth Anderson thinks we’ve misunderstood the basis of a free and fair society.” That profile of Anderson begins: [play audio]
She ended up studying political and moral philosophy at Harvard under John Rawls and teaching at the University of Michigan, where she stayed, despite being heavily recruited by other universities.
In 1999 the esteemed journal Ethics published her path-breaking, widely reprinted article "What is the Point of Equality?" She’s also written three books, including Value in Ethics and Economics, which argues that some goods like love and respect should not be sold on the market or otherwise treated as commodities, and The Imperative of Integration, which examines how racial integration can lead to a more robust democracy. Her many podcast interviews include a great one with Vox.com founder Ezra Klein.
Last year Anderson received the no-strings-attached $625,000 MacArthur “Genius” award. Included in their announcement was this [play video].
Read More
Colleagues have called Elizabeth S. Anderson’s 50-page 1999 tour de force “What is the Point of Equality?” “path breaking” and The New Yorker described her as “The Philosopher Redefining Equality.”
Anderson wants to end oppression by creating communities “in which people stand in relations of equality” to one another. Her thinking is rooted in numerous grassroots egalitarian movements, such as the civil rights, womens’, and disability rights movements.
Unfortunately, however, most grassroots political movements today don’t clearly reflect those social values.
Read More
Politics/Books
A review
Become America: Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy
Eric Liu
Sasquatch Books, 2019, 302 pages
Citizen University Sermons
By Wade Lee Hudson
Eric Liu’s latest book, Become America: Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy, is eloquent and inspiring. His exhortations to be engaged in civic activism, beyond voting, are compelling. In the end, however, he comes up short. He neglects the need for new, holistic structures that nurture an energizing cultural environment.
The book consists of “civic sermons” that Liu presented at various locations throughout the country as part of a series of “Civic Saturdays,” a project of the Seattle-based Citizen University, which is dedicated to “building a culture of powerful, responsible citizenship.” In the Preface to the book, Liu declares:
We are the counterculture now. In a culture of celebrity worship and consumerism, we stand for service and citizenship. And in the age of hyper-individualism, we practice collective action and common cause. In a time of sentimentalism and showy sanctimony, we stand for discernment and humility. In the smog of hypocrisy and situational ethics, we still live and breathe the universal timeless values and ideals of the Golden Rule, the Tao, the Declaration, and the Preamble of the Constitution. That is radical.
In the “A Divided Heart” chapter, Liu reports that a friend, Mark, who was a founder of the Tea Party, in so many words said, “Millions of Americans have felt left out and put down, told that they’re deplorable racists and bigots and sexists if they challenge the elites and insiders who are tolerant of everyone but them. They're tired of it, and with Trump, they found a way to say so.” Become America and the Citizen University aim to speak to these people.
Liu has concluded “Americans today lack the coherence and moral clarity and civic self-possession to resist a real Hitler, and that's one thing we’d better work on.”
Read More