Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died today. For most of his life, he was the conscience of the Soviet Empire. Some of the most forceful passages in his writing were directed against the intelligentsia who allowed themselves to be puppets for their rulers:
“A man sprouts a tumor and dies — how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?” he asked questioning the complicity of ordinary Russians in the crimes of Stalin’s era.”
“A major new study of the political correctness of faculty members may challenge assumptions all around. For those who deny that there is an identifiable group of PC professors, the study says that there is in fact a group with consistently common perspectives, largely based on their views of discrimination (that it exists and matters).
But for those who say that these tenured radicals have all the power in academe, the study finds that politically correct professors’ views on the role of politics in hiring decisions aren’t very different from the views of other professors. Further, the study finds that a critical mass of politically incorrect professors is doing quite well in securing jobs at the most prestigious universities in the United States, despite claims that such scholars are an endangered species there……”
More at Inside Higher Education News.
“Simmons analyzes disciplines, and finds sharp differences — largely consistent with previous studies about disciplines and political leanings. Humanities and social science fields tend to have higher politically correct rankings, while professional and science disciplines do not. The table that follows is in order of political correctness. Psychology is the only field where a majority of professors are politically correct. Four fields — finance, management information, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering — had no one who was politically correct….”
Comment
* Being too optimistic about business ventures
* Relying on any one idea or concept in your investments
*Relying on borrowed money you use for your ventures and assuming that you won’t have to pay it back
John Templeton, who passed away today in the Bahamas, was one of the world’s most successful investors and the three dangers he listed ought to have been nailed on the door of the Federal Reserve. Think about it. His trifecta of over optimism, single-concept thinking, and eternal borrowing just about sums up the mess the US economy is in: how better could you sum up the following:
1. The ‘new economy’ paradigm
2. The wholesale adoption of derivatives
3. The credit-and-leverage bubble.
Sir John had broader interests than finance, of course, which was what made him such a great financial thinker.
As this article in the Wall Street Journal points out, he “forged a union between his progressive investment philosophy and his equally open-minded religious thought.”
He was tolerant.
“I am still an enthusiastic Christian,” Sir John once said. “But why shouldn’t I try to learn more? Why shouldn’t I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn’t I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more.”
In 1972, he established the Templeton Prize, the largest annual award given to an individual. Mother Teresa received the first award in 1973. The prize, which in 2009 will be valued at 1 million pounds, or about $2 million, recognizes achievement in work that relates to science, philosophy and spirituality. Its monetary value is always more than the Nobel Prizes — Sir John’s way of demonstrating that spiritual work should not be discounted.
Sir John was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 for his philanthropic achievements. That same year he created the foundation, which today has an endowment of about $1.5 billion and awards around $70 million in annual grants. The foundation supports research into fields of science and theology, in keeping with Sir John’s religious values and beliefs.”
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” –Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Remember the tightwad tourist whose baggy shorts, frequent complaining and shouted questions about why none of the locals spoke any English made the ugly American the world’s Visitor From Hell? Well, it’s time for Archie Bunker to move over and make way for Petulant Pierre. According to a recent international survey, the French are now considered the most obnoxious tourists from European nations, and behind only Indians and the last-place Chinese as the worst among all countries worldwide. And it’s not only the rest of the world that have a gripe with the Gallic attitude: the French also finished second to last among nations ranking the popularity of their own tourists who vacation at home…..”
More at Time.
Comment:
It’s nice to know that some Indians (and their bhai-bhais up north) are beating the world to the bottom-rung of the globe-trotter hierarchy. Avid globalizers have always known that anything those Westerners can do, Asians can do better.
“Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.”
Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling at her Harvard commencement speech on June 5 2008.
“Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting what’s for dinner. Freedom is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote….”
Benjamin Franklin (?)
My Comment:
Maybe so. But corporatism is a pack of wolves and a sheep drawing up an employment contract. Individualism is a lamb with a contract lawyer and paid-up union membership.
“History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.”
-Ronald Reagan
Comment:
Weakness invites attack. Statistics show that mugging victims are more likely to be shorter, frailer and more defenseless than the average person – which is why mugging victims are typically older people, women, slightly-built men, children, the physically handicapped, foreigners, or outsiders of some sort. And why victims of harassment in the work place are usually employees with fewer options to negotiate or leave (such as older men and women, divorced women or single mothers, or junior employees/contract workers (men and women).
Fundamentally this is a type of mob behavior. The establishment beats up on the outsider; the corporation hunts down the lone whistle blower; the church burns the the isolated dissenter – (though a group of dissenters might quickly become another church); carnivores prey on the deer that is wounded or separated from the pack.
“On Oct. 14, 2007, one of Watson’s former assistants, Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, wrote an article about him in London’s Sunday Times that quoted him making racist comments about black people by suggesting there are inherent, unalterable biological differences in intelligence between black people and everyone else. The response was swift and impressively devastating. The father of DNA had spoken the unspeakable. Echoing racist remarks that have been used to justify the enslavement and colonization of black people since the Enlightenment (think Hume, Kant, Jefferson, Hegel), Watson’s comments implied that he believed that nature had created a primal distinction in intelligence and innate mental capacity between blacks and whites, which no amount of social intervention could ever change.
He had uttered the unutterable, the most ardent fantasy of white racists (David Duke would wax poetic on his Web site that the truth had at last been revealed, and by no less than the discoverer of the structure of DNA). His words caused a ripple effect of shock, dismay and disgust among those of us who embrace the range of biological diversity and potential within the human community. It was as if one of the smartest white men in the world had confirmed what so many racists believe already: that the gap between blacks and whites in, say, IQ test scores and SAT results has a biological basis and that environmental factors such as centuries of slavery, colonization, Jim Crow segregation and race-based discrimination—all contributing to uneven economic development—don’t amount to a hill of beans. Nature has given us an extra basketball gene, as it were, in lieu of native intelligence….”
More at The Root by a scholar of race theory, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.