Truth and Facts have the inherent property of being
monolithic. It is the perception of these that have various shades. Each
perception has its purpose as well as its place and it is therefore only
natural that one should be tolerant to each of these perceptions. However, when
one of these singular perceptions tries to mask or take over the Truth and
Facts that it originates from and seeks to impose an exclusive right over it,
that perception inevitably looses its plurality; such a perception then becomes
neither interesting, nor convincing or constructive.
A call for revival from An und für sich by Adam Kotsko
I have been teaching Buber’s I and Thou and
finding it amazingly productive of thought and discussion. I wonder if, after
such a long period where Levinas has had a corner on the “ethics of respect for
the Other” market, the time may be ripe for a Buber revival.
Re: Organising Action from sbicitizen at Yahoo! Groups by devinder singh
gulati
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory,
first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book,
Political Parties. It states that …
The human economy in a revolutionary moment: political aspects
of the economic crisis from The Memory Bank by keith
Three things count in our societies — people,
machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the
people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse
that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but
to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money. To the idea
of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must now add that of political
revolution. I have argued here that the dynamics of revolution require active
consideration in this context. Revolutions give rise to digital contrasts and
rightly so, but human societies are built on analogue processes. This is not
just an academic debating point. A lot hinges on how humanity responds to the
contradictions of the turbulence ahead.
Secularism, lexical ordering, and resistance to dialogue from The Immanent Frame by Jeremy Webber
Bilgrami makes an eloquent plea for the capacity of
believers’ commitments to evolve with time, as a result of history, so that it
is wrong to think that they are locked within an inescapable relativism. But he
applies the insight only to believers. Aren’t rationalists also historical
beings, whose most cherished commitments evolve with time, in ways that are
similarly a product of experience? If so, we should open ourselves to the
possibility of change.
This militates in favor of an ethic of engagement
that is very different from lexical ordering. At the very least we should
understand the beliefs and practices that we are encountering, so that we know
accurately how our principles interact with them. And we might stumble upon
something unexpected in the encounter: market interactions tempered by ethical
injunctions to an extent that we in the non-Islamic world have neglected; an
idea of gender equality that is genuinely equal but that de-sexualizes the
public space; or something else…
What matters most, then, are the ethical practices
one adopts for maneuvering in the face of these provisional, never fully
resolved or elaborated assertions of ideals. They are practices of deliberation
and decision-making, where no one’s cherished commitments are relegated to the
second stage of a lexical ordering, but where one seeks to understand and, if
possible, respond to deeply held opinions. Sometimes the disagreement will be
so acute as to render imposition inescapable. Sometimes it will be possible to
live and let live. Often there will be room for adjustment by all parties – and
that adjustment may even represent a normative advance for all parties, as they
take into account insights drawn from a broader range of experience…
Secularism is the
attempt to preserve the independence of the state from identification with
particular religious doctrines so that the state remains open to individuals of
different beliefs. But that does not mean that it can be insulated from those
beliefs, or that it can satisfy them equally in every decision, or that it must
subject them as a matter of lexical ordering to “the ideals that the polity
seeks to achieve.” It involves the managing of continual encounters between
religiously and non-religiously motivated reasons. The solution involves an
ethic of dialogue prior to decision, not peremptory imposition.
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