Month: March 2015

by

Syrians in the Darkness

“The seasons are according to the sun. The people of Syria now, they don’t see any sun. They are in the darkness.”                                    

–Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, February 2014

I’ve had the quote from Ahmet Davutoglu tucked away in my notes since last year, and had forgotten about until I saw the above image in an article in The Guardian earlier this month. It shows a series of satellite images of Syria at night from 2011 to 2015. The article reveals that there has been an estimated 80% reduction in night-time illumination of Syria over the past few years, correlating with the destruction of infrastructure and the enormous loss of population from people fleeing their homes. To date, an estimated 10.8 million people have been displaced as a result from the conflict. Davutoglu was correct, literally and figuratively. I can’t help but wonder how these events will affect ordinary Syrians for decades to come. 

.

Related: Growing Up in the Two Koreas

by

…And They Shall Beat Their Tanks into Playgrounds

“Safety and security don’t just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear.”  (Nelson Mandela)

“… and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaiah 2:4)

Or convert bombs into spoons…

Boy in Sarajevo. LA Times.
Congolese children play on a destroyed military tank in Kibumba, DRC. Prime Collective.
Children play on an anti-aircraft gun near Beirut, Lebanon. Steve M. Curry
James Nachtwey ‘Boy On Tank, Nicaragua’ 1984.
Children play on a destroyed tank in the Libyan city of Benghazi. Spiegel.
Children playing on an abandoned tank from WW2 in Saipan. Michael John Grist.
Children playing on an abandoned tank in Mundri, South Sudan. Huffington Post.
Children play on a damaged Soviet tank on the outskirts of Jalalabad east of Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov 13, 2012. ABC News.
Dien Bien Phu, northwestern Vietnam.
Tanks become toys in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Steve M. Curry.
Children play on the bomb sites and wrecked tanks in Berlin, in the aftermath of the fighting in the city in 1945. Fred Ramage / Getty Images.
by

Confronting Human Frailty

“A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.”                                                                                                               

                                                                                     ― Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Adam Bede

 

In his book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker borrowed a concept from the conservative scholar Thomas Sowell, who argued that there were two “visions” of human nature (Pinker, 2002). Pinker referred to these as the Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision, and he spent several pages placing famous historical thinkers into one of the two camps.  

According to Pinker, the Tragic Vision suggests that “humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits” (p. 287). On the other hand, in the Utopian Vision “psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world.”

These groupings are not perfect, but Pinker argues that they work better than trying to categorize people as left/right or conservative/liberal. For some examples, in the Utopian camp, Pinker placed people like Bobby Kennedy, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine. For Tragic Visionaries, he chose – among others – Friedrich Hayek, James Madison, Edmund Burke, and Hobbes.

Continue reading →