User blogs

I’ll admit to a prejudice. I dislike Richard Dawkins, the emeritus professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. Holding such a pompous title is enough to warrant a demerit. Dawkins is broadly known for two insights. Both have aged poorly. The 'selfish gene' conjecture no longer enjoys much credit: such is life in science. Geneticists have proven it to be simplistic and flawed. In itself, unproblematic. In its heyday, however, it undergirded a libertarian view of human selfishness.

We condemn the violent left and right. Are the threats equivalent? Is one more dangerous? Let’s reflect – in compact fashion.

1.       Both share an ideology of a ‘desirable’ hierarchical social order

Both extremes share a hierarchical ideology:

The pivoting argument in the article ‘Reading the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] Clearly’ by Perry Link (The New York Review of Books, 11 February 2021 issue) on US policy toward China is the topos of appeasement vs disagreement or resistance. I quote the analogy: ‘Why are the lessons the West has learned opposing dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin so difficult to apply to China?'

Is the analogy appropriate? Let’s have a closer look:

Some see two black faces,

Some see a white vase.

A few see them both.

Both sides mock the relativists.

It is all a matter of the right imagination...

Ever since people learned to fight autocracy and oppressive regimes, the battle has raged between ‘accommodationists’ and revolutionaries. The first ones pleaded for dialogue and used, if necessary, civil disobedience. The others discounted protest as ineffectual and called for outright revolution.

Today’s Guardian brings an interesting diplomatic issue into in the news: you can read it here. It raises a wealth of questions in international law but it also in national culture.

As an international diplomat, you may want to address issues in international law like:

Behold America: A history of America First and the American Dream (Sarah Churchwell, 2018, p. 356):

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books and the compilers of magazine articles and television programmes. 

Eric Hobsbawn

Conviction without experience makes for harshness

Flannery O’CONNOR
 

The internet is an enabler. Arguably, the internet has been the most transforming event in the last thousand years – akin, in its impact, to writing, or the domestication of the horse.

I have attended a seminar on the subject of “Democratizing public space”. This is the text of my intervention. I argued, somewhat paradoxically, that “public space” is shaped by “what is not seen” more than by the explicit will of the people or rulers. My thoughts are an attempt to flesh out BASTIAT’s recommendation, namely to study what is “not seen” rather than what is “seen”.[1]

Kwetching about 'multi-stakeholderism'