I enjoyed this woman's attitude toward training oneself, in this case, she is an undefeated boxer. Also, her attitude on expression. An inspiring combination.
Showing posts with label kokoro (at the heart of it). Show all posts
Showing posts with label kokoro (at the heart of it). Show all posts
11.2.12
12.1.12
22.12.11
Life is easy
This is Jon Jandai, from Pun Pun Center for Self-Reliance near Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Life is easy. Build your own house, grow your own food, have plenty of free time.
"The four basic needs, food, house, clothes, and medicine much be cheap and easy for everybody. That's civilization. But if we make these four things very hard for many people to get it, that is uncivilized."
Life is easy. Build your own house, grow your own food, have plenty of free time.
"The four basic needs, food, house, clothes, and medicine much be cheap and easy for everybody. That's civilization. But if we make these four things very hard for many people to get it, that is uncivilized."
9.12.11
great song: Truth by Alex Ebert
lyrics:
The truth is that I never shook my shadow
Every day it's trying to trick me into doing battle
Calling out "faker" only get me rattled
Want to pull me back behind the fence with the [cattle]
Building your [lenses]
Digging your trenches
Put me on the front line
Leave me with a dumb mind
With no defenses
But your defenses
If you can't stand to feel the pain then you are senseless
[Since] this
I've grown up some
Different kind of fighter
And when the darkness come let it inside you
Your darkness is shining
My darkness is shining
Have faith in myself
Truth
I've seen a million numbered doors on the horizon
Now which is the future you choosen before you gone dying.
I'll tell you 'bout a secret I've been underminding
Every little lie in this world come from dividing
Say you're my lover, say you're my homie,
Tilt my chin back slit my throat take a bath in my blood get to know me
All out of my secrets
All my enemies are turning into my teachers.
Because, lights blinding, no way dividing what's yours or mine when everything's shining
You darkness is shining my darkness is shining
Have faith in ourselves
Truth
Yes I'm only loving, only trying to only love
That's what I'm trying to do is only loving
Yes I'm only lonely loving feeling only loving
Till I'm feeling only loving
Ya say it ain't loving ain't loving my loving
But I'm only loving only loving only loving
Only loving the truth.
5.12.11
quote on freedom from David Foster Wallace
28.11.11
Ralph Waldo Emerson poem on friendship
Friendship (from Essays: First Series, 1841)
A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the mill-round of our fate
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the mill-round of our fate
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
13.11.11
livestrong campaign for personal responsibility
I have never paid much attention to the Livestrong campaign. I used to be particularly annoyed by the yellow wristbands- why does one need to wear (consume) something to show what they are thinking about? Tonight I searched for articles on personal responsibility and was pleasantly surprised:
8.11.11
TED talk on Oxytocin
Non pharmacological ways to increase oxytocin:
massage, dancing, and praying
Could the world be a better place on 8 hugs a day?
talk on trust and morality from Paul Zak:
massage, dancing, and praying
Could the world be a better place on 8 hugs a day?
talk on trust and morality from Paul Zak:
7.11.11
31.10.11
Two Kinds of Intelligence by Rumi
Two Kinds of Intelligence
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,
and it doesn't move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
Manifesto for Conscious Men
Manifesto for Conscious Men (facebook page link)
Gay Hendricks and Arjuna ArdaghThe Manifesto emerged from the radical transformation that’s underway in the way men and women relate to each other. We’d like your assistance in giving expression and life to this awakening movement. You may know of our work as writers and teachers in the areas of spiritual development and relationship transformation. Now, though, we speak to you primarily as men committed to a new era of co-creation with women. Whether you are a man or a woman, we invite you to join with us in creating the new era.
Apology and New Commitment
One intent of the Manifesto is to offer a genuine apology for actions in the past and present, so that we can start afresh with new commitments that can guide us in bringing the new era into reality. Our apology is rooted in the original meanings of the word--to give an account, to acknowledge with regret, to express sorrow for present or past actions. A genuine apology never shames or blames either person, nor does it deny either person’s right to take full responsibility for the actions.
A Commitment To Usher In A New Era Of Worship
We believe that the next step in our evolution rests is a restoration of our capacity for such deep respect, attention and love in human relationships that we become capable of seeing the divine in another. We speak of this as the capacity for a man to “worship” a woman, and vice versa. We know that “worship” is a charged word for many; it has been kidnapped by patriarchal religions and often evokes a sense of subjugation. We wish to restore “worship” to mean a mutual capacity to express and see the the divine dimension in each other, to look through and beyond the personal as a window to the universal.
Dear Woman:
Together, we can make miracles.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments?
-Lauren
9.9.11
home
I was thinking about the line "you can't go home again" while I have been visiting home (Milwaukee, Wisconsin area). From the book of that title:
"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." (Thomas Wolfe)
Wisconsin is the same, it's culture is everlasting, but I find a lack of form and system almost everywhere I look. I see a distinct difference in Wisconsinites and Washingtonians- folks in Washington seem to have grand plans about what they do with their land. On average, people tend to fields, farms, or gardens with more diligence and creativity than those in Wisconsin. Does it have something to do with the unfriendly winter weather in Wisconsin? Does that put a damper on people's ideas for their spaces? Why do Wisconsinites love fields of grass so much? What is so special about grass? Do Wisconsinites like having that control over nature because nature controls them from December through March? Is there more of a pioneer spirit in the Northwest, versus a culture of stability in the Midwest?
Another question: what is nostalgia- why does it have such power? Power to cripple people in their old age into sitting around in their memories instead of enjoying all the freedom they have saved and waited for? If you can't go home again, why do so many people choose to go nowhere?
30.8.11
Flobots message with TEDX
Also known as Brer Rabbit and Jonny 5 of the hip hop group, Flobots, Stephen and Jamie share their holistic media experiment that invites listeners to "live the lyrics."
3.8.11
David Foster Wallace interview from 1997
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/5639
This interview is incredible, topics include: pedagogy, Lynch films (a much more intelligent analysis than I have heard many places), the use of the term "post-modern", women not often enjoying Western films (I was raised on them, so this excludes me), Paul Cézanne's desire to make a large, great painting: "What the really great artists do is they are entirely themselves". He also refers to his early self as a "library wieny".
This interview is incredible, topics include: pedagogy, Lynch films (a much more intelligent analysis than I have heard many places), the use of the term "post-modern", women not often enjoying Western films (I was raised on them, so this excludes me), Paul Cézanne's desire to make a large, great painting: "What the really great artists do is they are entirely themselves". He also refers to his early self as a "library wieny".
13.7.11
Guest House by Rumi
Rumi - Guest House
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
17.5.11
Humanist article: What do we deserve?
http://thehumanist.org/2011/05/02/what-do-we-deserve/
What Do We Deserve?
by: Namit Arora
Published in the May / June 2011 Humanist
I often think of the good life I have. By most common measures—say, type of work, income, health, leisure, and social status—I’m doing well. Despite the adage, “call no man happy until he is dead,” I wonder no less often: How much of my good life do I really deserve? Why me and not so many others?
The dominant narrative has it that I was a bright student, worked harder than most, and competed fairly to gain admission to an Indian Institute of Technology, where my promise was recognized with financial aid from a U.S. university. When I took a chance after graduate school and came to Silicon Valley, I was justly rewarded for my knowledge and labor with a measure of financial security and social status. While many happily accept this narrative, my problem is that I don’t buy it. I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being in the right place at the right time.
A pivotal question in market-based societies is “What do we deserve?” In other words, for our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements are just? How much of what we bring home is fair or unfair, and why? To chase these questions is to be drawn into the thickets of political philosophy and theories of justice. American political philosopher Michael Sandel’s 2009 book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? proves valuable here in synthesizing a few thoughts on the matter, including a review of the three major approaches to distributive economic justice: libertarian, meritocratic, and egalitarian, undermining en route the dominant narrative on my own well-being.
The libertarian model of distributive justice favors a free market with well-defined rules that apply to all. “Citizens are assured equal basic liberties, and the distribution of income and wealth is determined by the free market,” says Sandel. This model offers a formal equality of opportunity—making it a clear advance over feudal or caste arrangements—so anyone can, in theory, strive to compete and win. But in practice, people don’t have real equality of opportunity due to various disadvantages, for example, of family income, social class, gender, race, caste, etc. So while the racetrack may look nice and shiny, the runners don’t begin at the same starting point. What does it mean to say that the first to cross the finish line deserves his or her victory? Isn’t the contest rigged from the start, based on factors that are arbitrary and derive from accidents of birth?
Take my own example. I was born into the upper-caste, riding on eons of unearned privilege over a full 80 percent of my fellow Indians. I was a also boy raised in a society that lavished far more attention on male children. My parents fell closer to the upper-middle class, had university degrees, and valued education and success—both my grandfathers had risen up to claim senior state government posts. I lived in a kid-friendly neighborhood with parks, playgrounds, and a staff clubhouse. I had role models and access to the right schools and books, the right coaching classes, and peers aspiring for professional careers. My background greatly shaped my ambition and self-confidence and no doubt put me ahead of perhaps 96 percent of other Indians—the odds that I would perform extremely well on standardized academic tests were huge from the start.
The meritocratic model, often associated with the United States, recognizes such inequities and tries to correct for socioeconomic disadvantages. At its best, meritocracy takes real equality of opportunity seriously and tries to achieve it through various means: Head Start programs, education and job training, subsidized healthcare and housing, and so forth. Meritocrats admit that market-based distribution of rewards is just only to the extent to which we can reduce endemic socioeconomic disadvantages and bring everyone to comparable starting points. But thereafter, they believe that we are the authors of our own destiny and whoever wins the race is morally deserving of the rewards they obtain from the market—and its flip side, that we morally deserve our failure too, and its consequences. Swiss writer Alain de Botton looked at this phenomenon in the United States in his 2004 documentary film, Status Anxiety.
But is this entirely fair? Even if we somehow leveled socioeconomic disparities, the winners of the race would still be the fastest runners, due in part to a natural lottery. People are often born with certain talents and attributes—for instance, oratory, musical acumen, physical beauty and health, athleticism, good memory and cognition, even extroversion—that give them unearned advantages. Are their wins not as arbitrary from a moral standpoint as the wins of those born with silver spoons in their mouths? Further, isn’t it dumb luck that our society happens to value certain aptitudes we may have—such as the leap and hand-eye coordination of Michael Jordan, sound-byte witticisms of talk show hosts like Jay Leno, or the algorithmic wizardry of Sergey Brin in the Internet age? A millennium ago, society valued other aptitudes, such as sculpting bronze in Chola India, equine archery on the Mongolian steppes, or reciting epigrammatic verse in Arabia. My own aptitude for science and math served me well in an India looking to industrialize and a United States facing a shortfall of engineers. I might have done less well in an earlier age where the best opportunities were perhaps in mercantile pursuits or the bureaucracy of government.
But how can a system of distributive justice compensate for random natural gifts that happen to be valued in a time and place? We can’t level natural gifts across people, can we? The mere thought is bizarre. The American political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) had much to say about this in his landmark 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, in which he developed his egalitarian model. Since we can’t undo the inequities of the natural lottery, he writes, we must find a way to address the differences in the rewards that result from them. We should certainly encourage people to hone and exercise their aptitudes, he says, but we should be clear that they do not morally deserve the rewards their aptitudes earn from the market. Since their natural gifts aren’t their own doing, and are moreover profitable only in light of the value a community places on them, they must share the rewards with the community.
One might object here: Wait a minute, what about the role of the personal drive and effort we put into cultivating our talents? Don’t we deserve the rewards that come from our striving? Not really, says Rawls. Countless factors beyond our choosing influence our ambition and effort, such as our upbringing, our family’s work ethic, our childhood experiences, subconscious insecurities, social milieu, career fads, role models, parental and peer pressure, available life paths, lucky breaks, and other contingent factors. It isn’t clear how much of it is our own doing, however militantly we may hold the illusion that we create our own life story (an illusion not without psychological and practical payoffs). Even the accident of being firstborn among siblings can be a factor in how hard we strive. Each year, Sandel reports, 75-80 percent of his freshman class at Harvard are firstborns. Besides, effort may be a virtue but even the meritocrats don’t think it deserves rewards independent of results or achievement. So, in short, we can’t claim to deserve the rewards on the basis of effort either.
Rawls deflates the idea that we morally deserve the rewards of meritocracy. If we accept this, it follows that the house of distributive justice cannot be built on the sands of moral desert (in simple terms, moral desert is a condition by which we are deserving of something, whether good or bad), but must be built on other grounds. Notably, however, Rawls doesn’t make a case for equal rewards. Instead, Rawls speaks of the “Difference Principle” in dealing with the inequities of the natural lottery. This principle, says Sandel, “permits income inequalities for the sake of incentives, provided the incentives are needed to improve the lot of the least advantaged.” In other words, income inequality is justified only to the extent to which it improves the lot of the most disadvantaged when compared to an equal income arrangement. Only if society is better off as a whole does favoring inequality seem fair. Does this approach diminish the role of human agency and free will when it comes to moral desert? Some say it does, yet the claim seems modest enough, that our achievements have many ingredients, and the contributions from agency or free will are intertwined with the contributions from social and random factors—to the point that it seems unreasonable to give by default all credit to agency or free will, which libertarians try to do in order to justify the rewards of the market. However, some philosophers find an unresolved tension in Rawls’ approach to setting up the Difference Principle. (See, for instance, Egalitarianism, Free Will, and Ultimate Justice by Saul Smilansky.)
One might ask: Why should we uphold the Difference Principle at all? Is it not an arbitrary construct? No, says Rawls, and invites us to a thought experiment on creating “a hypothetical social contract in an original position of equality.” Imagine, he says, that “when we gather to chose the principles [for governing ourselves], we don’t know where we will wind up in society. Imagine that we choose behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that temporarily prevents us from knowing anything about who we are,” including our race, gender, class, talents, intelligence, wealth, and religion (or lack thereof). What principles would we then choose to order our society? Rawls makes a powerful case that, simply out of a desire to minimize our odds of suffering, we will always choose political equality, fair equal opportunity, and the Difference Principle.
Some have argued that the Difference Principle may not get chosen as is, not unless it has a clause to address the unfairness of propping up those who willfully make bad choices or act irresponsibly. Further, is it desirable, or even possible, to choose a social contract from behind the so-called veil of ignorance, as if, in Rawls’ words, “from the perspective of eternity,” with scant regard for context? Doesn’t Rawls implicitly presuppose a people who already value political equality, individualism, and resolving claims through public deliberation? Rawls later downplays its universality but, argues Sandel, even in the United States, Rawls’s thought experiment supports an arid secular public space detached from so much that is central to our identities. This includes historical, moral, and religious discourses, which, if squeezed out, often pop up elsewhere in worse forms, such as the religious right. If the point is to enhance the social contract, Sandel adds, political progressives should do so not by asking people to leave their deepest beliefs at home but by engaging them in the public sphere.
Sandel’s basic critique here is that Rawls’s concern with the distribution of primary goods—which Rawls defines as “things that every rational man is presumed to want”—is necessary but not sufficient for a social contract. As purposive beings, we should also consider the telos of our choices, such as our common ends as a community, the areas of life worth shielding from the market, the space we should accord to loyalty and patriotism, ties of blood, marriage, tradition, and so on. Still, Rawls’s thought experiment retains a powerful moral force and continues to inspire liberals. His theory of justice, writes Sandel, “represents the most compelling case for a more equal society that American political philosophy has yet produced.”
Theories of justice may clarify and guide our thoughts, but we still have to figure out how to change the game we want to play and where to draw the lines on the playing field. An open society does this through vigorous public debate. As British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote, “people who want to govern themselves must choose how much liberty, equality, and justice they seek and how much they can let go. The price of a free society is that sometimes, perhaps often, we make bad choices.” Thereafter, when the rules are in place, “we are entitled to the benefits the rules of the game promise for the exercise of our talents.” It is the rules, says Sandel, and not anything outside them, that create “entitlements to legitimate expectations.” Entitlements only arise after we have chosen the rules of the competition. Only in this context can we say we deserve something, whether admission to a law school, a certain bonus, or a pension.
In Rawlsian terms, the problem in the United States is not that a minority has grown super rich, but that for decades now, it has done so to the detriment of the lower social classes. The big question is: why does the majority in a seemingly free society tolerate this, and even happily vote against its own economic interests? A plausible answer is that it is under a self-destructive meritocratic spell that sees social outcomes as moral desert—a spell at least as old as the American frontier but long since repurposed by the corporate control of public institutions and the media: news, film, TV, publishing, and so forth. It parallels a religious spell in more ways than one. Here too, powerful social institutions are invested in clouding our notions of cause and effect. Rather than move towards greater fairness and egalitarianism, they promote a libertarian gospel of the free market with minimal regulation, taxation, and public safety nets. They beguile us into thinking that the lifestyles of the rich and famous are within reach of all, and uphold rags-to-riches stories as exemplary (“if this enterprising slumdog can do it against all odds, so can you!” goes the storyline). All this gets drummed into people’s heads to the point that they only blame themselves for their lot and don’t think of questioning the rules of the game.
What would it take to break this spell? For starters, it would require Americans to realize that the distribution of wealth in their society is far less egalitarian than they think it is—a recent survey revealed that Americans think the richest fifth of them own 59 percent of the wealth, while the actual figure is 84 percent. Perhaps living on credit helps create the illusion that the average American has more than he or she does. Americans also believe that their odds of rising to the top are far better than they actually are; social mobility is quite low by international standards. A kid from the poorest fifth of all households has a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percentile income bracket, while that of a kid from the richest fifth has a 22 percent chance. The task of breaking this spell, then, requires telling new kinds of stories, engaging in vigorous public debate, and employing our best arts of persuasion.
What Do We Deserve?
by: Namit Arora
Published in the May / June 2011 Humanist
I often think of the good life I have. By most common measures—say, type of work, income, health, leisure, and social status—I’m doing well. Despite the adage, “call no man happy until he is dead,” I wonder no less often: How much of my good life do I really deserve? Why me and not so many others?
The dominant narrative has it that I was a bright student, worked harder than most, and competed fairly to gain admission to an Indian Institute of Technology, where my promise was recognized with financial aid from a U.S. university. When I took a chance after graduate school and came to Silicon Valley, I was justly rewarded for my knowledge and labor with a measure of financial security and social status. While many happily accept this narrative, my problem is that I don’t buy it. I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being in the right place at the right time.
A pivotal question in market-based societies is “What do we deserve?” In other words, for our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements are just? How much of what we bring home is fair or unfair, and why? To chase these questions is to be drawn into the thickets of political philosophy and theories of justice. American political philosopher Michael Sandel’s 2009 book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? proves valuable here in synthesizing a few thoughts on the matter, including a review of the three major approaches to distributive economic justice: libertarian, meritocratic, and egalitarian, undermining en route the dominant narrative on my own well-being.
The libertarian model of distributive justice favors a free market with well-defined rules that apply to all. “Citizens are assured equal basic liberties, and the distribution of income and wealth is determined by the free market,” says Sandel. This model offers a formal equality of opportunity—making it a clear advance over feudal or caste arrangements—so anyone can, in theory, strive to compete and win. But in practice, people don’t have real equality of opportunity due to various disadvantages, for example, of family income, social class, gender, race, caste, etc. So while the racetrack may look nice and shiny, the runners don’t begin at the same starting point. What does it mean to say that the first to cross the finish line deserves his or her victory? Isn’t the contest rigged from the start, based on factors that are arbitrary and derive from accidents of birth?
Take my own example. I was born into the upper-caste, riding on eons of unearned privilege over a full 80 percent of my fellow Indians. I was a also boy raised in a society that lavished far more attention on male children. My parents fell closer to the upper-middle class, had university degrees, and valued education and success—both my grandfathers had risen up to claim senior state government posts. I lived in a kid-friendly neighborhood with parks, playgrounds, and a staff clubhouse. I had role models and access to the right schools and books, the right coaching classes, and peers aspiring for professional careers. My background greatly shaped my ambition and self-confidence and no doubt put me ahead of perhaps 96 percent of other Indians—the odds that I would perform extremely well on standardized academic tests were huge from the start.
The meritocratic model, often associated with the United States, recognizes such inequities and tries to correct for socioeconomic disadvantages. At its best, meritocracy takes real equality of opportunity seriously and tries to achieve it through various means: Head Start programs, education and job training, subsidized healthcare and housing, and so forth. Meritocrats admit that market-based distribution of rewards is just only to the extent to which we can reduce endemic socioeconomic disadvantages and bring everyone to comparable starting points. But thereafter, they believe that we are the authors of our own destiny and whoever wins the race is morally deserving of the rewards they obtain from the market—and its flip side, that we morally deserve our failure too, and its consequences. Swiss writer Alain de Botton looked at this phenomenon in the United States in his 2004 documentary film, Status Anxiety.
But is this entirely fair? Even if we somehow leveled socioeconomic disparities, the winners of the race would still be the fastest runners, due in part to a natural lottery. People are often born with certain talents and attributes—for instance, oratory, musical acumen, physical beauty and health, athleticism, good memory and cognition, even extroversion—that give them unearned advantages. Are their wins not as arbitrary from a moral standpoint as the wins of those born with silver spoons in their mouths? Further, isn’t it dumb luck that our society happens to value certain aptitudes we may have—such as the leap and hand-eye coordination of Michael Jordan, sound-byte witticisms of talk show hosts like Jay Leno, or the algorithmic wizardry of Sergey Brin in the Internet age? A millennium ago, society valued other aptitudes, such as sculpting bronze in Chola India, equine archery on the Mongolian steppes, or reciting epigrammatic verse in Arabia. My own aptitude for science and math served me well in an India looking to industrialize and a United States facing a shortfall of engineers. I might have done less well in an earlier age where the best opportunities were perhaps in mercantile pursuits or the bureaucracy of government.
But how can a system of distributive justice compensate for random natural gifts that happen to be valued in a time and place? We can’t level natural gifts across people, can we? The mere thought is bizarre. The American political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) had much to say about this in his landmark 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, in which he developed his egalitarian model. Since we can’t undo the inequities of the natural lottery, he writes, we must find a way to address the differences in the rewards that result from them. We should certainly encourage people to hone and exercise their aptitudes, he says, but we should be clear that they do not morally deserve the rewards their aptitudes earn from the market. Since their natural gifts aren’t their own doing, and are moreover profitable only in light of the value a community places on them, they must share the rewards with the community.
One might object here: Wait a minute, what about the role of the personal drive and effort we put into cultivating our talents? Don’t we deserve the rewards that come from our striving? Not really, says Rawls. Countless factors beyond our choosing influence our ambition and effort, such as our upbringing, our family’s work ethic, our childhood experiences, subconscious insecurities, social milieu, career fads, role models, parental and peer pressure, available life paths, lucky breaks, and other contingent factors. It isn’t clear how much of it is our own doing, however militantly we may hold the illusion that we create our own life story (an illusion not without psychological and practical payoffs). Even the accident of being firstborn among siblings can be a factor in how hard we strive. Each year, Sandel reports, 75-80 percent of his freshman class at Harvard are firstborns. Besides, effort may be a virtue but even the meritocrats don’t think it deserves rewards independent of results or achievement. So, in short, we can’t claim to deserve the rewards on the basis of effort either.
Rawls deflates the idea that we morally deserve the rewards of meritocracy. If we accept this, it follows that the house of distributive justice cannot be built on the sands of moral desert (in simple terms, moral desert is a condition by which we are deserving of something, whether good or bad), but must be built on other grounds. Notably, however, Rawls doesn’t make a case for equal rewards. Instead, Rawls speaks of the “Difference Principle” in dealing with the inequities of the natural lottery. This principle, says Sandel, “permits income inequalities for the sake of incentives, provided the incentives are needed to improve the lot of the least advantaged.” In other words, income inequality is justified only to the extent to which it improves the lot of the most disadvantaged when compared to an equal income arrangement. Only if society is better off as a whole does favoring inequality seem fair. Does this approach diminish the role of human agency and free will when it comes to moral desert? Some say it does, yet the claim seems modest enough, that our achievements have many ingredients, and the contributions from agency or free will are intertwined with the contributions from social and random factors—to the point that it seems unreasonable to give by default all credit to agency or free will, which libertarians try to do in order to justify the rewards of the market. However, some philosophers find an unresolved tension in Rawls’ approach to setting up the Difference Principle. (See, for instance, Egalitarianism, Free Will, and Ultimate Justice by Saul Smilansky.)
One might ask: Why should we uphold the Difference Principle at all? Is it not an arbitrary construct? No, says Rawls, and invites us to a thought experiment on creating “a hypothetical social contract in an original position of equality.” Imagine, he says, that “when we gather to chose the principles [for governing ourselves], we don’t know where we will wind up in society. Imagine that we choose behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that temporarily prevents us from knowing anything about who we are,” including our race, gender, class, talents, intelligence, wealth, and religion (or lack thereof). What principles would we then choose to order our society? Rawls makes a powerful case that, simply out of a desire to minimize our odds of suffering, we will always choose political equality, fair equal opportunity, and the Difference Principle.
Some have argued that the Difference Principle may not get chosen as is, not unless it has a clause to address the unfairness of propping up those who willfully make bad choices or act irresponsibly. Further, is it desirable, or even possible, to choose a social contract from behind the so-called veil of ignorance, as if, in Rawls’ words, “from the perspective of eternity,” with scant regard for context? Doesn’t Rawls implicitly presuppose a people who already value political equality, individualism, and resolving claims through public deliberation? Rawls later downplays its universality but, argues Sandel, even in the United States, Rawls’s thought experiment supports an arid secular public space detached from so much that is central to our identities. This includes historical, moral, and religious discourses, which, if squeezed out, often pop up elsewhere in worse forms, such as the religious right. If the point is to enhance the social contract, Sandel adds, political progressives should do so not by asking people to leave their deepest beliefs at home but by engaging them in the public sphere.
Sandel’s basic critique here is that Rawls’s concern with the distribution of primary goods—which Rawls defines as “things that every rational man is presumed to want”—is necessary but not sufficient for a social contract. As purposive beings, we should also consider the telos of our choices, such as our common ends as a community, the areas of life worth shielding from the market, the space we should accord to loyalty and patriotism, ties of blood, marriage, tradition, and so on. Still, Rawls’s thought experiment retains a powerful moral force and continues to inspire liberals. His theory of justice, writes Sandel, “represents the most compelling case for a more equal society that American political philosophy has yet produced.”
Theories of justice may clarify and guide our thoughts, but we still have to figure out how to change the game we want to play and where to draw the lines on the playing field. An open society does this through vigorous public debate. As British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote, “people who want to govern themselves must choose how much liberty, equality, and justice they seek and how much they can let go. The price of a free society is that sometimes, perhaps often, we make bad choices.” Thereafter, when the rules are in place, “we are entitled to the benefits the rules of the game promise for the exercise of our talents.” It is the rules, says Sandel, and not anything outside them, that create “entitlements to legitimate expectations.” Entitlements only arise after we have chosen the rules of the competition. Only in this context can we say we deserve something, whether admission to a law school, a certain bonus, or a pension.
In Rawlsian terms, the problem in the United States is not that a minority has grown super rich, but that for decades now, it has done so to the detriment of the lower social classes. The big question is: why does the majority in a seemingly free society tolerate this, and even happily vote against its own economic interests? A plausible answer is that it is under a self-destructive meritocratic spell that sees social outcomes as moral desert—a spell at least as old as the American frontier but long since repurposed by the corporate control of public institutions and the media: news, film, TV, publishing, and so forth. It parallels a religious spell in more ways than one. Here too, powerful social institutions are invested in clouding our notions of cause and effect. Rather than move towards greater fairness and egalitarianism, they promote a libertarian gospel of the free market with minimal regulation, taxation, and public safety nets. They beguile us into thinking that the lifestyles of the rich and famous are within reach of all, and uphold rags-to-riches stories as exemplary (“if this enterprising slumdog can do it against all odds, so can you!” goes the storyline). All this gets drummed into people’s heads to the point that they only blame themselves for their lot and don’t think of questioning the rules of the game.
What would it take to break this spell? For starters, it would require Americans to realize that the distribution of wealth in their society is far less egalitarian than they think it is—a recent survey revealed that Americans think the richest fifth of them own 59 percent of the wealth, while the actual figure is 84 percent. Perhaps living on credit helps create the illusion that the average American has more than he or she does. Americans also believe that their odds of rising to the top are far better than they actually are; social mobility is quite low by international standards. A kid from the poorest fifth of all households has a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percentile income bracket, while that of a kid from the richest fifth has a 22 percent chance. The task of breaking this spell, then, requires telling new kinds of stories, engaging in vigorous public debate, and employing our best arts of persuasion.
15.4.11
Joseph Campbell quote
This is the threat to our lives. We all face it. We all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes?
-- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
-- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
5.2.11
26.5.09
Atlantic article on happiness- Harvard study (from Kai)
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness/2
The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).
The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).
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