Week-end readings 1

But let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness.

MONA ELTAHAWY in The Foreign Policy.

The secular age, then, is characterized by the fact of pluralism—an irreducible pluralism of beliefs, values, commitments. Yet we secular moderns also give special primacy to freedom of religion. Freedom of religion is standardly presented as the archetypical liberal right. So the paradox is this: how (and why) do we protect freedom of religion in an age where religion is not special?

Cécile Laborde on the Immanent Frame.

The investigative website Mediapart published what it called"compelling new evidence" that the Libyan regime decided to help finance Sarkozy's successful election campaign in 2007. A document that it said was signed by Gaddafi's foreign intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa, stated that the regime had approved a payment of €50m (£40m). 

 Angelique Chrisafis in The Guardian.

When you look at America, you have to concede that we have failed. Most Americans today are worse off than they were fifteen years ago. A full-time worker in the US is worse off today than he or she was 44 years ago. That is astounding – half a century of stagnation. The economic system is not delivering. It does not matter whether a few people at the top benefitted tremendously – when the majority of citizens are not better off, the economic system is not working. We also have to ask of the German system whether it has been delivering. I haven’t studied all the data, but my impression is no. I don’t want to talk about GDPanymore, I want to talk about what is happening to most citizens.

 Joseph Stieglitz in The European.

social sciences and humanism

Few of the social science theories we employ in our disciplines model human beings in ways that justify for account for ... humanistic moral and political beliefs. Few representations of the human in social science theories make it at all clear why such objects should be bearers of rights, equality, or self-determination. If anything, much theory portrays humans as essentially governed by external social influences, competing socially for material resources, strategically manipulating public presentations of self, struggling with rivals for power and status, cobbling identities through fluid assemblies of scripted roles, rationalizing actions with post hoc discursive justifications, and otherwise behaving, thinking, and feeling in ways that are commonly predictable by variable attributes and categories according to which their lives can be broken down, measured, and statistically modeled. Perhaps all this is true. But that picture does not obviously justify belief in human rights, social justice, equality, tolerance, and emancipation.

Christian Smith talks  in What is a Person? about the tension between the ideal of objectivity in social sciences and the moral appeal they should contain.

Ceddo (1977) by Ousmane Sembene

Just entered an African-movie mood.

Ceddo (1977) by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene tops the list.

The best and shortest description of the movie belongs to Mark Leeper: a very big film on a very small scale. Put differently: an Akira Kurasawa movie on the scale of a village. A micro-epic. 

The movie tells the story of an African tribe forced to covert to Islam. A small group of rebels - the Ceddo - refuses to follow the majority and decides to keep alive their traditions. 

It is not God that makes people human, says one of the rebels.

It is Him, argues the imam. And actually, if you don't recognize Allah you are dogs that should be killed.

But we have our own traditions and beliefs, continues the rebel.

It doesn't matter.

They should be killed, tells the imam to his followers. 

(a very personal and liberal narration of the movie). 

Don't forget the Catholics. They are watching on the margins, they are selling wine and guns to the natives. They are buying slaves and baptize them thereafter. 

In the end, some of them are killed. The king, because the law of Allah does not allow two different authorities (a religious and a secular one) to reign in the community. Catholics, because a village is too small to accommodate two Deities. The imam himself got killed. For the power of blood is stronger than the appeal of religious texts. 

Other people choose the exile. The movie has a sad end. 

Here a review from the New York Times. 

A Poem I Wrote Standing Up-Indictment by Blessing Musariri

We are proud to be Africans on distant shores,
learning ancient tongues, fighting for their survival,
while forgetting our own.
We adopt new inflections
and sing-song ways of speaking
to camouflage our origins,
hiding from the tainted brush.
We are the new Celts – darker, more robust.
We sanction our memories of sun and hunger
and hopeful hopelessness.
We unlearn our songs and disappear through our children –
the pristine generation, unmarked by unpopular citizenry.
We are not proud. We are not Africans.


source.