Robert W. Fuller’s blog can be found at Breakingranks.net.
Am I a Home for Identities?
Thu, 16 May 2013 23:10:21 +0000[This is the second post in the series Why Everything You Know about Your “Self” Is Wrong. The series explores how our understanding of selfhood affects our sense of individuality, our interpersonal relationships, and our politics.] In the first post in this series, we disentangled the notion of selfhood from the body, the mind, and the witness. Another common mistake is to identify a current identity as our “real” self. With age, most people realize that they are not the face they present to the world, not even the superposition of the various identities they’ve assumed over the course of their lifetime. By my late thirties, I had accumulated enough personal history to see that I had presented several quite different Bobs to the world. Principal among my serial identities were student, teacher, and educator. Alongside these occupational personas were the familial ones of son, husband, and father. As Shakespeare famously noted: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts … Like many an Eastern sage, Shakespeare saw that we assume a series of parts while at the same [...]
Who Am I?
Thu, 09 May 2013 23:08:02 +0000[This is the first post in the series Why Everything You Know about Your “Self” Is Wrong. The series explores how our understanding of selfhood affects our sense of individuality, our interpersonal relationships, and our politics.] Confusion about fundamental notions such as selfhood, identity, and consciousness distorts personal relationships, underlies ideological deadlock, aggravates partisan politics, and causes unnecessary human suffering. A better understanding of selfhood holds the promise of resolving perennial quarrels and putting us all on the same side as we face the challenges in a global future, not least of which will be coming to terms with machines who rival or surpass human intelligence. While we all casually refer to our self, no one knows quite what that self is. Nothing is so close at hand, yet hard to grasp as selfhood. To get started, think of your self as who or what you’re referring to when you use the pronouns “me,” “myself,” or “I.” Am I My Body? As infants, we’re taught that we are our bodies. Later, we learn that every human being has a unique genomic blueprint that governs the construction, in molecular nano-factories, of our physical bodies. But we do not derive our identity [...]
Something America and China Could Do Together
Sun, 21 Apr 2013 05:38:55 +0000It may be an exaggeration to say that as Chinese-American relations go, so goes the world, but it’s probably not far from the mark. I’m not only thinking of China’s and America’s common interest in avoiding war on the Korean peninsula, but looking ahead to a time when, if the two twenty-first-century superpowers trust each other well enough to act together, the world could take an irreversible step away from the twin perils of environmental degradation and war. At the moment, the greatest threats to China and America come not from each other, but from flaws in their own systems of governance. Chinese and Americans alike are burdened by political systems that are not keeping pace with the times. In the spirit of trial-and-error, why couldn’t the two giants conduct experiments designed to discover forms of decision-making that are better suited to deal with the technological, environmental, and political challenges that we face? Each nation would draw on its own traditions and could borrow from the other’s. As many have noted, the political philosophies of Confucius, Mo Zi, and Huang Zongxi are no less rich than those of the Founding Fathers. Confucius taught that a harmonious relationship is one in [...]
Reason to Hope: A New Deal for Religion and Science
Sun, 30 Sep 2012 23:42:20 +0000Live your life as if there are no miracles and everything is a miracle. – Albert Einstein Crisis in Religion A spate of bestsellers—The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; The End of Faith by Sam Harris; and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by the late Christopher Hitchens—argues that religion, as we’ve known it, no longer serves the needs of our scientific, cosmopolitan world. Books like these appeal to a public put off by science deniers, repulsed by clerical abuses, and alarmed by fundamentalist zealotry. Contemporary religious leaders, painfully aware of the relationship between public participation and institutional viability, know that empty pews, like empty theaters, herald obsolescence. If religion is serious about restoring its public reputation, it could do so by partnering with science. I know that sounds naive, but hear me out. Religion heralds “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” Science gives us reason to think we can vanquish famine, disease, and poverty. What would it take for these venerable antagonists to emulate Rick and Louis in Casablanca and form a beautiful friendship? By way of introducing my answer to this question, I’d like to acknowledge that, despite its current ill-repute in some quarters, religion has [...]
Einstein’s Question: Is the Universe Friendly?
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 19:30:28 +0000[This is the 20th and last in the series. All twenty posts have been collected into a free eBook which can be downloaded at Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship?] We are as gods and have to get good at it. – Stewart Brand The shift from opportunistic predation to inviolate universal dignity is an epochal one, and arguably, it’s one we now find ourselves making. However, it’s only prudent to ask “What could go wrong? What could postpone the advent of a dignitarian world? Are we overlooking new threats to human dignity?” Challenges [Someday human intelligence] might be viewed as a historically interesting, albeit peripheral, special case of machine intelligence. – Pierre Baldi Futurists are warning that at some point during this century we’ll be confronted with an unprecedented threat to what it means to be human—the advent of sophisticated thinking machines. It’s one thing to use calculators that outperform us; it would be quite another to face machines manifesting supra-human intelligence. Picture a cute little gadget perched on your desk who, by any measure, outperforms the cleverest, most creative person you know. We’ll probably program such devices not to condescend to us, but the knowledge that they beat [...]
The Brotherhood of Man and the Politics of Dignity
Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:48:13 +0000[This is the 19th in the series Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship.] As prophets in every religion have tried to tell us, humankind is one big extended family. The simultaneous advent of globalization and the emergence of dignitarian values is no coincidence. Greater exposure to “foreigners” is making their demonization untenable, and, as discussed in previous posts, the predatory strategy is becoming obsolete. An important factor in its demise is that it simply isn’t working as well as it used to. Victims of rankism have gained access to powerful weapons and can exact a high price for humiliations inflicted on them. Increasingly, they’re in a position to make the cost of predation exceed the value of the spoils. Weapons of mass destruction seize the imagination, but even if they’re never used, non-violent “weapons” of mass disruption, employed by aggrieved groups, can paralyze modern, highly interdependent societies. This represents a fundamental shift in the balance of power in favor of the disregarded, disenfranchised, and dispossessed. Given that predation has been a fixture throughout human history, it’s not surprising that when one form of predation has ceased to work, we’ve devised alternative, subtler forms to accomplish the same thing. Although slavery [...]
The Moral Arc of the Universe
Sat, 28 Jul 2012 23:30:50 +0000[This is the 18th in the series Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship.] The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. – Martin Luther King Jr. One reading of the human story emphasizes war, domination, pillage, rape, slavery, colonization, and exploitation. Wealth and leisure for the few and a subsistence living for the many. To the extent that we can put people down and keep them there, we take what’s theirs and force them to do our bidding. To the extent that we can’t credibly do so, it’s our ineluctable fate to be victims. Another telling of history highlights overthrowing tyrants, expelling colonizers, and, by marshaling the strength of numbers, progressively emancipating ourselves from slavery, poverty, and other degradations. The key to deciding which of these perspectives is predictive of the human future lies in a paradoxical property of power. Once it’s understood that a group’s competitive success vis à vis other groups depends on limiting abuses of power within the group, King’s optimism regarding the curvature of the moral arc of history is vindicated. Here’s the gist of the argument: If a ruler is regarded as unjust or self-aggrandizing by his subjects, morale will [...]
Rankism vs. the Golden Rule
Thu, 26 Jul 2012 20:30:37 +0000[This is the 17th in the series Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship.] The Many Faces of Rankism Rankism is a collective name for the various ways power can be abused in the context of a rank difference. It’s a name broad enough to cover a wide range of rank-based indignities and abuses. Whereas rank is meant to serve, rankism is self-serving, a perversion of service. Examples of rankism (some may overlap): • Illegitimate uses of legitimate rank (e.g., a boss extorting money or sex from an employee) • The creation or use of social hierarchies that condone degradation and exploitation (e.g., the social construct of white superiority and supremacy, the caste system) • Damaging or degrading assertions of rank (e.g., hate crimes, sexual harassment, child abuse) • Actions or social arrangements that violate the principle of equal dignity (e.g., racial segregation, lack of the franchise) • Putting others down; disempowering them (name-calling or obfuscation by elites) • Using the power inherent in rank to strengthen the hold on a senior position or otherwise advantage incumbents. (E.g., office-holders exploiting the advantages of incumbency to insure retention of rank; life-time appointments that leave tenured teachers, professors, judges, and clerics virtually unaccountable. [...]
The Source of Indignity
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 22:30:13 +0000[This is the 16th in the series Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship.] What People Want – Dignity There’s a place for us, A time and place for us. Hold my hand and we’re half way there. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there Somehow, Someday, Somewhere! – Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story What people really want in relationships is dignity, not domination. While it’s not hard to understand why people who have suffered oppression might fantasize taking a turn at domination, to actually do so is to over-reach. Domination is not a reciprocal, symmetrical relationship. It’s one of superior and inferior, and simply reversing the roles of sovereign and subject perpetuates indignity rather than ends it. Reversing the directionality of domination is not a long-term equilibrium solution to inequity, indignity, and injustice. Like other revenge-driven “peace” arrangements, it invariably unravels and the struggle for domination resumes. Dignity is in a class by itself when it comes to establishing good relationships with our fellow humans. Why? What do we mean by dignity? Each of us has an innate sense that we have the same inherent worth as anyone else, regardless of our individual traits or worldly status. Though religious [...]
Peace Dividend: A Model of Morality
Sun, 22 Jul 2012 21:00:15 +0000[This is the 15th in the series Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship.] Somebodies and Nobodies Bullying has always bothered me. Not just being bullied, though that too of course. I mean the phenomenon of bullying, in all its forms. I think bullying troubles everyone, even the bullies themselves. No one wants to be pushed around, to be forced to act against one’s own interests. And, if it’s happening to anyone, deep down we know it can happen to us. Growing up, I saw bullying all around me. War was an extreme example of it. Slavery was, too. But, I didn’t need to look that far afield to find bullies. My schools were full of put downs, physical and verbal. Some of my classmates were regularly humiliated with epithets like “retard” and “fatso.” In college and graduate school, one-upmanship was the name of the game. Women were actively discouraged from studying mathematics and physics. Some educators even went so far as to claim that females lacked the “math gene.” And, of course, in mid-century America everyone knew that blacks could be denigrated at will. When our all-white high school athletic teams lost to a school with black players, the N-word [...]
