Revisionist Licensing

Malcom Gladwell's new podcast is called Revisionist History (feed) and this title instilled in me a slightly different expectation than what I got in the first episode. I was expecting either a revision of any widely accepted narrative, or a study of any such widely accepted narrative that had been challenged, more or less successfully. What Gladwell does rather, is take on a certain subject and show how we would generally assume a certain history and in stead get another. It is not very different, but still it is not negating an established thought but rather revealing the twist of closer inspection versus superficial expectation.


There are two episodes out, while I write this and I have only heard the first one, but this episode, The Lady Vanishes was so powerful, I just had to review immediately. Gladwell asks us: If Hilary Clinton will be elected as president, will that pave the way for more women in office or will generally enhance the chances for any other woman to be elected president? The historical sample taken is from the 19th century when the female painter Elizabeth Thompson was about to enter the Royal Society of the Arts in England.

Yes, we would expect such occurrences to work as a sluice that opens, but Gladwell invokes the concept of Moral Licensing from social psychology to show that the opposite might be true and presents the historic examples to support this kind of revisionist history (which I maintain is not exactly revisionist history in the regular sense, but we catch the drift). His point is that frequently individuals and societies allow particular cases of minority members (Women, Colored people, Jews etc) to enter a realm otherwise closed for them, only to satisfy their conscience and consequently proceed to discriminate with renewed ardor. The saddest example Jews in Germany as he takes it from Amos Elon's study "The pity of ot all" - which shows the Jews in German society from 1743-1933 occasionally succeeding to break the glass ceilings and walls, but nevertheless finding themselves eventually in a land that embraced the lethal antisemitism of the Nazis.

It is a very bleak conclusion; it cautions us that when we think discrimination might be over it may come back with a vengeance. While this may exactly be the case, there are two major reservations I have here. One is that this line of thinking has a tendency to be irrefutable because no matter how many examples you may find that discrimination is receding, it might still be a case of moral licensing. The second is that this idea of moral licensing comes from psychology, hence it describes processes in individuals and Gladwell takes this micro-level theory and applies it on a macro-level which is a jump cannot be made just like that.

The History of Islam podcast

The most essential history podcast right now must be The History of Islam podcast (feed) by Elias Belhaddad. Current affairs have a very palpable presence of Islam and much of the history since the rise of Islam (and it rose at lightning speed) has a strong presence of Islam. Yet most historiography (and podcasts as well) can only offer the perspective from without. Yet, as we are in crisis with Islam (and maybe we always were) it seems without a doubt extremely important to acquire understanding of Islam. I certainly feel that way.

Elias Belhaddad clearly has set this as a goal: to inform about Islam and convey its perspective to his audience. The consequence of this is that while we have proceeded 14 episodes into the series, we have only just now arrived at Muhammad and he is about to leave for Medina. Belhaddad has deliberately spent most of his time until this point in laying out the groundwork for what he sees is indispensable for understanding the world and people from which Muhammad and Islam came about.

He has invested in explaining the environment of the Arabian Penninsula and how the harsh nature designates the mentality and life style of the Arab peoples. Then he has gone through great lengths laying out the history of the Quraysh clan, how they came to control Mecca and from there on along the lineage down till Muhammad.

He is clearly passionate about the subject, he has great admiration for the Arab people (though not without criticism), he knows his Arabic and personally I assume he is a Muslim, although he has not divulged any such details about himself which is his full right of course.

Hence this is a podcast of great relevance, done with passion and with much purpose. In addition his audio is good and his delivery is much to my liking. Nevertheless I keep wondering with each and every episode: why is this important? What is the take away message? I am sure Elias has a clear idea where he wants to go, and why he narrates the way he does, but he reveals very little of it. Maybe he feels this keeping of the cards to his chest is an advantage, but I wager, the podcast would gain in depth if he were to be transparent on his decisions of what to put in, what to leave out and what it is he wants to make clear in particular.

The alleged racism of Albert Camus

Albert Camus became my idol, when at the age of 16-17 I read The Stranger for the first time (L’Étranger - I read it in French and in Dutch). On one of the recent issues of Entitled Opinions (feed) host Robert Harrison discussed this novel with Alice Kaplan, Professor of French at Yale University: Alice Kaplan on Albert Camus and The Stranger. And from the start the discussion gave a new interpretation of the racism in The Stranger.

Albert Camus as my idol represented the ultimate personal moralism, cleansed from common hypocrisy and ideological and religious pomposity. However, soon enough my personal saint was seriously challenged in his sainthood: I read an analysis of The Stranger by Conor Cruise O'Brien. O'Brien attempted to show that The Stranger was the product of French colonialist bourgeois cultural baggage. In the novel all the French characters have names and a personalized identity. Yet all the native Algerians are 'Arabs' and Meursaults murder of an 'Arab' is a mere vehicle to bring about an unconvincing show trial which is a vehicle to show Meursaults sanctity of the Camusian kind, yet indifferently ignores the cruelties towards the Arabs in the book to which Meursault shows no protest, judgment or even regret. In short, the Arabs are treated as the subhuman the French colonial was used to treat them and hence the writer and his book are marred by inherent racism. My hero was markedly tainted now; I would not want to give up on him and kept on reading and studying his work, yet O'Brien's harsh criticism was impossible to overlook.

Alice Kaplan turns the issue completely around. She claims that Camus saw his society for what it was and as a court reporter was acutely aware that a case such as Meursault's would be treated as the murder of 'an Arab'. Hence, in her view, Camus' use of the French colonialist language and point of view is deliberate and entails among others a critical view on the inherent racism of his environment. I find it partly convincing for two reasons. For one it fits in with the naturalistic style of The Stranger which meticulously describes Meursault's world as it is, without making it grimmer or prettier and carefully abstaining from all judgment. Secondly, it fits in with Camus' independent moralism as expressed also in his later work. Listen and judge for yourself; as for me, as reluctant as I ever was to take in O'Brien's criticism I still feel that something holds.

The point where it holds connects with my personal experience, today, here in Israel, but also previously, when I still lived in The Netherlands. You see, it has always struck me that even the most politically correct people, those that reject racism wherever they see it and choose the side of the oppressed, they still talk of the oppressed in those generalizing terms. In the society where ethnic identity has such deep implications, even if you are totally against it, you are stuck with a language and public discourse that is drawn along the lines of ethnic categorization and profiling. It means that only if The Stranger would not be written in French and not be set in Algeria in the 1940's the novel would have a beginning of a chance to get away with this kind of inherent racism. It would no longer be The Stranger and would no longer be by Camus. So we will have to live with the criticism no matter what.

More Camus on the blog:
Entitled Opinions (2009),
In Our Time (2008),
In Our Time (2009),
The Partially Examined Life (2011),
Philosophy Bites (2008),
Philosophy Bites (2009).

Reith Lectures 2012 - BBC Podcast

Here is a quick heads up to announce that the Reith lectures Podcast has begun publishing the lecture series that was held about a month ago. Speaker is historian Niall Ferguson and the series title is The Rule of Law and Its Enemies. (feed)

This title is rather reminiscent of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) in which he pointed at Fascism and Communism as the ideologies that held the greatest threat to society. Underlying these ideologies were theories that, in Popper's view, had the kind of tendency towards totalitarianism that brought these ideologies about and what similar dangerous ideologies could emerge.

In 2012 such discourse is not taken to ideologies, as is to be expected. Ferguson takes a look at the institutions and their role in society. But the question is still the same: what helps and what threatens the kind of nation we would like to live in?

Reith Lectures 2011:
Reith Lectures 2011.

Reith Lectures 2010:
Reith Lectures 2010 (2),
Reith Lectures 2010.

Reith Lectures in 2009:
A new politics of the common good,
The bioethics concern,
Morality in Politics,
Morality and the Market.

The Moral Foundations of Politics (Yale)

Currently on my iPod features prominently an open Yale course The Moral Foundations of Politics with Professor Ian Shapiro (feed). This course kicks off with the promise to delve into questions of legitimacy of the political order, but as I am through half the course, we are for the time being, still, mostly delving into the history of political theory, with an additional emphasis on political economy. A lot of Bentham, Mill and by now Marx with a lot of Pareto, Ricardo and Adam Smith.

I am happy though with the four lectures' attention to Marx in this framework. It helped me to understand a little bit more, what I somehow could not digest in the all out reading of Marx's Das Kapital a podcast with Richard Harvey (feed)

Shapiro's delivery of Marx is more distant, more concise and applied. All in all a very interesting course, though I am still waiting to get less economics and more moral philosophy. Maybe in the second half...

More open Yale courses:
History of epidemics,
Early Modern England,
European Civilization 1648-1945,
France since 1871,
New Testament, history and literature.

EHEC and the history of emerging diseases since 1600

Following the news about the outbreak of EHEC infections and looking for relevant podcasts, I found that I had just been listening in the past weeks to a very relevant series of history lectures.

A little over a month ago Yale published a 2010 course Epidemics in western society since 1600 in which Professor Frank Snowden takes us through the past centuries with great inflictions such as Plague, Asiatic Cholera and the Spanish Flu that suddenly emerged and left their mark on history, as well as endemic diseases that had their epidemic and pandemic waves such as Small Pox, Malaria, Polio and others. In addition to the medical background and the medical history around these and other epidemics, Snowden also looks at the effects on society, cultural as well as political in how the diseases were perceived and what were the reactions especially in the field of public health measures and the (scientific) quest for cures. (feed)

Along the way we meet interesting and unknown figures such as the German scientist Max von Pettenkofer (lecture about Contagionism versus Anticontagionism) who, unlike the much more famous Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, did not believe in germs and was proven wrong in his life time. Snowden's lecture shows how Von Pettenkofer, in spite of having the wrong theory about Cholera, as was shown, still made a tremendous contribution to the fight against the disease and you somehow learn to appreciate the anticontagionistic ideas about disease.

As the series closes in on the present and Snowden lectures about SARS, Aviatic Flu and Swine Flu, much of what we witness today with EHEC appears on the scene.

I was thrilled by this series and once started I couldn't stop listening until I had finished. 26 academic hours of very informative and very engaging matter that, as it turns out, in case I had not already realized it before the EHEC outbreak, is extremely relevant in current affairs. Aside new afflictions, such as this mutated strain of E.coli, I was especially struck by the impact of Malaria, which is still rampant today. Eventually the whole series carries but one shining triumph: the eradication of Small Pox. Other than that we still face the old diseases as much as we face the new ones.

The Innocent - New Books in Law

It rarely makes head-lines, but when it does, the news is great and shocking: in the criminal justice system, occasionally, the innocent get convicted. Brandon Garrett wrote a book about the phenomenon: “Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong” (Harvard UP, 2011) He studied 250 US cases where the convicted was re-trialled because evidence had come up that they were innocent. Jim von der Heydt interviewed Garrett on the new podcast from the New Books Network New Books in Law (feed).

In many ways Garrett's research field is just the tip of the iceberg. Many innocent just finish their punishment and are never exempted. But with the aforementioned case-load at hand, Garrett set off to seek an answer to the gnawing question whether the legal system including its officials contain systemic traits that help convicting suspects that are actually innocent. Listen to the interview to find more out about legal constraints to repair the mistakes, the role of legal representation in these cases and obviously, the newly developed technologies for DNA evidence.

It seems to me, however, that one aspect is getting too little attention: a very large portion of convictions (maybe up to 90%) are based on the accused confessing to the crime and this suggests something that has been haunting the legal system forever and will continue to do so, also with DNA evidence: suspects tend to confess. The psychology of both the suspect and the interrogator are pulling towards confession and consequently there is a systemic tendency towards producing confessions, even false confessions. Legal psychologists have been describing this for a long time, including the interrogation techniques that can even instill false memories into the suspects. If you understand Dutch, you can hear this explained in the closing 15 minutes of an interview with the world famous expert Professor W.A. Wagenaar.

New Books in Public Policy

One of the new podcasts that come out of the recently instituted New Books Network is New Books in Public Policy. On this show that has produced three interesting issues already, Tevi Troy interviews the authors of recently published books in this field. (feed)

The first two issues immediately reveal a theme that Troy is engaged in: the dangerous consequences of unscientific medicine in general and the anti-vaccine movement in particular. He had first Robert Goldberg on the show to talk about his research into the workings of the internet as a source for medical information. Although also the scientifically supported medicine is described on the internet, the medium is giving equal footing to quackeries. At best this gives the uninformed public an illusion of two equally valuable perspectives, but frequently, the unscientific is propagated if only for the attention effect it can resort. Goldberg's opinion is that this is done for profit and for fear mongering.

The other interview was with Dr. Paul Offit which explicitly looks at the anti-vaccine movement. His point is that among specialists there is not a shadow of a doubt that vaccines are much needed and basically harmless. He describes the awful consequences of the diminishing percentages of people who have their children not vaccinated. Not only do these children get sick and often suffer terrible long-term handicaps or even death, but in general the population is less well protected than a decade ago. Diseases that could have been exterminated by now are in fact returning.

Troy is a very engaged interviewer which makes this podcast a valuable addition to the NBN.

Tapestry - Karen Armstrong - Compassion (a year hence)

Remember Karen Armstrong's Charter for Compassion? That initiative was launched a little over a year ago and one may wonder how that went further. Armstrong returned to the CBC program Tapestry to tell about it. (feed)


I did not know the Charter started with funding by TED that Armstrong won and was to invest any which way she saw fit. It was not felt when she spoke at TED about the Charter. By now TED's money has been used, but the Fetzer institute stepped in to continue the funding. Apart from the interfaith dialog, there is also a book Twelve steps to a compassionate life - is that a paraphrase of AA's twelve steps program? We do seem to be addicted to our selfishness all right.

Listen to Mary Hines's conversation with Karen Armstrong on Tapestry and and pay attention to what she says about dialog. For me that comes straight to my heart: how I love good conversation and how rare is it. Another podcast that pointed that subject out was On Being when Krista Tippet received John O'Donohue (feed) and he asked: when was the last time you truly conversed with someone else; when you had a conversation where you heard yourself say things you did not know you had in you and thus the dialog changed you both. How often is human interaction a senseless reiteration of the same sentences we speak on and on?

More Tapestry:
Giordano Bruno,
Surviving in the Wilderness,
Survival of the Kindest,
Fear,
Terry Eagleton.

Age of Unequals - Big Ideas

There is also a Philosophy Bites issue in which Alex Voorhoeve argues what is bad about inequality, but that is more on a theoretical level. (see Three issues of Philosophy Bites)

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett took on the practical approach and collected data from all over the world and compared the social fabric of societies where equality is greater to those where inequality is greater, as far as wealth is concerned. On Big Ideas you can hear a lecture in which Wilkinson brings that point with a stream of examples home. What is interesting to find out is that not only is inequality bad for the poor. In societies where there is greater inequality there is more crime, more psychiatric disorder and people are less happier and live less longer and this affects the rich as well.

More Big Ideas:
Dan Dennett: what should replace religion?,
Chris Hedges,
Needham about China,
The Reluctant Fundamentalist,
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the quest against Islam.

The latest revolution

Sorry, yes, I have not been blogging for nearly a month. I have been listening to podcasts though and here is a handful around one theme: the wave of popular uprisings in North-Africa and the Middle East.

BBC Analysis (feed)
Rethinking the Middle East; Maha Azzam examines the long term implications of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. Get updated with some backgrounds within half an hour.

Rear Vision (feed)
The Arab world; As political unrest spreads across the Middle East and North Africa we take a look at the history of the Arab world, through the 20th century. Another mere half hour to get smart quicker. A very learned and concise introduction to the relevant history.

Africa Past and Present (feed)
Salah Hassan and Ken Harrow (Michigan State University) on the democratic revolutions in North Africa. Events in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt are analyzed from below and above, with focus on the perspectives of youth, creative uses of technology, as well as the connections to, and relevance of, the events to Africa and the wider world.

CNES (feed)
Podcasts from the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. The Egyptian Intifada in Historical Perspective; A lecture by Joel Beinin, Stanford University. If you want to be more thorough and are ready to spend a couple of hours, start here. An in-depth expose of the Egyptian situation, with noted applicability to the other countries in uproar is given here. The shorter references in the other podcasts will then be less enigmatic.

LSE Podcast (feed)
A Perfect Storm in the Arab World?
Regardless of the outcome of events in Egypt, for Arabs, psychologically and symbolically, this is their Berlin Wall moment. They are on the brink of a democratic wave similar to the one that swept through Eastern Europe more than 20 years ago, hastening the Soviet Union's collapse. The Arab intifada has put to rest the claim that Islam and Muslims are incompatible with democracy. The democratic virus is mutating and will probably give birth to a new language - and a new era - of politics in the Arab world. Fawaz A. Gerges is a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He also holds the Emirates Chair of the Contemporary Middle East and is the Director of the Middle East Centre at LSE.
Here also Israel and Iran are entering the equation.

And if you want more Israeli and Jewish perspective:
Radio Open Source (feed)
A Jewish Argument around the Arab Revolt
Philip Weiss, exulting in the glorious news from Egypt, says: “the handwriting on the wall is Arabic.” The 55-year-old meta-journalist dedicates his website MondoWeiss to “the war of ideas in the Middle East.” His project is more daring and difficult than that sounds. Really it’s to start something between a moral argument and a civil war over the big book of Jewish tradition and “spiritual wholeness” — over US national interests, the Palestinian condition, Israel and the whole modern idea of Zionism, by which he means the judgment from 19th and 20th Century European experience that Jews cannot be safe as a tiny minority in non-Jewish countries.

Chris Hedges - Big Ideas

I am currently listening to many issues of Big Ideas and I think I will make a combined review later this week, but here I'd like to shortly separate out a lecture by Chris Hedges on his book The Death of the Liberal Class. (feed) On the same book he was interviewed by Christopher Lydon at Radio Open Source which I reviewed as well.

Hedges is extremely critical of western and especially American society and in addition to that extremely pessimistic. After you have listened to him, you really feel that fascism is going to take over really soon. At the Big Ideas lecture you get some insight as to where his dedication and inspiration comes from. This is not only left leaning politics, which has become clear in other shows just as well, nor his experiences in the wars in Yugoslavia, although none of these should be underestimated as influence.

I was surprised to learn of his Christian angle, which is just as unconventional as it is conventional. Pay attention where he says: I didn't study so many years on the seminary, only to find... In addition to his left politics it is also his religion that has imbued him with high social standards and which make him angry, sad and deeply disappointed to find that in modern society these values are mindlessly and systematically trodden. That makes you understand why he is so bleak.

More Big Ideas:
Needham about China,
The Reluctant Fundamentalist,
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the quest against Islam,
Jewish Humor,
JRR Tolkien versus CS Lewis.

More Chris Hedges:
On Open Source,
On Media Matters.

Naomi Klein: Addicted to risk - TED

More TED:
Rise of women, fall of men - inequality again,
Rory Sutherland,
Dimitar Sasselov,
Sir Ken Robinson,
Photos that changed the world - Jonathan Klein.

More Naomi Klein:
Naomi Klein on Media Matters,
Naomi Klein on Big Ideas.

Justice according to Michael Sandel - Philosophy Bites

Philosophy Bites just had a show in which they had Michael Sandel explain the ideas of Justice. The best podcast on philosophy with the most clear mind in the field of Justice - what more do you want? (feed)

If you have followed Sandel's vodcast about Justice (at Harvard), what he says is not new. Yet he manages to sum up in twenty minutes what takes hours in the series. The two polar approaches to justice are consequentialist utilitarianism on the one hand, which tries to capture justice by looking at the outcome of behavior and law and the measure to which the outcome is worthy or not. On the other side is the idea of fundamental right and wrong, which tries to find justice in a priori values. Sandel chooses neither side nor makes a suggestion for a third way as the one right approach, but rather comes up with the third approach in order to further inform and balance out the polarity.

The remaining thought then is that the search for Justice continues yet Sandel has enriched our tool box which helps us on the way.

More Philosophy Bites:
Three issues of Philosophy Bites,
Morality,
The genocide and the trial,
Dirty Hands,
Understanding decisions.

Chris Hedges - Radio Open Source

Here is a quick recommendation to listen to Radio Open Source, where Christopher Lydon interviews Chris Hedges about his bleak outlook on modern world in general and the US society in particular. Here he explains how he think our democracy is run down the drain - with Democrats and Republicans equally guilty. (feed)

About a year and a half ago, we also heard him on Media Matters with an equally grim depiction of where we live. Also here his concern is liberal democracy, but here he discusses how our culture is dumbing down and thus is undermining the proper political state. (feed)

More Radio Open Source:
Geography shifting big history,
Kai Bird,
Amartya Sen on India,
Mustafa Barghouti,
Jackson Lears.

Rise of women, fall of men - inequality again

Most of the time, in most places of the world, I think, women are still discriminated against. The inequality mostly still is at the expense of women, yet, in the TED Talk I embed below, Hanna Rosin presents data of the rise of women in the modern age, in the modern world and the extent seems to not go towards equality, but rather show a flipped reality, in which women are the better performers, the better earners, the ones in power. And Rosin seems to also ask: was this what Feminism was aiming for? (feed)



I have been aware of some elements of what Rosin makes visible. For example, I have been seeing for decades that there is an especially underpriviliged chanceless class of uneducated poor young men. These days, for a man to be without education is worse than for women. Rosin adds the next nail to the coffin: men have been underperforming in the educational system for a long time. Consequently, this class of male drop-outs is only growing. Consequnetly, as Rosin has made me realize, our culture will change and within it our stereotypes of men and woman. We both fear that the next inequality will be just as bad as the other and most of all worse than the equality we had hoped for.

A last point to make is about this show being a videocast. I prefer podcast; my listening time lies especially in moments when my hands and eyes need to be somewhere else. Ted Talks are great videos to look at, but this specific talk I tested listening while not looking and there is very little you miss. I have experienced that this goes for many videocasts and so, if you are inclined like me towards audio alone, do not discard the vodcasts off the cuff.

More TED:
Rory Sutherland,
Dimitar Sasselov,
Sir Ken Robinson,
Photos that changed the world - Jonathan Klein,
Karen Armstrong on The Golden Rule.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the quest against Islam

In June Ayaan Hirsi Ali gave the Donner lecture in Toronto Canada. The lecture was podcast with CBC's Ideas and TVO's Big Ideas. The point of her lecture is to show that Islam is dominated by a destructive ideology, she calls it the ideology of death. Her mission appears to be to warn the west of how fundamentally different this ideology is from its own, she calls it an ideology of life. In addition she hopes to reach as many Muslims as possible and to persuade them to give up the ideology of death, which means to either turn away from Islam or reform it - although she is quite pessimistic about the rational forces within Islam.

I think her strong point lies in showing optimistic multiculturalists that a rational dialog with Islamists is rather impossible. The ideology of death, the irrational readiness to choose sacrifice in death is easily overlooked and as a result the true intentions of the likes of Ahmedinijad are easily misconstrued. A rationalist interpretation of Ahmedinijad's strife for nuclear weapons and his collision course with the west will not be able to see that death and total destruction are an acceptable element in his mind set.

I think her weak point lies the uneven perspective she is taking on Islam and on the West. She is looking at Islam from the downside, fed by her own biographic experience, emphasizing the dogmatism, the oppression and the irrational simplified version of it. The West she views from the upside and here the dogmatism, the oppression and the irrational simplified versions of Christianity, Judaism, Capitalism, Communism, Liberalism and so on, which historically can be shown to show their ugly heads, are pushed to the background. She is so entrenched in framing the competition as the famous clash of cultures that there can only be for and against. It goes so far that during the question and answer session, which can only be heard on Ideas, she calls someone like Tariq Ramadan a 'Closet Islamist'.

More Big Ideas:
Jewish Humor,
JRR Tolkien versus CS Lewis,
Malcolm Gladwell,
The Age of Inequality,
Disappearing cultures.

More Ideas:
Short review.

Office Hours - Sociology Podcast

Early in the past Summer a sociology podcast, Office Hours, was recommended to me by one of his makers - see Reported Podcasts Summer 2010. Consequently I have tried two episodes from the backlog and keeping it in my feed readers for the coming updates. Among the social sciences in podcast we mostly see economics and psychology and relatively few sociology so it is good to have this one around. (feed)

When I studied Sociology in the good old days, we had a running joke about sociological research: it somehow tended to narrow down on too specific a subject. We would call it 'Alcoholism in Drenthe' (Drenthe is a small region in The Netherlands) and if that would not put the message through we would add 'Alcoholism among school teachers in Drenthe'. The point being, how much can you learn about alcoholism, about Drenthe or about school teachers if this is the study. And so, with some trepidation I watched the subject list and listened to issue Elizabeth Wissinger on Modeling.

A much more general issue was found when they discussed Studs Terkel and I was surprised and extremely delighted to hear Harvey Pekar on the show. If I recall correctly Studs Terkel was also discussed one day at the BBC program about sociology Thinking Allowed.

Alan Rabinowitz at Speaking of Faith

At APM's Speaking of Faith, three weeks ago, Krista Tippett spoke with Alan Rabinowitz who is a zoologist and wildlife conservationist. The title for the program was: A Voice for the Animals. As such, you would expect a conversation about animal rights and what animals and the biosphere  mean for the world. That would be interesting in itself, but the issue to a whole other turn. (feed)

Tippett's conversation with Rabinowitz, concentrated much more on him as a person and the individual challenges he has to overcome in order to achieve what he has been achieving in life. For example, there is his stutter and although having a stutter, certainly as serious as he had it, is quite the handicap, Rabinowitz's life story shows how a challenge can turn into a quality. Having a stutter shut him out socially, but allowed him to bond with animals and develop the skills he needed for his profession. And then, his profession and his bothersome relationship with speech and the social constraints of life, allowed him his insights.

But that is not all, there is also his amazing encounter with the Asian pygmy and by the end of the show, his candid discussion of what it means to have cancer. And in the mean time, he has also touched on the meaning of having children. And so, this show goes beyond the subject of animal rights and if Rabinowitz supplies a voice for the animals, human beings are part of that palette he speaks for - the man with the stutter.


More Speaking of Faith:
Desmond Tutu,
China, secularism, religiosity,
Three issues of Speaking of Faith,
Preserving Ojibwe,
The story and God.

Reading Marx's Das Kapital - David Harvey

By the end of the lecture David Harvey tells Marx once said: "I am not a Marxist." It appears that even in his own time, many things were ascribed to Marx which Marx did not intend. Furthermore, Harvey claims at the beginning, few people integrally read Marx's central work - Capital (Das Kapital). Mostly it is quoted in part, which is prone to misquote or taken into the wrong context. In this podcast David Harvey takes us with him in his 2008 version of the course he has been teaching over 40 years: about Das Kapital, volume one, as a whole (Reading Marx's Capital).

The course is available in an audio feed as well as a video feed. I have embedded the video of the first lecture below and with me, you will find that there is hardly anything you miss out on if you take only the audio.

After the (nice) addition of the little conversation at the beginning, it kicks off with the first lecture about the first chapter and generally how this book is to be read. It had me excited right from the start. Not only is it worth to engage into the question how one should address any author's major work with Marx as an example, for it is not just him who is victim of endless quoting in snippets and stereotypical interpretation. I was also thinking of Mills, Darwin, Keynes and Freud to name but a few. In addition Marx kicks off with taking us to pondering the value of a commodity - to analyze the value transitions of any simple product we purchase any time any day without much thought.


Class 01 Reading Marx's Capital from David Harvey on Vimeo.

I want to thank my reader Naveh for pointing me to this series.