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"Here's some background those befuddled Democrats need to know: One of the most robust and effective conspiracy theories on the right, the notion that "secularism" – or, just as often, "Secular Humanism" – is a religion is meant to be taken entirely literally: right wingers genuinely believe it refers to an actually existing religious practice. How do conservatives know? Because, they say, the Supreme Court said so. "
"Rhizome.org’s annual “Seven on Seven” conference isn’t really meant to have a theme beyond simply exploring the intersection of art and technology. Rhizome director Lauren Cornell plays yenta, matching various figures from the two fields who then brainstorm collaborations and build whatever prototypes can be whipped up in the very abbreviated 24-hours they actually have together (the teams first meet Friday morning, then talk, hatch an idea, and finally present on Saturday afternoon). It was notable, then, that at this year's conference — held April 14 at the New Museum — a theme did emerge organically: Quite a few of these pairs, in one way or another, were responding to a sense that the quality of mental experience was on the decline in our over-wired world."
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Once upon a time, when I was overwhelmed by my reading load in college, I took a speed reading course. The conclusion I came to was that the tricks of speed reading were fine for absorbing raw information, but useless when it came to processing literature. In fact, I realized that literary language was almost specifically engineered to thwart anyone who is trying to relate to it in this way. So I gave up on speed reading. Yet pretty much all those tricks — reading an article out of order, scanning paragraphs as single blocks — are now how I naturally process the flood of emails and online articles I have to consume everyday for my job.
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Maybe our present-day glut of communication is just something we are becoming acclimated to, and we will all, in the future, be happily welded into our Google Glasses, Borg-like. Or maybe at some point, we'll suffer the mental equivalent of a nuclear meltdown, and society will realize that we need to regulate our exposure to technology before it completely dehumanizes us. (As David Auerbach puts it in a recent essay debunking the idea of computer intelligence, computers are not going to adjust to our humanity naturally, so if we don't engage with them critically, there can only be one result: "Their dumbness will become ours.") Or maybe — this is the third way, and the one that the Rhizome conference by nature defaults to — some soulful inventors will find a way to use technology against itself, creating applications that somehow help cure us of our info addiction without forcing us to go cold turkey.
"Products of intelligent design typically have capabilities that exceed usefulness precisely because these can be “intelligently” engineered, not in order to make the product more useful but in order to make it more impressive. In biological evolution, by contrast, “barely good enough” is the highest level that can be reached, because expense that does not improve overall fitness cannot be tolerated. The “barely good enough” standard is also maintained in biological evolution because species characteristics cannot be redesigned from scratch. Human bipedalism is far less than perfect—consider all those endemic back problems! It is clearly the result of a quadruped design being turned into a biped design rather than having been intelligently designed from scratch. This is exactly the mark of the “blind watchmaker” of natural evolution. But the nonblind watchmakers who intelligently design watches can, and do, redesign from scratch."
"The Prevail Project aims to be the worldwide clearinghouse for humanistic response to rapid technological change. Its goal is to accelerate bottom-up, enlightened triumph in the face of exponential challenges the way the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency accelerates technology. Its core hope is that in the face of unprecedented transformation, humans will continue to prevail, shaping their own futures, toward their own ends, rather than being the pawns of their explosively powerful technologies. For the only enduring advantage is to learn faster than the competition. And the best way to anticipate the future is to invent it yourself."
"But the silver lining here is that what will most improve or sharpen practices of new media creation and interpretation is not technical skill with hardware and software nor is it being the most brave-new-worldish professor on the block. What would most dramatically improve or transform existing digital practices of cultural interpretation and information literacy would be the extrapolation and extension of many of the existing and long-standing strengths of humanistic inquiry. Note I do not say, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” New media environments are new, and the jobs and practices which extend from them are also novel. "
Rosa Luxemburg’s letters have been published in English before, but this collection, of which about two-thirds are newly translated, has delivered to us a real, recognizable human being. In the previous volumes, Luxemburg often seemed uniformly heroic; here we have her in all her strength and all her frailty. And it is in the letters from prison, more than in any others she wrote, that she emerges as one of the most emotionally intelligent socialists in modern history, a radical of luminous dimension whose intellect is informed by sensibility, and whose largeness of spirit places her in the company of the truly impressive. To one old comrade she writes, “To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life ‘on the giant scales of fate’ if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud…the world is so beautiful, with all its horrors, and would be even more beautiful if there were no weaklings or cowards in it.”
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From earliest times, Luxemburg had felt existentially homeless. She believed that “home” was to be found in a cause great enough to make world and self come together in a common effort to renew the human race. That effort, of course, was socialism. At the same time, she understood—really understood—that socialism had to be made, on a daily basis, from the inside out, through the internal struggle of people to humanize (that is, “socialize”) themselves, even as they worked for radical change. She knew instinctively that if socialists closed down inside, they’d become the kind of people who, devoid of fellow feeling, would make police-state socialism. This was Luxemburg’s single most important insight—that socialists must remain empathic beings throughout their revolutionary lives. Otherwise, she asked, what kind of world would they be making? Whom would it serve? And how would human existence be bettered? This meditation never left her; in fact, as the years went on it grew in size and depth. Out of it, ultimately, comes her opposition to war, her criticism of Lenin, her analysis of why she reads Tolstoy in prison instead of Marx.
And it all begins—and ends—with Leo. It was with Leo that she hungered to see this great ideal of hers come to life, with Leo that she wanted to make, in the here and now, a socialist home within themselves, through the nourishment of mutual love. Leo, however, would not play ball—and Rosa could not give it up. Hundreds of letters passed between them. For years on end, his are cold and inexpressive, consisting solely of political advice, criticism and instruction, while hers are saturated with bitter objection to his emotional stinginess.
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Right now I’m as touchy and skittish as a hare. Your slightest gesture or inconsequential remark makes my heart shrink and seals my mouth…. I’ve had so many thoughts to share with you…. I don’t know, I don’t know how to behave, I can’t get control over the way I am in our relationship. I don’t know how to do it. I’m not capable of taking firm hold of the situation…so much love and suffering have accumulated in my soul that I throw myself at you, throw my arms around your neck, and your coldness pains me—it tears at my soul, and I hate you for it—and I feel I could kill you.
"Worlds Made of Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West by Anthony Grafton"
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The new humanism spends little time exalting man as an ideal. It says nothing, or next to nothing, about faith, hope, and charity; is scathing about patriotism; and is dismissive of those rearguard actions in defense of the family, public spirit, and sexual restraint that animated my parents. Instead of idealizing man, the new humanism denigrates God and attacks the belief in God as a human weakness.
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Les Humains Associés
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