segunda-feira, outubro 30, 2006

O caminho da vida



"Suponhamos uma estrada longa, em cuja extensão se encontram, de distância em distância, mas com intervalos desiguais, florestas que se tem de atravessar e, à entrada de cada uma, a estrada, larga e magnífica, se interrompe, para só continuar à saída. O viajor segue por essa estrada e penetra na primeira floresta. Aí, porém, não dá com caminho aberto; depara-se-lhe, ao contrário, um dédalo inextricável em que ele se perde. A claridade do Sol há desaparecido sob a espessa ramagem das árvores. Ele vagueia, sem saber para onde se dirige. Afinal, depois de inauditas fadigas, chega aos confins da floresta, mas extenuado, dilacerado pelos espinhos, machucado pelos pedrouços. Lá, descobre de novo a estrada e prossegue a sua jornada, procurando curar-se das feridas.

Mais adiante, segunda floresta se lhe antolha, onde o esperam as mesmas dificuldades. Mas, ele já possui um pouco de experiência e dela sai menos contundido. Noutra, topa com um lenhador que lhe indica a direção que deve seguir para se não transviar. A cada nova travessia, aumenta a sua habilidade, de maneira que transpõe cada vez mais facilmente os obstáculos. Certo de que à saída encontrará de novo a boa estrada, firma-se nessa certeza; depois, já sabe orientar-se para achá-la com mais facilidade. A estrada finaliza no cume de uma montanha altíssima, donde ele descortina todo o caminho que percorreu desde o ponto de partida. Vê também as diferentes florestas que atravessou e se lembra das vicissitudes por que passou, mas essa lembrança não lhe é penosa, porque chegou ao termo da caminhada. É qual velho soldado que, na calma do lar doméstico, recorda as batalhas a que assistiu. Aquelas florestas que pontilhavam a estrada lhe são como que pontos negros sobre uma fita branca e ele diz a si mesmo: “Quando eu estava naquelas florestas, nas primeiras, sobretudo, como me pareciam longas de atravessar! Figurava-se-me que nunca chegaria ao fim; tudo ao meu derredor me parecia gigantesco e intransponível. E quando penso que, sem aquele bondoso lenhador que me pôs no bom caminho, talvez eu ainda lá estivesse! Agora, que contemplo essas mesmas florestas do ponto onde me acho, como se me apresentam pequeninas! Afigura-se-me que de um passo teria podido transpô-las; ainda mais, a minha vista as penetra e lhes distingo os menores detalhes; percebo até os passos em falso que dei.”

Allan Kardec, Obras Póstumas.



Otimismo


Se o naufrágio é inevitável, então afundemos graciosamente...

sábado, outubro 21, 2006

A fé que se nega

O ateísmo militante, um fenômeno que se tornou muito visível e aparentemente muito mais conhecido depois do advento da Internet, é uma corrente de pensamento das mais interessantes. Em primeiro lugar porque, com um pouco de cuidado, o internauta de todas as posições filosóficas tem nele um acervo considerável de textos e documentos úteis ao exame da religião, especialmente, como era de se esperar, sob um viés crítico. Em um dos mais ricos portais dedicados ao assuntos, o Internet Infidels, pode-se encontrar uma coleção de livros, ensaios e demais textos que examinam questões como a existência de Deus, a legitimidade da religião e do materialismo, as dificuldades da noção de vida após a morte, os fundamentos do método científico, a teodicéia e outros problemas filosóficos, além de temas ligados à ética e à moral. E o Infidels nem de longe é o único site dedicado a tais questões, embora certamente esteja entre os melhores. Conhecê-lo é, tanto para a pessoa religiosa quanto para a não-religiosa, uma exploração intelectual altamente estimulante, desde que se esteja preparado, no caso dos primeiros, para pôr as próprias crenças à prova.

Quando se faz esse exercício, é algo que ganha um novo significado: não precisa ser mais dogmática, ou fundada na desqualificação de quem a questiona. Pode-se simplesmente mantê-la reconhecendo que tem pontos mais ou menos aceitáveis, mais ou menos acessíveis ao exame puramente racional e, sim, que pode ter pontos que, de tão subjetivos, não são demonstráveis. Essa consciência, moldada nos embates mentais que a leitura de boa vontade dos ateus (ou céticos ou agnósticos) necessariamente propicia, inspira um setimento de humildade quanto às nossas convicções que é extremamente saudável. O auto-exame implícito nessas confrontações pode ser um excelente antídoto contra o fanatismo, o proselitismo exagerado e a adesão emocional inconseqüente a uma doutrina religiosa, infelizmente tão comum. Os "infiéis" forçam os religiosos a analisarem até onde seus princípios e crenças levam, coisa que muitas vezes não é feita nos púlpitos e seminários. Eles são muito hábeis em apontar incoerências, levantar questões obscuras, dados históricos e a minar a propaganda proselitista, que em várias ocasiões não sobrevive a um olhar mais crítico e informado.


Entretanto, esse esforço questionador dos ateus militantes e seus companheiros de cruzada anti-religiosa -- particularmente anti-cristãos --não os isenta dos mesmos males que se propõem combater. Suas fileiras também possuem os dogmáticos, os "senhores da verdade", os fanáticos e os proselitistas inconseqüentes. Também eles, tão céticos das crenças tradicionais de todos os quadrantes do globo, por vezes fecham os olhos às suas inconsistências e aos seus próprios maus hábitos de pensamento, fechando-se numa visão de mundo auto-congratulatória tão confortável e ingênua quanto a do religioso mais ardente. Isso porque, tanto num lado quanto do outro dessa disputa de convicções, somos todos humanos, e cada qual busca alento e diretrizes da forma como pode. Sejam evangélicos, muçulmanos, ateus, liberais ou marxistas, as energias psicológicas em questão não diferem muito: todos querem uma grade de referências com que entender o mundo e o seu papel nele. Uma vez que julguem tê-la encontrada, irão defendê-la com unhas e dentes, nem sempre da forma mais racional e justa.

Isso dito, é curioso como a história nos leva a certas inversões. Outrora a ciência era vista como uma forma, e não necessariamente a mais elevada, de dar a conhecer a obra de Deus e afirmar sua divina glória; hoje, ela é invocada não apenas para afirmar a absoluta impossibilidade de Deus e de uma dimensão espiritual do universo, como até mesmo para descartar a religiosidade como um artifício da natureza biológica do homem, útil até certo ponto mas já perfeitamente dispensável, quando não claramente prejudicial ao avanço da civlização. Tendo sido alçada à autoridade que um dia foi da religião, a ciência é, para alguns, o grande árbitro de todas as questões humanas, e, da mesma forma como antigamente se invocavam as fontes da fé na luta contra o demônio e seus representantes, o parecer do cientista se reveste de uma aura que poucos ousam desafiar. Aos olhos da maioria, ele é o cume da civilização, o sacerdote do verdadeiro saber, o arauto do único tipo de progresso legítimo. E alguns sabem muito bem do poder que possuem. Richard Dawkins, geneticista americano de renome, é um desses; um cruzado na guerra contra toda fé, sua obra é extensa e uma referência obrigatória para os que crêem ser a religião não apenas uma questão pessoal e inócua -- como asatuais regras de boas-maneiras sugerem que a tratemos --, mas uma enfermidade mental e cultural que deve ser extirpada do seio da humanidade tão logo seja possível.

Nesta resenha para a London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton, professor universitário e crítico literário, aborda o mais novo lance de Dawkins na sua luta para "sanear" a mente humana. O link para o site original se encontra no título do post.

--------------
Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

Terry Eagleton

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins · Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.

Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.

Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The suicide abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr surrenders his or her most precious possession for the ultimate well-being of others. This act of self-giving is generally known as sacrifice, a word that has unjustly accrued all sorts of politically incorrect implications. Jesus, Dawkins speculates, might have desired his own betrayal and death, a case the New Testament writers deliberately seek to rebuff by including the Gethsemane scene, in which Jesus is clearly panicking at the prospect of his impending execution. They also put words into his mouth when he is on the cross to make much the same point. Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas’ surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes his treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons of destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.

Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.

Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.

Some currents of the liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays degenerated into a rather nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my view this is no reason not to champion liberalism. In some obscure way, Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible for Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its fallibility), and who could refrain from writing sentences like ‘this objection [to a particular scientific view] can be answered by the suggestion . . . that there are many universes,’ as though a suggestion constituted a scientific rebuttal. On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn’t know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where he lives.)

There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion.

It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole wave,’ he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’ There are, he generously concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University. His latest book is How to Read a Poem.

quinta-feira, outubro 19, 2006

Sentimental

Ponho-me a escrever teu nome
com letras de macarrão.
No prato, a sopa esfria, cheia de escamas
e debruçadas na mesa todos completam
esse romântico trabalho.

Desgraçadamente falta uma letra,
uma letra somente
para acabar teu nome!

- Está sonhando? Olhe que a sopa esfria!

Eu estava sonhando...
E há em todas as consciências um cartaz amarelo:
"Neste país é proibido sonhar."

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

quarta-feira, outubro 18, 2006

A violência e o Islã

Islam's heritage of violence

In an interview with Michael Mönninger, Abdelwahab Meddeb is perplexed by the Pope but makes clear that more shows of violence simply reinforce what he said.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/978.html

Die Zeit: Mr. Meddeb, how is it that in the Middle Ages, a peaceful dispute between Christians and Muslims was possible, whereas today, the very mention of these times causes an uproar?

Abdelwahab Meddeb: Because at that time, the Islamic world was home to a large, well-educated upper class which encouraged debate. Throughout the medieval period, there were renowned literary salons in major cities like Baghdad that were run by aristocratic patrons and merchants and whose sole raison d’être was to bring together Christians, Jews and various sects who did not agree at all on questions of faith. The Pope is wrong to speak of a single Islamic doctrine; there were many, and they were often the subject of open disputes. In Tunis, the capital of the Maghreb, the Sultan explicitly placed progressive theologians under the protection of the freedom of opinion and defended them against attacks by the people. Of course, the majority of simple Muslims were uneducated and hardly willing to be persuaded by the power of logic and arguments as the intellectuals hoped. Today, we have comparable Muslim masses, but there is little trace of an educated elite capable of leading the discussion.

Die Zeit: An obviously historical quotation used by the Pope is immediately understood as a declaration of aggression in the here and now. What is the source of this lack of historical awareness among Muslims?

Meddeb: I would ask you to consider that the Pope used this quotation not as a historical reference but as an assessment of Islam today. Nonetheless, Muslims must recognise that the aspects of their religion addressed by the Pope are not a malicious invention, but something that has existed from the outset in spoken and written form. For far too long now, Islam has failed to openly discuss this dangerous dimension of its faith. The imams and theologians are to blame for not dealing with the ignorance in their communities. The protesting masses show that the official state version of Islam has failed and that the old mediating role of the clerics is on the verge of bankruptcy. They are afraid that their mythology and the foundations of their faith will be demystified by historical and scientific criticism. So they put up barriers. Paradoxically, they are abetted in this by Western stereotypes, such as the claim that there is no dividing line between the religious and the political. In saying this, Western experts on Islam are in accord with the fundamentalists. A glance at the history of Islam shows that the claim is totally false.

Die Zeit: By raising the issue of violence, did the Pope hit a raw nerve?

Meddeb: Actually he didn’t, because theologians have been discussing this issue in great detail for centuries. In Islam, both sides exist: those who want conversion by the sword and want to kill all non-believers, and those who call for an end to coercion as part of religion. What is worrying is that in spite of this split, the violent side is the only one present in the media and in the self-image of Muslims. It’s just that when the Muslim subject falls ill, it chooses the warlike part of the Prophet’s message.

Die Zeit: Where does this disease come from?

Meddeb: If fanaticism was the disease of Catholicism and Nazism was the German disease, then fundamentalism is the disease of Islam. On the one hand, it is a way of fleeing the centuries-old inferiority to the West, but it is also a reaction to the failure of the West to acknowledge Islam as representing an inner otherness. But we should no longer react to these provocations by purely military means as in the failed war in Iraq. The real danger is not warlike Islam but authoritarian Islam which subjects day-to-day life in its entirety to religious practice.

Die Zeit: What was more provocative about the speech given by Pope Benedict XVI. – his criticism of the basis of the Islamic faith because it stands above all reason, or his raising of the question of violence?

Meddeb: The Pope is right to suggest that in principle, all belief systems built on ultimate truths will produce fanaticism. But what the Pope says about the role of reason in Islam is totally at odds with historical reality. One only has to study the theologians who convincingly founded Islam on reason following debates on Christianity and Hellenism. Seeing as he is German, it's a mystery to me why the Pope is not familiar with the rich intellectual resources devoted to these very issues by Islamic studies in Germany. That said, the protesting Muslims don’t have the slightest interest in subtleties like the question of reason. They take to the street because of the Pope’s mention of the issue of violence, and they don’t even realise that these violent manifestations confirm what the Pope is saying. Well into the nineteenth century and in many cases until the end of the colonial period, the great Islamic reformers repeatedly managed to neutralise jihad. But after World War I, the Islamists rediscovered jihad as a driving force to restore the hegemony and sovereignty of Islam.

Die Zeit: Are we going to see violent outbreaks like those triggered by the recent dispute over the Muhammed cartoons?

Meddeb: Only if the familiar feedback starts up again. In this matter, many Muslims resemble the Western media: they only show up when there’s trouble, because they love it when things escalate.

Die Zeit: What can the Pope do?


Meddeb: On no account should he tone down the dispute or allow himself to be intimidated. He has already apologised too much. I am very glad that he has addressed these problems. There is a growing number of Muslims who are willing to deal with such criticism in depth.

Die Zeit: Where does the violence in Islam come from?

Meddeb: It really is not unique to Islam. But whereas it took Christianity a thousand years to discover fire and the sword, this violent persuasion was part of Islam’s inheritance from the very beginning. Muhammed was a warlike Prophet, and the Islamic conquests from China to Spain followed a quasi-Napoleonic principle. Yes, Muhammed was a kind of successful Napoleon. But this is less astonishing than the fact that there was violence in Christianity, as this was completely at odds with the spirit of the gospels. Acting against all Christian teachings, there were Popes who also called for holy war and promised religious warriors a place in the kingdom of heaven. Not to mention the forced conversions during the Inquisition, when Jews and Muslims in Spain had the choice between exile, burning at the stake, and baptism. But just as the Christians overcame their historical phase of violence, the Muslims face the same challenge. What Europe experienced in the age of the Enlightenment happened a century later in the Arab world, coming mainly from Egypt, which until the interwar period was the centre of modernity and reason in the Islamic world. That was the place most likely to produce a figure like Spinoza, someone to finally break the taboo of the holiness of scripture.

Die Zeit: Why did this process stall?

Meddeb: Since the Middle Ages, Islam has been left behind by the rise of Christianity and has resigned itself to this plight. But we should not forget that Christianity too had to pass through the bloodbath of interdenominational wars. The fundamentalists’ current struggle against modernity can be seen as a form of belated inter-denominational war. One major problem is the failed Westernisation of many Muslims, who only have a scant knowledge of their own tradition and who are looking for a replacement. There is no more dramatic example than the attackers of September 11th, who may have been incapable of building aeroplanes but who were at least able to pilot them.

Die Zeit: What can the West do to ensure that this new religious war ends well?

Meddeb: What Europe must do – above all the Germans and the French – is to face Islam with solid convictions and to make clear to the Arab states what a danger the fundamentalists pose to the world. To give just one example: many countries have no idea of the unbelievable things going on in their schools. After September 11th, when Saudi Arabia’s leaders were reeling under the shock of Saudi nationals having attacked the country’s traditional protector, the USA, the Saudis were surprised to realise that their children’s schoolbooks contained things that were bound to produce hordes of little bin Ladens. The rulers of many Arab states have long since lost touch with their populations, which is most clearly visible in the puritanical Stone Age Islam of the Wahhabis.

Die Zeit: Which Islamic country holds the most promise in this respect?


Meddeb: Turkey. Its status as part of Europe is a matter of survival for us. Admitting the Turks into the EU would provide essential confirmation of the solidity of our principles, which are not just Judeo-Christian, but which contain a mighty historical promise of convergence. On this point, I do not agree at all with the Pope, who rejects the entry of Turkey into the EU. But I also think Morocco is on the right path, even if it has seen no republican awakening like Turkey. As a result of the French influence, the whole of the northern Mediterranean region is suited to becoming a laboratory for European thought. Only here can we win the worldwide cultural battle against the Islamists.

Die Zeit: But is Turkey modern enough?

Meddeb: I'm sure it is. The claims that a new Islamic republic is emerging in Turkey are all false. I only know one other country that defends its republican achievements with as much vigour as Turkey, and that is France. Democratic Islam is just as feasible as democratic Christianity. Moreover, the Turkish army protects secularism and makes sure that the Islamists abide by pluralism. What is happening in Turkey and Morocco is the strongest force in disarming the type of fundamentalism that is currently developing in Pakistan, the most dangerous development of its kind in the world. In Pakistan, fundamentalism lies at the heart of the reasons of state. By contrast, I am not at all concerned about Iran because Persian civilisation – in spite of Ahmadinejad – is enormously strong and highly developed. Iran's current attempt to secure a position within the world by means of its nuclear programme is a problem, but not an insoluble one, as the example of South Africa has shown.

Die Zeit: And what can the Pope do?

Meddeb: In his next address, he should delve a little deeper into the history of Islamic thought and not only refer Muslims to their shortcomings, but also remind them of the full glory of their traditions.

*

Abdelwahab Meddeb is a high-profile French writer of Arab origin. He was born in Tunis in 1946 and comes from a long family line of theologians and scholars. He studied art history and literature, beginning his working life as an editor for a major Paris publishing house. Between 1974 and 1988, he edited his own series of literary titles at Editions Sindbad. He has published the novels Talismano (1976) and Aya dans les villes (1999). His book The Malady of Islam (2003) gives a precise analysis of contemporary Islam. He lives in Paris.

This interview originally appeared in German in Die Zeit on September 21, 2006.

domingo, outubro 15, 2006

O "empurrão" que faltava

Vencedor do Nobel da Paz ajuda necessitados de Bangladesh

NOVA DÉLHI (Reuters) - Para um homem que talvez tenha feito mais do
que qualquer outro para ajudar a tirar as pessoas da miséria,
Muhammad Yunus não se desculpa por não dar esmolas a mendigos.

Yunus é o fundador do Grameen Bank, que concedeu mais de 5,7 bilhões
de dólares em microcrédito para bengaleses pobres, fornecendo uma
bóia de salva-vidas para milhões de pessoas e um modelo de banco que
foi copiado em mais de 100 países, dos Estados Unidos a Uganda.

Mas a filosofia de Yunus é a de ajudar os pobres a se ajudarem: dê a
um homem um peixe e você o ajuda por um dia, mas ensine-o a pescar e
você o ajuda a vida toda. Por isso, ele nunca responde quando um
mendigo cego ou aleijado, ou quando uma mãe com um bebê nos braços,
estendem a mão em busca de um trocado.

"Eu me sinto mal, às vezes, eu me sinto horrível, por negar algo a
essa pessoa. Mas eu me contenho. Nunca dou nada a eles", disse Yunus
à Reuters em uma entrevista feita em 2004 em seu escritório na
diretoria do Grameen. "Eu preferiria resolver o problema do que
apenas lhes dar uma ajuda e cuidar deles por um dia."

Esse professor de Economia, que junto com seu banco ganhou o Nobel da
Paz deste ano, vem tentando solucionar o problema desde 1976, quando
emprestou o equivalente a 27 dólares para 42 mulheres em uma vila
perto de sua casa, na cidade portuária de Chittagong.

As mulheres deviam a agiotas que lhes cobravam taxas extorsivas, e o
objetivo inicial de Yunus foi o de convencer um gerente do banco
local a dar a essas mulheres um crédito regular. Mas o banco disse
que isso era impossível sem uma garantia.

Yunus então decidiu mostrar que eles estavam errados. O Grameen --o
nome significa vila em bengalês-- hoje desembolsa dezenas de milhões
de dólares por mês para 6,6 milhões de pessoas, das quais 96 por
cento são mulheres.

"Estou muito feliz por ter continuado e porque isso cresceu e virou
uma instituição e realmente provou seu valor", afirmou
Yunus. "Fizemos algo que colocou uma interrogação em todo o sistema
bancário. Os bancos nunca mais serão os mesmos."

FOME MUDOU SUA VIDA

Nascido em 1940 em Chittagong, o centro comercial do que era então o
leste de Bengala, ele é filho de um ourives que teve 14 filhos --
sendo que cinco morreram ao nascer.

Uma fome devastadora que atingiu Bangladesh em 1974, deixando
centenas de milhares de mortos, mudou sua vida para sempre. Uma
viagem à universidade naquele ano o fez questionar se as teorias
econômicas modernas poderiam realmente dar justiça social aos pobres.

"Enquanto as pessoas morriam de fome nas ruas, eu ensinava teorias
elegantes de economia", disse ele a Alan Jolis, co-autor de um livro
sobre a sua vida, "The Good Banker", em um artigo publicado em 1996
no jornal britânico Independent on Sunday.

"Comecei a me odiar, (a odiar) a arrogância de fingir que tinha
respostas", acrescentou. "Nós, professores universitários, somos tão
inteligentes, mas não sabemos absolutamente nada sobre a pobreza que
nos cerca. Eu decidi então que os próprios pobres seriam meus
professores."

NÃO CHORE PELOS POBRES

Yunus tem orgulho de que o microcrédito tenha se espalhado pelo
mundo. Se os pobres tiverem o mesmo acesso ao crédito que os ricos,
eles vão prosperar, diz.

"Deixe com as pessoas", afirmou à Reuters. "Elas podem tomar conta
delas mesmas. Você não precisa derramar lágrimas por elas. Elas são
muito capazes."

O Banco Grameen recupera quase 99 por cento de seus empréstimos e os
seus clientes não precisam de garantias. Todas as transações são
feitas em reuniões públicas semanais em um país em que a corrupção é
endêmica. O Grameen dá empréstimos livre de juros para os muito
pobres.

"Por que os pobres não deveriam ter acesso aos serviços financeiros?
Por que a tecnologia da informação deve ser privilégio exclusivo dos
ricos? Por que não projetar coisas para os pobres?", pergunta Yunus.

Yunus desafia os críticos, que dizem que seu banco dá empréstimos
muito pequenos, e insiste que não está lançando uma guerra contra os
ricos, mas que apenas está ajudando os pobres.

"Não me importo se os ricos ficarem mais ricos. Isso não me incomoda.
O que me preocupa é os pobres ficando mais pobres e não
enriquecendo", diz.

"Se houver vários Bill Gates no país, não me importo. Levantar a base
da sociedade é o mais importante."

(Escrito por Alan Wheatley e Simon Denyer)

quinta-feira, outubro 12, 2006

JOSÉ

E agora, José?
A festa acabou,
a luz apagou,
o povo sumiu,
a noite esfriou,
e agora, José?
e agora, você?
você que é sem nome,
que zomba dos outros,
você que faz versos,
que ama, protesta?
e agora, José?

Está sem mulher,
está sem discurso,
está sem carinho,
já não pode beber,
já não pode fumar,
cuspir já não pode,
a noite esfriou,
o dia não veio,
o bonde não veio,
o riso não veio
não veio a utopia
e tudo acabou
e tudo fugiu
e tudo mofou,
e agora, José?

E agora, José?
Sua doce palavra,
seu instante de febre,
sua gula e jejum,
sua biblioteca,
sua lavra de ouro,
seu terno de vidro,
sua incoerência,
seu ódio - e agora?

Com a chave na mão
quer abrir a porta,
não existe porta;
quer morrer no mar,
mas o mar secou;
quer ir para Minas,
Minas não há mais.
José, e agora?

Se você gritasse,
se você gemesse,
se você tocasse
a valsa vienense,
se você dormisse,
se você cansasse,
se você morresse...
Mas você não morre,
você é duro, José!

Sozinho no escuro
qual bicho-do-mato,
sem teogonia,
sem parede nua
para se encostar,
sem cavalo preto
que fuja a galope,
você marcha, José!
José, para onde?



Carlos Drummond de Andrade

terça-feira, outubro 10, 2006

Cultura. Inútil?

A Internet nunca cansa de me surpreender. Onde mais se poderia encontrar com tanta facilidade um manual sobre como cuspir fogo, quando tudo que se queria era um link sobre filosofia espírita? Quanto mais estudo o passado por força de curiosidade e ofício, mais me surpreendo com a mudança que o acesso fácil e rápido à informação trouxe para nossas vidas. Mas esse é um tema a desenvolver noutra ocasião.

A neurociência aplicada à economia

Depois vêm os anarco-capitalistas defenderem o fim de todas as instituições estatais vigentes em prol de um "livre-mercado" visionário e essencialmente racional...

--------------------------------




The Times October 07, 2006

Why say no to free money? It's neuro-economics, stupid
By Mark Henderson

Studies show how the brain lets the emotions override common sense when reaching some tough decisions. Our correspondent reports on the 'ultimatum game'


IMAGINE that you are sitting next to a complete stranger who has been given £10 to share between the two of you. He must choose how much to keep for himself and how much to give to you.

He can be as selfish or as generous as he likes, with one proviso: if you refuse his offer, neither of you gets any money at all. What would it take for you to turn him down?

This is the scenario known to economists as the ultimatum game. Now the way we play it is generating remarkable insights into how the human brain drives financial decisionmaking, social interactions and even the supremely irrational behaviour of suicide bombers and gangland killers.

According to standard economic theory, you should cheerfully accept anything you are given. People are assumed to be motivated chiefly by rational self-interest, and refusing any offer, however low, is tantamount to cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Yet in practice derisory offers are declined all the time. Indeed, if the sum is less than £2.50, four out of five of us tell the selfish so-and-so to get lost. We get so angry at his deliberate unfairness that we are prepared to incur a cost to ourselves, purely to punish him.

Homo sapiens is clearly not Homo economicus, the ultra-rational being imagined by many professional economists.

An emerging fusion of economics, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience — neuro-economics in the jargon — is now starting to tell us why this is so.

Scientists yesterday published new evidence in the journal Science, showing not only how the brain makes difficult decisions but also that our choices can be changed when a critical part of the brain is switched off with magnets.

The researchers, Ernst Fehr and Daria Knoch, of the University of Zurich, used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to tire out and thus temporarily suppress a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans show that this is particularly active when people play the ultimatum game.

When the right DLPFC is shut down, the way they play starts to change. When given a low offer, they still feel it is deeply unfair. But, instead of rejecting it as they usually would, their selfish, ultra-rational side wins out over their emotional reaction against the other player’s meanness. They accept any amount of cash, however small.

The implication is not that the DLPFC is generating a sense of injustice — that was still there even when the region was knocked out. Rather, it seems to be more like an executive decision-maker, balancing the claims of emotion and reason.

“It is as if it is the referee that enforces fairness, and overrides narrow self-interest,” said David Laibson, Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

The results tend to support a very different theory of human behaviour from that favoured by classical economists. Our decisions seem not to be determined mainly by reason, but by a continuous battle between two sides of our psyches that are rooted in different mental circuits.

One of these is rational, controlled by the cortex — the cauliflower-like outer section of the brain where reasoning takes place, which is uniquely developed in humans. The other, however, is emotional, governed by the limbic system — the deeper-lying brain structures such as the amygdala that are much closer in character to the brains of other mammals.

George Loewenstein, Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, and one of the pioneers of neuro-economics, said: “The new science of neuro-economics is lending support to a very ancient view of human behaviour. That is the idea that there is a conflict and interaction between passion, and reason and self-interest.

“The now standard view of people as rational maximisers of self-interest is a very recent view. Neuroscience is telling us that that was a bit of a diversion. The rational side is a process that sometimes overrides the dominant interest on human behaviour, which is the passionate side.”

Interestingly, the DLPFC does not develop fully until early adulthood, offering a possible explanation for adolescent selfishness — the “Kevin the teenager” phenomenon.

Why might the brain want to overrule self-interest in the first place? Colin Camerer, Professor of Business Economics at the California Institute of Technology, says that it probably evolved that way.

If we always accepted low offers for the sake of tiny gains, we would rapidly get a reputation as a soft touch. Everybody else would try to bilk us at every turn. By acting apparently against our interests, we do better in the long run. Our ancestors were better at surviving if they were bloody-minded. Professor Camerer explained: “Emotion is nature’s way of letting people know that if you’re treated badly you’ll do something about it.”

Professor Laibson said: “One prospect is that, as we understand this brain research, we will be able to go beyond tweaking the classical model and develop a much richer understanding of how people make choices.”

What is starting to emerge is a more accurate — and recognisable — picture of human nature than classical economic theory provided. In many ways, it is a positive one, helping to explain the human capacity for kindness and co-operation, and the centrality of fairness to social norms. We are not acquisitive automatons conditioned always to follow narrow self-interest.

But it also has a dark side. The depth with which we feel injustice, and the way we respond to it emotionally, rather than rationally, may also underlie extreme reactions to perceived wrongs. The gang leader who has a rival murdered over a slight to his honour and the fundamentalist who takes out his grievance against the West by becoming a suicide bomber are both particularly high-stakes players of the ultimatum game.

Professor Loewenstein said: “In a sense, suicide bombers are playing a version of the ultimatum game. Their sense of injustice is such that they are willing to pay the highest possible cost. For models of behaviour which assume that self-interest is all important, it has always been a mystery why people go to war or sacrifice themselves for their nation, their religion, or even for abstract principles. To explain these types of behaviours, we need to take account of how human actions are governed by emotion.”

terça-feira, outubro 03, 2006

Mulher remota

Esta mulher cabe em minhas mãos. É branca e ruiva, e em minhas mãos a levaria como a uma cesta de magnólias.

Esta mulher cabe em meus olhos. Envolvem-na os meus olhares, meus olhares que nada vêem quando a envolvem.

Esta mulher cabe em meus desejos. Desnuda está sob a anelante labareda de minha vida e o meu desejo queima-a como uma brasa.

Porém, mulher remota, minhas mãos, meus olhos e meus desejos guardam inteira para ti a sua carícia porque só tu, mulher remota, só tu cabes em meu coração.

Pablo Neruda, Para Nascer Nasci.

Pobres gigantes...



Quando criança, lembro-me bem de gostar de filmes com temas fantásticos. Dentre eles, poucos se igualavam ao apelo daqueles de ficção-científica em um uma formiga, uma aranha ou qualquer outro pequeno animal aparecia em versões colossais para atacar a nossa pobre humanidade. As causas eram sempre as mesmas -- radiação proveniente de tecnologia nuclear ou intoxicação por detritos químicos --, mas as chamadas e os traillers eram absolutamente fascinantes: pessoas desesperadas correndo dos monstros, quase sempre numa cidade, enquanto o locutor em voz alarmada anunciava o filme "inédito" para o horário nobre. Ainda me recordo perfeitamente da minha contrariedade numa festa de casamento, aos 7 anos, por estar perdendo "O Ataque das Aranhas Gigantes" que passava pela 547ª vez no SBT. O filme se tornava ainda mais saboroso quando tinha seu título alterado para "O Império das Aranhas Gigantes", uma fraude que hoje deixaria Antonio Negri orgulhoso e deixava no ar a dúvida quanto a se o filme anunciado era o mesmo exibido quinze dias atrás.

Foi numa edição especial do Reader's Digest que li pela primeira vez o quão fictícia a idéia de insetos gigantes (e outros filos menos cotados) era, pela impossibilidade orgânica implicada nas aranhas de 15 metros que eu tanto apreciava. E agora, conferindo a última atualização do Arts & Letters Daily, deparei-me com essa instrutiva e divertida análise que mostra por que esse conhecidíssimo tema dos filmes B nunca deixará de ser ficção. Com vocês, The Biology of B-Movies.

domingo, outubro 01, 2006

Cópias e leis

Uma interessante discussão sobre os limites e excessos na legislação sobre direitos autorais nos EUA, que acabam influenciando o fluxo de informações em boa parte do mundo:

By Siva Vaidhyanathan