The Modern Stoic

Oil on canvas by Robert Burridge

Posted by Lina Ufimtseva

The ancient Stoics famously consoled themselves by accepting the inevitable. Through this, their purpose was to endure and to govern their negative emotions. Today, this has led to the misconception that being stoical means to be devoid of all emotion. Rather, it is to be devoid of passions, in the old sense of the word—distress, lament, lust, even excessive delight (including, for example, malice or ostentation).

Here is the crux of the matter: how then does one control excessive passions or negative emotions? This further leads us to the question: what do negative emotions result from? Usually they result from a disparity between desire and outcome. Simply put, when we cannot control what happens around us, we are nettled, riled. All people inherently have a God-complex. We want to plan and control our lives as we see fit.

• STOICAL CONTROL

We exercise control over our negative emotions when we reduce the disparity between desire and outcome, consciously reducing the desire to govern the things we have no control over. Thus we increase our happiness and satisfaction. I visit the airport. My flight is delayed. A friend of opposite persuasion to that of the Stoic—call him the ‘impulsive’ person—gets agitated because he desires to be on time. I, as a stoical person, realise that this is outside the realm of my control. The Stoic therefore might say, ‘The flight is only delayed by two hours. It's not as though it is cancelled.’

Following this logic—namely, that Stoicism reduces the disparity between desire and outcome—being stoical can make one a more buoyant person than the non-Stoic. An impulsive person might react to unwanted surprises with grumpiness, or drama, which can exhaust the patience of others. A stoical person, on the other hand, turns the lack of external control into the abundance of internal control. This may include such reactions as humour, or a quick wit. The Stoic need not be confined to dispassionate or boring responses.

The wisdom is learning to gauge when something is out of one’s control or not. For instance, my friend and I at the airport could have gone to the information desk, and asked if there was another flight with two empty seats—which often happens at airports. This would be an example of practicing Stoic virtues.

• SELF-PERPETUATING STOICISM

Paradoxically, Stocism in itself may lead to positive feelings. Consider the after-effects of destructive passions: drinking too much, or burning the house down. Naturally, this would leave one with destructive feelings in the morning, or may hamper relationships around one (people don't like people who burn a house down).

I may enjoy the illusion of power that destructive behaviour momentarily brings about, yet at the end of the day, it robs me of joy and liveliness. It is generally not sustainable to burn houses down, or to drink excessively, without harming one's own esteem. Stoic virtues therefore aim to increase and sustain satisfaction.

Courage is another virtue of the Stoic. To laugh in the face of a nuisance (such as a delayed flight) or in the face of danger, takes courage. Such courage generally raises one's self-esteem, as long as it is done in humility. With the raising of one's self-esteem, one becomes happier, and loses the need or desire for impulsive behaviour. So the Stoicism which might seem emotionless or boring can actually be a deep sense of satisfaction.

• THE INNER AND OUTER STOIC

Now this leads us to the inner experience of the Stoic, and begs the question what it means to be such a person. Is one boring by being perceived as being boring, or is it important to be perceived by others in a certain way? Which is more true? My own perception of myself, or other people's perception of me? Which is more objective?

What one person perceives as a boring reaction (say, not reacting at all) might be perceived as cool and level-headed, even inspiring, by another. A friend seems to touch the quintessence of it: ‘There is a certain beauty and elusive joy that comes from embracing the absurdity of the things that lie outside of one's control.’

'A bad feeling is a commotion of the mind repugnant to reason, 

and against nature.' —Zeno of Citium.

Picture Post #27 An Icon on the ‘Verge’ of American History

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen 

A native American family taking a ride in a car. The picture was 

apparently taken in 1916 in the American Pacific Northwest

There's a piquant quality about the image. For the photographer and the publisher of the time, were the passengers meant to be ridiculous? A mocking look at native peoples in the White Man's world? Yet even if so they surely do not know that. For the passengers of that day, they are very modern, very grand.

The picture shows that realities fuse together in ramifications of accidental experiences. Notably, the image contains the awareness that symbols deeply embedded in societies take on different senses given different motivations and perspectives.

We now know how Native Americans, in general, fared with modernity: the car is a symbol of their fate and oppression. An image such as this accumulates meaning by virtue of some of its intrinsic symbolic values, which are nonetheless unusual in the face of deep-rooted events – events that allow a symbol to become an icon. 

There cannot be anything strange to see a Native American family driving around in an automobile. Yet this occasion, strange indeed might be the Indians pictured in the limousine. The first possibility shades into a reality where everything becomes like a dream and realisation is always immediate, no matter how many complex things are combined. The second bears the idea that realisation will always be something postponed to the future, and that in this process elements reappear as odd, as clashing symbols.  

The difference in the language is subtle. This is the delicacy on which an icon can be raised.

Doublethink 25 – Death Synchronizers

 

Identity: From Theseus's Paradox to the Singularity

Posted by Keith Tidman

A "replica" of an ancient Greek merchant ship based on the remains of a ship that wrecked about 2,500 years ago.  With acknowledgements to Donald Hart Keith.

As the legend goes, Theseus was an imposing Greek hero, who consolidated power and became the mythical king of Athens. Along the way, he awed everyone by leading victorious military campaigns. The Athenians honoured Theseus by displaying his ship in the Athenian harbour. As the decades rolled by, parts of the ship rotted. To preserve the memorial, each time a plank decayed, the Athenians replaced it with a new plank of the same kind of wood. First one plank, then several, then many, then all.

As parts of the ship were replaced, at what point was it no longer the ‘ship of Theseus’? Or did the ship retain its unique (undiminished) identity the entire time, no matter how many planks were replaced? Do the answers to those two questions change if the old planks, which had been warehoused rather than disposed of, were later reassembled into the ship? Which, then, is the legendary ‘ship of Theseus’, deserving of reverence — the ship whose planks had been replaced over the years, or the ship reassembled from the stored rotten planks, or neither? The Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch elaborated on the paradox in the first century in 'Life of Theseus'.

At the core of these questions about a mythical ship is the matter of ‘identity’. Such as how to define ‘an object’; whether an object is limited to the sum of people’s experience of it; whether an object can in some manner stay the same, regardless of the (macro or micro) changes it undergoes; whether the same rules regarding identity apply to all objects, or if there are exceptions; whether gradual and emergent, rather than immediate, change makes a difference in identity; and so forth.

The seventeenth-century English poilitical philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, weighed in on the conundrum, asking, ‘Which of the two existing ships is numerically one and the same ship as Theseus’s original ship?’ He went on to offer this take on the matter:

‘If some part of the first material has been removed or another part has been added, that ship will be another being, or another body. For, there cannot be a body “the same in number” whose parts are not all the same, because all a body’s parts, taken collectively, are the same as the whole.’

The discussion is not, of course, confined to Theseus’s ship. All physical objects are subject to change over time: suns (stars), trees, houses, cats, rugs, hammers, engines, DNA, the Andromeda galaxy, monuments, icebergs, oceans. As do differently categorised entities, such as societies, institutions, and organizations. And people’s bodies, which change with age of course — but more particularly, whose cells get replaced, in their entirety, roughly every seven years throughout one’s life. Yet, we observe that amidst such change — even radical or wholesale change — the names of things typically don’t change; we don’t start calling them something else. (Hobbes is still Hobbes seven years later, despite cellular replacement.)

The examples abound, as do the issues of identity. It was what led the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus to famously question whether, in light of continuous change, one can ‘step into the same river twice’—answering that it’s ‘not the same river and he’s not the same man’. And it’s what led Hobbes, in the case of the human body, to conveniently switch from the ‘same parts’ principle he had applied to Theseus’s ship, saying regarding people, ‘because of the unbroken nature of the flux by which matter decays and is replaced, he is always the same man’. (Or woman. Or child.) By extension of this principle, objects like the sun, though changing — emitting energy through nuclear fusion and undergoing cycles — have what might be called a core ‘persistence’, even as aspects of their form change.

‘If the same substance which thinks be changed,
it can be the same person, or remaining
the same, it can be a different person? — John Locke

But people, especially, are self-evidently more than just bodies. They’re also identified by their minds — knowledge, memories, creative instincts, intentions, wants, likes and dislikes, sense of self, sense of others, sense of time, dreams, curiosity, perceptions, imagination, spirituality, hopes, acquisitiveness, relationships, values, and all the rest. This aspect to ‘personal identity’, which John Locke encapsulates under the label ‘consciousness’ (self) and which undergoes continuous change, underpins the identity of a person, even over time — what has been referred to as ‘diachronic’ personal identity. In contrast, the body and mind, at any single moment in time, has been referred to as ‘synchronic’ personal identity. We remain aware of both states — continuous change and single moments — in turns (that is, the mind rapidly switching back and forth, analogous to what happens while supposedly 'multitasking'), depending on the circumstance.

The philosophical context surrounding personal identity — what’s essential and sufficient for personhood and identity — relates to today’s several variants of the so-called ‘singularity’, spurring modern-day paradoxes and thought experiments. For example, the intervention of humans to spur biological evolution — through neuroscience and artificial intelligence — beyond current physical and cognitive limitations is one way to express the ‘singularity’. One might choose to replace organs and other parts of the body — the way the planks of Theseus’s ship were replaced — with non-biological components and to install brain enhancements that make heightened intelligence (even what’s been dubbed ultraintelligence) possible. This unfolding may be continuous, undergoing a so-called phase transition.

The futurologist, Ray Kurzweil, has observed, ‘We're going to become increasingly non-biological’ — attaining a tipping point ‘where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important any more’. The process entails the (re)engineering of descendants, where each milestone of change stretches the natural features of human biology. It’s where the identity conundrum is revisited, with an affirmative nod to the belief that mind and body lend themselves to major enhancement. Since such a process would occur gradually and continuously, rather than just in one fell swoop (momentary), it would fall under the rubric of ‘diachronic’ change. There’s persistence, according to which personhood — the same person — remains despite the incremental change.

In that same manner, some blend of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, heuristics, the biological sciences, and transformative, leading-edge technology, with influences from disciplines like philosophy and the social sciences, may allow a future generation to ‘upload the mind’ — scanning and mapping the mind’s salient features — from a person to another substrate. That other substrate may be biological or a many-orders-of-magnitude-more-powerful (such as quantum) computer. The uploaded mind — ‘whole-brain emulation’ — may preserve, indistinguishably, the consciousness and personal identity of the person from whom the mind came. ‘Captured’, in this term’s most benign sense, from the activities of the brain’s tens of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses.

‘Even in a different body, you’d still be you
if you had the same beliefs, the same worldview,
and the same memories.’ — Daniel Dennett

If the process can happen once, it can happen multiple times, for the same person. In that case, reflecting back on Theseus’s ship and notions of personal identity, which intuitively is the real person? Just the original? Just the first upload? The original and the first upload? The original and all the uploads? None of the uploads? How would ‘obsolescence’ fit in, or not fit in? The terms ‘person’ and ‘identity’ will certainly need to be revised, beyond the definitions already raised by philosophers through history, to reflect the new realities presented to us by rapid invention and reinvention.

Concomitantly, many issues will bubble to the surface regarding social, ethical, regulatory, legal, spiritual, and other considerations in a world of emulated (duplicated) personhood. Such as: what might be the new ethical universe that society must make sense of, and what may be the (ever-shifting) constraints; whether the original person and emulated person could claim equal rights; whether any one person (the original or emulation) could choose to die at some point; what changes society might confront, such as inequities in opportunity and shifting centers of power; what institutions might be necessary to settle the questions and manage the process in order to minimise disruption; and so forth, all the while venturing increasingly into a curiously untested zone.

The possibilities are thorny, as well as hard to anticipate in their entirety; many broad contours are apparent, with specificity to emerge at its own pace. The possibilities will become increasingly apparent as new capabilities arise (building on one another) and as society is therefore obliged, by the press of circumstances, to weigh the what and how-to — as well as the ‘ought’, of course. That qualified level of predictive certainty is not unexpected, after all: given sluggish change in the Medieval Period, our twelfth-century forebears, for example, had no problem anticipating what thirteenth-century life might offer. At that time in history, social change was more in line with the slow, plank-by-plank changes to Theseus’s ship. Today, the new dynamic of what one might call precocious change — combined with increasingly successful, productive, leveraged alliances among the various disciplines — makes gazing into the twenty-second century an unprecedentedly challenging briar patch.

New paradoxes surrounding humanity in the context of change, and thus of identity (who and what I am and will become), must certainly arise. At the very least, amidst startling, transformative self-reinvention, the question of what is the bedrock of personal identity will be paramount.

Pity the Fundamentalists

Posted by Mirjam Scarborough*
          with Thomas Scarborough

Ferdinand Hodler - Die Lebensmüden (Tired of Life) 1892

What is it that sustains the fundamentalist?  I should say, the religious fundamentalist.  In particular, the fundamentalist who is willing to give up everything for God?  Of this description, there are fundamentalists of many kinds: missionaries, militants, medics, volunteers – priests, nuns, imams, rabbis – anyone for whom God means the world, and proves it by his or her sacrifice.

I had the privilege of researching religious fundamentalism through a ten-year study of women missionaries in Central Africa.  These represented the most committed members of fundamentalist faith**.  In a sense, they were the foot soldiers of the avant garde.  They were the leading edge – ready to give up everything in the name of God: friends, comforts, health, security, even freedom, children, life itself.

The reason why they did it, not unexpectedly, was that fundamentalists see themselves as being under orders – and these are orders from God himself.  The orders may go by various names: God's summons, commission, commandment, burden, among other terms.  In the case of the women missionaries, it was a 'call'. 

This call from God is not 'empty', so to speak.  It is rich in content.  Yet one thing characterises it above all.  God’s demands are high.  His paragons are perfect.  One gives much and expects little.  The orders which the religious fundamentalist receives make the highest demands – indeed they represent, generally speaking, the hardest tasks that anyone may aspire to. 

The question of my research was simple: 'What is it that sustains such a call?'

My intuitive answer was: God himself.  It is sufficient to know that one is called by God, to see one through any challenge and hardship on earth – and then, in many cases, to add to it love.  In fact, this proved to be true, and was borne out by the research.  Orders from God – or the perception of orders from God – encouraged the religious fundamentalist to great commitment and endurance, heroism and sacrifice.

However, it didn’t last.  It couldn’t last.  In the long term – which was about four years – the heroes crumbled.  There were intense stresses.  Their expectations were deeply challenged.  They suffered severe emotional trauma and exhaustion.  In fact, it was accepted as the norm that one would 'break down' in year four. Most, if not all of the missionaries I interviewed, needed medical interventions to stabilise their condition.

Even then, statistically, 50% of them were lost to the mission every thirteen years. Worse than that, anecdotal evidence showed that their spouses and children may have suffered the deepest trauma.

The call of God sustained them at first. It inspired them to extraordinary commitment and endurance. Up to a point, my assumptions were on target. Those who feel that they are called by God – perhaps ordered, summoned, commanded, commissioned by him – are sustained by the call. But as months grow into years, they nearly all crumble. They are utterly depleted.

However, there was a surprise.  Some of fundamentalism's foot soldiers – by far not all – rebounded.  After their first leave of absence, broken and beaten, they returned to the mission field repaired, if not refreshed – to the very same circumstances – never to experience such crisis again.

What changed?  It was not their fundamentalism, really.  They did not lose the sense of being under the call and commandment of God, nor did they feel in any way that his high demands had slipped.  But they let go of personal effort, and they trusted God to do it – in spite of them.

It all turned, therefore, on their understanding of their trust in God. No longer did they trust God to give them super-human powers for the task, or an indomitable will.  Rather, in brokenness, they trusted him to bless their great weakness.  Some called it the purification of the call.  Some called it repentance.

It all hinged on this one thing: God is great – but he does not impart his greatness to us.  It does not rub off on mere mortals.

The religious fundamentalist – the avant garde – missionaries, militants, medics, volunteers – priests, nuns, imams, rabbis – anyone for whom God means the world, and prove it by their sacrifice – all are of only fleeting usefulness to the cause, if any usefulness at all, until their call is purified.  In fact, until then, if anecdotal evidence would be true, they do great damage not only to themselves but to all those close to them.

It is tragedy and ruin – until they find a realistic sense of themselves, and a realistic sense of the God they serve.  Pity the religious fundamentalists, and all those near to them – at least, those whose call has not yet been 'cleansed'.

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* Rev. Dr. Mirjam Scarborough (1957-2011) was a doctor of philosophy and a missiologist.
** My study included some who are sooner referred to as 'revivalists'.

Poetry: A Notice Offering Amnesty

Posted by Chengde Chen*

A Notice Offering Amnesty

Written after the Grenfell Tower fire

By Chengde Chen

To determine the numbers of dead,

The police appeal to the survivors:

‘Please let us know your situation

And that of others you may know of.
Don’t worry about your immigration status–

We will not report it to the Home Office,

Nor will the Home Office pursue it.
So, please contact us!’

I seem to be touched by this,

But don’t really know what for.
For humanity in the law?
Or because we’re guilty of so lacking in it,

That we have to sacrifice the law

To compensate?

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* Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde@sipgroup.com

Picture Post #26. Life-Matters

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Guatamala, 1968. Picture credit: Jill Gibson

A woman with a newborn passes by the word ‘Muerte’ written on the wall. Nothing could be more natural; birth and death simply belong to each other.

Which raises two questions: what happens when death becomes a symbol to reclaim something belonging to the past? What happens when a distinction is made about who, and who should not, live? Because then the right to live is not the same concept for all of us. 

Suppose that birth is a concept about being, and death a concept about non-being, then whatever touches upon these concepts, touches upon a principle. The problem is not birth, nor yet death itself. The problem is in the claims being made. To respect life means to respect death. Herein lies something universal.

A note by the photographer, Jill Gibson:

During the years 1966–1968, I was photo-documenting the work and progress of doctors who were examining the medical problems of children living in the pure Mayan village of Santa Maria Cauqué, located in the hills 30 minutes outside of Guatemala City. There were some days I travelled in a 4-wheel drive vehicle, up riverbed roads for five to six hours just to reach remote villages, along with a doctor. The doctor educated me about the United Fruit Company and it’s influence over the Guatemalan government, and the ramifications of U.S. involvement in the country. So, I believe the word Muerte, being a graffiti on the wall, has something to do with the resistance at the time.

There was in fact a lot of death going on then, as the country was immersed in military violence from 1965 through 1995. We saw it again first hand in 1984. During these years, the Mayans were being annihilated.

The Death Penalty: An Argument for Global Abolition

Posted by Keith Tidman

In 1957, Albert Camus wrote an essay called Reflections on the Guillotine. As well as arguing against it on grounds of principle, he also speaks of the ineffectiveness of the punishment:

‘According to one magistrate, the overwhelming majority of the murderers he had tried did not know, when they shaved themselves that morning, that they were going to kill someone that night. In short, capital punishment cannot intimidate the man who throws himself upon crime as one throws oneself into misery.’

For myself, too, the death penalty is an archaic practice, a vestige with no place in a 21st-century world. In the arena of constitutional law, the death penalty amounts to ‘cruel and unusual’ (inhumane) punishment. In the arena of ethics, the death penalty is an immoral assault on human rights, dignity, and life’s preeminence.

Through the millennia, social norms habitually tethered criminal punishment to ‘retribution’ — which minus the rhetorical dressing distils to ‘revenge’. ‘Due process of law’ and ‘equal protection under the law’ were random, rare, and capricious. In exercising retribution, societies shunted aside the rule of authentic proportionality, with execution the go-to punishment for a far-ranging set of offenses, both big and small — murder only one among them. In some societies, matters like corruption, treason, terrorism, antigovernment agitation, and even select ‘antisocial’ behaviours likewise qualified for execution — and other extreme recourses — shades of which linger today.

Resort through the ages to state-sanctioned, ceremonial killing (and other severe corporal punishment) reflected the prevailing norms of societies, with little stock placed on the deep-rooted, inviolable value of human life. The aim was variously to control, coerce, impose suffering, and ultimately dehumanise — very much as enemies in war find it easier to kill if they create ‘subhuman’ caricatures of the enemy. Despite the death penalty’s barbarity, some present-day societies retain this remnant from humanity’s darker past: According to Amnesty International, twenty-three countries — scattered among the Asia-Pacific, Africa, the United States in the Americas, and Belarus in Europe — carried out executions in 2016; while fifty-five countries sentenced people to death that year.

But condemnation of the death penalty does not, of course, preclude imposing harsh punishment for criminal activity. Even the most progressive, liberally democratic countries, abiding by enlightened notions of justice, appropriately accommodate strict punishment — though well short of society’s premeditatedly killing its citizens through application of the death penalty. The aims of severe punishment may be several and, for sure, reasonable: to preserve social orderliness, disincentivise criminal behaviour, mollify victims, reinforce legal canon, express moral indignation, cement a vision of fairness, and reprimand those found culpable. Largely fair objectives, if exercised dispassionately through due process of law. These principles are fundamental and immutable to civil, working — and rules-based — societies. Nowhere, however, does the death penalty fit in there; and nowhere is it obvious that death is a proportionate (and just) response to murder.

________________________________________

‘One ought not return injustice

for injustice’ — Socrates

________________________________________

Let’s take a moment, then, to look at punishment. Sentencing may be couched as ‘consequentialist’, in which case punishment’s purpose is utilitarian and forward looking. That is, punishment for wrongdoing anticipates future outcomes for society, such as eliminating (or more realistically, curtailing) criminal behaviour. The general interest and welfare of society — decidedly abstract notions, subject to various definitions — serve as the desired and sufficient end state.

Alternatively, punishment may be couched as ‘deontological’. In that event, the deed of punishment is itself considered a moral good, apart from consequences. Deontology entails rules-based ethics — living under the rule of law, as a norm within either liberal or conservative societies and systems of governance — while still attaining retributive objectives. Or, commonly, punishment may be understood as an alliance of both consequentialism and deontology. Regardless of choice — whether emphasis is on consequentialism or deontology or a hybrid of the two — the risk of punishing the innocent, especially given the irreversibility of the death penalty in the case of discovered mistakes, looms large. As such, the choice among consequentialism, deontology, or a hybrid matters little to any attempt to support a case for capital punishment.

Furthermore, the meting out of justice works only if knowledge is reliable and certain. That is, knowledge of individuals’ culpability, the competence of defense and prosecutorial lawyers, unbiased evidence (both exculpatory and inculpatory), the randomness of convictions across demographics, the sense of just desserts, the fairness of particular punishments (proportionality), and the prospective benefits to society of specific punitive measures. Broadly speaking, what do we know, how do we know it, and the weight of what counts — epistemological issues that are bound by the ethical issues. In many instances, racial, ethnic, gender, educational, or socioeconomic prejudices (toward defendants and victims alike) skew considerations of guilt and, in particular, the discretionary imposition of the death penalty. In some countries, politics and ideology — even what’s perceived to threaten a regime’s legitimacy — may damn the accused. To those sociological extents, ‘equal protection of the law’ becomes largely moot.

Yet at the core, neither consequentialism — purported gains to society from punishment’s outcomes — nor deontology — purported intrinsic, self-evident morality of particular sentences — rises to the level of sufficiently undergirding the ethical case for resorting to the death penalty. Nor does retribution (revenge) or proportionality (‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’). After all, whether death is the proportionate response to murder remains highly suspect. Indeed, no qualitative or quantitative logic, no matter how elegantly crafted, successfully supports society’s recourse to premeditatedly and ceremoniously executing citizens as part of its penal code.

_____________________________________________

‘Capital punishment is the most

premeditated of murders’ — Albert Camus

_____________________________________________

There is no public-safety angle, furthermore, that could not be served equally well by lifetime incarceration — without, if so adjudged, consideration of rehabilitation and redemption, and thus without the possibility of parole. Indeed, evidence does not point to the death penalty improving public safety. For example, the death penalty has no deterrent value — that is, perpetrators don’t first contemplate the possibility of execution in calculating whether or not to commit murder or other violent crime. The starting position therefore ought to be that human life is sacrosanct — life’s natural origins, its natural course, and its natural end. Society ought not deviate from that principle in normalising particular punishments for criminal — even heinously criminal — behaviour. The guiding moral principle is singular: that it’s ethically unprincipled for a government to premeditatedly take its citizenries’ lives in order to punish, a measure that morally sullies the society condoning it.

Society’s applying the death penalty as an institutional sentence for a crime is a cruel vestige of a time when life was less sacred and society (the elite, that is) was less inclined to censor its own behavior: intentionally executing in order, with glaring irony, to model how killing is wrong. Society cannot compartmentalise this lethal deed, purporting that sanctioned death penalty is the exception to the ethical rule not to kill premeditatedly. Indeed, as Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, laconically observed, ‘the death penalty is a symptom of a culture of violence, not a solution to it’.

Although individuals, like victim family members, may instinctively and viscerally want society to thrash out in revenge on their behalf — with which many people may equally instinctively and understandably sympathise — it’s incumbent upon society to administer justice rationally, impartially, and, yes, even dispassionately. With no carveout for excepted crimes, no matter how odious, the death penalty is a corrosive practice that flagrantly mocks the basis of humanity and civilisation — that is, it scorns the very notion of a ‘civil’ society.

The death penalty is a historical legacy that should thus be consigned to the dustbin. States, across the globe, have no higher, sober moral stake than to strike the death penalty from their legal code and practices. With enough time, it will happen; the future augurs a world absent state-sanctioned execution as a misdirected exercise in the absolute power of government.

Language: Two Himalayan Mistakes

Seated Woman by Richard Diebenkorn

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

We take a lot on trust. Too much of it, mistakenly. We even have a name for it: ex verecundiam.  With this in mind, there are two things at the heart of our language, which we have mistakenly taken on trust. The first is how to circumscribe the meaning of a word, the second is how to qualify that meaning. These are not merely issues of semantics. They have profound implications for our understanding of the world. 

There was a time, not too long ago, when we had no dictionaries. In fact, it was not too long ago that we had no printing presses on which to print them. Then, when dictionaries arrived, we decided that words had definitions, and that, where applicable, each of these definitions held the fewest possible semantic features. A woman, for instance, was an ‘adult human female’, no less, and certainly no more – three features in all. While this may be too simple a description of the matter, the meaning will be clear.

We may never know who first gave us permission to do this, or on whose authority it was decided. It may go back to Aristotle. But at some time in our history, two options lay before us. One was to reduce the meaning of a word to the fewest possible semantic features. The other was to include in it every possible semantic feature. We know now what the decision was. We chose artificially and arbitrarily to radically reduce what words are.

We canvassed the literature. We canvassed the people. All had their own vast ideas and experiences about a word. Then we sought the word's pure essence, its abstract core – like the definition of the woman, an ‘adult human female’. This, however, introduced one of the biggest problems of semantics. We needed now to separate semantic features which mattered from those which did not. The artificiality and uncertainty of this dividing line – that is, between denotation and connotation – has filled many books.

Worse than this. It is easy to prove that we took the wrong option at the start.  We are in a position to demonstrate that, when we refer to a word, we refer to its maximal semantic content, not minimal. Some simple experiments prove the point. Take the sentences, ‘I entered the house. The karma was bad,’ or, ‘The car hit a ditch. The axle broke.’ What now does ‘the karma’ or ‘the axle’ refer to? It refers to the maximal content of a word. This is how, intuitively, innately, we deal with words.

Our second big mistake, which follows on from the first, was the notion of subject and predicate. We call these the ‘principal syntactic elements’ of language. They were at the forefront of Kant's philosophy. Today, the universally accepted view is that the predicate completes an idea about the subject. Take as an example the sentence, ‘’The woman (subject) dances (predicate),’ or, ‘The penny (subject) drops (predicate).’

Again, ‘the woman’ is taken as the bare-bones concept, ‘adult human female’. Add to this the predicate – the fact that the woman dances – and we expand on the concept of a woman. We already know that a woman dances, of course. We know, too, that she laughs, sleeps, eats, and a great deal more. Similarly, we define ‘the penny’ as a ‘British bronze coin’. Add to this that it can drop, and we have expanded on the concept of a penny. Of course, we know well that it clinks, shines, even melts, and much more besides.

Yet, what if the predicate serves not to expand upon the subject, but to narrow it down? In fact, if words contain every possible semantic feature, so too must subjects. A predicate takes a ‘maximal’ subject, then – the near infinite possibilities contained in ‘the woman’, or ‘the penny’ – and channels them, so to speak. ‘The woman (who can be anything) dances.’ ‘The penny (which offers a multitude of possibilities) drops.’  Predicates, then, are ‘clarifiers’, as it were. They take a thing, and narrow it down and sharpen its contours.

The application to philosophy is simple.  We discard a word’s many possibilities – those of a woman, a penny, a house, a car – in the interests of the arbitrary notion that they represent minimal meanings – so reducing them to the smallest number of semantic features people use, and throwing the rest away.

Day after day, we do this, through force of centuries of habit. With this, we instantly discard (almost) all the possibilities of a word. We meet situations without being open to their possibilities, but cobble a few predicates to bare-bones subjects, and so lose our good sense. Nuclear power is the generation of electricity, a ship is something that floats, a Führer is someone who governs. The words, being stripped of their maximal meanings, do not contain – perhaps most importantly – the possibility of evil. This greatly assists prejudice, bigotry, partiality, and discrimination.

When words are reduced to their minimal features – when we base their meaning on their denotative core – we ‘crop’ them, truncate them, reduce them, and above all, cut away from them a great many meanings which they hold, and so reduce our awareness of the world, and cosmos.  Due in no small part to the way we imagine our language to be – minimal words and minimal subjects – we have entered habits of thinking which are simplistic, reductionistic, technical – and dangerous.

But to understand words in terms of maximal meanings is to reject the reductionism of our present time, and to think expansively, creatively, intuitively, holistically. 

Seeking Reformers

Torture by Kevin (DJ) Ahzee

Posted by Sifiso Mkhonto

Unity has a mixed reputation, in South Africa.  It was under apartheid that the motto ‘unity is strength’ became the tool of exclusion.  Yet even under our new constitutional democracy, with the motto ‘Working together we can do more’, unity became an illusion.

Today we find ourselves with different kinds of unity: political party unity, religious unity, and cultural unity. Yet rather than uniting us, these ‘unities’ exist in menacing tension, and instead of being united, we seem isolated. Furthermore, as the contours of these ‘unities’ have become more apparent, they have revealed parallel power structures in our society:

•  Political party unity has promoted ‘party first’, and cadre deployment.
•  Religious unity has served religious leaders, who have consorted with political power, and
•  Cultural unity has divided society through tribalism.

Over time, each of these unities has polarised us into captives and captors, and united us in bondage. Our ‘unities’ have become what I shall call ‘civilised oppression’. The dynamic is simple, on the surface of it. The major tool which is used to secure our captivity is patronage. Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organisation or individual bestows on another. It indicates the power to grant favours – but also, importantly, the need to seek them.

Underlying this dynamic, at both extremes, is the cancer we call greed. This greed then becomes institutionalised, and oppression, in the words of Iris Marion Young, becomes ‘embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutions and rules, and the collective consequences of following those rules’. Chains and prison cells are a mere shadow of the chains and prison cells of mental oppression such as this. ‘The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor,’ wrote the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, ‘is the mind of the oppressed.’

Since greed is embedded in each of us, and this greed has become institutionalised, we cannot eliminate the attendant oppression by getting rid of rulers or by promulgating new laws – because oppressions are systematically reproduced in the major economic, political and cultural institutions. To make matters worse, in the words of the American social psychologist Morton Deutsch, ‘while specific privileged groups are the beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups, and thus have an interest in the continuation of the status quo, they do not typically understand themselves to be agents of oppression’. They, and we, are blind.

Contrast this now with the fact that we do, in fact, live in a constitutional democracy, with a bill of rights and the rule of law. People have lost the will and the desire to insist on law because they are cowed through the dynamics of patronage. Despondency has increased – or rather, our leaders have increased our despondency – as the dynamics of greed have gained the upper hand. Iris Marion Young describes our oppression ‘as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions that are supported by the media and cultural stereotypes as well as by the structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms’.

The cancer is within most of us. Now where do we look for restoration? Our greatest need is for Reformers who will press for merit systems, insist that lawmakers respect the law and find strategies to eliminate patronage. They will seek unity under one constitution, one bill of rights, one law. However, this cannot be done by Reformers who do not have the cure for the cancer. I believe that freedom will flourish, citizens will emancipate themselves from mental oppression, and patronage won’t be the big elephant in the room, as soon as we implement this cure.

It is time to turn our house into a home. Find a cure for the cancer. Seek knowledgeable and principled Reformers who won’t give society the cold shoulder when symptoms of the cancer are identified even in them. Now is the time to act on the diagnosis of the cancer, and take the medication that will cure us. Those who are controlled by the disease need to repent and find their way, instead of being sidetracked by patronage.

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Also by Sifiso Mkhonto: Breaking the Myth of Equality.