Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

A Review of Dipesh Chakrabarty's "Provincializing Europe" by Amit Chaudhuri (London Review of Books)

Debashish — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:03:26 -0800

(recycled): Dipesh Chakrabarty's book "Provincializing Europe" is an important theoretical study of colonialism and its legacies in India. While [many] works outline the atrocities and dleterious effects of colonialism abound, Chakrabarti, one of the founder-members of the Subaltern Studies movement in Indian (and world) history tells the story from the lesser known side of the strategies used by Indians (in colonial Kolkata) for making an "alternate habitation" of modernity - i.e. adapting it to their own uses. In doing this, he also makes a number of important theoretical points about cultural situatedness and conditions for effective cross-cultural dialog. This review, taken from the London Review of Books is by Amit Chaudhuri, a well-known younger Indian novelist and commentator.

Arundati Roy on sham Democracy in India

Rich — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:38:44 -0700

In a country where one can be arrested for writing a book because it offends the sentiments of religious devotees or criticizing or for criticizing the judiciary this interview with Arundati Roy addresses sham democracy in India. One has to confront Arundati one by one on the issues she raises for social justice that are wide ranging and concern Maoist in Orissa, armed occupation in Kashmir, the ever latent potential for genocide within the power regimes couched within Hindu or Islamic fundamentalist movements or even more to the point, the model of Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalism for ethnic cleansing that is being adapted by the Home Minister (and former Enron lawyer) India's new neo-liberal elite, its global corporations to move 85% of the population from the villages and countryside into mega-city slums, appropriating the lands of indigenous peoples, to harvest for themselves India's last remaining natural mineral resources, such as bauxite....

The Alien Home by Pico Iyer

Debashish — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:25:21 -0700

In this last chapter of his autobiographical novel The Global Soul, Pico Iyer captures the peculiar malaise of contemporary modernity - the uncertainty of belonging, the illusory surface of global consumerism, the search for traditional fixities.

Perhaps underlying this statement of alien homecoming lies a tragic absurdism; perhaps it opens a door on an alternate modernity; perhaps it is a call for an engaged postmodernity. Iyer leaves us with ambiguous questions.

Crisis of the Mind by Paul Valery

Debashish — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:14:39 -0700

"The Crisis of the Mind" was written by by the French Symbolist poet and essayist Paul Valery at the request of John Middleton Murry. "La Crise de l'esprit" originally appeared in English, in two parts, in The Athenaeum (London), April 11 and May 2, 1919. The French text was published the same year in the August number of La Nouvelle Revue Française.

Valery's post WWI text, read today, bears a curiously contemporary prescience in its final aphoristic paragraphs, though it is also marked by the pervaisve Eurocentrism of the turn of the 19th/20th c. It also illustrates a form of poetic thinking and writing style which braids a scientific temper with Nietzschean mysticism in what he calls "a physics of the imagination."

The striking yet understated ending points to the way ahead for contemporary man in the thought of Valery (following in the wake of Mallarme and other French modernist thinkers). It lies in a new freedom at the margins of modernity and its social determinism. In thinking this self-reconstitution, the human can perhaps reconfigure himself in his historicity.

Capitalism a Love Story by Michael Moore

Rich — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:37:16 -0700

Michael Moore returns with economic barbarism and class warfare on his mind.

The Fundamentalism Project: A series from the University of Chicago Press Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Editors

Rich — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:15:44 -0700

The Fundamentalism Project (1991–95), a series of five volumes edited by the American scholars Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Marty and Appleby viewed fundamentalism primarily as the militant rejection of secular modernity. The Fundamentalism Project has produced the definitive text on the phenomena of Fundamentalism

Technology in a Global World by Andrew Feenberg

Debashish — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:25:43 -0700

In this article, Andrew Feenberg, a major thinker on culture and technology (more properly the culture of technology) refelcts on globalization and the contribution of national cultural histories to its increasingly systemic pervasion. The specific non-western nation he takes for his illustration and the exploration of a thesis of alternate modernity is Japan. How is modernity technologically assimilated in Japan and how is world modernity shaped by Japanese culture? Is there any cultural distinction which can be spoken of here? Do cultures change as a result of modern technology or do they remain the same? Or can they influence modernity? Or are they capable of alternate modernities? These are some of the questions Feenberg starts with.

In further developing his refelctions, Feenberg draws on the thought of early modern Japanese thinker, Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945). It is interesting to see how Nishida's ideas of the rise of Asia and the concord of national cultures in an organic globalization resembles Sri Aurobindo's thesis on the ideal of human unity. Neo-Hegelian reflections of this kind were an important staple of early modern thought, on the threshold of a wave of world modernization, and Sri Aurobindo's own contribution to this imagining of the future must be read within this discourse. Feenberg points to the ultra-national distortions in Nishida's text, but also to its continued relevance and fertility. - db

Zizek: A Lacanian plea for Fundamentalism (part 6 or 9)

Rich — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:32:06 -0700

This is part of (midway through) an excellent lecture by Zizek on Fundamentalism. In this particular part of the lecture he considers the differences in how Derrida and Habermas treat the question of "the other" and how in his view they actually compliment each other. In the other parts of the lecture Zizek gives his insight into why, if Max Weber were writing today, he would call his book, "Taoism and the Spirit of Capitalism", (aka why westernized Buddhism or Taoism is the perfect compliment to neo-liberal globalization). Zizek also addresses the differences in fundamentalism between the type practiced by Tibetean Buddhist and Amish versus moral majority Christianity and radical Islam as well as eurocentric tendencies to exoticize the other

About half way through this part of the lecture are some questions raised (that are difficult to hear) but if one listens to the entire lecture (either the series of nine u tube videos or the mp3) one will be richly rewarded, because Zizek is here, at the top of his game wildly speaking to issues of fundamentalism, eurocentrism, orientalism, and otherness.

The link to the utube page with the entire series of nine videos and the mp3 download of the lecture is given in the body of the post....

“It’s development, stupid !” or: How to Modernize Modernization by Bruno Latour

Debashish — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:26:12 -0700

Bruno Latour (1947-) is Professor and vice-president for research at the Institut d'études Politiques de Paris. Latour is a leading and very influential anthropologist of Modernity whose major contribution may be called holistic politcal epistemology. This, for Latour, is not a form of idealism, but what, following William James, he calls "radical empiricism." Latour is (in)famous for his pronouncement "We have never been modern." By this he means that the overarching hubris of modernity for human autonomy and mastery is a sub-narrative in a larger embeddedness in holistic properties which is only beginning to make its imperative critical demands on human attention. This emergence depends on the recognition of a change of telos and and a political epistemology of interdisciplinarity which takes humanity beyond itself into the fullness of global embodiment. In this essay, he reflects on environmentalism, society, technology and theology. - db

The Violence of the Global by Jean Baudrillard

Rich — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:15:02 -0700

The analogy between the terms "global" and "universal" is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was unmatched by any other culture. Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies. That's what happened to all those cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values. And this is a much more ugly death....

We are really not talking about a "clash of civilizations" here, but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity. From the perspective of global power (as fundamentalist in its beliefs as any religious orthodoxy), any mode of difference and singularity is heresy. Singular forces only have the choice of joining the global system (by will or by force) or perishing. The mission of the West (or rather the former West, since it lost its own values a long time ago) is to use all available means to subjugate every culture to the brutal principle of cultural equivalence. Once a culture has lost its values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. Beyond their political or economic objectives, wars such as the one in Afghanistan [7] aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the territories. The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both geographically and mentally.

An Imaginative Geography - Chapter One of "The Myth of Shangri-La" by Peter Bishop

Debashish — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:35:25 -0700

As globalization strips the veil from the last inviolable topos of earth and real-time surveiilance renders every square unit of the planet physically transaparent in its utilitarian Google Maps and Star War strategies, the sacred plexuses of the earth also multiply in their resistant cultural geographies of surreal uptopia.

Peter Bishop teaches Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Australia. Bishop's entertaining and erudite analyses of contemporary material culture pry open the spaces where spirituality, imagination, cultural history and material practices intersect. In this first chapter from his book, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred landscape, he presents the makings of a theory of sacred cultural materiality - the spiritual, psychological, aesthetic, cultural, historical, political, economic and geographic transactions which establish the utopian spaces of contemporary spiritual desire. - DB

Conference: Fundamentalism and the Future

Rich — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:54:40 -0700

Conference Announcement: Fundamentalism and the Future
Friday, September 11 and Saturday, September 12, 2009
California Institute of Integral Studies
1453 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA
A two-day conference will be held Friday, September 11 and Saturday September 12 on the topic “Fundamentalism and the Future.” The conference will be at the California Institute of Integral studies in San Francisco, hosted by the Department of Asian and Comparative Religions. The conference organizers are Rich Carlson, Debashish Banerji and David Hutchinson. Registration is free. For details on the conference, location, and registration, please see http://fundamentalismandthefuture.com

Heidegger, Habermas and the Essence of Technology by Andrew Feenberg

Debashish — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:52:19 -0700

Andrew Feenberg is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. In this article he considers the specificity of our Modern Age as Technology, as identified and theorized both by Martin Heidegger and Jurgen Habermas. Both these seiminal modern/contemporary thinkers, though marked by divergence in important respects, see Technology as the determining agent for modern subjectivity as a condition of subjection, alientaion, instrumentalization, homogeniety and social fragmentation. Feenberg here analyzes primary and secondary characteristics of Technology and indicates possibilties of technological reform in a post-industrial context to reintegrate culture, community, creativity and participatory improvization into world culture. One may note that though for the purposes of his own transformative discourse, Feenberg construes Heidegger and Habermas oppositionally as essentialistic in their characterization of Technology, in fact his reformative possibiltiies return us to Heidegger's view of the essence of Techne as Poiesis.

Postsecular Interrogations: AsiaSource Interview with Talal Asad

Debashish — Fri, 29 May 2009 11:10:34 -0700

Talal Asad is a Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York. In his self-description, "I am interested in the phenomenon of religion (and secularism) as an integral part of modernity, and especially in the religious revival in the Middle East. Connected with this is my interest in the links between religious and secular notions of pain and cruelty, and therefore with the modern discourse of Human Rights. My long-term research concerns the transformation of religious law (the shari'ah) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt with special reference to arguments about what constitutes secular and progressive reform."

Asad looks at the phenomenon of modernity as a discourse in Foucauldian terms, marked by the rise of the secular public sphere and the disciplinary institution and apparatus of the nation-state. The inevitable subjugations and investments in ideological choices rooted in the history of the European Enlightenmnt that this implies have led, in his opinion, to our present fractured and violent postcolonial world, where contested uniformities assert their right over the ubiquitous disciplinary space of nation states. But Asad's analyses don't stop short at stating the obvious in a sophisticated language or taking sides either with apologists of religious militancy or secular normalcy. Asad's call is for a dialogic engagement, interrogating the biases, provincial limitations and arbitaray choices within post-Enlightenment modernity through the critiquing of its doxa and nomos by alternate cultural histories, while probing these pre-modern formations for pluralities of interpretation and internal resources of human emancipation.

He thus envisages a postsecular world, in which individuals and groups may co-exist not through the policing of the boundaries of a public sphere by the nation-state, but through the development of alternate social realities of human emancipation. Asad's views are germane to the present situation in India, with the rise of a majoritarian uniformalist Hindutva at the national level and the percolation of its ideological nomos into ashrams such as the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The following interview with AsiaSource correspondent Nermeen Shaikh brings a number of his insights to the front.

Is Capitalism a Disease? The Crisis in U.S. Public Health by Richard Levins

Rich — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:04:33 -0700

Reference: 100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution

The scientific tradition of the "West," of Europe and North America, has had its greatest success when it has dealt with what we have come to think of as the central questions of scientific inquiry: "What is this made of?" and "How does this work?" Over the centuries, we have developed more and more sophisticated ways of answering these questions. We can cut things open, slice them thin, stain them, and answer what they are made of. We have made great achievements in these relatively simple areas, but have had dramatic failures in attempts to deal with more complex systems. We see this especially when we ask questions about health. When we look at the changing patterns of health over the last century or so, we have both cause for celebration and for dismay. Human life expectancy has increased by perhaps thirty years since the beginning of the twentieth century and the incidence of some of the classical deadly diseases has declined and almost disappeared. Smallpox presumably has been eradicated; leprosy is very rare; and polio has nearly vanished from most regions of the world. Scientific technologies have advanced to the point where we can give very sophisticated diagnoses, distinguishing between kinds of germs that are very similar to each other.

But the growing gap between rich and poor make many technical advances irrelevant to most of the world's people. Public health authorities were caught by surprise by the emergence of new diseases and the reappearance of diseases believed to be eradicated. In the 1970s, it was common to hear that infectious disease as an area of research was dying. In principle, infection had been licked; the health problems of the future would be degenerative diseases, problems of aging and chronic diseases. We now know this was a monumental error. The public health establishment was caught short by the return of malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, dengue, and other classical diseases. But it was also surprised by the appearance of apparently new infectious diseases: the most threatening of which is AIDS, but also Legionnaire's disease, Ebola virus, toxic shock syndrome, multiple drug resistant tuberculosi, arid many others. Not only was infectious disease not on the way out, but old diseases have come back with increased virulence and totally new ones have emerged.

How did this happen; why was public health caught by surprise? Why did the health professions assume that infectious disease would disappear and whey were they so wrong? In fact, infectious disease had been declining dramatically in Europe and North America for the last 150 years...

100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution (complete text with links)

Rich — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:24:00 -0700

As the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origins of Species take place this year, it is easy to overlook the fact that 2009 also marks the 100th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo's first major text on evolution and consciousness. In Process and Evolution and Yoga and Human Evolution (1909) Sri Aurobindo begins to comprehensively articulate his vision of human evolution. Just as Darwin's book became the foundation for a science of evolution, what has been called evolutionary spirituality can be traced back to Sri Aurobindo's work. Many are acknowledging this bi-centennial year of Darwin's birth with a reassessment of his work in light of what we now know about evolution it therefore, also seems to be a good time to reassess Sri Aurobindo's vision of human evolution in terms of our contemporary understanding of the phenomena......

Even though his view of history is essentially cyclic he starts his consideration of evolution by writing in Yoga and Human Evolution (1909) the following:

“Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact” (Aurobindo)

However, by the early1940s when he is revising the last chapters of The Life Divine he writes:

“the idea of human progress itself is very probably an illusion, for there is no sign that man, once emerged from the animal stage, has radically progressed during his race-history; at most he has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science, in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature “ (Aurobindo 1949 p832)....

There are six sections in this paper:

I) Why Sri Aurobindo would not believe in Intelligent Design
2) Darwinian Fundamentalism: reductionism, pluralism, play
3) Anticipating Science & Society
4) Complexity and the Dialectics of the Visible and Invisible
5) The Illusion of Human Progress and the Ideal of Human Unity
6) The Dialectics of Biology and Culture: science, ecology & economics

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - I

Debashish — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:03:33 -0700

Some relections on the continuing issue of techno-capitalism and post-human futures by Debashish Banerji. This is a first fragment highlighting Moishe Postone's commentaries on the late writings of Marx.

Religious Nationalism and Transnationalism in a Global World by Mark Juergensmeyer

Debashish — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:56:11 -0800

The rampant rise of religious nationalism and sectarian violence all over the world may have an intimate relation with contemporary neo-liberal globalization. Mark Juergensmeyer, director of global and international studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, presents his sociology of 21st century national and transnational religious sectarianism in a post-Enlightenment global context.

Competing Visions of History in Internal Islamic Discourse and Islamic-Western Dialogue - ABDULLAHI A. AN-NA'IM

Debashish — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:52:48 -0800

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Originally from Sudan, An-Na'im is a disciple of nationalist leader and Islamic reformer and Sufi, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who was executed in 1985 by the regime of President Gaafar Nimeiry. Taha's pronouncement of his first political incarceration by the British is reminiscent of Sri Aurobindo's: "When I settled in prison I began to realize that I was brought there by my Lord and thence I started my Khalwah with Him."

An-Na'im's specialties include human rights in Islam and cross-cultural issues in human rights. He is the director of the Religion and Human Rights Program at Emory. He also participates in Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. An-Naim was formerly the Executive Director of the African bureau of Human Rights Watch. He argues for a synergy and interdependence between human rights, religion, critical thought and secularism, instead of a dichotomy and incompatibility between them.

Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin R. Barber

Debashish — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:17:03 -0800

Juergensmeyer's article on Religious Nationalism and Transnationalism in a Globalizing World, carried earlier in sciy, throws a clear interpretive light on our contemporary world situation, a context within which the present imbroglio in Pondicherry wrt. "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" may be framed (with whatever customized caveats). But perhaps the earliest intuitive ray on this dialectic fueling the present discourse was the publication in 1995 of Benjamin Barber's now classic study "Jihad vs. McWorld." The book itself was in fact preceded by a March 1992 article of the same name in The Atlantic by the author (which later became the Introduction chapter in the book). This article is worthy of our consideration (or reconsideration if already read) in the present circumstances.

Who Carries Out Spectacular Acts of Terrorism and Why? Nitasha Kaul (C Theory)

Rich — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 15:01:46 -0800

Spectacular Acts of Terrorism create Events which are designed to shift the public discourse by rupturing processes of dialogue and understanding. A Big Bang such as planes that crash into buildings, or trains that explode, or discotheques that blow up, or a rain of bullets across a city -- brings about a quantum shift in every single aspect of individual perception and public policy -- immediately. This is the deliberate outcome of such Spectacles -- they are planned to disrupt incrementalist and rational development of thought processes at every level of a pluralist functioning state and society. This is why they happen unannounced, this is why they happen simultaneously at multiple locations, and this is why they target places of public prominence.

Who carries out such Spectacular Acts? We hear that the terrorists in Mumbai were young men in jeans with rucksacks who went for carnage with smiles on their faces. It is foolish to assume that the terrorists who go for such Spectacles are desperate people interested in alleviating genuine grievances. Of course, terrorists fight for a cause. But that cause isn't what they kill for; the specificity and legitimacy of their cause (Iraq, Kashmir, Gujarat, Chechya, Afghanistan, whatever they may think it to be) is condensed into the general and universal terms of violence and hatred by those who recruit them and radicalise them. By the time they spray bullets and hold hostages, asking for justice on their own terms, they have long betrayed themselves and become prisoners of manipulated representations. ....

Xul Solar

Debashish — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 23:22:12 -0700

Untitled 1

"A man well versed in all disciplines, curious about each and every mystery, father of alphabets, languages, utopias and mythologies, host of paradises and infernos, author, pan-chess player, and perfect astrologer in indulgent irony and generous friendship, Xul Solar is one of the most peculiar events of our times" - Jorge Luis Borges

If the essence of critique, as per Foucault, is the desubjugation of the self in the politics of truth, and if utopias, as per Jameson, represent the limit condition of social critique, Argentinian Xul Solar (1887-1963) is one kind of subject exemplar of the wholesale reconfiguration of modernity. Standing at the initiation of an age of world history which harvests humanity for a totalitarian global market, offers alienation and conditioning in the name of freedom, policed uniformity in the name of creativity and multiculturalism, dromologic deformation in the name of progress, animal lust and aggression cloaked as civilization, Xul Solar, like his friend Jorge Luis Borges, made of his life and its expressions a performance at the margins which opened the cracks to alternate worlds of creative communitarian self-fashioning, poised between internal coherence and external noise, negotiating their realities and truths in real-time. An epic personality, Solar leaves his legacy of the message that it is not through the politics of the democratic vote but through what may seem an eccentric creative aspiration towards global and teleological alternate integralities, resistances to assimilation and an assimilation of resistances, that we may gather the invisible threads and weave the text of a world which makes possible the gnostic community.

'Reflections on Machine Consciousness,' by William Irwin Thompson

Ron — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:57:32 -0700

I've taken the liberty of typing in all of Chapter 4 of my copy of this important book, because it powerfully addresses one of the main themes of SCIY, the manifold relationships between science, culture, and consciousness. (ron)

"It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist. ...

"Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulfed in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle. ...

"Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe... For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a 'Celestial Intelligence' — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil's vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges's 'Library of Babel'. 'I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret'. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges's use of the word 'Babel'. ... "

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies III

Debashish — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:05:34 -0700

The concluding section on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies by Debashish Banerji continues its second installment's reflections on the Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence presented to us as the emerging destiny of post-Enlightenment Modernity and compares this destination with its appropriation and supercession in the Neo-Vedantic teleology of Sri Aurobindo. What are the differences, dangers and promises of these destinies and what are the conditions for achieving an alternate destination? ...

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - II

Debashish — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:04:11 -0700

This is a fragment constituting a continuation of Debashish Banerji's reflections on Techno-Capitalism as the epistemic regime of modernity and posible post-human futures at the eschatological cusp of history. Here the alignment of Marx and Hegel with the Enlightenment vision/teleology is contemplated and questions asked regarding a comparative alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.

Trajectories of the Catastrophic

Rich — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 15:25:06 -0700

To invent something is to invent an accident. To invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck; the space shuttle, the explosion. And to invent the electronic superhighway or the Internet is to invent a major risk which is not easily spotted because it does not produce fatalities like a shipwreck or a mid-air explosion. The information accident is, sadly, not very visible. It is immaterial like the waves that carry information.

- Yet you call yourself an "adept of technologies". I am an art critic of technologies, a fan worried about the propagandistic and sudden nature of the new technologies. When machines begin to be idolized, social catastrophe is never far behind.

Who's on Top in Tech-Readiness?

Ron — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:42:49 -0700

...the Global Information Technology Report... assesses 127 economies on scores of factors ranging from the cost of mobile phone calls and available Internet bandwidth to the quality of higher education. Not just a catalog of technical specifications, the report weighs these measures to determine which economies are best positioned to compete in the information-intensive 21st century economy.

The conclusion, as in previous studies, finds Nordic countries grabbing five of the top 10 slots, with Denmark and Sweden placing No.1 and No.2 for the second year running. Credit widespread Internet usage, supportive government policies, and good education. The U.S. came in at No.4, up three positions from last year. Although the U.S. gets top marks in innovation and education, it's pulled down by "red tape and rigidities" that stifle its business environment...

100 Years of Sri Aurobindo on Evolution: The dialectics of biology and culture; science, ecology & economics (part 6 of 6)

Rich — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:36:55 -0700

Perhaps it is best if the twain between science and religion do not meet. Trying to engage science and spirituality in a dialog has a long and troubled history. The incommensurable narratives of matter and spirit they both tell have proven time and time again troublesome for reaching any common understanding. In fact, if science and spirituality do share something in common it is that they all too often accuse the other of totalizing a universal narrative that usurps all ways of looking at the world that are inconsistent with their own.

Religion and science each have their own fundamentalist practitioners who would reduce the world solely to accounts told in their holy books or biology text books. One can not easily imagine an encounter between science and religion in which some violent reaction would not be triggered. Worse perhaps then the violent confrontation between science and religion is when either one appropriates the narratives of the other for the purpose of furthering their own ideological concerns. In the case of religion one example would be in their use of science to justify creationism, while in the case of science such appropriation usually results in one of the just-so stories of origins or cultural analogs of natural selection that Neo-Darwinism tells....

This holds true also for any dialog one would wish to begin between integral yoga and science. It would perhaps be best to begin such a dialog by first exploring Sri Aurobindo's dialectic between yoga and culture and then to look for resonances with narratives told by credible scientist regards the dialectics of science and culture. Better yet, in Sri Aurobindo's own work one finds him at times also critically exploring the dialectic between science and culture. It would therefore seem best to arrive at a dialogic platform to engage science and integral yoga using their diffusion in the semi-permeable membrane of culture, rather then by a direct confrontation as a means to begin the conversation.

Tibet is one thing, but India and China tensions spell bigger disaster

Ron — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:39:07 -0700

...Few of his contemporaries think of George Walker Bush as a visionary American president, unless they are using the term to imply a touch of madness. Yet early in his second term Bush launched a bold initiative to try to establish closer American ties with India, the world’s biggest democracy, in what may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination...

Bush... has managed to cast aside 40 years of hostility and suspicion between America and India – and even agreed to start collaborating over nuclear energy – in the hope of strengthening India and its economy. And all for a special reason: the rise of China. ...

Global Voices: alternative global journalism at its best

Rich — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:24:15 -0700

Global Voices is a great blog of comprehensive alternative journalism for world wide news. Funded by the non-profit Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society, they have assembled a systematic method for procuring first hand information about world events that the multinational mass media sources miss. I believe it is on the cutting edge of global alternative journalism. rc

Tata Unveils the World's Cheapest Car

Ron — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:48:41 -0800

It's called the Nano, for its high technology and small size. It's cute, compact, and contemporary. It's a complete four-door car with a 623-cc gas engine, gets 50 miles to the gallon, and seats up to five. It meets domestic emissions norms and will soon comply with European standards. It's 8% smaller in outer length than its closest rival, Suzuki's Maruti 800, but has 21% more volume inside. And at $2,500 before taxes (value-added taxes increase the price by about $300), it is the most inexpensive car in the world. Starting this fall, the Nano will roll off the assembly lines at a Tata Motors (TTM) plant in Singur, Bengal, and navigate India's potholed roads.

The Nano, also known as the People's Car, is Ratan Tata's dream come true, and is India's contribution to changing the global auto industry. "The car has put India on the global map," says Fionna Prims, head of business development for Segment Y, a Goa-based automotive consultant for emerging markets. "Tata has done in four years what the Japanese took 30 years to do. It will change the whole industry." Even rivals are gushing. "It's a red letter day for Indian industry, a day India should be proud of," says Venu Srinivasan, chairman of motorcycle maker TVS Motors. "Ratan Tata has the vision to create a new business model and all the naysayers are looking at it with concern. The Nano is a path breaker." ...

The Malthusian energy-trap: old Europe, new China

Ron — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:25:58 -0800

Thanks to Rich for recommending the excellent openDemocracy.net, in which this article appeared. ~ ronjon

The price of oil is approaching $100 a barrel, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is accumulating faster than the most pessimistic scenarios are predicting, anthropogenic climate change is occurring. The recognition that the world's scientists, diplomats and media gathered at the Bali climate-change summit are arguing over - the necessity of moving beyond dependency on a fossil-fuelled, carbon-emission-based global economy - is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

Where is leadership in the quest for a new model to come from? The results of a BBC opinion-poll inviting the views of 22,000 people in twenty-one countries, released in November 2007, included the striking discovery that the Chinese were the most willing to change their lifestyle and accept higher energy prices in order to save the environment. ...

William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle

Ron — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:33:04 -0700

Here's another provocative TED video. McDonough shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world's largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the sustainable cities he's designing in China. -- This blip is 20 minutes.

Stewart Brand TED Video: Why squatter cities are a good thing

Ron — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:48:52 -0700

I highly recommend watching this 3-minute video blip of Stewart Brand's TED talk. (See also SB's 1-hr. "City Planet" talk at Google.) ~ ronjon

Al Gore, UN Climate Panel Share 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

Ron — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:18:49 -0700

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to publicize and understand human-caused global warming. -- The Norwegian Nobel Committee this morning announced that the former U.S. vice president and the United Nations' climate panel will equally share the prestigious award for "their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Gore and the IPCC were chosen from a list of 181 candidates to split the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors (about 1.5 million U.S. dollars). -- The award committee, based in Oslo, Norway, said their decision was intended to bring into sharper focus the actions "necessary to protect the world's future climate and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind.

"Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man's control," the committee added. ...

Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience, by David Pogue, NYT

Ron — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:52:50 -0700

Wearing a new hat in Galadima, a hamlet in Abuja, Nigeria [photo added by ronjon]

In November, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

And this laptop will cost $200... It’s an effort by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries...

OLPC slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world — for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called “Give 1, Get 1,” and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country. ...

Nearly 80 percent of India lives on half dollar a day

Ron — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 11:29:36 -0700

Seventy-seven percent of Indians -- about 836 million people -- live on less than half a dollar a day in one of the world's hottest economies, a government report said.

The state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) said most of those living on below 20 rupees (50 US cents) per day were from the informal labor sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty.

"For most of them, conditions of work are utterly deplorable and livelihood options extremely few," said the report, entitled "Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector" ...

The China syndrome

Ron — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:20:22 -0700

For the foreign officials gathered at President Bush's two-day climate summit meeting this week, there's a cruel reality - no matter whether they opt for the voluntary, go-slow American path to emissions cutbacks or the more muscular United Nations approach, there's no way to stop catastrophic global warming if China doesn't also go green.

Without fast, concerted action to help China clean up its emissions-spewing economy - using lessons already learned by Bay Area scientists and regulators - the world's fight against climate change may be doomed to defeat.

According to several international studies released in recent months, China is in the process of overtaking the United States as the world's No. 1 source of greenhouse gas emissions. But a closer look at the numbers shows even more startling news - China's emissions growth will soon outstrip that of the entire industrialized world combined. Even if China meets its own targets for energy-efficiency improvements, its greenhouse gas emissions will increase by about 2.5 billion metric tons over the next five years, an amount far larger than the 1.05 billion tons in reductions imposed by the Kyoto Protocol on wealthy nations and on the United States, which has since withdrawn from the treaty. ...

The Revolution That Is Arising From The Earth, by William M. H. Kötke

Ron — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:06:37 -0700

This is, imho, an excellent article -- one that summarizes the psychosocial, cultural, political and economic roots of the ballooning sustainability crisis looming over our beloved planet. I strongly recommend reading it. ~ ronjon

The planetary elite are compelled to continue on their path of growth leading toward planetary domination. The international bankers through their control of the industrial world’s privately owned central banks maintain a tether on the money system through their control of the U.S. dollar as the currency of international trade. One important mechanism that allows this is that the largest item in international trade - oil - is sold in dollars. In order to insure the continuance of the dollar economy, they must be able to choose which currency oil is sold for or control the oil - or both. The center of the empire, the U.S., is maintained by debt as the petrodollars and other dollars come into the U.S. at the rate of at least two and a half billion per day (purchasing U.S. government bonds) in order to continue the cycle, which keeps the empire and its military power expanding As the elite carry out their strategies of domination they are racing against time. The monster trends of Peak Oil and energy exhaustion, climate change which will severely disrupt the seasons of growth in the food supply system, the weakness of the dollar and ecological collapse are pursuing them. An exponentially growing world population with growing material consumption based on dwindling resources and a dying planet won’t work, but they have no other option to maintain their power and profit. ...

Buy a cheap laptop, give one to world's poor kids

Ron — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:39:28 -0700

A computer intended to improve education for children in developing countries is to be offered to western buyers. -- Engineers at the One Laptop Per Child project, based in the US, have built a low-cost computer designed to work in some of the world's most undeveloped areas. Until now only governments have been invited to buy the machines, but in an attempt to jump-start the project, western consumers will soon be able to buy their own version.

In return for spending $399 (£197), customers will receive their own laptop as well as paying for a second computer for children in deprived parts of world. To begin with, the machines will be donated to youngsters in countries such as Afghanistan, Haiti and Rwanda.

The machine, conceived by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, incorporates a number of innovations, including a high-resolution screen and low power consumption. It can be powered by solar energy, foot pump or a clockwork charger. The idea is that access to learning aids and hi-tech equipment will help children in some of the world's poorest countries learn skills that can lift them out of poverty. The scheme will run for two weeks in November, and only in North America.

The biopolitical/dromological reversal, by Ian R. Douglas

Ron — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:11:19 -0700

I came across this interesting article when Googling the term "dromology" -- which Rich used in an earlier comment.

For Foucault, biopower was the essential missing link in genealogy of capitalist modernity. As he insisted in 'Discipline and Punish': " ... the two processes - the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital - cannot be separated." On the other side of the equation, Paul Virilio has stressed that his focus on speed in no way detracts from the importance of capital. As he insisted in 'Pure War': "Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed is the hidden side of wealth." And lest we forget, Marx also understood the political advantages of the collision of dromological/biopolitical technology: ...

Nowhere better do we find resonances of this "vulgar stimulation" than the ensemble of discourses that seem now in the ascendant (the discourses of globalism and globalization), fast overtaking the globe, and in the same movement creating anew a fast globe. These discourses, and their subsidiaries (informatisation, risk, competition, efficiency) - reflected and enacted in a whole panoply of specific practices - are all linked in the double movement sketched out above (the "will-to-speed" and "modern governmentality"). Taken together - I argue - we stumble across the unwritten history of globalization, and in that, the unwritten history of contemporary advanced capitalism.

The links are fairly simple. Dromology: the will-to-speed finds its final realisation in the destruction of the space (astronautical flight, space obliterated in proportion to the velocity of the vehicle). This destruction, as a social principle (Mumford's "desire to get somewhere"), has reduced the expanse of the world to naught, thrusting us into the global epoch. Governmentality: we need look only to the proliferating discourses of risk, competition, informatization, self-monitoring, self-organization, efficiency, effectiveness and excellence to get a taste of the ways in which the discourse of speed works to order the world into which individuals - indeed whole societies - are thrown. Each element feeds of the other: dromocratic power has encouraged the release of the will-to-speed through which we face what Virilio has termed the "negative horizon" (the implosion of space under the violence of speed). In parallel, disciplinary society has actively sought to produce this violence of speed (first in the military, then in the factory, then in the school, then in the prison) as a technical instrument in the ordering of populations ("populations at speed"). ...

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativism

Ron — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 16:22:10 -0700

In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (SWH) states that there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. Although it has come to be known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, it rather was an axiom underlying the work of linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his colleague and student Benjamin Whorf.

... “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees." (Whorf, 1940, pp. 213–14)

Building One Laptop Per Socialized Child (One Laptop Per Child News)

Ron — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:00:00 -0700

OLPC News: "Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's computer, the OLPC Children's Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte."

"Social inclusion has been one of the foremost issues in the minds of many ... people, like me, Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla, of Lima, Perú. The advantages of using computers and the Internet as a mechanism for making governments and institutions readily available to the citizen, and to enhance the potential of consumers to act together, are always a significant component of the reasons given to invest in technology.

But social inclusion means also some degree of socialization. To include all citizens demands that those that haven't been able to (or haven't been allowed to) exercise their collective citizenship find the means to do that, but first of all, that are aware that they have the rights and duties that come with participation in a polity, in a nation as a whole. This demands a very specific form of socialization.

Historically, the most important resource for this kind of socialization has been the school system. Even more so, in many developing countries with confusing situations of race, ethnicity and class, and with structural limitations to social mobility, schools are the only significant support of the "imagined community" as discussed by Benedict Anderson. ...

Slavoj Zizek: Trickster purveyor of post-Lacanian mischief

Ron — Sat, 05 May 2007 17:00:00 -0700

...Zizek has cast a very long shadow in what can only be termed "cultural studies" (though he would despise the characterization). He is an effective purveyor of Lacanian mischief, and, as a follower of the French "liberator" of Freud, Zizek's Lacan is almost exclusively transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables. That he has an encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop cultural currents — and that he has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his imagination — is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and confounded his critics for over ten years.

Primarily the goal appears to be to demolish the coordinates of the liberal hegemony that permit excess and aberration insofar as it does not threaten the true coordinates. He suggests as well that the true coordinates are much better hidden than we realize. The production of cultural difference is to Zizek the production of the inoperative dream — a dream that recalls perhaps Orwell's 1984 or even Terry Gilliam's Brazil where a kind of generic pastoralism or a sexualized nature substitutes for authentic freedom — the flip side of this is film noir. Zizek has determined that late-modern capitalism has engendered a whole range of alternative seductions to keep the eye and brain off of the Real. The Real only exists as a fragment, fast receding on the horizon as fantasy and often phantasm intercede. These dreams and nightmares are systemic, structural neuroses, and they are part of the coordinates of the hegemonic. The hegemony — the prevailing set of coordinates — always seeks to "take over" the Real, and, therefore, this contaminated Real must be periodically purged. ...

Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference, by Eric Davis

Ron — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:30:17 -0700

...Unlike most religious seers, Dick did not approach his visions with anything like certitude. Dick distrusted reification of any sort (his novels constantly wage war against the process that turns people and ideas into things), and so he refused to solidify his experiences into a belief system. ...Dick approached his theophany (or "in-breaking of God") as artistic material, reworking it in his writings with an artist's commitment to irony, craft, and a political bite. Even in his private journals, he constantly liquefies his revelations, writing with a modern thinker's sense of the tentativeness of speculative thought.

... Dick's Black Iron Prison imaginatively captured the "disciplinary apparatus" of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault. Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a "technology of power" was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, "The Empire never ended."

"...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. [10]"

As Jean Baudrillard has argued into the ground, simulation rather than representation has become the defining characteristic of cultural signs and artifacts in our time. ... The technological simulacrum creates its own reality, which Baudrillard calls the "hyperreal," a kind of ersatz parody of Plato's ideal world of forms. For example, when you download a printer driver from the Internet or record a CD onto digital tape, you do not "copy" the information so much as replicate a hyperreal object.

... As an exhausted rationalist, Baudrillard simply abandoned himself to a morbid celebration of the pixel apocalypse, giving up any notion of resistance or transformation while ignoring the messy realities that gum up the works of all such grand intellectual scenarios. But Dick never gave up his commitment to the "authentically human," the "viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new." He also recognized that simulacra lie deep in our souls, and that we are not so far from the spiritual paradigms of the ancient world, with their camouflage spirits, talking images, and automata gods. And so Dick redeployed the gnostic struggle for authenticity and freedom within the hard-sell universe of simulation. The world is a prison not because of its materiality—which was the opinion of the ancient Gnostics—but because of the hidden orders of power and control it houses: the various corporate, political, and ideological archons herding us into increasingly compelling synthetic worlds. ...

'The Great Turning' by David Korten

Ron — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 09:25:08 -0700

In The Great Turning, Korten argues that corporate consolidation of power is merely a contemporary manifestation of what he calls “Empire”: the organization of society by hierarchies of domination grounded in violent chauvinisms of race, gender, religion, nationality, language, and class. The result has been the same for 5,000 years, fortune for the few and misery for the many. Increasingly destructive of children, family, community, and nature, the way of Empire is leading to environmental and social collapse.

The Great Turning makes the case that we humans are a choicemaking species that at this defining moment faces both the opportunity and the imperative to choose our future as a conscious collective act. We can no longer deny the need nor delay our response. A mounting perfect economic storm is fast approaching. A convergence of climate change, peak oil, and the financial instability inherent in an unbalanced global trading system will bring an unraveling of the corporate-led global economy and a dramatic restructuring of every aspect of modern life.

Thanks to Mario Santonm for recommending this book. ...

ISEC: The International society for Ecology & Culture

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:47:52 -0700

I got to know the remarkable Helena Norberg-Hodge, the Founder of ISEC, back in the 70's, when she was setting up the Ladakh Project, for which she shared the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize.' –- Her selfless, Buddhist commitment to protecting the indigenous peoples of the Tibetan high plateau from Western commercial development deeply impressed me. I'll always remember her inspiring photos of the unique and glowing faces of the Ladakh people who hadn't yet been exposed to Western culture. Knowing Helena, I can unreservedly attest to the quality and integrity of ISEC. ... ~ ron

Forty Initiatives that are changing our world (Resurgence Mag.)

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:12:56 -0700

This informative list of annotated links compiled by Resurgence Magazine includes interesting initiatives in the areas of Activism, Agricultural Development, Ecology, Economics, Education & Community, the Internet, Political & Corporate, Publishing, and Scientific Principles. The few I’ve had a chance to check out so far look like they’re indeed doing important work; e.g., ISEC (the International society for Ecology & Culture), which I’ll post more info about in my next article. — Recommended.

The Institute of Science in Society (ISIS): Science Society Sustainability

Ron — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 17:37:32 -0700

The Institute of Science in Society says it's "The only radical science magazine on earth." I don't know if that's literally true, but at first look, this does seem worth a serious look. Thanks to koantum for telling us about it.

“SIS is the antidote to scientific mumbo-jumbo. It treats people as grown ups - capable of understanding and facing up to difficult issues - whilst demanding that scientists describe the challenges of science in terms people can understand. Every idea that SIS explores is an advocacy of good science. A must-read for all who wish to change society for the better.” Alan Simpson, Member of Parliament, UK ...

Is India headed the right way?, by Francois Gautier

Ron — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:35:11 -0800

Thanks to Koantum for suggesting this article by Aurovillian Francois Gautier.
_______________________________________________________________
Today, there is a sense of deep satisfaction, of gloating even, in India... we see a much more dynamic and self-confident India, galvanised by the liberalisation taking place at this very moment.

But if one looks closer at what is happening here, one is bound to feel a little unsettled. For what we see today is an India veering blindly, without restraint, towards total globalisation and Westernisation. — Yes, there are great values in the Western world: Freedom, democracy, equality (not always though), respect for the environment, less corruption. And India must, and has already borrowed from these qualities. — But since the last two, three years, it seems the Indian political and intellectual mind is pushing these qualities to an illogical extreme, as if it wants to prove to the West that 'we are as democratic, as liberal, as free as you are.' — Thus, democracy in India has been hijacked. It takes a fortune to be elected. Politicians, elected by and for the people, once they are locked in the ivory tower that is Delhi, forget all about the people.

This process of copying the West to the point of aping it has, of course, already happened many times in the developing world. And it killed the soul of many countries, making them just another replica of the West -- with a youth that wears the latest Calvin Klein jeans, knows the No 1 bestseller on the Time list, can quote a few lines from Dante, reads The Times of India, but knows nothing about pranayama, has never read a verse from Kalidasa and does not know who Sri Aurobindo is. ...

Clean air or TV: Where will Asia find more energy?

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:50:41 -0800

A toxic purple haze of diesel exhaust hangs over the rice and jute fields here in northeastern India, and bird songs are frequently drowned out by the chug-a-chug-a-chug of diesel generators. — Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China have become a favorite way to provide electricity. — They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world. — But as the demand increases for the electricity that makes those advances possible, it is often being met through the dirtiest, most inefficient means, creating pollution in many remote areas that used to have pristine air and negligible emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases...

Another popular approach being tried in India and elsewhere -- using solar energy to recharge lanterns by day -- has run into difficulty even as diesel prices would seem to make it more competitive. — The problem is that prices for photovoltaic panels for solar energy have surged as governments in industrialized countries, especially Germany, have encouraged greater use of renewable energy, said Hemant Lamba, the coordinator of Aurore, a renewable energy service company in Auroville, India. — "It's harder to do any solar energy projects in India," he said. ...

Interview: Dr. Francis Collins, devout Christian & Head of the US' National Human Genome Research Institute

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 01:17:17 -0800

I started reading this interview with more than a little skepticism. ("Oh, this must be one of Bush's Christian fundamentalist appointees.") But as I read through it, I became increasingly impressed with the balanced perspective held by Dr. Collins. I'm posting it here because I think it provides an encouraging example of a possible rapprochement between scientists and people of faith.

The media often portray the religious right in the United States as antiscience. Is that a fair characterization?
I don't think it's fair to blame believers for getting defensive about attacks on the Bible when they see their whole belief system is under attack from some members of the scientific community who are using the platform of science to say, "We don't need God anymore, that was all superstition, and you guys should get over it." Believers then feel some requirement to respond, and this has led to an unfortunate escalation of charges and countercharges...

So what would you say to the scientists who are fervently opposed to religious thought and practice?
Is there any dogma more unsupported by the facts than from the scientist who stands up and says, "I know there is no God"? Science is woefully unsuited to ask the question of God in the first place. So give the religious folks a break. They are seeking the kind of spiritual truths that have always interested humankind but that science cannot really address. ...

Jaron's World: "Why your next telephone may come mounted on a neck."

Ron — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:09:43 -0800

I've been thinking lately about two seemingly unrelated questions that have a hidden and, I suspect, significant connection:

1. Why do you have a neck?
2. Why hasn't videoconferencing ever caught on? ...

It might sound strange at first to design a communication device that bobs around just as our heads do when we talk and listen. But when nature settles on the same solution to a difficult problem more than once, as it did with vertebrates and cephalopods, it is worth paying attention. ...

'Waterworld China' wins top prize in international design competition

Ron — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:27:26 -0800

Atkin's Architecture Group recently won the first prize award for an international design competition with this stunning entry. Set in a spectacular water filled quarry in Songjiang, China, the 400 bed resort hotel is uniquely constructed within the natural elements of the quarry. Underwater public areas and guest rooms add to the uniqueness, but the resort also boasts cafes, restaurants and sporting facilities.

The lowest level runs with the aquatic theme by housing a luxurious swimming pool and an extreme sports center for activities such as rock climbing and bungee jumping which will be cantilevered over the quarry and accessed by special lifts from the water. With a stunning visual presentation as shown here, it's no wonder this project took home the first prize. This is a fine example of an ultra modern facility co-existing amongst its natural environment. ...

"Response to my critics," by Meera Nanda

Ron — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:11:11 -0800

"Prophets Facing Backward," my book under discussion here, claims that the cluster of social constructivist, feminist and postcolonial theories that deny any cognitive distinctions between warranted knowledge and collectively accepted beliefs ... have provided philosophical justifications for [a] kind of populist interpretive flexibility ...

Set against the backdrop of the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the book argues that the relentless debunking the very idea of universally valid, bias-free facts has received in the hands of its many academic critics, has added to a culture of doublethink where truth has becomes infinitely malleable, open to all kinds of nativist, pseudo-scientific and faith-based interpretations.

Intellectuals, whose job it is to challenge such mystifications, I argue, have betrayed their calling by condemning the very possibility of impartial and universally valid truth that can cut through cultural and national boundaries. This betrayal has made it easier for the religious right to present itself as the defender of the tradition, dressed up as “alternative science”, which it claims has been unfairly rejected and willfully suppressed by the secular elite. The logic of deconstruction of modern science simultaneously provides the logic for the construction of “sacred sciences” by the resurgent religious-political movements that have sprung up among the Hindus, Christian and Muslims alike.

It is indeed high time for science studies to get engaged in the thorny issues raised by the attempt of religious extremists to take on the prestige of science for their objectively false and outdated cosmologies. It is gratifying to note that the debate I began in the "Prophets" has now been joined. My colleagues from science studies and postcolonial studies have done me the honor of critically engaging with the concerns I have raised regarding the political dangers of epistemic multiculturalism in this age of religious fundamentalisms. In this essay, I will respond at length to the issues my critics have raised in their readings of the "Prophets." ...

"Prophets Facing Backward," by Meera Nanda

Ron — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 21:26:26 -0800

The leading voices in science studies have argued that modern science reflects dominant social interests of Western society. Following this logic, postmodern scholars have urged postcolonial societies to develop their own "alternative sciences" as a step towards "mental decolonization". These ideas have found a warm welcome among Hindu nationalists who came to power in India in the early 1990s. In this passionate and highly original study, Indian-born author Meera Nanda reveals how these well-meaning but ultimately misguided ideas are enabling Hindu ideologues to propagate religious myths in the guise of science and secularism.

At the heart of Hindu supremacist ideology, Nanda argues, lies a postmodernist assumption: that each society has its own norms of reasonableness, logic, rules of evidence, and conception of truth, and that there is no non-arbitrary, culture-independent way to choose among these alternatives. What is being celebrated as "difference" by postmodernists, however, has more often than not been the source of mental bondage and authoritarianism in non-Western cultures. The "Vedic sciences" currently endorsed in Indian schools, colleges, and the mass media promotes the same elements of orthodox Hinduism that have for centuries deprived the vast majority of Indian people of their full humanity.

By denouncing science and secularization, the left was unwittingly contributing to what Nanda calls "reactionary modernism." ...

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) to deliver first 5 million units this year

Ron — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:19:44 -0800

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Initiative unveiled its final industrial prototype of the XO - a laptop computer with a toylike look. But to say it's a toy is misleading. The device is intended to bring the most isolated tribal village into the Information Age, with the ultimate goal of offering one to every child on the planet. [Except for India, whose education bureaucracy vetoed OLPC participation last year.]

By keeping the price low, the OLPC initiative hopes that governments in the developing world will be able to afford them. Already, Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Thailand, Uruguay, and, most recently, Rwanda have committed to participate in the program. Rwanda hopes to have laptops for all of its schoolchildren within five years. ...

Prof. Suarez-Villa’s website on the rise of technocapitalism

Ron — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:06:32 -0800

Thanks to RY Deshpande for the reference to Prof. Suarez-Villa’s website on the rise of technocapitalism:

Technocapitalism is a new form of market capitalism that is rooted in technological invention and innovation. It can be considered an emerging era, now in its early stage, that is supported by such intangibles as creativity and knowledge.

Intangibles are at the core of technocapitalism. Creativity and knowledge are to technocapitalism what tangible raw materials, factory labor and capital were to industrial capitalism. During industrial capitalism, tangible resources acquired the greatest value, as factory production, repetitive labor and massive output ruled the day. In the emerging technocapitalist era, however, those material resources are becoming secondary in importance.

Intangibles are therefore vital for technocapitalism. Creativity and knowledge are the most valuable resources of this emerging new era. They, for example, already account for as much as three-quarters of the value of most products and services in existence, and that proportion is bound to increase over time. In contrast, the material resources that were most valuable for industrial capitalism are losing value relative to those intangibles in most every product or service.

New economic activities are emerging that are representative of technocapitalism. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, software design, genomics, molecular computing and biorobotics, for example, are likely to be hallmarks of the twenty-first century, as electronics and aerospace were in the twentieth. This new ecology of activities and sectors is more reliant on creativity and knowledge than any of the old industries of industrial capitalism. ...

Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation (LA Times Investigative Report)

Ron — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 16:07:15 -0800

Ebocha, Nigeria — Justice Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb.

An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it "the cough." People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Justice squirmed in his mother's arms. His face was beaded with sweat caused either by illness or by heat from the flames that illuminate Ebocha day and night. Ebocha means "city of lights."

The makeshift clinic at a church where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works. ...

The Challenge of Our Moment: A Roundtable Discussion with Don Beck, Brian Swimme, Peter Senge, & Andrew Cohen (WIE)

Ron — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 06:12:33 -0800

This seemed like an appropriate article to post in honor of Christmas Day. ~ ron

...if you've been following the evolutionary trajectory of What Is Enlightenment? over the past couple of years, you may have noticed that a new kind of thinking has indeed been finding its way onto more and more of our pages. Call it integral, second tier, holistic, or systemic, this new thinking is the hallmark of a growing wave of visionaries with the eyes to look beyond the surface turbulence and grapple with the multilayered complexities undergirding our global dilemmas. Challenging us to face the elaborate interwoven forces that are shaping our destiny for better or worse, these evangelists of higher-order thinking offer what many feel may be the best chance we have at meeting the demands of the years ahead.

So, in attempting to come to terms with our uncertain future, and particularly with the role that religion will play in it, for this issue we decided not just to speak with a number of these leading-edge thinkers but to bring them together and have them speak with each other. As firm believers in Plato's assertion that the highest form of knowledge is that which emerges in dialogue, we couldn't imagine what could give us a better chance of seeing the biggest possible picture than a roundtable discussion between some of today's brightest integral minds, who are each attempting, in their own way, to forge a more evolved course through our present and future world. ...

Siem Riep, Cambodia #s 2-5

Ron — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 12:53:18 -0800

Here are a few more of the email updates I've been receiving from a friend who's now traveling in SouthEast Asia. His writing is so vividly "on the spot" that I thought to share it here on SCIY.

Nearby (4 km. north) is the larger walled city of Angkor Thom. Within its 10 sq. km. area lies Bayon, a three tiered temple best know for its collection of 54 gothic towers decorated with 216 coldly smiling enormous faces of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. Below on the first level are 16 intricate bas-relief panels relaying among other things naval battles, linga (phallic symbol) worship, every-day life and more. Amazing. ...

"What I've Learned," Kofi Annan (Sec. General of United Nations) Farewell Address

Ron — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:24:10 -0800

Thanks to RY Deshpande for sending this text of Kofi Annan's farewell address, which he delivered today at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, USA.

Nearly 50 years ago, when I arrived in Minnesota as a student fresh from Africa, I had much to learn -- starting with the fact that there is nothing wimpish about wearing earmuffs when it is 15 degrees below zero. All my life since has been a learning experience. Now I want to pass on five lessons I have learned during 10 years as secretary general of the United Nations that I believe the community of nations needs to learn as it confronts the challenges of the 21st century.
First, in today's world we are all responsible for each other's security. Against such threats as nuclear proliferation, climate change, global pandemics or terrorists operating from safe havens in failed states, no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others. Only by working to make each other secure can we hope to achieve lasting security for ourselves. This responsibility includes our shared responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. That was accepted by all nations at last year's U.N. summit. But when we look at the murder, rape and starvation still being inflicted on the people of Darfur, we realize that such doctrines remain pure rhetoric unless those with the power to intervene effectively -- by exerting political, economic or, in the last resort, military muscle -- are prepared to take the lead. It also includes a responsibility to future generations to preserve resources that belong to them as well as to us. Every day that we do nothing, or too little, to prevent climate change imposes higher costs on our children. ...

Siem Riep, Cambodia #1

Ron — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:27:25 -0800

I received this email a couple of days ago, from a friend who's now traveling in SouthEast Asia. His writing is so vividly "on the spot" that I thought to share it here on SCIY. ~ ron

Here in Siem Riep (Angkor Wat) Cambodia, there is no shortage of entrepreneurial capitalism….just like in Thailand. Because of all the foreign dollars, euros and yen flowing into here because of Angkor´s famous temples, there´s a plethora of people catering to the foreigner´s needs. ...

Nobel Winner Muhammad Yunus Warns of Dangers of Globalization

Ron — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:46:16 -0800

The Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus, who invented the practice of making small, unsecured loans to the poor, warned today that the globalized economy was becoming a dangerous “free-for-all highway.
“Its lanes will be taken over by the giant trucks from powerful economies,” Dr. Yunus said during a lavish ceremony at which he was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. “Bangladeshi rickshaws will be thrown off the highway.”
While international companies motivated by profit may be crucial in addressing global poverty, he said, nations must also cultivate grassroots enterprises and the human impulse to do good. ...

A Second Response to Daniel Gustav Anderson's "Towards a Critical Integral Theory"

Debashish — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:30:45 -0800

Sri Aurobindo is not just the "foundational thinker" of "Integral Theory" – in Anderson’s back-handed compliment “To adapt a meme attributed to Whitehead: if European philosophy amounts to a footnoting of Plato, Integral theory may very well amount to a conversation about Aurobindo.” As I proceeded to read I could see how this is possible if one takes Sri Aurobindo’s Vedantic darshan, Purnadvaita Vedanta (inseparable from its corresponding yoga, Purna Yoga) as a western style speculative metaphysics purporting to be a Theory of Everything, an ideology which maintains itself as Truth through the Will-to-Power and becomes the defining hegemonic ideology of late Enlightenment Neoliberalism through the production of its world-subjects, something perhaps possible. But to attribute the foundation of such an ideological field to Sri Aurobindo is, certainly a new wrinkle to the abuses/misuses of his text which seem to be multiplying lately (as for instance through left and right perceptions of it as the foundational text for Hindutva). ...

UN Study Shows Richest Two Percent Own Half World Wealth

Ron — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:31:38 -0800

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER).
The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.
The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which — with 37 million members worldwide — is far from an exclusive club.
The UNU-WIDER study is the first of its kind to cover all countries in the world and all major components of household wealth, including financial assets and debts, land, buildings and other tangible property. ...

"Two myths that keep the world poor," by Vandana Shiva

Ron — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 09:53:56 -0800

...Jeffrey Sachs...is not a simply a do-gooder but one of the world’s leading economists, head of the Earth Institute and in charge of a UN panel set up to promote rapid development. So when he launched his book The End of Poverty, people everywhere took notice. Time magazine even made it into a cover story.
But, there is a problem with Sachs’ how-to-end poverty prescriptions. He simply doesn’t understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as the original sin. “A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor,” he writes, then adding: “The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind.”
This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have been “left behind”; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South. ...

The MIT Media Lab's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project: a New Prototype for Philanthropy?

Ron — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 13:28:42 -0800

...The concept behind the project, which Negroponte unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, less than two years ago, is as simple as its name: give all children in the developing world laptop computers of their own. If we achieved that, he believes, we could bridge what's usually termed the "digital divide." The laptops would offer children everywhere the opportunity to benefit from the Internet and would enable them to work with and learn from each other in new ways. OLPC, the nonprofit organization that Negroponte set up to manage the project, has taken responsibility for designing the computer and engaging an outside manufacturer to produce it. But the nonprofit is not going to buy the computers. That, at least for now, is the responsibility of governments, ...

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Program Surges Ahead; India backed out

Ron — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 12:55:01 -0800

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has just taken another step forward by shipping the first 10 computers from the manufacturer in Taiwan, to the US State Department for testing. This is the first batch of the $100 laptops for children in poor countries such as Nigeria, China, Brazil, Egypt and Thailand who have already placed an order for 1 million laptops... India was part of the program initially until Indian Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee reversed the decision to back the OLPC project. ...

"Human history as a response to a future Attractor." - A talk by Terence McKenna

Ron — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 14:41:10 -0800

This is another experimental audio file. It's a 5-minute talk by Terence McKenna, a cultural anthropologist who spent many years doing participant observation research with indigenous tribes in Central and South America. The experiences he had with the Shamans of those tribes led him to believe that humanity is in the midst of a major cultural transformation that's being mediated by an "Attractor that lies ahead in the temporal dimension."

"Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of Attractor, or dwell point, that lies ahead in the temporal dimension... It's almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past––illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary––and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of Eternity, we can build a kind of map of not only the past of the universe, of the evolution and ingression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future. ...

Brian's Story

Ron — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 17:58:55 -0800

I'm posting below an item recently placed by my brother Brian into his blog on MySpace.com. It's about the impact the Internet has had on his life.

Brian was born, when I was 7 years old, with severe asthma, excema, and many allergies to both foods and inhalants. I'll always remember going to visit him on the second floor of our parents' home, in his special bedroom outfitted with air conditioning and electrostatic dust filters. The room felt cold and had a strange ozone smell from the dust filter, which would crackle and pop as it zapped dust particles. -- Brian was a tiny child and had to sleep in a special jacket; its sleeves were tied to his crib and it had stiff balsa wood inserts to keep him from scratching and infecting his allergic skin rashes. I could only imagine what it must have been like for him not being able to scratch what the doctors described as some of the most intense itches humans can feel. -- His doctors predicted for many years that Brian would never live out the next year. But Mom and Dad never gave up on him, sacrificing much to pay for his medical expenses and frequent emergency trips to specialists at the Children's Hospital 25 miles away in Boston. -- And Brian never gave up either. ...

SoL Sustainability Consortium

Ron — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:04:50 -0800

This is the website of SoL's (The Society for Organizational Learning) Sustainability Consortium. Their tagline:

"Our purpose is to build the learning capacity to achieve economic, ecological, and social sustainability."

This is an interesting website, an example of a new kind of social and organizational global collaboration grounded in net-savy individuals who are recursively informing and empowering one another. If you're interested in sustainability issues, consider plugging into this group ...

"The Impact of Globalization," A 'QuickTalk' by Peter Senge

Ron — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:39:32 -0800

This posting is an experiment re listening to audio files on SCIY. The initial file we've posted was recommended by Rich. It's a 5-minute "QuickTalk" by Dr. Peter Senge, the Founding Chairman of the Society for Organization Learning (SoL), on the impact of globalization in today and tomorrow's world. I recommend listening to this; Peter has a way of saying things that can awaken us to new ways of thinking. -- And please let us know (by commenting to this article) how the audio quality sounded to you. Thanks! ~ ron ...

Shanghai, The City of Tomorrow: A history of what is to come.

Ron — Thu, 18 May 2006 17:22:58 -0700

Ask anyone here and they will tell you: Shanghai is the future. But that is not so. Shanghai is not the future; it is every future, a palimpsest of urban visions, a history of what is to come. Visiting Shanghai is a journey to the very near future by way of the very near past, a fact that contributes to a strange form of urban vertigo: I came here looking for the city of tomorrow and was immediately overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu. Shanghai is a fantasyland of architectural grandiosity where any drawing, no matter how insane or adolescent, may come to life almost instantly, without the citizens' committees, building restrictions, and expensive labor that hamper architectural geniuses elsewhere. ...

The China Syndrome: For architects, China is the land of dreams.

Ron — Wed, 17 May 2006 19:29:32 -0700

.. For architects, China is the land of dreams. The construction statistics tantalize. The Chinese consume 54.7 percent of the concrete and 36.1 percent of the steel produced in the world, .. But Herzog & de Meuron .. has more work than it can handle. What attracted the [Swiss] firm's leaders to China is an openness to audacious projects, which they attribute to the lack of timidity and inhibition in the people there.
"They are so fresh in their mind," Herzog says. "They have the most radical things in their tradition, the most amazing faience and perforated jades and scholar's rocks. Everyone is encouraged to do their most stupid and extravagant designs there. ...

UC Berkeley extends reach to iPod generation

Ron — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 12:33:33 -0700

The University of California (UC) at Berkeley has joined other leading universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in offering courses free to the public via the Internet. UCB is now making these course available on Apple's Computer's iTunes Music Store in an easily downloadable format for viewing on Apple's color video iPod.

Think about this. High-level academic materials that have previously been restricted only to wealthy elites are becoming available to everyone. I anticipate that we'll soon be seeing incredible new contributions to human knowledge coming from poor, unknown kids living in small Chinese, African and Indian villages. Imagine what that will do for the world!
___________
"Podcasts of selected UC Berkeley course lectures are now available through Apple's iTunes Music Store.

"Further extending its curricular reach to the iPod generation, the University of California, Berkeley, today announced "Berkeley on iTunes U," a free service that makes video and audio recordings of a growing number of course lectures available both on and off campus through Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store.

"Berkeley on iTunes U" is now available by visiting itunes.berkeley.edu, and is open to the public as well as to all UC Berkeley students.

"... As a public university, UC Berkeley has a tradition of openness," [a Berkeley spokesperson] said. "It really speaks to our motto - 'Fiat Lux,' Let there be light." ...

'Give Peace A Chance,' by John Tierney, New York Times

Ron — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:04:07 -0800

You would never guess it from the news, but we're living in a peculiarly tranquil world. The new edition of ''Peace and Conflict,'' a biennial global survey being published next week by the University of Maryland, shows that the number and intensity of wars and armed conflicts have fallen once again, continuing a steady 15-year decline that has halved the amount of organized violence around the world. By JOHN TIERNEY New York Times, May 28, 2005

Dramatic decrease in organized violence

Ron — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 10:33:37 -0800

All forms of violence are headed down, and the crucial years are between 1985 and 1990, which is just the time when after a continual increase (see the first three charts), the number of democracies jump up. The way to understand this is that in the late 1980s, democracies achieved a critical mass in the international system, a tipping point for violence. ...

$100 WiFi-enabled laptop to be distributed to children of the world

Ron — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 01:58:32 -0800

The MIT Media Lab has launched a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), has been created. The initiative was first announced by Nicholas Negroponte, Lab chairman and co-founder, at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland in January 2005.

The World Digital Library: "A Library for The New World"

Ron — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 06:33:51 -0800

..the time may be right for our country's delegation to consider introducing to the world body a proposal for the cooperative building of a World Digital Library. This would offer the promise of bringing people closer together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking. ...

Interview: Dr Karan Singh re India Center in D.C., Talk re "The Auroville Experiment"

Ron — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 17:51:27 -0800

Dr Karan Singh, Deputy Leader of the Congress Party in the Rajya Sabha and the new president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, is optimistic that during his tenure, the much-talked about India Center in Washington will finally become a reality. ... Dr Singh, who also currently serves as chairman of the Auroville Foundation -- a UNESCO-sponsored international community in South Asia where residents from over 30 countries and many states of India are trying a 'hands-on' experiment in spiritual and ecological harmony -- also delivered a lecture at the Asia Society in New York on 'An Alternative Approach to Resolving Sectarian and Communal Conflict: The Auroville Experiment.' He spoke to Managing Editor Aziz Haniffa recently..

"We Are the Web," by Kevin Kelly

Ron — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 01:31:07 -0800

"The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people."