Amor Mundi, August 28th 2016

08-28-2016

Free Listening or Why The Free Speech Bogeymen Exist

This week Dean John (Jay) Ellison of the University of Chicago sent a letter to all incoming University of Chicago Freshman. The letter offers a bold defense of academic freedom, “one of the University of Chicago’s defining characteristics is our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression.” Ellison’s decision to inform incoming University students about the importance of free speech is praiseworthy. He also rightly explains that free speech is not absolute, writing that “Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others.” This claim is legally and morally correct. It offers a principled defense of free speech with an awareness of the limits on uncivil, harassing, and threatening speech. Ellison succinctly informs students that academic and political freedoms depend on encountering contradictory and opposed ideas, limited, of course, by concerns of outright harassment and calls to violence. None of this is controversial, or at least it should not be. But Ellison’s letter has unleashed a controversy by stating clearly that the limits on free speech for harassing and threatening speech do not mean that we should impose formal “trigger warnings,” cancel speakers whose ideas offend some, or provide “safe spaces” to those who are bothered by controversial ideas. He writes:

“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called “trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

Such a statement of principle by a Dean at a major University is beyond reproach. It should be a non-event. Sadly, it is necessary at a time when colleges around the country are disinviting speakers to prevent uncomfortable or unpalatable views from being expressed. It is important for academic institutions to stand up and state clearly that the life of the mind means that we listen to those with whom we disagree. Continue this piece on Medium...

Form more information visit: http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/sites/ito/files/acceptance_letter.jpg

Horsin' Around

Joel Cuthbertson talks the 6th century Christian philosopher Boethius in the context of a cartoon about a horse:

"BoJack, in this light, is Boethius’s successful evildoer, well-paid for bad behavior and unpunished by society for cruel decisions. Yet he can’t escape his self-made pain, whereby the whims of fortune — money, fame, and even friendship — seem as nothing compared with the stings of wickedness. He wants to know if he’s a good person deep down because he can’t live with himself, can’t stand himself, and feels punished by the very fact of his own behavior. And then by the end of season three he might even be a killer. Not a murderer, if such a distinction is possible, but an accessory to a former cast-mate’s overdose. Sarah Lynn, who played one of the children on his old sitcom, becomes his bender buddy, and after they scream across America in a haze of blackouts, they sit together in an illuminated planetarium. BoJack rhapsodizes about the beauty of the moment, and then realizes she’s dead. Even if she was courting disaster on her own, maybe she wouldn’t have died without someone pushing her, a father figure, a horse with drug stamina with whom a skinny former child star could never compete. The zaniness of the show — the fact that its lead is a horse — bleeds directly into its tragedy. BoJack is the problem. “I don’t know how to be,” he says. “It doesn’t get better and it doesn’t get easier… I’m poison.” Boethius’s argument is more nuanced than “bad people feel bad about being bad,” but BoJack’s behavior and subsequent unraveling serve as an emotional outline wherein his selfishness punishes itself. All of these specific theological and philosophical ideas are no doubt alien to the explicit vision of Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman. For all the moralizing, pseudo-psychology, and downright pontification of its characters, the show is written by comedians struggling with felt truths. The pain of depression, of repetitive and lasting self-deprecation, is their entry into all larger statements. The regret of a hangover, of months of hangovers, of breaking trust with everyone you know and love, is the moral center of this weird, cartoon universe. But the moral center is there, however undercut by the jokes, and the larger truths are there as well. Other dramas dabbling in nihilism lack such a vulnerable heart of regret either because they don’t show enough fallout or because they don’t show enough compunction. Other satires, meanwhile, might match BoJack Horseman joke for joke but rarely plumb the depths of the darkness they acknowledge. Yet, importantly for any parallels to Boethius, the show retains a concealed romanticism through all this tragic contemplation. The latest season finale shows BoJack Horseman driving into the heart of the West, into big-sky hopelessness, closing his eyes and preparing to die. He can let the car veer. He can be done. But he sees a herd of horses in the distance. He sees them sweating, and he doesn’t kill himself. They look free, and even though he deserves all the pain he’s brought upon himself, BoJack keeps control of his car. This is the hope of something beyond justice, but that only a justice like Boethius’s could allow: some sense of purpose, a whiff of a plan, in the midst of a desert. The tale of BoJack’s brokenness is powerful because he doesn’t want to be broken; while he can’t seem to fix himself, nor can he resist hoping that someone, or something, might.

Form more information visit: http://www.themillions.com/2016/08/being-bad-is-sad-bojack-horseman-boethius.html

The Sum of All Knowledge

Robert F. Worth draws attention to an early Muslim encyclopedia:

"Sometime around the year 1314, a retired Egyptian bureaucrat named Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri began writing a compendium of all knowledge, under the appealingly reckless title The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. It would eventually total more than 9,000 pages in thirty volumes, covering all of human history from Adam onward, all known plants and animals, geography, law, the arts of government and war, poetry, recipes, jokes, and of course, the revelations of Islam. At one point, Nuwayri tackles a subject that may seem familiar to the modern audience: the Islamic punishments for adultery, sodomy, and fornication. He cites authorities who declare that such sinners must be stoned to death or severely flogged, in language that conjures up the gruesomely “medieval” execution videotapes posted seven hundred years later by ISIS: “Whosoever engages in the act of the people of Lot—both the active and passive participant—must be put to death.” Yet this authentically medieval author then continues unblinkingly with a long, celebratory chapter about erotic poetry, much of it homosexual and wine-fueled... The juxtaposition is one of many in this bizarre, fascinating book that illustrate the sprawlingly heterodox reality of the early centuries of Islam, so different from the crude puritanical myths purveyed by modern-day jihadis. The Ultimate Ambition, a canonical work for scholars in the Islamic world for centuries, has been translated into English for the first time and radically condensed (to about three hundred pages) by Elias Muhanna, a professor of comparative literature at Brown University. Reading it is like stumbling into a cavernous attic full of unimaginably strange artifacts, some of them unforgettable, some merely dross. From the alleged self-fellation of monkeys to the many lovely Bedouin words for the night sky (“the Encrusted, because of its abundance of stars, and the Forehead, because of its smoothness”) to the court rituals of Egypt’s then-overlords, the Mamluks, nothing seems to escape Nuwayri’s taxonomic ambitions."

Form more information visit: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/08/24/in-the-attic-of-early-islam-shihab-al-din-al-nuwayri/