Blind Ourselves Research Articles

Just an Illusion?

Just an Illusion?

PH Roundtable: Disparities in PH

PH Roundtable: Disparities in PH

On occasion we go after an innocent: A review of MariaBalaska (ed), Cora Diamond on Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). xii + 267, price £89.99.

On occasion we go after an innocent: A review of MariaBalaska (ed), Cora Diamond on Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). xii + 267, price £89.99.

The Metabolic Core of Environmental Education

I consider the case of the “simplest” living beings—bacteria—and examine how their embodied activity constitutes an organism/environment interaction, out of which emerges the possibility of learning from an environment. I suggest that this mutual co-emergence of organism and environment implies a panbiotic educational interaction that is at once the condition for, and achievement of, all living beings. Learning and being learned from are entangled in varied ways throughout the biosphere. Education is not an exclusively human project, it is part of the ancient evolutionary process of elaborating and diversifying the relational possibilities inherent in metabolism that has brought forth our diverse and flourishing world. ed from context, “education” appears as a set of ways in which humans actively engage and take responsibility for the learning outcomes of relationships with each other. Insofar as we consider this distinction absolute rather than a performed construct to be assessed by its consequences, we blind ourselves to the educative dimension of other species as well as our many miseducative engagements with them. If learning processes are inherent and constitutive of ecological communities, education theorists should devote their pedagogical sensitivities and insights to the crucial challenge of developing educative sustainable human–nature relations.

Calvin's legacy for contemporary Reformed natural law

AbstractRecent scholarship has done much to uncover a continuous tradition of distinctively Reformed natural law reflection, according to which knowledge of the natural moral law, though not saving knowledge, is universally available to humanity in its fallen state and makes a stable secular order possible. A close look at Calvin's understanding of natural law, and in particular of conscience and natural human instincts, shows that Calvin himself did not expect the natural law to serve as a source of substantive action-guiding moral norms. First, Calvin held that conscience delivers information concerning the moral quality even of individual actions. But he also thought that we often blind ourselves to the deliverances of conscience. Second, he argued that our natural instincts predispose us to civic order and fair dealing insofar as these are necessary for the natural well-being or advantage of creatures such as ourselves. But he also carefully distinguished the good of advantage from the good of justice or virtue. The modern natural lawyers eroded Calvin's careful distinction between conscience as revealing our duty as duty, and instinct as guiding us towards natural advantage. They also turned away from Calvin's insistence on the moral incapacity of unredeemed humanity. The modern natural lawyers saw their task as one of developing an empirical science of human nature to guide legislation and shape international law, bracketing questions of whether this nature was fallen and in need of redemption. When Scottish Presbyterian Reformed thinkers, such as Gershom Carmichael and John Witherspoon, tried in diverse ways to restore eroded Reformed commitments to the science of human nature, about which they were otherwise so enthusiastic, they were not particularly successful. A science which could derive moral norms from an examination of human instincts, and a conscience which could deliver universal moral knowledge, proved too attractive to decline simply because of the transcendence of God or the fallenness of humankind. Those who wished to preserve an account of natural law which remained faithful to a fully robust set of Reformed theological commitments could do so only by refusing to regard the natural law as a positive source of moral knowledge.

Blind to sameness: sexpectations and the social construction of male and female bodies

What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but Asia Friedman pushes this question further still. How, she asks, did we come to blind ourselves to sex sameness? Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations - the blind and the transgendered - Blind to Sameness answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing Friedman to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.

Big Data: New Opportunities and New Challenges [Guest editors' introduction

We can live with many of the uncertainties of big data for now, with the hope that its benefits will outweigh its harms, but we shouldn't blind ourselves to the possible irreversibility of changes-whether good or bad-to society. The first Web extra at http://youtu.be/24czULRCI9c is an audio recording in which Katina Michael at the University of Wollongong discusses the June 2013 Computer magazine special issue on "Big Data: New Opportunities and New Challenges," introducing the special issue, the guest editors, the authors, the articles, and the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). The second Web extra at http://youtu.be/9zpFqEDydDA is an audio recording in which Katina Michael at the University of Wollongong talks about the IEEE Society on the Social Implications of Technology (SSIT), IEEE Technology and Society (T&S) magazine, and the International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS). The third Web extra at http://youtu.be/mn_9YHV2RGQis an audio recording in which Katina Michael at the University of Wollongong discusses how we can live with many of the uncertainties of big data for now, with the hope that its benefits will outweigh its harms, but we shouldnít blind ourselves to the possible irreversibility of changes-whether good or bad-to society.

Law and Religion in Theoretical and Historical Context (review)

Reviewed by: Law and Religion in Theoretical and Historical Context Anver M. Emon Law and Religion in Theoretical and Historical Context ed. Peter Cane, Carolyn Evans, and Zoë Robinson Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 Pp. 328. ISBN: 978-0-521-42590-2 Does religion have a place in the public sphere? To begin to answer that question would first require a definition of 'religion' and 'public sphere' as well as an appreciation of what it means to be in the public sphere. As political theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have noted, religious discourse may, in fact, offer a substantive content that secular philosophy has not yet achieved.1 Such theorists call into question the assumptions we make about the nature and dominance of secularism in liberal democratic societies. In doing so, they offer an opening for the religiously devout to participate in the public sphere, while disagreeing on how wide that opening should be. Liberal democratic countries are no stranger to these debates. In Canada, the 'Sharia arbitration debate' in Ontario and Quebec's Reasonable Accommodation commission attest to the difficulties that can arise when religious groups seek accommodation of religious values and practices in different parts of the public sphere, whether in the workplace, in the legal system, or in the halls of government. Thus, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was the target of international outrage when he suggested that the British legal system must make room for the pluralism in the United Kingdom, in particular by making space for Sharia-based tribunals for devout Muslims seeking some form of religiously oriented resolution to a limited range of cases. Beyond creating space for pluralism in areas once deemed the exclusive preserve of the state, religious communities also make claims upon the political culture of a society. In 2006, European cities were beset with protests by angry Muslim upset over the publication of cartoons negatively depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The controversy fuelled ongoing debates about when the freedom of speech includes the freedom to offend. The fact that these episodes involve Muslims and Islam is not a coincidence. Indeed, ever since the Muslim identity of the 9/11 attackers was confirmed, we have witnessed how the debates on religion and law [End Page 905] have taken on a special intensity. For those living in liberal democratic societies, the challenges of accommodating religion in the public sphere are often addressed alongside concerns about immigration and security. The negative effect of such an association is to see religion as both foreign and threatening. Religion is viewed as a destabilizing force that must be considered with considerable caution, if not decisively repelled. But to associate religion in the public sphere with foreign threat is more a matter of circumstance than an inherent feature of religion and religious experience in our world today. Indeed, to view religion as such is to blind ourselves to the ways in which religion has been and remains an important feature of the way in which citizens of a state render their lives meaningful. The editors of the anthology Law and Religion in Theoretical and Historical Context are keenly aware of the problems that arise when considering religion in the public sphere as connected to issues on immigration and security. To avoid reductivism, they present articles that resonate in different registers that address matters of theory, history, and context. The first group of articles offers theoretical analyses of how the liberal democratic state should treat and contend with religion. Whether framed in terms of the freedom of religion or from religion, the theoretical contributions relate important conceptual challenges that arise when considering the place of and space for religion in a liberal state. The second group of articles offers a historical account of how these challenges have been addressed in the past, with examples drawn from the United States and the United Kingdom. The third and final set of articles looks at particular examples of the question of law and religion, such as debates over days of rest or conscientious objectors, to explore how the challenges related to law and religion reveal particular and important features of a given constitutional order. Specialists in the field...

Bread, Roses, and Resistance at Work

During the famous textile workers' strike at Lawrence in 1912, a female striker was reportedly asked to explain the workers' demands. Her reply, which soon became the basis for many songs and legends, was beguilingly simple: Bread-and roses! Randy Hodson's Dignity at Work argues that sociologists of work have too long overlooked the lesson implied in this worker's comment, in effect a plea for respect, compassion, and recognition. By so neglecting the moral or symbolic side of work, Hodson reasons, we blind ourselves to the everyday struggles of workers seeking to defend their dignity against symbolic injuries and cultural slights. It is a lesson worth heeding. In a deceptively ambitious effort, Hodson's book combines humanistic concerns with more traditionally positivist methods, producing a lucidly written analysis of the organizational conditions that impact worker dignity, the nature of workers' responses to such challenges, and the outcomes with respect to worker well-being. While flawed in not insignificant ways, the book holds substantial importance for readers in varied branches of sociology. Of the several virtues of this book, four are especially notable. The first lies in its methodology: As Joyce Rothschild notes in her essay, Hodson has applied much the same methods that were used by anthropologists to generate the Human Relations Area Files. Codifying the population of Englishlanguage workplace ethnographies, he produces a rich store of observations that can be used in quantitative analysis, while nonetheless retaining the naturalism and authenticity of data initially gathered through in vivo means. The result manages to combine the precision and analytic breadth of survey data with the interpretive richness of ethnographic observation (as in the numerous quotes Hodson draws to illustrate particular findings). A second virtue of the book stems from the author's determination to take seriously the dimension of human agency and worker resistance, in effect responding to Ida Harper Simpson's call (1989) to bring the workers back in. This is one of the strongest aspects of Hodson's analysis, in that it helps us identify the structural determinants of worker resistance without losing sight of the workers' capacity to act back on their work situations and defend their own dignity at work. A third virtue lies in the author's effort to escape the theoretical straitjacket imposed by the use of a strictly materialist or classbased lens. Hodson argues in favor of addressing work relations not only along the vertical axis (the management/worker relation) but also horizontally, thus examining the nature of social relations among the workers themselves. This aspect of the wage labor nexus proves much more important than academic research has allowed, and has a value that may transcend Hodson's own analysis: Attending to the patterns of solidarity and alienation that emerge among workers themselves can help us better understand the allocative processes that shape the distribution of opportunity-a task only peripherly addressed in Hodson's book. A fourth contribution of Hodson's analysis lies in the comparisons he draws between the levels of resistance found among workers in different occupational groups. Assembly line workers, it turns out, typically lack the resources needed to resist mismanagement and abuse: The most they can do is to withhold their citizenship behavior (or degree of cooperation). Professional workers, by contrast, are able to resist managerial edicts, but they seldom seem willing to do so, given their positions as salaried employees. It turns out to be craft workers who are the least compliant group within the U.S. occupational structure, manifesting higher levels of behavioral and cultural resistance than any other occupational group. Ironically, it was precisely this group that deskilling theory declared to have been extinct. As these contributions indicate, there is much to admire here. Dignity at Work is an important contribution that should command much attention from researchers in the field.

Disney's Splash Mountain: Death Anxiety, the Tar Baby, and Rituals of Violence

Disney's Splash Mountain:Death Anxiety, the Tar Baby, and Rituals of Violence Jason Isaac Mauro (bio) Bruce Lee is said to have been able to deliver a strike he called the "vibrating palm." This strike could be delivered at a distance, with the intended victim neither feeling it nor knowing of it, yet within hours the recipient would fall down dead. Whether or not the myth is based in fact, the point is compelling. Violence can be a soft, subtle, often unfelt thing. Cultural theorists such as Alice Miller, in works such as Banished Knowledge and The Untouched Key, would suggest that an entire atmosphere of violence might surround us, and yet, as with our atmosphere of air, the enormous force of it may be undetectable. In fact, I would hazard the guess that some of the most pernicious acts of violence pass right through us undetected, like gamma rays, while our attention is often directed to more visible, but perhaps less harmful, frequencies. It seems that as members of cultural groupings we can willfully blind ourselves to the brutality of our communal rites by dint of the glare generated by other and more flashy varieties of violence. Perhaps, then, we need a taxonomy or a grammar of violence in order to distinguish between benign, perhaps even healthy, acts of violence and potentially lethal, yet odorless, colorless, tasteless acts. Indeed, this taxonomy is always in the making, as we enact postmodern analyses of literature and culture, revealing the violent consequences of what has hitherto been accepted as neutral and even pleasant. To read Miller, for instance, is to contemplate how damaging and aggressive the seemingly most benign and common child-rearing practices may be. Parental gestures as reflexive and simple as comforting and hushing a child who is crying, she regards as the means by which parents shield themselves from acknowledgment of their own pain at the expense of their children. She would suggest that our knees are buckling under the force of a barrage of blows that, like Lee's "vibrating palm," we never even felt. In this article I will look at Disney World's Splash Mountain as an arena in which such invisible blows are dealt, and dealt principally to children. And I will use the works of psychologist William James, cultural theorist Ernest Becker, and anthropologist Victor Turner as lenses that might make visible those most damaging frequencies of violence to which we are normally, and often willfully, blind. "You know that feeling you get when you're leaning back in your chair," says comedian Steve Wright, "and you almost fall over, but then at the last second you catch yourself? That's how I feel all the time." What is so deeply funny about imagining a human psyche persisting at that particular pitch of anxiety is that such a state is unimaginable over any length of time. It is necessarily momentary, something that exists in time only in retrospect, since our entire organism is devoted to getting out of it while it is happening. We simply cannot tolerate such a feeling of threat, of displacement. James understood how intolerable such a level of anxiety is, and in his Essays in Pragmatism he argued that the only response human beings have is willfully to impose a conscious order on the chaos and trauma of such times of dislocation: "The universe is horribly confused and Gothic" and as such is "poisonous to the human psyche" (23). Our job as human beings is to carve out for ourselves a narrative that ameliorates the effect of such poisonous moments. Yet in order to edge up to these moments, we often drive or fly considerable distances and spend tremendous amounts of money, only to flee from them with gratitude and relief. Walt Disney World's Splash Mountain dramatizes both the moment of dissolution that James insists is "intolerable" and the strategies by which we reflexively push aside moments that remind us of the terror of our human predicament. The strategies exhibited by Disney's ride are typical of the strategics that the cultural theorist Becker enumerates, by which we "confidently deny man's real situation on the planet" as...

The Perils of Naturalism: Some Reflections on Daniel J. Boorstin's Approach to American History

DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN STUDIES Association, reiterates advice of another esteemed guardian of American ideals when he asks fellow historians to disenthrall themselves from high-brow angst of European culture and return home to native grounds. capture full flavor of their society, William Dean Howells told writers to consider smiling aspects of life which are the more American; to recapture raw materials of our past, Boorstin tells us to reconsider forgotten commonplaces of American The novelist instructed Americans to shun unsuitable tragic visions of Dostoevski; historian warns us to be skeptical of undeniable contributions of Freud and Marx lest we blind ourselves to truer reality in the very surface of experience.' According to Boorstin, it homely aspects of American history that must be recovered from that oblivion which inevitable fate of obvious. No less than Howells, Boorstin has set out to find general truths in ordinary facts, lost values in mundane virtues, uncommon insights in common sights of history. The discovery of profound in prosaic elevates history to level of philosophy. To run down philosophy, wrote Pascal, is really to philosophize.

II. Comparison

Casual judgements on Homer, and even those less casual, are often in a sense comparative, because the mind is illumined, or fogged, by contemporary prejudices. Blind ourselves, we laugh at Xenophanes who denounced the theologian Homer, and Plato who found fault with the moralist. The disease was diagnosed and the cure prescribed over 80 years ago by the Russian, A. N. Veselovsky: ‘The scholars of the West, who know very little about modern epic poetry, involuntarily transfer problems of purely literary criticism to the folk-poetry of the ancients. This is the usual fault of all the criticism of theNibelungenliedand part of that of Homer. ... It is absolutely necessary to take as a starting-point the living epos, whose structure and stages of development must be carefully investigated.’ The comparison of one literature with another sheds light on both in various ways. It may be simply a matter of bringing a better balance to the judgement. Thus the long tradition of Homeric scholarship has made us well aware of the flaws in the Homeric plots. A whole school of criticism has rested on the assumption that the construction is incompetent. For such an attitude I know no better remedy than a reading of the paratactic, anticlimacticArgonauticaof Apollonius Rhodius. Both Homeric epics are intensely dramatic and very cunningly put together.

A Common Wealth of Peoples

Provided we do not blind ourselves to its present defects, nor leave its undeveloped potentialities unexplored, our British Commonwealth system of regulating-international affairs can justly be regarded as an object lesson for those who will shape the peace. General Smuts has described it as ‘this greatest experiment in political organisation, this proudest political structure of time, this precedent and anticipation of what one hopes may be in store for human society in the years to come.’ On the other hand, Lionel Curtis, who shared with Smuts and others the task of creating the Union of South Africa, makes the following criticism in ‘Decision and Action ‘(Oxford University Press) :— ‘In 1914 the British Commonwealth had failed to prevent the outbreak of world war. In 1919 a League was constructed on the model of the British Commonwealth, into which that Commonwealth was incorporated. By 1939 the two together had completely failed to prevent the outbreak of an even more terrible world war.’If we are wise, we shall study, with equal impartiality, these apparently conflicting but really complementary points of view. Curtis divides political systems into two kinds; organic (states such as Great Britain, federations such as the U.S.A.) and inorganic (confederations, alliances, leagues). The British Commonwealth he regards as a mixture of both, and cites Mr. Menzies of Australia to prove that its effective functioning is primarily due to some degree of hegemony exercised by the Mother country. His book demonstrates that inorganic systems are unstable and that as regards international coalitions for war purposes ‘history, when it comes to be written, always shows how the inorganic bond of alliance hastened defeat or delayed victory.’

The Conception of History in the Prophets and Jesus

THIS SYMPOSIUM seeks a deeper understanding of the prophets and Jesus by means of comparative study. My assignment is to discuss their viewpoint with regard to the historical process. Many such comparative analyses proceed upon five assumptions: (I) that the central and definitive factor of religion lies in the area of beliefs; (2) that each of these beliefs may be reduced without difficulty to an abstract concept which may be defined with precision; (3) that the total configuration of ideas may be dissolved and the component elements be withdrawn from the complex; (4) that the growth and relative validity of each separate concept may be determined by genetic study; and (5) that the superiority of Jesus, if there be such, must be found by locating the unique ideas which he held. For some purposes these assumptions may be valid, but they do not help us enter into the real world of the prophets and Jesus. They may help us dissect the idea of the kingdom, but they do not help us share the consciousness of the kingdom which dominated the lives of the prophets and Jesus. Taking these five assumptions in reverse order, let us suggest the main objections to them. (5) Never has the Christian church held that the authority of Jesus rests upon the novel ideas which he espoused. Such was not the basis of his call to discipleship, nor was it the substance of the preaching of Peter or Paul. (4) Never did the prophets or Jesus test the origin of their message by the process of objective study. Their word came from God and was intended for immediate acceptance by men. In most cases, their theological ideas coincided with those of the false prophets; their message was unique in its origin and impact, not in the discovery of new ideas. (3) Nor is the skeleton of Biblical thought such that we are able to dissect it one bone at a time, analyzing the genesis and growth of that bone. To separate the concept of God from the immediate encounter with God is to falsify both. It is God and not the idea of God who acts in history and who through such activity speaks to the prophets. (2) Hence, to consider any aspect of prophetic experience as an abstract concept is to blind ourselves to the concrete experience from which thought proceeded. (I) Of course, the prophets held ideas, as all men must. And these ideas are susceptible to genetic study. But the distinguishing mark of Biblical faith is its character as history and as revelation. God speaks; He acts. The prophet hears; he sees. To understand the prophet we need to stand with him at his point of standing. Our purpose, therefore, is to enter into the historical consciousness of the prophets and Jesus. We will proceed by outlining three areas: the distinctive historical con-

THE STATUS OF THE CHILD.CHAIRMAN'S ADDRESS BEFORE THE SECTION ON DISEASES OF CHILDREN AT THE FIFTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL SESSION, AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, 1907.

To all who have given serious thought on conditions of society as they exist in our country to-day, certain changes in our ways of living seem imperative if the integrity of the nation is to be preserved. More and more numerous are the bubbles which, rising on the surface of our civilization, denote the workings of ferments beneath. The nation is already somewhat taxed with the burden of caring for, while protecting itself against, an army of defective, degenerate and unstable citizens. The rapid increase in such members continuing, society as a whole will be vitiated, and sooner or later our people will be compelled to give way to some newer, cleaner and stronger power. To live unwarned by the experiences of other, older and past civilizations, and to blind ourselves to the evidences of decay within us is not optimism but folly! To insist that if our nation is