Widespread Indifference Research Articles

Propaganda and thought work in the Mao era: Absoluteness, sharp transitions, and political instability

AbstractThis paper elucidates the reasons behind Deng Xiaoping's initiation of political reform from a propaganda perspective by examining the features of Mao's propaganda and thought work and their implications for the Chinese Communist Party, analyzing cases such as the “Two‐Hundred Policy,” the “Anti‐Rightist Campaign,” propaganda campaigns related to the USSR, and the transformation of Lin Biao's image. It argues that Mao's propaganda and thought work, characterized by their absoluteness and sharp transitions, were detrimental to the stability of the communist regime. These characteristics led to widespread indifference, distrust, and even resistance toward the Chinese Communist Party among the Chinese populace since the late Mao era. China had entered a post‐trust era, marked by a growing tendency among the populace to preemptively view official messages as untrustworthy. To restore the party's credibility, Deng Xiaoping initiated reforms in propaganda and thought work to address these shortcomings.

Literary responses in Spanish adolescents: Adaptation, validation, and analysis of the Literary Response Questionnaire

AbstractThis study involves translating, cross‐culturally adapting, and validating the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ) for 413 Spanish adolescents. It explores the evolution of literary education in Spain and its alignment with the Reading Responses paradigm. The LRQ, adapted across various locations, is validated in Spanish through Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The research analyzes reading responses in dimensions like Leisure Escape, Insight, Empathy, Story‐driven Reading, Concern with Author, Imagery Vividness, and Rejecting Literary Values. Findings reveal widespread indifference and rejection toward literary reading among the adolescents, along with a clear disapproval of the historicist‐authorial approach to literary education. Significant variations were identified based on students' gender, enrollment in a bilingual program, and notably, the number of books read per year. This underscores the significance of introducing literary reading practices in secondary education that align with the leisure preferences of adolescents, encouraging personal and experiential engagement with texts. This could materialize in the classroom the shift from a historicist to a reader‐centered approach suggested by the current Spanish curriculum.

Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker

Reviewed by: Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker Lucinda Rasmussen Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist. By Joanne Barker, University of California Press, 2021. Joanne Barker’s Red Scare: The State’s Indigenous Terrorist explores the destructive ways imperial nations reify harmful stereotypes of Indigeneity: as the author puts it, the settler state maintains its power by ensuring that “Indigenous peoples are [both] identified and made identifiable as terrorists” (x). By shaping such outcomes, the settler state ensures that many of its mainstream non-Indigenous citizens continue to normalize “racist ideologies,” making it easy to justify ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples, including the appropriation of their lands for commercial purposes (x). The reification of practices that cause Indigeneity to be read as a threat are what enables settler nations to maintain power, as well as to postpone steps toward meaningful social change that would help to bring about reconciliation. Red Scare is comprised of four chapters including an introduction titled “Scared Red,” in which the author introduces the etymology of the book’s titular phrase. The text also includes a brief prologue, a glossary, endnotes and appendices. The opening chapter is followed by two substantive ones that break down the tropes that Barker identifies as foundational to the claim that through imperialism there occurs an equating of Indigeneity with terrorism: one is subtitled “The Murderable Indian: Terror as State (In)Security,” and the other “The Kinless Indian: Terror as Social (In)Stability.” These chapters, which make up the bulk of this slim volume, are followed by a final chapter titled “Radical Alterities from Huckleberry Roots.” Here the author follows through on the promise not to center imperialist institutions and their violence, but instead to locate solutions to these longstanding problems in Indigenous feminism. Barker supports her argument that Indigeneity is “made indistinguishable from terrorism” with many contemporary examples drawn from what is now Canada and the United States. There is serious discussion of the oil industry, beginning with how corporations and the government worked to frame Elizabeth LaPensée as a threat to national security, after she used a small grant to create a virtual game in which players could restore aspects of the natural environment while removing pipeline projects (3–4). The game, which LaPensée named Thunderbird Strikes, contained links to Indigenous teachings, as well to information about the harm being done to Indigenous lands by the oil industry. Even though the game clearly served a pedagogical function, and it did not portray the death of any humans, members of the government and oil industry leaders did serious harm to LaPensée’s reputation with accusations that she condoned and even perpetuated terrorism. After a compelling introduction, Barker convincingly continues to deconstruct the hegemonic work being done to silence Indigenous peoples who advocate for social change. In “The Murderable Indian,” Barker suggests that mainstream citizens have been socialized by media, history and popular culture to normalize the iconic image of violent Indigeneity—“the Indian in buckskin wielding a hatchet…; the Indian in a jeans jacket defiantly raising a rifle overhead; the Indian standing in the path of oil trucks” (26). Imperial forces can locate, within such a portrayal, the justification for “surveillance, incarceration, and violence,” including the murder of any Indigenous person who can be perceived as resisting its rules and thereby posing a threat (111). This chapter is both distressing and insightful when it notes the connection between corporate preservation of the oil and gas industries, with a widespread indifference to police violence against Indigenous peoples, as well judicial indifference to violence against Indigenous women and girls. Barker’s third chapter, “The Kinless Indian,” explores the topic from a new angle. In this section, Barker defines the “Kinless Indian” as the “social terrorist who, through lies and deceit, undermines the integrity of the state’s claims regarding its democratic ideals” (71). What Barker proceeds to do is to explain what happens when people without the necessary “lineal or community-based relationships” claim to have an Indigenous identity (25). Two high-profile cases are discussed. First, Barker outlines the controversy surrounding Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Cherokee descent. Second, author Joseph...

Logic of Catastrophe – Deeper Logic of Reality

The huge change brought about by the coronavirus pandemic contains some structural characteristics that define it as a catastrophe. The text explores and offers an outline of a possible analysis of some of the logical and normative features of this phenomenon. Catastrophes are not crises, they are unpredictable, not self-inflicted, accompanied by scarce knowledge or ignorance, and imply some restraints coming from necessities that are their consequences. One of the most important of those consequences are restraints in what in normal circumstances were valid rights, especially those rights that are privileges, i.e. rights that depend on the clause that they won’t be “consumed” by all – implying that in such rights “all” does not imply “everyone”. At the end, the issue of reciprocity and responsibility towards others is briefly mentioned, and especially the phenomenon of widespread indifference towards others.

Processes of non-identification: Business school brands and academic faculty

This paper examines the internal implications of branding within higher education, a specific context which is dominated by the co-existence of strong professional logics and identity structures. We focus on how and whether academic faculty identify with the branding practices undertaken by their respective institution. The paper proposes a communicative perspective on brand identification to understand how academic faculty relate to and make sense of the brand. The findings, from responses of 65 faculty members at five business schools, indicate widespread indifference and non-identification with brand messages. Specifically, we identify four types of disconnects between faculty members and branding practices of their respective schools, namely ambiguity, emptiness, misalignment, and irrelevance. The evidence of these disconnects, we argue, suggests that the faculty members refrain from relating the brand to their own identities. Although individuals relate to discourses around the brand, these are often not internalized and do not thereby impact on their individual identity. Rather than navigating between identity tensions, they eschew identification altogether. We contribute to research on how branding works inside contemporary organizations – including higher education - through questioning the role of identity in branding processes seen as the management of meaning.

Temporal change in inequality perceptions and effects on political attitudes

ABSTRACT Widespread unawareness and indifference arguably contribute to growing inequalities. However, previous studies have paid little attention to the applicability of these arguments over time. This paper demonstrates that perceptions of inequality and their effects on attitudes towards inequality and redistribution can change considerably. Using social survey data from the United States (1987–2009), it is shown that perceptions of income inequality do not have the same effect on attitudes throughout the period under study. Perceptions of opportunity inequality, which have received less attention in prior studies, produce more stable results. Accounting for and explaining such changes is necessary to advance research on inequality and public opinion.

How America disguises its violence: colonialism, mass incarceration, and the need for resistant imagination

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how a delusive social imaginary of criminal-justice has underpinned contemporary U.S. mass incarceration and encouraged widespread indifference to its violence. I trace the complicity of this criminal-justice imaginary with state-organized violence by comparing it to an imaginary that supported colonial violence. I conclude by discussing how those of us outside of prison can begin to resist the entrenched images and institutions of mass incarceration by engaging the work and imagining the perspective of incarcerated people.

Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters

Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters

Rebellion of the Righteous: Jesuit Partisanship for Jews

This essay rescues the memory of Jesuit partisanship for Jews and Judaism from a widespread indifference, both scholarly and popular. This memory complicates a long history of Jesuit hostility to Jews and is at the source of a new inter-religious identity for Jesuits. Jesuit rescuers of Jews during the period of the Holocaust crossed traditional borders in embracing a reverence and respect for Jews and Judaism. Both German Jesuit and French Jesuit resistance to Nazism are examined. The Jesuit righteous and resisters formed a spiritual alliance with such important scholars as Augustin Cardinal Bea, Joseph Bonsirven and Henri de Lubac. The witness of the former and the scholarship of the latter prepared the way for the April 24, 1960 petition from the Jesuit Biblical Institute in Rome that requested a declaration on the Jewish People from the Vatican Council, the first institution to make such an appeal to the council fathers. The council’s adoption of Nostra aetate with its reshaping of the relationship between Catholics and Jews was one of the most significant outcomes of this rebellion of the righteous.

Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States by A. R. Ruis

Reviewed by: Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States by A. R. Ruis Amy L. Best Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States. By A. R. Ruis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. ix + 201 pp. Cloth $95.00, paper $29.95. Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States by A. R. Ruis is a carefully crafted account of some of our nation's earliest school food programs. The book is part of the important Rutgers University Press book series Critical Issues in Health and Medicine and is composed of six substantive chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. Built upon extensive archival investigation, Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat offers much insight into how the National School Lunch Program took early shape at the turn of the twentieth century, a period of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and demographic change. Taken together, the chapters help us to understand the historical context and changing social tides that left a lasting imprint on a program that has been the subject of substantial debate for more than a century. Changing ideas about health, the ascendance of scientific expertise, growing recognition of poor nutritional health among children, increasing opposition to child labor, and the changing value of the child serve as a backdrop. Of particular relevance to understanding the early iterations of school food programs in the United States was the shifting understanding of school itself. Whether school was fundamentally an institution of the state or a community institution, [End Page 470] a social welfare institution committed to the betterment of children or exclusively an educational institution was a subject of widespread disagreement. This is a point Ruis revisits on several occasions, revealing tensions about the relationship of the state to individuals and the collective body informing public and policy discussion. Most early school lunch programs were organized by private charity. The view that a state-sponsored subsidized lunch program would cultivate national dependency, pauperization, and moral degeneracy was widely held by state and municipal government officials and middle-class charity organizations. Yet there was also considerable variation, with some city school boards adopting broad, school-based health initiatives. The majority of school boards relied on community partnerships with women's clubs, churches, and settlement houses to skirt rules against use of public money for school lunch. A few school boards sued states and municipalities to secure legal funds to cover the cost of school lunch. To understand these municipal differences and their sociopolitical contexts, Ruis spotlights two contrasting cases of school food programs. In Chicago, the subject of chapter 2, public obligation for children's nutritional health was taken as a given. But widespread indifference characterized New York City (chapter 3), whose school board saw feeding children as an activity belonging to the private realm of home. Both chapters offer rich detail of the complexity in administering school lunch programs and provide interesting contrast between the two cities in their willingness to address religious and ethnic differences among immigrant student populations. From the two cases, we also learn some things haven't changed all that much. Early school lunch programs had to compete against the pull of commercial food vendors. In the early 1900s, the concessionaires and street food tempted many children, much in the way McDonald's does today. Chapter 4 examines school lunch programs in rural schools, detailing an altogether different set of obstacles. Despite rural children's proximity to farm food, malnutrition was common. The high cost of rural education and few resources made the task of feeding rural children difficult. At the turn of the twentieth century most rural schools were single-room schools, with little more than a wood-burning stove to heat the room, let alone an appropriately equipped kitchen. Yet rural food programs, unlike their urban counterparts, did attempt more comprehensive nutritional programming. The final two substantive chapters offer a lead-up to the National School Lunch Program and the changing role of the federal government in the 1930s, a period marked by soaring relief registers, high demand for food aid, and the...

Caricature and the Comic Image in the 1830s

This essay forms a brief overview of the extent to which the comic image became inscribed into the print culture of the 1830s. The decade saw a decline in the production of caricature as a satirical force, but developed a wide range of new print forms and genres that allowed graphic satire a broad cultural presence. Some of these, such as down-market single-plate lithographs and short sequences of oblong folio multi-image plates, sought to retain the autonomy of the comic image within a rapidly developing and commercially inventive market place. Other hybrid forms, especially periodicals, were developed as a mechanism for incorporating radical graphic political commentary. The comic image was also used to produce subversive travesty versions of established print forms such as the almanac and the annual. The decade suggests a turbulently inventive and experimental phase in the history of the comic image, and, in spite of the widespread indifference of scholars, offers much of interest to cultural historians.

Caricature and the Comic Image in the 1830s

This essay forms a brief overview of the extent to which the comic image became inscribed into the print culture of the 1830s. The decade saw a decline in the production of caricature as a satirical force, but developed a wide range of new print forms and genres that allowed graphic satire a broad cultural presence. Some of these, such as down-market single-plate lithographs and short sequences of oblong folio multi-image plates, sought to retain the autonomy of the comic image within a rapidly developing and commercially inventive market place. Other hybrid forms, especially periodicals, were developed as a mechanism for incorporating radical graphic political commentary. The comic image was also used to produce subversive travesty versions of established print forms such as the almanac and the annual. The decade suggests a turbulently inventive and experimental phase in the history of the comic image, and, in spite of the widespread indifference of scholars, offers much of interest to cultural historians.

Law Trumps Hate? Enforcing Legal Constraints on Use of Force in Armed Conflict in the Face of Literal, Interpretive and Implicatory Denial

The rise to power of champions of post-truth politics attests to a social climate in which facts are devalued while sentiment is given great currency. In this environment, there is cause for concern that both facts and norms will be set aside when yielding unpopular outcomes. Such concerns are especially warranted when it comes to holding state servicemen accountable for alleged violations towards persons affiliated with the adverse party to an armed conflict. Promoting accountability in such cases has always posed a challenge and will likely prove all the more difficult in a state of widespread indifference to the truth. With this threat to the rule of law looming in the background, the article looks to experiences from the Israeli-Palestinian context to draw cautionary lessons and raise a call for vigilance. Through analysis of case studies in which Israeli troops allegedly applied unlawful force against Palestinians, it traces a corrosive process whereby regular recourse to ill-founded and unwarranted denial has undermined the enforcement of international humanitarian law and related rules in the occupied territory. Noting that denial persists even in the wake of seemingly compelling evidence furnished by advancing technologies, the article contends that it has fostered a culture of impunity that in turn threatens to bred widespread disrespect, indifference and alienation towards the law and towards its underlying values. The article ultimately advocates for steps to be taken to offset this dangerous outcome.

‘a fine risk to be run’: Améry and Levinas on Aging, Responsibility, and Risk in the Wake of Atrocity

Does atrocity age? What I mean to ask is, does time heal wounds that were genocidal or otherwise broad, deep, and caused by a fatal combination of human depravity and widespread indifference? Jean Améry famously refused to let the past be past in his essay “Resentments.” He argued that even if, with regard to the Holocaust, logically speaking, what happened is in the past, there is no moral sense to that. Morality requires of us that we refuse to let the past be whenever we are faced with a past that should have been otherwise. For him, writing 20 years after he was freed from the camps, time had not healed all wounds. Atrocity was not aging gracefully.

Carbon Trading – A Profitable CSR Initiative for Reducing Economic Asymmetries among Nations

Another international climate change summit, this time in the Qatari city of Doha, has concluded without a binding agreement reached on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. The failure of 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18) was anticipated beforehand by everyone involved, and met with widespread indifference on the part of international media. Since, the debacle at Copenhagen summit in December 2009—which broke up without agreement on a post-Kyoto climate treaty amid bitter conflicts between the major powers — annual UN-sponsored climate summits have been restricted to negotiating various secondary issues, unrelated to the question of binding emissions targets. Heads of government have not gathered to discuss the issue in past three years, leaving junior ministers and diplomats to head negotiating teams at the subsequent summits at Cancun, Durban, and Doha. The inability of world leaders to even meet to discuss the climate change crisis, represents a devastating indictment of capitalist system. Overwhelming scientific evidence points to the serious threat posed to world's population by excessive emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The forecasts made in first UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, in 1990, have proven accurate. “We've sat back and watched the two decades unfold and warming has progressed at a rate consistent with those projections,” Matt England, of the University of New South Wales' Climate Change Research Centre, told Australia's ABC Radio. “The analysis is very clear that, IPCC projections are coming true. And at the moment, we are tracking at high end in terms of our emissions, and so all of the projections that we look to at the moment are those high end forecasts.” However, the researchers believe that the conclusions will have a broader implication, that will surely help developing nations in not only reaching, the much sought economic integration among them and reducing Economic Asymmetries with developed nations, but also in reducing the emission levels to save our planet. So, if a revolution has to be there in International trade and globalization, be it the Green Way!

Theses on Weak Ecology

I. WEAK THOUGHT IS NOT A MERE INVERSION OF THE IDEAL OF STRENGTH ON THE UNDERSIDE OF METAPHYSICS. IT MARKS A SHIFT FROM METAPHYSICAL ECONOMY TO POSTMETAPHYSICAL ECOLOGY.1We live at a time of metaphysical backlash. Behaving as though deconstruction and weak thought were but minor blips on radars of Western intellectual tradition, unfortunate complications in a timeless pursuit of truth, or playful interludes between bearishly serious acts of system-building, metaphysics, realisms, and materialisms- prey to collective amnesia-compete with one another for title of best, most accurate, and comprehensive ontological framework. Two years ago, Gianni Vattimo responded to worrisome trend, which is still gathering steam, in article Need, What Metaphysics? There, he lamented that [a] spectre is haunting (late industrial) world: new (or old) need for metaphysics, for absolute truth, even for eternal life, and suggested asking whether there really is a (be it new or old) need for metaphysics.2 The need of metaphysics itself, experienced from within its systems, is insatiable. It will not rest until it has swallowed up all of raw existence and digested it into its categories. In turn, need for metaphysics can be only sensed from outside, once needed object has been lost, is lacking, and, through its absence, evokes nostalgia, sends spectral tentacles, announces returns and renewals, and so on. It is in register of unsuccessful, because aborted halfway, work of mourning that today's backlash gains strength and threatens to erase each and every erasure, dissolution, or of foundations announced by deconstruction and weak thought.The spectral return of metaphysics suspends thought from a kind of pendulum that has now swung back to default position of same, if only under sign of lack. The risk is that weak thought, too, would be swept away by this pendular movement unless it breaks with dogma of metaphysical monism admitting only or violence and uniformity. Vattimo's appeal to think the history of Being as guided by common guiding thread of reduction of strong structures . . . oriented towards ethics of non-violence3 needs to be accompanied by proviso that reduction and are qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, shifts. To approximate an ethics of non-violence, in other words, it is imperative to make a Hegelian leap from quantity to quality and to recast distinction between weakness and strength in terms of two largely incommensurate attitudes, which I would like to name ecological and economic.Note that ecology and economy at once respect and trouble onto-metaphysical monism I have just invoked in a critical key. With regard to each other, they are both same and other and neither same nor other, since they revolve around oikos (or dwelling), which lends first three letters to each word and at which they arrive from opposite directions of logos (articulation, reasoning, discourse, language, speech) and nomos (law, convention, division, distribution, allotment). If default position of contemporary metaphysics is economic or economist-a position that encompasses assumption of complete interchangeability of parts in whole; obsession with quantification and rankings; and imposition of more or less arbitrary conceptual and concrete partitions, barriers, walls, or separation fences onto world-then challenge addressed to its hegemony should involve ecological alternative that begins but does not end with a one-dimensional weakening or softening of dominant structures. Only proceeding in such a way will we be able to skirt traps that await anyone embarking on Nietzschean revaluation of all values: first, a symmetrical inversion that elevates low and brings down high (read: valorizes weakness over strength) and, second, a leveling down of differences observed through lens of a general and widespread indifference. …

Preface

Preface Michael C. Jordan Archbishop Bruno Forte in his book, The Portal of Beauty, suggests that there exists a widespread indifference or hostility to beauty in the contemporary world, while also demonstrating that a Christian theological understanding of beauty can show us what it means to say that beauty can call us to salvation.1 Forte’s reflections are deeply grounded in the Christian tradition of thought about beauty from Augustine through Hans Urs von Balthasar, and it is of particular benefit to readers of the English translation of Forte’s book that we also gain access through Forte’s work to the fruit of Italian scholarship on this tradition. In addition, Forte calls to our attention in his final chapter significant poems by Italian poet Eugenio Montale and Catalan poet Joan Maragall. Forte enables us to reach a fresh understanding of what it means to recognize the precarious position of beauty and he revitalizes our recognition of beauty’s theological importance. As Forte indicates in his chapter on Balthasar titled “The Glory of Beauty,” it is the great merit of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics to have called attention to the contemporary urgency of recovering a theological understanding of beauty. Forte’s exposition of key arguments from Balthasar is cogent, but especially helpful is the [End Page 5] expanded contextualization of the contemporary cultural conditions that have obstructed cultural openness to beauty’s theological power. Forte draws upon Italian writer Cristina Campo to ask in the opening words of his final chapter, “Is not beauty the place where we must necessarily begin?”2 Campo in turn draws our attention to American poet William Carlos Williams who in Paterson explores the fear of beauty in the modern world: “But it is true, they fear/it more than death, beauty is feared/more than death, more than they fear death.”3 The text quoted by Campo is from Book III of Paterson, but Paterson’s Preface to Book I immediately names the centrality of the theme of beauty: “Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?”4 This confluence of cultural sources suggests the contemporary predominance of a troubling spiritual condition: there are elements in modern culture that cultivate hostility and avoidance of beauty, and yet it is beauty that points the way to overcoming spiritual depletion. Forte builds his analysis of the sources of hostility to beauty by indicating the close association between beauty and death: like death, beauty disrupts the seeming autonomy, self-sufficiency, and tranquility of an enclosed worldly horizon and induces a restlessness that calls us to seek beyond the familiar temporal world. As Forte says, “beauty unsettles us in a way we often seek to avoid: we flee from beauty as we flee from the thought of death.”5 Therefore, the modern project that sees death as something to be conquered through scientific and technological mastery over the natural world also predisposes us, even if only as an unforeseen consequence, to regard beauty as an indication of a fragility that we seek to overcome. Just as Forte’s book provides an expanded understanding of the hostility to beauty, so also the intense focus on the deep implication of beauty in the Christian understanding of the Trinity and the Incarnation helps us see what it means to speak of the saving power of beauty. The opening sentence of the book provides what we might call a Christian distillation of the concept of beauty, that is, a concept that implies an understanding of Christian revelation as the foundation [End Page 6] for this approach to beauty. “Beauty is an event; beauty happens when the Whole offers itself in the fragment, and when this self-giving transcends infinite distance.”6 While this account of beauty is sufficiently broad to accommodate aesthetic theories that do not draw upon Christian revelation, the formulation is prepared, so to speak, to be especially suitable to a Christian trinitarian and incarnational vision of the world. Forte follows the insight of Balthasar according to which the human person, having been created in the image of God, is endowed with...

The Spitzenkandidaten Exercise One Year Later – The Unsung Hero; The Ballad of Google Spain; On My Way Out – Advice to Young Scholars I: Presenting a Paper in an International (and National) Conference; In this Issue

The Spitzenkandidaten Exercise One Year Later - The Unsung Hero A year has gone by since the last elections to the European Parliament. One significant innovation in those elections was the Spitzenkandidaten exercise. At the recent fifth edition of the State of the organized by the European University Institute I conducted a public interview with Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans. Vice President Timmermans and I reached the point where we touched on that perennial topic of the still existing deficiencies of European democracy, resulting, inter alia, in widespread indifference as expressed in the low turnout to the last European elections - 2014 scored the lowest turnout ever. Here is an edited transcript from the interview. Weiler: [...] Part of the problem is that when people go and vote for the European Parliament, they are not really being offered a real political choice (the way, for example, yesterday they were offered in the United Kingdom - Labour or Conservative.), neither as regards the policies that will be pursued nor as regards who will govern them. So the delicate question is whether the Union in its processes needs to become overtly more political? Do you think the bold, even though limited, experiment of the last elections to the European Parliament with the Spitzenkandidaten, who delivered here in this space [the Salone dei cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio] one of the televised debates, should be pursued and perhaps deepened as one of the ways of addressing that problem of citizen disengagement? Timmermans: Yes, first of all ... the core of the problem also refers to one of my favourite authors, Hannah Arendt, who ... actually, if you bring back the essence of some of her writings [says] It is not the anger of the minorities that hates us, it is the indifference of ...

Should 16-Year-Olds Be Allowed to Vote in Westminster Elections? Public Opinion and Electoral Franchise Reform

Britain has a long and often celebrated history of progressively expanding the electoral franchise. In recent years, the idea has been advanced to allow 16-year-olds to vote in general elections. This article uses data from a July 2013 national survey to examine public attitudes on this topic. These data show that less than one person in six favours lowering the voting age, with a large majority preferring the status quo. Younger—but not the youngest—people, men, working class and lower income persons, self-identified members of the ethnic majority and Scots tend to be most favourably disposed towards lowering the voting age. Multivariate analyses confirm these socio-demographic relationships and demonstrate that views about reducing the voting age covary in theoretically expected ways with several attitudinal variables prominent in the literature on voting, political participation and support for democratic political systems. Although statistically significant, none of the relationships of interest is especially strong. Thus, an effort to lower the age of majority would lack widespread popularity and be only weakly leveraged by the demographics of the British electorate. If franchise change occurs, it likely will be the result of an elite-driven project that succeeds because of widespread public indifference.

Is the Digital Revolution Driven by an Ideology

The writings of computer futurist writers such as Ray Kurzweil, Eric Schmidt, Hans Moravec, and Peter Diamandis argue that the digital revolution that is “Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business” (to quote the sub-title of Schmidt’s book) is being driven by the Darwinian forces of natural selection. What they do not consider is how their thinking, as well as the thinking of most computer scientists and programmers, is influenced by the metaphorical language of their culture. As language both illuminates and hides, the main focus in this essay is on the diversity of cultural ways of knowing that are being lost as people rely more on print-based data, information, and other abstract systems of representation. The assumption of the computer futurist writers that the digital revolution is an inherently progressive force is based on the same metaphorical language that underlies such progress-oriented ideologies as libertarianism and market liberalism. These ideologies, in turn, are based on the Western Enlightenment assumption that traditions are the source of backwardness and a limitation on progress. This same view of traditions, which ignores that the diversity of the world’s cultural commons carried forward through face to face communication are the basis of less consumer dependent and less toxic destructive lifestyles that will become more important as the ecological crisis deepens, is a key feature of the digital revolution. The double bind is that the many important uses of digital technologies lead to the widespread indifference about the importance of living cultural traditions that are passed forward face to face and through mentoring relationships. Is the loss of privacy, communication between generations, economic security from being displaced by robots and from hackers, the diversity of cultural ways of knowing––including the exercise of ecological intelligence, to be written off in the name of progress?