Bigthink - User Ideas Feed

Re: How do I use Big Think?

Bigthink — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:51:46 +0100

Participating in bigthink is clunky because of the 'quick thought' / 'response' distinction. Ironically, the idea of 'joining the conversation' and contributing something substantial is more difficult than making a quick, uncritical 'quick thought'.

Regular Web forums work better because they have all of the responses (re/re/re) displayed in a text-based branching map. Bigthink pages could do this, but make it better with less text reliance and more graphic based design.

What are the sensuous aspects of various religions?

Bigthink — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:34:15 +0100

I would like to know (from religious people, or people with experience in a particular religion): what are the sensuous aspects of your religion? How does participation in the ceremony influence the participant?

I am not a religious person but I would like to gain an appreciation for religion. I am less interested in what religions say is true/false/good/bad, and I would like to have more discussions about other important aspects of religion. I am particularly interested in the 'physical' aspects of ceremonies, including: touching, tasting, moving, praying, etc.

As an example, I was struck by the sensuous aspects of Buddhism when I went to a meditation. The meditation leader emphasized a consciousness of our bodies and our muscles. It seems to me that this type of awareness--an activity that centers awareness and relaxation on the body--is something that is lacking in the secular, middle-class community where I was raised.

What experiences have you had with the sensuous aspects of religious ceremonies?

Re: Can a country in the western world support an anarcho-communist government?

Bigthink — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:42:56 +0100

Short answer: No.

Capitalist liberal democracies have a very specific organization, and it has been shown that their institutions actually function to reproduce the capitalist system in important ways. The whole apparatus of taxation and the services it provides (police, healthcare, roads, highways, schools) all reproduce the necessary conditions for capitalism in various ways. Schools create a hierarchicalized environment where students are increasingly evaluated and trained so that they will be useful for the capitalist workforce. This helps sustain control and conformity as well as create a workforce ready for capitalist exploitation.

Many of the other services provided by government function in similar ways. I think part of the difficulty of thinking about the problem of anarcho-communism is that it gets lumped in with other 'political philosophies' and we consider them all in the same way. Political philosophy tends to assume that a system of organization is going to be implemented by government, usually in a top-down way. This is what I would call hegemonic thinking. To simplify a little, hegemony is a word for the dominance of a particular system of thought or government. So thinking about anarcho-communism hegemonically means thinking about what it would mean for anarcho-communism to become hegemonic (dominant) in the way our society functions. This doesn't really mesh with anarcho-communism.

Anarchism has often dedicated to pointing out the ways in which government and capitalism are linked and help to reproduce each other. Anarchism has always been a counter-hegemonic movement, meaning that it struggles to point out the problems with any hegemonic system. It struggled against state communism in the USSR and it continues to struggle against neoliberal capitalism today. This means that it's often problematic to think about anarchism (or anarcho-communism) in a way that assumes it will all-of-a-sudden be implemented in one country or another. Thinking in terms of 'all-of-a-sudden' presupposes a revolution (violent or not) which I don't think is very useful for contemporary society, especially in the overdeveloped West. Most people are attached to capitalism and government. Anarchism, by contrast, requires the willing participation and cooperation of people. It can't be imposed like capitalism or state communism. This means that it's often more productive to think about how anarchism can be mobilized at a smaller scale to chip away at (or present small-scale alternatives to) existing systems of domination, including capitalism and government, as well as racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, etc

How can we think about 'equality' in a productive way?

Bigthink — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:19:22 +0100

First off: the desire for equality has been an important idea to promote and organize around (in abolition, women's struggles, gay rights, etc) and it will no doubt continue to be an important idea in the future.

Without claiming that equality is a 'bad' thing, is it possible to question the ways equality is talked about in contemporary debates? For example, I often hear conservatives latching onto equality to fight affirmative action policies and ant-racist strategies. Is it possible that the idea of 'equality' has outlived its usefulness in certain areas?

Equality is often discussed in a way that assumes we should already be equal, and because that is the 'end goal', I think we often end up thinking passively rather than actively. If we are looking for equality between men and women (for example) we tend to wait for government to fix things. We hope that affirmative action, equality of opportunity, equality of education, etc, will end sexism. I would not claim that these policies have done nothing to tackle sexism, but by depending on them alone we forget that sexism is often perpetuated in culture, in thought, and in action. It doesn't make sense to depend on government to 'fix' sexism in this context. For example, almost all Hollywood films are shot according to an implicit (heterosexual) 'male gaze' where the camera is like a set of male eyes. Women get 'checked out' and objectified; we see shots of female body parts and the female figure, but we don't see the same shots of male characters. This can't simply be stopped or changed. Prohibiting sexist culture would mean an oppressive government that banned certain books, tv, film, etc.

We need to be able to tackle sexism (and racism/heterosexism/classism/etc) on our own at a communal and relational level. I think this is the only way to create productive change at a 'micro' level (in terms of thought, culture, beliefs, etc). This means being critical of sexism and oppression in our society, and analyzing things like the 'male gaze' in film. How does 'equality' fit into this personal and communal process of working on sexism? Other than saying 'we should all be equal (eventually) and oppression is bad', can equality be a useful way to think about cultural issues surrounding oppression? Can 'equality' be used productively to think about strategies that actually subvert or challenge sexist thought and culture?

Re: What do you like most about Big Think so far? Least?

Bigthink — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:16:57 +0100

: we also need a way to see when/if people have responded to our ideas and our comments. you can see responses to your own ideas if you click on your profile, but you can't see if there are new ones, and you can't see if people are responding to your own thoughts.

Ideally there would be a way to 'cite'/'quote' another comment/idea so people can follow the connections. i.e. i'm not responding to earlier responses; i'm responding to the original question, and it would be good if i could connect this post with that question. right now, the only way you can tell who is talking to who is by counting the number of 're:'s in the title.

this allows new ways of ordering/sorting/linking things, rather than just in chronological order. it allows users to link relevant ideas themselves.

What needs to change in academia? We need more progressive pedagogy

Bigthink — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:36:08 +0100

The vast majority of academia currently employs the 'banking model' of education. Knowledge is conceived as a big pile of data that students need to absorb and then spit back out onto their exams, tests, and essays.

However, knowledge can be thought of in other ways. Knowledge can be transformative, and rather than 'training' people, it can be a genuine exchange between people. It's hard for a lot of academics to appreciate this approach because it doesn't seem to serve a function. You won't get hired as a dentist because you learned to think critically.

Critical thought and progressive pedagogy is crucial for the future. We need to find ways to be more creative and to demolish power imbalances. Students can go through all of elementary, high school and even university without ever having to think critically about racism, sexism, poverty, colonialism, heterosexism or homophobia.

Thinking about these things is problemetic if we use the banking model, because it's often not a question of getting MORE knowledge. It's about questioning our assumptions and examining the knowledge we've already received, and the ways we come to know about things. bell hooks wrote a great book on this topic called Teaching to Transgress; check it out if you're interested

If we don't start practicing progressive pedagogy in academia, we will continue to be unable to confront oppression except through ineffective policy. Academia is great at producing knowledge that tells governments, corporations, or 'the world' what to do. It's not so great at grappling with the same issues at the personal or group level. What's needed is alternatives that transform us and force us to think about how WE fit into these problems and what WE can do about them.

White privilege and anti-racism - what are you working on?

Bigthink — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:57:26 +0100

As white person living in North America I'm committed to acknowledging my privilege. I'm also interested in finding new ways of thinking, knowing and acting that are more inclusive of different social locations. I didn't always think this way. I needed to learn about the white legacy of colonialism, and how white folks often need to work on their own privilege and oppressive behaviours before they can be a real ally in anti-racist struggle. I needed to learn that "whiteness" is a whole way of being; I have white ways of speaking, acting, thinking and learning. Some of these behaviours seem 'normal' or invisible because they're accepted as the norm. Non-white ways of being are thus marginalized and seen as 'different' and sometimes wrong. I'm in the process of uncovering these invisible white behaviours and examining them.

If you're committed to anti-racist struggle and you're white, how did you come to think about your privilege? What changes have you made in yourself to acknowledge and demolish this privilege? What have you found helpful/inspiring in this process?

If you're a person of colour committed to anti-racist change, what are your thoughts on white privilege? Have you found ways that white people can learn to acknowledge their whiteness? How can people of colour participate in this process without assuming responsibility for changing white folks?

Tackling poverty without charity

Bigthink — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:37:57 +0100

A lot of people are concerned about poverty, but fewer people are interested in connecting immense wealth to immense poverty. We might donate to charities, but most people with money aren't interested in thinking about the fact that their privilege comes at the expense of others. If you're making these connections, what are some of the links you've made between wealth and poverty? In what ways to rich people need poor people to maintain their lifestyles? Are you working with any anti-poverty groups that are doing something interesting?

Personally, in my own community, I'm doing outreach with street youth. We go to where youth are at (malls, skate parks, parks, overpasses) rather than asking them to come to us. This helps to demolish the power imbalance between service provider and service receiver. We're all equals and we work together to learn and reduce harm. There are other interesting things going on too: free schools, Food not Bombs, and urban agriculture are all ways that people are confronting the issues of poverty without placing themselves above poor people by 'giving' charity.

Environmentalism without policy-making or consumption?

Bigthink — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:52:48 +0100

: Almost all of the comments on this site (and in the mainstream media) provide solutions to global warming in two main categories: (1) legislation, policy-making, lobbying. This relies on governments who often aren't receptive to making changes. They're worried about damaging the economy or damaging relationships with various industries. (2) individual consumption and relying on new technology. Even though overconsumption and overproduction is one of the big factors that got us into this global warming mess, a lot of people are turning to the market to provide solutions: buy a hybrid car, buy new lightbulbs, off-set your emmissions. There's no doubt that these can have an impact, but they also require more production, which creates more emissions and pollution. I'm not saying that (1) or (2) is wrong, but what about community projects? What are people doing as groups or communities to help the environment? For example, some people are making connections between our reliance on multinational corporations and pollution, and they're finding alternative ways to get what they need. If we can find ways to produce more things locally, outside of the corporate/capitalist model, we can go a long way in helping the environment, and we won't have to rely on corporations or governments to take action. What kind of environmental projects are going on in your community outside of governments and corporations? How are these initiatives helping the environment? Have you heard about interesting projects underway elsewhere? Where I live, we're trying to start an organic community garden and a clothing-swap, which will reduce our environmental impact by allowing us to get some of our food and clothing locally, in a carbon-neutral way.

Re: How does corporate globalization change the state-market relationship?

Bigthink — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:33:03 +0100

: Corporate globalization has meant that states are increasingly unable to regulate economic arrangements within their own countries. Regional trade regimes like NAFTA have increased corporate profits while destroying the livelihoods of people who rely on smaller-scale trade. Traditional economic indicators of 'prosperity' like GDP don't fully capture this trend because they measure growth based on the whole nation-state, rather than looking at individuals and communities. Some people have predicted that the state will just whither away and we'll end up with a different system that resembles the EU. However, states aren't going anywhere. Many countries are dismantling the welfare state, but we're also seeing an emphasis (especially in the US) on more police, military power and especially surveillance. Our purchases, interests, activities and patterns of behaviour are increasingly monitored by corporations and governments. So we see less of 'big government' around economic issues, but more social control through police and surveillance technology. Some see these trends as good things, but for those of us who aren't interested in a future dominated by megacorporations and surveillance, these trends are worrying.

We need difference for anything to exist!

Bigthink — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 04:05:49 +0100

I think what amiecook said was really interesting, especially the bit about the lampost: "For everything there is an opposite, it sounds simple but for a lampost there is everything that is not the lampost." Ferdinand de Saussure's work has a lot to do with these questions. Saussure studied linguistics and wanted to understand how we attribute meaning to words. However, when we start to think about how we define a word or concept, we quickly find that it's not really defined by what it IS, but by what it ISN'T. The simplest way to show this is by pointing out that we rely on other words to define a word. Another way of thinking about it is that a dog is only a dog because we have a bunch of other words/concepts that it is not. In language, a dog is a dog because it is not a chair, or a cat, or a presidential candidate. The notion of difference (not similarity) as primary within language (and perhaps thought?) have influenced a lot of really famous philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze.

Another way to subvert corporate globalization

Bigthink — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:32:48 +0100

: Mary Robinson provides a good, short explanation of how corporate globalization is destroying the livelihoods of communities and individuals. However, she doesn't tell us much about solutions to these problems. Robinson seems to want to rely on governments and corporations to fix a problem that they've created. I'm pretty pessimistic about the willingness of either group to hear concerns about poverty, pollution, and other problems that stem from corporate globalization. I'm not suggesting we quit pressuring these groups, but there are other things we can do that make an impact right now. We can examine our own patterns of consumption. Where were our clothes made? Where did our last meal come from? If we're relying on big corporations for basic needs, it's likely that someone was exploited for ultra-cheap labour to make our stuff, and it's likely that a ton of pollution was created by the decentralized production network that corporations rely on to produce goods. We can create alternatives to this: buy used clothing, set up clothing swaps with friends, start growing our own food, buy from local farmers. These practices challenge corporate globalization DIRECTLY, by setting up new ways to get what we need. They also avoid the negative environmental impacts of corporate consumption. They won't fix the problems over night, but they chip away at them. They also remind us that we don't NEED corporations as much as we might think, which is important in itself. A final note: this retreat from global consumption doesn't mean a retreat from all aspects of globalization. In fact, a lot of groups are using the tools of globalization (especially the internet) to share the alternatives they're working on with other like-minded individuals.

Anarchism, direct action and pushing the limits of 'politics'

Bigthink — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:06:57 +0100

: I sympathize with the anarchist tradition as well; however, I couldn't wrap my head around anarchism until I started learning about the things that are going on today within the anarchist movement. haymarket summarizes anarchism as 'political philosophy' but his description of anarchism remains utopian. in other words, anarchism is held up as a utopian system that we need to 'get to'. Talking about anarchism this way makes it hard to conceptualize what anarchism means in the present. When I speak with people about anarchism, the most common reply is that anarchists are 'naive' or 'idealistic'. people assume that advocating anarchism requires assuming that 'all humans are good' or that 'if we got rid of all the laws, everything would be great'. These assumptions stem from treating anarchism as a utopian political philosophy that is 'somewhere in the future' rather than right now. However, the most interesting part of anarchism (to me) is its strength as a philosophy for the present. When we start thinking about anarchism in the present, it opens up a whole new set of possibilities that are often completely invisible to the mainstream. These possibilities are hard to think about because they don't fit into what most people traditionally think of as 'politics'. For example, as I write this, all of the subheadings under politics are about policy and governmental politics: elections, energy policy, foreign policy, healthcare, and Iraq. For a lot of people, these are the limits of politics; we get to talk about what 'the politicians' or 'the policymakers' are doing, but we don't do much ourselves, other than argue about policy, and vote every few years. Anarchism helps open a whole new field of 'politics'. A lot of people who don't identify or sympathize with anarchism actually practice forms of politics that are 'anarchistic', meaning that they are based on a lot of the same principles that are central to anarchism. For example, a lot of people (not just anarchists) practice 'direct action'. This means getting out there and being political yourself, or within your own community. Direct action describes political acts that don't rely on government or other large-scale institutions. If you're against the barrage of corporate advertising that saturates all of our cities, direct action might mean spraypainting a corporate billboard, rather than lobbying the city for new laws. If you're looking to take a stand against pollution, global warming, and huge SUVs, direct action might mean joining in a Critical Mass ride (google it) rather than lobbying government for more bike lanes or asking them to sign onto Kyoto. Direct action doesn't have to be illegal or 'radical'. Community gardens are a great example. These might not seem to be 'anarchistic' at all... what's political about gardening? When we start to think about it, community gardens can be deeply subversive because they challenge the monopoly of huge corporate agribusiness and factory farms. For people who oppose corporate farming (maybe because of its pollution, treatment of animals, or because it ruins the livelihood of small-scale farmers) community gardening provides an alternative that lets us get (at least some of) our food elsewhere. The idea of providing alternatives is important as a concept of anarchism, and as a way of doing politics in general. Direct actions like these help to show that other worlds are possible. In other words, they help to show that the basic ideas behind anarchism (more freedom, more autonomy, more creativity) aren't so naive or idealistic after all. This is political in itself because it presents alternatives to neoliberalism, corporate control, and reliance on government for help with our problems. A final note: widening the concept of 'politics' doesn't necessarily mean throwing out traditional ways of doing politics. In other words, just because we recognize that gardening can be political and that it can challenge corporate farms doesn't mean that we should stop challenging corporations and governments in other ways. In other words, sympathizing with anarchism doesn't necessarily mean asking for governments to dismantle welfare and social services. We need to recognize that this would play into the hands of corporations because people depending on these services would be forced to pay for private services instead. However, we can chip away at this dependence by creating alternative ways for people and communities to sustain themselves. This won't happen all at once, but the important (and inspiring) thing about direct action is that it's happening somewhere right now!