In this 2002 meditation on working for the common good in dark times, Margaret Wheatley writes:  "[R]ecall the Buddhist teaching that hopelessness is not the opposite of hope.  Fear is.  Hope and fear are inescapable partners.  Anytime we hope for a certain outcome, and work hard to make it a happen, then we also introduce fear — fear of failing, fear of loss.  Hopelessness is free of fear and thus can feel quite liberating.  I've listened to others describe this state.  Unburdened of strong emotions, they describe the miraculous appearance of clarity and energy."[1] ...

In the May 1 number of the New York Review of Books, historian Garry Wills compared the strategies of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama in overcoming the considerable level of prejudice against them.  --  "The most damaging charge against each was an alleged connection with unpatriotic and potentially violent radicals," wrote Wills.  --  Lincoln and his Republican Party were "accused of supporting abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who burned the Constitution, or John Brown, who took arms against United States troops, or those who rejected the Supreme Court because of its Dred Scott decision."  --  Obama is "suspected of Muslim associations and of following the teachings of an inflammatory preacher who damned the United States."  --  "Jeremiah Wright was Obama's John Brown," wrote Wills.  --  And the parallel goes further.  --  Just as "Lincoln did not call [John Brown] a fanatic or insult those who sympathized with him" because "many Republican sympathizers favored Brown, including such respectable figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson," so "Obama did not reject the black community that felt a sympathy (though not an agreement) with Reverend Wright" because "many decent persons, and not only blacks, had refused to do just that — and such people were also being denounced.  Martin Marty, the respected church historian at the University of Chicago, had often attended Wright's services and found inspiration there.  In some ways, Marty is to Jeremiah Wright what Emerson was to John Brown."  --  Garry Wills concludes:  "[W]hat is of lasting interest is their similar strategy for meeting the charge of extremism.  Both argued against the politics of fear.  Neither denied the darker aspects of our history, yet they held out hope for what Lincoln called here the better 'lights of current experience' — what he would later call the 'better angels of our nature.'  Each looked for larger patterns under the surface bitternesses of their day.  Each forged a moral position that rose above the occasions for their speaking." ...

The shortest verse in the Bible is, famously, John 11:35:  "Jesus wept."  --  Jesus weeps again in a poem composed by Marie J. Peck in memory of her mother, entitled "On This Easter Day Jesus Weeps."  --  Marie composed this work exactly five years ago, when the Iraq war was only one month old.  --  Five years later, it is possible to begin to appreciate how prescient a poem it is.  --  Thanks to Marie for allowing us to reproduce it on this web site....

There are fundamental flaws in the assumptions that underlie economics as it is understood by contemporary governments, flaws that make it difficult for human society in this hour of crisis to address the global catastrophe that has already engulfed many forms of life on Planet Earth, and that will eventually affect them all, Prof. Robert Nadeau writes in the March 2008 issue of Scientific American.  --  On Mar. 19, 2008, he posted on the web an extended version of his essay, reproduced below.[1]  --  "Neoclassical economic theory," writes Prof. Nadeau, "is predicated on unscientific assumptions that massively frustrate or effectively undermine efforts to implement scientifically viable economic policies and solutions."  --  An historian of science, Robert Nadeau describes the forgotten origins of the modern discipline of economics as "surely one of the strangest chapters in the history of Western thought."  --  Nadeau lists eight "unscientific assumptions" that stem from the discipline's unexamined origins.  --  Among them is the belief that, in his words, "the environmental costs of economic activities can only be determined by pricing mechanisms that operate within closed market systems."  --  "When mainstream economists are confronted with the charge that there is no basis in neoclassical economic theory for realistically assessing the environmental costs of economic activities and internalizing these costs in pricing systems, they typically deny that this is the case by appealing to the work done by environmental economists," he writes.  --  But the denial rests on the assumption "that optimal private decisions 'based on mutually advantageous exchange' lead to optimal social outcomes."  --  "Contingent valuation methods" have been devised to take into account thing like the economic value of recreation, scenic beauty, air quality, water quality, species preservation, bequests to future generations, etc., but Nadeau shows that these lead to absurd results such as the demonstration in a 1987 paper that the existence of the bald eagle had a value of $11 per household.  --  Prof. Nadeau argues that international agreements are impeded by the fact that "The economic interests that the representatives of nation-states are seeking to protect are based on unscientific assumptions about the dynamics of market systems in neoclassical economic theory.  Another related problem is that these assumptions are embedded in the mathematical theories that serve as the basis for making cost-benefit analyses and the results of these analyses almost invariably indicate that the costs of implementing scientifically viable economic policies and solutions are greater than the benefits."  --  "This explains," he claims, "why the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) failed to protect the climate system, why the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) did not even begun to reduce losses in biodiversity, and why the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (1994) did not slow, much less reverse, this process."  --  But Robert Nadeau is not pessimistic.  --  He believes that the collaboration of mainstream economists and environmental scientists that the world urgently needs may come about when they realize their "once-in-all-human-lifetimes opportunity" to "protect the lives of the 6.6 billion members of the extended human family and the future existence of their descendents by resolving the crisis in the global environment." ...

In a recent lecture delivered at the New America Foundation, the eminent economist Ha-Joon Chang presents the arguments rebutting neoliberal free trade ideology and the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) attitude that dominates mainstream policy-making circles.[1]  --  With clarity, humor, and wit, Ha-Joon Chang, 44, who now teaches at Cambridge University, shows why he has become one of the leading heterodox economists in the world today....

On Tuesday, Barack Obama chose the National Constitution Center, across the street from Independence Hall, as the venue for a major address on America and race whose title, "'A More Perfect Union,'" invoked the Preamble to the United States Constitution.  --  Obama delivered what may be a historic speech of almost 5,000 words, arguing that "we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren."[1]  --  Obama spoke about his own background ("I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents") before addressing "the last couple of weeks [in which] the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn."  --  He denounced the statements of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that emerged last week as representing "a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America."  --  But he refused to "disown" him:  "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.  I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."  --  For years, Obama said, the United States has been in "a racial stalemate," one that the divisiveness of the present moment risks perpetuating.  --  Obama said he has "never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy," but "asserted a firm conviction — a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people — that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union."  --  As for Jeremiah Wright, Obama said that "The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society.  It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.  But what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change.  That is the true genius of this nation.  What we have already achieved gives us hope — the audacity to hope — for what we can and must achieve tomorrow." — The real thrust of Obama's speech was an invitation to Americans to say "not this time":  "[W]e can," he said, "play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day, and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words.  We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.  --  We can do that.  --  But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction.  And then another one.  And then another one.  And nothing will change.  --  That is one option.  Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, 'Not this time.'  This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children.  This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem.  The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy.  Not this time." ...

In this 1949 essay on the death of Gandhi, Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) plumbs the depths of the politics of assassination, and concludes that a complicity exists between the assassins and the world’s ordinary “realists,” who regard examples of extraordinary goodness as “glaring improbabilities” whose disappearance is anything but surprising:  “[T]he good-natured derision of my colleagues at the luncheon table, as they ‘cut [Gandhi] down to size,’ between mouthfuls, is different only in degree from the angry unconcern of the murderer, who immediately told reporters that he was not ‘at all sorry.’”[1] ...

In March 2007 BBC Two aired Adam Curtis's three-part documentary "The Trap," which offers a provocative narrative about the intellectual as well as political development of the idea of freedom in the post-WWII world.  --  All three episodes have been uploaded in segments on YouTube.[1-18] ...

Environmental biologist Chris Maser wrote this meditation on the power of fear in 2000.[1]  --  Maser gives voice to fear and conducts an imaginary dialogue with the dark lord.  --  Asked where he lives, Fear replies:  "In the dark side of the future.  I can dwell nowhere else, because I am the dark, negative side of the future, just as Love, who lives only in the present moment, is nevertheless reflected in the light, positive side of the future.  I am the absence of Love."  --  "What do you mean when you say:  'I am the dark side of the future'?  What, exactly is the 'future'?"  --  "The future exists only in your mind as a figment of your imagination based on an illusion of time, which is also a figment of your imagination.   'Time' is not real; it does not exist.  All that is real is this eternal moment."   --  But Fear is not concerned about being discovered, named, and understood:  "I shall not magically vanish now that you know me, because all schools in all nations teach about me and celebrate me on every holiday that is somehow devoted to violence, such as your Memorial Day, Canada's National Day of Mourning, Mexico's Day of the Dead, and Europe's All Saint's Day.  I fill not only the annals of history but also the daily news, magazines, novels, television, motion pictures, and religions.  Eternal vigilance is necessary to counteract my powers of persuasion.  Eternal vigilance is exhausting, however; so it's easy for me to slip through your lapses in vigilance."  --  "[W]hen parents teach their children that Love is in any way conditional, they plant a doubt and thereby teach their children about me — the most popular subject of the 20th century and, I predict, of the 21st as well."  --  But Fear has a weakness.  --  "[Y]ou mean to tell me that you have absolutely no influence in the present moment?" Maser asks.  --  "That," said Fear, "is true enough.  My only weakness, and, therefore, my best kept secret, is that I am barred by the Love of God from entering the present.  But the fact is that the future — my domain — is only one second from the present, and very, very few people have so disciplined their minds as to be eternally in the present moment with Love and, and . . . well, however you choose to think of 'God.'  That's to my advantage."  --  Maser asks Fear:  "Can I ever get rid of you?"  --  Fear replies:  "Yes, you can, but few have there been in all of time with the capacity to be so truly in the present that all they feel is Love.  Let there be a single expectation in your love, a single blemish in your acceptance of what is, a single second of your time spent away from the present moment in either the past or the future, and there am I!  Remember, every expectation you harbor attaches a condition to your thoughts, which projects you into the future, and there am I! — eternally, there am I!" ...

Steven Pinker argued enthusiastically in an 8,000-word article that appeared in Sunday's New York Times Magazine in favor of the existence of a "science of the moral sense," derived empirically from observations about how humans arrive at moral judgments.[1]  --  Pinker cites the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt and of anthropologists Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske according to which there are certain "themes" that appear in moral judgments.  --  "The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority, and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense.  Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture."  --  He concludes:  "Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend.  As Anton Chekhov wrote, 'Man will become better when you show him what he is like.'"  --  Pinker's presentation of his ideas is determinedly apolitical; he says nothing about moral questions facing the contemporary United States like torture and wars of aggression....