The Los Angeles Review of Books: Philosophes sans Frontièrs

AS ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY becomes ever more specialized, a number of philosophers have sought to bring philosophizing out of the ivory tower and into the street. Specialized cafes, book clubs, and “philosophy of everyday life” courses, like those in Alain de Botton’s School of Life enterprise, all point to the same cultural and social desire for high-quality intellectual conversation. In Teaching Plato in Palestine, Canadian-Brazilian philosopher Carlos Fraenkel pushes this democratizing impulse in a radical direction, traveling to some of the more conflicted communities across the globe with the aim of showing how philosophy can contribute to what he calls a “culture of debate.” His fascinating experiences as an itinerant philosopher, discussing classical philosophical texts (Greek, but also Jewish and Islamic) with students from Palestine and Makassar (Indonesia), Hasidic Jews in New York, high schoolers in Brazil, and members of the Mohawk community in Canada, demonstrate how philosophy can educate citizens and cultivate an ethos of mutual understanding. If one ever needed a book to suggest to those skeptical about the social benefits of philosophy, Teaching Plato in Palestine would be one to recommend.

The volume emerged out of Fraenkel’s experiences as a doctoral student working on Arabic and Hebraic texts while studying in Cairo. He soon discovered there was more to philosophy than analyzing arguments and devising objections. Muslim students he met became concerned with saving his soul by converting him to Islam, while Fraenkel, in turn, wanted to “save them from wasting their real life for an illusory afterlife” by converting them to a secular worldview. The result was a lively philosophical exchange over arguments for God’s existence, which did not lead to any definite conclusions (or conversions) but did prompt Fraenkel to pose two questions: Can philosophy be useful beyond the academy? And can it contribute to the transformation of conflicts over diversity into an ethical “culture of debate,” that is, a practice of rational discussion over conflicting values in a divided world? [...]

A recurring issue throughout is the tension between a commitment to religious faith and pursuing the philosophical maxim of leading a rationally examined life. As Fraenkel remarks, while most students accept the idea of examining religious views in a Socratic manner, “their commitment to the truth of Islam leaves no room for confusion.” Some of them attempt to turn the tables on their teacher, asking Fraenkel how a secular citizen could live an examined life; according to one student, many Westerners are moral relativists who equate freedom with individual choice but also view “all choices as equal.” While acknowledging that relativism makes questioning futile, Fraenkel points out that such interrogations should also be applied to the Islamic faith, which leads to a rather one-sided discussion of the differences between Sunni and Shī‘ite Muslims. The debate ends inconclusively but prompts Fraenkel to remark that one way beyond dogmatically asserting the superiority of one’s moral beliefs is to explore the shared traditions between the West and the Muslim world in order to “conduct an open discussion on an equal footing.” Despite the ongoing conflicts in Israel, Fraenkel leaves his students to ponder how philosophy might help resolve these moral-political disputes via ethical questioning and rational discussion.

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Katoikos: Can Europe afford to copy Japan on immigration?

More essentially, do we understand why Europe’s leaders have chosen apparently the multiculturalism option, rather than trying to keep Europe ethnically “European”?

Apart from our continent’s colonial legacy, Europe became multicultural because it chose to follow the USA in its financial and social policies. After WW2 the European economy was in tatters and so it was forced to copy the American model, whose economic boom was based on immigrants from all over the world, including Europe.

One by one, eventually, most European nations adopted this model and for many years it proved acceptable and successful. That is, until the EU’s 2004 big-bang expansion to the East, combined with the eurozone and refugee crises. [...]

The debate over whether the country should loosen its immigration laws is becoming more vocal. Shigeru Ishiba, in charge of revitalising regional economies, stated in 2015 that since Japan’s population is in decline, the government should promote policies to accept immigrants into Japan. “It is wrong to think that foreigners must not come to Japan,” he said. [...]

Today just 0.7% of the population receives benefits – compared with the 4.8% of Americans who get grants from Aid to Families With Dependent Children or the 9.7% who receive food stamps. About 2.3% of Americans receive grants through the Supplemental Security Income programme, which serves the elderly, blind and disabled.

To be sure, Japan’s welfare system operates in a very different context to America’s. Only 1% of Japanese births are to unwed mothers. By comparison, the rate in the United States has now reached 30% and keeps climbing.

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The Atlantic: The Return of Syphilis (DEC 3, 2015)

Today, syphilis can seem like a historical relic, more likely to appear in period movies than in one’s next-door neighbor. But after more than a decade of increases in syphilis cases, the United States is looking at its highest rate in recent memory.

According to a report released on November 17 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, syphilis rates rose for both genders in every region of the U.S. in 2014. The rate of reported primary and secondary syphilis (the earliest symptomatic stages of the disease) increased by 15.1 percent from 2013 to 2014, to 6.3 cases per 100,000 people. The rate of reported congenital syphilis (passed by an infected mother to her child during pregnancy) increased by 27.5 percent, to 11.6 cases per 100,000 live births. [...]

The new wave of syphilis shows no signs of slowing down. In New Orleans, the number of syphilis cases tripled between 2012 and 2014. Central New York, which two years ago reported 27 syphilis cases, most recently reported 110, and some health clinics are now offering free syphilis testing. Health officials in Oregon, where syphilis rates have increased by more than 1,000 percent from 2007 to 2014, have created a new website, syphaware.org. The site's homepage reads, “Oregon is known for many things: natural beauty, coffee, beer, and Pinot Noir. Did you know that Oregon is also known for syphilis?”

Researchers are still trying to work out why these increases are happening now, but the CDC’s report offers a few clues. For one, syphilis isn’t the only sexually transmitted disease becoming more common. Syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea—the three STDs that comprised the focus of the report—rose simultaneously for the first time on record, which suggests an underlying cause that isn’t syphilis-specific.

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Wendover Productions: Containerization: The Most Influential Invention That You've Never Heard Of

Thrillist: Why the Hell Did Humans Evolve to Be Ticklish?

What researchers who did just that found is that when tickled people laugh, it's an entirely different function than "social laughter," the noises you make when you find something funny, or even "taunting laughter," which is apparently a thing that needs studying.

For one, tickling laughter sounds different -- it has a "higher acoustic complexity" -- and activates parts of the brain that process auditory information, as well as a part of the brain related to language comprehension. In short, tickling laughter has meaning. But what?

Well, the researchers describe tickling laughter as an "unequivocal and reflex-like social bonding signal," related in part to how your brain processes language and working memory. It helps you form bonds with those close enough to tickle you, and your response signals that you have a relationship with the tickler. Social laughter grew out of this basic bonding response, but it can appear in scenarios that have nothing to do with touch; we humans have evolved to laugh at movies, for example, while chimps remain totally ignorant of Hollywood. [...]

So tickling serves a twofold purpose by identifying you as an individual, but also an individual in need of social interaction. "Laughter," Provine says, "reveals us as a social mammal, stripping away our veneer of culture and language, challenging the shaky hypothesis that we are rational creatures in full conscious control of our behavior."

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The Atlantic: Why Some People Take Breakups Harder Than Others

In these types of stories, rejection uncovered a hidden flaw, one that led people to question or change their own views of themselves—and, often, they portrayed their personalities as toxic, with negative qualities likely to contaminate other relationships. One study participant wrote: “I learned that I have a part of my personality that sabotages my happiness.” Another confessed: “I just feel hurt and rejected. I try to tell myself that it wasn’t my fault and that it was that person’s loss but I can’t help but feel inadequate.” [...]

But the loss of a partner can make it easy to fall into the self-deprecation trap. Research by the psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues shows that when people are in close relationships, their self becomes intertwined with their partner’s self. In other words, we begin to think of a romantic partner as a part of ourselves—confusing our traits with their traits, our memories with their memories, and our identity with their identity. In a measure designed to capture the closeness of a relationship, Aron’s team ask people to consider themselves as one circle, their partner as another, and indicate the extent to which the two overlap. [...]

So separating rejection from the self tends to make breakups easier, and linking the two tends to make them more difficult. But what makes people more likely to do one or the other? Past research by Dweck and others shows that people tend to hold one of two views about their own personal qualities: that they are fixed over the lifespan, or that they are malleable and can be developed at any point. These beliefs impact how people respond to setbacks. For example, when people consider intelligence to be something fixed, they’re less likely to persist in the face of failure than people who believe that intelligence can be developed.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Electoral College Blind Spot

Donald Trump’s victory in last November’s election victory came despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, making for the widest discrepancy between the popular vote and the Electoral College since 1876. So one measure of the quality of horse-race analysis is in how seriously it entertained the possibility of such a split in Trump’s favor. This is one point on which the data geeks generally came closer to getting the right answer. FiveThirtyEight’s statistical model, for example, saw the Electoral College as a significant advantage for Trump, and projected that he’d be about even money to win the Electoral College even if he lost the popular vote by 1 to 2 percentage points. Overall, it assigned a 10.5 percent chance to Trump’s winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, but less than a 1 percent chance of Hillary Clinton’s doing the same. [...]

But the “emerging Democratic majority” had a lot of flaws, some of which had been pointed out by data-savvy journalists for years. (See for example Real ClearPolitics’s Sean Trende, The Upshot’s Nate Cohn, and FiveThirtyEight contributor David Wasserman.) One basic problem with the theory is that while white voters without college degrees might have been declining as a share of the electorate, they still represented a hugely influential group and significantly outnumbered racial minorities in the electorate. According to Wasserman’s estimates, 42 percent of voters are whites without college degrees. By comparison, 27 percent of voters are nonwhite. If white noncollege voters were to start voting Republican by the same margins that minorities voted for Democrats, Democrats were potentially in a lot of trouble, even if they also made gains among college-educated whites.

Furthermore, whites without college degrees are overrepresented in swing states as compared to the country as a whole. Sure, there were some exceptions, such as Virginia. But in the average swing state — weighted by its likelihood of being the tipping-point state — whites without college degrees make up an average of 45.3 percent of the electorate, higher than their 41.6 percent share nationwide. That’s a big part of why Clinton won the popular vote while losing the Electoral College.

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JSTOR Daily: Does Street Protest Matter?

In 2012, Daniel Q. Gillion looked into the question of whether protests “work” in a very specific, quantifiable way: checking to see if they change how elected representatives vote. He did this by looking at civil rights protests between 1961 and 1995 and then considering the subsequent roll-call votes of the House representatives from the districts where the protests took place.

What he found was that representatives of districts with just the occasional protest weren’t likely to be swayed. But, in places where there were 50 protests over the course of two years, the typical representative became 5 percent more likely to take liberal positions on civil rights issues. If there were 100 protests in a district, the representative became 10 times more likely to take those positions. [...]

What that means is that, even in largely black and Latino areas where politicians might assume that their constituents were generally in favor of civil rights laws, protests made a difference in how politicians acted.

Slate: Trump Sold America a Miracle Cure

There are many who hope Trump’s supporters will hold him accountable. That they will insist he fulfill his promises about jobs or universal health coverage—and when those promises are broken, that their fervent support will turn into rage at having been duped, causing Trump anguish and eventually costing him re-election.

This is wishful thinking. Trump’s rise to power has followed a similar trajectory to that of quacks who peddle panaceas to the desperate—a bizarre and heartbreaking world I’ve long studied. Just like them, Trump will fail to deliver. But his supporters will find a way to exonerate him. Consider the ability of one “Archbishop” Jim Humble—a former gold prospector who claims extraterrestrial lineage—to persuade parents to pump their autistic children full of Master Mineral Solution, even though MMS, when activated by citric acid, becomes a dangerous form of industrial bleach. Or “Gerson” therapy evangelists, who talk cancer patients into paying thousands to detoxify with organic juice at a Tijuana, Mexico, clinic, despite studies showing the therapy is ineffective (unsurprising given that it was developed not by oncologists, but an early 20th-century Viennese doctor named Max Gerson as an unsuccessful tuberculosis treatment).

When people make big bets on miracle cures that fail to work, they rarely turn against the treatments or their merchants. Instead, they rationalize their misplaced faith, in order to save face, remain hopeful, and preserve an identity that’s defined by their courageous ability to reject the status quo. [...]

The process of embracing a charlatan’s empowering vision is not rational, which means that rational arguments are unlikely, in isolation, to dispel it. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that people cling tenaciously to their worldviews, and conflicting data may actually strengthen their beliefs. (Just look at this family who thinks Trump is “a man of faith who will bring Godliness back.”) To renounce Trump would mean admitting that one’s worldview—of a country wracked by carnage, as the president put it in his inaugural address, and a truth-telling hero who can heal it—is fundamentally mistaken. And that can also mean confronting existential panic without a panacea. It is much easier to forgive Trump for not locking her up than to wrestle with such truths.

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