On Tossing The Canon In A Cannon – article by Marie Snyder on 3 Quarks Daily, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Students have complained about my course before, certain that they should not be expected to read anything so difficult in a high school philosophy course. But this semester brought out that other quibble. A few students were adamant that I shouldn’t be getting them to read philosophers who are sexist or racist or homophobic. … That’s almost all of them!… They do have a point. We definitely need a wider scope of readings that are more inclusive in approach and in authorship; however, we can still benefit from exploring controversial ideas from the past, and from reading exceptional ideas weeded from the abominable, even from dead philosophers who don’t deserve our accolades…. There is … benefit to tracing the dominant ideology to its origins, as has been tackled in book form by Hannah Arendt and Charles Taylor, so that we can better chip away at the foundation…. We further benefit from controversial ideas in order to test the limits of our own thought-process by disputing them, either on our own or in discussions. We’ll have a limited knowledge, a dangerous naivety, if we only read what’s agreeable to us…. Schopenhauer’s theory of attraction in a portion of his Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes provoked peak outrage this year. Normally I’d be pleased to arouse rebuttals and hone debating skills, and some of his claims are excellent fodder for refutation in an intro-level class. But a few ignored the weakness of his specific claims to focus instead on what he didn’t say: There’s nothing about asexuals or gay attraction in this, so it shouldn’t be discussed. He’s just talking about heterosexual attraction, and we shouldn’t read works that aren’t inclusive. This is becoming a more common take down, and while I applaud the concern, I suggest it’s misdirected with a counterargument that uses ethnicity to illustrate the problem: If an Indigenous writer is discussing their theories around being Indigenous, is it objectionable that they aren’t also addressing every other ethnicity? If not, then is it objectionable for a heterosexual writer to write about his understanding of heterosexual attraction only because it’s the dominant sexuality?”
‘The greatest director the world has ever seen’: actors salute Peter Brook – Adrian Lester, interviewed by Chris Wiegand in The Guardian. “Some directors will tell you what to do: stand here, walk over there, sit down. That is the most basic kind of approach, like directing traffic. Others will tell you how to say what you’re saying. But Peter directed your thoughts. He didn’t care so much how it sounds or how you moved, he was interested in what you meant. You were always left digging into deeper parts of yourself. In doing a play with him, you really didn’t know where his work finished and your work started. It just felt like you were completely free on stage.”
Tess Gerritsen: ‘There’s always comfort in Sherlock Holmes’ – questionnaire interview in The Guardian. “My comfort read: Any story featuring Sherlock Holmes. He makes you believe that every strange event has a logical explanation, that if one is simply clever enough, any puzzle can be solved. There’s comfort in that.”
Edwardian morals, Thatcher and bad design: why Britain’s homes are so hot – article by Phineas Harper in The Guardian. “British domestic architecture has … been shaped by idiosyncratic rules that contribute to its poor environmental credentials. For instance, in many parts of the UK, homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This large distance means that instead of clustering buildings together around cool courtyards or shady streets, as is common in hotter climates, many homes in new neighbourhoods are directly exposed to the sun. The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built. As a result, entire British neighbourhoods have been designed with more attention paid to this antiquated rule than to the risk of overheating.”
Courageous listening – meditation from Fr Richard Rohr. "Sikh activist Valarie Kaur has made a commitment to listen to those with whom she disagrees. Here she describes some of the practices that make it possible. The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt ] says, 'One trains one’s imagination to go visiting.' When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit.... When listening gets hard, I focus on taking the next breath. I pay attention to sensations in my body: heat, clenching, and constriction. I feel the ground beneath my feet. Am I safe? If so, I stay and slow my breath again, quiet my mind, and release the pressure that pushes me to defend my position. I try to wonder about this person’s story and the possible wound in them. I think of an earnest question and try to stay curious long enough to be changed by what I hear. Maybe, just maybe, my opponent will begin to wonder about me in return, ask me questions, and listen to my story. Maybe their views will start to break apart and new horizons will open in the process. ... Then again, maybe not. It doesn’t matter as long as the primary goal of listening is to deepen my own understanding. Listening does not grant the other side legitimacy. It grants them humanity – and preserves our own."
Protest literature – cartoon byTom Gauld in The Guardian. “Alice’s Activism in Wonderland (Carroll). About a Boycott (Hornby). Tom Brown’s Strikedays (Hughes). The Placard of Dorian Gray (Wilde). Far from the Marching Crowd (Hardy).”
Body politics: the secret history of the US anti-abortion movement – article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian, linked to her book The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells. “When the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade on 24 June, … the only thing everyone could agree on was that it was a historic decision. Unfortunately for America, the history it was based on was largely fake. The ruling, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization … claims that in reversing Roe v Wade, the court restores the US to ‘an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment [that] persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973’, when Roe legalised abortion. This assertion, however, is easily disproven.As historians have exhaustively explained, early American common law (as in Britain) generally permitted abortions until ‘quickening’, or perceptible foetal movement, usually between 16 to 20 weeks into a pregnancy. Connecticut was the first state to ban abortion after quickening, in 1821, which is roughly two centuries after the earliest days of American common law. It was not until the 1880s that every US state had some laws restricting abortion, and not until the 1910s that it was criminalised in every state. In the wake of Dobbs, social media was awash with examples from 18th- and 19th-century newspapers that clearly refuted Alito’s false assertion, sharing examples of midwives and doctors legally advertising abortifacients, Benjamin Franklin’s at-home abortion remedies, and accounts of 19th-century doctors performing ‘therapeutic’ (medically necessary) abortions…. Although most people today assume that anti-abortion laws were motivated by moral or religious beliefs about a foetus’s right to life, that is far from the whole story. In fact, the first wave of anti-abortion laws were entangled in arguments about nativism, eugenics and white supremacism, as they dovetailed with a cultural panic that swept the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as a result of the vast changes in American society wrought by the conflict. This panic was referred to at the time in shorthand as ‘race suicide’.”
