A Deeper Look - Issue #2 | Jan 17 2021
Pluralism, Education, and the Humanities
Hello Friends:
I hope you and your families are keeping safe. To those of you reading this for the first time, welcome! I am so happy that you have joined this newsletter community. I hope you will find this worth it, and I will do my best to make it so. If this provides you with a new thought, a new perspective or insight, or leaves you a little better informed, then I will have done my job. At the very least it will leave you with a conversation starter and new book recommendation.
This week we take a look at:
The UN Secretary General’s remarks to the General Assembly
The geographical relationships between the diversity of animals and humans
Ethical reflections on COVID-19 by the Pontifical Academy for Life
We end with a new recommended read: Arundhati Roy’s Azadi.
Secretary-General's Remarks [Secretary-General António Guterres]
On January 10 2021 UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres gave his first address of the new year, marking the 75th anniversary of the first meeting of the UN General Assembly. He provided a somber view of the challenges humanity faces in the years and decades ahead remarking:
Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction and whole ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes. This is a war on nature – and a war with no winners. Meanwhile, conventional wars are growing more entrenched and difficult to resolve. Geopolitical tensions are escalating. The threat of nuclear proliferation and confrontation has returned. Inequality is growing; hunger is on the rise. The number of people who have fallen into extreme poverty has increased for the first time in decades. Transformative technology has opened up vast new opportunities, but also new threats – from cyberwarfare to rampant disinformation; from hate speech to political subversion and mass surveillance. And the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted serious gaps in global cooperation and solidarity.
Guterres went on to reaffirm the importance of international cooperation; inclusive multilateralism; justice and equality; gender equality; women’s representation; and and the courage and resilience of the world’s youth.
FK’s Take: UN speeches rarely make for the most exciting reading, but this was relevant as it marked the first major address of the year and laid out issues which are likely to dominate global conversation over the foreseeable future.
The Relationship Between Complexity and Diversity [Santa-Fe Institute]
A paper published by Nature, and highlighted by the Santa-Fe Institute explores the geographical distribution of the diversity of ecological life on earth. For all of earth’s history, this distribution of diversity has been asymmetrical; that is to say the greatest diversity of life among species is found at the equator, while it recedes as one nears the poles. This is unique because the “biogeographic distribution of human cultural, linguistic, and economic diversity shows similar gradients”
The equator cuts through some of the most ecologically diverse places on the planet from rainforests of South America to the jungles of West Africa, from the plains of Sub-Saharan Africa, to the tropical islands of South-East Asia).
The study explains that:
Our results show that diversity begets diversity for both mammal species and cultural diversity because the kinetics of diversity are faster than the kinetics of environmental productivity resulting in superlinearity between diversity and environmental productivity. Increasingly productive environments are also more interactive meaning that not only is more energy available to support individuals, species, and communities, but there are increasingly different ways in which that energy is apportioned in the environment and thus competed over.
FK’s Take: I found this report interesting as it highlights an often overlooked lens when we speak of diversity - the role of geography and its connection to the environment. Conversations about diversity are often framed with reference to the larger forces of globalisation, that of increasing connectivity, connection, and interaction of people of different backgrounds. Yet in the ecological world these same forces of globalisation are having a profoundly different effect. Climate change and human activity are endangering species, destroying habitats and threatening the diversity of animal species. Given the inherent connections this paper explores does this hint at what awaits humanity?
Humana Communitas in the Age of Pandemic [Pontifical Academy for Life]
The Pontifical Academy for Life serves as the primary academic advisory body to the Vatican on issues that speak to the core of human dignity. In recent years it has provided guidance into the areas of bio-ethics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and end of life care. In July 2020 the Academy released a paper focusing on the reflections and implications of what the COVID-19 pandemic has meant for humanity.
Enclosed are selected highlights:
The Hard Reality of Lessons Learned: The COVID-19 pandemic has imparted hard lessons for humanity and for communities around the world.
It has deprived us of the exuberance of embraces, the kindness of hand shakings, the affection of kisses, and turned relations into fearful interactions among strangers, the neutral exchange of faceless individualities shrouded in the anonymity of protective gears. Limitations of social contacts are frightening; they can lead to situations of isolation, despair, anger, and abuse.”
The Lesson of Fragility: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the collective frailty of the human condition, and in his realisation there is a lesson for us all - that we must learn to accept the “ebb and flow” of life.
But “frail” is what we all are: radically marked by the experience of finitude at the core of our existence, not just occasionally there, visiting us with the gentle touch of a passing presence, leaving us undeterred in the confidence that everything will go according to plan. We emerge from a night of mysterious origins: called into being beyond choice, we come soon to presumption and complaint, asserting as ours what we have only been vouchsafed. Too late do we learn consent to the darkness from which we came, and to which we finally return.”
The Impossible Dream of Autonomy and the Lesson of Finitude: The pandemic has reinforced that we are not masters of our worlds, that we are bound by the finitude of resources that surround us.
We have built for ourselves an ethos of prevarication and disregard for what is given to us, in the elemental promise of creation. This is why we are called to reconsider our relation to the natural habitat. To recognize that we dwell on this earth as stewards, not as masters and lords. We have been given everything, but ours is only an endowed, not an absolute, sovereignty. Mindful of its origin, it carries the burden of finitude and the mark of vulnerability.
The Challenge of Interdependence and the Lesson of Common Vulnerability: The pandemic has reinforced how connected to each other we are, and this is a sign not only of our interdependence but its accompanying vulnerability.
The lesson awaits deeper assimilation… the seeds of hope have been sown in the obscurity of small gestures, in acts of solidarity too many to count, too precious to broadcast. Communities have struggled honourably, in spite of everything, sometimes against the ineptitude of their political leadership, to articulate ethical protocols, forge normative systems, re-imagining lives on ideals of solidarity and reciprocal solicitude.
FK’s Take: I highlight this piece because it is reflective of a perspective on COVID-19 that is rarely heard. The human tendency is one that tends to look forward, to the next day, week or year. Conversations on COVID-19 have largely reflected this dangerous habit, asking questions like: How do we pivot to the future? How do we take advantages of the opportunities it has provided? How do we optimise these advantages? I do not want to suggest that these are unimportant questions, but we must take stock of the past before we start stepping ahead. What have we learned about the nature of human connection? What has the pandemic meant for human cooperation and fragility? What lessons has this provided to societies around the world? What has it demonstrated about the nature of humanity? Over the course of COVID-19 the messages provided by Pope Francis have provided this balance in a tone and manner that is reflective, empathetic, and grounded in the realities of the everyday lives of millions around the world. The urge to “capitalise,” upon and “leverage” opportunity for the future is perhaps symptomatic of a broader malaise - one which we have yet to understand, and the implications of which we have yet to realise.
Read of the Week:
This week’s read is Arundhati Roy’s Azadi. Published in September 2020, it is a collection of short essays on the themes of literature, language, freedom, democracy and pandemic. While Roy takes the subcontinent as her focus, her messages echo with universal appeal. I picked up a copy after reading Roy’s op-ed in the Financial Times earlier last year.
Coronavirus has brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi [Freedom], the Free Virus that has made nonsense of international borders, incarcerated whole populations and brought the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. It casts a different light on the lives we have lived so far. It forces us to question the values we have built modern societies on - what we have chosen to worship and what we to cast aside. As we pass through this portal into another kind of world, we will have to ask ourselves what we want to take with us and what we will leave behind. We may not always have a choice - but not thinking about it will not be an option. And in order to think about it, we need an even deeper understanding of the world gone by, of the devastation we have caused to our planet and the deep injustice between fellow human beings we have come to accept. - Arundhati Roy, Azadi
Thank you for reading, and until next week.
FK
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