My birthday (Dec, 10) coincides with Human Rights Day.

Sometimes I remember this, sometimes I do not.

I cannot say that I am an activist on behalf of any cause, beyond my own. Oh, I’ve been passionate about things, over the years. I’ve been a supporter of human and animal rights, been (privately) outraged, debated the issue with friends and family (over wine), I’ve signed petitions, walked in rallies, held placards, sent letters and emails as a (sometimes) PETA member, even written a few ‘urgent action’ letters as an Amnesty International member. But I have saved no one, and I secured no rights – apart from my own, that is.

Well, of course, I’ve not even secured my own rights. I was simply born with them. When I was born – in a lucky and safe country – I received a very full package of rights – each and every right listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I was born free, equal and with dignity. I have been secure and never enslaved. I have never been tortured, never degraded, and always recognised as a person before the law. I have moved freely from country to country and from job to job. I have never been deprived of my property, nor my right to social security. I have expressed my opinions freely.

I have enjoyed all of these rights because I was simply born human.

It happened so effortlessly I could be forgiven for believing that human rights are indeed based on some universal and fundamental and rational truth, and that this truth, by virtue of its rational universality would apply universally.

It does not.

I have these rights because I was born in a particular society and community, at a specific time in history. Others, born in other societies and communities during other historical periods, do not have these rights.

This is the paradox of human rights.

It is our intuitive understanding of human rights that they are universal, that they are based on some rational and a priori moral principle and may thus apply to all human beings, always. In reality, they do not, and not because all human beings should not be equal, but because human beings are historical and political beings and they exist within given societies which govern citizen relations in various ways. When human rights violations occur – during wars and dictatorships – the violators never think they are violating “human” rights, because they believe that they are not dealing with humans at all, but sub-humans or “pseudohumans” (referring to Richard Rorty). Take the American Christians and the Muslims – for the former, the Muslims are not real humans, but some weird, inferior sub-human beings – as such, how can they claim inalienable rights?

Well, that’s the paradox then. Hannah Arendt understood this paradox of human rights as one which was founded in the understanding of a human being as somehow “abstract,” as apolitical and ahistorical, some sort of fundamental human being, some Platonic idea maybe? Abstract humans would surely enjoy universal rights because there is nothing – no society, religion or regime – in the way.

In any case, despite the problems that the socio-political reality poses for the universal application of human rights – we still feel that human rights should be universal. Richard Rorty says we feel this not because of an appeal to some rational foundation for a universal moral code, but because of an appeal to our emotions. Morality is sentimental, he says, it comes from the heart, not the head. It is based on things like love, sympathy, empathy, friendship, care, on senses that are profoundly human. When we support universal human rights, we do so because we care that all humans enjoy the same rights we believe that humans should, we care that others do not suffer. We do not, in the first instance, ever really support human rights because it is in some rational way, correct and fundamental.

Today, I watched the Black Pimpernel, a movie about Harald Edelstam, Sweden’s ambassador to Chile in the 1970s, who saved over 1,300 people during the Pinochet dictatorship. At the end of the movie there is some real-life footage of Edelstam being interviewed.

At one point he says that in matters of life and death you cannot negotiate, there is no time to act diplomatically, but instead, you must act as a human being. With this statement, Edelstam appeals to human sensibility rather than rationality.

All human rights matters are essentially either literal matters of life and death or, at least, matters of quality of life and death. In such matters, it is human emotion that is the best weapon. All of the greatest human rights activists may have based their fight upon some rational foundation, but it was not to this that they appealed to. They were passionate human beings and it was their passion – that fiery human emotion that creates and destroys – that made all the difference.

My Facebook profile says that I’m apathetic about political matters, and I certainly am. I became confused by the paradoxes of rational foundations – if human rights are universal why is this place such a nightmare? - and at one point suppressed my sentimentality about such matters, retreating into that sad place called apathy. Not that I stopped caring, but I guess I did stop believing.

Maybe it is time to fire up the heart again.

As of 24 January, 2009, I’ll be a philosophy student. Again.

The first time I was a philosophy student was 21 years ago at the University of Sydney as part of an undergraduate degree in the arts.

I was completely unprepared – intellectually – for what I would encounter back then and my chief motivation for choosing philosophy was linked to a story my high school English teacher teacher had told me. Miss Clark had told me about her philosophy-student friend who’d spent the first week of her epistemology course crying on the steps of the great lecture hall.

That philosophy could bring about such an acute emotional reaction fascinated me, because I also wanted to learn things that would devastate me. Philosophy did devastate me. And then aided and entertained me. Philosophy lived up to very expectation. And more. Ever since then I’ve been frolicking through the philosophy books…

Now, it is time to get really serious about it. There will be no tears this time round. But I do hope to suffer again, a little, and hope to just do it, philosophy that is.

So, I’ve enrolled in Open University’s A850 Postgraduate foundation module in philosophy, towards the MA in Philosophy. I hope to record personal responses here and to explore various philosophical topics. I’ll use the A850 tag as well as relevant other tags to make archiving and retrieving posts practical. The search box may also be used.

And thus I begin: Yesterday, a big box of educational material arrived and the opening section considers what it is to do, read and write philosophy.
First of all, Nigel Warburton on the OU Department of Philosophy website states that philosophy is “different from many other Arts subjects in that to study it you need to do it.”

Seems like an odd statement, that studying philosophy means doing it, a statement that almost completely goes without saying. Or does it? I guess philosophy is about saying those statements that seem to go almost without saying.

Warburton compares philosophy to literature - you don’t need to write it to study it; music – you don’t need to play it to study it, but with philosophy “you have to engage in philosophical argument.”

From Michael Beaney introductory notes on studying philosophy, I learn that:

* philosophizing is a particularly self-conscious activity, in which I must refine the way I think

* I must concern myself with asking fundamental questions and be willing to engage critically with the thought of all the great philosophers, but also with my own thoughts

* I must find my “own voice and gain confidence in” my own “ideas and powers of argument.”

Find my own philosophical voice and gaining confidence in my own ideas and powers of argument – now that is something to look forward to.

Another is to develop the type of attitude that Bertrand Russell encourages: In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.

And so, I have begun.

My short story, THIS IS NOT A LOVE STORY, an excerpt from the novel, appears on page 79 of MiPOesias, December 2008. Photography by Gonzalo Rodriguez (also on page 4).

Get your own - Open publication

Just settling into a new online course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08):- “a twelve week course that will explore the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. It will outline a connectivist understanding of educational systems of the future.”

About to begin reading introductory material on “What is Connectivism?” and anticipating the next topic, “Rethinking epistemology: Connective knowledge.”

Trivia: There are around 1600 registered participants in this course.

[Been studying a bit of philosophy, again, hence the topic…]

Man is (not!) free, and (so, naturally) everywhere he is in chains.
In the land of illusion we can be free.

A really, really, really good way to upset someone is to tell them they have no free will, that they are not free, that they have no freedom.

But, really, why all the fuss?

Consider this:

1. The notion of free will is incoherent with what we know to be the current state of affairs in the world (physical laws, both Newtonian and quantum) and what we know to be our physical and chemical make-up.

2. Therefore, the only thing we possess when we say we have free will is the illusion of free will.

But:

1. We are reluctant to renounce our freedom despite the logical incompatibility of freedom and determinism because: Historically, the notion of freedom is what allows our code of moral responsibility to function justly. Also, freedom allows us to claim desert and distribute justice (Smilansky, Saul, “Free Will: From Nature to Illusion”, 2001). And it is freedom that allows us to live as active agents in the world, allows us to be creative, to form significant and valuable relationships with others, to fall in love, to live with dignity, and to be the rational and civilised beings we believe we are.

2. Also, despite the looming threat of determinism, we still feel free. When it comes to acting on our desires, we have a clear sense of choosing between two or more alternative courses of action and tend to deliberate between them, we consider reasons for and against, and when we come to make a decision to act, we feel that we have done so with cause, that it was up to us, and that had we chosen to, we could have done otherwise.

A brief history of thought on free will:

Plato and Aristotle defined free will as an attribute of any agent that also exhibits a capacity for intellect. Aquinas said the same. Hume stressed the ability to act or to not act based on one’s determination and will and Hobbes maintained that free will is a the ability to act without external impediments.
Compatibilists are the cool philosophers who admirably aim to reconcile free will with determinism by claiming, for example, a difference between being coerced or manipulated to act or will, and being constrained to do so. Our actions and choices and desires very often feel unconstrained even if they might be caused.

Other interesting and persuasive theories are Harry Frankfurt’s* hierarchical model of desires, where humans have the capacity to develop second-order desires, those desires which concern wanting the sort of will we want to have, and John Martin Fischer’s* reasons-responsive model where humans have the capacity to respond to and act according to certain reasons and rational considerations. These theories show that humans exhibit free will, albeit at a limited level.

Smilansky’s ‘accusation’ of shallowness!

Smilansky calls any view that seeks to make free will compatible with determinism “shallow” because, while perfectly valid at a functional and practical level, compatibilist theories always ignore the ultimate reality of our existence, that things simply are the way they are and our level of control over our actions and choices, while real and significant at the social and practical level, is actually very limited.
Why? Because determinism rules.

A brief word about determinism:

Determinism is the thesis that given the past and the laws of physics or nature, the present could not have been otherwise. Determinism is a fact of reality, as Newtonian mechanics show, and even when determinism is not a fact, as quantum mechanics often imply, the alternative, indeterminism, provides no relief, since this demands that things happen without cause and that they are therefore based on random chance. If our actions are random or based on chance then we no more choose them than when they are determined.

In a world where Newtonian mechanics prevail, libertarian free will is impossible. And where quantum mechanics prevail, libertarian free will is still not guaranteed, because as Barry Loewer* shows us, Bohm’s theory actually supports causality and Wignerian mechanics support chance. Both cause and chance deny agent libertarian free will, where an agent’s free choices must originate in the agent, and therefore offer “little prospect for gaining libertarian freedom from physics.”

Conclusion: It’s all an illusion.

Shallow compatibilism is cool in so far as it offers the “illusion” of free will, which is positive, practical and preserves the “moral and personal reality” in our lives.

But, we need to simply accept the fact that ultimately the only thing we possess when we say we have free will, is the illusion of free will.

This doesn’t mean that we are creating happy illusions, or that we prefer ignorance to truth. The point is that the illusion is already in place, and it is real enough in so far as it allows us to function as rational and dignified beings, who forge valuable relationships and perform creative activities, who may claim desert for their successes and talents, and distribute justice to those who do bad things. In Smilansky’s “land of illusion” we are able to lead the “free” and, therefore, civilised lives we cherish.
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*Papers by Frankfurt and Loewer can be found in Crane, T. and Farkas, K. (eds.), 2004 Metaphysics: A Guide and Anthology. Summaries and references to their views, including Martin Fischer’s are excellently dealt with in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s entry on compatibilism.

Who are you?

I don’t know.

[Don’t say that, say something humble and brave, about wandering and not being lost and how I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Quote a poet. Or a philosopher. Do not quote Star Trek. Please.]

I know who I am but I’m not going to tell you.

What do you write?

I write long fiction and short fiction. But mostly short fiction.

[Say literary fiction. Ethnic! I write ethnic literary fiction. I write ethnic literary fiction and magic realism. And Indian Writing in English, don’t forget to mention that. I write ethnic Indian magic literary realism English fiction. Writing.]

Actually I don’t write long fiction at all. That was a lie.

Why do you write what you write?

I write what I write because I believe I can find a cure for dengue fever through short stories.

[I write what I write because I am a magic golden rockstar.]

I write what I write because if I don’t, nothing will happen.

Why should we read what you write?

You should read what I write because there’s usually an insect in there somewhere. Moths. Sometimes butterflies. Usually moths though.

[You should read what I write because it will make you smarter and enlarge some parts of your body while it shrinks others. You should read my writing because it will save the whales. Every time someone reads what I write, a kitten dies. I mean it flies.]

And bewildered men. You get insects and bewildered men, what better reason do you need to read something?

Is the world a better place because of what you write?

No.

[Yes.]

No.

Ok, yes. Though there’s a really good chance that my writing has made everything a little bit worse on a global scale. But that’s just being egotistical, no?

Yes.

–

Kuzhali Manickavel’s debut story collection Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings is now available via Amazon and Target.

–

Previously on the Five Minute Interview.

Who are you?

A mass of fearons or is that leaptons trying to make sense of the world. No seriously I am just trying to make sense of the conflict that is life. We are given desires and dreams and then often the inability to make them real cos life comes along and makes it impossible. Sometimes I’d rather just be a fox.

What do you write?

Leaptonistra or is that fearonism? Dunno fiction trying to make sense of the world.

Why do you write what you write?

I have no choice though others would say dogpoo to that and that we have lots of choices to go where and do what we want. They should tell that to my uncommercial fingertips.

Why should we read what you write?

Cos it sounds pretty and if you let the rhythms work on you (on your leaptons that is you of course) the meanings will make you think as they sink into your brains.

Is the world a better place because of what you write?

Of course! It’s a trip; a journey an adventure into other modes and thinking - it takes you elsewhere for a few hours and with more lasting foundation than the latest Jeffery Deaver!

__
Previously on the Five Minute Interview.

Who are you?

It’s only when I crossed 40 that I realized I should do the thing I love the most, to write. So you could say it’s only since the last few years that I have no hesitation in calling myself a writer.

What do you write?

At the moment equal doses of fiction and nonfiction. Some years back it was only fiction and I did get success but not in the amounts I craved. So, to not let despair overwhelm me, I also began to dabble in non fiction—features on places, peoples, events, wild life, and even that strange but perfectly satisfying exercise called creative nonfiction.

Why do you write what you write?

I think I have a viewpoint on things and people that would interest others.

Why should we read what you write?

You know most of us writers lug around this baggage of self importance, this deep conviction that what we have to say is of critical value to the rest of humanity. I am no exception. Except that sometimes I hear twenty or thirty voices in my head, howling with laughter, and asking me, so, you think you are indispensable, you think the world will stop turning even for a few seconds when you are gone?

Is the world a better place because of what you write?

In little ways, yes. My son who is an absent minded genius in computer software suddenly put down his beer when we were having dinner one evening, when he visited me after a long gap. “You know, Dad. I enjoy reading your articles.” That’s it. That was all he said. We moved on to other topics. Mostly about his recent struggles and successes.

Some of my neighbors have featured in my articles. They glanced through them and for about two and half seconds a light shone in their eyes and their cheeks went a little pink.

A lot of characters in my nonfiction–like snakes, cattle, crocs–haven’t had a chance to read my articles. But I suspect they would be pleased to know that one more writer has joined a few writers to write about their usefulness to the environment.
Years ago, a sister in law, from the Our Lady of Poor Sisters gang and a teacher in a reputed school in Mumbai, told me that she and her gang laughed non stop for about five minutes after they read one of my humorous articles in The Times of India (It was about my wife and Saddam Hussein).

Things like that.

Of course there’s this big dream that I will one day emulate Updike’s or Greene’s success. Maybe in another fifty weeks or years. But I will.

And thank you, Kathryn, for being patient with all this rambling.

__
Previously on the Five Minute Interview.

I have an op-ed piece running in today’s International Herald Tribune, which is online here: Speed up or get out of the way.

On Monday, the Cambridge Union Society debated “This House would return the Parthenon Marbles to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.” Sponsoring the debate was easyCruise. The travel company offers a Classical Greece cruise that includes a visit to the Acropolis, the tourist attraction bereft of most of its treasures. An Acropolis reunited with its lost marbles is surely a seductive motive for those in the cultural tourism trade to back the repatriation campaign.

Of course, tourism companies and museums shouldn’t feel bad about sustaining commercial interests in the fate of the Parthenon (a.k.a. Elgin) Marbles, but guilt has always been an underlying theme in this tug of war between historical rivals, the English and the Greeks.

Nikos Kazantzakis (acclaimed for his exuberant Zorba the Greek, but excommunicated for tempting his Christ) put it rather aptly when he referred to the illegitimate acquisition of the Marbles, “In her sooty vitals,” he wrote in his England: A Travelogue, “London stores these marble monuments of the gods, just as some unsmiling Puritan might store in the depths of his memory some past erotic moment, blissful and ecstatic sin.”

And pro-repatriation Christopher Hitchens echoed Kazantzakis when he wrote, “There is, in one of the museum’s priceless acquisitions, a repressed and guilty secret.”

Underlying much of the popular debate on the Marbles is the outrage and hysteria surrounding the original theft 200 years ago, but the most legitimate argument for repatriation is the motivation behind easyCruise’s support of the campaign and one that is in line with contemporary archaeological theory: that cultural treasures should always be displayed in their original context.

But why should the unity of the monument be more desirable than its disunity? Every monument from the past exhibits its history and the Acropolis exhibits layers and layers of it, a true palimpsest (to quote Kazantzakis) of numerous historical periods. We can never reclaim what was lost when the Byzantines converted the Parthenon into a church, or when the Ottomans converted it into a mosque, or when the Venetians bombed it, or when Greeks recycled its stones to build other structures. So why should we hope to reclaim what was lost to the British? History is full of such wrongs. So why make right this particular wrong? Why cleanse the “sin?”

The historical truth of the Marbles in London and the Parthenon in Athens includes all the illegitimacy, looting and plundering of the past. I say that this “guilty” history adds to, not detracts from, the beauty of the monument.

Kazantzakis might even have agreed with me.

When, in 1939, he travelled to England, he visited the British Museum countless times and conducted his own little debate: In the case of a great disaster – earthquake, fire, Barbaric invasion – which artefacts would he be moved to save?

He spent days on end examining his three most “stable loves:” the Assyrian reliefs, the Persian miniatures and the Classical Greek exhibit. Incidentally, Kazantzakis was able to do this because the British Museum offers a unique opportunity to experience the world’s cultures under one roof; just one more argument often cited against repatriation.

Kazantzakis responded to the Marbles just like any Greek would: with epic emotion characteristic of the most nationalistic Greek he praises the Hellenic miracle, the attainment of the “great secret of perfection in life and art.”

Reading his philosophically charged account of his museum visit with its heightened and patriotic tone, it seems that Kazantzakis would solve his conundrum by choosing to save what, as a Greek, he “must” save: the Parthenon Marbles, his cultural heritage.

And yet, he does not. “I would not choose what I ’should’ chose,” he writes, “I would chose to save the wounded Assyrian lioness, my sister.” The alabaster relief of a dying lioness was carved in 650BC as Assyria fell to Babylon.

Granted, it was a different world back, a world ready for war and Kazantzakian scholar Vrasidas Karalis, of the University of Sydney, tells me that Kazantzakis would have seen the “strong emotions” and “raw animality” of African art and not the “symmetry and harmony of Greek art” as better able to express the “the atmosphere of barbarism and imminent collapse experienced by Western civilisation.”

But what if Kazantzakis were here today? Would he bow to nationalist pressure for Greeks to support the cause and call for the return of the marbles?

I doubt it.

Let us remember that this is the man who saw himself as a human being first and a Greek second, this was the man excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church, the man who was loved more by non-Greeks than his own countrymen, the man who requested “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free” to be his epitaph, the man who knew that one must be at once “soaked in” one’s culture and yet removed from it so as to better see the truth.

I can only conjecture that Kazantzakis would keep things as they are. He would visit the divided monument in Athens and in London and be awed and astonished by the plundered history in one place and the guilty possession in the other. I too wish to be astonished by them, wherever they are. And as a Greek who does not live in Greece I am both soaked in my culture and free from it. Also, since I have no commercial interest or any other other interest in the Marbles, I can freely say to the British, keep the guilty secret; do not cleanse the sin.