Arquivo para a ‘Information Science’ Categoria
The meekness in times of polarization
02
Nov
Meekness is a fundamental virtue for resolving conflicts,
establishing new spaces for dialogue where it ended and opening new horizons where they seem impossible.
John Calvin has a very noble phrase: “It will be useless to teach meekness unless we have started with humility”, in fact the great reason why some seem right and others unreasonable. on the sides (the opposite of humility) and within these parameters, no dialogue will be possible, or what we prefer, no “new horizon” will be drawn that establishes a future point where conflicting points may enter into a process of convergence.
Polarization is inevitable may be the arguments of some, yes if reaching a certain point of conflict this is valid, but we must know that the actual way out of a conflict will have to have the flag of peace at some point and it cannot be the The flag of submission of the vanquished, the pax Romana, after Rome conquers its territories, it is submission to an authoritarian concept that at a certain point will return to war.
Power is always asymmetrical, this is true, but meekness can lead to it being exercised with modesty and justice.
Polarization is logic may be the argument to justify it, but remember that fuzzy logic, paraconsistent logic and other logics are not binary, yes or no, and that there are never only two sides, this is an idealistic position that it induces duality, there can be multiple sides, so the really fair logic admits a third hypothesis.
These will never be winners and will always be by the wayside may be another thought, as paradoxical as the divine teaching may seem, in many religions, is that meekness and humility lead people to high, one of the biblical beatitudes says (Mt 5, 5): “Blessed are the meek, for they will possess the land” and so where is their power, the conquest through perennial values can only lead to plenitude and perenniality itself, the problem is to yield to values tricky and unfair.
The construction of a perennial reality, a time of peace and justice, as we begin to emerge from a pandemic, is fundamental, even if it seems distant.
Falling, but the pandemic is not over
25
Oct
We mentioned last week the concern about evolving cases in
some countries such as Russia and England, where a variant of the virus is being studied with concern, also the poorest countries have received fewer vaccines than promised by donation, and we already understand that Pandemic is global, that is, there is an influence of less vaccinated regions in others that maintain a high level of immunity, policies for future pandemics already take these factors into account.
Some countries continue with a high level of deaths, despite vaccination, in the US around 1700 daily deaths in the last week, in the rest of the world it is falling, but with the presence of deaths, in the graph above with deaths registered on the 23/ 10 (Saturday) in absolute number of deaths, Brazil, followed by India, Mexico and then Russia.
The major concern of WHO is with respect to promises of vaccine donations to the poorest countries that are not being fulfilled. the news is not from this blog, but from the WHO itself, as it has positioned itself against the third dose, as according to The People’s Vaccine report made on the BBC, an alliance of a charity institution reported that only one in seven doses of vaccines promised by companies and rich countries, in fact reached the poorest nations.
In the report, in the interview with Bruce Aylward he stated: “Do we really need to step up or do you know what’s going to happen? This pandemic will last another year than it needs to,” he warned, and this is due to the fact that even with isolation measures we are always connected, and any communication (not only of people, but of products and any biological material such as fruits and food) can be transmitter.
In Brazil, the number of vaccine doses is coming, a boost in the vaccination campaign against Covid 19, a batch of 1.7 million Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines arrived on Friday (10/22) and other equal amounts had already arrived, totaling almost 5 millions of vaccines.
The inputs for AstraZeneca were also received by FioCruz (Brazil), which produces the vaccine in the country, the landing of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) arrived for the production of 5.6 million doses with arrival scheduled for 5:50 am on Sunday morning (25/10).
Vaccination in the first dose reaches close to 153 million doses, while the second dose (or single dose) reached just over 109 million vaccinated, the moving average of deaths is just above 300 daily deaths, with a downward trend we can assume that we will be below 100 daily deaths in early December.
Mass culture and its criticism
21
Oct
In Morin’s book “The Mass Culture of the Twentieth Century”,
it is stated that there is a zone “where the distinction between culture and mass culture becomes purely formal: The Human Condition, Nausea or The Plague enters the culture of mass without, however, leaving the cultivated culture” (Morin, 1997, p. 53) and Camus’ book is interesting for its coincidence with the issue of the current Pandemic, and interesting that it did not enter into the analysis of the cultural aspect of the moment.
We have already posted on the blog at another time about Camus’ book “The Myth of Sisyphus” and oher about José Saramago’s novel Essay on blindness (1995), although widely read in some European countries amidst the pandemic, his analysis was not entered the circles of cultural “high narrative”, that we tried to explain in some posts this week.
Written in 1947 by the weak Algerian Alberto Camus, its origin is important, because its chronicle starts from an analysis of an epidemic that occurred in the Algerian city of Oran, in some year of the 1940s, when Camus worked clandestinely in the clandestine newspaper “ Combat!” where he wrote texts engaged against Nazism, among them “Letters to a German Friend” (1945) stand out.
The book deals with the absurdity of existence, when in the midst of an epidemic there is a lack of love and human solidarity, whose feelings can be summarized where he wrote: “There were common feelings, such as separation or fear, but the personal concerns.
No one had yet truly accepted the disease”. Another excerpt that can be highlighted: “Many continued to hope that the epidemic would cease and that they, with their families, would be spared. As a result, they still didn’t feel obligated to do anything.
The plague was nothing more to them than an unpleasant visitor who would one day depart. Frightened but not desperate, the moment had not yet come when the plague would appear to them as the very form of their life and when they would forget the existence they had been able to lead until then.”
With the war just over in the period that he wrote the book, he remembers: “The scourges, in fact, are a common thing, but it’s hard to believe in them when they befall us. There were an equal number of pests and wars in the world. And yet, plagues, like wars, always find people equally unprepared.”
He shrewdly analyzes the scourges in history: “From the beginning of history, the scourges of God have brought the proud and the blind at his feet. Meditate on this and I fell to my knees.” and adds: “Oh, if it were an earthquake! A good shake, and there was no more talk about it… counting the dead, the living, and that was it. But this damn disease! Even those who don’t catch it seem to carry it in their hearts.”, and his conclusion brings a reflection: “The more the pandemic spreads, the more the moral will become elastic.”
I understood that the absence of solidarity and compassion, as well as the elasticity of morality were not unusual facts in epidemics, but somewhat expected, but I would add that there is always a more humane, more solidary alternative that gives us the hope of a much more just after a sad scourge, learn something from it.
Culture and the great crisis
20
Oct
After analyzing the aspects of homogenization and cultural
colonization, Morin will analyze who the average man is and what culture he consumes, he says:
“The language adapted to these anthropos is audiovisual, a language of four instruments: image, musical sound, word, writing. Language is all the more accessible insofar as it is the polytonic involvement of all languages” (page 45) and, therefore, it is not specific to new media that only enhances them, and it involves more an imaginary than “of the game that overflows the fabric of practical life” (idem).
This is because “the borders that separate the imaginary realms are always fluid, unlike those that separate the realms of the earth” (ibidem), so a man can participate in the legends of another civilization than adapt to the life of this civilization, and so Morin prepares to talk about the great crisis or great civilizing night, which Morin calls “great craking”.
As technical quality improves, it mediates artistic quality, says Morin: “they go up in industrialized culture (writing quality of articles, quality of cinematographic images, quality of radio broadcasts), but the irrigation channels relentlessly follow the main lines of the system (page 50).
Morin separates the cultural currents coming from Hollywood into three main currents: the one that “shows the happy end, the happiness, the success; the countercurrent, the one that goes from The death of a Traveling Salesman to No down payment [AC/DC Rock], shows failure, madness, degradation” (p. 51), but there is a third current that he calls ” black”.
This is “the current in which fundamental questions and contestations ferment, which remains outside the culture industry: it can partly usurp, adapt to itself, make publicly consumable certain aspects of, say, Marx, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Freud, Breton , Péret, Artaud, but the condemned part, the antiproton of culture, its randium is left out” (idem).
Morin describes this anti-climax at the beginning of chapter 5 “The great ‘cracking”: “long playing records and radio multiply Bach and Alban Berg. Pocketbooks multiply Mlaraux, Camus, Sartes. The reproductions multiplied Piero dela Francesca, Masaccio, Césanne or Picasso” (p. 53), culture seemed to be democratized by the cheap book, the disc, reproduction, as recommended by Walter Benjamin, but the result was vulgarization, because the “culture cultivated” is neither the mainstream nor the specific in mass culture.
The imaginary leaves the rites, parties and dances and goes to radio, television and cinema, there “those ghost spirits, geniuses who permanently pursued archaic man and reincarnated in his parties” (page 62), now they are “rushed away by printed culture”, mass culture breaks “the unity of archaic culture which, in the same place, all participated at the same time as actors and spectators in the party, rhythm, ceremony” (p. 62), spectator and show are physically separate.
This transformation of a “party man” follows what we call audience, audience and spectators: “the immediate and concrete he becomes a mental tele-participation” (p. 63(, this mass media (now confused with the networks, which is something else), while “reestablishing the human relationship that destroys the printed material”, “it is at the same time a human absence, the physical presence of the spectator is, at the same time, a physical passivity.” (page 63 ).
Mass culture maintains and amplifies a “voyeurism”, more broadly: “a mirror and glass system, movie screens, television videos, glass windows in modern apartments, Plexiglas in Pullman cars, airplane shutters, always some something translucent, transparent or reflective separates us from physical reality” (pages 72-73) and all this was prior to the new media, depositing to them only this great “cracking”, is to ignore the construction (or historical deconstruction) of the imaginary , folklore and festivals, which began even before the last century with printed culture, enlightenment and idealism.
Attempts to reactivate “cultivated” culture are not lacking, as we have already discussed, through the same mass media that vulgarize and destroy the substance of human culture, there is no lack of vivid works by Van Gogh that Akira Kurosawa animated in cinema, of large public events with “ animated video-mapping” by Vang Gogh (made at the Atelie des Lumiéres, in Paris, photo), who presented in 2018 the work of Gustav Klimt, also animated.
The cultural crisis is not just its own work, its root is the thought and development of a mass culture of idealism, of an objectivism that ignores the human.
MORIN, Edgar. (1997) Cultura de massas do século XX. (20th century mass culture). trad. Maura Ribeiro Sardinha. 9ª. edição. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Forense.
Covid falls and worrying cases
18
Oct
Covid 19 already shows signs of decline worldwide, but there are still 
worrying cases such as Russia, the first country to launch a vaccine and had on Saturday (16/09) more than a thousand deaths from Covid 19, the reasons are several, the main thing is the low rate of vaccination, Russia reached 218,362 thousand deaths for a population of 145 million inhabitants.
The whole world has almost 48% at least one dose and just over 36% fully immunized, it is possible to consider that we are not out of danger, something around 60% would be desirable, at least until the end of the year for the Christmas parties , in Brazil the number of vaccinees is 73.4% at least one dose and close to 50% fully vaccinated, but the infection curve still drops very slowly.
The consequences of Variant delta are not yet known, in a balance made of the pandemic by neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, he stated that in Brazil we have not yet seen the face of this variant.
Winter is approaching in the Northern Hemisphere and the WHO intends to consider the possibility of a new pandemic, so that we are not surprised as this one has not ended, in November it will hold a World Health Assembly where it will study the possibility of a “treaty for pandemic”, it is necessary to consider greater solidarity and more effective combat.
The deputy director of WHO Mariângela Simão was emphatic: “there will be a next pandemic”, and added: “This is something we already know and which is inevitable, it’s a question of when it will happen” said according to the Instituto Paulista of Medicine.
Simão alerts that there is no approved vaccine yet for children, so there cannot be a national policy using vaccines that have not been approved for children under 12 years of age, and he points out that we only have one vaccine approved for use by adolescents from 12 years of age, which is the Pfizer.
He highlighted the importance of the Covax consortium that helped vaccination in poor countries, stressing the importance of donating 500 million doses from Pfizer, which will allow the entry of 200 million doses from Pfizer this year, France also made available the make donations and more countries are expected to help because, for now, it is the only vaccine for teenagers.
Act, potency and agape
15
Oct
What Aristotle defined as potency was conditioned to the act, so
the act is a current manifestation, in the example of the figure beside the seed), while potency is what could be (virtually, while virtú) the seed in potency is a tree could its manifestation as being to produce fruits and new seeds, while virtual, in the sense of virtue, is to transform it into a table or even a house.
Actual potential actualization is not just the seed that becomes a tree and bears fruit, the main source of change must be completely real and not only correspond to natural potentiality, but that which completes the rest, and this depended on Aristotle’s The first motor that gave meaning to everything, and that Thomas and Aquinas claims to be God, enters the question of conscience.
Here comes Logos or Pathos, since consciousness is always a dictate of reason and will, so for Thomas Aquinas Ethos depends essentially on human will and consciousness, while Logos leads us to a more primordial reason for Being , Pathos moves towards disordered passions and drives, while Logos should lead us to agape and balance.
Potency is thus characteristic of Being and Pathos its distortion, power seen as Pathos is authoritarian and passionate, while power as Ethos is ethical and agapic, in the sense of service done out of gratuitous love to those they are subordinate, so it can until there is asymmetry, but it will only be diversity and never authority in the sense of absolute power as it is united with the Logos.
It is not by chance that Aristotle was tutor of Alexander the Great, and his form of power spread to the peoples, as well as Plutarch in his text “Alexandre (in Parallel Lives”, 1st century): “After this battle of Issus… Macedonians form to take a liking to the other, silver and women, and the way of life of the Asians, becoming so fond of it that, as if dogs, they set out on the trail in search and pursuit of the opulence of the Persians”, is likely. which also influenced the Romans.
That’s how we reach the second war and the dangers of post-modernity, will we leave our childhood civilization and will one day be able to coexist with peoples with different cultures and cosmogonies, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction: polarization.
It was also no different for Jews and Christians, in the nascent community many wanted to have “power” alongside Jesus, in the reading of Mark (Mk 10:36-37) the apostles James and John make a special request to Jesus: “He he asked, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ They replied, ‘Let us sit one on your right and one on your left, when you are in your glory,’ and the master tells them they don’t know what they’re asking for.
Ai asks if they can drink from the cup that He will drink (referring to their type of death), they keep saying yes, then rebuke them and tell the form of power that exists in civilization (Mark 10: 42-43): “Jesus called them and said: ‘You know that the heads of the nations oppress them and the great ones tyrannize them. But among you, it must not be like that: whoever wants to be great, be your service and whoever wants to be first, be the slave of all”.
So those who govern believers in the same way as the temporal power have not yet understood the potency of the agapic Logos.
Will to power and civilizing childhood
14
Oct
A well-known concept of Nietzsche is the will to power, as a “natural”
driving force of man, we have already developed that the natural is different from the cultural, this being one of the infernal dichotomies as Latour said, the other is objectivity x subjectivity coming from rationalism/idealism of modernity.
In fact, this led people to expand from the primitive world, I would say in the infant civilizing age, the wars and empires of Alexander the Great, of which Aristotle was tutor, and later the Roman Empire, and the empires of modernity: the Portuguese, the French, Russian and American and the two world wars are in fact the great crisis of modernity, we were not able to overcome the civilizing childhood.
There were other great empires little mentioned in history: the great Manchu Qing dynasty of northern China invaded and defeated the Ming dynasty, it was a minority ethnicity but it dominated all of China and even had a brief restoration in 1917 and the great Mongol Empire was one of the largest in terms of area, reaching Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries.
One can think of potency as a form of growth to overcome both individual and civilizing childishness, so there is an act and potency, theorized Thomas Aquinas, but Nietzsche himself warns of this other sense: “the will to power is not even a being , not a becoming, it is a pathos”, so let us analyze the triad of classical antiquity: ethos, pathos and logos.
Pathos is in modern rationalism that also used by Descartes, in a different sense from Nietzsche from which the idea of pathology comes, which moves in imperfection, using Nietzsche’s own idea is not ontological, it denies being because it does not even ethos and nor the classic triad logos.
In Aristotelian rhetoric, ethos is one of the modes of persuasion or components of an argument, and this one gives meaning to being, being the link with the Logos that gives meaning to Being, giving credibility and establishing a truth that is not reality, because that is where the Logos draws the consistency of Being to oppose the Pathos-logical.
The Pathos lives in pure emotion, in irrationality, in deceitful imagination, he is responsible for the disorders of the Being, being in a way its denial.
The Pathology of two world wars has shown that humanity has not left its civilizing infancy, it is still a victim of itself incapable of conceiving Being as Ethos.
Renouce privileges and provide conditions for the poor
08
Oct
Alongside the problem of poverty and extreme poverty, the 
world lacks solidarity and compassion for the poor, according to Amartya Sen, another Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998, “poverty is the deprivation of capabilities”, so it is not about the disabled. or some system of privileges, but access to education, social and financial status, health, etc.
The contribution of Kremer, Barnerjee and Duflo (see previous post) is revealing because it addresses the multidimensional aspect, which goes beyond the lack of resources of poverty, and even further points to the ineffectiveness of government poverty, and among these measures they address that even microcredit has limitations.
The survey was conducted in 13 countries in The Economic Lives of the Poor study, the authors demonstrate that microfinance cannot increase investment, consumption, health and education conditions or empowerment. of women, so what is the solution pointed out.
They point to effects of strengthening and improving specific aspects related to poverty, such as education and infrastructure, and point to a study done in Kenya 2009 (Additional Resources versus Organizational Changes in Education: Experimental Evidence from Kenya), and another one done in India in 2007 (Remedying Education: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India), 2007.
Developed countries are also in line with these proposals, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) plans, but there will be no lack of polarized arguments that will say that it is about welfare or it is a proposal of the radical left, it is about overcoming the selfish and make sure that globalization has not looked at the social problem of humanity.
As it is difficult to overcome this vision, and this comes from afar, overcoming the vision of agreement of the rich and the poor and looking at the poor is also a Christian teaching, says the passage of the evangelist Mark (Mk, 10:21-23) to a rich young man who followed all the commandments and wanted very much to follow Jesus, He looked at him with love and said: “You only need one thing: go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me”, the young man is dejected and leaves, because he was very rich.
Erasure, invisibility and politics
07
Oct
It is not ignored in history the fact that the state, being a “possible”
solver of conflicts, has taken for itself the right to violence, which in the last instance is the right to kill.
Cameroon philosopher Achille Mbembe took this extreme of state power to develop his thesis on the state’s right to kill, calling this policy “Necropower”.
The essay was translated into Portuguese in 2018, and at the heart of this essay is a question about who can live or die in the contemporary world? Mbembe denounces that the role of States should have the defense of the lives of the most vulnerable as a principle, and not what is structurally done, which is the erasure of memory and the conditions of these lives.
We see that, beyond the erasure, there is a permanent invisibility of these people, by a layer that is linked to power, reaching the limit of not having civil registration and cultural rights.
Approached with regard to the forgetfulness (or social invisibility) and silencing made by the State regarding the historical past of these vulnerable groups, it is beyond the academic field, the social, cognitive and identity memory of what was experienced in the past and which is shameful not only through oblivion and invisibility, but made from a narrative opposite to its memory.
If we look from complex thinking, which etymologically means tissue together (complexus), the biological term “necrosis” refers to issues involving the biological death of bodily tissues or part of them, thus, one cannot think of the death of a part without let the whole body suffer, even though it does not look to see the tissue that is failing.
It is important to address the complexity of this concept of necropolitics and invisibility, because only it can address the problems involving racism, sexism and the erasure of different cultures (such as the indigenous, but there are many others in the contemporary world), the already known and unresolved economic dimension, which is access to social goods and services, joins the political dimension (the spaces of power), the construction of narratives and historicity of subjugating cultures (the psychological dimension) and the comprehensive cultural dimension.
Starting from the misery and invisibility of peoples, cultures and races, it cannot deny structural factors that are strong and prevent a more sustainable change of peaceful and harmonious coexistence.
Falling, but care must be taken
04
Oct
After a legendary pandemic fall in Brazil, Saturday the curve
was below 500 deaths in the last 24 hours, the deaths reaching almost 600 thousand since the beginning of the pandemic, indicate that there is still danger and the flexibility that is already happening for massive public events is worrisome.
It’s important to remember that on September 13th the moving average was 465.’ and then it went up.
We already explained last week that a “aftermath” is needed and that the proximity of the holidays and the end of the year can worry us, I remember the case of Portugal last year, which relaxed on these dates and had an increase in January, the countries that are in the beginning of flexibilization have really low rates of infection and mortality and the regions of contagion are observed.
The vaccination of the first dose already 40% (93,271,450 immunized and 147 million first doses), the vaccine delay rate in Brazil is 11%, according to the bulletin VigiVac of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil.
The Bulletin points out the states with the greatest delay, Ceará with 33% and the smallest Rio Grande do Norte with 5.4%, also note the absence for the second dose, in absolute numbers, São Paulo 1.25 million, in Rio de Janeiro 956.9 thousand people did not show up for the second dose and in Bahia 907.5 thousand people, the State with the highest vaccination is São Paulo with 79.20% in the first dose when it is not the only one and the lowest is Pará with 50, 91% took a dose.
Vaccines also had delays in delivery, Coronavac 33%, AstraZeneca 15% and Pfizer with a lower rate of 1%, which is why it has been the most applied in many cases in the third dose.
Pfizer entered more than 1 million doses this Saturday at Viracopos airport and promises to deliver up to 10 million on four charter flights that will arrive in the next few days.
Flexibility should advance in reliable numbers, taking serious control measures, for example, isolation in sporting events, in shopping malls and in means of transport.
