New war front and dangerous week
09
Oct
Since Israel had developed a strong anti-aircraft
battery scheme called the Iron Dome, missile attacks in the region had decreased, but at the end of the week a new attack by the Hamas group took place and more than 700 people were killed, showing that there are weaknesses in this system.
Israel’s military was caught by surprise on Saturday (10/07) and despite decades of the country becoming a technological powerhouse with the world’s most impressive military and a world-class intelligence agency, all of this simply hasn’t worked and This creates a new front of war in geopolitics already with delicate problems and Israel responded with missiles into Palestinian territory.
Hamas has Iran as a strong ally, which has supplied drones to Russia, and although it has denied that this continues to happen, Iran wants to be part of the BRICS and on the side of another invisible war, according to the words of Medvedev, the vice-president of the Russia’s Security Council and former president of the country, this war is taking place.
He was referring to Russia’s good harvest of wheat grains, which it intends to become a bargaining chip with allied countries, even providing supplies to allied countries in Africa that do not have the resources to purchase grains.
The week is delicate in Ukraine and Russia, because on both sides a new surprise attack is expected, such as that of Hamas in Israel, on the Ukrainian side long-range missiles, and on the Russian side the destruction of energy sources in Ukraine which would make the coming winter cruel to the population and weaken the Ukrainian military army, which already has difficulties with ammunition for conflict regions.
Something new is expected in terms of peace, there is no shortage of nods from Russia, but without negotiating the territories already conquered, while the Ukrainian side wants possession back, including the controversial Crimea, one of the main targets in the counteroffensive.
All people of good will and who know the dangers of war want some relief.
True commitment to the common good
06
Oct
Bad managers and dictators also promise to
work for the excluded and the common good, what happens is that their true personal interests remain hidden.
No one openly says they are going to do evil, except declared psychopaths who are already at a level of mental illness that can no longer disguise their desires.
Political and social analyzes hide interests of violence, hatred and war against opponents, there is no shortage of justifications, but any initiative of exclusion is already an indication that no common good will be well managed by these managers.
They begin with small actions that initially confuse people with good faith and who actually want the common good for all, a peaceful and balanced life for everyone, but little by little the true personal desires for personal possession of goods are revealed.
Corruption also starts like this, small unrestrained thefts lead to large ones when there is no impunity, parents who correct and educate without children know this, it is necessary to always be attentive to actions and what each small gesture leads to, educators also know this.
As a biblical reading says, an owner of a vineyard rented it and traveled, after a certain time he ordered the employees to collect the rent (Mt 21:33) they beat him and sent him back, he sent others and they also caught him and returned with nothing and finally sent his son, so the tenants thought let’s kill him and keep the vineyard, and Jesus remembers himself at the end of the parable: the stone that the masons rejected became the cornerstone.
This is how good is established, with those that the evil people rejected, oppressed and after much suffering it is possible to establish peace and the common good.
Resilience and the development of good is greater than great evil, although avoiding them also means avoiding injustice, social imbalances and mainly innocent deaths.
Because evil grows
05
Oct
Common sense is to say that evil grows because
good is omitted, in part this is true, as evil is the absence of good, but this absence can be due to aporia (lack of knowledge), due to bad education that forms unenlightened minds and due to end out of pure pride and power.
Power is a way of legitimizing both good and evil, this is only possible through violence, and generalized violence is war, so this is the clearest and most unequivocal form of evil, in it intolerance, contempt for what is different, the imposition of ideas and injustices is facilitated.
Thus, at different times in our history, it was through violence that empires and dictators imposed their wills and ideologies, not without the consent of a large part of the population, which is why we remember bad education, whether through propaganda campaigns or through schooling itself. impoverished and malformed, the two issues are linked.
Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to management at all levels, from our homes, neighborhoods and condominiums to power structures, small illegitimate actions, education for empathy, coexistence, cleaning and even leisure must be observed and guided by managers and public bodies in order to preserve common space and public goods.
The zeal for honesty, transparency, respectful dialogue between opinions that are not necessarily opposite, but different even if in completely divergent directions should not be a reason for hatred and violence, dialogue is always possible.
Evil needs polarization, radicalization (in the bad sense, there is the good sense of going to the root of a problem), pure disagreement as a way to justify and propagate violence.
Just like the seeds of a good tree, weeds and poisonous plants also have roots, they grew in a healthy plantation and the fact that they must grow together can be a mistake because they can suffocate the good seeds, pests and diseases in plants.
Care must also be taken to cure these pests, in agriculture several pesticides have already been condemned, and even disease-resistant plants can be questioned, genetic mutation can cause greater harm than expected, there is a lot of ethical dialogue about this.
Therefore, three precautions must be considered: the ethical education of valuing what is good, the zeal so that error and evil do not spread and finally the correction methods must be careful not to cause even greater harm.
Religions and evil
04
Oct
One of the biggest mistakes, already developed
in some of the posts, is the Manichaean duality of evil x good, without understanding that evil is precisely the absence of good, great Christian thinker, Augustine of Hippo converted precisely by abandoning Manichaeism.
Religious concepts that have long been forgotten, or that are submerged in mistaken preaching, impede what would be the “natural flow of humanity towards the enlightenment of the soul”, evil has deep-rooted sources in the form of old thoughts and emotional burdens from the past and, despite obsolete, still persist, hindering the progress of souls.
The remedy would be very simple, the closer the soul is to enlightenment, the less evil is present, and the more enlightened souls make the world more empathetic, harmonious and free from injustice.
The ethics and morals that derive from the need for civilizing progress do not find space if there are not souls and people in prominent positions with clear and convincing illumination, that is why evil has become a social, theological or ideological issue, and the both times.
It’s not just Christian thinkers who say this, Hannah Arendt talks about the Banality of Evil, Nietzsche about the “death of God” (or how we “kill” Him, of course impossible), Paul Ricoeur and Lévinas about the Other and Byung Chul Han about the “ Society of Fatigue” speaks of the vita contemplativa as a complement to the vita activa (which Hanna Arendt also spoke of), even remembering Christian thinkers.
The return of threats of war, the social crisis of moral values (everything is permitted!), before a true civilizational crisis occurs, a new enlightenment of souls is necessary (in Picture st. Francis expelling devils from Arezzo, by Benozzo Gozzoli).
The lack of understanding of subjectivity and human imagination, or its submission to unenlightened values, the absence of compassion towards others, the misunderstanding of progress as having fundamental positive aspects, even to save the civilizing process, leads society to exhaustion , disbelief or the fatality of wars and hatred.
It is not difficult to find positions in newspapers and social media in favor of the process of excluding people with a certain opinion, religion or even simple disagreement with dubious moral values (see the case of abortion in Brazil at the moment), the debates are sterile and instead of arguments the reactions are sarcasm and irony.
They are seeds of the broader process of civilizational crisis in progress and detected by great thinkers since the last century, crediting them to new media, to the resurgence of nationalism and authoritarian currents is to look only at the consequence, the root is the absence of enlightened souls who help humanity to contemplate its future with greater grandeur.
*When Francisco was in Arezzo, there was a great scandal and a war almost throughout the city, day and night, because of two factions that had long hated each other.
Exercises for political reflection
03
Oct
When we enter Manichaeism we only perceive
opposing forces without clearly discerning where evil and ethics lie, every philosophical exercise about evil is seen from a moral perspective.
However, what is moral has become confused, precisely because power has become confused with violence, and Hannah Arendt’s reflection on this is quite enlightening: “Power and violence are opposites; where one absolutely dominates, the other is absent (ARENDT, Between the past and the future: Eight exercises for political reflection, 1961).
The philosopher’s argument is simple, difficult to understand in a polarized world, but I would say it is the first of her reflections on politics when power is exercised legitimately, violence is absent. This means that in a healthy political system, power must be based on consent and voluntary cooperation, rather than resorting to violence to impose the will of one group over others, as there is no consent by others.
Much of political reasoning today is to exercise violence against opposites, this is its own denial, Arendt argued that freedom and political action are synonymous, since politics has no meaning enclosed in itself, the famous bubbles, being free is a necessary condition for political exercise, the exercise of citizenship, any limitation becomes violence.
Freedom exists as a plural condition of man, in religious terms it is free will, in social terms it is the possibility of acting freely as a citizen and having protection for this, if this condition is removed there is no other definition to the system other than the authoritarianism.
Just as in the arts: music, dance and theater, political action is valued as a “virtue”, all serious theories since Plato aimed at this participation in the “polis”, even Machiavelli’s amoral concept of virtú, performance requires a “audience” and a space for the spectacle to take place, in Arendt’s view, the Greek polis was “a kind of amphitheater where freedom could appear (Arendt, 2001, p. 201).
Listening to the contradictory, allowing it to express itself is a necessary condition for politics, the model of excluding opponents is nothing more than a euphemism for dictators.
Arendt does not fail to analyze the violence advocated by Marx, and returns to Aristotle’s zoon politikon, poorly read by hasty readers: “… which may be difficult to perceive, but what Marx, who knew Aristotle very well, must have been conscious” (ARENDT, 2001).
And he continues: “Aristotle’s double definition of man as a zoon lógon ékhon, a being who reaches his maximum possibility in the faculty of speech and in life in a polis, was intended to distinguish the Greeks from the barbarians, and the free man from the slave. The distinction was that the Greeks” (Arendt, 2001, p.50), living in a polis […] conducted their actions through discourse, through persuasion, and not through violence and through mute coercion.
For philosophy it would have been a contradiction in terms to “realize Philosophy” or transform the world in accordance with Philosophy without it being preceded by an interpretation, thus Heidegger warned that Marx’s statement “philosophers have interpreted the world, now it is up to transform it” is contradictory, because you must think about what transformation you want.
ARENDT, Hannah. Between the Past and the Future Trans. Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida. 5th ed. Brazilian edition, São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 2001. Em english (pdf)
War attrition and peace in Nagorno-Karabakh
02
Oct
As the Russian/Ukrainian war enters a phase of
attrition, a border region has a sign of peace, even if it means a loss of territory.
The struggle for dominance over the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh goes back centuries, however the president of the self-declared republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, Samvel Shaharamanyan declared that it would cease to exist from the 1st. January 2023.
In the 18th century, when the region was under pressure from Persia, Russian Tsarina Catherine II issued letters of protection to them, but the conflict was never fully resolved.
The signed decree dissolved all state institutions that will be vacated by the beginning of 2024, and more than 100,000 Armenians have already left the country, which already has the presence of military personnel from Azerbaijan, with a Muslim majority and supported by Turkey, Armenia is Christian and supported by Russia.
The region has geopolitical importance because since Russia’s war against Ukraine, Azerbaijan has supplied millions of barrels of oil to the European Union through the Caspian Sea along the Mediterranean coast, and recently Russia announced that it will no longer supply it.
The Armenian genocide of 1915-1916 during the Otman Empire led many Armenians to flee to this region of Nagorno-Karabakh, since then they have been called Azeris, during the Russian revolution the region continued in conflict with Azerbaijan, although both were Soviet republics, the anti-Armenians in the city of Shusha killed 30 thousand Armenians.
With the end of the Soviet Union, the Armenians once again established themselves as a nation, but the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remained, there were several periods of fighting in the region, now with the session of the territory this autonomous republic ceases to exist.
Despite the fears of separatist Armenians, this new situation is a great sign of peace.
Russia and Ukraine can be inspired by this model or something similar, the world wants peace.
Good people can do evil
29
Sep
Far from the aporia (ignorance of evil) is the
realization of good, the universal good, the common good, the good that sees and explains the will of the Other, the one that eliminates the symbolic nature of evil.
Hell is paved with good will, but it is not quite like that, because if it is a right intention it can produce fruit at the right time, but there is good not done and poorly done, that is evil.
There is a determination in the will, which is intention, the topic has already been treated by countless philosophers, most clearly in phenomenology where it is an essential category, but intention requires a habit, and making it a habit requires courage and determination.
There is confusion about intention and confusing it with purpose, psychologists don’t like the term very much because it involves the future and places the cause of behavior in individuals and not in their life history, many hasty and mistaken judgments start from “purpose”. .
However, a purpose made in order to overcome traumas, bad conditioning or something that disturbs a healthy and intentionally active mind for personal and social good, is a purpose that leads to an intention linked to consciousness.
In philosophy, the term intention is linked to and is a subcategory of consciousness, and this is very different from the magical action that some defend as the “law of attraction”, which is why psychologists do not like it, it is about activating consciousness and with this make the intention healthy.
This conscious intention leads to a flow of learning that re-elaborates and makes clearer awareness of the possibilities and healthy perspectives for life and makes the future present in actions that lead to this learning and elaboration of intention.
So it’s possible for someone to go and not go, just as it’s possible for someone to say maybe I’m not going, but ends up going, assuming, of course, a healthy direction of a straight intention.
A biblical parable that explains what will is in a fuller sense is the one that tells how a father who owns a vineyard invites his two sons to go and work in the vineyard (Mt 21,28-30), the first one said I will and no It was, the second one said I won’t go and it was, which of the two fulfilled the father’s wishes, everyone responded that it was the second one, so intention is different from purpose and is related to conscience.
The structures of evil
28
Sep
If evil is the absence of good, it is also possible
that in our individual actions, through carelessness, intention or even malice, wanting to do good we do evil, as Ricoeur explained in symbolic evil.
After evil is socially structured, it seems to give meaning to what in full awareness we know is not moral or socially correct, it is not about political correctness here, but that structure of meaning that is given through symbolic language, a crude example, but what is the point here, the different types of prejudice that enter society.
It can be didactically divided into three topics, the first being within human experience, the second within various discourses where evil has a philosophical importance of aporia, this is part of philosophical thinking, and the third as a determination of the language that asks whether evil exists in itself or is a reality of naming things and actions around existence.
It is therefore possible to discuss it outside the Manichaean sense, they are not opposing poles, but rather symbolic structures that penetrate our daily lives as experience, as aporia (difficulty or rational doubt about their objective existence) or symbolic element of language.
The symbolism of evil was deeply developed in Paul Ricoeur’s book, it is linked to human transcendence that somehow determines the denial of the positive values of human existence: defense of life, appreciation of solidarity, protection of the weakest, etc. aporia is one that, due to its clear indefiniteness, falls into the indeterminacy of good.
Aporia not only denies evil, it denies human evolution (social, technological, ecological and moral), it ignores the imaginary, transcendence and moral values beyond the apparent ones, it denies the Other, imagining that in this way I will be affirming its Being, which in truth does not understands it or is not integrated, thus prevailing an idealistic rigidity about what transcendence would be.
Building our inner being, placing it at the service of society in every way, in solidarity with everyone else, is not just a good thing, it is a condition for civilizational evolution (ecological cities, for example, image)
Civilization evolves not only because it builds new structures, technologies and human values, but because at some point in this process it goes through imagination, transcendence and looking at the Other and around.
Narrative and ethical coherence
27
Sep
Polarization has led to ethical relativism and ethical
relativism leads to social instability, there is no coherence between what is said and what is done, everything is done to justify this or that view.
Ethical coherence must accompany all of our lives or it is not ethics, just a convenient behavior, we need to cultivate it in social, professional, religious and family terms, it is not just in one area because the behavior becomes a habit.
The nudity at a university volleyball game (sporting event at a university), the discussion about abortion, the logic of ideological political punishment and the emblematic speeches in the country’s official bodies are not a mere coincidence, they are not autocratic attempts, they are the lack of results of a long social process where ethics does not predominate.
An ethics professor at a university, after discussing a subject in class, asked students during the break to write down at least one unethical act in the canteen: feet on the wall, papers on the floor, jumping in line, etc., when all students returned from break they had something to tell.
It is also not about exaggeration or the absence of punishment, but the fair measure, what in law is called disproportionate punishment, but the absence of punishment is also dangerous.
The problem is that Discipline and Punish is a process that can lead to the logic of a madhouse, Foucault in his famous book shows that justice in his time stopped applying deadly torture and started seeking the “correction” of criminals, but the practices Educational measures are rare and today even worse, it has become unilateral, that is, the punishment depends on the condition and situation of the defendant.
It is what Byung Chul Han called psychopolitics, a kind of return to torture through propaganda and a distorted view of true social problems, it is about fighting the “enemy”, and the law only applies in this case.
The narratives confuse society, create religious holes and animosities, are not conducive to any healthy social process, create more division and injustice.
The good and wars of Darius
26
Sep
The separation between secular and religious
human historie´s is not always possible without an adulteration of both by those who do it in a particular way.
This process also includes the question of good and evil, it is common thought that those who are in this or that religious confession will be “saved”, or even, who have somehow accepted God in their lives, this is just a part of the truth .
The biblical reading says: “not everyone who says ‘Lord Lord!!’ will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 7:21) and so the understanding of what it actually means to do good pleasing to the heavens is not even remotely the simple formal or nominal religious commitment requires the will.
The will is also not like a belief that spreads today, the daily reaffirmation of the desire for a certain thing, called the law of attraction or “the mystery”, nor is it also the will to power as Nietzsche thought, for the philosopher everything in the world it is Will to Power because all forces seek their own expansion.
Will is, in a spiritual sense, that which is in line with the power that we are and that we must develop, one would say a vocation, but in everyday acts that require the ability to discern between one’s own will, often impetuous, and that which is a good thing.
We can better distinguish between evil, the absence of good, and good, which we developed last week as the inadequacy of good: illicit enrichment, being superior to others, judging by our own non-universal criteria, in short, an infinite number of issues can be an evil. not apparent.
A universal story cited in the Bible is that of Darius in the Persian Empire, not being religious, he appointed the prophet Daniel to one of his provinces (called satrapies), determined that the Hebrew people be repatriated and authorized the reconstruction of the temple, as per narrates the book of Ezra.
Without being religious, he recognizes the Hebrew people, so Darius has a privileged place in biblical and religious history. Another curious event is the war of the Medes and Lydians, after an indecisive battle, on May 25, 585 BC, both armies end the fight by a sign in the sky, which was actually a lunar eclipse (a similar one will occur on October 14).
This date was confirmed by scientific calculations, being one of the first recorded annular eclipses.
Thus, one can understand historical and divine designs even without belief, as King Darius did, and do what is fair and good for people and humanity.
In times of threat of war, finding this asset can prevent major disasters.
