Arquivo para April, 2020
The eclipse of God and the pandemic
16
Apr
Martin Buber, who was a Jew, gives his name to his book “The eclipse of God”
(1952), because for someone who believes, and if he believes, God is not dead, but undeniably some “solid” veil eclipsed him in modernity, which it seems to be “dissolving”, as stated by Buber.
I agree and it is always my analysis that the misunderstanding of the current thinking situation, we have already talked about the night of thought this week, Buber also affirms that it was the emergence of Kant’s Idealist thought that states that “God is not an external substance, but only a moral relationship in us ”, and Hegel who sees God as an abstraction.
However, the Hegelian synthesis is so powerful, it is the summit of idealism for different readings that can be made of it, its abstraction will confuse the divine Trinitarian, with an “absolute abstraction”, using the categories in-itself, of-itself and for -si, where the “for” is not a beyond, but a return to yourself. I do not exclude two aspects outside this context, but Marx’s “young” Hegelianism found Feuerbach, also the need for denial of the absolute, and starting from Feuerbach’s atheistic theology (in a way also Kantian), the religious idealism of Steiner, Bruno Bauer and others, who calls them “are” Bruno, Steiner, etc.
Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’, is due precisely to his fideistic and fundamentalist formation, coming from a Lutheran family he will try to deny him (to God) throughout his life, but it is important to read him because he reveals what many people call him. a fundamentalist and little “substantial” faith, this is disconnected from reality. We have reached the bottom of the can in modern existentialism, and the pandemic crisis takes us back to it, the search for a reason for existence, which seeks to know if the insistence on “religious necessity” does not point to something inherent in human nature.
This is the problem that “torments” Buber, who also wrote Eu Tu where he practically affirms the existence of a horizontal God present in the human relationship, not being a Christian he is curious because he discovers the one who is “between two or more who are in my name ”(Mt 18,20), as a relationship with God, for Christians it is Jesus.
The central problem, which is that of the Trinity, God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, will not be addressed by Buber, but when commenting on Sartre’s existentialism, as part of the existential crisis of modernity, he affirms: “Does the existence, like the Sartre understands, it doesn’t really mean being there ‘for himself’, encapsulated in his subjectivity, or does it mean being there before a certain X – not just any X, to which a certain greatness should be attributed, but the X par excellence, the indeterminable and peerable? ”asks Buber.
The existential problem is that without the “substantial” God and he exists if we believe that Jesus is God is not separable from the triune God, and faith is inseparable from this “divine medium”.
The cultural crisis and the pandemic
15
Apr
The second great blindness of the Western crisis is culture, the book Anything Goes
by Theodore Dalrymple, pseudonym of english´s psychiatrist Anthony Daniel who treated dangerous prisoners, is an anthology of short stories written from 2006 to 2009, and called his studies declinology (see the video below) but in the book cited there are beautiful passages on how to read a culture. in many countries.
Since the dawn of human culture, the discovery of the Chauvet Cave (dated 32,000 BC) proves this, man builds and records his culture, and here a parallel with #StayAtHome this is done in a cave, probably a meeting place and protection of families.
It may seem too much the term used by Peter Sloterdijk, but human domestication is nothing other than the structuring of “domestic” life, and also the Greek origin of the word oikos-nomicus (we have already made a post) means oikos – home.
We add here Xenophon’s Socratic dialogue, which refers to the term how to be a good gentleman, Kalokagathos (good in beautiful, in Greek), which is thus a reference to culture.
Byung Chul Han, who wrote Salvação do Belo, where he criticizes the culture of the plain and in particular that of Jeff Koon and his sculptures of “baloons” (figure) that say a lot or nothing, the desire for total immunity, without seeking the co-immunity, concept of its master Sloterdijk, that can be applied to the current pandemic.
A hard article, even for me as an appreciator of Chul Han, about the current pandemic crisis, published in El País, states that: “it seems that Asia controls the epidemic better than Europe”, quotes the data of March 20 when the epidemic had not yet reached its peak in Europe and is based on the disciplined and ancestral structure of the east.
Earlier than us, they bet on Big Data, says the author, and “they suspect that big data may have enormous potential to defend themselves against the pandemic” says in the article by El País, but warns that this could lead to a digital dictatorship, as in China and this is not a change.
About the current culture, the author affirms “today not only the polished is turned to the beautiful, but also the ugly” in the work A Salvação do Belo (page 19), we hope that the scourge of the virus will move our hearts and make us go from discovery from interdependence, as Morin says, to solidarity.
https://veja.abril.com.br/videos/clube-do-livro/uma-aula-de-decliniologia-com-theodore-dalrymple/
The crisis of Western thought and the pandemic
14
Apr
Old analyses still grounded in idealism, which study the state model, economic problems and
anthropocentric models do not account for the new reality, the global pandemic was caused by a virus and caught every society unprepared.
The net analyses continue with discourses about obviousness, we are one planet, the problem is everyone’s, we have to review values, etc. but those that point to the future still live in the dimness of a thought about ideals that have been exhausted, but not the discourses.
Edgar Morin, who has long been pointing to a planetary citizenship, approaching 100 years and keeping a lucid head, in an interview with the L ́Observateur of 03/18 said: “Confinement can help us detoxify our way of life”, and in the same interview points out that “this crisis shows us that globalization is an interdependence without solidarity”, and that it has produced a techno-economic unification of the planet.
In the same vein Byung Chul Han wrote in the Society of Tiredness, that we are all in active life and ignore contemplative life, however the pandemic has taken us out of activism and we still do not know what to do with the “idleness” of staying at home, there is even religious discourse that calls it a tomb, but we will talk about it when we speak of the night of God and the instrumentalized religiosity of today.
To those who do not believe in this analysis, I remember that successful programs like “reality show” are now in fact realities because each one lives in his home, and “master chef” now has to happen in practice in families because restaurants are closed.
As for the technological aspect pointed out by Morin we can not forget that in addition to the global news, now for work, for education and even for leisure videoconferences are now realities, there are still those who curse against them, but it is schizophrenia because they are now necessary and even to maintain trade are indispensable, online shopping are there.
The detoxification of our way of life did not come through a plan of government, nor by a great cultural change, although the pandemic suggests this, even in our homes we still seek the unrealities of contemporary life, the pandemic, however causes a change of this vision.
The East and some countries, I quote the case of Portugal, are succeeding because of a certain discipline in the #StayAtHome when Peter Sloterdijk in The rules for the human park spoke about the failure of “human domestication”, did not imagine that a virus could demonstrate its thesis, will come out of the crisis early and will have fewer dead countries with greater social discipline.
Finally, Social Networks (not to be confused with the techno media we talked about above), the dynamics of the spread of the virus follows the logic of networks, and so if these studies are taken seriously we may be more ready in the defense of lives, not by chance the infectologist Carl Latkin is one of the scientists with the greatest publication in this subject.
Pascal’s hope
13
Apr
If it is necessary to overcome the divisions, perhaps the biggest one is between
religion and science, between theology is philosophy, between faith and reason.
Even those who recognize this urgency, due to addiction and the years dedicated to this division, are in contradiction.
In times of pandemic that unites all sincere hearts of love to humanity, time that we gain time to reflect away from the hustle and bustle of modern life maybe we can open up and unite the faith that gives hope to those anguished by fear and death is the struggle of science to overcome the virus.
The urgency also of more rigid protection measures and of serenity with the present difficulties.
Staying at home also means maintaining a “stop” time that does not mean leisure, finding good readings, good films and the indispensable family conversation, also the “media” of social networks can be well used.
The sense of pain and sacrifice
10
Apr
Death causes us pain, fear and even despair; in the face of a pandemic, it reveals
aspects of tragedy, anxiety and apprehension, and we can do everything we can to prevent greater pain, but some go further and worry and donate to reduce the pain of others.
This is a human meaning, but the divine goes beyond what it means to be able to donate one’s life, or to put it at risk for the sake of the Other, only in this limit do we really understand the meaning.
Teilhard de Chardin, after admitting that the cross means “evasion out of this world” (p. 114), will explain to us that it is precisely it (in the present case the fear of death by the pandemic, “that exactly the path of human effort , supernaturally rectified and prolonged.
Because we have fully understood the meaning of the Cross, we no longer risk thinking that life is sad and ugly. We simply become more aware of its unspeakable seriousness.”(page 115).
So we thought of the happy days that we could walk freely and savor the air of the city, see the beaches now banned from being visited, the joyful family lunches, but it is for this loss that we now look with other eyes whose blindness could not allow.
How beautiful it would be an Easter Sunday with the whole family, or just going out to see happy autumn days in the southern hemisphere or early spring in the northern hemisphere, but it is this pain and this terrible pandemic that makes us “change glasses”, also in spiritual aspect.
So Chardin points out: “the cross is not an inhuman thing, but a superhuman one. We see well that the origin of Humanity today, the Cross was erected at the front of the road that leads to the highest peaks of creation ”, we will have to rethink home and social life after this pandemic. Chardin invites us to the mystery: “let us get closer. And we will recognize the flamed Seraph of the Alverne (picture), the one whose passion and compassion are “incendium mentis” *. For the Christian, it is not a question of disappearing in the shadow of the Cross, but of ascending in the light of the Cross.” (page 116).
Take advantage of this night of the pandemic to shed light on the “night of culture”, on the “night of God” and on the “night of the senses” that seemed to make us suppress all sensitivity to human life and the Other.
Let us live these three “nights” well to achieve an Easter (in sense of passage) for all humanity.
* incendium mentis – David Grummet says that in Chardin it is “fire of divine love in our soul”.
Chardin, T. (no year) O meio divino (The divine medium). Lisbon: Editorial Presença.
The “war” and pandemic economies
08
Apr
The only economic model we have of a situation in which the productive forces
of society are disorganized by the impossibility of going to work or by the effort concentrated in another activity is the “war” economy, however there is a difference because it is not war between peoples , the enemy is now a virus that has the power to do a war-like damage.
John Kenneth Galbraith wrote after the September 11 attacks, believing in a possible war, that “in a war economy, the public obligation is to do what is necessary: to support the military effort, to protect and defend the national territory, and especially to maintain the physical well-being, solidarity and morale of the population ”.
Of course, military effort can be exchanged here for medical effort, but it is already happening because not all productive forces are disorganized, the reorganization of oeconomicus, the initial meaning in ancient Greece that gave rise to the word economy, that is, the domestic economy. However, the social economy must reorganize, still in a period of pandemic, paralyzed sectors such as domestic tourism, the light and heavy mechanics industry and the consumer goods industry can be rethought around the “war effort”, in several countries to the auto industry has been called to make and restore hospital equipment, and hotels are used to house some homeless people, in short it is possible to rethink some things.
Volunteers working in needy communities are also an important effort, clothing stores can make clothing and masks to help the population, probably this should continue after the pandemic, as shown by eastern countries, the use of masks is common in Japan and some eastern countries. Family spaces should also be rethought, personally I have always built an office outside or isolated in the home environment, an American report went viral that the reporter’s wife enters his current office to remove the children.
We also did not make monthly purchases, of course, storage has a perverse side of being able to increase or even disappear some products, as happened in Brazil with milk, and the gas cylinder apparently has some speculation at stake, but we must reorganize the economy of the “Neighborhood” where people can travel less and make monthly purchases.
The main thing is to overcome an “economocentric” model and think of a biocentric one, I prefer the anthropocentric one because pets and nature must also be thought of in the social relationship.
There is a “paschal” side not only for the period we live in, but for the number of deaths and the struggle to reduce this number, in those who have sensitivity there is a feeling of death, but the struggle for life, the essential thing is the bread of each day and the resurrection to come gives this paschal environment.
Social Isolation and small words
07
Apr
It has already been explained that social isolation is diferente of the #LockDown,
reducing the dynamics of physical proximity between people and social isolation, but the explanation that we are in networks, which makes a person from the outskirts of São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro move to the center, it is the fact that networks (which can communicate through media called “virtual”) in this case are physical networks.
The contact between people to be infected by a virus occurs because many people live in the so-called dormitory cities and need to travel to the big centers for work, and the essential jobs: transport, employees of health posts and markets, live in peripheries. and must return home.
In the study of Social Networks there is a phenomenon called “six degrees of separation” that was named after a play in 1990 by playwright John Guare, and a film by Fred Schepisi (see the picture), where a character says: “… everyone on this planet is separated from each other by only six other people. Six degrees of separation.
Between us and anyone else on the planet ”, these are the small worlds, each person says the character in the film“ it is a door that opens to a new world ”.
It is a profound idea, also says in the film, of the dynamics of large masses, we are going to see a form of microsociety where each one has a role and can provide a new world, a change in the worldview, and an important thing at this moment is the defense of life , perhaps the good economy.
Let’s stick to the proposal of social isolation, it slows down but does not reduce the number of infected people say experts and appeal to science, however, the science of networks shows that small worlds make this interaction possible, so a “type” of isolation vertical makes sense if we think of the small worlds.
It is not just about the elderly, a risk group, but the peripheries where contagion is arriving can cause the exponential call of contagion, due to both physical proximity conditions and sanitary conditions, this is where we put the serious problem, and no study has been done yet.
The Ministry of Health said it would do this study over the weekend, but the bad policy hurt, the small world of politics suffered a contagion, which within the government itself suffered vertical isolation, but there was already social isolation, 76% of the population it supports the Ministry of Health policy in Brazil (different vision of the president), but the analysis of expansion in the periphery was left aside.
#LockDown now
06
Apr
We have entered a decisive week of the pandemic, especially in Brazil, but
also in many parts of the world, contagion will reach poorer areas and countries, where sanitary conditions and the concentration of people can lead to the greatest human tragedy, but it is Easter week. and I have hope.
A huge #LockDown could have a fulminant effect against contagion and this would help fight the pandemic, network studies (in the sense of the relationship between two nodes, in this case it is the proximity of people) show that the network effect exists, and the only now appear in poor peoples.
The possibility of interrupting is to create clusters, isolated sectors of society and a single contact of the one node produces a viral effect.
Carl Latkin, in addition to being an eminent infectologist who works in Global health programs, is also one of the most productive researchers in Social Networks, our study of co-citations in Social Networks works demonstrated this (a PhD in progress), but a given important of this researcher is what shows the presence of HIV in African-American homosexuals.
This study carried out with a sample of 234 African American men, showed that the fact that they are in denser sexual networks, are more prone to contagion.
The analogy with COVID-19 is that peripheral populations are in denser population networks and the relationship within the family is stronger, as they are larger families, as we do not have time to do local sampling, beyond the quarantine period, we’re running a simulation and the risk is real, even the ministry team admits a Covid-19 explosion.
It turns out that workers supporting essential services: truck drivers, cleaning workers and assistants in medical centers, secretaries, etc. it comes from the periphery and displacement is already a problem, they ride on crowded buses and do not have the necessary hygiene conditions.
There is an urgent need for a #LockDown during this week of the end of Lent, not only can the holidays help, but a political attitude of frontal confrontation can help a lot.
Carl Latkin, Cui Yang, Karin Tobin, Typhanye Penniman, Jocelyn Patterson, Pilgrim Spikes, “Differences in the Social Networks of African American Men Who Have Sex With Men Only and Those Who Have Sex With Men and Women”, American Journal of Public Health 101, no. 10 (October 1, 2011): pp. e18-e23.
The changing worldview
03
Apr
The Ptolemaic model changed the Aristotelian worldview by creating a model of
spiral movement for stars and planets known at the time, changing the worldview, but it was Copernicus who changed the view that took the Earth from the center of the universe and placed the Sun, this model helped the anthropocentric worldview by opposing the theocentric worldview.
Galileo’s great controversy with the theological view was not the cosmological view, but the question of interpretation and biblical reading by the “common”, not by chance the first popular version was called “vulgate” and when deepening the biblical reading some interpretations exegetical activities have been set aside.
However, Galileo before the Holy Office actually affirmed “E pur si muove” (translating Italian and then moves) that today he could look at the whole universe saying “E pur tutto si muove”, everything is in motion and the dynamics no longer resist the classic worldview Being and Not Being, there is an excluded third party that can be thought of as Not Being is still Being, quantum physics and the string model indicate a third state, which is already used in quantum applications.
So the theoretical models and the idealistic worldview together with their universe model collapsed for some time and even the Standard Physics Model that explained particle physics seems in check with the studies of dark matter and energy that are nothing more than 95% of the universe.
The vision of seeing the world through a shock of opposition is gradually crumbling, when admitting an excluded third party (as the Sourbone professor Florent Pasquier calls it) admitting not a synthesis (the result of idealistic opposition, thesis and antithesis), but a third possibility that conjugates with the other two. It must affect the religious world, it is a great support for a time to unite minds and hearts to fight the world pandemic, and it can be the germ of great changes.
A biblical reference to the subject is the moment on the cross that Jesus cries out to God, who no longer calls him Father, the tradition says in the Aramaic language of his mother Mary, and feels separated from the Father, prays in the Trinitarian vision in that Jesus is also God, it is a paradox to separate from the Father.
Jesus on the cross is repeating Psalm 21 “My God, my God, because you abandoned me”, and it seems to be the cry of all humanity in the face of the pandemic, and it is also possible to read the “excluded third” where we learn that the opposition has time and the answer must be everyone’s.
However, the mystical explanation is precisely the third excluded, the human nature of Jesus is reconnecting it to the Father, if we want Teilhard Chardin’s noospheric vision to the Universe, the reading says that it was a great night.
Current cosmology is a worldview
02
Apr
Current cosmology is one that considers the universe as having a beginning, which
may be a multiverse or a bubble, and that expands in a constant between Hubble’s H0 and the rates measured from the supernovae, whose reconciliation may be the new theory of universe in a bubble launched by Lucas Lombriser whose article appeared in this month’s Physics B magazine.
But this cosmology considers the mystery of the energy and dark matter that makes up 96% of the unknown universe and this puzzle modifies cosmology and also our worldview.
This cosmology postulates the idea that this dark matter does not interact with ordinary matter and the hypothesis something that “swallows” all known matter (called baryonic around it, including light) evolves to the idea that it has a high mass density and collapse of supernovae and their gravitational interaction has an effect on visible matter, stars, galaxies and clusters.
Of what it is made, it is certain that it does not have matter like the now stable model called Standard Physics, which we explored in the previous post, so it goes beyond this model and one of the most interesting theories is that of supersymmetry, which explores the concept of standard physics that each particle has a symmetric, just like bosons and fermions,
What this theory about dark matter proposes is that for every known boson there is an unknown fermion and vice versa, but there is a difference with the theory of antimatter, because antiparticles have opposite charges but the same mass and when they come into contact they produce energy, which would also explain dark energy.
Fermions as well as protons, electrons and neutrons, make up our material world and bosons are the ones that generate the forces of nature, the discovery of the Higgs boson or “God particle” was important because it made us understand the mass, while fermions explain the quantum state because two fermions occupy the same quantum state.
The fact of the existence of dark energy, more interesting than its mystery and presence in 70% of the universe (25% is dark energy) in addition to our ignorance is the fact that it is this “matter” that gives us a complete worldview of our universe , not only because it is dark because it is not visible, but also unknown.
James Gilles’ TED below, seen by more than 2 million people, explains the dark matter theory.
