Arquivo para a ‘Politics’ Categoria
Two utopias in conflict
27
Apr
There is no room for poetry, for enchantment, for contemplation, the society of 
efficiency and performance transforms thought in the sensual, commercial and lucrative sense, pure living within the inefficient and empty egocentrism, the Being empties itself and desperately seeks the aroma and taste where there is not only a deified nothingness.
There is no room even for deified thought, loose phrases draw sighs, “the cow does not give milk” says a good Brazilian philosopher, but what is work and does it make sense to laborans (see the previous post) to produce modified milk that arrives modified on the shelves and now very expensive.
Another asks for teachers and says that “being crazy is the only possibility of being healthy in this sick world”, but what disease is he talking about, if there weren’t healthy and serene people in whom simple people can be inspired, it is necessary to be sane in order to be able to talk about the wholesome and the praiseworthy.
There is no ethics without ethical beings, it is true that the great metanarratives have failed, but the polarization forces the new sophists to justify themselves in historically outdated and outdated narratives, none of them was able to avoid war, and which science is capable of avoiding it ?
I read a sentence by Morin, and I already posted here that the idea of peace requires a certain utopia, in an interview in 2000 with Rede Cultura (in Brazil, below), he speaks of two utopias: a negative one that promises a perfect world, in which everyone is reconciled and there is a perfect harmony, this one is impossible (and I would say a liar) and the other positive thing is to realize the most perfect world, it is not “The brave new world” by Aldous Huxley (not by chance, chatGTP chose it as one of the 10 greatest films) , she says something is impossible but it can be achieved: a world of peace and a world without hunger, are achievable.
Without freedom and fraternity, human utopia does not come true, authoritarianism is a negative utopia.
Trying to reduce inequalities, increase tolerance between different cultures, respect the rights of peoples, races and genders, what is missing, says Edgar Morin, is to increase “the state of consciousness and thought that allows realization”
He knows that there are extremely negative forces that, when helping a country that suffers from starvation, aid is diverted by bureaucracy and corruption, he explains that fraternity must come from citizens and would say that surveillance too, if we justify corruption and bureaucracy we do not help to solve problems essential to human life.
There are possible utopian solutions, as stated by Morin, who calls them positive.
The War and its Consequences
24
Apr
We have already emphasized here, outlining a crisis (before the war) that
it begins in a way of thinking about the world and consequently the economy, politics and society as a whole, so it is not a question of this or that world, but of all worlds together.
Economics is not separate from them, however it is the most sensitive and the one that is most thought about.
Russia’s oligarchs, those who didn’t migrate or were killed in strange situations, remember the news of Sergey Protosenya, found hanged in Spain and Pavel Antov who fell from the third floor of a building in India, oligarchs there in general do not criticize the government.
However, at a meeting of the Economic Forum in Krasnoyarsk, in March in Siberia, Oleg Deriaska declared that the economy could last a little over a year and that afterwards there would be many crashes, in the West it is no different, the European and American economies are already feeling the consequences , as world leaders of capitalist countries, every economy must face serious problems.
The American Department of Defense has just asked for a budget of 842 billion dollars, increasing the already high 816 billion of the previous year, which means an increase of 3.2% and a perspective of even greater war on the horizon this year, and the economy already shows serious damage.
The attempt to form a third bloc, of which Brazil is one of the protagonists and France’s Makron tries to be another, is a crossfire, since both sides want unilateral adhesions, there are analysts, such as Rodrigo Ianhez, who claims that the Russians have a reading of the Brazilian position that is “overestimated” for a bilateral position, China on the contrary is clearly unilateral.
There are no innocent people in these facts, this is the political action of our days, confusing or even distorting the facts, a really serious press, its art is called investigative press, for being independent, it tries to do this work, but until then, sometimes find suspicious news.
Nobody is apolitical, of course, but it is necessary to face the truth through the facts it reveals.
If we analyze the consequences of a war, in the economic aspect that generates more poverty and hunger and the most fragile are the most affected, we begin to have a serious position before the truth.
Looking at things from above
21
Apr
Miracles or prophecies are not necessary for us to understand that even in
the most earthly realities there are things from above, and they respond to the most earthly realities, without them we cannot find exits and paths to a full, happy and peaceful life.
Without ethical, moral and responsible values, finding safe ways out of conflicts, situations of insecurity or injustice is almost impossible, as one error does not correct another error, and only an action of love and solidarity resolves a conflict of hatred and division.
From division to division, from hate to hate, we walk with an earthly look at our difficulties, it does not mean that we should take our feet off the ground and have rational decisions, it means that without serenity and serious and proactive attitudes we only make what is wrong worse.
It is common even for people of good will to appeal to violence and force, even if the side of justice and solidarity is the right side, acting with recklessness and cruelty takes away the value of this act of force, the greatest act of force is responsibility. act with firmness, education and truth.
If we are troubled, anxious and out of balance, we cannot find the path of wisdom, hear that inner voice of common sense, clarity and truth.
It also serves as well as for questions of justice and right for the true cultural and religious values, the use of authoritarianism, which means in this context false authority that many want to have before the office or position they have, they make the mistake of the authority argument and fall into the easy trap of too much power.
They want to be imbued with a halo of goodness when they invest themselves against simple people, but the grace to raise hearts to higher values and remove them from difficult situations is not achieved.
For Christians, one of the most significant passages after the Passover of Jesus that we recall a little while ago in Christian culture is the episode of Emmaus in which, while Jesus was walking among them and they did not realize it, they were still ruminating on the violent death of the Master, but they were blind and did not understood correctly the victory of the one they crucified.
Jesus asks: “What are you talking about along the way?” They stopped, with sad faces, and one of them, named Cleopas, said to him: “Are you the only pilgrim in Jerusalem who does not know what has happened there these last few days?” (Luke, 24, 15-18) and gave their earthly version of the Passover.
And Jesus (still without being recognized) how to explain the meaning, already reviewed by the prophets: “Wouldn’t the Christ have to suffer all these things and enter into his glory?” (Luke 24,26).
Gradually their hearts warmed up and in the end they understood that they were walking with the Master and then they asked them to stay with him because the night was coming, but Jesus disappeared.
It is not necessary to have this vision or even to have this faith, it is necessary to listen to the voice from above, of healthy values.
A chance for civilization
19
Apr
At the height of almost 102 years (he will complete it in July) in an interview
given to Cesare Martinetti in the newspaper La Stampa, Edgar Morin talks about his new book Di Guerra in Guerra (From war to war, editor Rafaello Cortina, 2023) where he reflects on an endless 20th century that lives as a witness, for him there are still things to be digested:
“I wanted to remember not only the terrible physical evils, but also the intellectual evils caused by wars, that is, lies, one-sided views, Manichaeism, hatred for all enemy people, for their culture, their language, their literary and artistic works, and I wanted to help myself and readers to develop this awareness, in the face of a war that risks taking us to the worst, through the process of escalation and radicalization.
His synthesis of this war is that it is militarily localized, but globally globalized, but he has hope that we can escape it.
Remember that in the first years after the fall of the wall, Putin himself came to Germany and made a very pro-European speech, but NATO advances on Russia’s borders irritated him and already in 2015, when there was an agreement on Crimea, the Donbass region broke out in hostilities.
On the other hand, he emphasizes “the wars of reconquest led by Russia in Chechnya and Georgia led the United States, moreover at the request of countries close to Russia, to extend NATO to a siege that the leaders perceived as a threat”.
A shared Donbass suggests the centenary thinker, he knows that his position seems more utopian than realistic, but he thinks that this is the role of thinkers: to mix utopia and realism, after all it is necessary to awaken hope and serenity.
What is actually the current war
17
Apr
Increasingly, the Russia-Ukraine war is revealed with the clear contours of the
interests of great empires in conflict: on the one hand, Russia, which did not accept the reduction of its territory and influence after the end of the Second World War, on the other, NATO as an arm of capitalist forces and their world influence.
In fact, the great emerging empire is China, and it has roots in the great cultural revolution, an attempt made by Mao Tse Tung, the first leader of the Chinese revolution, but the attempt to industrialize the country by taking people out of the countryside in the 50s was a failure causing more than 20 million people to starve to death.
The opponents led by Liu Shao-Chi, in 1959, removed Mao, his family and his allies, who were isolated within the Chinese Communist Party, and promoted a re-education of the population, preparing a new industrial revolution, this time attracting capital and companies from abroad. , cheap labor and the idea that it could be an opening to capitalism, Hong Kong was until recently not controlled by China, boosted this model.
Speaking about what would be the desired peace for Russia, Putin declared that it would be a “new world order”, and in it talks with China are involved and explain Russia’s recent military maneuvers in the Pacific Ocean near Japan, the Kuril Islands which is disputed by Japan.
It was a clear nod to the partnership with China, although it, together with Brazil, is trying to form a third bloc to negotiate peace, because the Brics are closer to Russia, and this includes India and South Africa, which are also part of this economic bloc. .
On the western side, the Scandinavian countries: Finland, Sweden and Norway carried out joint maneuvers with NATO forces, the geopolitical picture is drawn with a dangerous warlike picture.
There is a fracture in the European bloc, as Macron says that France will not be a “vassal” of the American allies, however it can also be a force for the third “peace” bloc.
A peace without surrender and without winners seems the only possible way out, difficult but possible.
What does it mean to see
11
Apr
We explore blindness a lot in our posts: philosophical (in Plato’s Republic,
the myth of the cave), logical (Parmenides, Russell, Hilbert, etc.), religious (Feuerbach, Hegel, etc.) and literary (Saramago’s blindness essay and the Plague of Camus), just to name a few, besides them we navigated about the language in Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Levinas, Ricoeur and others.
Now we want to navigate through the world of vision, said Bachelard: “all beings are pure because they are beautiful”, while the poet Alberto Caeiro “the world was not made for us to think about it, but for us to look and agree, also the Russian philosopher and mystic Nicolas Berdjaev (there are many Russian mystics) used to say that in Paradise there is no ethics and there is only aesthetics, all this to say that seeing is having eyes for beauty, which is why many things today that are ugly are self-proclaimed beautiful, so the inversion is not just ethical .
The ugly was for Plato, from the ontological point of view, the almost-nothing, the sensible world being what is apparently real, being mere shadows of ideas (the myth of the cave) and the ideal (eidos) the truly real, thus the ugly it is formless and has no real existence and is not a universal model.
It is not unnatural that in a fragmented world, on the brink of its polycrisis, beauty almost disappears, and so man does not see it, what he sees are shadows, drafts of diffuse and confused ideas, the universal model disappears and discourse is merely discourse. of the conflict.
We like the point, straight and flat, but this is Euclid’s Geometry, the world is not straight and flat.
The beautiful emerges in harmony, suggests fusion where there is division, confuses the chaotic by giving it form and even the world of pure form is no longer geometric it is fractal, not fractional, but a natural fraction belonging to the whole of the less significant part of the whole body (in the photo the Lorentz fractal and the butterfly effect).
From the logical point of view it is the approximation of chaos theory (there is chaotic logic), from the philosophical point of view it is the view of complexity (the simple is almost always simplistic), from the religious point of view one can say: “God created everything and saw that it was good” (and beautiful), from a literary point of view I think the best expression was Friedrich Schiller (1756-1805): “How are we going to rebuild the unity of human nature, which seems completely suppressed by this original opposition and radical?”(page 71), wrote in his work “Educação Estética do Homem”, about the division inside man between the formal impulse that drags him in the dimension of his time.
Seen as a poet it is a wonderful work, as a philosophy it is subject to criticism due to the historical distance of its time and the walls of the German ideology of its time.
SCHILLER, F. (1989) “Educação Estética do Homem numa série de cartas”, trad. Roberto Schwartz e Márcio Suzuki, Brazil, São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras.
Leaked documents and rhetoric of tension
10
Apr
A leaked document that would contain alleged US secret information about
the war between Ukraine and Russia may contain part of the information true and some false, according to US military sources, the assessment of the death toll in the war in Ukraine would be false.
Newspapers like The New York Times, on the other hand, assess that it is an effort by Moscow to provoke more disinformation than news already known as the anticipated deliveries of weapons, as well as the formation of troops and battalions according to war strategies, however this already shows that there are some gaps in US intelligence in the effort to support Ukraine.
Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said, “We are aware of the reports of social media posts, and the department is looking into the matter.”
The US Department of Justice opened investigations into these disclosures, which also included information from important allies such as Israel, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.
American rhetoric and Western leaders continue to assert that Russia has committed war crimes, including the “deportation” of Ukrainian children to Russia, condemned by the Hague court, while Russian rhetoric continues to be one of insecurity at its borders.
What the documents reveal, although without precise data, is a probable Ukrainian offensive next month, Finland’s official entry into NATO creates another frontier of conflict and some Russian response is also expected there.
In terms of peace, the Brazilian proposal to cede Crimea, which was already Russian territory before the war, in exchange for the resumption of territories occupied in the current war, was not accepted by Ukraine.
So both Russia and Ukraine seem to be taking the war to the limits of attrition, the death of countless soldiers and the economic consequences that have begun to appear in the world economy.
China has hit back at rhetoric that it is not making enough effort for peace, saying the “West are not in a position to dictate what we should do”, Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui told Izvestia.
The hope that negotiations can move forward from countries outside the conflict remains.
Civilizing passion: crisis and clearing
07
Apr
It is not the first civilizational crisis that humanity is going through today, if 
it has roots in the thought that developed a form of national and chauvinist polis, empires are the multinational expression of this way of looking at nations, this however has an aggravating factor: the possibility use of nuclear and biological weapons of mass extinction.
Because a passion comparing it with the passion of Jesus, we have already outlined the issue of innocence and the tragic and legal aspects that it involves throughout last week, Brazil experienced this week a drama in the city of Blumenau the death of innocent children, the world aspect is the one that from ideological conceptions and visions of the world promotes a limitless crisis, this is the passionate side (in the photo Bucha´s tragedy, Ukraine).
The entry that we announced at the beginning of the week, of Finland in NATO creates a large border area of NATO with Russia allowing a land war in an area where it is sensitive and there are remnants of recent historical intolerance, the so-called “winter war” from 1939.
If Russia takes what it calls a “countermeasure” and it could be in the military field, since in the economic and trade field there is nothing that could be more serious than the current situation between nations, military retaliation triggers a dangerous trigger. that will have a response from NATO.
A clearing is possible, the one that Heidegger claimed in the midst of these hostilities, the clarity that there will be no unilateral victories, the war with Ukraine itself does not seem to have a possible end this year, unless there is a round of peace negotiations.
China would take an offensive position in its resumption of the island of Taiwan, which it considers part of its territory, Iran is increasingly closer to Russia and a good part of Latin America currently has governments that are more to the left, in short, this complicated world scenario may be the reason to open a clearing in the middle of the forest of hatred and hostility that opens up at every step of the war.
It will be a great passion of humanity, like all suffering, this one on an unimaginable scale after a trauma and then a reflection when seeing the enormous losses that the situation involves, it will undoubtedly be in a possible tragic situation never seen before, a new “clearing” of civilizing consciousness .
Peace is always possible, it is always possible to avoid the loss of innocent lives if there is prevention.
Thought from on High and Communion
06
Apr
What kind of knowledge is this that encompasses knowledge “from above”,
beyond the human, but without contradicting it, Morin’s response and others such as Martin Buber, Emannuel Lévinas and Paul Ricoeur seem to lead to the same point, to go towards the Other without reservation.
Two mystical falsifications are possible in this direction, one that denies conscience and respect for the Other, those who appeal to a false Christian religiosity, the Bible is clear: “If anyone declares: “I love God!”, but hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 John, 4:20-21), but there are those who cry out for the extreme opposite of the materiality of faith, to these the biblical answer is also clear: “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4 ,4), curiously opposes and does not dialogue.
Curious because the vision of the last supper of Jesus with his disciples, his great memorial and his eternal presence in his materiality (flesh and blood), is the cause of much controversy and divergence, both true that he broke the bread, and true who declared his divinity.
Thinking things from above cannot fail to have its concreteness, its materiality, you see that bread is not wheat, but wheat transformed by human hands into bread, just like wine.
It does not fail to have the most sacred and divine aspect when asking the disciples to do this in his memory and in his name, thus it is renewed and divinized by the human hands that repeat it.
How to understand communion without the presence of the Other, without dialogic with the opposite, without this paradox of understanding that even with opposition, new horizons are possible, as advocated by the hermeneutic circle, which asks that preconceptions be left “in parentheses” before .
We have a vision of truth, logic and rationality, but true communion is only possible with a step further, the belief that something divine also belongs to the Other, to the different and the opposite of my worldview, there is no communion without this , there is only tolerance.
I have always asked myself why wars, hunger, misery, injustice among men, my answer today is that there is no true communion among men, perhaps some small tolerance, some respect that hides true interests, perhaps a respect that is even human but not divine.
welcome to polycrisis
04
Apr
This is the part of title of the article by Adam Tooze, professor of history at Yale
University (USA) written in the Financial Times in 2022 that drew a lot of attention: pandemics, droughts, floods, mega storms, forest fires, war in Ukraine and high prices of fuel and food, as is typical of the magazine and of today’s world, the economic aspect stands out.
But Edgar Morin’s polycrisis went deeper, the author recognizes the origin of the term, but is unaware of what Edgar Morin and many other philosophers actually think, who point to the most fundamental root of these evils: our way of thinking. thinking and the vision of the world that we create from it and implant in our societies.
The term cited by Morin was said for the first time in 1990, but in an interview with Le Monde on April 20, 2020, the French educator updated the word: “The health crisis triggered a chain of crises that were linked together. This polycrisis or megacrisis extends from the existential to the political, passing through the economy, from the individual to the planetary, passing through families, regions, states. In short, a tiny virus in an overlooked village in China has unleashed a world of disruption.”
In his view, the polycrisis crossed our ways of being, living together, producing, consuming and being in the world, challenging us to think about all our paradigms, much of what he wrote talks about new methods such as hologramatic and the danger of hyperspecialization of science that leads “to a new obscurantism” that is our inability to see the whole in modernity.
It is true that we are going through other crises, but Tooze’s article shows the implications of the war in Ukraine and the pandemic in accelerating these crises (see the Map), in the pragmatic aspect of the economic it is clear, in the spiritual and ontological aspect it is still not so clear , but it may be clearer soon.
