Academic Relevancy

So today was the second Annual Liberal Arts Symposium (LAS). I participated as a presenter and an observer. I presented my math senior research this morning. I took a previous social model (simulated on a computer) that was arguing for the importance of religion by showing that under certain conditions competitive players fared better than nice players. We took this model and tried to apply a social network to this model. We found that the social network is important in determining the effectiveness of various strategies.

As part of my obligation to the LAS I needed to stay to listen to the rest of the presentations in my group. I was in the natural science group. I was struck by the presentations by the lack of applicability to these problems to seemingly global problems, such as clean water, food, shelter, and other things that make for peace. I am not trying to bash Chemistry, because the students and professors can do things, and say words that I don’t even begin to comprehend. But my problem is that if a student can synthesize a new molecule, so what? Is the world better? Is the world better because of my research? Probably not. We have all of this intellectual brain power in college, what are we doing with it? I have done so many mindless projects that don’t get read by anyone other than the professor. Yes I have learned a great deal. I think the best thing that I have learned, is I have learned how to learn. I can research a topic in no time. But so what? How does me writing a paper about Islamic Scripture make the world a better place? How does me studying classical music make the world a better place? I know more. But would college be better if we would work on real world problems? Why don’t we in class we spend half of the class learning about historic roots of problems and the other half applying ideas to today to make the world better? I know that we must understand the world to make a difference. But can we ever achieve knowledge? I am a senior and for the first time I am applying what I am learning, by organizing the candle light vigil. I apply what I learn about peace to conflicts of today. But mostly, that is on my own time. I wonder what we could accomplish, academia that is, if we would work to apply more of our time to the problems of today. How can we achieve academic relevancy? Even if we could make chemistry problems, for example, less esoteric, personal endeavors, but made them relevant to today would be great. I hope we can figure out a way.

What's the point?

Sometimes, lots of times, when I think about all of the problems of the world, I feel despondent. In the end, we, as Americans—and believe me I am just as guilty as everyone else—only care about ourselves. We are concerned with happiness and gratification now. If our actions mean that a person in some other part of the world can’t eat, or can’t survive, it doesn’t matter because we don’t see the effects. We are willing to spend countless amounts of money on entertainment—movies, clothes, alcohol, going out to eat, (include your favorite material passion here)—but how many of us college students give money to charities? What could be done if we used 10, 20 or 50% of the money we would have used on entrainment and used it on the helping people have clean drinking water? What would that world look like? How do we make us aware of our actions to the point of caring about the world? Most of the conversations in which I engage, or I hear, revolve not about working on major global problems but about the trivialities in our lives. Does it matter, in the end, if we talk about the upcoming storm? Does it matter who is wearing what? We are incredibly fortunate! Why do we need to buy? Because we can! As Vroom, a band that I quite enjoy, sings,

I don't believe that you've got nothing to wear
I've seen your closet, decadence resides there

We buy not because we need, but because we need to feel special. However, to be special is to exist! Purchasing destroys our uniqueness. We consume to feel important but by consuming we become just like everyone else.

What’s the point? “The world’s so big and I’m so small,” a Juniata Peace Studies professor once sang. Does “One person at a time do it all?” I hope, but there is no incentive to change. We know the world is strained, through global warming, through increased oil demand, through over 1/6 of the world’s population, ONE BILLION PEOPLE, living on less than one dollar a day! 2.7 BILLION people live on less than $2 a day (World Bank’s website see link at the end). All of these troubles in the world and our actions show that we really don’t care! It breaks my heart. It makes me despondent. I try to talk to people to raise awareness about the problems of the world. But when at the end of the day, we all would rather have fun than worry about Global problems. How do we change this? How do we make people realize the consequences of actions? How do we show people the causality: if you drive everywhere, you are harming yourself and the world? The structures in place have been there for a long time. The structures of violence are so big. How do we change them? I hope that we are able to realize the causality of actions. We must. The world is such pain right now, it is not sustainable. We must find solutions. I hope that nonviolence is the way. It should be the way. It must be the way!

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:20153855~menuPK:435040~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367,00.html

A must read is Thom Hartman’s Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, (2004) http://www.amazon.com/Last-Hours-Ancient-Sunlight-Revised/dp/1400051576/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/103-0919875-4079043?ie=UTF8&qid=1176621270&sr=1-1

Easter part 2

Just as I finished my post I was looking at the BBC and found this article

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6536773.stm

It is story covering the Pope’s comments about Iraq. He said, “Nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees.” I was pleased to see world religious leaders coming out and denouncing the war. I wonder if the Pope’s message is similar to messages of international religious leaders and that American religious leaders are taking a markedly more American approach to politics. I think that we need to increase the dialogue between people around the world especially with religious undertones of conflict in the Middle East. Hopefully with dialogue we can bridge conflicts and misunderstanding.

Happy Easter: Did Jesus give our government a blank check for violence?

Last night I was watching a CNN Easter special about Jesus and the host was asking a range of theologians about what would Jesus do in today’s world, especially with regards to politics? I was shocked to hear more than one theologian say that God was a God of war and that Jesus would condone the Iraq war. One Theologian said, “There are some things worth dying for […] freedom is one of those things.” I began to question how someone could say that. I was reminded of Wink’s concept of Jesus as trying to use active nonviolence to work for justice. How could people’s understanding of Jesus be so different? For me, I cannot fathom how people can use Jesus to justify any wars. When Jesus said “Love your Lord your God with all your heart soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself,” I think that it’s pretty clear—love everyone. He also said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” How can you say yes I love my neighbor so much, I want to kill him? I cant fathom Jesus coming to earth and leading us to war. Maybe I am wrong, but I believe that we are all one. We all are children of God. As Tony Campolo once asked can you imagine Jesus dropping a bomb on another Jesus? I can’t imagine Jesus ever resorting to violence. The Prince of Peace came to bring peace and preach love. How can we have missed this message so much?

Denmark: Model of possibility of nonviolence

I am always amazed by the story of Denmark. Denmark did what other allies could not do: save their country from destruction with out the loss of life. Denmark was able to rescue their Jews, their country and their citizens. The Denmark situation is unique insofar as Germany did not focus on Denmark until well into the war. Nevertheless, Denmark is a shining example of the power of NV. There is an old adage, “Any discussion of morality always comes back to Hitler.” Denmark is important, because even in the face of Hitler and the Holocaust, they were able to resist and keep most of their Jews safe through NV. It is interesting to discuss whether destruction of trains, infrastructure or other material objects, is violence? That will be the subject of a post in the future. But for now, suffice to say, nonviolence has great potential, even in a circumstance that most people say could only be responded to with violence. It is often assumed that countries could only respond to Hitler with violence. What would it like to have all of Europe respond to Hitler with nonviolence? Maybe nonviolence could have been used to prevent the war all together. If countries would be more concerned with human life and being will to use nonviolence, maybe the peace at Versailles would have been more equitable? We won’t know but it would be interesting to see how nonviolence would look on an international stage between many countries.

Hopeless or Hopeful Idealism?

Tonight I got in a conversation with a friend about the community of sustainability. I feel a bit unable to make a difference about the world. I’ve been thinking lately about how hard it is to change people’s actions. It is easier to get people to agree with an idea but it is hard to change people’s actions. Let’s look at Juniata’s campus wide program of sustainability. I think that most of the people on campus agree with sustainability as an idea. I think you would be hard pressed to find many students who said they were against saving the environment for their children. But when it comes to putting these actions in to place, it’s harder. I know that there are lots of students on campus who drive their cars across campus: drive from East to classes. How can we talk about a community of sustainability when students are willing to get in their car instead of walking five minutes? We can convince people that they in theory should live sustainably, but it is just so easy to drive there are no visible consequences for taking a five minute drive. How do we bring awareness to little behaviors? How do we make it easy for people to live sustainably? Do we need to make actions easy for people to do them? Will people do things because it is the right or best thing to do? I hope that people will do things because it is the right thing. I think that it is important to make all actions seem important. If we could every action important, or seem important, maybe then behavior would change. But it is hard link the small actions of one player with a large concept such as global warming. I think JC is going about it the right way: trying to make it a community effort. I think we need to work on continually showing the importance of every action.

A way towards ahimsa?

This post is a continuation of my post called, “The loss of a way to practice ahimsa.” In that post I raised numerous questions about the use of nonviolence on larger structures of violence, vis-à-vis global warming, etc. I think that it is hard to practice self suffering on these larger structures because they are so ingrained in our culture. If I had to design a campaign on a larger structure such as global warming, I would begin with education. I think that it is important to work on making the invisible visible. To that end, I believe that the first step is education by showing movies like An Inconvenient Truth. We must destroy the myth that Global Warming doesn’t exist. We must expose the truth about global warming and appeal to people’s desire to care about the world in which we live. After education we must make it easy to work for a better environment, similarly to the way the Selma bus boycott made it easier for people to not use the bus. But this time we should try to make people use busses. Make public transportation cheaper. But it must not only be cheaper we need to try to make it culturally unacceptable to: take short trips in our cars; to not recycle; to drive suvs; etc. We need to make it culturally unacceptable to engage in un-green actions. It is hard but I believe it could be done one step at a time. It needs to start small. Raising gas prices with green taxes, i.e. taxes for the development of green technologies. By slowly change attitudes actions will hopefully change as well.