By Telos Press · Monday, August 22, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Ban Wang about his article “The Clash of Civilization and World Community: The West and China,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss whether it still makes sense to speak of distinct human cultures; if the very ideas of China and the West need to be discarded, or, if not, what the basis of such distinctions would be and why they persist; whether there is a human commonality that lies below and beyond age-old cultural norms, and if so what is its content and what forms does it take; how both Chinese and Western forms of universalism have converged to form a cosmopolitan unity; how multiculturalism and identity politics have undermined cross-cultural interaction and a universalist vision; and what alternatives there are for affirming both universalism and local culture. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.
Continue reading →
By David Pan · Monday, August 15, 2022  If we are seeing a rise in political violence today, is the main cause a decline in tolerance? On today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, I discuss the concept of tolerance with Tomáš Sobek, whose essay on the subject appeared in Telos 199. He argues that tolerance cannot be equated with liberalism, or rather that there are two ways of understanding the meaning of liberalism. While a positive form of liberalism contains a set of values that today would include support for abortion rights and gay marriage, a negative form of Liberalism (let’s call it Liberalism with a capital L) is limited to tolerating viewpoints or practices that one does not agree with. From this perspective, Liberal tolerance would include a conservative opposed to abortion who is willing to tolerate its practice. On the other hand, liberal (with a small l) tolerance would not include tolerating gay marriage, which the liberal in any case supports, meaning there is nothing to tolerate. Since one only tolerates something with which one is in disagreement, liberal tolerance would have to include something like tolerance of racism, even though one opposes it. Of course, it may be that some things are not to be tolerated, for instance murder, and some anti-abortion advocates would classify abortion as a form of murder and therefore intolerable, and liberal anti-racists might similarly classify racist prejudice as intolerable, to the point of advocating violence to oppose it.
Continue reading →
By Telos Press · Monday, August 15, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Tomáš Sobek about his article “Tolerance as Suppressed Disapproval,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the difference between a moral norm and tolerance as well as the consequences of this difference for understanding tolerance; tolerance as a second-order attitude that involves a suppression of disapproval; how excessive tolerance can be wrong; the difference between positive and negative liberalism; and whether negative liberalism is opposed to or destructive of moral norms. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.
Continue reading →
By David Pan · Monday, August 8, 2022 Dear Telos readers,
I’m excited to invite you to attend a special event at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City on October 14–15, 2022, to celebrate the 200th issue of Telos, which will be appearing in Fall 2022. You can register for the event at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website, at www.telosinstitute.net/telos200. The event will take place from 3 pm to 6 pm on October 14 and from 9 am to 5 pm on October 15. The admission is $100 for both days and includes a reception on October 14 and lunch on October 15.
The event will feature Joel Kotkin (author of The New Class Conflict) and Michael Lind (author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite) as keynote speakers, who will discuss the new politics of class.
Continue reading →
By Russell A. Berman · Monday, August 8, 2022 The following comments refer to Mathieu Slama’s “How Brilliant Scientists Damage Democracy,” which appears here.
Among the many features of the COVID crisis, one stands out as particularly consequential: the attribution of ultimate and exclusive authority to science. Public statements abounded urging that we “follow the science,” and signs popped up on front lawns across the country advertising that the residents “believe in science”—as if science were a matter of belief rather than skepticism, observation, and experimentation. There was of course little attention to alternative scientific claims or debates within science. Instead of a scientific event, we witnessed the assertion of authority by way of the invocation of science or of what came to pass as “science.” The mandate to “follow the science” blindly has come to mean “follow the leader,” with no questions asked.
For large swaths of the public, the scientific label carries with it the implication of veracity: science, as opposed to religion (which is otherwise the proper subject matter of belief), is truth. Indeed the equation is a formula for modernity, which is why bizarre variants of modernization repeatedly cast themselves in the role of science: for Communism, the “science of Marxism-Leninism,” and for Nazis, “race science.” Nor do we have to look that far afield to those extreme cases in order to find reason to question the absolute truth claim of science. One can point to scandals like the Tuskegee experiment and to the regular reports of fraud and retractions, even in the most prestigious scientific journals. Just recently one reads that research reported in the journal Nature concerning Alzheimer’s may have been fraudulent. Following that science probably wasted millions of research dollars.
Continue reading →
By Mathieu Slama · Monday, August 8, 2022 These remarks on the French Science Council were published in Le Figaro on July 7, 2022 and appear here with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
The Science Council met for the last time this week and has issued its 75th and final opinion. It will disappear officially on July 31. In its final statement, it underscored the importance of better scientific education for the youth, who will be the public leaders of the future, and it recommended the creation of a “Council of Science,” which would consist of a “group of scientists of the highest quality” to advise the head of state. Whether these recommendations are followed or not, it is likely that some new organ will be established in the coming months. In any case, we are at the end of an institution that played a decisive role throughout the public health crisis, and it is useful to offer a preliminary evaluation of it.
Composed of brilliant individuals and our best scientists, the Science Council—despite all the talent that it has included—has been one of the principal architects of the democratic debacle of the health crisis. And if there is a lesson to be drawn from this fiasco, it is that science should never be a substitute for politics and that political decisions cannot result simply from scientific expertise—at the risk of profoundly degrading our democracy.
Continue reading →
|
|
