Tag: Charlie Rose

How to See Fundamental Tension in the World Easily

People-Class Part II

A few years ago, in 2006, there was a first rate movie called The Last King of Scotland with the great black American actor, Forest Whitaker, playing barbaric Idi Amin Dada Oumee who destroyed the life of the Asian community in Uganda in the 1970s.

This great actor later appeared on the TV talk show, The Charlie Rose Show. Charlie Rose and Whitaker were discussing the movie and Rose denounces Idi Amin as the mad barbarian he was.

But Whitaker objects and says, “You gotta keep in mind, Charlie, that more than 90% of Ugandan commerce was in Asian hands and the situation was not viable.”

We have here a simple way of seeing our world more clearly since commerce is a cosmopolitan activity of business people whereas “ethnonational” considerations (expressed by Whitaker) are tribal and backward or inward looking and not conducive to cosmopolitanism.

Somebody once made the quip that the world, country by country, is divided into the tribal “ethnonational” Serbs (so to speak) in conflict with the “cosmopolitans.”

In this vocabulary Trump and Trumpism are “Serbian.” He will decide who is and who is not a “real American.”

Go back to our essay on the concept of “people–class” and all the attendant genocidal murders. (Uganda under Amin being the example we’re mindful of here).

Ethnonationalism (e.g., “Serbian” style anti-cosmopolitanism) is of course exactly what is at war with cosmopolitan or internationalist global trends and commercial chains which makes it nativist. Populism refers to that connected sense that the elites (in the worst case, “The Davos Crowd”) are trying to destroy the real people (e.g., “Trump’s America”) via their internationalist or cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviors.

Thus the movie The Last King of Scotland and the discussions it engendered are very “canonical” or educational in laying forth this “civil war” everywhere.

Thinking of a group as a “people–class” tells you that Idi Amin or Rwanda 1994 belligerence (i.e., ethnonationalism) is being stoked by politicians to create “hatred opportunities” like Trump did. Trump’s idea was to use hatred as a “wave maker” that he could ride. The Trump voters created a nativist/populist cult figure in Trump. He would protect them from the outside world and globalism by ethnonationalism.

Forest Steven Whitaker (born July 15, 1961) is an American actor, producer, director, and activist. He is the recipient of such accolades as an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

After making his film debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Whitaker went on to earn a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird; Good Morning, Vietnam; The Crying Game; Platoon; Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai; The Great Debaters; The Butler; Arrival; and Respect. He has also appeared in blockbusters such as Panic Room, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as Saw Gerrera and Black Panther as Zuri. For his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the British historical drama film The Last King of Scotland (2006), Whitaker won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Wikipedia

Essay 64: Neuroscience by Itself Limited

Senators John McCain of Arizona and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts died in recent years of brain tumors (such as gliomas and glioblastomas). It is perfectly reasonable to wonder if neuroscience, neuropathology and brain science might one day be able to vaporize tumors without damaging the “host” brain at all.  Who could possibly be against such progress?  After all, if you had an impacted wisdom tooth and could choose between seeing an oral surgeon at a major hospital or going to a dentist at the time of Plato, you would choose the oral surgeon. 

These truths obscure a deeper problem in all “reductivist” sciences namely the relationships between the brain and the mind and the person.  This was anticipated by Gabriel Marcel (died 1973) when he wrote in his journal that he puzzled all his life over the conundrum that “I both have a body while I am a body…having and being are twined around each other.”

The outstanding French philosopher Paul Ricœur (died in 2005) gives us a useful hint:

“To the extent that the body as my own constitutes one of the components of mineness, the most radical confrontation must place face-to-face two perspectives on the body—the body as mine, and the body as one body among others.  The reductionist thesis in this sense marks the reduction of one’s own body to the body as impersonal body.

“The brain indeed differs from many other parts of the body, and from the body as a whole in terms of an integral experience, inasmuch as it is stripped of any phenomenological status and thus of the trait of belonging to me, of being my possession.  I have the experience of my relation to my members as organs of movement (my hands), of perception (my eyes), of emotion (the heart), or of expression (my voice).  I have no such experience of my brain. In truth, the expression ‘my brain’ has no meaning, at least not directly: absolutely speaking, there is a brain in my skull, but I do not feel it. It is only through the global detour by way of my body, inasmuch as my body is also a body and as the brain is contained in this body, that I can say ‘my brain.’

“The unsettling nature of this expression is reinforced by the fact that the brain does not fall under the category of objects perceived at a distance from one’s own body. Its proximity in my head gives it the strange character of non-experienced interiority.  Mental phenomena pose a comparable problem.”

(Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Other, University of Chicago Press, 1994, page 132)

In other words, the removal of brain tumors such as glioblastomas or the alleviation of migraine headaches in headache clinics is one level of activity and is perfectly valid and neuro-scientific. On the other hand, the relation between brain, mind, body and self is a complete mystery as sensed by Gabriel Marcel and Ricœur.  It is not mechanistic and we lack the language to captures such resonances.

Money and funding and prestige and their relationship to science keep obscuring the deeper truths.  This is also why excellent TV shows on PBS, such as the recent The Brain Series with Charlie Rose, led by the marvelous Professor Eric Kandel (Columbia University Nobelist) comes across as overly narrow—too narrow and curiously unsatisfying.  At a certain point, ‘mechanistic’ descriptions of phenomena like creativity are not convincing.

The education we visualize and promote here would happily straddle neuroscience and those levels of understanding that are beyond it.