Author Archives: Editors

‘We Share 98.5 % Genes With Chimpanzees- What makes us human?By A C Grayling

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According to genetics, there is not much that makes us human; depending on how you count, we share 98.5 per cent of our genes with chimpanzees. Perhaps this is not such a significant matter, given that we also share about 60 per cent of our genes with tomatoes. As this shows, human beings are fully part of nature, and the elements that make us make not just the rest of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but the rocks beneath our feet and the stars in the sky above us.

So what does make us human? It is not that we live in social groups: ants, antelopes and sparrows do the same. It is not that we have nuanced emotional lives: so do dogs and baboons. It is not even that we have language, for other things – including trees, as it happens – have communication systems, too, and it might be that some of those systems are quite complex, as appears to be the case with dolphins, for example.

But in the human case the system of communication – language – is particularly complex and flexible, with great expressive power, and this makes possible the phenomenon of culture. If I were to pick one thing that separates humanity from the rest of the living world, culture is it.

There are two senses to the word “culture”. It is used by anthropologists to talk about the traditions, practices and beliefs of a society in general. But it is also used to mean the art, literature and intellectual life of a society – and it is this that most spectacularly differentiates human beings from all other animals. Click link for full article

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/05/culture-what-separates-us-rest-living-world

Posted By F. Sheikh

‘Islam Is Not A Monolith’ By Mohsin Hamid

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There are more than a billion Muslims in the world, each with an individual view of life. So why are they viewed as a unified group, asks Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

n 2007, six years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, I was travelling through Europe and North America. I had just published a novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and as I travelled I was struck by the large number of interviewers and of audience members at Q&As who spoke of Islam as a monolithic thing, as if Islam referred to a self-contained and clearly defined world, a sort of Microsoft Windows, obviously different from, and considerably incompatible with, the Apple OS X-like operating system of “the west”.

I recall one reading in Germany in particular. Again and again, people posed queries relating to how “we Europeans” see things, in contrast to how “you Muslims” do. Eventually I was so exasperated that I pulled my British passport out of my jacket and started waving it around my head. “While it’s true the UK hasn’t yet joined the euro zone,” I said, ” I hope we can all agree the country is in fact in Europe.”

Six years on, a film inspired by the novel is in the process of appearing on screens around the world, and I am pleased to report that those sorts of questions are a little rarer now than they were in 2007. This represents progress. But it is modest progress, for the sense of Islam as a monolith lingers, in places both expected and unexpected.

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics. Most Muslims do not “choose” Islam in the way that they choose to become doctors or lawyers, nor even in the way that they choose to become fans of Coldplay or Radiohead. Most Muslims, like people of any faith, are born into their religion. They then evolve their own relationship with it, their own, individual, view of life, their own micro-religion, so to speak.

Islamophobia can be found proudly raising its head in militaristic American think tanks, xenophobic European political parties, and even in atheistic discourse, where somehow “Islam” can be characterized as “more bad” than religion generally, in the way one might say that a mugger is bad, but a black mugger is worse, because black people are held to be more innately violent.

Click Link to read full article;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2013/may/19/mohsin-hamid-islam-not-monolith

Posted By F. Sheikh

 

Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

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By MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER

As Richard Hofstadter wrote in his seminal 1965 book, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” conspiracy theories, especially those involving meddlesome foreigners, are a favorite pastime in this nation. Americans have always had the sneaking suspicion that somebody was out to get us — be it Freemasons, Catholics or communists. But in recent years, it seems as if every tragedy comes with a round of yarn-spinning, as the Web fills with stories about “false flag” attacks and “crisis actors” — not mere theorizing but arguments for the existence of a completely alternate version of reality.

While psychologists can’t know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.

In 2006, the political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler identified a phenomenon called the “backfire effect.” They showed that efforts to debunk inaccurate political information can leave people more convinced that false information is true than they would have been otherwise. Nyhan isn’t sure why this happens, but it appears to be more prevalent when the bad information helps bolster a favored worldview or ideology.

In that way, Swami says, the Internet and other media have helped perpetuate paranoia. Not only does more exposure to these alternative narratives help engender belief in conspiracies, he says, but the Internet’s tendency toward tribalism helps reinforce misguided beliefs. Click Link for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/why-rational-people-buy-into-conspiracy-theories.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

Posted By F. Sheikh

MQM’s Power & Federal Government

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A worth reading insight by Irfan Hussain in the Dawn about “Unhappy marriage in Sindh”.It also sheds light on MQM’s Power and Federal Government. It also raises the question what MQM has accomplished for Mohajirs by this power? Having a power to shut down Karachi for political purposes will hurt Pakistan’s economy, but it will hurt more Karachi and its residents.( F. Sheikh)  

“Another big difference is that Nawaz Sharif does not need any coalition partners, and this will make a bigger difference to the MQM than to the PPP. At the height of the anti-Musharraf agitation in 2007, I asked a senior MQM member why they were sticking with the dictator. His answer was very revealing: “We need to have powerful friends in Islamabad.”

But the PML-N is no friend of the MQM’s. The fraught history of relations between the two parties is full of antagonism and mistrust. In the early days of Musharraf’s government, the MQM was invited to join the cabinet. When I asked Tariq Aziz, Musharraf’s principal civilian advisor, why he had helped induct this party into the government, he was pretty blunt: “We know the MQM has a stranglehold on Karachi, so we would rather have them with us than have them closing down the city every few days.”

This brings us to the source of the MQM’s power: the party that can shut down a city controls it. Despite its steady decline over the last three decades, Karachi remains Pakistan’s jugular vein. Each time the MQM announces one of its frequent days of protest or mourning, billions are lost.

So it’s not the number of seats it wins in the national and provincial assemblies, but the effectiveness of its muscle power to bring Karachi to a standstill that gives the party its clout.

And while the PML-N can distance itself from the MQM, the PPP has come to terms with the reality of the ethnic party. Whatever its nationalist elements might feel, the leadership realises that both Sindhis and Mohajirs have to share the province.

Another factor driving the need to cooperate is the steady influx of the Taliban into Karachi. These religious extremists threaten to displace the ANP as the representatives of the huge Pakhtun community in the metropolis. Thus far, the government has proved ineffective in confronting them, and it appears that only the MQM has the manpower and firepower to take them on.

But as recent events have shown, the MQM is not the monolithic entity it once was. Apart from the recent erosion of its once-solid vote bank, there are signs of cracks in its discipline. Its leader’s bizarre statements from London reveal a person increasingly out of touch with reality.

These last five years while the MQM was a coalition member in both Islamabad and Karachi, it often acted as though it was in the opposition.

Given these factors, the coming years do not hold out much promise for peace and prosperity in Karachi. Nawaz Sharif will be happy to see the MQM and the PPP self-destruct over the next five years.” To read full article click link below;

http://dawn.com/2013/05/25/unhappy-marriage-in-sindh/