Miruna Gritu, așa o cheamă pe prietena berzelor din Sibiu, este atât de cunoscută în lumea iubitorilor de animale încât atunci când un cetățean din Biertan a găsit doi pui de urs, a sunat-o pe ea. Nu la Garda de Mediu. La Asociația Prietenii Berzelor!
După cum înțelegeți din context, aceasta s-a dus la Biertan. Pe drum a tot dat telefoane până când a aflat că la Zărnești există un sanctuar pentru urși. Așa că a luat puii – deshidratați și foarte slabiți de diaree, și i-a dus la Zărnești. Între timp a fost sunată de cineva de la Garda de Mediu. Invitată la sediu. Și amendată cu 10 000 de lei. Pentru că a transportat urși fără să fi fost autorizată în acest sens.
Garda de Mediu este o înstituție care se ocupă cu ‘ocrotirea mediului’. Urșii fac, evident, parte din mediu. Garda este obligată să se ocupe de bunăstarea urșilor. Obligată să aplice legile. Pentru simplul motiv că dacă s-ar apuca oricine să transporte urși unde li se năzare, urșii ar avea de suferit. Împreună cu restul mediului.
Miruna Gritu se ocupă și ea tot cu ocrotirea mediului. Cu ocrotirea aceluiași mediu… Berzele pe care le oblojește Miruna Gritu nu sunt cu nimic mai prejos decât urșii care tocmai au fost protejați de Garda de Mediu.
Și atunci?!?
Cum putem ieși din situația asta? Ce era să facă comisarul de la Garda de Mediu? S-o lase în pace pe Miruna Gritu după ce aceasta tocmai încălcase legea? Ce exemplu dădea? Pe de altă parte, cam câte berze poate să îngrijească Miruna Gritu cu banii aia?
Am să închei cu o altă serie de întrebări.
Care este amenda minimă pentru transportat urși fără autorizație?
Și, mai ales, cum rămâne cu sustenabilitatea? Facem ceva pentru ea, pe bune, sau ne ‘acoperim cu hârtii’?
This book represents Djuvara’s thesis for his 1974 Doctorat d’Etat.
There are two main ideas which are to be pointed out here. A first one hidden under the distinction he identifies between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’. The second being the bread and butter of his thesis. That civilizations are initiated in one place, diffused/exported for a while and then replaced – or led further, depending on how one chooses to interpret the facts, by people until then living somewhere on the fringes of the civilization they are replacing/refurbishing.
Nothing really new, right? ‘Cyclical History’ wasn’t invented yesterday. And certainly not by Neagu Djuvara.
Well, Djuvara’s ideas – like everybody else’s, are nothing but ‘overgrowth’. Things which sprung in people’s minds ‘on top’ of what those people had already learned. Found out. Or, of course, both.
In a sense, what I’ve said in the previous sentence is the very condensed abstract of Djuvara’s second ‘main idea’. The first, the ‘hidden’ one, – again, in an extremely abridged version, being that ‘history, as a narrative, is nothing more and nothing less than what historians choose to make of the facts they had learned about’.
Too blunt? Well, first and foremost, I’m an engineer. Not a fancy pen-pusher…
OK. Let’s go further. I’m going to illustrate, briefly, Djuvara’s main thesis by presenting his version of what had happened in Europe. What had started as an European phenomenon, more precisely.
The Roman civilization had grown at the periphery of the Ancient Greece. And, eventually, took over more ‘space’ than the Ancient Greeks. The Russian civilization had grown at the periphery of the Byzantine/Orthodox one and eventually took over. Or, at least, attempted to… The Holy Roman Empire of German Nation ‘recycled’ – or, at least, attempted to, the ‘ancient’ values and traditions. Great Britain had grown at the periphery of Europe until it took over the whole world. At least for a while… The US, which had started as a British colony, had grown into the most powerful nation known to man.
‘OK, I understand what you meant by trailers and trailblazers. Some of those who trail might end up trailblazing. Do you want to add anything? Is there an actual point to your post?’
Yep. As they say about the market, ‘past performance is no guarantee about the future’. The fact that things have happened as they did is no guarantee that they’ll keep unfolding in the same manner.
In a sense, Fukuyama was right, after all… Even if not in the sense he thought it!
According to “The end of history” people – all over the World, had realized the relative merits of ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘capitalism’. Which were going to be put in practice, effectively marking ‘the end of history’. Thirty years past that moment, it seems that things aren’t going in that direction.
I’m I contradicting myself? Who’s right, after all? Djuvara? Since history doesn’t seem to have stopped? Or Fukuyama, but for some other reason? Than the one advertised by him?
‘History, as a narrative, is nothing more and nothing less than what historians choose to make of the facts they had learned about’
Then, if history is ‘man made’, what about the future?
Can we really make it? Predict it?
‘Make it’, for sure! If not us, then who?!?
‘Predict it’… that’s something totally different!
There are signs, though.
First of all, Djuvara had described something which can be compared with fire burning in a savannah. It starts in one place, burns for a while… and then starts up some place else. Until now, no fire – no fire known to man, had burned any savannah so thoroughly that nothing was left for a ‘second’ fire.
Secondly, Fukuyama said that history will end when all humankind will sync. When all ‘civilizations’ will be run according to the same paradigm. According to the liberal democratic and capitalist paradigm, in Fukuyama’s vision. We’re still far from that. Only there is one paradigm which is willing to play that role! To fill those shoes…
The ‘greed is good’ paradigm! Or, if you don’t like to think in ‘monetary’ terms, the ‘my version is the only right one’ paradigm.
The problem being that these two work in concert. They are two facets of something called ‘intellectual arrogance’.
I’ll come back to this notion sometime in the future. Now I’ll end up telling that there’s not much left of the ‘savannah’.
When things were unfolding as Djuvara described them, the planet itself was more or less ‘virgin’. Unexploited. Unoccupied. Human culture used to be diverse. Ideas were developing. Traded. From one place to the other. From one culture to the other.
Nowadays, much of the planet – our home, is occupied by the, more or less, same civilization. And by an increasingly similar culture.
Nothing inherently good nor bad here, mind you!
If we still have no definitive history, then the future hasn’t been written yet. It’s up to us to choose the right trail. For no other reason than the fact that there are very few trails left for us to burn!
Attempting to value individualism over collectivism is similar to trying to establish which came first, the chicken or the egg.
Having experienced both – collectivism and individualism put in practice as political principles, I have noticed that neither extreme is capable of working in a sustainable manner.
Communist regimes had fallen one after another. Fascist regimes did the very same thing. Pirate republics could never resist for long.
Coming back to what is happening in the US, I’m afraid very few people are aware of how much collective thinking had been embedded in the American Psyche. The good kind of collective thinking… Americans go to church. A place where you go to to be together, not alone. Americans used to help each-other. Charity used to be a big thing. Slowly, it had become a dirty word. And so on.
Individuals can not exist on their own. They need each other to survive. And to thrive. Collectives can not last for long unless the individuals who constitute them do respect each-other. Help each-other maintain and develop their individuality.
“Those are called Witches Stairs. Allegedly, witches can’t climb up them. You will occasionally find them in very, very old New England homes.
(photo by Daphne Canard)”
Yesterday I got a notice from FB:
I presume this was the ‘consequence’ of some artificial intelligence employed by FB doing its job.
Doesn’t make much sense but…
For whatever reason, I made a screen capture of the notice and shared it on FB. A friend asked me about the original post. I looked it up and it was no longer there! I searched FB for the picture… and there it was. Shared multiple times by multiple people. Sometimes with the accompanying text, sometimes baren. And, at least once, bearing a very similar warning:
I’m not questioning FB motives for fact checking the information on its walls. That’s a good idea. Only I’m not so sure the ‘artificial’ intelligence FB uses to implement that idea is intelligent enough for the task….
Meghan and Harry had a chat with Oprah. Which had eventually been broadcasted on TV. Basically, there was nothing new nor really interesting there. For me, anyway. Yet there’s a lot of reaction.
I don’t really care about the reason for which the royals have treated Markle the way they did. About the reason which convinced the couple to speak up. The individual reasons for those who comment on the internet to do it as each of them had chosen to do it.
There are two points I need to make here.
The fact that they are rich and famous doesn’t change the fact that the oppression they’re speaking about is real….Maybe they experience it differently… maybe they have it easier when speaking about it… but opression continues to be dealt. Among us, by people like us.
And, secondly but just as important, those three weren’t discussing about mere oppression. They were talking about racist oppression!
Could this be the reason for so many people taking issues on this subject?
I fully agree with Sowell but the fact that Sowell is right doesn’t change the fact that we’re the ones responsible for present day racism.
I still have to find, only I’ve lost patience, an explanation for what had ‘fed’ Trump. Trump as social phenomenon…
For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed.
Trump has made himself famous. Among others, for imparting new meaning to the concept of ‘fake-news’. And for using “alternative facts” to introduce us to an ‘alternative reality’. His…
Only his reality did have something in common with that faced by many of his fellow Americans.
Oops! Suddenly, Trump’s ‘alternative’ reality – part of it, at least, has become one with that experienced by “we, the People”. By a majority of them, anyway.
What made so many people – dispirited, undoubtedly, believe that a self professed pussy grabber and proud member of the Washington establishment would solve their real-life problems… by ‘draining’ the very ‘swamp’ in which he had grown to his present stature … that’s something for other people to explain.
My point being that Trump’s behavior had very closely followed that of Goethe’s Apprentice Sorcerer. He had used his uncanny knack of playing hide-and-seek with reality to climb into the Oval Office only to be fired after one mandate. To be the first American President who had survived two impeachments. And the second one who had witnessed – more or less unmoved, the untimely demise of half a million Americans due to disease
But the first who had done that during a mostly peaceful mandate. Pandemic, true enough, but otherwise peaceful.
NB. The ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic, which had happened during Woodrow Wilson’s mandate, had caused the death of 675 000 Americans. Only that had occurred just after a world war, when viruses hadn’t yet been discovered and man hadn’t yet walked on the Moon.
What will happen next?
Who knows… Goethe’s poem had a relatively happy ending because a master sorcerer was at hand. Who had solved the problem with a swift gesture of his powerful wand.
No such easy solution is available now. But one thing has become clear. Again…
Two things, actually. Too many dispirited people eventually become a powerful – and highly unstable, ‘Petri dish’. Where all kinds of ‘social experiments’ might ‘spontaneously’ explode. And playing with people’s passions might take you places. But will, almost always, end up badly.
‘Are you nuts? or something? Isn’t exactly this what the Europeans had been doing all over the world? For the last five centuries? And you attempt to ‘nuance’ it? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?!?’
Ashamed of what some of my predecessors have done, yes! Also ashamed of what some of my contemporaries are doing. Right now, as opposed to back then.
And since there’s nothing to be done about the past, but to learn from it, and everything to be done about the future, right now, I’d rather have at least some of those statues still standing.
In public squares! Maybe not in the same places, maybe not in the same settings. But still in public! Hiding them in museums would mean taking them out of the limelight. Out of public scrutiny! If we are to learn anything from past mistakes we must focus on them. Putting those statues aside because we feel too strongly about them would only serve those who don’t want to admit mistakes had been perpetrated. Who actually don’t want to own our past.
Those who had promoted Jim Crow legislation had erected the confederate statues as a symbol of their regained public influence. Obliterating the statues won’t make anything suddenly right. The consequences of Jim Crow won’t disappear, as if by magic, along with the statues. They didn’t disappear when the legislation had been abolished and they won’t disappear now. If we want to put the past behind us, we must accomplish what has to be accomplished. We need to make things right, not hide away the prickliest pieces of evidence.
Demolishing statues won’t help any of those living in still segregated neighborhoods. Won’t help the children going to heavily underfunded schools. And so on… Demolishing statues will only help those who will certainly ask, in a few short years, if nothing changes in our hearts and minds:
‘Handicap’ has become a dirty word… Somewhat strange, given the breadth of its meaning. Horses get handicapped in order to even their chances to win a race. Yachts get handicapped so that different makes might participate in the same race… In these situations, its an ‘honor’ to be handicapped…
Then why has this concept, ‘political correctness’, become so ‘popular’?
You might already be familiar with the ‘upfront’ explanation.
“political correctness has reset the standards for civility and respect in people’s day-to-day interactions.”
I’m convinced there was something more. Civility and respect haven’t been invented yesterday. We’ve been polite for quite a while now.
Yeah, only politeness had been invented, and polished, when society was way more hierarchical than in is now. In those times, when a ‘superior’ told somebody ‘you idiot’ that somebody paused to think. The ‘idiot’ could not dismiss what the ‘superior’ had just told him. The ‘idiot’ really had to make amends. He was so busy trying to correct himself that he couldn’t allow himself to feel offended. If anything, he was grateful. The ‘superior’ had made the effort to help the ‘idiot’ improve himself instead of dispatching him altogether. In modern times, even before PC had become fashionable, calling someone’s attention about how idiotic he was behaving only made him angry. Hence dismissive and unresponsive. In an era when all people had become peers, a new ‘manner of speaking’ had to be invented in order for ‘information’ to be made ‘palatable’.
The process had been successful. So successful that the same approach had been used when dealing with other ‘hot’ subjects. Race, gender… ‘inclusion’ in general…
In fact, the process had become too successful for its own good!
Some of the ‘enthusiasts’ have reached the conclusion that ‘everything’ is open for reconsideration. That ‘everything’ should be closely reexamined. According to the ideological lenses worn by the examiners, of course…
Unfortunately, the end result is rather messy.
Instead of facilitating the dialog, the stiffer and stiffer set of ‘appropriate’ ‘rules of engagement’ has almost stifled any transfer of meaningful information.
“Despite this obvious progress, the authors’ research has shown that political correctness is a double-edged sword. While it has helped many employees feel unlimited by their race, gender, or religion, the PC rule book can hinder people’s ability to develop effective relationships across race, gender, and religious lines.”
Ibid.
Not only that people find it harder and harder to understand each-other, ‘things’ themselves become blurry.
Now, do the statues of these two people stand for the same thing? And no, I’m not trying to discern between two villains!
Each of them had done an immense amount of harm and had produced endless suffering. People are still smarting to this day because of what both of them had done. Only there are some differences between them. One had also done some good in his life. While the other had been used, after his death and without his consent, as a symbol. After he had, directly, kept people in slavery he had also been used to further the sufferings of black people.
Are we capable of seeing any of these differences? Or are we too angry to differentiate?
Do you remember why we had invented political correctness in the first place?
Descartes was the first who had introduced a ‘pecking order’ into this mess.
Dubito ergo cogito. Cogito ergo sum.
You’re free to translate this any way you want. Mine goes like this:
My existence is certified only by my doubts.
My existence as a human being, of course. As a conscious human!
The ‘pecking order’ being, as far as I figure it out:
I need to exist, as an animal, in order to become conscious. And I need to gain consciousness in order to learn about my existence.
Complicated? Let me elaborate.
Our understanding of the world is incomplete. First of all, there are so many things we don’t know about.
For example, we have no idea what goes on between Mars and Jupiter. We think we know that there’s no major planet hidden in between those two orbits. No object with an important enough mass to disturb either Mars or Jupiter and no object with an albedo big enough to be noticed. To be noticed by us… Other than that… we have no clue about what’s going on there. In fact, we don’t know much about what’s going on in the middle of our own planet… or on the floor of ‘our’ oceans…
But the fact that we don’t know about their existence doesn’t preclude the actual existence of whatever ‘objects’ and/or organisms might happen to be there.
Secondly, there are so many things we don’t fully understand. Not yet, anyway. We are aware of their existence – because we’ve been confronted with some ‘consequences’ of the aforementioned things, but we haven’t yet figured out, exactly, how those consequences have been produced. For example, we’re still learning about viruses. About their ability to bypass our defenses. About how they infect us. About how we might improve our chances of avoiding/surviving infection.
But the fact that we don’t fully understand them doesn’t preclude us – well, some of us, from believing those viruses to be real.
My point being that ‘existence’ is far wider than ‘reality’. There’s no need for us to know about it for something to exist. But for something to be considered ‘real’, by us, that something needs to exist first.
‘But aren’t you contradicting yourself? In a previous post, you argued that ‘the Flat Earth’ was real?!?’
Confusing, isn’t it? I’m sorry if I misled you. All I was trying to say was that ‘the Flat Earth’, as a concept, is ‘real’. In the sense that so many people discussing it – either for or against, make it real. Those very discussions, a direct consequence of the concept’s very existence – albeit only in the virtual space, give consistency to its reality. Don’t get me wrong. The Earth – as I ‘know’ it, continues to be round. The Earth – that we live on, is not ‘Flat’. The Earth doesn’t exist as a flat object.
We are confronted with two facts here. 1. All that we’ve so far learned about it leads us to the conclusion that the Earth is, more or less, round. 2. There still are people who believe – or pretend to, that the Earth is flat.
The second fact exists. The belief which made it possible is false. As far as we know. As far as the scientific community is convinced. Yet the fact still remains. Those people believing in it provide it with ‘existence’. Those people believing in it make it ‘real’.
Now, will ‘they’ find a constitutional way to set a precedent? That a guy who had so horribly – and tragically, misused the sacred notion of “freedom of expression” has no place in such a powerful position? Or, by failing to do so – for whatever reasons, will ‘they’ leave open the ‘opportunity’ for an even more callous ‘political animal’ to climb into the Oval Office?
nicichiarasa 