Sumários
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27 Outubro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
Empire is a "estado de espírito" (mix of mood, Zeitgeist, state of mind) that people learn to adopt to serve elite to stay elite far from nature and exploring it and its human resources. Empire works dividing to reign, discriminating as under the Descartes rules of science, taking only the parts and forgetting about the whole, hiding the main trends that flow in the background and censuring the engagement of people in that direction.
Being aware of the Empire social and personal mechanisms makes people aware that the states, instruments of the Empire, are not protecting and supporting the people: there goal is to explore the Hearth and its resources.
Being so, it becomes clear that poverty trap, meritocracy trap, mainstream cartesian episteme trap, crime trap, war trap, are different aspects of imperial trap that incorporates mental censorship in each one of individuals when adapting to social special environments, as schools or universities.
Amartya Sen propose to present human rights as a social-economic political and civic project around the concept of capabilities. Human rights is not about protection of the state: it is about empowerment of people to decide individually by their own sake.
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20 Outubro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
Globalization is a word. It was made in the beginning of the 90´s, just after the fall of Soviet Union, to refer to a new era with the characteristics of the expected progressive future designed mostly by left-wing hopes of better life, when right-wing Thatcher-Reagan win the floor. It substitutes words like development, post-industrial, post-modern.
It was presented as one thing, something that just happens, and no one is responsible or can abolish it, like progress in time. At the same time, globalization is like the end of the history, the end of ideologies, the end of waring and the final making of humanity (human rights). (Unhappily one of the first moves was humanitarian war in Somalia, with disastrous results).
If one asks those who use the word in the social sciences what it is, some try to draw answer, and acknowledge that according to different sensitivities different understandings about what globalization refers to. Trade? Technology? Migrations? Transnational monopolies? Multicultural cultures? End of the regular waring?
Many preconcepts comes with globalization about nations hierarchy and rivalry. Now a day, for instance, globalization turn into the II Cold War, US-China. Some say that globalization is ending because USA launch it and lost it for China.
If one understands globalization as a way of hiding Empire (a notion I will introduce next class) it becomes clear why it is so difficult to those who use the word to know what it is and why they use it anyway.
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13 Outubro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
Adam Smith started social science making a difference between moral and economics. Economics, like Newton universe, is automatic (the invisible hand): the market mechanism, like a street market, is the automaton. Every one worth what his bourse worth - no morals attached.
Adam Smith knew that the wealth of his friends was result of overseas business. And he did not consider it in his theory (Marvin Brown (2009) Free entreprise and the economics of slavery in real-economics review). He starts a social nationalist science trend, till today. Most social analysis are national, as if overseas exploitation, Earth exploitation, has nothing to do with wealth accumulation.
Modernity is about separating moral emotions of practical reasons, as if they were different separated worlds. Professionalism and initial training are about habituation to special institutionalized environment, blocking emotions. For instance, emotions of doctors regarding sick people, or engineers regarding environment or social workers regarding people in need.
Social justice is an evaluation of the promises of modernity and the real life. We want freedom and equality and there is not the case, today. How can one deal with it? Optimism? Pessimism?
Novak propose that the best social justice one can have is free creative people at expenses of all the rest (equality is not to be followed). The creative people, like entrepreneurs, will develop new ways of living that will profit all societies.
Pierre Guibentif notices that justice is a call for those who feel injustice and fight for changing the situation. Social movements do fight to institutionalize their claims against injustice and for justice. Adding new goals to institutions would be the securest way to conquer justice against injustice.
Habermas "Trends of Juridification" shows how modern state was build on each time more influent political institutions raising justice to more social groups, starting with Versailles society and ending with social integration of workers.
Social justice.
6 Outubro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
Assessment of social justice depends on ideologies. When a cup is half plenty, any one can say equally accurately that it is half empty. Is it possible social sciences and sociology to escape from that bias?
August Comte, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, were classic authors that worked aiming to overcome ideological bias. Max Weber, on the reverse, stated that all one can do is axiological neutralization, a fancy name to say social science should dismiss ideological discussions to political arena and conform with it as an outsider. As professional submission to whatever mission those who pay our wages design to us.
The big change between classic authors driven by looking forward to new fairer social arrangements, and today professional practices of social sciences hopeless regarding any social transformation has an history, started in USA new deal epoch (between wars) when the states start integrating working classes, avoiding, and repressing socialist and communist ideals victor at USSR.
Cold War is over, still ideological scars are still working and dissimulating otherwise clear notions. For instance, working in our little professional fields, hoping that the COVID crises come to an end, we, as societies, continue doing what causes global warming and all its consequences, science warned in time 60 years ago.
Can we do otherwise? Yes, we can. We need to learn about the big torsion of our mind incorporated since childhood on us all by disciplines and teaching strategies. For instance, thinking about money as an instrument to lubricate exchange fail to understand that money is also a political instrument to produce capital - money that do not exchange and, on the reverse, accumulate. This complexity of money makes it indispensable and odious, at the same time. If one want to avoid ideology (money is good, money is bad) we need to dig on knowledge, mainly on historical and anthropological knowledge (read David Graeber Debt - the First 5000 Years, free PDF available on the internet).
Money example must be multiplied by many other concepts, such as globalization, social justice, and human rights. Avoiding specialization - economics, political, psychological, sociological, and so on - must include the mother of all specializations, the divide between social sciences and natural sciences. Avoiding specialization includes also to understand the way competition between states, also felt as nations they urge to represent, is used to organize an imperial hierarchy and to avoid the discussion of better social and structural arrangements, since everyone is invited to follow those countries that have better ranking. The same illusion is used at institutional and individual levels: every think and everyone are integrated in rankings, as if the rules of the game could not and were not being changed (read Daniel Markovits´ The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite).
To think otherwise, out of the box, is hard work. This kind of work is not supported by universities or public policies on science. The reverse is true. Still, the best thinking always has been and will be against common sense.
For next class please watch the documentary "The Subversives" dedicated to Theo van Boven, Human Rights Chair at United Nations. You can find the documentary on RTP Play (Portuguese Public Broadcaster).
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29 Setembro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
Globalization, Social Justice and Human Rights are three specialized subjects calling for interdisciplinary approach and thinking. Each one sends each one of us to different reasoning habits that are not easy to integrate. Plus, each one of us tend to adopt optimist or pessimist approaches, normally ideologically biased.
Economics, law, sociology, psychology, politics, and son on, develop different approaches to each one of these subjects. One needs a lot of reading and information to get a global view on each one of the subjects. Joining the three together is a huge challenge.
What one would do is to get specialized in one subdiscipline and a sub subject according to the schedule designed by each group and, at the same time, to follow class readings and discussions looking for a holistic approach to human species good life.
The teacher recommends students to be sensitive and emotional about violation of human rights, as war and exclusion, about social justice, as merit recognition and poverty, about globalization, as history of the world and finance global networking. To deal with all these subjects it is our academic task to avoid moralism and ideological biases.
One should avoid dealing with one case as if all injustice and bad feelings (or paradise and pleasure) on the world is in this spot. One need to try to look from 360º and out of space to produce knowledge in each one of us to guide our lives and action the best way possible for us and for those who live around us.