A Tale of Two Humanitarian Educators

Interestingly, one of these stories takes place in India, and the other in Pakistan, each being reported on within months of each other. Regardless of their location, selfless and innovative ideas like these help give me hope in humanity. I’m short on time, so I’ll let the pictures and their captions speak for themselves. Click the images to link to their original sources (Washington Post and NPR, respectively).

A makeshift school set up under a bridge in New Delhi, India. Run by shop owner Rajesh Kumar, the over 50 students, ages 4 to 14, study everything from basic reading and writing to mathematical concepts like the Pythagorean Theorem. The students sit on foam mats just yards away from an excrement pit, and are taught for over 2 hours.

After decades abroad Saeed Malik (left) returned to his native Pakistan to rectify the poor education system. He remembered talking to a group of boys, 9 to 16 years old, and finding that the majority wanted to be freedom fighters and die as martyrs, because they had nothing else to live for. “And I felt, in what way can we bring these kids back to the beauty of life, to the beauty of future, to be of value to fellow mankind and to themselves and to the country,” he says. “And I started thinking in what way can we help the children.” Malik felt books were the way to broaden children’s minds, to introduce them to a whole world of subjects, and to help build tolerance for others. But he discovered that virtually none of the public schools in and around Islamabad had libraries. Through donations from the UN and private individuals, he founded the Bright Star Mobile Library, which now serves about 2,500 children, providing a range of books in Urdu and English.

We need more stories like this to be known, especially to balance out all the cynicism and negativity that typically captures our attention (and subsequently make up the bulk of our news). Even a flicker of light in the darkness is something to be cherished.

Welcome to North Korea

There is little doubt that the regime in North Korea is one of the most odious and evil in human history. The level of cruelty, capriciousness, and sociopathy that characterizes this pseudo-religious totalitarian state is surreal (indeed, I dare say the villainy of NK government is almost Hollywood-worthy in how over-the-top and disturbingly cartoonish it can be).

While the exploits of its bizarre and ruthless leaders –namely the late Kim Jong-il — are well-known and the subject of many pop culture references, there are very few details about what everyday life in the regime is like. What little we know comes from either escapees, satellite images (which have captured the large network of labor camps), and the small coterie of people who manage to visit the notoriously isolationist state. Needless to say, their accounts are profoundly disturbing.

As it turns out, however, there was actually a documentary filmed in the country over a decade ago that managed to portray what conditions were like for average North Koreans. I’m not sure how this rare find managed to go under the radar, especially as it one the International Emmy award for Best Documentary — although I imagine that its release in 2001 was likely overshadowed by bigger events elsewhere in the world, as North Korea has only recently gained its level of notoriety)

Dutch filmmaker Peter Tetteroo and his associate Raymond Feddema spent a week in and around the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, where most of the filming takes place. How they managed to get in there, film nearly an hour of intimate footage, and make it out is beyond me (contrary to popular belief, people to visit North Korea, although its exceedingly difficult, and I doubt such filming is allowed).

In any case, this video is well worth your time. Fair warning — it’s probably one of the most disturbing things you’ll see in a while, which I doubt is surprising to anyone.

RIP Robert G. Edwards

Robert G. Edwards, pioneer of in-vitro fertilization, passed away yesterday, April 10, at age 87. The British physiologist, in collaboration with obstetrician and gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe (who died in 1988), successfully pioneered conception through IVF, which led to the birth of the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, on July 25, 1978. For this he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

As of today, over 4 million babies have been born through IVF. Louise Browns had said that ”his work, along with Patrick Steptoe, has brought happiness and joy to millions of people all over the world by enabling them to have children.” His work was motivated by his belief that “the most important thing in life is having a child.”

Watch a video portrait of his life and achievement here.

On Same-Sex Marriage

As I write this post, the Supreme Court is beginning to hear one of two cases regarding same-sex marriage, Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144, which will determine whether California’s referendum banning gay marriage (Proposition 8) is constitutional. As the New York Times reports:

Two California couples challenging Proposition 8, the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, say it excludes gay and lesbian couples from an institution with a deep and distinctive meaning and thus violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

Defenders of the ban say that states should be able to work out for themselves whether to permit same-sex marriage. The Constitution is silent on the question, they say, and the court should not intervene in the vigorous debate playing out across the nation.

Nine states and the District of Columbia allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. Polls show that a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, suggesting that further gains are likely in state legislatures and at the ballot box.

If the court is to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, it will be in this case and not in a narrower one to be argued tomorrow, on Wednesday, about the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The latter deals with how the federal government would treat same-sex couples (namely in terms of federal benefits and obligations), which DOMA wouldn’t recognize since it defines legal unions as those between a man and a woman. If the banning of gay marriage is found unconstitutional in today’s case, chances are DOMA would get shot down. A great article in the New Yorker offers more background details, and shares that opinion that DOMA will likely get shot down.

So what might happen with respect to the comparatively more vital Prop 8 case being debated as we speak? The Times article breaks it down thusly:

 The court may say the Constitution requires all states to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. At the other extreme, the court may say the Constitution is silent on the question, leaving states free to allow or reject same-sex marriage. (There is no possibility that the court would ban same-sex marriage in places that choose to permit it.)

The court could also adopt a rationale that would apply only to California along the lines of the one endorsed by the Ninth Circuit. It could adopt the “eight-state solution” suggested by the Obama administration. Or it could dismiss the case for want of standing, which would probably effectively allow same-sex marriages in California.

Meanwhile, Slate describes how the Supreme Court could determine the validity of either side of the Proposition 8 case:

When laws treat one class of people differently from another, as Prop 8 and DOMA do, the Supreme Court has a choice. It can strike down such laws only if they have no rational basis. Or it can look more closely, and ask whether the law passes the test of “heightened scrutiny” (the standard in sex discrimination cases) or “strict scrutiny” (the standard when discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or religion is at issue). The justices have never applied one of these higher standards in a gay rights case. But some lower courts have used the heightened scrutiny tests in same-sex marriage cases. Will the justices move in that direction? Personally, I think there’s no rational basis for banning gay marriage. The myth that children fare worse when raised by gay parents, for example, has been shredded by social science. But if the court went for heightened scrutiny in the context of gay marriage, that would make it easier for gay people to sue over employment discrimination or mistreatment as well.

Indeed, I’m quite surprised that there is so much legal, political, and public wrangling about this issue. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that the married gay couple down the street is going to have any negative impact on your personal life. Is a gay marriage really any more disruptive than the millions of failed, abusive, unfaithful, and otherwise unhealthy heterosexual marriages that are common in our society? Is it anymore immoral or unfavorable as the dozens of other actually unsavory things that are technically legal in the private sphere — alcoholism, sexism, bad parenting, bullying, infidelity, etc? What happened to keeping government outside of our personal lives?

I’m rather amused by the arguments levied by the opposed party in the Prop 8 case, as reported in another New York Times article on the subject:

What justifications have supporters of Proposition 8 offered? They say that preserving the traditional definition of marriage will “further society’s vital interests in responsible procreation and child rearing.” Those interests would be undermined, they say, by “officially redefining marriage as a genderless institution.” It is rational, they add, to proceed with caution in changing the definition of marriage, to respect societal judgments made through the democratic process.

So are those who make this argument claiming that infertile couples shouldn’t have the right to marry? And are they really claiming that marriages exists only as an instrument of procreation, rather than of love between two people? Does that mean people should only be allowed to marry insofar as they plan to have children? Does that mean a couple can’t raise children responsibly without the label of “marriage” upon their relationship?

The point about “responsible child rearing” is especially interesting. Does anyone really think that banning gay marriage will somehow turn back centuries-old social ills like child abuse, negligent parenting, teen pregnancy, and the like? Are consenting gay adults willing to adopt children really the worst thing that can happen to the institution of marriage?

All this reminds me of the outlawing of interracial marriage that once existed in several states. It should be noted that in the 1967 landmark case Loving vs. Virginia, which was challenging just such a law, the Supreme Court made the following ruling:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

Replace any reference to “race” with “sexual orientation,” and tell me if there is any appreciable difference. Also keep in mind that, like arguments against gay marriage, many of these racist laws had religious grounds, which should have no bearing on our constitutionally secular legal system.

And despite popular belief, the fact that people voted to ban gay marriage in California or else doesn’t make it legally or ethically legitimate: if people democratically chose to reinstitute racial segregation, it obviously wouldn’t be any less unconstitutional. We shouldn’t forget that slavery was once popularly supported by the people of each slave state. The 14^th amendment protects freedoms regardless of who strips them (though whether gay marriage will be a legally recognized freedom will remain to be seen).

I try to imagine what it would be like if homosexuals were the dominant group in this country, and they decided by matter of personal conviction that traditional marriage is a backward and outdated practice that should be banned. In response to this, wouldn’t proponents of heterosexual marriage make the same arguments they currently reject from the gay community – that people have a right to marry who they want, and that the government shouldn’t be in the business of telling people who to marry?

Furthermore, aren’t these the same individuals who claim they want small government, and that the state shouldn’t involve itself in private matters? Clearly they will make exceptions when it’s convenient. That’s why democracies are measured by how much freedom they accord to their minorities, who could otherwise easily be oppressed by the tyranny of the majority

Why should someone’s rights be limited or looked down upon just because something is seen as unfavorable or “sinful?” Setting aside the fact that our secular government shouldn’t take into account such views with respect to the law, if it harms no one, it shouldn’t be immoral. There is no credible scientific evidence showing that gay marriage harms anyone, be it the participants, their immediate loved ones, or society at large.

Indeed, the overwhelming consensus by scientific academies the world over is the homosexuality — including homosexual parenting — has no discernible negative affect on anyone, at least not anymore than “regular” heterosexual partnerships do. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently came behind gay marriage, after an extensive scientific review of over 60 studies, finding that it was far preferable to have gay parents than none at all.

Besides, the empirical evidence is clear: of the 11 countries that currently recognize gay marriage — and the many more than at least legalize civil unions and similar alternatives — the majority rank very well in metrics of political stability, crime, poverty, and other measures of social ills. The same goes for the majority of US states. If gay marriage were really so disruptive to the social order, we’d be seeing these communities racked with all sorts of subsequent problems.

So from scientific and rational perspective, there is simply no rational basis for banning gay marriage. As long as it involves two consenting adults — which of course is all anyone is advocating for — than on the basis of liberty for autonomous persons, it should be allowed. If you don’t like it, than you don’t have to have a gay marriage, nor will your religious institution be required to perform one. You have a right to dislike or be offended by something, but not to use the legal system to act on behalf of that prejudice.

Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules, the trend is clear: the majority of Americans support (or at least tolerate) gay marriage, and the numbers continue to grow. In fact, it was only a decade ago that most people were opposed to gays and lesbians marrying. A complete reversal in such a short span of time suggests that sooner or later, homosexuals will have the right to marry, whether by judicial decree or popular votes.

Either way, this court case will be leaving me at the edge of my seat.

My open letter to the Steubenville survivor

Reblogged from MSNBC:

Today, I have a letter to a young woman whose name I do not want any of us to know, because we already know too much about her. We already know how she was assaulted and photographed. We know she was shamed via social media. We know she has been bullied since the young men who raped her were found guilty…

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I feel tremendous sympathy towards the victim of the Steubenville rape case. Were it not enough that she was sexually assaulted and humiliated — and will live with the subsequent trauma for the rest of life — that she was also subject to a litany of stigmatization, blame, and even threats by both local residents and people all over the country (I can only hope she hasn't seen the horrific things said about her on social media). This poor girl, not yet an adult, has to live with both the violation of her sexual and personal autonomy, and with the shame, isolation, and ostracizing that often befalls such victims. She’ll no doubt develop severe social and psychological problems. I've had to work with rape victims like her, and I've seen the horrific consequences: often times, the reaction towards -- and treatment of -- rape victims seems as awful and damaging as the act  itself. Imagine amplifying that on the national scene  with millions having seen you humiliated and abused, and many of them believing you’re a terrible person who deserved it. I wish I could reach out to this girl and help her. I wish I could show her she’s not alone and has support. I'm glad this open letter was written. It's small comfort, but every little bit counts.

The History of American Assassinations

It’s a long read, but this detailed account about the legal history of opaque assassinations and spying is well worth your time, for it reveals that the seemingly recent growth of executive power — namely through the national security apparatus — has been decades in the making. It was especially (though not solely) intensified by none other than Ronald Reagan, widely regarded as a defend of American freedom and values. 

In December 1981, Reagan signed the executive order 12333 undoing the previous decades’ reforms with the stroke of a pen. For cover, Reagan’s people planted fake scare stories through Jack Anderson about non-existent Libyan assassination squads infiltrating U.S. borders, waterskiing their way across the Great Plains to spring John Hinckley and wreak havoc on the American Way of Life.

And that is the back story to Reagan’s executive order 12333, the one that allegedly banned assassinations and allegedly made him so much more progressive than Bush or Obama.

Reagan not only gave the CIA carte blanche in the US to spy, but he also massively expanded the powers of the FBI and law enforcement to spy on Americans domestically with another executive order in 1983, paving the way for a repeat of all the awful abuses uncovered by Sen. Church, which only started coming to light at the end of Reagan’s presidency.

In other words, there is arguably a legal precedence for the drone attacks, warrantless wiretapping, legal opaqueness, and other questionable government practices. Indeed, the courts have been either willing to abide by these actions, or forced to begrudgingly accept their legality given the precedence. Excess and unaccountable state power is not only being further entrenched in our system, but it’s been intricately established within it for some time. Needless to say, that’s very troubling. 

Stupendous 13th century illustrated manuscript

Reblogged from Why Evolution Is True:

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by Matthew Cobb

There is a community of medievalists on Twitter who re-tweet their latest finds in their studies of illustrated manuscripts. I follow some of them, and this popped up in my Twitter stream today. It is a stupendous 112 page 13th century Sicilian manuscript from the Vatican Library, dealing with birds and falconry (De Artes Venandi Cum Avibus…

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What a beautiful collection. I'd love to see it for myself some day.

Ice age art

Reblogged from Why Evolution Is True:

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Perusing the latest stuff from the journal Nature, I found this lovely video of a new exhibit at the British Museum featuring some of the oldest artwork known—including pieces made 40,000 years ago. That's not too long after the "out of Africa" event that spread modern Homo sapiens through the world! Take a look at the "lion man" in the first clip…

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There's something beautiful about seeing our primitive ancestors demonstrate creativity. We popularly imagine ancient man to have been a crude savage concerned strictly with the primal needs of survival. Yet no matter how difficult and simple their existence, it seems almost every human group developed some sort of art form.

King Leopold’s Ghost

I just finished reading “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa,” by Adam Hochschild, and I highly recommend it. The book tells the horrific but little-known story of one of the most brutal colonial regimes in history: King Leopold of Belgium’s rule of what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the efforts of some of the world’s first international activists to stop it.

It’s excellently written, providing a detailed background of African civilization, the colonial era, and Western-African interactions and relations. It also introduces a wide variety of true larger-than-life villains and heroes, who are nonetheless treated with nuance and realism. The book is a great balance of scholarly analysis and gripping narrative. Needless to say, however, the subject matter is disturbing and heavy. However, it’s vital for understanding the wider reasons why the Congo, and much of Africa, remain blighted to this day.

Rationally Religious

Jared Diamond, a polymath with a number of professions and specialists, has written a new piece in Salon about religion titled “Jared Diamond: It’s irrational to be religious.” It’s an excerpt from his latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, which I haven’t yet read, but certainly plan to (his most well-known book, and the one that introduced me to him, was Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies).

Diamond, who is an atheist that regards religion as mere superstition, nonetheless raises some fair academic questions about the origins and character of religion – namely, why do religious beliefs take the particular form that they do, and why do they seem so compelling to the majority of the human species?

It’s a question I often ask myself as well, given the universal prevalence of religion even to this day (albeit a prevalence that is both waning and altering in its character). I know that religious people aren’t simply stupid or crazy (at least not all of them, though that could be said of many secularists as well), and that like most human phenomena, there are complex reasons for it.

Diamond’s conclusion, which others have postulated as well, is that religion serves a sociological and psychological purpose: it is a form of bonding through group solidarity, a way of maintaining community and cooperation, which are vital to our survival as a social species.

The more of one’s life is wrapped up with one’s group, the more crucial it is to be able to identify group members correctly and not to be deceived by someone who seeks temporary advantage by claiming to share your ideals but who really doesn’t. If that man carrying a Boston Red Sox banner, whom you had accepted as a fellow Red Sox fan, suddenly cheers when the New York Yankees hit a home run, you’ll find it humiliating but not life-threatening. But if he’s a soldier next to you in the front line and he drops his gun (or turns it on you) when the enemy attacks, your misreading of him may cost you your life.

That’s why religious affiliation involves so many overt displays to demonstrate the sincerity of your commitment: sacrifices of time and resources, enduring of hardships, and other costly displays that I’ll discuss later. One such display might be to espouse some irrational belief that contradicts the evidence of our senses, and that people outside our religion would never believe. If you claim that the founder of your church had been conceived by normal sexual intercourse between his mother and father, anyone else would believe that too, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate your commitment to your church. But if you insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was born of a virgin birth, and nobody has been able to shake you of that irrational belief after many decades of your life, then your fellow believers will feel much more confident that you’ll persist in your belief and can be trusted not to abandon your group.

One thing to add is that such rituals and norms won’t bond you to your group unless 1) you believe that others genuinely believe them and 2) you also sincerely believe.  There’s no genuine sense of bonding if you follow these rituals simply to conform to the social and religious norms around you.

Accounts from “closet atheists” – among whom are clergy – reveal that they continue to publicly conform to these beliefs largely to avoid being ostracized (or worse), but no longer feel any sincere sense of connection or solidarity. Similarly, people will often drop out of their congregation, if not abandon organized religion entirely, largely because they perceive their coreligionists to insincere, due to demonstrations of hypocrisy or duplicity.

Perhaps this also explains (partly at least) why heretics, apostates, blasphemers, and others who don’t toe the religious line are are usually met with repression or even death: they undermine the social cohesion that is so vital for maintaining order (or consolidating the power of ruling elites, whose relationship with organized religion was close, if not intertwined).

Obviously, this religiously-based social cohesion can have beneficial results as well, especially in helping to respond to individual or community tragedies. Religion’s help to maintain the institutional and organizational framework that helps facilitate everything from charity or even job searches (indeed, in many small towns and communities, the church is the center of cultural, political, and economic life). This is why many atheists nonetheless see religions as practical, or at the very least acceptable, even if they don’t agree with them. Of course, the potential for abuse is always there, as history has shown time and again.

Anyway, Diamond goes on to note another key reason for religion’s potency:

Nevertheless, it’s not the case that there are no limits to what can be accepted as a religious supernatural belief. Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer have independently pointed out that actual religious superstitions over the whole world constitute a narrow subset of all the arbitrary random superstitions that one could theoretically invent. To quote Pascal Boyer, there is no religion proclaiming anything like the following tenet: “There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But he exists only on Wednesdays.” Instead, the religious supernatural beings in which we believe are surprisingly similar to humans, animals, or other natural objects, except for having superior powers. . . Hence it doesn’t surprise me that gods in many religions are pictured as smiting evil-doers, but that no religion holds out the dream of existing just on Wednesdays. Thus, religious supernatural beliefs are irrational, but emotionally plausible and satisfying. That’s why they’re so believable, despite at the same time being rationally implausible.

This reminds me of surveys (none of which I could locate at the moment) that asked individuals the reasons they “found” religion after having previously been secular. In most instances, they cited emotional or psychological factors: a traumatic experience, a purported miracle, the need for a sense of purpose or longing, and so on. Indeed, I’ve encountered such motivations through my many engagements with religious believers of all persuasions.

It reminds me of the correlation between high rates of religiosity in a given society, and a higher prevalence of crime, poverty, violence, and other socioeconomic ills. If one looks at the majority of the world’s most prosperous and stable nations, they are relatively more secular than the global average; conversely, nearly all of the world’s most impoverished and politically troubled countries demonstrate higher rates of piety.

This pattern can be seen in the US as well, with the deeply religious states of the “Bible Belt” typically recording far higher rates of crime, poverty, and so on than the more secular states of the Northeast and Northwest. Basically, the parts of the world in which people have less to worry about – in terms of money, civil liberties, personal safety – tend to be less religious. Secularism (and to a lesser extent atheism) rises in conjunction with individual and societal prosperity. There are exceptions of course, and this is merely a trend, not an iron rule. But it’s something to consider.

Obviously, the reasons for human social dysfunction (like that of all of our behavior) are very complex, but this relationship between piety and one’s socioeconomic or psychological conditions – both individually and socially – suggests that religion’s serve some sort of practical role as a source of comfort, purpose, and community (the last of which also gives us comfort). This also helps to explain why religion is so universal in our species, and why religions often alter in conjunction with economic and political developments (for example, more organized and politically developed civilizations tend to have more organized religions).

On a more personal level, this explains why my atheism was more comforting following my adoption of a secular humanist framework. Atheism in itself offers little to nothing to work with – it’s merely the absence of religion, and to have no religion is one thing, but to have no purpose or guiding principles is another. Embracing secular ethics and guidelines – and the growing community of those who share them – has served as my substitute to supernatural religion. It’s not for everyone, but it suits me just fine.