Tag Archives: United States

Of races and other castes

08 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by in Family, Modern Hinduism, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

While studying development sociology at Cornell in my early twenties, I took a trip to see my Marathi family in India. I was pleasantly sipping tea with older relatives whom my father was making conversation with.

“One of Amod’s colleagues in his graduate program is Marathi,” he said. The family members nodded appreciatively and expressed their approval.

“And her name is Rukmini,” he added. The family nodded appreciatively again. “Ah! Rukmini! Very nice.”

Wanting to add to the conversation, I chimed in: “Yes, Rukmini Potdar.”

Suddenly the tone in the room took a dramatic shift. “Oh, Potdar,” one of them spat as they all rolled their eyes and shook their heads. I looked around in bewilderment – what was so wrong with being called Potdar? – but no further explanation came up. The conversation just moved on to different topics.

After we left, I turned to my father. “What happened there?” I asked him. Rukmini was a perfectly nice person and Potdar seemed to me a perfectly nice name. What did they have to object to?

“Well,” he said, “Rukmini is a nice old-fashioned Marathi name, so they appreciated that. But Potdar is a Bania name.”

I had stumbled into the world of modern Indian caste prejudice.

Continue reading →

On knowing how hard BIPOC faculty have it

27 Sunday Aug 2023

Posted by in Compassion, Politics, Work

≈ Comments Off on On knowing how hard BIPOC faculty have it

Tags

, , , , ,

In a recent piece in the Atlantic, the Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper records an exchange both ordinary and extraordinary, between himself and a white woman he met waiting to register at an academic conference:

At some point, we began talking about our jobs. She told me that—like so many academics—she was juggling a temporary teaching gig while also looking for a tenure-track position.

“It’s hard,” she said, “too many classes, too many students, too many papers to grade. No time for your own work. Barely any time to apply to real jobs.”

When I nodded sympathetically, she asked about my job and whether it was tenure-track. I admitted, a little sheepishly, that it was.

“I’d love to teach at a small college like that,” she said. “I feel like none of my students wants to learn. It’s exhausting.”

Then, out of nowhere, she said something that caught me completely off guard: “But I shouldn’t be complaining to you about this. I know how hard BIPOC faculty have it. You’re the last person I should be whining to.”

It is the idea expressed in the temporary academic’s latter remark that is both ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary in that the idea is quite frequently and commonly expressed in academic and other educated American circles. Extraordinary in that it is completely cuckoo bananas.

Continue reading →

Defending half-elves and half-Asians

13 Sunday Aug 2023

Posted by in Play, Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Since the game began in the 1970s, Dungeons & Dragons players have always had the option of creating characters in various Tolkienesque nonhuman (“demi-human”) varieties like elves, dwarves and orcs, each with different kinds of abilities in the game. The term that the game has always used for these varieties has been “races”. Circa 1980 few people worried about any unfortunate implications of that approach, though there’s reason to think Tolkien’s “races” were tied to racist views.

Also since the old days, players have had the options to play half-elves and half-orcs: characters with one human parent and one elvish or orcish parent. One implication is that these different “races” were not different species, since they can interbreed. The existence of half-elves and half-orcs was a boon for those of us growing up with D&D who happen to be descended from two different “races” in the real world. I read Weis and Hickman’s Dragonlance novels while spending long childhood trips in India, and identified with the character Tanis Half-Elven who similarly found himself an awkward fit in at least one of his ancestral lands.

So I’m alarmed that Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns D&D, apparently plans to remove half-elves and half-orcs from the game – and this on the grounds that it’s “inherently racist” to have them in there. As you might imagine, the issues presented by this decision go well beyond role-playing games.

Continue reading →

Stoicism for boys, mindfulness for girls?

26 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in External Goods, Gentleness, Meditation, Mindfulness, Modernized Buddhism, Patient Endurance, Serenity, Stoicism

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

The contemporary world is not a particularly philosophical place, the United States even less so. Philosophy’s reputation can be low enough to make it a convenient whipping boy, as when politicians join in a pile-on on it. So it’s a wonderful surprise when a philosophical tradition becomes a trend.

Such is the recent rise of popular Stoicism in the past decade. While it’s particularly influential in Silicon Valley, the modern Stoic movement is popular around the world, with conventions on multiple continents. Stoicism’s message that external goods are not what makes the difference to living well proved a particularly important consolation during the pandemic, when sales of the works of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius surged.

Now a common observation about the newly popular Stoicism is that it appeals primarily to men. I’ve often heard its practitioners dismissed as “tech bros”. An interview by Skye Cleary observed that Stoicon attenders were primarily men, and took this as an occasion for criticism: little surprise, perhaps, in an era that rarely uses the noun “masculinity” without attaching the adjective “toxic”.

Continue reading →

A very brief survey of Latin American philosophy

12 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in African Thought, Indigenous American Thought, Metaphilosophy, Place, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Western Thought

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When one aspires to love all wisdom, one should look for it worldwide – and that task is not easy. Typically, when we philosophers look outside the West, we look above all to Asia. But within the West (at least after the fall of the Roman Empire), we also tend to narrow our focus to the United States and Western Europe, with occasional bones tossed to Canada and Australia. And there’s a lot we miss when we do.

Like Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Latin America is largely a Western culture, even if it has been on the periphery of the West’s overall attention. (Latin America and Eastern Europe each pay more attention to the USA and Western Europe than they pay to each other.) Like Africa, it is a continent-sized region of the world that gets much less philosophical attention than does Asia. Two years ago I gave African philosophy a survey post here – still less than it deserves – but have not yet done the same for Latin America. I’d like to fix that now.

Continue reading →

King’s improvement on Gandhi

15 Sunday Jan 2023

Posted by in Economics, Jainism, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Protestantism

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Tomorrow the United States celebrates a holiday in honour of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston University, where I work, is always eager to remind everyone that King got his doctorate there. They are not always as eager to remind you that King studied at the School of Theology – and clearly learned his lessons there well, for he was not merely a great activist but a great philosopher.

I have come to know King’s thought through the courses I have taught in BU’s philosophy department – even though the courses were on Indian philosophy. I have nevertheless included King on the syllabus for that class, with guest speakers introducing him to the students, because I wanted to show students the contemporary relevance of Indian philosophy. Specifically, King drew a great deal of his ideas from Gandhi – who was a philosopher-activist like King, and in turn drew on earlier Indian thought like Jainism and the Bhagavad Gītā. It seems to me on reflection, though, that the student surpassed the teacher: that what King said and wrote with Gandhi’s influence was profounder and more valuable than Gandhi’s own thought was in itself.

Martin Luther King Jr.
Continue reading →

Introducing Canadian Hegelianism

04 Sunday Dec 2022

Posted by in German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Politics

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hegel wrote about Canada just once, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and what he said comes down to: mostly harmless. His main concern in that passage is the future power of the United States; having noted that the poor organization of the American colonies prevented them from conquering Canada, he then adds that Canada and Mexico “present no serious threat” to the US, and then moves on. It is scarcely more consideration than Voltaire’s dismissal of Canada as “a few acres of snow”; like the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy discussing Earth, Hegel pauses on Canada only long enough to say “you don’t need to worry about it.”

And yet, as Robert Sibley notes in beginning his fascinating Northern Spirits, English Canadian philosophers have had a deep, abiding and continuing interest in Hegel, unrequited as it may be – an interest not generally shared by other countries in the anglophone West. Canadian Hegelianism turns out to be its own philosophical tradition – one that’s played a significant role in my own philosophical formation. It is only in the 21st century that people like Sibley have started writing about this Canadian Hegelianism, but it’s been around for longer.

Continue reading →

On getting a religious exemption

11 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by in Indigenous American Thought, M.T.S.R., Politics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

Longtime readers will know I don’t have much patience for the concept of “religion”. I continue to endorse the various critiques I’ve made in the past: the concept of “religion” confuses more than it clarifies. And yet as it turns out, I owe the concept of “religion” a favour.

What do I mean by that? I mean that I recently got a valuable and important opportunity which I don’t think I could have undertaken if the concept of “religion” didn’t exist.

Continue reading →

The 1502 project

03 Sunday Jul 2022

Posted by in Place, Politics

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

Who was the first person of African descent – the first black person – to set foot in the Americas? In what capacity did that person come, and when?

If you have been in the United States or otherwise following American debates in the past few years, you might call to mind the 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones at the New York Times, which aims to tell an “alternate origin story” for the United States, focused on African-Americans. That story begins in 1619 with the arrival of African-descended slaves in the colony of Virginia. So you might think that the first black people in the Americas, or at least in the United States, were these slaves who arrived in 1619.

You would be wrong.

Continue reading →

Whither blogging?

27 Sunday Feb 2022

Posted by in Blog Admin, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

At the beginning of Love of All Wisdom’s tenth-anniversary post, I wrote: “In the span of the history of philosophy, ten years is the blink of an eye. In the span of the blogosphere, however, ten years is an eternity.” Immediately after the post went up, a thought occurred to me, which would probably have made that point even more effectively. Namely: does anyone even say “blogosphere” anymore?

Continue reading →