[Liminal] is a term that comes from the study of ritual, given to the middle phase of a right of passage: the preliminaries are over, you have shed the skin of an old reality, but not yet acquired the new skin that would allow you to return to the everyday world. The liminal is the space of the threshold, with all the vulnerability and potential of transition: the costliness of letting go, with no guarantee of what will come after. The liminal phase of a ritual is the moment of greatest danger – or rather, ritual is a safety apparatus built around the liminal. Whichever, the liminal is where the work gets done, where the change happens.
Top of my reading list from this week:
- Pope Francis, A Crisis Reveals What Is in Our Hearts
- Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference
- Elizabeth Bruenig, Forgive Us Our Debts
Excerpts from those three pieces plus a few others worth reading follow below.
Pope Francis, A Crisis Reveals What Is in Our Hearts
Sometimes, when you think globally, you can be paralyzed: There are so many places of apparently ceaseless conflict; there’s so much suffering and need. I find it helps to focus on concrete situations: You see faces looking for life and love in the reality of each person, of each people. You see hope written in the story of every nation, glorious because it’s a story of daily struggle, of lives broken in self-sacrifice. So rather than overwhelm you, it invites you to ponder and to respond with hope.
These are moments in life that can be ripe for change and conversion. Each of us has had our own “stoppage,” or if we haven’t yet, we will someday: illness, the failure of a marriage or a business, some great disappointment or betrayal. As in the Covid-19 lockdown, those moments generate a tension, a crisis that reveals what is in our hearts….
Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of what is good for individuals. It means having a regard for all citizens and seeking to respond effectively to the needs of the least fortunate.
It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything….
If we are to come out of this crisis less selfish than when we went in, we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain. There’s a line in Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Hyperion” that speaks to me, about how the danger that threatens in a crisis is never total; there’s always a way out: “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” That’s the genius in the human story: There’s always a way to escape destruction. Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself; that’s where the door opens.
This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities — what we value, what we want, what we seek — and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.
Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference
The International Encyclopedia of Philosophy boils [standpoint epistemology] down to three innocuous-sounding contentions:
1) Knowledge is socially situated
2) Marginalized people have some positional advantages in gaining some forms of knowledge
3) Research programs ought to reflect these facts.
[…]
To say what’s wrong with the popular, deferential applications of standpoint epistemology, we need to understand what makes it popular. A number of cynical answers present themselves: some (especially the more socially advantaged) don’t genuinely want social change – they just want the appearance of it. Alternatively, deference to figures from oppressed communities is a performance that sanitizes, apologizes for, or simply distracts from the fact that the deferrer has enough “in the room” privilege for their “lifting up” of a perspective to be of consequence.
I suspect there is some truth to these views, but I am unsatisfied….
Deference epistemology marks itself as a solution to an epistemic and political problem. But not only does it fail to solve these problems, it adds new ones. One might think questions of justice ought to be primarily concerned with fixing disparities around health care, working conditions, and basic material and interpersonal security. Yet conversations about justice have come to be shaped by people who have ever more specific practical advice about fixing the distribution of attention and conversational power. Deference practices that serve attention-focused campaigns (e.g. we’ve read too many white men, let’s now read some people of colour) can fail on their own highly questionable terms: attention to spokespeople from marginalized groups could, for example, direct attention away from the need to change the social system that marginalizes them.
Elizabeth Bruenig, Forgive Us Our Debts
RIP Medical Debt [is] a charitable organization founded in 2014 by two former debt collection executives, Craig Antico and Jerry Ashton. It uses donations to buy portfolios of medical debt at a fraction of their value — and then forgives it…
In 2019, the [Kaiser Family Foundation] found that 26 percent of adults have either struggled to pay medical bills or live with someone who has. Unpaid medical bills become medical debt, which destroys credit ratings, attracts harassment from collections agencies and postpones or precludes important purchases, including additional care.
In just societies, these debts do not exist. But in our society, charity must stand in for justice so long as the latter is in short supply…
Partners of RIP Medical Debt need not raise the actual amount of money they intend to relieve in debt, because the price of debt reflects what collectors could recover — far less than is owed. That means a buyer can eliminate the debt for much less money than the debtor could.
A recent campaign led by the [United Church of Christ] abolished more than $26 million in medical debt throughout New England, and the church plans to expand efforts to include the entire country.
Related links:
- RIP Medical Debt
- UCC members, church bodies abolish $26.2 million in medical debt for New Englanders and first responders
Also Worth Reading
Mike the Mad Biologist, Prosecute Those Around Trump
For justice to have a deterrent effect, it must target his enablers. That is, many of the people who supported Trump supported him through illegal actions, and they must be punished for doing so… This isn’t about vengeance… but ensuring that well-off powerful people who gain governing power don’t misuse it.
Matthew Niederhuber, The Fight Over Inoculation During the 1721 Boston Smallpox Epidemic
On a November day in 1721, a small bomb was hurled through the window of a local Boston Reverend named Cotton Mather. Attached to the explosive, which fortunately did not detonate, was the message: “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you! I’ll inoculate you with this; with a pox to you.’’ This was not a religiously motivated act of terrorism, but a violent response to Reverend Mather’s active promotion of smallpox inoculation. The smallpox epidemic that struck Boston in 1721 was one of the most deadly of the century in colonial America, but was also the catalyst for the first major application of preventative inoculation in the colonies. The use of inoculation laid the foundation for the modern techniques of infectious diseases prevention, and the contentious public debate that accompanied the introduction of this poorly understood medical technology has surprising similarities to contemporary misunderstandings over vaccination.
Arwin Rimmer, Is the Phosphine Biosignature on Venus a Calibration Error?
The Principal Investigator and her team should be commended for their openness and willingness to share their data. Honestly, scientists talk a lot about openness but few walk the talk. She and her colleagues did. More of us scientists should follow their example. Anyhow, it’s a letdown to find a calibration error. It would have been pretty exciting if the results had held up.
Jane Greaves (Cardiff University) and colleagues published the possible discovery of phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus. The study garnered a lot of media attention because on Earth the molecule is a biosignature associated solely with life. At the very least, the sighting indicated that some unexpected chemistry was taking place…
Greaves’s team released their calculations, models, and methods to the public immediately upon publication, so that other astronomers could vet the find. Greaves’ willingness to expose the study to scrutiny brought a large amount of attention to the observatories involved. That in turn led [Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)] staff to find a problem with the data, specifically with the way Jupiter’s moon Calisto is used for the Venus calibration…
Looking for something barely visible (the phosphine absorption line) inside a large, bright, nearby object (Venus) creates large uncertainties with the interpretation of the subsequent data. It’s possible to see things that aren’t there, in the same way that looking at a bright light causes afterimages when your eyes are closed.
“ALMA told us, ‘we’ve never tried to push the limits of getting a faint line in this way before,’” Greaves says. “So it was a risk. And obviously I’m not comfortable with finding out the drawbacks afterwards. But we did want the community to look at it and that’s what they have done.”
Ending on a Positive Note
Karen Brown, A Bridge, Dating To 1800s, Goes Down In A Storm. It Takes A Village To Restore It
A walking bridge in western Massachusetts was badly damaged in an autumn storm, but the town doesn’t own the land under it. So residents have banded together to take on the project — for its practical and historical value.
André Vieira, Snapshots of Daily Life in a Remote Region of Portugal
The Barroso, in northern Portugal, is part of the historical province of Trás os Montes — “behind the hills,” in Old Portuguese. It’s one of the nation’s most isolated areas, known for its harsh climate, rough terrain and stunning beauty. Its residents are sometimes dismissively (and wrongly) portrayed as simple and unsophisticated. The truth is that their profound attachment to their land and traditions makes Trás os Montes one of the most culturally unique parts of the country.
Isolation has made the traditions here particularly rich and diverse. Ancient Catholic rites have combined with the cultural vestiges from the many other peoples who, over several centuries, have found their way to the region: Visigoths, Celts, Romans, the soldiers of Napoleon’s army.