{Culture, politics, religion, global interest, ethics}

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Women in the workplace and the world

A survey of women's global demographic changes: includes this: "Women now comprise an increasing share of the world's labour force---at least one third in all regions except northern Africa and western Asia."

But in status, pay, human rights, decision-making, and the sex trade, women are suffering.

The cities are coming! The cities are coming!

Here's a summary of what we know about global urbanization. A sample:
In 1800, London was the only city in the world with a population of a million people.
The number of cities with 5 million inhabitants or more will pass from 41 in 2000 to 59 in 2015. Among those cities, the number of 'mega-cities' (those with 10 million inhabitants or more) will increase from 19 in 2000 to 23 in 2015.
And a graph showing rural and urban population shifts that you will probably see better by going there yourself:

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The right question

Eric Cohen argues that the question is not, as modern liberalism would have it, What would Terri Schiavo want?
For some, it is an article of faith that individuals should decide for themselves how to be cared for in such cases. And no doubt one response to the Schiavo case will be a renewed call for living wills and advance directives--as if the tragedy here were that Michael Schiavo did not have written proof of Terri's desires. But the real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are.
Cohen doesn't note an important point that I would add. The founders spoke of rights given to us by our Creator as "unalienable," in reaction to the likes of Thomas Hobbes. What does "unalienable" mean? Hobbes saw that if rights are possessions, then there are circumstances under which it can be assumed that we have transfered our rights to the state. But rights aren't possessions in that sense, so they are unalienable, even by our own will.

Monday, March 28, 2005

Suspicious minds

The most religious Americans are more suspicious of Muslims, according to a recent survey.
The Atlantic Online summarizes the relevant part of the report thus:
Jesus taught Christians to "love thy neighbor." According to a recent survey by researchers at Cornell University, however, the more religious the American, the less likely he is to love (or at least trust) his Muslim neighbors. For instance, 42 percent of the highly religious (versus only 15 percent of citizens who are "not very religious") believe that American Muslims should have to register their whereabouts with the government; 34 percent (versus 13 percent) say that U.S. mosques should be monitored; and 40 percent (versus 19 percent) look favorably on government infiltration of Islamic civic and volunteer organizations. The highly religious are also more distrustful the more attention they pay to TV news. While it's true that all the 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, none of them were Americans. So why do the religious mistrust American Muslims? The survey contains a hint: 65 percent of "highly religious" Americans believe that Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence.
The results of the survey can be interpreted in more than one way. This editor at the Atlantic Online attributes these suspicions to ignorant prejudice and hypocrisy. Christians are, of course, just demonstrating what everyone knows about Christians since the Crusades, 1492, Servetus and all that. And as for hypocrisy, well, it's a given.

Hmmm. In the general population "the most religious" generally take religious differences most seriously. The non-religious, especially the militantly secular, sometimes sees all religions as equally suspect and susceptible to blind prejudice and dangerous fanaticism. Many in the secular media have more worries about Christians than Muslims because, well, they just do. They tend to overlook incidents such as that unfortunate series of events preceding the Crusades, the first widespread encounter between Christianity and Islam, when Islam first offered to direct the future course of Europe. (The offer was declined.) And they tend to overlook a certain statistical pattern connecting religion and terrorism today. Could it be that there are actual reasons for suspicion? The survey does not indicate whether the most religious actually know more than the non-religious about the history and beliefs of Islam. Nor does it take a position on that history and belief system, but just ignores that what the peerless Islamologist Bernard Lewis has called Islam's "bloody borders."

But, on the other hand, American Muslims don't have a record of violence in their short history.

So the reaction of "the most religious" to their Muslim neighbors could be based in ignorant prejudice and hypocrisy, or in knowledgeable prejudice, or in some combination of the two.

The same could be true of the reaction of the Atlantic.

Sunday, March 27, 2005

It's never too late to fail...

but this piece in The American Enterprise on the post-Iraq War impact is encouraging.