University of Wisconsin, Parkside
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Created: December 1998
Latest update: August 28, 2009
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Welcome to our ongoing forum, journal, discussion, blog, whatever identity is current this week. Like the world around us, we're trying to assimilate and share the information that bombards us daily as we all try to make sense of this world, and, perhaps even more importantly, figure out what we as individuals can actually do to maintain some sense of empowerment as individuals seek to co-exist in communities that seem to grow and change with lightning speed.

In these times of great change on both a global and local level, the community must become a focus of support, empowerment, and collaborative work in adapting to the challenges of the 21st Century. Long ago tribal cohesiveness (or the tyranny of feudalism) nurtured the local community. And creative individuals who sought the freedom to take risks and seek new knowledge and paths were held back by community consensus (or sovereign rule) on just how much change how fast was acceptable. Today technology and the accumulation of knowledge (and I'm tempted to add "anti-knowledge") leave many of us searching in vain for the tradition and culture that once anchored us to our human community.

I barely manage to learn a new software program before a new version makes me start anew. In the blink of an eye I am behind, no longer current. Just as I am secure in the knowledge and understanding that the world is flat, astrophysicists question that, not in the immediate sense of our planetary system revolving around the sun, but in the sense that the whole universe may be flat, with other universes located on different planes, so that gravity, but only gravity, can slip right over the edge of the plane on which we exist. And all this to explain why gravity is a weaker force than the physics we know would seem to predict.

Now imagine the frustrations of the astrophysicists if we tried to slow them down to traditions and cultures that might anchor us ordinary folks in the chaos of today's world. The 21st Century is a time of multiverses and multiculturalism. . "String theory" and "singularity" (Cosmological Singularity and the Creation of the Universe) are as likely to pop up in our news sources (on paper or in the ever-expanding electronic media) as is the more welcome just plain English of common sense.

Dear Habermas was named, some ten years ago, after one of the great 20th Century thinkers, Jürgen Habermas, who has spent a lifetime theorizing the hope that one day we can all live together without violence, without exploitation, without imperialism, in a democracy legitimized by a system of law. The "DEAR Habermas" (as in "Dear Abby's" advice column) is our disclaimer to any knowledge of how Habermas himself would answer the questions our students and fellow thinkers tend to ask: "What would Habermas say about . . . " This is not a site on explicating and criticizing the philosophy of Habermas to further new theoretical positions. This is a site for those who, like ourselves and our students, seek a broad understanding of the major conceptual orientations of many thinkers, like Habermas, to develop a manageable framework of theory, methods, and praxis that will guide us as we read the texts of daily events and governance issues in our lives.

We believe that humans, like most living creatures, prefer empowerment to control by some authority. (Tale of the white-footed mice.) When we feel that there is nothing we as individuals can DO about the issues we face, we tend to focus on our own daily lives and view the world as way beyond our control and concern. (The Serenity Prayer) What can we as individuals DO about health care, about the growing disregard of some "corporatist" doctrines to the enormous wealth gap being created between rich and poor, to "cheap" labor and unlimited and unaccountable "profit," to violence and crime at all levels of society, to the unspeakable neglect of education and little understanding of the changing role education is playing in our lives, from early schooling to professional performance, to aging gracefully and pleasureably.

Though it is broadly unclear what we can DO about these issues, it is nonetheless true that we are passionate about most of them. They matter greatly in our lives and in the lives of our children and nation-states. Habermas places great hope in the law and in reason to guide us in merging our differences into some common good that would allow us to live together without killing one another. Bakhtin, in his search for what the Other might ansrwer, urged the importance of considering the Other before and as we speak. Such consideration requires understanding the Other's while honoring and respecting our uniqueness as humans.

We try in good faith to provide access to textual and visual material across disciplines that will clarify many perspectives of the issues we face, for critical thought is our goal, not the profession of any given position. Virtual publication permits us to leap temporal and spatial barriers, and our commitment to answerability fosters our efforts to expand this into a forum. Our interpretation is that good faith demands that we share our collective reasoning skills (editing, theoretical references, interpretive skills) with those who are trying to present their own validity claim. Bakhtin's answerability means to us that we make a good faith effort to understand the position of the Other, not that we agree with the Other's position. Pia Lara, in one feminist approach to Habermas' theory, emphasizes the essential importance of this cooperative effort to reach mutual understandings (illocutionary discourse) in negotiated consensual governance. Thus, we remind our readers that our efforts to introduce brief summaries of theoretical and methodological knowledge is in the nature of providing factual information, one component of governance discourse. Beliefs and emotional responses to these facts, as they appear in different knowledge systems, are irrevocably colored by beliefs and feelings. Even the facts, as we present them, to the best of our knowledge, are limited by the ability of humans to observe neutrally a world of which they are a part.

We cannot claim expertise in all of the many disciplines to which we allude in our discussions. You will need to delve further into the resource links and texts we and others proffer for such expertise. We invite others with greater expertise to enter the dialog and expand our collective knowledge. We are opposed to what we call the "arrogance of knowingness," (Lear and Fellman) the certitude that the bit of liberal arts and/or science knowledge to which we have been exposed provides "a right answer" to any of the issues that really matter in our lives today.

This is a learning forum, for dialog with our students at two State Universities, and with the community at large. The priniciple on which the site is founded is that we humans are curious, creative, competent creatures who choose to recognize and honor our interdependence with one another and with the infrastructure in which we are situated. We incessantly search for new and exciting discoveries to live a good life that harms no others, either presently or inadvertently in the future, and that concedes room for creativity, sensitivity and social justice. We believe that liberal arts learning furthers those interests and that a forum such as this enables that learning to take its rightful place in academic and scholarly dialog and with honor, amongst academy texts and out there, in the community to which we belong, and which we serve.

We believe that both the individual and the communal collective are free to follow creative paths and are accountable for their actions to Others who are affected by their decisions. And we believe that today the communal collective extends beyond our nation-states to the entire globe. We also believe that the discipline of sociology has strong roots in philosophy and aesthetics, and that those roots offer an opportunity to fruitfully merge the separate micro and macro perspectives that have permitted the arrogance of "knowingness" and "objectivity" to overshadow the humility appropriate to the ambiguity of knowledge, as reflected by the limits to human knowing.

All are welcome to this forum, for inclusion is one of the paths to participation and legitimacy for all. In our discussions we try to follow Bakhtin's priniciple of answerability in our belief that everyone has an interest in these issues, and that our mission is to try to understand the different perspectives.

 

Range of Online News Resources for Issues on the Site

• Newspapers: Labeling here is based on an article by Ashley K. Vroman on the impossiibility of labeling newspapers by ideology. I personally go along with the conclusion of the conservative Media Research Center's L. Brent Bozell III: if the paper never met a conservative cause it didn't like, it's conservative, and if it never met a liberal cause it didn't like, it's liberal. But then, what about the Wall Street Journal whose news staff is considered liberal and its editorial staff considered conservative? jeanne

  Liberal Newspapers:

  New York Times - Los Angeles Times - The Washington Post
  The Boston Globe - The Chicago Tribune

  Conservative Newspapers:

  The Wall Street Journal - The Washington Times - The New York Post
  Manchester (N.H.) UnionLeader - The Oklahoman

   

   

   

  Dictionary, PolitiFact.com, and Google - (Ctrl End)

• Farlex Free Online Dictionary:

  	Online Reference Dictionary, Encyclopedia & More
  Word:
  Look in:	Dictionary & thesaurus Medical Dictionary Legal Dictionary Financial Dictionary Acronyms Idioms Encyclopedia Wikipedia Spanish Dictionary German Dictionary French Dictionary Italian Dictionary Periodicals Literature
  by:	WordStarts withEnds withMentions

  PolitiFact.com - Tries to give balanced opinion of facts expressed in politics as to their truth value.

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