text:
» Евлампиев И.И.
Petersburg, Moscow, Rome: Intertwining Metropolitan Myth
Евлампиев И.И. Petersburg, Moscow, Rome: Intertwining Metropolitan Myth
(The City As A Meaning-Generating Center of Culture)
The city is not just a habitat for humans. A far more complicated social and ideological phenomenon, the city, especially the metropolitan one, conveys most essential characteristics of the national culture, comprising the traditions, the mores, the habits of its inhabitants. As such, the urban environment is a way of transforming the national culture or, in a wider sweep, the national Weltschaaung, into actual forms of living through which a formation of new generations is being carried out. The culture shaped so into the phenomenon of a city is thereby endowed with a translation from one generation into another. And the city (as opposed to the country) attracts, for most time (except, perhaps, for some crisis periods) the «best and the brightest» of the nation. In this respect, especially significant is the role of a metropolis, most often capitals but not necessary, as Saint Petersburg in Russia, Uppsala in Sweden or New York City, if not in America then at least in the land of those with an incurable crush on the «Big Apple».
By morphing the national culture into modus vivendi, the city turns out to be in rather complex relations with the culture as a spiritual and material entity. This notwithstanding, one may discern two opposite roles of a city within the culture which correspond to the predominance of one or another of the above-mentioned functions of a city. Thus, the preponderance of the «translation» function, i.e. the function of preserving the ethos, may well eventually lead to what is called a traditionalism, stick to the inherited and short on innovation, especially from outside. Most often such a role is performed by smaller, provincial towns, used to withstand the «metropolitan model» intruding. While on the contrary, metropolitan cities are playing the role of the «locomotives» of cultural development, the aspects of creativity and innovation prevailing over just a translation of the ethos 1.
Naturally, the bigger is the city's role within the nation's culture, the stronger is the aspiration towards finding out the purport of and grounds for the city's singularity, for a special, if not a leading, position in the culture as a whole or at least in some niche of it.
It is the myth of a city that provides a conceptual framework for this aspiration, setting up some space of meanings, at once conveying and interpreting most essential constituents of the city's history, architecture, mores. Referring to this conceptual framework as a myth is justified by its being shaped up «anonymously» within the collective consciousness of the city's inhabitants. At the early stages of its development, the myth of a city just embraces some grassroots, by definition motley, notions of the townsfolk about the predestination and fate of the city and its inhabitants. However, the myth of a city may well become an overt part of the nation's ideological buildup that the powers that be would use for achieving certain political goals.
In general, the problem of tracing back the origins and process of how the mythology of a city is taking shape seems to be very difficult. Thus, we'll be dwelling at length on only one but rather characteristic issue: the essential meanings of the myths of Moscow and Saint Petersburg and the elucidation of the role of these two cities in the culture of Russian. For that, it is just inevitable to conjure up the myth of yet another metropolis - Ancient Rome. The whole point is that the making the most of the image of the «Eternal City» had been of greatest importance in the shaping of the myth of Moscow.
After the fall of Constantinople (1453), the capital of the Christendom, the «Second Rome», continuing as the successor of Rome for almost a millennium, the Czardom of Moscow remained the only Orthodox power. In the wake of that, the Russian monk of obscure origin Philopheus advanced up as early as in the 16th century the famous motto «Moscow is the third Rome». In an eschatological conception of Philopheus, the Russian people was the last Christian people chosen by God and Moscow as the capital of a young Russian autocracy was to become the center of the Christendom at the very last stage of human history. Later this motto served as an ideological and theological basis during the epoch of Boris Godunov, Czar of Russia (1598-1605), for establishing the rule of a Russian patriarch, independent from the bishop of Constantinople, still the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church. «Moscow is the third home» paradigm had become a cornerstone of the myth of Moscow to be completed in the period followed the victory of Russia and its allies over Napoleon in 1814. Flushed with its success, Russia had been experiencing at that period an unprecedented uplift of self-consciousness. Within the myth of Moscow, two constituents are clearly discernible. The former is the imperial idea consisting in a conviction that Europe should be united under the predominance of Russia with Moscow as the center of a New Order, while the latter is the religious idea: this unification was meant as a victory of the Russian Orthodoxy over all sorts of «infidel» religious belief, for one thing, and as a supremacy of the Russian Orthodoxy in all the issues of ideology and culture.
These two most important constituents of the myth of Moscow came to be mingled in a rather bizarre way with yet another trait of Moscow's «self-consciousness»: the conception of the naturalness of this city, its thrownness into the Nature. This conception is partially responsible for what that, being the capital of a vast and wealthy state, Moscow had looked for so long as a «big village» with neither a general layout nor prominent features of a metropolis (straight broad avenues, large stone structures, developed means of communication).
By contrast to Moscow, Saint Petersburg is a comparatively young city to have emerged in a very brief period of time, according to a general plan, worked out up to the then most advanced city layout's canons. Built under the orders of Peter the Great on a swamp (in defiance of the old Russian tradition), hardly suitable for a normal living, Petersburg comes up within the context of the myth of Moscow, not surprisingly, as intentionally artificial, hostile to the Nature and, as a consequence thereof, doomed 2.
Within the context of the myth of Saint Petersburg, the opposition between the old and new capitals of Russia is also clearly articulated. Here, in turn, Moscow seems to be doomed at least to a cultural fading out due to its self-imposed isolation from European culture 3. On a more positive side, both the myths share, as the most essential part of them, the imperial idea - the concept of Russia as a great European power. However, in the case of Petersburg, this idea was devoid of any religious background. This reflects a dramatic shift of the Russian imperial idea from an orthodox faith in the supremacy of the Russian Orthodox faith over all other ones to an all worldly, all embracing sweep. This shift happened by (the Schism as a result of Patriarch Nikon's reforming in the 17th century) and especially during the times of Peter the Great. The Schism came to reveal the «crisis of the Russian messianic idea» 4 on a whole, downright undermining the idea of Moscow's being the third Rome as a capital of a true Orthodox faith. Peter the Great just institutionalized this shift in the further secularization of Russian autocracy, stressing out the aspects of cultural and military supremacy instead of religious one.
From the very birth, Saint Petersburg was conceived by his founder as an European crossroads (recall Alexander Pushkin's line from the Introduction to «The Bronze Horseman: A Tale of Petersburg» (1833): «We'll be hosting every flag»), as a place where a synthesis of all cultures, all traditions all religions being possible, where the embracing of whatever most significant in European civilization being underway.
Thus, during the 18th and 19th centuries, Saint Petersburg and Moscow determined the opposite trends in the development of Russian culture. By and large, Moscow set a trend for Russia's isolationism implied by its refutation of the West, with the Slavophiles (A. Khomyakov, I. Kireyevsky, K. Aksakov, to name just a few) as the ideologues of this trend. Whereas Petersburg urged Russia to integrate into a one European civilization by assimilating and developing Western culture. It was F. Dostoyevsky who pronounced this most ecstatically in his famous «Speech on Pushkin» (1880). According to him, «universal responsiveness» as an intrinsic ability of incorporating other cultural patterns is the most inherent characteristic of Russian culture and of the Russian national character.
In order to grasps understand and evaluate more deeply and more faithfully these trends, a deeper analysis of Russian culture is needed. For that, we apply to a typology of culture, proposed in our earlier paper 5.
Underlying this typology lies a hypothesis that any culture, in the very essence of it, is a form of the synthesizing of two metaphysical poles which may be referred to, rather conventionally, as the spheres of the «Eternity» and the sphere of the «Temporality». The former is a sphere of absolute, ultimate values, as epitomized by religion. The latter is a sphere of the historical reality of our being, of our transitory, instantaneous being to be destroyed by the irrational flow of time.
All the history of human culture is evolving through ages as yet more and more profound and fruitful synthesizing of these two poles. The Ancient World culture could proceed this synthesis only in a most superficial form. Thus, at the early stages of humankind's development the following two polar types of culture prevailed: the culture of the «temporality» type and the culture of the «eternity» type, corresponding to the priority of either pole. A singular example of the latter type the Ancient Egypt culture delivers. Featuring the dominance of religious background, of constancy and selfsameness of cultural patterns, this culture conveys exclusively the idea of the existent eternity, viewing through the prism of it the ephemeral being of a mere mortal as senseless.
The culture of the opposite type, i.e. of «temporality», is much harder to identify. Being immersed entirely in its historical time, such culture is rich in sensual concreteness, intricate grace and vitality but devoid of this internal force that strikes most in a culture - the force of an abyss yawned, of the Eternity opened up. Most likely, it is a culture of this enigmatic burgeoning type that the mysterious Cretan (Minoan) civilization flourishing in Crete and on some islands in the Aegean Sea during the advanced Bronze Age, had engendered. The characteristic features of this culture shows the top priority of its «temporal» constituents: the scarity of special sites of worship that speaks about a minor role of religious and mythological background, preponderance of playful forms of culture (music, dancing, sports events), an endemic cult of women, emphasizing physical love, and so forth. «The Cretan art, - writes B.R. Vipper, - appeals for neither the mind nor the will of an observer but for one's emotions and moods»6. A lack of rigid canons and strict traditions, a bias towards the «momentous» were conducive to what just few monuments of this civilization have remained, ornamental effects and genres prevailing in its art.
These polar types of culture are devoid of authentic history that comes to emerge only once some balance of the metaphysical poles is achieved. In the history of humankind, it is Ancient Greece, especially in its «classical» period, that seems to be the first to have achieved such a balance, thus bringing forth quite a unique pattern of «harmonious» culture. Therein lies the true origin of European cultural tradition on a whole, adherent to the principle of the most organic synthesizing of the Temporality and the Eternity 7. By contrast, most cultures of Asian Orient are still bending to the «Eternity» type, whereas African culture on a whole - to the «temporality» one.
However, in a seemingly paradoxical way, supreme Harmony and sublime perfection often come to display a certain metaphysical shallowness of culture. Thus, Old Greek culture could not penetrate into the essence of the Eternity so deeply that the vision of it would have amazed them to the same extent as Old Egyptians were. But this comparative hollowness had become a basis of their superiority, letting incarnate the vision of the Absolute into a historical being and, thereby, give an incontestable pattern of culture in its authentic self-expression.
Most important, in our view, is to state the existence of yet another type of culture, in a sense, opposite to the «harmonious» (Ancient Greek) culture but, at the same time, very distant from the polarized types of «temporality» and «eternity» ones. This type of culture is notable for a deep penetration into the sphere of the Eternity, though without diminishing the significance of the polar sphere, making thereby our sense of belonging to the temporal order of being even more acute and intensive. Such culture may be called, for lack of a better adjective, «dissonant»: while opening up both the poles of Being to the utmost extent, this is unable to synthesize them into a harmonious, self-sufficient Weltanschaung of an epoch through «calming down» its contradictions. Doomed to the fate of perennial restlessness intrinsic discords, and ultimate tension beyond the edge of clear conscience, such culture, thus, most often finds expression not in genuine and completed works but in an obscure gust to be realized only in an expansionist drive, a seizure of either other terrains or cultures.
Pretty close to this type was the culture of Ancient Rome. Here we encounter a wondrous nigh singular for the Antiquity, feeling of fluidity, of the transiency of human conditions of the uniqueness of the individual (as incarnated in either portrait sculpture or lyrics). What we have come to know about the «Eternal City» provides a strong evidence for this statement. Take this thirst for sensual, irrational emotions, as the Romans were experiencing at fierce festivities, for one thing, or their cult of domestic oven (the Lares and the Penates, tutelary deities of the home and of the state). At the same time, the opposite pole was also clearly seen in an incessant drive of the Roman spirit to conquer the entire world.
In general, any «dissonant» culture has a clear choice: to achieve at least some external juxtaposing of its metaphysical poles or to die out. In the case of Ancient Rome, it is the imperial idea that had become a consolidating force, pushing into the background more organic, «inner» forms of unifying its culture. The main intention of the Roman spirit shaped out into the tenet of outward expansion, of the building up an «absolute» State in an attempt to link its vision of the Eternity with its adherence to the irrational flow of time.
But for all its internal contradictoriness, the dissonant culture possesses one intrinsic advantage over the tempered one: while embracing other cultures in the process of outward expansion, it is apt to assimilate them deeply, thereby gaining a footing for «harmonizing» its internal gust. Ditto for Rome. On conquering Greece, Rome found out in Greek culture an underlying base for a more genuine synthesis of temporality and eternity. Thanks to Rome, the antique culture of «harmonious» type Greece had begotten in all its integrity gained a worldwide sweep, having exerted an ineffaceable influence on yet younger cultures of Europe.
In its subsequent development, European culture on a whole had been connected with yet deeper penetration into the sphere of absolute values where the Eternity reigns. Yet more profound vision of the Eternity had been shaping into yet more complex and integral forms of culture and history. The most significant shift in this direction was caused by the advent of Christianity. A new optic of the Eternity had eventually led to a deeper synthesis of the Being's metaphysical polarities. The Antique Culture, professing the realness of the acme of perfection, gained once and for all, came to just recapitulating itself, whereas the culture the Christianity begot, though experiencing a poignant feeling of the impossibility to achieve perfection, was altogether oriented to the incessant pursuit of it.
The gravitation of European culture towards «harmonizing» meant by no way a lack of dynamism in the process of its development. In the history of European culture one may find out effortlessly the periods when either «eternal» or «temporary» constituents started prevailing or «dissonant» character was heightening. Diverse trends may also be traced down in the development of Europe's regional cultures: while some of them invariably bending to the «harmonious» type, the others were doomed to incessant internal discords.
The early Middle Ages in Europe passed under the sign of a shock caused by the advent of Christianity - yet another bursting into the sphere of the Eternity. Not surprisingly, the art of that epoch, which is rightfully called the epoch of Roman culture, shows some affinity with Ancient Egypt art. At once, the opposite pole also came to gaining ground: the earthy, transient state of being more and more attracts the human and candidly penetrates into the culture of Christianized Europe. Thus, a novel stage of «dissonance» in its development emerges - the Gothic. Born out of an acute withstanding of the temporary and the eternal, this, as well as any «dissonant» culture, reveals the aspiration towards some ideal beyond reach and, often, comprehension. This aspiration most graphically the Gothic cathedral, with the spire pointing out to the infinity, symbolizes. Some trends in the history of this dissonant epoch as the late Middle Ages crusades also disclose the same unquenchable and eventually aimless thirst of man who, despite all his efforts to create history, is unable to carry out in his historical time the constancy and logicality of the Absolute he came to see clearly.
However, alongside the development of the «dissonant» Gothic, the birth of a regional culture happens which would reach new horizons of «harmony» - the early Italian Renaissance. Though not so much in common may be found in the aesthetical principles of the Antiquity and the Renaissance, an intuitive conviction of the new epoch's ideologues in the affinity between their own creative quests and the Antique creative intentions has a sound metaphysical ground: both these epochs in European history came to engender ultimately «harmonious» cultures, on reaching an organic synthesis of temporality and eternity.
The later intertwining of these «dissonant» and «harmonious» cultures - the Gothic and the Renaissance - had been shaping up a developing, open-ended art of the Mannerism and the Barocco. Therein lies the origin of a whole subsequent development of European culture well into the early 19th century. Even a later bias towards «harmonizing» in the epoch of the Classicism could not fade out these creative impulses that the interaction of the Gothic and the Renaissance had brought about.
All the history of human culture gives a strong evidence that «dissonant» cultures play a specific role in history. Possessing certain «incompleteness» and «inferiority» in comparison with more «harmonious» cultures, they at the same time have had an indelible influence on the fates of the civilization. Often within them a latent ripening of something novel, unknown is happening, bringing about a bursting into the future. Of special interest in this respect are those national cultures that are doomed to be «dissonant» not only in some brief periods of their history but nigh over its duration. Two of such cultures are Austrian and Russian ones.
The logics underlying the development of «dissonant» cultures often does not obey the natural laws valid for «harmonious» ones. The history of Austria-Hungary provides a striking example of the persistent striving for a Utopian goal: the existence of this deliberate Empire made of a conglomerate of peoples, quite alien to each other, in the 18th-19th centuries contradicted to any logics and common sense. But, seemingly, it is the deep national conflicts that had caused what a creative impulse of the Gothic gave an outburst of Austrian Barocco and did not let the culture «calm down», «harmonize» itself. As any «dissonant» culture, Austrian one had existed at the expense of constantly renewable attempts to elaborate or to borrow from outside some forms which would let achieve an organic synthesis of the culture's internal contradictions. And, to a considerable extent, it had succeeded in this process (in this respect, its fate is similar to the one. of Ancient Rome): as an incarnation of the «harmony» achieved became Vienna - one of the most beautiful and, at the same time, one of the most paradoxical cities of Europe. It had become at once an embodiment of an invariable «harmony» gained once and for all, and a symbol of new ingenious impulses, breaking up with tradition: a man seeing the city for the first time could be absorbing the deepest currents of its inexhaustible creative energy and, at the same time, be experiencing a chilling, paralyzing glamour of pompous, rigid perfectness.
But the last uplift of the late 19th - early 20th century Austrian culture proved out to be originated through not a so hard and long achieved «harmony» but through yet another bursting of internal «dissonance». The contradiction between dispersed national trends and the idea of a supernatural unity had created by the shank end of the 19th century a unique milieu, where man came to experience most acutely the rupture between the eternal and the historical between the Absolute and life.
This intrinsic discrepancy of the discourse of our freedom reverberates in the music of Gustav Mahler. The hero of his symphonies is a wanderer, leaving his native land for good heading for the horizons unknown. The image of a wanderer renders quite well the feelings of a man of a «dissonant» culture. The wanderer being thrown into the Time, the meaning of his journey is wandering through the current time. He is tied with the Time as nobody else. The Time is taking the shape of his existence, even incorporating space - the space of his journey. But, underlying his outward bursting, there is yet another, genuine meaning - an attempt to reach out beyond the Time. Only he for whom no place in the world may be a terminal point, a last abode, may be justfully called a «wanderer». The state of being a wanderer is the state of absolute unsatisfaction, the state of the Being's discrepancy: being immersed into the Time, even dissolved in it, the wanderer, acutely experiencing any instant passing away, is driven to the Eternal, the Absolute, to what is beyond the Time but open to his spiritual sight.
The pursuit of «another reality», of the Absolute incarnated, overwhelms the main hero of a well-known novel by R. Musil «Man without Properties». From his relationships with people, he is trying to squeeze the «juice» of the Eternity so as to reach out some edge beyond which the Time loses its power over a human. What this novel remained uncompleted, just proves out once more, for both the author and his hero, that this pursuit is doomed to be eternal, for it is impossible to eschew from being thrown into the Time. Still, it seems that man could. hardly overcome his intrinsic drive to get out of the reign of the Temporality, thus dooming himself to the eternal quest of the Eternity.
But the most profound insights of the early 20th century Austrian culture are connected with a city located at the Empire's national periphery - with Prague, in a sense, a counterpart of Vienna. While Vienna incarnated incessant and often successful attempts of culture to achieve wholeness integrity, Prague came revealing its internal «dissonant» character. It is here, within a strange German language culture, as though impending in the air of an alien national environment, that such artists as F. Kafka and G. Mayrink could come up. Heroes of their novels are also wanderers of a sort but their path runs into some metaphysical depths of life, where the inner disharmony of our earthly being is becoming starkly polarized. Kafka and Mayrink are utterly disclosing a metaphysical «frame», on which are stretched painted cloths of our outwardly ordered and logical existence. And it turns out that our peace of mind, our satisfaction with life - it is a terrific disease causing death, and the only hope for saving oneself consists in the daring of our freedom, withstanding the absurd, deeply rooted into the very grounds of existence.
Only a personality, feeling acutely a gap between the Temporal and the Eternal, could be willing as passionately as Rilke a realization of a harmonious, «healthy» world. The same prophetic feeling let him grasp to the full his spiritual kinship with Russian culture, where he came to discern the most authentic complete expression of this grief for wholeness, for harmoniousness of the Being, of this grief that is caused by a deep rootedness into the Time and a deep terrifying vision of the Eternity. Even the very Russian word «toska» («grief», «grievance») Rilke considered as a unique expression of the gist of this spiritual self-consciousness that engenders the greatest creative achievements of humankind .
All the path of Russian culture confirms the correctness of Rilke's insights, its dissonances having been predestined by some peculiarities of the formation and development of the Russian ethos. Just a glimpse at the works by Scythian craftsmen suffices to have grasped how deeply our distant ancestry from the Steppes were experiencing the whimsical flow of life. Scythian culture was a vivid culture of «temporal» type and though it was bound to die soon, this culture could outlive itself in a supernatural way, passing on this pagan, irrational feeling of the fluidity of existence to a people to have «sprouted» out of the soil, with which its ashes.
Christianizing the pagan Old Rus, started around the year of 988, had determined a breakthrough into the second pole of culture. But unlike most European countries, christened by or that time about, that adhered to the Rome Church and, thereby, to the Ancient Rome cultural tradition, Rus ,as Bulgaria, adhered to the Byzantine Church. The impact of the Byzaritine spiritual and cultural tradition on a young Christian nation had been overwhelming over a span of several centuries. Some masterpieces of Russian architecture and icon-painting, fostered by the patterns borrowed from Constantinople, are widely known. Yet, on a whole, the effect of Byzantium proved not strong enough to have formed a really efficacious core of a culture of «harmonious» type. Consequently, these ingenious impulses of freedom that were seething within the Russian soul's abysses could not have been morphed into some natural and refined phenomena of ideology and culture. They went mostly into a great many riots («a Russian riots insensate and ruthless», to quote another famous line by A. Pushkin, this time from his novel «The Captain's Daughter»), bursts of fanatic faith or, at the very best, into an unsatisfiable and aimless outward expansion, a drive into space that had led to an incredulous extension of the boundaries of the Old Russian state 8. The latter fact provides grounds for claiming a metaphysical identity of the Old Russian and Old Roman cultures, though not implying a phenomenological closeness of these cultures, as realized by the two peoples in history. The depth of «disconcertedness», inherent to the Russian spiritual life, had proved to be so striking that Russian culture was doomed to remain «dissonant» over a whole span of its development.
The whole history of the before-Peter-the-Great Muscovite Rus presents itself as a few endeavors to develop own cultural patterns through assimilating the Byzantine legacy. And in a historical perspective, one has to admit that even the greatest achievement of Russian culture at that period - the Russian Orthodox Church architecture and icon-painting - could not lay down the foundations strong enough for its self-sufficient development.
Moscow stands by itself as probably the most striking incarnation of the tragedy of before-Peter-the-Great Russia. The city mirrored all the chaos and fruitlessness of these endeavors to have an original «harmonious» culture created. Devoid of a footing, solid enough to cool down inner controversies, the own cultural patterns had proved out to be too fragile, so easy. to be destroyed in pursuit of yet another, not lesser ephemerical ones. Moscow's memory is so feeble that any new epoch starts from a nigh downright demolition of the monuments considered antiquated. This attitude had predetermined the city's fate: whether intentionally or not (recall the Great Fire of Moscow in 1812 during Napoleon's invasion), the city's past came to be destroyed more than once. And this process of depriving Moscow of historical memory kept going well down our time. Just a stroll down today's Moscow shows quite well how radically the city memory is uprooted, how few traces of its gloriose past remained, except for the Kremlin and around.
The persistent attempts to make Moscow the center of the State, of the Empire's activity, directed outwardly had been draining out own, internal cultural patterns, since the primary goal of this activity was seen as an expansion of the culture over vast lands and conquered peoples. Rather curiously, ditto for Rome at the early stage of the development of the Roman state: on conquering vast lands and becoming the center of a powerful state, Rome had very long remained a typical «out-of-the-way» town against the background of the magnificent cities conquered by the Roman legionaries. Failed to inherent the heritage of «harmonious» cultures, Moscow was bound to be a city with a most bizarre mosaic of magnificent architectural monuments (the Kremlin, cathedrals palaces and mansions of the nobility) laid down on gloomy faceless surroundings. A city that did not appreciate its beauty, even sought to destroy it in order to give place for yet novel incarnations of the specter of the Empire's might. Under the Bolshevik rule, this plague of reconstruction had heightened to a catastrophic dimensions: lots of what had left from old Moscow was destroyed and, instead, pompous Stalin's Empire and faceless constructivism of glass-concrete-and-steel boxes were burgeoning.
The epoch of Peter the Great had exerted a decisive influence on the formation of a genuinely authentic Russian culture through bringing Western tradition and experience to the country. Ever since Russia has been evolving in a deeper and deeper contact with European civilization. In particular, Russian culture at large has succeeded in acquiring an array of completed and balanced patterns, worked out during a millennium of the incessant development of European culture. As a material elaboration of this process, Saint Petersburg and its suburban parks had become. It is worth pointing out yet again that this assimilation of the West did not plunge Russia into the state of a poor imitator. «Harmonious» patterns came to be injected into a people which had kept either a pagan worshipping of an earthly, transitory being and a sense of its closeness to God. The depth of «metaphysical dissonance» here proved out to be so dramatic that these borrowed «harmonious» patterns had been transformed and developed in a very brief period of time (around a hundred years) as to convey, into these novel patterns, the same withstanding of the Time and the Eternity, the acute sense of which has ever been the gist of the Russian spirit. That «universal responsiveness» of the Russian soul, its aptitude for adopting other cultural traditions, its willingness to learn from other peoples thus has become a great advantage of Russian cultural tradition. Still retaining its «dissonant», character, ingenious impulses, and spirituality, Russian culture acquired at last a language for conveying its profound insights.
And, most and foremost this is true with respect to the Russian language itself and Russian literature. Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Russian poet, prosaic and playwright, may, be rightfully considered as a creator of modern Russian literary language. The importance of Pushkin in our history stems from what it was him who had «closed» the outcome of a whole century of acquiring western cultural patterns, especially French ones, and started a radical transformation of them, adjusting them express a novel vision of the world and man in it well beyond contemporary tradition. A. Pushkin's creative development evolved from borrowed romanticism (Byron, Ossiang, Parni) to a mature realism through ironic reinterpretation and enhancing romantic stereotypes. In his novel in verse, «Eugen Onegin», Pushkin created, according to our understanding scholar, late Yu. Lotman, a «formula of Russian novel», based on «a conception about essential incompatibility of life and fiction, about the plenitude of possibilities and infinite variancy of reality» 9. But also, in Pushkin's creative activity we are finding out not only the drive for rendering the wealth of life; he is also quite aware of the opposite pole of Being, the Eternity, that rises above the human as somewhat stone-like, as superhuman and unhuman, as an «idol» of Don Guan in his «Don Guan» from the cycle «Small Tragedies». The withstanding of the chaotic, the irrational, the living, for one thing, and of the eternal, merciless, inpenetrable constitutes a key paradigm of late Pushkin's writings. And man is thrown into the very center of this notwithstanding, while his pursuit of freedom comes up as the only way of keeping his dignity against the fatality of his destiny. Not surprisingly, Petersburg stands as a perfect setting for Pushkin's heroes. In the poem «The Bronze Horseman», Eugene, a humble clerk, comes to revolt against Peter the Great incarnated in a famous monument to him, by Falconet and Callot, whose Emperor's will set a city in a place unfit for living.
This artistic paradigm has become, in the essence of it, absolutely exact expression of that metaphysical paradigm, underlying «dissonant» culture. In verity, A. Pushkin indeed became a national genius, a prophet, who was the first to realize in perfect artistic forms the very gist of Russian fate, of the Russian national spirit.
Back to our comparative analysis of the Myths of Moscow and Petersburg, one may state that these myths manifest in a very precise manner two intentions inextricably linked with a «dissonant» culture.
The first intention is to reach some «outward» supremacy by gaining land and material resources while mostly neglecting own original forms. Thereby, this would eventually lead to a somewhat gloomy though ostensive cultural milieu (cf. a close affinity between the artistic styles in Stalin's Soviet Union and Nazi Germany). This intention is clearly pronounced in the main, imperium constituent of the myth of Moscow.
The second intention is to assimilate other cultural patterns in order to convey own creative impulses and to develop national culture of a quite distinctive character. This is the hallmark of the myth of Petersburg. In this respect, Petersburg may be compared with Ancient Rome. Indeed, the then Rome, particularly under the emperors, was a cosmopolitan city, a melting pot foil all the cultural traditions, contiguous with each other within a framing of one Antique civilization. Here peacefully coexisted temples and shrines to every deity under the Sun. Here, in a whimsical way, altogether diverse trends in architecture were reverberating and interweaving. The Ancient Rome comes up as a symbol of one, tolerant all-embracing European culture.
Owning to its metaphysical substantiveness, Saint Petersburg is beyond the Time. The city conveys the very essence of culture as the being on the brink of the Eternity. as a burst into the sphere of the Absolute; expressed in the most adequate form, this burst is not to breaking up with the historical time but overwhelming it. And it is not incidentally that Petersburg was doomed to a tragic fate of the «city of three revolutions». The message it has been carrying - to transform downright the historical time in compliance with the laws of the chasm yawned had turned out to be too grandiose, nigh impossible for a young nation. A brisk, unstoppable Russian national spirit came to get this message with enthusiasm. But in attempting to «conquer» history by one effort it went far beyond the natural course of evolutive development. Once more, the destructiveness of our national being came to surface, once again what had been achieved over a century of creative development came to be destroyed.
Since the fall of Communist rule in August 1991 we started to comforting ourselves with the hope for a final recovering from «dissonance» plague on the roads of turning back to Christianity and human values. Alas, the October 1993 storming of our own «White House» in Moscow, war in Checnya and all the pleasures of born-again capitalism have faded out this hope.
Fortunately, Saint Petersburg keeps standing outside this turn of events, thus giving another hope. The hope for another revival, for yet another attempt to become a site of quite new, matured and calmed down Russian culture. Metaphorically, a true «second Rome», or a «second Athens», or just Saint Petersburg, inextricably linked with the times of Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, with the times of Alexander Block and Ossip Mandelstamm, with the time of our youth.
[*] Let us note that these two aspects involve different social structures. Translating may be carried out, for instance, through the structures responsible for upbringing and education, the mass media or mass culture, whereas the impulses of innovation being condensed only in a tiny streak, the cultural elite. The priority of one or another aspect is determined, to a considerable degree, by a kind of interrelation between these structures. If the cultural elite (though even numerous and creatively active) happens to be detached from educational structures, from the influencing on the mass media and the political elite, the general function Once of a city would be, by necessity, conservative. If, the other way round, the practice of exchanging people and ideas between these social spheres established, the function of a city within the culture would be, in a greater extent, innovative.
[*] In prophecies on the perish of this «invented» city, Russian that literature abounds, most well-known are the ones by F. Dostoyevski and D. Merezhkovsky.
[*] For a detailed comparative analysis of the single constituents of the myths of Moscow and Petersburg see: Lotman, Yu. M. «The Symbolism of Petersburg and Problems of the City Semiotics» - In: Semiotics of the Town and Town Environment: Petersburg. Tartu, 1984 (in Russian).
[*] Berdyaev, N.A. «The Russian Idea. Main Problems of the Russian Thought of the 19th and the Early 20th Centuries» - In: On Russia and Russian Philosophical Culture. Collection of Papers. Moscow, 1990, p.54 (in Russian).
[*] Yevlampiev, I.I. «On the Brink of Eternity. Metaphysical Foundations of Culture and its Fate» - Metaphysics of Petersburg. St. Petersburg, 1993.
[*] Vipper, B.R. Art of Ancient Greece. Moscow, 1972, p. 17-18.
[*] In this respect, two personages from Greek mythology may be evoked, the Sphinx and Minotaur, as reflecting the perception by Old Greeks of Egyptian and Creten civilizations respectively. .While either of these creatures menacing humans, their messages were outright diverse, even polarized. The Sphinx incarnated the Eternity perceived as the absolute Inevitability and the absolute Truth (henceforth, the Sphinx's riddles), whereas Minotaur - an unpredictable, irrational chaos of Time. Both of them turned out to be slain by Greek heroes (Oedipus and Theseus, resp.) in the end. That testifies to what Greek civilization, already at the later mythological stage of its development, had a presentiment of the character of its superiority over the civilizations of Egypt and Crete.
[*] On this immune trait of the Russian national character, Nikolai Berdyaev wrote at length, attributing it to a variety of historical and geopolitical factors. See, for instance: Berdyaev, N.A. «The Russian Idea. Main Problems of the Russian Thought of the 19th and the early 20th centuries» - In: On Russia and Russian Philosophical Culture. Collection of Papers. Moscow, 1990, p.44 (in Russian) and Berdyaev, N.A. The Origins and Meaning of Russian Communism. Moscow, 1990, p.7-8 (in Russian).
For that matter, let us recall some favorite ideas of Russian political, social and religious thinker Pyotr Chaadayev, author the famous «Philosophical Letterlt (1836). He wrote (in French): «… Nous marchons si singulierement dans le temps qu'a mesure que nous avancons la veille nous echappe sans retour. C'est une consequence naturelle d'une culture toute d'importation et d'imitation. Il n'y a point chez nous de developpement intime, de progres naturel; les nouvelles idees balaient les anciennes, parce qu'elles ne viennent pas de celles-la et qu'elles nous tombent de je ne sais ou. Ne prenant que des idees toutes faites, la trace ineffable qu'un mouvement d'idees toutes faites, la trace ineffable qu'un movement d'idees progressif grave dans les esprits, et qui fait leur force, ne sillonne pas nos intelligences. Nous grandissons, mais nous ne murissons pas; nous avancons, mais dans la ligne oblique, c'est-a-dire dans celle qui ne conduit pas au but…» (Chaadayev, P. Complete Writings and Selected Letters, in 2 Vol. Vol. 1. Moscow, 1991, p. 92-93).
[*] Lotman, Yu.M. In the Shool of Poetical Word. Pushkin. Lermontov. Gogol. Moscow, 1988, p. 17.
Academic Science and Religion in Ethical and Pedagogical Context
Religious anthropology in the postmodern situation
Social and Anthropological Background for Addressing Xenophobia
«I like the Service of the Lutherans...» (F.Tyutchev and Christianity)
Postmodernism as the problem of metaphysics
Teleology as a method of historical cognition H.Rickert's philosophy
Madness, Melancholia and Death in Eighteenth-century England
Boswell's Wretched Register:Hypochondria and Confession In the Journals of Jjames Boswell
F.H. Bradley on Self-realization as Relation to the Self and to Others
Non-classical Paradigm of Interpretation
Евлампиев И.И.


Yesterday, an estimated two thousand people filled the National Cathedral in Washington for a memorial service that celebrated the post-incarceration life of Charles W. Colson, the Watergate conspirator-turned-evangelical who died last month. Colson was part of an infamous group of men in the Nixon White House who could be charitably described as revolting. In 1974 he went to prison for Watergate-related crimes including the cover-up that toppled a president. Seven months later, he was "born again," as he proclaimed upon release—a changed man.
Many were skeptical of his jailhouse conversion, then and for years afterward. But Colson eventually proved them wrong as he dedicated the second half of his life to serving the spiritual needs of his fellow sinners in the slammer, through his organization, Prison Fellowship Ministries.
This basic story line and its variations are not unfamiliar. Many have gained remarkable insights into themselves and their world, peering out from behind bars. Some, like Colson, were incredibly guilty; some were ultimately vindicated; others were prisoners of conscience or of politics. Nelson Mandela, to name a revered one, was a violent revolutionary, overflowing with resentment (and not without cause), when thrown into the cramped prison cell that contained him for 27 years, courtesy of South Africa's white minority regime. He came out a reconciler. Mandela's honored guest at his 1994 presidential inauguration was his white jailer.
Some inmates have reached a level of consciousness where they could see themselves as radically free. They might even look upon the rest of us, on the outside, as existing in a kind of spiritual incarceration. Such was the illumination given to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during his eight years in the Russian gulags after World War II.
So what's this about unwiped feet? And what's this about a mother-in-law? What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don't be afraid of misfortune; and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well.


Super Solitaire Deluxe vv1.05b Shareware Download - Super Solitaire Deluxe includes about 450 solitaire card games such as FreeCell, Diplomat, Eighteens, Flower Garden, Grandfather's Clock, Klondike, Pyramid, Royal Rendezvous, Spider Solitaire, Golf and Travellers.
Super Solitaire Deluxe includes about 450 solitaire card games such as FreeCell, Diplomat, Eighteens, Flower Garden, Grandfather's Clock, Klondike, Pyramid, Royal Rendezvous, Spider Solitaire, Golf and Travellers. It features great graphics, rich sounds, extensive options and fast game play. All games are carefully classified and well documented. Furthermore, you can preview and learn each game easily in the game browser. Click menu->game video to see the live tutorial if you can't figure out how to play a new game.
Pirated Software Hurts Software Developers. Using Super Solitaire Deluxe Free Download crack, warez, password, serial numbers, torrent, keygen, registration codes, key generators is illegal. We do not host any torrent files or links of Super Solitaire Deluxe from depositfiles.com, rapidshare.com, any file sharing sites.


SIX MONTHS of painstaking talks were due to start this week as contractor Bovis Lendlease LMB and the City of New York try to agree fees for managing the World Trade Center (WTC) clean up.
Bovis claimed this week that the final bill would not top the -1bn (£714M) estimated when the work started. It has worked on the site since the 11 September terrorist attacks and was appointed to programme manage the clean up operation early in the new year, 'We are not going to exceed 70% of the original estimate, ' said Bovis Lendlease LMB senior vice-president Paul Ashlin.
The contractor - in charge of the operation with Amec and Tully as subcontractors after a failed bid by Bechtel to manage the site (NCE 13 December 2001) - is expected to complete debris clearance next week.
An official closing ceremony will be held on 30 May to mark the end of the clear up, although workers are expected to remain on site until 15 June.
Meanwhile, reconstruction of the buildings surrounding the WTC towers continues. Contractor Tishman this week started piling work for the replacement building for World Trade Center 7, which collapsed after the twin towers came down.
Six teams were also shortlisted this week to carry out a £2M Ground Zero transport study for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
The land use plan for vastly improved transport links at the site is expected to be in place by December.
'The area is not particularly well served for commuters from New Jersey, Long Island or Brooklyn, ' Ashlin told NCE.
Proposals on how to replace the terrorist destroyed World Trade Center are pouring in. The latest - launched this week by Bahamas based businessman Derek Turner and advised by consultant Meinhardt - is a 475m tower costing an estimated £3.93bn.
The building is described as 'five cylindrical towers of steel and glass topped by an 11 storey pyramid rising from an enclosed, transparent biosphere'.


text:
Q: Android - ACTION_POINTER_UP not called until movement of remaining touch Whilst trying to debug a multi-touch issue, I ended up stripping my onTouchEvent code right down to see what was going on, and found the following issue. Am I missing something? Cheers in advance!

*

*Finger 1 down: ACTION_DOWN is called – OK.

*Finger 2 down: ACTION_POINTER_DOWN is called – OK

Now this is the problem:

*

*Finger 1 (the 1st finger) up: ACTION_POINTER_UP is not called. But it IS called when Finger 2 is moved.

By holding Finger 2 as steady as possible when Finger 1 is released, it's very noticeable that the above is happening.
Here's my simple test code, the vars are just continuously printed out:
@Override
public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event)
{
    switch (event.getActionMasked())
    {
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN:
            jpACTIONDOWN++;
            return true;
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_DOWN:
            jpACTIONPOINTERDOWN++;
            return true;
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_UP:
            jpACTIONUP++;
            return true;
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_POINTER_UP:
            jpACTIONPOINTERUP++;
            return true;
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE:
            jpACTIONMOVE++;
            return true;
        default:
            jpDEFAULT++;
    }
    return false;
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Join the fight against ComEd & Ameren rate hikes
January 13, 2015 Jim Chilsen Ameren, ComEd
As of Jan. 1, ComEd and Ameren hit Illinois consumers with a combined electric rate increase of $436 million (about $232 million for ComEd and $204 million for Ameren).
The rate-hike, which went into effect January 1, impacts "delivery" rates—what you pay the utility to deliver power to you—and accounts for a third to a half of the bill. Since this increase involves delivery rates, all ComEd and Ameren customers are responsible to pay the higher rates, regardless if they're with an alternative power supplier.
Why the increases?
The delivery increases are in accordance with passage of the 2011 "Energy Infrastructure and Modernization Act," or the "smart-grid bill." The new law uses a formula to determine ComEd and Ameren rates annually for the next several years to pay for about $3.2 billion in system upgrades.
While hopeful that the upgrades will help consumers save money, we still think the rate hikes are excessive. That's why we're filing a "petition for rehearing" with the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) to try to reduce the rate hike as much as possible.
CUB Executive Director David Kolata added: "Our focus is also on holding ComEd and Ameren accountable and pushing them to live up to their promise of building a better power grid that maximizes consumer benefits. Illinois consumers deserve to see results."
Check out ComEd and Ameren's new delivery rates below. If you're frustrated with the higher rates like we are, please send a message to state regulators, asking them to grant CUB's petition and reduce the rate hikes.
Send a message opposing the ComEd rate hike!
Send a message opposing the Ameren rate hike!
OLD ComEd delivery rate NEW ComEd delivery rate
Distribution Facilities
Standard Metering
Monthly Customer
2.439¢ per kWh
Multifamily homes
Single family homes w/ electric heat
Multifamily homes w/ electric heat
**********************************************************************************************************
OLD Ameren delivery rate NEW Ameren delivery rate
Zone 1 (formerly AmerenCIPS)
Non-summer
Over 800 kWh
Summer Delivery
Meter Charge
1.34¢ per kWh
Zone 2 (formerly AmerenCILCO)
Monthly Customer Monthly Customer Charge 1.766¢ per kWh
$11.22/month 2.247¢ per kWh
Zone 3 (formerly AmerenIP)
CUB Alert: An Unprecedented Rate-Hike Barrage
Ameren pushes $500 million+ in gas and electric rate hikes
CUB's money-saving events in February
February continues trend of lower gas prices–but they're still higher than 2021
CUB analysis connects high power bills to dependence on fossil fuels
Your ticket for the: Join the fight against ComEd & Ameren rate hikes

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


This issue features excerpts (with permission) from an email I received recently. "Carl" and I met early last year for a Career Action Planning (CAP) session after he was laid off from a managerial position at a large financial services firm.
In his recent email update, Carl described his active, thorough, and ultimately-successful search: applying online, working with recruiters, and tapping into his network in a focused, professional manner. Carl concluded his update with the following "lessons learned.


text:
December 1939 – The Growing Acuteness Of The Finnish-Soviet Dispute – Address To America
Finnish Troops on the border - Quickly getting to the point of no return.
By gordonskene 2 months ago
Finnish Troops on the border – Quickly getting to the point of no return.
https://oildale.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/01142915/Radio-Helsinki-December-1939.mp3
December 4-6, 1939 – Finnish Foreign Minister's Office – Radio Address – Radio Helsinki – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
If the outbreak of war between France, Britain and Germany over the invasion of Poland weren't enough, the Soviet Union, now allied with Nazi Germany added to the already boiling tensions.
The Winter War also known as First Soviet-Finnish War was a war between the Soviet Union (USSR) and Finland. It began with a Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939, three months after the outbreak of World War II, and ended three and a half months later with the Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. Despite superior military strength, especially in tanks and aircraft, the Soviet Union suffered severe losses and initially made little headway. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the organization.
The Soviets made several demands, including that Finland cede substantial border territories in exchange for land elsewhere, claiming security reasons—primarily the protection of Leningrad, 32 km (20 mi) from the Finnish border. When Finland refused, the USSR invaded. Most sources conclude that the Soviet Union had intended to conquer all of Finland, and use the establishment of the puppet Finnish Communist government and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocols as evidence of this,[F 8] while other sources argue against the idea of the full Soviet conquest.[F 9] Finland repelled Soviet attacks for more than two months and inflicted substantial losses on the invaders while temperatures ranged as low as –43 °C (–45.4 °F). The battles focused mainly on Taipale in Karelian Isthmus, on Kollaa in Ladoga Karelia and on the Raate Road in Kainuu, but there were also battles in Salla and Petsamo in Lapland. After the Soviet military reorganized and adopted different tactics, they renewed their offensive in February and overcame Finnish defenses.
Here by way of Radio Helsinki in a member of the Finnish Foreign Office, delivering an address beamed to the American people, sometime between December 4-6, 1939.
Previous December 1, 1984 – El Salvador: 'Little Progress And No Truce' –
Next Judith Jauregui In Recital – Music Of Mozart, Brahms And Schumann – 2011 – Past Daily Mid-Week Concert


Since Hillmans were not a BMC product, our shade of engine green is nothing like the olive shades used on the Austin engines, etc.
It is instead more toward the blue side of green, somewhere between the Grabber Green and Chrysler 383 engine paints by VHT. More accurately, it looks a lot like the Alpine Green used on Detroit Diesel engines and this is what I'm using in my light restoration, from DupliColor. Looks amazing.
Along the same lines I wanted to give a slightly different finish to the passenger side column delete plate and to the Smiths heater box, rather than the gloss black they were born with. Thinking of the wrinkle finish black used on some Triumph dashes and lots of Jaguar manifolds, etc, I decided to go for an even more subtle grain, so I experimented with the spray truck bed liner from RustOleum Professional (any Auto Zone). It looks really uniform and bulletproof - great results.
Don't worry, the balance of the assemblies under the hood (heater Y-pipe, both horns, accel shaft support, etc) will be done in semigloss black, very similar to the original finish. Same for the AC oilbath air cleaner.
Any questions, please ask, but here's four photos from some recent work (click on the link).
The empty engine bay was me simply unbolting everything for degreasing/detailing/painting, scraping/washing the engine bay with mineral spirits, dried and lightly waxed to gain back the shine.
I used Duplicolor DE1618 "Detroit Diesel Alpine Green engine color" for valve cover and intake (and thermo housing and water pump and soon, the engine block (not shown)); Calyx manifold dressing paste for the exhaust; Rust-O-Leum spray truck bed liner on the Smiths heater for a nice mild wrinkle finish and bulletproof covering; Regal Red spray on the fan and the inset letters on the replated boot lift trimplate.
I used true aluminum foil tape (ShurTape duct work tape) to cover the openings to the manifolds while they were immersed in a warm TSP solution to degrease, finished with light application of a propane torch to drive off any traces of moisture/oil after two days of drying from the TSP bath.
Need a great plating shop for small work? Look up Wells Plating in Collinsville, OK. Nicest guy you'll ever meet, great prices and fast work.
The work looks great. Thanks for sharing the photos and ideas.
Just a test post to try out image posting from Photobucket - learning for the first time.
Sorry about using a link in the previous post.
Some before and after pictures of my drivetrain.
The cradle sits on four iron swivelling casters, allowing easy movement around the garage, made from 2x4 studs and 3/4" plywood. The extra verticals on the pics with the transmission removed allow the engine to sit higher so the bellhousing and gearbox could be slid off using the engine hoist and some straps.
With the transmission back on, I hammer off the verticals and allow the trans to sit on the rear mounts and it nicely rests horizontal.
Scraping, mineral spirits, oven cleaner and any touchups with lacquer thinner are the fluids I used to get the longblock and head and all ancillary parts prepped for engine paint. This one is a lighter shade green than OEM but it's easy to find in the US/Canada: Detroit Diesel "Alpine Green" from Duplicolor.
Most bolts are capped in semi-gloss black or will be. Only the generator mount bolts and crankshaft bolt (both grade 5 with cadmium finish) will remain as such.
fan blade (regal red), generator and starter (semi-gloss black), oil filter canister (semi-gloss black), exhaust manifold (TSP washed and rubbed with Calix paste), fuel pump (bare diecast finish).


text:
Features | November/December 2022
Seeking stable ground
After three years of nearly constant ups and downs, the feeling heading into 2023 is one of cautious optimism, and property management experts feel many asset classes will be on more solid ground by the end of the year.
Shannon Longino, CPM®, HCCP, CMH, CMO, TCS, SBS
"I'm hoping that the general spirit of the forward outlook is a sense of optimism," says Shannon Longino, CPM®, HCCP, CMH, CMO, TCS, SBS, senior vice president at Truist Community Capital, the company's affordable housing division, in Atlanta. "We've recovered, and we're still recovering. But we've had enough doom and gloom, so we'd do well to renew ourselves with our passions and be reminded of our purpose."
Karen Whitt, CPM®, RPA, CRE, president of U.S. real estate management services with Colliers, AMO®, says companies have been put to the test since 2020, and those still standing have shown their resilience.
Karen Whitt, CPM®, RPA, CRE
"The businesses that have survived a pandemic and inflation have lived out Darwinism in the business world—only the strongest survive," she says. "I don't have a crystal ball, but I can say for certain that the businesses that thrive during times like these are the ones that stay nimble and can accommodate many different client requirements."
To remain flexible in this way, property managers are keeping their eyes on several variables—economic, legislative, and technological, to name a few—that will shape the near future of real estate management.
Economic unknowns
One variable on everyone's radar is inflation and its impacts on rents and the prices of goods and services—and whether a recession is on the horizon.
"Recessions cause dislocations within the market, which will, in turn, alter the outlook for various asset classes," Whitt says, adding that people are watching with anticipation for signs of a softening market.
"That will probably drive many firms to take more conservative financial stances than they have over the last decade and will probably be concerning for transaction-focused professionals," Whitt says. "In property management, we tend to shift focus away from expensive capital expenditures under such conditions and toward cost efficiency and protecting asset value and cash flow."
Experts agree that the outlook for the industrial segment remains rosy, and Whitt adds retail to that list. "Much of retail spending has been diverted into essentials due to high inflation, but expectations are for more moderate inflationary pressures in 2023," says Whitt. "This should support additional gains for retailers, and in turn, retail property owners."
She adds that the office sector is expected to continue lagging while tenants decide on their future space needs. Property managers overseeing multifamily properties also have a positive outlook after the years of turmoil during the worst of the pandemic.
"We have landlords and owners who are recovering from the impacts of COVID-19 and the eviction moratorium, and they've finally been able to catch a break with the increased rents," Longino says. "Now, we're looking forward to seeing residents catch a break, as well."
Cindy Clare, CPM®
Cindy Clare, CPM®, chief operating officer of Bell Partners in Greensboro, North Carolina, expects to see more average rent growth while some of the dramatic rent increases of the past year balance out.
"The rent growth we've seen in the last 12 months has been unprecedented, and it's not going to continue," she says. "It's important to realize that some of that massive growth was a bounce back from COVID. So, I do think we'll see moderation and some normal rent growth. Overall, I'm cautiously optimistic."
Clare says rent affordability will continue to be a hot topic and hopes a middle ground that benefits both landlords and residents can be reached.
"Just lowering the rents isn't the answer because the costs to build, maintain, and run the properties continue to go up," Clare says. "How do we find a solution that works for everybody?"
Longino echoes this and hopes 2023 will bring more available affordable housing.
"One of the challenges will be how we can get more affordable housing or multifamily units built quickly," Longino says. "We need legislative leaders, developers, owners, management companies, and advocates to keep an ongoing dialogue to ensure this change fully takes place."
Legislative impact
Longino hopes that new affordable housing-related legislation will make it easier and more appealing for landlords to get involved in the program. "We have an open dialogue with legislative leaders," says Longino, who has been advocating for affordable housing for more than 29 years. "With IREM, I've participated in many legislative sessions. The relationships are there, so the conversations, intent, and passion must be ongoing. We're continuing to look at innovative ways and measures to incentivize landlords to participate in these programs to further develop this housing."
Aside from affordable housing measures, multifamily property managers will keep an eye on any new regulations that might affect their properties. "Legislation will remain a part of the multifamily story in 2023 that you can't diminish," Clare says. "We're already highly regulated."
Longino says she's also interested in climate change initiatives that could benefit multifamily properties.
"If passed, there are measures for the federal government to support landlords and consumers in installing energy-efficient systems, heat pumps, rooftop solar panels, water heaters—additions that can help residents have a safer and more efficient home," Longino says. "We'll have to continue to monitor all of this because, even once things are passed and implemented, it takes a while for all of them to trickle down."
The role of tech and data
Unsurprisingly, the role of technology will continue to be a significant factor in 2023.
"Whether it's self-guided tours, AI tools, or virtual touring, all of those things will come into play even more," Clare says. "We'll be looking at how tech can expand into the maintenance side, as well as how it could provide efficiencies that allow people on the site to spend more time focusing on the customer."
Whitt says it will be imperative for property managers to keep an eye on emerging technologies to stay competitive. "Everybody is using a CRM and can sign a contract with Yardi, but it's the developments in the fringes that create differentiation," Whitt says. "We're all still trying to figure out exactly what the metaverse's impact will be on the world at large. I'm confident that that's going to have a real impact on commercial properties."
Property managers also realize the importance of effectively using the data captured by these various technologies. Clare says her team will explore how to use the correct KPIs and metrics to make better decisions and improve their predictive capabilities.
Says Whitt: "Data-driven operations are the future of CRE. Everything produces data now, and we're deploying more tools that leverage the strengths of that capability. There are tools that help us monitor for infrastructure early warning signs so that buildings become more reliable. Meanwhile, software that supports general operations—like accounting and CRM—also produces myriad data points that remove cognitive bias and blind spots from our analyses. This helps firms improve their internal efficiency and create more value for clients."
A pain point that will carry into the new year is staffing, especially for maintenance employees. Many of these on-site positions do not offer the flexibility or remote options that some job seekers now desire. Clare says her teams will explore ways technology and centralization can allow for more flexibility.
"I think this trend of looking for efficiencies and centralization will continue, particularly as expenses go up," Clare says. "As the employee preferences and staff shortages continue to pose a challenge for us, we'll look for ways to be more efficient in managing our properties while still providing great customer service. It's a big challenge."
Companies' remote work policies will also affect every aspect of commercial real estate, says Whitt. "Some firms will take less space than they did before, while others may opt to expand as more inventory becomes available in competitive markets," she says. "Space use will change, too, which will impact areas that range from design and construction to how our property managers and engineers handle day-to-day operations."
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives will also remain high priorities over the next 12 months. "At Colliers, we'll continue to target state and local ESG requirements, but we'll also work to make green operations a realistic path for owners through transparent operations that make data available to owners and buyers," Whitt says. "Property operators will also need to deal with volatility associated with climate change and the costs associated with protecting real estate investments."
Clare says all of the considerations for 2023 will come down to improving the customer experience. "We'll look for new ideas for taking care of our residents," she says. "What can we do to ensure our associates and residents are happy? If our residents are happy, they will stay. And if our associates are happy, they make our residents happy. Everything's connected."
Issue: November/December 2022 Volume 87 Number 6
Leaders in the community
Property managers and their successful community engagement initiatives
IREM's 2023 President Renee Savage, CPM®, CCIM, is ready to...


text:
Darryl 'dmc' Mcdaniels
Darryl "D.M.C." McDaniels as he Mentors Children from the Garden of Dreams Foundation at Radio City Music Hall in New York, USA. Garden of Dreams is a 501c3 non-profit charity that works closely with all areas of Madison Square Garden, including the New York Knicks, Rangers, Liberty, MSG Media, MSG Entertainment and Fuse �to make dreams come true for kids facing obstacles�.
Alice in auction land – Largest collection of alice in wonderland memorabilia auction!
One of the world's largest collections of Alice in Wonderland memorabilia has been auctioned for £70,000. The massive 3,000 piece collectio...	read more>>
Jesse Metcalfe celebrating the New "Dallas" TV Series at Gallery Nightclub in Las Vegas, USA on March 10, 2012. The Desperate Housewives star, Jesse M...	read more>>
Nicki Minaj at the "I Am Still Music Tour" at the Bank Atlantic Center in Sunrise, USA. Nicki Minaj in an American hip hop and r&b artist. She has...	read more>>
Anthony Hopkins arriving at "The Rite" Los Angeles Premiere held at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, USA. The film about an American priest...	read more>>
"Baby, you can drive my car": John Lennon's last car and Paul Mccartney's Mini to hit the auction blocks
This upcoming auction will make The Beatles' immortal promise, "Baby, you can drive my car," a reality, as John Lennon's last vehicle and Paul...	read more>>
Julianne Moore arriving at the HBO Films "Game Change" Series New York City Premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City, USA. The story follows ...	read more>>
Tyrese Gibson visited WDAS's Performance Theatre in Bala Cynwyd, USA on October 10, 2011. The R&B singer, rapper, actor and former fashion model, ...	read more>>
Johnny Depp arriving at the "Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" World Premiere held at Disneyland in Anaheim, USA. The eagerly awaited fourt...	read more>>


text:
By Guest Post
Book Preview: A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature by Anthony Paul Smith
[Anthony Paul Smith, La Salle University, previews his new book, A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).]
I have a bad habit of making intellectual work personal. I don't mean that I lose my temper when my work is criticised, though like too many other academics I have, of course, done that. And I don't even mean that I see my work as a "vocation", like many theologians of the confessional kind do. No, my bad habit is something closer to when Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say that the question "what is philosophy?" can perhaps only be asked late in life, in a quiet moment when one can finally say, "What is it I have been doing all my life?"
The line might not have been intended to be funny, but I have always read it in the spirit of Woody Allen-esque dark humor. Imagine one of the 20th Century's greatest philosophers and his revolutionary friend, mere years away from their deaths, looking at all the books they've written, all the psychological patients helped, all the people inspired by them and who have learned from them, and then, instead of a certain pride, settling into a certain Sunday malaise, setting in at twilight. Perhaps I am not yet old enough to ask this question, but I can't help but look at this book in my hands and ask, What have I been doing my whole life? Of course, there is a certain nihilism to Woody Allen; each of his movies always has that nagging question in the background: What does any of it matter? And indeed, that's how I always make my work too personal. Because, in the light of the ecological catastrophe which has already started to settle in, what does it matter that to have written a book on nature with the title A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought?
This is actually a profoundly ecological question that gets to the heart of what the book is about, because to answer it I have to step away from the obsessions of theology and philosophy today when dealing with the question of nature and which I critique in the book. In this post, I want to introduce you to how I understand standard philosophical and theological discussions of nature to have focused, before ending with a short sketch of the different approach I attempt in Ecologies of Thought (I prefer to refer to the book by the subtitle).
But let's keep it personal for a moment, before I turn to outlining the book itself. Because I want to first speak at a human level, or what I prefer to think of as the creatural level. Since the book is so highly abstract and is written in the usual respectable academic tone, let me write here as a person.
The impetus for this book goes back to my experience in the second grade of having my ecological consciousness raised for the first time. The year was 1990 and Barbara Bush had teamed up with a host of cartoon characters to push that year's Earth Day (actual cartoon characters – I'm not being funny by referring to her anti-ecological co-Republicans in this way). Reading about this event – probably in some free Warner Bros. or Disney owned magazine designed to hook kids on the cartoons and their toy lines – was the first time I remember looking around me and thinking that there was this whole big connected thing in which I was a tiny part. I didn't call this thing nature yet and I didn't yet know what a biosphere was, but I felt at the tender age of eight that mysterium tremendum. Because that is what hearing that your planet was falling apart around you, largely because of the actions of your species, felt like. It was terrifying and yet I was drawn towards to it, to this power which seemed to reside in creatural life.
From that moment forward the question of nature stuck with me. It stuck with me when my mother's religious experience brought me into the culture of Christianity and my father's atheism pushed me to look at the world as just an accident of the universe. What did any of the culture that my parents gave me have to do with this overwhelming thing called nature? What could either religion or atheism say to me about a nature that could both be broken by our hands and also had the power to simply forget about us?
This brings us finally to the book itself. The book is separated into four parts. The first part lays out a typology of the various relationships philosophy and theology have with ecology, both in terms of the scientific discourse on ecosystems and in terms of politics of nature. The second part of the book is devoted to an introduction to François Laruelle's "non-philosophy" which constitutes the methodology for the construction of the theory of nature put forward in the book. I have written elsewhere a great deal about Laruelle, but what his method provides for me in Ecologies of Thought is a way to bring together philosophical theology with the scientific discipline of ecology. Part three is devoted to an argument that scientific ecology is already in itself thinking philosophically and theologically, as well as that philosophy and theology are implicated in ecological systems. This last point is important, as it means we can no longer rely on idealist conceptions of philosophy or theology unmoored from very real material concerns like "can one think without food, that is, without existing ecologically?" I then go on to develop a philosophical and theological reading of certain concepts and notions in ecology that are used in part four to develop a theory of nature.
So, what do I think is wrong in terms of the way philosophers and theologians have tended to engage with nature? First, I should point out that, following Laruelle's method I don't simply dismiss any of the systems of philosophy or theology that my work is coming after and building upon. Indeed, I treat them as ecological materials and structures that I can engage with both as thought and as ecology. The purpose of the first part of the book is to simply lay out the nature of how philosophy and theology relate to another discipline – ecology. What is it that they each do to the other discipline they proclaim to speak about and often for? What is their relationship?
I develop a typology to organise these relationships a bit more. For philosophy, I see a bonded type that tries to bond philosophy to some science in order to think of nature (usually a "big" science like physics or mathematics) and a subsumption type that always subsumes science within philosophy, claiming that the science itself cannot think. Christian theological discourse on nature that engages with ecology all tends to fit necessarily under the subsumption type, as theology claims to unify all the sciences (itself included) in the light of revelation. However, I locate two different kinds of subsumption in the Christian eco-theology literature. One is an inflection type, attempting to join Christian theology with ecology in order to raise them both up, and the other is a declension type, seeing in science only a witness to fallen reason which requires theology and the religion behind it for healing and "right ordering".
While some of what has gone on under the name of eco-theology and eco-philosophy has been admirable, there are a number of weaknesses with these approaches. One major weakness is that the approach to engaging with the science of ecology is itself not ecological. To oversimplify for the sake of this post, both disciplines tend to over-code ecology by absorbing them into some already existing philosophy or theology.
So what does Ecologies of Thought do that is different? It takes up Laruelle's method of non-philosophy (and I develop in nascent form a corollary discipline of non-theology in the book, which will be the focus of future research), which treats these disciplines as simply materials that can be brought together democratically or in some kind of commons. Laruelle has referred to his work as the fostering of a Democracy (of) Thought as well as a Communism (of) Thought (the brackets around 'of' represent the suspension of this relationality, as non-philosophy aims to think a thought that is identically thought and democracy or common), which brings together science and philosophy, religion and philosophy, and other disciplines.
While this provides me with a good model for what interdisciplinary work between the humanities and the natural sciences can look like, at least for the contributor coming from the humanities, it also already avoids some major problems in the usual philosophical and theological ways of thinking about nature. At the heart of some of the more extreme forms of theology, whether it be the analogical subsuming of nature into the supernatural (Milbank, Benedict XVI) or the rejection of nature all together in the face of the in-breaking of the wholly Other (Barth, the new apocalyptic theology), we are presented with thinking that is teleological thinking at its base. Thus nature is already always determined by that thought. Nature can never surprise us. It is never perverse. But there is also the twist that, for the first form at least, nature is also appealed to in a fantastical way in order to ground our ethics and politics.
I say that this is fantastical because, make no mistake about it, depending on where you look in nature you will be given very different visions of what is good and right to do. Lars von Trier was at least somewhat right in his Antichrist; nature is evil. The whole complex of energy exchange is, after all, just a polite scientific way of saying that everything is eating everything else, often having to tear it apart and break the body of the other, and then just shitting it out the next day for the earth.
But the purely naturalist approach to engaging with nature is no better, really. In its more extreme forms as a hybrid of the so-called Continental and analytic traditions, the naturalist philosopher subsumes nature into an identity of "just already dead". Here, again, nature isn't surprising and is evaluated by its end. If the current majority consensus in cosmology is correct and the universe is to end in a heat death, then nothing, no Derridean trace or cosmic stones to cry out to God, will be left. And so nature is just death, since that is where it ends up.
Well, so what?
This is a fair question because both of these paths lead to errors derived from being simplistically reductive in their understanding of nature. Problems with the first are well known for those coming out of the critique of natural law, treating all "deviant" behaviours as simply "disordered natures". In plain terms, this view of nature leads to silly statements, like the recent theological claim about the "ontological impossibility" of gay marriage. That's Milbank again, and it's a statement worth mocking instead of treating with academic politesse, but it also reveals something about theological thinking about nature. It constantly confuses and mixes the empirical and the transcendental, the ontic and the ontological. After all, surely to make the claim that gay marriage is ontologically impossible is to claim one of two things. Either it means that gay people who are now currently married are not actually married, which is akin to Richard Dawkins claiming that Milbank isn't a professor of anything since Dawkins doesn't recognise the validity of theology. Or it means that the very structures of being have been contradicted, suggesting some science-fiction vision of the space-time continuum ripping apart because people with the same genitals have been married somewhere in the cosmos. I could be wrong, but since we are all still here and gay people are still married, that seems a bizarre claim that is essentially meaningless beyond some rhetorical dazzlement.
But just as bizarre is this idea that we are already dead. As if it matters to our actual lives if we will be remembered in a hundred years, to say nothing of the timescale upon which the heat death is to take place. As if the fact that you won't even exist in one-hundred years' time stops everyone from struggling for some kind of happiness, some kind of free moment today (it does, of course, stop some; may they find some peace).
At the heart of both the philosophical and the theological, I claim, is a theodicy (with or without God). For the theologian that theodicy is easy, especially coming from a place of male, white privilege. Of course this is the best of all possible worlds! Of course it is providence that I was born here, in this place, with this skin, with this access to food, with this power! And the good news is that it is all going to be ok, because any problems that arise with nature, including the humans that are a part of it, will be rightly ordered at the end. The philosopher's theodicy is a bit different, perhaps a bit sexier, but it is still theodicy. Because there is a certain appeal to finally being done with this world, with the best of all possible worlds being none. To reduce all human beings to already dead, to see the world with the eyes of one suffering from Cotard's syndrome, is to ultimately be free of the overwhelming ecological relations we find ourselves implicated in.
In the light of these theodicies, my book takes the biblical figure of Job as its model for subjectivity. I can't say hero, because Job was not a hero. But, following the reading of Negri and others, Job does present himself as one who resists both the theodicy that comes from thinking the world is well made and the theodicy that comes from slipping into death as the true nature of the world.
Ultimately, I develop a theory of nature that is tripartiate in character, drawing in the end on an ecologically transformed Aquinas and Spinoza alongside the Islamic theologian-philosophers al-Sijistani and al-Din Tusi. There is indeed a transcendent Nature-with-a-capital-N and it may be that its kingdom is death, but this kingdom is not absolute and is relativized in relation to the subjects of that kingdom, to those creatures who live and die and continue to do so within Nature. This creatural nature everyday looks to the sun for its energy and keeps going. The very existence of these creatures in their immanence resists theodicy, they are and in their being have no telos that gives them identity. What we need today when facing the ecological catastrophe that has already arrived is not a new St. Benedict, but a new Job. A Job that faces the contradictions present in the world without attempting to unify and ameliorate them in a theodicy, but instead tarries with them as the very subject of nature.
In a world such as ours, where the whole of creation appears to cry out in suffering both human-caused and non-human, how can our most abstract thinking help be anything but personal?
al-din tusi
al-sijistani
Antonio Negri
eco-philosophy
eco-theology
felix guattari
francois laruelle
In the Author's Own Words
John Milbank
non-philosophy
non-theology
nonphilosophy
nontheology
politics of nature


text:
Home Perspectives The Women of Afghanistan – Prospects and Challenges
The Women of Afghanistan – Prospects and Challenges
Nadia Moustafa
The Muslim world has been facing heightening crises, which have led to violent escalations in certain areas during the last decade of the 20th century. In addition to the innumerable loss of lives during the onslaughts of war, women have suffered immeasurably at the hands of despotic governments and tyrannical rulers. The status of women has immensely deteriorated and this has been reflected to the world, through the camera lenses, in war or strife hit regions such as Jammu and Kashmir, Kosovo, Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Chechneya, Algeria, and most recently Afghanistan.
In the case of Afghanistan, the plight of women has been led to the forefront of the media's attention in light of the repercussions of the September 11 attacks and the resulting war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan.
While the world was focusing its efforts towards reshaping the political landscape of Afghanistan, the issue of Afghan women was brought to the table in such a way that raised effective questions about the politicization of the issue, the means of this politicization, and its goals regarding the shape of political, social, and cultural forces in Afghanistan after Western intervention.
The Afghan women's situation is by no means unique and has its equivalencies and derivatives in the Muslim world albeit varying degrees and levels of extremeties. General features of women's conditions throughout the Muslim world, Afghanistan being no exception, are: Backwardness that is characteristic of the underdevelopment of Muslim communities calling for real changes as part of a comprehensive social reform program; the inability for progress caused by controversial debates revolving around Islamic jurisprudence on women's issues necessitating fresh and new discussions; and the repercussion of foreign intervention introducing internal reforms which do little for the status of women and instead cause internal rifts amongst warring factions.
It should be highlighted that Taliban policies have not created the problems that Afghan women are currently suffering from, but the movement rather brought these problems to their climax. The world had little concern for Afghan women's issues until political debates heated. Women's suffrage became a pressing issue, when the US decided to lead its military campaign contra-Taliban. However, Afghan women served merely as an excuse for international criticism, while the main problem the West was addressing was that of the political and juridical framework that Afghan women resided in.
In the pretext of the military campaign against Taliban, we can recall the following incidents that the media highlighted: the report presented by the United Nations Secretary-General in 1999 in which he accused Taliban of human rights violations, the programs aired by US channels and articles that appeared in the mass- circulated US newspapers accusing Taliban of violating women's rights under the pretext of Islam, the support of former US President Bill Clinton, his Democratic Party, the rivals Republicans and even some UN agencies to this anti-Taliban media campaign, and the TV program jointly prepared by the American CNN and the British BBC televisions in the summer of 2001 showing the deterioration of Afghan women conditions under Taliban.
To defend its policies, Taliban offered religious claims to confine women at home, declaring that the government was aiming to protect women from impending dangers that may arise from political instability or the absence of an effective security system. Regardless of its justifications, one can argue that Taliban practices, as well as other practices led by Islamic regimes, are unfairly measured according to a Western model which takes no account of religious, cultural or social forces operating in the Muslim world. This raises intelligent questions worth contemplating such as, is the Western model applicable for all the worlds regimes and should any regimes that deviate from the model be punished. Also, should Islam be blamed, regardless of the model at hand, for the oppression facing Muslim women in contemporary societies. The answers are not simple but they do call for the creation of an indigenous model that has its roots in Islamic jurisprudence leading to political manifestations.
However, it is still arguable that Taliban practices have undermined the basic rights that Islam has given women and in such has created an ambience of sex discrimination under the banner of religion. Prohibiting women from education, work, and political mobilization, has only added to the list of grievances that women have been suffering. Progress doesn't come without pain, and no doubtedly the Taliban model has led to new and invigorating discussions about Islamic-based models of governance and their responsibilities towards securing women's rights, as upheld by Sharia Law.
However, it is not fair to assess the Taliban policies of women without making a due comparison regarding the status of women under other regimes.
The first comparison that can be made is to that of Muslim women in Western societies. Veiled women in the West enjoy the right to education and participation in the labor force, albeit facing mounting obstacles towards full integration in society because of their Islamic dress. The hijab, as referred to by Hanifa Sharifi, a 48-year-old French Muslim in an interview with the Le Monde, published on December 15th 2001, is a trap eventually leading to the isolation and marginalization of women.
The second example refers to the case of a Muslim woman residing in a Muslim community under a secular state. Marwa Quwagi, Turkish Member of Parliament, was denied her rights because she chose to wear Hijab. In defending herself against the discriminatory practices of the secular regime, the Turkish MP adopted the same vocabulary of democracy, liberalism, and Western secularism, that the Turkish regime claimed to have its basis in.
The third example rests with the case of Iranian women, under the Islamic republic of Iran. After the Islamic revolution in Iran took place, the West harshly criticized the status of women in the country and accused Iran of violating womens' rights. However, over the last two decades of the 20th century, Iran has presented to the world a model which has its roots in a feminist movement, harmonious with Islamic fundamentals, that has given women a wide range of liberal participation in society.
While the first two examples share the pains of Afghan women in the face of oppressive circumstances, the third sheds light on an indigenous model rooted in feminist ideology that has led to an enhanced status of women. The third case is one from which Afghan women can benefit without forgoing or overstepping religious limitations.
Symbolic landmarks including the demonstrations led by women in Kabul to celebrate the return of women's rights and the appointment of two women to the prestigious posts of Women Affairs Minister and Health Minister in the interim Afghan government, still cast somewhat dubious shadows and one should attempt to answer the following questions: Will the downfall of Taliban truly herald a solution to the Afghan women's problems? Will the solutions to the problems being faced by Afghan women derive from Western models that have little consideration for indigenous issues? If so, how practical will these solutions be? Will the new Afghan government, that paraded female delegates to the Bonn conference, introduce real changes to the status of women? Would the Western attention to the Afghan women's issue be seen as part of its concern for the protection of human rights? Or would it be regarded as part of the Western battle against terrorism and efforts to redraw the map of regional powers?
Events and reactions in the coming few months after the establishment of the transitional government and the deployment of international troops may present initial answers to the above-mentioned questions. Yet the full impact will not materialize before several years. In this period of observation, it is important to highlight that Afghan women and the Afghan people are in dire need for immediate and effective humanitarian aid from both Western and Islamic agencies. Yet the future of humanitarian aid efforts aimed at improving the women's situation depends on the future of the political stability of the country as well as its costly reconstruction process.
Debates revolving around the nature and impact of Islamic jurisprudence are not confined to Islamic circles but extend to other circles that can be way too critical of the forces behind such a rule. Islam, as a global power, although not represented by a strong cohesive unit, is present, effective and influential, stirring both praise and blame. Intellectual debates and efforts to change the status quo of Muslim women should lead to the creation of a framework ensuring and enhancing women's rights and roles in the society. Western ideologies and conceptions do not hold the magic wand that will bring an end to the problems of the Muslim world and the dangers of the politicization of women's issues need no further clarification. Internal issues should be dealt with a religious, cultural and social sensitivity oblivious to Western policy makers. That is not to say that Westerners have not indeed helped Muslim societies overcome some of the problems plaguing them, however Muslims need to confront their issues collectively and individually to draw conclusions that are both feasible and effective.
Nadia Moustafa, Ph.D. is associated with Center for Civilizations and Political Studies, Cairo, Egypt.
amongst
Bushlexia: Protecting the Citizenry while Defeating the Constitution
Pakistan: the politics of anti-Americanism
Rohingya refugees should not be treated with hostile attitude
A Counterproductive U.S. Advice to Palestinians