Human beings are diverse and live in diverse ways. Should we accept that we are diverse by nature, having followed separate evolutionary paths? Or should we suppose that we share our biological inheritance, but develop differently according to environment and culture? Over recent years scientific research has reshaped this familiar “nature-nurture” debate, which remains central to our understanding of human nature and morality.

For much of the 20th century social scientists held that human life is a single biological phenomenon, which flows through the channels made by culture, so as to acquire separate and often mutually inaccessible forms. Each society passes on the culture that defines it, much as it passes on its language. And the most important aspects of culture—religion, rites of passage and law—both unify the people who adhere to them and divide those people from everyone else. Such was implied by what John Tooby and Leda Cosmides called the “standard social science model,” made fundamental to anthropology by Franz Boas and to sociology by Émile Durkheim.

More recently evolutionary psychologists have begun to question that approach. Although you can explain the culture of a tribe as an inherited possession, they suggested, this does not explain how culture came to be in the first place. What is it that endows culture with its stability and function? [More]

Cornel West, Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University, is among the most prominent public intellectuals of our time. “Bluesman in the life of the mind and jazzman in the world of ideas,” as West often describes himself, he is the author of numerous books, including The American Evasion of Philosophy, Race Matters, The Cornel West Reader, and Democracy Matters. Along with Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor, West participated two years ago in a major public symposium c0-sponsored by the SSRC.

Eduardo Mendieta: Brother West, what is philosophy and do you think we need a new definition of it today, in light of what we can call, in shorthand, a globalized planet?

Cornel West: I would want to conceive of philosophy as grounded in the very long humanist tradition that is the best of the West, which is open to the East and North and South. But what I mean by that is that I begin with “humando,” which means burial. I begin with the humanity and the humility, which are very different than the biological species homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens—very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about “humando,” you’re talking about that particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis. The question for me is, how do we love wisdom—philosophia—in the face of impending catastrophe, given the kind of thinking, loving, caring, laughing, dancing animals that we are?  So, it’s a very, very historicist, contextualist, fallibilist, concrete, fleshified conception of philosophy. [More]

Joseph Nye, Jr. is one of the most influential international relations scholars today, and has been contributing to the field for decades. Dr. Nye laid the foundations for some of the most fundamental concepts in the study of international relations, including neoliberalism, soft power, and smart power.

He has been selected as the most significant scholar of his field multiple times by various surveys and has published countless books that are essential reading for any student of foreign policy, including Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics and most recently, The Future of Power. Indeed, Dr. Nye embodies the kind of intellectual that sees the world outside of Ivory Tower boardrooms, as he has served in senior governmental positions throughout his career.

These positions include the Undersecretary of State for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology from 1977 to 1979, as well as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Clinton Administration. Dr. Nye is currently the University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University. The Diplomatic Courier got a chance to catch up with Dr. Nye to discuss his most recent book, his thoughts on the Obama Administration’s foreign policy, and the current ills facing America.

Diplomatic Courier: Secretary Clinton recently applied your term “smart power” to explain the administration’s strategy towards applying pressure on the Syrian government. Would you say that this strategy embodies the idea of smart power?

Joseph Nye: Smart power is the combination of hard and soft power to create optimal strategies in particular contexts. In the context of Syria, it makes sense to use the hard power of targeted sanctions, but not a no fly zone such as was used in the very different context of Libya.  [More]

The Enlightenment was a revolution in the way we think about morality. Two ethical models, in particular, have come to dominate ever since. One can be traced back to Immanuel Kant, and is based upon the notion of duty (and hence is called deontological, from the Greek deon, meaning duty.) The second is hedonist and can be traced back to Jeremy Bentham, and his principle of utility: an action can be called good if it increases pleasure or decreases pain.

Put them together and you have the liberal approach to asking what’s the right thing to do. It’s liberal not in the sense of being pro-gay or pro-abortion. Rather, it’s liberal in the deeper sense of focusing on the individual and the choices an individual makes. It’s ethics conceived of in terms of rights and responsibilities, or in terms of what makes you happy or sad. The philosopher John Stuart Mill summed it up when he wrote: “Neither one person, nor any number of persons is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.”

You can understand why Mill wrote what he did. He lived in a period of history in which many people were not free to do as they chose. They were ruled by monarchs and chastised by prelates. The result was the subjugation of women and the owning of slaves. But we don’t live in such a world now. Most enjoy a degree of freedom that would have been unimaginable for most of human history, in the West at least. As a result, the liberal approaches to ethics are increasingly being questioned. Can they tell us what this freedom is for? Is it for more than just more consumption, more accumulation? What is the good life? [More]

In 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the mental collapse that ended his career, he was virtually unknown. Yet by the time of his death in 1900 at the age of 55, he had become the philosophical celebrity of his age. From Russia to America, admirers echoed his estimation of himself as a titanic figure who could alter the course of history: “I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.”  (…)

From the start, Nietzsche’s American readers were bewitched and bedeviled. His hatred of Christian asceticism, middle-class sentimentality and democratic uplift was an assault on 19th-century America’s apparently most salient characteristics. For that very reason, he attracted young Americans who felt estranged from their culture, and has continued to do so. But today’s inescapable and perplexing Nietzsche is not necessarily the same Nietzsche who inspired readers in the past; and it’s the achievement of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s “American Nietzsche” to show how that is the case.

Though Nietzsche loathed the left, he was loved by it. As Ratner-Rosenhagen explains, the anarchists and “romantic radicals” as well as the “literary cosmopolitans of varying political persuasions” who welcomed him to America believed they had found the perfect manifestation of Emerson’s Poet, for whom a thought is “alive, . . . like the spirit of a plant or an animal.” To read Nietzsche was to overcome an entire civilization’s inhibiting divide between thinking and feeling.  [More]

More than 50 percent of the world’s population now live in cities – and there is no end of urbanization in sight. As opposed to the conventional wisdom, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser believes urbanization to be a solution to many unanswered problems, such as pollution, depression and a lack of creativity.

The European: As an economist, you have a very pragmatic approach to cities. Let’s begin with one of your thoughts: Cities help preserve the environment precisely because they keep people away from it.
Glaeser: That is right. It is somewhat counterintuitive but all that is leafy is not necessarily green – living around trees and living in low density areas may end being actually quite harmful for the environment, whereas living in high-rise buildings and urban core may end up being quite kind to the environment. Together with with Matthew Kahn of UCLA we looked at carbon emissions from home and transport energy use and found very significant differences, even when holding incumbent family size constant between low density and urban living.

The basic point is that people who live in densities are much less likely to drive long distances than people who live in lower densities. And people who live in urban apartments all typically use less electricity at home and less energy at home heating than people who live in larger suburban or rural homes. A single family detached house uses on average 83% more electricity than urban apartments do within the United States. [More]

We live in time. On days like this one, when we find ourselves carried without any effort or intent from the end of one calendar year to the next, this observation is perhaps especially clear.

Our lives are temporal. Time passes, and with that our lives. Dissolving into things, processes, and events as the mode of their becoming, time is a medium within which every being is able to exist and develop. Time is, however, also destructive. Its power means that everything, including ourselves, is transient, provisional and bound to come to an irreversible end.

Many philosophers have tried to articulate what it means to be not only temporal but aware of oneself as such. How should we interpret the fact of our own temporality?  (…)

Clock time is the time of our modern, busy and highly coordinated and interconnected lives. It is the time of planning and control, of setting goals and achieving them in the most efficient manner. We move through such time in the same way we drive a car: calculating the distance passed while coordinating our movement with that of other drivers, passing through an environment that can never be particularly significant and which will soon be observable in the mirror.

Modern society is unimaginable without clock time. With the rise of the chronometer came a vast increase in discipline, efficiency and social speed, transforming every institution and human endeavor. The factory, the office, transportation, business, the flow of information, indeed almost everything we do and relate to is to a greater or lesser extent controlled by the clock. It was not always like this. [More]

DO BANKERS inevitably go to hell? What many people today merely hope will come to pass was for Christians in the early 1400s a matter of faith. After all, the Bible, like the Koran, was explicit in its condemnation of lending money at interest, the basis of most banking operations. So in many parts of Christendom moneylending was left to Jews. In several northern cities of medieval Italy, however, ingenious Christians started to find ways round the banking ban. Their contrivances, though legal, were not popular with the church, which held that usurers, by charging for the duration of a loan, were not trading in goods but in time, and this was God’s.

The prospect of an eternity of hellfire was particularly acute in Florence, since it was here that the foundations of modern banking were being laid. As it happened, Florence was also witnessing the first stirrings of an extraordinary flowering of the arts. Before long guilt-ridden bankers were commissioning great works of religious art in the hope that they might after death escape the damnation that the scriptures foretold. In this way were the birth of the international financial industry and that of the Renaissance intimately connected. [More]

Thomas Pogge has taken Rawls’ Theory of Justice to a global level. He sat down with Sören Musyal and Martin Eiermann to talk about European solidarity, the democratic paradox and the line between academia and activism.

The European: You live in the US. What is your take on the European debate about financial support for Greece?
Pogge: There is tension between the interest of the nation-states to prop up their own economies and the desire to further the European idea. One thing seems clear: A policy of radical self-interests harms the collective. If small concessions happen routinely, the collective becomes rational. But the problem is that we begin to anticipate these concessions – and that pushes the collective towards irrationality.

The European: How would you define solidarity?
Pogge: Within Europe, the goal is to reduce income inequalities among states. And on an individual level, solidarity is the attempt to act in such a way as to overcome the worst inequalities in Europe or the world.

The European: Much faith is put into the idea of a European identity. Can something like the EU function without a grand narrative like that?
Pogge: It has always been the vision of Europe to overcome the monopoly that nationalism and patriotism held over our identities, and to offer another identity option at a higher level. It would be dystopian if people in Europe began to think of themselves only as Europeans and hunkered down in defense against anything outside the borders of the EU. Global inequalities would only grow. [More]

What is a person? And why does it matter how we answer that question?

Every social science explanation has operating in the background some idea or other of what human persons are, what motivates them, what we can expect of them. Sometimes that is explicit, often it is implicit. And the different concepts of persons assumed by social scientists have important consequences in governing the questions asked, sensitizing concepts employed, evidence gathered, and explanations formulated. We cannot put the question of personhood in a “black box” and really get anywhere. Personhood always matters. By my account, a person is “a conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who — as the efficient cause of his or her own responsible actions and interactions — exercises complex capacities for agency and inter-subjectivity in order to develop and sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the non-personal world.”

Persons are thus centers with purpose. If that is true, then it has consequences for the doing of sociology, and in other ways for the doing of science broadly. Different views of human personhood will provide us with different scientific interests, different professional moral and ethical sensibilities, different theoretical paradigms of explanation, and, ultimately, different visions of what comprises a good human existence which science ought to serve.  [More]