Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance - the idea that when we hold two conflicting thoughts or beliefs, we unconsciously adjust to make one fit with the other. 
For example, if you have a belief that it is wrong to cheat, yet you find yourself cheating on a test, because it was a dumb class that you didn’t need anyway. Or you may say to yourself that everyone cheats so why not you? In other words, you think about your action in a different manner or context so that it no longer appears to be inconsistent with your beliefs and ease your anxiety .

Carl Sagan's public lecture at Cornell

" Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. "

From Carl Sagan's public lecture at Cornell, October 13, 1994

Melting pot or Salad bowl ?

The vision of America as a “melting pot of nations” (cf. the Latin motto “e pluribus unum” – ("one from many" –or "One out of many"  suggesting that out of many peoples, races, religions and ancestries has emerged a single people and nation—illustrating the concept of the melting pot.) , in which the foreign immigrants give up their national identity, way of life, culture and language and form a new nation, has never become reality. In the 1960s, the growing self-confidence of the minorities, their fight against discrimination, and the influx of new ethnic groups who refused to be culturally absorbed by American society, has made America look for a new image for this concept. The concept of the “salad bowl” was suggested as more accurate, accepting America as diverse, multi-cultural and pluralistic.

The Fench Revolution's backhground

The broad background of the French Revolution was colored by a number of overarching circumstances. The first of these was the rise of absolute monarchies everywhere in Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In England, absolute government was instituted by the Tudor monarchs and continued by the Stuarts, James VI and Charles I. Their inflated conceptions of monarchy and their attempts to undermine Parliament eventually resulted in the Civil War (1642–1649) between the supporters of the king and those of Parliament. The latter, led by Oliver Cromwell, were victorious. Charles I was beheaded in 1649 and England was ruled for a short spell by Parliament. However, the so-called Restoration of 1660 placed Charles II upon the throne.

Central Europe and Spain were also under the rule of despots, some enlightened such as Frederick II the Great of Prussia (1740–1786) and Joseph II of Austria (1780– 1790), and others more repressive such as Catherine the Great of Russia (1762–1796), who crushed a serf rebellion in 1773–1774. In France, however, the situation was dire.

Henry IV, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, had promoted industry and manufacture and effectively minimized the sovereignty of the feudal nobility. The next three Bourbon kings, Louis XIV (1643–1715), Louis XV (1715–1774), and Louis XVI (1774–1792), took to new extremes the arrogation of power and the instruments of justice. Louis XIV had declared “l’état, c’est moi,” and both of his successors professed the divine right of kings.

Hence, the French Revolution was in part a reaction against the excesses of absolute government which had grown both in theory and practice since the fourteenth century.

Another factor was the economic transformation of society. The fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries had witnessed tendencies which would later foster the growth of capitalism.By the seventeenth century, England, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal,and Holland had become imperial powers; trade became a worldwide rather than a national or local phenomenon. By the end of the seventeenth century the bourgeoisie had achieved economic hegemony.

Another economic cause was the survival of a feudal system of privileges, whereby the higher clergy and certain classes of nobles monopolized government. Peasants resented the fees and land taxes they were obliged to pay to their lords; and the urban masses suffered greatly from high prices. The political causes included a despotic monarchy, an unsystematic mode of government, finance, taxation, and law.

The intellectual influences stemmed largely from the Enlightenment . The more specific influences on the French Revolution included Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), which justified the new political system in England that prevailed after the English revolution of 1688. Locke condemned despotic monarchy and the absolute sovereignty of parliaments and suggested that the people had a right to resist tyranny. Voltaire advocated an enlightened monarchy or republic governed by the bourgeois classes. Baron de Montesquieu also influenced the first stage of the French Revolution, advancing a liberal theory based on a separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau exerted a powerful impact on the second stage of the Revolution through his theories of democracy, egalitarianism, and the evils of private property, as advocated in his Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.

Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth

" Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth: His light (in the universe) may be likened (to the light of) a lamp in a niche: the lamp is in a glass shade: the glass shade is like a glittering star and lamp is lit with the olive oil of a blessed tree which is neither eastern nor western: its oil is (so fine) as if it were going to shine forth by itself though no fire touched it (as though all the means of increasing) light upon light (were provided ); Allah guides to His light whomever He wills. He cites parables to make the Message clear to the people; He has perfect knowledge of everything. " 

The physical light is but a reflection of the true Light in the world of Reality, and that true Light is Allah. We can only think of Allah in terms of our phenomenal experience, and in the phenomenal world, light is the purest thing we know.
The first three points in the Parable center around the symbols of the Niche, the Lamp, and the Glass.
The niche is an opening in a wall which is not a window, fairly high from the ground, in which a light (before the days of electricity) was usually placed. Its height enabled it to diffuse the light in the room and minimized the shadows.
So with the spiritual Light: it is placed high above worldly things: it has a niche or habitation of its own, in Revelation and other Signs of Allah; its access to men is by a special Way, open to all, yet closed to those who refuse its rays. The Lamp is the core of the spiritual Truth, which is the real illumination; the Niche is nothing without it.
The Glass is the transparent medium through which the Light passes. It protects the light from moths and other forms of low life (lower motives in man) and from gusts of wind (passions) ...
The glass by itself does not shine. But when the light comes into it, it shines like a brilliant star. So men of God, who preach Allah’s Truth, are themselves illuminated by Allah’s Light and become like illuminating media through which that Light spreads and permeates human life.
The mystic Olive is not localized. It is neither of the East nor the West. It is universal, for such is Allah’s Light.

اللَّهُ نُورُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۚ مَثَلُ نُورِهِ كَمِشْكَاةٍ فِيهَا مِصْبَاحٌ ۖ الْمِصْبَاحُ فِي زُجَاجَةٍ ۖ الزُّجَاجَةُ كَأَنَّهَا" كَوْكَبٌ دُرِّيٌّ يُوقَدُ مِن شَجَرَةٍ مُّبَارَكَةٍ زَيْتُونَةٍ لَّا شَرْقِيَّةٍ وَلَا غَرْبِيَّةٍ يَكَادُ زَيْتُهَا يُضِيءُ وَلَوْ لَمْ تَمْسَسْهُ نَارٌ ۚ نُّورٌ عَلَىٰ نُورٍ ۗ يَهْدِي اللَّهُ لِنُورِهِ مَن يَشَاءُ ۚ وَيَضْرِبُ اللَّهُ الْأَمْثَالَ لِلنَّاسِ ۗ وَاللَّهُ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ "

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

Known as the founder of French symbolism (though not himself part of the movement), and often associated with the artistic decadence and aestheticism of the later nineteenth century, Baudelaire was born in Paris where he lived a bohemian life, adopting the artistic posture of a dandy, devoted to beauty and disdainfully aloof from the vulgar bourgeois world of materialism and commerce .

Baudelaire is often credited with expressing one of the first modernistic visions, a vision of the sordidness, sensuality,

and corruption of city life, a disposition that profoundly influenced modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Baudelaire’s famous or infamous collection of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), was published in 1857 and became the subject of a trial for obscenity in the same year for including some lesbian poems.

Baudelaire contracted syphilis and was paralyzed by a stroke before his death.

Karl Marx's thoughts

As with all socialists, Marx’s main objection to capitalism was that one particular class owned the means of economic production: “The bourgeoisie . . . has centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.”

The correlative of this is the oppression and exploitation of the working classes: “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed; a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.

These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity.”

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production . . . The need of a constantly expanding market . . . chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.”