The Devotion of the Suspect X

The classroom felt deserted that day, as always. The room was large enough to seat a hundred students, but there were only twenty or so there now. Most of them were in the back row so that they could slip out after attendance had been taken or work on some project of their own during the lecture.

Very few undergraduates wanted to be mathematicians. In fact, Ishigami was probably the only one in his entire class. And this course, with its lectures on the historical background of applied physics, was not a popular one. 

Even Ishigami wasn’t all that interested in the lectures, but he sat in the second chair from the left edge in the front row. He always sat there, or in the closest available position, in every room, at every lecture. He avoided sitting in the middle because he thought it would help him maintain objectivity. Even the most brilliant professor could sometimes err and say something inaccurate, after all.

It was usually lonely at the front of the classroom, but on this particular day someone was sitting in the seat directly behind him. Ishigami wasn’t paying his visitor any attention. He had important things to do before the lecturer arrived. He took out his notebook and began scribbling formulas.

“Ah, an adherent of Erdős, I see,” said a voice from behind.

At first, Ishigami didn’t realize the comment was directed at him. But after a moment the words sank in and his attention lifted from his work—not because he wanted to start a conversation, but out of excitement at hearing someone other than himself mention the name “Erdős.” He looked around.

It was a fellow student, a young man with shoulder-length hair, cheek propped up on one hand, his shirt hanging open at the neck. Ishigami had seen him around. He was a physics major, but beyond that, Ishigami knew nothing about him.

Surely he can’t be the one who spoke, Ishigami was thinking, when the long-haired student, still propping up one cheek, remarked, “I’m afraid you’re going to hit your limits working with just a pencil and paper—of course, you’re welcome to try. Might get something out of it.”

Ishigami was surprised that his voice was the same one he’d heard a moment earlier. “You know what I’m doing?”

“Sorry—I just happened to glance over your shoulder. I didn’t mean to pry,” the other replied, pointing at Ishigami’s desk.

Ishigami’s eyes went back to his notebook. He had written out some formulas, but it was only a part of the whole, the beginnings of a solution. If this guy knew what he was doing just from this, then he must have worked on the problem himself.

“You’ve worked on this, too?” Ishigami asked.

The long-haired student let his hand fall down to the desktop. He grinned and shrugged. “Nah. I try to avoid doing anything unnecessary. I’m in physics, you know. We just use the theorems you mathematicians come up with. I’ll leave working out the proofs to you.”

“But you do understand what it—what this—means?” 

Ishigami asked, gesturing at his notebook page.

“Yes, because it’s already been proven. No harm in knowing what has a proof and what doesn’t,” the student explained, steadily meeting Ishigami’s gaze. “The four-color problem? Solved. You can color any map with only four colors.”

“Not any map.”

“Oh, that’s right. There were conditions. It had to be a map on a plane or a sphere, like a map of the world.”

It was one of the most famous problems in mathematics, first put into print in a paper in 1879 by one Arthur Cayley, who had asked the question: are four colors sufficient to color the contiguous countries on any map, such that no two adjacent countries are ever colored the same? All one had to do was prove that four colors were sufficient, or present a map where such separation was impossible—a process which had taken nearly one hundred years. The final proof had come from two mathematicians at the University of Illinois, Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. They had used a computer to confirm that all maps were only variations on roughly 150 basic maps, all of which could be colored with four colors.

That was in 1976.

“I don’t consider that a very convincing proof,” Ishigami stated.

“Of course you don’t. That’s why you’re trying to solve it there with your paper and pencil.”

“The way they proved it would take too long for humans to do with their hands. That’s why they used a computer. But that makes it impossible to determine, beyond a doubt, whether their proof is correct. It’s not real mathematics if you have to use a computer to verify it.”

“Like I said, a true adherent of Erdős,” the long-haired student observed with a chuckle.

Paul Erdős was a Hungarian-born mathematician famous for traveling the world and engaging in joint research with other mathematicians wherever he went. He believed that the best theorems were those with clear, naturally elegant proofs. Though he’d acknowledged that Appel and Haken’s work on the four-color problem was probably correct, he had disparaged their proof for its lack of beauty.

The "Muslim World"

By Cemil Aydin
Full version if this article is originally published as What is Muslim World? by aeon.co on 1 August 2018.

Nearly a fifth of the way into the 21st century, however, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism seems to have vanished but Pan-Islamism and the ideal of Muslim world solidarity survives. Why? The answer lies in the final stages of the Cold War. It was in the 1980s that a new Muslim internationalism emerged, as part of a rising political Islam. It was not a clash between the primordial civilisational traditions of Islam and the West, or a reassertion of authentic religious values. It wasn’t even a persistence of early 20th-century Pan-Islamism, but rather a new formation of the Cold War. A Saudi-US alliance began promoting the idea of Muslim solidarity in the 1970s as an alternative to the secular Pan-Arabism of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose country allied with the Soviet Union. Any ideas of an ‘Islamic’ utopia would have floundered if not for the failures of many post-colonial nation-states and the subsequent public disillusionment of many Muslims.

The notion that Pan-Islamism represents authentic, ancient, repressed Muslim political values in revolt against global Westernisation and secularisation was initially a paranoid obsession of Western colonial officers, but recently it comes mainly from Islamists. Western pundits and journalists have erred in accepting at face value Islamist claims about Islam’s essential political values. The kind of Islamism that’s identified with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood or Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran did not exist before the 1970s. None of the Indian Muslims meeting Wilson, nor the late Ottoman-era caliphs, were interested in imposing Sharia in their society. None of them wanted to veil women. On the contrary, the first Pan-Islamist generation was highly modernist: they were proponents of the liberation of women, racial equality and cosmopolitanism. Indian Muslims, for example, were very proud that the Ottoman caliph had Greek and Armenian ministers and ambassadors. They also wanted to see the British Crown appointing Hindu and Muslim ministers and high-level officials in their governments. None would have desired or predicted the separation of Turks and Greeks in Ottoman lands, Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and Muslims and Hindus in India. Only the basic form of early 20th-century Pan-Islamism survives today; the substance of it has, since the 1980s, transformed completely.

The fact that both Lewis and Osama bin Laden spoke of an eternal clash between a united Muslim world and a united West does not mean it is a reality. Even at the peak of the idea of global Muslim solidarity in the late 19th century, Muslim societies were divided across political, linguistic and cultural lines. Since the time of prophet Muhammad’s Companions in the seventh century, hundreds of diverse kingdoms, empires and sultanates, some in conflict with each other, ruled over Muslim populations mixed with others. Separating Muslims from their Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Jewish neighbours, and thinking of their societies in isolation, bears no relationship to the historical experience of human beings. There has never been, and could never be, a separate ‘Muslim world’.

All the new fascist Right-wing anti-Muslim groups in Europe and the US obsesses over Ottoman imperial expansion in eastern Europe. They see the Ottoman siege of Vienna of 1683 as the Islamic civilisation’s near-takeover of ‘the West’. But in the Battle of Vienna, Protestant Hungarians allied with the predominantly Muslim Ottoman empire against the Catholic Habsburgs. It was a complex conflict between empires and states, not a clash of civilisations.

The Hindu nationalism of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi promotes the idea of an alien Mughal empire that invaded India and ruled over Hindus. But Hindu bureaucrats played a vital role in India’s Mughal empire, and Mughal emperors were simply empire-builders, not zealots of theocratic rule over different faith communities. There are also Muslims today who look back at the Mughal empire in India as an instance of Muslim domination over Hindus. It is notable and important that anti-Muslim Western propaganda and Pan-Islamic narratives of history resemble one another. They both rely on the civilisational narrative of history and a geopolitical division of the world into discrete ahistorical entities such as black Africa, the Muslim world, Asia and the West.

Contemporary Pan-Islamism also idealises a mythical past. According to Pan-Islamists, the ummah, or worldwide Muslim community, originated at a time when Muslims were not humiliated by racist white empires or aggressive Western powers. Pan-Islamists want to ‘make the ummah great again’. Yet the notion of a golden age of Muslim political unity and solidarity relies on amnesia about the imperial past. Muslim societies were never politically united, and there were never homogeneous Muslim societies in Eurasia. None of the Muslim dynasty-ruled empires aimed to subjugate non-Muslims by pious believers. Like the Ottoman, Persian or Egyptian monarchs of the late 19th century, they were multi-ethnic empires, employing thousands of non-Muslim bureaucrats. Muslim populations simply never asked for global ummah solidarity before the late 19th-century moment of racialised European empires.

The term ‘the Muslim world’ first appeared in the 1870s. Initially, it was European missionaries or colonial officers who favoured it as a shorthand to refer to all those between the ‘yellow race’ of East Asia and the black race in Africa. They also used it to express their fear of a potential Muslim revolt, though Muslim subjects of empire were no more or less rebellious to their empires than Hindu or Buddhist subjects. After the great Indian Rebellion of 1857, when both Hindus and Muslims rose up against the British, some British colonial officers blamed Muslims for this uprising. William Wilson Hunter, a British colonial officer, questioned whether Indian Muslims could be loyal to a Christian monarch in his influential book, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (1871). In reality, Muslims were not much different from Hindus in terms of their loyalty as well as their critique of the British empire. Elite Indian Muslims, such as the reformist Syed Ahmad Khan, wrote angry rebuttals to Hunter’s allegations. But they also accepted his terms of debate, in which Muslims were a distinct and separate category of Indians.

The growth of European nationalisms also found a useful enemy in Muslims, specifically the Ottoman sultan. In the late 19th century, Greek, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian nationalists all began to depict the Ottoman sultan as a despot. They appealed to British liberals to break the Ottoman-British alliance on behalf of a global Christian solidarity. Anti-Ottoman British liberals such as William Gladstone argued that Christian solidarity should be important for British decisions with regard to the Ottoman empire. It is in that context that the Ottoman sultan referred to his spiritual link with Indian Muslims, to argue for a return to an Ottoman-British alliance thanks to this special connection between these two big Muslim empires.

In his influential book The Future of Islam (1882), the English poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt argued that the Ottoman empire would eventually be expelled from Europe, and that Europe’s crusading spirit would turn Istanbul into a Christian city. Blunt also claimed that the British empire, lacking the hatred of Muslims of the Austrians, the Russians or the French, could become the protector of the world’s Muslim populations in Asia. In patronising and imperial ways, Blunt seemed to care about the future of Muslims. He was a supporter and friend of leading Muslim reformists such as Al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, and served as an intermediary between European intellectual circles and Muslim reformists.

Around the same time that Blunt was writing, the influential French intellectual Ernest Renan formulated a very negative view of Islam, especially in regard to science and civilisation. Renan saw Islam as a Semitic religion that would impede the development of science and rationality. His ideas symbolised the racialisation of Muslims via their religion. Of course, Renan was making this argument in Paris, which ruled over large parts of Muslim North Africa and West Africa. His ideas helped to rationalise French colonial rule. Al-Afghani and many other Muslim intellectuals wrote rebuttals of Renan’s arguments, while being supported by Blunt. But Renan enjoyed more success in creating a distracting narrative of a separate Islamic civilisation versus a Western, Christian civilisation.

European elites’ claims of a Western civilising mission, and the superiority of the Christian-Western civilisation, were important to the colonial projects. European intellectuals took up vast projects of classifying humanity into hierarchies of race and religion. It was only in response to this chauvinistic assertion that Muslim intellectuals fashioned a counter-narrative of Islamic civilisation. In an attempt to assert their dignity and equality, they emphasised the past glory, modernity and civility of ‘the Muslim world’. These Muslim opponents of European imperial ideology – of the white race’s civilisational superiority over Muslims and other coloured races – were the first Pan-Islamists.

During the early 20th century, Muslim reformers began to cultivate a historical narrative that emphasised a shared civilisation, with a golden age in Islamic science and art, and its subsequent decline. This idea of a holistic Muslim history was a novel creation fashioned directly in response to the idea of a Western civilisation and the geopolitical arguments of Western/white racial unity. Like the early generation of Pan-African and Pan-Asian intellectuals, Muslim intellectuals responded to European chauvinism and Western orientalism with their own glorious history and civilisation. Throughout the 20th century, the great Muslim leaders such as Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nasser in Egypt, Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddeq and Indonesia’s Sukarno were all secular nationalists, but all of them needed and used this notion of a glorious history of Muslim civilisation to talk back against ideologies of white supremacy. Nationalism eventually triumphed, and during the 1950s and ’60s the idea of Islam as a force in world affairs also faded from Western journalism and scholarship.

Pan-Islamic ideologies did not resurface again until the 1970s and ’80s, and then with a new character and tone. They returned as an expression of discontent with the contemporary world. After all, gone were the heady days of mid-20th-century optimism about modernisation. The United Nations had failed to solve existential issues. Post-colonial nation-states had not brought liberty and prosperity to most of the world’s Muslims. Meanwhile, Europe, the US and the Soviet Union showed little concern for the suffering of Muslim peoples. Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan appeared, maintaining that the colonisation of Palestine and the tribulations of poverty required a new form of solidarity.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 proved a historic moment. To condemn the status quo, Khomeini appealed to this new form of Pan-Islamism. Yet, his Iran and its regional rival Saudi Arabia both privileged the national interests of their states. So there has never been a viable federative vision of this new Pan-Islamic solidarity. Unlike Pan-Africanism, which idealised black-skinned populations living in solidarity within post-colonial Africa, Pan-Islamism rests on a sense of victimhood without a practical political project. It is less about real plans to establish a Muslim polity than about how to end the oppression and discrimination shared by an imagined global community.

The calls for global Muslim solidarity can never be understood by looking at religious texts or Muslim piety. It is developments in modern intellectual and geopolitical history that have generated and shaped Pan-Islamic views of history and the world. Perhaps their crucial feature is the idea of the West as a place with its own historical narrative and enduring political vision of global hegemony. The Soviet Union, the US, the EU – all the global Western projects of the 20th century imagine a superior West and its hegemony. Early Pan-Islamic intellectuals developed Muslim narratives of a historical global order as a strategy to combat imperial discourses about their inferiority, which suffused colonial metropoles, orientalist writings and European social sciences. There simply could not be a Pan-Islamic narrative of the global order without its counterpart, the Western narrative of the world, which is equally tendentious as history.

Ideas of Western and Islamic worlds seem like enemies in the mirror. We should not let the colonisers of the late-19th century set the terms of today’s discussion on human rights and good governance. As long as we accept this tendentious opposition between ‘the West’ and ‘the Muslim world’, we are still captives to colonisation and the failures of decolonisation. In simply recognising and rejecting these terms of discussion, we can be free to move forward, to think about one another and the world in more realistic and humane ways. Our challenge today is to find a new language of rights and norms that is not captive to the fallacies of Western civilisation or its African, Asian and Muslim alternatives. Human beings, irrespective of their colour and religion, share a single planet and a connected history, without civilisational borders. Any forward path to overcome current injustices and problems must rely on our connections and shared values, rather than civilisational tribalism.

Peki, Biz Niçin Bu Durumdayız?

Mardin’de büyüdüm ve 19 yaşıma kadar orada kaldım. Mardin, hayranlık uyandırıcı bir medeniyetler bileşkesidir. Asurlardan Romalılara, Perslerden Araplara, Bizanslılardan Selçuk ve Osmanlılara kadar çeşitli medeniyetler Mardin’de buluşuyor. Bu anlamlı buluşmayı harikulade taş yapılarda müşahede etmek mümkün. Merak ettiğim ise: “Eğer atalarım bu eserleri yaptıysa biz de yapabiliriz. Ama yapamıyoruz? Neden?” Hep kendime bu suali sordum. 

Tarihin tanıklığına dönüp baktığımız zaman, yani kendi tarihimize Osmanlı’ya Selçuklu’ya ya da Begoviç’in işaret ettiği gibi, Hint yarım kıtasından, Semerkant’tan Endülüs’e ve bugün adına Ortadoğu dediğimiz bütün İslam dünyasındaki bu medeniyet merkezlerine baktığımız zaman atalarımızın ürünlerini görmekteyiz. Ama biz onların torunları utanç verici bir ilkellik içinde yaşıyoruz.

Kendimize, “peki, biz niçin bu durumdayız?” sorusunu sormamız lazım.  Eğer kimi oryantalistin bize telkin ettiği gibi fıtratımızda, yapımızda bir ilkellik varsa bizden önceki atalarımızın da ilkel yaşaması icap ederdi. Aksine atalarımız insan yüzlü şehirler inşa ettiler,  yüksek medeniyetler kurdular. Biz ise güzelim şehirlerimizi vandalca tahrip ediyoruz. Demek ki, sorun bizden kaynaklanmaktadır. Alev Erkilet’in de değindiği gibi, Moğolları harici sebep olarak göstermek yerine içerdeki asıl etkenler üzerinde durmamız gerekiyor.

İslam, salt bir din değildir. Bu akıldan çıkarılmaması gereken temel bir önermedir.

Peki, öyleyse nedir İslam? İslam, “Ed-Din”dir.

Biz yanlış olarak İslamiyet’i diğer din kulvarlarında yer alan dinler gibi bir din olarak telakki ediyoruz. Din olarak telakki ettiğimizde de, Müslüman kavimlere ait, millileştirilmiş, yerlileştirilmiş, tekel altına alınmış bir din olarak algılıyoruz. İslam, ya Türklerin ya Arapların ya da Farsların dinidir sanki. Mesela bir İngiliz veya bir Fransız Müslüman olduğu zaman, ya bir Türk, ya bir Arap, ya da bir Fars ismini almak zorunda. Oysa Ed-Din, en-nas’a, insanlara, türümüzün tümüne ait olan bir dindir, kimsenin tekelinde değildir.

Bir diğer husus İslamiyet, diğer dinlere karşı olan bir din de değildir. Ne Hıristiyanlığa ne de Yahudiliğe karşıdır; aksine onları tamamlayan, ikmal eden bir dindir. Onu Ed-Din yapan vasıf da budur. Begoviç buna vurgu yapıyordu. Begoviç, hep dinin tevhid eden, dünya ve ahireti birleştiren boyutundan bahsetti. Türkiye’de ise, Müslümanlığının temelini oluşturan din ve Ed-Din değil, “diyanet” olmuştur. Bu, sakatlanmış bir Müslümanlıktır. Bu sebepledir ki, devletin en önemli kuruluşuna “Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı” denilmiş, “Din İşleri Başkanlığı” denilmemiştir. Bu isimlendirme üzerinde çokça düşünülmüş ve daha sonra seçilmiştir. Halbuki Begoviç’in yazılarında  İslamiyet ne tek başına bir din ne de sadece diyanettir. Malik Bin Nebi ile Seyyid Kutup arasındaki medeniyet-siyaset tartışmasında, Begoviç bir adım ileri gitmeyi denemiştir. İslam’ı, Seyyid Kutup siyasete, Malik Bin Nebi medeniyete irca ediyordu. Türkiye’de İslamcı algının merkezinde “salt iktidar” yer aldığından önce Seyyid Kutub’un “siyasete vurgusu” yüceltildi, iktidar olunduktan sonra da Malik Bin Nebi’nin “medeniyet vurgusu” öne çıktı; iktidarla yerel ve merkezi kamu kaynaklarını ele geçirenler, şimdi ceplerine doldurdukları parayı harcayacak medeniyet formları arama aşamasına gelmişlerdi. Medeniyet onların konfor özlemlerinin dışa vurumuydu. Aramice asıllı medeniyetin bir mahkemenin yetki sahası içindeki yerleşim birimi olduğunu; Hz. Peygamber’in Yesrib yerine Medine'yi seçerken 'dinin mekanda ete kemiğe bürünmesi formlarını kastettiğini' düşünmediler; yeni muktedirler göç ve kentin sahneye çıkardığı Bedeviler olduklarından, iktidar ve medeniyet tasavvurlarında  beşeri hayatın aşkın birliği olan tevhid merkezde yer almadığından, ne Seyyid Kutub’un siyasetini doğru algıladılar ne Malik Bin Nebi’nin medeniyetini. 

Ali Bulaç

İslam Dünyası niçin geri kaldı?

Biz bu soruyu 19. yüzyılda sorduk ve cevabını –hala- yanlış vermeye devam ediyoruz. Aslında bu mesele, bir yere gitmek isterken yanlış bir otobana girmemize benzer. Yanlış otobana girersek, o yol bizi nereye kadar götürecekse ve yolun sonuna kadar, yanlış yolda gideceğiz demektir. Belki 19. yüzyılda bu soru anlamlıydı, çünkü yaşanan bir travma vardı ve 20. yüzyıl boyunca da bu sorunun cevabı arandı. Dolayısıyla bu soruyu soranları küçümsemiyorum, eleştirmiyorum, fakat 21. yüzyıldaki sorumuz bu olmamalıdır. Bizi ayağa kaldıracak meşru sorumuz: “Bizim küresel düzeyde moderniteye cevabımız nedir?” olmalıdır. Özgürlük, ahlak, adalet, izzet ve bir arada yaşama iradesini amaçlamayan radikalizmin bizi kör bir şiddet ve cinayetlere; iktidar için iktidarın da bizi istibdada ve yozlaşmaya mahkum ettiğini gördük.

Ali Bulaç

Batı'da Entellektüel Kalmadı

Bir durum tespiti olarak şu hususun altını çizmekte yarar var: Batı’da entelektüel kalmadı; dünya yeni bir döneme adım atarken geçmiştekine benzer “kurucu zihin” ortaya çıkmıyor, kurucu zihinlerin mirası üzerinden gidenler de yavaş yavaş tarih sahnesinden çekiliyor. Şu anda Batı düşünce hayatına siyasetine, maddi ve iktisadi evrenine yön verenler, sosyal bilimciler, politikacılar, uzmanlar ve stratejistlerdir. Fonksiyonel değerleri inkar edilmese de, bu zümre içinde yer alanlar entelektüel sıfatını almaya hak kazanmazlar.

Teknoloji, ekonomi, strateji ve politika, yeryüzü ölçeğinde hayatı giderek yoksullaştırmakta, acımasızlaştırmaktadır. Sosyal bilimcilerden filozof veya yüksek düzeyde fikir adamı çıkmaz; sosyal bilimlerin suyunun derinliği bir karışlıktır, bilimlerin sularında sadece ayaklarınızı ıslatırsınız. Entelektüel, okyanusun derin sularına dalar, derinliklerde hikmet incileri arar. Söz konusu dört düzeyde -teknoloji, ekonomi, strateji ve politika- tabiat tüketiliyor, istifçilik gelişiyor, bedenin organizmaya ait istekleri öne çıkıyor. Tabii bunun arkasından da pragmatizmin ve başarı tutkusunun tetiklediği, hegemonik bir kültür yeryüzününün genelini istila ediyor.

Zamanımızda sanat, edebiyat ve felsefe alanında inanılmaz bir zaaf söz konusu. Kurtarıcı paradigmayı inşa etme gücünde olan din, deizm ve nihilizmle atbaşı giden sekülerleşmenin etkisinde özelleşiyor, marjinalleşiyor ve izafi alana çekilmek zorunda bırakılıyor. Din adına hüküm süren iktidarlar dini sekülerleştiriyor. Bu sebepten sürecin anavatanı Batı olduğundan entelektüel çıkmıyor. İyi bir entelektüel ancak dinin evreninde mümkün hayat bulabilir. Hıristiyanlık, Yahudilik, Budizm de entelektüel çıkarabilir, fakat en iyi ve en kâmil anlamdaki entelektüel örnekler sadece İslam’a özeldir ve bu manada sadece İslam entelektüel çıkarabilir. Şu var ki, sahih entelektüel geçmişte olduğu gibi bugün de “zenginlerin (ulusal ve küresel kapitalistlerin) sofrasından ve sultanın sarayından uzak” sade, mütevazi ve çileli bir hayat tarzını seçmeyi göze almalı.

Ali Bulaç, alibulac.net

Sarı Yelekliler

Benzin fiyatlarına yapılan zamla başlayan ve 3. haftasında tüm Fransa’yı etkisine alan ‘Sarı Yelekliler’ hareketi Türkiye’nin de gündeminde. Paris’teki şiddet olayları nedeniyle dünyanın dikkatini çekmiş olsa da aslında Fransa bu tür kitlesel ayaklanmalara yabancı bir ülke değil. Sonuncuları 1995, 2003 ve 2005’te olmak üzere son 200 yılda ülkede hayatı durduran 24 büyük ayaklanma oldu. Bunlara 2007 ve 2010’daki 2 milyon’un üzerinde katılımcının olduğu dev hükümet karşıtı gösteriler dahil değil. Fransa’da 3 yaşında bir çocuk grevin ne anlama geldiğini ve bir hak olduğunu anaokulunda öğrenir. Ortaokul yaşına gelmiş 3 Fransızdan ikisi büyük bir gösteriye katılmıştır. Bugün Batı dünyasında hak kabul edilen veya norm olarak görülen temel hak kazanımlarının ekseriyeti için Fransız halkı tarih boyunca kan dökmüş, can vermiş ve yüzlerce yıl savaşmıştır. Ancak, Facebook üzerinden başlayan ve benzin fiyatlarına getirilen çevreci vergi uygulamasıyla tetiklenen ‘Sarı yelekliler’ eylemleri mahiyet olarak alışageldiğimiz Fransız ayaklanmalarından biraz farklı görünüyor. Türkiye’de sık sık Gezi olaylarına benzetildiğini görüyoruz. Ancak, Fransız İhtilali ile doğan ‘Sans Culottes’ (Donsuzlar) ile Sarı yelekliler arasındaki benzerlikler dikkat çekici. Türkçeye ‘Baldırı çıplaklar’ olarak geçen ‘Sans Culottes’ (Donsuzlar) Fransız ihtilalinde kısa ömürlü ancak etkisi yüzyıllara yayılmış bir grup. Paris sokaklarında terör estirerek siyasi taleplerini kabul ettirmiş bir hareket. Terör kavramı bugün radikal dini örgütlerin ve ayrılıkçı hareketlerin siyasi bir aracı olarak bilinir. Ancak, Sans Culottes’lar yöneticilerde ve halkta panik ve korku oluşturmak amacıyla rastgele şiddetin bir siyasal dönüşüm aracı olarak kullanılmasını öngören terör kavramının mucididir. Fransız İhtilali’yle doğan bu hareketin ismini dönemin aristokratları koymuştur. O dönemin kıyafet adabının aksine sade kıyafet giymeleri, köylü, düz işçi ve küçük esnaftan oluşan bir grup olmaları nedeniyle aşağılama amaçlı kullanılan bu tanımı sahiplenmişler, Fransız İhtilali’nin ilk yıllarında büyük rol oynamışlardır. Hareketin öne çıkan liderleri hiç olmamıştır. Robespierre’in bu hareketi sahiplenmesine kadar kendi oluşturdukları konseylerde örgütlenmişler ve başta Paris olmak üzere şehirleri kendi aralarında bölgelere bölmüşler ve yönetmişlerdir. 

Aristokratları öldürerek, zenginlerin mallarına el koyarak ve sokakları yağmalayarak Fransa’da bugün ‘terör yılları’ olarak bilinen dönemde çok etkin olmuşlardır. Baldırı çıplakların en büyük ve kanlı gösterileri yine bugün olduğu gibi Paris’in dünyaca ünlü Şanselize (Champs-Elysees) caddesinde olmuştu. Bugün Şanselize’de araçları dükkanları yağmalayan Sarı yelekliler Fransa’yı yönetenleri terörize etmekte.

Fransız İhtilali’ni gerçekleştirerek kraliyet ailesini öldüren ve aristokrasiyi sonlandıran Paris burjuvası, Sans-culottes’ları ‘radikal’ olarak niteliyordu. Çünkü onlar tüm vatandaşların siyasi karar alma süreçlerine katılmasını talep ediyor ve bu taleplerini ‘doğrudan demokrasi’ olarak tanımlıyordu. Fransız ihtilalini yapan jakobenler ise ‘halk için halka rağmen’ anlayışını savunuyor, sans-culottes hareketini küçük görüyordu. Bugün de Sarı Yeleklilerin ortaya çıkmasının ardından Paris elitleri ve kurumsal muhalefet tıpkı Fransız İhtilali’ni yapanların baldırı çıplakları küçümsemesi gibi tahkir etme yolunu seçti. Bu da her cumartesi yapılan gösterilerde şiddetin daha da artmasına yol açtı. Bugün de belki kısa soluklu olarak ‘Sarı Yelekliler’ eylemlerinin Fransız siyasetinde köklü değişikliklere yol açması sürpriz olmaz.

Fransa’da son 20 yıldır siyaset ve kamu hayatını dönüştüren tektonik depremleri hep iki sınıf arasındaki kavgalar belirliyor. İki Fransa arasında bitmeyen bir kavga. Bir tarafta otomotiv, demiryolu, nükleer enerji, kozmetik, moda gibi sektörlerde dünya lideri öbür tarafta şehir merkezlerinde her gün bir işyerinin daha kapandığı hayalet şehirler. Bir tarafta 5 km²’de 60 farklı milliyetten insanın yaşadığı kozmopolit Paris, 2 saat uzağında aşırı sağcı partilerin yüzde 65 oy aldığı Henin-Beaumont. Bir tarafta Fransa’yı dünyanın start-up merkezi yapmayı, Paris’in Londra’nın yerini alıp Avrupa’nın finans merkezi olmasını isteyenler. Öbür tarafta, geçmişte kan dökerek kazandığı sosyal haklarını birer birer kaybeden ve ayda bir konsere gitmeyi artık lüks gören eski orta sınıf. İki yıl önce bir ailede kişi başı 1923 euro gelir düşerken, bugün bu rakam 1700 euro’ya düştü. Cebindeki para her geçen gün azalırken, sigaraya, benzine vs. gelen tüketim vergileri özellikle taşrada yaşayanları daha kötü etkiliyor. Bu bölünmenin üstüne fakirlik sınırının altındaki göçmenleri, son 3 yıla damgasına vuran terör olaylarını, mülteci akınını ilave edin. Bir Fransa küreselleşmenin nimetlerinden yararlanmanın hayallerini kurarken, ikinci Fransa ‘geride bırakılmışlık ve unutulmuşluk hissi’ ile her geçen gün daha da öfkeleniyor.

Emre Demir, Kronos

The Importance of Rice

Like wheat, rice belongs to the grass family, the Poaceae, and it looks similarly unpromising as a food – yet it’s become one of the most important cereals feeding our huge global population. Rice contributes around a fifth of the calories and around an eighth of the total protein consumed worldwide. Some 740 million tons of rice are produced each year, and it’s grown on every continent except Antarctica, and although it’s also becoming an increasingly important staple in both sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, around 90 per cent of the world’s rice is grown and eaten in Asia. More than 3.5 billion people across the globe depend on rice as a staple, and it’s the most important food crop in low- and lower-middle-income countries. For the poorest 20 per cent of the tropical population around the world, rice provides more protein per person than beans, meat or milk.

Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now

By: Benjamin Conlon, waituntil8th

Let’s imagine a seventh grader. He’s a quiet kid, polite, with a few friends. Just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill twelve-year-old. We’ll call him Brian. Brian’s halfway through seventh grade and for the first time, he’s starting to wonder where he falls in the social hierarchy at school. He’s thinking about his clothes a little bit, his shoes too. He’s conscious of how others perceive him, but he’s not that conscious of it. 

He goes home each day and from the hours of 3 p.m. to 7 a.m., he has a break from the social pressures of middle school. Most evenings, he doesn’t have a care in the world. The year is 2008. 

Brian has a cell phone, but it’s off most of the time. After all, it doesn’t do much. If friends want to get in touch, they call the house. The only time large groups of seventh graders come together is at school dances. If Brian feels uncomfortable with that, he can skip the dance. He can talk to teachers about day-to-day problems. Teachers have pretty good control over what happens at school.

Now, let’s imagine Brian on a typical weekday. He goes downstairs and has breakfast with his family. His mom is already at work, but his dad and sisters are there. They talk to each other over bowls of cereal. The kids head off to school soon after. Brian has a fine morning in his seventh grade classroom and walks down to the lunchroom at precisely 12 p.m.

There’s a slick of water on the tiled floor near the fountain at the back of the cafeteria. A few eighth graders know about it, and they’re laughing as yet another student slips and tumbles to the ground.

Brian buys a grilled cheese sandwich. It comes with tomato soup that no one ever eats. He polishes off the sandwich and heads to the nearest trashcan to dump the soup. When his sneakers hit the water slick, he slips just like the others. The tomato soup goes up in the air and comes down on his lap. 

Nearby, at the table of eighth graders, a boy named Mark laughs. He laughs at Brian the same way the boys around him laugh at Brian. They laugh because they’re older, and they know something the younger kids don’t. They laugh at the slapstick nature of the fall. The spilled tomato soup is a bonus. The fall is a misfortune for Brian. That’s all. It’s not an asset for Mark. A few kids hear the laughter and look over, but Brian gets up quickly and rushes off to the bathroom to change into his gym shorts.

Mark tries to retell the story to a friend later. The friend doesn’t really get it because he wasn’t there. He can’t picture it. In fact, Mark seems a little mean for laughing at all.

After lunch, Brian returns to homeroom in his gym shorts. No one seems to notice the change. He breathes a sigh of relief. The cafeteria fall is behind him. He meets his sisters at the end of the day and they ask why he’s wearing gym shorts. He tells them he spilled some tomato sauce on his pants. They head home and spend the afternoon and evening together, safe and sound, home life completely separate from school life. Brian doesn’t think about the incident again. Only a few people saw it. It’s over. 

Now, let’s imagine Brian again. Same kid. Same family. Same school. He’s still in seventh grade, but this time it’s 2018. 

When Brian sits down for breakfast, his dad is answering an email at the table. His older sister is texting, and his younger sister is playing a video game. Brian has an iPhone too. He takes it out and opens the Instagram app. The Brian from 2008 was wondering about his position in the social hierarchy. The Brian from 2018 knows. He can see it right there on the screen. He has fewer ‘followers’ than the other kids in his grade. That’s a problem. He wants to ask his father what to do, but there’s that email to be written. Instead, Brian thinks about it all morning at school. While his teacher talks, he slips his phone out and checks to see how many ‘followers’ the other kids in class have. The answer doesn’t help his confidence. At precisely 12 p.m., he heads to the cafeteria. He buys a grilled cheese. It comes with tomato soup that no one ever eats. 

At the back of the lunchroom, Mark sits with the other eighth graders. He holds a shiny new iPhone in one hand. Mark has had an iPhone for five years. He’s got all the apps. Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. He’s got lots of followers too. He doesn’t know all of them, but that’s okay.

A few years ago, Mark made his first Instagram post. It was a picture of his remote control car. Mark used to really enjoy remote control cars. Mark checked Instagram an hour after putting up that first picture. A bright red dot showed at the bottom of the page. He clicked it. Someone had ‘liked’ the picture of the car. Mark felt validated. It was good that he posted the picture. A little bit of dopamine was released into Mark’s brain. He checked the picture an hour later. Sure enough, another ‘like’. More dopamine. He felt even better. 

For a while, pictures of the remote control car were sufficient. They generated enough ‘likes’ to keep Mark happy. He no longer got much joy from actually driving the remote control car, but he got plenty from seeing those ‘likes’ pile up. 

Then something started to happen. The ‘likes’ stopped coming in. People didn’t seem interested in the pictures of the car anymore. This made Mark unhappy. He missed the ‘likes’ and the dopamine that came with them. He needed them back. He needed more exciting pictures, because exciting pictures would bring more views and more ‘likes’. So, he decided to drive his car right out into the middle of the road. He had his little brother film the whole thing. He filmed the remote control car as it got flattened by a passing truck. Mark didn’t bother to collect it. He just grabbed his phone and posted the video. It was only a few minutes before the ‘likes’ started coming in. He felt better. 

Now it’s eighth grade and Mark has become addicted to social media.  Sure, he needs a lot more ‘likes’ to get the same feeling, but that’s okay. That just means he needs more content. Good content. Content no one else has. That’s the kind that gets a lot of ‘likes’, really, really fast. Mark has learned the best content comes from filming and posting the embarrassing experiences of classmates. 

When he notices that water slick at the back of the cafeteria, he’s ready.  Each time someone walks by and falls, their misfortune becomes an asset for Mark. A part of Mark wants them to fall. He hopes they fall.

Brian walks across the cafeteria with his soup, minding his own business. Suddenly, his feet slide out from under him. The tomato soup goes up in the air and comes down on his lap. He’s so embarrassed, that when he stands up and rushes off to the bathroom, he doesn’t notice Mark filming.

Mark’s fingers race over his iPhone screen before Brian is out of sight. That was a great video he just took, and he wants to get it online. Fast. He knows he’s not supposed to have his cell phone out in school, but the teachers really only enforce that rule during class. They all use Twitter and Instagram too. They understand. 

Mark doesn’t know who he just filmed, and he doesn’t care. It’s not his fault the kid fell on the floor. He’s just the messenger. The video is a kind of public service announcement. He’s just warning everyone else about the water spot in the cafeteria. That’s what Mark tells himself.

He gets the video uploaded to Snapchat first. No time for a caption. It speaks for itself. He has it up on Instagram seconds later. By then, the ‘likes’ are already coming in. Dopamine floods into Mark’s brain. There’s a comment on Instagram already! “What a loser!” it says. Mark gives the comment a ‘like’. Best to keep the audience happy. 

This has been a rewarding lunch. The bell’s going to ring in a few minutes. Mark sits back and refreshes his screen again and again and again until it does.

Meanwhile, Brian heads back from the bathroom, having changed into his gym shorts. He’s still embarrassed about the fall. It happened near the back of the cafeteria, though. He doesn’t think many people saw. He hopes they didn’t. But when he walks into the classroom, a lot of people look at him. One girl holds her phone up at an odd angle. Is she…taking a picture? The phone comes down quickly and she starts typing, so he can’t be sure. 

Class begins. Brian is confused because people keep slipping their phones out and glancing back at him. He asks to go to the bathroom. Inside a stall, he opens Instagram. There he is on the screen, covered in tomato sauce. How could this be? Who filmed this? Below the video, a new picture has just appeared. It’s him in his gym shorts. The caption reads, “Outfit change!”

Brian scrolls frantically through the feed trying to find the source of the video. He can’t. It’s been shared and reshared too many times. He notices his follower count has dropped. He doesn’t want to go to class. He just wants it to stop. 

He meets his sisters outside at the end of the day. Several students snap pictures as he walks by. Neither sister says a word. Brian knows why. 

Home was a safe place for Brian in 2008. Whatever happened in school, stayed in school. Not now. Brian arrives at his house, heart thundering, and heads straight to his bedroom. He’s supposed to be doing homework, but he can’t concentrate. Alone in the dark, he refreshes his iPhone again and again and again and again.

Brian’s family is having his favorite dish for dinner, but he doesn’t care. He wants it to be over so he can get back to his phone. Twice, he goes to the bathroom to check Instagram. His parents don’t mind, they’re checking their own phones.

Brian discovers that two new versions of the video have been released. One is set to music and the other has a nasty narration. Both have lots of comments. He doesn’t know how to fight back, so he just watches as the view counts rise higher and higher. His own follower count, his friend count, keeps going in the opposite direction. Brian doesn’t want to be part of this. He doesn’t like this kind of thing. He can’t skip it though. It’s not like the dance. And he can’t tell a teacher. This isn’t happening at school.

He stays up all night refreshing the feed, hoping the rising view count will start to slow. Mark is doing the same thing at the other side of town. He has lots of new followers. This is his best video ever. 

At 3 a.m., they both turn off their lights and stare up at their respective ceilings. Mark smiles. He hopes tomorrow something even more embarrassing happens to a different kid. Then he can film that and get even more ‘likes’. Across town, Brian isn’t smiling, but sadly, he’s hoping for exactly the same thing. 

From the Author

I started teaching in 2009. At that time, public school was very much the way I remembered it. That’s not the case anymore. Smartphones and social media have transformed students into creatures craving one thing: content. It’s a sad state of affairs. 

But there’s hope. 

Over the last few years, my students have become increasingly interested in stories from the days before smartphones and social media. In the same way many adults look back fondly on simpler times, kids look back to second and third grade, when no one had a phone. I think a lot of them already miss those days. 

Smartphones and social media aren’t going anywhere. Both are powerful tools, with many benefits. But they have fundamentally altered how children interact with the world and not in a good way. We can change that. In addition to the “Wait Until 8th” pledge, consider taking the following steps to help your children reclaim childhood.

1. Propose that administrators and teachers stop using social media for school related purposes. In many districts teachers are encouraged to employ Twitter and Instagram for classroom updates. This is a bad thing. It normalizes the process of posting content without consent and teaches children that everything exciting is best viewed through a recording iPhone. It also reinforces the notion that ‘likes’ determine value. Rather than reading tweets from your child’s teacher, talk to your children each day. Ask what’s going on in school. They’ll appreciate it.

2. Insist that technology education include a unit on phone etiquette, the dark sides of social media and the long-term ramifications of posting online. Make sure students hear from individuals who have unwittingly and unwillingly been turned into viral videos.   

3. Tell your children stories from your own childhood. Point out how few of them could have happened if smartphones had been around. Remind your children that they will some day grow up and want stories of their own. An afternoon spent online doesn’t make for very good one.

4. Teach your children that boredom is important. They should be bored. Leonardo Da Vinci was bored. So was Einstein. Boredom breeds creativity and new ideas and experiences. Cherish boredom. 

5. Remind them that, as the saying goes, adventures don’t come calling like unexpected cousins. They have to be found. Tell them to go outside and explore the real world. Childhood is fleeting. It shouldn’t be spent staring at a screen.