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.

Probabilistic Thinking

Probability is everywhere, down to the very bones of the world. The probabilistic machinery in our minds—the cut-to-the-quick heuristics made so famous by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky—was evolved by the human species in a time before computers, factories, traffic, middle managers, and the stock market. It served us in a time when human life was about survival, and still serves us well in that capacity.

But what about today—a time when, for most of us, survival is not so much the issue? We want to thrive. We want to compete, and win. Mostly, we want to make good decisions in complex social systems that were not part of the world in which our brains evolved their (quite rational) heuristics.

For this, we need to consciously add in a needed layer of probability awareness. What is it and how can I use it to my advantage?

There are three important aspects of probability that we need to explain so you can integrate them into your thinking to get into the ballpark and improve your chances of catching the ball:

1. Bayesian thinking,
2. Fat-tailed curves
3. Asymmetries

Thomas Bayes and Bayesian thinking: Bayes was an English minister in the first half of the 18th century, whose most famous work, “An Essay Toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” was brought to the attention of the Royal Society by his friend Richard Price in 1763—two years after his death. The essay, the key to what we now know as Bayes’s Theorem, concerned how we should adjust probabilities when we encounter new data.

The core of Bayesian thinking (or Bayesian updating, as it can be called) is this: given that we have limited but useful information about the world, and are constantly encountering new information, we should probably take into account what we already know when we learn something new. As much of it as possible. Bayesian thinking allows us to use all relevant prior information in making decisions. Statisticians might call it a base rate, taking in outside information about past situations like the one you’re in.

Consider the headline “Violent Stabbings on the Rise.” Without Bayesian thinking, you might become genuinely afraid because your chances of being a victim of assault or murder is higher than it was a few months ago. But a Bayesian approach will have you putting this information into the context of what you already know about violent crime.

You know that violent crime has been declining to its lowest rates in decades. Your city is safer now than it has been since this measurement started. Let’s say your chance of being a victim of a stabbing last year was one in 10,000, or 0.01%. The article states, with accuracy, that violent crime has doubled. It is now two in 10,000, or 0.02%. Is that worth being terribly worried about? The prior information here is key. When we factor it in, we realize that our safety has not really been compromised.

Conversely, if we look at the diabetes statistics in the United States, our application of prior knowledge would lead us to a different conclusion. Here, a Bayesian analysis indicates you should be concerned. In 1958, 0.93% of the population was diagnosed with diabetes. In 2015 it was 7.4%. When you look at the intervening years, the climb in diabetes diagnosis is steady, not a spike. So the prior relevant data, or priors, indicate a trend that is worrisome.

It is important to remember that priors themselves are probability estimates. For each bit of prior knowledge, you are not putting it in a binary structure, saying it is true or not. You’re assigning it a probability of being true. Therefore, you can’t let your priors get in the way of processing new knowledge. In Bayesian terms, this is called the likelihood ratio or the Bayes factor. Any new information you encounter that challenges a prior simply means that the probability of that prior being true may be reduced. Eventually, some priors are replaced completely. This is an ongoing cycle of challenging and validating what you believe you know. When making uncertain decisions, it’s nearly always a mistake not to ask: What are the relevant priors? What might I already know that I can use to better understand the reality of the situation?

Now we need to look at fat-tailed curves: Many of us are familiar with the bell curve, that nice, symmetrical wave that captures the relative frequency of so many things from height to exam scores. The bell curve is great because it’s easy to understand and easy to use. Its technical name is “normal distribution.” If we know we are in a bell curve situation, we can quickly identify our parameters and plan for the most likely outcomes.

Fat-tailed curves are different. Take a look.

At first glance they seem similar enough. Common outcomes cluster together, creating a wave. The difference is in the tails. In a bell curve the extremes are predictable. There can only be so much deviation from the mean. In a fat-tailed curve there is no real cap on extreme events.

The more extreme events that are possible, the longer the tails of the curve get. Any one extreme event is still unlikely, but the sheer number of options means that we can’t rely on the most common outcomes as representing the average. The more extreme events that are possible, the higher the probability that one of them will occur. Crazy things are definitely going to happen, and we have no way of identifying when.

Think of it this way. In a bell curve type of situation, like displaying the distribution of height or weight in a human population, there are outliers on the spectrum of possibility, but the outliers have a fairly well defined scope. You’ll never meet a man who is ten times the size of an average man. But in a curve with fat tails, like wealth, the central tendency does not work the same way. You may regularly meet people who are ten, 100, or 10,000 times wealthier than the average person. That is a very different type of world.

Let’s re-approach the example of the risks of violence we discussed in relation to Bayesian thinking. Suppose you hear that you had a greater risk of slipping on the stairs and cracking your head open than being killed by a terrorist. The statistics, the priors, seem to back it up: 1,000 people slipped on the stairs and died last year in your country and only 500 died of terrorism. Should you be more worried about stairs or terror events?

Some use examples like these to prove that terror risk is low—since the recent past shows very few deaths, why worry? The problem is in the fat tails: The risk of terror violence is more like wealth, while stair-slipping deaths are more like height and weight. In the next ten years, how many events are possible? How fat is the tail?

The important thing is not to sit down and imagine every possible scenario in the tail (by definition, it is impossible) but to deal with fat-tailed domains in the correct way: by positioning ourselves to survive or even benefit from the wildly unpredictable future, by being the only ones thinking correctly and planning for a world we don’t fully understand.

Asymmetries: Finally, you need to think about something we might call “metaprobability” —the probability that your probability estimates themselves are any good.

This massively misunderstood concept has to do with asymmetries. If you look at nicely polished stock pitches made by professional investors, nearly every time an idea is presented, the investor looks their audience in the eye and states they think they’re going to achieve a rate of return of 20% to 40% per annum, if not higher. Yet exceedingly few of them ever attain that mark, and it’s not because they don’t have any winners. It’s because they get so many so wrong. They consistently overestimate their confidence in their probabilistic estimates. (For reference, the general stock market has returned no more than 7% to 8% per annum in the United States over a long period, before fees.)

Another common asymmetry is people’s ability to estimate the effect of traffic on travel time. How often do you leave “on time” and arrive 20% early? Almost never? How often do you leave “on time” and arrive 20% late? All the time? Exactly. Your estimation errors are asymmetric, skewing in a single direction. This is often the case with probabilistic decision-making.

Far more probability estimates are wrong on the “over-optimistic” side than the “under-optimistic” side. You’ll rarely read about an investor who aimed for 25% annual return rates who subsequently earned 40% over a long period of time. You can throw a dart at the Wall Street Journal and hit the names of lots of investors who aim for 25% per annum with each investment and end up closer to 10%.

This article was originally published at Farnam Street Blog.

Üç Farklı Cevabın Manası

https://caglayandergisi.com/2018/11/01/uc-farkli-cevabin-manasi/

How the Inkas governed, thrived and fell without alphabetic writing

Between the 1430s and the arrival of the Spanish in 1532, the Inkas conquered and ruled an empire stretching for 4,000 kilometres along the spine of the Andes, from Quito in modern Ecuador to Santiago in Chile. Known to its conquerors as Tahuantinsuyu – ‘the land of four parts’ – it contained around 11 million people from some 80 different ethnic groups, each with its own dialect, deities and traditions. The Inkas themselves, the ruling elite, comprised no more than about one per cent.

Almost every aspect of life in Tahuantinsuyu – work, marriage, commodity exchange, dress – was regulated, and around 30 per cent of all the empire’s inhabitants were forcibly relocated, some to work on state economic projects, some to break up centres of resistance. Despite the challenges presented by such a vertical landscape, an impressive network of roads and bridges was also maintained, ensuring the regular collection of tribute in the capacious storehouses built at intervals along the main highways. These resources were then redistributed as military, religious or political needs dictated.

All this suggests that the Sapa Inka (emperor) governed Tahuantinsuyu both efficiently and profitably. What’s more, he did so without alphabetic writing, for the Inkas never invented this. Had they been left to work out their own destiny, this state of affairs might well have continued for decades or even centuries, but their misfortune was to find themselves confronted by both superior weaponry and, crucially, a culture that was imbued with literacy. As a result, not only was their empire destroyed, but their culture and religion were submerged.

Instead of writing, the Inkas’ principal bureaucratic tool was the khipu. A khipu consists of a number of strings or cords, either cotton or wool, systematically punctuated with knots, hanging from a master cord or length of wood; pendant cords might also have subsidiary cords. The basis of khipu accounting practice was the decimal system, achieved by tying knots with between one and nine loops to represent single numerals, then adding elaborations to designate 10s, 100s or 1,000s. By varying the length, width, colour and number of the pendant cords, and tying knots of differing size and type to differentiate data, the Inkas turned the khipu into a remarkably versatile device for recording, checking and preserving information.

The main uses to which khipus were put were, firstly, to record births, deaths and movements of people, thereby providing an annual census upon which local labour, military and redistributive assessments could be made. They were also used to count commodities, especially the tribute payable by conquered provinces such as maize, llamas and cloth (there was no coinage). Maize, for example, might be represented by a yellow cord, llamas by a white cord, and so on. Early Spanish chroniclers and administrators were astonished at the accuracy of khipu calculations: according to Pedro de Cieza de León, writing in the late 1540s, they were ‘so exact that not even a pair of sandals was missing’.

Training in what anthropologists call ‘khipu literacy’ was compulsory for a specified number of incipient bureaucrats (khipukamayuqs) from each province. For this, they were sent to Cusco, where they also learned the Inka dialect, Quechua, and were schooled in Inka religion. Like most imperial rulers, the Inkas conquered in the name of an ideology, the worship of their chief deity, the Sun, and his child on Earth, the Sapa Inka. Sun-worship was mandatory throughout the empire, and vast resources were allocated to the performance of an annual cycle of festivals and rituals, and to the maintenance of the priests who staffed Tahuantinsuyu’s ubiquitous shrines. However, the Inkas also tolerated local deities, which, if perceived to be efficacious, might be incorporated into the Inka pantheon.

It is hard to see how alphabetic writing would have helped the Inkas to administer Tahuantinsuyu more efficiently: this was not an intensively governed empire but a federation of tribute-paying and politically allegiant provinces. In other spheres of government, such as law, writing would doubtless have made more of a difference, leading perhaps to the development of written law-codes, arguably even a ‘constitution’. But since writing was never developed, imperial rule remained weakly institutionalised, leading to a concentration of power and office, which meant that when the Sapa Inka was removed, there was little to fall back on. 

So when Francisco Pizarro and his 200 or so conquistadores captured the Sapa Inka Atahualpa at Cajamarca on 16 November 1532, Tahuantinsuyu was left headless and disorientated. The confusion that followed was the crucible in which Spain’s New World empire was forged.

The seizure of Atahualpa was preceded by an incident pregnant with significance for the creation of European empires on a global scale. The first Spaniard to approach him after he entered the great plaza at Cajamarca was the Dominican friar Vicente de Valverde, carrying a cross in one hand and a missal in the other. Speaking through an interpreter, he declared that he had come to reveal to Atahualpa the requirements of the Catholic religion, which were contained in the book he was carrying. Atahualpa demanded to see the missal. When handed it, he was initially unable to open it. When he eventually managed to do so, he seemed more impressed by the calligraphy of the text than what it said. After examining it for a while, he angrily hurled it to the ground. This act of blasphemy was the trigger for Pizarro to give the order to attack.

After eight months of captivity, Atahualpa was tried for treason and condemned to death. If he converted to Christianity, he would be garrotted; if not, he would be burned (as a heretic). Since fire would destroy his body, he agreed to accept conversion, and towards nightfall on 26 July 1533 he was led out into the plaza at Cajamarca, tied to a stake and strangled. The last words he heard were those of Friar Valverde instructing him in the articles of the Catholic faith. Atahualpa wanted to preserve his body so that it could be mummified and venerated by his descendants.

Whatever he believed his ‘conversion’ to imply, it was clearly not the monotheism central to Catholic doctrine. Inka religion, which was broadly speaking animistic, acknowledged many gods, ranging from heavenly bodies (Sun, Moon, stars) to topographical features (mountains, rivers, springs) to ancestors, whose earthly remains were venerated to a degree that baffled Europeans – although most of them made little attempt to understand such practices, disparaging them as heathen, folk-magic or simply childish.

Like other Religions of the Book, Catholicism demanded strict adherence to one God, and the rejection of all other deities. Religions based upon books such as the Bible or the Quran, being (literally) prescriptive, were less tolerant than oral religions. Rival belief-systems presented both an opportunity and a threat. Missionaries and evangelists preached conversion, but with them came inquisitors or crusaders, at which point definitions were sharpened, and criteria for inclusion and exclusion delineated. ‘Truth’ acquired a different meaning, less something to be sought after than something to be received: one God, one credo, one book (‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’). ‘Reform’ for a book-centred religion did not mean adaptation, but a reversion to fundamentals – the immutable ‘word of God’, as interpreted by the priesthood. Confronted by such certainties, backed by coercive force, the more open-ended, absorbent oral religions of Africa or the Americas were simply overwhelmed.

Nor was this only a matter of religion. The greater ‘law-worthiness’ given to written evidence by literate incomers meant, for example, that customary land-rights and inheritance patterns were similarly overridden. Despite also being colonised by Europeans, societies with written cultures in China, India and the Middle East proved much more resistant to European cultural hegemony than oral societies. The strenuous efforts made in recent times to recover and promote the indigenous heritage of the Americas, Australasia and Africa are testimony in themselves to the degree to which those cultures were submerged, suppressed or derided by Europeans. Their lack of a written tradition was at least partly responsible for this.

Christopher Given-Wilson

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Thomas More

Aziz Kamil Can, tr724

Ütopya’nın yazarı Thomas More’un (1478-1535) hayatına baktığımızda, Rönesans öncesi İngiltere’de yaşananlarla günümüz Türkiye’sinde yaşananların çok da farklı olmadığını görüyoruz.

Thomas More, 23 yaşında girmiş olduğu barodaki konuşmalarla herkesin dikkatini çekmişti. 25 yaşındayken parlamentoya giren More, VII. Henry’nin iplerini elinde tuttuğu diğer parlamenterlere benzemeyecekti. VII. Henry’nin, kızını evlendirmek bahanesiyle koymaya kalktığı ek vergi, More’un yaptığı konuşma sonrasında engellenmiş oldu. VIII. Henry’nin tahta geçmesiyle de bu ünü nedeniyle yargıçlığa atandı.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), yazdığı bir mektubunda, “hiçbir yargıcın More kadar dürüst olmadığını, onun kadar davayı karara bağlamadığını ve de bu kadar doğru kararlar vermediğini” söylemiştir. Yargıçlığı sırasında kimse ona rüşvet vermeyi göze alamazdı, çünkü en yakınlarını bile kayırmadığını herkes bilirdi.

VII. Henry’nin büyük oğlu Arthur, çocuk denilecek yaşta İspanya Prensesi Aragonlu Catherine ile nikahlandırılmış, bir yıl içinde de ölmüştü. VIII.Henry adıyla tahta geçen kardeşi, siyasi nedenlerden ötürü ağabeyinin dul eşiyle evlendirildi. Ancak günün birinde Anne Boleyn’e tutuldu. Yengesiyle evlenmesinin dinsel yasalara aykırı düştüğü bahanesiyle, boşanarak Anne Boleyn ile evlenmeyi aklına koydu. Bilindiği gibi, Katoliklerin boşanmaları, ancak Papanın nikahı bozmasıyla gerçekleşebilirdi.

Karısından kurtulmaya karar veren VIII. Henry, boşanmasının dinsel yasalara sözde uygun olduğu konusunda Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Bruges, Bolonya, Padua üniversitelerinden bir çeşit ferman kopardı. Bu “fetva”ları parlamentoda okuttu. Sonra, hem papalığa fena halde öfkelendiği, hem de Katolik Klisesi’nin mallarına göz koyduğu için, “Act Of Supremacy” denilen yasayı çıkardı.

Thomas More, bu gelişmeler üzerine sağlık durumunu bahane ederek zaten zorla kabul ettiği Lord Chancellor’luktan çekildi.

VIII. Henry, kendini Kilise’nin başı yapan özel yasayı üyelere baskı yaparak parlamentodan geçirmekle yetinmemiş, ülkenin ileri gelenlerinin bu yasaya boyun eğecekleri konusunda açıkça ant içmelerini istemişti. Böyle bir ant ise, Katolik olan, dolayısıyla papayı tüm Hristiyan dünyasının başı sayan Katolik Thomas More’un vicdanına aykırıydı. More bu konuda hiçbir açıklama yapmamış ve düşündüklerini kimseyle paylaşmadığına göre bir suç işlemiş olamazdı. Ancak onun İngiltere’deki etkisini bilen VIII. Henry onun sessiz kalmasını kabul edemiyor, kendisine destek vermeye zorluyordu. Nihayet bu emeli gerçekleşmeyince Thomas More uydurma bir suçlamayla sorguya alındı.

Kral’ı İngiliz Kilisesi’nin başı saymaya yanaşmadığı için, More’u iyice sindirecek bir yol tutmaktan başka çare kalmamıştı artık. More, 1534 yılının Mart ayında, yakın arkadaşı Piskopos Fisher ve başka Katolikler ile birlikte Londra Kulesi’ne kapatıldı. On beş ay yani ölünceye kadar da burada hapis yattı.

More çekildikten sonra, onun yerine Lord Chancellor olan ve beş yıl sonra tıpkı More gibi ölüm cezasına çarptırılan Thomas Cromwell, More’u sorguya çekmiş, Kral’ın merhametli olduğunu, istenileni yapması halinde Kral’ın kendisini hapisten çıkartacağını iletmişti.

More, bu öneriyi nasıl karşıladığını şöyle anlatır: 

“Ant içip bu yasaya boyun eğenleri suçlamıyorum. Ama kendim aynı şeyi yaparsam, ruhumun sonsuza dek lanetleneceğine inanmaktayım… Bana tüm dünyayı bağışlasalar bile, dünya işlerine artık karışmayacağım… Artık aklım fikrim bu dünyadan kurtulmakta… Hiç kimseye kötülük etmiyorum, hiç kimse için kötü söylemiyorum, kötü düşünmüyorum herkesin iyiliğini istiyorum. Bir insanın yaşayabilmesi için bu yetmiyorsa yemin ederim ki yaşamakta gözüm yok… Onun için Kral, şu benim zavallı bedenime canının istediğini yapsın.”

Lord Chancellor’luktan çekildikten sonra, onun yoksul kalacağını bilen piskoposlar ve rahipler, Katolik Kilisesi’ni savunan yazılarını ödüllendirmek amacıyla 5000 İngiliz lirası toplamış, bunu More’a vermek istemişlerdi. Ama o, 16.yy’da büyük bir servet sayılan bu paranın meteliğine dokunmaya bile yanaşmamıştı. Oysa o sıralarda ailesi öylesine yoksuldu ki, odunları olmadığından Chelsea’deki evin bir tek odasında oturuyor ve bahçelerden topladıklarını yakarak ısınmaya çalışıyorlardı.

More, hapse girdiği ilk aylarda, Kral’ı İngiliz Kilisesi’nin başı yapan yasaya yemin etmeyi iki kez reddetti. İki ağzı da keskin bir kılıca benzetmişti bu yasayı: “İnsan buna evet derse, ruhunu;  hayır derse bedenini yitirecekti.” More ise, ruhunu yok etmektense, bedenini yok etmeye çoktan razıydı. Sorguya çekilirken, “Anlayın bunu” demişti “her yurttaşın, her şeyden önce kendi vicdanına, kendi ruhuna saygı göstermesi gerekir.”

Bu sessiz direniş karşısında, More’u mahkeme önüne çıkarmaktan başka çare kalmamıştı artık.  Thomas Cromwell’in elinde birer kukla olan yargıçlar, “Kralın Savcısı” Sir Richard Rich’i yalancı tanık olarak kullanmışlardı.

Roper’in anlattığına göre, Londra Kulesi’nde More’un kitapları bağlanıp götürülürken, Kral’ın resmi temsilcisi olan bu adam, More ile sözde dostça tartışmış, onu kandırmaya çalışmıştı. “Siz bilgili, akıllı bir adamsınız, ülkenin yasalarını da biliyorsunuz. Eğer parlamento beni kral ilan ederse, siz beni kral kabul eder misiniz?” diye sormuştu. More buna evet deyince, “Peki”demişti Rich, “ya parlamento beni papa ilan ederse, siz bunu kabul etmez misiniz?” More, bu soruya başka bir soruyla karşılık vermişti: “Tutalım ki, parlamento bir yasa çıkardı Tanrı Tanrı değildir diye. Siz Bay Rich, Tanrı’yı yok mu sayacaksınız o zaman?” Rich, böyle bir yasanın hiçbir parlamentodan geçmeyeceğini Söyleyince More, “Tanrı Tanrı değildir diyemeyen parlamento, Kral’ı da Hristiyan Kilisesi’nin başı yapamaz” demişti.

More‘un bu sözlerini gerçek amacından saptırıp bozarak anlatan bu yalancı tanığın yardımıyla yargıçlar, Thomas More’u ölüme götürecek olan yasal hileyi buldular. Onu, “kötü bir amaç uğruna haince ve şeytanca” davranmakla suçladılar. Jüri, sadece on beş dakika süren bir görüşmeden sonra More‘un suçlu olduğuna karar verince Başyargıç Audcley, onun ölüm cezasına çarptırıldığını bildirdi.

Sir Thomas More, ancak o zaman konuştu: “Beni mahkum etmeye karar verdiğinizi görüyorum. Onun için şimdi, vicdanıma uyarak, açıkça ve canımın istediği gibi konuşacağım”dedikten sonra, Kral’ın çıkardığı yasanın, Tanrı’nın da, Kilise’nin de yasalarına ters düştüğünü anlattı.

İngiltere’nin tüm parlamento üyelerinin, en dini bütün ve bilgili Katoliklerinin bu yasaya karşı koymadıkları ileri sürülmüştü. More gibi düşünenler, İngiltere’de azınlıktaydı belki. Ama More, Hristiyan dünyasını bir bütün olarak görüyordu ve vicdanını bir tek ülkenin verdiği karara bağlamak zorunda değildi. Tek başına Londra kenti, tüm İngiltere’de geçerli sayılabilecek bir yasa çıkaramayacağı gibi, İngiltere de yeryüzünde tüm Hristiyan ülkeleri adına bir yasa çıkaramazdı.

More bunları açıkladıktan sonra, kendisini yargılayanlara şunu da söyledi: “Sizler, Lord Hazretleri, yeryüzünde benim yargıçlarım olup beni ölüm cezasına çarptırdınız. Ama ben, gökyüzünde hepinizle sevinç içinde yeniden buluşabilmek için candan dua edeceğim yine de.”

Ölüm karşısındaki yiğitliğine, düşmanları bile hayran kalacaklardı. Bu düşmanlardan biri ve More’un çağdaşı olan tarihçi Edward Hall, More’un, “Kellesi uçmakla insanın başına felaket gelmez” dediğini aktarmış ve “Kellesi uçacağı sıradaki davranışı, bu söylediğine gerçekten inandığını kanıtlar” demişti.

Kimine göre bir bölümünü de Shakespeare’in kaleme aldığı Sir Thomas More oyununda, Katolik dini uğruna kendini kurban eden bir adamın, ölümünden yarım yüzyıl sonra, Protestanlığı artık tamamıyla benimsemiş bir ülkede böylesine yüceltilmesi, More’un büyük ününün kanıtıdır.

Ütopya’nın yeni bir çevirisini yapan Paul Turner’e göre More, söz ve düşünce özgürlüğünden yoksun bir İngiltere’de, düşüncenin bir suç sayılamayacağına inandığı için ölümü göze aldı.

More üstüne önemli bir kitap yazan R.W. Chambers’e göre ise, o yalnız Katolik Kilisesi’nin birliği uğruna değil, insanların inanmadıkları şeylere yalan yere yemin etmemeleri uğruna, yani vicdan özgürlüğü uğruna öldü.

Zorba Kral ve More ilişkisi, sanırım günümüz Türkiye’sini çok iyi resmediyor. Hukuk ve adaletten ayrılmayacağı düşünülen binlerce hakimin, zorbanın savcıları ve kukla hakimleri tarafından yine meslektaşları olan yalancı tanıkların ifadeleriyle keyfi olarak suçlanıp cezaevlerine alınması; vicdan, inanç ve ifade özgürlüğünden taviz vermeyen yüzbinlerce insanın More hikayesinde olduğu gibi vatan haini ilan edilmesi ve kimisinin öldürülmesi, 500 yıl sonra da zorba anlayışın devam ettiğini gösteriyor.

Fakat o gün hain ilan edilen More, bugün hem Protestan hem Katolik ve hem de Hristiyanlık dışındaki dünyada takdir görürken, zorbalar da lanet uygulamaları ile anılıyorlar. Değer miydi birkaç yıllık saltanat için onca zulme.

(Kaynak: Thomas MORE, Ütopya, Hasan Ali Yücel Klasikler Dizisi, Çevirenler: Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, Vedat Günyol, Mine Urgan, İş Bankası Yayınları, 16.Basım).

Yuval Noah Harari: I don't have a smartphone

How has your work changed your relationship to technology?
I don't have a smartphone. My attention is one of the most important resources I have, and the smartphone is constantly trying to grab my attention. There's always something coming in.

I try to be very careful about how I use technology and really make sure that I'm using it for the purposes that I define instead of allowing it to kind of shape my purposes for me. That sometimes happens when you open the computer: you have a couple of minutes to spare, so you start just randomly browsing through YouTube, and two hours later, you're still there watching all types of funny cat videos, car accidents, and whatever. You did not say to yourself, "Okay, I want to spend the next two hours watching these videos." The technology kind of dictated to you that this is what you're going to do by grabbing your attention in such a forceful way that it can kind of manipulate you.

How has removing those attention-grabbing technologies changed your quality of life?
I have much more time. I think it makes a much more peaceful… I mean, it's not such a big secret. The way to grab people's attention is by exciting their emotions, either through things like fear and hatred and anger, or through things like greed and craving. If somebody [is] very afraid of immigrants and hates immigration, the algorithm will show him one story after the other about terrible things that immigrants are doing. Then somebody else maybe really, really doesn't like President Trump, so they spend hours watching all kinds of things that make them very, very angry. And it doesn't matter if it's true or not—they see this headline of “President Trump Said the World is Flat,” they feel this irresistible urge to click on it.

It grabs your attention because you already have this weakness. But if you kind of sit there and just read infuriating stories for an entire hour you are basically feeding your mind with things that make you more angry and hateful. And this is especially bad if many of these stories are just not true. Sometimes they are true, quite often they're not. But the net result is that you now just spent an hour feeding your hate and your fury.

It's the same way with the other side of the coin, with greed. Because if you really want something—the perfect body, the perfect car—and you watch all these videos, you want it more and more. And if you don't have it, then you feel worse and worse that you don't have this kind of body, or you don't have this kind of car. So you just spent one hour feeding your cravings and your greed, and it's really not good for you.

The better you know yourself, the more protected you are from all these algorithms trying to manipulate you. If we go back to the example of the YouTube videos. If you know “I have this weakness, I tend to hate this group of people,” or “I have a bit obsession to the way my hair looks," then you can be a little more protected from these kinds of manipulations. Like with alcoholics or smokers, the first step is to just recognize, “Yes, I have this bad habit and I need to be more careful about it.”

So how do you get your news?
I rarely follow the kind of day-to-day news cycle. I tend to read long books about subjects that interest me. So instead of reading 100 short stories about the Chinese economy, I prefer to take one long book about the Chinese economy and read it from cover-to-cover. So I miss a lot of things, but I'm not a politician and I’m not a journalist, so I guess it's okay I don't follow every latest story.

via GQ