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

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (5): Real Mathematicians are Slow Thinkers!

Another serious problem we face in math education is that people believe that mathematics is all about calculating and that the best mathematics thinkers are those who calculate the fastest. Some people believe something even worse—that you have to be fast at math to be good at math. There are strong beliefs in society that if you can do a calculation quickly then you are a true math person and that you are “smart.” Yet mathematicians, whom we could think of as the most capable math people, are often slow with math. I work with many mathematicians, and they are simply not fast math thinkers. I don't say this to be disrespectful to mathematicians; they are slow because they think carefully and deeply about mathematics.

Laurent Schwartz won the Fields Medal in mathematics and was one of the greatest mathematicians of his time. But when he was in school, he was one of the slowest math thinkers in his class. In his autobiography, A Mathematician Grappling with His Century (2001), Schwartz reflects on his school days and how he felt “stupid” because his school valued fast thinking, but he thought slowly and deeply:

I was always deeply uncertain about my own intellectual capacity; I thought I was unintelligent. And it is true that I was, and still am, rather slow. I need time to seize things because I always need to understand them fully. Towards the end of the eleventh grade, I secretly thought of myself as stupid. I worried about this for a long time.

I'm still just as slow… At the end of the eleventh grade, I took the measure of the situation, and came to the conclusion that rapidity doesn't have a precise relation to intelligence. What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant. (Schwartz, 2001)

Schwartz writes, as have many other mathematicians, about the misrepresentation of mathematics in classrooms, and about mathematics being about connections and deep thinking, not fast calculation. There are many students in math classrooms who think slowly and deeply, like Laurent Schwartz, who are made to believe that they cannot be math people. Indeed, the idea that math is about fast calculations puts off large numbers of math students, especially girls. Yet mathematics continues to be presented as a speed race, more than any other subject—timed math tests, flash cards, math apps against the clock. It is no wonder that students who think slowly and deeply are put off mathematics.

**

When people are asked about how mathematics is used in the world, they usually think of numbers and calculations—of working out mortgages or sale prices—but mathematical thinking is so much more. Mathematics is at the center of thinking about how to spend the day, how many events and jobs can fit into the day, what size of space can be used to fit equipment or turn a car around, how likely events are to happen, knowing how tweets are amplified and how many people they reach. The world respects people who can calculate quickly, but the fact is, some people can be very fast with numbers and not be able to do great things with them, and others, who are very slow and make many mistakes, go on to do something amazing with mathematics. The powerful thinkers in today's world are not those who can calculate fast, as used to be true; fast calculations are now fully automated, routine, and uninspiring. The powerful thinkers are those who make connections, think logically, and use space, data, and numbers creatively.

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (5): Real Mathematicians are Slow Thinkers!

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (4): What is mathematics?

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (3):The Power of Mistakes and Struggle

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (2):The Brain and Mathematics Learning

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (1):Traumatized by Math

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (4): What is mathematics?

Jenya Sapir

When we ask students what math is, they will typically give descriptions that are very different from those given by experts in the field. Students will typically say it is a subject of calculations, procedures, or rules. But when we ask mathematicians what math is, they will say it is the study of patterns; that it is an aesthetic, creative, and beautiful subject (Devlin, 1997). Why are these descriptions so different?

**

Recently I was chairing the PhD viva of one of Maryam's students. A viva is the culminating exam for PhD students when they “defend” the dissertations they have produced over a number of years in front of their committee of professors. I walked into the math department at Stanford that day, curious about the defense I was to chair. The room in which the defense was held was small, with windows overlooking Stanford's impressive Palm Drive, the entrance to the university, and it was filled with mathematicians, students, and professors who had come to watch or judge the defense. Maryam's student was a young woman names Jenya Sapir, who strode up and down that day, sharing drawings on different walls of the room, pointing to them as she made conjectures about the relationships between lines and curves on her drawings. The mathematics she described was a subject of visual images, creativity, and connections, and it was filled with uncertainty

**

Three or four times in the defense, professors asked questions, to which the confident young woman simply answered, “I don't know.” Often the professor added that she or he did not know either. It would be very unusual in a defense of an education PhD for a student to give the answer: “I don't know,” and it would be frowned upon by some professors. But mathematics, real mathematics, is a subject full of uncertainty; it is about explorations, conjectures, and interpretations, not definitive answers. The professors thought it was perfectly reasonable that she did not know the answers to some of the questions, as her work was entering uncharted territories. She passed the PhD exam with flying colors.

This does not mean that there are no answers in mathematics. Many things are known and are important for students to learn. But somehow school mathematics has become so far removed from real mathematics that if I had taken most school students into the mathematics department defense that day, they would not have recognized the subject before them. This wide gulf between real mathematics and school mathematics is at the heart of the math problems we face in education. I strongly believe that if school math classrooms presented the true nature of the discipline, we would not have this nationwide dislike of math and widespread math underachievement.

Mathematics is a cultural phenomenon; a set of ideas, connections, and relationships that we can use to make sense of the world. At its core, mathematics is about patterns. We can lay a mathematical lens upon the world, and when we do, we see patterns everywhere; and it is through our understanding of the patterns, developed through mathematical study, that new and powerful knowledge is created.

**

Knowledge of mathematical patterns has helped people navigate oceans, chart missions to space, develop technology that powers cell phones and social networks, and create new scientific and medical knowledge, yet many school students believe that math is a dead subject, irrelevant to their futures.

To understand the real nature of mathematics it is helpful to consider the mathematics in the world—the mathematics of nature. The patterns that thread through oceans and wildlife, structures and rainfall, animal behavior, and social networks have fascinated mathematicians for centuries.and social networks have fascinated mathematicians for centuries.

**

Numerous research studies (Silver, 1994) have shown that when students are given opportunities to pose mathematics problems, to consider a situation and think of a mathematics question to ask of it—which is the essence of real mathematics—they become more deeply engaged and perform at higher levels. But this rarely happens in mathematics classrooms. In A Beautiful Mind, the box office movie hit, viewers watch John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) strive to find an interesting question to ask—the critical and first stage of mathematical work. In classrooms students do not experience this important mathematical step; instead, they spend their time answering questions that seem dead to them, questions they have not asked.

**

Over the years, school mathematics has become more and more disconnected from the mathematics that mathematicians use and the mathematics of life. Students spend thousands of hours in classrooms learning sets of procedures and rules that they will never use, in their lives or in their work. Conrad Wolfram is a director of Wolfram-Alpha, one of the most important mathematical companies in the world. He is also an outspoken critic of traditional mathematics teaching, and he argues strongly that mathematics does not equal calculating. In a TED talk watched by over a million people, Wolfram (2010) proposes that working on mathematics has four stages:

1. Posing a question

2. Going from the real world to a mathematical model

3. Performing a calculation

4. Going from the model back to the real world, to see if the original question was answered

The first stage involves asking a good question of some data or a situation—the first mathematical act that is needed in the workplace. The fastest-growing job in the United States is that of data analyst—someone who looks at the “big data” that all companies now have and asks important questions of the data. The second stage Wolfram describes is setting up a model to answer the  question; the third is performing a calculation, and the fourth is turning the model back to the world to see whether the question is answered. Wolfram points out that 80% of school mathematics is spent on stage 3—performing a calculation by hand—when that is the one stage that employers do not need workers to be able to do, as it is performed by a calculator or computer. Instead, Wolfram proposes that we have students working on stages 1, 2, and 4 for much more of their time in mathematics classes.

What employers need, he argues, is people who can ask good questions, set up models, analyze results, and interpret mathematical answers. It used to be that employers needed people to calculate; they no longer need this. What they need is people to think and reason.

The Fortune 500 comprises the top 500 companies in the United States. Forty-five years ago, when companies were asked what they most valued in new employees, the list looked like this:

Computation has dropped to the second-from-the-last position, and the top places have been taken by teamwork and problem solving.

Parents often do not see the need for something that is at the heart of mathematics: the discipline. Many parents have asked me: What is the point of my child explaining their work if they can get the answer right? My answer is always the same: Explaining your work is what, in mathematics, we call reasoning, and reasoning is central to the discipline of mathematics. Scientists prove or disprove theories by producing more cases that do or do not work, but mathematicians prove theories through mathematical reasoning. They need to produce arguments that convince other mathematicians by carefully reasoning their way from one idea to another, using logical connections. Mathematics is a very social subject, as proof comes about when mathematicians can convince other mathematicians of logical connections.

A lot of mathematics is produced through collaborations between mathematicians; Leone Burton studied the work of mathematicians and found that over half of their publications were produced collaboratively (Burton, 1999). Yet many mathematics classrooms are places where students complete worksheets in silence. Group and whole class discussions are really important. Not only are they the greatest aid to understanding—as students rarely understand ideas without talking through them—and not only do they enliven the subject and engage students, but they teach students to reason and to critique each other's reasoning, both of which are central in today's high-tech workplaces. Almost all new jobs in today's technological world involve working with massive data sets, asking questions of the data and reasoning about pathways. Conrad Wolfram told me that anyone who cannot reason about mathematics is ineffective in today's workplace. When employees reason and talk about mathematical pathways, other people can develop new ideas based on the pathways as well as see if a mistake has been made. The teamwork that employers value so highly is based upon mathematical reasoning. People who just give answers to calculations are not useful in the workplace; they must be able to reason through them.

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (5): Real Mathematicians are Slow Thinkers!

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (3):The Power of Mistakes and Struggle

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (2):The Brain and Mathematics Learning

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (1):Traumatized by Math

Plants from South America

Columbus is, of course, a person who has inspired admiration and vilification in almost equal measures. He forged a connection which would see the empires of Europe rising to become global superpowers, while the Eden of the Americas was plundered and its civilisations destroyed. Setting foot on that beach, he sealed the fate of tens of millions of Native Americans and ten million Africans. The impact of that moment would ripple out through history. Until this point, Europe had been something of a backwater – but the establishment of colonies in the New World would change all that. The rise of the West had begun.

And the impact would be felt not just throughout human societies, around the world, but by the species that had become our allies – on both sides of the Atlantic. This contact between Europe and the Americas would quickly turn into a sustained connection between the Old and New Worlds. These supercontinents had been largely separate since the break-up of Pangaea, which began around 150 million years ago. During the Great Ice Age, the Pleistocene, the world went through repeated glaciations. And during the glacial periods, sea levels would fall to such an extent that the north-east tip of Asia would be joined to the north-west corner of North America, via a tract of land known as Beringia – or the ‘Bering land bridge’. This bridge

would allow some interchange of plants and animals between Asia and North America. It was the route by which humans first colonised the Americas, around 17,000 years ago. And yet the ancient, underlying theme of divergence and difference between the flora and fauna of the Old and New Worlds persisted – until the human-mediated transfer of plants and animals which started with Columbus bringing back his pineapples, chilli and tobacco in 1492. Plants and animals which had been contained and separate from each other made that leap across the pond, to find themselves facing new landscapes, new challenges and new opportunities on the opposite side. Cattle and coffee, sheep and sugar cane, chickens and chickpeas, wheat and rye travelled from the Old World to the New. Turkeys and tomatoes, pumpkins and potatoes, Muscovy duck and maize made the reverse journey.

The Columbian Exchange has been described by some as the most significant ecological event on the planet since the dinosaurs were wiped out. It was the beginning of globalisation: the world became not just interconnected but interdependent. But it had a wretched inception.

The fortunes of Europe (and, in due course, Asia and Africa) were transformed by the domesticated species brought back from the New World. Novel crops boosted agriculture and populations began to recover from war, famine and plague. But that was in the Old World. In the Americas, a scene of devastation ensued. Just as plants and animals had followed separate evolutionary trajectories on either side of the Atlantic, the pace and direction of technological change had been different in the Old World compared with the New. The Europeans possessed advanced technology: their military and maritime kit was vastly superior to that of the Native Americans. The immediate consequences of contact, with heart-stopping, dreadful inevitability, were tragic. Disease organisms were also part of that Columbian Exchange: the Europeans brought back syphilis from the Americas, while introducing smallpox there – with disastrous consequences. The indigenous population of the Americas plummeted after conquest. It was decimated: by the middle of the seventeenth century, 90 per cent of the indigenous population had been wiped out.

It’s easy to focus on the power imbalance that existed between the Old and New Worlds in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Human societies had developed in different ways in the Americas and in Europe, but it wasn’t as though the Native Americans were entirely without technology – far from it. When it came to their exploitation of natural resources, they were clearly experts. It’s wrong to see the pre-Columbian Americas as, on the one hand, a natural Garden of Eden, and on the other, an innovation vacuum in need of European inspiration to realise its potential. Native American societies had a rich and diverse history of innovation, and the Americas contained completely independent centres of domestication. Many of the pre-Columbian societies of the Americas were large, urbanised – and already dependent on agriculture.

The Spanish explorers didn’t pluck wild plants, out of relative obscurity, recognise their utility for the first time, and transform them into something which would greatly benefit humanity. What the Europeans found on the other side of the Atlantic were organisms which had already changed away from wildness, over thousands of years – which had already entered into a tightly bound, successful alliance with humans. What Columbus discovered was not only a new land, previously unknown to Europeans, but a wealth of useful, tamed animals and plants – ready-made domesticates.

Among those prizes was that cereal he’d spotted and written about, just four days after landing on San Salvador – the cereal that was not only a staple food but a sacred food for the Aztecs and Incas, whose civilisations would soon be swallowed up by the Spanish Empire: maize.

Baskıcı yönetimlerin “fıkhi temeli”

Geleneksel fıkhımızın tarih içinde teşekkül eden hamulesiyle bugünkü sosyo-ekonomik sorunlarımızı çözemeyeceğimiz gibi, esasında uzun yüzyıllardan beri herhangi bir gelişme gösteremeyen kelam’la da bugünkü entelektüel sorunlarımıza cevap bulamayız. Bunun sebeplerinden biri geleneksel fıkıh ve kelamın teşekkülünde nassların yanlış kullanımının oynadığı rol kadar, daha fazlası, tarih görüşümüz ve içtihatların teşekkül ettiği zamanın sosyo-politik şartların belirleyici konumda rol oynamasıdır.

Fıkıh usulünün belirli kurallarından biri, içtihadi bir meselenin mutlaka kaynağını nasstan almasıdır. Bu doğrudur, fakat hukukun kaynakları arasında Sünnet sayıldığında sahih olanı ile olmayanı dikkatlice birbirinden ayrılmadığında ve özellikle sahabelerin içtihat ve tatbikatları “nass seviyesi”nde kullanıldığında önemli problemler doğmaktadır. Kur’an ve Sahih Sünnet seviyesinde olmayan her metin “nass” değil, ancak “dogma” hükmündedir. Yazık ki fıkıh külliyatımız “nasslar” yanında çok sayıda “dogma”yı da bağlayıcı kaynaklar arasında saymış ve içtihatlarda kullanmıştır.

Bugün İslam dünyasının neredeyse tamamında baskı rejimleri, yolsuzluklar, gelir bölüşümünde adaletsizlikler, sosyal çürüme, ahlaki yozlaşma vb. sorunlar hükmünü icra ediyorsa bunun sebeplerinden birisi budur. Bu sebep bugüne devralıp ısrarla korumaya çalıştığımız öylesine kuvvetli bir mirastan beslenmektedir ki, siyasetten sosyal hayatın hemen hemen her alanına nüfuz etmiş bulunuyor.

Bugünden geçmişe baktığımızda Muaviye’nin bir ihtilal ile yönetimi ele geçirdiğinden beri yönetimlerin meşru bir temele dayanmadığını, politika üretir ve tatbik ederken İslam’ın belirgin hükümlerine riayet etmediğini hepimiz söylüyoruz, ama kaynakları üzerinde yeterince kritik yapmaya yanaşmıyoruz. Fıkıh kitaplarımızda yöneticilerin meşruiyeti ele alınırken baş vurulan deliller bu konuda hayli açıklayıcıdır.

Bu yazıda bir örnek vereceğim. Vereceğim örnek doğrudan yönetim ve  siyaset felsefesiyle ilgilidir. Geleneksel fakihlere göre  devlet başkanlığı dört yolla sübut bulur:

1) Fıkıh bilenlerin, başka bir deyişle ulemanın oluşturduğu Ehlü’l hal ve’l akd’in seçtiği kişi. Fakihler bunun şer’i dayanağını Hz. Peygamber (s.a.)’in irtihalinden sonra Hz. Ebu Bekir’i halife seçen heyette bulmaktadırlar.

2) Bir önceki halifenin kendisinden sonra bir kişiyi devlet başkanlığına işaret etmesi. Bunun dayanağı Hz. Ebu Bekir’in kendisinden sonra Hz. Ömer’i tavsiyesi etmesidir. Hatta bu bir “tavsiye” veya bir “temenni”den çok, bağlayıcı bir “vasiyet” hükmünü taşır. Bir bakıma “ta’yin”dir. Bazı fakihler bu modelden hareketle devlet başkanının kendi çocuğunu veliaht tayin edebileceğini söylemişlerdir; örnek olarak Muaviye’nin kendinden sonra Yezid’i veliaht olarak tayin etmesini delil göstermişlerdir (Bkz. Abdülkadir Udeh, “Mukayeseli İslam Hukuku ve Beşeri Hukuk” Çev. Ali Şafak, 1991-Ankara IV, 328.) Sanki sorun siyasi ve idari sistemi yapısal bir çürümeye uğratacak kötü sıfatlara sahip Yezid değil, Muaviye’nin yasal ve mülk üzerinde hak sahibi bir yetkili olarak oğlunu veliaht ilan etmesiyle çözülmüştür.

3) Üçüncü modele göre halife, kendisinden sonra iş başına gelecek olan kişiyi belirleme işini belli bir topluluğa bırakabilir. Hz. Osman, kendisinden sonra halife olacak kişiyi altı kişilik bir heyetin kararına bırakmıştı.

4) En dikkat çekici olanı halifenin silah/güç kullanarak başa gelmesini “meşru” gören modeldir. Silah zoruyla -yani darbe veya ihtilal yaparak- iş başına gelen teb’ayı kendine itaat etmeye zorlar, halk ona itaat etmeyi kabullenir. Böylece güç kullanarak iş başına gelenin halifeliği sübut bulmuş olur. Müslümanların zorbalıkla yönetimi ele geçiren ve istibdatla yöneten halifeye biat ve itaat etmeleri vaciptir. Bu modelin dayanağı Emevi halifesi Abdülmelik bin Mervan’ın ona başkaldıran Abdullah bin Zübeyr’i şehid edip hilafet makamına gelmesidir. Halk isteyerek veya istemeyerek Mervan’ın oğluna biat etti, hükmü altında yaşamayı kabullendi.

Fakihler, bu dört yoldan biriyle devlet başkanlığına gelen kişiye biat ve itaati vacip görmüş, ona karşı gelmeyi “bağy fiili” saymışlardır. İlginçtir, “sahabe” olması hasebiyle Muaviye’nin Hz. Ali’ye başkaldırması ve onbinlerce Müslümanın kanının dökülmesine yol açması fiilini “bağy” kategorisine sokmamışlardır.

Fakihlerimiz başka model üzerinde durmamış, mesela iktidarın şiddet kullanılmadan ve belli aralıklarla seçim yoluyla el değiştirme yöntemi üzerinde imal-i fikr etmemişlerdir. Bu konu üzerinde yeterince imal-ı fikr etmedikleri gibi tek kişinin veya bir hanedanın yönetimini pekiştirici unsurları da fıkıh ve kelam kitaplarına geçirmişlerdir. Şöyle ki:

1.   Fakihler, şu veya bu yolla seçilen halifenin hayat boyu bu makamda kalabileceğine hükmetmişlerdir. Kayd-ı hayat tarihte ve bugün İslam ülkelerinde son nefeslerine kadar iktidarı bırakmayan yöneticilerin meşruiyet kaynağını oluşturur. Dini monarşiler ve diktatörlükler büyük ölçüde bu mirastan beslenmektedirler.

2.   Kur’an ve Sünnet bakış açısından yönetim teorisinin temelini teşkil eden “şura” fiilen geçersiz hale gelirken fakihler, şura’yı halkın; tabii temsilcileri, kanaat önderleri ve itibar ettiği alimler aracılığıyla karar mekanizmaları ve karar süreçleri üzerinde etkili olma enstrümanı olarak tarif etmemiş, ücret ve ihsanlarla tutulan kişilerin yöneticileri her karar ve icraatında tasdiklerinden ibaret görmüşlerdir.

3.   Hz. Ebu Bekir’den başlamak üzere iktidarın kutsanması, ilahi meşruiyete dayandırılması cihetine gidilmiş. Hz. Ebu Bekir kendisine “Allah’ın halifesi” diyenlere “Ben Allah’ın halifesi değilim, Resulü’nün halifesiyim” demek suretiyle muhtemel bir teokrasinin önüne geçmişse de, evini kuşatan isyancılara Hz. Osman ‘Bu cübbeyi bana Allah giydirdi, ancak O çıkarır” demek suretiyle hilafeti ilahi/aşkın bir kaynağa dayandırmanın kapısını aralamış, daha sonraları Emevi halifeleri kendilerine “Allah’ın yeryüzündeki gölgesi veya Allah’ın halifesi” ünvanını vermişlerdir. Fıkıh ve Kelam kitaplarında yazık ki yeterince bu konu üzerinde durulmamış, zamanla Bizans ve Sasani etkisinde halife ve sultanlar, şahlar ve padişahlar yönettikleri memleketleri kendi mülkleri, teb’ayı da kulları saymışlardır.

4.   Diğer önemli ve belki de en vahim olanı, Kur’an ve Sünnet yönetimin meşruiyetini, sebeb-i hikmetini adaletin tesisi, başka bir deyişle hukuka riayeti şartına bağlarken, fakihler güvenliği, toplumsal istikrarı esas alıp, yöneticinin hukukun dışına çıksa bile ona itaatin gerektiğini açık-seçik savunmuşlardır. Sünni dört mezhebe ve Zeydilere göre “imam facir ve fasık olsa bile ona karşı çıkmak haramdır.” Zahirilere göre ise, zulmeden halifeye onun zulmünün misliyle veya daha hafifiyle karşı çıkılıyorsa, yine de zalim halifenin yanında yer almak gerekir; çünkü baştakinin kötülüğüne karşı mücadele edilirken daha büyük bir kötülüğün ortaya çıkması muhtemeldir.

5.   Bununla da yetinmeyen fakihler “ta’zir” adı altında devlet başkanına öylesine yetkiler tanımışlardır ki, Kur’an ve Sünnet’in öngörmediği “ölüm cezaları”nı fıkha sokmuş, yöneticinin -yani devletin- kendi gerekli gördüğü bazı suç fiillerine ölüm cezası verebileceğine hükmetmişlerdir. Bazıları ise -Fatih Sultan Mehmed’in aldığı fetvada zikredildiği üzere “ekser-i ulema”- Şer’i Hukuk yanında Cengiz töresinden mülhem Örfi Hukuk icat etmiş, böylelikle devlet başkanına “Siyaseten katl” yoluyla muhaliflerini kolayca ortadan kaldırmaya cevaz vermişlerdir.

Bağy, ta’zir, irtidat (dinden dönme) ve siyaseten katl tarihimizde Hz. Ali’nin şehadetinden bu yana hükmünü sürdüren istibdat ve zulüm yönetimlerinin “sözde meşruiyet” temelini oluşturmuştur. Başka faktörler yanında bugün İslam dünyasının geneli baskı rejimleri altında ise, baskıların beslendiği en önemli kaynaklardan biri bizim fıkıh ve kelam kitaplarında karşılık bulan söz konusu tarihi mirastır. (8 Kasım 2018.)

Ali Bulaç