Collective Wisdom

Concerning political and social reform of Korean society after the ‘Candle revolution’ and impeachment of a president, the civil society and the political sphere show different approaches to the problem. The people (or citizens) assembled and marched with candles in their hands on the square longing for constitutional government and better society, and consequently, the head of government who lost the people’s trust was removed from the office. This brought our society an opportunity to discuss the new constitutional order – in other words, we encountered a ‘Constitutional momentum’. The Special Committee on the Constitution, which was constituted in the Parliament at the end of last year, tried to proceed a quick process of constitutional amendment whereas most citizens are not in agreement. So the history of ‘revolution by the people’ and ‘constitution-making without the people’ is about to repeat itself. Constitutions in democratic countries are people’s documents and therefore gain legitimacy by people’s participation in the constitution-making process. Moreover, constitution-making in accord with the constitutional momentum driven by the people should be accomplished by the people and for the people.
This paper introduces the Iceland’s constitution-making case after an economic crisis in 2008. Confronting unprecedented financial crisis and inefficient action by government, Icelandic people were deeply disappointed with political elites and looked back on the ground of the society, and then they decided to make a new constitution for re-establishment of social values. Many people participated in the process of constitution-making, from the very first step to decide what were the most important values in the country and should be included in a new constitution and then they participated also in the next step to produce a draft. The most innovative and revolutionary point in democratic perspective in the process was that the draft for a new constitution was written with direct participation of its people for the first time in history. The internet and social media made it possible to make a crowdsourced constitution. The Iceland’s constitutional experiment, which combines the trust of collective wisdom with internet communication technology for constitution-making, is full of suggestion concerning current discussion of constitutional amendment – without citizens – in Korea.

Christopher Buck, “Kahlil Gibran.” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Supplement XX. Edited by Jay Parini. Farmington Hills, MI: Scribner’s Reference/The Gale Group, 2010. Pp. 113–129.

KAHLIL GIBRAN
(1883–1931)
Christopher Buck

The Arab American author and artist Kahlil Gibran was a best-selling writer whose work has yet to receive critical acclaim equal to his popular appeal. There is no question that Gibran’s work in Arabic was central to the development of twentieth-century Arabic literature—in that Arab Romanticism begins with Gibran, the pivotal figure in the Mahjar movement of émigré Arab writers centered in New York. There is also no question that Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet (1923)—a small volume of aphorisms (wise sayings) offering pithy wisdom of an almost prophetic quality—belongs to world literature, for it is known and loved the world over. As an American man of letters, however, Gibran has received scant attention by American literary critics. Since The Prophet has yet to be widely recognized as an American classic, and the author yet to be fully accepted as an American writer, Gibran’s inclusion in the American Writers series requires some justification.

Eminent scholars including Irfan Shahid (professor emeritus at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.) and Suheil Bushrui (professor emeritus and current director of the Kahlil Gibran Chair for Values and Peace at the University of Maryland at College Park) have made the case for Gibran’s recognition as an American writer worthy of note. According to Bushrui, America is entitled to claim Gibran as one of its sons (even if not a native son) as fully and as authentically as his native Lebanon can lay such claim: “In his work, he became not only Gibran of Lebanon, but Gibran of America, indeed Gibran the voice of global consciousness” (1996, p. 10). After all, the young Gibran spent only the first twelve years of his life in Bsharri (a village near the famous “Cedars of God”), where he was born in 1883, before emigrating with his family to the United States. Apart from a two-year study in Paris and two brief return visits to Lebanon, Gibran spent his entire adult life—the last two-thirds of his life, in fact—entirely on American soil, dying in New York at the age of forty-eight. In The Prophet, the city of Orphalese is often said to represent America (or New York).

Shahid underscores the fact The Prophet was America’s best-selling book of the twentieth century, not counting the Bible, and that Gibran outsold all other American poets, from Walt Whitman to Robert Frost. According to Gibran’s New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, The Prophet has sold more than ten million copies. The book’s success was due entirely to its own appeal, as Knopf never promoted it. Strangely, Gibran is arguably America’s best-loved prose-poet, whose market appeal continues despite critical indifference. It’s true that Gibran had what might be called a double psyche, and inhabited two thought-worlds at once. As an Arab American, Gibran wrote in two languages: English and Arabic. Arabic was his mother tongue, and English his second language. As an accomplished man of letters of considerable influence in the Middle East, Gibran inspired a literary renaissance in the Arab world, such that all modern Arabic poetry bears the marks of Gibran’s. Yet Gibran’s work has had little influence in American letters, despite its enormous popular appeal. Notwithstanding, Shahid thinks that Gibran has not been fairly treated as an American writer. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that, categorically, The Prophet exists in splendid isolation, severed from its Arabic cultural roots. And so The Prophet will have to be evaluated, or reevaluated, on its own literary merits and for its singular contribution to the American literary heritage.

By looking at collective intelligence (CI) through four distinct lenses, this paper draws on recent research in organizational design, evolutionary economics, cognitive sciences, knowledge ecology and political economy to built a twin path forward: collective intelligence and collective leadership. It lays out elements of a framework for building this twin path beyond chaos. It is our intent to invite conversations designed to engage questions surrounding this interdependent evolutionary path. How might we develop criteria for a design capable of supporting a large range of collective intelligence phenomena in an integrated way? Will the emergent socio-economic life forms be strong enough to balance the destructive power of our global crises if and when "the perfect storm" hits? When everything goes worse and worse, and better and better, at the same time, and they do it faster and faster, how do we deal with the ensuing chaos? In order to bring forth desirable futures, we must be ready to navigate through it, using a twin path of collective intelligence and collective leadership. This is our global challenge. This paper is the first in that will delve into the topic more deeply, expanding certain sections of this overall expose into separate albeit inter-related lines of inquiry.

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The soul, duly prepared by exhortation to the study of true philosophy, finds herself in gradually advancing to the greater from the less. It should be noted that the one-paragraph reference to Olympiodorus herein (p. 9), while perfectly congruous with the exposition, is strictly impossible as he was in fact much posterior in historical time to Iamblichus. This editorial interpolation was mistakenly left in the final draft years before it was subsequently uploaded, an error for which the editor apologizes. No reader has ever noticed or objected to this mistake, and so we are not going to correct it now. Undoubtedly, neither Iamblichus nor Olympiodorus would object in spirit, for they were not mere philologists, and both of them are quoted correctly herein. They are in fact spiritual brothers and work together in this presentation for the true benefit of souls. It is like the friendly table talk between Callimachus (d. 240 B.C.) and Heraclitus portrayed in a beautiful and philosophically accurate woodcut published in 'The Dial' just before it ceased publication about a century ago--it could never have happened but it should have and (at least in the mind of Callimachus) did indeed occur, or so the artist surmised.

OMG - THIS  PROVES THAT THE EXTENT OF OUR COLLECTIVE AND INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESSES EXCEEDS THE CONFINES OF THIS MULTIVERSE

THEY CONFIRM THAT HUMANITY KILLS ITSELF OFF ENTIRELY AND THEN STARTS OVER, THAT CYCLE IS ABOUT TO CHANGE VIA THE COMING EVENT, WHICH WE CAN CAUSE VIA ORGONE BUBBLE TECHNOLOGY.

The first part of the paper develops the argument that geographers should learn to decompose human memory into its constituent parts because then and then alone will we become attuned to the full range of ways in which we incorporate places into our beings. The second part of the paper articulates Stephen Hill's comments on episodic memory with my recent work on wisdom.

Epistemic justifications of democracy affirm the comparative quality of democracies’ decisions. The challenge faced by those who endorse such views is to explain why we should prefer standard democratic institutions to some sort of epistocracy or rule of the wisest. This article takes up this challenge by assessing the epistemic potential of an epistocratic council, as imagined by Jason Brennan. Members of such council would be selected through competency exams, the required competencies being defined by the whole population. The argument defended in this article is that the potential gain in instrumental rationality that such an institution could offer under certain questionable conditions would be outweighed by the increased risks of misrule and involuntary biases if such council has decision-making or veto power. In comparison with the existing literature, this argument stresses the importance of moral rightness, here defined as impartiality, in the epistemic assessment of democracy and its alternatives. The article then ends with a qualified assessment of purely epistemic justifications of democratic inclusion, which could be insufficient to reject implausible but imaginable forms of epistemically justifiable disenfranchisement.

If our concern is to help wisdom to flourish in the world, then the central task before us is to transform academia so that it takes up its proper task of seeking and promoting wisdom instead of just acquiring knowledge.  Improving knowledge about wisdom is no substitute; nor is the endeavour of searching for the correct definition of wisdom.

Both Piketty (2014) and Lucassen (2021) argue that empires/states/markets demand strong ideologies to legitimize producing class inequalities (see Throulliot 2001). Are our conceptions of states itself such 'doxic' (hidden by power) ideologies? (Anderson 1990; Bourdieu & Eagleton 1990; Bourdieu et. al. 1994; Scott 2009; Kumar 2010)..

This is a review of Hélène Landemore's "Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many." It was published in the Jan. 2014 issue of Ethics.

Can collectives be wise? The thesis that they can has recently received a lot of attention. It has been argued that, in many judgmental or decision-making tasks, suitably organized groups can outperform their individual members. In this paper, I discuss the lessons we can learn about collective wisdom from the emerging theory of judgment aggregation, as distinct from the literature on Condorcet’s jury theorem.
Preprint: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/pdf-files/CollectiveWisdom19Oct.pdf