So how can anyone be certain about anything? The answer is simple. You can’t be certain. When you encounter someone that tells you they know the answer to life’s questions, absolutely, for certain — RUN! They’re taking the lazy path. They’re not certain — they have just stopped asking questions and are now expecting you to do likewise.
World Thinkers On Certainty
Look at these responses, quoted from some of the world’s great thinkers regarding the issue of certainty:
“Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” – Benjamin Franklin
“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.” – Erich Fromm
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire
“What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.” – Bertrand Russell
“Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether, of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear.” – William Congreve
Consequences of Certainty
One of the most unfortunate consequences of certainty is that it leads to the soft insulation of belief. Yes, for a spiritual person there are things in life that should not simply be taken by faith and be believed without question. God made us with inquisitive minds and intended for us to use them. When we do not question and we become certain about everything, I believe we in fact disappoint God. I believe faith and belief are for trusting in God, not for being lazy with our minds.
If we allow our minds to soften into a pudding by allowing belief and faith to intrude into areas never intended to be handled by faith and belief, we become certain something is true and must therefore protect that conclusion from falsification. For example, articles of faith such as the exact method used by God to perform the Creation are viewed by us as something we must protect from falsification, and we, therefore, attempt to disprove well-grounded scientific theories such as Evolution. Starting with the conclusion, then proclaiming it to be false anything that calls our conclusion into question is NOT how scientific discoveries are made.
Faith And Reason
I believe that faith and reason are not in conflict, and where the question of Creation and Evolution are involved, I believe God respects those who can say that we believe God created the earth, and that science proved life evolves over time. I believe in my heart that both things can be true and there is no conflict. I do not need to see proof of the Creation to know it is true. For me, the proof is for science, not for the realm of the divine. My proof of God is in my heart. I need no further proof of God.
I believe God wants us to explore, study, to question the things we see around us. God is strong and powerful and he can take a few ‘Why’ questions from his questions just like we can handle them from our 3-year-old grandchildren. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Questions are the beginning of understanding. Certainty is the end of it.
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Author Bio
Steve and Kristyne McDaniel host NewLifeMastery, a training and counselling portal with new classes beginning every quarter. Learn to master life’s issues, feel more joy, understand yourself, and ask/answer perplexing questions.
Marianne Williamson recently burst onto the political scene as a somewhat unconventional candidate vying for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the United States.
While she has never garnered more than two per cent in the polls and did not qualify for the third debate — meaning it’s likely her run will come to an end soon — her remarks during the first two Democratic debates, as well as her personality and unconventional campaign parlance, have provoked many media responses.
What distinguishes Williamson from other candidates is her personal and professional background. Prior to her foray into politics, she was internationally renowned self-help and spiritual author and speaker, known for penning bestsellers like A Return to Love.
Today, she’s known as Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual adviser and remains an outspoken advocate of mindfulness meditation, yoga and therapy as ways to achieve spiritual and social transformation.
Marianne Williamson: Calling for an awakening
Williamson unapologetically infuses her interest in spirituality into her political campaigning.
On her website she calls for “a moral and spiritual awakening” in America, speaking to those who are “seeking higher wisdom.” And in her closing statement at the first Democratic debate, she proclaimed that she will harness love to defeat President Donald Trump.
NBC News.
A number of pundits have mocked Williamson. But the more common reaction is puzzlement: many just don’t know what to make of a renowned spiritual and self-help teacher running to lead the Democratic Party.
I believe this is large because few are familiar with the history of alternative spirituality in North America and its ties to progressive politics.
Spiritual But Not Religious
We have seen a dramatic rise over the last few decades in the number of North Americans who self-identify as “spiritual but not religious.”
Those in this group, while certainly diverse, have deep spiritual interests, often champion something like the existence of a higher power, remain wary of orthodoxy and place a premium on individual autonomy.
It is these people to whom Marianne Williamson appeals. And while they might view themselves as seekers who don’t adhere to traditions, there is a longstanding tradition of alternative spirituality in the West.
These movements were certainly theologically different, but nevertheless, like Marianne Williamson and her followers, they postulated the existence of unseen forces and championed the importance of both mystical experiences and individual freedom. If channelled appropriately, those forces could purportedly lead to self-empowerment.
The influence of these movements was far from marginal in American society. They often attracted well-known writers, politicians and artists. Ralph Waldo Emerson, often called America’s national poet, was an avowed Transcendentalist, as was Henry Thoreau, a committed civil right, activist and author.
Others who belonged to some of these movements include psychologists William James and Carl Jung, philosopher Rudolf Steiner and biologist Alfred Russell Wallace.
The Spiritual Is Political
Historian Leigh Eric Schmidt of Princeton University usefully traces the historical ties between these movements and progressive democratic politics in the U.S. in Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality.
Schmidt observes that many of the leaders and spokespeople of these movements were ahead of their time, both socially and politically.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), an important leader of the 19th-century women’s rights movement in the United States, is seen in this 1890 portrait.
For instance, Margaret Fuller, an early Transcendentalist and confessed mystic was also a staunch advocate for women’s rights in the early 19th century. So was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a women’s suffrage activist who sought to claim the privilege of autonomy for the female sex in The Woman’s Bible, published in 1895.
Walt Whitman, the famous American poet and writer – as well as a “curious inquirer into clairvoyance and Spiritualism” – championed, in cosmopolitan fashion, “the good in all religious systems,” according to Schmidt.
Felix Adler, a Reform Jew and founder of the Society for Ethical Culture, published 1905 The Essentials of Spirituality, wherein he championed the importance of “doing justice to that inner self” in order to do “justice to others.”
Finally, Ralph Waldo Trine, a proponent of New Thought and author of the successful In Tune with the Infinite, depicted God as a spirit of infinite life akin to a “reservoir of superhuman power.”
And though Trine’s doctrines were eventually appropriated by entrepreneurial and materialist ministers such as Norman Vincent Peale in the mid-20th century, Trine himself was a staunch progressive and social reformer. He was also a committed vegetarian, playing an active role in the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Why Is Marianne Williamson So Mind-boggling?
In light of this history, Schmidt concludes:
“The convergence of political progressivism, socioeconomic justice, and mystical interiority was at the heart of the rise of a spiritual left in American culture.”
It’s therefore worth asking why a candidate like Williamson so boggles the modern-day mind.
In part, it has to do with the way alternative spirituality developed over the 20th century. The New Age movement of the 1970s was arguably the most prominent. And while the “New Age” label may today be out of fashion, many ideas that were once championed under its banner remain strikingly popular.
In fact, it’s likely that many who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” subscribe to a set of ideas and engage in a variety of practices that were once central to that counter-cultural movement. And carrying forward a long-standing tradition, these ideas tend to appeal to the left.
Of course, one of the tenets of New Age thought, at least in its most radical form, is that politics is a distraction from what really matters: self-transformation and spiritual enlightenment. So for those with spiritual interests, cosmopolitan and inclusive spirituality of Williamson has an obvious appeal.
This may be why the image of Williamson as president is so difficult to entertain: we tend to think spirituality and politics just don’t mix.
But that’s at odds with the actual history of spirituality in America. Perhaps those who are “spiritual but not religious” will stop drawing a line separating the spiritual from the political. And if this happens, maybe the thought of a Williamson presidency won’t seem so implausible.
“Is the #MeToo era a reckoning, a revolution, or something else?” by Zora Simic, UNSW Sydney
“The world”, declares Laurie Penny on the first page of their new book, “is in the middle of a sexual revolution.” And unlike earlier sexual revolutions, this one is for real – provided we eradicate capitalism, fascism and the patriarchy.
With this call, it’s business as usual for British writer and activist Penny, who has never sugar-coated their feminist and radical politics.
Australia’s Laurie Penny
Penny – who is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns – first came to public attention in the 2000s with the blog Penny Red and regular columns in left-leaning outlets like the Guardian and New Statesmen. A steady stream of books followed, with arresting titles like Unspeakable Things (2014) and Bitch Doctrine (2017), in which Penny dared to call out the sexism of the radical-left circles in which they moved.
Anticipating the first-person feminism of Australia’s Clementine Ford, among others – and updating the 1970s mantra “the personal is political” for a new generation – Penny has often shared difficult and intimate personal experiences, from anorexia to masturbation to sexual assault. And while they have been what would now be described as “extremely online”, they have also gone in person to where the action is, whether taking part in the Occupy movement or travelling to Greece to observe the financial crisis up close.
Given all that Penny has been writing and protesting about for well over a decade, it was inevitable that they would write what could broadly be described as a #MeToo book – indeed, most of their six previous books have been #MeToo books of a kind. Penny deserves recognition for writing about sex and power in unapologetically feminist terms when mainstream feminism was widely considered to be in the doldrums, passé, and/or no longer necessary.
The #MeToo Movement
Still, it’s no longer 2007 – which, as well as being the year Penny started blogging, was also the year that African American activist and survivor Tarana Burke launched the #MeToo movement, her hashtag raising awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault.
Since 2017, when #MeToo went viral and then global, countless words have been written about it by feminists, including Burke, whose memoir Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (2021) is essential reading. Penny is entering a crowded field, inviting the question of what is new and distinctive about the grandiosely titled Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback.
At their best, Penny offers a rousing and enticing prediction for what sits on the other side of the #MeToo era. For Penny, the present moment is one in which “sex and gender are in crisis”. #MeToo is part of a “Great Reckoning” that almost nobody saw coming, because “when it came, it came from women”.
We are now “living through a profound and permanent alteration in what gender means, what sex means, and whose bodies matter”.
Thousands of Years of Patriarchy
Everywhere “women, men and LGBTQ people … are walking quietly away from the expectations posed on them by thousands of years of patriarchy”. The changes underway promise “ways of life that are not based on competition, coercion and dominance but on consent, community and pleasure”.
Laurie Penny Wikimedia commons
Yet rather than telling us more about the “paradigm shift” that is remaking “our civilisation”, Penny’s book mostly explains the present moment by covering similar terrain to their earlier titles, with some new piecemeal research and updated terminology.
Frequently, Penny’s declarative mode undercuts rather than generates analysis. The abrupt pivots throughout suggest a book written in some haste. Anecdotal evidence and personal experience drive the narrative and analysis, so much so that Penny’s own journalism is alluded to rather than showcased.
For instance, Penny tells the reader that they have spent years “researching and attempting to understand the mindset behind the incel and “men’s rights” and “seduction communities” and that the “problem is getting worse”. But rather than properly extrapolate, Penny references a few random studies and concludes with an ode to the heroes of the global pandemic – “not fighters or soldiers”, but “doctors, nurses, care workers and community leaders”.
The Flashpoints of Sexual and Gender Politics
There’s no doubting Penny’s ambition. Across 14 chapters, most with an arresting if the formulaic opening (“Pain is political, and so is pleasure”; “Heterosexuality is in trouble”; “Sooner or later, every revolution comes down to who does the dishes”), Penny covers the flashpoints of contemporary sexual and gender politics, including #MeToo and the backlash against it.
Much of what is argued is easy to agree with: capitalism exploits some people and bodies more than others; women continue to carry the weight of domestic and caring labour; economic and sexual exploitation are not separate issues, but are intimately linked.
In the chapter focusing on work, Penny refreshingly moves #MeToo beyond the realm of celebrity to other industries, such as hospitality, agriculture and domestic work. They devote the most attention to sex work as paradigmatic of all labour under capitalism. Yet Penny cuts short rather than enhances another promising thread by focusing on arguments that have been made more powerfully by others. These include sex workers themselves, as showcased in the anthology We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival (2021).
The organising themes of the sexual revolution, modern fascism and feminist fightback provide some cohesion, but not in an especially sustained or persuasive fashion.
Beyond #MeToo
In Penny’s telling, “modern fascism” is a catch-all term that includes “neo-masculinist” strongmen like Putin, Bolsonaro, Trump and Johnson, the “overwhelmingly White men” who voted for them (a claim in need of some qualifications), incels, the far right, and any man experiencing a crisis or threat to his masculinity. It is a “brutal political backlash” provoked by “changes in the balance of power between men and women”.
Now, it is clear that authoritarian governments everywhere are much more likely to take away women’s rights than extend them, as Penny covers in a chapter on reproduction that focuses mostly on the US. But to make the case that “modern fascism” is best understood as a backlash against feminism requires more work than Penny is willing to do.
Other feminist thinkers have offered far more probing and genuinely disturbing accounts of contemporary misogyny, including another British journalist Laura Bates, in her book Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pick-up Artists (2020)
The Genealogies of #MeToo
Like “modern fascism”, the “feminist fightback” is taken as a given, rather than something to be accounted for or documented. Penny prefers sweeping statements about “the greatest challenge to the social order in this century” coming from
women, girls and queer people, particularly women, girls and queer people of colour, finally coming together to talk about sexual violence and structural abuse of power.
Furthermore, the “feminism” most often referenced is not the left, black or trans feminisms Penny seems most aligned with. It is the “choice”, neoliberal, mainstream feminism she criticises (as have many other feminists in far more encompassing fashion). For a self-proclaimed feminist book, Sexual Revolution is sparsely populated with actual feminists and largely bereft of feminist history. It is as though #MeToo came from nowhere.
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Genealogies have been identified and scrutinised by Tania Serisier in her important book Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Sexual Politics (2018), among many others, including Tarana Burke. Yet in place of proper details about “feminist fightback”, we get Penny’s intervention: sexual revolution.
Cognisant that the concept of “sexual revolution” comes with hefty historical and cultural baggage (though not to the extent that they engage with relevant critiques), Penny attempts to rehabilitate it anyway. This sexual revolution, writes Penny, will deal “not just with a sexual licence but with sexual liberation” – as though they are the first rather than umpteenth person to make this argument. This “new sexual revolution is a feminist one”.
The Sexual Revolution – Unfinished Business
Instead, Penny’s focus is overwhelmingly on how dire heterosexual relations are and how abhorrent the sexually desiring woman continues to be. The idea of the sexual revolution as unfinished business is decades old. So are expressions of what a “feminist” sexual revolution might entail. Penny’s update is to advocate for consent as the fundamental basis of the new sexual and economic order. Of course! But if we are at the midpoint of a sexual revolution, as Penny suggests, there is very little sense of positive developments in the sexual sphere.
Sexual Revolution is a bulldozer of a book in which Penny opts for full-throttled polemic instead of nuanced analysis at almost every turn. There has always been a place for such books in the feminist canon, and Penny brings flair and spirit to the task. But beyond its potential value as a primer for contemporary feminism, it is difficult to discern who Sexual Revolution is written for.
I suspect most readers are already familiar with “patriarchy”, “rape culture”, “toxic masculinity”, “intersectionality”, and other key terms.
From The Rote To The Muddled
Though Penny was once a welcome feminist voice at a time of “post-feminism”, Sexual Revolution reads as outdated, or not up to its proclaimed task, despite its contemporary focus. It suffers from comparison with other books which have tackled similar material with more depth and insight.
Penny promises a more wide-ranging and grassroots approach to sex and power, but only really skims the surface. In contrast to the polyphonic format of numerous anthologies, including the edited collection #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement (2019), Penny’s voice eclipses the voices of people she knows have often been marginalised, including Indigenous women, women of colour, and trans, queer and non-binary people.
Penny is attentive to the racial and racist dynamics of both the far-right and mainstream (or White or carceral) feminism. But these discussions are too condensed to take root and sometimes read as rote. “Quite apart from being ethically suspect,” Penny states, “any movement to end exploitation that fails to centre race is intellectually useless.”
White Feminism
Sara Ahmed, author of the groundbreaking book Complaint! Wikimedia commons
In terms of connecting the dots between White feminism and political Whiteness, a more illuminating book is Alison Phipps’ Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (2020). Phipps carefully and powerfully draws out the racist logic of what has come to be known as “carceral feminism” – an approach that advocates for increased policing, prosecution and imprisonment as key strategies for combating violence against women – evident in some parts of the #MeToo movement.
Penny’s book is muddled by comparison in the solutions it offers for dealing with perpetrators of sexual violence. As for the victims, Penny is sensitive to how and why they are often dismissed as “mad” or unreliable, but Sara Ahmed’s recent book Complaint! (2021) takes the subject much further and in new directions.
Yet as Kathleen Angel persuasively argues in Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (2021), the contemporary fixation on consent as the solution to the pervasive problem of sexual violence can place additional burdens on women, including the need to know emphatically what they want sexually.
#MeToo Is Not A Stand-Alone Movement
In making this argument, Angel hardly disavows the “bare minimum” of consent as central to contemporary sexual ethics. But she’s also sceptical about the very notion of “sexual revolution” that Penny so heartily advocates. Her book’s title is a reference to philosopher Michel Foucault’s highly influential critique of what he saw as one of the delusions of the earlier so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s – that tomorrow sex will be good again.
As Penny recognises, #MeToo is not a stand-alone event or movement, but an expression of wider social patterns. It is a tipping point in understanding the ubiquity of sexual and gendered violence. It has galvanised feminism, and redirected and refocused contemporary discourses around gender and sex.
But its effects are too varied, diffuse and contradictory for the sledgehammer treatment Penny favours. Other feminist thinkers, such as British academics Amia Srinivasan and Jacqueline Rose, have pursued far more generative approaches. Srinivasan has productively revisited the feminist “sex wars” in The Right To Sex (2021), while Rose has consistently turned to psychoanalysis, most recently in On Violence and Violence Against Women (2021).
#MeToo – A Reckoning
Penny is more successful in capturing the affective dimensions of the #MeToo era. On this front, Sexual Revolution is a worthy successor or companion to Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018) and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (2018), two early responses to #MeToo and the Trump presidency. These books are clearly part of the same zeitgeist, as their almost identical subtitles indicate.
While Penny clearly shares their faith in the political potential of rage (not all feminists do), Sexual Revolution is more useful is in its reflections, right at the end of the book in an extended endnote, on “trauma politics”.
Penny writes that “pain is not supposed to be part of the political conversation”. But it has become so, and the connections or continuities between intimate and structural forms of violence have become much more explicit.
Where Penny leaves us is where Australian journalist Amy Remeikis begins in On Reckoning (2022), she recently released an already bestselling monograph: the moment at which the complicity of modern politics in gendered violence is made starkly and painfully apparent.
For Remeikis, this was the day after former parliamentary staffer Brittany Higgins went public on 15 February 2021 with the allegation that she had been raped by a male colleague in Parliament House in March 2019. Some 24 hours later, Prime Minister Scott Morrison addressed the nation. At the prompting of his wife Jenny, Morrison declared that “he’d been reminded to think of the situation as a father”.
Somebody Else’s Daughter
A parliamentary reporter, Remeikis was at work, typing out the Prime Minister’s words. She was first traumatised, then enraged by them: “Somebody else’s daughter. We always have to be somebody else’s daughter.”
Soon after, Remeikis shared her own experience of sexual violence in the Guardian, becoming a spokesperson for survivors in the process. On Reckoning powerfully reiterates and extends her key point that being “thought of as someone else’s daughter is not empathy”. It obliterates the experiences of real, rather than imagined victims. It sets limits on whose pain can even be conceived. Is it any wonder then, writes Remeikis, that “First Nations women, women of colour, trans and culturally and religiously diverse women have found it so hard to be heard?”
In the #MeToo era, the word “reckoning” has been used so often it can slip into meaninglessness. But Remiekis – like another Australian journalist Jess Hill, in another recently released essay with an almost identical title The Reckoning: How #MeToo is Changing Australia (2021) – imbues it with fresh force.
As records of Australia at a moment of profound cultural change, they offer vital local and personal perspectives of a global phenomenon that has – among its many effects – reinvigorated feminist writing for the mainstream, mostly for the better.
Editor’s note: The Conversation Canada asked our academic authors to share some recommended reading. In this instalment, Michael Armstrong, an operations research professor at Brock University who has written for The Conversation Canada on topics as diverse as student success rates in school to the mathematics of Civil War battle, shares the top three books that he recommends for guidance on making the most of your career at any age.
Here are three books that I often recommend to my students and friends. All are practical guides that have stood the test of time. The first will help you start your career, the second will help you succeed in it and the third will help you profit from it.
A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers
by Richard N. Bolles (Non-fiction. Paperback, 2016 and others. Ten Speed Press.)
This is a popular guide for job seekers. Like most such books, it gives advice on the mechanical details of job hunting, such as good ways to organize a resume.
More importantly — and less commonly — it helps people figure out what they want to do with their lives. What kind of career will best fit your personality? Will you be happier working with people or with data?
The book is an obvious fit for graduates seeking their first job. But it could also help teenagers choose the best education to pursue after high school, or adults trying to make their careers more satisfying.
by R. Richard Ritti, Steve Levy and Neil Toucher (Non-fiction. Hardcover, 2016 and others. Chicago Business Press.)
Don’t let the academic-sounding subtitle deter you. This is a highly readable book. It consists of short stories or parables that illustrate how people behave and interact at work.
Every workplace has an official structure and formal rules. But workplaces contain people with individual personalities and relationships. This book will help you understand the unofficial structures and unwritten rules before they get you into trouble.
I often recommend The Ropes to Skip and the Ropes to Know to people starting their first job. It would be especially good for someone promoted to their first management or supervisory role.
The Common Sense Guide to Successful Financial Planning
by David Chilton (Non-fiction. Paperback, 2002 and others. Stoddart.)
Once you receive your first paycheque, you’ll want to read this beginner’s guide to personal finance. It covers the basics of investing: retirement savings, mutual funds, etc. It also introduces a lot of other financial topics: savings versus spending, insurance that you do or don’t need, and so on.
This probably isn’t the only financial guide you’ll ever need, but it is a good first one. I typically recommend it to recent graduates starting their careers. But it also suits mature adults dealing with money issues for the first time, perhaps after the death or divorce of their spouse.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
The Big Idea
Feeling poor relative to others can spur families to support women in pursuing work outside the household and to invest more in girls’ schooling, according to our new study. But that does not mean women become more empowered.
In 2018, we conducted a survey experiment in Papua New Guinea to see how feeling economically left behind affects gender attitudes. We used a special type of survey technique to subtly alter respondents’ perception of their economic well-being in relation to other households. Half of the study participants were randomly primed to feel that they were at the bottom of the wide income distribution.
We then surveyed both women and men in both groups about their attitudes toward women’s roles to assess the effects of our experiment on gender attitudes, specifically. We found that attitudes about women’s proper roles are sensitive to perceptions of their relative poverty. When those surveyed felt relatively poor, they were more likely to support women’s economic participation, including in terms of girls going to school.
Male Support
At first blush, the increase in male support for women’s working seems to be good news for women’s economic empowerment. But we found two troubling side effects.
First, being primed to feel poor did not lead men in our survey to indicate greater support for women making decisions about how to manage household assets. But it did lead women to want more decision-making authority. We speculate that women feel the stakes are higher to make good economic decisions when they feel poorer and are expected to contribute relatively more to their household’s income. These contrasting effects for women compared with men are important, as they suggest societal income inequality may trigger greater household tension. This is worrisome, particularly in places with an already high rate of domestic violence like Papua New Guinea.
Second, we carried out focus group discussions and confirmed that working outside the home does not reduce women’s unpaid domestic burdens. Indeed, some women even indicated these unwavering responsibilities as a reason to shy away from the formal labour market lest they expose themselves to violence at home for failing to perform domestic duties.
In other words, feelings of relative poverty are yet another factor fueling the demand for women to “do it all” – generating income outside the home while also performing a disproportionate share of household chores.
Our findings suggest that, as a result, more women around the world could want to or be compelled by family members to enter the workforce. While women’s economic participation can be a positive development, the benefits are lost if it mainly means women’s workloads increase without greater ability to make decisions affecting their lives.
We are carrying out similar work in Nepal – a country that is similar to Papua New Guinea with respect to levels of gender inequality and economic development, but different in that citizens often rely on remittances to make ends meet. It’s unclear how societal differences like this will affect our findings.
Different countries and cultures, with distinct roles for women and relationships between spouses, may yield divergent impacts of perceptions of relative poverty on gender roles.
Climate change exacerbates global water insecurity because it contributes to more frequent and severe droughts, floods and extreme rainfall, accelerated glacier melt, rapid declines in groundwater and the deterioration of water quality. These water-related risks of climate change have negative repercussions for agriculture, energy production, water infrastructure and economic productivity, as well as human health, development and well-being around the world.
Water is central to the discussions about how societies, economies and governments adapt to climate change, and the vast majority of adaptation strategies already in place are water-related. Yet researchers know little about how effective they are.
As a researcher in the field of climate change and sustainable food systems, I was part of a team that reviewed more than 1,800 case studies for the “Water” chapter of Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, the second part of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). This newly-released report is the most comprehensive review of climate impacts and how much we can adapt to them since 2014.
Water At The Centre of Climate Change Strategies
The United Nations defines water security as having sustainable access to enough water of adequate quality to support people’s well-being, livelihoods and health, without jeopardizing ecosystems. Water insecurity covers a spectrum of issues — too much, too little, too dirty.
Unsurprisingly, a large majority of countries have listed water as the priority for adaptation in their climate change plans. In our review of more than 1,800 climate change adaptation strategies, we found that over 80 per cent were water-related. Some were in response to water hazards (droughts, floods, groundwater depletion, glacier depletion). In others, the response itself was water-related (irrigation, rainwater harvesting and wetlands conservation).
Yet when we looked at the outcomes of these water-based adaptation strategies, we found that only 359 had been analyzed for effectiveness, meaning that we do not know if most of these strategies actually reduce the impacts of climate change and improve health, well-being and livelihood.
Adaptation strategies that are enacted without adequate investigation of their effectiveness not only waste scarce resources but can also distract us from taking more relevant actions that carry larger benefits for the affected population.
Many of these water-focused approaches included changing the timing and arrangement of crops, choosing better crop varieties and farming techniques, expanding access to irrigation and adopting water conservation practices.
We also found that local, traditional and Indigenous knowledge plays an important role in shaping many adaptation responses. For instance, some farmers in Sri Lanka successfully adapted to the 2014 drought by practising bethma, a traditional technique where the community temporarily reallocated agricultural land among farmers so that each would have similar access to the limited water supply.
Combining local, traditional and Indigenous knowledge with a technical understanding of climate change can lead to the development and implementation of more acceptable and successful climate change adaptation strategies. This not only ensures equitable and inclusive adaptation actions but also increases the proposed solutions’ effectiveness at minimizing climate change impacts.
A tubewell pumps groundwater to irrigate rice fields in Punjab, India. The exploitation of groundwater for irrigation has made this region a major hotspot of groundwater depletion in the world. (Diljot Jatana), Author provided
Adaptation Responses
The largest number of the adaptation responses, especially those in the agriculture sector, were implemented and led by individual households and civil society bodies. Schemes by governments at various levels of administration — from local to multi-national — comprised the second largest chunk of adaptation strategies.
So far, the role of the private sector has been negligible. Private financing is a minor source of adaptation financing that has mostly focused on developed and emerging economies. Local needs, especially those of the economically disadvantaged communities, have not been adequately addressed by private financing until now.
But we also found that the strategies that work now, might not work in the future. The success of irrigation, soil and water conservation or other agricultural adaptations is contingent on how much warming occurs.
The benefits of these practices are mostly incremental — they have short-term rewards — and may not always lead to transformative outcomes, such as enabling a community to shifts its livelihood to one with reduced exposure to climate hazards.
We found that some responses have co-benefits: they not only help adapt to ongoing climate change but also help mitigate (or reduce) future climate change. For example, reusing wastewater for irrigation can have adaptive and mitigative co-benefits. If implemented properly, such projects can not only provide a reliable water source throughout the year but also reduce the pressure on water treatment infrastructure.
Adaptation strategies can work, but we need to have a better understanding of their costs and benefits. If the world continues down a high-emissions pathway, these adaptation strategies will start becoming less effective in response to increasingly complex and severe water security issues.
Water is central to everyone’s health, well-being and livelihood. We must focus on adapting to climate change and mitigating its effects immediately and simultaneously if we are to lessen the hardships of the world’s 10 billion people by 2050. The longer we delay aggressive actions, the higher will be the adaptation costs and smaller will be the opportunity window to undo past actions.
“Brain scans of Black women who experience racism show trauma-like effects, putting them at higher risk for future health problems” ~ Sierra Carter, Georgia State University
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
The Big Idea – Brain
Black women who have experienced more racism throughout their lives have stronger brain responses to threats, which may hurt their long-term health, according to a new study I conducted with clinical neuropsychologist Negar Fani and other colleagues.
I am part of aresearch team that for more than 15 years has studied the ways stress related to trauma exposure can affect the mind and body. In our recent study, we took a closer look at a stressor that Black Americans disproportionately face in the U.S.: racism.
My colleagues and I completed research with 55 Black women who reported how much they’d been exposed to traumatic experiences, such as childhood abuse and physical or sexual violence, and to racial discrimination, experiencing unfair treatment due to race or ethnicity.
We asked them to focus on a task that required attention while simultaneously looking at stressful images. We used functional MRI to observe their brain activity during that time.
Black Women’s Brains
We found that Black women who reported more experiences of racial discrimination had more response activity in brain regions that are associated with vigilance and watching out for threat – that is, the middle occipital cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Their reactions were above and beyond the response caused by traumatic experiences not related to racism. Our research suggests that racism had trauma like effect on Black women’s health; being regularly attuned to the threat of racism can tax important body-regulation tools and worsen brain health.
Other trauma research shows that this kind of continuous response to threat can increase the risk of mental health disorders and additional future brain health problems.
Why It Matters
Black Americans continue to suffer from health disparities, including being at disproportionately greater risk for stroke, cognitive decline and neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, compared with white Americans. Although research has consistently demonstrated that the chronic stress of racism can get under the skin and leave a biological residue of enduring health consequences for Black Americans over time, little research has explored the impact of racism on brain function and health.
There is a large and well-established history of research connecting traumatic experiences, such as childhood maltreatment, physical assault and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, to changes in brain functioning that lead to negative health outcomes. Our study is one of the first to consider how the brain might respond to experiences of racial discrimination above and beyond other traumatic stressors.
Black women may be particularly vigilant about threats within their environment because they have had to adapt to living in societal spaces that perpetuate racism. Knowing this could be a step forward in research and advocacy efforts aimed at reducing health inequity.
What Still Isn’t Known
Our research findings demonstrate that Black people’s experiences of racism can influence how the brain responds and adapts, which deserves greater research attention. My colleagues and I believe that neurobiology research is just beginning to appropriately investigate the effect that racism has on the health disparities seen in this population. Our study provides a preliminary glimpse into the need to consider the traumatic nature of racism in Black lives.
More research is needed across all stages of life, including in childhood, to understand how and when some Black people develop highly elevated vigilance to threats related to racial discrimination, and how that affects their health.
What’s Next
I plan to do more research inspired by the results of this study.
Fear puts strain on the body, but it also can serve a protective purpose. I hope to get a better understanding of the costs and benefits of fear to threats in a context of chronic oppression for some Black Americans.
I’m also interested in how Black people describe, experience and address potential threats when the threat originates from individuals in positions of power who are expected to protect and serve.
The drama Inventing Anna and the true-crime documentary The Tinder Swindler has taken over Netflix — and they’ve also taken over social media and our collective psyches. Both landed on Netflix’s Global Top 10 lists of the most-watched TV shows and films.
These two hugely popular shows both feature con artists and their elaborate schemes among the traditional “man’s world” of high finance. While trading on issues of gender and gender relations (among other things) we see how gender norms inform the ways in which gender scripts are enacted, and at times transgressed, by the two con artists.
Inventing Anna tells the story of real-life convicted con artist, Anna Delvey (real name Anna Sorokin), who masqueraded as a wealthy German heiress to defraud financial institutions and wealthy New Yorkers. The Tinder Swindler tells the story of Simon Leviev, (real name Shimon Hayat), who swindles women he meets on Tinder.
So, what is it about these con artists’ allure, and how do gender and gender relations play out in each drama?
Confidence Artists
In Inventing Anna, we see Sorokin navigate the patriarchal world of power, privilege and New York corporate culture. In her effort to build her exclusive members’ club, the Anna Delvey Foundation, she confidently assures her advisers that she is “trying to build a business.”
Sorokin challenges sexism in corporate culture by assertively pursuing Alan Reed, a corporate real estate lawyer. She convinces him to reconsider his decision of financing her business proposition by relating her experiences of sexism in corporate culture to his daughter Julia’s experiences in her own internship pursuits.
The seductive allure of wealth, power and status is what seems to drive Sorokin as she cons her way into a world that has historically excluded young women (particularly women of racialized backgrounds). But let’s not be fooled — Sorokin’s story is not a story about the advancement of women’s empowerment. Sorokin works for the benefit of Sorokin — at anyone’s expense.
Trailer for Netflix’s ‘Inventing Anna.’
The Tinder Swindler retraces the destructive path of con artist Leviev and how he used Tinder to charm and exploit women.
Pretending to be the son of the “king of diamonds” Lev Leviev — who he is now being sued by — and using photos of himself on yachts, travelling across the globe, Leviev presented himself as superior through the suggestion of wealth, status and power while reinforcing the male-wealth stereotype.
Once his deception and manipulation became apparent and his victims stopped funding his lavish lifestyle, his sense of aggrieved entitlement surfaced in the form of harassing phone calls and threats.
Exuding supreme self-confidence and a sense of grandiosity, both Sorokin and Leviev’s personalities are shaped by the darker side of personality traits.
Con: The Dark Triad Traits
In psychology, the dark triad traits — which include narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism — have been found to predict a wide array of behaviours and interpersonal tendencies.
Research indicates these behaviours and interpersonal tendencies are often expressed through a lack of moral concern and aggression following provocation and impulsivity — all of which were displayed by Sorokin and Leviev.
Convincing themselves and others of their psychopathic fiction, the “art of the con” that both Sorokin and Leviev proficiently performed was reliant on a system of prevailing gender norms.
Leviev used the ideals of patriarchal masculinity to seduce his female victims, while Sorokin used the idea of feminine innocence to elude any sense of scrutiny from her victims.
The misogynistic victim-blaming towards those who were emotionally manipulated by Sorokin and Leviev demonstrates the tendency to shift the focus away from perpetrators of gender-based violence by punishing and blaming victims.
Whether it’s our relatable appreciation of how easily most victims trusted Sorokin and Leviev, or how the shows made apparent the ways in which gender and gender relations operate in con artistry, both stories have undeniably captivated viewers for varied and complex reasons.
Over 20 years ago, my mother disowned me for a period of 10 years of my life. It wasn’t something I could ever imagine doing to one of my children, but it happened. It was one of the most painful times of my life. I was angry at her. I got married and gave birth to my first child and she wasn’t there. I missed her and longed for a mother-daughter relationship. I cried a lot. Today my mother and I have a beautiful relationship and I am so grateful for our reconciliation. As a matter of fact, her birthday card to me this year said, “You are the best daughter”. Did this relationship we have today happen overnight? The answer is no. At the core of our relationship, today is forgiveness.
What Is Forgiveness?
“Forgiveness is something virtually all Americans aspire to – 94% surveyed in a nationwide Gallup poll said it was important to forgive-in the same survey; only 48% said they usually tried to forgive others.”
I don’t think a single person can escape life without experiencing hurt by another person. Maybe the hurt is angry words spoken during an argument or a friend who surprises you with betrayal. Perhaps the pain comes from emotional neglect, infidelity, divorce or even sexual and physical abuse. Sometimes the hurt is a one-time event. Other times the pain continues for a long time.
Forgiveness is a necessary step to healing from pain. It is a choice to extend mercy to the person who hurt you. Sometimes forgiveness allows you to move forward with the other person and experience a new relationship. Other times, reconciliation is not possible. In this case, forgiveness is more for you and your own personal growth.
Why Forgive?
First and foremost, God commands us to forgive. In Mark 11:25-26, it says “And when you stand in praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins. But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father who is in heaven forgive your sins.”
You might be saying, “But you don’t understand what’s been done to me.” And you’re right; I don’t know all the hurts you’ve endured. However, I know from experience that it pays to forgive. Forgiveness is a sign of strength – not weakness. It is the strong person who can put aside the past and let go of anger and resentment. My mom comes from a large family, with seven brothers and sisters. There has been a lot of sibling rivalry, and I’m always amazed at the amount of resentment that still remains in the family today.
Anger and resentment drain your energy and keep you imprisoned by your past. By choosing to let go of your hurt and anger, you give yourself the freedom to fully experience joy in life. Anger builds inside us, so by letting go, you improve your ability to control your anger. We’ve all seen the person who blows up at the smallest incident. It is the accumulation of built-up anger that is unreleased that causes this explosion. So many diseases, like heart disease and cancer, can be triggered by unresolved resentment. By choosing to forgive, you can dramatically improve your emotional and physical health.
Without forgiveness, you cannot move forward in your own personal and relational growth.
What Forgiveness Is Not?
Forgiveness does not mean you allow people to treat you badly. It does not mean you ignore the wrongdoings. It means you accept that the person has made a mistake, and you are choosing to grant them mercy. When you forgive someone, you won’t necessarily forget the hurt. I will always remember the pain I felt when my mom disowned me, but I do not dwell on it, and I do not let it interfere with the quality of our relationship today. I have allowed myself to heal and move on. Forgiveness does not mean you are condoning or excusing the person’s behaviour. And it doesn’t mean you have to trust that person again. Some acts, like physical and sexual abuse, require that you limit your trust or at least test the trust with the person who hurt you. Remember, forgiveness is more for you than the other person.
The Process of Forgiving
So you’ve thought about it and you’re ready to forgive. You’re tired of holding on to old pain and you’ve decided it’s time to let go and move on. What do you do? First, you must face and release the anger that you feel. On the surface of the hurt is anger and you need to break away from that layer first. Underneath the anger is the pain and hurt that you must grieve. There are many ways to release anger and hurt. You can talk about it with trusted people. You can spend time journaling. You can pray about it and ask God to take away that pain and resentment. You can express your feelings to the person who hurt you, provided that it’s possible to have a healthy conversation where both you and the other person speak and listen in respectful ways.
Release Negative Feelings
One of the best and most cleansing ways to release your negative feelings is to write a letter to your perpetrator. In this letter, you pour out every emotion you feel. You tell them everything that hurt you and everything they did to make you angry. Do not hold anything back. Allow yourself to really feel the anger and cry the tears by reading it out loud to yourself. When you are done, burn or bury the letter as a symbol that you are ready to move on. DO NOT give the letter to the person. This letter is for you and you only.
After processing all your emotions, you are ready to make the choice to forgive. It is a choice that requires compassion, understanding and an open and loving heart. When my mother and I first reconciled, we talked about our feelings. Sometimes we even fought because the pain was still fresh. But we listened to one another and we tried to get inside each other’s shoes. It wasn’t easy, but today, even though I don’t agree with some of my mother’s beliefs, I have compassion and understanding for who she is and why she made the choice she did. I love her regardless of our differences.
Mistakes Are Part Of Life
Each of us makes mistakes in life. At one time or another (probably more than one time), we will hurt another person. Maybe it will be an accident, or perhaps it will be a purposeful reaction to someone hurting you. When this does happen, do you want to be forgiven? Do you want another chance to make amends? Most people don’t mean to hurt us – they are dealing with their own pain and unresolved resentment. It’s unfortunate that we take it out on our loved ones, but until we break the cycle, it will continue to happen.
Are you ready to break the cycle and do your part to forgive?
Credits
Author Bio
Lori Radun, CEC is a certified life coach, speaker and author for moms. To receive her FREE newsletter and the special report, “155 Things Moms Can Do to Raise Great Children”, visit her website at www.true2youlifecoaching.com
The word intuition is derived from the Latin intueor – to see; intuition is thus often invoked to explain how the mind can “see” answers to problems or decisions in the absence of explicit reasoning – a “gut reaction”.
Several recent popular psychology books – such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Jonah Lehrer’s The Decisive Moment – have emphasised this “power of intuition” and our ability to “think without thinking”, sometimes suggesting we should rely more heavily on intuition than deliberative (slow) or “rational” thought processes.
Such books also argue that most of the time we act intuitively – that is, without knowing why we do things we do.
But what is the evidence for these claims? And what is intuition anyway?
Defining Intuition
Albert Einstein once noted, “intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience”. In a similar vein, the American psychologist Herbert A. Simon (a fellow Nobel Laureate) stated that intuition was “nothing more and nothing less than recognition”.
These definitions are very useful because they remind us that intuition need not refer to some magical process by which answers pop into our minds from thin air or from deep within the unconscious.
On the contrary: intuitive decisions are often a product of previous intense and/or extensive explicit thinking.
Such decisions may appear subjectively fast and effortless because they are made on the basis of recognition.
As a simple example, consider the decision to take an umbrella when you leave for work in the morning. A quick glance at the sky can provide a cue (such as portentous clouds); the cue gives us access to information stored in memory (rain is likely), and this information provides an answer (take an umbrella).
When such cues are not so readily apparent, or information in memory is either absent or more difficult to access, our decisions shift to become more deliberative.
Those two extremes are associated with different experiences. Deliberative thought yields awareness of intermediate steps in a chain of thought, and of an effortful combination of information.
Intuitive thought lacks awareness of intermediate cognitive steps (because there aren’t any) and does not feel effortful (because the cues trigger the response). But intuition is characterised by feelings of familiarity and fluency.
Is Intuition Any Good?
Whether or not intuition is inherently “good” really depends on the situation.
Herbert A. Simon’s view that “intuition is recognition” was based on work describing the performance of chess experts.
That ability is achieved via immediate “pattern matching” against memories of up to 100,000 different game positions to determine the next best move.
Novices, in contrast, don’t have access to these memories and thus have to work through the possible contingencies of each move.
This line of research led to investigations of experts in other fields and the development of what has become known as recognition-primed decision making.
Work by the research psychologist Gary A Klein and colleagues concluded that fire-fighters can make rapid “intuitive” decisions about how a fire might spread through a building because they can access a repertoire of prior similar experiences and run mental simulations of potential outcomes.
Thus in these kinds of situations, where we have lots of prior experience to draw on, rapid, intuitive decisions can be very good.
But intuition can also be misleading.
Over-Reliance On It
In a contrasting body of work, decision psychologist Daniel Kahneman (yet another Nobel Laureate) illustrated the flaws inherent in an over-reliance on intuition.
To illustrate such an error, he considered this simple problem:
If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total and the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?
If you are like many people, your immediate – intuitive (?) – the answer would be “10 cents”. The total readily separates into $1 and 10 cents, and 10 cents seems like a plausible amount.
But a little more thinking reveals that this intuitive answer is wrong. If the ball cost 10 cents the bat would have to be $1.10 and the total would be $1.20! So the ball must cost 5 cents.
So why does intuition lead us astray in this example? Because here intuition is not based on skilled recognition, but rather on simple associations that come to mind readily (i.e., the association between the $1 and the 10 cents).
Kahneman and Tversky famously argued these simple associations are relied upon because we often like to use heuristics, or shortcuts, that make thinking easier.
In many cases, these heuristics will work well but if their use goes “unchecked” by more deliberative thinking, errors – such as the 10 cents answer – will occur.
Using Intuition Adaptively
The take-home message from the psychological study of intuition is that we need to exercise caution and attempt to use intuition adaptively.
When we are in situations we have experienced lots of times (such as making judgements about the weather), intuition – or rapid recognition of relevant “cues” – can be a good guide.
But if we find ourselves in the novel territory or in situations in which valid cues are hard to come by (such as stock market predictions), relying on our “gut” may not be wise.
Our inherent tendency to get away with the minimum amount of thinking could lead to slip-ups in our reasoning.
Below are our most recent videos from our Live conversations, Talk Shows and other presentations, gathered in one place for your viewing and listening. They are updated weekly.
I believe that faith and reason are not in conflict, and where the question of Creation and Evolution are involved, I believe God respects those who can say that we believe God created the earth, and that science proved life evolves over time. I believe in my heart that both things can be true and there is no conflict. I do not need to see proof of the Creation to know it is true. For me, the proof is for science, not for the realm of the divine. My proof of God is in my heart. I need no further proof of God.
In part, it has to do with the way alternative spirituality developed over the 20th century. The New Age movement of the 1970s was arguably the most prominent. And while the “New Age” label may today be out of fashion, many ideas that were once championed under its banner remain strikingly popular.
Why It Matters – Support For Women
Water At The Centre of Climate Change Strategies
Why It Matters
What Forgiveness Is Not?
Is Intuition Any Good?
In a contrasting body of work, decision psychologist 