What are your morals like?

March 10, 2014

*My results based on the Moral Foundation Questionnaire*

What are your moral foundations? It is an interesting question and one I find compelling. An ongoing study tries to provide some insights into yourself on the back of questions you choose answers to from a drop down menu on www.yourmorals.org. This chart up there, tells me how I stack up against the average liberal or conservative. The green bar represents my moral foundations, blue for the average liberal and red for the average conservative.

On a scale of one to five, this test tells me I place a very higher premium on not harming anybody and fairness, have moderate loyalty, no respect for authority, and veer towards the puritanical.

What does that say about me?

When all the tests that are part of this study are stacked up, the answers around who I am and what I stand for, I was surprised. I always thought I'd average out as liberal.

But I find myself at various points given various situations. There is a capitalist in me, a socialist, a liberal, an autocrat, a conservative. All put together, there is enough fodder in here in chew on.

I take this scale reproduced above seriously because its co-creator is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who teaches ethical leadership at the Stern School of Business.

I first got acquainted with his work when I chanced upon his absolutely delightful The Happiness Hypothesis. Reviewers called it one of the best books to have emerged out of the Positive Psychology movement. I am no authority to comment on that. But I can say it offered me sharp insights into ancient wisdom across all traditions. I think it a mandatory book on all shelves.

I think everybody ought to give these tests a try and then spend time reflecting on what they're about.

I did the best I could with what I had

March 10, 2014

*Philip Roth: Image from the New Yorker*

"When I decided to stop writing about five years ago I did, as you say, sit down to reread the 31 books I’d published between 1959 and 2010. I wanted to see whether I’d wasted my time. You never can be sure, you know.

My conclusion, after I’d finished, echoes the words spoken by an American boxing hero of mine, Joe Louis. He was world heavyweight champion from the time I was 4 until I was 16. He had been born in the Deep South, an impoverished black kid with no education to speak of, and even during the glory of the undefeated 12 years, when he defended his championship an astonishing 26 times, he stood aloof from language. So when he was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just 10 words. “I did the best I could with what I had.”

Philip Roth on Writing in the New York Times

How to disappear online

March 09, 2014

Lifehacker is one of my favorites for the sheer number of productivity tips they come up with. This post, on how to disappear from all things online, is one I stumbled on a while ago. I don't know how practical it is. But it caught my attention because I quit Facebook very recently and articulated why on The Other View.

This infographic was originally published on Lifehacker and the link to it is right here. May I suggest you bookmark this website?

The only problem with trying to access Lifehacker from India is that it gets redirected to www.lifehacker.co.in. I'd have much rather I had the option to choose between the original www.lifehacker.com and www.lifehacker.co.in. This whole idea of geoblocks and IP targeting gets my goat.

If it bothers you, I strongly recommend using a plugin called Hola. I use Chrome for most of my needs and this plugin sits well with it. Haven't tried it with the other browsers. But do give this a look.

Grow up, will you? →

March 08, 2014 in Ideas

PRESS RELEASES

PRESS : BOYCOTT OF NDTV

Saturday, 08 March 2014

Kind attention,

Tweet being manufactured by a channel in order to hurt BJP is unprecedented. BJP therefore has decided to keep away from panel discussions of NDTV for present.

Just came across this press release on the BJP's website.

A religion for atheists

March 07, 2014

I hadn't seen this picture before until Richard Dawkins re-tweeted it with a link to a sharp rebuttal from a believer. The post Riding with Richard in the Land of Atheist Devotion caught my attention. Unlike most rebuttals that are shrill, this one is measured. But more importantly, it's clear to me after reading it, it comes on the back of contemplation. I so wish debates around religion were as measured as this.

The reason I say that is because until some time ago, I was one of those firmly ensconced in the Dawkins camp. The kinds who believed religious advocacy can only be countered by militant atheism.

Over time though, I've tempered down. My belief in science, reason and logic remains unchanged. To that extent, I am still a believer in the Dawkins school of questioning everything. That said, the more I think of it, militant atheism is as fundamentalist as staunch beliefs held by any religious sects.

That is why I find myself someplace in between. The sweet spot for me was articulated by Alain de Botton

Four years ago, I wrote to him in my earlier avatar as one of the founding editors at Forbes India to write an essay on our pages. He was kind enough to hear me out and wrote a lovely piece I had the privilege of publishing: A religion for atheists

"We’d be wiser to start with the common-sense observation that, of course, no part of religion is true in the sense of being God-given. There is naturally no Holy Ghost, spirit, geist or divine emanation. Dissenters from this line can comfortably stop reading at this point, but for the rest of us the subject is henceforth far from closed. The tragedy of modern atheism is to have ignored just how many aspects of religion continue to be interesting even when the central tenets of the great faiths are discovered to be entirely implausible. Indeed, it’s precisely when we stop believing in the idea that gods made religions that things become interesting, for it is then that we can focus on the human imagination which dreamt these creeds up. We can recognise that the needs which led people to do so must still in some way be active, albeit dormant, in modern secular man. God may be dead, but the bit of us that made God continues to stir."