This event is part of the Harlem Jazz Shrines celebration. Co-sponsored by the Office of Government and Community Affairs, and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University.

A conversation with Mustafa Akyol and the Reverend Daniel Madigan on the common ground that exists between Christianity and Islam, and between conservative and moderate traditions in both religions. They will discuss how, within Islam, Quranic interpretation can lead either to humanist depictions of freedom and democracy or to a justification of authoritarian political force.

Mustafa Akyol is a columnist for two Turkish newspapers, Hürriyet Daily News and Star. His articles have also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, copies of which will be sold at the event.

Daniel Madigan, a Jesuit priest, is the Jeanette W. and Otto J. Ruesch Family Associate Professor in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University.

A response to a public conversation series held Spring 2012. 

How many different items does the average American grocery store stock?  (45,000)  How many Starbucks are there in Manhattan? (187 and counting) In the world? (17,244)  How many channels are there on your TV?  (You don’t know.)  We have become obsessed with choice — the more choices the better.  Or at least so it seems.  Why?  Why is there so much emphasis on choice and the supposed freedom of choice?

While the freedom of choice has long been one of the most important values for democratic societies, something has changed in the past several decades. What might best be described as an ideology of choice has emerged among the partisans of neo-liberal economists and neo-conservative politicians.  This development is symptomatic of the latest stage of capitalism.

For capitalism to thrive, markets must keep expanding, and there are only three ways for this to occur: spatially, temporally, and differentially.  When spatial expansion reaches its limit, markets expand by accelerating product cycles, and planned obsolescence goes into high gear.  The art of advertising is to create desire where there is no need.  But the speed of turnover is not enough to keep the engines of production and reproduction churning.  In an effort to increase profits, manufacturers create a proliferation of products until there is a frenzy of consumption that leaves everyone in debt.  At this point, capitalism’s engines and servers short-circuit — necessary expansion inevitably creates an excess that leads to the system to implode.

This collapse raises pressing questions. Is more choice always better?  Is choice that is forced on us really choice?  For whom is choice good?  The 1%?  The 99%? Why do the ideologues of choice promote it in the public sphere but deny it in the personal sphere?  Choice of schools, health care, retirement plans, but no choice when it comes to reproductive issues, for example.

The Burden of Choice was a year-long series of conversations devoted to a consideration of these questions that focused on four critical contemporary issues: philanthropy, guns, nuclear waste, and debt. The conversations were rich, probing and critical. All of the participants have extensive experience that provides an invaluable perspective on the complexities of these issues. Fresh out of Yale, Charles Best started teaching history at a Bronx public school only to discover that he did not have the supplies he needed to do his job.  With a group of his high school he started DonorsChoose.org, a thriving online program that matches the needs of public school teachers with individual donors who contribute the supplies and equipment. John Feinblatt is responsible for New York City’s extraordinarily effect gun control initiatives.  By taking a creative approach to interstate gun trafficking, he and his colleagues in the Mayor’s office have significantly reduced gun violence in the City. Allison Macfarlane is one of the leading critics of local, state, and federal policies — or lack of policies — on nuclear waste.  Her writings about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility have been largely responsible for the Obama administration’s decision to put the project on hold. Michael Lewitt, a leading financial analyst, was one of the few to predict the 2008 market meltdown.  He maintains that the failure of individuals, companies, corporations and governments to learn the lessons from that experience make another catastrophe all but inevitable.

While all of the participants in these discussions agreed that the freedom of choice is important for democratic society and free markets, there was a consensus that the excessive veneration of unfettered choice reflects the loss of any sense of welfare in society as a whole.  Choice is never free but always has a cost – personally, educationally, socially, politically, economically and environmentally.  The ideology of choice places a significant burden on many individuals and institutions, some of which, paradoxically, are its most vocal proponents.

Mark C. Taylor is the chair of the Department of Religion and co-director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. 

A response to a public conversation with Allison Macfarlane on March 28, 2012. 

Listening last week to Allison Macfarlane, Harvard-affiliated member of the White House’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future and author of Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste, one got the impression that if anyone could explicate the quagmire that is nuclear-waste safety, it’d be this woman. An MIT-trained geologist who went on to study nuclear reactors and their radioactive byproducts, she has a dazzlingly thorough knowledge of both nuclear power and the geological constraints on underground waste disposal.

And so when she said our grasp of nuclear safety is a joke, I didn’t find myself laughing.

“There’s no operating repository anywhere in the world for high-level waste,” Macfarlane said. (“High-level,” she explained, means the most dangerous forms, including the spent fuel rods that can no longer provide power at plants but are still very radioactive.) Sweden, Finland, France, and Canada are trying to create underground repositories, though none of these countries are close to finished.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, Macfarlane explained, “We’re not doing anything.”

Right now, nuclear plants are each outfitted with a deep pool in which used fuel rods are submerged. The idea is that once placed in the pool, the hot unstable byproducts can cool down away from substances with which they’d react. But they aren’t meant to hang out there forever. Though Macfarlane said that radioactive rods take about five years to cool, most pools are cluttered with rods that have been taking decades-long dips. There are now more than 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel being stored.

What’s more, when storage pools were built decades ago, they were placed precariously on the fourth or fifth floors — not the ground floor — of each plant. The incredulous laugh Macfarlane gave with that fact was none too reassuring.

But the funny part isn’t just that engineers forty years ago made structures that look absurd to experts today. The real kicker, if we listen to Macfarlane, is that the more permanent choices we have to make about storage will be based on murky science at best. As a believer in human error, I wasn’t shocked to learn about the possibility of inaccuracies. But when Macfarlane explained the issue further, I realized just how dicey it was for even top experts to make sound decisions.

Geology is not predictive, Macfarlane said. It looks backwards in time. So when we think about taking those fuel rods out of crowded pools and burying them in the earth, we really can’t know what conditions will prove safe. Some geologists use elaborate computer modeling to “test” future repositories and answer questions like, “If we were to bury radioactive rods in this rock formation, what are the odds of something dangerous occurring?” If geologists think they can predict quakes, floods, and chemical reactions, Macfarlane said, “they’re fooling themselves.” If Fukushima is any indication, we’re not great at predicting the weather.

It’s probably wise to heed an expert who admits that her own field is fallible. When that field is nuclear waste, it’s also a bit disturbing. As Klaus Lackner, the Columbia geophysicist who moderated the discussion, pointed out, carbon capturing (in which CO2 is trapped as a gas, turned into a liquid, and injected into rocks underground) is a parallel procedure to burying of nuclear waste. Both practices are intended to store harmful materials far from us and in places from which they ostensibly shouldn’t escape.

However, the comparison ends there. Once liquid carbon is sequestered, an accidental leak is not a disaster. Scientists can release the underground well back into the environment as carbon gas. While letting out tons of CO2 is not ideal, it is also not a life-threatening proposition. At least at the moment it isn’t. But if radioactive waste leaks, “Oops, better luck next time” doesn’t quite cut it.

Once we bury our waste permanently, we can’t just start anew. Yet until we find the right geological site, the radioactive byproducts stay in those aging, crowded pools. Yucca Mountain, which for a long time had been considered the permanent site of choice, was never the safest option, Macfarlane said. A clear enough risk of chemical reaction betrays that it was chosen more for its middle-of-nowhere-ness than geological suitability. Other, better choices were dismissed too early on.

When reactors were built forty years ago, the long-term storage problem should have been considered. More recently, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy said that Yucca Mountain is the “most shovel-ready” site and that “there are possibly no other 230 square miles in the world that have been examined and reexamined more by America’s greatest scientific minds.” He said we’ve already funneled money into it, so we shouldn’t consider other options.

My question is, how did we let that happen? Politicians love showing that they’re solving a problem, but here the problem is that they made a choice without enough comparison. Given that we can’t choose again once it’s done, that sounds like a joke to me.

Michele Lent Hirsch is a former writer for Psychology Today. Currently she writes for Women Under Siege. 

Sponsored by the South Asia Institute at Columbia University

Speakers: Dr. Nouzha Guessous (University Honorary Professor, Feminist, Human Rights and Social Activist; A Key Creator of Morocco’s Progressive 2004 Family Code); Dr. Radwan Masmoudi (President, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Tunisia); Dr. Toby C. Jones (Specialist on Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University);Dr. Tarek Masoud (Egyptian Specialist on Political Transitions, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government); Dr. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (Chairman, United Nations Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry on Syria).

Discussants: Dr. Alfred Stepan (Wallace Sayre Professor of Government, Columbia University) and Nina zu Fürstenberg (President, Board of Govenors, Reset-Dialogues On Civilizations).

Co-Sponsored by The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion; The Middle East Institute; and Reset- Dialogues on Civilizations, a Rome-based non-profit that promotes dialogue and intercultural understanding through international conferences and its online magazine.

homepage image credit: (nz)dave

Q&A with Gregory Henry, executive producer of the film, and Colin Waugh, author of Charles Taylor and Liberia: Ambition & Atrocity in Africa’s Lone Star State.

Event is open to the general public, but registration is required. Register Here.

Co-sponsored with the Office of the University Chaplain

A response to a public conversation with John Feinblatt on February 29, 2012.

For the past decade, John Feinblatt, chief policy advisor to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has led New York City’s effort to rid its streets of illegal guns. At a recent event at Columbia, he emphasized the need to get guns “out of the wrong hands,” by which he meant reducing gun violence by reducing gun availability.

Feinblatt has been instrumental in involving Mayor Bloomberg in the coalition Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which seeks “stop criminals from getting guns while also protecting the rights of citizens to freely own them.” As Feinblatt pointed out, no federal legislation prevents guns from being manufactured in other states and shipped to New York, whose gun-control laws are, in fact, relatively strict. Most illegal guns in New York City are actually imported—85% of guns recovered in crimes are originally sold out of state. Without a federal law stemming this flow, illegal guns will continue to litter large urban cities like New York.

I applaud Feinblatt and the mayor for doing what they can to prevent illegal guns from entering the city and thus lowering gun crime to record levels. But there are holes in their formula to rid the city of gun violence—one of which is the controversial “stop and frisk” policy, which enables NYPD officers to stop people under probable cause and search them for contraband substances or illegal guns. When asked why men of color appear to be targeted by the policy, Feinblatt responded it is, in fact, young men of color whose lives the policy aims to save. Choosing not to dwell on the racial aspects of “stop and frisk,” he reiterated that NYPD reserves the right to take any measures necessary to get illegal guns off the streets.

And yet, there is undoubtedly a racial element to “stop and frisk” and how it plays out in neighborhoods where people of color are stopped most. In 2011, the police stopped 684,330 New Yorkers, with 88 percent of those searched being found totally innocent; 353,624 were black (53 percent), and 224,849 were Latino (34 percent), while only 62,033 were white (9 percent). “Stop and frisk” yields little results and, worse, alienates working-class communities of color. Brooklyn College student Nicholas Peart wrote eloquently in a New York Times op-ed:

For young people in my neighborhood, getting stopped and frisked is a rite of passage. We expect the police to jump us at any moment. We know the rules: don’t run and don’t try to explain, because speaking up for yourself might get you arrested or worse. And we all feel the same way — degraded, harassed, violated and criminalized because we’re black or Latino.”

When asked why funding for illegal-gun initiatives is greater than programs that tackle poverty or improve educational opportunities, which could address the root causes of gun violence, Feinblatt was quick to comment that it’s not an “either/or” decision. We need to create innovative ways, he argued, to fund both anti-illegal gun policies as well as educational programs that teach youth to stay away from guns. I agree with Feinblatt that funding cannot be examined in an “either/or” vacuum. Instead, anti-gun initiatives and educational programs must be strategically combined to make communities safer. Unfortunately, it seems that the mayor’s office is spending more time defending “stop and frisk policies” than promoting such programs.

While the over-arching philosophy of the mayor’s policy against illegal guns is good, the process through which illegal guns are being collected muddles its effects.  Policies like “stop and frisk,” instances of police brutality, and an emphasis on policing over community outreach only serves to divert the program’s efforts—and worse, cause extreme policing in low-income communities of color. Undoubtedly a politician, Feinblatt, is earnest in his mission to make the city safer, but without acknowledging how race and class inform the policies by which guns are eliminated, he and the city will not accomplish what they are seeking to do.

Carlos Blanco is an undergraduate student in religion and human rights at Columbia University.