Stories from the Sunflower: Lucy (1)

"A student asked his biology teacher, 'How did Charles Darwin propose his wife?'

The mentor thought for a moment, then said, 'In mathematics, you can arrive at 'the right answer', but regarding human behaviors, 'the right answer' could be a myth. However, you can find 'the best answer' or 'good judgement' after comparing a variety of statements from many of points of view and of course, should be valid.'

'So, what do you think is 'the best answer'?' the student was curious.

'Darwin proposed and revealed that his future wife, was chosen because a 'survival of the fittest',' concluded the instructor."

"Have you ever watched a film 'Lucy', a 2014 French science fiction action film written and directed by Luc Besson, about a woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, accidentally caught transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic?" said the Sunflower while waiting for Wulandari, the Moon, that hadn't been arrived yet, after greeting with Basmalah and Salaam. "

Why Lucy? I'm not going to talk about sexy, captivating, or even cute woman—grandma says it's dangerous, and it's expressed by Cak Imin in an interrogative words—who makes men are stunned. No, it's not.

Before moving on, let me tell you that the Sunflowers, me and and my kind, are known for our ability, called heliotropism, to track the sun throughout the day, following its movement from east to west. It's a clear symbol of time’s passage. Time is an elusive concept that has captivated human imagination for centuries. As the sun sets and rises again, we track its movement, a reminder that time marches on. Furthermore, sunflowers have been used as a symbol of the cycle of life and death. So, we are a beautiful and powerful symbol of the passage of time and the cycles of life, making us a fitting addition to any discussion of flowers that represent time.

I remember when the New Year was approaching, the elders looked at the young people, and they shook their heads while muttering to each other, 'How quickly time flies!'

And I wonder, 'What is time? Did it have a beginning and will it ever end?' These are profound questions that have been asked by serious thinkers over the centuries, from early speculations among the ancient Greeks to the startling discoveries in the modern sciences, says H. James Birx. Both philosophers and theologians have offered dynamic worldviews to accommodate new facts and ideas about time and change. Because of its elusiveness, time still challenges those individuals who strive to understand and appreciate the flux of reality and the pervasive influence of time on all objects and events within it (including our own species). Perspectives on time range from subatomic particles to cosmic evolution. Temporal changes may encompass merely attoseconds or billions of years. Remarkable advances in technology, particularly in telescopes and microscopes, along with rapid improvements in computers, have greatly increased our scientific knowledge of this universe in general and our planet in particular. The history of life on Earth stretches back about 4 billion years, while human culture began less than 3 million years ago. Even so, this expanding cosmos is expected to endure for billions of years into the future. And, no doubt, human views about time will change over the coming centuries if our species survives.

Birx then tells us that the ancient Greeks pondered time and change. Of special importance was the idea from Heraclitus that this cosmos is endlessly changing, manifesting ongoing cyclical patterns. Later, Plato and Aristotle interpreted this universe in terms of geometry and biology, respectively. A philosophical dispute emerged as to whether reality is a static being in which change is an imperfection or an illusion, or an eternal becoming in which permanence is an illusion. Since antiquity, ingenious attempts have been made to synthesize change and fixity in a worldview that does justice to both. Such attempts are found in the cyclical cosmologies of Eastern philosophies.

With the coming of Christianity, religious thinkers attempted to reconcile an eternal and perfect personal God with a temporary and imperfect material universe. Concerning time, different beliefs emerged about the divine creation of this finite cosmos and its ultimate destiny. Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas offered subjective and objective views of time, respectively. For both, the origin of this universe was held to be an event that occurred only several thousand years ago. This created cosmos had the earth at its center and the human being occupying a special place in static nature. The end of time was held to be in the near future. Until the emergence of modern astronomy and physics, according to Brix, earlier believers could never have imagined either the vast age of this universe or the complex history of life forms on our planet.

During the Italian Renaissance, the artistic genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) reflected on the marine fossils he discovered in rock strata while walking in the Swiss Alps. He reasoned that these fossils were the remains of once-living organisms in the remote past; natural forces had elevated the fossil-rich sedimentary layers of the Mediterranean Sea over thousands of years. In fact, at a time when the common consensus maintained that this universe was created only a few thousand years ago, Leonardo’s dynamic view of earth history held that our planet is at least 200,000 years old. Furthermore, his cosmology held the universe to be eternal, infinite, and filled with other planets. Taking change seriously, Leonardo claimed time to be the evil destroyer of everything. Speculating on the end of the earth, he foresaw a future catastrophic event in which fire would destroy all living things on the planet (including our species).

At the end of the Italian Renaissance, the monk Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) challenged the entrenched Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic theology that dominated Western thought. Using his critical intellect and remarkable imagination, he envisioned an eternal and infinite universe with an endless number of stars and planets. His cosmology also included other inhabited worlds with intelligent beings. Consequently, Bruno’s bold interpretation of this universe paved the way for new ideas about time and change. It may be argued that he ushered in the modern cosmology, which is free from geocentrism, anthropocentrism, and a fixed ceiling of stars. His worldview even anticipated the relativity framework in modern physics.

With the Age of Enlightenment, natural philosophers stressed the value of science and reason. Rejecting earlier beliefs and opinions, they emphasized critical thought and open inquiry. For them, history was a progressive process, and scientific advances promised freedom from dogmatism and superstition. These enlightened thinkers established an intellectual atmosphere that was crucial for paving the way for the emergence of the social sciences, including anthropology and psychology. The new social sciences would supplement the established natural sciences. Extolling the value of individuals, the academic stage was now set for exceptional naturalists and philosophers to make substantial contributions to understanding and appreciating both cosmic time and earth history.

At the end of the Enlightenment, long before nanotechnology and genetic engineering, the visionary philosopher Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) foresaw ongoing advances in the natural sciences resulting in future human beings enjoying an indefinite life span.

At the beginning of the 19th century, naturalists began to take the study of rocks, fossils, and artifacts seriously. Their investigations challenged the traditional ideas concerning the age of our earth, the fixity of species, and the recent appearance of the human animal on our planet. Historical geology, comparative paleontology, and prehistoric archaeology became distinct sciences that together offered an incredibly vast temporal framework. Over the decades, the accumulation of empirical evidence clearly demonstrated the enormous age of our earth, the evolution of species over eons of time, and the great antiquity of the human animal. Throughout geologic time, the fossil record even revealed that many past species had become extinct. Nature was no longer perceived as manifesting a divinely preestablished design; the alleged fixed order of our planet was now replaced by pervasive and ongoing change. Earth time was now recorded in the millions of years, and the origin of this universe had occurred in a remote past lost in the immensity of cosmic time.

After the beginning of the 20th century, the genius Albert Einstein presented to the intellectual world his special and general theories of relativity. The physicist challenged the basic ideas of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton by denying that space and time are independent absolutes and, instead, maintaining that they constitute a space-time continuum in a four-dimensional reality (with time being the fourth dimension). Moreover, for Einstein, there is no fixed frame of reference in this universe from which absolute judgments may be made concerning time and motion; his only fixed constant is the speed of light.

In the 20th century, an inevitable conflict emerged between those biblical fundamentalists who clung to a strict and literal interpretation of Creation as presented in Genesis and the scientific evolutionists who accepted the new temporal framework that is clearly upheld by the empirical evidence in geology, paleontology, and biology, as well as the results from radiometric dating techniques. In fact, this conflict between traditional religion and modern science continues today and shows no sign of ending in the foreseeable future.

Thomas Dixon illustrates that in Rome on 22 June 1633, an elderly man was found guilty by the Catholic Inquisition of rendering himself ‘vehemently suspected of heresy, namely, of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture’. The doctrine in question was that ‘the sun is the centre of the world and does not move from east to west, that the earth moves and is not the centre of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined as contrary to Holy Scripture’. The guilty man was the 70-year-old Florentine philosopher Galileo Galilei, who was sentenced to imprisonment (a punishment that was later commuted to house arrest) and instructed to recite the seven penitential Psalms once a week for the next three years as a ‘salutary penance’. Galileo accepted his sentence, swore complete obedience to the ‘Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’, and declared that he cursed and detested the ‘errors and heresies’ of which he had been suspected–namely belief in a sun-centred cosmos and in the movement of the earth.

It is hardly surprising that this humiliation of the most celebrated scientific thinker of his day by the Catholic Inquisition on the grounds of his beliefs about astronomy and their contradiction of the Bible should have been interpreted by some as evidence of an inevitable conflict between science and religion, Dixon further added. The modern encounter between evolutionists and creationists has also seemed to reveal an ongoing antagonism, although this time with science, rather than the church, in the ascendancy, says Dixon.

Does that mean the conflict needs to be written out of our story altogether? Certainly not, says Dixon. The only thing to avoid is too narrow an idea of the kinds of conflicts one might expect to find between science and religion. The story is not always one of a heroic and open-minded scientist clashing with a reactionary and bigoted church. The bigotry, like the open-mindedness, is shared around on all sides–as are the quest for understanding, the love of truth, the use of rhetoric, and the compromising entanglements with the power of the state. Individuals, ideas, and institutions can and have come into conflict, or been resolved into harmony, in an endless array of different combinations.

Scientific knowledge is based on observations of the natural world. But observing the natural world is neither as simple nor as solitary an activity as it might sound. Take the moon, for instance. When you look up at the sky on a clear night, what do you see? You see the moon and the stars. But what do you actually observe? There are a lot of small bright lights and then a larger whitish circular object. If you had never learned any science, what would you think this white object was? Is it a flat disc, like a kind of giant aspirin? Or is it a sphere? If the latter, then why do we always see the same side of it? And why does its shape change from a thin crescent to a full disc and back again? Is it an object like the earth? If so, how big is it? And how close? And do people live there? Or is it a smaller night-time equivalent of the sun? Finally, perhaps it is like one of the little bright lights but larger or closer? In any case, how and why does it move across the sky like that? Is something else pushing it? Is it attached to an invisible mechanism of some kind? Is it a supernatural being?

Now, if you are well informed about modern science, you will know that the moon is a large spherical rocky satellite which orbits the earth completely about once a month and which rotates once on its own axis in the same time (which explains why we always see the same side of it). The changing relative positions of the sun, earth, and moon also explain why the moon displays ‘phases’ – with either the entirety or only a small crescent of the illuminated half of the moon visible at a particular time. You may also know that all physical bodies are attracted to each other by a gravitational force in proportion to the product of their masses and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them, and that this helps to explain the regular motions of the moon around the earth and of the earth around the sun. You will probably also know that the bright little lights in the night sky are stars, similar to our sun; that the ones visible to the naked eye are thousands of light years away and those observable through telescopes are millions or even billions of light years away; so that to look up at the night sky is to look into the distant past of our universe. But however much of all this you know, you did not find it out by observation. You were told it. You possibly learned it from your parents or a science teacher or a television programme or an online encyclopaedia. Even professional astronomers will not generally have checked the truth of any of the statements I 've told you before, by their own empirical observations. The reason for this is not that astronomers are lazy or incompetent, but simply that they can rely on the amassed authoritative observations and theoretical reasonings of the scientific community which, over a period of many centuries, have established these facts as fundamental physical truths.

During the Dark Ages very few Greek classical texts survived in Europe. The few that did survive were read and valued by Muslim philosophers and scholars, and some of them were translated into Arabic. When the Muslims were driven out of Spain in the 12th century, a few medieval Christian scholars were curious enough to translate these manuscripts from Arabic into Latin. Some of these translated texts dealt with the natural world, including human origins. For example, the 13th-century Italian Christian philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, integrated Greek ideas about nature and modern humans with some of the Christian interpretations based on the Bible. The work of Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries laid the foundations of the Renaissance, when science and rational learning were reintroduced into Europe.

According to Bernard Wood, after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, Graeco-Roman ideas about the creation of the world and of humanity were replaced with the narrative set out in Genesis: reason-based explanations were replaced by faith-based ones.

With very few exceptions Western philosophers living in and immediately after the Dark Ages (5th to 12th centuries) supported a biblical explanation for human origins. This changed with the rediscovery and rapid growth of natural philosophy that was only later called science. But, paradoxically, not long after the scientific method began to be applied to the study of human origins in the 19th and 20th centuries some religious groups responded to attempts by scientists to interpret the Bible less literally by being even stricter about their biblical literalism.

During the Dark Ages, very few Greek classical texts survived in Europe. The few that did survive were read and valued by Muslim philosophers and scholars, and some of them were translated into Arabic, says Wood. When the Muslims were driven out of Spain in the 12th century, a few medieval Christian scholars were curious enough to translate these manuscripts from Arabic into Latin. Some of these translated texts dealt with the natural world, including human origins. For example, the 13th-century Italian Christian philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, integrated Greek ideas about nature and modern humans with some of the Christian interpretations based on the Bible. The work of Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries laid the foundations of the Renaissance, when science and rational learning were reintroduced into Europe.

The move away from reliance on biblical dogma was especially important for those who were interested in what we now call the natural sciences, such as biology and the earth sciences. An Englishman, Francis Bacon, was a major influence on the way scientific investigations developed. Theologians use the deductive method: beginning with a belief, they then deduce the consequences of that belief. Bacon suggested that scientists should work in a different way he called the ‘inductive’ method. Induction begins with observations, also called evidence or ‘data’. Scientists devise an explanation, called a ‘hypothesis’, to explain those observations. Then they test the hypothesis by making more observations, or in sciences like chemistry, physics and biology, by conducting experiments. This inductive way of doing things is the way the sciences involved in human evolution research are meant to work.

No one knows when human beings first appeared. In the scientific evolutionists point of view, our only clues lie in fossils and stone tools. The journey started some time around six million years ago (mya) in Africa. Humans are classified as primates, a group that includes apes and monkeys. Our closest living relatives are chimpanzees, with whom we share almost 99 percent of our genes, but this tiny genetic difference is what makes us so far removed from apes. According to the evolutionists, one of the earliest known human ancestors is a small forest-living primate named Ardipithecus anamensis, which flourished in Afar, Ethiopia, some 4.5 mya. Ardipithecus was probably the ancestor of the Australopithecines—highly diverse hominins that appeared for the first time one million years later. The earliest found, Australopithecus afarensis, was famously nicknamed 'Lucy' by the archaeologists who found her in 1974. Although it seems that this longlimbed hominin spent a great deal of time in the trees, some well-preserved footprints reveal that the species was bipedal (walked on two feet). As such, 'Lucy' is an important link between us and our treedwelling ancestors.

What I want to tell you is not that one of religions is that bad, no, but rather, if we ponder about time, we will come to the question of who we are and where we come from. Socrates was once asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied, ‘Know yourself.’ Aristotle says, 'Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.' 'Know thyself, O man, and thou wilt know thy Lord' says Avicenna. And we started to study History. History is important and that we can all learn from the triumphs—and mistakes—of our ancestors, says Adam Hart-Davis. And we are constantly aware of time. Tides, erosion, lunar phases, solar eclipses, returning comets, recurring seasons, and alternating days and nights illustrate for us that this universe is always changing. The birth, development, and death of organisms are a sobering reminder of the finitude of life forms on our planet. With such awesome and disturbing examples of time and change, it is not surprising that great minds have attempted to grasp the flux of reality. Even measuring time and change to ever-greater degrees of certainty is an ongoing challenge to modern science and technology.

By the way, as an Indonesian, don't you want to know why you are called an Indonesian? Don't you want to know everything about your Indonesian background? Let's find out in the next session, of course from the perspective of 'how foreigner assess Indonesia'. Bi' idhnillah."

Then, the Sunflower sang Vanessa Carlton's song,

Take my hand, live while you can

Don't you see your dreams

lie right in the palm of your hand?

In the palm of your hand *)

Citations & References:

- H. James Birx (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Time: Science, Philosophy, Theology, & Culture, 1-3, 2009, Sage

- Bernard Wood, Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction, 2005, Oxford University Press

- Dorling Kindersley, History: The Definitive Visual Guide, 2007, DK Publishing

- Smithsonian, Timelines of Everything, 2018, DK Publishing

- Thomas Dixon, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, 2008, Oxford University Press

*) "Ordinary Day" written by Vanessa Carlton

[Session 2]

Bahasa

Stories from Sansevieria: Political Thought's Evolution (11)

"A CEO, whose tenure will be ended tomorrow, is screwing his office up. Confusing, his secretary asks, 'What's up, sir?'

'Just leave it, let the one who will come into this room tomorrow, fix it,' says the company leader.

'But sir, what would be happened if it turns out that your son will be the one who comes here?' says the secretary.

'Good idea,' replied the boss briefly, 'I'll be more free to mess it up!"

"Why do people cheat? What I mean by cheating, are breaking the rules to get ahead academically, professionally, or financially. Some of this cheating involves violating the law; some does not. Either way, most of it is by people who, on the whole, view themselves as upstanding members of society," said Sansevieria while her hands holding a loupe and examining a blurry portrait. "Probably, as an Indonesian, you would say, 'Cheating? Wait, it's an advice that has been told in wayang puppet. About Pandawa lost the game of dice because Patih Sengkuni cheated. Sengkuni was a master at gambling and owned a pair of dice which magically did the crooked nose's bidding. This event shows us some kind of dishonesty and we are often at our most comfortable when we can cast it as a moral issue. It's not our culture. The wider culture exhibits contempt and a professed discomfort with dishonesty. So, whoever cheated, they are not us, but Duryudana's colleagues, who were ambitiously to control the kingdom of Hastina. And even though the Pandawas won the Kurukshetra war, their children and grandchildren and relatives had disappeared, they also ended up with moksha. Dishonesty makes a true nation, disappeared.'

However, according to Mark Moore, our culture’s ambivalence about lying and dishonesty is evidenced by our grudging acceptance that politics involves some form of dissemblance. In popular culture, says Moore, we see admiration of Hollywood antiheroes such as Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s con-artist characters in The Sting, Leonardo DiCaprio’s check-forging character in Catch Me If You Can, and George Clooney’s master of deceit in Ocean’s Eleven. Even our greatest heroes often lead a duplicitous life, including such iconic American heroes as Superman, Spiderman, and Batman, spies such as Jason Bourne in the Bourne trilogy, and Casablanca’s Rick. And great evil must often be countered by clever deceit as exemplified by the central hero of Schindler’s List.

Yet nowhere is popular admiration for the art of deception more evident than in the recent upsurge of national interest in poker. In 2003, amateur poker player Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker against seasoned professional Sammy Farha. What made Moneymaker’s win so aweinspiring was not his tight playing style or his ability to read other players (indeed it could be argued that he was too impulsive a player); rather it was his willingness to pull off stone-cold bluffs against the best of them.

However, according to Mark Moore, our culture’s ambivalence about lying and dishonesty is evidenced by our grudging acceptance that politics involves some form of dissemblance. In popular culture, says Moore, we see admiration of Hollywood antiheroes such as Paul Newman’s and Robert Redford’s con-artist characters in The Sting, Leonardo DiCaprio’s check-forging character in Catch Me If You Can, and George Clooney’s master of deceit in Ocean’s Eleven. Even our greatest heroes often lead a duplicitous life, including such iconic American heroes as Superman, Spiderman, and Batman, spies such as Jason Bourne in the Bourne trilogy, and Casablanca’s Rick. And great evil must often be countered by clever deceit as exemplified by the central hero of Schindler’s List.

Yet nowhere is popular admiration for the art of deception more evident than in the recent upsurge of national interest in online-gambling. Moore gives example in 2003, amateur poker player Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker against seasoned professional Sammy Farha. What made Moneymaker’s win so aweinspiring was not his tight playing style or his ability to read other players (indeed it could be argued that he was too impulsive a player); rather it was his willingness to pull off stone cold bluffs against the best of them.

Cheating is always up. Cheating is everywhere, says David Callahan. Cheating is not a new problem in the whole world. It has existed in nearly every human society. In ancient China, there was frequent cheating to get admission to the civil service. Test takers sewed pockets into their garments for smuggling crib notes and resorted to other creative deceptions. The persistence of cheating on civil service tests was especially impressive given the penalty imposed on those caught: death.

In Ancient Greece, the Olympic games were rife with cheating. Athletes lied about their amateur status, competitions were rigged, judges were bribed. Those caught were forced to pay fines to a special fund used to erect statues of Zeus. Greece ended up with a lot of statues of Zeus.

You've known that the Ancient Greece has an almost complete and orderly account of Democracy. In Athens, the democracy existed in roughly from the middle of the fifth century, says Kurt A. Raaflaub, was a remarkable system, unprecedented, unparalleled in world history, exhilarating, capable of mobilizing extraordinary citizen involvement, enthusiasm, and achievement, enormously productive and at the same time potentially greatly destructive. We know this democracy best in the shape it took in the fourth century, after a comprehensive revision of laws between 410 and 399. By then it could be understood as a system of rather clearly defined institutions that operated according to legally determined rules, which to some extent approached a 'constitution.' Parts of this system are described in the second half of the Aristotelian. To mention only the most obvious elements, the assembly (ekklesia) met at least forty times a year. For some of these meetings, items on the agenda were prescribed. The presidents of the assembly and council were selected by lot and essentially could not serve for more than one day. The democratic 'council of 500' (boule)—to be distinguished from the Areopagus council composed of former magistrates (archons) who were life-long members—was selected by lot; its five hundred members, limited to two (nonsuccessive) years of service, represented, according to a sophisticated formula, the population of numerous districts in Attica (demoi, demes, consisting of villages and sections of towns and of the city of Athens). This council broadly supervised the administrative apparatus, dealt with foreign policy issues, heard reports of officials, and deliberated the agenda and prepared motions for the assembly. The latter was free to accept such motions, with or without amendment, to refer them back to the council for further deliberation, or to reject and replace them with different ones altogether. The assembly passed decrees (psephismata) on speciWc policy issues, while laws with general validity (nomoi) were formulated by a board of 'lawgivers' (nomothetai), passed in a trial-like procedure, and, if challenged, scrutinized in the people’s court.

The assembly, assisted by the boule and the law courts (dikasteria), decided upon policies, supervised every step of their execution, and held a tight control over the officials who were in charge of realizing them. Professional personnel (whether in administration, religion, or the maintenance of public order) was minimal, mostly consisting of a few hundred state-owned slaves who served in specific functions at the disposal of various officials or as a rudimentary police force. Virtually all administrative business was in the hands of numerous committees of various sizes (totalling about seven hundred members), who assisted, and in turn were supervised by, the boule and various officials. (In the fifth century, hundreds of other officials served in various functions throughout the empire). A small minority of these officials, primarily those holding major financial and military responsibility, were elected; all others were selected by lot, as were the chief magistrates, and the thousands of citizen judges (in modern scholarship usually called jurors), who on every court day staffed variously large juries (or, more precisely, assemblies of judges) that tried several cases simultaneously in various locations. These jurors were chosen in a sophisticated mechanical procedure (by an allotment machine, kleroterion) that eliminated tampering and made bribery virtually impossible. The law courts themselves were an important part of democratic life and procedures: much political business was conducted there, one might say, in a continuation of politics by different means.

Several thousand citizens thus were politically active every year and many of them quite regularly for years on end—out of a population of adult male citizens that in the fourth century comprised hardly more than 30,000. Most impressively, 'over a third of all citizens over eighteen, and about two thirds of all citizens over forty' served at some point in their lives at least one year-long term in the council of 500, a very time-consuming office. It is thus clear that this democracy was not only 'direct' in the sense that decisions were made by the assembled people, but the 'directest' imaginable in the sense that the people through assembly, council, and law courts controlled the entire political process and that a fantastically large proportion of citizens was involved constantly in public business. Moreover, the system of rotation of offices made sure that those who were not involved at a given time would be at another (if they wished to) and that the citizens through their engagement in various offices and functions achieved a high level of familiarity with the administration of their community and its policies. On top of all this, these same citizens also regularly served in their polis’s infantry army or helped row its fleet, even if mercenaries played a more significant role in fourth-century warfare than they did earlier.

So, in Greece at that time, the entire community played an active role, not only in selecting leaders, but in all areas of life. Not just dancing around, free money and free lunches—and actually there is no free lunch—then surrender to the politicians. Indeed, Democracy is constituted through institutions, practices, mentalities, and, eventually, ideologies. In Greece these different components of democracy reached their fullest development in the fifth and fourth centuries. If democracy means that all citizens, the entire demos, determine policies and exercise control through assembly, council, and courts, and that political leaders, attempting to shape public opinion, are subordinate to the demos, the first democracy that we can identify with certainty was that of Athens from the 460s, emerging as a result of historically specic and even contingent factors.

Democracy succeeds when government, in some broad sense, represents the will of the people. Democratic representation can be assured if informed citizens freely elect their leaders, and those leaders stand for reelection at some regular interval. Thus citizens, voting for leaders who best represent their views, and holding those leaders (or their political parties) accountable for their performance in office at the next election, make democracy work. At least that is the theory. Naturally enough, voting is a topic that has drawn quite a bit of attention in political science, and the classics of political behavior research have all focused, in one way or another, on the vote decision.Presidential campaigns are inherently dynamic events that occur over a certain period of time. They have a defined beginning, around the time candidates throw their hats into the ring, along with a clear ending–Election Day. Throughout the campaign season, citizens are inundated with information about the candidates, whether they wish to pay attention to politics or not. One would have to read no newspapers or magazines, watch no television and listen to no radio, and have no contact with other people in order to avoid acquiring at least a little information about the candidates running for president.

The amount of information available during a campaign varies, however, depending on the campaign cycle itself. The classic texts of democratic theory assume that for a democracy to function properly, citizens should be interested in, pay attention to, discuss, and actively participate in politics. The attention and discussion provide information about political affairs, which allows citizens to make political decisions (e.g., a vote) based on carefully considered principles reflecting their own self-interest and the common good. All citizens may not be able to live up to these standards–some may be too disinterested, or lack sufficient information, or lack the skills to understand politics, and as a consequence vote by habit or narrow prejudices, or not vote at all—but as long as a clear majority of citizens do live up to these standards, the collective wisdom of the people will prevail.

Differences among voters—their general political sophistication, their political predispositions, and their education, gender, and age—affect information processing and choice strategies. All these characteristics are things voters carry around with them, as they live through actual political campaigns.

In election, the potential fraud overshadow election in all-election holding countries. Investigations by journalists, academics, lawyers, political parties, official nonpartisan observers and interest citizens, have drawn attention to cases of clear-cut voting fraud in many countries around the world.

Scholars and practitioners use a variety of terms to normatively qualify elections, including free and fair, clean, fraudulent, corrupt, and manipulated, among others. Similarly, actions that render an election unacceptable have been described as election fraud, electoral corruption, electoral manipulation, electoral malfeasance,patronage, and clientelism.

Schedler lays out a 'chain of democratic choice' based on Robert Dahl’s classic body of work on democratic theory, such that an election is considered acceptable ('democratic' is the language used by Schedler) if and only if all seven links in the chain remain 'whole and unbroken'. The links in the chain of democratic choice can be summarized as follows: Empowerment: offices filled via elections ought to wield real power; Free supply: a wide-enough range of candidates to choose from, other than the state-sponsored ones, must be available; Free demand: voters must be free to form their preferences, implying, among other things, that plural public sources of information about the candidates must be available; Inclusion: the franchise must be universal; Insulation: the vote must be free from bribery and coercion; Integrity: votes must be counted honestly and weighted according to the principle of 'one person, one vote.' Irreversibility: winners must be able to access office, exercise power, and complete their terms in office.

Electoral fraud–stuffing of ballot boxes, tampering with the vote count, and multiple voting, for example–constitutes a violation of the sixth link in the chain, integrity. Vote buying and voter intimidation violate the fifth link, insulation. Schedler also argues that the fifth link entails ballot secrecy. Arbitrary obstacles to voter registration violate the fourth link, inclusion. Media restrictions favoring government sponsored candidates, as well as some campaign finance violations, contravene the third link, free demand. Bans on opposition parties or candidates, such as are in contemporary Iran or were present in Mubarak’s Egypt, violate the second link, free supply.

Alberto Simpser suggests that electoral manipulation can influence the subsequent behavior of a wide variety of political actors–such as bureaucrats, voters, and party leaders–potentially yielding benefits to the perpetrator that could encompass not only the election, but also the post-electoral period, subsequent elections, and realms beyond the electoral. For example, blatant displays of electoral manipulation before an election, such as vote buying by the incumbent, can discourage opposition supporters from turning out to vote. To take another example, a large margin could also bolster the winner’s bargaining stance after the election with respect to labor unions, business organizations, and other actors by showing that no one actor is indispensable in a winning coalition.

Simpler further argues that election fraud aimed are only winning matters and or more then winning.

When authoritarian regimes lose elections, power is not automatically transferred. These regimes commit a form of manipulation after election day if they fail to accept the results and retain power through other means. Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos engaged in well-documented fraud in the 1986 presidential elections that involved both retail fraud (bribery and intimidation) and postelection wholesale fraud (manipulating the vote tallies). Similarly, Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has systematically engaged in violence and intimidation to ensure that the opposition is weakened, and he continues to win elections. Of course, not all authoritarian governments resort to fraud in order to hold on to power; the party of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua handed over power to the opposition when they lost elections in 1990. Likewise, many nations with long histories of democratic government have held elections where irregularities and administrative problems raised questions about the integrity of elections where existing governments have tried to retain power, such as in the 2006 parliamentary elections in Italy.

It becomes immediately clear that understandings of the Election Fraud are rooted in each country’s cultural and political milieu. Consider, for example, the allegations of fraud in Mexico’s 2006 presidential election. Some charges centered on the use of door-to-door canvassing by one of the political parties and whether such campaigning constituted undue partisan pressure on voters. Similarly, the decision by President Vicente Fox to endorse one of the candidates running to replace him was perceived within Mexico as illegitimate pressuring of voters and an unfair use of state funds to promote one candidate.

Human beings are not simply creatures of their economic and legal environment. We don’t decide whether to cut corners based only on a rational calculus about potential gains and losses. We filter these decisions through our value systems. And while more of us will do wrong in a system where cheating is normalized or necessary for survival or hugely profitable, some of us will insist on acting with integrity even if doing so runs counter to our self-interest. This is one trait that distinguishes flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens from that consistently rational actor of academic theory, Homo economicus.

Stephen Carter suggests that integrity requires three steps: discerning what is right and wrong, acting on what you have discerned, and saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right and wrong. Of course, to show integrity you need to know the difference between right and wrong—which is easier said than done nowadays.

Notions of right and wrong are not only shaped by our family and friends and by work or academic environments but also by the broader culture. As we go through life, the culture’s prevailing values, or social norms, shape our ideas about what constitutes the good life, how hard we should labor and to what end, how we should dress and groom ourselves, and much more. Some of us may emerge in early adulthood with a sophisticated ethical outlook picked up from religious education, or from those rare parents and teachers who clearly articulate ideas about character and ethics.

The values of a culture are heavily shaped by the large forces transforming society: war or peace, booms and recessions, demographic shifts and technological change. Values can also be shaped by social movements, religious awakenings, intellectual activism, and celebrity-driven fads—by “influentials” with loud bullhorns who preach a particular way of life. Mass media has made it easier than ever for the values of a society to change quickly.

And finally, many of the collectors want to know, on how to kill me. You need to know that my nation, have various forms: spears, samurai, fans, baseball bats, umbrellas, twisters, and many more, but all of them are known as only one nation, the Sansevieria nation. Our language is also one, to fight pollutants. So how do you kill me? You cannot kill me by uprooting my body from the earth, or cutting off my roots—my roots can grow again, or cutting off my leaves—my leaves can grow roots and produce some pups. Drowning myself in the water? Not really. Bury me alive? Remember the principle of roots and leaves: roots get food from the earth and leaves seek light intake from sunlight, in short, roots go down and leaves go up, then, I can suddenly appear on the surface of the earth.

So, how can I die? I could die because of my own fault, greedy of water—and it can be faster if mixed with Russian NPK fertilizer. Yes, if I consume too much water, my leaves will swell, my roots will rot and I will slowly die. Like you o humans, if you consume too much sugar, your body will swell and rot, you'll get diabetes, right? Too much love will kill you, 'cause you love too much sugar to consume. So, we could die by our own gluttony. And Allah knows best."

And in closing, Sansevieria sang the Beatles' song,

Michelle, ma belle,

[Michelle, my beauty,]

sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble,

[these are words that go very well together,]

très bien ensemble

[very well together]

And I will say the only words I know

that you'll understand, my Michelle *)

Citations & References:

- Salman Akhtar & Henri Parens (Ed.), Lying, Cheating, and Carrying On, 2009, Jason Aronson

- David Callahan, The Cheating Culture, 2004, Harcourt Inc.

- Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace, Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece, 2007, University of California Press

- Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk, How Voters Decide: Information Processing during Election Campaigns, 2006, Cambridge University Press

- R. Michael Alvarez, Thad E. Hall, Susan D. Hyde, (Ed.), Election Fraud : Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation, 2008, The Brooking Intitutions Press

- Alberto Simpser, Why Goverments and Parties Manipulate Elections: Theory, Practice, and Implications, 2013, Cambridge University Press

*) "Michelle" written by John Lennon & Paul McCartney

[Session 1]

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