international journal of science

FEBRUARY ISSUE 2012

VOLUME 1

ISSN 2225-7063

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE

2012

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE (ISSN 2225-7063)

FEBRUARY ISSUE 2012

VOLUME 1

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International Journal of Science

ISSN 2225-7063

EDITORIAL BOARD Prof. Dr. Zorica Kuburic University of Novi Sad, Serbia Dr. Giovanni Ercolani Nottingham Trent University, England Dr. Edmond Çali Università Degli Studi Di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy PhD Kais Al-Momani University of Technology, Sydney, Australia PhD Ivana Kojadinovic University of Belgrade, Serbia February Issue Coordinator Ms. Martha Zimbber

IJOSC is published by “Mankind Tracks” ctr.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE ISSN 2225-7063 VOLUME I. - 2012 MISCELLANEOUS ISSUE

© 2012 “Mankind Tracks” ctr. for February Edition © 2012 The copyright to the essays in this volume belong to the authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

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International Journal of Science

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Martha ZIMBBER

Introductory note

Zorica KUBURIC Conversion into the religion that speaks unto you Robley E. GEORGE

Socioeconomic Democracy

Giovanni ERCOLANI Considerations on warfare capabilities as a social formation methodology: the ‘Survival of the Superior Defence’

5 7 34

50

Fjoralba SATKA

Edi Hila’s Painting: View under the Mask of Socialist Realism

58

Inês ROLO AMADO

Storytelling, exchange, and sensorial observations of the everyday

68

Alma DEMA

A critic and psychoanalytic view over some elements of teaching

73

Giuseppe GAGLIANO The Social Network, the alterglobalization movement, and counter-forums

81

Olivera Z MIJUSKOVIC The relationship between doctor and patient

91

Risvan TËRSHALLA Notes on Contributors

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Education to judge on human rights

106 115

Martha ZIMBBER

Introductory note International Journal of Science is a scholarly open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal focusing on Human, Social and Natural Sciences. It is an academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. International in scope and authorship, the International Journal of Science bridges academic communities together. Its scope is to bring close disciplines and continents with a view to sharing information and debate with the widest possible audience.

IJOSC has a particular interest in policy-relevant questions and interdisciplinary approaches. It serves as a forum for review, reflection and discussion informed by the results of recent and ongoing research. It is published quarterly in one language edition: English.

IJOSC February Issue will be sent to our contributors and subscribers worldwide. Site visitors are encouraged to read it online. Special thanks go to ISSUU for publicizing and marketing this issue.

The forthcoming issue of International Journal of Science will focus on Education. Senior scholars, researchers and PhD students are invited to submit their proposals on the following topics: Adult learning Alternative Education Arts in Education Bilingual education/ESL Brain research Career education Civic education Comprehensive School reform Demographics Distance Learning/ Virtual Universities Education research

Homeless education Homeschooling International Education Language arts Lifelong learning New perspectives in education Specialized schools Students Improving teaching quality etc.

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Zorica KUBURIĆ

Conversion into the Religion that Speaks unto You1 Theism (Greek theos-God) is a religious world view that postulates the existence of one personal God that governs the world, the belief in God who acts upon what he has created. The term was used by Ralph Cudworth (Ralph Cudowrth 1617-1688), as opposed to atheism (Greek a-theos-heathen). Theism and Deism were used interchangeably up until 18th century (Latin Deus-God). Later on the fuller meaning of Deism defines it as a belief that God has created the world but has no impact on its affairs whatsoever, which implies the impossibility of God’s Revelation and miracles, so that imminence is negated as well. Within pantheism, God is equated to nature, so that transcendence can not be ascribed. Today, theism equals the worship of one God, so that it is synonymous to monotheism. It is differs from both polytheism that implies the existence of multiple godlike beings as well as henotheism, which implies belief in one God, but does not exclude the existence of other Gods (Collier’s Encyclopaedia, 1965: 266; Mayers Grosses Universal Lexikon, 1985: 162; Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique, 1946: 218; Kuburic, 2007a).

Within theism God is an Absolute Power, the force that incited the creation of the world, but that said, there are more ways in which theism explains the relations between God and the world. God established the general laws of nature and guides them as well as impacting the systems of causality. That is theism that builds the foundation upon which resides the theology of revelation. Apart from this theism that can be labelled as interventionist and implies the existence of miracles, the type of theism that can be likened to Deism introduces the possibility that God does not intervene, whatever the reasons, so as to jeopardize the execution physical laws.

The cognizance of divine identity takes place gradually, to the extent that it is intelligible to the human mind. Within theism, there is an emphasis on the relations between God and man, the interaction between the Creator and the object of creation that forms the community with God. The initiative stems from God, and within the first instances fear predominates conceived as wisdom, whereas subsequently 1. This piece of work is prepared as a part of a project: “Socio-economic and cultural characteristics and potential of Vojvodina as a means of regional bonding and European integration”, Republican programme, fundamental research, project no:149013D, 2006-2010.

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it is elevated to the mutual close friendship that is based on trust. The doctrine of Revelation is central and enables dogma, the firm belief into the truth of God’s word, that does not exclude man as a mediator. The revelation of divine being has been interpreted and understood for centuries in differing ways. The personal inclusion of God in man’s life, the religious experience in theistic context sometimes comes interpreted in terms of paranormal activities such as nocturnal visions and auditory apparitions that have no natural cause.

Theism corresponds to the metaphysics of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The existence of a created World is the simplest testimony in favour of Gods existence.

In Judaism, the fourth of the Ten Commandments goes that six days are meant for work, while seventh, which is Saturday, comes reserved for rest which is the homage to the act of Creation. Within Christianity, an inherent characteristic of the Godlike being is that he created everything: “Because every home is created and the one who created everything is God” (Jews 3:4). Within Islam, the eight names of God point out to the creation (Burrel 1997:141). “He is (the only) creator of Heavens and Earth. When he wants something to BE, he just says let (it) be and it is (Created). (Quran 2:117).

God is endless and is conceived as a Person, transcendent (transcends us and our world, he is from the other side, but he is imminent) and omnipresent, omniscient, sovereign and good. Divine goodness is his absolute righteousness which comes expressed as love. If God is love, there is a hope for humanity, because he will not betray his own creatures, which does not exclude the possibility that humanity may relinquish God because freedom, alongside love, alongside love and righteousness, comes as main characteristics of divine relation to the world.

The concept of God was enhanced with the individual understanding of the Divine Being as “one of us” which downplayed the importance of religion, so that depictions of God as wisdom, righteousness, power, goodness and love had to be enhanced with words such as “eternal” and “perfect”. Human beings are created in godlike image and are capable of understanding the world and God, that has the active role in seeking those who seek him. Human beings are created as intrinsically good in character, but with the fact that they succumbed to sin this picture has been endangered. Within Christian theism the process of renewal of God’s image within mankind is made possible through Christ’s redemption, which starts with the conversion conceived as a re-creation of goodness. The presence of divine has been made through the presence of Christ, a synthesis of God and man, which unites both human and divine characteristics. Ethics is transcendent and has its foundations in God’s character. History is linear and has as its ultimate aim the divine purpose which is embodied in the act of salvation.

There are multiple questions that stem from the theoretical conflict of the theistic worldview that has as its essence the belief in the perfectionism of the selfwww.ijosc.net | International Journal of Science

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created, transcendent Creator that is imminent to his imperfect, limited, changeable and mortal creatures. The category of moral development is paradoxically expected within the autonomous personality that stems from heteronomous morality. How should we reconcile the belief in divine omniscience and the ability to foresee with the freedom of human action? How should we conceive God’s omnipotence, love and goodness with the presence of evil in worldly affairs? With all these uncertainties, it is intelligible that conversion needs to take place in order to reconcile man with unintelligible God. Those who find that this would not be sufficient, may sound out to atheism as an alternative world view.

Atheism (greek a-no, without; theos-God) or heathenish behaviour, nonreligion, a-religiousness, comprises an important part of sociological investigation (Djordjević, 1990; 1997; 2007). Within research on atheism up until the present date we should highlight the importance of the work done by English sociologist Colin Campbell, who defines non-religiousness as a way of anti-culturalism, formed particularly in the U.S. and Europe in 18th and 19th century as a reaction of overemphasis on religion, authoritarianism, and anti-human tendency of the official religion.

Atheism is a term more narrow that non religion because it is caused as a countervailing power to the theistic religion. Antonio Grumeli observes the question of atheism within contemporary society as a part of the process by which society and culture diminish the influence of religious institutions. Traditional atheism has been limited to the intellectual negation of God from the elites that have been closed to the wider societal affairs. Contemporary atheism, as Grumeli argues, is “the second hypothesis” that can be intellectually compared to any other hypothesis, religion included. As opposed to traditional atheism that was a certain kind of “intellectual world view”, contemporary atheism has a form of collective behaviour, very ill-differentiated and collective.

Esad Ćimic (1984) points out to the fact that contemporary society becomes critical towards all of the traditional values. Spontaneous and un-organized penetration of atheism, or at least the indifference towards religion, contributes greatly to the simplification and vulgarization of God and the more and more visible reduction of religious categories and symbols through the processes of desacralisation and secularization. Ćimic observes religion and atheism as interrelated categories. Religion is the underlying assumption of atheism, which comes described as a negation of religion.

Jakov Jukić (1973) argues that the source of historical forms of atheism is alienated, perverted world in which man resides. Atheism of the ancient times has been centrally concerned with arguing for a logical fallacy of the theistic world view.

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Non-religious man stems from the religious man, homo areligious stems from homo religious; modern atheist is heathenish in his statements, intentions and influence, but has nourished the memory of religion within his very being.

Djuro Šušnjć (1998) writes that atheism is one way of non-religion which comes as a response to the official theistic faith. Atheism is antitheism which is possible only if there is a theistic system to contest in the form of rejection, battle, negation, suspicion and equanimity. The dependence of atheism on theism makes the first category a religion. Theism and atheism are religions with different directions: God is and is not. Non-belief follows belief, says Šušnjić, as well as shadow follows man.

Atheism is the final end point of non-belief, because it ruptures all ties with God, it is a religion of the heathen. The end point of non-belief is equanimity. People who feel equanimity are not against God, but without God. Within this dynamics of relation between theism and atheism, both within historical and individual experience, there is a man as a subject of free-will that enhances our research potential with his introspective abilities, with the embodiment of inner struggles of the religious towards selfdom, God and the world. If we perceive theism and atheism as two dimensions of which one end point constitutes atheism and the other theism, then our research can be founded on the self-evaluation scale on which individuals identify themselves.

Conversion is a moment of decision to be what one essentially is and represents the intrinsic identity as well as integrating all other aspects of the human being. It is a more complex question whether or not this is irreversible and whether we can speak of conversion and re-conversion in the sense of registration and preregistration (“register again under a new number, under a new owner” (Klajn, Šipka 2007:979). In the Encyclopaedia of existing religions (Jacobs 1992:555-557) the term is re-conversion whereas within the Dictionary of Sociology (Kuburić 2007:370-371) the term is conversion. Within Sociology of Religion (Hamilton 2003:425), within the context of New religious movements there is the word reconversion whereas the English edition uses the term conversion (Hamilton 2001:260). Theological literature on conversion speaks of the supernatural transformation of mind, feeling and life that re-creates freedom, self-control and spiritual unity with God that has been lost as a result of sin (SDA Encyclopaedia, 1976:349). Within the Dictionary of Orthodox Theology (Brija 1999:311) the only word I found was becoming divine that can be equated to the process of conversion whereas this process comes identified as spiritual conversion. “Becoming Divine is a state of human conversion, the surmounting of the created nature and its consolidation towards the genuine existence with the newly found potential that was present as deeply ingrained from the very beginning.”

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Conversion, re-conversion, change (Bahtijarević, 1988; James, 1990; Jacobs, 1992; Hamilton 2001;2003; Kuburić 2007b; Sremac 2007), hence, in linguistic terms represents the process by which an individual accepts religious, philosophical and political doctrine that he was not acquainted with before, or was its straightforward opponent. Religious systems imply the need to deflect the course of life that implies non-belief towards a course that takes belief as the basic assumption, or from immature towards a mature religious life. Within the Judeo-Christian context it means going from the evil towards God. The words that express conversion intrinsically imply Jewish word šub-the change in course or going backwards. Greek language uses epistrephein as the act of return towards God. The verb metanoein expresses internal shift.

Conversion is normally preceded by the self-image as a sinner and the need for forgiveness. This becomes the decision that willpower should be subjected to the goals and the life that is in accordance with God’s will. Personal experience of conversion “being born anew”, is the essence of the process of salvation that implies the consciousness that God exists and that he is involved in human life, mortality and the need for help from outside. The function of missionary activities is to enhance the responsibility towards God’s calling, because religious people’s view is that God acts in human affairs in order to find those who seek him.

So we come to the understanding of conversion as a progressive and interactive process that changes life from “chaos” or “wrong way”, through selfimprovement of the responsible individual towards God and the community towards which an individual has converted. This is the beginning of becoming deeply ingrained for the development in individuality.

The nature of conversion can be examined from the perspective of history, anthropology, sociology and psychology. We can employ various criteria for typology. If the axis is the number of converts, conversion can be collective and individual. If it is the duration of the process, conversion can be quick and turbulent, and those that are slow and pass unobserved.

If freedom of choice is the criterion, then we have voluntary and compulsory with various degrees and levels of manipulation. If we wonder on how long the consequences of conversion last, then we have temporary and those that last a lifetime. If the criterion is the sociocultural distance between the potential converts and those that already are adepts of a particular religious teaching then we can distinguish: 1.) conversion involving diametrically opposed religious traditions (Christianity and Islam are examples of a mass transition of tradition); 2.) conversion within the same religious tradition (within American Protestantism when a Baptist converts to Adventism or the other way round, when the main line

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of transition is from a more conservative towards a more liberal Christianity); 3.)

Conversion into the fundamental groupings and new religious movements that use strategies of manipulation and who impose their own beliefs in order to gain adepts; 4.) Conversion within one’s own faith, the re-invigoration of obedience to the faith when individual believers make their belief the central axis of their own lives, when the live through the deep religious experience and a new insight that gives incentive to spiritual values.

Bearing in mind that Protestantism as a movement of reform of Christianity comes embodied in numerous religious denominations that differ in nuances regarding important religious doctrines but in missionary activities as well, we will focus our attention to those communities that highlight the mission of preaching and baptism across peoples and nations. According to recent research, Adventists have the fastest growth of the Church. On the global level the number of adepts increases, and by a rough estimation, one half of the believers comes from the “world”, through conversion, and the other one from the “Church”, by birth in the family of Adventists.

The Research (World Survey 1993) has been conducted on the sample of 18.494 respondents, and takes as a target population Adventists in the whole world, and especially those that come to Church regularly, which means that from the survey was excluded between 20 and 45% of the members that do not go to church and have become inactive. Hence, the results should be understood within the context of Church believers. Apart from that, the research has to deal with educated believers and those who reside in urban areas, because illiterate and those who have no address have not been part of the survey.

The first question was: For how long have you been a baptised member of SDA? On a global level the results vary from 4% to 12% at the highest. TED2, division within which Serbia has 8% of the newly baptized believers, that is to say those whose Church membership goes on for less than a year. There is approximately 32% of the baptized believers whose Church membership lasts between 1-5 years (TED 19%) and those with a membership of 20 years are 51% (TED 37%).

We have the impression that the number of older believers predominate within the Church, spiritually, so that newly converted are a minority. Perceived across divisions, there is over 51% who have been members for 20 years within the North American Branch, whereas within East African branch we have 14%.

2. TED (Trans-European Division) is a branch of the general conference that encompasses the unions of: England, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, The Netherlands, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Hungary, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Israel, Poland, Pakistan. http://www.tedadventist.org/directory.htm

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The question interlinked with conversion is number 4. How exactly have you joined the Adventist Church? The greatest number of respondents answered that it was the influence of parents that gave incentive for the conversion, that is to say that they were born within the bosom of the Adventist family and have been raised in the spirit of the faith. The percentage varies globally from 30 to 53% of those who were “born within the Church� (TED 42%). The East African Division had a sample of over 4.000 respondents and according to the results of the newly converted it leads the way as well as representing a spiritually young Church. Within places where Adventism began as a movement and where church has the longest standing, the greatest is the number of believers by birth, and the least is the number of the newly converted.

Hence, the main factor influencing religious beliefs is the family, and the greatest number of adepts is gained through being born and bred within the Adventist family. The second path towards belief is through acquaintances, friends and family. The percentage there is between 23 and 41 (TED 41%). We can say that between 7-23% of the believers are recruited through reading books (TED 14%).

Public evangelization, lectures, and meetings contributed to the membership from 5 to 18% (TED 15%). For 7 to 16% the attendance of a preacher in their house and biblical lectures was crucial (TED 13%), and equally important were domicile educators, biblical school amounted to 5-10%, depending on the area of the world (TED 8%). The activity of the humanitarian organization ADRA, amounted to only 1-2% of the conversions. The equal influence exerted radio and TV shows that were answerable for 1-3% of the converts.

It is important to highlight this research because it points out to the mission of the Church, and the interviews I conducted with the believers regarding their conversion describe the process and point out to the details that are indiscernible within global statistical reports.

Empirical research highlights some important aspects that are interlinked with conversion. There is a general agreement that some sort of internal crisis precedes conversion, because it opens up new options for people. During the period of adolescence and identity building, we have a developmental crisis, so that new information and conceptions of life are sought. Individual crises come from the context of destructive state of the family, failures during the process of socialization and other personal traumas. Growing up in authoritarian, stern, punishing system, facilitates that power is understood as the one that controls, from which we should hide, and which we should manipulate and make shady dealing with. Families that nourish the culture of acceptance and growth facilitate that God is perceived as cooperative and caring, non-violent and as a being whose actions are foreseeable.

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In that way conversion might be caused by fear and love, which depends on the understanding of God’s character, and it stems from the experience with parents as first authority. Recent research highlights (Kuburić 2008) that people who are born and bred within religiously mixed families come more open to religious options. Within the sociological context conversion implies missionaries and potential converts. That said, within the context of colonial penetration missionaries carried immense power. Indirectly, they have been promoters of the colonial government that had backup from the military forces and enjoyed superiority. However, there are missionaries who were persecuted, either as heretics within their own nation or as promoters of a different culture, who have yet been successful in bringing news of God that leads people to conversion.

According to pertinent research, many converts confess that there is a crucial role of contact, meeting with individuals, leader or a member of a certain group by which people have gained cognizance of a higher value, a living testimony of faith. Potential converts, either as active researchers or passive partners, bring their own intellectual, emotional and practical needs that they try to satisfy within the religious group through prayers, praise to God and integration into the wider community. Exclusive groups highlight the need for the decision to be made and expressed in public, because it helps the convert to ratify his sense of community with the group as well as stress the value of ideas and methods which is a powerful method of mutual support.

With regard to the consequences of conversion on psychological processes and characteristics of personality, behaviour and interpersonal relations, the development of culture and society, we must admit that empirical research remains the most potent force for the understanding of these. There are numerous questions that should be answered. For an example-to what extent does conversion contribute to personal growth, identity forming and integrity?

Are the effects of conversion progressive or regressive? From which perspective should we evaluate the effects of conversion? Do religious traditions enable further maturation of personality after conversion? Who are the people who convert and what are their psychological characteristics? Is there a difference between those who accept persecuted faith from those who convert towards a dominant religion? And finally, how, and in what ways, should we distinguish genuine conversion from a false one?

The internal process of the experience of conversion has a social from that becomes confirmed through socially expected behaviour. The purpose of ritual expresses itself through the long line of acts that very often come under one process of existence that transforms itself into another, and this in essence

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embodies the purpose of growth and maturation, which is valid to even a greater extent for religious consciousness. Here we can enumerate rituals of life-cycle that encompass rituals of separation, in order to enable to abandon in an appropriate way the former status; passage rites in order to secure stability during the risky transitional period; rituals of inclusion, in order to secure identification with the new status and the acceptance of the new state. These rituals are not always sharply separated, but come interlinked and are executed at the same time. All societies have a number of statuses that are interlinked with age and mark a shift from one state to another. This is how birth is commemorated, passage into the world of adults, marriage and death.

Religious passage ritual as baptism does not belong to the lifecycle rituals within protestant communities, for an example. Baptism is conducted only on persons of mature age who are able to intellectually and autonomously grasp the passage. The transition could be labelled as “new birth”, “oath”, “death within the old man”, “birth for eternal life”. Baptism is interlinked with conversion and is followed by a religious experience of the meeting with the Divine being.

For the purpose of this research it is important to pay attention to the possibility of the gradual meeting with God that goes on within the religious family and the sudden experience of meeting with God which is a typical type of experience within protestant Christianity through which many have “accepted Christ”. Here I want to highlight one conversion (Kuburić, 2008:52-58) that depicts the process that leads mature people towards conversion. One young and beautiful lady expressed her experience of conversion in Zemun during the regular Eucharist (November 1994) that I will underline here in a shorter version.

She highlights that her life story so far has been a difficult one. Her mother died when she was five. She lived with father, mother and stepbrother. Later on she moved to another city to live with her grandmother and uncle who was blind, whom she loved and whose loss she regrets bitterly even today. Later on she was taken to the orphanage, where she accomplished her secondary school which was followed by a marriage. She was married for four years, but her husband died and she lived with her son together with his deceased husband’s mother and father for 9 years. Her father-in-law was an alcoholic so that she had a bitter life.

Eventually, she realised she could not go on like that any more. She took her son with her not knowing where to, telling everybody in the house: „Unitl God starts to work upon my life, I will take up the role“. The enterprise where she worked, as well as his husband’s enterprise, together with the city council kept promising free accommodation, but she said, as it often happens, everything remained only promises. She wept for night and nights, smoked over three packages of

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cigarettes a day, and could not eat. She also reports on everybody thought she would die as she didn’t look well.

What is more, she says she always believed God existed and never talked ill of Him. She was concerned with astrology, transcendental medicine, autosuggestion, but all these activities were a poor response for what she sought.

During her visits to her friend, she bought a small booklet within the Orthodox Church entitled „Madonna’s Dream“. Included were various prayers that she used to read. One night at 3 o’clock she was fed up, she wept bitterly and powerless and said „God do help me, I can see no way out any more, I do not know where to heed. Father, please do help me“. After this cry, as though somebody had a magic stick, everything started working well. The next day a friend advised her of an uninhabited flat that she used. At the time she visited her previous dwelling place to bring some books, but of all of them she just took the Bible, thinking „let it be at home, times are turbulent, it won’t do any harm if I keep it with me. I was drawn to read, not knowing why. When the doorbell rang, I kept it under the pillow, so that people wouldn’t say that I am reading the Bible in 20th century“.

Her ardent study of the Bible lasted for six months. One day, while reading, she sensed „an overwhelming power of love and a strong desire to do something to her high Lord“. She said: „ God, my affection towards you is of such grandeur that I sense the need to do something to please Thee, what is the exact act you would like me to do?“. Then she felt the need to abandon smoking. The crisis lasted for 7 days and after she felt as though she had never started smoking in the first instance. She read that Saturday is the Seventh day and that one should not perform any work whatsoever on that day. She wondered on how to make a change towards that bearing in mind that she worshipped Sunday throughout all of her lifetime. But she eventually said: „If God commands who am I to annihilate his commands and if He says that Saturday is the seventh day let it be so“. So that is how she started worshipping Saturday. Having read that it is a sin to eat pork, she decided not to eat it any longer.

She noticed that Bible talks of sacrifice. That said, she felt the need to do it herself as the expression of gratitude. She wondered on how to do it when this is not done in our churches, how to do it so as not to let the clergy perceive that. So that is how she decided to go to church once a week and buy the largest candle that she would light as an act of gratitude towards God. While candle was thus lit, she prayed that if what she was doing was not righteous let the God show on how to do it appropriately. The ceremony lasted for 2 months, and then she noticed Christ’s image on banners all over the city, advertising lectures with a title „Let us get acquainted with Christ“.

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This person talks further: “I came, dear brethren, and met Christ which led me to stay in communion with you. What is more, only death can separate me from the Lord who sacrificed himself for me, so why wouldn’t I sacrifice myself for him. Having had an in-depth study with the preacher that lasted for almost 2 months, I decided for baptism and thus formed my communion with the Lord.

Some have rejected me and stopped visiting me and socializing with me, but the Lord blessed me with you, dear brethren, and I am grateful for that…Moreover, the Lord has taught me not to expect the world to revolve around me, that in my selfishness do not expect everything to be subjected to me, but to turn towards those that are close to me, to make them happy, to weep and laugh with them, that their needs are equally important to me as mine. To be obedient to them and that every thought, word and deed be a blessing for them and a eulogy for Lord…”

The depiction of this case has elements such as hard life, feeling of loneliness, rejection, powerlessness. A person seeks sense for what has been going on in her life for years. In Bible she finds out about the rituals and starts to form a bond with God as an individual, so as to ask for mercy and help. There is a desire to do something herself for God, to sacrifice, to become ascetic in some way.

Finally, she does not remain alone in her desire, she finds a group that reads Bible, she tries to respect and adhere to any precepts that are written there.

Faith and the understanding of God become an inherent part of her life. She starts with baptism that is her way of forming an oath to God. These and similar examples of conversion are many, in particular within Protestantism. What is more, Protestantism began with the individual reading and interpretation of the Bible. Influential individuals became the founders of Churches who founded their faith on what they have read in the Bible.

Here it is important to highlight the difference between “internal” conversion which is the sense of achievement of internal peace and sense of living and „external“ which is the process of acceptance of an explicit religion and joining a particular social group. Hence, baptism represents social and psychological event at the same time.

Baptism is an initiation ritual towards religious maturation that has a certain temporal progression. At the beginning there is one period within which a person is not conscious that he or she lives in an atmosphere where religious experiences occur. After that there is a moment of truth in which the person becomes focused on those who go through religious experiences. An individual makes a decision to enable this meeting in which conversion occurs. On a manifest level, the person enters a community from which it learns and accepts discipline, or the lifestyle

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of believers. What follows is the moment of confirmation when convert passes through „ritual of passage“ that marks the fact that he is a full member of the religious body and capable to experience the religion profoundly. This ritual is confirmed with putting the initiate deep into the water which represents the „death of the old being“, “death of sin”, “rising into the new life“. Finally, there is a period of maturity during which the person grows and develops within the everyday life of the religious community. During this period, religious experience gets stylized, ritualistic and traditional character (Maloney 1992).

Religious experience offers to the participants stable identity, as well as feeling of conversion and new identity. When we talk about identity, it is important to highlight that the role of ritual in confirmation of social identity is quite salient, and represents what the participant is within the social context, that is to say confirm him as a member of a community. Ritual enables psychological identity to the extent that this process makes one aware of the values, beliefs and norms, as well as tension within the wider social structure. Apart from social and psychological identity, ritual enables historical identity, because by practicing the rituals of „our fathers“ an individual takes place in his spiritual lineage. Through ritualistic relief of inner struggles as well as social tensions and tensions within families, through confession, baptism or the experience of presence of the Divine Being, an individual gains purpose and as well as perspective within worldly reality. This transformatory effect of the communion with God through ritual surpasses all relations and impacts on the formation of the new identity. Present and future identity, this gradual maturation and transformation that religious individual nourishes have been described by apostle John: „Beloved! Now we are God’s children, and we can not foresee what is to be; though we know when it is, we will be like him, because we will see him as he is. And every one that is above him, should be purified, as well as he is pure“ (1.JOB. 3,2,3).

Ritual is, hence, a way to surmount existential crisis. The latter is primarily caused when an individual becomes conscious of transgression (of cosmic, social laws). Crisis causes tension, feelings of guilt, fear, which gives incentive to ritual (substitute for sacrifice, purification) which ultimately leads to the end of crisis, through the symbols of reconciliation, peace and joy (Turner 1969, 1974). The purpose of ritual is to „please God“, to express gratitude, reconciliation with God. This type of ritual is present within the prayers of gratitude, as well as within gifts and donations, as well as sacrifice of gratitude.

Language of the ritual and symbols that are used within religious ritual are manifold and geared to address all of the human senses. Let us remember the smell of candles and myrrh, the smell of bread and wine within communion, the sound

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of bells and spiritual songs. By returning to the roots of Christianity, Protestantism has abandoned candles, ended the sound of bells, put cover over icons, abolished monuments. Within Adventist Church we can see blank walls, the smell of flowers can be sensed and music can be heard. Mysticism is reduced to the lowest level, arguments and prophecy are highlighted.

Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart (1989) wrote in chapter The Art of Expression: “The adventists’ concentration on sound belies the superficial impression that they adhere to the minimalist aesthetic of Puritanism. Unlike Quakers, Adventists are loath to sit in silence, and music has always been a significant part of worship.

Adventist churches may be architecturally uninspiring band lacking in visual interest, but the absence of decoration has more to do with a mistrust of sight than an abhorrence of superfluity. In sound, Adventists are prepared to tolerate a degree of variety and elaboration well beyond functional necessity.

Next example was put forward by a girl named Anita (Terek, 2007) „I have lived without God although thinking I do believe in him. As many people today who do not have attitude, so my beliefs have collided with one another. On the one side I was an atheist, thinking that there is nothing in our head and that all things immaterial are a product of imagination, but on the other side I believed in something, not knowing what, but with a faint idea it might be God. In essence I believed in God I created myself (the one that is not judgmental towards my acts and deeds). People are imperfect, we tend to idealize them until we get a chance to meet them, and then we face with disilusionment, for a short time or once and for all until we accept them as they are. With God it tends to be quite different, when we acquaint ourselves with him, we tend to feel exultation because we can not conceive the purity of his character. But as though we can say we know a person only when we have had a chance to acquaint ourselves with the character of that person, so that is how we acquaint ourselves with God, we can not say we know him, perhaps we have heard of him, but we do not know him to the extent that we know his character that reveals the Holy Scripture to us. Everybody that has had the experience of conversion knows what exultation and joy it is to get acquainted with him! It is difficult to tell, but those who have not experienced that could regard you insane. But Bible talks a lot on these subjects. ….Something led me to seek Bible. From that moment onwards I had a feeling that I do a great crime, so I tried that people do not find out. It is interesting that reading as such influenced me. When I started reading my attitude was that God does talk to me, and not only that the scripture was written for somebody, and there was not a grain of doubt that Bible had been re-worked, although I have always been listening to „how can somebody believe in that, only people have written that, the book could not have just fallen of Heavens“, so that I was

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sceptical as all of the others. I do not know why I reacted in that fashion. I wanted to check if it is so although I thought the contrary from the very beginning. It was the acting of the Holy Spirit on my testing on what truth really is. I now fully realise that it was how the enemy diverted me from getting closer to the book, not to mention further reading. As though somebody had convinced you, do not touch because you will burn. Now I am convinced that there are people, and I know some of them personally, that would turn believers if only they had a chance to read. But the enemy keeps deceiving them and they do not venture to read. On the other hand, those who read can be deceived so as to believe that these are myths and they just read as a means of contributing to their general knowledge.

It is incredible and explains the great deception that goes on within us. In the meantime I have found a job and this has been a special experience through which God led me. Looking from outside I have been the same person and nobody could tell that something was going on within me….I took one Adventist book after another, that I took to the balcony so as not to let other people know I read them, brought them into my room, read, up until the moment the bookshelf was full of them. I visited Adventist webpages and took songs, texts and sermons. In took the sermon „desert“ that interested me because that is how I felt before, as though I was in a desert. It is not to be argued with, I was stricken and that was what broke my heart. My conceited heart was broken and open to divine experience. The sermon was held by Mića Tanurdžić. The colour of one’s voice and speech broke me because I felt sincerity. God knew exactly on how I would react and it was not by chance that I found the topic.

For the summer holiday I took a course. They told the course leader would be Mića Tanurdžić which re-invigorated my desire to attend. What is more, all of the circumstances were set so as to point out that only God could put the pieces together so that I was exulted with the same vigour as before.

After returning and getting back to work, I felt conscience-stricken to work on a Saturday. God led me gradually, truth by truth. Really, man can’t accept everything all of a sudden. I was uneasy about not worshipping Sunday but have taken no action.

My aunt’s death was the first genuine loss. God was really merciful and I had no traumas or deaths whatsoever as a child. This was an upset and the only thing weaving through my mind was I WANT TO GO TO CHURCH! I think nobody could stop me when my desire was so strong and nothing could divert me from that.

From then onwards I frequent Church every Saturday.

There have been struggles around me and for me regarding baptism. When reading the Bible, I have been followed by a line that I have read repeatedly and

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underlined: “Why do you hesitate?” Get up, baptise and purify yourself from the sin you have within you, calling on God’s name.’ I did not take action though. I was overwhelmed by fear and could take no initiative. I thought time was not ripe for that. I did not know what to think but I had my fears….Then, more than ever, I have been scared to death, and all the prejudices I nourished have come to the surface. I have been scared and though if I was normal at all, what am I doing, if I was doing the right thing. Still, I did not relinquish, I was not comfortable, but the truth that God has revealed to me overcame all of my fears and I attended biblical study regularly. At the time God has re-invigorated my confidence through a friend with whom I have discussed God. By talking to him I confirmed my own self and his comments and story firmed up my faith! I had no prejudice because I met the true and only God that revealed himself in my own life so that no stories could jeopardize that.

My study has finally been concluded and I have been baptized. I think many have been surprised by that, from my friends and relatives, to the people from the church. I experienced them as something personal and did not share that with the others. This experience tells us that we never know, and should not form prejudice about a person because we do not know what goes on inside and in what mysterious ways God works upon their lives”.

Within this process of conversion we can see many factors that exercise influence, from family to preachers, friends and summer courses. Reading the Bible and religious literature had an important role to play as well, which points out to the cognitive dimension that makes life meaningful.

The next example of conversion is highlighted by Špiro Marić, a person with whom I have conducted an interview and from whom I have received written text, from Zelenika who wanted to depict all of his life as being interlinked with religious experience with GOD (Marić 2006).

“Thirty-first of July 2004. was a jubilee for me, because on that day I celebrated my oath to God 63 years ago. In other words, it was the period when God made an alliance with me, because if it was not so the union could not have been preserved. I was born to an Orthodox family, my grandfather was Luka Marić, known as an adept of Orthodox Christianity, celebrated his saint on 9th of January. When our friends would gather, the first sentence he would utter was: “My dear friends, I am glad you came and I willingly share with you what I have made. But to tell you the precepts of my home: in my house there is no abusive language! If somebody ventures to do so, he will have to go out!”

I was an adept of the Orthodox Church and I believed it to be the true and only Church. The priest was our friend and he was so eager to involve me in the

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sermon and carrying litija as well as other Church activities. There were no adepts of the Christian Adventist Church, and we did not even hear of their existence until a train-driver came in 1935 with his numerous family: spouse Ana, son and eight daughters. His son died during the war but his daughters remain. His spouse and his three elder daughters, that were members of the Christian Adventist Church, came very close to our house. They had one salary, and the family was grand, so that they had to supplement their earning with further work.

They rented some property and had a number of goats and poultry. They collected olives from the owners and remained in possession of one half, and it was a fruitful period for growing olives. My friend’s daughters went to the craftsmanship school with my sisters, and they grew to be quite affectionate friends. As a firm believer in Orthodoxy I was uneasy about that. My daughters to be friends with Jews, Seventh Day Adventists! But, God has mysterious ways!

On the 6th of April 1941, Germany started bombing Belgrade without previous information released, and on the same day bombed the harbour at Zelenika. As the gunpowder stock was 300 meters away from our house, they started pouring bombs around us. Thank God they missed the target. We had to run to the village Kute where our old house was and where my grandfather celebrated his patron saint with high esteem. When we ran, the daughters asked whether or not they could join us because they don’t have any acquaintances whom they could ask for help. Naturally, we could not refuse assistance, bearing in mind the circumstances.

We arrived to the village, the planes kept circulating and the bombing continued. The mother of this jewish family asked me: “Would you allow me to pray to God with my children? “. Đeđe, the owner of the house, responded: „You can have our room so do feel free to pray”. The Lady said: “Do not go, we are all in the need of God’s assistance in this particular situation”. She started the first biblical class, allegedly talking to her children. She did mind the words and talked only on knowledge in accordance with the Holy Scripture. I minded every word and said it was a pity that these words are uttered by a Jew. She held the Bible study every night and I could not miss a single one. We were accompanied in our study by Krsto Uljarević with his spouse Radojka, Natalija Schultz, brothers Marko and Janko Milošević, my mother Naste and my sister Štefica. Everything was fine, but I was Orthodox and thought this was not suitable for me. At that moment I felt God was working upon my life.

Walking towards the centre of the village I was met by a gentleman and asked me If I knew the house of a woman with many children. I inquired if it was the Jewish woman, but he said it was not and that it is a genuine Christian that had Holy Scripture and was well versed in biblical science. I inquired into who he was

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“I am from Negotinska Krajina by birth, a Serbian, I worked as a diving specialist in the Army, but the Jugoslav Army having been dismantled, I had to go and am now in search of a dwelling place. As the only people I know are here, I thought to hide somewhere”. There was food around the village because stock was full in Zelenika so that people gathered a lot of food. So that is how Dragoljub Radovanović joined our study. He kept on with biblical work on a daily basis. Wherever I would perform my work-on the meadow, place where cows eat, or the place where we stockpiled wood-he would be there.

Jugoslavija had been conquered. Boka Kotorska had been conquered by the Italians. The Jew would not stop with the biblical work each night at the same time.

We returned from the village to our houses but the work would not stop. The lady followed us every night, and Dragoljub Radovanović would do that during the day, they followed every of our acts and offered assistance in our work.

For him, Saturday was the day of rest and prayer. I do recall, when I would plan work on a Saturday, he would normally say: “Do not do that today, I will finish it up tomorrow.” So that is how I would spend Saturdays with him-it is not so much that I accepted it as Holy, it was more that I respected Drago.

When he would be absent, I was afraid to go and perform some work so as not to let him see me. So the study went on for three months, and I would always be present.

Towards the end of July 1941, the ardent studier of the Bible invited Stjepan Manestro to cross-examine the enrolees and do the baptism. I attended the class of examination of those who were baptised as well as arrangements for baptism scheduled for 31st July. Among those to be baptized was Krsto Uljarević, employed as captain on a steamship that operated on the line Herceg-Novi to Kotor, with a departure at 5 a.m.. Baptism was therefore scheduled for 4 a.m., on the sea, below our edifice in Lalovina. Early in the morning I went to observe baptism. When we arrived to the agreed place, we saw grand waves that were quite normal for the summer period. I thank God from the very essence of my being for that, so as that God’s will operate in that way. God works in mysterious ways. My brother Stjepan, who was to do the baptism raised his hands towards the sky and said: “Dear heavenly father, these beloved souls that are with you have made an oath with biblical baptism”. Lowering his hands towards the sea he said “I pray thee for this space that we need for the holy act, so do pacify the water”. When he uttered these words the water was pacified as though it had been glass, whereas waves kept raging. At the precise moment God had made a change in my heart. The baptism went on and eight persons were baptized. Within this great exultation I heard a voice uttering these words: “Do baptize now or never”. Everybody went

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home, and I approached brother Manestro and said: “Brother can I be baptized?”

“Listen to me my friend, I have seen you attending our classes but I neither know to what extent do you know or believe. That said, if your request is sincere, I can not refuse you! “It is sincere brother. God has given me a call”. “Based upon your request and firm faith, I baptize you now on your responsibility”. For a few days I was restless. I could not cast a glimpse on the Orthodox Church because of the recollections of my service there from my days of thinking it was the right one. …As far as church life is concerned, thank God, it went on with more difficulties, but there we go! We were few. The family who interceded left, as well as brother Milosevic. Family Uljarevic, my sister, mother and myself were those who left. Every Saturday we visited brother Uljarevic on the hill above Zelenika. Life conditions were difficult. There was no sufficient food. But if somebody could spare a couple of pounds of bread, which Italians used, we would share it unselfishly.

The years went on and the experience happened to Špiro Marić, on the place where he lived and in the state where he lived, which he narrated after our conversation regarding the type of conversion which was eventually converted into a text to be published in the Journal Religion and Tolerance no. 5. 2006.

The main characteristic of this conversion is interlinked with miracles. Although the conversion happened in 1941 in Montenegro, is it important to highlight that intercessor was a family that came to live in the area and introduced faith based on their mode of life. It is also important to highlight that new church had been formed in a “new place”. The group had a collective baptism and was prepared for it, so that the ceremony had a familial character. Quite contrary from other converts that experienced rejection from family, friends and school, where some young people have been expelled, what is idiosyncratic for Montenegro and conversion there is that entire families accepted faith from the moment when individuals decided to perform that act.

I conducted many more interviews than can be depicted here. I chose to describe one that is characteristic by the fact that conversion happened during the military service, in Subotica, and the baptism took place more than sixty years ago in Zagreb; the person concerned was a young man born in the village of Janjila

by Bosanski Petrovac. The tribe started meeting last year in order to seek roots.

He was the only one who converted towards the new faith and nobody followed his footsteps, so that he was labelled “Moses”.

I conducted the interview on the 10th of June 2009. In Prijedor, and the person concerned was Todor Banjac, born in the village of Janjila, 15th of March 1916., from the father Ilija and Mother Deva. He enlisted for military service on the 1st of October 1937. In Subotica he converted by the influence of a peer-soldier

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who was at the military cottage. He baptized a month after military duty had been completed, on the 1st of April 1939. in Zagreb and became an adept of the Christian Adventist Church. The process of conversion has deep roots in infancy.

In his family that consisted of numerous members, and lived in a community that consisted of 35 members at that time, nobody really accepted his faith, so that he was isolated with his spouse that gave birth to five sons and four daughters who are the second generation of Adventists and live on various parts of the world. He has 16 grandchildren and 2 grand-grandchildren. All of his offspring are believers.

The crucial person for his conversion was Mitar Milosević, from the town of Peć, who was Montenegrin by nationality. He worked on the railway. They met by the military cottage. There had been seven cooks and they switched duty on a daily basis. They were guarding and kept conversing. As he recalls, those were good times, the salary was 541 dinar, and they could save up to half of the monthly amount. Todor used to save to buy a house, and having made decision to be a believer and to be baptized during his days of attending military service, to start building heavenly house, so that with that amount of money he remained in Zagreb and waited for baptism. Military service lasted for 18 months without leave. Bosnia belonged to Zagreb according to the organization HAC. During the period of military service he got a letter from Ludvig who was the president of the area. When he found a church in Zagreb, he should undergo a test and see how to make a living rather than in what to believe. They left him for a month to wait for the baptism and in the meantime they involved him with Maraš on a bookselling job. He was a leader among newspaper salesmen. They frequented houses and sold religious literature, but the young man was left in the yard while he entered the house. It looks to me as though they were checking if he was genuine and why he came in the first instance. Then he carried books and sold nine of them, which made them enchanted. Ludvig baptized him in Zagreb. He also attended the seminar of the newspaper salesmen. What he experienced then was external spirituality, as he describes it. They prayed in small groups. On his days when he was selling books, as he reports, he was busted by the clergy and policemen.

What is more, he had a leave from the army. He was busted in Lešćani where he started doing newspaper sales in the first instance.

What is more, the first book he had ever bought during his days in military service was the Bible. He ordered it from Radomir Dedić who was Milošević’s schoolmate and he ordered books from Belgrade. It is interesting to note that Dedić packed the Bible of his spouse, that he gave her as a gift on the day when she became his fiancée, and she read and underlined. At the time purchasing Bible was by no means an easy task and the interests of the potential believers were above personal interests.

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It is an interesting fact that the soldier who taught him the new faith was from Montenegro by birth, that he knew how to preach but that he was not baptized himself: “I did not get the Bible from granddad Luka who trained to be a priest, nor from my Dad but from a person in the military service who gave a good information so that I listened to him as I would the Lord”. Milošević said to Todor: „Todor I lost my salvation because I did not pay attention to that what used to be a threat to divert me from following God’s path. My father quarrelled with the neighbour and I used abusive language because I lost my temper, and was ashamed to go to Church and did not receive baptism.”

Myself having asked what attracted him to the new faith he enumerated a list of arguments involving difficulties within the early childhood which definitely played a key role. “It has been an old-fashioned life: work, treasure, we were all barefooted, in my fourth year I lit fire within the house so that my eyes burned from smoke, when I was five I took care of pigs (Livestock) thirteen of them chased up to be breastfed and I could not deal with them even with the aid of my sister. I was sick with life. When I was sick I took care of lamb, which had been difficult. The parents were stern. When I was seven they sent me to take care of all of the fortune and do some further work with the animals (300 sheep, 70 goats, 35 cattle)”.

It has been a tough nut to crack for a child. They did not even have time to eat, they extracted stones, 300 wagons were taken from the meadows so that these could be cross-pollinated and that harvest could take place. At eight he was a supplement worker looking after sheep on the Grmeč mountain. The assembly decided on who goes where, so he was chosen to work, rather than attend school. At 11 he was to look after cattle. They were 35 and he was alone.

At the time he learned on how to pray, so they prayed for the weather not to be humid and for the rain not to fall which might affect cattle negatively. He was hungry and thirsty and fought for survival. He carried water within the beer bottle and he drained it half way through. He did not have anything, he used to collect rain, and cows drank from the fountain on the way back. So that is how he lived for five years looking after the cattle. Todor says: “That is where I learn on how to pray to God”.

Wednesday and Friday were the worst days for him because he ate nothing but bread. He believed it to be a mandate from God and saints. My parents told me of their work cutting grass on the days of Saint Michael and Gabriel, when a bear killed one of the cattle and people were in general afraid of working during the religious festivities. Next year they continued on with their work, because they needed to cut grass, and then bear killed two cows, and they paid no attention so that subsequent year they lost three cows, so that they stopped working during

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religious festivities. This could be labelled as religious experience. Todor recalls how he used to sharpen up his knife while mother entered the house and said fearfully “what are you doing it is a day of celebration of the patron-saint today”.

He went outside and it was snowing, goats had eaten, and he put some piece of clothing on his head so as not to let his head be wet, and cast a glimpse upon a wolf who got the nicest lamb. That was wolf’s day. Everybody had a patron saint and nobody could perform any work. That was what annoyed him. He was sick with that. Other people kept praying because they enumerated saints and apostles, and children could not bear standing before having had eaten.

From his sixteenth year onwards he was a forester. He made ten meters of wood with the aid of his brother in a day. The task was to lay two pieces of wood and cut to a meter length, and further cut and arrange to one-meter-and-twenty in length and ten-meter width. This was their task both during the summer and winter. He was an expert for the wood, and people employed him to perform house furnishing because they needed somebody who is acquainted with the quality of wood. Later on he did carving which was a craftsmanship handed to him by his father and uncle who were experts in the field, but with his knowledge he used to work as a child, because he enjoyed working with the wood, from tools to toys. For the house he made windows and doors and furniture which is still an essential part of house furnishing.

His conversion was driven by the impact of his Dad’s granddad Luka who got the Holy Scripture from Russia. There is something in tradition. His grandfather waived the requirement to become a priest when he started reading the Scripture and said: “It is not the task of a clergy to ride a horse and gather funds for the poor but to take up the Holy Scripture and evangelize people in their houses”. It was a message from grandad Luka, because priests know the road to salvation. And bearing in mind that they did not work as hard as him, although having accomplished theology, he did not want to become a priest. For years and years Todor listened to the story from his grandfather and was well-versed in the importance of the Bible as well as the crucial importance of adhering to what is written there.

When he enlisted for the military service they would not let him go because of his utmost importance for the village. He still went and they told him to go to the border group. He soon found out it to be dangerous, and they advised him it is as though you were in a war. Everybody feared to go to Kosovo, and he was to go to the Hungarian border. They were building a small cottage. He met many lads and no one of the bricklayers had anything special about them. But his religious calling was of utmost importance for the future because they read the Bible.

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When he came from the military service and newspaper sales, he was like a white bird among black. Everybody attacked him on a personal note and he talked and preached with zeal, what he knew best. He met the priest by the church, that asked him about the faith and they had an argument and went from church to church where there were 50 young people who came to the Orthodox Church for the Eucharist. Everybody gathered around the two and listened attentively to what they were talking. The priest told him that he thinks he has the Holy Spirit, and Todor replied “You have if you adhere to God’s precepts”. The priest invited him to the Church to pray and Todor said he would willingly if he was to read from the Gospels in Serbian and not in Ancient Slavic. Bearing in mind that this is impossible they talked in the yard. Then everyone of the boys were taking the side of the priest and did not say to go to the master to see what he has to say, so Todor replied the master did not teach theology and was not well-versed in the questions of faith.

The priest asked him not to spread word of the new faith to anyone. Still, he preached on everything and young people used to frequent him, young lads, and there were a few girls from the neighbourhood. On Sundays there were young to whom he preached. Still, he did not have much success with his own people, only one girl accepted his teaching, and this was the one whom he married and had nine children with. He would not work on a Saturday, which had not been accepted, they were not glad to hear that, but some cousins came to hear preaching on a Saturday and they were exulted, but still, those who opposed were strong and they did not survive as believers.

What characterizes the spirit of Protestantism, as Max Weber observes, is the work ethic. Our interlocutor was known for his hard work. They labelled him as a biblical man because within the old jewish tradition he was labelled Veselilo. He boasts that he was the first person in the village to make oven and mattress he was a carpenter and bricklayer and incited the building of roads in the village. But the did not succeed and said woefully: “If they listened to my advice everything would be in Janjile, water and roads and houses”.

Upon his return to the village of Janjila by Bosanski Petrovac he was labelled Moses. Still, he was not the leader of the exodus of the inhabitants of that village that remains without people up until the present date. Nobody lives there, the grass is overgrown and uncultivated, there is a broken church and a few graves that nobody frequents.

I have only come across a snake on the doorstep, and there is just stone, with no roof. Deep grass gives testimony about a deserted house. Everything is broken it is just that the willow tree grows and outperforms all of the others. Everybody has left the village, it is not their village, and it looks as though it is nobody’s. According to his

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recollections from the childhood the grass has always been low, and it appeared as though there was not any because sheep kept feeding and would not let it grow. Within the village, it was only children that looked after the sheep and their recollections were interlinked with the stone that was a pillow that they slept on during their duty, and a horse where they sat and played. Only the holes remained the same both in terms of appearance and origin.

From further conversation I find out the details on what led him towards conversion. It was more important to him to learn about the initiation of saints and their road to heaven, rather than what he inherited from tradition. He thought all saints were on the sky. He wondered why God would not institute any law that would be applicable to earth. The most painful cognizance was that of death. His younger brother died, Todor was around fifteen and his brother was five. The first four brothers died and they were not remembered. Five brothers remained alive as well as four sisters. His mother gave birth to 14 children. His spouse gave birth to nine, one daughter died from galloping tuberculosis during the war. Children were not secure so that they were victims to disease. He was vulnerable towards justice.

He wondered if a child like that could be saved in the first instance; does it depend upon the fact that parents are baptized or not.

He found his answers within the Bible. When he first took the book in his arms he was delighted: “that is what I eagerly expected, and everything is written”. Bible within their house was lost after Luka’s death so that nobody could study it. He became an ardent studier of the Bible during his days of attending military service. He could not attend school because he opted for looking after the cattle. During military service he attended literacy studies for 2 hours each day a week and test came soon afterwards so that he was the first in the group on reading test although his literacy was heavily indebted to the fact that he read from the Bible.

Keywords from this particular case are: difficult life, the problem of death and the Bible. The context concerned is idiosyncratic but what is common is an individual’s need to seek the meaning of life, once conscious of the fact that death is not to be avoided. From the interview with Aleksandar Birviš (Kuburić 2008) I highlight the response to the question: What can you say about your first conversion?

“I bought the very first New Testament and Psalms from the person performing orthodox catechism at the beginning of 1938. I have read it very quickly around my tenth birthday, before going to sleep, I speculated on the transience of human life and fell asleep weeping: “God give me eternal life”. Unfortunately I had nobody to talk to back then. I continued on living with sadness. It eventually faded within the next ten years because of the war, conquest, Stalinism and similar events.

Still, when I read the Bible in its entirety during the school year 1945/45, I started

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seeking people who believe in Gospel and live in accordance with precepts with great delight in NiĹĄ in the first instance and Belgrade afterwards. I met different people and different denominations. Still, in spite of the politicisation of personality, atheism and wrong delights, what influenced me were my two religious scholars during my days of attending grammar school. The first of them was a priest and talked to us of the need for the faith to be our own experience, and that it is more important than belonging to any religious community. Second person was only well-versed in catechism. After the Second World War some priests decided to leave the army and concerned themselves with the teaching of the Russian language, this man rejected very tempting offers to become a priest. His message was clear: conviction matters more than an easy life.

Because of the state of affiars concerned, during the autumn of 1947 I entered the Baptist Church and have not gone out of it up until the present date.�

Conclusions Theoretical concepts of life that become embodied in lifestyle of those who practice it within communities that accept them. Going to the extreme in the either of the value systems have caused social revolutions that have left a significant mark in history. On an individual level in everyday life this tension seems to be a never ending process and points out to the ambivalent relation towards God. Strangely enough, solving the conflict goes on an individual level through free choice, on the basis of individual beliefs, during the process of conversion.

The subject under scrutiny in this paper has been the individuals that have shown by their mode of life the readiness to hold their beliefs in public and devote their lives to the theistic concept. Life stories of those who converted abruptly illustrated the process of conversion and oath within the religion that spoke unto individuals within crucial moments in their lives, forming within their consciousness a system of beliefs that has the power to influence the set of believers as a group, but, what is more, it does influence individuals as such.

We can conclude that there are common characteristics of believers.

Although conversions are possible in all of the stages of life cycle, we acknowledge that there is an optimal period for conversion, and that it is a part of psychological maturation and takes place during the period of identity-building. An important factor influencing this is the cognizance of the brevity of the human life, which shakes the existential potential of the human being and incites the process of seeking of the fuller meaning of life. During this process that can be inspired in

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various ways, it seems that the meeting with those that have already undergone the process of conversion is the most important one. The intermediaries that point to the importance of God are members of the family, and each one of them is important during the process of value transmission. Friends and family also play a crucial role. There are innumerable variations of negotiation from the theistic perspective. It is important to be skilful in saying the word that means salvation at the crucial moment. For Protestants, Bible plays an important role because it contains the word of influence.

When the curtain is lifted and the perspective of the new life is opened, believers sense the feeling of being chosen, joy and peace, which is quite contrary to the former temptation. All of a sudden, everything becomes clear and the pieces of the life jigsaw are put together and make the path meaningful. On the theoretical or theological level the teaching exercises philosophical function, on the practical and social level of the community of believers there is a psychological backup without which conversion would not be meaningful because as Serbian folk say “One bird does not constitute spring”. Challenges of the former life become meaningful and overcome. An individual has finally taken control of life’s affairs, he decided upon the direction and implications that are explicit in all aspects of one’s life. All of our interlocutors have chosen a spouse from the line of believers and formed families that are firmed up in their faith and the conversion of the first generation of members has become an event of mythical importance that influences subsequent generations. Characteristics of personality of the first, second and the third generation of converts and the importance of their faith can be researched scientifically, and bearing in mind the fact that Protestantism within our region insists on conversion, I firmly believe that studies of this kind will mushroom in the future.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Bahtijarević, Š (1988) Psychological Structure and the Develoment of Religiosity, Religion and Tolerance, Editorial, Belgrade: ZUNS, pp 98-107 Bull, Malcolm and Lockhart, Keith (1989) Deeking a Sanctury, Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream, San Francisco: Harper & Row. Brija Jovan (1999) Dictionary of Orthodox Theology, Belgrade: Theological Faculty of the Serbian Orthodox Church Burrel David (1997) Creation, in: Colin Cunton (ed) Christian Doctrine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Collier’s Encyclopaedia (1965) Volume 22 of twenty four volumes. The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company. Ćimić Esad (1984) Challenges of Atheisation, Belgrade: Youth Publishers Dictionaire de Theologie Catholique (1924) Paris, VI. Librairie Letouzey et Ane 87.

Dictionaire de Theologie Catholique (1946) Paris- VI Librairie Letouzey et Ane 87. Đorđević Dragoljub (1990) On Religion and Atheism, Niš: Gradina Đorđević Dragoljub (1997) Challenges of Atheism, editorial, Niš: Gradina Đorđević Dragoljub (2007) Atheism, in: Dictionary of Sociology, Belgrade: Zuns Encyclopaedia Britanica (1965) Chicago: London: Toronto Hamilton, Malcolm (2001) The sociology of religion: theoretical and comparative perspectives. 2nd. Ed. London and New York: Routledge Hamilton, Malcolm (2003) Sociology of Religion:theoretical and comparative approach, Belgrade:Clio Jacobs D.R. (1992) Conversion:Encyclopaedia of existing religions, Belgrade: Nolit James, W. (1990) Multitude of Religious Experiences, Zagreb: Naprijed Jukić Jakov (1973) Religion in modern and industrial societies, Split: Church in everyday life Kuburić Zorica (2007a) Theism, in: Dictionary of Sociology, Belgrade: ZUNS

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Kuburić, Zorica (2007b) Conversion, in: Dictionary of Sociology, Belgrade: ZUNS Kuburić Zorica (2008) Religion, family and the young, Novi Sad:CEIR, Belgrade:Čigoja Štampa Kuburić Ratko (2008) Aleksandar Birviš, questions and answers, Religion and Tolerance, number 10, pp 149-156 Malony H.N. (1992) Religious experience, Encyclopaedia of existing religions, Belgrade:Nolit Mayers Grosses Universal Lexikon (1985) Band 14: T-Vd, Bibliographisches Institut Mannheim/Wien/Zurich. Meyers Lexikonverlag.

Marić Špiro (2006) Experience with God, Religion and Tolerance, no. 5. pp 155-175.

Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (1998) London and New York.

James W (1990) Divesity of Religious Experience Zagreb:Naprijed The Glorious Quran (1978) Zagreb: Stvarnost SDA Encyclopaedia (1976) Washington: Review and Herald Publishing Association Sremac Srđan (2007) Phenomenology of Conversion, Novi Sad: CEIR Holy Scripture the Old and the New Testament, Belgrade: British and Foreign Biblical Society Šušnjić Đuro (1991) Religion. 1. The concept, structure and functions, Belgrade: Čigoja Štampa Terek Anikta (2007) Experience with God, Religion and Tolerance, no 7., pp 163-167.

World Survey (1993) Report to Annual Council, Washington DC: General Conference of Seventh Day Adventists. http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/cudwor.htm The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2006).

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Robley E. GEORGE

Socioeconomic Democracy Introduction Whether viewed from a Normative or Positive perspective, and regardless of whether one is obsessed with Individualistic self-interest or afflicted with global welfare concerns, it is increasingly clear that essentially all the psycho-politicosocio-economic systems of the planet are in pathetic disarray.

By no means absurdly implying a universal solution to this planetary problem, it is nevertheless respectfully suggested that Socioeconomic Democracy, a carefully defined and described Transformational Politics, be seriously considered as a contribution to the fundamentally just, democratic and systemically consistent resolution of humanity’s now universally acknowledged, unnecessary and painful predicament.

Socioeconomic Democracy (SeD) is a theoretically consistent and practically implementable socioeconomic system wherein there exist both some form and amount of locally appropriate Universally Guaranteed Personal Income (UGI) and some form and amount of locally appropriate Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth (MAW), with both the lower bound on personal material poverty and the upper bound on personal material wealth set and adjusted democratically by all participants of a democratic society.

The definitive document describing SeD is the book Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System [1]. A historical development of the ideas of SeD, starting in 1968, is presented in [2].

As demonstrated, Socioeconomic Democracy will eliminate or significantly reduce a multitude of serious-to-deadly, yet utterly unnecessary, intimately intertwined societal problems including (but by no means limited to) those familiar ones associated with: automation, computerization and robotization; budget deficits and national debts; bureaucracy; maltreatment of children, present and future; crime and punishment; development, sustainable or otherwise; ecology, environment, limited material resources and unlimited mindless pollution;

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education; the elderly; farcical “free-market” fantasies; the feminine majority; inflation; international conflict; intranational conflict; involuntary employment; involuntary unemployment; labor strife and strikes; sick medical and health care; military metamorphosis; natural disasters; pay justice; planned obsolescence; political participation; poverty; racism; sexism; so-called “offshoring” of jobs and personal/corporate profits; unconscionable empires; unconscious politicians; untamed technologies; and the General Welfare.

Briefly discussed here are the Essential Aspects of SeD (including the four basic forms of Socioeconomic Democracy, “quantitative democracy,” possible numerical variations and practical political approximations), Scientific Justifications for SeD, Economic Incentive and Self-Interest, System Implementation, and a few examples of the Socially Desirable Impact of SeD.

Essential Aspects of Socioeconomic Democracy UGI. With Socioeconomic Democracy, each Participant of the Democratic Society would understand that some form and amount of a democratically determined guaranteed personal income or financial support would always be available. Put another way, society would guarantee each citizen some minimum amount of purchasing power, one way or another.

To be sure, this basic idea dates back at least to antiquity, and has, in recent decades, been increasingly explored and richly developed by numerous individuals, organizations and governments at all levels. The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) [3] and the United States Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) [4] organizations are but two of numerous dedicated and productive groups exploring, advocating and introducing the general concept around the world.

Depending upon available resources and the degree and direction of technological development, this democratically set, socially guaranteed income for all could be sufficient to satisfy the typical individual’s minimum subsistence and/or personal healthy growth requirements. Alternatively, other societies might democratically decide to set the guaranteed amount at a partial subsistence level, for a variety of legitimate reasons usually resulting from particular and timedependent circumstances.

There are, of course, as many names and forms of UGI (ranging at least from Basic Income (BI) to Negative Income Tax (NIT) and including Guaranteed Livable Income (GLI)) as there are reasons to establish some form of UGI, or, for

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that matter, as there are ways proposed to fund different forms of UGI. Indeed, a democratically set UGI could logically be called and considered Guaranteed Sustainable Development for All. An increasingly popular public policy perspective referred to as “Socioeconomic Affirmative Action” is clearly related.

MAW. Further, with Socioeconomic Democracy, all participants of the democratic socioeconomic system would understand that all personal material wealth above the democratically determined maximum allowable amount would, by due process, be transferred out of their ownership and control in a manner specified by the democratically designed and implemented laws of the land, and transferred in accordance with other laws of the land to fund, say, various forms of Sustainable Development for All. Do note that all the wealth above the democratically determined maximum allowable amount, now to be devoted to the sustainable development of all, could be either transferred in some sense directly to a democratically elected government to be deployed as democratically determined, or be dispersed as the present wealth owners desire and think best, satisfying, of course, a few reasonable laws, rules and regulations on the matter.

This latter procedure has many merits, of which one would be that the present wealth holders might in general be expected to more fully appreciate their “earned” opportunity to direct their democratically determined excess wealth toward focusing on specific societal problems that particularly interest and concern them personally. Numerous admirable examples are already appearing.

Perhaps needless to say, the primary benefit of Socioeconomic Democracy to enhance the General Welfare is the result of the economic incentive the democratically set MAW limit creates, and not the amount of wealth periodically trimmed off and donated toward the worthy cause of insuring sustainable development for all. (But everything helps!) Economic Incentive and Self-Interest are discussed below.

Quantitative Democracy. There is a simple procedure by which each individual participant in a democratic society (or each member of a democratic legislative body or committee) can directly vote her or his particular preference for an amount or magnitude of something in question, with the democratically determined, socially or legislatively desired amount unequivocally resulting. As if to emphasize the significance of the discovery, Duncan Black [5] and Economics Nobelist Kenneth Arrow [6] independently and more or less simultaneously established the important yet simple mathematical result and procedure more than a half century ago.

Their now-classic Social Choice contributions have provided the theory which shows that the Median Value of the participants’ (citizens’ or legislators’) individual

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“single-peaked” Personal Preference Distributions is the amount the democratic society or body, as a whole, is “for” -- assuming the minimal operational “one participant, one vote; majority rule” decision-making process. Roughly speaking, this means that the democratically determined amount is such that half the voters want that much or more while the other half want that much or less.

Note that the objective of SeD is not “equality, in and of everything” (whatever that might mean, and neglecting its impossibility of realization), but rather Democratically Determined Bounds on Inequality of Essentials, with the particular democratic society democratically determining the degree of inequality it will tolerate.

Numerical Variations of SeD. Note that any participant in the democratic political process, who might be opposed to any (non-zero) amount of UGI, for any reason, could vote to place the lower bound on UGI at zero. If a majority of voters so voted, it would be the democratic desire of that particular society, at that particular time, to have no UGI. Likewise, anyone who might be opposed to some (finite) limit on allowable personal material wealth, for any reason(s) whatsoever, could and should vote, at election time, to place the upper bound of MAW at infinity. If, for any of a variety of reasons, a majority of the voting public were to prefer and vote to place MAW at infinity, then it would be the democratic desire of that society, at that time, to have no finite upper bound on personal material wealth.

Socioeconomic Democracy is thus seen to embrace and facilitate all four of the generic variations of democratic socioeconomic systems. That is, there can be democratic societies wherein there is a nonzero UGI and a finite MAW (the standard and most effective form of SeD); zero UGI and finite MAW (a system with many merits!); nonzero UGI and infinite MAW (legendary problems: how and how much to finance the UGI, and who says so?); and finally, zero UGI and infinite MAW (similar to the current situation, but at least then democratically approved, with such skewed and problem-producing wealth mal-distribution apparently acceptable). Beyond these four theoretically fundamental variations of Socioeconomic Democracy are, of course, the wide ranges of particular magnitudes of the UGI and MAW levels, both to be democratically determined.

Perhaps needless to observe, the same voting procedure (Quantitative Democracy) can be used to democratically resolve a wide variety of other serious societal questions concerning magnitudes of important societal parameters, arising in many different realms and levels of society. These might include, for example, a socially set upper bound on allowable personal income and/or an upper bound on the allowable ratio of maximum-to-minimum income, or wealth,

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whether in a company, corporation, or country. Thus, many societies, all fundamentally democratic, could nevertheless display their individual democratic differences.

Practical Political Approximations. Numerous approximations to the ideal theoretical democratic socioeconomic system model are also possible. One simple, obvious and meritorious political approximation is characterized by different political parties advocating different amounts for the two crucial socioeconomic boundary parameters, with the “winning” political party or coalition then implementing their particular understanding of the General Will of the democratic society. Another not-unreasonable political approximation to universally guaranteed income might be guaranteed income for all citizens over and/or under certain age limits. A poor but nevertheless “approximation” to a democratically set upper limit on personal wealth would be a democratically set tax on wealth (note, we’re not talking about income here, though many confuse the two).

Striking similarities and two intriguing minor differences between SeD and Zakat, one of the Five Pillars of Islam, that embodies the essence of Islamic Economics, have been indicated and globally discussed. Simply exploring this relationship logically could facilitate considerable international progress [see 1, ch. 7].

Justifications of Socioeconomic Democracy Quite apart from the multitudinous serious individual (but interrelated) societal problems eliminated or abated by Socioeconomic Democracy, there are also the larger scientific, philosophic and humanistic arguments pushing incontestably in the same direction.

Painfully aware of the inadequacy here afforded these comprehensive areas, we simply mention a single supportive work in each. Regarding Psychology, there is Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being [7]; Philosophy, John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (as fairness) [8]; Religion, again what single example to choose other than the universally proclaimed and universally ignored “Golden Rule.”

Regarding Human Rights, is there anything more appropriate than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights expressed on December 10, 1948 by the UN General Assembly? This writer thinks not. While it could do no harm to review all of the Declaration, two Rights are particularly germane to our truncated list of justifications for some form of Socioeconomic Democracy.

“Article 25 (1): Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security

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in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

“Article 25 (2): In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”

Terminating this skeletal section with an A, let us not forget Anthropology and one of its pioneers, Ruth Benedict, mentor to Margaret Mead, herself a pioneer with handsome walking stick. Abraham Maslow and John Honigmann [9] recovered some insightful and predictably unpublished notes of Benedict regarding what she unabashedly referred to as “social engineering.”

“From all comparative material,” Benedict informs us, “the conclusion that emerges is that societies where nonaggression is conspicuous have social orders in which the individual by the same act and at the same time serves his own advantage and that of the group. The problem is one of social engineering and depends upon how large the areas of mutual advantage are in any society.

Nonaggression occurs not because people are unselfish and put social obligations above personal desires but because social arrangements make these two identical.

“I shall need a term for this gamut, a gamut that runs from one pole, where any actor skill that advantages the individual at the same time advantages the group, to the other pole, where every act that advantages the individual is at the expense of others. I shall call this gamut synergy, the old term used in medicine and theology to mean combined action greater than the run of their separate actions.

“I shall speak of cultures with low synergy, where the social structure provides for acts that are mutually opposing and counteractive, and of cultures with high synergy, where it provides for acts that are mutually reinforcing.

“There is no problem about which we need more enlightenment than about concrete ways in which synergy is set up in societies.”

Benedict observed that “anthropologists have not found any atomistic society with high synergy; courses of action in mutual opposition to each other are the order of the day, and the possibilities of people joining each other for common action are minimal. Extremely low synergy in atomistic societies is the commoner rule” Later, Benedict speaks of primitive economic orders, which “fall into two main types”:

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“The first of these I shall call the funnel system. All that the community produces you are to imagine going into the large end of the funnel, which collects everything and channels it toward the richest persons. The collective wealth has only one prime destination, the person who already has valuable possessions.

This system depends upon certain men’s claims to the labor of others, or upon ownership and the right of favored persons to corner certain articles of wealth.

It reaches its highest development where there is interest and where wealth can be used to obtain forced labor.

“The second great pattern of economic orders is one I shall call the syphon system. This is the economy where wealth is constantly channeled away from the point of greatest concentration – from any point of concentration – and spread throughout the community. The syphon system ensures great fluidity of wealth.

“Since everyone is provided for, poverty is not a word to fear, and anxiety, which develops so luxuriantly in funnel societies, is absent to a degree that seems to us incredible. These are preeminently the societies of good will, where murder and suicide are rare or actually unknown. If such societies have periods of great scarcity, all members of the community cooperate to get through these periods as best they can.

“When one is studying aggression in different cultures, therefore, one of the things one looks for is the degree to which economic distribution is set up according to the syphon method or the funnel method.”

Economic Incentive and Self-Interest Consider first the economic incentive created by a democratically set Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth limit. We have observed earlier that, with SeD, all wealth above the democratically set upper bound on personal material wealth could either be given to the government as taxes (to either enhance the General Welfare Fund or be mandated for specific projects and purposes) or be disposed of as the present wealth “owners” so choose (again, satisfying reasonable, democratically established societal restrictions, suggestions and opportunities).

In any case, all rational, self-interested and insatiable (as the current dominant-though-fading neoclassical economic assumption/hypothesis/theory goes), extremely wealthy, and certainly law-abiding, participants of the democratic society with its democratic socioeconomic system, who still desire increased personal material wealth, would be economically motivated, that is, have

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economic incentive, to actively and seriously work to increase the welfare and well-being of the less well-off members of society. Only in this manner can these (still-wealthiest) participants persuade a majority of the citizens/participants of the democratic society to see the wisdom in and democratically vote to raise somewhat the legal upper limit on allowable personal material wealth -everything considered.

There is, in fact, strong economic incentive for those at or near the democratically set upper bound on allowable personal material wealth to be successful in improving the General Welfare. For if the current level of MAW is not producing sufficient improvement in the General Welfare, as democratically decided, there is the possibility and indeed probability that the rest of the similarly self-interested democratic society will democratically decide to reduce the MAW limit even more, in order to enlist even more still-wealthy participants (with their unique and valuable know-how, contacts and “can-do”-ness), and their extra wealth, in the noble task of seriously improving the welfare and well being of all society, humanity and posterity.

The ultimate effect of such economic incentive, as experienced by those at or near the democratically set upper bound on MAW, will be to transform their very real, primitive and originally quite justified (individual survivability) concept of “self-interest” to instead, and in effect, interpret and include larger and larger segments of society and humanity as “self,” insofar as calculations of “self-interest” are concerned. This is because such a perspective will be appealing to that stillfunctioning, primitive, individual-ego-informed self-interest. Put another way, global and higher consciousness will be increasingly appreciated, encouraged and demonstrated with the emerging realization of the very real benefit to personal “self-interest” that results from considerations of inclusive “self-interest.”

Note also that a not-insignificant amount of this effect would be manifest, even if some particular democratic society democratically decided and voted to initially establish the upper limit on allowable personal material wealth (MAW) at, say, twice the amount of wealth presently possessed by the currently Richest of the Rich. Verification of this observation is an amusing exercise.

Another informative and amusing exercise is to consider the effects and ramifications of many different levels of MAW, democratically set in, say, contemporary United States of America -- though the general idea is, of course, applicable everywhere. For example, consider what different situations would obtain in the USA (as well as globally, for that matter) if the personal MAW limit in the USA in 2012 were democratically set at, say, $1tn, $700bn (did you ever

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think you’d get used to thinking in these magnitudes?), $100bn, $50bn (good ol’ Bernie), $10bn, $1bn, $500m, and even $100m (also known as a “Texas Unit”).

A further question might be: Just what does the Gentle Reader think/feel the MAW limit should be in the USA? Still another, as instructive, question is: Just what does the thoughtful reader think/feel the MAW limit ultimately would be, if democratically established in the USA in 2012?

The economic incentives created by various forms of UGI have long been theoretically examined, practically tested and adequately documented. The results are easily available, though anyone not familiar with the subject could conveniently begin with BIEN and USBIG. And, of course, there’s the Alaska Permanent Fund [10].

Certainly, except for Tom Paine [11] and, actually, Thales [see 12], no proposal for some form of UGI has ever yet been seriously linked directly to either democracy or some form of upper bound on allowable personal material wealth.

Hence, in spite of its promise and potential, the present state of this biologically and psychologically very sick planet Earth.

Insights parallel to those regarding the democratically set MAW limit, above, can be obtained by considering implications and ramifications of various possible specific, democratically set UGI amounts and approximations, in the USA and elsewhere, again in 2012. As noted, if one were “totally” against any universally guaranteed income for all, one could/would/should vote to place the UGI at $0/ yr. For different reasons, different arguments could easily be produced to justify consideration of, say, numerical values of personal UGI ranging from $1/yr, $1/mo, $1/d (amount one-sixth of humanity tries to live on), $100/mo, $200/mo (roughly comparable to the varying Alaska Permanent Fund dividend), $10k/yr, $100k/yr, $1m/yr, and, say, $657m/yr (which was the average “earned compensation” of the “top” 20 private equity and hedge fund managers in 2006).

The incentives, economic and otherwise, created by establishing these two crucial economic bounds, i.e., UGI and MAW, democratically, will, among many other desirable developments, significantly encourage and enhance the informed political participation of all citizens in their finally meaningfully democratic society -- here assumed a positive and progressive political development. This, again, is basically because of very real and undeniable self-interest in all of us. After all, the only way to democratically establish the UGI and MAW limits is to participate in the political process that would change the de facto settings from zero and infinity, respectively, to magnitudes more suitable to a sustainable democratic society.

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System Implementation The rational study and objective comparison of alternative future possibilities provide the opportunity to make a contribution to socially desirable evolution.

The serious student of the future must, of course, be willing to seriously consider presently nonexistent situations. Complementing this requirement is the necessity of establishing that the alternatives considered are in fact physically realizable.

In this limited space, it must simply be stated that the necessary implementation aspects of Socioeconomic Democracy are clearly established in [1]. These include Voting procedures, Administrative technicalities, Legal technicalities, Economic analysis and Political considerations. Suffice to say, Socioeconomic Democracy is unquestionably realizable.

Democratic Resolution of Societal Problems As discussed above and described at length in the referenced material, Socioeconomic Democracy would create economic incentive and provide necessary funds to effect significant reduction in an almost surprisingly diverse array of unnecessary yet painful, expensive and lethal individual, societal and global problems. A few of over three dozen are sketched below. Keep in mind that these highly desirable outcomes of reduced societal problems are not simply “Goals for a Better World.” Rather, they are the direct and predictable ramifications of adopting various forms of locally appropriate Socioeconomic Democracy.

Regarding Automation, Computerization and Robotization, “What is to be done?” now that automation is increasingly able to produce almost everything the whole of humanity could possibly need, and a good bit of what humanity could reasonably want, while requiring next to nobody to push the buttons?

The Common Technological Heritage of Humanity has been reinvested time and time again, accruing compound interest over years, decades, generations, centuries and millennia. There is sufficient accrued technological capability to provide a satisfying material and spiritual existence for every member of humanity, and the fact that this is not (yet) realized is the direct and predictable result of the economic incentives created by contemporary sputtering psychopolitico-socio-economic systems.

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The obvious and blatant violation of this intended inheritance and birthright of all humanity to benefit from properly directed science and technology is unconscionable, predictable and soon to be eliminated, democratically.

Crime and Punishment. While there certainly are Many Faces of Crime, it should be immediately clear that SeD is capable of democratically differentiating between Crimes caused by Need and Crimes caused by Greed.

It can even be anticipated that overwhelming majorities of law-abiding, sensitive citizens might coalesce to form a consensus supporting a solution to the far more important and harmful crime problem (crime caused by greed) by throwing all people apprehended and found guilty of crimes caused not by need but by greed into a jail equipped with only such amenities as can be afforded by the prisoner’s forfeited UGI during his (or her) residency in jail. This, as opposed to present-day Country Club Confinement currently reserved for many wealthy and successful corporate criminals and government officials convicted of crimes of greed.

The sheer terror (that good ol’ “economic incentive”) often associated with being fired, laid off, terminated, downsized or outsourced in a global market where there are far more people than meaningful jobs would, of course, no longer be experienced with SeD -- since at least the individual’s subsistence needs would be guaranteed). Hence, far fewer people would become so desperate, distorted and “demented” after being fired (for any of a variety of reasons) as to massacre former employers, fellow employees, innocent bystanders, shoppers in malls, citizens in Post Offices and school children.

Perhaps needless to say, the contemporary “growth” and presently profitable Incarceration Industry (profitably supplying an obvious need), most notable in the USA, and devoted in the USA to attempting to warehouse (certainly not rehabilitate) the highest number and proportion of incarcerated individuals on this planet, could and would be reduced, with surprising billions saved. Indeed, the present cost of one prisoner in jail (food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, supervision, gym equipment, etc.) is far more than society “freely” provides its hard-working, law-abiding, honest and well-intentioned citizens.

The fact that doesn’t “figure” figures, considering contemporary socioeconomic systems and the malignant economic incentives they create.

It is true that the USA Incarceration Industry might be expected to take a “hit” from such a policy, but again, there is the democratically set UGI to provide at least sustenance for all the no-longer-needed Human Warehouse Guards and Human Warehouse Entrepreneurs until they get back on their feet and find another job to contribute to their healthy personal growth and that of the nowdemocratic society.

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International Conflict. The enhancement of societal well being made possible with Socioeconomic Democracy ipso facto provides an effective and positive deterrent to international warfare, here assumed undesirable and to be eliminated. The simultaneous resolution of a large number of these other serious societal problems eliminates at once many causes of -- and perhaps more importantly, many excuses for -- war.

Beyond this, other significant beneficial effects can be anticipated. For example, those participants in the democratic socioeconomic system who are personally at or near the socially set upper bound on allowable personal wealth would no longer have personal economic incentive to promote war or military intimidation, whether involving their own country or other nations. They could no longer gain personal wealth by such action and could well lose it, especially if their society democratically decided to further reduce the allowable personal wealth limit to help finance involvement in any “necessary” hostilities.

Democratically set, governmentally guaranteed personal income for everyone also provides many direct deterrents to warfare. Among other strong effects, it would eliminate any economically “handicapped” class, which, of course, has historically provided warring nations with a convenient pool of combatants. Such guaranteed income also solves the very real and almost always neglected problem of necessary income for all those who presently derive their personal income and wealth from warfare, its threat, preparation, propagation or promotion, either directly or indirectly.

All this reduction in “war” makes available, among other things, needed funds for Sustainable Development for All. Far more importantly, perhaps, it provides a fundamentally different and far healthier Mindset for Mankind.

Yet if some war is absolutely “necessary,” both democratically set MAW and UGI bounds, and the economic incentives they create, would go a long way to insure that all military personnel are provided adequate care (financial, medical, psychological, educational, therapeutic and otherwise) to meet their requirements for attempting to salvage a deservedly respected, dignified and healthy life, both during and after their military service -- as opposed to notuncommon current conditions. The veteran suicide rate, estimated to be about 18 per day in the USA, but certainly a universal phenomenon, is to be expected considering contemporary socioeconomic systems and the economic incentives they create. This same suicide rate could be essentially eliminated, with Socioeconomic Democracy.

Involuntary Employment and Unemployment. Whether rooted in the requirement to “work or be shot” or “work or starve to death,” involuntary employment, if not

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identical with, certainly shades into slavery. A most important characteristic of any socially satisfying economic system -- and one totally ignored by practically all contemporary economic systems and systems theorists -- is therefore the ability to eliminate or substantially reduce involuntary employment. It bears reemphasis; it is here assumed that involuntary employment (or, for that matter, involuntary anything) is undesirable and to be minimized or eliminated throughout society.

Socioeconomic Democracy does well in this regard. A universally available guaranteed income, democratically placed somewhere around subsistence level, would allow most of those presently involuntarily employed to terminate personally unsatisfying and/or socially detrimental employment. Note that the amount of income guaranteed everyone and set democratically would determine just how much involuntary employment could be eliminated, with effectiveness increasing as the socially set UGI level is increased.

On the other side of the wealth spectrum, those near the democratically determined upper limit on allowable personal wealth would be economically encouraged to help make all truly necessary and desirable societal work personally satisfying for, and voluntarily sought by, those who are willing to perform such work. The percentage of the population enlisted in this socially desirable endeavor increases as the level of the democratically set allowable personal wealth limit decreases.

Socioeconomic Democracy would also be an effective safeguard against the problem of involuntary unemployment. Quickly reviewing, if a person is involuntarily unemployed, for any reason and for any duration, that person’s basic needs, democratically determined, would still be satisfied. This necessary minimum income would be available regardless of whether the unemployment was frictional, cyclical, structural or simply theory-impaired. Indeed, this income, guaranteed against the shortcomings of economic theory and theorists, not to forget the onslaught of work-eliminating technology, would eventually allow “unemployment� to become a good thing -- something no current scarcityassuming (actually, scarcity-producing, scarcity-maintaining and scarcity-glorifying) economic system can do. Until that time, those at or near the democratically set maximum allowable personal wealth limit would have considerable monetary motivation to see that acceptable, satisfying, reasonably remunerated and socially beneficial work is made available for all who desire such structured activity.

Natural Disasters. As the experience of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) efforts in the USA to socialize some of the costs and benefits of widespread natural disasters help emphasizes, almost all such efforts have in the past been partially helpful but too often too little and too late. These governmentally

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organized responses to natural disasters have been both too little and too late primarily because society has not yet made an unquestionable commitment to the general welfare of all its citizens.

In the hypothesized just and democratic socioeconomic system, as defined here, all (or at least a majority) of the participants will have made such a commitment.

A balanced budget, reduced societal debt (both public and private) and reduced expenditures on society’s other shrinking problems will make available far more funds and capabilities to maximize beneficial response to, and minimize harmful effects caused by, the predictably continuing sequence of multibillion dollar “unexpected” natural disasters. The peaceful metamorphosis of the military provides enormous potential for further rapid, effective and massive response capability during and after, as well as anticipatory preparation prior to, natural disasters.

Do consider the possibilities. From asteroids and comets slamming into the planet, to hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, blizzards, floods, mud slides, droughts, fires, melting polar ice, rising tides flooding all coastal communities and cities, shifting oceanic currents and all the other impressive natural processes, they will all continue to occur even if humanity does not, by its actions, improve by one iota Gaia’s health and well-being.

On the other hand, and being realistic, rational and responsible, it could be acknowledged that some detrimental effects of human action have already taken place, more are to come, and it is by no means clear just how harmful things really are or will get and just how big a “natural” disaster humanity will really manage to create and personify.

Adding to the natural and man-made disasters, the Wrath of Goddess and God, who are perhaps understandably upset with how humanity has been carrying on lately, it would appear prudent for humanity to quickly create a planetary surplus and society to create a national surplus in anticipation of, and preparation for, all the “natural” disasters to come.

Poverty. The myriad manifestations of the ubiquitous problem of poverty assault our senses daily. It is of moral, ethical and visual interest to eliminate poverty.

But if we are serious about the desire to eliminate poverty, it behooves us to pay appropriate attention to the meaning of the word. From almost unbelievably obliging dictionaries, we are given the following apropos phrases illustrating meanings of the word poverty:

(1) State or condition of having little or no money, goods or means of support, as in broke.

(2) Lack of something specified, as in poverty of intellect.

(3) Deficiency of desirable ingredients or qualities, as in poverty of charity.

(4) Scantiness or insufficiency, as in poverty of the “Safety Net.”

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Beyond these more or less common definitions and interpretations of the word “poverty,” there is the poverty of practically everything else. There is the Poverty of Affluence and the Poverty of Progress. There is the Poverty of Liberalism (18th, 19th and 20th century versions; 21st century version DOA/RIP), the Poverty of Socialism (ditto), and the Poverty of the Welfare State and the Poverty of Mixed(up) Economies. There is the Poverty of Education and the Poverty of the Academic Community. There is the Poverty of the University Economics Departments, that can’t or don’t want to figure out a better economic system to eliminate the poverty they and everybody else daily experience, ignore or guarantee their personal income by “working on.” Certainly Hope, Confidence and Justified Faith appear impoverished. Perhaps most important of all, there is the Poverty of Ideas to solve, once and for all, the Unnecessary Planetary Problem of Poverty.

The terrifying Tsunami of Poverty, engulfing the globe, can and will be ended with Socioeconomic Democracy.

Conclusion While it is apparent that “Standard” Economic “Science”, incrementally pacing back and forth, is increasingly LOST, it is clear that Socioeconomic Democracy will provide the necessary structural paradigm shift of a Kuhnian Revolution [13]. All that is required is Hampden-Turner’s Radical Man [14].

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BIBLIOGRAPHY [1] George, Robley E. Socioeconomic Democracy: An Advanced Socioeconomic System. Westport: Praeger, 2002. (Praeger Studies on the 21st Century.)

[2] George, Robley E. “Bibliography of Socioeconomic Democracy.”

http://www.centersds.com/biblio.htm [3] Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ [4] U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIGN).

http://www.usbig.net/index.php [5] Black, Duncan. The Theory of Committees and Elections. London:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1958.

[6] Arrow, Kenneth. Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd Edn. New York: Wiley, 1963.

[7] Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1968.

[8] Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

[9] Maslow, Abraham H. and Honigmann, John. “Synergy: Some Notes of Ruth Benedict.” American Anthropologist 72, 1970.

[10] Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation. http://www.apfc.org [11] Paine, Thomas. Thomas Paine: Collected Writings. Eric Foner (ed.). New York: Library of America, 1995. (Specifically, Rights of Man, though all of Paine’s writing is at once current, prophetic and empowering.)

[12] Richard, Gilbert S. How Much Do We Deserve? An Inquiry in Distributive Justice. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982.

[13] Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Edn. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970.

[14] Hampden-Turner, Charles. Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development. Cambridge: Schenkman, 1970.

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Giovanni ERCOLANI

Considerations on Warfare Capabilities as a Social Formation Methodology: the “Survival of the Superior Defence” The present article aim to focus on a particular social science methodology developed by Thomas Hojrup, professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).

Prof. Horjup is one of the founding theorists of the Analysis of Life-Modes, which is a social theory which analyses culture inside the framework of the state. In his work the state is understood in its double sovereign efforts – toward the external and toward the interior – and he has elaborated a model of society which binds the process of interpellation to a reformed analysis of the modes of production and the life-modes which are the tide to the society itself.

In his oeuvre “State, Culture and Life-Modes” Horjup takes “war” as a particular social reality and give it a remarkable position and function in the formation of society, for this purpose the author underline the importance of war in the fourth chapter (“Fission theory”) which is going to be the subject of my comments.

“War is a product as well a shaper of culture. Animals do not make war, even if they fight. No less than the market and the law courts, with which it is inextricably intertwined, war is a creative act of civilized man with important consequences for the rest of human culture, which include the festivals of peace.”1 The above quotation from Philip Bobbitt will help us to focus on the two dimensions which participate in the state formation: one domestic, while the other dependent on the international system.

Both dimensions are very well summarized by Thomas Hojrup when he talks about fusion theory (domestic dimension) and fission theory (international-system dimension) applied to society-state formation.

1. Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles – War, Peace, and the Course of History, New York: Anchor Boos, 2003 [2002], p xxxi.

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It is on this particular relation which historically has been constructed between “war-culture-state formation” that the chapter wants to demonstrate that “civil society (…) cannot be understood independently of the state subject of which it is part. It is only in civil society’s own understanding (…) that civil society can be considered as self determined or as an end in itself while the state is a derivative or means (…) This means that the state is not simply a social contract in which individuals ensure themselves against civil war and the violation of their right. The state is culture’s substantial foundation. Without the state subject, no individual and particular subjectivity or social relation can be conceived. (…) Culture is part of the concept of the state.”2 In this “cultural-state-formation” process a corner stone concept is represented by the concept of “recognition” that was introduced by Hegel.

•

•

This “recognition” exercise operates at two levels: At domestic level in which the individual-citizen has to recognize the state and the state has to recognize the individual-citizen as terminal elements of a relationship. This mutual recognizing affair is constructed through the “interpellation process”3; At International level (international system level) in which the mutual recognition is a permanent struggle for recognition then this has become the accepted “rule of the game” among a plurality of state subjects.

As the author says, cultural history contains both the struggle for recognition and interpellation, and this is not a novelty if we read history with the right eyes.

In this interpellation-recognition conflicting-exercise in which is involved the “citizens-state-states” a catalyst element is inserted in this laboratory: war.

This is because war activates a variety of elements which at international and domestic level play a decisive role in this interpellation-recognition process.

“Only the recognized state subject, which possesses the defence capability in the struggle for recognition (during war) to exclude others from its domain of sovereignty, can interpellate its own citizens. (…) Sovereignty is forged in war. State subjects are not pre-existing entities, but wills which are forged and recognised as sovereign in the struggle for recognition. Cultures are forged and selected in this struggle.”4 2. Thomas Hojrup, State, Culture and Life Modes, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, p 160.

3. Louis Althusser, Ideologia Y aparatos ideologicos de Estado, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Vision, 1988, pp. 52-58.

4. Thomas Hojrup, State, Culture and Life Modes, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, pp. 166-167.

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Thus it is here that the theory of war developed by Carl von Clausewitz comes into play in this framework: war is struggle for life and death between wills, each of which attempts to subordinate each other. War is the effort of wills to destroy each other’s plans.

According to the work of Danish philosopher and peace researcher Anders Boserup at one point “Clausewitz’ theory contains the key to a true infinity, i.e. the infinite struggle for recognition which never culminates in some all-encompassing dominant Will, and that resolves the contradictions of the Hegelian state theory.

In his Krieg, Staat und Frieden, Boserup outlines the way in which war theory’s initial sequence of specifications explains why the struggle for recognition is a truly infinite process which will continue to split up into a plurality of states i.e. generate state system”5 It is at this point that Hojrup to sustain his reasoning make use of Clausewitz’s point that the war comprises two forms of struggle: offensive (O) and defensive (D), of which the defensive struggle is stronger (D>O).

In this D-O (defensive-offensive) period of confrontation, the importance of pauses (of peace) are of essential importance, but the D>O (supremacy of defensive on offensive) struggle is only possible if the capabilities of the defending state are well enough to sustain the pauses periods. Having at its disposal more capabilities is equal to benefit of “pauses time”, and then peace time.

Then D>O is possible only if the defending state is really able not only to interpellate his citizens to sustain the state struggle, but even to provide material capabilities to the state itself. In military terminology I can say that as far as the defending state has a strong logistic structure then it is able to live in pausespeace time.

Consequently we can assume that the struggle for recognition among states has is foundation on the defence capability of the states themselves.

“The state, then, is defined in the system of states as a capability for defence. (…) As the defence capability rests upon the state’s ability to generate and renew the internal social structure which provides the defence capability and the will to defence, this structure is conditioned by the concrete conditions of possibility in the state system. The social structure, therefore, are quite varied and defined concretely by the context of the state system.”6 Going back to the art of war7 it is natural that the offensive-attacking part will try to attack the opponent on its weak point, and then reach the “centre of 5. Thomas Hojrup, State, Culture and Life Modes, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, p 169.

6. Thomas Hojrup, State, Culture and Life Modes, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, p 173.

7. We do not have to forget that wars and conflicts are conducted at four levels: political, strategic, theatre and tactical.

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gravity” of the opposing structure. Thus if D>O then the defending state has to defend its own centre of gravity which is not only material but is something else, because if the tactics of the enemy are limited by material factors, the strategy to destroy the adversary centre of gravity are based on ideas and then unlimited.

The centre of gravity then can be seen in the “will” of the state.

According General Sir Rupert Smith “The will to win is the paramount factor in any battle: without the political will and leadership to create and sustain the force and direct it to achieving its objective come what may, no military force can triumph in the face of a more determined opponent. (…) political will is an essential ingredient to success in war. The will to triumph, to carry the risks and bear the costs, to gain the reward of victory, is immense; as Napoleon had it, “The moral is to the physical as three to one.’ (…) capability=means x Way2 x 3 Will.”8 And the British General to sustain his thesis calls in the example of the historical experiences of France and Algeria, and other case studies of the Cold War period.

Therefore on this idea of the “will” as an immaterial capability Hojrup constructs his discourse in which the state’s defence capability requires three elements:

1. given goals; 2. given means; 3. the ability to activate these means purposefully in relation to the goals9.

Consequently using the Aristotelian problematique of polis, oikos, and etikos constructs his domestic structure in which this state defence-will capacity is constructed in combining three levels: 1. “polis-political level” in which ensures the formation of the will to defend the domain of sovereignty when it is challenged; 2. “oikos-economic structure” which not only provide the material capability but the armed forces in charge to defend the city; 3. “etikos-ideological structure” which activate, through the interpellation process, the means to attain the goals.

8. Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force – The Art of War in the Modern World, London: Penguin Books, 2005, pp. 241- 242.

9. Thomas Hojrup, State, Culture and Life Modes, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, p 176.

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This last point is of particular importance because in this “etikos-ideological structure” there is the construction of the citizen self-consciousness (linked to the concept of live-modes). However in this ideological process of consciousness construction I see a strong relation with the concept of “habitus” developed by Pierre Bourdieu in which the “habitus is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways”10, then provides individuals with a sense of how to act and respond in the course of their daily lives.

“There is every reason to think that the factors which are the most influential in the formation of the habitus are transmitted without passing through language and consciousness, but through suggestions inscribed in the most apparently insignificant aspects of the things, situations and practices of everyday life.”11 As a result the capability of a state resides in this capacity of the political level to “interpellate-habitus” (interpellate-accustom) its subjects in order activate them to provide the means (material and immaterial) for the sustainment of the state defence. This is in short the state domestic production of its own defence capability.

“Defence capability is a necessity in that it constitutes the conditions of possibility for all other aspects of culture.”12 I strongly support the above construction and thesis, because we are plenty of historical events which are the results of the international system influencing/ constructing society/states formation.

One clear example can be provided by reading of the oeuvre of the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne13 (“Mohammed and Charlemagne”, and “Economic and Social History of Modern History”) where he clearly explains how the formation of modern Europe is to be found in the defence organised by Charlemagne against the invasion of Islam (international system) and how this was possible thanks to the same domestic scheme we have seen above: political will (+ religion)… interpellation-habitus (+ religion)…life-mode system.

Once Charlemagne was made Emperor by the Pope, the recognition came from the international system of that time.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005, p. 12.

Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005, p. 51.

Thomas Hojrup, State, Culture and Life Modes, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, p 180.

In his famous essay on Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937) he propounded the “Pirenne thesis”’ stressing the continuity of Roman civilization in transalpine Europe after the fall of Rome, arguing real change in Europe came from the rise of Islam, not barbarian invasions His famous summary said, “Without Islam, the Frankish Empire would have probably never existed, and Charlemagne, without Muhammad, would be inconceivable.” That is, he rejected the notion that barbarian invasions in the 4th and 5th centuries caused the collapse of the Roman Empire. Instead the Muslim conquest of north Africa made the Mediterranean a barrier, cutting western Europe off from the east, enabling the Carolingians, especially Charlemagne top create a new, distinctly western form of government.

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Furthermore Hojrup on this state system based on D>O and the consequently mutual defensive capability, divides the state-forms in two groups accordingly their defence capabilities: Martial and Mercurial state forms.

Martial state forms, in which the states are direct means of their own defence, have the form of: • Fortified state; • Tribal state; • Imperial state; • Fragmentary state.

Mercurial State-forms in which the state calls in means to their own defence (based on the use of money): • Mercantilist state form; • Liberalistic state form; • National state-form.

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As a result what is important on the above classification of the states according their way to generate a defence capability is their capacity to produce the political will (through the interpellation-habitus process) inside their own citizens.

This process which works as a centrifugal force (struggle for recognition at international level), and as a centripetal force (domestic interpellation process), finds its explanation in the fission and fusion theories.

In fusion theory “the state emerges as an amalgamation of pre-existing concepts. This theory is an effect of the given properties which emerge when certain object-concepts are put together. In fission theory, states appear in a process of splitting on the global level.”14

These two theories open the path to the concluding analysis in which the capacity of the state to generate a defence capability (based on internal interpellation) and its D>O struggle for recognition at international level (ecosystem) is seen a biological evolutionary theory in which is eradicated the notion of the “survival of the superior defence”.

But is a biological evolutionary theory applied to social science in which cultural-historical perspectives play an important role.

14. Thomas Hojrup, State, Culture and Life Modes, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, p 219

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While Hojrup concludes his theoretical research with the analysis of the mercurial state, Philip Bobbitt, mentioned at the beginning of this paper, says that “in our own era we are witnessing the emergence of the market-state and the shift to that form from the constitutional order of the nation-state that has dominated the twentieth century. (…) The market-state is a constitutional adaptation to the end of the Long War and to the revolutions in computation, communications, and weapons of mass destruction that brought about that end. (…) Such a (market) state depends on the international capital market and, to a lesser degree, on the modern multinational bossiness network to create stability in the world economy, in preference to management by national or transnational political bodies. (…) Like the nation-state, the market-state assess its economic success or failure by its society’s ability to secure more and better goods and services, but in contrast to the nation-state it does not the State as more than a minimal provider or redistributor. Whereas the nation-state justified itself as an instrument to serve the welfare of the people (the nation), the market-state exists to maximize the opportunities enjoyed by all members of society.”15 Of course Bobbitt when he speculates about the emergence of the marketstate, where the market’s norms rule the life of its citizens, he sees the potentiality of the USA. But in his constructed dimension in which cultural and norm of justice indifference, and where men and women are only consumer subjects in the marketplace, and then not producers, he puts too much emphasis on rational human behaviours. But the market-state too is a product. It is the result of an adaptation of a state-form to an international system and I really would like to see if in this market-state the interpellation-habitus process will be based on more philosophical ideals than merely market thinking. For the above I think that the emphasis that Horjup puts on an interpellation-habitus process rooted on lifemodes is more close to the human reality: Man does not live by bread alone.

15. Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles – War, Peace, and the Course of History, New York: Anchor Boos, 2003 [2002], pp. 228-229..

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Fjoralba SATKA

Edi Hila’s Painting: View Under the Mask of Socialist Realism The period of communism in Albania is characterized by total isolation of the country from the European world. Behind the Iron Curtain between East and West Europe, it was drawn another “iron curtain” between Albania and the rest of the socialist countries. The significant fact for Albanian culture at that time was that the appearance of the new method of socialist realism at the end of 1950-s, as a result of the Soviet Union dictatorship1, on the one hand, and Enver Hoxha’s authoritarian governing (1944-1985), on the other hand, served as an unmistakable sign that the art would correspond to the new party ideology2.

The creativeness of art took the heaviest responsibility for the coming changes in the development of the art as socialist one. It was forced to be placed in the service of the iron political ideology personalized by the dictator Enver Hoxha. The Black Plenum of the Albanian Labor Party in 1973 brought the culture to heel. The types of effects caused by the withering criticism at the Plenum, on the one hand, and the decisive blow over the artistic freedom immediately after that, on the other hand, were disastrous for the constructive spirit: convictions of shooting, sentences of 2 to 10 years’ imprisonment, arrests, suspended sentences, deportation and exile in distant villages, sentences of forced labor, destruction of art works, Planting Trees oil on canvas, 1971

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interruption of artistic life and work in solitude, loss of status as an artist, prohibition to practice, reorientation of artists to other professional practices, etc.3 Edi Hila was one of the deported and exiled in a distant village with a sentence of 3-year forced labor for his painting Planting Trees (1971). The story of the picture is indicative of the dictatorial methods of works of art evaluation.

Planting Trees was commissioned by the Parliament, and Edi Hila exposed it at The Retrospective in 1971. Artists had to paint all the nationally significant events, and in this picture Hila re-created planting trees in the mountains by youth.

Firstly, at the discussion about the exhibition, it was liked and praised for its originality, light colors and optimistic impression by the Union of Artists, Central Party Committee and other artists, and bought by the National Gallery of Arts.4 However, later, at the Black Plenum in 1973, the picture was criticized for impressionistic impact; critics emphasized somewhat deformed shapes and figures and non-realistic colored areas. Although Edi Hila is neither a dissident, nor outspoken campaigner against socialist realism and conformity5, the authority acted in its prescribed line: the IV Party Plenum (Black Plenum) was followed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, State Security, the Party Secretary of the Union of Artists6, meeting, criticism, lawsuit, and finally, the poultry farm for rehabilitation through forced agricultural labor.

Two illegal books form Hila’s views on artistic problems in Western European culture.

As a result, the truth of the life behind the official face of the socialist realism becomes the core of his work. All his life, the artist has just wanted to draw and paint what he sees in the real surrounding. Through the years 1970-1989, E. Hila created his painting in shadow7 which was exposed far in 2007, titled The Factory of the Nightmare and Image and in three separate cycles. He chose the picture Play with pierced Play with pierced sacks, 21.5x24 cm, sacks (1975) for the slogan because the labor of aquarelle, 1975 an Albanian peasant was the artist’s pain learned by painful experience as a personal destiny in the poultry farm.

As a whole, Hila’s painting in shadow does not belong to the dissident space of the Albanian art, but elaborate problems taboo which blackened the

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shiny image of the Albanian socialist realism8. Therefore, the collection of small drawings of 20x21 to 37x51cm, made with a pencil, flourishing, watercolor or oil on paper, was hidden from the ruling bodies. At that time, the artist did not want to operate across his individual intentions just to indicate political position and rhetorical application of the specific ideological regulations. However, because of the court sentence, he was obliged to make one picture for each national exhibition, which was regularly not exposed, but had to demonstrate that he works for his rehabilitation.

Edi Hila supports the idea of painting as a code system, reflecting sociocultural time and space9. Ideological and semantic layers of his drawings are based on true life, and from a formal and stylistic point of view, they express the pain of the revelation, and do not domineer as “Hila’s style”. In the core of each painting lays a real concrete conflict and the content is independent from the officially presented material visibility of the external world. In that way, behind the parade mask of the “happy and victorious” socialist society, it appears a parallel reality crippled by the misery and absurdities of the dictatorial period, and shattering the myths of Communism10. These works generate irony, but also concern.

At a formal-structural level, paintings are not abstracts beyond the pictorial information, but deeply and personally experienced and meaningful moments of life. In the limited place of the small dimensions are developed motives with multi-directional potential for conceptual, meaningful and formal elaborations. k Penetrating into the parallel socialist reality, they are looking for their own language to reveal it. Hila encounters with the absurd that in Albania, even after the dictator Enver Hoxha’s death (1985), there is no outlook on peculiar language of art even in theoretical aspect.

Edi Hila’s painting in shadow is not an elaborated and assembled result passed through a sketch, etude and experiment to the final artistic product. Its formal and plastic as well as conceptual and meaningful layers do not demonstrate revolt and do not individualise dissident painting. The artist does not elaborate another method denying the socialist realism, although some authors find out “internal polemic against the aesthetic platform of the socialist realism or against servile intellectuals”11. His figure images and situations are impressive emotionalevaluative reflections of saved in the realism vital facts. In their aesthetics we can detect inwrought “psycho-mythical intuition combining poverty, humanity and somewhat primitive construction in our image”12. On the contrary, if we juxtapose Hila’s painting in shadow to the official socialist art we can clearly discern the characteristics of “dehumanization of art”13 of the second one. www.ijosc.net | International Journal of Science

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The thematic motives of the three cycles are extracted from the living environment where the artist was exiled to work. The pictures Play with pierced sacks (1975), Women sitting on sacks (1975), Women are quarreling (1975), The intellectual and the women(1975), Under the sacks (1975) are moments in the poultry farm re-creating the typology of the Albanian peasant. The images dramatically highlight the differences from the inculcated in the official art typology of the happy, majestic and triumphing socialist man.

This second reality, experienced by the artist as „convicted of heresy against totalitarian religion”14, is the inconvenient truth for the parallel life that the Albanian socialism hid. Meeting the artist with the not depicted life retains its drama in art, existing next to the official ostensible pictures.15 That reminds the relentless struggle in the ancient Greek culture between high tragic art and low comedy art, holding up to ridicule ills of society.

In terms of the content of the drawings, Hila elaborates an absurdity – he himself, the offender according to the socialist law, is condemned to the hell of the poultry farm, where the good socialist peasant works every day. This absurdity Under the Sacks, 43x28.5 cm, aquarelle, 1975 reflects into the formal features of the images which break the iconographic canon adopted. In the pictures Play with pierced sacks, the man with sacks, The intellectual and the women, Women sitting on sacks lines are thrifty, and figures have a bit of cruel forms and slight deformations with caricature soft sound. This leads some authors to seek some connections with the stylistic of French sculptor, painter and master of caricature Honoré Victorin Daumier, known in XIX century as a political and social satirist.16 Analyzing ethical and psychological layers, we can ascertain that the proximity of the imagery in the two authors’ works, belonging to different cultures, has no formal, but internally valid link. Edi Hila’s art is authentic realism unswayed neither by the French one, nor by Daumier personally. Hila has deep emotional and moral grounds, and the formalistic idea about impact of a foreign author sounds superficially.

Hila‘s pictures embody his new relationship as sentenced a hired with the reality behind the official socialist realism mask. The drawn does not exceed the

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truth of the hidden face of life but represents the author’s collision with it and the contradictions engendered. Painting in shadow is evoked by them but it is not a claim for modernity. Relationship with Daumier is in the attitude of mind of both artists, and when thinking is akin there is a prerequisite for transforming ideas into tangible artistic expression marked by some features in common with each other. This suggests that for the cultural convergence between nations in modern civilizations we should not seek an explanation in connecting traces between a creator and follower. Therefore, excerpting Hila’s authentic realism from the French realism influence or from Daumier’s caricatures is internal unreasonable and frivolous formalism.

Hila intrigues with the expressive “reality– inferno” in which imaging system impressively hefty 20-year old girls, with rough male hands pluck hair each other and vulgarly swear (Women are quarreling), as well as we find out some virtues as spiritual purity and authenticity (Under the sacks). If through the heavy mass of the female body we search links with the shape forming elements in artists’ works of other cultures, we would easily find them in Picasso’s peasants or in Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian women who relate to the modern trends in Western European art, and overseas – in Mexican panting of 70–80-s.

Forms in Hila’s work are not mannerism nor influenced, but life itself. Expressive power of their Women are quarreling, 34.5x50 cm, oil on cardboard, 1975 plastic values is author’s emotionally evaluative attitude rather than subjective reaction towards reality, as it is in expressionists. The artist’s drawings are not narrative but their laconic language has deep conceptual content. Expressive exaggerating in the drawing by slightly tapered traits of faces contributes to a thin humor in The Intellectual and the women, Play with pierced sacks. Irony is generated by the contrast between formative elements – pierced sacks and pouring out grains, and semantic elements – the text in the picture Play with pierced sacks: “In the flour-mill. Any grain cannot go in vain”; as well as by the unusual composition solution of a nude woman, embraced by men’s hands at her work place in Work in the Poultry farm (1975), and The man with sacks provokes the imagination by

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inter-penetrating forms.

Fine lines frugal, colored spots and contrasts create affective toned language of the watercolor Play with pierced sacks. From a political point of view, the author puts the question: Who is the peasant class – this one who suffers or “that one” who rejoices with the regime in the image of the new socialist man? Now, we can speculate using it as propaganda “for” or “against”. However, referring to the double life standard as the main vulnerability of the socialist time, nowadays Hila is not demonstrating neither he was a fighter “against”, nor a dissident, but defends his idea “for” unappeasable authentic realism generated by humaneness.

The cycle “The city sets” leads to the ideological problems of the capital Tirana: Preparing for the 1st of May (1978), Drying the Banners (1979), In the City’s stage setting manufactory (1978), Outside the Congress (1977), Area security officer (1970) Symbiosis between form and content emotionally and City’s stage setting manufactory, intellectually provokes and suggests new ideas.

5.5x23 cm, aquarelle, 1978 The “City sets” is a place for propaganda by decorative art, “purgatory” of life as it was called by the artist17. Therefore, the painting “In the City décor” is painted with a sense of humor. Scenes are fragmented and move smoothly into one another. Author’s criticism can be deciphered in the caricature image of the manager with four hands.

Some of Hila’s works have specific biographical value. The composition of Outside the Congress (1977) embodies Hila’s idea about art referred to problems of actual events. It combines a Party Congress with nude figures.

First, as a formative component nudity is unknown in Albanian socialist realism; it is forbidden in the Art Academy educational program. Next, the st Preparing for the 1 of May, 29.2x23.7 cm, artist himself prepared the decoration for the congress but was not invited to present. These collage pencil aquarelle, 1978

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real facts generate the deep contextual sense of revolt in the painting, referring to devaluation of values and temerity to resent against the prohibition of nudity. The pregnant woman (1973) is related to the sentence the author. Ring of thorns, snakes and fire, surrounding his pregnant wife, presents the idea of dangers in life.

Other works typify socialist way of life. The watercolor Preparing for 1 May (1978) Drying the Banners, 31.7x24.7 cm, aquarelle, 1979 reminds the strong organization of the holidays. The ideological messages of the leaders’ portraits, the new socialist heroes’ images and the prevalent red are communist signs which the author provokes with. Drying the Banners (1979) is irony of a real situation before 1 May when an active member of the party ordered the posters to be dried by burning newspapers. Among his works we can find out the synthesized image type of employees at the State Security, for example, The Informant of the neighborhood (1970) whose caricature of the face of a clown emphasizes the idea of hypocrisy as a professional method.

Outside the Congress, 1977 Seeking symbols of released spirit, Hila liberates the form and the color. The watercolor Water orchestra (1987) is an expression of a vital scene of Dionysius joy in what we hear cries instead of romantic melody of the type of “song by the sea”. Summarizing internal dimension can be found in the watercolor White lamb (1970) recreating in the abstract meaningful plan the author’s views about problems of socialist time. The synthetic language of the white and red

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colors represents human inner purity dipped in blood stain. Semiotics of the two colors creates relations and makes their decoding symbolic.

Created in the period of socialist propaganda art, Hila’s painting in shadow has innovative features in its semantic layers. Their major contribution is that they complement the image of the socialist period by depicting unsaid truth behind the official propaganda face of art. From the symbiosis of the concealed life and the parade picture of socialism the author elicits emotions and critical ideas. Behind the happy face of socialist art as endless solemn feast in the honor of victory over life, Hila represents the expertise of its illness. He mythologizes the love for man turning it into a feast of the soul in honor of its sincerity and humanity.

In conclusion, Edi Hila’s paintings are a proof that not only influence of schools and directions in art makes artists from different nationalities become intimate, but primarily internal human nature of creative process which lies deeply at the root of human nature. Although the creators belong to different cultures, people of our civilization achieve nearness because of humanity The pregnant woman, 1973 in art.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY (Endnotes) 1 See Golomstock, I. 1990. Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China, London.

2 See Fagone, V. 1983. “Arte, politika e propaganda”, In: Gli annitrenta. Arte e cultura Italia, Milan: Mazzota; also see Чавдар ПОПОВ, Тоталитарното изкуство. Идеология, организация, практика, 2004. // Popov, Ch. 2004. Totalitarian Art. Ideology, Organization, Practice, St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, Sofia; Griffin, R. 2001. “Fascism an anti-culture and unnatural pairings”, In: Renaissance and Modern Studies, vol. 42, Autumn 2001, pp. 95115.

3 Satka, F. 2011. “Albanian Alternative Artists vs. Official Art under Communism”.

– In: Avatars of Intellectuals under Communism, History of Communism in Europe, Zeta Books, Bucharest, II/ 2011, pp. 73-94.

4 Satka, F. Personal interview with Edi Hila, painter, recorded 2008.

4 “Being against conformism was something natural for me, born with me. I was not opposed by the stubborn of this or that, but it was something true... I did not do anything for reasons of policy.” – Fjoralba SATKA, Personal interview with Edi Hila, painter, recorded 2008.

6 See “Statuti i Lidhjes së shkrimtarëve dhe artistëve”, Në Nëntori, Tirana: Tetor 1957, № 10 // “Status of the Union of Albanian Writers and Artists”, In October, Tirana: Oct. 1957, № 10, p. 204-208.

7 See Satka, F. 2011. “Albanian Alternative Artists vs. Official Art under Communism”. – In: Avatars of Intellectuals under Communism, History of Communism in Europe, Zeta Books, Bucharest, II/ 2011, pp. 73-94; also Satka, F. “Political Power and Ideas on Space and Place Embodied in Albanian Socialist Painting”. 1st Global Conference “Space and Place”, Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom, 14-16 September 2011; Satka, F. 2009. Tendencies in Albanian Painting – 1950-1980, doctoral work, Sofia, pp. 250.

8 See Burini, S. 2005. Realismo socialista e arti figurative: propaganda e construcione del mito, p. 79. In: http>//www.esamizdat.it/burini_termi_art_ eS 2005_(III)_2-3.pdf www.ijosc.net | International Journal of Science

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9 Satka, F. 2010. Personal interview with Edi Hila, painter, recorded 2008; Personal interview with Edi Hila, recorded 18.08.2010; Personal interview with Edi Hila, recorded 07.09.2010.

10 See Busek, E. 1994. “Zwischen Mithos und Moderne. Zum Verhältnis zwischen Kunst und Dictatur”, In: Kunst und Dictatur, Band 1.

11 “All of them are small drawings because I drew the moment, and I had the willingness then to do large compositions.” – Satka, Fjoralba, Personal interview with Edi Hila, painter, recorded 18.08.2010.

12 Paci, Z. 2009. Edi Hila. The Unexposed Works 1970-1989. Kilica Studio, Tirana, Albania.

13 Murati, V. 2007. Edi Hila with unexposed works. – In: http://kolektiviza. wordpress.com/2007/12/05/edi-hila-me-vizatime-tepashfaqura/ 14 See ОРТЕГА-и-ГАСЕТ, Естетически есета. София, 1984. // Ortega-and-Gasset.

1984. Aesthetic essays, Sofia, Bulgaria.

15 Papa, E. 2007. “You have not heard, but art is made also in Tirana”. – In: Koha jonё, 17.12.2007, Tirana, Albania.

16 “There is no single work of art which to show realistic attitude from a formal view point, and to be ideologically and politically targeted against the government. At that time, the system itself was very scared of realism, although they preached it as a basic method of the socialist realism.” – Satka, Fjoralba. Personal interview with Edi Hila, painter, recorded 18.08.2010.

17 See Paci, Z. 2009. Edi Hila. The Unexposed Works 1970-1989. Kilica Studio, Tirana, Albania.

18 “After the poultry farm, I went to the City Decoration which was as Purgatory…

It was as a lobby for me where I had to pass through and then rehabilitate”. – Satka, Fjoralba. Personal interview with Edi Hila, painter, recorded 07.09.2010.

Carneci, M. 1999. Art of the 1980 s in Eastern Europe, Texts on Postmodernism, Bucharest: Paralela 45.

K. ЛЕВИ-СТРОСС, Структурная антропология, Москва, 1983, с. 186 // LevyStross, K. 1983. Structural anthropology, Moscow.

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InĂŞs ROLO AMADO Story telling, Exchange, and Sensorial Observations of the Everyday My particular approach to research is one that sifts through memory and material culture blending notions of anthropology, temporality, globalization, and migration, through the process of story telling. By utilizing an organic method of exchanging stories, I have been able to make deeper connections and encounter threads of common memories and rituals of my own past.

I am engaging with issues of communication through an organic, ordered, but fluid process of exchange, thus finding diverse and flexible ways of interacting and communicating like a thread Madrinha Still that expands and shrinks, connects, reconnects and traces back, ultimately reaching a collective memory archive.

My research enquiry is one based on reflexivity, sensorial knowledge, presence and absence in the form of the object and its recollection(s) through story telling. My contribution to knowledge is not limited to an academic approach / structure, my work addresses, through process and research, the academic framework at both the practical as well as the theoretical level.

Knowledge cannot be limited to a hard-core scientific approach, it has to also rely on other aspects of our humanity, thus our sensorial knowledge, the wisdom that is passed from generation to generation through story telling, embodied memory, and repeated gestures that convey knowledge and meaning, is also a part of our collective history and enlarged knowledge. My work as a researcher, and as an artist, is formed by fragments. These can be seen and read individually, or as a whole, like the collections and recollections of Walter Benjamin and his fragments of the everyday.1 Like Benjamin, I believe that it is important to recover aspects of life 1. David S. Ferries, The Cambridge Companion to Water Benjamin, Cambridge University Press, 2004

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and of lives lived through another time, relating to a past in order to articulate the transitory / fleeting moment that is the present. I bring within my work aspects of participation, collectiveness and socio-political issues under an umbrella of temporality, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, thus crossing and re-crossing borders of engagement, insight and thought.

My method of exchange, in my fieldwork research together with the interpretation of the gathered material, is one toward the production of creativeled art practice. It is a method of personal interpretation of the gathered materials and it is the study of those materials, through a creative and poetical process, which distinguishes the work from the convention of a study in oral history. It is my personal construal of the research that separates my work from narrative, and presents the research as sensorial knowledge.

Thus, collaboration, participation, interdisciplinary, and space/site specificity are, as a norm, present in each of my installation works. They are informative aspects of my art practice and essential to me as the researcher/maker. Through collaboration, engagement and participation I am able to reach a public who might not otherwise have the opportunity to encounter and much less be involved in art.

In all of my work, aspects of social and emotional memory, as well as sensorial embodiment of lived and registered experiences, and recollections, are expressed through words and/or are present in the sensorial object. The objects I choose to use in my work — which I term sensorial — are imprinted with affective remnants; these memory aids act as reminders of other ways of living and as connectors to a past which can be traced throughout generations into history and across cultures. So much of our inherent and fundamental unconscious story is lost to our modern aptitude and knowledge, as we rely more and more on a recorded world of simulation.

In my video piece 1 Kg de Bacalhau (2008-11), the main focus is a pot of resin that metaphorically and poetically resonates of another time when the collection of resin from the pine trees was one of the main factors of survival within small rural communities across Portugal.2 This video piece starts with an image of a pot full of resin; the reflection of the pinewoods is seen on the surface of the resin.

The sound in the video is the fusion of a rumbling sea and of cars passing on the road through the woodland. The sound disturbs the image, which trembles gently with each passage. Counterpoising the painterly quality of this initial sequence, there then appears an elderly woman, in a bare and dark background talking about a rather mundane, real, and concrete subject, comparing the price of 1kg of bacalhau3 with the income from a pot of pine resin, she is referring to a recent past comparing it to today. In this piece there is a dramatic play between opposites; 2. Inês Amado, 1 Kg de Bacalhau, Coimbrão - Leiria, Portugal, 2008-11 3. Bacalhau is a salted and dried cod fish, used after it has been soaking in water for 24 hours

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the beauty of a reflected pinewood upon a pot of resin bathed in sunlight and the stark image of a woman who does convey, through her appearance as well as her words, dramatic and final change. Ultimately the video goes from her face into the face of the cut in the pine tree; marks of wear and tear, indentations of the passage of time present in both.

Historically pinewoods were planted by King Afonso III and expanded by D. Dinis, on an enormous area along the Portuguese West coast in order to stop the sand dunes from continuously encroaching upon and eroding the countryside.

Pinewoods are connected to our history, their wood used to build the ships in which the Portuguese left to discover and colonize – hence the genesis of the maritime empire happens! And in a rather strange and twisted manner connected to the sea once again, when the Spanish Armada arrived in the English seas, their ships were constructed from Portuguese pine. Portugal was ruled by Spain between 1581 and 1640. The two Felipes’ were Felipe II (I to the Portuguese) and Felipe III – ‘The Oppressor’ - to the Portuguese, and ‘The Great’, to the Spanish.4 This period was to the Portuguese a bitter page in their history and the pine forests are unquestionably a marker of that time, carried forward into today. The other issue focussed in the piece relates to bacalhau - salted codfish - a fish that has been part of the staple diet in Portugal for centuries and is integrally connected to a rural way of surviving in winter months. The Portuguese have 365 recipes for cooking bacalhau; this fish, to the Portuguese, is part of the significant background of the ‘authentic’ Portuguese spirit; it is embodied in the mythical collective memory associated with the sea.

The sensory attributions to bacalhau are unique in terms of smell, texture, and taste. The associations and the memories it does bring forth are totally immersed in our unconscious collective. Bacalhau is associated with Christmas Eve, a very simple basic meal with vegetables. Also with festivities and celebrations of all kinds, when it is cooked in a more elaborated and complex manner. This coming together and sharing, of flavour, of smell and visual experience is very particular and carries one back into other times of similar gatherings, connecting past and present.

Seremetakis describes a similar experience when discussing the taking of coffee (Sentrofiá means coffee and/or friendly companion in Greek), by an old man, as an opportunity to halt from his daily activity to think of the weather, news happenings, of the past fused with the present. “There is a perceptual compression of space and time that is encapsulated in the small coffee cup, from which he takes a sip every other minute, and while feeling the sediments on his tongue, he makes his passage through this diversity.”5 4. Alexandre Herculano, História de Portugal, annotations by José Mattoso, Bertrand, 1980-81 5. C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Senses Still Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, University of Chicago Press, Edition 1996 p. 13

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Italo Calvino, in Time and the Hunter, asserts that: “the past disposes of us with blind indifference, and once it has moved those fragments of itself and of us, it doesn’t bother afterward how we spend them. We were only the preparation, the envelope for the encounter of pasts which happens through us but which is already part of another story, the story of the afterward.”6 This story of the afterward, this unknown story is the embryonic seed we have planted and that

Resina Pote

Um Pote

through memory and the repletion of our stories will carry through fragments of our ephemeral humanity.

Nadia Seremetakis’s writes: “A knowledge of the past and the present is also produced in the course of everyday life. It is embedded in places and artefacts that are stratigraphies of personal and social experience. I am proposing that memory is not merely a resource pool of ideas; it has material and sensory coordinates that are part of the living membrane of a city. Memory can be found in the emotional connection to particular spaces that have their own biographies and carry biographies within them; memory can be found embedded and miniaturised in objects that trigger deep emotions and narratives.”7 I find Seremetakis’s reference to ‘stratigraphies’, rather appropriate in the context of my own work. She uses the word to refer to layers of sedimentation and fossilization of organic remains in layers in the strata, however in both her work, and in mine, the word reference is to objects and artefacts emotionally and/or historically connected to people and their accumulated life experience.

6. Italo Calvino, Time and the Hunter, Pan Books Ltd, 1993, p. 84 7. Nadia Seremetakis, The Other City of Silence: Disaster and Petrified Bodies of History, Invited guestobserver, paper presentation. Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival) 2000

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In his book, The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa states: “In rich and invigorating experiences of places, all sensory realms interact and fuse into the memorable image of place.” And he continues “in emotional states, sense stimuli seem to shift from the more refined senses towards the more archaic, from vision down to hearing, touch and smell and from light to shadow.”8 The philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, in his book The Poetics of Space, reinforces this opinion. Whilst arguing that all the words in French that relate to daydreaming - (la rêverie), memory - (la mémoire), are feminine and that this feminine element heightens one’s enjoyment in speaking the words, Bachelard goes on to stress: “All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.”9 It is this sense of the poetic reverie encountered and reassembled through the senses, then carried and embodied in memory that I focus upon both in my practical work and my theoretical research. In many of my installation projects the need to involve the public on more that one level of experiencing the work is present. I strive to achieve this objective by using sensorial objects. Artists have, since the Baroque, continuously challenged the Cartesian perspectival epistemology, and the “uncorrupted intellect/understanding (intellectus),”10 which may depend on the senses, but be based on activation, not creation.

From Turner, who gradually eliminates the picture frame, to Cézanne, who revolutionised painting by making visible how the world touches us, taking it from the 19th into the 20th century, and whose sensorial fruits in his various still-life paintings seem to be three dimensional and one will, if one’s imagination allows, just about smell those amazing apples,11 beautiful cherries,12 and juicy peaches.13 In my work I endeavour, through participation, collaboration, interactivity and by stimulating other senses apart from the optical, (haptic, olfactic and aural), to take the viewer/participant into another realm of feeling and perceiving, by utilizing in most cases, immersive environments where more than one sense is present.

8. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin Architecture and the Senses, Wiley-Academy, John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 2005, pp. 48-9 9. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, Beacon Press, Boston, 1971, p. 6 10. Lex Newman, Descartes’s Rationalist Epistemology, forthcoming in the Blackwell Companion to Rationalism 2002, p. 2 11. Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, 1890 - Collection of Otto Krebs, Holzdorf. Now in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia 12. Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Cherries, 1885-87 - Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, USA 13. Paul Cézanne, Un coin de Table, 1895 The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, formerly collection of Bernhard Koehler, Berlin

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Alma BESIM DEMA

A Critic and Psychoanalytic View over Some Elements of Teaching 1. Introduction Psychoanalytic, an inevitable bench of psychology entered in the academic and everyday world thanks to Freud1, a century ago, when the human society operated based on different characteristics, features and institutions. I would like to say, such biologic necessaries and reasoning.

All the following problematic of this term, essence of studying, human and social conduct, sharply conclusions and debates, spreads since in the process of teaching, involving all his process, in excommunicating the other human sciences, where it can be the origin and can’t dispense them.

I think the teaching all included and all over included, relies on the competences (or the responsible of the qualitative proves) which answer to the “modal devices”2 want, should, know (after the contractual function where the Transmitter, obeys in a way, the Subject for the possibility of an achievement’s enterprise) and in the function of this enterprise, the reciprocity between teacher and pupil, is getting more and more difficult, more and more complicated and almost collapse. The reasons of this situation are not the subject of the topic, but it doesn’t mean this situation doesn’t exist and shouldn’t be touched. This situation may have a subjective character, taking in consideration the kind of personalities of teachers and pupils, but obligatory it has an objective character too.

1. With psychology, we will understand a) a special treatment method used by Frojd to cure category neural illnesses. B) A special technique to study the deeper levels of the brain. C) To describe the knowledge we attribute to this technique, practically it is called the unconsciousness science. The use of the last meaning, we should take as a elongation of the significance, to understand that a studding method, may be in the same time, a cure method, which to be successful it needs to know some vague rapports into the individual mental function.

2. As the Narrative Grammar of Greimass

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For Dewey to monumentalize and improve the society, the teachers should be not only chosen, but even too selective in the determination and the organization of the pupils’ achievements. Their experience should limit as good as possible, because it affects the children’s goals and desires. To effect in their goals is the most important reason.3 Albanian school (with the term let’s mean all the organizer, leading, controlling organisms) for one reason, or for another it is not possible to offer human resources to this kind. This momentous impossibility can be cured, because according to Adler his duty is to educate individuals to be able to work independently during all life, the problems of the community are not considered as something strange, but as problems related directly with them and they work continuously to solve them. 4 In this topic, referring to the classics of the psychology, psychoanalysis, pedagogy and sociology, I am going to face the relationship it exists between these human sciences and the teaching, tightening hard into the application in teaching, area and space in which, I operate.

2. The aim of the topic The aim of the topic will be focused in the psychoanalysis of teaching, its application in the teaching – learning process, the adaptability and the problems we find during its implementation.

To bring the discussion to practical, let us examine three applicative moments of the psychoanalysis in teaching, in all levels, from preschool education to the preparatory to university.

The psychoanalysis applied in the process of growing and education, offers a lot of opportunities for the future, even more than any other area applied and analyzed since now (the pedagogy, the sociology, the psychology, the methodology, etc) even so being a new field may face against a lot of obstacles during the process and the likely results may have equivoque nature. Too many teachers, more enthusiasts than consolidates toward the argument, have tried his application in the school and in the achievements related directly with that, but the ways used to the tendency cannot be right from no one, because before we feel sure in this territory, there is a lot to do. The critics form the annalists of the 3. Dewey. John, The experience and the Education, New York, Macmillan, 1938, pg. 39 – 40.

4. Adler, A. Individual Psychology in the school and the Psychology of Education, Standards and Curricula’s Institute, Tirana, 2005, pg. 10.

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field are concentrated in a point, not because the all involved of the psychoanalysis in children’s problems, is not important e should be avoid, but contrary, because, very much so, due to its importance, needs to give to this problem the right place, the right attention, the right time, because up to today the psychoanalysis hasn’t worked resolutely and intensively with the education. 5 The tools and especially attention limp when they aim to distinguish the kind of teaching from the normal growth. So, is not paid the right attention to the teaching’s interposition into the biological growth process, even so it can be thought we can (effectively we do) illustrate our work with individual psychoanalytic examples, that is to say, everybody from us as teachers, think he\ she interlaces the education and mother-craft process to his \ her pupils everyday and permanently, using the best modern models and methods. Everybody from us knows very well the school after all, is not the first social rapport the child lives, because the social relationship are preceded from the relationships with the mother; are undergone to the familiar paradigm.

Let’s go deeper into the topic The act of teaching to reach to the absorbing process, from the part of the child, sometimes is conceived exaggerated and obstructive for them, regardless from its thirst to study, because he consciously or unconsciously, consider the teaching an unwelcome form of critic, displeased, unattractive.

This fact, I think we face everyday clarify in our eyes the previous ignorance of the child. To leave out this motivated pretermission, we have to do a lot of efforts, to improve this “pretermission”, because the school is an experiment, a trial, it permits us to see (as consequence, observable) the scale of the preparation of the child toward social obligation. This “syndrome” – if I can determine as such, can’t be cured only being qualified teachers, because this kind of ignorance, over all favoured to the child, it is over lived by the child as “love’s wound”, that sometimes is oriented to the darkest complexes.

If it can be verified or ascertained, the child - our pupil – will become a bad pupil, but not only this, he will grow up as such a child;6 will never become 5. Jones, Ernest. What’s the psychoanalysis? Editor Giunti, 2009, Firenze, Italy, pg. 67-68 6. I don’t want to allow myself to express with the definition “bad child \ children”, because this definition doesn’t exist. There aren’t bad or good children. They are simply categorized as intelligent, passive, active or shy children etc., abilities and states temporary or permanent, depended from the psychomotor, psychological and physical biological abilities.

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conscious by the education process. It is not difficult to notice that generally the children of each age are very sensible to everything and ready to raise moral critics for everything. With this concept we can assert, that bigger is the moral “taste” stratified in the childish education, bigger will be the inhibitory effect over the future intelligence of the child.

According to Dewey, the knowledge and the social customs aren’t inert; they are in continuously reformation. It is happening with the raise of the information and people’s recognizance into reciprocal cultural and social achievements. For this, the education is the tool of eternity (conductor) and the improvement (transformation) of the society.

The reason of this result pushes us further to examine the second point.

1. We all – as teachers and educators, - have understood the children are related with the teachers unconsciously, conscious relations e somehow symbiotic, having been before with the parents. We mentioned above the relationship child-mother, where into the nucleon of this relationship we can sort out the probability to ascertain the right measure of the preparation the mother has done for his child to put correct rapports with the others. – When can it realize?

- when she has worked enough to do the child to be interested for himself and in the same time to feel he is part \ member of the community. The mother sometimes evokes in herself all the interest of the child, even sometimes in commode situation, where the child doesn’t learn to do almost nothing. This kind of mother can profit more than the child’s automation. Another kind of child hasn’t profited from the mother the signs of a “social being”, namely to whom miss the characteristics of a social man (in this category, we may mention the orphans, the children who aren’t desired by the parents, stepson’s, stepdaughter’s etc.) The environment in which the child lies, gives to him the context to learn.

It doesn’t happen only for superficial motivations to the authority or to the same causes with it, but it is often dictated from deeper erotic relationships as it can notice to the girls and boys in different periods of their scholar life.

A good teaching is oriented from emotional relations (sentiments) between teachers and pupils. It is known that there exist a lot of cases and feedbacks related with the unconscious eroticism, where those relationships derivate from. The proved relation (a hypothetic, in our occasion) is presented as a mix of a lot of positive and negative tendencies and treating these kinds of conclusions, none of the theories over the education can’t be entire, if it doesn’t take in consideration e it doesn’t focus in these important dates.

Everyone from us, whether with little experiences in the education (active or

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passive, whether as pupils, whether as teachers) can illustrate with concrete examples, and maybe with every day one, everyday attraction, unconscious, concrete a materialized or simply downtrodden side feelings, but whatever they exist, have existed and will exist.

Come back once more to the relationship mother-child, according to Adler, the children of the first type, try to find anyone where to rely, they don’t know or aren’t able to do nothing lonely.7 It’s precisely this kind of children who drop back as such for all life. The above syndromes appear mostly in the scholar age, age in which we can intervene and change their personality. First of all the teacher should inquire and understand the inner of the children exploring the problems in all the directions the psychology shows.

Let’s speak concretely: who from us hasn’t heard saying his \ her love, has been the nursery-governess or teacher of the first class or the teacher (male) of X, Y subject? This last case refers to the higher classes. Who from us (as teachers) hasn’t been astound, when has understood that one of the pupils (students in our case) is attracted by us?

This kind of eroticism, in the puberty’s age, is inevitable, in the cases when the relation teachers – pupils it is strong and with full academic impulses. The border between having a teacher as an idol and the confusion of the emotions, it’s so fragile, quasi – quasi transparent. Let’s not forget to remember that this kind of border is always present between mother and son or between father and daughter.8 This is a bigger reason for the teacher to have a very good effective preparation into psychology.

2. The third point, normally derive as the consequence of the two first. Its aim is to study analytically the subject, the lessons and the chapters, which we teach9 to the others. It is in its centre every direct or indirect stratagem, through which one or more persons affect into the perception, the feelings, emotions, thoughts or the actions of one or more persons, purposely or not; hereupon is the communication in the centre.10 The way of studying, to be able in knowledge or a given subject fluctuates into unusual varieties from one individual to another. It happens not only in 7. Adler, Alfred. Op. Cit. Pg. 13.

8. If you want to read more over the topic, I suggest: Spitz, A. Rene’, The first year of the life of a kid, Editor Giunti, S.p.A, 1962, Florence, Italy, pg. 29-31, Freud. S, Mass psychology and the analyses of I. into Operas, vol. 9, Boringheri, Torino 1977.

9. I would like to use the forms of the lexeme learn, but since the Albanian doesn’t have the power to specify and distinguish learning as a concept attached empirically a subject according to the function and as a concept with the responsibility to represent an object, an act, a situation, a notion and these dates should adapt to the situations. Understood differently the first concept surrounded into the second.

10. Spitz, A. Rene’, Op Cit. Pg. 42.

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the general subjects, as in the example of a smart child in studying the foreign languages and not so smart or intelligent to do maths, but it happens in the details of every subject too (subject details we will understand specific themes or chapters). This kind of learnt, lettered , used varieties, according to Wolfrang Köhler are considered as intellectual qualities or intellectual deficient’s,11 but the psychoanalysis has demonstrated than in some of these cases, is treated to emotional restrictions transformed into sublimation, which depends from the reaction of the child \ children into the unconscious absorbing of the material.

It can be discussed widely, but we should always remember, each part of the conscious argument, is accompanied by the unconscious ideas they may symbolize.

The action of casting (adding) or discounting for a second elementary grade child may become “difficult” even controlled from the insensibility, due to the unconscious combination that may remember to deal the situation – when he \ she count using the fingers – psycho-motor motivated and drilled crashes.

In these cases the mistakes in counting or calculation might consider and understood as curios preferences not fully conscious for some figures and non interest for some others, beginning from the merit these figures symbolize.

(I would like to illustrate the discussion with an example from the elementary level, treating the symbolic parallelism between the figures of the animals and the human qualities or in the secondary level, the Skanberbeg12 figure’s comparison with another films or legendary character or in the high school level, a pupil may bring arguments for a situation or natural phenomena or occurrence from everyday experience.)

During the psychoanalysis process inevitability it happens that in the examination of X ability, when the patient – in our case the pupil – thinks he is deficient, simply he \ she is slacked from this sentiment and from the inter sorrows related unconsciously with him \ her.

Hasn’t it happen to everybody in our everyday experiences, with a pupil which for whom is very difficult to comprehend a chapter or he \ she introduces a lot of difficulty or efficient less in a given period of the academic year, when then, with our help and certainly his \ her desire and will, comes back and restarts, has it? Haven’t we professionally combined biologic growth with the education process?

In fact this trudge, is the first application’s form of psychoanalyses in the teaching.

11. Jones, Ernest. What’s the psychoanalysis? Editor Giunti, 2009, Florence, Italy, pg. 67-68 12. Skenderbeg is Albanian national hero from the XV-th century.

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Such experiences maybe make us to feel sceptics regarding the “intelligence” test, which today is a big fashion, for the simple reason the final result through the “test” are never the same thing in different children. In this point, we face a virgin field of searching, which I am sure will be investigated with the same desire and insistence as the other fields related with the teaching, its process and its building – function elements.

3. Conclusions Over the teaching and learning argument it may say and discus more, having in consideration the education as function and wont. We, as specialists of the field, should attempt to personalize this process every day more.

We, have the great advantage because we see, work with the first treatment material of the discussion every day. Regarding to this important fact we should sharpen more our senses and do not lose the vigilance. The most important point to step on is that the child \ children, during the development, fight unconsciously against life-importance conflicts for his \ her future. The consolation of this affirmation, may have sorted out from the psychoanalytic conclusion, regarding to, all the human personality is whole formed in its bad and good side, and the further stimulus are superficial effects or posses possibilities to system elements, already built.

In the first years of life, the child (children) may pass through a complicated emotional development, which has taken to the human kind 50.000 years of elaboration, which represents its primordial instincts. Even so, the five first years of the child (children) suffice to automate the child’s (children) behaviour. This process continues during the years of the secondary school. Understanding this and more, we as educative and formative should be more tolerant in children’s difficulties and their behaviour. We must demonstrate kindness and lenient with children; love is as necessary for the mental development of the children, as the food for the corporal development is.13 We should always remember this particularly when we have to put away the children from immediate manifestations. More careful we do backtrack – displacement, more spontaneous may develop the child (children) nature and hurtles will the further effects be.

13. E. Jones, Op. Cit.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY - As the Narrative Grammar of Greimass.

- Adler, A. Individual Psychology in the school and the Psychology of Education, Standards and Curricula’s Institute, Tirana, 2005.

- Dewey. John, The experience and the Education, New York, Macmillan, 1938.

- Freud. S, Mass psychology and the analyses of I. into Operas, vol. 9, Boringheri, Torino 1977.

- Jones, Ernest. What’s the psychoanalysis? Editor Giunti, 2009, Firenze, Italy.

- Kohler, Wolfrang, The mentality of Apes, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, London, 1968.

- Spitz, A. Rene’, The first year of the life of a kid, Editor Giunti, S.p.A, Florence, Italy, 1962.

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Giuseppe GAGLIANO

The Social Network, the Alter-globalization Movement, and Counter-forums Introduction An attentive analysis of the ways in which the alter-globalization galaxy enacts its antagonism to the system, especially in regard to national and transnational political, economic and military institutions, reveals both how the alter-globalization movement implements its antagonistic demands above all through social networks and counter-forums and the extent to which it is capable of mobilizing non-homogeneous groups, often by exerting substantial influence on the choices made by political decision-makers on one hand, and capable of implementing vast and widespread disinformation campaigns on the other. Like all technological instruments, also social networks can cut both ways: like two-faced Janus, they can incite terrorist violence or contribute to the consolidation of antagonist ideologies by catalyzing discontent or just as equally consolidate consensus around national and super-national political and/or military institutions. Attempts at censure in today’s democracy would be destined to fail because the web offers such a wide variety of technological solutions that any type of shutdown imposed could be bypassed. Even if the manipulation of information is not only possible but desirable in a context of information warfare between institutions and movements or between national institutions themselves, in fact, the web offers the possibly to provide counterinformation also through film footage and photos taken by cell phones and transmitted via Youtube. As regards the role played by information in the contexts of both sociology and social psychology, the domination of a particular piece of information and the ability to spread it can have such profound effect on civil society that Gen. Sullivan, ex-Chief of General Staff of the US Army, once claimed that information is the equivalent of a victory on the battlefield. On the other hand, as aptly noted by Luther Blisset, theoretician of anti-establishment media

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warfare, it is necessary to act within the mass media communication system and fight the power structure using its own arms. In light of these considerations, the definition of war as “…a struggle of opposing wills between organizations that use any violent or coercive means (armed conflict, cold war, evident and occult coercion) available to impose their own best interests or point of view” provided by Gen. Fabio Mini appears more appropriate than ever. The relevance of this definition depends on the absence of the adjective “military” and the presence of the expression “any struggle” between organizations. This means that the previous limit on the participants in traditional war – opposing nations – disappears and gives way to an opposition between nations and economic or social groups and/or political and other types of organization. In this light, also the definition provided of net war by Arquilla and Ronfeldt is extremely interesting because it amounts to the aggregate of activities conducted for the purpose of disturbing, damaging or modifying what a determined population knows or thinks it knows about itself and its surroundings. In other words, what the antagonists have promoted and continue to promote through the social network may be considered warfare strategy in the Minian sense of the term, and more exactly, in information warfare, and therefore in propaganda and deception or altered, deceitful and/or misleading information. As correctly observed by Capt. Alfonso Montagnose, the Social Media are instruments of mass communication and relation whose utilization takes place in cyberspace using hardware (Internet, cell phones, pc, etc.) and software (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.). Compared to traditional media channels, social media users can interact and overcome geographic limits in real-time. Yet when social networks are used in an asymmetric context of conflict (with a governmental institution or a national or multinational industry one on side with a group of alter-globalization activists on the other, for example), the opposition takes form alternately in psychological warfare (through disinformation and propaganda) and antagonistic mobilization with the expenditure of reduced resources. The political and cultural subjects that have enacted asymmetric-type oppositions can largely be grouped as national subversive groups (Marxist-Leninist groups, anarchical-insurrectionist groups); antagonist movements/extra-parliamentary powers (anti-global, environmental protection, anti-nuclear power groups, xenophobe groups, organized sports hooligans, right-wing extremist groups); non-profit associations/foundations; religious groups, and trade union/political party groups. Appropriately, Capt.

Montagnese mentions the comments of Gen. Francesco Lombardi, Ce.Mi.S.S. Military Sociology Department vice-Director and Head, who emphasizes how the protest movements of the future will still manifest themselves through physical

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conflict, the illegal occupation of public space, demonstrations, and rioting, and as in the past will still have antagonistic ends, but will differ from those of the past in the interaction between the demonstrators themselves, between the demonstrators and the power against them, and between the demonstrators and the world at large.

Strategic warning must certainly be included among the counter-measures to be enacted, and horizon scanning is extremely important because as noted

by Montagnese it permits threat trends to be monitored in the mid and longterm, the orientation of opponent force to be identified, and their evolution to be predicted. Specifically, national security institutes must draft a Social Media Strategy capable of alternating offensive activity through influence, deception, and propaganda with defensive activities like counter-propaganda, counterinterference, and the early warning conducted through the direct or indirect use of Social Media.

The Social Network and alter-globalization In the context of the antagonism of the alter-globalization movements, the independent networks developed by civil society in the wake of Seattle (such as Indymedia, for example) have proven to be fundamentally important in globalizing the antagonism and making it more widespread and efficacious; these activists have made use of independent networks to convey clearly defined ideological content: ecologist, pacifist, anti-militarist, anti-capitalistic. In such regard, the promoters of these networks, whether consciously or unconsciously, have adopted as reference at the levels of both topic and mobilization technique the protest movements of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s in their implementation of both virtual and operative activism. The structure of these networks is naturally horizontal and this affords a greater degree of freedom in the flow of information while precluding every form of hierarchy similar to those of traditional political organizations. At the base of these networks lies the conviction of the existence of a universal right to knowledge and networking and that this right is an essential component in the exercise of the rights of citizenship in the context of participative democracy. It is enough to consider in this regard the networks of hacker movements that trace their roots to the social movements of ‘70s, the cyberpunk/ artistic avant-garde, internationalism, and the self-managed social centers in general. Specifically, during an encounter in Naples in March 2001 against the Global forum, the Italian hacker movement implemented a technique known as

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netstrike designed to jam institutional internet sites. Again in 2001, but this time in Genoa, the independent networks were able to create a media center capable of efficacious counter-information for the purpose of de-legitimizing the work of the law enforcement system. In Italy, the Isola nella rete – the most significant entity inside the independent network is undoubtedly important. Founded as an association in the mid-‘90s with the purpose of placing communication and mobilization tools at the disposal of social movements, through an extensive network of links, the association has constructed an authentic virtual community of the antagonists. It is enough to consider that a dossier entitled “Under Accusation” that documents the violations of individual rights during the Genoa demonstration has been created in the Isole nella rete and that the new media sociologists use the expression controversial political communication to define this new communication vehicle, intending the combination of techniques or repertory of communication actions adopted to de-legitimize national, transnational and/or determined representatives of the same as an expansion of democracy. This new approach in communication has opened representative democracy to alternating direct and indirect criticism of increasingly wider scope.

Another expression employed by mass-media sociologists is “counter-democracy”, which is used to emphasize the increasingly important role played by alterglobalization movements in monitoring and criticizing the institutions that hold political and economy power in blogs, forums, on-line campaigns, and mailing lists as tools that coordinate the activities of different groups. In this sense, Facebook becomes a fundamentally important instrument of counter-information because when it is used in an antagonist context, it can transform the consumption of news articles into a participative and antagonist process at both virtual and physical level. In this regard, the experience of the Popolo viola bears much significance. Using Facebook, it has proven capable of organizing at national level a campaign such as the one entitled No Berlusconi day with great visibility.

Another example of political aggregation with antagonist ends in mind is provided

by Beppe Grillo’s blog, which has now become a new place of meeting, encounter, and political interaction among citizens. This blog succeeds in attracting fairly constantly a considerable participation of around 200,000 visits a day and over 1000 comments on every single posted entry; beyond that, the blog has led to the birth of around 400 local groups in over 200 cities under the name Amici di Beppe Grillo (Friends of Beppe Grillo). The blog’s operative efficacy is demonstrated by the fact that between 2007 and 2008 it proved capable of collecting from a minimum of 350,000 to a maximum of 1,350,000 signatures for a law proposal made at popular demand. At international level, another successful example of

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popular mobilization is certainly the American movement known as MoveOn.org, which even if it cannot be considered unequivocally a part of the alter-globalization movement has, in any case, dealt with similar questions and adopts similar operating methods. In the context of new media sociology, this organization is known as a meta organization, meaning that it is radically decentralized and possesses a number of specific characteristics, including that of consisting of an organizational core of limited dimensions that serves as both facilitator and producer of organizational processes. First of all, it has smaller size than traditional organizations because its nucleus oscillates between 20-30 people; secondly this organization does not have a physical office ands therefore has ho administration costs. In other words, in legal terms, MoveOn.org resembles a cross-linked nonprofit organization. This organization has a mailing list of 5 million members and is currently the most authoritative pressure group on the US political scene at network level. Its significance is demonstrated by its role in a promotional campaign for Obama that raised 88 million dollars in 2008 and provided the future president with 933,000 volunteers. Back on the Italian scene, much of the alter-globalization movement has used freeware software to create its own websites on the basis of precise assumptions: a common struggle against multinationals and their influence, and the establishment of an alternative society to the current one based on the freedom of information and spontaneous selforganization. Above and beyond the purely idealistic motivation, it is evident that the use of freeware gives anti-global movements an undeniable economic advantage. It is no coincidence that during the 2005 World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazilian President Lula committed his nation to both freeware and open-source software. One of the most important characteristics of the antiglobal organizations that use the telematic network is certainly the promotion of alternative information that lets the public participate firsthand in the management of certain aspects of communication, provides additional documentation to sympathizers of determined movements like the peace movement or the antagonistic left. Another extremely important aspect is the need to integrate information with widespread work in the territory by creating, for example, local branches that collect all the most pertinent information on the issues under consideration. Another alternative communication tool is certainly TeleStreet, or in other words, “street television� that is closely linked to the local dimension. In purely technical terms, street television is born in a neighborhood or some other small center of inhabitation. Historically speaking, street tv was born with the 1977 movement and more precisely in the free radio movement. One particularly important event regarding street tv occurred in 2003, the year when numerous

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Italian tv activists promoted the widespread flying of rainbow-colored peace flags in their towns. The public addressed by Italian anti-global movements – prevalently the people who use Internet through websites and mailing lists – is a global and therefore heterogeneous one. The websites Indymedia, ControllArmi and Peacelink are undoubtedly particularly significant in the context of alterglobalization movements. ControllArmi, for example, is nothing but a website that runs by the Rete Italiana per il Disarmo (Italian Disarmament Network) set up in March 2004. This network has proven capable of mobilizing its resources to report the amendments made to Law No. 185 regulating arms exports; in particular, ControllArmi was born precisely to defend Law No. 185 and obtained an impressive and significant success after applying pressure to certain influential representatives of parliamentary institutions. The establishment of ControllArmi arose from the need to exert short-term control over arms sales on one hand and general disarmament in the long-term on the other. The presence of a number of important alter-global movements such as Rete Lilluput, Attac, Arci, Acli, FiomCgil, Fiom-Cisl, Pax Christi, Un ponte per…, and Emergency in the organization is significant. The study of arms and the general disarmament desired in the future can be seen in the organization’s detailed analysis of every aspect of the world of arms, starting from small arms and covering international arms brokers, nuclear arms, depleted uranium, and the economic and political problems linked to the legal and otherwise exportation of arms. Also extremely interesting are the organization’s bonds with Iansa – the global small arms control movement founded in England – and with Safer World set up to monitor and study armaments; equally significant is the pressure exerted on the European Parliament – together with Safer World – in the defense of Law No. 185.

Counter-forums and the alter-globalization movement According to the alter-globalization movements, only diplomats or government representatives who were never publicly elected usually take part in the world’s decision-making summits, but this, on the contrary, reflects a balance of power between nations. In other words, the alter-globalization movements lay claim to a logic of direct democracy that would enable civil society movements to become key players on the international scene. The counter-forums are characterized as unofficial meetings that deal with the same problems as traditional forums but with a deeply critical stance in regard to the choices made by governments and even those of neo-liberal companies on one hand, and on

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the other, the counter-forums utilize operative methods far different from those used by traditional ones (including counter-information, civil disobedience, etc.).

From the historical point of view, counter-forums first came into existence in the ‘60s with the Tribunal against war crimes in Vietnam created in 1967 and then in the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal founded in Algiers in 1976 and instituted in definitive form in 1979. Naturally enough the composition of these tribunals – far from being impartial and unbiased – reflects world views with a strong ideological slant: in favor of the under-developed world, anti-capitalist and anti-militarist.

Another historical root of the counter-forums that Mario Pianta identifies lies in the Peace movements that developed during the ‘80s. Experts on alter-global movements explicitly acknowledge the extent to which experiences in the leftist and ecologist movements of the ‘70s and ‘80s were fundamentally important because a large part of the activists on these fronts continued their activities in alter-globalization movements. As regards the risk posed to national and transnational military institutes, it must be remembered that some of these counter-forums have questioned the need for the existence of NATO and demanded the democratization of the UN, intending by such term the widespread presence of alter-globalization organizations in UN decision-making processes.

From the historical point of view, the first counter-forum undoubtedly took place in Seattle (1999) and was organized alternately by structured and unstructured groups and an articulated organization that succeeded in bringing 60,000 people to the city. The media impact created by the counter-forum was such to raise hopes of a grass-roots globalization to be achieved precisely through such counter-forums. The Davos counter-forum of 2000, the counter-forum held in April in Washington, the one held in May, 2000 in New York called the Millennium Forum with 1200 participants must also be remembered in this sense. The apogee of such counter-forums was certainly the one held in Porto Alegre in January 2000, the fruit of an alliance between the Brazilian Workers’ Party, the trade unions, and the Sem Terra and Attac movements. This event with worldwide media coverage featured the participation of 20,000 activists from every continent and was the launching pad for the counter-forum to the G8 meeting in Genoa held in July, 2001. Naturally enough, one of the reasons for which these counterforums developed is to pose a challenge to the nation-state system and the neoLiberalist economy on the political and economic levels. The strategy pursued by the exponents of these counter-forums was – to use Mario Pianta’s expression – alternately reformist (this approach centers its attention on procedural change and specific political choices and is a strategy developed by the NGOs for the purpose of implementing integration with inter-governmental organizations

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wherever possible), radical alternative (an approach that places existing concentrations of power in serious doubt and indicates new models of collective actions such as new democratic structures as alternatives to neo-Liberalist structures), and lastly the strategy of resistance, which has been particularly developed in the undeveloped world for the purpose of implementing coordinated antagonistic action at national and international level. The strategy pursued so far by institutions – above and beyond the legitimate repression of manifestations of violence – has consisted in enacting surface level modifications in their political plans on one hand and in integration through co-opting whenever possible, on the other. The UN has chosen to accept some of the demands made by civil society and to acknowledge the validity of certain anti-Liberalist choices made by numerous NGOs, permitting these latter in this way to increase the gap between transnational institutions and intensify – for example – the contrast between decisions made by NATO and those made by the UN. At any rate, it is clear that the long-term strategy pursued by the counter-forums is to implement real and therefore structural change in the system. In this sense, it is well worth analyzing certain aspects of the document issued by the Assembly of Young People’s UN in Perugia, Italy, in September 1995. Firstly, it is clear that the alter-global movement wishes to convey all transnational institutions into the United Nations system, and that member nations must abandon thinking in terms of national security as the first step towards real disarmament (and the conversion of national military institutions in an international police force under the authority or command of the United Nations). It also emerges that nations must create an unarmed, nonviolent force in replacement of today’s military, and lastly, that education in peace and human rights must be initiated in public schools and training institutes. The considerations made in the Tavola della pace (The Peace Table) in the Documents of the Assembly of the People’s UN drafted in Perugia between 1995 and 1999 are particularly interesting. First of all, the authors of this document express the need to bring institutions like the World Monetary Fund and the World Bank under the control of the United Nations; they also expound the concept that member nations must abandon thinking in terms of national security once and for all; thirdly – and consequently – the pacifism theorized in the document implies disarmament, the cessation of the international arms trade, the conversion of national military institutions in an international police force under the authority or command of the United Nations, and above all the creation of an unarmed, non-violent force in gradual replacement of today’s military. In light of these proposals, the refusal of the document’s authors to legitimize rightful warfare or interference on humanitarian grounds is clearly evident; on the other hand, the

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authors express the need to internationalize penal law through international courts, to condemn neo-Liberalism, and above all, emphasize the determinant role that must be played by organizations coming from civil society if a positive change is to be made, organizations that play – and can play – a determinant role in the establishment of world peace, a fair economy enhanced by solidarity, the promotion of human rights and democracy. Equally significant is the idea of education that emerges clearly from the document: the authors of the Tavola della pace also emphasize the need to promote education in the principles of world peace, human rights, and non-violence in the curricula of public schools.

These proposals formulated at the Tavola della pace are democratic in nature but a more careful reading – especially one capable of identifying the operative implications of these proposals – clearly reveals their substantially antagonistic nature, and therefore one of radical rupture with the existing order. The proposals that the Tavola della Pace intends to achieve are as follows: first of all the dismantling of international trade organizations and the gaining of access to the nerve centers of transnational power by first gaining credit at the institutional level at UN level, the substitution of existing institutions for the purpose of planning an international policy and economics completely opposed to the one in existence. Secondly, the Tavola della pace aims at the elimination of the existing national and transnational military institutions and their substitution with nonviolent armed force. The unswerving and radical rejection of neo-Liberalism – the third aspect – induces the document’s authors to identify in fair trade and solidarity organizations – such as alternative banks such as the ethical or sustainable banks – the only feasible alternatives capable of dismantling the current commercial organizations founded on the principle of mere capitalistic profit. Lastly, the fourth aspect, the emphasis posed on educating young people in the principles of peace at school and university level, really aims at systematic psychological warfare through widespread disinformation to induce them to reject the legitimacy of military institutions, which are portrayed only as illegitimate and immoral institutions. In short, the program formulated by the Tavola della pace is to every effect a political program – and one wide in scope, to be sure – that aims at taking power – even with the use of non-violent instruments (and therefore rejecting the traditional techniques or military overthrow, terrorism or guerilla warfare) and replacing the existing military and economic institutions with others controlled by delegates from lay and religious organizations of pacifist and alter-globalization origin.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Cap. CC Alfonfo Montagnese, Impatto dei Social media sulla sicurezza nazionale, OSN, 2011 2. Lorenzo Mosca e Christian Vaccari, Nuovi media, nuova politica? Partecipazione e mobilitazione on-line da MoveOn al movimento 5 stelle, Franco Angeli, 2011 3. Mario Pianta, Globalizzazione dal basso. Economia mondiale e movimenti sociali, Il Manifesto Libri, 2001 4. Donatella della Porta e Lorenzo Mosca, Globalizzazione e movimenti sociali, Il Manifesto Libri, 2003 4. Umberto Rapetto-Roberto Di Nunzio, Le nuove guerre, Bur, 2001 5. Francesca Veltri, La rete in movimento. Telematica e protesta globale, Rubbettino, 2005

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Olivera Z MIJUSKOVIC

The Relationship Between Doctor and Patient Medicine draws its roots back to ancient times. There are numerous documentary evidence testifies this, such as the Code Hammuraby and the Hippocratic Oath. It can be the emerging of medicine related exclusively to these documents, because before the period in which there occurred a number of medical school with its own rules for ethical behavior and practice (praxis and ethos).

Let’s start with the ancient traditions of Egypt. Egyptian medicine relies on the knowledge that was known in Mesopotamia, India, Persia and Greece. Art of their medical practices are basically magic-cult of access to modern medicine which rejects a priori. Medicine of ancient Egypt comes alive and develops the socalled temples of healing and medical schools (Sakkara, Sais, Heliopolis, Thebes, Edufu, Alessandria, and Epidaurus). These schools are receiving a large number of students who have been through a library fund, and practical lessons learned medicine. It is interesting to note that these temples-schools called “home life” would be equivalent to today’s name; hospital.

These students have acted according to high moral standards, and the chief priest was also a doctor, a researcher (a scientist of his time) and the servant of his God, whose job was to heal any suffering.

Ancient medicine was reduced to three levels: 1) treatment of words, 2) treatment of substances and 3) treatment with a knife. In the temples there were used all methods except surgery which was a separate issue. Kind of “assistant” doctors were different Gods and natural forces that helped in the road to recovery.

The oldest god of medicine of ancient Egypt was Thot, known also as the lord of wisdom, science and art. With him, came to existence the term of the goddess - the goddess of dwarf Bes; Toeris, in the form of a hippopotamus who was the goddess of fruit; Hackett – frog and the beautiful goddess, Hathor. Isis was a doctor and a magician, while Sechmet that had a lion’s head was considered as

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the protector of the Egyptian surgeon. Together with Ptah and Imhotep, who was a doctor of the Old Empire consisted of “Egyptian triad”. During Ptolemy Dynasty, there was an Egyptian-Greek god, Serapes.

It is presented as a magnificent bearded figure with nilomerom, the symbol for the measure of all things (like Greek philosopher Socrates and his teachings about the measure). In Egypt it is very similar to Osiris, the Greek Zeus, Hades, or even their god of medicine Asklepios. 45 Parishes that had sprung up along the Egyptian state honored the goddess Isis and Serapes, his companion. It included the parts of Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and lasted up to the appearance of Christianity. Serapeion of Alexandria was destroyed during the crusades around the 391st Theophiliusa B.C. In China, Sun Su-Miao (581-673) wrote the book “1000 gold drugs” where it is exposed rules and obligations that physicians begin to resemble the Hippocrates oath. Hippocrates oath could directly affect the Sun Su-Miao’s list, which was in itself a medical tradition of China but entirely different from the European one. This is especially true in the acceptance of traditional forms of treatment such as acupuncture, seeking the causes of disease rather than treatment effect, which is why surgery is less frequent than in the Western world. However, as acupuncture traditional Eastern medical disciplines are applied today in all parts of the world. In the Middle Ages, Gothic law was dictating the physician’s fee in case of successful treatment. Otherwise, according to the provisions of the Code Hammuraby for unsuccessful treatment, penalties were provided, such as mutilation and capital punishment.

European tradition, to developments in medicine, especially after World War II records the number of declarations governing these issues and obligations.

“Code Hammuraby” dates back from the 2100 B. C. in Babylon. In this Code are incorporated explicitly the price lists of specific surgical interventions, but there is legislation in case of unsuccessful treatment of the patient. There is a different matter if the tariffs were applicable to slaves or free men. For example, if a slave was not successfully cured, it was paid in cash compensation, while in the case of free man there was a drastic punishment - the doctor is convicted of mutilation or cutting off their hands. Even more striking example can be found in the case of blindness or death of a patient due to medical errors the sanction was the death penalty!

The precedent was only in the event that a doctor from the competent authorities of the time, requested permission for the surgery.

Hippocratic Oath as a written document that is based in the ancient medical traditions and modern bioethical era had great difficulties in its long history of

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2000 years. It was long forgotten, but it was rebuilt in the sixteenth century from Arabs. The Hippocratic Oath can be taken as evidence of conditional early development of traditional medical ethics and medical law. It is a fact that was not favorably received by other schools of traditional medicine. There was not any particular thrill for that, among doctors of “European medical schools.” The Hippocratic Oath is going through problems of historical and social character as expressed for example in the disunity of Europe and its division into numerous small states, which stretched from the nineteenth century. Such an atmosphere made it difficult for the ruling general acceptance of Hippocrates principles as rules for behavior in medical practice. The twentieth century brought with it a different climate of thought and the principles of the Hippocratic Oath to become in a very real sense the basis of medical ethics. This acceptance coincided with the development of modern scientific medicine, and later paved the way for the development of “new medical ethics” and bioethics.

The emergence of new technologies and scientific leap during the half of the twentieth century has brought the need for a new way of regulations, ethics and praxis medics. Hippocrates tradition with its ethical principles no longer was able to answer all the questions that the new era brought with it. Here is the first line of thought on issues of artificial insemination, euthanasia, distanasia, genetic engineering and cloning, problem issues which did not exist in ancient times.

The sudden jump of science as if it were to materialize learning anthropologist and philosopher Johann Hujcinge, the playing man-homo ludens. The man is without hesitation peered into the sphere of nature and sought to become the master of life and death. The twentieth century was marked by the fear of such a mode of relating to life and ecology, and there is a number of radical critiques of fantasy on the management of nature. It was felt that this directly leads to decadence and self-destruction. Open bioethical issues have become the place of the collision of traditional medical ethics and bioethics, and new medical ethics.

Hippocratic Oath, with all its provisions and principles of the modern version is amended in the Geneva Declaration. This is especially true of the relationship between doctor and patient, as modified. Traditional paternalism later transformed into a partnership. The penetration of liberalism and the formation of the civil rights movement, and supported by Kant’s doctrine of the autonomy of the person the patient receives all rights to participate in their treatment in the new era.

This means that it is an autonomous entity able to judge about their health, treatment modalities, and as an equal partner with its responsibility to participate as compared with the doctor is a person who owing to his expertise takes care of his own health.

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Medical workers must respect the deontological (moral and legal) principles in their professional praxis. Any deviation from it results in the legal and moral responsibility to the ethical committees and courts of honor medical associations and chambers. This form of sanction due to institutionalized deviations from proper operation is realized by the expulsion from professional organizations and revocation of all rights to practice his profession. Responding courts consider further violation of the regulations. For example, a physician or other health worker can bear property liability. This is because - vitium artis or improper intervention due to ignorance, then due to violation of principles of humanity that are unique to medicine and as a result of negligence. The doctor may or may not be held responsible for unsuccessful cure in certain instances of the most complicated diseases, and if the pursuit has acted lege artis being so in accordance with their medical profession. Any violation of the criminal law entails criminal liability, and this is all due to the denial of assistance, performing illegal abortions, revealing medical secrets, sexual assault and abuse, issuing false certificates and similar situations.

In old medical tradition there was not any specific mention about the ethics of the patient, because it meant paternalism in which the patient as a moral entity did not exist as such, literally. A certain type of problem situations could be reflected in the patient’s dissatisfaction with the work of the doctors who approach the treatment, or if the doctor broke some basic ethical principles.

Only in modern times when the idea of ​​liberalism gained strength, when the individualization of the individual receiving its manifest form through various movements for human rights and freedom, the patient becomes treated as a person and the holder of moral rights and obligations in relation to the doctor - patient relationship in modern ethical medical practice.

This process of individualization of moral patient has led to two main problems - 1) understanding the principles of beneficence in which largely relies Hippocrates medical tradition and 2). Another problem was the patient’s consent to certain therapies and treatment methods.

The first problem (1) is due to the so-called collision with Hippocrates medical tradition and modern medical ethics, or former paternalism and free will of the patient in the bioethical era.

Hippocrates paternalization meant that the doctor in accordance with their knowledge in the field of medicine and therefore has a moral right to make decisions about the health of the patient. In modern medical practice and the introduction of moral subjectivity of the patient in making free decisions, there is a conflict of these two types of approach to solving the health status of the patient.

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For these reasons, very important is to create a high degree of trust and patient-doctor bond, then the patient’s ethos fully appreciate the meaning that when the patient is unable to make a sober decision due to illness, to act as they thought it would be decided on in a healthy condition. Therefore, it is possible to happen in that situation some technical details of therapy in conflict with ethical principles. Because of this Hippocrates principle of beneficence in modern times gets a slight tone of controversy. The second problem (2) occurs in the patient’s consent to certain forms of treatment, therapy, and the like. When a patient builds up a stable relationship of trust with the doctor, and he gives his tacit consent to a request for specific methods and procedures which will be based on their knowledge in applied medicine.

However, this should not be taken explicitly because it is necessary that the patient be informed of the progress and success of his treatment, which comply with modern bioethical practice. Deviation of information can only be pronounced in the case of method of diagnosis to the patient because of his psychological condition as a result of such specific situations, not because of the contents of a diagnosis that the patient will be presented with. This problem is particularly addressed by the Italian National Bioethics Committee (Comitato Nazionale per la Bioethics).

A wave of new age has brought changes not only in economics, culture, politics, science, but also in the field of medical science. For this reason Hippocrates ethical principles have lost their capacity to address fundamental ethical dilemma of the doctors of a new era in which continuous growth of new technologies, methods, and research follows the growth of medicine as a science. In particular, the position of doctors and other medical workers become specific, because the patient became equal moral entity that participates in decisions regarding his health.

As the Hippocrates ethic has become narrowed to resolve these dilemmas, new medical ethics have been a logical consequence.

So the American bioethicists (Baushamp, Cilders, etc.) tended towards the adoption of basic principles of bioethics that would be the guiding principles of medical ethics, under the auspices of a mental orientation known as principlism.

Only principlism name, speaks of a clear intention to consolidate the system of all the principles of medical ethics which would regulate the field of action of medical workers themselves and their ethos, in order to improve the relationship patients and physicians, as well as to help solve the dilemmas that can arise when it is necessary to make the right decision. The principles of principlism do not exclude the principles of other schools of thought such as, for example principles of physical life, liberty and the principle of responsibilities, etc.

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However, principlism is known for the formulation of the medical ethos that is expressed by four principles: 1) the principle of respect for the other person, principle of autonomy, 2) the principle of beneficence, 3) the principle of safety, 4) the principle of fairness.

The first principle is particularly important; (1)the principle of personal autonomy as a patient in respect with the equal moral individual or entity whose consent or non-consent shall free the doctor to apply some form of therapy.

Also, in this respect is also important that the doctor is honest with the patient, informs him about his health and the success of treatment. If the patient is not able to decide, and that is when the patient is in a coma or is difficult due to a mentally ill person, the doctor has to decide on an appropriate treatment of a method that would go to benefit the patient and his health. The second principle (2), the principle of beneficence, and the third (3) safety support the aspect of the reduction of old principle “Primum non nocere,” or the principle of “Do no harm”, which expects doctors’ duty of doing good to the patient, but only its abstract desire for a good person who is entrusted to him his health, but would expect this behavior in practice. The fourth principle (4), the principle of justice, is also a part of this general Hippocrates principle which requires equal rights for all to health care, in the redistribution of funds and the like.

However, often the medical praxis proved that this principle can easily come into conflict. It was therefore necessary to introduce some new principles that would substantiate the medical ethos, such as 1) the principle of lesser evil and 2) the principle of double effect or indirect desires. First (1) applies in situations where it is necessary to choose between two complex situation, but when one is the lesser evil.

The choice may fall on the choice between moral and physical evil. In any case, the physician shall respect the autonomy of the patient and pay attention to his moral, religious, ethical, philosophical and other beliefs. Some patients prefer to suffer pain than to receive therapy, analgesics, and everything to preserve mental lucidity. It is the duty of the doctor to comply with that decision. However, this example carries a certain veil of controversy because the question is whether it is possible to hold lucidity when suffering from pain, or whether this is in line with basic medical and bioethical principle that no patient will suffer pain. In these situations, it is a great principle of double effect, which the doctor makes a decision when faced with a dilemma of this kind.

Doctor-patient relationship is modified by a specific and different social and historical epoch. In other words, there is a long way from Hippocrates paternalistic relationship to the contractual relationship is an integral part of the

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new medical-ethical practices. It has long been considered as the right one, only the traditional paternalistic approach towards patients, because the patient has not been regarded as the bearer of moral duty in this instance, responsibility was poured over the side of the doctor, who has a valid medical knowledge and support in their education.

Because of modern scientific technology and the increasing advances in medicine, this kind of relationship has grown into a contractual or legal relationship, which implies equality between doctor and patient in decisionmaking and includes a legal and moral responsibility for both. However, this relationship is problematically reflected in the fact that in some way physicians’ authority can be compromised, because when patient decides by himself, the doctor gives up his powers.

However, bioethics and medicine as a science, tries hard to keep all the knowledge as a value-neutral. This means that the physician is expected to have a relationship with patients that would be value-neutral, as it transits from paternalistic to partnership in any way that jeopardizes the doctor’s moral character.

There are three general types of relationships that must be considered in the doctor-patient relationship. 1) One-man, a relation of reciprocity, (patient and doctor to treat each other as moral persons; 2) citizen-citizen relations of reciprocity, (doctor and patient are equal before the civil law; 3) the doctorpatient relationship of reciprocity (the doctor prescribes a certain treatment to the patient).

The first type of relationship (1) represents a general-ethical principle.

This means that all moral action must apply to everyone equally. If we want to determine the general moral principles it is necessary to determine the key moment of reciprocity between man to man.

If we accept a value of 43 as the highest moral value, then it must apply to all relationships between people. The second relation (2) is somewhat similar to the first relation, and means that every seemingly unequal treatment of citizens has the purpose of equality, reciprocity, such as people with some form of disability, where they are privileged in some cases and in others are complete equal with us. The third relationship (3) is the most specific and is completely asymmetrical, that is reminiscent of the relationship between parent and child. This attitude of “being a doctor” and “be patient” is one sided. Otherwise, the medical profession would have lost its meaning entirely. If all of the above may be boiled down to only this third item (3) then it would have been an incomplete relationship with lots of open problems. The first relationship (1) refers to some ethical aspects of human relationships, while the second (2) the basic relationship.

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Every doctor is not sure how and when to give priority to any one of these relationships, that is the dilemma of how to solve an open problem questions that arise in praxis. Here the question is whether one can learn to be a good doctor, like the Socrates questioning whether there is any lesson to become a good person.

Here is another obvious dilemma that arises from this – are you confident that the good man can be a good doctor, or whether the good doctor is a good person? These three relationships cannot be reduced to one another. However, the specific of doctor-patient relationship is in fact standardized by certain laws that restrict the space of action and through these so-called “red lines” which must not be exceeded.

Before defining these specific examples, let us provide a definition of the patient and health and answer questions - “Who is the patient?” and “What is health?

Tradition dictates to us the different terms which give a conceptual definition of the patient. Literally, the patient is a person who is suffering from something (lat.

Homo patiens). This term corresponds to the patient of the best traditional one.

You must ask the question-”What concerns the patient’s suffering?” Hippocrates tradition believes that suffering is related primarily to the body. It is believed that medicine is more successful in the treatment of mental suffering body.

In the eighteenth century there was a medicine and medicine corporis mentis, or philosophy.

Kant’s 1778th The Rector’s speech addressed it as De corporis quae philosophorum medicine. He says in this speech it is the duty of every physician and health professional to help through patient’s intellect to cure the sick body, and that the task of philosophers to help the sick body concerned with the intellect.

Kant proves that the soul is a substance and is separable from the body.

Modern medicine is a continuation of the Kant position and believes that we should not divide the soul and body in terms of health and health is complex. Even Aristotle spoke of sickness and health, in the discussions of the ethical virtues.

Medicine belongs to the applied sciences and its knowledge weighs only to the objective value of neutral truth. When further examined, the relationship of the patient and the physician should consider the two great global changes that have affected this relationship, firstly to the technical and economic change in modern medicine and secondly to the value of pluralism of views. Technical and economic changes have led to the use of new medical technologies that 50 years ago were considered a domain of science fiction.

This technological leap has led to an improved diagnosis of disease, but the anonymity of medicine still requires that only a doctor can give diagnoses and

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stand behind it. This situation can lead to confusion for the patient. This problem was attempted to be solved by introducing preventive counseling for healthy adults, or family doctors who are dedicated exclusively to one type of patient.

If the pursuit of any doctor had more specialization, it is considered to be a neglected area due to physical inability to perform several functions.

Furthermore, technical progress has made expanding health insurance to nearly all classes of society, which entails a large number of the costs of maintaining a country’s health system.

The solution for this is the implementation of the contractual relationship between doctor and patient, because in this way, the doctor provides the arbitrary interpretation of its responsibilities, and the patient is aware of the limitations of that. This limit is clearly appointed in the contract.

Pluralism is a value posing as an important factor, because the leading political liberalism as a philosophical doctrine involves not only freedom of opinion but also the fundamental ethical values, and this also applies to the relationship between doctor and patient.

Liberalism in medicine is reflected in the informed patient, which entails responsibility for his own health, for participating in the important and vital decision-making.

Ethical foundation of medical action entails three basic principles on which Hippocrates ethics rests; namely 1) help the patient, 2) accountability, 3) discretion.

Due to the growth of modern science, and with the modernization of medicine, these three principles must be supported with two principles: 4) autonomy of the patient and 5) mutual honesty.

The autonomy of the patient (4) is represented in those areas where health education is at the university level or where the patient is well informed about medicine in general. The autonomy of the patient occurs when the patient is sufficiently informed, or as they say in the West - informed consent. The contractual relationship is not quite ideal and carries some degree of problems because on the one hand it protects the patient and devalues the doctor and the other can lead to the spread of defensive medicine. The second principle (2), or honesty, refers to the mutual duty of doctors and patients. This honesty is primarily related to respect for patient autonomy.

This is particularly true in the U.S. and Western European countries where honesty is an important factor in the doctor-patient relationship and is considered highly moral because everyone has the right to the last days, months or years of their life the way they want, and with dignity. A crucial role is played by the economic factor too, as is often the treatment of hopeless cases with high costs, and the life of such patients that continue the therapy is often not satisfactory.

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Suppression of the truth about health is possible only in the cases of the interests of the patient (child, severely retarded person or mentally unstable person). Paternalistic model (1) is the fundamental ratio and it can never be abolished. This relation contains paternalistic (traditional) predisposition.

An example of this model in medicine is when pediatricians, doctors and nurses who care for people who are in some forms of comatose condition, or when the patient is not able to make sober decisions. This model does not treat the patient as a moral entity and all moral responsibility is transferred exclusively to physicians.

This model is obsolete in the developed and rich countries. In developing societies, doctors and patients are expected to behave in a completely patronizing and viewed as an absolute authority.

The contractual model (2) the doctor-patient relationship is of great importance in some areas such as diagnostic decisions, laboratory analysis, radiation therapy, endoscopy, anesthesiology, surgery, etc. An example of the contractual relationship is when the symptoms of the patient are discussed with the doctor, with the intention of reaching some results and solving the health problem. It remains at the doctor’s hand to reach decisions about how and what measures will be taken.

Moral and ethical framework of this relationship is the contract that protects equal rights between patient and physician and is embodied in the rule: “Do to others as you would like them to do to you� The partnership in the principle (3) is very important when it comes to specific chronic diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney dialysis, etc. The experience has proven that the treatment of these diseases is very important that the physician and patient must mutually cooperate in treatment. In this case the doctor is the expert who gives advice, and the patient is an active collaborator with whom to share responsibility. Also, this relationship is particularly significant in the preventive medicine and psychotherapy.

The new medical ethics is evidence of transition from the classical, Hippocrates Code to the partnership model. The doctor is the one to whom the health of the patient is very important. However, the classical Hippocrates model is not bad and should not disappear.

It is due to new technological and weather conditions of a modified living changes should be reflected in some situations, even in bioethics. In this specific relationship between physician and patient there are three different notions of privacy: 1) physical privacy, 2) information privacy, 3) privacy when making decisions. The term policy can be viewed in terms of integrity, which includes in itself all these three segments.

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Confidentiality is akin to the notion of privacy, and some authors associate it with the narrower concept of privileged communication. The main goal and task of confidentiality is to find its base primarily in ethics and medical ethics from which stem the professional ethics, legal rules and regulations. Another very important issue is the obligation to keep medical secrets, which in itself means absolutely all health workers. This is important primarily because the doctor-patient relationship is based on trust. Some members of the scientific community do not fully agree with this because it believes that it is dependent only on one side.

So, a doctor may accidentally practice violations of their moral code even though the patient has absolute confidence in him, and without suffering major consequences. It is important for physicians to have clinical independence, which was shaken by the introduction of new technologies and more detailed search of patients involving a number of experts.

An important moment for the doctor is his right to conscientious objection because of his beliefs (religious, political, philosophical, moral, ethical, etc.) is required to fulfill a responsibility to the patient, because it is guaranteed by positive law. In clinical praxis the most common cases are examples of the rejection performance of abortions. It is up to the doctor to decide whether to use the legal right or not. Under these lenses should be seen the issue of concepts of modern medical practice and the development of bioethics as artificial insemination, euthanasia and distanasia.

Also problematic is the case when the physician has to take care of a patient “a pregnant woman� who abuses alcohol or other drug resources thus harming the health of the fetus. The doctor has no right to force such an impact on the patient because every patient has autonomy, but is obliged to provide the method of persuasion and the health of mother and fetus. Other major issues and moral dilemmas are related to the forecasts about future life of a newborn, though new technology has given numerous diagnostic possibilities. While making decisions about the treatment of such babies, all health care workers and parents have the right to appeal to their religious, cultural, moral and other beliefs. Conflict of opinions may arise here, but we should bear in mind that medical ethics requires the benefit of each patient and is required by consensus of all parties around the course of treatment.

Another sensitive branch of medicine is palliative medicine, which must ensure to provide better conditions for their patients and their family members, until the last days spent in the best possible way.

Medical ethics is an essential regulator covering all fields of medical science and praxis. Paternalism, as a legacy of traditional medicine, is essentially a model

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of praxis which would have been unable to solve the basic problem questions of medicine. Main problems stood with the concept of personal autonomy of the patient.

The doctor was considered as an undisputed authority with proper medical knowledge and experience as opposed to patients who are in a subordinate position.

The role of the inviolability that the doctors had in ancient Egypt made them not only physicians, but scientists also. The recent period that met with all the achievements of atomic science, the science of genome technology has brought with it a question of ethics and some forms of treatment and relationship with the patient.

The modernization of everyday life could no longer be reflected in an authoritarian impulse as it was pronounced in ancient times through the family authority, emperors and pharaohs, but the field has found its authority in liberal movements for autonomy for man as an individual. In such an environment, the patient could no longer be a mere homo patiens, but persons with the right to decide about their own lives and health. The three basic models of doctor-patient relationships are object to the spiritual and philosophical climate in which they are developed. The “ancient” doctor from Egypt is no longer able to serve the modern age where all the diseases of old times have become daily routine of medicine. Paternalism becomes updated with new principles of partnership and relationship. Moral task of the physician prevails and becomes the patient’s side.

This is a scientific contribution to the modernization of the time in which man becomes a ruler of the nature and searching for the so-called formula of life and death. Although advances in the science have been made, they have remained controversial. It is therefore of great importance to develop bioethics problem that approaches the patient’s personality, which is clearly as the period when Kant needed medicine for the mind and medicine for the body.

Therefore, the patient is not merely a body, as considered by the doctors of the infamous Third Reich, but a person with all rights, able to decide on who to be treated from, whether it will accept certain types of treatment and the like. The patient is a person with any moral rights and responsibility for his own life.

A doctor, in modern medical practice, is a partner in solving problems and finding solutions with their medical knowledge.

The autonomous theory as a carrier of the European modern medicine is set against the Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism, which is formed around a mere pragmatic attitude of Peter Singer, who in some of his remarks denied the autonomy of the human personality as being controversial.

Bioethics is an upgrade of the traditional ethical principles of medicine and the modern attempt to control the problems due to obvious historical and other

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changes in modern times. Bioethics, as a value system, is the upgrade system of values ​​of Hippocrates principles without which it would have been not possible for today’s open debate concerning many open questions of bioethics.

Medicine is the specific field of human praxis and is the most humane call from the foundation of the human race. However, as such, through different time periods and cultures in which it developed, was not able to regulate borders, duties, accomplishments and problem questions. It is quite logical as it is a philosophy, as the second highest achievement of spiritual civilization came to rescue it and tried to light the way to the right action and respect for basic ethical models of behavior and action.

In ancient times there were greatest thinkers, physicians and philosophers such as Pythagoras, Empedocles, Aristotle, Galen, Sextus Empiricus, and many others even in the later epochs, which indicate a connection between these two achievements of mankind.

Hippocrates traditional medicine has known many accomplishments and treatment techniques that are the basis of modern medicine and the ethical principles set out to be the basis of the Geneva Declaration, which is a key piece of legislation for the regulation of medical praxis of modern times. Medicine has been known to different civilizations developed in a certain way in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, etc, but common to all medical school is the existence of ethical codes of conduct of medicine and patients’ rights.

Medicine itself, just like philosophy, could mature and develop at a level to influence the cultural, economic and other changes at the global level. In ancient times, the form of organization of society and the ethos of countries and people and therefore the issue of the medical practice itself was quite narrow and the Hippocrates declaration (specifically in his medical school of thought) was sufficient for the regulation medical practice.

In accordance with the spirit of the times and the doctor-patient relationship paternalism was expressed, where the doctor was the main authority and one that took the most important decisions. Progress of science in modern times, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, made it impossible to rely solely on this principle.

Modern technology has enabled better diagnosis, better quality care. With the fall of communism and socialism in almost all developed countries and the penetration of liberalism as the guiding currents of thought, the patient was given a higher role than the doctor, with his moral rights and obligations. Liberalism is substantiated from the providence of Kantian autonomy of personality.

Furthermore, different movements and citizen initiatives launched a multitude of questions that are open to this day, and there are issues of abortion, euthanasia,

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organ donation and transplantation, genetic engineering, cloning and the like.

Medicine would not have survived as a science without the outstanding support of philosophy.

The most famous ethical theories have become the backbone of the medical ethical theories that are properly directed to the stream of medical progress.

The need for new studies of medical ethics (bioethics) in the world is proved effective because bioethics consists as a subject in all universities in developed countries. A pioneering step was made in the USA in the 80’s.

Although, bioethics has controversial nature because it deals with fragile issues related to man and his health, it is necessary primal because of the different forms of abuse in medicine encountered every day. Without ethics, there is no morality. And without morality is completely absurd to think of medicine as the most specific humanist call.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Bioethics: A Brief Description, www.bioetica.uchile.cl 2. Bioetica Tratto dalla voce „Bioetica“ in Encyclopedia of Bioethic, http://www.webethic.net/testi/aavv/Bioetica.pdf 3. Recent Publications from the Center for Healthcare Ethics, www.duq.edu 4. Comitato Nazionale per la Bioetica , www.governo.it/bioetica 5. Bioethic and Human Rights – UNESCO, www.unesco.org/bioethics 6. The Hippocratic oath, Baltimor, John Hopkins Press, 1943. godina, www. medicinabar.com 7. Hamurabys Code of Law, Translated by L. W. King, http://eawc.evansville.edu/ anthology/hammurabi.htm , 198­226 chapter 8. Darrel W. Amundsen, PhD, “Medical Deontology and Pestilential Disease in the Late Middle Ages”, Oxford Journals, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/content/XXXII/4/403.extract.

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Risvan TĂ‹RSHALLA

Education to Judge on Human Rights 1. Introduction The citizenship it is understood as the concern of the citizen to the state.

It gives to the citizen a juridical status, with which are related with the fixed obligations. But the citizenship it is not only a juridical problem; if we want to speak about the situation, there will be numerous debates because it means that the individual is incorporated into the community creating reports with the political power.

When we analyze the most important discussions to this problematic, we continuously, turn the intention to these to concepts.

- Firstly it refers to the freedom of the individuals related with the state.

- Meanwhile the second conception pays attention to the tradition, identity and the continuance of the nation.

In this context, the citizenship and the approach by it, depends by the acceptance of the determinate way of living, the thought and the relief. The right, in which basements are up taken the institutions which lead the democratic life of the societies, to be understood, it needs to be, firstly unbuckled in these questions: a) Its basements b) The reason their existence c) The problems might gush from the entirety of its ingredients (to the right) As a consequence, this kind of decomposition, it looks for a come back to the beginning of the civil society, where the man it was in his natural state, doing after the gradual release into the civil society.

It is important to understand how has happened this process, because by this enterprise, we will be able to understand how did they begin, how did they consolidate the rules that guide our behaviour in the society, the necessity and the obligation, the education should ask and consider, its institutions, its elements, to transfer better and efficiently to the youth, it will come in the world because it mustn’t be foreigner.

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1. The aim The goal of this paper will have in its focus the conditions that the individual should respect without losing his autonomy and the possibility to be a judge of his values, on which is based his life and achievement in the community he is part of.

So, it is very important to understand the way the autonomy and the disposition to think are right with the life of a given politic community. The problem it lies down it’s the judge of the citizen related with the important questions in whole the society. But it is difficult to define the judge when it means the public question, because to make this, we, preliminarily should know what we are judging and over which criteria are we judging on.

So, it isn’t the same to choose a lawmaker only due to his charisma of his personality or because of his politics incline in the economic politic favour. This is not the same thing, to choose a government due to its moral reasons or to choose the political projects to a party. If we talk to the right and the human rights, we should understand that the citizens education, aims information, a minimal knowledge of juridical system and institutions.

The citizen for its more important actions should know the laws and the principles that fix the right and the obligations and should be able to distinguish the moments where they should be applied. This means the capability to judge and this is very important, because the law can not determine explicitly the rights and the obligations of the citizen, in all the special situations, in which he might be.

The law gives a given space to the individual for that kind of action, hereupon each individual should have or supply with that minimum of practical knowledge, in that way that the fixed situations, and it may be, to know how to act, how to behave. To know the institutions and to be able to judge, are the right orientations to the social life. This recognition, gives to the individual enunciation others behaviour related with the law, and to enunciate the consequences of their action, because as Th. Hobbes says: “...the man becomes felicitously to the society, not from the nature, but from the education.” 1

Let’s go deeper into the problem: The individual is part of all the laws, in the meaning he makes them. Even thought their authority limits his freedom. But, the volitional admission of the

1. Hobbes, Thomas. “De Cive”. Riuniti Editors, Roma, 2005. Pg. 20.

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law from the individual, who hasn’t been part of the law, who hasn’t helped in making it, it is required from him to know the principles and the values, on which it is based the law, to find himself in these values.

This turn back to the principles, has its peak to the consideration the humanity has for these principles, where this consideration in some countries (meanly developed) is collected within a declaration over the human rights, constitution or in one same document, where are summed up the human rights. If they aren’t expressed clear in these kinds of documents or in the constitution, are highlighted in the human rights juridical assurance or between the international accordance ratification.

However, the essential values of the contemporary state are not considered only as national values, which belong to a given community, but they aim to be universal values, so, the conflict between juridical status, products discussions and misapprehension through different conceptions to the humanity in geopolitical and political plan. Expressing in another way, it means different countries (status) might have different perceptions to the human values, which can become against.

If we agree that the national values, aim to grow bigger and bigger toward the universalism, the conservation of the national values through the educational system and the institutions that support it, doesn’t aim indispensably to motivate the individual to protect his special identity. His aim is to lead and to orientate him toward the world, in which the fundamental question is that of the man, where his national tradition, offers only fixed points of view.

Expressed laconically, the values make sense from the fact that they have begun from the question for the universalism. Precisely, for this reason, the human rights take a very important place in the citizen education, because from one side, it is determined one of the biggest topics of the political debate, and from their side, the state which debate over, offer criteria to judge the political programmes or the juridical bills, always respecting the basic principles.

In each time when we speak over the valuation of the consistence of any rule with any law, or any law with the constitution, the criteria are found in that law or constitution. There might face any difficulty, because there might be different interpretation of the texts, and except from this, it should be justified the special occasions, in which is applied the general rule.

Even so the human rights present some essential problems that should be solved if we wish them to be one of the central parts of the citizen education. First, we should agree the base, where these rights (principles) are incumbent. If we can’t understand their base, they aren’t more than a admittance petition (expression that is understood as a deliberation, which considers as self understood true, that

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it should be verified), and in this case they will be considered as one of numerous demands, that in the last instance, costs the arrangement in the same plan to the fundamental human rights and several pseudo-rights as, the environmental right, the animalistic rights, etc.

As a consequence, the rights will be left without the necessary content. * * * Another problem to be resolved is the fictive contrary between the citizen and political rights on a part and the social right from another one. We understand as citizen rights the freedom the state guarantee to all we, might be or not citizen of a given state: the equality in front of the law, the safety, the defence from the state’s arbitrariness, the propriety, the freedom of thinking.

And, with political rights to a given individual (as a free citizen) we will understand: participation in the general elaboration (to the law), the right in the reception of the imposition, duty and cess.

Here are included the rights that have to do with the free expression and free way of thinking, etc. The societal rights are those rights which limit the power of the state too, and from it they ask to guarantee such rights as those of the work, of the schooling, in the minimum of the material supplies. The social rights mean the huge intervention of state in the economical and social activity.

In the end we propound the universalism’s problem of these rights treated above. From one part different disciplines as the sociology and the ethnology teach us the cultures are different and specific. If we wanted to give a determination for the culture we would express ourselves in this way: “The culture is compound by the values, which are held, constrained by the members of a group, by the norms they respect and by the goods they create”.1 To avoid the trick of ethnocentrism, which judges over the others’ cultures, putting itself from the prejudices of the observation, we tend to be led from the cultural relativist. In this case we consider the other cultures are specific and there aren’t any criteria, which make us possible to decide if one is better than another one. If we paid attention over the light of the human rights, the consequence as P. Canivez would be: “Those rights are the expression of the western culture”.2 Their peak is marked with the reflection into the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights.

So, it is not legal to put out arguments that judge fixed costumes from other cultures, if the human rights are universal rights, we should answer rebuke way to the relativism.

1. Giddens, Anthony. Sociologjia. Cabej, Tirane, 2004. Pg. 42.

2. Canivez, Patrice. To educate the citizen. Dukagjini Peja, 2004. Pg. 108.

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Serving as an example to the “Universal Declaration of the Human Rights” of 1789 (in France) the human rights are natural rights. Those correspond to the human nature and as such they don’t get older, so are lifetime. They obtrude their self to each political authority, whatsoever it might be. But, sometimes we face the right interpretation of the notion “natural right”. There are two basic ways to understand the natural right: the classical doctrine and the modern one. * * * The classical doctrine that outflows from Socrates and Plato makes it possible that to the notion right is attached a right connotation considered as a coherent ensemble of the laws or as a constitution, where the term constitution is meant as the legal organization and the political regimen of the state. The natural right by this doctrine exists and as such it exists the city – state and the constitution commensurate the nature. The theory of the natural right is combined with the description of the constitution and the very good organized republic, respectively with the theory of the right. Here the term “nature” should be understood theologically. Here the human nature is determined between the dependence of the constitutive functions as: the desire, the power, the energy and the intelligence. So, consequently the city- state is natural. Its simplicity gushes from the fact that the human is understood as a political being, as a being that the nature has invited to life in eternity.

If we referred to the words said by Aristotle, we would express: “The state is created by the nature, because the human being from the nature is a political animal”.3 In the same way the reason dominates the spirit of the human being “mentally healthy”, the city that is in the harmony with the nature is it which is led by the wise people.4 In a state there govern the knowledge and the intelligence, there where the individual by his capability can develop his capability as an intelligent being. From there, flow two aspects: 1. It can’t be spoken for the human right, because the right is determined in the constitution 2. The individual does not overjoy spontaneously this right.

From his first nature it can derive a determined essential duty. In this point the human being is muddled with the citizen and the human experience is mixed up with the political one.

3. Aristotle. The politic, Tirana; Plejad, 2003. Pg. 11 4. If you want to read more; Leviathans. Th. Hobbes. IPLS & Dita 2000. Tirana.

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The modern doctrine of the natural right, tents to orientate the individual toward the description of his rights. This subordinates another way to understand the nature; such as it was developed from the XVII-th century. In that period the nature was not meant as the essential aspects goals, but as a motives and results mechanism. So, we should not begin form the final goal concept and the perfection, but from the motive notion. Although we are discussing the behaviour, the characteristic passions for the human nature, are responsible for the show of the state and only they can justify.

This happen because the most basic passion of the human is being afraid of the death, principally from the violent death, imposed by the environmental – says Hobbes. From the other hand it is considered as a basic wish for each being to conserve the personal existence, because the main legal aim of the human is related with his safety.

So, the natural right, in this light is based in the absolute right of the individual in the life. These are principles of Hobbes’s theory5, which concludes the role of the state is not to create or to promote e virtual life to the man, but to save the natural right to each one. The power of the state seen from this prism is strictly determined from that natural right and not from any moral right. This position is expressed in this way my Locke: “The natural state is controlled by a natural right; this reason contains the essence of this right, teach all the people who want to respect it, since all they are equal and independent, none of them should harm the life, the health, the freedom or the others proprieties”6. Once more Locke adds: “The state is based in a kind of social contract. The union of the individuals in this contract, whose fine is to guarantee to everyone the safety or the proprietary and the possibility that the wealth might be raised though the labour”, as in fact Locke wished. 7 This theory is the essence of the conception of the human right, meant as the individual’s protection way from the excessive demand of the state or, said briefly, this is the freedom related with the state. But, this idea spreads two problems: • The first gushes from the fact these rights are not natural in the full meaning of the word, if we agree the passions, the desires or the moral facts, in which they lay, suppose the man lives in the society, as Russo is expressed in the essay “Over the inequality origin” In according with him the man: “In his natural condition, it is a lonely being and his relationships with the others are episodic and spontaneous. Besides this, the man effectively and intellectually is an undeveloped being, in the meaning it 5. Hobbes. Th., Ob. Cit, pg. 22.

6. Locke, J. The second tractate for the government. IPLS & Dita 2000. Tirana pg. 81.

7. Canivez, P. To educate the citizen. Dukagjini, Peja 2004, Pg. 112.

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is a limited animal”8 Naturally, he is free and happy, but unconsciously, as well as his wish to possess more and more, fighting everybody against everybody and the fear to die violently, are not qualities of the human nature, but ht first form of the violence in the life into the community, a political existence didn’t make so well and organized insufficiently”9.

Hereupon, the natural rights, especially the propriety doesn’t exist in the nature. For Russo, the unique quality of the man in the natural condition – which aren’t well absorbed since the first steps of the education – and the decisive are the freedom, the capability to improve, the development of those potentials and the infinitive possibilities to live in the community.

• The second problem, comes from the fact the above rights aren’t rights in the full meaning of the word. The isolated individual if it isn’t protected by the state, he will not have any right in the close meaning of the term.

Said differently his right lies down as far as the other’s begins. However, if it happens in the conditions of a missing state, which if it had guaranteed the rights of each citizen, then it would have done it forcefully, not rightly.

If we wish to save the natural rights notion, to rely in it the human rights, we will have produced only the freedom and the rationality of the man. The man in the natural condition is not a reasonable being, but a reasonable animal, if we wished to underline the words said by Russo. This capability of the man is based in that, that the individual is conscious to be a reasonable being. This kind of conscience must be highlighted and supported with all the necessity pedagogical a didactic supplies, since in the first steps of the process of education of the new individual, as well in the familiar paradigm as well as in the scholar one.

3. Conclusions It must be emphasized the education should purpose the preparation of the individual, to be able to understand his personal egoist interests, that should be came under the reasonable law inside the man. This law obliges the individual do not desire at all something banned, to not desire more than it expects, do not cause contradictions and violence between people.

This is the absolute duty to respect the individual or the human being. It asks to not watch the man as a tool, but as a subject, so as a reasonable being.

8. Russo, Zhan-Zhak. Social Contract. Tirana; Luarasi, 2002. Pg.17-23.

9. Canivez, Patrice. Op. Cit. Fq.113

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The educational institutions must feed the individuals with the notions of the human rights, are based in the moral conscience, even so, they are not rights the individual asks for himself as an independent individual, but they are rights addressed by the others to him. In the conscience of the individual, these rights answer the obligation toward the others. This is present in everyone conscience that respects himself. Said differently, the human rights originally are based in the sensibility the individual has for his dignity.

If the human rights are the others rights, it doesn’t mean they aren’t mine. Those are because I am similar with the others, not only biologically or psychologically, but because I am a reasonable being. This mean the human rights are based on the relationships between people. This rapport is the rapport of the equality. This is the duty and obligation to the appropriate institutions to grow the individual confronted with the model of the laws and institutions. This happens to facilitate the way to the new individuals who come in the community and to make softer and touchable the join to the institutions which interact the work with the aims.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY - - - - - -

Aristotle. “Politics”. Tirana. Plejad, 2003 Cannives, Patrice. “To educate the citizen”. Dukagjini, Peja 2004 Giddens, Anthony. Sociology. Çabej, Tirana, 2004 Hobbes, Thomas. “De Cive”. Riuniti Editors, Roma, 2005 Hobbes, Thomas. “Leviathans”, Tirana. IPLS & Dita 2000, 2007 Locke, John. “The second tractate for the government and other writings”.

IPLS & Dita 2000, Tirana, 2005 - Russo, Zhan-Zhak. “Social Contract”. Luarasi, Tirana, 2002 - “Universal Declaration of the Human Rights”. Tirana. Edition of KSHH. Albinform. 1994.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Zorica KUBURIĆ is a fulltime professor of Sociology of Religion and Sociology of Education at the Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad, and president of the Center for the Empirical Research of Religion. She graduated in psychology and pedagogy (University of Sarajevo). Postgraduate study finished 1989, in Medical faculty, University of Zagreb (The relationship Between Parental Acceptance-Rejection and Psychiatric Problems in Adolescence). She holds a PhD in Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade 1995 (with the thesis: The Self-image of Adolescents in the Protestant Family). She and CEIR have launched different projects concerning religion, religious education and pluralism, and participated in various scientific projects. She is the chief editor of the journal Religion and Tolerance (Religija i tolerancija), 15th issue is at the moment being prepared for publishing.

Together with Christian Moe, she edited book Religion and Pluralism in Education: Comparative Approaches in Western Balkan, project which was financed by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Kuburić has published widely on religious education, including books Religion, Religious Education, Tolerance; Dialogue and Dogma; Faith and Freedom; Methodic of Religious Education; Religious and Civic Education; Religion and Psychical Health of Believers; Religion, Family, Youth. In her rich scientific career, she researched the religious and civic education, religious and social distance, attitudes concerning religious tolerance, religiosity of youth, state policies toward religious minorities, and position of women within religious communities. She published more than 100 books and scientific articles about mentioned issues. Within the Gallup Research Monitor, she coordinated the research in Western Balkan including Bulgaria where the people’s images of God, content with government performance, level of happiness, attitudes toward religious others and European integration were studied. She is also a lecturer at the Center for Women’s Studies in Novi Sad, and guest lecturer at the different Theological Faculties in the region. In her work at the university, she is especially dedicated to motivate students and young people to participate in different projects and together with students organizations organized serial of roundtables and public debates concerning different issues of public importance, with the stress on the position of minorities.

Giovanni ERCOLANI is a thesis advisor for the “Peace Operations Training InstitutePOTI” (USA), POTI lecturer at the Nottingham Trent University (UK), and lecturer on Theory and Politics of Global Security at the University of New York – Tirana (Albania).

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115 A Doctor in Political Science and Oriental Studies, both from the University of Roma (“La Sapienza”, Italy), he holds a M.A. in Politics and Government from St. John’s University (USA), and a Master in Social Anthropology from the Universidad de Murcia (Spain).

Previously, Dr. Ercolani served at the NATO COMLANDSOUTHEAST HQ in Izmir, Turkey and has been a Research Associate at the Scottish Centre for International Security at the University of Aberdeen.

Dr. Ercolani has been lecturing on international security issues, and political anthropology in Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Albania, and Turkey.

He is a specialist in Social and Political Anthropology, International Relations, Security Studies (Critical Security Studies, Conflicts, Peacekeeping and International Conflict Resolution, Human Security, CIMIC, International Terrorism, and Intelligence), Geopolitics of Energy, Energy Security, Modern and Contemporary European History, and a regional expert on Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea. He is associated to various journals’ editorial boards: “The Journal of Security Strategies” (Turkish War College, Istanbul, Turkey), “International Journal of Science”, “UPRAVA” (“Administration”) (Faculty of Public Administration, Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina), and “IBSU Journal of Business” (International Black Sea University, Tbilisi, Georgia).

Dr. Ercolani is member of the “Centre for Energy and Environment Security” (Nottingham Trent University, UK), member (elected) of the “Royal Institute of International Affairs - Chatham House” (UK), and Fellow (elected) of the “Royal Anthropological Institute” (London, UK).

Robley E. GEORGE. Founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Societies, was born in Indiana in 1931 and was graduated from Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis. He then studied engineering at San Diego State and Sacramento State Colleges and was graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a BSChE in 1954. After serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, he entered Purdue University and was graduated with a MSChE in 1957. He completed his formal education at UCLA, specializing in applied mathematics, automatic control theory and nuclear engineering.

Mr. George entered the aerospace industry and participated in the conception, design, analysis, implementation, operation and maintenance of various sophisticated computerized systems. His work through much of this period was classified, though scientific articles did result in the general area of mathematical optimization, specifically nuclear rocket thrust optimization and complex scheduling algorithms.

In 1969, Mr. George left industry to create the Center for the Study of Democratic Societies, a research and educational institution dedicated to the examination and explanation of the properties and possibilities of democratic societies. Mr. George has

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lectured, presented workshops and short courses, as well as given TV and radio interviews on various aspects of present and potential democracy and advanced, democratic socioeconomic systems.

He has presented his seminal work on Socioeconomic Democracy at a number of international conferences and is the author of three books and over fifty articles published in the U.S. and abroad. He has further developed the concept and discipline of Economic Engineering, first articulated by Keith Roberts. His honors include the Dr. Khurshid Ahmad Khan Memorial Award from the Pakistan Futuristics Institute for his “long-standing services to the Futures Field.

Fjoralba SATKA holds a PhD in History of Arts and Visual Art at the National Academy of Arts, Sofia, Bulgaria; Lecturer on Art History and Introduction to painting, “Aleksandër Moisiu” University, Durrës, Albania.

Her recently published works include: SATKA, Fjoralba. Албанското Въоръжено социзкуство, In Problems of Art, Research Institute of the Arts, Bulgaria, 1/2012; SATKA, Fjoralba. Albanian Alternative Painting vs. Official Painting under Communism, In Avatars of Intellectuals under Communism, History of Communism in Europe, Zeta Books, Bucharest, II/ 2011, pp. 73-94; SATKA, Fjoralba. Political power and ideas on Space and Place embodied in Albanian socialist painting, e-book 2011; SATKA, Fjoralba. Pictures in shadow, in Problems of Art, Research Institute of the Arts, Bulgaria, 2009, pp. 46-55.

Inês ROLO AMADO PhD works at De Montfort University. Rolo Amado’s work spans several media, sculpture, video, site-specific installation, and performance with a particular interest in interdisciplinary, collaboration and participatory projects through a process of dialogue, interaction and exchange. Recent exhibitions and research activities include: Facing the Other Here and Now Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon Portugal, Exhibition and Conference - curated by Paul Goodwin Tate Britain 2011 Tiresias Video de artistas made in Portugal Centro Cultural Montevideo Uruguay – 2010 Narrativa de lo Cotidiano Diaspora Vibe Gallery, Miami, USA and at La Ex-Culpable, Lima, Peru - 2010 The 28th State: European Borders in an Age of Anxiety, Tate Britain – 2009 Artist Talk and Catalogue Launch IMMA Dublin Ireland – 2008 New Territories (co-curator and participant) Pavilhão 28 H. Julio de Matos, Lisboa, Portugal – 2008 Laranjas Tableau Vivant or Memento Mori Mundos Locais, Lagos, Portugal - 2008 Amado organised and curated The International Multi Media Symposium an event that took place in the Islands of the Azores involving 25 international artists, writers,

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117 musicians and poets focusing on the concept of Place and People with an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach. In 1997 Inês Amado created Sands in Time, with technical support from Dave Lawrence, the first live-art video installation broadcast on the Internet.

Images beamed to London from the Azores by satellite were fused with images of London and projected as part of an installation; a live video broadcast of the installation was live screened on the net.

In 2000 Amado organized and curated BreadMatters I in Poland; and In 2003 BreadMatters II in Lisbon. Followed by BreadMatters III in West Cork Arts Centre, under the umbrella of Cork European Capital of Culture.

Amado has held one person shows in Portugal, Norway, Italy, England, Poland, Belgium and the USA. Inês Amado was awarded an AHRB research grant for the BreadMatters project.

Other awards and support include The Gulbenkian Foundation, The Portuguese Ministry of Culture, British Council, Arts Council of England, London Docklands Development, Middlesex Hospital, Portugal Telecom, British Telecom, RTP, Instituto Camões, Fundação Luso-Americana, Universities award schemes, Sherkin Island Development Society Ltd. and The Credit Union Cork. Her work is in various private and public collections, latest acquisitions: In Situ Foundation, Warsaw and Adirondack C. C. New York.

Born in Leiria, Portugal, Amado works and lives in England.

Giuseppe GAGLIANO was born in Como and has graduated in Philosophy near the National University in Milan. He has achieved the following Master in Courses: Strategic studies and Intelligence, International Right and Armed Conflicts, Analysis of Intelligence and Peacekeeping Intelligence. Currently is President of the Center for Strategic Studies Carlo De Cristoforis.

Alma DEMA is a Lecturer of the Literature nearby the Linguistic Department, State University “Aleksander Moisiu” Durres. She was born in Fushe – Kruje, in 1978 and has graduated State University of Tirana, Faculty of Linguistic and Literature in 2004, where in 2008; she took the Master Degree in the Field of Cultural Anthropology. She is a PhD candidate nearby the Literature Department, Faculty of Linguistic and Literature, State University in Tirana.

From 2007 she is lecturing Literature and Academic Writing in the State University “Aleksander Moisiu” Durres.

She has presented her papers in national and international conferences and congresses. She has already published some of her works in scientific magazines.

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Olivera Z MIJUSKOVIC was born on July the 31st, 1984. in Vrbas (Novi Sad) in Serbia. After completing the socio-linguistic department of the high school with the graduation thesis “Nietzsche’s Concept of Imoralism”, she enrolled the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philosophy, at the age of 18. During the studies she was interested in ethics, philosophy of law, theory of law, politics and aesthetics. She graduated in the class of Milenko A Perovic, a Ph.D. of Ethics, with the Diploma thesis “The Concept of Law in the Hellenistic-Roman Philosophy”, rated by a committee headed by Professor Perovic as one of the most accomplished thesis, and what naturally followed was the enrollment at the MA studies. She is currently involved in studying the ancient philosophy and bioethics.

Special attention is paid to the topic of medical ethics, which are being covered in her MA thesis titled “The Comparison of Bioethics and the Traditional Medical Ethics.”

She is also engaged in journalism and humanitarian work. She attends psychological workshops with the role of psychological coordinator, providing assistance to people from different social groups, as well as she worked as a lecturer at a medical center, on a course of reproductive and psychological health of youth. Her philosophical essays and thoughts were at wordpress.com.

Her spare-time occupation is writing and painting. She has been awarded the first prize by the audience for the best article in the “MLS” magazine in Belgrade. Her painting exhibition was held in the hall of cinema “Yugoslavia” in Vrbas. Currently lives on relation Vrbas (Novi Sad) – Belgrade, Serbia.

Risvan TËRSHALLA was born in Debar, north Albania. From 2008 he is lecturing Philosophy and Social Ethic thereby the University “Aleksander Moisiu” Durres.

He took a Bachelor Degree and Master Degree from the University of Tirana Faculty of Social Sciences, where he is working his Doctorate too. His Master Degree, which treated the Beauty’s concept in the esthetic judge of Kant, has been valuated from the jury with the maximum of valuation.

He has participated in some national and international conferences. His papers have been presented even in international congresses.

He is the author of philosophical scientific articles as The impossibility of adapting to the social is one of the individualism’s recourses, or the Ethic in the ancient Albanian laws, published in scientific magazines.

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