The New York Review of Books
The Hope for Humanism: Within the West, Beyond the West
Our conference, 'The Hope for Humanism: Within the West, Beyond the West', held in collaboration with the New York Review of Books, brings together distinguished panelists from the academy, the media and politics, and from both sides of the Atlantic. We are defining 'humanism' to include issues of human rights arising both within the western community and beyond, especially in the Middle East; as well as humanist issues of personal dignity and fulfillment that arise with the provision of public goods such as health care and education.
In promoting his recent health care reforms, President Obama has argued that access to affordable and high quality health care is indeed a human right, and that the denial of auch access to the growing number of the American uninsured is a violation of their human rights. Similarly, access to education at all levels, irrespectible of gender, race, religious persuasions and income levels is an accepted human right throughout the western world, and increasingly in the developing world. But how well is that right upheld in practice, even in the West?
And what kind of education should students receive? Many fear that the humanist values inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are losing out to the instrumentalist values of the hyper-competitive,
IT-intensive economies of globalization. We will then be looking at the role of humanist values in the operations of the information economy itself, and especially of the management systems used by corporations, and by organizations of all kinds, to order their affairs.
It is appropriate that we should do this at a conference here in Oslo, the home of the late Kristen Nygaard of the Department of Informatics at Oslo University – computer scientist, trade unionist, progressive, humanist, and pioneer of the Scandinavian School of System Design, which embodies the principle that employees whose working lives can be profoundly influenced by the introduction of these systems should have the right to participate in their design.
The global financial crisis, now in its third year, frames the discussion of these issues. The crisis is being seen by many as a crisis of the Anglo-Saxon faith in free, lightly regulated markets, and of the belief that this free market regime can be extended to public services such as health care. Are these beliefs now discredited, and is the Obama administration, with its reforms of health care and financial services, moving towards a more Northern European and social democratic model of a mixed economy; and if so, what can be learnt from European experience?
Erik Rudeng, Director, Fritt Ord
Simon Head, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford
The Hope for Humanism: Within the West, Beyond the West
Our conference, 'The Hope for Humanism: Within the West, Beyond the West', held in collaboration with the New York Review of Books, brings together distinguished panelists from the academy, the media and politics, and from both sides of the Atlantic. We are defining 'humanism' to include issues of human rights arising both within the western community and beyond, especially in the Middle East; as well as humanist issues of personal dignity and fulfillment that arise with the provision of public goods such as health care and education.
In promoting his recent health care reforms, President Obama has argued that access to affordable and high quality health care is indeed a human right, and that the denial of auch access to the growing number of the American uninsured is a violation of their human rights. Similarly, access to education at all levels, irrespectible of gender, race, religious persuasions and income levels is an accepted human right throughout the western world, and increasingly in the developing world. But how well is that right upheld in practice, even in the West?
And what kind of education should students receive? Many fear that the humanist values inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are losing out to the instrumentalist values of the hyper-competitive,
IT-intensive economies of globalization. We will then be looking at the role of humanist values in the operations of the information economy itself, and especially of the management systems used by corporations, and by organizations of all kinds, to order their affairs.
It is appropriate that we should do this at a conference here in Oslo, the home of the late Kristen Nygaard of the Department of Informatics at Oslo University – computer scientist, trade unionist, progressive, humanist, and pioneer of the Scandinavian School of System Design, which embodies the principle that employees whose working lives can be profoundly influenced by the introduction of these systems should have the right to participate in their design.
The global financial crisis, now in its third year, frames the discussion of these issues. The crisis is being seen by many as a crisis of the Anglo-Saxon faith in free, lightly regulated markets, and of the belief that this free market regime can be extended to public services such as health care. Are these beliefs now discredited, and is the Obama administration, with its reforms of health care and financial services, moving towards a more Northern European and social democratic model of a mixed economy; and if so, what can be learnt from European experience?
Erik Rudeng, Director, Fritt Ord
Simon Head, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford
The New York Review of Books