User:Slrubenstein

This Wikipedian is deceased. His user page is preserved here in his memory.
Learn more about this Wikipedian at Steven Rubenstein.

This is the userpage of Slrubenstein, a great guy and a dedicated and skillful Wikipedian, who contributed more than 30,000 edits to Wikipedia since his first edit on December 12, 2001 to his last on March 1st 2012.

Being a cultural anthropologist by profession he made most of his contributions in areas related to human culture, but he was also a prolific editor in other areas, contributing hundreds of edits to pages such as Jesus, Race and Franz Boas. In the world of academia he was a recognized expert on the culture of the Shuar people of Ecuador, as well as an ardent spokesperson for indigenous rights. He was also a dedicated proponent of free knowledge, and over the 11 years he edited he also made many important contributions to developing the basic policies and guidelines by which Wikipedia operates. He will be sorely missed by the Wikipedia community and by all who knew him.

The tale of the fool, the naif, the adventurer, the wiseacre, may be the best weapon against the myths of the state.
— Steven Rubenstein, 2002.

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Hi. I used to believe I had nothing to say about myself beyond what I contribute to articles, which I hope reflects my knowledge and interests but not my biases, and to talk pages, in which I try to be honest about my biases, especially if someone asks. I still think that as a Wikipedian I am best judged by my work on Wikipedia, although those who now care to, may judge me by what I read and what I watch. Of course, I am always willing to answer a question if you ask me.

Anyway, I now believe I can do what so many other Wikipedians have done on their user pages: introduce myself:

Everyone has one question. For the Little Prince, the question is whether his drawing #1 frightened them. If they answer "Why should I be frightened of a hat?" he knew that they understand nothing.

Here is my question:

Do you believe that ...

(CHOOSE ONE: Michaelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or statue of David, the Dome of the Rock, The Gilgamesh Epic, the Iliad, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Arnold's "Dover Beach," Melville's Moby-Dick, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, Forster's A Passage to India, Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, Greene's The End of the Affair, Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Fowles's The Magus, Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy (see [1], [2], [3]), Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or Ninth symphony, Ellington and Coltrane's Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, and for the cognoscente, Springsteen's "Darkness on the Edge of Town," and Elvis Costello's "Alison")

...expresses some great truth?

If the person answers yes (or can answer yes to an appropriate addition), I know they will understand why the fact that I think the Bible was written by human beings and that many parts of it are not historically accurate does not mean that I think it a fraud or an anachronism, nor does it mean that I am a blaspheming heretic, but on the contrary that I believe it to be a divinely profound and truthful work. And if the person answers yes, they will understand why as a scientist I think that research with living people, the aim of which is to understand how they make meaning of their lives and their world — something that cannot be measured and subjected to statistical analysis, and research that is not reproducible — is nevertheless among the most significant and valuable research one can conduct and learn from.

If the person answers "no," I know that they understand nothing.

I think of those people who would answer "no" to my question whenever I read this passage from Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum:

Idiot. Above her head was the only stable place in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum's business, not hers. A moment later the couple went off — he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter — their first and last encounter — with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?

Foucault's pendulum does not rotate. It swings back and forth, as the earth rotates beneath it

There is one other question I think is rather important (actually, I suspect "my one question" is really a corollary of this question, or this question is just a cruder version of "my one question"):

Do you believe that a text has only one true meaning, generally that intended by the author of the text?

If you answer "yes," you are, by my definition, a fundamentalist, whether the text you are thinking of is The Bible, The Communist Manifesto, Euclid's Elements, Moby-Dick, or something else. If this be the case, sooner or later you and I will find it very hard to understand each other.