Democracy: Its Principles and Achievement

               This post is a summary of the book with the title above published by Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1998 at http://archive.ipu.org/PDF/publications/DEMOCRACY_PR_E.pdf

              The word democracy is one of the most used terms of the political vocabulary. This vital concept touches the very fundamentals of the life of human beings in society, has given rise to much comment and reflection; nevertheless, until now there has not been any text adopted at the world-wide level which defined its parameters or established its scope. The Inter-Parliamentary Union is pleased to publish in this book the text of the Universal Declaration on Democracy. The Union's commitment to democracy will, however, be pursued far beyond the approval and publication of a text whose implementation it is now striving to promote assiduously. The U.N. has taken note of this declaration in a resolution adopted by the General Assembly. The Principles of Democracy are: 1) Democracy is a universally recognised ideal as well as a goal, which is based on common values shared by peoples throughout the world. 2) As an ideal, democracy aims essentially to preserve and promote the dignity and fundamental rights of the individual, to achieve social justice, foster economic and social development, strengthen the cohesion of society and enhance national tranquility. 3) A state of democracy ensures that the processes by which power is acceded to, wielded and alternates allow for free political competition and are the product of open, free and non-discriminatory participation by the people. 4) Democracy is founded on the primacy of the law and the exercise of human rights. Economic, social and cultural development are conditions for and fruits of democracy. There is thus interdependence between peace, development, respect for the rule of law and human rights. 5) Democracy is based on the existence of well-structured and well-functioning institutions. 6) It is for democratic institutions to mediate tensions and maintain equilibrium between the competing claims of diversity and uniformity, individuality and collectivity, in order to enhance social cohesion and solidary. 7) Democracy is founded on the right of everyone to take part in the management of public affairs, it therefore requires the existence of representative institutions at all levels. 8) The key element in the exercise of democracy is the holding of free and fair elections at regular intervals enabling the people's will to be expressed. These elections must be held on the basis of secret suffrage so that all voters can choose their representative in conditions of equality, and transparency that stimulate political competition. To that end, civil and political rights are essential, and among them, the right to vote and to be elected. 9) It is an essential function of the state to ensure the enjoyment of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights to its citizens. 10) Public accountability, which is essential to democracy, applies to all those who hold public authority. Accountability entails a public right to access to information about the activities of government, the right to petition and seek redress through impartial judicial mechanisms. 11) Public life must be stamped by a sense of ethics and by transparency, and appropriate norms and procedures must be established to uphold them. 12) Individual participation in democratic processes at all levels must be regulated fairly and impartially and must avoid any discrimination, as well as the risk of intimidation by state and non-state agents. 13) Judicial institutions and independent, impartial and effective oversight mechanisms are the guarantors for the rule of law on which democracy is founded. 14) While the existence of an active society is an essential element of democracy, the capacity and willingness of individuals to participate in democratic processes can not be taken for granted. It is necessary to develop conditions conducive to the genuine exercise of participatory rights, while also eliminating obstacles that prevent, hinder or inhibit this exercise. 15) A sustainable state of democracy thus require a democratic climate and culture constantly nurtured and reinforced by education and other vehicles of culture and information. 16) The state of democracy presupposes freedom of opinion. 17) Democratic institutions and processes must also foster decentralised government and administration, which is a right and a necessity, and which makes it possible to broaden the base of public participation. 18) A democracy should support democratic principles in international relations. Democracies must refrian from undemocratic conduct, express solidarity with democratic governments and non-state actors which work for democracy and human rights, and extend solidarity to those who are victims of human rights violations. In order to strengthen criminal justice, democracies must reject impunity for serious violations of human rights and support the establishment of a permanent international criminal court. Democracy can not exist without civil society, and civil society ca not exist without a population that has the will and capacity to act in defense of its values and institutions. In the final analysis, however, it is people who make and live democracy, and who can also undo it and destroy it. Thus, people must have the knowledge and capacity to exercise their individual and collective rights in order to bring about democracy, preserve democratic processes, and insure that these processes work effectively and with integrity so that democratic outcomes may be attained. Education is indispensable and allows a citizenry the capacity to develop civil society and to act in defense of its values and institutions. Lack of education is probably the single most factor which causes apathy and indifference in a society. Such apathy and indifference is what allows the few to malgovern, to abuse individual and collective rights, and to exploit their fellow citizens. No genuine democracy can long exist while the citizenry is apathetic or indifferent. Although elections form a key mechanism for the popular control of government, they are of limited effectiveness on their own without institutions that secure a government's continuous accountability to the public. Here, the task of parliament is not only to approve proposals for legislation on behalf of the electorate, but to keep the policies and actions of the executive under continuous scrutiny, and they require independence to do this effectively. A further crucial dimension of accountability is the requirement that all public officials act within competencies explicity authorised by the rule of law, and this in turn depends on the independence of the courts and judiciary. Finally, no effective accountability of government is possible without the openness of their activities to public inspection, according to the pricniple of freedom of information. The system of democracy becomes synonymous with the idea of justice as the glorious words of Daniel Webster thus indicate: "Justice is the greatest interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together. Wherever her temple stands, there is a foundation of social security, general happiness and the improvement and progress of our human race. And whoever labours on the edifice with usefulness and distinction, whoever clears its foundation, strengthens its pillars, adores its entablatures or contributes to raise its august dome still higher in the skies, connects himself in the name fame and character with that which is and must be durable as the frame of human society." No society can advance without open conflicts. But if there is to be a clash of ideas, the rational expression of social claims and needs in a free and responsible manner, it is essential for the citizens to have received a minimum of education. Indeed, without it, the citizens would have no awareness of the freedoms and rights to which they are entitled. Such civil and political rights would remain merely theoretical. Consequently, investment in education must be a priority, along with the production of goods and employment. Social marginalisation destroys national cohesion and democratic rule. The prospects for a long-standing democratic political system depend on the ability of leaders to put forward new ideas and to translate into action the diffuse democratic hopes of the populace, these can be ideas and measures designed to accelerate the democratic process or to repair a democratic system which has broken down. But these leaders must be imbued with democratic values. The bedrock of any democratic system lies in the preservation of basic human rights for all. The preservation of human rights, the final objective of the democratic process, demands the integration of political rights with those of an economic, social and cultural nature. Democracy guards against opportunities for abuses of power and ensures that they are rectified should they occur, especially through the system of checks and balances, considered paramount for a viable observance of the principle of separation of powers. Democracy attempts to satisfy the will of the majority without sacrificing the minorities, to favourequality without ignoring differences, to make room for civil society without devaluing the role of the state, to preserve the right of the individual without neglecting the general interest. This delicate balance, this difficult vigilance of the citizen can sometimes lead to lassitude, uncertainty and disappointment. But the ordinary citizen must be virtuous and well-educated and be willing to make an effort, he or she is subjected to estreme stress. As a result of the subtlety of its procedures and the legitimate progress of individual rights, democracy is becoming more complex for the ordinary citizen. It requires a high degree of rationality. It is now up to the political actors themselves to become the agents of their own renaissance. This implies that political life will be reorganized around new choices. This political reconstruction will not be possible unless we become aware of the conditions needed for the existence of democracy and unless we do away with the false opposition between the requirements of world economy and those of social justice. Conversely, only democracy can enable them to blend together and to create for all of us a space of freedom.

Flexibility Gives Students a Better Chance of Success

          This post is a summary of three articles and a handbook. The first with the incomplete title above was published at https://gazette.education.govt.nz/articles/1H9crS-flexibility-and-responsibility-gives-students-a-better-chance-of-success/. The second is a handbook published in 2016 at  https://www.sycamoreschools.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashxmoduleinstanceid=3596&dataid=225&FileName=CreditFlexHandbook1.pdf. The third was published at  https://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/School-Choice/Credit-Flexibility-Plan/Credit-Flexibility-Web-Conference-Series/10-12-10-Webinar_Transcript. The fourth was published at  www.ed.gov/oii-news/competency-based-learning-or-personalized-learning

          Students at high school in Taranaki have this year been given a flexible day to do practical learning which gives them a broader career and study options and keeps them engaged in school. Core subjects and traditional academic subjects are taught four days a week. Wednesdays however, have been freed up to allow students to take courses with a vocational focus. "To widen the opportunities available to our students we decided to implement something different and introduced a Flexible Learning Wednesday, now students can experience possible future employment pathways without missing their core subjects." Students are encouraged to select a pathway which links to their future work. This helps students choose subjects relevant to that sector, making their learning more relevant to future work or study options in the university. The principal says vocational pathways are paramount in "meeting the needs of our students and equipping them for the future." "When students study subjects in areas which are more relevant and interesting to them, then they are much more likely to stay at school and remain engaged with their learning," says the Ministry of Education. Planning started last year to restructure the timetable to equip students for the future. The changed timetable structure gives students a considerable degree of self-responsibility of their time and learning. The school has received positive feedback to its "flexible learning." While the programme is still in its infancy, the principal is delighted with what is been achieved so far and says the new approach to preparing students for the outside world is liked by both students and staff. There is a needs to increase the number of young people moving into further education, training and employment. We need to improve the minimum qualification a young person needs to get to be ready for a better future.

             Ohio's plan for credit flexibility is designed to broaden the scope of curricular options available to students, increase the depth of study possible for a particular subject, and allow tailoring of learning time and conditions. These are ways in which aspects of learning can be customized around students interests and needs. Students may now earn credits and this credit flexibility is intended to motivate and increase student learning by allowing: 1) Access to more learning resources, especially real-world experiences. 2) Customization around individual student needs. 3) Use of multiple measures of learning, especially those where students demonstrate what they know and can do, apply their learning or document performance.

          A component directed the State Board of Education to expand the ways that students can learn. Credit Flexibility allows students to demonstrate mastery of learning and this can be instead of traditional hours of classroom instruction. The focus in on performance in mastering the content rather than just the time element of how many hours in the seat students spend, and to certainly begin our commitment to changing education to become student centered so that learning does accommodate different learning styles, paces, interests of students. We are going to do a specific well-defined event for credit-flex and call those information so that we can meet one-on-one with students and help each student define his/her pathways. We're heavily engaged in social media and using our website as a means of communication and put information in terms that people can understand. We created an online place where students and parents who were interested in our programs could go and find out what life wasreally like within our school. They blogged and had blogging assignments that they were responsible for each week. They also took pictures and created a photo albums of their different experiences at school. One thing to ask the student is. What course content are you seeking? What course content is that? Is it arts, construction, sociology, humanities? You have to reach some sense of agreement. But, there is a clear understanding. For example, I am going to do veterinary; well there is a clear pathway as far as it might be an anatomy physiology credit I am looking for. This is individual. They have students now who may be able to work in a much narrower field and much more in depth, which gives the teacher an opportunity to expand their work with students as well and to work with students on some really innovative things that go way beyond what could happen in class. While some of the students are going to take general type classes, there is  an opportunity in credit flex for staff to really expand what they do with students as well. So I think it all goes back to expectations for staff are, what is available to them.

            Transitional away from seat time, in favor of a structure that creates flexibility, allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning. Competency-based strategies provide students with personalized learning opportunities. These strategies include online and blended learning, dual enrollment, community-based learning and credit recovery, among others. This type of learning leads to better student engagement because the content is relevant to each student and tailored to their unique needs. It also leads to better student outcomes. By enabling students to master skills, competency-based learning systems help to save both time and money. Depending on the strategy pursued, this system also create multiple pathways to graduation, make better use of infrastructure, support new staff patterns that utilizes teacher skills and interests differently, take advantage of learning opportunities outside of school hours, and help identify target interventions to meet the specific learning needs of students. Each of these presents an opportunity to achieve greater efficiency and increase productivity. 

                

470th Birthday of Miguel de Cervantes - Part III

             This is the third part of the tribute to Miguel Cervantes. This post is a summary of an article with the title of, "Quixotic Utopia of Human Rights Introduction," published in 2017 at   seer.rdl.org.br/index.php/anamps/article/download/316/pdf_

            The gap between theoretical enunciation and actual practice in human rights expresses the need to seek compromised alternatives. This balance can come from a critical and innovative mirage that contains other theoretical possibilities that are especially critical of the role of order in safeguarding human and fundamental rights. Literature emerges as one of these possibilities of analysis in the field of human rights, as emancipation of these in front of the traditional legal rationality. The literary discourse is more diverse, complex, heterodox and imaginative - which allows it greater plasticity, sensitivity and attention to reality. Ingredients that the law needs in order to commit to the reality of those whom it seeks to protect. Literature offers law a vast repertoire of observation of human social relations, as well as bringing freedom to the law by repeatedly dismantling the formalisms of the legal structure. The analysis of literary works, such as Don Quixote de la Mancha offers different perspectives to the interpretation of human rights, especially to those committed to reality. The link between law and literature flourishes in narrative. Norms and rules are worthless without context, without history, without a fact to attribute meaning to it. Thus, the use of literature leads human rights to the real dimension. Literature operates a fundamental refoundation in the legal conception of rights. The possibility of overcoming the practical distance that keeps traditional law through a literary bridge that is able to approximate it to concrete subjects and material justice is what makes it imperative for this simple reflection to deal with the set of ideas above. The aim of this article is to tell the legal discourse of human rights through the emancipatory lens of literature. For that purpose, the work The ingenious nobleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes was chosen. By analyzing the literary work , the objective is to draw a parallel between Quixote's struggle and the struggle of human rights in today's world, showing the points of convergence based on the salutary dialogue between law and literature. Don Quixote is a complex work by a complex author. Literature, especially those that, like the Cervantine one, assume a critical posture of the real can be a great driving force to propose and problematize the alteration of social and legal directions. Under the aegis of dogmatism, the social and political effects that stem from the transformative dialogue that literature can have in law and rights have for a long time been enclosed in consonance with a closed view of reality and also rights. Literature as a human product, like legal science, undoubtedly reflects, to a greater or lesser extent, the vicissitudes, peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of its subjects, as well as the context in which it is inserted.  According to Lukács, "there is no composition without conception of the world." The political, critical and liberating dimension of literature is already present in the work of Cervantes, since it was books that disturbed the reason of Alonso Quijano. It is the books that are to blame for the madness of Quixote. On the contrary, it was precisely his readings that opened the possibility of emancipating himself and giving life to Quixote. The criticism of dogma and its transforming sense is in the work represented as madness, which is nothing more than insurgency with the order and the ability to see beyond. It is here that Alonso Quijano  and Quixote are set apart. For Saramago (2005), in his reading of the work, Quijano was just tired of the life he led and deciding radically to change his life, he says he is crazy in the purest act of sanity. Madness is characterized as such by subverting the static, dogmatic and normative order of life. If conflicts are part of reality, they become part of the law, not as something to be excised, but as a constituent element of its own core and not an evil in itself. The agonistic and dialogical dimension of human rights allows us to shed light. The political tension in the exercise of democracy in its radicalism is therefore essential to the notion of human rights. The quixotic vocation to combat injustices, the focus on the vulnerable, the dimension of dialogical alterity, all these marked by the real/ideal tension that stood out in the work and is today the great paradox in the dilemma of the realization of rights. The motive of the work and of Quixote is the denunciation of injustices; The knight reports that is his duty and destiny is to repair the injustices of the world. The Cervantine text is very close to the counter-supremacy vocation of human rights. It is human rights produced from the social dynamics, "in defense of new freedoms against old powers" (Bobbio, 2004), fruits of a "rationality of resistance" (Flores, 2009). The tonic of human rights aimed at balacing the asymmetric relations of power as insurrections against despotisms, from the public or private fields. At the same time, these rights are powerful for the struggle to build a more inclusive society in which everyone is subject to equal respect and consideration. By means of this rationality, the law happens to see the subjects no longer as members of an innominate and undifferentiated fiction, the recipient of the abstraction of the legal texts, but as unique singularities. This is because law as literature tells a story, a story told by human rights is the history of the prevention or combat of human suffering. Associated with the defense of injustice, Quixote defends the weakest and fights for the weary and injured, these are the subjects of rights. The contemporary mark of human rights is linked to the ethics of otherness; to see in the other a being worthy of equal consideration and deep respect, guided by the universal affirmation of dignity and the prevention of human suffering. It is, however, insufficient to treat the individual in a generic, general and abstract way. It is necessary to specify the subject of law, who is now seen in its peculiarity and particularity. Thus, alongside the right to equality, the right to difference with respect to diversity also arises as a fundamental right. The important dimension that opens here and that is very explicit in the metaphorof the mill is the struggle of the dream in relation to reality. It remains to be seen whether our contemporary battle for rights is to break against established windmills. We live paradoxically the triumph of the normative discourse of rights with its universal extension, on the one hand, but, on the other, we live an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in terms of the disposability of rights and their subjects. It is precisely this arc between the applicability of the norm in abstract and the result of its effective applicability that must be traced to overcome the abyssal gap between practice and human rights theory. Human rights are, in their contemporary face, the history of perseverance. It was the breaking of the idea of rights that left us rights after the war. From breakage came protection. Rights thus became "the cry of the oppressed, the exploited, the dispossessed, a kind of imaginary or exceptional right for those who have  nothing else to lean on" Therefore, it is important to look for alternatives that aim to give them concreteness, even if in a utopian way. Thus, utopia is a project, projecting a proposition: it becomes concrete when there is action directed at willing to change. In the terms advocated by the theory of human rights. The utopia can come to fruition. Rights can be reality. Yet another stance is required before the law and the world for this to happen. From the interlocution with the quixotic literary imaginary and the opening it provides, it is possible to construct a critical theory of human rights based on a critical, peripherical, dialogical and utopian posture. As Antonio Avelas Nunes teaches us: The necessary changes do not just happen because we believe a better world is possible. These changes must come as a result of the laws of motion of human societies, and we all know that voluntarism and good intentions have never been the engine of history. But awareness of this does not have to kill our right to utopia and our right to dream. While maintaining its prospective meaning, the protective order of human rights must land on reality as a tangible utopia to those who need an urgent response. The law can not evade this practical commitment to the observance of human rights, essential to a minimally dignified existence, still unknown to a part of the world's population.

470th Birthday of Miguel de Cervantes - Part II

              The tribute to Cervantes carry on. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at   https://www.shmoop.com/don-quixote/. The second was published in June of 2016 at  https://www.ft.com/content/570e8b70-282f-11e6-8ba3-cdd781d02d89. The third was published in September 2016 at https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/quixote-colbert-and-the-reality-of-fiction/

             When Part 1 of Dom Quixote was first published in 1605, it was an instant hit. In fact, people might have liked the book a little too much, because some unscrupulous jerk decided to write a sequel to the original Dom Quixote... without Cervantes's permission. This irkedCervantes so much that he went and published his own sequel in 1615, which turned into Part 2 we all know and love today. In fact, some critics speculate that Cervantes might not have even written his sequel if it were not for the upstart knock-off artist. If the text of Dom Quixote ever strutted into an office and applied for a job, its résumé would include a impressive entries. For start, the book is considered to be the first example of modern novel. Let's go ahead and say that it just might be the best book ever written. Well, according to a 2002 poll of 100 famous authors, Dom Quixote is "the best book of all time".  It is not surprising that Dom Quixote has received this kind of support, The novel is such a big deal that it is directly referenced on other classic novels like The Three Musketeers, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to name just a few. Apart from the fact that the world's greatest living authors have voted Dom Quixote the "best book of all time," there are plenty of reasons to care about the book. For start, the idea of a regular person wanting to dress up and become a hero is probably even more popular today than it was in Cervantes's time. After all, just look at how many Batman movies they are making. Batman and Don Quixote are both dudes  who use their fortunes to fund their crime fighting.  With the popularity of superhero movies today, maybe this generation could use Don Quixote to help bring audiences back down to earth. It is great walking out of a superhero movie and feeling like you can do anything. But it does not hurt to remind people that they live in the real world, with real world limitations, but Cervantes show us that maybe it is wisest to wake up every morning and be our best selves in a realistic way, rather than always escape into the world of pure fantasy. To clarify, Dom Quixote is an important book for many reasons, but mostly because it was the first book to bring legitimate real-life consequences into the world of literature. In short, this book introduced the world of literature to a pesky little thing called reality.

               In January 1605, an ageing veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published the strangest of books. Unlike the bestsellers of the day, it was not a chivalric romance, a pastoral drama or the fictional confession of an outlaw. instead, it told the story of a gentleman so besotted with reading those kinds of books, especially the ones about knights errants and their magical adventures, that he loses his mind and begins to believe they are real. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was an immediate and roaring success. Demand for copies was so high that within a few months its author, Miguel de Cervantes, was having the book distributed throughout the Iberian peninsula while his publishers began work on a second edition. Two pirated versions appeared in London, along with two others in Valencia and Zaragoza. While Cervantes may have been surprised by his novel's success, he was certainly not innocent of the fact that his style was something new. We can appreciate something of the disruption that Cervantes wrought to the old Aristotelian categories of poetry and history into which literary texts were supposed to fall. Fantastical in the sense that they were born exclusively of his own imagination, and thus a vehicle for universal, philosophical truths, his stories were also intended to have real pertinence to readers' lives: they aspired to the condition of the highest literature even as they claim to the territory of the most popular. "I have given them the name 'exemplary'," Cervantes wrote of the 12 novellas, "and if you look at it well, there is not one from which you can not take some example." To understand that example, his public would have to approach these stories in a new way, not merely as external judges of an entertaining and false image of the world, but as "attentive readers" attuned to how their own prejudices helped create that image. Today,  more than 400 years after his death, we rightly fête Cervantes as the creator of the modern novel. What is less appreciated is the extent to which his innovations were a response to a media revolution that in some aspects mirror our own. Don Quixote was published at a time when the print industry was booming. Literacy had exploded during the previous century. We see the influence of books in the first pages of Cervantes' novel: not only are they the ostensible cause of Quixote's madness, they also quickly become the subjecty of commentary from almost every character encountered, no matter what his or her station in life. These book and theatrical productions, heavily controlled and often sponsored by the monarchy and its thought police, tended to paint a specific picture of what was right and desirable for a citizen of the Spanish state. Honour was available to all men as long as they were free of even the slightest stain of suspicion concerning the religion or the sexual purity of their women. This insidious ideology metastasised throughout Spanich society almost inverse proportion to the control the Spanish crown was able to exert over its diverse subjects. His entire literary creation is bent on exploring the ramifications of a media age in which everyone has access to multiple, often conflicting portrayals of reality. More than that, though, he was sceptical about the reality readers and theatregoers were being led to believe in. Born in the middle of the 16th ventury in a university town at the heart of what was then the world's most powerful empire, Cervantes was always on the move: In his fifties by the time he published Don Quixote, Cervantes had become deeply disillusioned with the ideals his society trumpeted but failed to live up to. This more than any other single factor accounts for the extraordinary success and innovation of Don Quixote.  For in it, Cervantes created not just a picture of the world but a picture of how people pictured the world and got it wrong. This approach to fiction continues today and extends far beyond the novel. The point to grasp is that Cervantes' innovation was areaction, a brilliant, to a world in which media had blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality. The state-controlled theatre industry and the monarchy's censors and official historians kept a sharp eye on the content of plays and books, and actively propagated a vision of the nation that helped sustain the monarchy's fragile alliance with the landed aristocracy while co-opting a complacent bourgeoisie and peasantry with fantasies of honour and blood purity. Cervantes, clearly unable to reconcile his own experiences with this picture of the world, did something different: he made dissonance the subject of his writing. This is why so many people today who decide to return to that great classic are stunned to find in Don Quixote so much that they consider "modern": a preface in which the author appears as a character, an fictional frame story that insist that what is being recounted is utterly real: characters making mention of the author as if he were another character in the book. What Cervantes realised, and what we should remind ourselves today, is that precisely because media are immersive, they are capable not only of persuading us, but of making us take for reality itself. When media threaten to blur that border, fiction is on all. Its job is to jog our awareness, shake our complacency, and show us how we have taken the bait.

              In his contribution last week, Alex Rosenberg, posed a defense of naturalism, "the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge." At the expense of other theoretical endeavors such as, literary theory. To the question of "whether disciplines like literary theory provide real understanding, Professor Rosenberg's answer it is withering: just like fiction, literary theory can be fun, but neither one qualifies as knowledge. As a literary theorist, I could take umbrage at the calim that my own discipline, while fun, does not rise to the level of knowledge. But what I'd like actually like to argue goes a little further. Not only can literary theory, along with art criticism, sociology, and philosophy produce knowledge of an important and even fundamental nature, but fiction itself, so breezily dismissed in Rosenberg's assertion, has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe. We especially revere Shakespeare in the English-speaking world, but I'd like to focus in the genius of Miguel de Cervantes. He did someting more profound: he crystallized in prose a confluence of changes in how people in early modern Europe understood themselves and the world around them. While writers prior to Cervantes deployed elements of this fictional template, he was the first to use the technique as a basis of a full-blown, extended narrative. In order to do this, Cervantes imported into the art of prose narration a ploy he learned from the theater. In one of the many debates about literature that takes place in Don Quixote, the canon, a staunch critic of the kind of reading that occupies his good friend, says, "For my part I can say that when I read the tales of chivalry, as long as I avoid thinking about the fact that they are all lies and frivolity. And when I realized what they are, I throw the best of them against the wall. As Cervantes realized in the context of the newly born mass culture of the catholic, imperial, Spanish state, irony expertly wielded is the best defense against the manipulation of truth by the media. Its effect was and still is to remind its audience that we are all active participants in the creation and support of a fictional world that is always in danger of being sold to us as reality.