tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52622670924679425832024-02-20T19:12:53.801-06:00Self-Referential CollapseFor words to have meaning they must point to something beyond themselves, or so say the philosophers. The words on this blog are intended to point to our collapsing society, and our philosophical reflections on that collapse.BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-84993065555477717412014-07-31T10:37:00.002-05:002014-07-31T10:39:50.781-05:00Transfeminism, Radical Feminism and Me<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
OK so I'm gonna dart between ideology
and personal stories. Some fights are too big for us, but we still
need to make them human, and show where they interact with actual
people.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The other day, one of my tangential
friends, read this article in the New Yorker
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2">http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and commented that she leaned to the
Radical Feminist side of this dispute.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I was aghast. I'm currently
transitioning from male to … something, we'll see, I call it
genderqueer or androgyne for now. So this is a topic close to my
heart and life. And I have a side in this dispute. My run-ins in
the recent past with Radical Feminism have been with some really foul
parts of it, Janice Raymond and Cathy Brennan, for instance. What
sometimes gets called TERF (Trans-Excluding Radical Feminism). And I
recent read Julia Serano's impressive book Whipping Girl, detailing
the Transfeminist side. But my friend always struck me as a decent
person, I didn't think she'd fall for venom. What was going on?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So we had a couple of back and forths.
My friend is leaning to the Radfem side, but certainly not convinced
yet, and trying to research both sides of the debate. Eventually she
found me this blog post
<a href="http://bigboobutch.com/2013/10/31/the-truth-about-why-transgenders-are-really-angry-at-women-like-me/">http://bigboobutch.com/2013/10/31/the-truth-about-why-transgenders-are-really-angry-at-women-like-me/</a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It was the first time I'd personally
ever seen the Radfem side described without a lot of what seems to me
like extra-hatefulness thrown in. I could see how someone might
follow this train of reasoning and come to these conclusions. I
thought maybe I was beginning to understand that position, instead of
just reacting to it.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So I guess the person I'm trying to
write this for is someone who is just coming to this fight for the
first time and isn't really convinced by either side yet. I won't
convince a committed Radfem, and I know it, and they probably don't
convince very many Transfeminist folk either. But let's see if I can
at least describe where I am for the benefit of the not yet
committed. Read other stuff too and make up your own mind.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
First caveat – this fight is old, and
bitter, and full of acrimony. At least since 1979 the
Trans-Excluding Radical Feminists and the Transfeminists have been
extremely hostile to each other. As Transfeminists, Mari Brighe and
Cristan Williams point out,
<a href="http://www.autostraddle.com/the-new-yorkers-skewed-history-of-trans-exclusionary-radical-feminism-ignores-actual-trans-women-247642/">http://www.autostraddle.com/the-new-yorkers-skewed-history-of-trans-exclusionary-radical-feminism-ignores-actual-trans-women-247642/</a>
and http://www.outsmartmagazine.com/2013/12/terf-battles/ many
Transfeminists blame Radical Feminists for sabotaging political and
psychological acceptance of transgender rights in the early 1980s.
It is not unusual for Transfeminists to view at least some strains of
trans-excluding radical feminism as hate groups. And don't get me
started on “doxxing.” Contrariwise, Radical Feminists often feel
extremely hounded and bullied by Transfeminists. Bigboobutch is
clearly highly annoyed at the responses she has gotten to previous
posts. It's normal for both sides to accuse the other of trolling
them. I am NOT trying to heap extra anger onto this fire. I'm
actually trying to dampen it a bit. I think there are some radical
feminists that are not worth the effort of trying to reach, but I'm
coming to think there are others who are, and maybe some kind of
dialogue beyond bitter words is possible.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Second caveat – I ain't
little-miss-speaker-for-my-generation. That's folks like Jen
Richards, Julia Serano or Cristan Williams, all of whom I admire
greatly even if I don't always agree with them. Read them for the
theory and the background and the journalistic skill. I'm just a
schlubb writing a blog post, about ME and my experiences and
positions. I don't even try to call myself a “woman.” But I
think this kind of issue requires both high level theory overviews,
and personal nitty-gritty amateur views.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Third caveat – the langauge used is
very much one of the disputes. I'm going to use the language I'm
comfortable with, because I'm me, but we'll talk more about this in a
bit.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I think the best way to tackle the
disputes is to look at some of the key questions.</div>
<h2 class="western">
Why Do Transfolk Want to Transition?</h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
BigBooButch says</div>
<div style="line-height: 0.22in;">
<span style="color: navy;">“<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 9pt;">These
readers are confusing <u>me</u> with this
patriarchal <u>society</u>. It is <u>society</u> that
tells little girls, “Oh, you can’t do that, only little boys can
do that.” It is <u>society</u> that tells little boys,
“Oh, you can’t do that, only little girls do that.” Carrying
that forward then, transgenders go forth believing that, well, if I
like to wear these clothes, do these things, love these people, then
I <u>must</u> be the opposite sex trapped in this horrible
body. I am not saying these things and making transgenders feel this
way, <u>society</u> is.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 0.22in;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 9pt;">What <u>I</u> am
saying is: fuck the patriarchy and homophobia. Little girls should be
allowed to wear what they want, roll around in the mud, play sports,
play with “boys’ toys,” and dream about growing up to marry the
princess and save her from the evil witch, all while still being
little girls who aren’t conditioned to believe that the only way
they can live these lives of which they dream is by “becoming”
little boys.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 0.22in;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 9pt;">What <u>I</u> am
saying is fuck the patriarchy and homophobia. Little boys should be
allowed to wear dresses and make-up and high heels, have tea parties,
play with their Barbie Dream House, and dream about growing up and
being rescued from the evil witch by their prince charming, all while
still being little boys who aren’t conditioned to believe that the
only way they can live these lives of which they dream is by
“becoming” little girls.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 0.22in;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 9pt;">It
is <u>society</u> that convinces people that gender is
innate and not a social construct designed to enforce sexual
stereotypes that keep male/men/masculine above everything
female/women/feminine. To give in to this conditioning doesn’t make
you a non-conformist, it makes you the biggest sheep on the planet
because you are helping the patriarchy to enforce these woman-hating
sexual stereotypes called gender.”</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now I'm pretty sympathetic to this
understanding, even though I disagree with it. The dynamic
BigBooButch is pointing out, certainly seems to me to be part of why
some people choose to transition. But I don't think it is the heart
of the issue, and I think the heart of the issue is pretty hard to
understand if you haven't experienced it yourself. If you think the
ONLY way to live the kind of life you want is by becoming the other
gender/sex, then yeah it looks like society being overly rigid and
unequally oppressive about socially constructed gender roles is the
problem.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The thing is, transfolk, often do in
fact lead lives that don't conform with patriarchal gender
expectations even before they transition, and usually hang out with
plenty of other folks who do. My best transmale buddy, did in fact
wear what he wanted, play with boy toys, and lust after women, and
hang out in lesbian circles, before he began transitioning to male.
And it wasn't enough. Something ELSE inside of him still yearned for
a more bodily masculinity. I'm not all that femme. I rarely wear
dresses, make-up, or high heels. But I'm almost always wearing
female clothes (often a mix of male and female clothes in fact). And
I did that before I transitioned. I was living as a housewife for
several years before I began transitioning. I knew extremely femmy
guys, who led very feminine lives, but still thought of themselves as
male, and didn't really want to transition. If what I really wanted
was a femmy life, I knew I could have that, with difficulties and
pushback, but without necessarily transitioning. But I always
thought of my body as being more feminine than it actually was. I
regularly had “ghost limb” breasts and hips. I felt a constant
mismatch between my body and my identity. Don't get me wrong, the
social role was part of it, and if I happened to be wearing female
clothes, or acting socially female, that helped, but it didn't make
the yearning go away. The yearning was more bodily than that. Julie
Serano describes it as “subconscious sex.” She says that her
experience is that something in her brain, “expected” her body to
be female, even before she had done the medical tricks she could to
feminize it. That fits my experience too. We often talk about this
as “gender dissonance” or “gender dysphoria.” There are
people who yearn for feminine lives, but not for particularly
feminine bodies. People who live those yearnings out, instead of
just suppressing them, are certainly transgressing patriarchal gender
expectations, but my experience is that they usually still
self-identify as their assigned gender. On the flip side, if you
identify as a butch woman, instead of as a transman, great! That's
cool. You'll get static for it from the patriarchy, but I'd like to
try to be your ally. I think that's a perfectly fine way to live
your life. But I think that being a transman is different from that,
and there ought to be space for both. My experience as a transgender
genderqueer is that it is something inside of me that yearns to be
non-male in a bodily way, and that when I started feminizing hormone
that made me feel sooo much better. It wasn't just that the hormones
were part of the path to leading an idealized life, rather the
hormones made me feel better right away. They quieted my gender
dysphoria or gender dissonance. The science of transgenderism is
still in early days, and is highly disputed. But my personal
experience definitely lines up with the common theory that there is
something in the brains or minds of transfolk that yearns for a
bodily experience of a different sex/gender.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
One of the big long debates in social
science, and gender theory in particular is about the extent that
gender and sex and sexual orientation and such are “innate” or
“essential” vs “socially constructed.” Julie Serano's
“Whipping Girl” has a couple of careful chapters on this if you
want to read a lot, but the short version is that Transfeminism, and
I personally, think the truth is a little bit of both. There are
real innate differences between the genders, but with lots of
variation, plenty of overlap, and lots of cultural overlay which is
often designed to exaggerate the differences or privelege some
aspects over others. There are plenty of women who can bench press
more than I can, but yes, testosterone really does give an advantage
on certain kinds of physical strength. Biological differences
between the genders are part of the story here, but a culture that
makes many women overly afraid of “bulking up” is also part of
the issue. Sexual orientation is another good example. I think the
science (and the experiential reports of folks) are pretty clear
here, that there is something innate and biological about the urges
and attractions that a person experiences, but that different times
and cultures process this in different ways, and use different
language and categories and social constructing get involved in the
process of turning urges and attractions into labels, social circles
and conscious identities. People don't “choose” to have lesbian
urges and attractions and “orientation,” but they do choose what
they are going to do about it, and how to make sense of it, and how
to manifest it socially. If they choose to do their best to repress
their sexual orientation, and live a celibate life for religious
reasons … well that's likely to the a lifelong struggle. That is
very much how I have experienced MY gender identity. It feels like
there are innate things that I am constantly trying to suppress, or
embrace, or cope with (all attitudes I've taken at different parts of
my life). So, yeah, I disagree with rad fems that gender is
completely socially constructed, or that trans people choose to
transition for completely socially constructed reasons. I think
that's only part of the issue.
</div>
<h2 class="western">
What does Transition actually accomplish?</h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
BigBooButch says</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 0.22in;">
<span style="color: navy;">“<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 9pt;">Since
both FtM and MtF are misnomers, in that no female can magically turn
into a male and conversely, no male can magically turn into a female,
as both are biologically impossible; and since using the terms
transman and transwoman seem to bring about the need of these
individuals to “other” the rest of us by insisting on using the
slur, “cis,” I have been looking for better descriptors when
speaking about these individuals.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 0.22in;">
<span style="color: navy;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 9pt;">I
have come to like the terms female transgenders for women who attempt
to transition into some facsimile of “men” and male transgenders
for men who attempt to transition into some facsimile of “women.”
I also like the terms, F2Tg and M2Tg, which would mean female to
transgender and male to transgender, respectively. Both have the same
meaning, neither should be considered transphobic since they are more
accurate depictions of what transgenders are actually doing with
their bodies, and both sets of terms satisfy the need to move away
from the idea that one’s biology can be somehow changed with
medication and surgery.”</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Ok I think the second big fight
between Transfeminism and Radical Feminism is about what transition
can actually accomplish. BigBooButch seems to think that sex and
gender are quite distinct and that while gender is entirely socially
constructed, sex is completely innate and non-fluid. And this was a
pretty common understanding of how sex and gender work, and how to
make the right compromises between innatism and social construction,
so I can't fault her a lot for it, even though I want to disagree.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My position, which mirrors other
Transfeminists pretty well, is that biology CAN be changed to some
extent with medication and surgery, but not completely. But that
“man” and “woman” even biologically, are broad enough
categories to include transmen as men and transwomen as women.
Female humans can turn into male humans, and vice versa, in certain
cases, sometimes without medical intervention (as in some intersex
cases), and sometimes with medical intervention (as for example, when
trans folk transition).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My understanding of the biology of sex
differentiation is that human sex is actually a dozen or more
different biological criteria. That is, biological sex is made up of
chromosomal sex, genital sex, gonadal sex, hormonal sex, secondary
sex characteristics, wolffian-mullerian sex, brain sex, skeletal sex,
and so on. And some of those are made up of even finer distinctions
(certainly brain sex is). Often times these all line up. My mom is
probably biologically female in the sense that she has female
chromosomal sex, and genital sex, and gonadal sex, and
wolffian-mullerian sex, and hormonal sex and so on. But there are
lots of ways the picture can become more complicated. Sometimes the
criteria are not so binary. Chromosomal sex comes in XY, and XX, but
there are many other possibilities too, XXY, X0, XYY, etc. Hormonal
sex has a very male pattern, and a very female pattern, but can have
a bunch of in-between, or variant states as well. Or the biological
criteria of sex might not all line up. Someone with fairly complete
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, may well be chromosomally male, and
have male gonadal tissue in their undescended testes, and lack womb
development, but be genitally normal female, have a very female
hormone profile, female secondary sex characteristics, female
skeletal structure, female fat distribution patterns, and a very
female brain. Such a person is likely to be assigned the female sex
at birth and raised to believe they are female, and indeed to think
of themselves as female. Even biologically, I think the right thing
to say is that this person is a woman, and is biologically female.
Because “biological sex” is a summary of a large number of other
biological criteria. But it is true that this person is biologically
“not completely female” or has a mix of male and female
biological traits. Similarly, imagine a woman who is biologically
female in all other ways, but has elevated androgen levels, and seeks
an androgen-blocking medicine to minimize facial hair, or other
secondary male characteristics from developing. No one would say
that such a person isn't a woman, or isn't biologically female, even
though biologically they have one criterion out of dozens that is a
bit ambiguous rather than fully on the female side. Biological sex
is a summary of many, many criteria.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
So intersex people and transgender
people are cases where the biological summarizing process runs into
problems. Someone with complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome is
almost certainly best thought of as biologically female, and someone
with very mild Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome is probably pretty
clearly biologically male. But there are cases of people with
partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or in other situations like,
Klinefelder Syndrome or 5-alpha-reductase syndrome, where the biology
just doesn't summarize well as “basically female” or “basically
male.” We often call such folk intersex. I'm not intersex, so I
don't want to speak for them much, except to say that they illustrate
some ways that biological sex can get complicated, and the fact that
how one identifies and lives is often far more important than the
complicated medical details of one's life. In the case of
transgender folk, we seem at birth clearly enough falling into one
sex that people assign us to that sex. But over the course of our
lives we come to disagree with that assignment.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In many cases, including mine, we come
to try to use medical tricks to alter our biology to be more in line
with how we want it to be or feel it ought to be. There is a lot we
can't change yet. If you don't have a womb, we can't give you one.
We can't change your chromosomal sex. Skeletal sex changes very
little after puberty. Various surgeries can do all kinds of things
to change one's genitals, gonads, and various secondary sex
characteristics. (Although it certainly is true that a surgically
created neo-vagina is not exactly the same as a regular vagina, nor
is a neo-phallus entirely similar to a traditional phallus). There
are definate limits to what we can do. But it is just plain the
TRUTH that “one's biology can somehow be changed by medication and
surgery.” There are lots of ways to do it. I'm doing it. I'm
changing many aspects of my biological sex via hormone replacement
therapy (and a few other things), altering my hormone balance and
many of my secondary sex characteristics. I may still be
biologically male in some ways, but there are other ways in which I
am just not biologically male anymore even at the level of sex rather
than gender.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But in a sense, that's not the heart
of the disagreement here. Even if a well-off transwoman is able to
get a hold of and afford all of the hormonal and surgical tricks
currently available, the body they have at the end of the process is
not going to be entirely parallel to someone way at the female end of
the biological sex continuum. You might think that they have made
themselves into a “facsimile” of a woman rather than into a
“real” woman.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I disagree. I think “woman” and
“man” are broad categories that include lots of people and lots
of biological possibilities, and I think that transwomen can be
genuinely biologically women, and transmen can be genuinely
biologically men. And as we'll see in the next section, I do think
that who counts as a man or woman is not entirely a matter of
biology. But even at the level of biology, I think many transwomen
count as women. Look, most people never actually get around to
checking their chromosomal sex, or getting the painful biopsy
required to check your gonadal tissue. You could have a chromosomal
sex at odds with your overall biology and not know it. When the
Olympics used to require chromosomal sex typing, they would get a
couple of people surprised by the results every cycle. Similarly, if
you think that an infertile woman is not a “real” woman, because,
say, they were born without a womb, or had to have it surgically
removed for medical reasons, you are being an asshole, AND
misunderstanding how biological sex works. Even before we bring
intersex or trans people into the picture, the category “women”
include lots of biological differences between people, who are
nonetheless genuinely biological women. A woman who has had a
hysterectomy, or a mastectomy and artificial breast replacement, has
not turned themselves into a “facsimile” of a woman. So, too,
when we think about intersex or trans people, you can have some
female biological traits, but not all the classic female biological
traits, and still count as biologically female. Because
“biologically female” is a summary of a whole bunch of traits.
And our medical technology is good enough now, that it is possible to
alter your biology to the point that “biologically female” is the
right summary of where you are now, even if it wouldn't have been the
right summary at some earlier part of your life.</div>
<h2 class="western">
Who counts as a woman?</h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
We make judgments about who is a man
and who is a woman all the time in our daily lives. You look at a
figure walking in the distance, and guessing their sex/gender is
probably going to be one of the first things you do, perhaps even
unconsciously. We make these judgments even without knowing fine
details of their medical situation. Partly this is because of
sexism. Our society encourages us to treat men and women differently
in a variety of ways, many of which are pretty fucking unjust, which
means that we have to decide early on whether to “code” someone
as a male or a female.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Like all judgments we MIGHT revise
this judgement in light of further information, but we resist doing
so, (and resent it if we have to). We are likely to continue to
treat someone as male or female based on our initial judgement of
them. And we make the initial judgments largely based on clothes,
and secondary sex characteristics, and outward appearance, and
movement patterns, and often vocal patterns. Doing a biopsy of their
gonadal tissue is usually not part of the process at all. “Woman”
and “Man” are social categories at least as much as they are
biological categories, and the two are definitely interrelated in
complicated ways.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Me, I don't usually “pass” as
either male or female. Most people look at me and start wondering
what I “really” am. I don't claim to be a woman, but I might
someday. Or maybe I'll always think of myself as in-between and
neither-nor. But lots of transfolk “pass” very successfully (and
non-deceptively) as their self-identified gender, on a regular basis.
Julie Serano is a transwoman who people almost always treat as a
woman, until perhaps they learn about her past. And indeed, she
looks female, acts female, and has enough female biological traits,
that I think a neutral observer (if such a thing were even possible)
would classify her as female. She's not trying to trick anyone.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the original article that sparked
this whole discussion, entitled “What is a Woman: the Dispute
between Radical Feminism and Transgenderism” Sara St. Martin Lynne
said “This moment where we’re losing the ability to say the word
‘woman’ or to acknowledge the fact that being born female has
lived consequences and meaning is kind of intense to me.”
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I certainly don't want people to lose
the ability to say 'woman” or to stop acknowledging that being born
female has lived consequences. Folks that are assigned as female at
birth, and folks that start getting counted as female later in life
have LOTS of important lived differences. I hope us Transfeminists
are never denying that. I just think that both folks that are
counted as female at birth, and folks that come to be counted as
female later on, can be legitimately called women when they are
adults.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If someone wants to be treated as a
man, and you won't treat them as a man, what rational excuse can you
have? That men are better than women and this person hasn't “earned”
being treated as a man? That's sexist bullshit. That may well tug
on our subconscious because we live in a culture of sexist bullshit,
but that is something that we should consciously resist any time we
can. I think the same applies to someone who wants to be treated as
a woman, but for some reason you won't. What you think they haven't
paid their dues enough, they haven't earned the feminine pronoun?
That's exactly the same kind of sexist crap. Ok, maybe you hesitate
because you think women and men are fundamentally different and it
just seems wrong or false to treat a woman as if they were a man.
Well, the “fundamental differences” are real but small and
probably exaggerated by our culture, but OK, even if so, how do you
know this person is “really” a woman, even though they are
claiming to be a man, and asking to be treated as one? Have you
looked into their genitals, their brain, their heart, their life,
their self? Are you a better expert than they are on WHO THEY ARE?
Do you really think they are trying to scam you? Chat with them a
bit. Try to understand their viewpoint. Is that really the vibe you
are getting?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
My position is that who counts as a
woman, and who counts as a man is often an easy call. When it gets
tricky though, it is hard for me to trust anyone more than the person
who is claiming to be a woman or a man. OK, maybe if I think they
are are working on a scam, but that is just SOOO not the vibe I've
gotten from the transfolk I have known.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
If you think someone honestly thinks
of themselves as a woman or a man, why would you want to disagree
with them? Ok maybe you're their parent or lover or physician and
want to make sure they've thought about it enough and examined all
the angles, and are trying to help prevent them from making a
mistake. And yes, detransition and regret do happen sometimes. It's
not like it is impossible to be mistaken. But everybody's gotta live
their lives, they have to make the best choices they can, they have
to make their best guesses about who they are and what is going to
make them happy. If someone says please count me as a woman, or as a
man, in all seriousness, I don't think there is any good reason not
to.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sometimes you get a religious version
of this worry instead of a radical feminist one. That people
“really” are male or female, and can't change that, and that it
is offensive to try, and that we should treat people as they “really”
are. Well, if there is some fundamental truth here, then it would
take perfect epistemology to get to it. Perhaps the person “really”
is male, even though they outwardly seem female for part of their
life. Or perhaps the reality is more complex than our simplified
concepts can get at. God or an omniscient being of some kind might
know what sex we “really” are and treat us as such. But humans
have to guess based upon the evidence and self-reflection and such
that we are capable of. And it just seems badly arrogant to me to
think you know what sex or gender someone really is, better than they
themselves do.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Even if you want a more restrictive
criterion for who gets to count as a woman, than anyone who seriously
asserts they do, there are lots of criteria you could use less
essentialist than “you will always be the gender you were assigned
at birth.” Maybe you want to make sure someone has lived as their
target gender for at least a year, or that they have started
hormones, or even that they have had some surgery. I think these are
over-restrictive, but they are sometimes compromises between Transfeminists and other views. The vast majority of legal
jurisdictions (outside of the Islamic world and Africa, and even in
several of those cases), acknowledge that humans really do sometimes
transition from male to female and vice versa. If you think that
once someone is assigned female at birth then they are always
“really” female, or vice versa, then every major medical
organization disagrees with you, and nearly all legal jurisdictions.
The people who are still on your side of that particular debate are
conservative Muslims, some conservative Christians, and some radical
feminists.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Some Radical Feminists will accept a
formerly male assigned person as female, but only after they have had
major genital surgery. The mantra “penis is male” gets thrown
around a lot. And regular folks who haven't thought about
transgender stuff a lot, also often come to the table believing that
the genital surgery is the key dividing line between who should count
as male or female. This is wrong, but it's very understandable.
Being male or female is an amalgamation of tons and tons of different
things, social, biological, interpersonal, psychological, and so on.
And genital shape is a biggie, but it isn't really a central issue.
It is hard and rare to be a woman with penis, or a man with a vagina.
But it does happen, and I know people who do it. Who you have sex
with, and how exactly that sex works is really more an issue of
sexual orientations and sexual preferences than of genital shapes. I
don't really have an argument here, and many people don't believe me,
but genital shape isn't a magical dividing line between male and
female any more than chromosomal sex is, or sexual orientation is. I do find it mildly chuckle-worthy that radical feminism's over-emphasis
on genital shape, can wind up making them literally more
phallocentric than their opponents on this issue.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Who counts as a woman? I think the
best standard we can have for day-to-day purposes is “anyone who
upon serious reflection, beleives they count as a woman.” And I
guess if we disagree, then we disagree ...</div>
<h2 class="western">
Who should be allowed in women-only spaces?</h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But many times the real motivation for
these worries is not about who should count as a woman or a man in
some abstract or legal or theoretical sense, but who should be
allowed into women's restrooms, or changing rooms, or womyn's music
festivals. And when we get to this practical level we are trying to
balance a bunch of different etiquette issues.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
From the trans side, let me tell you
that this is a constant headache or worse for us. I am not welcome
in either gender's restroom or changing room. Occasionally a place
will have a gender-neutral bathroom (usually called a “family”
bathroom), and those are handy. But I'm always scared when I enter
either gender's public restroom. I often try to “hold it” rather
than use public restrooms (and one of the side effects of my
t-suppressor meds is that I have to drink more and urinate more than
before). I change at home before and after going to the gym, because
I know I'll be unwelcome in either changing room. I haven't been
beaten up over restroom use yet, but I have other trans
friends that have. Trans people complain about the bathroom problem
to each other a lot, I am not at all alone here.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
But contrariwise, many women see
restrooms and changing rooms, not just as a place to use the
facilities, but as a place to retreat from all things male. If they
see someone they perceive as male, (whether the person is male or
not, I've known butch ciswomen who were mistaken for men in bathrooms
and given the riot act) it can seriously harsh their retreat. In
fact, if the person is a rape or abuse survivor, they might find
perceived masculinity in a place they thought was “safe”
particularly triggering. The safety argument has always rung hollow
to me. Transpeople are in far more danger in bathrooms and changing
rooms than other people are in danger from us. Similarly, I'm sure
that some people felt “safer” when they were confident that the
restrooms and changing rooms they used were all white too … On the
other hand, our society is soooo damn dysfunctional on anything
having to do with rape, and rape culture is so terribly pervasive,
that it is very easy to sympathize with people wanting a temporary
break from it, or even just the vague sense that they have a break.
In male bathrooms ... well male bathrooms have extremely rigid social
codes, there are unspoken rules about talking, and looking and who
takes which stall or urinal or sink when. Sometimes, it's possible
to take advantage of these rules to not be noticed at all, but if
something goes wrong, men are often willing to get belligerent (or
uncomfortable), about slight mess ups of the unspoken rules. Sigh...
I don't really want to make other people uncomfortable, I just want
to pee, wash my hands, maybe occasionally touch up my make-up. I
know I'm no danger to you, and not really male, but you don't
necessarily know that, and the dumb theories that transwomen are all
motivated to transition because of sexual deviance don't really help
the issue. Trans people have the legal right to use the bathroom
they are presenting as in every state, and in many states have the
right to use changing rooms too (other states it isn't clear or gets
case by casey). I think we have the moral right too. But I also
think that we shouldn't always press that right, when we have other
decent options, because we don't want to be creating unnecessary fear
or discomfort. Hopefully over time people will come to realize that
transwomen are no more scary than any other random woman in the
bathroom, and that transmen are not trying to flout the rules of the
bathroom, they just wanna use the closed stalls more often than other
men.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Social clubs, and concerts and places
like that which are limited to one gender are a slightly different
case. No body really NEEDS to see this concert, or join the Boy
Scouts, the way that we do sometimes need to use a nearby restroom,
despite our planning. And clubs and social venues are by and large
within their legal rights to exclude people on all sorts of bases,
including gender, or even more restrictive gender based criteria. If
a concert wants to only allow in “womyn born as womyn” in most
states they can, and probably ought to be allowed to. But why
exactly would you want a restriction like that? Famously the Boy
Scouts of America have been very regressive on LGBT inclusion, while the Girl
Scouts of America have been equally progressive on the same issue. The Girl
Scouts say if a child identifies as a girl, and their parents present
them socially as a girl, then they are girl enough to be a girl
scout. If a country club wanted to restrict it's members by race,
well, even if it was legal, most people ought to avoid a country club
like that. Where this gets tricky is in places aimed heavily at gay
or lesbian culture. Here there are legitimate reasons to want to
restrict things to one gender, although even there many clubs,
concerts, bars and such that choose not to, but merely to use social
pressure to make folk that aren't appropriate for the venue feel
uncomfortable. But you know what? A lot of transmen were deeply
involved in lesbian social scenes as butches prior to coming out as
males. A lot of transwomen are attracted to women or already
partnered with women. And queer women certainly are sometimes
attracted to transwomen or to transmen. Similarly a lot of
transwomen had strong ties to male gay culture prior to, during or
after transition. I haven't personally known a lot of transmen
attracted to other men trying to participate in gay male culture, but
I've known a few, and I'm told that that happens a fair bit too.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I don't have much opinion on the
Michfest case, and don't know a lot of details. But one of the
groups I was involved with had a case last year where a transman was
competing in a competition traditionally limited to gay males, and
there was some dispute about whether transmales were “male enough”
to qualify. The judges disqualified the contestant, and there was an
uproar, and a few weeks later the rules were formally clarified to
explicitly allow transmen, and the people in charge apologized and
expressed that they were trying to keep the traditional gay male vibe
of the contest and had misjudged what the constituents of this little
sub-culture actually wanted. (I haven't talked to the contestant
since, I wonder what, if anything, they did to apologize to him).
Michfest can have their womyn-born-womyn policy, and contests can
limited themselves to cisgender people if they want, but I hope
that lots of people of goodwill will be turned off by a club or
concert or contest's decision to do so, and will look elsewhere for
their culture. And this does seem to be happening. I know I
personally was heartened when I saw that the Indigo Girls, who I've
long admired, decided to stop going to Michfest.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Historically, radical feminism has had
a lot of ties with lesbian culture. And it makes a lot of sense to
try to create lesbian spaces. And since a lesbian might have a bi
girlfriend, or someone might still be in a questioning stage and want
to check out the venue for the first time, often such spaces are open
to even women that are shaky on whether they identify as lesbian. So
in a lot of ways, I suspect the more moderate and sane parts of the
fight between Transfeminists and Radical Feminists are really about
whether and when to allow transmen and transwomen into traditionally
lesbian spaces and clubs and bars and venues. And whether to allow
at the level of etiquette and welcome and social pressure, at least
as much as at the level of rules or legalities. And in many cases
there is a generational old guard/new guard dynamic that is at play,
with younger folk being far more welcoming of trans people, and older
folk being far more suspicious. I don't claim to be a lesbian yet.
(I'm trying to learn the culture some. My wife and I are
taken as lesbians more and more often, and it gets a little closer to
true all the time). It would be easy to resent me, and people like
me as privileged men trying to steal lesbian culture and poach in on
the last sanctums protected from men. Sigh... I get that. I do.
I'm just trying to make sense of my life and live it as best I can.
Trans folk aren't going away, you have to deal with us. If you deal
with us with meanness, it reflects on you, and slowly fragments the
LGBT alliance, such as it is, a little further. I don't have the
answers for how exactly lesbian culture should respond here. I
certainly am more likely to go where I feel more welcomed, and I have
a sense of which venues are more trans-friendly than others, and I
know that non-transfolk who have trans friends pay attention to such
things too. But if you want to make us feel unwelcomed, because you
want places where you don't have to interact with us … well there
are honorable ways to do that.
</div>
<h2 class="western">
What is the right language to talk about all this
with?</h2>
So BigBooButch, objected to the terms MtF and FtM, and thought of
the term “cis” as a slur, and regularly refers to transgender
folk as “transgenders.” Sheila Jeffreys in her book repeatedly
refers to transwomen as “he.” The term for a genital surgery
associated with transition, can be anything from “genital
mutilation” to “sex reassignment surgery” to “sex
confirmation surgery” depending on one's political allegiances
here.<br />
<br />
Look trans terminology is a mess. There are a whole lot of
terms, and they change from decade to decade, and often make
distinctions that the uninitiated don't know how to make sense of. I
often have to direct well meaning trans-allies to glossary pages like
this one <a href="http://transwhat.org/glossary/">http://transwhat.org/glossary/</a>.
For example, the term “transvestite” is not polite in the US
(use “crossdresser” instead), but is still polite and
non-derogatory in England and Australia and other parts of the
English speaking world. And there are even good (complicated)
reasons why. Further, trans folk can often be more sensitive about
word choice than cis folk are (I use “cis” as a non-derogatory
term, and hear it used by others as such. I'm not really sure why
BigBooButch thinks it's a slur; one more thing we disagree about, I
guess). I suspect it's a side effect of the gender dysphoria/gender
dissonance. I'm pretty flexible about what pronouns someone uses for
me, or which names they call me, but if you call me “sir” it is
going to seriously bug me all day. Even if I know you mean well, or
are required to use sir/ma'am by your boss. It just hurts, and makes
me feel dumb, and failurey, and hopeless. People screw up pronouns
and names all the time, even when they are trying. One common
experience is that it is the people who have known you longest, and
thus may be in some ways your strongest allies, family and old
friends, that have the most trouble switching names and pronouns.
But it is usually very easy to tell who is trying to be respectful
and who doesn't give a crap. And that is the heart of the
terminology issue. If you are trying to be respectful, even if you
happen to say the wrong thing, people involved can usually tell. And
if you aren't even trying to be respectful, that will show too.<br />
<br />
But there is also the issue of ideological bias in our
terminology. I call transwomen transwomen, because I believe they
are trans and they are women. BigBooButch calls the same people
“male transgenders” because she believes they are not women (and
not the more normal phrase “transgender males” for reasons I'm
not sure of. Certainly the GLAAD style guide
<a href="http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender">http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender</a>,
considers using “transgenders” or “a transgender” as a noun
rather than “transgender people” or “transgender male” where
transgender is an adjective, to be problematic. Maybe BigBooButch is
being informal, or maybe she's intentionally trying to be impolite).
Point is, the language is question-begging. Both mine and hers. And
it betrays one's ideological affiliations to varying degrees. And
there are further complexities. I like the term “gynephile” for
myself (since I'm sorta partway between being a het male, and a
lesbian female, and it captures both). But the term is most at home
in and strongly associated with Blanchard's theories of
transgenderism, which are pretty offensive to me and many other
transfolk, so I don't feel comfortable using what would otherwise be
a useful word.<br />
<br />
So at the end of the day I don't really know what the right way
to talk about all this stuff is. Try to be respectful. Be mindful
of the quirks and preferences of the people you are actually
interacting with. Learn as much detail as you need for your level of
interaction with transfolk. Use the terms that have the ideological
baggage you are most comfortable with. Even if you disagree with Transfeminism, if you can do so politely rather than being
intentionally rude, it will probably gain you more sympathy from
folks that are still on the fence about the genuine debates.<br />
<br />
<br />
So that's my spiel. Truth is, that as much as I'm in a weird
place gender-wise personally, I'm really pretty moderate on a lot of
gender issues. People should do what they honorably can to try to be
happy in our brief little lives. For a lot of people that's probably
something pretty conventional with maybe a bit of edge to try to
change things for the better. I'm just not a radical about Feminism
or anything else. So I probably disagree with the Radical Feminists
on lots of other things too, but these are the few places I think I
can say something vaguely productive. BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-10287003858922438322010-06-10T13:48:00.003-05:002010-06-10T13:57:19.020-05:00June 10 - A.A. DayStory: June 10th, 1935 is the traditional day of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. The story goes that “Bill W” and “Dr. Bob” were both alcoholics searching for ways to cope with their problems. Both of their real names are matters of public record, but by tradition they are called Bill and Dr. Bob, or variants of these names. Both had had partial success with medical treatments for alcoholism, and partial success with religious approaches to dealing with alcoholism. “Bill W ” had become convinced that spirituality was part of the solution, as was medicine, but that the other element he personally needed to stay sober was the caring support of other alcoholics who were trying to do the same thing, who had been there, who somewhat understood. So Bill W. searched discretely for another alcoholic to share his troubles with, and found Dr. Bob. Now, Dr. Bob was skeptical at first, but rapidly became friends with Bill W. Indeed, Bill moved into Dr. Bob and his wife’s house.<br /><br /> They talked about what worked and what didn’t, what helped them stay sober and what wasn’t quite right. Dr. Bob returned to drinking heavily at a medical convention, but when he got home Bill W. rode him to return to sobriety. They made plans to take their proposals for alcoholics mutual support groups on the road. On, June 10, 1935 Dr. Bob had the last drink of his life, a single beer to steady his hands for performing surgery. June 10, 1935 has become the traditional date for the founding of AA, because it was the first time the AA approach WORKED, the first time that the combination of spiritual surrender and mentorship by another recovering alcoholic was used intentionally to allow an alcoholic to remain sober the rest of his life.<br /><br /> Shortly, there after Bill W. and Dr. Bob began targeting other alcoholics for their planned treatments, and Dr Bob’s home became a kind of center for alcoholics, in Akron OH. The method wasn’t exactly the 12 steps at first, and indeed they thought of it largely in terms of the ideas of the Evangelical Christian Oxford Group. Before long, Bill W. moved back to New York and established a group there as well. By 1937, Bill W.’s group in New York and Dr. Bob’s group in Akron were working quite differently, and Bill W’s group was coming into increasing friction with the Oxford Group. Eventually there was a split, the Oxford group understood this as Bill W. quitting, but Bill’s wife claims they were kicked out. Nonetheless, Bill W.’s group continued, focusing solely on alcoholics rather than a mix of spiritual problems, and accepting practicing Catholics, or others whose religion wasn’t quite in line with the Oxford group. By 1939, the Akron group split with the Oxford Group as well, and both groups agonized about how to spread their method more broadly. Bill W. proposed a grand plan involving writing a book, sending out paid alcoholic missionaries, and setting up a recovery center, which went against several of the spiritual principles of the Oxford Group. The 18 alcoholics still with the Akron and New York groups took a vote, and in the end approved the writing of the book by 1 vote, but refused to fund the more elaborate plan.<br /><br /> Bill W was the primary writer at first, and was working to secure various sources of funding. He succeeded in getting a little funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr., but did not receive the millions he hoped for, for the recovery center and professional ex-alcoholic missionaries. Rockefeller argued that the power of Bill’s method was one man carrying the message to another man out of goodwill and having been there, and that money would ruin the spiritual power of the approach. Yes, "man," AA was all male at first. By 1939 the “Big Book” was published, it was entitled “Alcoholics Anonymous” and was over 400 pages long. Bill had expanded the initial draft of 6 steps into 12 steps, somewhat modeled on the 12 apostles. In 1939 AA had around 100 members in 3 cities, and the book did not sell well. But things did slowly pick up. AA started publishing a newsletter. In 1946, Bill W developed the “twelve traditions” to help govern individual AA meetings. By 1950 there were 100,000 AA members, and soon Narcotics Anonymous was created as the first AA spin-off group. By the 70s there were a million AA members. Today it is estimated that there are over 2 million AA members, and there are over 100,000 official AA meetings, in 150 countries.<br /><br /> Now, I’ve never benefited directly from AA, but I’d wager I know plenty of people who have. Part of what interests me are the personal characteristics of Bill W, and Dr. Bob. Yesterday I praised experimental charity. Both of Charles Dickens experimental charities worked only passingly well. They probably weren’t wastes of money, but neither were they heavily imitated in later years. But Dr. Bob and Bill W. struck upon a model for charity that was fairly novel at its time, and has worked extremely well and been widely imitated since. But they didn’t strike upon it all at once. The idea of group psychological counseling cropped up in several places in the 1930s, including another of my heroes Jacob Moreno. AA got it largely through the Oxford Group, a group spiritual and religious practice. Similarly the medical model of Alcoholism as mental disorder rather than moral weakness, predates AA, and the idea clearly got to Bill W via one of his earlier doctors, Dr. Silkwood. But the model, not of doctors helping alcoholics, or religious professionals helping alcoholics, but alcoholics helping each other - that was novel. Similarly, the 12 step format was a spiritual path that is reminiscent of, but isn’t exactly like, earlier Christian ideas of humbling and healing. Similarly it was more than a decade after AA’s founding that it developed the 12 traditions, the rules of anonymity, neutrality, non-professionalism, openness and so on, that explicated the model for how AA was going to work at the group level, rather than just at the personal level. The 12 traditions are a sociological innovation, at least as much as the 12 steps are a spiritual one. And Bill W., himself, disagreed with several at these at various points of the story. The alcoholics group he ran in 1935 was only open to alcoholics who were still sober and had already undertaken a serious surrender to God, rather than open to anyone at all that is trying to recover, as specified by the third tradition. Bill W. argued strenuously against traditions 7 and 8 when he was looking for financial support from John Rockefeller in 1937. AA, evolved, changing many times in its first few decades. Bill W. was amazingly willing to let it evolve. Another good example is political neutrality. Bill W. himself was quite conservative politically, but he wanted AA to stay out of politics, to be as open to all alcoholics as possible. He continued even after founding AA, to be very open to new possible spiritual or medical approaches to treating alcoholism. He participated in medical experiments with LSD, under Aldous Huxley in the 50s, and studies on niacin in the 60s. He was interested in spiritualism and parapsychology, his house had a "spook room" where he and his wife used the Ouija board and conducted seances. He believed that the spirit of a 15th century monk named Boniface helped him write the book “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.” Much of that was later swept under the rug, but my point is that he was very open and innovating, intellectually and spiritually.<br /> Bill W. was undoubtedly a terribly flawed individual. He drank his way to flunking out of law school. He was a failed stock speculator in the 1920s. There is decent evidence that he cheated on his wife with 3 or 4 AA members after AA started letting in women. After he gave up alcohol, he smoked like a chimney, (starting that AA stereotype, Dr. Bob forbid smoking at the early Akron meetings …) and he died of emphysema. But he kept trying, and he was flexible in his approach. He was also supremely humble, building his success on humbling himself at the beginning, calling on others to humble themselves, seeking to structure his organization in ways that would insure continued humility, writing genuinely heartfelt praises to the value of humility that are quite unique in 20th century literature.<br /> Dr. Bob, who took his last drink on that June 10th, was never the humble leader, or writer, or theorist that Bill W was. But he, too helped forge AA in the early days, and he was the personal sponsor of over 5000 recovering alcoholics during the last 30 years of his life, and was by all accounts an amazing sponsor. <br /><br />Gratitude<br /> I am grateful for all the lives saved, and improved by AA.<br /> I am grateful for the many spin off organizations to AA.<br /> I am grateful for the pluralistic model of recovering victims helping other recovering victims, rather than the hierarchical model of superiors descending to aid their inferiors.<br /> I am grateful for the spiritual searchers dedicated to looking for ways to apply the spiritual to solving the problems of today.<br /> I am grateful for flexible minds willing to try new things and adapt and experiment.<br /> I am grateful for the humility of the 12 traditions, seeking to minimize organization lest the organization be suborned<br /> I am grateful for skillful use of neutrality, understanding when to be open to many political positions, or religious positions, or walks of life. <br /> I am grateful again and again for everyday heroes of self-reform.<br /><br />Other Notables for me for today<br />The births of b. of Howlin’ Wolf(musician), Judy Garland (actor), Maurice Sendak (children’s author), Kim Deal (Musician, Pixies Breeders), Elizabeth Hurley (actor)<br />The martyrdom of Giacomo Matteotti, the last real opponent of Fascism in Italy. The death of Alexander the Great, Marcus Garvey (controversial racial theorist), Bernard Williams (2003, philosopher, promoter of virtue theory, I’ve used his textbooks).BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-42039370137540320502010-06-09T14:31:00.002-05:002010-06-09T14:37:38.205-05:00June 9th – Charles Dickens DayWhen I taught philosophy, one stunt I pulled occasionally, was to have my students write a short essay on which fictional character they admired most and why. I remember being gobsmacked by one very surprising choice, Ebenezer Scrooge. Here, the student argued, is a man that with much difficulty managed to perceive his failings, and set his heart to earnestly mending his faults. I can’t think of Dickens without remembering this essay, and as it turns out it has echoes in his own life.<br /><br />Charles Dickens was one of those rare authors that combine lasting critical acclaim with stunning popularity in his own time. His novel “A Tale of Two Cities” is still the best-selling book of all-time, originally composed in English. (The Bible, Quran and works of Chairman Mao dust it, for example). He is still the best-selling all time author in English, although J. K. Rowling is getting close. Much about his life and works is well known, and well explored, but I want to meditate a little on it anyway.<br /><br />His dad was thrown into debtor’s prison when Charles was young, and he was reduced to a fairly working-class life. Charles had an education in a crappy school with the occasional side jaunt to working in a shoeshine manufacturing factory. He eventually became a junior law clerk, and then a journalist, then a journal editor and novelist. His first novel brought him immediate fame, and by the age of 30, he had published 5 novels (only one of which I’d heard of), and was famous enough that during his trip to the US, they threw a ball in his honor in New York, and he visited President Tyler at the White House. He spent the whole of the rest of his life writing novels, and giving public readings of them, frequently as part of literary tours. Most of his novels were published in monthly or weekly installment in popular journals of the day, before being reprinted in whole as novels. Social reform and social commentary was a long abiding theme of his work, and once he was famous he was involved in trying to create new forms of charity that would not suffer from the problems of existing charitable institutions, such as the “Urania House” that was funded by the richest lady in England, and run largely by Dickens. On the other hand, he and he wife Catherine “separated” when he was 45 and lived with a much younger woman named Ellen Terman, whom he seems to have spent the rest of his life with. The split was bitterly painful too, some of the children sided with Charles and some with Catherine, and even Catherine’s sister Georgina took Charles side rather than hers during the split. Charles Dickens was one of the early members of “the Ghost Club,” a London based paranormal investigation club founded in 1862, which appears to be the first of its kind. He also survived a major rail crash in 1865, but managed to keep his name out of the papers. He died in 1870, at 58 after a series of strokes.<br /><br />The obvious things to say about Dickens involve his social commentary. Dickens was a liberal’s liberal and wanted people to understand what life was like for the less fortunate. He was keenly interested in how people could fall through the cracks of the social system, and was always looking for ways to patch the cracks, as well as to point them out. He was a fierce opponent of poverty and of social stratification, and worked to “humanize” people who occupied various marginal positions, such as prostitutes or criminals. He tackled the legal system in one novel, and corrupt patent offices and unfettered market speculation in another. Karl Marx said of Dickens that he (and other Victorian novelists like him) <blockquote>"...issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together..."<br /></blockquote><br />Charles Dickens is also one of the most famous Unitarians of England, well kinda. He was born and raised as an Anglican, but had little patience with Anglicanism as a young adult. When he first visited the US, in 1842, at age 30, he met and interacted with a number of Unitarians, whom he found both humorous and impressive. He makes fun of them in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit. In his own notes to himself, he writes of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays that they contained "much that is dreamy and fanciful," but also "much more that is true and manly, honest and bold." Back home in England, he began attending the Essex Street Unitarian Church several times, and then took a pew at the Little Portland Street Unitarian Church. According to Dickens, Tagart, his minister, had "that religion which has sympathy for men of every creed and ventures to pass judgment on none." Dickens wrote to Unitarian Harvard professor Cornelius Felton, "I have carried into effect an old idea of mine and joined the Unitarians, who would do something for human improvement if they could; and practice charity and toleration." He remained a Unitarian for around a decade, and it’s not that hard to see its influence on him. During this time, he wrote the Christmas Carol (and most of his other Christmas work), as well as several of his other novel. This is also the part of his life where he was involved in running experimental forms of charity. He also wrote a purely religious book “The Life of Our Lord” that was intended only for his children. It was read aloud in the family every Christmas, and he begged that the manuscript never be taken out of the house or given to publishers, although it was published in 1934, after the death of his last surviving son. The book begins <br /><blockquote>“My Dear Children, I am very anxious that you should know something about the History of Jesus Christ. For everybody ought to know about Him. No one ever lived who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in any way ill or miserable, as He was.”</blockquote><br />By the 1850s, a form of Anglicanism called “Broad Church” had developed that emphasized Latitudinarianism, and what we would call religious liberalism. Dickens, returned to the Anglican Church, but remained friends with many Unitarians including his ex-minister, to his death. He accepted Darwin’s theory of Evolution, had an interest in Biblical criticism, and when the curate at his Anglican Church was replaced with one he found dull, he just stopped attending.<br /><br />In many ways, Dickens is the creator of the modern version of Christmas. Historian Ronald Hutton (who I like a lot on many fronts), argues that the current state of observance of Christmas in our culture is a result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by Christmas Carol, and I agree. I’ve written elsewhere about the many subtle changes in our understanding of Christmas represented by Dickens vision, but here are a few points. Dickens imagined a family centered celebration of generosity, rather than a church-centered or community-centered celebration, and he wedded the commercial message and the religious message together as intimately as he could. <br /><br />Another interesting story about Dickens involves his anti-Semitism and racism. A lifelong champion of misunderstood underdogs, it’s nonetheless possible to find evidence of racial bias against Eskimos, Indians, and Jews in Dickens corpus in various ways. But most interesting to me is his anti-Semitism. His early work Oliver Twist, has an impressively vile villain named Fagin, a Jew, who runs a gang of child pickpockets. Fagin seems to have been based on Ikey Solomon, a real criminal that Dickens interviewed while he was a reporter. Nonetheless, the portrayal of Fagin, who is frequently refered to in the novel simply as “the Jew” does not seem free from bias. In 1854, the Jewish Chronicle asked why "Jews alone should be excluded from the 'sympathizing heart' of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed." Then in 1863, one of Dickens friends, Eliza Davis, wrote to Dickens complaining to him about his portrayal of Fagin, and arguing that he had "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew", and that he had done a great wrong to the Jewish people. What is interesting to me, is that he responded to the criticism. He halted the printing of the book version of Oliver Twist, and altered the wording on the sections that had not yet been sent to the typesetters. Then in his next novel he made a caricaturishly good Jewish lady, named Riah (friendship in Hebrew), and at one point gives her the line: "Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ... they take the worst of us as samples of the best ..." <br /><br />I remember keenly a discussion I had with my father as an adult, when I described a black girl I had had a crush on in high school, but never worked up the guts to ask out. He said that he didn’t know how he would have reacted if I had, or if he would have been able to act honorably. I said, c’mon you’re not a racist or anything. And he said, oh yes I am. I have been all my life. It’s part of how I was brought up. But as an adult, I’ve struggled against it, and tried to hide it from you kids because I didn’t want you to grow up to be be racists too. That’s kinda how I see Dicken’s anti-Semitism. He has it, and it isn’t really that hard to see if you look. But he’s embarrassed by it, he tries to cover it up, or make up for it, when he can perceive it. He was trying to grow beyond it. <br /><br />Gratitude<br />I am grateful for Christmas as a holiday of family celebrations and generosity.<br />I am grateful for Scrooge’s example of self-reform.<br />I am grateful for Dicken’s tireless work to humanize all classes of society and shed light on where social systems are failing.<br />I am grateful for people who fund and direct experimental charities, looking for new ways to deal with societies flaws.<br />I am grateful for serialized narratives as an art form, from Dickens to comic books and TV shows.<br />I am grateful for religious toleration, where people of different beliefs work together for mutual goals. <br />I am grateful for the inner urge to reform our own flaws, the secret good side of embarrassment<br /><br />Other Notables for me for this day<br />Donald Duck’s debut, Joseph Welch stands up to Senator McCarthy during the 1950s.<br />birth of Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman, death of Tsukiyoka Yoshitoshi (last master of Ukiyo-e)BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-46320377172274338572010-06-08T15:20:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:27:23.432-05:00The Gratitude Project - Project StoryI recently read Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Year of the Flood” which depicts a fictional environmentalist religious cult, God’s Gardeners, operating in Canada some decades into our future. I could speak the praises of this thought-provoking novel, and indeed of Atwood, but maybe another time. One of the many bizarre habits of this remarkably admirable and weird little fictional cult, is their calendar. Every day of the year for them is a saint day, holiday or feast day, but their choices are typically environmentalists or biologists, like a strange mix of early Christianity and 20th century environmentalism. For example, Saint Rachel Carson Day is named after the patron saint of all birds who was sainted for warning the world of the dangers of pesticide. <br /> <br />Now, I’m not really a biologist, or a novel writer, but the project of dedicating each day to some hero of the past well it niggled at me. I’ve thought about it off and on for the last several months. Eventually, I decided that I would try to decide on one person or event or organization to be grateful for each day. Part of my goal was to cultivate my own sense of gratitude, as I can be a, well, a bitter old cuss. But as I’ve actually begun to work on the project, I’ve found it also a kind of interesting way of re-telling old stories that deserve to be told again. <br /><br />I’ve been working on it privately since May 26th, but haven’t shared any of my decisions or rationales with anyone other than my wife. But I think, I’m going to attempt to be a little more public about it. Here’s my goal, I’m going to try to pick some person or event, for each day of the year, that was born or died, or happened, or had some important link to the date. Someone or something that is important to me, or I’m particularly grateful for, or I think deserves to be raised up a bit. And I’m going to tell their story in my words, leaning heavily on Wikipedia as I often do. Each entry will also have a section to remind myself what I’m grateful for it. Feel free to follow my progress, or suggest other folks or stories for a day. Obviously these are my own choices, guided by my interests and tastes in philosophy, politics, art, and so on. As a flick of the hat to Atwood’s book, I’ll even call some of those I especially admire “saints,” so long as they are dead.<br /><br />I'll also back date the posts to the day they are about, even if I wrote them a little early or late, or didn't post them until today.BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-87336572194494450482010-06-08T13:49:00.002-05:002010-06-08T13:54:06.160-05:00June 8th: World Ocean DayStories: Since 1992 when the idea was first proposed by Canada at the “Earth Summit” at Rio De Janeiro, June 8th has been unofficially and later officially celebrated as World Ocean Day.<br /><br />Here is Un Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s official statement from the 2009 World Ocean Day, the first officially recognized by the UN<br /><br /><blockquote>The first observance of World Oceans Day allows us to highlight the many ways in which oceans contribute to society. It is also an opportunity to recognize the considerable challenges we face in maintaining their capacity to regulate the global climate, supply essential ecosystem services and provide sustainable livelihoods and safe recreation.<br /><br />Indeed, human activities are taking a terrible toll on the world’s oceans and seas. Vulnerable marine ecosystems, such as corals, and important fisheries are being damaged by over-exploitation, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, destructive fishing practices, invasive alien species and marine pollution, especially from land-based sources. Increased sea temperatures, sea-level rise and ocean acidification caused by climate change pose a further threat to marine life, coastal and island communities and national economies.<br /><br />Oceans are also affected by criminal activity. Piracy and armed robbery against ships threaten the lives of seafarers and the safety of international shipping, which transports 90 per cent of the world’s goods. Smuggling of illegal drugs and the trafficking of persons by sea are further examples of how criminal activities threaten lives and the peace and security of the oceans.<br /><br />Several international instruments drawn up under the auspices of the United Nations address these numerous challenges. At their centre lies the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It provides the legal framework within which all activities in the oceans and seas must be carried out, and is the basis for international cooperation at all levels. In addition to aiming at universal participation, the world must do more to implement this Convention and to uphold the rule of law on the seas and oceans.<br /><br />The theme of World Oceans Day, “Our oceans, our responsibility”, emphasizes our individual and collective duty to protect the marine environment and carefully manage its resources. Safe, healthy and productive seas and oceans are integral to human well-being, economic security and sustainable development. “</blockquote><br /><br />Gratitude<br />I am grateful for the times I have gotten to enjoy the ocean, its beachs, sailing, snorkeling and so on though I am no coastalman myself.<br />I am grateful for the ecological roles played by the ocean, in the water cycle, the CO2 cycle, the moderating of climate via the oceanic conveyor belt, etc.<br />I am grateful for seafood, and the many material benefits provided by the sea.<br />I am grateful for international cooperation to try to cope with international problems, indeed, the question of how the law deals with the seas has been a powerful force towards the creation of international law since at least the 1600s.<br /><br />Other Notables for me this Day<br />Carl Laemmle founds Universal Pictures, 1912,<br />Births of Joan Rivers (comedian), Scott Adams (cartoonist), Keenan Ivory Wayans (director), Nick Rhodes (musician), death of Muhammad (religious leader), Thomas Paine (patriot), Abraham Maslow (psychologist), Richard Rorty (philosopher)BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-1658094575312598742010-06-07T13:42:00.000-05:002010-06-08T13:57:18.989-05:00June 7th – Saint Alan Turing DayStory: When I used to teach philosophy, I called Alan Turing “the logician who saved the world twice” it is an exaggeration, but not much of one. Alan Turing was one of the great mathematical minds of the 20th century and spread his talents to philosophy, and chemistry as well. He was a homosexual, and out to himself fairly young. When his first love interest died from complications from Bovine TB, while he was a teen his faith was shattered and he became a lifelong atheist. He got a degree in math and at the ripe age of 24 published a paper pushing some of the boundaries of computability theory. He was send to Princeton to study at the Institute for Advanced Studies, under Alonzo Church, and got his Ph. D. in 1938.<br /><br />Soon after WWII broke out and as it happened, Turing played a key role in the war. He became the star cryptoanalyst of British intelligence, and eventually of Allied intelligence. Straight away he invented a machine that made cracking the German Enigma cipher (which was designed to be constantly changing) easier. His mathematical work had focused on the limits of what can be done with mechanical computational devices, but in fact during the War he developed or helped develop numerous mathematical code breaking devices, several devices for secure coded transmission, and several new mathematical approaches to code breaking having nothing to do with his computational theories (Bayesian approaches, and an approach involving the principle of ex falso quadlibet). It is no exaggeration to say that the Allied cryptological superiority was a key part of why they won WWII, or that Turing personally was a key part of the Allies cryptological superiority. That was the first time he changed the world, although it was all strictly hush-hush for decades.<br /><br />Turing’s own mathematical work was foundational, original and searching. He wanted to explore the theoretical limits of what a computational device can, and cannot do. He invented a type of logical computational device, which we now call a Turing machine, and proved that anything that can be computed by any device can be computed by a Turing machine too (albeit vastly less efficiently in many cases). And it turns out that, his work together with Godel, and Church’s means that there are a number of tasks that even the most powerful and sophisticated computer can never do. <br /><br />Turing was intimately involved in the transition for mechanical computation devices to electronic ones. He was also intimately involved in the transition from building special purpose computational devices, to building fully general ones. Turing devised the world’s very first compiling program, and designed on paper an electronic computer that could run any program. This was the nucleus of ENIAC the world’s first Turing-complete physical computer. The closer one looks at the history of early computing, the clearer it becomes, that like with the automobile, no one person can really be considered the inventor. Thing progressed in many small stages, and many, many people and labs were part of the story. But no one can doubt that Alan Turing was central to the story, in theoretical ways, in practical hands-on ways, in finding applications and solving engineering problems, as well as in seeing what can be done. Turing’s invention of the compiler program is probably the closest thing there is to the beginning of modern computing. And by founding modern computer science he changed the world again.<br /><br />And now we get to his shame and martyrdom. In 1952, one of his lovers helped an accomplice break into Turing’s house, and in the police investigation Turing admitted that he had slept with the man, which was illegal in Britain in 1952, but rarely prosecuted and rarely punished heavily. The judge in the case, was particularly upset that Turing had not enlisted and helped his country in its time of desperate need, and demanded clarification as to why. Turing begged the government for a letter, that without giving away the secrets of just how much Turing had helped in WWII, would say that Turing had been serving his country and that his government was happy with his service. They refused. Indeed, although he had been awarded the Order of the British Empire, in 1945 for his war-time services, he was forbidden to share this fact with anyone without high-security clearance. The judge publicly called Turing a coward and a reprobate and gave him the maximum sentence of 10 years in jail. Shortly after, his lawyers cut a deal to suspend the sentence in return for house arrest and an experimental “chemical castration” hormone treatment. <br /><br />From 1952-54 Turing was despondent, friendless, in exile, depressed and see-sawing around emotionally and physically in response to the drugs he was on. He worked some on chemistry and mathematical biology, and indeed made several significant contributions there. On June 7th, 1954 he died of cyanide poisoning, with a half eaten apple nearby that was never tested for poison, and no note. There are many theories floated about what exactly happened. The inquest ruled that Turing had committed suicide. If so, his recent trial, public shaming, arrest, enforced experimental drug-regime, and inability to defend himself without violating national security are surely to blame. For my part, I consider him a martyr to the culture of secrecy surrounding national security since WWII. His mother argued that his poisoning was accidental, and resulted from incautious handling of the chemicals he was researching with in his lab. Some writers have speculated that he was assassinated by National Security forces of some kind or another to keep some secret, or to prevent him from inventing something else dangerous, like a new code or a new code breaker. Another theory is that he intentionally re-enacted the scene from Snow White with the poison apple.<br /><br />Turing has been honored in many ways since his death. He ranked 21st in a 2002 BBC poll of the 100 most influential Britons of all time. In 1999, Time named him one of 100 most influential people of the 20th century, saying “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine." On Sept 10, 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown, publicly apologized for the British Government’s failure to intercede on Turing’s behalf at his trial, and thanked him once again for his many services to his country. <br /><br />Gratitudes<br />I am grateful for the Turing theory of computability.<br />I am grateful for Turing’s proof that there are some things that computers will never be able to do.<br />I am grateful for Turing’s work to build functioning electronic computers, from math, to logic, to programming to engineering.<br />I am grateful for Turing’s philosophical speculations on artificial intelligence and the “Turing Test”<br />I am grateful for Turing’s work to aide the Allies in WWII<br />I am grateful for a symbol of gay pride in math and science<br />I am grateful for the kind of deep patriotism that would lead a man to keep a secret, even while it was destroying him<br />I am grateful for those who died in shame, while doing good, even if their secret contributions have not come to light, as Turing’s did.<br /><br />Other Notable Events for the day<br />Gandhi performs his first act of civil disobedience against Apartheid, while he is a young lawyer in South Africa. The Supreme Court decision in Griswold vs Connecticut 1965 effectively legalizes contraception use by married couples.<br />Birth of Herman Wells, IU president who among other things defended Kinsey, birth of Nikki Giovanni (poet), Prince (musician), Damian Hirst (conceptual artist), Dave Navarro (musician), death of Chief Seattle, and Henry Miller (dramatist)BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-77962786787281235202010-06-06T13:41:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:00:43.332-05:00June 6th – Cripple Creek DayStory: This is the story of the 8 hour day, and one of the larger private battles in US history. In 1894 the Cripple Creek Colorado mine owners lengthened the standard work day from 8 hour shifts, to 10 hour shifts, at the same pay of 3$ a day. The miners unionized in a hurry and struck. By the end of Feb pretty much every mine in Colorado was shut down, although by Mar some had given in to the Union demands and others had succeeded in bringing in non-union workers from further away.<br /><br />There were fights between striking miners and “scabs.” There was an incident were strikers ambushed 6 deputy sheriffs, leading to a fistfight and shots fired. Gov. Davis Waite, who was a Populist, called in 300 National Guard to observe the scene and keep the peace, and they did in fact find things peaceful. They went home, thinking the reports of chaos in the area had been exaggerated. The Unions and owners negotiated, but in May talks broke down.<br /><br />The mine owners met with Sheriff Bowers of Colorado Springs, saying they were going to bring in hundreds of nonunion workers and asking if he could protect him. He said, nope, he was stretched too thin. So the mine owners offered to subsidize the pay of another 100 deputies, and the Sheriff began recruiting. The workers dug in, and fortified their camp on Bull Hill. The strikers began practicing military drills, and making military fortifications. May 24th, 125 deputies approached the fortified camp on Bull Hill, and the strikers used dynamite to blow a shafthouse 300 feet into the air as the deputies approached. The deputies fled with no shots fired, and the next night the mine backers agreed to finance a force of upto 1,200 additional deputies, and again recruitment began …<br /><br />Gov. Waite got wind and ordered the strikers to disband their camp on Bull Hill, he ordered the deputies to stop recruiting and disband their private army of over a thousand deputies, declaring it an illegal body, and he ordered the state militia to get back to Cripple Creek ASAP. Waite met with the mine owners and the Union leader trying again to broker something, on the campus of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. A lynch mob attempted to catch and kill the governor and union president Calderwood, but a local judge distracted the mob, while they escaped via a back route. The negotiators tried again, and by June 4th, both parties had reached an agreement, on an 8 hour day at 3$ an hour, and no retaliations, but also an agreement not to harass any nonunion workers that chose to remain.<br /><br />But by this point Sheriff Bowers had lost control of his 1,300 man army, which marched on Bull Hill cutting telegraph and telephone wires, and imprisoning reporters. Again the state militia was send in and when they arrived on June 6th fighting was already taking place. There was gunfire exchanged between the two armies. As the head of the militia and Sheriff Bowers argued about what to do next, the Deputies charged the hill but were repulsed. The militia occupied the Hill, and the strikers gave them no resistance and they ordered the deputies to stand down. The deputies then occupied the town of Cripple Creek, arresting, imprisoning, dragging people from their homes and beating or clubbing them. So the militia came into town and began arresting the Deputies. By nightfall the state militia was in control. The mine owners refused to disband their army of deputies, at first, that had not be agreed to in the negotiations, but by June 11th they began standing down. To this day it is the only time in US history that a State Militia has intervened on the striker’s side. <br /><br />The strike was a huge success for the Unions, and within a few years there were 54 occupations unionized in Cripple Creek, and the Western Federation of Miners was at the peak of its power. But the WFM was tarred with the brush of violence, and its 1898 strike did not go well, and as for 1903-4, well that usually gets called the Colorado Labor Wars these days. Public support went slowly against the miners, and Gov. Waite, and the Populist movement were defeated soundly in the Nov. elections that year, and never recovered, mostly because he was seen as being pro-labor. The mine owners also hardened their stance, and readied for the next round, turning to the Thiel Detective Agency, and the Pinkerton Detective Agency for security arrangements instead of impromptu last minute army-raising. And their combination of spies, lockouts, blacklisting, and strikebreaking proved much more effective. But just this once, the Gov. and the State Militia fought to defend the strikers against the attacks of the private army financed by the owners.<br /> <br />Gratitude<br />I am grateful for the 8 hour work day, or what is left of it.<br />I am grateful that private armies are still rare in the US.<br />I am grateful that government occasional intervenes for the people against armies gone wild, or even against the interests of the owners.<br /><br />Other Notables for the day<br />YMCA founded 1844, Martyrdom of James Meredith (1966 civil rights activist), Martyrdom? of Robert Kennedy, Jr. (1968, politician), deaths of Patrick Henry (patriot), Louis Lumiere (pioneer of cinema), and Karl Jung (psychoanalyst), birth of Sandra Bernhard (comedian)BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-20718800733057402152010-06-05T13:36:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:02:50.989-05:00June 5th – Tank Man DayStory: In China, the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989 are known simply as June 4th, or 6-4, in much the way that 9-11 is more than enough information to evoke plenty of reaction in Americans. They actually extended quite a bit earlier than that, the demonstrations began as early as April 15th, and began as mourning for Hu Yaobang, an upper party member who pushed for reform, and was humiliated, to some extent scapegoated, and forced to resign earlier that year. This mourning party gradually turned more radical, testing the bounds of what the government would allow. Much is still not known about the protests today, and there has been plenty of suppression of information about them by the Chinese state. But it looks as if the protests had no real leadership, or indeed unified agenda. To some it was about freedom of speech or press, to some it was about democracy, to some it was opposing nepotism, to some it was dissatisfaction with Deng Xiaoping as the head of the central committee. It began with students and intellectuals, and indeed there were general strikes at the universities on April 21-23rd, but it spread to many kinds of urban workers. By late April there were similar protests in cities all throughout China, and in Taiwan and the US. By May 13th there were hunger strikes, and Mikhail Gorbachev was scheduled to visit. The protests were pretty much well ordered, huge, and allowed to continue in hopes they’d burn out. There were 100,000 people in the square protesting peacefully pretty much every day for a month and a half. On May 19th, the Premier Li Peng, and General Secretary Zhao Ziyang spoke to the crowd, pleading with the students to end their hunger strike, famously saying “we are already old, it doesn’t matter to us anymore” in contrast the students were young, and he urged them not to sacrifice themselves so easily. They applauded but they did not disperse. The next day, martial law was declared, General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was stripped of all his positions and placed under house arrest. He was not seen publicly again for the rest of his life and died in 2005. But the military, claimed it was unable to get to Tienanmen square being blocked by throngs of protesters and still unwilling to fire first, and they gave up attempting to occupy the square on May 24th. Understand that at first, there was a lot of reporting of the event within China, and many sympathy protests, and indeed, many people traveled to the capitol to take part in the continuous protests. On May 27th, for example, Hong Kong had a huge gala concert “Democratic Songs Dedicated for China” in which many pop stars sang a free concert expressing sympathy with the protesters in Beijing, at the end of which was a huge parade attended by 1.5 million! people, one fourth of the population of Hong Kong walking peacefully through the streets chanting against the government. On May 30, the protesters erected a statue of “the Goddess of Democracy” carved specially for this purpose. <br /><br />Eventually Li Peng, who had always favored military intervention, and was now no longer blocked by Zhao Ziyang, was able to bring in the 27th and 38th armies from the provinces to attempt to occupy the city, apparently believing that the local army unit was too sympathetic to the protesters and unwilling to fire on their friends and relatives. Then June 1st it turned ugly. The Beijingers flooded into the streets to block the army, as they had on May 20-24. They set up barricades, and blocked off streets with vehicles. The army came from all 4 directions, systematically taking control and establishing checkpoints of their own. The protesters threw rocks and Molotov cocktails. Vehicles burned across the city, often with occupants in them. There are reports of soldiers and police being beaten to death, and burned to death. There was a lot of live media coverage that this point, and it shows soldiers firing into crowds with live ammo. It also shows tank commanders being pulled out of tanks and beaten to death by protesters. By all accounts the army systematically took the city block by block. By 1 AM June 5th the army had reached Tienanmen Square, and gave one last plea for amnesty, saying they had orders to secure the square by 6AM by whatever means necessary, and would rather let the students flee than kill them. At 4AM the student leader took a final vote. By 5:40AM June 5th the square was cleared of protesters for the first time in 50 days. You still hear conflicting accounts of exactly what happened that morning.<br /><br />The story of tank man takes place that morning, the 5th of June. Many protesters had attempted to return to Tienanmen Square and were shot on the morning of June the 5th. But in the “tank man” incident takes place a little off of Tienanmen square and no bodies are visible. You’ve all seen the picture, maybe even several versions of it. A lone young man dress nice stands in front of a column of 4 Chinese tanks. He just stands there preventing them from going to Tienanmen Square. They try to go around him, and he moves to the side so they can’t. He holds a shopping bag in each had, and they are full of groceries. We do not know his name or fate. There are many conflicting stories even now. He was Wang Weilin, no he wasn’t. He was imprisoned for a time and then released, he was killed by firing squad, he was never caught. <br /><br />The incident itself was seen by many and caught on camera by several. He stood there blocking the tanks, with his groceries in his hands. Unlike the last two times this had happened in the last two weeks, there were no throngs of people beside him blocking tanks. The battle was already lost that morning, he had to know that. There are many conflicting estimates on death counts, but clearly there were plenty and they had already happened and the army held the square. Preventing these tanks from reaching the nearby, already militarily occupied square accomplished nothing. Yet there he stood alone. Neither he nor the tank commander said anything to each other. The tank stops and shuts its engines. He climbs onto the tank and speaks into its ports. He has a short conversation with the gunner. He jumps off the tank. The hatch opens and the tank commander says something. The tanks engines restart, and the lone man hustles back in front of the tank. The stand-off continues. Eventually two pedestrians in blue come up and snatch him away. Secret police? Friends? Concerned citizens? <br /><br />Four western reporters got versions of the incident in film, and successfully smuggled them out of China, in various ways. Several other versions were confiscated. Many of the photos have won awards. One of the iconic photos in in Life’s 2003 collection of 100 photos that changed the world. In the Western media he is usually called “tank man,” but as “unknown rebel” he made it only Time’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. In 2009 a new photo of him was discovered, taken from ground level it focus on two Chinese men running away terrified. But if you look carefully in the background you see a lone man in the middle of the road holding two shopping bags standing still, while a column of tanks are a hundred yards off approaching …<br /><br />Tienanmen in 1989 is a complex story, with many angles, and spun as thoroughly in the West as it was spun by the Chinese. Once I thought “Tank Man” was a symbol of non-violent resistance of Tienanmen. He’s not, that happened earlier, for weeks, in crowds of hundreds of thousands, even millions. “Tank Man” is a late hit, after one story is over as the next story is beginning. He is the story of the day after non-violent resistance, when the battle is already lost. And he does it again. He serves as a symbol that not everything was lost. That even if the students flee the tanks in the depths of the night, the next morning in broad daylight the game of tank vs. civilian can go on again with the cameras watching. He reminds us that when great events are over, there is still spin, and the civilians can play the game of spin too. <br /><br />Gratitude<br />I am grateful that there are still victories to be had after a sound defeat.<br />I am grateful that tank commanders often refuse to run over civilians.<br />I am grateful that civilians sometimes stand up to tank commanders.<br />I am grateful that someone unknown can capture the world’s imagination and hold it for years.<br />I am grateful that shopping bags can be weapons of pacifism.<br />I am grateful that 6-4-1989 cannot be forgotten in China no matter how much it’s memory is repressed.<br /><br />Other Notables for me for today<br />Gen. Marshall calls for the Marshall Plan, whereby the victors of WWII will bankroll economically re-constructing Europe in an attempt to prevent another World War in a generation, 1947. Bose-Einstein condensate first created in a lab, 1995, Birth of Adam Smith (economist), Federico Garcia Lorca (poet). Bill Moyers (journalist), Laurie Anderson (performance artist), death of Dee Dee Ramone (musician)BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-11795312150635467132010-06-04T13:33:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:10:27.663-05:00June 4th – Saint Gustav Schroeder DayStory: Saint Gustav Schroeder was born in 1885 and died in 1959. Much has been written about the central story of his life, but I’ve had troubles finding more information about his early and late years. Gustav was a German who, at age 17, he went to sea and became a sailor. Over the next 37 years he worked his way up the ranks, becoming eventually the captain of a luxury ocean liner stationed out of Hamburg, the MV St. Louis. Now 1939 was not a good year for the German luxury tourism industry. However, Kristallnacht had occurred 6 months earlier and many of the few Jews left in Germany were desperate to escape. They had mostly lost their jobs, and been subjected to additional rents, so they were nearly out of money. But a group of Jews cooked up the idea of spending the last of their money on a cruise ticket to the Caribbean and just STAYING in Cuba or Jamaica or the US, rather than coming back to Germany. <br /><br />On May 13, 1939 the MV St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg bound for Cuba, carrying a crew of 231, 930 Jewish refugees hoping to escape Germany, 6 non-Jewish refugees hoping to flee, and apparently 1 genuine tourist. Most had sold everything they owned for the cruise tickets. Several of the Jews had come out of hiding for the first time in months to board the ship. Its story was made into a book entitled <span style="font-style:italic;">Voyage of the Damned</span>, and in 1976 into an academy award winning movie entitled the <span style="font-style:italic;">Voyage of the Damned</span>. Now right at the beginning it was clear that this trip was not full of high-tipping rich folk, and of course, the Jews had been pretty effectively demonized in Germany by then. The crew was surly towards the Jews, and the Nazi flag flew on the ship, and Hilter’s portrait dominated the social hall. In the first few days, Schroeder, who was non-Jewish and staunchly anti-Nazi even before this story, called a meeting of the whole staff, emphasizing that the Jews were paying guests, and were to be treated with the same respect due any other paying guest or he would come down like a hammer. One thing that dominated the early part of the voyage was passing around the story of Aaron Pozner. Aaron Pozner had been released from Dachau two weeks earlier for reasons that are still unclear with the condition that if he did not leave the country immediately he would be killed. But he had seen the inside of the concentration camps first hand, and he wanted everyone to know what awaited them if they were not able to escape. <br /> The trip to Cuba was in many ways relaxing, good food, movies, a pool, it was a luxury liner after all, and there was no immediate trouble. The one of the elderly passengers whose health was already failing died. His wife wanted him buried in Cuba, but the ship had no facilities to keep the body that long, so Capt. Schroeder pushed for a burial at sea. He found a Rabbi, on board and kloodged together the best compromise ritual he could between a traditional Jewish burial, and a traditional burial at sea. One of his underlings, who Schroeder knew was a Secret Service plant, insisted that Party regulations required a burial at sea to be draped in the Swastika flag, and Captain Schroeder’s first act of treason was to refuse this and to allow the Jew to be buried without the Swastika flag. <br /><br />When the ship arrived in Cuba, they found that Cuban immigration law had been changed in early 1939, to prevent just what was now occurring. Tourists were still allowed and encouraged and required no visas, but “refugees” required a visa, and a significant monetary bond “to insure that they did not become wards of the state.” Further, the precise rules had changed since Jan, so most of the Jews thought they had already paid the required fee to the required person, when they got their tickets, but now found that if they wanted to get off at Cuba it would be another large fee, which almost none of them had the money for. There was much bureaucracy and negotiation, the ship sat in harbor accomplishing nothing. The crew and passengers all became distrustful of the captain. The passengers became fearful that there were SS and Gestapo had spies on board the ship watching, as indeed there were. One man slit his wrists and jumped overboard. But the Cuban police got him, sent him to the hospital, and eventually brought him back to the ship. Cuban boats patrolled the side of the ship to insure no one snuck out. The passengers began debating the merits of a suicide rather than being returned to the concentration camps. The captain set up “suicide patrols” to patrol the ship at night looking for people attempting suicide (and the beginnings of mutiny plans). In the end, the Cuban navy threatened to open fire if the MV St. Louis didn’t leave the harbor, and it left with only 23 of the 936 hopefuls having managed to disembark at Cuba. As they left Havana harbor it was full of rented boats with family of the Jews who had arrived in Cuba or America in earlier months shouting their farewells, expecting never to see their loved ones alive again.<br /><br />So Schroeder took the ship to Florida, which was close, figuring that Roosevelt had been talking a lot about opposing the Nazis and rescuing the Jews from Germany. We actually have now records of Roosevelt’s cabinet discussing what to do about the MV St. Louis and its cargo full of desperate Jews. They really hoped Cuba would take them, because when push came to shove Roosevelt was not willing to bend the immigration quota laws that had just been passed to allow the Jews entry. The boat milled around the edge of international waters in Florida for some time, making regular radio pleas and hoping for a change of policy, but none of the fleeing Jews from this ship were allowed to enter the US. <br /><br />At this point the Hapag cruise line ordered Schroeder to start heading back to Germany, and to make some haste. Their company said, this was because of supply issues, and the ship was running low on food and water, but there was also real worry that war was going to break out soon. But here Captain Schroeder made his next heroic act. He vowed, but not yet publicly, that none of this Jews were going back to Germany, and that he would not return until he’d found safe places for each of his passengers. So he headed back and started up back-room negotiations with Britain. During the Atlantic crossing, a group of Jewish youths conducted a mutiny, and succeeded in capturing the bridge, but not the engine room, and Captain Schroeder and his crew were able to re-establish control. At this point it is clear that Captain Schroeder is personally leading the negotiation to find places for his passengers. As they cross the Atlantic, Britain does not budge, and the Captain and his upper officers form a desperate plan. They are going to run their ocean liner aground on British soil and force the issue. They planned out exactly how they were going to do it. However, before the day came, there was a diplomatic breakthrough. Britain wouldn’t take all the Jews, but if a few other countries would agree to share the immigrants they would probably be willing to take in some of them as a well-timed public relations gesture. France, Belgium and the Netherlands quickly agreed to those terms too, and the remaining 913 refugees were split up roughly 4 ways and deposited each in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. By June 20th the ship was basically empty and on its way home.<br /><br />Sept 1st, 1939 a few months later saw war break out. Many of the Jews from the "Voyage of the Damned" were in France, Belgium or Netherlands, when those countries were overrun by the Germans. Records show that 275 of the passengers of the MV St. Louis died in concentration camps after all. The MV St. Louis and Captain Schroeder were at sea when war broke out. Schroeder ran the loose and hastily erected Arctic Blockade to reach Murmansk an (at that time) neutral port for resupplies. Then he successfully ran the much tighter Helgoland blockade to take the ship and crew home to Hamburg. Schroeder, however, refused to join the German military navy. He spent WWII in poverty. He tried to become a writer with little success. After the war, he was brought up on war crime charges during the de-nazification trials. However, several of the Jews he had saved spoke out at his trial and he was acquitted on all counts. His last decade or so, he was supported almost entirely financially by gifts from the Jews he had saved, and he died in 1958. In 1993 the state of Israel proclaimed him among “the righteous of the Nations” Gentiles who repeatedly risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust with no plan of reward. <br /><br />Gratitude<br />I am grateful for normal folk who become heroes when the situation demands.<br />I am grateful for systems to provide basic assistance for refugees fleeing war or political violence.<br />I am grateful for intercontinental communications.<br />I am grateful that the evils of Nazism were exposed, reviled and defeated.<br /><br />Other Notables for today<br />June 4th is the day most associated with the Tienanmen square struggles of 1989 in China. It is the date of the first hot air balloon ride by the Montgolfier brothers of France. It was the date of the first Pulitzer prizes, and the first minimum wage law in the US (in Massachusetts). It was when the 19th amendment granting womens suffrage passed Congress.BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-79814441937963048092010-06-03T13:31:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:11:04.266-05:00June 3rd – Saint Franz Kafka DayFranz Kafka was a Jew from Prague, who was born 1883 and dies June 3rd, 1924, at age 41. He was the oldest of 6 children. His dad was an loud, overbearing businessman, his mom worked 12 hours a day at the family business as well, and he was raised by a series of governesses. He majored in Law. To all external views he led a brief and unremarkable life. He worked at insurances companies as a claims adjuster. He also wrote up his companies’ annual reports. He also helped his brother-in-law found an asbestos factory. He flirted with Socialism and Anarchism in school, but gave little sign of following them as an adult. He had a 5 year long affair with one lady that involved them being engaged and breaking it off, and then being engaged again and then breaking it off for good. In his 30s he contracted TB, which troubled him off and on. To his co-workers he was a diligent, competent, boring man. He worried that he was repulsive, but others descriptions of him are always, as a neat, handsome, austere, intelligent man with dry wit, maybe a bit boring. His close friends knew that he fancied himself a writer, and that much of his spare time was spent writing, but his literary career never went anywhere. He published a few short stories, and even the novella “Metamorphosis” but none of them attracted any attention during his life. He had two other brief romantic relationships in his last years. Eventually his TB got so bad that he was put in a sanitarium, where his throat became so damaged from coughing that it was too painful for him to eat, and he starved to death, amid plenty of food at the age of 41. Lest he seem too saintly, we know he also had subscriptions to several trashy porno mags. <br /><br />At his death, Franz Kafka was a wholly unremarkable man… and yet. There is some inconclusive evidence that Franz Kafka is the inventor of the civilian hard hat. Hard hats were already common in military contexts. But the idea of asking civilian workers to wear hard hats to minimize on the job injuries was first promoted by his insurance firm, and seems to have been his idea. And, of course, what he is known for today is his brilliant, disturbing, illuminating fiction-writing. Indeed, his last request to his best friend, Max Brod was “Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread. “ Needless to say Brod didn’t (and apparently told Kafka while he was alive that he had no intention of burning Kafka’s writings, not matter how much he begged). At least 20 notebooks of Kafka’s were in the hands of his girlfriend Dora Diamant, when they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933, and by then he was (post-humously) famous enough that they might have survived somehow.<br /><br />But his literature… He wrote an “accurate and informed” depiction of the Austrian legal process, given his expertise as an insurance lawyer, and it seems absurd, otherworldly, alien. He writes about self-loathing as a transformative experience. He was profoundly skilled at taking our assumptions about the world and showing them through a twisted mirror so that they seemed untenable, barely imaginable. Before we can change a problem we must be able to see it as a problem, and Kafka excelled at showing us problems we barely had the conceptual apparatus for. <br /><br />Gratitude<br />I am grateful for IV technology so that no one need starve to death in a well-stocked hospital anymore.<br />I am grateful that TB is largely conquered for the moment (in the first world)<br />I am grateful that the most ordinary insurance lawyer, can contain depths of wisdom, imagination, and literature, than an ordinary life can be rendered extraordinary in the judgment of history.<br />I am grateful that even an insurance lawyer can be the good guy from time to time, thinking up new ways to minimize on-the-job injuries.<br />I am grateful for literature that helps us make sense of self-loathing.<br />I am grateful for literature that helps us see how ridiculous many of the aspects of our society are …<br />I am grateful for regular people struggling constantly to make sense of the meanings of our lives, failing, sharing their failings, and struggling on for meaning …<br /><br />Other Notables for me for today<br />The death of Saint Pope John XXIII, the humble Pope who pushed for Vatican II, and championed Ecumenicism, and the Catholic Church reaching out to cooperate with religions that it had previously been antagonistic with. John XXIII is not sainted by the Catholic church, but several other denominations, including the Episcopalian Church of the USA, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America have recognized him as a saint.<br />This day is also the date for the heresy conviction of Peter Abelard a great Medieval logician, the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol by the author of the “Society for Cutting Up Men” manifesto, the Ixtoc 1, gulf of Mexico oil drilling disaster of 1979 (echoes, echoes), and the beginnings of the Tienanmen Square crackdown of 1989, of which more tomorrow and the fifth, …BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-84394840760326478342010-06-02T13:30:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:11:48.418-05:00June 2nd – ??Stories: I don’t have a good story yet for June 2nd. Any suggestions? <br /><br />Gratitude<br /><br />Notables for me for this day<br />The births of Martha Washington, the Marquis de Sade, and the notorious Italian occultist/trickster Count CagliostroBP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-21978571018683561722010-06-01T13:29:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:12:56.505-05:00June 1st – Saint Andei Vosnezsensky DayStory – Andrei Vosnezsensky was born in 1933 in Moscow, and died June 1st 2010, as in today, peacefully at home at the age of 77. He was one of the leading poets of the Soviet Union, in an era noted for great poets.<br /><br />At age 14 he began a friendship with Boris Pasternak (who was already a noted poet, and later authored of Doctor Zhivago, and won a Nobel) who became a mentor for him. In 1957 Andrei graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute with a degree in Engineering. But famously he witnessed a night time fire at the Architectural Institute that year and wrote the poem “Fire in the Architectural Institute” about the experience, and later said “I believe in symbols. I understood that architecture was burned out in me. I became a poet." He published his first book of poems in 1958, and was famous all over Russia by 1960. By 1963 he was “more famous than the Beatles” in Russia, and was soon shipped off to tour other countries, as part of the cultural exchanges of the Cold War Thaw of the 60s.<br /><br />Vosnezsensky was famous for performing his poems as well as just writing them and was among the best poetry performers in the world in the 20th century. He was also famous for developing friendships with many other poets, artists and intellectuals, including for example Marilyn Monroe, Allan Ginsberg, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. <br /> His best piece is probably “I am Goya” one of his early pieces about the horrors of war, which was also a performance wowwer and delivered throughout his career. I also like his “Anti-Worlds” which was adapted into a theater performance a few years after he wrote it. In his later career he wrote a very successful rock opera called “Juno and Avos,” and a Russian pop hit “Millions of Scarlet Roses” sung by Alla Pugacheva. <br /><br />Gratitudes<br /> I am grateful for my intellectual mentors.<br /> I am grateful for the courage to pursue a career that was risky at best.<br /> I am grateful for poets who struggle to make war horrible again, despite all the defense mechanisms we have built up to filter out the awful truths.<br /><br />Other Notables for me for this day<br />Birth of Alanis Morissette (musician), deaths of John Dewey (philosopher), Helen Keller (activist), the Martyrdom of Mary Dyer, 1660, hanged for repeatedly preaching Quakerism in Massachusetts before freedom of religion. Baudelaire’s classic poetry Le Fleur Du Mal was published in 1857. On more morally ambiguous notes, (but certainly effecting me), this is also the day that CNN launched 24-hour news in 1980, and that GM filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009.BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-83896480262814493322010-05-31T13:29:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:14:22.467-05:00May 31st - SyadayStory – Sometime around 1958 or 1959 Malaclypse the Younger, AKA Greg Hill, wrote a book called the Principia Discordia, thereby founding the religion Discordianism. The Principia Discordia is a masterpiece of silly nonsense and profound philosophy. It is often taken as a joke, and it is a joke, but it is also far more than a joke. I will have to wax rhapsodic about it’s brilliance some other day. For now suffice it to say that it is an excellent introduction to Zen aimed at Americans, and a good example of high grade traditional Crazy Wisdom mysticism, wrapped up in late 50s pop culture.<br /><br />One of the many jokes in Discordeanism is the creation of an intentionally absurd calendar system, whereby May 31st is the 5th day of the month of Confusion, and is called Syaday in honor of the Patron Apostle Sri Syadasti, who is the patron of Confusion.<br /><br />Sri Syadasti is one of the 5 apostles of Eris (the Greek Goddess of Discord worshipped by Discordeans), and thus a 5 star saint in their system (a rank “reserved for fictional beings who, not being actual, are more capable of perfection”).<br /><br />His full name is SRI SYADASTI SYADVAKTAVYA SYADASTI SYANNASTI SYADASTI CAVAKTAVYASCA SYADASTI SYANNASTI SYADAVATAVYASCA SYADASTI SYANNASTI SYADAVAKTAVYASCA which is supposedly Sanskrit for “All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.”<br /><br />That affirmation right there provoked me for many years. I have engaged in much contemplation of the roots of logic, both formal and informal. And I am still to this day in awe of this affirmation. Much of whatever enlightenment I have comes from the deep realization that this claim is true. Well, in some sense. And of course false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense, and both true and false, and true and meaningless, and false and meaningless, and true and false and meaningless. Well, in some sense …<br /><br /> Gratitude<br />I am grateful that confusion isn’t always a bad thing.<br />I am grateful for crazy wisdom<br />I am grateful for silliness in the cause of the greater enlightenment of humanity<br />I am grateful for multivariate logic, especially the dialethisms of the Indian tradition<br />I am grateful for skepticism’s constant reminders of the limits of our understanding<br /> <br />Other Notables for me for this day:<br />The death of Joseph Grimaldi, in some sense, the inventor of clowns (whose traditional feast day is the first Sunday in February, at All Saints Church in Haggerston, Hackney)BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-49042216638061265752010-05-30T13:28:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:25:37.585-05:00May 30th – Memorial DayStory The US holiday of Memorial Day began as grassroots remembrance of Union soldiers who died in the civil war. It was a day to decorate their gravestones and reminisce, and was promoted largely by the Grand Army of the Republic, basically the Unions veterans organization. It became called “Decoration Day,” and was celebrated in cemeteries throughout the North by the late 1868 and 69. It became a time for speeches to be given, bitter at first, but by the end of the 1870s the rancor was gone, and it became normal to praise the brave soldiers of both the Blue and Grey. Gradually it became a patriotic occasion to emphasize unity and forgiveness, as folk of all religions joined together in the commemorations, and folk of rival ethnicities did as well. Naturally, this took longer in the South, but by 1913, national unity, and a shared feeling of American exceptionalism, typically was emphasized over re-hashing the “lost cause” of the South, even in Southern Memorial Day speeches. The famous cemetery of Gettysburg played a key role, with obligatory parades and presidential speeches for many years.<br /> <br />Over time, the emphasis shifted and the name changed gradually from “Decoration Day” to “Memorial Day.” Decorating the graves and remembering folk who died in some other way than in the Civil War became normal. In WWI, veterans of that war were honored too, but by then it was normal to honor even non-veterans.<br /><br />In the 1960s the emphasis of Memorial Day shifted again. In 1968 the Federal government passed the “Uniform Holidays Bill” shifting and renaming, 3 holidays, Washington’s Birthday became President’s Day, Decoration Day was officially renamed Memorial Day, and Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day. In each case they were moved from a fixed day, to always occurring on a Monday for the explicit purpose of creating a three day weekend. From 1868 to 1968 Memorial Day was observed always on May 30th, but since then its date has moved. And as its date moved so did its cultural function. Memorial Day became a time to relax, to celebrate the beginning of spring. Barbecues, trips to the pool, or family get-togethers became more typically associated with it than trips to the cemetery or public parades. Here in Indiana, it is associated with the Indianapolis 500, which has run on Memorial Day since 1911. <br /><br /> Gratitude<br />I am grateful that we as a culture take time occasionally to honor our dead.<br />I am grateful for symbols of national unity, especially of reconciliation which call us to set aside our differences and grievances and work together.<br />I am grateful that our nation does not allow legal slavery anymore.<br />I am grateful that our country has largely healed from the terrible wounds of a Civil War over a century ago.<br />I am grateful that the many religions of America can occasionally agree to pray together. <br /><br />Other Notables for me for this day:<br />The birth of Mikhail Bakunin (anarchist) and Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny), and the death of Saint Voltaire (philosopher, writer and activist).BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-4120917671398084682010-05-29T13:27:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:24:06.721-05:00May 29th – The Rites of Spring DayStory – May 29th, 1913 was the Paris Premier of the “ballet” the Rites of Spring at the Theatre des Champs-Elysee. Igor Stravinsky wrote the music, Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed it, Nicholas Roerich designed the costumes and set, Serge Diaghilev was the impresario (roughly producer/director). <br />The piece was so artistically shocking, that the audience descended into a riot, the Paris police attempted to re-establish order during the intermission with only limited success.<br /><br />Why? Well, The Rites of Spring marked a moment in the transformation of the art world and how we understand what art and beauty are. Cubism and other forms of avant-garde painting in the first part of the 20th century had already started the process. They gave pictures that were bizarre and challenging rather than beautiful in the conventional sense of the time. Yet they seemed to have a kind of beauty too … It was a sort of simmering scandal, that sometimes the opposite of beauty wasn’t ugliness but some alien form of beauty.<br /><br />The Rites of Spring brought this point to dance. Traditional Ballet focuses on beauty and elegance. Long lines, graceful forms, height, airiness, refinement. Dancers stretch and stand on point whenever possible, bodies curve in delicious and delicate shapes. The Rites of Spring inverted all of that. It was as much of an “anti-ballet” as it could be. The motions were low, and heavy. It imitated folk dance wherever possible, and low class rural rhythms and modes. The movements emphasized pelvis over leg, centralness over extension, rhythm over grace. It should by all balletic theory have been horribly ugly, but it wasn’t. It was beautiful, but beauty of some heretical kind, beauty contrary to the canons of conventional wisdom. It was a clearly intentional thumb in the eye of conventional ballet. It was the beginning of modern dance. On top of that the set and costumes was designed to mimic early Russian Paganism and folkways. But Stravinsky’s music was complex and adventurous using dissonance, asymmetrical rhythms, polyrhythm, polytonality, deeply influencing 20 century classical music.<br /><br />Imagine you are at the premiere, you have paid good money to see a thing of beauty and grace from a strange foreign troupe of artists, and what you get challenges all your preconceptions. That may even seem old hat now. Today perhaps it seems normal for art to be cutting edge and challenging, as if the job of art is to provoke as much as to beautify. But this is precisely what was changing in those first decades of the 20th century as Cubism and modern dance began to shake up what we thought of beauty and art.<br /><br />Gratitude <br />I am grateful that I can see beauty in things that are challenging to me<br />I am grateful that I can be surprised by new forms of beauty, even after many encounters with beauty<br />I am grateful that artists take risks to bring me new forms of beauty, and new insights<br />I am grateful that sometimes the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but an alien form of beauty<br />I am grateful that dance has been liberated from the strictures of ballet, while allowing ballet to remain one form of dance among many.<br /><br />Other Notables for me for this day:<br />The births of Harry Frankfurt (philosopher, On Bullshit), Patrick Henry (patriot), G.K Chesterton (writer), Danny Elfman(musician), Melissa Ethelridge (musician), the death of Bahaiullah(founder of Bahai), Hoover Dam completed, and the election of Boris Yeltsin to Russian SFSR (marking the beginning of the End of Soviet Communism).BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-87773856586355501092010-05-28T13:26:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:22:32.063-05:00May 28th – Amnesty International DayIn 1960, Portugal was the last European power to be explicitly colonialist, and the regime of Estado Novo was noted for its secret police, and its vigorous pursuit of perceived anti-Portuguese conspiracies. On Nov 19, 1960, the English Lawyer Peter Benenson, overheard 2 Portuguese students talking on the London Underground (what we’d call a subway). They claimed to have been imprisoned for 7 years for “having drunk a toast to liberty.” Benenson was aghast, and it stuck with him. He wrote a newspaper article “The Forgotten Prisoners” about all the people imprisoned across the world for terrible reasons, and how we learn of them, feel indignant, but feel like we are unable to do anything about it. Its not like the Novo regime is going to listen to us. It was published in newspapers in several countries on May, 28th 1961. Benenson and his friend, the Quaker social activist Eric Baker, got a huge response and transformed it into “Appeal For Amnesty, 1961” a group intended to apply public pressure to free people who were imprisoned in violation of articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which all UN member nations are technically signatories to. People who are “imprisoned, tortured, or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government,” what Benenson called, “prisoners of conscience.” That year Benenson published a book detailing several cases of prisoners of conscience. The whole thing was originally intended to be very short term, but it soon became clear it wouldn’t be, the name was changed from “Appeal For Amnesty, 1961” to “Amnesty” and then to “Amnesty International” in 1962.<br /><br />Amnesty International became pretty much the first modern human rights organization, and has had many imitators since. In the 70s it broadened its purview to include violations of UDHR article 9 (long detention without trial) and article 5 (torture). In 1977, Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize for their “campaign against torture.” Amnesty International has been an important force in pushing for many UN reforms, including the creation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the International Criminal Court. <br /><br /> Gratitude<br />I’m grateful for social organizations which pressure governments to live up to their highest ideals<br />I’m grateful for social organizations which help us transform individual desire for justice into collective pressure for justice.<br />I’m grateful for the Universal Declaration on Human Rights<br />I’m grateful that I’ve never been tortured, extra-judicially executed, disappeared, rendered<br /><br />Other Notables for me for this day:<br />The death of Noah Webster (of dictionary fame), Alfred Adler (psychologist), the First Continental Congress convened for the first time to organize the US revolutionBP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-86374353057189853942010-05-27T13:26:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:21:25.026-05:00May 27th –Saint Ibn Khaldun DayStory: Abu Zayd ‘Abdu r-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldun Al-Hadrami, was born May 27th 1332 by our calendar, lived until 1406, and is usually just called “Ibn Khaldun.” He was high born, well educated, and following family tradition went into politics. His autobiography reads like an adventure story, involving political intrigue, lots of jail time, reaching high public office, and being exiled again. He bopped around from Spain to Tunis, to mighty Egypt, to the wild Berber tribes. He was at various times an academic, a vizier, a man charged with collecting taxes from hostile barbarians, a prisoner, a diplomat successfully brokering a peace treaty, a soldier, and a judge. He wrote books on history, mysticism, logic, theology, philosophy, and an autobiography.<br /><br />But we care about him, because of his masterpiece, the Kitabu l-‘ibar- the “Book of Evidence” which was nothing short of a history of the world in 7 volumes. Historians still use book 6, and 7 about the details of the Berber people, and the politics of medieval North Africa, but for everyone else, the action is in book 1, "the Muqaddimah"- the Prolegomena. It is a book of theory, of introduction to the whole project of history. It discusses the methodology of researching history, but also discusses general trends in history. The great British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee called the Muqaddimah "a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.” Ibn Khaldun is frequently cited as the founder of sociology, and I concur. He was deeply interested in WHY groups of people behave in the way they do, and argued that “social cohesion” was more central to the explanation than the groups ideology, or any individuals actions or psychology, even the leader of the group. He is also probably the first person to apply the scientific method to history. He has an elaborate discussion of different forms of bias to which histories are habitually subjected.<br /><br />Ibn Khaldun argued eloquently for understanding history in terms of cycles based on generations fueled by conflict between town and wilderness. He described a reoccurring process of barbarians conquering “soft” townies, and then over a few generations adopting the ways of town life, and being conquered in turn. His understanding of economics is profound, describing in detail feedback mechanisms that even the economists of the 1800s Europe hadn’t understood. One, famous example, among many is the Laffer Curve, a principle of taxation rates and revenues over time, which is usually referred to after Arthur Laffer who explained it repeatedly to people in the Ford administration in 1974, sketching it on napkin graphs, but is in fact clearly explained in Khaldun in 1332. He ranks with Smith and Marx as among the great economists of all time (and both camps have tried to claim him as a predecessor). He is the first person ever to propound the labor theory of value, and described the multiplier effect typically associated with Keynesian understandings of aggregate demand. Ibn Khaldun even argued for something like the evolution of humans from monkeys in chapter 6 of the Muqaddimah. <br /><br />Ibn Khaldun is in many ways the father of the social sciences, presaging them, introducing them, arguing for the scientific study of societies, rather than just the unscientific recording of stories about societies. None who read him can doubt he was a pioneer in history, sociology, and economics. On a personal note, my beloved theorists of history, Strauss and Howe, are deeply indebted to Khaldun.<br /><br />Gratitudes:<br />I’m grateful for inquiry into the behavior of societies.<br />I’m grateful for the theory that history moves cyclically, and generationally.<br />I’m grateful for the labor theory of value, that all economic values rest ultimately not on gold or land, but on human labor.<br />I’m grateful for the insight that histories are habitually biased in various ways, unless careful corrective measures are observed, and these minimize rather than eliminate the problems.<br />I’m grateful for the idea that careful methodology might be applied to social situations as well as to physical sciences.<br />I’m grateful for the bonds of social cohesion which form us into a society rather than a mere collection of individuals.<br /><br />Other Notables for me for this day:<br />The births of Vincent Price (actor), Harlan Ellison (writer), Siouxsie Sioux (musician), Neil Finn (musician of Crowded House)BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-89522736479576596592010-05-26T13:25:00.000-05:002010-06-08T14:18:19.184-05:00May 26th – Martin Heidegger DayStories: Martin Heidegger, born 1889 - and died May 26th, 1976 and it’s not at all clear he should be thought of as a saint. He undoubtedly had 2 extra marital affairs, for example, with Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Blochmann. But the real kicker has always been that he was a Nazi. But, well, not much of a Nazi. He was a member of the party and gave a few pro-Nazi speeches, but he never rose in the ranks and the other Nazis had contempt for him. Heidegger has had detractors and defenders over the years, even a number of European Jews have apologized for him. Heidegger claimed that he was initially attracted to the hopes the Nazis offer, but by 1934 had decided they were a bunch of hateful and worthless thugs, but that someone needed to pretend to join them to protect the future of the University. <br /><br />Perhaps he was a comical toady, sliming up to the Nazis; perhaps he was a bitter collaborator trying to restrain the worst of the Nazi’s from within. Either way, he was a towering philosopher with a huge influence on Western philosophy, (and indeed, both Japanese and Chinese thought), from 1927 to today. Although, I frequently disagree with him, he’s certainly influenced me. He was also by all accounts a great teacher and several of his students became important in their own rights with time. <br /><br />It’s hard to explain exactly why he was so influential, or what his “contributions” to our society have been. His first major contribution is the re-raising of fundamental ontology. His most famous work “Being and Time” begins by noting that we have lost the ability to even wonder what exactly being is. He claims that Western Philosophy has sold us on a story about the nature of being, re-affirmed in many ways from Aristotle, to Christianity, to Descartes, to his own mentor Husserl. There are objects which have properties, the world is a place of things, and ways for things to be. People, books, blogs. Liberal people, conservative people, people jogging, smutty books, blogs that are just starting and so on. But if I say “Brett is a liberal,” even if I understand the terms “Brett” and “liberal” what the heck does that “is” mean? Is it just a piece of grammar, or is it trying to tell us something, adding something to the sentence? Once philosophers were puzzled over the meaning of being, but now its almost impossible to even raise the question of the meaning of being again.<br /><br />And that’s his second contribution, his understanding of “hermeneutics.” For Heidegger, we have habitual ways of understanding things which “covers over” our ability to understand things in deeply new ways. Progress involves digging under what we think we already know, and exposing things once again, so that they can be re-interpreted in new ways. Truth is not ultimately a matter of mathematics, or simple fact-checking, or adherence to an intellectual system, it is more like the process of interpreting art. We look at what we think we see, and we reach past it to search out new understandings, and the truth is the moments of “discovery” or “uncovering” where we “wrestle away” what we think we know and encounter something else. For Heidegger, this is not just how science comes upon new paradigms, but upending the old, but is also the process of us re-understanding our lives and our selves, in search of the meaning of our being, as part of the search for the meaning of being itself.<br /><br />Heidegger had lots of other cool insights too. He traveled from Phenomenology to Existentialism, before Sartre made it cool, and pioneered much of that trip. He developed a notion of “handiness” that he used to express many ideas reminiscent of American Pragmatism within the idioms of Germany. He has a discussion of the three levels of human consciousness that my undergrad always found genuinely helpful, and that rather revolutionized how artificial intelligence theorists approached computerized intelligence in the 90s, when they re-discovered him. Heidegger explored how “care” is central to human experience. He meditated on the role of death in our lives. He has several remarks on the formal logic of questions that I have always admired. Late Heidegger, after the war thought a lot about technology, and feared that it had subtler philosophical effects than are typically appreciated. He was one of the first in Europe to express fear of industrial agriculture, saying in 1949 <br /><blockquote>“Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”</blockquote> <br /> <br />Heidegger failed in his principle philosophical project, “Being and Time” was intended to explore human-being (Dasein) and use that to shed light on the nature of capital B. Being. But it didn’t work - he could link our own beings, with time, and care and mortality, but never showed how any of this linked to capital B, Being. Heidegger failed in his personal and political life, casting shadows on every interesting insight he ever had. His writings were opaque enough that he often failed to be comprehensible at all. Yet something of his thought transcends all his failures. Some hint of yearning to search out deeper matters than most have settled with. Some insight that truth is more about discovering than it is about being right. <br /><br />Gratitude<br />I’m grateful for inquiry into the deepest questions of being.<br />I’m grateful for the picture of truth as discovery, rather than just truth as being right.<br />I’m grateful for value transcending the failures of our lives. <br /><br />Other notables for me for this day:<br />Birth of Miles Davis (musician), Jack Kevorkian (suicide activist), Stevie Nicks (musician), Sally Ride (astronaut), Matsuhiro Morimoto (chef), Bobcat Goldthwait (comedian), Lenny Kravitz (musician)BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-17960400775340606322009-10-09T09:54:00.005-05:002009-10-09T11:14:38.940-05:00Better Choices than Obama for the Peace PrizeI am no great fan of Pres. Obama, but I voted for him, and I'm no great opponent of his either (except maybe of his backing of Geithner). But I was floored and dismayed by the Nobel Peace Prize Committees choice of Obama for the 2009 prize. What great accomplishment or body of work can he point to for the promotion of world peace? Has he ended the War in Iraq yet? Nope. Afghanistan? Nope. Made some important breakthrough in nuclear disarmament? Nope. Help brokered peace in a troubled land using his diplomatic muscles? Nope. <br /><br />Here's the AP's version of the committee's side <blockquote>"The Norwegian Nobel Committee countered that it was trying "to promote what he stands for and the positive processes that have started now." It lauded the change in global mood wrought by Obama's calls for peace and cooperation, and praised his pledges to reduce the world stock of nuclear arms, ease American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthen the U.S. role in combating climate change.<br /><br />The peace prize was created partly to encourage ongoing peace efforts but Obama's efforts are at far earlier stages than past winners'. The Nobel committee acknowledged that they may not bear fruit at all.<br /><br />"He got the prize because he has been able to change the international climate," Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said. "Some people say, and I understand it, isn't it premature? Too early? Well, I'd say then that it could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond — all of us."</blockquote><br /><br />So essentially their rationale is that he has started processes that they approve of even if they are only just begun. Now I strongly object to using the Peace Prize as an encouragement beforehand, rather than a recognition for long work. IF Obama's efforts turn out to be fruitful peacemaking, maybe he will deserve the prize some day, but he does not deserve it yet. Sharon Astyk, one of my heroes and favorite interlocutors makes the point more forcefully over at her <a href="http://sharonastyk.com/2009/10/09/hope/">blog</a>. I then asked what should the committee have done instead, and here is my own preliminary thoughts on 6 choices the Nobel Peace Prize committee could have made, that would be better than Obama<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1) Award No Prize This Year</span> - This has been done many times in the past. 1972, 1955-6, 1948, 1939-43, 1923-24, 1914-16 all lacked a Nobel Peace Prize. Sometimes this is because the world was at war and peace was far away, like in 1939-43, or 1914-6. But sometimes like 1948 or 1972 it was simply because no single person or organization stood out as especially worthy. If Obama's fragile, early, tentative record of peacemaking was the best the committee could find, then no award should have been given this year. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2) Give the prize to an organization that has received it before but continued to do good work</span> - The Red Cross/Red Crescent has been awarded the prize 3 times already (in 1917, 1944, and 1963), but they have continued to do go work since 1963, and could certainly be awarded the prize again. Or give it to UNICEF, or Amnesty International, both of whom have received it before but not for decades.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">3) The International Olympics Committee</span> - The IOC stands out as one of the great international peacemaking organizations that has never received the prize. They have worked for decades to provide a non-violent venue for international competitions while promoting cooperation, global unity, cultural exchange, and peace.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">4)Wendell Berry</span> - If the Nobel committee really wanted to give the prize to an American, Wendell Berry would have been a better choice than Obama. He has a lifetime of influential peacemaking, and has done more on the specific issue of bringing global warming to the American consciousness than Obama. If they really wanted a Black American, even Van Jones would have been a better choice than Obama.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">5) Some person or organization actually involved in ending wars</span> - The Conflict in Darfur ended in 2009, and by Feb 1 it was pretty clearly wrapping up. Many groups could have been given the nod for peacemaking in Darfur including UNAMID or Save Darfur Coalition, or even The International Criminal Court. Similarly the Kivu War between Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda and the Somalian Civil War, both had real peace makers, and some hope of real progress during 2009, and either could have been given the nod. Or the committee could have looked to the South Ossetian conflict of 2008 between Georgia, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia, and given the prize to French EU president Bernard Kouchner, for successfully mediating the ceasefire, and brokering the peace.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">6) Do something edgier</span> - They could have picked one of the groups working on international water disputes, a topic they've never covered before; or an agriculturalist like Vandana Shiva or Slow Food, which they haven't picked in a long time, or a aboriginal rights groups, or the International Criminal Court, or some journalist (they haven't given it to a journalist since 1935), etc.BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-78750708543702065062009-08-20T13:32:00.002-05:002009-08-20T15:41:12.635-05:00Tainted Lunch and Moral CompromiseSometimes I am overwhelmed by guilt at the routine activities of living in America. I eat lunch. I contemplate the horrors of factory farming, of monocropping corn. Perhaps I see the bloody dead native Americans being cleansed from the land in the past in my mind’s eye. Or if, perhaps, there is some chocolate, I reflect on the role of slavery in modern West African chocolate production.<br /><br /> A blogger using the pseudonym VK, puts it this way:<br /><br /><blockquote>“We mine, we bomb, we pollute, we steal, we kill, we poison and we destroy - Forests, oceans, lakes, mountains, land, the air and our very souls.<br /><br />Everytime we go to shop, fill up our cars with gas, use any convenience that we associate with modern life. There is a price to be paid, someone will die or has died due to you your consumption. Think of the rivers of blood that have been spilt over land, water, power and oil. And the rivers of blood that will be as we begin our climate descent. Today's consumption and gratification means that someone, somewhere else will suffer and probably die.<br /><br />Large parts of the world have been built on the backs of slave labour, including America and resource exploitation and the decimation of local/indigenous peoples.<br /><br />Civilization is inherently brutal and being a 'civilized person' is actually being complicit in mass murder - genocide and ecocide. We deny this reality though, people choose to ignore this reality, absolve themselves of any blame, blame the banksters, the governments, the idiots in charge, anyone but themselves.<br /><br />When you stone a child, does it matter whether you have thrown a smaller stone? Because this is exactly what we do, on a day to day basis. It is the root cause of the evils that we face in the world, the scars of death and murder, the trail of blood we leave is palpable in our very souls. It rots us from within. <br /><br />No wonder then that denial is such a wonderful option. Living in our bubble is much better then ever admitting our role in civilization. We are a rapacious and greedy species, with an infinite blood lust. So remember this when you have your next meal, your next dose of medication, the next movie you watch or the next time you surf the web - Your existence has led and will lead to the deaths of many - take a pause and reflect.<br /><br />Many times at night, this keeps me awake. I drown my sorrows over large amounts of whisky. Their is a madness in this world, one I can not relate too. We all like to think we are better, good, kind, generous. In reality, I am just a cold blooded killer. I don't even know who I've brought suffering too, I just carry on though, as a hypocrite and a charlatan.<br /><br />So the next time you are happy from consumption or think you are happy? Ask yourself this - what blood price had to be paid to cause that happiness? Suffering brings us a deep connection - to the reality of our world and to ourselves. The unhappiness, the existential torment and emptiness is a sign from the earth - why do you kill me child? Why do you destroy that which bore you, why do you lust for your brother's heart?”</blockquote><br /><br /> Well, many times at night, for years now, this keeps me awake too. To me, this is the great problem of contemporary moral theory. The good and the terrible are causally intertwined in deep and complex ways. Everything we value is systematically dependent on what we deplore. In a sense, that is even what it means to BE a world, for a set of events to be systematically intertwined, and we could think about this in metaphysical terms if we want, but I like to think of it in day-to-day terms. I had cabbage-cheddar pie and a piece of zucchini brownie for lunch today. And that lunch was morally tainted in many ways (West African slavery, land ownership issues, the treatment of the cows involved in the cheese production, the moral problems of the multinational ag. corporations that raised the feed that the cows ate, etc). So how are we to think about moral compromise in day-to-day situations like this? <br /><br /><br />A moral system must pass a series of hurdles to be attractive to the modern mind. In “The Morality of Coping” I argue that four main challenges or hurdles have shaped the development of the moralities we see today. Any competent moral system must help encourage children to grow up to be “conventional” or “normal” members of their society, rather than “pre-conventional” or “immature” members – that is it must encourage and enforce normativity. Second, every moral system for a society with division of labor, must find some way to encourage people to become excellent at something the society values – that is it must encourage and enforce valuing excellence above the norm. But excellence is quite close to social eminence. Some moral systems embrace this analogy and picture the good as being essentially the same as the high-class, or the noble. But many moral systems develop the notion that someone can be high-class but still morally objectionable in some way. If so, then the third challenge of morality is to distinguish heroes from monsters; the right high, powerful people, from the wrong high, powerful people. And oddly this winds up being the same challenge as helping us not to be evil. <br /><br /><br />But it is the fourth challenge of morality that I want to explore here. The fourth challenge of morality is how to cope with the close intertwining of good and ill, right and wrong, valued results and dis-valued results. Moral dilemmas are the simplest manifestation of the problem, because both sides have some real cost, but the phenomenon is more general. How do we cope with the fact that what we want morally, is deeply interconnected with what we do not want, that every choice has a cost? <br /><br />I think that this challenge is still the primary driver of moral thought today. The main moral theories that are contending with each other for the hearts and minds of Westerners today, distinguish themselves from each other, largely by offering different strategies for meeting this challenge, and no one approach to this challenge has yet emerged as dominant. Until one strategy for resolving this challenge emerges as dominant, there can be no fifth great challenge of morality, rather there will be plenty of lesser challenges of morality, and each approach to meeting the fourth great challenge, will have their own further developments, rather than morality having a more or less unified further line of dialectical development. <br /><br />I believe that there are four basic strategies that have been offered for coping with the deep interconnection of the valued and disvalued, and that my own approach is a fifth one that has not been explored much yet. <br /><br />The first strategy is that of Nietzsche and the ancients, don’t even employ the notions of right and wrong, of good and evil; restrict yourself to the notion of good and bad, better and worse, or higher and lower. Now dilemmas are merely a matter of finding a balance between competing goods. If you err a little on the side of generosity this time, then err a little on the side of thrift next time, but there is no need to see either side as “wrong” or “evil.” Dilemmas never really arise, rather we are constantly balancing goods, where no choice is really evil, they are at worst, unbalanced. Nietzsche advocates a fairly extremist vision of the good life, but more recent virtue theorists and Neo-Aristotelians, are making roughly the same intellectual move, albeit less boldly. Here we are never really compromising with evil, because there is no evil to be compromised with, we are merely balancing competing goods. From the point of view of this approach, my lunch is neither evil nor tainted, and guilt is a misguided concept. <br /><br />The second strategy is to choose only pure rights, pure goods. If an action has some right-making features, and some wrong-making features, then don’t do it! Be as pure as you can. As much as possible do good and avoid evil, rather than seeking to do good by also doing evil. This is the strategy of Kant and Ross and of the human rights movement in general. If a government can accomplish some worthy goal, (say catching criminals) by violating some human right, then they must not do so! In this picture, the wrong is a line which must not be crossed, even to achieve important goods. Since right actions often have bad consequences, and good consequences often require wrong, or at least mixed actions, the strategy of purity has to be extremely anti-consequentialist, valuing or disvaluing actions for reasons divorced from their outcomes. Here there is an evil to be compromised with, and that is a possible choice, but we are refusing to engage in moral compromise. From the point of view of this approach, my lunch is morally wrong, and I need to find something else to eat, no matter how hard it might be to do so. <br /><br />The third strategy is to think of the choice which is likely to have the best outcome as the right thing to do. The idea is to add up all the valuable outcomes of a choice (and their likelihood) and all the disvalued ones, and decide the overall value of the choice. Utilitarians add up all the values and disvalues to everyone; ethical egoists add up only the values and disvalues to themselves; corporate managers balance the costs and benefits to their stockholders, etc. But the basic adding and balancing of the cost-benefit analysis process works pretty similarly regardless of the precise flavor of Consequentialism used. It is essential to this strategy that the ends justify the means, that is - the likely value or disvalue of outcomes determines what the right thing to do is. A morally costly method can be the right thing if the outcomes are likely to be morally beneficial enough. Here we frequently need to build compromise positions, but we are never really compromising with evil or wrong, because the act of building a good compromise makes that choice the right thing to do. We cannot really compromise with the wrong, because compromise itself is right. From this point of view, I need to eat the morally best lunch I can, but if I have, then I have done nothing wrong.<br /><br />The fourth strategy is to say that the ends sometimes justify the means, but not always. The idea is that sometimes it is appropriate to do morally costly things to bring about morally valuable outcomes, but that there are limits. In Aquinas’ thought about the doctrine of double effect, for example, it is justified to do evil in the process of doing good, so long as: 1) we intend the good rather than the evil, 2) the good overbalances the evil, 3) the act isn’t inherently wrong, and 4) the good effects do not work directly via the bad effects. But when these requirements are met, the action with regrettable side-effects is nonetheless justified and right. Aquinas is less of a moral purist than Kant, but more of a moral purist than Mill. Similarly, Islam’s strategy of dividing moral actions into the required, recommended, optional, disrecommended and forbidden means that mixed values are sometimes acceptable. An action can be bad but still permissible. Here it is possible to compromise with evil, and this is allowed sometimes, but we need some guidelines to prevent our compromises with evil from leading us down the slippery slope to worse and worse evils. From the point of view of this strategy, I need a moralist to help me decide exactly when my lunch is tainted but still permissible to eat, or so tainted that I shouldn’t eat it at all, and this decision may turn on a lot of complex reasoning.<br /><br />My strategy is not quite like any of these, and I have not seen it articulated clearly before, although there are some elements similar to it in some earlier pictures. I advocate taking the best wrong action you can do, when right and wrong interconnect (as they usually do). Unlike Nietzsche or the virtue theorists, I think that right and wrong are helpful concepts even now, and even when right action is not possible. Unlike Kant or the purists, I think that consequences matter, that sometimes there is no right option, that ought does not imply can, and that striving for moral purity is a deep mistake. Unlike the Utilitarians and Consequentialists I think that the best option is not necessarily a right option, even if it is the best we can do. Some times all options are wrong, but one is nonetheless best. Likewise, the ends do not justify the means. Unjust means remain unjust, even when they are the best that we can do, because all options from where we are standing are unjust. Sometimes people ought to act unjustly, by acting in the best unjust way still possible for them. Killing enemy civilians in war is unjust; but so is allowing allied civilians to die. When war can be justly prevented, one ought to struggle to do so. When it is no longer justly preventable, find the best unjust option you can; but do not pretend to yourself or others, that the best option becomes just, simply because it is the best you can do. Finally, even the compromises of Aquinas are not quite right. Sometimes the best we can do is to cause good by causing evil, sometimes an inherent evil is the best we can do. And even when the best we can do fits all four of his criteria, sometimes that is not enough to make it justified or right. Morality is the struggle to do the best we can, whether are options are between right and right, right and wrong, or wrong and wrong. But for us, most real choices are choices between wrong, wrong and wrong. Choosing the best wrong is the heart of our morality, coping with a set of bad choices is our fate, and thus an authentic morality is typically a morality of coping. Here we are engaged in constant moral compromise with evil and wrong, but rather than setting any limits before hand, we must simply find the best compromise we can based on our power, our options, and the costs. The process of moral negotiations is the heart of moral decision making. I think this leads to a morality that isn’t exactly like that of deontology, consequentialism, virtue theory, or Catholic or Islamic thought. I haven’t worked the detail out very fully yet, but I call it a morality of coping, and it’s the subject of my long and unfinished work “The Morality of Coping.”<br /><br />In the morality of coping, many emotions which are typically thought of as negative, like despair, guilt or pain are virtues, or rather can sometimes be traits which help us to function well, rather than mere hindrances or failure states. Guilt itself is part of this matrix of moral negotiations where we try to do the overall best wrong thing we can. If we wallow in our guilt, or are paralyzed by it, we may wind up doing less good than we otherwise could. If we wall off our guilt or tranquilize it successfully somehow then we may wind up doing more evil than we should. Guilt like physical pain, points to problem we should attempt to address, and by its insistent throbbing helps to remind us of problems we haven’t solved yet.<br /> So my take on the situation is that when you eat your tainted lunch, (or participate in any other tainted aspect of our society), you should feel both joy and guilt entwined together. Joy to give you strength, to acknowledge what is good and valuable in the experience despite the taints. Guilt to remind you of the unsolved problems that lie in the causal story of your joyful but tainted lunch. If the guilt brings you to occasional reflection on the big-picture problems of our society, that is fine albeit unpleasant. But if the guilt paralyzes you or makes you unable to do the best you can from within the tainted situation, then it is poorly-functioning guilt, and needs to be eased. If guilt infects everything to the point of strangling the joy like weeds in a garden, then it is poorly functioning guilt and must be weeded. If guilt whispers quietly and lets you live your life without really responding to, or even considering the taints of the situation, then it is also poorly-functioning guilt and needs to be re-empowered. Being awake to the horrors of our world, being willing to face our own role in them and complicity with the roots of the causes of the horrors without blinking, and taking joy, joy, joy in the world anyway despite the horror and guilt, that is the cornerstone of the morality of coping.BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-16702119634346782652009-07-03T14:28:00.003-05:002009-07-03T14:53:09.679-05:00100 reasons to be Proud of the USAIt's getting close to July 4th, and time to think about US Patriotism. Now I have a lotta complaints about the US. A lot of complaints. But I do really love my country, and its people. So here is a reprise of an old piece on things to be proud about the US for. These are specifically for contributions to modern life, which one could easily be ambivalent about more wholly ... This list certainly shows many of my biases and agendas, but think about what you would add, subtract or move up or down in the rough subjective rankings.<br /> <br /> * * *<br />On Oct 30, 2006 I was asked by an anonymous Italian, “Can you tell me which are the fundamental contributions of the United States of America to the modern world life?” Whew! That’s a tall order! The United States of America has made a HUGE number of contributions to the modern life of the world.<br /><br />100 Important contributions to modern life for Americans to be proud of!<br />(I’m only listing here items that I think are mostly positive, still important today, and clearly developed or led by America or Americans)<br /><br />1. Rock And Roll<br />2. Motion Pictures<br />3. The Marshall Plan for helping to rebuild the world economy after WWII.<br />4. US innovations in electronics (circuit breakers, integrated circuits, AC transformers, transistors, semi-conductors, microchips, etc)<br />5. US innovations in consumer electronics (washing machines, dish washers, dryers, electric lights, personal sewing machines, electric razors, electric toasters, vacuum cleaners, microwaves, etc.) [ok maybe I’m getting ambivalent on this one]<br />6. The development of the modern public school system.<br />7. US innovations in electronic computing (ENIAC, IBM, the ABC calculator, Apple, etc.)<br />8. Proportional Representation (used only limitedly in the US, but key to many other world governments, and developed by US politicians in the late 1700s and early 1800s as strategies for allocating seats in congress to the states).<br />9. Airplanes<br />10. American private donations to international charities<br />11. Hand-held cameras (both Kodak and Polaroid)<br />12. America’s university system, especially for graduate education<br />13. America’s financial, military, and civilian support of the UN (including both public and private donors)<br />14. American contributions to medical technology, research and the FDA<br />15. Oral contraceptives<br />16. America’s military participation in WWII<br />17. Jazz<br />18. Polio vaccination<br />19. The development of commercial telephones and cell phones<br />20. Video games<br />21. The US Space Program <br />22. Electric trains, trolleys and mass transit (we don’t use ‘em enough ourselves anymore but we pioneered them for other nations)<br />23. Giving Europeans fleeing WWII a home<br />24. Decimal coinage<br />25. American contributions to modern written literature (Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf, Carl Sandberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, etc.)<br />26. American contributions to materials technology (nylon, vulcanized rubber, stryofoam, celluloid, bakelite, teflon, tupperware, etc.)<br />27. American contributions to sound recording technology (Phonographs, records and tape recordings, microphones, etc)<br />28. Merck’s work to eradicate river blindness<br />29. American contributions to television technology<br />30. The Panama Canal<br />31. American contributions to other genres of music (pop, country& western, classical, etc)<br />32. American television programming<br />33. America’s role in the creation and evolution of the internet and web<br />34. The US constitution, and other legal and political documents<br />35. The Academy Awards system<br />36. Arcwelders<br />37. Artificial sweeteners<br />38. Contact lenses<br />39. Modern elevators<br />40. Scotch tape<br />41. Photocopiers<br />42. Fiberglass<br />43. Submarines<br />44. Frozen food<br />45. Helicopters<br />46. Broadway, and the Broadway musical genre<br />47. Comic books<br />48. The Smithsonian<br />49. Modern vaccination (for less extreme problems than polio)<br />50. The Kinsey report<br />51. Westerns as a genre<br />52. American contributions to dance<br />53. Magnetic Resonance Imaging<br />54. Ball point pens<br />55. Walt Disney<br />56. American contributions to children’s literature<br />57. Cash registers and other business machines<br />58. Wikipedia, Amazon.com, Ebay.com, and American cyberculture<br />59. Bifocals<br />60. American contributions to gay culture and gay liberation<br />61. Role-playing games<br />62. Bubble gum<br />63. the Global Positioning System<br />64. The 5 and dime, and now Dollar Stores<br />65. The Richter Scale<br />66. Denim jeans<br />67. America as a tourist destination for international tourists (#3 in the world)<br />68. American contributions to science fiction<br />69. Consumer Reports<br />70. Safety pins<br />71. Hip-Hop<br />72. Synthesizers<br />73. Peanut Butter<br />74. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.<br />75. Aldo Leopold and other American contributions to Environmentalism<br />76. Margaret Sanger’s work with birth-control<br />77. Other US Museums<br />78. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Pop Art<br />79. Rollerblades<br />80. Chomsky’s Structural Grammar<br />81. John Kenneth Galbraith and Veblen<br />82. Einstein’s theories of relativity<br />83. Feynmann’s Quantum Electrodynamic (QED) theory<br />84. Deming’s work on Statistical Quality Control<br />85. Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter<br />86. John Cage<br />87. Strauss and Howe’s theory of history<br />88. W. V. O. Quine<br />89. Joseph Campbell<br />90. Van Neumann, Conway, and Game Theory<br />91. Weiner’s theory of Cybernetics<br />92. American contributions to psychology (Moreno, Erikson, Mead, etc)<br />93. Cook’s Illustrated<br />94. Jackson Pollock<br />95. John Rawl’s theory of justice<br />96. American contributions to anthropology<br />97. Nozick’s theories of the minimal state<br />98. The theology of Neibuhr and Tillich<br />99. Cesar Chavez<br />100. Starhawk and the Reclaiming tradition<br /><br />Important “contributions” that are not entirely positive (IMHO, most of these should be on the top 100 if you value them rather than being more ambivalent as I am).<br />1. Brand loyalty marketing<br />2. Car inventions and car culture<br />3. American contributions to industrial agriculture<br />4. The atom bomb and nuclear energy<br />5. American leadership in NATO, G8, OECD and other international political bodies<br />6. American innovations in advertising<br />7. Tobacco<br />8. Levitt and the modern suburb system<br />9. Chain businesses and franchising<br />10. Fast food<br />11. The Cold War<br />12. American contributions to sports and sports culture<br />13. Bottling machines and the rise of soft-drinks<br />14. The Windows operating system<br />15. American blockbuster writers and the neutering of literature (Clancy, Cook, Crieghton, Follet, Grisham, King, Koontz, Rice, Steele, Tan, etc)<br />16. Disposable diapers<br />17. American consumption of imported illegal drugs such as cocaine or heroin<br />18. Gun technology developments (like silencers, or machine guns)<br />19. America’s contributions to pornography<br />20. Burbank and modern plant breeding<br />21. American developments in the department store<br />22. Skinner and Behaviorism<br />23. Other American contributions to fashion, cosmetics and perfume<br />24. The Great Chicago Strike and May Day<br />25. The International Landmine treaty of 1998 (and pulling out of it in 2002)<br /><br />Important contributions that may be no longer entirely “modern.”<br />1. Cheap Cotton and the Cotton gin<br />2. Older US Literature (Burroughs, Burroughs, Capote, Chandler, Crane, Cummings, Dickenson, Ellison, Twain, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Frost, Gibran, Ginsberg, Hawthorne, Heinlein, Hemmingway, Kerouac, L’Amour, Longfellow, Melville, Poe, Plath, Puzo, Sinclair, Steinbeck, Whitman, Williams, etc) <br />3. typewriters<br />4. Pragmatism: Dewey, James, etc<br />5. Cowboys<br />6. Hubble and the Expanding Universe<br />7. Rogers and Astaire<br />8. Benjamin Franklin<br />9. Beatniks<br />10. Tap danceBP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-45806253004938986182009-05-21T15:53:00.002-05:002009-05-21T15:56:47.272-05:00Unemployment and Ancient Chinese PhilosophyWell, I am now good and unemployed. My duties as a professor of philosophy are all over, and I head out to meet a retired philosopher who specialized in Japanese philosophy who only recently moved to town tonight. During my third year review, (which I failed) I wrote and printed a short piece entitled “Miscellaneous Thoughts on Retention in My Position as an Assistant Professor” which consisted of only the following 5 quotes, but I elected not to include it in my 100page+ “retention packet.”<br /><br />Here are a few things Confucius says about unemployment …<br /><blockquote>Confucius says “Riches and position are what men desire. If their attainment is to be by departing from the Way, do not have them. Poverty and lowliness are what men hate. If their abandonment is to be had by departing from the Way, do not abandon them ….” (Analects 4:5)</blockquote><blockquote>Confucius said, “Ning Wu Tzu was wise when the Way prevailed in the state, but dull witted when the Way did not prevail in the state. His wisdom could be equaled, but his dull-wittedness could not be equaled” (Analects 5:21)</blockquote><br /> Confucius believed in working, some times one worked for their family, and sometimes one worked for the state or some other employer. Confucius’ own job was mostly training young men who would seek employment, and he has a lot of other subtle things to say about the process (at 10:26, 9:16, or 14:1). But the heart of Confucius’ idea was that good people should be in high office, and offices should be given out meritocratically, not just to the most skilled, but to those with all round virtue. “Raising the Worthy” is the heart of Confucius’ system, his own “Way” and his opponents often think and talk about him in terms of his advocacy of raising the worthy. But Confucius also clearly imagines that taking part in family life is more central than employment (2:21). A virtuous man should be employed when the state is functioning well, but equally SHOULD be unemployed, or rather employed by his family, when the stat is not functioning well, even though this involves poverty or lowliness or dull-wittedness. For Confucius, employment is a good thing, but unemployment is nonetheless sometimes a duty. A job in a state which is not run via the way of virtue, will often put a person in the position of needing to act unvirtuously in order to keep their job, and that is not worth it according to Confucius. Likewise the job can come between a person and their duties to their family, unless the way prevails in the state.<br /><br /> Here are some things the Daodejing says: <br /><blockquote>“Do not raise the worthy, so that people will not compete<br />Do not value rare treasures, so that people will not steal<br />Do not display objects of desire, so that people’s hearts shall not be disturbed/ …”<br />Daodejing 3</blockquote><br /><blockquote>Be apprehensive when receiving favor or disgrace.<br />Regard trouble as seriously as you regard your own body<br />What is meant by being apprehensive when receiving favor or disgrace?<br />Favor is considered inferior. / …</blockquote>Daodejing 13<br /><br />The Daodejing has a deeper worry about employment. “Raising the worthy” is already wrong. Raising the worthy leads to competition, and competition leads to problems for the family and state. Rather the sage rules by “emptying hearts and stuffing bellies, by weakening ambitions and strengthening bones” (3). The Daodejing has a profoundly dialectical understanding of employment and unemployment. If the laws are complex, people will become cunning thieves to evade them. If wealth is exalted, people will fight each other and damage the state and themselves to become wealthy. If “merit” is the path to high status, then people will become skilled at faking “merit” in order to be “raised” as being “worthy.” So it is a mistake to encourage either employment of unemployment, “Therefore the sage says: I have no desires and people return to the good and simple life.” The way out of the mess is to re-orient one’s understanding so that favor does not seem desirable but dangerous, so that the good and simple life seems attractive. Humility is considered one of the Jewels of the Dao by the Daoists, but it isn’t a duty or burden like it is for Confucius. It is not enough to desire wealth but refuse to seek it, when it cannot be sought honorably, rather even desiring wealth is already a problem. <br /><br />But as usual, my favorite thinker here is Zhuangzi. In Chapter 4 of the Book of Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi imagines a discussion between Confucius and his favorite disciple Yen Hui. Hui describes how he is going to go about impressing the rich and powerful so that they will employ him and he can improve things. First he plans to encourage the rulers to reform and act better, and Confucius shoots him down and says that their bosses will just overrule and fire or kill them. So Hui imagines that he will dissemble, being outwardly deceptive, but inwardly retaining his integrity. And Confucius shoots him down again, saying that this won’t work, “You are still being guided by your perceptions.” Instead Hui needs to engage in “the fast of the heart.” When Hui has done this and comes back and describes the experience, Confucius is delighted and says<br /><br /><blockquote>“Perfect! I will tell you. You are capable of entering and roaming free inside his cage [the prospective employer], but do not be excited that you are making a name for yourself. When the words penetrate, sing your native note; when they fail to penetrate, desist. When there are no doors for you, no outlets, treating all abodes as one, you will find your lodgings in whichever is the inevitable, you will be nearly there.” Zhuangzi, chap 4</blockquote><br />For Zhuangzi the issue of employment isn’t ultimately about raising the worthy, and merit, or about the dialectic of striving and competition, rather it is about the true emptiness of one’s heart when one takes lodging in the inevitable. One treats “all abodes:” employment and unemployment, rich houses and poor, states where the way prevails, and states where it does not, as one.<br /><br />It is not only my job that is over. Unemployment is rising in the US like it hasn’t since the Great Depression, and it will continue to do so for some time. Much about our current collapse is already inevitable. Poverty and lowness are coming and we cannot abandon them whether we would like to or not. Our culture has excelled at “displaying objects of desire” and the peoples hearts will be disturbed beyond reckoning as they become more and more unattainable. Humility is certainly a jewel we should seek. But the truth is more than that. It is time for us to “find our lodging in whatever is inevitable.”<br /><br />A few pages later, Zhuangzi has Confucius give this following wonderful summary<br /><br /><blockquote>Confucius said: “Under heaven there are two great principles: one is destiny the other is duty. The love of a son for his parents is destiny and cannot be taken away from his heart. For a subject to serve his ruler is duty; there is no escaping this duty anywhere between heaven and earth. These are called two great principles. Therefore, a son finds contentment in serving his parents in all circumstances: this is the perfection of filial piety. A subject finds contentment in serving his ruler in all circumstances: this is the perfection of duty. But to serve one’s own soul so that grief and joy are not overwhelming, to outwardly handle what life throws at you as inevitable and not to be worried by this, this is the perfection of virtue. One who is a subject, or a son, has to do what he has to do. Caught up in the affairs of state, he forgets his own life. He has no time to love life or fear death. Therefore, dear friend, go on your mission!” </blockquote>BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-32288538630241271962009-04-24T12:03:00.003-05:002009-04-24T12:17:44.556-05:00The Value of DespairHere is a reprint of a article I wrote in Nov of 2007, before I had a blog. Parts of it have been reprinted in various places since then. I've been meaning to repost it up here for a while, and someone at The Automatic Earth asked about it, so here it is.<br /><br />***<br /><br />The most optimistic person I have ever encountered admitted yesterday that he is sad and scared. Beth Terry wrote a guest blog today entitled <a href="http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/on-caring-witho.html">“Caring Without Despairing.”</a> Her solution is to just not think about how big the problems are, but to focus on the little bit she can effect, as she calls it, “selective attention.” Smart people who look at America and our world today feel the emotion of despair, and then have to decide what to do about it.<br /><br />My position on despair is an odd one. I think that despair is, or at least can be, a good thing. Despair is a virtue, a habit of the correct functioning of the human spirit. Despair is not a meaningless blackness, nor a simple lack of hope, it is a more complex psychological state, and one that has a role to play in the healthy mind, not just in an unhealthy mind. Not all despair is valuable despair, properly functioning despair; just as not all humor, or passion, or resoluteness is valuable. Resoluteness can be a form of courage or stubbornness depending on the situation. In moral talk, we say that resoluteness can be a virtue or a vice depending on the situation. In just the same way, I hold that despair can be a vice, a counter-productive mental or spiritual tendency (as pretty much everyone else holds). But unlike everyone else, I hold that despair can also be a virtue, a productive, helpful, right-functioning mental or spiritual tendency.<br /><br />Many virtues, called moral virtues, exist as the mean between two extremes, the balancing point between opposite errors. Courage is the classic example. Too much fear of danger and one acts cowardly, and fails to take advantage of manageable risks. Too little fear of danger and one acts foolhardy, and takes risks that ought not to be taken. Fear of danger has a useful role to play in our psyches or spirits, but so does resistance to fear of danger. When these two are in proper balance, and we feel the right amount of fear, and the right amount of resistance to fear, we are experiencing the virtue of courage. Similar things could be said about overeating and undereating, or indeed any appetite, or about anger or many other psychological factors. Anger and fear are not bad things simply; they are proper and healthy adaptations to a world that includes injustice and risk. Injustice ought to make us angry, and risks ought to make us fearful. Just not too angry or fearful. And of course, both emotions would have no useful role left in a world without injustice or risk.<br /><br />But not every virtue works this way. Physical strength, for example, is a virtue (it helps us to act well in the world), and one that a rational person should want as much of as they could get without giving up some other valuable good. Weightlifting takes time that we could be using for other good things, like community service or enjoying our friendships. But if someone invented a way to become stronger without giving up some other good thing, we should take it. Similar things could be said about intelligence or health or beauty or friendship. <br /><br />Christian philosophers took this rough position on virtue from the Greeks and Romans, and noted that there was one more category of virtues which they called theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. In the Gnostic Tradition of Valentinius gnosis – that is direct mystical experience or knowledge by acquaintance is also a theological virtue. In the Catholic tradition, the theological virtues are ones which can be developed only by the grace of God, not by any human effort. More importantly they are not the mean between two extremes of vice. You can have insufficient faith, but there is no such thing to the Catholic theologians as having too much faith. Likewise, you can never have too much love. You can love the wrong objects (the sinful act, rather than the sinner who does it), you can have too much passion in your loving, but love itself can never be excessive.<br /><br />My position is that the opposite of a theological virtue is not a vice, but another competing theological virtue. Love has a valuable role to play in the human psyche, but indifference does too. Indifference is the root of detachment, of accepting the good and the bad alike with equanimity. Indifference is the root of justice, of logic, of many kinds of discursive knowledge. Our science works, in part because we can detach our observations, from what we want to happen. We can observe how things ARE quite apart from how we would LOVE for them to be. Indifference is the heart of accepting reality, just as love is the heart of transforming reality. We are beings of power, but not infinite power, and thus we need love to guide our use of our power, and indifference to tailor our use of power to our limits. I am of the opinion that indifference is the true opposite of love, however some think of hate as the opposite of love. I don’t really know anyway for hate to be a virtue, although closely related ideas like anger, or detesting, can be in the right circumstances.<br /><br />In a being of infinite knowledge and power, faith, hope, love, and gnosis would be virtues without any opposition. There would be no such thing as too much love, or insufficient indifference. But virtues do not work the same way for humans as they do for unlimited beings. For one thing, a being of infinite power has no virtue of courage at all, because it cannot experience genuine risk. Likewise, it has no virtue of moderation in eating, because it doesn’t need to eat or refrain from eating at all. For humans, courage and moderation in eating are virtues. Likewise, so is indifference, the opposite number of love. The opposite of a theological virtue is, for humans at least, is another virtue in dialectical tension with it. Love and Indifference are both good things, even though they sometimes oppose each other. Heraclitus calls this “opposing coherence.” The two work together in tension to create a more powerful effect like the ends of a bow straining against each other to keep the bowstring taut and propel the arrow more strongly,<br />or the lawyers arguing against each other to try to produce thoughtful justice.<br /><br />Similarly, the opposite of faith is doubt, and both are virtues for fallible humans. William James has a great discussion of when and why faith is a virtue, a position that is now called Fideism among epistemologists. Sometimes believing something, despite lack of decisive evidence, makes us more able to act well within the world. Optimism is one of James’s favorite examples, we have little evidence that things are going to be alright, but assuming they are anyway helps some people to cope. But the same point can be made in reverse on skepticism. Sometimes refraining from believing something, when the evidence is undecisive, makes us more able to act well in the world.<br /> <br />Even at the level of theology, faith and doubt are both virtues functioning together. Faith allows us to place trust in an imperfect image of the Divine, say our own faltering picture of what an ideal shepherd or an ideal father would be like. Imperfect images are the best images that humans can conjure up, and our own limitations pervade the image. When I imagine the perfect father, I am likely to frame the image as a human of my own race, rather than of some other race, or say a heron. But my images are flawed. Doubt helps me to see that the Divine is unlikely to be of my race or even human in a normal sense. Perhaps I instead use more glorious images (light, rock of ages, etc), or refrain from images entirely and use conceptions. Still my flaws pervade, and doubt calls on me to refine these images and concepts or to do without image and concept entirely. Faith is the cornerstone of positive theology, of saying flawed but still helpful and beautiful things about the Divine. But doubt is the cornerstone of negative theology, of pointing out the flaws in our formulations, and pushing us to improve our understanding of the Divine. Like my favorite theologian Pseudo-Dionysius, I firmly believe that negative theology and positive theology need to work together, and thus (perhaps unlike him) that faith and doubt are both virtues in dialectical tension, properly working together to push us upward. <br /><br />In the Gnostic tradition, gnosis or direct experience is a virtue. But the opposite of gnosis is innocence. Not knowing, at least not knowing directly via primary experience, is the root of the possibility of learning or discovery. Innocence allows experience to be a source of wonder, and I know of no better paean to the joint values of innocence and experience than Blake’s famous sets of poems, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.<br /><br />But the hardest of the virtues to understand is despair. I believe that a time of great despair is coming for my people and my generation. That the question of the meaning and value of despair will become more pressing and will not go away soon. And this experience will be hard and bitter, painful even. Further, I think that the research is clear that pain which seems meaningless or counter-productive is experienced as being worse than pain which is perceived as valuable or helpful. If we can find what is good and right about despair, that will simply help us to bear it with far less suffering.<br /><br />Despair clears the way for the possibility of new hope, of better, more realistic hope. Just as indifferent objectivity clears the way for more realistic love, and doubting skepticism clears the way for more realistic beliefs, (and true Blakean innocence clears the way for more wondrous experiences), so despair clears the way for humbler and more realistic hopes. Despair kills hopes, but only so that other smaller hopes can have a chance to flourish. When we despair properly, we give up an old hope as out of reach of our powers, and we let it go, but we do so, so that we may set our sights on a new hope that is hopefully within the reach of our powers. Proper despair is root of the virtue of humility. It is all about not over-estimating our power in this world. When despair functions properly, its job is to help us let for of a goal that we cannot reach because we have over-estimated our power, even though we badly want to reach this glorious goal.<br /><br />A despair that left us without anything worth reaching for would be a vice rather than a virtue. And indeed, we may feel like that for a time, while we adjust to the new possibilities that are left over, after we have given up on a long-term goal. But there will always be other, smaller humbler thing that we can reach for instead, after we have despaired of a great hope. No matter how bad things are, or how weak our power is, there are still gradations of better and worse, once we can bear to look carefully. It is always possible to make things a little better, if not for yourself then others. A person dying of a terminal disease, with only a few weeks left to live, who has despaired of survival, can still set lower, smaller goals and work towards them and hope towards them. A society that is addicted to cheap energy and cheap credit which is passing away, and cannot hope to maintain its lifestyle, can still set other humbler goals and try to reach them while watching its lifestyle pass away.<br /><br />We cannot save our society from the troubles that are coming. It is too late to save the icecaps from melting, the ocean levels from rising. Many of our cities can probably no longer be saved. Our financial system is probably already doomed to collapse soon regardless of what we do. Our way of life cannot be sustained much longer regardless of what we do. In our arrogance, we thought we could spend forever and let the future decide how to pay the bill. We thought that someone later would figure out how to clear up our messes of carbon and methane and debt and oil-dependence. A time of humbling is coming quickly. No one can honestly look at the big picture of where our society and our globe are without feeling despair. Beth Terry can accomplish caring without despairing, only by carefully not-looking, and not-thinking. But “caring without despairing” is the wrong goal! I care, and then I despair. And despair tells me to give up and let go. But despair also tells me to clear a space for new and humbler hopes. I cannot save my society, but perhaps I can save my family, or even my community. And if my strength gives out at that task too, perhaps I can help a few people prepare, or feed themselves, or comfort them in their distress.<br /><br />A time of black despair is coming, and if you feel like you are drowning in despair be comforted. Despair is a GOOD thing, when it functions properly. Swim in your despair, master it, use it for what it is good for. Use your despair to let go, and set new humbler goals. You are less rich, and less powerful than you think you are, than you are used to being. But you are not without any wealth; you are not without any power. Each breath is riches; each moment is wealth; each choice is power. All work is using our power. Do what work you can, plan, set new goals, and do what good you can. Despair, but do not drown in it, despair to clear a place for humbler goals. Your despair is in reality a valuable friend, helping you to re-prioritize your life, even when doing so is painful and difficult. Despair hurts, but it is a virtue in disguise. The pain of despair is the pain of healing, and adapting to humbler circumstances. All Americans will soon become acquainted with despair. Be assured, despair is a gloomy ally, but it is not in the end your enemy.BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-25044777081628040962009-04-21T16:00:00.003-05:002009-04-22T06:27:27.881-05:00Eating Our Children: The Story of Saturn and Moloch8 years ago I did a fair bit of work on the ethics of Embryonic Stem Cell Research, and even presented my work in a couple of public forums (like being a panelist on it at Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Conference, in 2002). One thing that interested me was the extent to which thinking about ESCR, was dominated by the metaphors of warfare, that medical science was fighting a war against disease and the embryos sacrificed to save the lives of others were like the soldiers on the frontlines, laying down their lives so that others back home could live better lives. This basic metaphor was as pervasive as it was fundamentally disingenuous. The “war” against disease can never be won, and isn’t very war-like, and the embryo soldiers are hardly willing warriors choosing to take brave and noble risks for the greater good.<br /><br />But what would be a better metaphor? In the end, I explored 11-13 other metaphors (depending on the version) and none was really adequate, although looking at several helped to correct the mistakes of each. I compared Embryonic Stem Cell Research to medical treatment, scientific research, abortion, to Nazi hypothermia research on unwilling victims, to recycling the waste products of an industrial process, to anthropological research on human remains, to agricultural growing and harvesting of “germ-lines”, to the killing pigs in insulin production, to Aztec practices of human sacrifice, to killing an innocent in the criminal justice system, and to euthanasia. Some metaphors make Embryonic Stem Cell Research look just, even noble, others make it look troubling. But my goal to explore the many moral nuances of the idea of “sacrifice.”<br /> But the metaphor that was most haunting for me was the myth of Saturn eating his own children.<br /><br />I wrote<br /><blockquote>“The ancient world has a couple of myths about gods eating children. Moloch, a Canaanite deity of power, is famous for devouring children as a means of maintaining his power. Saturn or Chronos, a Greco-Roman patriarch of the gods devoured his own children lest someone succeed him as the ruler of the divinities, until his wife tired of the death of her children helps Zeus escape this fate and overthrow him. In each myth, the story is of an old and powerful god eliminating the potential to overthrow them by eliminating the threat of their own children, and indeed by drawing strength from the devouring of their own children. In both cases, the moral of the story is that time marches on, things change, and that one should promote your children in their efforts to truly succeed you, rather than holding them back out of jealousy and the struggle against mortality. Likewise, we disapprove of a teacher who holds their students back from becoming greater than themselves. What does this have to do with ESCR? Well one important moral dimension of ESCR is its aspect as an intergenerational struggle. In stem cell research the very young and poor and powerless are destroyed to increase the wealth, power and health of the very old and already wealthy and powerful. Some of the diseases which might be benefited by stem cell research effect young and old alike, but most of them are health problems of the old, often specifically of the very old. Who benefits economically from stem cell research? Bio-medical researchers primarily, although some bio-medical companies as well. Why are we spending money and lives to push the boundaries of mortality and old age back even farther, rather than on universal health care for the young, or say education? As in war, the young pay the brunt of the price and the old get the bulk of the reward. Also notice that although embryos are not that much like children, the relevant feature for this story is a child’s ability to be a potential adult. <br /><br />Now we should not over work this intergenerational angle. Certainly, our society does spend a lot of attention and money on education and the care of the young. But the elderly have an extremely disproportionate amount of wealth and political power, and we need to be more careful than usual at looking for hidden agendas, perhaps even hidden agendas the researchers do not consciously realize they have. Likewise embryos are extremely powerless, and we need to be more careful than usual at safeguarding the interests of innocents who also lack power to safeguard their own interests. Whatever else is at stake we should be leery of the prospect of ending one life, and a young powerless, poor one at that, for the sake of merely extending the last few years of an older, richer, more powerful life. As a member of a young, poor, powerless generation, I often feel the frustrating wish that natural processes of death should hurry up in clearing the oldest generation aside, so that my generation will not spend its life choked by the past still lingering in a not quite dead yet state. Death has an important social function to play in aiding the young in displacing the entrenched power of the old. In many generations the old step aside voluntarily, or aid the young in taking the reins of power. But for a variety of comprehensible generational dynamics, this generation of elderly refuses to step aside and instead consumes everything in their path burdening the young in ways that previous generations of elderly people would have found unthinkable examples of impiety. Moloch or Saturn eating their children, gobbling up the potentials of the future in a desperate effort to stay in power a little long and to stave off the reaper a little more, is a parable for our time; from the third rail of Social Security to the elderly’s taste for gas-guzzling cars. The funding of the destruction of embryos for the sake of maybe staving off Alzheimer’s a little longer is just one more example of a deeper social problem. <br /><br />There are problems with this metaphor, too. Like the image of the medical researchers’ hands being stained with the blood of aborted embryos, the image of Moloch devouring his children is a symbol of our moral intuitions more than a real argument. The motives of the researchers are not as consciously selfish. They hope to benefit many not just themselves, and to help young and old alike. Taken to extremes this argument could turn into a slippery slope opposing all medical research or indeed any attempt to prolong or save life. This argument has a hard time responding to utilitarian arguments about benefits outweighing nonetheless real harms. What it does capture however is the intuition that if human life is valuable, then human death is valuable too. It is the engine of change and renewal and one of the holiest of mysteries. We can fail to do our duty by holding on to life at too great a cost, or with too little attention to intergenerational justice, just as we can fail by spending too little effort in resisting death, especially the death of the innocent or powerless.”</blockquote><br /><br />It is hard for me to think of a more obscene and foul image, than that of Saturn devouring his own children. And while this metaphor doesn’t exactly fit Embryonic Stem Cell Research, it is a much closer match for a wide variety of more nakedly over-consumptive policies whereby those currently in power enjoy all they can and try to push the debt burden for this onto future generations. Bush and Paulson, approving the banking bail-outs are Saturn eating their own children, devouring the future to keep the banks alive, in power, and in style for just a little longer. Obama and Geithner are playing exactly the same game – let us have a little more time now, and let the future pay for it. It is not enough to see them as pursuing mistaken policies; they are worse than that. It is not enough to see them as swindlers, enabling con-men allies to rip off the American public; although they are that too. It is not enough to see them as traitors, deliberately undermining the common good of America, for the personal gain of their allies. They are EATING OUR CHILDREN to remain in power a little longer. They are Saturn and Moloch, the great foul child-eaters of antiquity, recast in modern mythologies. They are blasphemies.<br /> And, of course, so are we all a little bit. We know that we are using up the potential of the future, the things that our children will need to survive, much less to live the kind of lives we have lived, or wish for them to live. We know that our society is unsustainable, and we have a variety of intellectual methods for processing this fact. But we need images, and myths, and narrative methods too. We need stories to make sense of what unsustainable really means to us, because we humans are storytelling, storyhearing, storythinking creatures. What are the great old stories about unsustainability? What are the classics of literature that help us to feel the meaning of unsustainability, rather than just intellectualizing it?<br /> We have very few stories like that. Unsustainable societies collapse, and by and large their stories don’t get told or remembered. We have the story of the fall of Troy and the folk who warned against it, but their understanding of the collapse of Troy is much more one of political defeat than of unsustainable society. We have the story of the fall of Jerusalem, and the Babylonian captivity, and the terrible lamentations surrounding that, (including a passage about destroying one’s children at Psalms 137). But again this is cast more in terms of a failed relationship with God, than of the unsustainability of the society.<br /><br />But in the myth of Saturn eating his own children we catch a glimpse of another narrative of unsustainability. We see the horror and disgust that other societies feel for unsustainable practices. The point of the story of Saturn eating his children is like the point of Orwell’s 1984, it is a dire warning DON’T DO THAT, understand intellectually and emotionally the terrible foulness of doing THAT. It is not a story of an actual unsustainable society, anymore than 1984 is a story of an actual tyrannical dictatorship. But it is a little primal myth, about how people living in fairly stable cultures felt about unsustainable practices, and they felt horror and disgust. Gusto – is of course, the emotion of wanting to joyously consume. Dis-gust is the emotion that makes us not want to consume something. And the thing that it is most important not to consume is our future. The idea of eating our kids should be literally more disgusting than the idea of eating shit, vomit, or old used tampons. It is the most disgusting image that we can conjure with. And disgust is precisely the emotion that advertising wishes most to suppress, the emotion that is most opposed to our current economic system of promoting as high levels of consumption as possible, and the emotion that we need to rediscover and re-awaken. Sometime we can reach dis-gust best by detachment, or self-restraint, or even ethical consideration. But the primal old emotional route of simple raw disgust, must be part of our arsenal too. We need a literature of disgust to help people who want to consume less, to actually succeed emotionally at consuming less. This literature of disgust would be a kind of companion to the literature of the practical guides of how to consume less, which include the dis-gusting strategies of detachment, restraint, ethics, and celebrating a less-is-more lifestyle, but stop short of serious use of raw disgust itself. We need a novel of vomit-stories that disgusts and transcends its disgust to point the way to emotional purging and cleansing, or a movie of transcendent disgust.BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5262267092467942583.post-41229871683957979812009-04-07T09:36:00.003-05:002009-04-07T09:50:22.078-05:00Belated April Fool’s Day Post: The Virtue of SillinessSeveral years ago I had the opportunity to see a wonderful thoughtful April Fool’s Day sermon by one of my favorite ministers (<a href="http://www.uubloomington.org/worship/sermons/index.php">Rev. Bill Breeden </a>), on the values of change and surprise and leaving one’s comfortable ruts. In 2007 I was asked to give an April Fool’s day sermon and I imitated several of Rev. Breeden’s playful tricks. Most of that sermon was on a variety of roles that humor plays in religion, and isn’t directly relevant here on this blog. I talked about jokes about religions, and joke religions; about using humors stories in wisdom traditions, like Zen teaching or Mullah Nasruddin jokes, about Buddhist use of humor to deflate egos, of ancient Greek use of humor for social commentary, or Medieval Christmas celebrations of a feast of fools, to help rebalance social relations in the community for the coming year, about Discordeans and Sub-Genii, and Pastafarians. Humor has a lot of important roles in religion, but that isn’t really our topic today. But the end of that sermon was on the transcendent value of silliness in dark times, and that is very relevant to this blog.<br /><br />Before I get to an excerpt of my writing on silliness, I need to explain a little about Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat was the greatest comic strip of all time, or at least the greatest comic strip in English. I was written and drawn by George Harriman in the US from 1913 to 1944. Its hard to understand for someone from my generation who grew up with the dying leftovers of the comic strip genre, but newspaper comic strips were full on literary art at one point, cutting edge venues of populism and artistic exploration, and genuine cultural commentary. And Harriman was the best of the best. Dali latter admitting that many of the key ideas of Surrealism came from Harriman’s comics, and that the European painters felt that they were hustling to keep up. The best writers and poets of the day swooned over Harriman’s work, we’ll read a bit of E.E. Cummings commentary in a minute. The style of Krazy Kat is a proto-surrealism, with a constantly changing background, numerous use of unconventional page layouts, and lots of whimsy. The dialogue is often in a very thick argot ("A fowl konspirissy — is it pussible?"), but is also often is poetry or near poetry. (“Agathla, centuries aslumber, shivers in its sleep with splenetic splendor, and spreads abroad a seismic spasm with the supreme suavity of a vagabond volcano.”) The “plot” is achingly simple yet bizarre. There are 3 characters, Krazy Kat, whose gender is kept carefully undeclared, Ignatz the Mouse, who is constantly throwing bricks at Krazy or otherwise acting up and disrupting things, and Officer Pupp (a dog) who is constantly trying to arrest Ignatz for law-breaking. But here is the Krazy thing. Krazy Kat is full-on head over heels in love with Ignatz, and refuses to accept the brick throwing as violence. Krazy just thinks that the bricks are Ignatz’s way of showing Krazy that Ignatz loves Krazy right back. So he/she just accepts the bricks, interpreting them as an expression of love. This uhm, love triangle, plays out over and over again in Sunday comics for 30 years, set against the painted desert of Coconino, county Arizona, where the 3 live. Ignatz and Pupp constantly re-enact the cops and robbers struggle, but Krazy just turns every act of violence into an act of love by the alchemy of silliness. And in this bit of silliness is a profound philosophy. E.E. Cummings puts it like this<br /><br /><blockquote>“The Sensical law of this world is might makes right, the nonsensical law of our heroine [Krazy Kat] is that love conquers all. … But if our hero and our villain don’t and can’t understand our heroine, each of them can and each of them does misunderstand her differently. To our softheaded altruist she is the adorably helpless incarnation of saintliness. To our hardheaded egoist, she is the puzzlingly indestructible embodiment of idiocy. The benevolent overdog sees her as an inspired weakling. The malevolent undermouse views her as born target. Meanwhile Krazy Kat, through this double misunderstanding fulfills her joyous destiny. ”</blockquote>E.E. Cummings “A Forward to Krazy” in Krazy Kat, 1946.<br /><br />Alright with that introduction, we are ready for my comments on silliness.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />… So religions have used silliness all across the world, for a variety of legitimate religious and spiritual purposes; as comedy relief, to helping us to be wise, or humble, or remain in right relation with our neighbors. But silliness has never been very popular with religions. Look through lists of religious virtues, and you may find obedience, justice, generosity, compassion, courage, and so on. But you will not find silliness. The Protestant Reformers of the 17th century were pretty staunchly opposed to silliness, for example. The British Puritans banned "games, sports, plays [and] comedies" because they didn't agree with "Christian silence, gravity and sobriety." That is they weren’t serious enough. In Buddhism, lay people are allowed to be silly, but one of the vows of monks and nuns is to give up frivolous talk, ie anything that isn’t aimed at bringing people to enlightenment. Even religions that tolerate silliness well rarely consider it a virtue. Our own hymnal contains beautiful songs and words in praise of peace, and justice, and freedom, and reason, and compassion, and work, of learning, of valuing cultures around the world, of respecting nature, of awe and the spirit of worship. But it contains no praise for silliness. Here we are not an anomaly but, are clearly in the norm. <br /><br />This is a mistake. The most important spiritual use of silliness is one I haven’t mentioned yet, and one that has become clearer during the 20th century. Silliness is a virtue, and virtue whose time has come.<br /><br />The 20th century revaluing of silliness has a lot to do with the literary tradition of Absurdism. Absurdism has roots in Kierkegaard’s religious thought, and the brilliance of Krazy Kat, and some other Existentialists, but really comes into its own in the hands of Humanist writers reacting to the horrors of WWII. Here is a story I read somewhere, I can’t find it now, but I think it was in the writing of Polish Nobel Prize Winner Czeslaw Milosz, somewhere. There was a joke shop prior to WWII. It was the kind of place that sold whoopee cushions, and electric handbuzzers. Dribble glasses, fake tits, and bawdy postcards. A sort of Polish Spencer’s gifts. One of their “novelty” products was a pink plastic artificial foreskin, so that Jews could pretend to be gentiles in sex play. And yet WWII was such a bizarre, absurd, silly-yet-deadly-serious conflict, that possession of pink plastic artificial foreskin became all at once a matter of life and death, instead of a casual joke. How do we humans, us survivors, cope with the kind of silly world where artificial pink plastic foreskins are a matter of life and death? We laugh. The world is broken, it is crazy, it is terrible and yet it is silly beyond belief. Silliness is the key to coping with an insane world. This is a theme explored again and again by the Absurdists. It is the heart of Joseph Keller’s Catch-22. It is the heart of Vonnegut’s made-up religion Bokonism, in the novel Cat’s Cradle. It is the recurring theme of the fiction of Douglas Adams.<br /><br />The story of the 20th century is a story of humanity triumphing over nature, or at least warring with it, and cutting itself more and more away from constant contact with nature. American life is a life of culture, of daily interaction with humanly made things far more than it is a life of constant interaction with nature. The natural order and the divine order recede each year further and further from our daily lives, and the cultural order, the political order, the economic order replace them more and more. And this is NOT healthy, not sane, as WWII and the environmental crises since have clearly shown. The world itself has gone insane, and we have the task of daily coping with the insane world we live in. Silliness is most importantly, a method of coping with an insane world. <br /><br />This is why religions both conservative and progressive have always been very leery of silliness. It is a spiritual competitor to their programs. The conservative spirituality bids us to be in the world but not of it, and to focus our hopes on the more perfect world that is to come. The progressive spirituality asks us to seriously and earnestly work to heal the world to fix its problems and bring it back to sanity. But silly spirituality bids us to laugh at the insanity of the world and try to enjoy the world despite its manifest brokenness.<br /><br />Is a deep spiritual silliness then opposed to the social justice values that Unitarian-Univeralists hold dear? Well, yes it is in an important sense, but I want to be very clear about the issue. Pure silliness without any admixture of seriousness, is an uncaring frivolity that is blind to the world around it, and unconcerned with its problems. But not all silliness needs to be pure. Pure seriousness is just as bad, it is a lead weight dragging us down into an abyss of darkness.<br /><br />The Indigo Girls in their song “Closer to Fine” sing that “Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable, and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.” If your spirituality is based around trying to heal our insane world, you will be dragged down into the darkness with its insatiable hunger! No amount of serious work or serious progress will even be enough. No matter how good you are you will never be good enough. The man who seriously hungers for riches will never be rich enough. The earnest progressive do-gooder will never do enough good. No matter how many of the world’s problems you succeed in solving there will be more. Gandhi died believing himself a miserable failure, because he had been unable to prevent the partition of India and Pakistan; we see his many amazing successes, he saw his terrible failures.<br /><br />The only viable spirituality for the 21st century, is a mixture of seriousness and silliness which values and respects both. It is Ok to work to mend the world, as long as one also takes silly delight in the many humorous bizarre facets of its brokenness. Work cannot be healthy with out play, and this is as true of religious or spiritual work as any other kind. Silliness is a lightness of spirit, a call that is hard to hear, especially in times of serious trouble. Our serious side bids us to work earnestly at mending the troubles of the world, our silly side opposes just this impulse and tells us instead to delight in this world despite its troubles. Serious Offissa Pupp tries to stop Ignatz Mouse from throwing his brick at Krazy Kat. Silly Krazy Kat tries to take delight in having Ignatz the Mouse throwing a brick at her. Serious Offissa Pupp tries to use his might, in the best way he can. Silly Krazy Kat tries to use her love to transform the situation. Progressive Seriousness says might, used rightly, makes right, Progressive Silliness says love conquers all. Seriousness calls us to our power; Silliness calls us to our joy.<br /> <br />We live in an insane, broken world, in a time of great spiritual darkness. The traditional spiritual remedy for spiritual darkness has been enlightenment. But the language of light and dark suggest another natural remedy for spiritual darkness. We can treat it instead with de-light. I wear a lot of black, and have been known to listen to my fair share of goth music. And in many ways this is the heart of the goth message. Dwell in the dark places, and do you best to find beauty there, to find delight. Silliness expresses the same basic spiritual message, in a quite different artistic style. Do you best to take delight, and keep your spirit light, despite the gathering darkness around you. And that is my April Fool’s day message to you, in all its earnest pompousness, repeating the jokes of others instead of making my own. Value silliness as a virtue. It helps us to be wise, and humble, and in right relation with each other, and most importantly helps us to keep out spirits light in a dark world, despite the many bricks that the world throws at us.BP Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531863521357661468noreply@blogger.com0