Self-Referential Collapse

June 10 - A.A. Day

2010-06-10T13:48:00.003-05:00

Story: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.
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.

Gratitude
I am grateful for all the lives saved, and improved by AA.
I am grateful for the many spin off organizations to AA.
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.
I am grateful for the spiritual searchers dedicated to looking for ways to apply the spiritual to solving the problems of today.
I am grateful for flexible minds willing to try new things and adapt and experiment.
I am grateful for the humility of the 12 traditions, seeking to minimize organization lest the organization be suborned
I am grateful for skillful use of neutrality, understanding when to be open to many political positions, or religious positions, or walks of life.
I am grateful again and again for everyday heroes of self-reform.

Other Notables for me for today
The births of b. of Howlin’ Wolf(musician), Judy Garland (actor), Maurice Sendak (children’s author), Kim Deal (Musician, Pixies Breeders), Elizabeth Hurley (actor)
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).

June 9th – Charles Dickens Day

2010-06-09T14:31:00.002-05:00

When 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.

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.

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.

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)

"...issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together..."

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

“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.”

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.

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.

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 ..."

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.

Gratitude
I am grateful for Christmas as a holiday of family celebrations and generosity.
I am grateful for Scrooge’s example of self-reform.
I am grateful for Dicken’s tireless work to humanize all classes of society and shed light on where social systems are failing.
I am grateful for people who fund and direct experimental charities, looking for new ways to deal with societies flaws.
I am grateful for serialized narratives as an art form, from Dickens to comic books and TV shows.
I am grateful for religious toleration, where people of different beliefs work together for mutual goals.
I am grateful for the inner urge to reform our own flaws, the secret good side of embarrassment

Other Notables for me for this day
Donald Duck’s debut, Joseph Welch stands up to Senator McCarthy during the 1950s.
birth of Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman, death of Tsukiyoka Yoshitoshi (last master of Ukiyo-e)

The Gratitude Project - Project Story

2010-06-08T15:20:00.000-05:00

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

June 8th: World Ocean Day

2010-06-08T13:49:00.002-05:00

Stories: 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.

Here is Un Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s official statement from the 2009 World Ocean Day, the first officially recognized by the UN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. “

Gratitude
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.
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.
I am grateful for seafood, and the many material benefits provided by the sea.
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.

Other Notables for me this Day
Carl Laemmle founds Universal Pictures, 1912,
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)

June 7th – Saint Alan Turing Day

2010-06-07T13:42:00.000-05:00

Story: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gratitudes
I am grateful for the Turing theory of computability.
I am grateful for Turing’s proof that there are some things that computers will never be able to do.
I am grateful for Turing’s work to build functioning electronic computers, from math, to logic, to programming to engineering.
I am grateful for Turing’s philosophical speculations on artificial intelligence and the “Turing Test”
I am grateful for Turing’s work to aide the Allies in WWII
I am grateful for a symbol of gay pride in math and science
I am grateful for the kind of deep patriotism that would lead a man to keep a secret, even while it was destroying him
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.

Other Notable Events for the day
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.
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)

June 6th – Cripple Creek Day

2010-06-06T13:41:00.000-05:00

Story: 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.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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.

Gratitude
I am grateful for the 8 hour work day, or what is left of it.
I am grateful that private armies are still rare in the US.
I am grateful that government occasional intervenes for the people against armies gone wild, or even against the interests of the owners.

Other Notables for the day
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)

June 5th – Tank Man Day

2010-06-05T13:36:00.000-05:00

Story: 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.

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.

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.

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?

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 …

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.

Gratitude
I am grateful that there are still victories to be had after a sound defeat.
I am grateful that tank commanders often refuse to run over civilians.
I am grateful that civilians sometimes stand up to tank commanders.
I am grateful that someone unknown can capture the world’s imagination and hold it for years.
I am grateful that shopping bags can be weapons of pacifism.
I am grateful that 6-4-1989 cannot be forgotten in China no matter how much it’s memory is repressed.

Other Notables for me for today
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)

June 4th – Saint Gustav Schroeder Day

2010-06-04T13:33:00.000-05:00

Story: 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.

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 Voyage of the Damned, and in 1976 into an academy award winning movie entitled the Voyage of the Damned. 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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gratitude
I am grateful for normal folk who become heroes when the situation demands.
I am grateful for systems to provide basic assistance for refugees fleeing war or political violence.
I am grateful for intercontinental communications.
I am grateful that the evils of Nazism were exposed, reviled and defeated.

Other Notables for today
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.

June 3rd – Saint Franz Kafka Day

2010-06-03T13:31:00.000-05:00

Franz 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.

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.

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.

Gratitude
I am grateful for IV technology so that no one need starve to death in a well-stocked hospital anymore.
I am grateful that TB is largely conquered for the moment (in the first world)
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.
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.
I am grateful for literature that helps us make sense of self-loathing.
I am grateful for literature that helps us see how ridiculous many of the aspects of our society are …
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 …

Other Notables for me for today
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.
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, …

June 2nd – ??

2010-06-02T13:30:00.000-05:00

Stories: I don’t have a good story yet for June 2nd. Any suggestions?

Gratitude

Notables for me for this day
The births of Martha Washington, the Marquis de Sade, and the notorious Italian occultist/trickster Count Cagliostro

June 1st – Saint Andei Vosnezsensky Day

2010-06-01T13:29:00.000-05:00

Story – 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.

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.

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.
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.

Gratitudes
I am grateful for my intellectual mentors.
I am grateful for the courage to pursue a career that was risky at best.
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.

Other Notables for me for this day
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.

May 31st - Syaday

2010-05-31T13:29:00.000-05:00

Story – 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.

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.

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”).

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.”

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 …

Gratitude
I am grateful that confusion isn’t always a bad thing.
I am grateful for crazy wisdom
I am grateful for silliness in the cause of the greater enlightenment of humanity
I am grateful for multivariate logic, especially the dialethisms of the Indian tradition
I am grateful for skepticism’s constant reminders of the limits of our understanding

Other Notables for me for this day:
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)

May 30th – Memorial Day

2010-05-30T13:28:00.000-05:00

Story 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.

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.

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.

Gratitude
I am grateful that we as a culture take time occasionally to honor our dead.
I am grateful for symbols of national unity, especially of reconciliation which call us to set aside our differences and grievances and work together.
I am grateful that our nation does not allow legal slavery anymore.
I am grateful that our country has largely healed from the terrible wounds of a Civil War over a century ago.
I am grateful that the many religions of America can occasionally agree to pray together.

Other Notables for me for this day:
The birth of Mikhail Bakunin (anarchist) and Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny), and the death of Saint Voltaire (philosopher, writer and activist).

May 29th – The Rites of Spring Day

2010-05-29T13:27:00.000-05:00

Story – 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).
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.

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.

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.

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.

Gratitude
I am grateful that I can see beauty in things that are challenging to me
I am grateful that I can be surprised by new forms of beauty, even after many encounters with beauty
I am grateful that artists take risks to bring me new forms of beauty, and new insights
I am grateful that sometimes the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but an alien form of beauty
I am grateful that dance has been liberated from the strictures of ballet, while allowing ballet to remain one form of dance among many.

Other Notables for me for this day:
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).

May 28th – Amnesty International Day

2010-05-28T13:26:00.000-05:00

In 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.

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.

Gratitude
I’m grateful for social organizations which pressure governments to live up to their highest ideals
I’m grateful for social organizations which help us transform individual desire for justice into collective pressure for justice.
I’m grateful for the Universal Declaration on Human Rights
I’m grateful that I’ve never been tortured, extra-judicially executed, disappeared, rendered

Other Notables for me for this day:
The death of Noah Webster (of dictionary fame), Alfred Adler (psychologist), the First Continental Congress convened for the first time to organize the US revolution

May 27th –Saint Ibn Khaldun Day

2010-05-27T13:26:00.000-05:00

Story: 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.

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.

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.

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.

Gratitudes:
I’m grateful for inquiry into the behavior of societies.
I’m grateful for the theory that history moves cyclically, and generationally.
I’m grateful for the labor theory of value, that all economic values rest ultimately not on gold or land, but on human labor.
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.
I’m grateful for the idea that careful methodology might be applied to social situations as well as to physical sciences.
I’m grateful for the bonds of social cohesion which form us into a society rather than a mere collection of individuals.

Other Notables for me for this day:
The births of Vincent Price (actor), Harlan Ellison (writer), Siouxsie Sioux (musician), Neil Finn (musician of Crowded House)

May 26th – Martin Heidegger Day

2010-05-26T13:25:00.000-05:00

Stories: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

“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.”

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.

Gratitude
I’m grateful for inquiry into the deepest questions of being.
I’m grateful for the picture of truth as discovery, rather than just truth as being right.
I’m grateful for value transcending the failures of our lives.

Other notables for me for this day:
Birth of Miles Davis (musician), Jack Kevorkian (suicide activist), Stevie Nicks (musician), Sally Ride (astronaut), Matsuhiro Morimoto (chef), Bobcat Goldthwait (comedian), Lenny Kravitz (musician)

Better Choices than Obama for the Peace Prize

2009-10-09T09:54:00.005-05:00

I 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.

Here's the AP's version of the committee's side

"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.

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.

"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."

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 blog. 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

1) Award No Prize This Year - 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.

2) Give the prize to an organization that has received it before but continued to do good work - 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.

3) The International Olympics Committee - 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.

4)Wendell Berry - 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.

5) Some person or organization actually involved in ending wars - 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.

6) Do something edgier - 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.

Tainted Lunch and Moral Compromise

2009-08-20T13:32:00.002-05:00

Sometimes 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.

A blogger using the pseudonym VK, puts it this way:

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.
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.

100 reasons to be Proud of the USA

2009-07-03T14:28:00.003-05:00

It'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.

* * *
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.

100 Important contributions to modern life for Americans to be proud of!
(I’m only listing here items that I think are mostly positive, still important today, and clearly developed or led by America or Americans)

1. Rock And Roll
2. Motion Pictures
3. The Marshall Plan for helping to rebuild the world economy after WWII.
4. US innovations in electronics (circuit breakers, integrated circuits, AC transformers, transistors, semi-conductors, microchips, etc)
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]
6. The development of the modern public school system.
7. US innovations in electronic computing (ENIAC, IBM, the ABC calculator, Apple, etc.)
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).
9. Airplanes
10. American private donations to international charities
11. Hand-held cameras (both Kodak and Polaroid)
12. America’s university system, especially for graduate education
13. America’s financial, military, and civilian support of the UN (including both public and private donors)
14. American contributions to medical technology, research and the FDA
15. Oral contraceptives
16. America’s military participation in WWII
17. Jazz
18. Polio vaccination
19. The development of commercial telephones and cell phones
20. Video games
21. The US Space Program
22. Electric trains, trolleys and mass transit (we don’t use ‘em enough ourselves anymore but we pioneered them for other nations)
23. Giving Europeans fleeing WWII a home
24. Decimal coinage
25. American contributions to modern written literature (Pynchon, Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf, Carl Sandberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, etc.)
26. American contributions to materials technology (nylon, vulcanized rubber, stryofoam, celluloid, bakelite, teflon, tupperware, etc.)
27. American contributions to sound recording technology (Phonographs, records and tape recordings, microphones, etc)
28. Merck’s work to eradicate river blindness
29. American contributions to television technology
30. The Panama Canal
31. American contributions to other genres of music (pop, country& western, classical, etc)
32. American television programming
33. America’s role in the creation and evolution of the internet and web
34. The US constitution, and other legal and political documents
35. The Academy Awards system
36. Arcwelders
37. Artificial sweeteners
38. Contact lenses
39. Modern elevators
40. Scotch tape
41. Photocopiers
42. Fiberglass
43. Submarines
44. Frozen food
45. Helicopters
46. Broadway, and the Broadway musical genre
47. Comic books
48. The Smithsonian
49. Modern vaccination (for less extreme problems than polio)
50. The Kinsey report
51. Westerns as a genre
52. American contributions to dance
53. Magnetic Resonance Imaging
54. Ball point pens
55. Walt Disney
56. American contributions to children’s literature
57. Cash registers and other business machines
58. Wikipedia, Amazon.com, Ebay.com, and American cyberculture
59. Bifocals
60. American contributions to gay culture and gay liberation
61. Role-playing games
62. Bubble gum
63. the Global Positioning System
64. The 5 and dime, and now Dollar Stores
65. The Richter Scale
66. Denim jeans
67. America as a tourist destination for international tourists (#3 in the world)
68. American contributions to science fiction
69. Consumer Reports
70. Safety pins
71. Hip-Hop
72. Synthesizers
73. Peanut Butter
74. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
75. Aldo Leopold and other American contributions to Environmentalism
76. Margaret Sanger’s work with birth-control
77. Other US Museums
78. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Pop Art
79. Rollerblades
80. Chomsky’s Structural Grammar
81. John Kenneth Galbraith and Veblen
82. Einstein’s theories of relativity
83. Feynmann’s Quantum Electrodynamic (QED) theory
84. Deming’s work on Statistical Quality Control
85. Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter
86. John Cage
87. Strauss and Howe’s theory of history
88. W. V. O. Quine
89. Joseph Campbell
90. Van Neumann, Conway, and Game Theory
91. Weiner’s theory of Cybernetics
92. American contributions to psychology (Moreno, Erikson, Mead, etc)
93. Cook’s Illustrated
94. Jackson Pollock
95. John Rawl’s theory of justice
96. American contributions to anthropology
97. Nozick’s theories of the minimal state
98. The theology of Neibuhr and Tillich
99. Cesar Chavez
100. Starhawk and the Reclaiming tradition

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).
1. Brand loyalty marketing
2. Car inventions and car culture
3. American contributions to industrial agriculture
4. The atom bomb and nuclear energy
5. American leadership in NATO, G8, OECD and other international political bodies
6. American innovations in advertising
7. Tobacco
8. Levitt and the modern suburb system
9. Chain businesses and franchising
10. Fast food
11. The Cold War
12. American contributions to sports and sports culture
13. Bottling machines and the rise of soft-drinks
14. The Windows operating system
15. American blockbuster writers and the neutering of literature (Clancy, Cook, Crieghton, Follet, Grisham, King, Koontz, Rice, Steele, Tan, etc)
16. Disposable diapers
17. American consumption of imported illegal drugs such as cocaine or heroin
18. Gun technology developments (like silencers, or machine guns)
19. America’s contributions to pornography
20. Burbank and modern plant breeding
21. American developments in the department store
22. Skinner and Behaviorism
23. Other American contributions to fashion, cosmetics and perfume
24. The Great Chicago Strike and May Day
25. The International Landmine treaty of 1998 (and pulling out of it in 2002)

Important contributions that may be no longer entirely “modern.”
1. Cheap Cotton and the Cotton gin
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)
3. typewriters
4. Pragmatism: Dewey, James, etc
5. Cowboys
6. Hubble and the Expanding Universe
7. Rogers and Astaire
8. Benjamin Franklin
9. Beatniks
10. Tap dance

Unemployment and Ancient Chinese Philosophy

2009-05-21T15:53:00.002-05:00

Well, 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.”

Here are a few things Confucius says about unemployment …

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)

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)

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.

Here are some things the Daodejing says:

“Do not raise the worthy, so that people will not compete
Do not value rare treasures, so that people will not steal
Do not display objects of desire, so that people’s hearts shall not be disturbed/ …”
Daodejing 3

Be apprehensive when receiving favor or disgrace.
Regard trouble as seriously as you regard your own body
What is meant by being apprehensive when receiving favor or disgrace?
Favor is considered inferior. / …

Daodejing 13

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.

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

“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

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.

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.”

A few pages later, Zhuangzi has Confucius give this following wonderful summary

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!”

The Value of Despair

2009-04-24T12:03:00.003-05:00

Here 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.

***

The most optimistic person I have ever encountered admitted yesterday that he is sad and scared. Beth Terry wrote a guest blog today entitled “Caring Without Despairing.” 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,
or the lawyers arguing against each other to try to produce thoughtful justice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eating Our Children: The Story of Saturn and Moloch

2009-04-21T16:00:00.003-05:00

8 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.

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.”
But the metaphor that was most haunting for me was the myth of Saturn eating his own children.

I wrote

“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.

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.

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.”

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.
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?
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.

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.

Belated April Fool’s Day Post: The Virtue of Silliness

2009-04-07T09:36:00.003-05:00

Several years ago I had the opportunity to see a wonderful thoughtful April Fool’s Day sermon by one of my favorite ministers (Rev. Bill Breeden ), 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.

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

“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. ”

E.E. Cummings “A Forward to Krazy” in Krazy Kat, 1946.

Alright with that introduction, we are ready for my comments on silliness.

* * *

… 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Inequality and Underconsumption

2009-04-02T10:10:00.005-05:00

Here's a nice quote from Palagummi Sainaith's lecture "The Age of Inequality"

"For two decades now the United Nations Development Program, and other organs of the United Nations have been telling us that an additional expenditure of 60 to 80 billion dollars a year will help the human race sort out all the basic problems of hunger, health, sanitation, education, literacy, and issues like that... and it has never happened, because governments have told us "There's no money. There's just no money. We can't do it. Where's the money going to come from?" But when crisis struck The Suits in Wall Street, governments figured out that they could raise one and a half trillion dollars in seven days."
...
"Every great Depression, every economic catastrophe, every major economic collapse in history has been preceded by years of absolutely unsustainable levels of inequality."

Now the question of what causes Depressions is a complex and thorny one. Keynesians have several possible theories (Goodwin's profit-wage oscillation model, Minski's credit-interest rate oscillation cycle, etc.) The "real business cycle" model of Kynland and Prescott imagines fluctuations mostly resulting from after effects of technological changes. Older economists often blamed "external" influences like changes in legal frameworks, warfare, labor union activity, etc. Kalecki even argues for a political business cycle theory, that political interference in the business world has a cyclic effect. The Austrian school of economics still holds that all business cycle effects are results of government interference in money supply and interest rates, and Friedman certainly made that line popular among American and British economists too. Marx thought that periodic depressions were a natural part of capitalism, caused by the nature of capitalism itself, but if you ask him exactly why, he gets cagey and has 3 main theories each of which he explores a little but he never really decides which if any are the underlying cause of depressions, or if perhaps all three are: the underconsumption problem, the full employment profit squeeze, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Now I'm a big fan of Strauss-Howe theory, which sees generational dynamics causing 80-100 year cycles in politics and culture. This in turn could easily be an underlying cause of the business cycle of periodic major depressions, ala real business cycles, or other externalist accounts. Or then again, the Strauss-Howe cycles could simply be correlative rather than causative. Or perhaps changes in generational attitude lead to changes in governmental attitudes towards interest rates, money supply and interventionism, which leads to the depressions via the Austrian picture. Even if Strauss and Howe are right, it doesn't really answer this particular question. And of course, I strongly oppose single etiology theories so probably different depressions are caused in different ways and most depressions have many different causal factors.

But today I want to explore the "underconsumption" hypothesis a little more. Marx toys with it, but he is neither the first nor the last to do so, Malthus had already discussed the issue back in 1820, and Foster and Catchings had fairly non-Marxian interpretations of it in the 1920s pre-saging some of Keynes' ideas. The basic "underconsumption" argument goes like this. Suppose that the capitalists are successful in pushing the wages of labor down and the productivity of labor up. This will increase the rate of surplus value and lead to wealthier capitalists. However, eventually the workers dependent on wages will not be able to afford to buy as much, and the aggregate demand (demand in the sense of what can actually be afforded) will go down, leading to a recession or depression. If the upper class are capitalists, and are too successful at impoverishing the rest, then everyone else won't be able to afford to buy the things the capitalist's companies produce, and slowdowns will occur. Too much economic inequality is itself bad for a capitalist economy.

Now this line of thought gets a lot of criticism. Keynes, famously points out that consumer demand is not the only factor in aggregate demand and that it is possible that even though consumer demand is declining, you can prevent a recession by increasing some other part of aggregate demand enough to counter balance it (the 3 main other parts being fixed investment, government spending, and exports net of imports). That's part of the whole rationale for government "stimulus" spending when a recession is looming. But, there are 2 problems with applying this reply to today's situation. First, unless you can permanently increase government spending (as FDR did), or fixed investment, or the export-import balance, that is a temporary solution, you STILL need to get consumer spending back up, and that often requires increasing real wages, and actually clawing some of the wealth back from the wealthiest to the put it in the hands of the consumers. Consider the advice of Simon Johnson, who worked for years at the IMF, and wrote "The Quiet Coup" in the May 2009 issue of the Atlantic. He argues that emerging economies get into trouble because they borrow too much, and then there are deep allainces between the elites of the political class, and elites of the economic class. As things get bad, you get "public-private partnerships" become "crony capitalism" and things get worse until the only way out is to "squeeze the Oligarchs."

The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

So even for a Keynesian, stimulus can't lead to real recovery from a severe recession or a depression, unless you can find the political will to squeeze the oligarchs enough to reverse the economic inequality that led to the collapse in consumer demand in the first place. But, second notice that to even soften the blow of the recession/depression, for a Keynesian, you have to have increases in trade balance, government spending or fixed investment that are enough to counter-balance the decrease in consumer spending. But right now, fixed investment sure isn't increasing much, and the US isn't repairing its trade balance issues much (nor are most other places in the world) and government spending increases are real, but nothing on the order of magnitude of the decreases in consumer wealth or consumer spending. Keynesianism isn't getting us out of the underconsumption problem this time, if indeed it ever really works.

What about Marxian critiques of underconsumption? Marx has 2 main objections. First, the underconsumption problem is often put in ways that make it a pure redundancy, an analytic truth rather than an empirical fact about economies. If we say the economy is declining because people are buying less; the danger is we may have said the same thing twice in 2 different ways, rather than saying one thing which explained another thing. Fair enough, so we need to phrase things in ways that make the inequality issue clearer. The economy is going down, because non-ultra-wealthy people are so much poorer than ultra-wealthy people that they no longer feel they can afford to buy as much, and are cutting back. If we respond to this situation by replying "well then get banks lending again so that non-ultra-wealthy people will trick themselves into feeling wealthy than they really are and buy things they can't really afford some more" we are either evil bastards, or have missed the point of the underconsumption problem. Even if we could get the banks lending again, it would only delay the issue a little. What the underconsumption problem really hypothesizes is that excessive economic inequality is decreasing aggregate demand.

Marx's second criticism is also interesting

When people attempt to give this redundancy an appearance of some deeper meaning by saying that the working class does not receive enough of its own product and that the evil would be dispelled immediately if it received a greater share,i.e., if its wages were increased, all one can say is that crises are invariably preceded by periods in which wages in general rise and the working class receives a relatively greater share of the annual product intended for consumption. From the standpoint of these valiant upholders of 'plain common sense,' such periods should prevent the coming of crises. It would appear, therefore, that capitalist production includes conditions which are independent of good will or bad will. . . " [in Das Kapital vol II, quoted by Franz Mehring in his biography of Karl Marx, p. 404 of the 1935 Covici, Friede edition, tr. Edward Fitzgerald]

Now I don't know if Marx is right "that crises are invariably preceded by periods in which wages in general rise and the working class receives a relatively greater share of the annual product intended for consumption" at the time when he wrote Das Kapital in 1893 (although I doubt it). But that sure isn't true of 20th century financial crises, and it sure isn't true of THIS ONE. Quite to the contrary, real wages have been stagnating, and inequality has been increasing, for decades. And the effect is much clearer when we look at the global picture of inequality, even though it also hold for looking at the recent history of 1st world workers and capitalists. Marx is just wrong.

Another insight that the underconsumption hypothesis can give us on depressions/recessions, is that over-production is the flip side of the underconsumption problem. In a sense, the current global problem is that Germany, China, and Japan all want to keep producing the things they are producing, even though the market signals are telling them to switch to different products. An easier way to see this is to look at Iceland's story. There was a really insightful article on what happened to Iceland in surprising mainstream women's magazine last month, and I can't remember the reference. But the journalist kept digging and eventually suggested that the root of the problem lay in the success of the reforms of Icelands fishing market in the 70s. For centuries Iceland had focused on fishing, and fishing has long been a very non-lucrative field. Then in the 70's Iceland tried a novel new way of regulating fishing, that was well designed to increase profits. And it worked, Iceland became fairly wealthy. And they invested the wealth largely in education. People sent their kids to school, and there was an explosion of highly educated Icelanders. And these Icelanders by and large didn't want to go into fishing, and their parent's agreed don't become a fisherman if you can go on to bigger and better things. But there were all these highly educated Icelanders without many bigger and better things to do or produce. Some turned to the arts, and we got Bjork. But eventually they discovered that high finance was another good way for educated people to spend their time. Iceland had all this excess productive capacity, and it didn't really want to go into more fishing, so it wound up producing complex and ultimately risky and poorly understood financial products. But in a sense, China and Germany have the same problem. All this excess productive capacity looking for something to do that will be worth doing. What is China going to say? Sorry we have enough factories to fulfill world demand go back to your villages and farm some more? It could. But there'd be grumbling, and it doesn't really want to. The American consumer doesn't really want to cut back consumption, even though they know they are over-extended and probably ought to, but equally the German or Chinese producer doesn't really want to cut back production (and thus switch to a crappier job) even though they also know that they ought to. One function of economic crisis is to force changes in consumption and production, despite our resistance to them. But this is true both directions.

I'm not saying that unsustainable levels of economic inequality are a key factor in all recessions and depressions (although Sainaith does), or that unsustainable levels of inequality are the only important factor in this one (it's not). But I do think that along with many other unsustainable practices, our economy has led to unsustainable levels of economic inequality, and these have led to decreases in aggregate demand that Keynesian strategies have not been able to compensate for. I doubt we'll ever get back to a real growth economy, but I also hold that we will not be able to stabilize or move forward until inequality drops to managable levels via a process of "squeezing the oligarchs." If this can be done via the current political system, so be it, if the current crop of politicians cannot find the courage to squeeze the oligarchs (who many of them also depend on and are friends with) in ways that genuinely lead to decreases in economic inequality, then eventually anger will boil over into extra-legal forms of squeezing the oligarchs and things will get even uglier. And economic inequality has 2 faces, the oligarchs are a lot richer than you and I, but you and I are a lot richer than most 3rd worlders. Part of the solution is going to have to be toppling financial racketeers who pretend to be titans (see Max Keiser's brilliant article "Let Them Have Stained carpets, Obama's Marie Antoinette Moment"), but part of the solution is also going to have to be regular 1st worlders living a lot more like 3rd worlders than we do now. And if the 3rd worlders cannot squeeze the 1st worlders any other way, then they will squeeze us with their dying bodies. You can only shoot so many starving desperate people before you start to question the virtue of your own leaders, and the justice of your own priveleges. I don't forsee a world of equality emerging, but given my poor understanding of economics, it looks to me as if there will have to emerge more equality than there is today, like it or not, and that for most of my readers that will feel like being squeezed down.

Thinking about the Whole Education System

2009-03-19T14:30:00.001-05:00

Which Australian 80s band performed “Who Can it Be Now?” and “Down Under” (Oh! do you come from the land down under (oh yeah yeah), where women glow and men plunder …)? Ok, Which US President managed to get the first federal progressive tax passed, pushed for the creation of a “League of Nations” and won the Nobel Peace Prize for the creation of the League of Nations in 1919, even though the Senate blocked the US from joining it?
How many of you knew the answer to the first question, but not the second? America has an extremely effective education system, but the system is much broader than simply what you learn in school, indeed schooling is an comparatively minor part of the overall system. Our system excels at aiding Americans in learning pop cultural information, and in developing strong and complex consumer preferences, but is sometimes lackluster at teaching the ability to enjoy poetry, or to make wise investment decisions. Sharon Astyk has, as usual, a good piece on our education system on her blog, but I wanted to respond with a much longer meditation. I believe that we need to see the whole scope of the education-system, especially how it pervades culture beyond formal schooling; we need to think about why some topics are promoted more heavily or effectively than others; we need to think about why some topics are learned more effectively than others when curriculums are in conflict; and lastly we need to think about what we can do.

The Whole Education System
Adults continue to learn new things throughout their life even though they are no longer in school. One common new thing we learn is the “news,” although we learn facts about the entertainments we enjoy, the names and faces of people we have newly met, and occasionally even new job skills. Children learn things outside of school, at least as much and probably more often as they learn things in school. Humans are constantly learning, but we don’t necessarily learn all different topics at an equal rate. Our own talents and interests are part of why we learn some things more thoroughly than other things, but our culture and education-system as a whole are part of the story too. Too often we think of “education-system” as a euphemism for “schooling,” but even in the US which has a lot of schooling comparatively speaking, only about 20% of the population is in school at any given point, and even for them schooling is probably at most ½ of their total education, although perhaps we do learn more while young and working on learning than later on, so I’d estimate that schooling (public schooling, private schooling, home schooling, and higher education) all together is probably only about 10%-15% of our overall education system. Not trivial, but not exactly central either.
The biggest chunk of our education system is the mainstream media and its curriculum of pop culture, TV, Radio, Movies, pop music, magazines, billboards, etc. Advertising is an especially important part of this section of the education system, but non-advertising content is pretty relevant too. The advertising curriculum focuses on getting to consumers to want or even feel that they need certain products, while the non-advertising content caters to entertaining the consumers. Often an attempt is made to blend other goals besides entertainment in with the entertainment, creating infotainment, edutainment, advertainment, etc. In the US, people watch an average of 4 hours of TV a day alone, (and sleep for another 8 hours) so estimating TV at about 25% of the total US education-system is probably about right. If we add in also movies, radio, magazines, newspapers, other forms of advertising, and mainstream media web sites with advertising, we are probably in the 50% range.
Third, we learn by direct observation of the people around us. By meeting them, talking with them, often imitating them. The brilliant educational psychologist Albert Bandura hammered this point home in many ways during his work over the past several decades, and the school of thought he created is typically called Social Cognitive theory, now. Children watch what adults do, they watch what other kids do and whether they get rewarded or punished for it. They chart out possibilities and options by looking at the people around them (or those they are exposed to via the media), in a process we call observational learning. Adults do this too, although we are typically already more set in our ways. Another form of social learning that adults habitually engage in is the opinion-leader effect. On a topic that one perceives as non-controversial one will form an opinion based largely on their media exposure. On a topic that one perceives as controversial, but well within one’s expertise or in an area of particular interest, one will spend the time to sort through the many competing claims and form your own opinion. But on a topic that one perceives as controversial, but not in ones areas of particular expertise or interest, one will seek out a trusted peer who is perceived as being more interested or more expert in the area and chat with them to form an opinion. For example, I’m a philosopher and I form my own opinions on anything I see as related to philosophy, but if I’m trying to decide what new computer to buy, or which blog-provider to put my blog on, I’ll talk with friends and learn what they have to say on the topic before deciding. An “opinion-leader” needs to be perceived as being a peer, and you need to be able to actually interact with them, but they also need to seem especially knowledgeable or passionate about the topic. Again this is a thoroughly social and cognitive form of learning, we are seeking fellow people directly as sources of learning. Peer pressure is another classic social cognitive learning phenomena. Social cognitive learning within the family is central to early development of children prior to school, and is also pretty key during school years, as well. If we add up these various social cognitive learning situations (early childhood learning, peer pressure, observational learning, opinion leadership, networking, informal mentoring, etc.) I suspect we have at least 10% of our overall education-system, albeit a particularly unorganized, unsystematic section of the overall system.
Fourth, we often learn things on the job, or via our work. Workplace learning is more organized than just social cognitive learning, (although of course, all of the sections I’ve mentioned interpenetrate quite a bit). Most jobs have a pretty high repetition rate, one is doing the same sorts of tasks over and over and over. But there is usually some degree of variation and learning involved as well. Work place learning, often includes occasional seminars or training exercises of various kinds, especially at the beginning, or when major changes are about to take place. Jobs are not focused on learning the way that schooling is, but we spend a lot of time on jobs, and there are a lot more people in work than in schools. I think it is probably reasonable to see working life as 10-20% of our education-system.
Fifth, we have issues of leisure life, high culture, and social capital. Now a lot of our leisure activities revolve around mainstream media, or shopping both of which I’ve already mentioned. But what about a bowling league, or boy scouts, or religious education, or visiting museums? I think there are 3 distinct but related things to talk about here. First, not all of culture has been successfully captured by the mainstream media. There is “highbrow” culture that doesn’t really fit in it, and counter-cultures that are actively trying to maintain some distance from it. Museums, symphonies, theatre, and poetry slams are all contexts where learning sometimes takes place, but so are underground newspapers, local bands in bars, pagan festivals, or Amish barnraisings. Secondly, culture contexts outside of the mainstream media, often revolve around small local organizations, of like-minded folk. Bowling leagues, amateur astronomy clubs, churches, a band’s fan club, etc. Sociologists talk about these in terms of “Social Capital” networks of social relationships that provide frameworks for certain kinds of social action. I, for example, learned a LOT from the Boy Scouts while I was growing up, even though most of my “teachers” were volunteers without particular expertise in what they were teaching. Small, organized groups can provide learning situations which are quite a bit richer than unstructured peer groups, or direct one on one relationships, precisely because of the organization or social capital involved. Small organized groups like this were once a far more prominent part of American life (and education) than they are now, but they are still fairly common, and crop up in lots of different ways. Often, culture and social capital are mixed together. My church, for example, is a cultural context at least as much as a hobby, but one that is run mostly by volunteers (with a few professionals) in ways very in line with the social capital model, and local sports leagues are culture as well as small-scale organizations. The third big factor here is the notion of self-directed leisure. Unlike work or school, participation in these kinds of groups is largely voluntary and thus directly intrinsically motivated (more on that later). Now both for my wife and I, this kind of learning through groups that we have done volunteer work for, or interacted with on a leisure basis has been at least as important as our schooling, but I’m not convinced we’re typical and I can’t find any statistics to use to estimate the overall impact of this style of learning, so I’d guess that it probably collectively less than 10% of the US’s overall education system.
Sixth, I think it does occasionally happen that people engage in self-teaching or directed research. Sometimes we go to a library and try to look up information we want, rather than going to a place where someone will teach us something. Sometimes we experiment with various ways of doing things until we find one we like. Libraries, Wikipedia, and basement workshops are part of our education-system too, even though they don’t really function much like the first 5 I’ve mentioned. My guess is that this is the least significant of the sectors I’ve discussed at the moment, maybe only 1-2% (meaning I have maybe 10% left over for error in estimation, or sectors I haven’t thought of). But self-directed education is also quite cheap, and has a lot of potential for the future.
In a sense, what we have are multiple curricula, math class teaches us one set of things, boy scouts another, and hip-hop music a third. Sometimes the curricula, are designed to be coordinated or work together, sometimes they are disparate but not really conflicting, but sometimes they are in more direct conflict. Boy Scouts teaches one set of values, and some Hip Hop music is teaching a very different set of values. Home economics class teaches us thrifty food prep behaviors, and food advertising teaches us to spend as much as possible to make food prep easier. When curricula directly conflict, it is often because there are conflicting agendas underwriting the education system. And these conflicting agendas mean that in practice the task of teaching, and the task of unteaching or anti-teaching are usually united, and teaching is often persuasion by hidden means.

E-ducation and De-ducation
The food advertiser wants to teach you to use pre-packaged foods as short cuts wherever possible, the cooking instructor wants to teach you to make from scratch wherever possible. Some teaching merely tries to convey facts, but usually you are trying to instill values, habits, and styles of thought as well, and that means that you habitually need to try to undo existing habits, values, or styles of thought. Education, comes from the Latin e-duco to lead out or lead upward, to build up or raise, often specifically to raise a child. The Latin has an antonym, de-duco, to lead downward, to subtract or reduce, to lead away or draw away, as a distraction leads away from the real issue. We do sometimes talk of deduction (where premises “lead down” to a conclusion under them), but we don’t usually use it as an antonym for education. So let mean coin the term “deducation” for the process of leading someone away from a particular pieces of knowledge, skill, value, or character trait, just as education is the process of leading someone towards a particular piece of knowledge, value, skill or character trait. Now deducation is not always a bad thing, breaking a bad habit counts. But deducation does often have fairly horrible motivations, the law forbidding teaching literacy to slaves in the old South were deducation policies, for example. Other cases are trickier, many facts are kept secret even in peacetime as matters of national security, and various tricks are used to prevent them from being known, and sometimes this is clearly defensible, and sometimes it is clearly immoral, and sometimes reasonable people disagree.
Our education-system frequently involves deducation as well, and often for reasons that are not entirely commendable. Governments want to keep some things secret, but they also want to be able to spin things that they cannot keep entirely secret, and the boundaries between spin and outright propaganda via conventional mainstream news outlets gets pretty shaky. Businesses likewise frequently wish to shape public discourse in ways that will prevent certain options from being considered or portray positions hostile to theirs in an inferior light. Advertisers want us to desire their products, but they often wish us to not think about certain downsides of the products as well. American’s die because of poor diet hundreds of times more often than they die because of terrorism, but food advertisers have every incentive to prevent us from realizing this, and are skilled at leading people away from serious contemplation of the dangers of poor diet. The creation of doubt and anti-knowledge as a PR technique (often called denialism) was pioneered by cigarette companies who fought a multi-decade battle against the fact that cigarettes are deadly, but has been applied to many other fields since. Our education system is used, and used effectively for PR, propaganda, to tranquilize legitimate fears, and to channel habits, and patterns of thinking into ways that are convenient for those with power over the education system.
And this happens at levels below government and corporate policy as well, and is often to some extent unconscious. For example, a profession earns its wage, by selling its skills. But the monetary value of those skills depends on exactly how rare they are. Thus, in order to keep a profession well paying, and thus high class, and well “professional” you have to limit how many people in the society have access to the skills. Lawyers command good pay BECAUSE legal skills are not particularly common. So any organization of lawyers (and lawyers are well-organized) has a strong incentive to prevent legal skills from being widely taught. There is a reason we teach very little law in public schools. Lawyer have a keen interest in deducation, and really most professions do even if they aren’t very upfront about it. Adam Smith has some interesting and counter-intuitive insights into the economics of education and apprenticeship for example (Wealth of Nation Book1 chap x part II, and Book V chap I part III).
But how does one go about preventing people from learning something? What are the best techniques for deducation? Well, you can simply suppress or forbid knowledge, as for example, our nuclear launch codes are kept tightly secret and any real attempt to inquire into them has terrible consequences. But suppression is a bad tactic in most cases. It makes the target tempting, it clearly shows the value of the knowledge being suppressed, it piques curiosity and motivates us. What is usually more effective, especially if the knowledge is not exactly dangerous, but merely must not become widespread, is to make the knowledge available, but very inconvenient to get. Put institutional barriers in the way of the knowledge or skill, forms, permissions, hoops to jump through. Make it a pain in the ass to learn the skill unless you do so through the carefully controlled channels. Anyone can learn the legal profession, but if you try to do it outside of a law school it takes an awful lot of work. Another common technique for preventing knowledge from becoming widespread is jargon, structure the knowledge so that the uninitiated will have difficulty understanding it even if they do happen to find it. But by far the best technique for preventing people from learning a particular skill, habit, or piece of knowledge is misdirection, get them to learn something else instead. Humans are wired to learn. We love learning, and we learn a lot all during our lives. No matter how bad your education system is, people will learn. But what will they learn? It is sadly easy to direct our learning away from a particular topic by directing it towards a different topic.
And this is the dark secret of entertainment. Americans are exposed to a lot of entertainment largely to prevent us from learning other things that might threaten the interests of the folk who have power over the education system. If we learned too much history, or politics, or economics, or even just cooking skills or legal skills, things would be quite different.

Competing Curricula
So our education system is characterized by disparate and often competing curricula, where different segments of the system are trying to teach children and adults disparate and often directly conflicting things. Should my values be shaped by my church or by heavy metal music? Or perhaps by the church down the road? Should I spend my time working on math or listening to pop songs? Should I store food, or buy as I go?
When people decry the problems of the education system, they usually mean to point out the problems with the schooling system, but the main problem that the schooling system has is that it can’t really compete with the mainstream media and pop culture. Our children are learning fine, they are just learning the curriculum promoted by the mainstream media corporations, far better than the curriculum promoted by public schools.
Consider the conflict between the math problem and the pop song. Which is more interesting? Which is more relevant to the life of the student? Which is better promoted? Which is taught in ways that better conform to our current best theories about educational psychology? I’m a mathematician so I like math, but even I think that pop songs are usually more interesting than math problems. Further, we focus on boring math problems, because those are the ones that are easiest to test over, and teachers incentives are tied to testing far more than to other areas of teaching. The math skill may eventually be useful to the life of the student (and even there we do a bad job, focusing a lot of math skills that were relevant to the life of the 19th century), but the pop song is relevant right now. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and PBS and a few other organizations may occasionally try to promote mathematics as a topic, but not nearly as extensively or expertly as the music industry promotes itself. Indeed, what are the primary motivations for listening to a pop song or doing a math problem. We listen to pop songs for their OWN sake, but we do math problems to get a grade and perhaps a diploma or good job someday. Everything we know about the psychology of learning tells us that intrinsic motivations (doing something for its own sake) are far more powerful and long lasting, than extrinsic motivations (doing something for so other reward). External rewards teach students that a subject is boring, and that they must be rewarded for the effort of doing it, they help motivation a lot over the short run, but absolutely destroy it over medium and long runs. The pop song probably talks about sex, and relationships, and things that the student actually cares about, but the math problem is probably divorced from anything that might be controversial. It is not JUST that pop culture is much better funded and more powerful, pop culture is frequently simply doing a better job of teaching than schooling is.
But the advantages are not all on the pop culture side. Schooling involves a large segment of a child’s time, and frequently can make good use of peer pressure. More importantly, many teachers manifestly care about the student, whereas even student can often tell that pop culture is trying to sell something to them and manipulate them. Some segments of schooling are things that the students can see the relevance of to their own lives. But many chunks of schooling have only dubious relevance, and far worse, schooling systematically transforms intrinsic motivations into extrinsic motivations, thereby killing most student’s love of the subject matters, and the motivation of all but the most ambitious students.

So what should we do?
First, simply be aware that an education system is more than just a schooling system. Think of education as something that happens over a whole life, and in many aspects of life outside of schooling. Think of schooling as one part of a broader whole. This helps to see that there are many, many possible places to make improvements beyond just school policies.
Second, be able to adopt a critical thinking “mental posture.” Some thinkers like to call this a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The idea is to stop and think, and in thinking try to look at the big picture and to identify the agendas of the various factions involved in the picture. If you see an ad, stop and think, and try to place the ad in a broader context, and try to identify the agendas and techniques of the ad. If your teacher lectures at you, stop and think about the content, try to place it in its broader contexts, try to identify the agendas of the teacher and the techniques he or she used. With enough practice this can become almost reflex. It doesn’t have to be an exercise in cynicism, perhaps the message fits in its broader contexts and the agendas in play are one’s you agree with. Criticism can include admiration for one’s goals or techniques as well as identifying worrisome features that might have slipped your notice if you had not taken the extra effort to stop and think. Critical thinking is a form of intellectual self-defense, and helps to prevent you from being manipulated by agents with agendas opposed to your own. There isn’t really very much teaching of critical thinking in our school system (it gets a lot of lip service, but every study ever done on it has found that it gets very little actual teaching), and it is strongly discouraged by the mainstream media. But teaching critical thinking in little chunks is pretty easy to integrate into social learning situations, and even into workplace learning. Ask someone why they think someone else did what they did. Get people to stop and think about the agenda and techniques that others use to advance their agendas.
Third, realize that learning and teaching in amateur contexts still counts. Learn about the things you love, the things you find yourself intrinsically motivated to learn about. Our society values professionalism too much and amateurism too little. There is a place for professionalism, I’m not really trying to insult it as much as say that we have too much and need to back off. Enjoy what you enjoy and let your enthusiasm show in teaching and learning. Our culture is poisoning our education, and our careerism is poisoning our culture so that everything is done for the sake of a career rather than for its own sake or some other sake. Joy is itself transformative of the educational system.
Fourth, we have lost a lot of social capital over the last few decades. Re-build social capital where possible and use these organizations for teaching and learning especially in amateur and non-school contexts. Similarly, seek to be a little extra knowledgeable on the things you care about so that you can act as a good opinion leader for your friends, and seek the educated opinions of your friends on topics that you think they count as good opinion leaders on. Usually it is a mistake to rely on experts, unless you are at least a “half-expert” yourself and can sort through the disagreements between experts adequately. Instead rely on someone you can trust who is at least half-expert and can sort through the issues honestly.
Fifth, think a little about the techniques being used to seduce people away from learning certain topics. It is hard to see your own blind-spots or hang ups, some tricks are used against us precisely because they are likely to work. But occasionally looking at the big picture, and regularly thinking about the context one step up from whatever issue we are working on, helps provide a little protection from misdirection.
Sixth, some techniques just plain work better in education than others. Often we want to tailor the technique to the context, but there are some fair generalities. Involving several senses in learning almost always helps, as does repetition, as does increasing the interactivity of the technique. Tapping into intrinsic motivations always does better in the long run, than tapping into extrinsic ones. I think there are a lot of things we can do besides trying to reform the school system, but trying to reform the school system makes sense too. We put too much emphasis on standardized tests, and this has a lot of negative consequences. Back off on emphasis on standardized testing a little in the school system would help.
Our education system pervades our culture, we cannot put boundaries around it, we certainly cannot confine it do the school system. But that means that improving our educational system is inseparable from improving our culture, and adapting our educational system for the end of growth economics is inseparable from adapting our culture to the end of growth economics. And I think this involves de-emphasizing the great cultural engines of growth economics, mass media, advertising, careers and professionalism, consumption, and social isolation, and re-emphasizing the cultural factors that were more central before growth economics became quite so bloated, social contacts, small organizations, amateurism, enjoyment, and self-directed exploration. Mass media and careerism and advertising are not going to go away, but it is not impossible for them to be taken down a peg or two.

An Unrelated Sermon

2009-03-15T14:33:00.002-05:00

This Sunday I did a sermon for my church*. The topic is not particularly related to this blog, and is something that my minister asked me to do a sermon on, I doubt I would have chosen the topic myself. However, it went pretty well, and my wife has posted the sermon on her personal blog, so if you are interested it is availible here. It's entitled "What Would Jesus Do: Liberal Christianity and the Theology of Prosperity." It doesn't really say anything about what Jesus would do, but is more a history of the "What Would Jesus Do" movement in Christianity, and how it relates to Andrew Carnegie, Christian Socialism, Televangelists and board games, with a few conclusions about fads and the tensions within Christian thought about social action.

*[technically it is the Terre Haute Unitarian Universalist Congregation, and isn't a church. Most UUs are Humanists, Atheists, Agnostics, Pagans, or a bit of several things like me; folk that don't fit elsewhere but still find some value in trying to be part of a religious community peopled mostly by folk that disagree with you on the basics. Only 10-15% of UUs consider themselves Christian, so the term "church" can be misleading, but we routinely call it church anyway, and the term church captures it about as well as any term can deal with the wonderful weirdness that is contemporary Unitarian-Universalism.]

Philosophy and Collapse

2009-03-14T14:28:00.006-05:00

The questions of what exactly philosophy is and what it is for, are old central questions in philosophy, (working on them is called “metaphilosophy”), and there are a lot of quite different answers. Here is the handout I give my students. The ancients thought philosophy was the love of wisdom, the literal roots of the word. Moderns often portrayed philosophy as some form of searching for truth. Kant thought that philosophy was about finding the limits of our reasoning ability. Marx thought it was about understanding the world so that we could change the world. Wittgenstein thought that philosophy was about clarifying the claims of other disciplines but that it can really make claims of its own.

Myself, I side with the ancients, that philosophy is the love of wisdom, but when talking to moderns, I often find Husserl’s picture helpful. Husserl says that philosophy has two fairly different aspects, one is aimed at contemplating timeless truths, searching for those things that are true in all times, what he calls “philosophy as an exact science.” Just as the laws of physics or geology care nothing for whether our society is flourishing with an expanding economy and hope for the future, or collapsing facing the end of growth economy with fear and despair for the future, so perhaps there are truths of logic, or metaphysics, or epistemology, or even ethics or aesthetics that care nothing for the particulars of the age. And indeed, it would be all too easy to confuse the prejudices of one’s own age with timeless truths, so when we are pursuing philosophy as an exact science, it is critical to try to find reasons for our beliefs that will not be exposed as merely the prejudice of our age when we poke at them hard. Many, including Husserl, have thought that philosophy-as-an-exact-science has made no or very little progress over the centuries, and have had various explanations for this curious supposed fact. The second aspect of philosophy in Husserl’s picture is what he calls “World-and-life Philosophy” and its job is to give us wise advice on how to live in our own particular time, place, and world. Here, it is critical to examine and understand the particulars of the age you live in, rather than abstracting away from them. Here, wisdom and advice are more central to the project than truth. Again, world-and-life philosophy seems to make little or no progress, but this is not surprising as its subject matter is always changing out from under it.

So as we are facing a collapse of some kind, a collapsing economy, but probably a broader societal collapse as well, philosophy has as usual its two main tasks, helping us seek for timeless truths, things that will not change despite the social and economic changes, and giving us advice on how to navigate the changes. And these projects are fairly distinct, but they are deeply interlinked. Navigating a changing world well probably requires understanding it deeply and insightfully (as well as luck and flexibility, and other virtues). But insight into the world of today usually requires seeing past to moment to the timeless truths that act as the skeleton of the age. So world-and-life philosophy brings us back to philosophy-as-an-exact science. But insight into the timeless truths usually involves understanding your own biases, and how you yourself have been shaped by your own times and society, and that requires insight into the particulars of your own age. So philosophy-as-an-exact science brings us back to world-and-life philosophy as well.

So what timeless truths are most salient for understanding our world’s situation right now? Well, a Christian and a Communist will give you quite different answers, and a devout Neoliberal economist will give you a third set of answers. But MY teachings are this. From metaphysics we learn that events rarely have a single cause, and that there is rarely a single best way of looking at things, rather different visions of the world have different strengths and weaknesses, and the world itself transcends them all. From epistemology, we learn that the world is too complex for anyone to really understand, that all strategies of human knowing have limitations. We make do with our imperfect models of reality, and divvy it up into many specialties and use division of labor in our epistemology as well as in our economy. But this relies on the ability to trust the honesty and competency of folk charged with keeping track of parts of the world that we are not ourselves specialists in. Any honest person, in dozens of specialities could see that exponential growth was going to hit resource limits eventually, whether in energy, population, habitats, atmospheric carbon, available freshwater, credit or something odder. Yet honesty itself is a resource that might be in short supply, and self-deception is a common problem for humans. From logic we learn that even when we try to communicate honestly what we have learned of the world to people of a different specialty or lifestyle, many problems can occur. At best, we summarize in ways that are helpful to our audience. Speaking claims that are formally true is usually impossible, for the same basic reasons that theories never reach reality, or that knowledge is never comprehensive. From ethics and value theory we learn that material wealth is not the end all and be all of happiness. Sometimes lack of wealth does cause misery, but other times more wealth is not going to solve the problems or make people happier. Nonetheless many people do seek more wealth (often as a stand in for social prestige or self-worth) and are often willing to compromise other values to do so. So we are often in the position of trying to make the best of a bad situation, and the ethics of acting as well as we can in a deeply f***ed up situation can be quite tricky, and quite different than the ethics of flourishing in good times, or of trying to prevent f***ed up situations from arising when they are still preventable. These are the themes that I will return to again and again in trying to explore my positions.

So what advice can world-and-life philosophy give? In flush times we seek every good we can, expanding in many directions; in contractions we seek to return to essentials, prioritizing goods as more or less pressing. What is most essential to your life and your happiness? Advice is not making the decisions for the advisee, it is seeking to augment the insight of the advisee, so that they can see more deeply into the situation than they could before. So how do I see the situation? We have reached the limits of exponential growth, and the ability of the global economy to create and sustain credit seems to be the most immediate limit. Perhaps the limits of water, carbon or oil will become increasingly salient soon. Like Sharon Astyk, I imagine that we will return to a level of ordinary human poverty, very much in line with prior historical ages, rather than some Mad Max world or zombie apocalypse or new dark age. Although wars, famines, and social unrest are certainly common elements in historical transitions. I predict that the US median income in real purchase parity power will drop to between 1/3rd and ½ of its 2005 value by the end of 2010 and remain under ½ of its 2005 value until at least 2020. This is going to change many aspects of our society, and certainly have global effects. I am optimistic that American life in 2025 will actually be better than in 2005 in a variety of ways, as America has suffered a number of problems related to having too much wealth, but the next 10-15 years are going to be extremely hard, and there will surely be plenty of injustice, death, and heartbreak along the way. I do not believe the government can be relied on to help us through this, but that preparations should be at the family and community level. Credit and money in a credit society act as a kind of artificial trust and these are breaking down, in large part because our society has become addicted to dishonesty, and lack of trustworthiness. As these breakdown, old fashioned trust, person to person bonds of obligation and trustworthiness, will become more important. I follow Stoneleigh in anticipating hard deflation in 2009 and 2010, with inflation setting in, in the US, sometime after that. You will lose much, your family will lose much. Some folk will lose everything. But many folk will lose much, but also keep much. What is most essential to your life and your happiness? What can you give up, and what must you fight to keep, knowing that no matter how hard you fight you probably can’t keep it all? That is a question that is at once intensely practical and intensely philosophical, and I can’t answer it for you, although I hope we’ll talk about it in dozens of different ways over the next months.

Beauty in Hard Times

2009-03-13T11:43:00.003-05:00

Beauty is a wonderful thing, a thing of true value. Stocks look valuable at sometimes, and seem worthless in others. Posters of one’s favorite band seem valuable when you are a teen, and just cheesy latter in life. But beauty is of real and enduring value, in swell times and lean times. God forbid I should speak against beauty.

What I do want to say is that Beauty has a whole host of relatives that are worthy too. Beauty is a good thing, but not the only good thing.

The ancients and medievals in the West, valued beautiful art, but had plenty of other goals for art too. Grotesque art (like statues of rotting corpses) which nonetheless managed to convey religious truths like the ephemerality of this life, were considered art and valued. Horror stories, political art, and homely arts, all of these were valued as well even if what they produced wasn’t exactly beauty. But beauty proper had a place too, in the cathedrals, in the songs, in the decoration of clothes. It was part of how the wealthy showed off there wealth, how the young showed of their youth, and how the content showed off their contentment.

But this picture changed in the 1700s and 1800s. Beauty (and its very close relatives the sublime and the delightful) came to seem central to art, and to aesthetics, and aesthetics was cashed out as the science of beauty. A Baroque artist, a Rococo artist, and a Neo-Classical artist would have very different pictures of what beauty is, and what techniques best achieve it, but all three think that all real art is aimed primarily, even exclusively at creating beauty. And the philosophers of this time are very interest in how the philosophy of beauty related to the philosophy of moral value, and of economic value. To David Hume, Edmunde Burke, or Adam Smith, the question which of these paintings is genuinely better is philosophically very parallel to the questions which of the actions is genuinely morally superior, which of these assets is genuinely worth more, and which of these political systems is genuinely better. For the Scottish Enlightenment, the artist exploring beauty is in effect exploring morality, politics, and economics as well, even though that isn’t their real goal.

But by the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s you begin to see a rebellion against beauty by artists, and it continues during the twentieth century so that you see plenty of anti-beauty art in the 1990s and the 2000s. Arthur Rimbaud is the first person I know of to speak against beauty in public, at the beginning of his poem “A Season in Hell”

“Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
One evening I took Beauty in my arms - and I thought her bitter - and I insulted her.
I steeled myself against justice.
I fled. O witches, O misery, O hate, my treasure was left in your care! …”

But the basic critique of beauty is found in many different arts and artists during this time, and it takes slightly different forms. Sometimes, the artist is pursuing some other goal besides beauty but thinks that they wind up hitting beauty as well, such as in Picasso’s Cubism; Picasso’s goal isn’t beauty, but he thinks his painting do succeed at being (oddly) beautiful incidentally. Sometimes, they are hoping to help people see beauty within a piece that looks ugly at first, but that they think is not genuinely ugly, as in Stravinsky’s ballet the Rites of Spring. But sometimes, the artist is actually opposed to beauty. The Dadaists thought that beauty was used by the powers that be to tranquilize the populous into accepting stupid policies like WWI. For them, undercutting beauty was part of undercutting the ruling regime. For Lichtenstein, obsession with beauty forced us to focus on the culture of the upper class, whereas art needed to wrestle with the culture of the whole society, thus must also struggle with pop culture. For Yoko Ono, beauty caused us to dwell on pleasant emotions, and situations where things were basically working, whereas art needed to confront life in both its pleasant and unpleasant forms. In a broken world, beauty is a balm, but it is in danger of being a lie or a distraction, and maybe the people need to be riled up rather than soothed. Many artists felt that art ought to confront the audience at least as much as it should cater to the tastes of the audience. So by the 20th century, beauty seemed like the coward's way out of refusing to look at the harsh realities of the world.

So do we need to be riled or soothed? Well, BOTH! Sometimes we need to be riled up and sometimes we need to be soothed, so I’m just not as willing to oppose beauty as a lot of 20th century thinkers were, but I’m also not as staunchly in favor of it as a lot of 18th and 19th century thinkers were. Further, I’m pretty impressed by Frank Sibley’s article “Aesthetic Concepts” from 1963. He argues that aesthetics is the study of human experience especially as it is colored by a particular kind of emotional experience such as when we experience beauty. But he argues that we have dozens and dozens of genuinely aesthetic concepts, like graceful, convoluted, or intriguing. According to Sibley, the vocabulary we use to talk about art falls into 3 basic categories, sensory talk that isn’t aesthetic yet (red, circular, polyphonal), aesthetic concepts (balanced, suggestive, harmonious), and overall judgment terms (good, lackluster, a classic).

So my position is that it makes sense to find ways to bring beauty into our lives, even in hard times, probably especially in hard times, but that beauty has a number of relatives that we should also try to bring into our lives during hard times.

There have been a lot of fights on exactly what beauty is, but a harmonious fit between parts, and a sense of delightfulness divorced from our immediate self-interest are classic elements. Winning a million dollars is delightful (at first), but our interests are directly involved. Watching a beautiful sunset is delightful too, even though it doesn’t really advance our interests in a direct way. Beauty is classically related to sexuality, youth and ephemerality as well. Sunsets are beautiful in large part because they don’t last. Beauty soothes us when things are hard. It makes it look as if things fit together, as if even the hard bits are just small parts of a larger more glorious design. One of my families’ favorite movies is O Brother Where Art Thou? which strives to convey the ways in which song and music weaved through the lives of common folk before the time of television and movies and Ipods. And here the music of beauty, solace and wistfulness dominates, not the music of anger, alienation, and reflection that I grew up with.

So beauty is a kind of delight but it is not the only variety of delight or even the only important one. When my kids get a new toy, they sometimes experience a delight that is not exactly beauty. It is a delight of fun, or hopefulness. Likewise when they learn a new skill that they can use, they experience a kind of delight twinged with pride and self-discovery. Delight is a close ally of curiousity, and so I will often find a book delightful even if it is not exactly beautiful. Beauty, as well as soothing, can give a lightness of spirit that we call delight, but delight is a broader concept than just beauty. And in hard times, delight is important too, not just soothing beauty. We need to keep our curiousity, our capacity for surprise and wonder. It is part of what allows us to retain openness to new and changing situations, it is part of what allows us to continue to adapt, and to enjoy adapting. In hard times, we need also a delight beyond mere beauty.

There is also a deeper kind of wonder, an experience tinged with awe, where we encounter what is far greater than ourselves. Traditionally, this close relative of beauty is called the sublime. In the sublime, we experience a glimpse of the transcendent, we are taken out of ourselves into a relation with things far vaster than ourselves. We stare through a telescope at the majesty of the Milky Way, and briefly experience our smallness. We look at an exquisite Greek vase from thousands of years ago and for a moment catch a glimpse of the brevity of our lives. The light filters through the trees of a forest, just so, and we are transported for a moment beyond time and space in the play of the dust motes in the beam of light. The sublime helps us to remember our place within the vastness, it helps our humility and our openness to wonder. It helps re-ground us in the essentials of our life. In hard times, we need splashes of the sublime, beyond just beauty.

And there are plenty more relatives of beauty that are important along side beauty. It makes sense to want a home to be familiar, comforting, ... well homey. Especially in hard times, some little corner of the world where one can be at home is a great luxury. The interesting helps to keep us engaged. The nostalgic helps us to remember our past. The graceful helps to lift us beyond mere necessity. The humorous, the cheerful, the silly, the festive, the cool, even the elegant are aesthetic goals worth seeking, if you can afford them, and usually you can afford at least some. And none of these aesthetic concepts is exactly the same thing as beauty. The angry, inspired, passionate, insightful, honest post-punk music I listened to as a youth, isn't really beautiful, but it is cool, and it is valuable, even aesthetically valuable. I do not think people should be cheerful all the time, or that one should be forced to live or work in a cheerful place. Enforced cheer is one of the more twisted aspects of our society. But we ought to have a place in our lives for cheerfulness on occasion. Cheerfulness isn't beauty or vice versa, but cheerful decor is sometimes appropriate, and I think that contemplating the differences helps us to see how lots of relatives of beauty all have a role in helping us to maintain a balanced and open perspective for confronting challenges.

Now I said that I don’t think a home should be beautiful, or at least not regularly beautiful. I think that a home should be homey, familiar, inviting and comfortable, and that is quite a different goal than beauty. But I do not mean that beauty should be missing, just that it should have a different place, or be an occasional visitor to the home, rather than the main aesthetic goal of a home.

But what of the ugly, the horrific, the terrifying, the repulsive, the tragic? Well, horror and tragedy in art usually thrive during economic downturns. People feel fear, and bitterness, and a whole host of foul emotions during hard times, and I think that is a good thing. Our world is not sweetness and light and people need to be able to face the dark as well as the bright aspects of our world. But pain is easier to bear when the pain makes sense than when it just seems meaningless. Childbirth involves intense pain, but women often find the pain far more manageable than other lesser pains precisely because they understand the point of it. Artistic explorations of the horrors and tragedies of our lives, can often help us to deal with them better precisely my making them more comprehensible. Some can find beauty even in horrors and tragedies (I’m quite good at that, and its one of the reasons I’m a goth), but even if you can’t experience them as beautiful, darker art, and darker aesthetic goals can still be valuable. But I wouldn’t want to live in a tragic house, or a horrific one, even if I want to read tragedies or horrors occasionally. Even ugliness itself is not always to be avoided. There are ugly truths, there are ugly tools. We must be willing to look on the ugly, even if we prefer the beautiful. I listen to beautiful music, like those haunting Depression era gospels, but I listen to ugly music too, like Einsturzende Neubauten. Without the beauty, it would be hard for me to find peace, without the ugliness, it would be hard to keep up the struggle, and I think both are important responses to our lives in hard times.

When life is a banquet where every wine flows it is possible to take beauty but find it bitter, and prefer as Rimbaud did camp and kitsch (it has been suggested that Rimbaud invented the idea of campiness). But after a season in hell, well … after that as Rimbaud says “All that is over. Today, I know how to celebrate beauty.”

The Problem With Prefaces

2009-03-12T10:47:00.005-05:00

Philosophy has a problem with prefaces, or rather quite a few problems. Hegel argued in the preface to his first major work, that prefaces in philosophy invariably violate the spirit of the work as a whole. The point of the piece is the way one makes the case, and the side comments at the beginning about the author’s aims, or the main drift of the content to come, these can only get in the way.

Heidegger has a different worry. Our interpretation of the meaning of a piece is based on our fore-understanding of the ideas presented in it, but as we come to understand the point of the author we re-understand the meaning of each of the author’s ideas. This looks like circular reasoning, and it is, a “hermeneutical circle” which exists in the very heart of the human way of understanding things. We understand each idea or thing we encounter based on the ideas and things we already understand. Circles are just how humans think. But this means that there is nowhere to start, no first thing to understand, no possibility for preface. You must understand each aspect of a system of thought in order to understand any aspect of a system of thought. By the time any philosopher worth a damn is ready to say anything of any importance, they want to say many, many things at once, and can find no best place to start.

Analytic philosophy has another worry, noticed first by Australian logician David Makinson. Authors often say something in the preface to the effect of “doubtlessly there must be some errors in my book somewhere.” And they have good grounds to - most books of any importance have errors. Yet the author believes each of the claims in the book, while also believing that not all of the claims of the book are true. How is this possible? How is it rational? It looks like it requires the author to believe a contradiction, that each of their claims individually is true, but that not all of them are true at once. Yet, even on reflection it seems that we want to believe both, to assert that yes I think I am right about each individual case, but I think I am probable not right about each and every case.

You see a preface requires putting together the whole of what is to follow into a simpler and shorter form than what is to follow. And yet if you could do that you would have said it all more briefly in the first place. So almost by definition a preface is always a lie; it always makes things short, by getting things wrong. The whole and the preface are always in tension.

Writing a preface is about synthesizing the material, and synthesis is hard. Writing a good summary requires distilling the essence of a lot of careful and detailed thought and writing, and summarizing oneself requires being better than you already are at exactly what you are already trying to do.

And yet the fields of literature and wisdom abound with examples of people trying to distill an important point down to the tersest summary possible. We have whole genres of epigram, aphorism, proverb and haiku. The great poet Catullus summarizes his own terribly complex feelings for his beloved in 2 lines

I love and I hate. Perhaps you’re asking why I do it.
I don’t know. But I feel it so, and I am tortured.

And so a summary, like most literature, is always both a lie and a truth. My own (terribly long) dissertation, involves among many other things a genre of Buddhist writings called “perfection of wisdom” literature (prajnaparamitas). There was one in 8000 lines (the one I studied), and later expansions to 18,000 lines, 25,000 lines, and even to 100,000 lines, but then people started writing summaries. The perfection of wisdom in 300 lines is called the Diamond Sutra, and is quite popular. Even more popular is the Heart Sutra, a prajnaparamita only 28 lines long. But those wiley Buddhists even developed the most heroic of all summaries I am aware of, “The Perfection of Wisdom in a Single Syllable.” That’s right, they believed that they had summarized their wisdom and teaching to a single syllable. It was “a-“. In Sanskrit, as well as English, this is the generic negation prefix, as in a-theist, or a-symmetric or a-historical. This summary too, is both a lie and a truth.

What a preface is really trying to do is to summarize a book down to a page or even a paragraph. To summarize a blog that with luck will go on for months and years and be filled with interesting ideas, profound insights and wonderful prose (ok I’ll settle for vaguely amusing prose), into a single prefatory blog entry.

Try heroic summary sometime. Summarize everything of value you have learned into a single page, a single paragraph or a single aphorism. It isn’t impossible, but it is hard, and it is a lie and a truth. It is also valuable. It forces us to return to essentials, to seek the meaning behind the chatter. So this post is pretty much what you will get on my blog: ruminations, sidetracks, academic trivia, and a genuine attempt to get past all that to the things that really matter.

Once in the past I summarized my understanding, with the whole numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, … But that point was pretty obscure. Maybe I’ll try to explain it, someday. Instead I’ll try putting it into the classic aphorism couplet.

Wisdom helps one flourish, avoid problems, and cope.
We’re fools, but for wisdom like that we can still hope.

Other have talked about flourishing and avoiding problems, but I don’t think enough has been said on the philosophy of coping, and I think that a lot of the philosophical points I have tried to make over the years on ethics and epistemology and logic, can be understood in terms of coping. And the way I read the news, and the signs of the times, and the blogs of smart people, we are going to have to do a lot of coping over the next few years.

Single Etiology Theory

2009-03-11T21:35:00.003-05:00

One of the philosophical errors that I complain about a lot is single-etiology theory. Single etiology theory is the theory than an event has a single cause, an etiology, rather than a huge host of different causal factors. Most ancient Western theories of causation imagined that every event had multiple causes, and typically thought that there were several different kinds of cause for any event. In Aristotle’s picture of causation, every event had at least 3 causes, a material cause, a formal cause, and an efficient cause, and it was normal to have final causes as well if living creatures were involved, and normal for an event to have a long series of related efficient causes. In Galen’s theory of medicine, the health of the body was importantly related to the balance of 4 humors in the body, and many, many factors affected the overall balance of the humors. That meant that if a body was sick, it was because the humors were out of balance, and even if one factor was the main cause of the imbalance, many other factors were also part of the overall picture, and you could attempt to treat the problem by addressing any of the factors, or often many of them in combination. A similar picture dominated in China, imagining balancing of yin and yang, or of multiple forms of chi, or of the 5 elemental processes to be a fairly holistic phenomena, so that natural occurences, especially in medicine, tend to have many different distinct causes. In India, even from ancient times, there was a lot of formal complexity to the debates on the nature of causation. It is normal in ancient India to make fine distinctions between causes, correlations, conditions, and other kinds of factors. The Buddhists, for example, largely restrict their claims to co-arising dependent factors. Still, if we think of these as all being species of conditioning factors, any given event is likely to have a whole host of conditioning factors of different kinds.

But Islamic medicine under Ibn Sina and Ibn Zuhr championed the notion that some diseases like stridor or tuberculosis or STDs had a single cause, as opposed to being caused by many factors together as in Galen’s humorism. There is something right about these cases, if we ask why does ‘Ali have an STD, then saying because he slept with Aisha who has the STD is more salient than saying, because he was in overall poor health when he contracted it. In that sense, sex looks like “the” cause of STDs. But, even here this isn’t the full story. Sex with a carrier is often a necessary condition of contracting an STD as well as being “a” cause, but this doesn’t make it “the” cause of the STD, because it isn’t a sufficient condition. Perhaps, Hussein slept with Aisha too, but didn’t contract the STD, and if we ask why did ‘Ali contract it but not Hussein, the answer might turn on issues of overall health, or perhaps on a combination of many factors. Even if sexual contact with a STD carrier is in some sense the “main” cause of contracting an STD, it still isn’t “the” cause, much less “the sole” cause.

Nonetheless, single etiology theory, the idea that some events have a single cause, or at least a single most proximate efficient cause with perhaps a chain of causation stretching into the past, became more and more popular in the West, in medicine and in other sciences over the centuries between the 14th and 20th. Mechanist philosophies of nature struggled against Vitalist philosophies of nature and Westerns came to think of many things as being more like machines than living entities: the stars, the earth, the human body, other plants and animals, even nations and societies. And the machine metaphors for everything made it more plausible to think of events as having a single etiology, a “the” cause. After all, that is how machines are often designed to work; this gear causes another gear to turn which causes a shaft to turn which moves the second hand on the clock. In this theory, causation happens in chains, but in one on one relations with each effect having a single cause or a single chain of causes.

Single etiology theory also fit nicely with the increased emphasis on individual selves in social philosophy, during modernity. If events have a single cause, then maybe a single person is to blame when things go wrong, the cause of the problem. And maybe a single person gets the glory when things go right too, a great artist or politician. Personal responsibility is a sort of social correlate of a metaphysics of causation where events have a single cause. And if the divine hierarchy of divinely ordained kings and bishops no longer seems plausible, perhaps the machine hierarchy of cogs and regulators can replace it, where the chain of causation, has its analogs in the chain of command and the chain of responsibility.

By the 19th century, Europeans routinely talked as if events had a single cause, rather than a host of causal factors, and this came to seem normal rather than seeming like a philosophical position. The idea that events typically have a single cause becomes a cornerstone of the official medical philosophy of the US in the 19th and 20th centuries, although the “holistic” approach that events typically have many causes has certainly reclaimed some respectability in the last few decades. But single etiology theory pervades many levels of American thinking, from our “folk” metaphysics when we are speaking loosely, to our most careful formalizations of the metaphysics of causation. It is a frequent unconscious assumption of our science and policies, although physics in particular has been backing away from single-etiology theory during the 20th century. Sometimes you can push people to admit that when they say “the cause” they mean “the main cause,” but it is a philosophical error of great importance to assume that events always have even a “main” cause. I hold that most events have a whole host of causal factors, often of quite different kinds. Each event happens the way it does because of many, many interlocking factors. Change any one factor and the event would turn out differently, at least a little bit differently, and often quite a bit differently. Single etiology theory is a decent simplification of the truth when an event really does have a single main cause (which does happen sometimes), or a single very relevant causal factor that has been overlooked or misunderstood. It works sometimes, or works well enough, and there are certainly success stories for single etiology theory. But it bollixes up the many, many situations in which many quite different causal factors are interacting to produce the overall event.

The fact that single-etiology theories of causation are extremely popular, but also are flawed, has a number of important consequences for our understanding of social collapse, and our adapting successfully to it. First, our usual sense of blame rests on an erroneous picture of causation and responsibility. What is “the” cause of our societal collapse? There is no one answer to this question, because there is no single sole cause, and probably not even a single main cause, but many, many causal factors combining to result in what is actually happening. The right causal story of our social collapse involves individual greed and fraud, the tensions built into growth economics, the arrogance and optimism of those who assumed we could keep growing on forever, the failures of the education system and the media to help people to understand, the power-hungriness of the elite, the patterns of generations, the biological impulse to overpopulate, and probably plenty more factors as well. The moral, the biological, the political, the economic, the historical, the social, and even the philosophical are all genuine parts of the causal story, and do not even form a single chain of efficient causation, but a vast web of interlocking causal factors. So who is to blame for our troubles? Well, many, many people and categories of people. Everyone shares the blame, but not everyone equally or all in the same way. Some people were definitely more causally influential than others, or more blameworthy in their influence, or influenced different parts of the long complex event of our collapse. Tim Geithner, Bernard Madoff, and your mother are all to blame, but they are not all equally to blame.

Second, when we are trying to plan our responses to problems, we need to understand that societies and economies are more like living things than they are like complex machines, in that events usually have many causes. Imagining that we can control the rate of change of a Consumer Price Index, simply by manipulating the interest rate on overnight debt in line with the Taylor Rule, is a philosophical error (misunderstanding the nature of causation) even before it is an error in economics or monetary policy. Interest rates are an important causal factor in the change of a CPI, but a little reflection shows that they aren’t the only important factor, and that means that even if they are the main factor under many circumstances, they aren’t the sole cause, or a sufficient cause, and thus aren’t the main factor under all circumstances. Often manipulating overnight interest rates will succeed in manipulating CPIs, but not always, and not when it is most important. And that is just one example. Our economics, our medicine, and often our own attempts at adaptation frequently involve erroneously exaggerating the importance of one causal factor, because we think of it as “the” cause of the problem, rather than “a” cause of the problem. This is just a common error in our culture, because of the tenor of philosophy over the last few centuries. Just as holistic medicine struggles against single etiology theory in medical philosophy, so a holistic psychology, holistic economics, and holistic politics need to struggle against single etiology theory in psychology, economics, or politics. Human psyches do not work like dominoes, with causal chains falling neatly in rows and orders, they are deeply interconnected meshes of causal factors, and so are economies, and political systems.

Third, holistic lifestyle adaptations need to struggle against single-etiology theory in lifestyle adaptation. Our medical system is going to collapse, and that means you need to plan for problems with medical care in the future. And that means you should address your medical situation holistically, thinking about your particular problems or issues, but also you should address the causal factors that relate to them, and whatever your issues, diet, exercise, stress, exposure to toxins, your access to preventative medicine, etc are probably among the causal factors. But that means you need to adapt how you eat, where you buy your food, how you spend your time, how you think about your life, etc. Each strand of adaptation will tug on the surrounding strands of our lifestyle, and that is to be expected because our lives are the product of the interconnection of the many, many factors that cause our lives to be as they are. Giving up on single etiology theory means that addressing most problems honestly involves revising whole systems, rather than making a single change and feeling that we are done, because no single part of the system is wholly to blame, rather the system as a whole is the problem to be confronted.

A Philosopher's Corner in the Collapsnik Zone

2009-03-11T11:26:00.000-05:00

The other day the denizens of "The Automatic Earth" took a moment out of there normal work of arguing about the details of the upcoming economic collapse of America and the world, to argue about the proper way to interpret Laozi's great work the Daodejing, how to summarize his insights, and what translations to use. But, well, taking about Laozi, isn't really what the Automatic Earth is for.

At Casaubon's Book, the magnificent Sharon Asytk argued that beauty must be an element of proper household economics, even in a collapsing society, but that we must reach for a beauty beyond the sterile elegance of a wealthy home that hides its toasters for the Town and Country photo spread. And I argued that the proper aesthetic goals of a home, should be other relatives of beauty rather than beauty itself, and that the conflation of aesthetics with beauty was a bad side-effect of 18th century reflection on aesthetics from Kant and Hogarth. And Astyk replied, roughly "get your own blog!"

And she is right. If you want to explore the role of energy policy on our collapsing society, and the role of societal collapse on energy policy, well, there are plenty of places in the blogosphere to do that. If you want to step back and look at the big picture of our collapsing society, I recommend the blogs of Kunstler and Orlov. If you want news on the emerging realities of collapse, and first rate commentary on economics, then read The Automatic Earth. If you want advice on adapting your lifestyle to the realities of a collapsing society, the home economics of collapse, then read my wife's Adapting in Place, or Astyk's Casaubon's book. If you poke, you can find blogs of people who are already well-adapted, of foodies, of environmentalists, of optimistic political organizers, of psychologists, and so on.

But I know of no particularly good place to argue about Laozi or the relation between aesthetics and beauty, or the ethics of triage, or the metaphysics of single-etiology causation as it relates to health care, or ... well a thousand little philosophical topics hiding around the edges of the big issues of a collapsing society. So I am creating one. The goal of this blog is to be a place for philosophical discussion of issues related to our ongoing societal collapse. I have quite a number of things to say myself, but I want to make a space for discussions to take place, at least as much as I want to push my own positions. Next time there is an argument about whether despair can ever be a virtue, or whether it is always a vice, I hope that Stoneleigh and Ilargi can say in good conscience, HEY take that discussion over to Self-Referential Collapse, our blog is for economics commentary!

Because philosophy DOES have a role to play in our collapse and our coping with it. Philosophy played a role in letting things get out of hand, and it ought to play a role in helping to cope with the mess were in as well.

Laozi said "little self minimal desires" and therein lies our problem in a nutshell. A strong sense of individual selfhood in the West led to ever expanding desires, and a growth economy that saw minimal desires, or even happiness and contentment as opposed to the need for ever expanding growth.

But Laozi also said "greatest eloquence seems like stammering" and therein lies a warning for all bloggers and blog readers.

So let us inaugurate this little corner for philosophizing in the collapsnik zone of the Blogosphere.
Any thoughts?

[P.S. I didn't really write this in 2010, that is just a trick to keep the introductory post at the top until I fix it]