As someone who has never been particularly ambitious, I occasionally think about what motivates the people who do end up becoming notably successful at one thing or another. Some may say that most unsuccessful people simply don't have what it takes: perhaps they're too disorganized, too stupid, too lazy or, more charitably, too disadvantaged, to accomplish much of anything. Others may view those who succeed as having special talents. Some may chalk it all up to luck. I prefer to look closely at those who are thought of as successful and examine what specifically motivated them, because I think this provides a clearer picture of both the individuals and the cultures in which they live.
Speaking anecdotally, it appears that most successful people work very hard before receiving recognition. People such as John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Ludwig van Beethoven, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and Vincent van Gogh all worked extremely hard throughout their careers. Those who aren't quite so industrious may work more deliberately and produce successful results over many years, for example Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin. The definition of success in the arts and sciences is somewhat more variable than it is in commerce. One may become famous posthumously like Vermeer or Mendel, and some excellent art has probably already been lost forever without ever being appreciated. In our age commerce triumphs, and the very rich often acquire a cultural stature that far exceeds the importance of their accomplishments. How else can you explain the current ascent of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential polls? Trump has "buffoon" written all over him, yet he is giving top Republican contenders such as Jeb Bush and Scott Walker a run for their money.
As you might expect, I tend to see the drive toward success as having evolutionary roots. Competition has historically been the province of males, who are directly or indirectly and consciously or unconsciously attempting to attract mates, produce offspring and protect them. High social status draws women like a magnet, and attractive young women still put up with the likes of old sexist geezers such as Hugh Hefner, who, I am sorry to say, remains a role model for millions of men. Women are equally interested in procreation, but biology has placed them in a different strategic position in which they must concentrate on the actual details of bearing and raising children, a situation which can be facilitated with a powerful husband. The recent cultural emphasis on gender equality has complicated the landscape in which both males and females operate, but men still tend to be more competitive than women, and women are still more interested than men in creating and maintaining safe environments that are suitable for raising children, whether they have children or not. Gender flexibility may have some biological justification, but there must be limits to that flexibility if populations are to reproduce.
The male idea of success can be seen in men's desire to compete in sports, games and at work. Being rich usually does the trick for attracting women, especially in the U.S. I have always found the case of Jacqueline Kennedy instructive. Here you had an upper-class, well-educated, attractive and intelligent woman who, in my opinion, married down for both John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. Though he had some good qualities and eventually the high status of being president of the U.S., Kennedy was the son of a rather crass and unpleasant social climber and Wall Street crook. Onassis was a crude Greek ship owner who clearly had nothing to offer Jackie besides money. Whether they think about it this way or not, men with lots of money are generally going to have better reproductive options than paupers, with a better pick of the lot than most others.
The female idea of success can be seen in childrearing and the formation of cohesive communities. Having an enriched, safe environment with lots of support provides optimal conditions for raising children. Also having the right sort of men around for protection helps, and this may partly explain why women are often attracted to risk-taking men, who otherwise might seem foolish or irresponsible. Women themselves, I find, are comparatively risk-averse and would usually rather delegate that role to men. This is probably borne out in mortality statistics, which consistently show women outliving men. Basically, from an evolutionary standpoint, having some guy die instead of you and your children is a pretty good deal. And men are accommodating anyway: they like being heroes, even at great personal cost.
Observer that I am, I enjoy seeing lives as a whole, and how, over a period of many years what once seemed like a special talent that sprang from nowhere years later looks like a rather pathetic monomania from which a person can't escape. Bob Dylan is a good example of this. Here you have one of the best pop lyricists ever, a lousy voice and passable instrumentation. He worked very hard and everything gelled for him in the early 1960's, but it might easily have turned out quite differently. He happened to be a talented writer who was in the right place at the right time, but writing was apparently not his main interest: he preferred performing in front of live audiences. Now, fifty years later, most of his lyrics are forgettable, but he is still on tour as an aged rock star, stuck in a formula from which a more creative person might have extracted himself. Similarly, I fail to see the point of how billionaires choose to live. Even one of the most likable, Warren Buffett, seems crazed: he's still working at age 84 with a net worth of $72 billion. Perhaps he has spent his life trying to prove that Harvard Business School was wrong to turn him down in 1950.
Lifelong obsessions can also be found in the arts. Vincent van Gogh, I think, expressed loneliness in many of his paintings. He had a rather difficult personality and couldn't get along with anyone for an extended period. Yet he yearned for companionship, and this appears in his painting of his bedroom in Arles, which shows everything in pairs, as if two people lived in it. His obsession, you might say in this instance, was the absence of a mate. Many artists and writers become typecast early in their careers, like villains in Westerns. They may end up spending their lives producing the genre that brought them success initially well after it serves any artistic purpose to them. In the arts, it is easiest to succeed with a brand, because the truth is that consumers of art don't really like much change. Painters and writers do this frequently: Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Stephen King, Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, for example.
It is important to recognize that many of the people who have been successful have had net negative effects on mankind. Besides all of the deaths caused by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, there is the global pollution caused by successful industrialists, and many wars can be attributed to religious leaders from across the centuries. Even when you look at advances in agricultural and medical technologies, you have to wonder whether anyone considered the desirability of the unchecked population growth that ensued. The world population has grown from just one billion when our house was built two hundred years ago to more than seven billion today. To some extent today's refugees are the product of yesterday's technological and industrial successes.
I'm not saying that there aren't any breathtaking artistic, technological or conceptual achievements, but rather that when they occur they must be seen in context, and one person's success doesn't imply someone else's failure. Subliminal drives are what produce success, and those drives exist more or less in everyone. For those who are happy living in their own skin, being unsuccessful may at the most fundamental level mean little more than not having the most attractive husband or wife.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Monday, August 3, 2015
Child Protection
One of the topics that I discuss with my daughter is how protective she ought to be of her son while he is growing up. The norms have completely changed since I was a child and have continued to change since my children were raised. You can get a general sense of the current standards from this video. In many parts of the country children who are outside unaccompanied by an adult are considered at risk, and consequently their parents may be deemed unfit or negligent. The two aspects of this phenomenon that interest me are how it came into existence and what effects it might have on the future development of children.
There has probably been something written about how this state arose, but I'll just give my impressions. A lot of it may stem from the fact that in most families today all of the adults are working, and stay-at-home mothers are in a minority. When I moved to the U.S. in 1957, hardly any mothers in my neighborhood worked. The children walked about by themselves unaccompanied by parents and played with friends without any parental supervision. I don't recall any adults out at night with trick-or-treaters (other than the very young) even when, unlike today, Halloween extended until well after dark. It is possible that always having mothers nearby led parents to feel that their children were safe, and that when mothers became unavailable due to their jobs a natural caution set in that caused parents to overreact. Leaving children with poorly-paid daycare workers doesn't inspire much confidence, and the fact is that many children may have experienced sub-optimal childhoods because of their daycare.
Furthermore, the public has always been at the mercy of the press, which tends to misrepresent child abduction and child abuse rates in the interest of selling advertising. The press has also been instrumental in generating public fear regarding terrorism, and collectively Americans seem to have felt far more threatened by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein than common sense would dictate. With those two men out of the picture, the press has now shifted its focus to the perils of ISIS and an Iran with nuclear weapons. The tendency of Americans to conform makes them vulnerable to propaganda campaigns that range anywhere from the harmless marketing of consumer products to the insidious manipulation of foreign policy by special interest groups such as military suppliers and subcontractors, oil companies and Zionists.
The present paranoia about child safety, then, seems to stem primarily from economic changes, public gullibility and perhaps a little public guilt about the increase in child neglect by busy parents. One must assume that regional legislators, social services, police and judges haven't cooked this up on their own and are merely responding to public demand. Once it started, the expectation that children will be protected may have increased spontaneously, because unattended children began to stand out and attract more attention than previously. The perception may be that twenty children seen wandering around unaccompanied is normal, but something must be amiss if there are only one or two.
What is harder to determine is the long-term effect of child over-protection. Not living in a child-rich environment, and not knowing many people under thirty, I can only speculate on this. As I have suggested in other posts, the cognitive development of younger people today seems to proceed quite differently from that of my generation. I get the sense that over-protection combined with the rise of digital media is making children less prepared for certain situations than the children of the past. When children are not allowed to spontaneously explore on their own, they may, for example, develop a poor sense of direction. If their interactions with other children are scheduled and limited, they may become socially retarded in comparison to earlier generations. This deficiency may be compounded by the substitution of social media for face-to-face interactions. If they are prevented from engaging in any risky activity, they may later be unable to cope with some situations that are easy to navigate for those with more diverse childhood experiences. An apt analogy is the role of early exposure to germs as beneficial for later resistance to asthma and certain allergies. It is too soon to tell, but I think sheltered children will tend to display some of the characteristics associated with only children, including self-centeredness and social inflexibility. On the other hand, there is also the possibility that sheltered children will acquire certain skills that they would be less likely to acquire in traditional childhood environments. For example, they might become more proficient in new technologies such as software development.
I am in the age group that used to say "Never trust anyone over thirty." The same group may soon be saying "Never trust anyone under thirty." I already feel that way about the sheltered college students who require trigger warnings for even the most innocuous of statements; they may be the wave of the future, and I don't think I'm going to be able relate to them well. Perhaps, if no one has done it already, someone should write a book about the benefits of feeding children a spoonful of dirt, releasing them into the woods alone and letting them sojourn unaccompanied in a ghetto. You can't prepare for unpleasant experiences by avoiding them entirely.
There has probably been something written about how this state arose, but I'll just give my impressions. A lot of it may stem from the fact that in most families today all of the adults are working, and stay-at-home mothers are in a minority. When I moved to the U.S. in 1957, hardly any mothers in my neighborhood worked. The children walked about by themselves unaccompanied by parents and played with friends without any parental supervision. I don't recall any adults out at night with trick-or-treaters (other than the very young) even when, unlike today, Halloween extended until well after dark. It is possible that always having mothers nearby led parents to feel that their children were safe, and that when mothers became unavailable due to their jobs a natural caution set in that caused parents to overreact. Leaving children with poorly-paid daycare workers doesn't inspire much confidence, and the fact is that many children may have experienced sub-optimal childhoods because of their daycare.
Furthermore, the public has always been at the mercy of the press, which tends to misrepresent child abduction and child abuse rates in the interest of selling advertising. The press has also been instrumental in generating public fear regarding terrorism, and collectively Americans seem to have felt far more threatened by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein than common sense would dictate. With those two men out of the picture, the press has now shifted its focus to the perils of ISIS and an Iran with nuclear weapons. The tendency of Americans to conform makes them vulnerable to propaganda campaigns that range anywhere from the harmless marketing of consumer products to the insidious manipulation of foreign policy by special interest groups such as military suppliers and subcontractors, oil companies and Zionists.
The present paranoia about child safety, then, seems to stem primarily from economic changes, public gullibility and perhaps a little public guilt about the increase in child neglect by busy parents. One must assume that regional legislators, social services, police and judges haven't cooked this up on their own and are merely responding to public demand. Once it started, the expectation that children will be protected may have increased spontaneously, because unattended children began to stand out and attract more attention than previously. The perception may be that twenty children seen wandering around unaccompanied is normal, but something must be amiss if there are only one or two.
What is harder to determine is the long-term effect of child over-protection. Not living in a child-rich environment, and not knowing many people under thirty, I can only speculate on this. As I have suggested in other posts, the cognitive development of younger people today seems to proceed quite differently from that of my generation. I get the sense that over-protection combined with the rise of digital media is making children less prepared for certain situations than the children of the past. When children are not allowed to spontaneously explore on their own, they may, for example, develop a poor sense of direction. If their interactions with other children are scheduled and limited, they may become socially retarded in comparison to earlier generations. This deficiency may be compounded by the substitution of social media for face-to-face interactions. If they are prevented from engaging in any risky activity, they may later be unable to cope with some situations that are easy to navigate for those with more diverse childhood experiences. An apt analogy is the role of early exposure to germs as beneficial for later resistance to asthma and certain allergies. It is too soon to tell, but I think sheltered children will tend to display some of the characteristics associated with only children, including self-centeredness and social inflexibility. On the other hand, there is also the possibility that sheltered children will acquire certain skills that they would be less likely to acquire in traditional childhood environments. For example, they might become more proficient in new technologies such as software development.
I am in the age group that used to say "Never trust anyone over thirty." The same group may soon be saying "Never trust anyone under thirty." I already feel that way about the sheltered college students who require trigger warnings for even the most innocuous of statements; they may be the wave of the future, and I don't think I'm going to be able relate to them well. Perhaps, if no one has done it already, someone should write a book about the benefits of feeding children a spoonful of dirt, releasing them into the woods alone and letting them sojourn unaccompanied in a ghetto. You can't prepare for unpleasant experiences by avoiding them entirely.
Friday, July 31, 2015
Bernie Sanders
I was hoping not to bore you with political discussions, but Bernie Sanders is one of Vermont's U.S. senators, and he is adding an uncommon dimension to the 2016 presidential race, making it seem almost as if Noam Chomsky were about to debate Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination on national television. The last few presidential elections have been dull, and there usually isn't much point in paying attention to what the candidates say. I am familiar with several of Bernie's positions, but won't go into any detail here. Rather I'll just explain what I generally like and dislike about him and leave it at that.
What is appealing about Bernie is his willingness to state in plain terms the positions that he feels strongly about. I may be slightly biased because I generally agree with him: for example, it seems obvious to me that Citizens United was one of the worst rulings in the history of the Supreme Court and that the federal government is effectively a plutocracy. In the context of how public servants should be spending their time, there aren't currently many national politicians besides Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who actively oppose the interests of those who provide most of the funding for election campaigns. As a politician, Bernie is highly accessible in Vermont and doesn't engage in double-talk when he claims to represent the people. He has honed his message with the help of years of political experience during which he learned how to win people over. His strongest card by far, and what makes him stand out the most, is his visible enthusiasm for the causes he values. That passion is contagious, and you won't find it in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or any of the Republican candidates. Bernie is possibly the best hope in the U.S. for generating a populist movement that counters the relentless trend toward greater inequality.
Unfortunately there are a few negatives about Bernie, from my point of view anyway. Although he has cleaned up his language considerably, his still sounds a lot like an old-school socialist along the lines of Noam Chomsky, and both of them seem to be operating on a conceptually obsolete political model. Bernie loves to say "working families," which means little to me. "Working," I think, is a way of saying "worker" without the direct socialist connotations. "Families," it seems to me, is a toned-down representation of "the people," and shows a conscious effort by Bernie to cast his ideas in a framework that is familiar and acceptable to most Americans. I don't think these are the optimal frames of reference, because they refer back to an industrial period that no longer exists. While it might be argued that we still have oppressed workers, the masses must rise up, etc., the real conditions are far more complex than that, and I'm not sure how Bernie would deal with the present global economic situation. Just saying "workers unite" won't fix anything. Furthermore, I don't know how Bernie would deal with automation and AI, which are inevitably going to eliminate millions or possibly billions of jobs worldwide. Although Bernie is focusing on the real problems, I'm not sure he has the vocabulary or tools to deal with them effectively.
Bernie is a smart Jewish guy from Brooklyn, but he doesn't quite make it into the top tier of that category. The problem is that the smartest people rarely go into politics, which is one of the reasons why I usually find it uninteresting. He followed a pattern roughly similar to that of Howard Dean, another New Yorker who moved to Vermont and found it easy to launch a political career here. The influx of liberals to Vermont has made the state as a whole far more liberal than it used to be, and some old-time Vermont conservatives now consider Chittenden County, where both Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean started their political careers, a different state. However, over the years Bernie has become popular statewide. Even so, our neighbor, former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, a Republican, says in his memoir, "A reasonable case can be made that Bernie's legislative accomplishments don't match those of other Vermont senators, but his rhetorical accomplishments certainly do." There may be some sour grapes in that statement, because even though it may be accurate, Jim Douglas would probably have liked to have Bernie's current job himself.
My guess is that Bernie Sanders is using this situation as a method of advancing his causes, and that actually becoming president is not his primary goal. At a minimum the political discussion should be more interesting than usual this time around. In the extremely unlikely event that Bernie wins the Democratic nomination for president I will vote for him. Otherwise I may vote for a third-party candidate, if at all.
What is appealing about Bernie is his willingness to state in plain terms the positions that he feels strongly about. I may be slightly biased because I generally agree with him: for example, it seems obvious to me that Citizens United was one of the worst rulings in the history of the Supreme Court and that the federal government is effectively a plutocracy. In the context of how public servants should be spending their time, there aren't currently many national politicians besides Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who actively oppose the interests of those who provide most of the funding for election campaigns. As a politician, Bernie is highly accessible in Vermont and doesn't engage in double-talk when he claims to represent the people. He has honed his message with the help of years of political experience during which he learned how to win people over. His strongest card by far, and what makes him stand out the most, is his visible enthusiasm for the causes he values. That passion is contagious, and you won't find it in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or any of the Republican candidates. Bernie is possibly the best hope in the U.S. for generating a populist movement that counters the relentless trend toward greater inequality.
Unfortunately there are a few negatives about Bernie, from my point of view anyway. Although he has cleaned up his language considerably, his still sounds a lot like an old-school socialist along the lines of Noam Chomsky, and both of them seem to be operating on a conceptually obsolete political model. Bernie loves to say "working families," which means little to me. "Working," I think, is a way of saying "worker" without the direct socialist connotations. "Families," it seems to me, is a toned-down representation of "the people," and shows a conscious effort by Bernie to cast his ideas in a framework that is familiar and acceptable to most Americans. I don't think these are the optimal frames of reference, because they refer back to an industrial period that no longer exists. While it might be argued that we still have oppressed workers, the masses must rise up, etc., the real conditions are far more complex than that, and I'm not sure how Bernie would deal with the present global economic situation. Just saying "workers unite" won't fix anything. Furthermore, I don't know how Bernie would deal with automation and AI, which are inevitably going to eliminate millions or possibly billions of jobs worldwide. Although Bernie is focusing on the real problems, I'm not sure he has the vocabulary or tools to deal with them effectively.
Bernie is a smart Jewish guy from Brooklyn, but he doesn't quite make it into the top tier of that category. The problem is that the smartest people rarely go into politics, which is one of the reasons why I usually find it uninteresting. He followed a pattern roughly similar to that of Howard Dean, another New Yorker who moved to Vermont and found it easy to launch a political career here. The influx of liberals to Vermont has made the state as a whole far more liberal than it used to be, and some old-time Vermont conservatives now consider Chittenden County, where both Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean started their political careers, a different state. However, over the years Bernie has become popular statewide. Even so, our neighbor, former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, a Republican, says in his memoir, "A reasonable case can be made that Bernie's legislative accomplishments don't match those of other Vermont senators, but his rhetorical accomplishments certainly do." There may be some sour grapes in that statement, because even though it may be accurate, Jim Douglas would probably have liked to have Bernie's current job himself.
My guess is that Bernie Sanders is using this situation as a method of advancing his causes, and that actually becoming president is not his primary goal. At a minimum the political discussion should be more interesting than usual this time around. In the extremely unlikely event that Bernie wins the Democratic nomination for president I will vote for him. Otherwise I may vote for a third-party candidate, if at all.
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Doubt the Experts Annual Meeting
The second annual world meeting of Doubt the Experts was held on July 28, 2015, and no additional meetings are currently scheduled for the remainder of this year. The only attendee other than me was John, the expat translator who currently resides in Switzerland. The meeting was held at the bar at American Flatbread in Middlebury, where we chatted and consumed beer for a little over an hour. Since I drank two pints, John advised me to take a short walk before driving home, but I told him that that wouldn't be necessary.
Of course, I'm kidding, and the only reason John was in Middlebury was that his family happens to gather here every summer. However, there appear to be a few more regular blog readers other than my family members, and some of them may also like to meet me during their travels at some point in the future. This blog is currently semi-anonymous, but I will respond to any e-mails I receive at doubttheexperts@gmail.com if you would ever like to contact me directly for any reason. Whether or not you ever plan to come to Middlebury, I am always interested in your opinions and suggestions.
Of course, I'm kidding, and the only reason John was in Middlebury was that his family happens to gather here every summer. However, there appear to be a few more regular blog readers other than my family members, and some of them may also like to meet me during their travels at some point in the future. This blog is currently semi-anonymous, but I will respond to any e-mails I receive at doubttheexperts@gmail.com if you would ever like to contact me directly for any reason. Whether or not you ever plan to come to Middlebury, I am always interested in your opinions and suggestions.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Future Art
The archaeological record indicates that humans have always created what we now call art. From a qualitative standpoint, I don't think there has been any substantial improvement since the Chauvet cave paintings, the epic poems of Homer or the plays of Euripides. The aspects that change over time are the social function, the media, the style, the materials and the subject matter, but not the quality, though some periods do inevitably produce better art than others. As I wrote earlier, I don't think that the contemporary arts, or at least the ones that are widely known and with which I have some familiarity, are particularly good by historical standards, and I attribute this to commercialization, which is not to say that there isn't some better contemporary art that is presently inaccessible to the public for one reason or another.
Extrapolating into the future, if you assume that we won't become extinct and that we won't be replaced by an evolutionary successor to ourselves, I think art will become more important than ever as a pastime, because we simply may have nothing better to do. This scenario assumes that we will remain more or less the same as we are now, automation will obviate the need for most human labor, the political systems globally will maintain a higher level of equality than at present, and human conflict will fall to significantly lower levels. It is a rosy picture that may end up depending on dumb luck to materialize, but I think it is worth discussing if one takes an optimistic view on human destiny. The principal alternatives are gloomy if not unsettling.
Speculating this way, what is interesting to me is how good art would be if you took money out of the equation. In the current art world, the flow of money is a stand-in for quality measurement, with the art that draws the most money often becoming the de facto important art as far as the public is concerned. I don't think Damien Hirst, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg or Madonna are likely to make it into any future lists of great artists, and it would be an improvement for humanity if its members somehow managed to become more discerning. If money were removed from the calculation of quality, it seems plausible that a more meaningful form of measurement might replace it.
In a world in which people had no financial pressures and an abundance of free time, everyone could become an artist of one kind or another if they so chose, and this would change the rules of the game entirely. Idle people like me might, for example, write a blog as a form of art, take up painting or write poems. Systems might even be devised to provide recognition to those who felt that what they produced was important despite the absence of monetary ramifications. No doubt social status would somehow work its way into any reward scheme, but it most likely would be far less pernicious than what we experience under the current system of financial recompense.
Let this be a word of advice to those who produce art now under circumstances which they find unfavorable. Produce your art as you see fit, forget the present and think about a less philistine future, even if that means that you must earn a living doing something else.
Extrapolating into the future, if you assume that we won't become extinct and that we won't be replaced by an evolutionary successor to ourselves, I think art will become more important than ever as a pastime, because we simply may have nothing better to do. This scenario assumes that we will remain more or less the same as we are now, automation will obviate the need for most human labor, the political systems globally will maintain a higher level of equality than at present, and human conflict will fall to significantly lower levels. It is a rosy picture that may end up depending on dumb luck to materialize, but I think it is worth discussing if one takes an optimistic view on human destiny. The principal alternatives are gloomy if not unsettling.
Speculating this way, what is interesting to me is how good art would be if you took money out of the equation. In the current art world, the flow of money is a stand-in for quality measurement, with the art that draws the most money often becoming the de facto important art as far as the public is concerned. I don't think Damien Hirst, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg or Madonna are likely to make it into any future lists of great artists, and it would be an improvement for humanity if its members somehow managed to become more discerning. If money were removed from the calculation of quality, it seems plausible that a more meaningful form of measurement might replace it.
In a world in which people had no financial pressures and an abundance of free time, everyone could become an artist of one kind or another if they so chose, and this would change the rules of the game entirely. Idle people like me might, for example, write a blog as a form of art, take up painting or write poems. Systems might even be devised to provide recognition to those who felt that what they produced was important despite the absence of monetary ramifications. No doubt social status would somehow work its way into any reward scheme, but it most likely would be far less pernicious than what we experience under the current system of financial recompense.
Let this be a word of advice to those who produce art now under circumstances which they find unfavorable. Produce your art as you see fit, forget the present and think about a less philistine future, even if that means that you must earn a living doing something else.
Monday, July 20, 2015
The Dark Triad in Cyberspace
The term "Dark Triad" refers to the psychological traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, which are all considered negative. A few days ago I read an article containing this link to a recent study of male Dark Triad behavior on social networking sites (SNSs). Although I don't engage in any social networking, unless you stretch things and count this blog, I have long been intrigued by Internet behavior and how traditional relationships have been undermined by the invasion of technology into people's lives. Among the study's conclusions:
Men who self-objectify spent more time on SNSs than those lower in self-objectification, and, supporting previous research, more narcissistic individuals reported spending more time on SNSs. Those higher in narcissism and psychopathy reported posting selfies more frequently. Narcissists and individuals high in self-objectification more frequently edited photos of themselves that they posted to SNSs. Thus, our study has provided evidence for several as yet unstudied relationships between personality traits and social media use and self-presentation. Further, it suggests that those high on Dark Triad traits may employ SNSs to execute "cheater strategies" that help them achieve their interpersonal and social goals despite their antisocial personality traits.
As is the case with many psychological studies, these conclusions seem fairly obvious and were only awaiting research to confirm them. I am wondering whether the Internet simply provides a new venue for people who already have Dark Triad characteristics or whether it actually increases the total Dark Triad population. Studies such as this one are too narrow to draw many conclusions, but I would say that Dark Triad traits have been there all along but were previously more repressed by face-to-face interactions and the relative difficulty of representing oneself anonymously. It is theoretically possible that Dark Triad characteristics would increase in the species over time if people who are predisposed to one or more of those traits reproduced more than they did in the past, but it seems more probable that the gene pool was flexible to begin with and the Internet is now rewarding such behavior, in effect making bad people out of those who would behave better under different circumstances. More people are willing to lie, cheat, etc., when they believe that there is little likelihood of their being caught and held accountable, and in any case the Internet hasn't been around long enough to change the gene pool. A further complication regarding how much influence the Internet has over behavior is the decline of civil behavior in other sectors of society. For example, the number of reported serial killers dramatically increased from 1900 to 1980, with the U.S. leading the world, and there may be multiple explanations for such phenomena that relate in complex ways to Dark Triad behavior. However, I think that cyberspace in conjunction with other social changes is probably producing more Dark Triad behavior than was present in previous generations.
To some extent the Internet seems to be normalizing over time, particularly under the influence of businesses, which now derive much more revenue through it than they used to and therefore have much more at stake. This gives it a safer appearance, but I think many of the elements of the Wild West are still present. For example, cyber-bullying, cyber-crime and Internet trolls are far from eradicated. Then there is the massive research conducted by businesses such as Facebook, Amazon.com and Google to figure out how to squeeze more money out of their users or sell that information to someone else. I suspect that beneath the surface of many websites, very little civility exists at all. I have experienced this myself at Wikipedia and at the NYRB and don't doubt that the Internet is teeming with façades concealing private agendas that are hardly kind and generous. Moreover, though I don't currently interact with many people, I get the impression that many within the under-thirty age group may lead double lives. They may outwardly placate their parents and their elders by exhibiting the behaviors expected of them while privately engaging in different behaviors which may, at their worst, fit within a Dark Triad profile. Even when their behavior doesn't seem sinister, they may be suffering from spending too much of their time in cyberspace, where they are less likely to learn many of the skills that were once considered part of being human.
Men who self-objectify spent more time on SNSs than those lower in self-objectification, and, supporting previous research, more narcissistic individuals reported spending more time on SNSs. Those higher in narcissism and psychopathy reported posting selfies more frequently. Narcissists and individuals high in self-objectification more frequently edited photos of themselves that they posted to SNSs. Thus, our study has provided evidence for several as yet unstudied relationships between personality traits and social media use and self-presentation. Further, it suggests that those high on Dark Triad traits may employ SNSs to execute "cheater strategies" that help them achieve their interpersonal and social goals despite their antisocial personality traits.
As is the case with many psychological studies, these conclusions seem fairly obvious and were only awaiting research to confirm them. I am wondering whether the Internet simply provides a new venue for people who already have Dark Triad characteristics or whether it actually increases the total Dark Triad population. Studies such as this one are too narrow to draw many conclusions, but I would say that Dark Triad traits have been there all along but were previously more repressed by face-to-face interactions and the relative difficulty of representing oneself anonymously. It is theoretically possible that Dark Triad characteristics would increase in the species over time if people who are predisposed to one or more of those traits reproduced more than they did in the past, but it seems more probable that the gene pool was flexible to begin with and the Internet is now rewarding such behavior, in effect making bad people out of those who would behave better under different circumstances. More people are willing to lie, cheat, etc., when they believe that there is little likelihood of their being caught and held accountable, and in any case the Internet hasn't been around long enough to change the gene pool. A further complication regarding how much influence the Internet has over behavior is the decline of civil behavior in other sectors of society. For example, the number of reported serial killers dramatically increased from 1900 to 1980, with the U.S. leading the world, and there may be multiple explanations for such phenomena that relate in complex ways to Dark Triad behavior. However, I think that cyberspace in conjunction with other social changes is probably producing more Dark Triad behavior than was present in previous generations.
To some extent the Internet seems to be normalizing over time, particularly under the influence of businesses, which now derive much more revenue through it than they used to and therefore have much more at stake. This gives it a safer appearance, but I think many of the elements of the Wild West are still present. For example, cyber-bullying, cyber-crime and Internet trolls are far from eradicated. Then there is the massive research conducted by businesses such as Facebook, Amazon.com and Google to figure out how to squeeze more money out of their users or sell that information to someone else. I suspect that beneath the surface of many websites, very little civility exists at all. I have experienced this myself at Wikipedia and at the NYRB and don't doubt that the Internet is teeming with façades concealing private agendas that are hardly kind and generous. Moreover, though I don't currently interact with many people, I get the impression that many within the under-thirty age group may lead double lives. They may outwardly placate their parents and their elders by exhibiting the behaviors expected of them while privately engaging in different behaviors which may, at their worst, fit within a Dark Triad profile. Even when their behavior doesn't seem sinister, they may be suffering from spending too much of their time in cyberspace, where they are less likely to learn many of the skills that were once considered part of being human.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Political Correctness is a Human Rights Violation
One sphere in which the denial of our mammalian heritage can readily be observed is that of political correctness. Those of us who are self-aware continuously recognize visceral reactions that we experience when we come into contact with certain people, and that some of these reactions may not be on the approved list. For example, I have developed both positive and negative associations with various ethnicities which consciously or unconsciously affect how I react to people, though without entailing rigid categories or unfair judgments on my part. For example, I grew up in a suburb of New York City inhabited by many lower-middle-class immigrants from Southern Italy, whom I generally found to be unrefined, and this association has stuck with me throughout my life. There was one family in particular that I got to know quite well which inadvertently encouraged stereotype formation. The mother doted on her two sons, and they could do practically whatever they liked. The older brother sometimes found it convenient to blow his nose on his bed sheet. The mother stayed home all day cooking and cleaning, and the father worked in the construction business in Queens. He drove a big black Cadillac, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had some connections with organized crime. They were nice enough people, but overall I developed a visceral dislike for the Southern Italians in the area. Later, when I lived near Chicago, I was exposed to a lot of Mexicans who mostly did landscaping or worked in restaurants. Although I came to respect their work ethic, it was obvious that the majority of them had little or no interest in becoming integrated members of American society, and they were operating within a self-imposed system of cultural isolation which made them relatively inaccessible to me. They generally seemed like poorly-educated lower class people who only wanted to work and be left alone.
In contrast to these somewhat negative reactions, I have more positive associations with some groups. The African blacks from Senegal and Liberia whom I met in college seemed intelligent, articulate and were often fun to be around. Later I worked with two Vietnamese refugees who were pleasant to encounter and seemed intelligent. My son-in-law, a Tibetan who grew up in Nepal, has a personality similar to my own. Although Americans comprise a highly mixed group, I usually place them somewhere in the middle in terms of positive and negative associations. On average there seems to be a dull, conformist, bovine quality to Americans that is hard to like but not particularly offensive. I also have mixed feelings about Northern Europeans even though I'm half English. My running theory is that the people who adapted to the harsh climate in Northern Europe may have become more cerebral than emotional, purely as a matter of survival, and as a result may have become emotionally stunted compared to Mediterraneans, who are generally more expressive.
Whether people admit it or not, they all have these kinds of reactions and take actions based on them. In my case this came into play in deciding where to live in retirement. I value low population density, an aesthetically desirable natural environment and an educated population, but as it has turned out I am also comfortable living in one of the least ethnically diverse states in the country. Vermont has a 96.4% white population, the highest of any state, though I didn't specifically consider this fact when deciding to move here. Our decision was based largely on an exploratory trip during which everyone whom we happened to encounter was white, and there were no Hispanics. We may still have chosen to move here if we had encountered different ethnic groups, but I think a case could be made for deep psychological influences underlying a preference for environments in which one feels an instinctive connection to the inhabitants, real or imagined.
The point here is that part of being human is having reactions like this, and the people who tell us to stop having them simply do not understand human nature. At best they are confusing the idea that all people must be treated equally, which is essentially a legal concept necessary to maintain fairness and order in a multicultural society, with an erroneous theory of human nature that denies the existence of known reactions that developed through an evolutionary process over the course of millions of years. Everyone has these reactions, and they are often harmless unless codified into a system such as Nazism, slavery, segregation or apartheid. In those instances the thought police, who directly benefited materially from the systems, created societies rife with inequality and unfairness. Unfortunately, the thought police in the U.S. today are just as likely to be associated with political correctness as with anything else. One may see this either as a misguided attempt by privileged liberals to put a stamp of authority on their sense of moral superiority or as a symptom of a collapsing society that attributes greater wisdom to the uninformed than they can possibly merit. Thankfully we are still able to laugh at political correctness or ignore it without going to jail.
In contrast to these somewhat negative reactions, I have more positive associations with some groups. The African blacks from Senegal and Liberia whom I met in college seemed intelligent, articulate and were often fun to be around. Later I worked with two Vietnamese refugees who were pleasant to encounter and seemed intelligent. My son-in-law, a Tibetan who grew up in Nepal, has a personality similar to my own. Although Americans comprise a highly mixed group, I usually place them somewhere in the middle in terms of positive and negative associations. On average there seems to be a dull, conformist, bovine quality to Americans that is hard to like but not particularly offensive. I also have mixed feelings about Northern Europeans even though I'm half English. My running theory is that the people who adapted to the harsh climate in Northern Europe may have become more cerebral than emotional, purely as a matter of survival, and as a result may have become emotionally stunted compared to Mediterraneans, who are generally more expressive.
Whether people admit it or not, they all have these kinds of reactions and take actions based on them. In my case this came into play in deciding where to live in retirement. I value low population density, an aesthetically desirable natural environment and an educated population, but as it has turned out I am also comfortable living in one of the least ethnically diverse states in the country. Vermont has a 96.4% white population, the highest of any state, though I didn't specifically consider this fact when deciding to move here. Our decision was based largely on an exploratory trip during which everyone whom we happened to encounter was white, and there were no Hispanics. We may still have chosen to move here if we had encountered different ethnic groups, but I think a case could be made for deep psychological influences underlying a preference for environments in which one feels an instinctive connection to the inhabitants, real or imagined.
The point here is that part of being human is having reactions like this, and the people who tell us to stop having them simply do not understand human nature. At best they are confusing the idea that all people must be treated equally, which is essentially a legal concept necessary to maintain fairness and order in a multicultural society, with an erroneous theory of human nature that denies the existence of known reactions that developed through an evolutionary process over the course of millions of years. Everyone has these reactions, and they are often harmless unless codified into a system such as Nazism, slavery, segregation or apartheid. In those instances the thought police, who directly benefited materially from the systems, created societies rife with inequality and unfairness. Unfortunately, the thought police in the U.S. today are just as likely to be associated with political correctness as with anything else. One may see this either as a misguided attempt by privileged liberals to put a stamp of authority on their sense of moral superiority or as a symptom of a collapsing society that attributes greater wisdom to the uninformed than they can possibly merit. Thankfully we are still able to laugh at political correctness or ignore it without going to jail.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
What is Progress?
At this time of year the baby birds are leaving their nests and flying around confusedly. Yesterday an unkempt-looking little chickadee landed on the deck followed by its anxious parents, as if it were out trick-or-treating on Halloween in a dangerous neighborhood. The day before that, a baby goldfinch landed on the watering can that I was carrying and looked at me curiously for a minute before flying off. The babies of many species can be quite trusting before they learn the importance of fear.
By feeding the birds I am disrupting the local ecosystem. The goldfinch population, which constitutes the majority at the feeders, has grown over the last four years, and the trees in the vicinity are currently filled with bright yellow dots at certain times of day. They wait their turn at the feeder, and over time some of the branches have been denuded of foliage by the traffic. I'm going through about 320 pounds of sunflower kernels and 30 pounds of nyjer seed per year. The changes to the environment aren't that noticeable to me. There's now more prey available for hawks and cats, but small birds are hardly worth a hawk's effort, and there aren't many cats around. However, there are probably thousands of minute changes that you could detect if you did an in-depth study.
I don't think human populations behave all that differently from goldfinches. If you provide them with the essentials for living, all things being equal, their populations also increase. This is a phenomenon that the unpopular Thomas Malthus noticed over two hundred years ago. In current political thinking, talk of controlling human population growth intersects with racism, communism and any number of politically incorrect positions. I consider this one of the great paradoxes of our time: human population growth contributes to poverty, crime, political instability, war, pollution, climate change and mass extinctions, yet no one can discuss it without being labeled a racist, eugenicist or elitist of some sort. Illegal immigration to wealthy countries has become a fact of life, and few countries are currently able to deal with the problem effectively within their political systems.
While in some ways I am a liberal (e.g. I support Bernie Sanders), I often find this group collectively naïve about human nature. Specifically, it is a taboo to refer to people as animals even though they clearly are animals. Science increasingly shows that we are more like than unlike our fellow mammals. As I have remarked before, there is a denial of this fact embedded in our culture; it is associated with Christianity and Romanticism and oddly belies our professed belief in the separation of church and state. There seems to be an unrecognized assumption in society that man is better than nature despite the massive evidence to the contrary: man is nature, or, more precisely, part of it.
A little observation demonstrates that in broad biological terms humans aren't much different from goldfinches. Under the right environmental conditions both goldfinches and humans increase in population until factors rebalance their ecosystems. Both goldfinches and humans tend to exhibit the same basic behavior before and after population increases. Goldfinches continue to build nests, lay eggs, etc., and humans continue to build houses, have children, etc. Somehow in all of this humans are supposed to be making progress, and that is what I'm questioning here.
To be sure, there has been some progress within developed countries in terms of quality of life, health, longevity, education and knowledge, but at a more fundamental level there has been little change at all. The ideals and goals that people have now are hardly any different from those who lived during the Bronze Age. Agamemnon wanted a big house in a good location with protection from intruders, so did William the Conqueror, and so does Bill Gates. I am struck by what many wealthy people do with their money now: they build big houses in attractive locations just as wealthy people did three thousand years ago. Although it is never stated exactly as such, the American Dream implies that everyone has a right to own a large house in a pleasant location, and that is exactly how many people see it. This is easy to spot here in Vermont, to which about half of the population has moved from densely-populated regions in the Northeast, and many of them bought large retirement homes. In other words, the American Dream wouldn't quite work for them in Bayonne, Brooklyn, Bridgeport or Boston. In what way is this model an improvement for humanity, and is it sustainable?
This is sort of a "what's wrong with this picture?" post. If you live in the U.S. and absorb the ideas in circulation you may get the idea that this is a free country that encourages everyone to own a large house in a nice location and have as many children as they like. Has anyone, other than a few environmentalists, thought much about the impact of population growth? What will Vermont be like in fifty years if ten thousand new people move here every year? On a small scale I can simply stop feeding the goldfinches if they get out of control, but little attention is being paid to the much more significant problem of human population growth, which is already straining us with countless burdens.
By feeding the birds I am disrupting the local ecosystem. The goldfinch population, which constitutes the majority at the feeders, has grown over the last four years, and the trees in the vicinity are currently filled with bright yellow dots at certain times of day. They wait their turn at the feeder, and over time some of the branches have been denuded of foliage by the traffic. I'm going through about 320 pounds of sunflower kernels and 30 pounds of nyjer seed per year. The changes to the environment aren't that noticeable to me. There's now more prey available for hawks and cats, but small birds are hardly worth a hawk's effort, and there aren't many cats around. However, there are probably thousands of minute changes that you could detect if you did an in-depth study.
I don't think human populations behave all that differently from goldfinches. If you provide them with the essentials for living, all things being equal, their populations also increase. This is a phenomenon that the unpopular Thomas Malthus noticed over two hundred years ago. In current political thinking, talk of controlling human population growth intersects with racism, communism and any number of politically incorrect positions. I consider this one of the great paradoxes of our time: human population growth contributes to poverty, crime, political instability, war, pollution, climate change and mass extinctions, yet no one can discuss it without being labeled a racist, eugenicist or elitist of some sort. Illegal immigration to wealthy countries has become a fact of life, and few countries are currently able to deal with the problem effectively within their political systems.
While in some ways I am a liberal (e.g. I support Bernie Sanders), I often find this group collectively naïve about human nature. Specifically, it is a taboo to refer to people as animals even though they clearly are animals. Science increasingly shows that we are more like than unlike our fellow mammals. As I have remarked before, there is a denial of this fact embedded in our culture; it is associated with Christianity and Romanticism and oddly belies our professed belief in the separation of church and state. There seems to be an unrecognized assumption in society that man is better than nature despite the massive evidence to the contrary: man is nature, or, more precisely, part of it.
A little observation demonstrates that in broad biological terms humans aren't much different from goldfinches. Under the right environmental conditions both goldfinches and humans increase in population until factors rebalance their ecosystems. Both goldfinches and humans tend to exhibit the same basic behavior before and after population increases. Goldfinches continue to build nests, lay eggs, etc., and humans continue to build houses, have children, etc. Somehow in all of this humans are supposed to be making progress, and that is what I'm questioning here.
To be sure, there has been some progress within developed countries in terms of quality of life, health, longevity, education and knowledge, but at a more fundamental level there has been little change at all. The ideals and goals that people have now are hardly any different from those who lived during the Bronze Age. Agamemnon wanted a big house in a good location with protection from intruders, so did William the Conqueror, and so does Bill Gates. I am struck by what many wealthy people do with their money now: they build big houses in attractive locations just as wealthy people did three thousand years ago. Although it is never stated exactly as such, the American Dream implies that everyone has a right to own a large house in a pleasant location, and that is exactly how many people see it. This is easy to spot here in Vermont, to which about half of the population has moved from densely-populated regions in the Northeast, and many of them bought large retirement homes. In other words, the American Dream wouldn't quite work for them in Bayonne, Brooklyn, Bridgeport or Boston. In what way is this model an improvement for humanity, and is it sustainable?
This is sort of a "what's wrong with this picture?" post. If you live in the U.S. and absorb the ideas in circulation you may get the idea that this is a free country that encourages everyone to own a large house in a nice location and have as many children as they like. Has anyone, other than a few environmentalists, thought much about the impact of population growth? What will Vermont be like in fifty years if ten thousand new people move here every year? On a small scale I can simply stop feeding the goldfinches if they get out of control, but little attention is being paid to the much more significant problem of human population growth, which is already straining us with countless burdens.
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
This Blog
During the summer months I spend more time outside or away than during the winter, and though I have never been what would be considered a heavy reader I read even less now. This dries up my writing material a little, and I hope I'm not becoming too boring or repetitious. I enjoy writing, because it allows me to put down thoughts that I rarely see elsewhere. I believe that my thinking is more independent and less derivative than it is for most people, and I feel a need to counter the light entertainment, propaganda, brainwashing and conformity that I see everywhere else. From my vantage point, the narratives that one encounters in books, magazines, film, television and throughout the Internet tend to reinforce each other even as they present a version of reality that is distorted compared to what I see. Of course, you can always write me off as a disgruntled crank, but many of the things that I object to I object to deeply after considerable observation and reflection and an effort to be unbiased. I have no ax to grind about anything and consider myself fortunate.
As it is, you may have to put up with whatever eruptions burst from my brain, however coherent or incoherent they may be. Today I've been thinking about what the main theme of this blog is. It looks to me as if the central one is the illusions one maintains during one's life: if one has an open mind, one realizes that many assumptions made earlier, either explicitly or implicitly, were just plain wrong. In a way I am observing and thinking like a novelist such as Honoré de Balzac, but I am making explicit interpretations of situations, people and events rather than presenting them as stories left to the reader's judgment. Balzac understood his era well, but he certainly doesn't pass my concision test, and his writing sometimes seems clumsy. Yet he creates memorable realism with, for example, the relationship between Lucien de Rubempré and Madame de Bargeton in Lost Illusions. I found it hilarious when, after all the buildup and fanfare during their escapades in Angoulême, the two split up permanently the moment they arrive in Paris. Of course, this is all written with French sangfroid and none of the sentimentality that American readers prefer, and as in most literature no one is there to point out anything to you. I am the man on the street who is there to do it - in the real world.
Probably I'm more sensitive to the consequences of delusional thinking than most people because of the lives my parents led, as recounted earlier. If people were able to see into the future they would radically alter some of their decisions. My mother thought she was marrying a dashing war hero who would take her away to a prosperous life in England. As it was, from a combination of immaturity, war trauma and a big ego, my father was a business failure and dead at age fifty. My mother never remarried and worked in menial jobs up until age seventy-five, when her Alzheimer's symptoms became pronounced, all the while stockpiling money saved with the help of her wealthy boyfriend, who treated her like a mistress. Late in life she speculated that her parents had intentionally set her adrift in order to have one less mouth to feed in postwar Greece. Any lingering fond thoughts for my father had evaporated by then.
The conditions that anyone who is now reading this is living under are probably far better than those of postwar Europe, but the same kinds of mistakes are made over and over again, perhaps with less dramatic consequence. My impression is that many young people don't understand the world, and many adults aren't much better. Although adults become acclimated to the world with which they are familiar, they are still susceptible to making false assumptions about how conditions may change during the remainder of their lives. Thus my repeated warning that no one is running the show - and the title of the blog.
As it is, you may have to put up with whatever eruptions burst from my brain, however coherent or incoherent they may be. Today I've been thinking about what the main theme of this blog is. It looks to me as if the central one is the illusions one maintains during one's life: if one has an open mind, one realizes that many assumptions made earlier, either explicitly or implicitly, were just plain wrong. In a way I am observing and thinking like a novelist such as Honoré de Balzac, but I am making explicit interpretations of situations, people and events rather than presenting them as stories left to the reader's judgment. Balzac understood his era well, but he certainly doesn't pass my concision test, and his writing sometimes seems clumsy. Yet he creates memorable realism with, for example, the relationship between Lucien de Rubempré and Madame de Bargeton in Lost Illusions. I found it hilarious when, after all the buildup and fanfare during their escapades in Angoulême, the two split up permanently the moment they arrive in Paris. Of course, this is all written with French sangfroid and none of the sentimentality that American readers prefer, and as in most literature no one is there to point out anything to you. I am the man on the street who is there to do it - in the real world.
Probably I'm more sensitive to the consequences of delusional thinking than most people because of the lives my parents led, as recounted earlier. If people were able to see into the future they would radically alter some of their decisions. My mother thought she was marrying a dashing war hero who would take her away to a prosperous life in England. As it was, from a combination of immaturity, war trauma and a big ego, my father was a business failure and dead at age fifty. My mother never remarried and worked in menial jobs up until age seventy-five, when her Alzheimer's symptoms became pronounced, all the while stockpiling money saved with the help of her wealthy boyfriend, who treated her like a mistress. Late in life she speculated that her parents had intentionally set her adrift in order to have one less mouth to feed in postwar Greece. Any lingering fond thoughts for my father had evaporated by then.
The conditions that anyone who is now reading this is living under are probably far better than those of postwar Europe, but the same kinds of mistakes are made over and over again, perhaps with less dramatic consequence. My impression is that many young people don't understand the world, and many adults aren't much better. Although adults become acclimated to the world with which they are familiar, they are still susceptible to making false assumptions about how conditions may change during the remainder of their lives. Thus my repeated warning that no one is running the show - and the title of the blog.
Monday, July 6, 2015
Anti-Science Bias
As I said earlier, when I was growing up I was more interested in math and science than in the humanities, but by the end of high school I took up the humanities instead. Looking back, I've occasionally wondered whether I ought to have continued in the sciences. It is impossible to know now whether I would have preferred a more technical career, but as the job market tightens now it appears to be in most people's interest to beef up on science and technology if they want good jobs in the future. I have been thinking for a long time about why people get turned off science and will say a few things on that topic.
I've noticed that even the greatest scientists often have other strong interests that have nothing to do with science. Isaac Newton owned and read more books in the humanities than in math and science. His most famous work, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which revolutionized physics and astronomy, contains few equations and follows a style similar to that of Euclid. He spent many years studying alchemy and mysticism, which today would place him among the ranks of the gullible. Albert Einstein also read widely and had hobbies such as playing the violin and sailing. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, many scientists write well - as well or better than many professional writers in the humanities - which indicates more than a superficial level of reading in non-scientific literature.
In the U.S. some parents are called "helicopter parents" and closely monitor their children in order to optimize their chances for success. The Asian "tiger moms" who have been in the news recently take radical steps to ensure that their children get top grades, particularly in math and the sciences. I consider these sociologically significant developments and think that these parents correctly recognize that their children will need this knowledge and the right credentials in order to have economically successful lives as adults if current trends continue. According to the "tiger mom" mentality, their children will become doctors and scientists or hold other top positions, while the children of many other parents will be doomed to lower-paying jobs or unemployment. This is interesting because even the wealthy class in the U.S. doesn't see things quite that way. Rather, the Bushes, the Kochs, the Rockefellers, etc., figure that they already have enough wealth and know how to keep it. Old money often becomes interested in the arts, charities or politics, and in most cases their children are set for life, making the relatively desperate behavior of "tiger moms" irrelevant from their point of view. One might argue that the rich are shortsighted in this instance, but I think that they represent some fundamental human features that aren't likely to disappear anytime soon.
My interpretation of this situation is that we are biologically and culturally predisposed to recognize and respond to the signals associated with high social status. While there is some recognition among wealthy Americans that their children need state-of-the-art educations that include science, they also recognize that the highest social status was once granted to those who didn't need to work and were, for example, merely conversant in the arts. The model in the U.S. dating from the nineteenth century and earlier has been to become fabulously wealthy by hook or by crook and then spend the remainder of your life demonstrating what good taste you have and what a nice person you are. These days, once rich, that often translates into buying ridiculously-priced art, building superfluous multi-million-dollar houses, funding research to cure AIDS, starting foundations to end child hunger, etc. The tastes among tech billionaires are a little different from those who were rich in the past, but the social function is little changed. A paradox seems to occur in parts of the upper middle class. These parents are not wealthy enough to be confident about the well-being of their children under many plausible future scenarios, and not all of them seem to have caught on to the fact that many of the professions could soon be downgraded with respect to income and social status. New software and outsourcing are already cutting into the pay of lawyers, and artificial intelligence may eventually cause a significant reduction in income among the medical and other professions. Some upper-middle-class parents still think that their children will do fine if they study, say, classics, art history or Romance languages, but economic reality is rapidly making that strategy implausible. In their case it seems as if obsolete social norms are doing their families a disservice.
Of course, in the U.S. in particular, there are more obvious sources of anti-science bias. As one of the ostensibly most Christian nations in the world, the U.S. is a stronghold for creationists and anthropogenic climate change deniers. There is also a lingering disruptiveness in the South emanating from the Civil War, making some Southerners behave like Luddites who, in a psychological sense, seem as if they would like to go back in time to the pre-industrial era during which their ancestors were able to become wealthy with slave labor. The South, though slowly modernizing, still possesses elements of willful anti-intellectualism that impede its economic and social progress and put it at odds with the developed world. Not much proof is needed to demonstrate that creationism is a pseudoscience that is best ignored, but it is still popular in the Bible Belt.
From an intellectual standpoint, the most interesting aspect of resistance to science has occurred in universities following C.P. Snow's introduction of the "two cultures" concept in 1959. Although I'm a long way from academia, there still seems to me to be an enormous rift between science and the humanities. They seem to be going their separate ways, with no shortage of enmity and little cooperation. I sometimes get the impression that the better scientists are more open-minded than the humanities academics who seem hell-bent on remaining scientifically illiterate, yet there are also a few presumptuous scientists who seem to have little understanding of the nuances of Western culture. The most arrogant and insensitive scientists use the successes of science to embellish their social prestige and don't always realize that they themselves have not escaped cultural paradigms that exist independently from the rationality that they claim to exemplify. The people who defend the humanities rightly recognize the importance to us of cultural history but at the extreme end do not represent openness to insights into reality that we would never have gained without scientific research. Extreme humanistic academics value culture so much more than science that they are comfortable living in a make-believe world that they erroneously believe can survive scientific scrutiny. As I wrote earlier, I believe that much of the popular thought in the Western tradition that pertains to ethics, political theory and human nature in general can be seen as warmed-over Christianity that harbors unquestioned theological dogma. While the worst scientific offenders are imperious bullies, the worst humanists are naïve fantasists.
To generally explain all of the above, I would say that we are in the process of an evolutionary transition. Although we are all instinctive scientists and observe and analyze the world from the moment that we are born, modern science fails to satisfy this instinct because it is too advanced and raises too many questions that we find threatening. It is one thing to invent the wheel but something else entirely to demonstrate precisely how we are related to chimpanzees. Until recently our scientific inquisitiveness did not conflict with our anthropocentric mythologies. People would rather not know that their behavior isn't all that different from that of chipmunks. Furthermore, science itself has become difficult and tedious. Gone are the days when a scientist could come up with a good idea and run experiments himself to prove whatever his theory might be. Now most scientists must diligently study abstruse topics for many years and then participate in large research teams whose projects may take decades to complete. It is possible to spend an entire career testing one theory that finally proves to be incorrect. Those who favor the humanities may not be wrong if they think that scientific jobs are like boring and meaningless desk jobs at a large corporation.
This tension regarding science may resolve itself in one of two ways. On the one hand, it is possible that the current pressures to make people more scientific will continue, and top scientists will become the leaders of society by virtue of their command of the relevant subjects. On the other hand, technology may reach a point where scientific research will be carried out through artificial intelligence, leaving people free to spend their time however they choose. I am inclined to think the latter will occur, because we are already going through scientific burnout and our brains are hitting limits that we never encountered in the past. We are good at being primates, and at the moment we are hesitant about becoming more intelligent than we have ever been. However, it is important to keep in mind that evolution has no predetermined path, and we may have big surprises in store.
I've noticed that even the greatest scientists often have other strong interests that have nothing to do with science. Isaac Newton owned and read more books in the humanities than in math and science. His most famous work, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which revolutionized physics and astronomy, contains few equations and follows a style similar to that of Euclid. He spent many years studying alchemy and mysticism, which today would place him among the ranks of the gullible. Albert Einstein also read widely and had hobbies such as playing the violin and sailing. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, many scientists write well - as well or better than many professional writers in the humanities - which indicates more than a superficial level of reading in non-scientific literature.
In the U.S. some parents are called "helicopter parents" and closely monitor their children in order to optimize their chances for success. The Asian "tiger moms" who have been in the news recently take radical steps to ensure that their children get top grades, particularly in math and the sciences. I consider these sociologically significant developments and think that these parents correctly recognize that their children will need this knowledge and the right credentials in order to have economically successful lives as adults if current trends continue. According to the "tiger mom" mentality, their children will become doctors and scientists or hold other top positions, while the children of many other parents will be doomed to lower-paying jobs or unemployment. This is interesting because even the wealthy class in the U.S. doesn't see things quite that way. Rather, the Bushes, the Kochs, the Rockefellers, etc., figure that they already have enough wealth and know how to keep it. Old money often becomes interested in the arts, charities or politics, and in most cases their children are set for life, making the relatively desperate behavior of "tiger moms" irrelevant from their point of view. One might argue that the rich are shortsighted in this instance, but I think that they represent some fundamental human features that aren't likely to disappear anytime soon.
My interpretation of this situation is that we are biologically and culturally predisposed to recognize and respond to the signals associated with high social status. While there is some recognition among wealthy Americans that their children need state-of-the-art educations that include science, they also recognize that the highest social status was once granted to those who didn't need to work and were, for example, merely conversant in the arts. The model in the U.S. dating from the nineteenth century and earlier has been to become fabulously wealthy by hook or by crook and then spend the remainder of your life demonstrating what good taste you have and what a nice person you are. These days, once rich, that often translates into buying ridiculously-priced art, building superfluous multi-million-dollar houses, funding research to cure AIDS, starting foundations to end child hunger, etc. The tastes among tech billionaires are a little different from those who were rich in the past, but the social function is little changed. A paradox seems to occur in parts of the upper middle class. These parents are not wealthy enough to be confident about the well-being of their children under many plausible future scenarios, and not all of them seem to have caught on to the fact that many of the professions could soon be downgraded with respect to income and social status. New software and outsourcing are already cutting into the pay of lawyers, and artificial intelligence may eventually cause a significant reduction in income among the medical and other professions. Some upper-middle-class parents still think that their children will do fine if they study, say, classics, art history or Romance languages, but economic reality is rapidly making that strategy implausible. In their case it seems as if obsolete social norms are doing their families a disservice.
Of course, in the U.S. in particular, there are more obvious sources of anti-science bias. As one of the ostensibly most Christian nations in the world, the U.S. is a stronghold for creationists and anthropogenic climate change deniers. There is also a lingering disruptiveness in the South emanating from the Civil War, making some Southerners behave like Luddites who, in a psychological sense, seem as if they would like to go back in time to the pre-industrial era during which their ancestors were able to become wealthy with slave labor. The South, though slowly modernizing, still possesses elements of willful anti-intellectualism that impede its economic and social progress and put it at odds with the developed world. Not much proof is needed to demonstrate that creationism is a pseudoscience that is best ignored, but it is still popular in the Bible Belt.
From an intellectual standpoint, the most interesting aspect of resistance to science has occurred in universities following C.P. Snow's introduction of the "two cultures" concept in 1959. Although I'm a long way from academia, there still seems to me to be an enormous rift between science and the humanities. They seem to be going their separate ways, with no shortage of enmity and little cooperation. I sometimes get the impression that the better scientists are more open-minded than the humanities academics who seem hell-bent on remaining scientifically illiterate, yet there are also a few presumptuous scientists who seem to have little understanding of the nuances of Western culture. The most arrogant and insensitive scientists use the successes of science to embellish their social prestige and don't always realize that they themselves have not escaped cultural paradigms that exist independently from the rationality that they claim to exemplify. The people who defend the humanities rightly recognize the importance to us of cultural history but at the extreme end do not represent openness to insights into reality that we would never have gained without scientific research. Extreme humanistic academics value culture so much more than science that they are comfortable living in a make-believe world that they erroneously believe can survive scientific scrutiny. As I wrote earlier, I believe that much of the popular thought in the Western tradition that pertains to ethics, political theory and human nature in general can be seen as warmed-over Christianity that harbors unquestioned theological dogma. While the worst scientific offenders are imperious bullies, the worst humanists are naïve fantasists.
To generally explain all of the above, I would say that we are in the process of an evolutionary transition. Although we are all instinctive scientists and observe and analyze the world from the moment that we are born, modern science fails to satisfy this instinct because it is too advanced and raises too many questions that we find threatening. It is one thing to invent the wheel but something else entirely to demonstrate precisely how we are related to chimpanzees. Until recently our scientific inquisitiveness did not conflict with our anthropocentric mythologies. People would rather not know that their behavior isn't all that different from that of chipmunks. Furthermore, science itself has become difficult and tedious. Gone are the days when a scientist could come up with a good idea and run experiments himself to prove whatever his theory might be. Now most scientists must diligently study abstruse topics for many years and then participate in large research teams whose projects may take decades to complete. It is possible to spend an entire career testing one theory that finally proves to be incorrect. Those who favor the humanities may not be wrong if they think that scientific jobs are like boring and meaningless desk jobs at a large corporation.
This tension regarding science may resolve itself in one of two ways. On the one hand, it is possible that the current pressures to make people more scientific will continue, and top scientists will become the leaders of society by virtue of their command of the relevant subjects. On the other hand, technology may reach a point where scientific research will be carried out through artificial intelligence, leaving people free to spend their time however they choose. I am inclined to think the latter will occur, because we are already going through scientific burnout and our brains are hitting limits that we never encountered in the past. We are good at being primates, and at the moment we are hesitant about becoming more intelligent than we have ever been. However, it is important to keep in mind that evolution has no predetermined path, and we may have big surprises in store.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
In Praise of Concision
Among the features of this blog that I would find attractive if it were written by someone else are the brevity of the posts and the emphasis on getting to the point. As a reader I frequently find other writers loquacious and unfocused. From my point of view, many of the articles and books that I read are more than twice as long as they ought to be and sometimes border on unintelligibility. There are many explanations for this, and I'll touch on a few of them here.
Sometimes the fault may be mine: perhaps I don't get it when others do. That probably occurs occasionally, but most likely in specialties with which I am unfamiliar. Of course, I may be more stupid than I realize, a common human error, but for general reading I don't think comprehension is much of a problem if you are literate: when in doubt you can always look things up. I suppose that it might also be argued that my preference for concision is a matter of personal taste and may not apply to everyone. However, what I'm complaining about has to do with unnecessarily fuzzy thoughts and the insensitivity and bad manners associated with wasting someone else's time. A case can be made for unusually verbose authors such as Proust, but even there I think he would have benefited from heavy editing. I'm about halfway through In Search of Lost Time, which I started several years ago, and it may take an act of will to resume reading it. It is surely no coincidence that in person Proust's acquaintance, Claude Debussy, a far greater artist in my opinion, found him "long-winded." Though Proust writes well, I believe that his standing will decline when the mystique currently in vogue wears off. I am willing to cut some slack for writers who display an unusual sensitivity to language. It is true, however, that my interests and background incline me to favor "the short version." As a philosophy student in the Anglo-American tradition, I was encouraged not to waste words. Most of my career in the printing industry required me to write short, accurate instructions that were followed in manufacturing plants where a mistake could cost thousands of dollars in losses. Furthermore, business school taught me the importance of "the executive summary."
These caveats aside, I have to say that a lot of what I read is quite disappointing. In an earlier post I commented on commercial writing, which I believe is a very large part of the problem. The length of an article is generally going to be determined by a publisher's requirement to fill a certain space, whether virtual or printed, and this constricts the author from the outset. Regardless of the real interest of a topic or an author's knowledge of the subject, you are going to get a predetermined number of words. In this context, you might, for example, get a circuitous two thousand word essay instead of a simple "He was a minor prewar English poet whom no one ever read or should read now." This example pertains to what one encounters in literary publications such as the TLS, LRB or NYRB and calls attention to the vapidity of much literary discourse, which has become a type of pseudo-intellectualism. But pure academic writing may be worse yet. In that you are likely to encounter unnecessary jargon and references which serve mainly to demonstrate the author's knowledge; he has dedicated his life to the rote memorization of obscure facts and jazzed them up for publication with convoluted language that passes for astute analysis. While some academic writing, particularly in technical subjects, remains precise, the humanities seem to be riddled with verbal legerdemain. To explain this phenomenon one need look no further than the number of PhDs in the humanities and the "publish or perish" pressures that they live with professionally. Unfortunately we now have thousands of academics combing the same barren ground for increasingly insignificant material long after the best of it has been harvested. You could probably write a PhD on Charles Dickens's underwear.
Popular writing seems to have become a little shorter over the years. In this area my complaints have more to do with quality, and one would not expect popular authors to write better books than their readers could appreciate. Thus, a reader who is not aesthetically challenged is likely to be disappointed not only with popular television programs, magazines and films, but with the works of popular authors. Within the broad field of fiction and nonfiction, literary fiction fits into a special category of its own. You might say that over the last fifty years fiction in the U.S. has become a managed industry. Bestsellers are controlled by major publishers with no academic involvement, while literary fiction is publicized subject to approval by academics and prize juries. Literary fiction represents an incestuous relationship between academia and the publishing industry that in my opinion tosses artistic merit to the wind.
To sum up, serious readers seek writers who say interesting things concisely, without fuss, diversion or subterfuge, and in a better world that would not be such a rarity.
Sometimes the fault may be mine: perhaps I don't get it when others do. That probably occurs occasionally, but most likely in specialties with which I am unfamiliar. Of course, I may be more stupid than I realize, a common human error, but for general reading I don't think comprehension is much of a problem if you are literate: when in doubt you can always look things up. I suppose that it might also be argued that my preference for concision is a matter of personal taste and may not apply to everyone. However, what I'm complaining about has to do with unnecessarily fuzzy thoughts and the insensitivity and bad manners associated with wasting someone else's time. A case can be made for unusually verbose authors such as Proust, but even there I think he would have benefited from heavy editing. I'm about halfway through In Search of Lost Time, which I started several years ago, and it may take an act of will to resume reading it. It is surely no coincidence that in person Proust's acquaintance, Claude Debussy, a far greater artist in my opinion, found him "long-winded." Though Proust writes well, I believe that his standing will decline when the mystique currently in vogue wears off. I am willing to cut some slack for writers who display an unusual sensitivity to language. It is true, however, that my interests and background incline me to favor "the short version." As a philosophy student in the Anglo-American tradition, I was encouraged not to waste words. Most of my career in the printing industry required me to write short, accurate instructions that were followed in manufacturing plants where a mistake could cost thousands of dollars in losses. Furthermore, business school taught me the importance of "the executive summary."
These caveats aside, I have to say that a lot of what I read is quite disappointing. In an earlier post I commented on commercial writing, which I believe is a very large part of the problem. The length of an article is generally going to be determined by a publisher's requirement to fill a certain space, whether virtual or printed, and this constricts the author from the outset. Regardless of the real interest of a topic or an author's knowledge of the subject, you are going to get a predetermined number of words. In this context, you might, for example, get a circuitous two thousand word essay instead of a simple "He was a minor prewar English poet whom no one ever read or should read now." This example pertains to what one encounters in literary publications such as the TLS, LRB or NYRB and calls attention to the vapidity of much literary discourse, which has become a type of pseudo-intellectualism. But pure academic writing may be worse yet. In that you are likely to encounter unnecessary jargon and references which serve mainly to demonstrate the author's knowledge; he has dedicated his life to the rote memorization of obscure facts and jazzed them up for publication with convoluted language that passes for astute analysis. While some academic writing, particularly in technical subjects, remains precise, the humanities seem to be riddled with verbal legerdemain. To explain this phenomenon one need look no further than the number of PhDs in the humanities and the "publish or perish" pressures that they live with professionally. Unfortunately we now have thousands of academics combing the same barren ground for increasingly insignificant material long after the best of it has been harvested. You could probably write a PhD on Charles Dickens's underwear.
Popular writing seems to have become a little shorter over the years. In this area my complaints have more to do with quality, and one would not expect popular authors to write better books than their readers could appreciate. Thus, a reader who is not aesthetically challenged is likely to be disappointed not only with popular television programs, magazines and films, but with the works of popular authors. Within the broad field of fiction and nonfiction, literary fiction fits into a special category of its own. You might say that over the last fifty years fiction in the U.S. has become a managed industry. Bestsellers are controlled by major publishers with no academic involvement, while literary fiction is publicized subject to approval by academics and prize juries. Literary fiction represents an incestuous relationship between academia and the publishing industry that in my opinion tosses artistic merit to the wind.
To sum up, serious readers seek writers who say interesting things concisely, without fuss, diversion or subterfuge, and in a better world that would not be such a rarity.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Writers
In a review of the late poet John Berryman, August Kleinzahler says:
For what seemed a lengthy spell, from the late 1950s well into the 1970s, the standard-bearers of American poetry were a group of manic depressive exhibitionists working largely, if not exclusively, in traditional metre and rhyme schemes, analysands all, and with self-inflating personae that always reminded me of those giant balloons of Mickey Mouse and Pluto with Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. They published and reviewed one another in journals like the Nation, Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the 'most important American poet now at work'. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ranking: the top three poets, the top three oyster houses or second-basemen, the three best Ibsen plays–they seemed especially to like the number three.
It has always seemed somewhat arbitrary to me how connections and self-promotion, especially among male American writers, have often led to successful careers. Perhaps because I am less suggestible than many as to what counts as good writing, I frequently find that esteemed writer so-and-so just plain stinks, and I then start thinking about how on earth he or she succeeded. It is not uncommon for college buddies to promote each other as described by Kleinzahler. Of course, going to the right college probably makes a difference. In my last foray into American poetry I noticed that quite a few recent poets attended Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale or Princeton: Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, Robert Pinsky, Robert Haas, William Matthews, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück and J.D. McClatchy. Although poetry seems to be getting more diverse, it still looks as if connections at major universities help a lot.
Four of my undergraduate acquaintances once seemed to be aspiring writers, and I suppose that is fairly common among English majors. The college was better known for producing journalists, not novelists or poets, though the successful writer Barbara Kingsolver happened to attend it - majoring in biology. None of the four actually became writers, though they did produce some writing, which I saw much later and left me unimpressed. One of them became an insurance salesman and apparently sold an insurance policy to Saul Bellow. Another worked for years at a psychiatric hospital near San Francisco. One had mental problems and hardly ever worked: he became a ward of the State of California. The one I knew best seemed depressed all of his life, never married, worked as a bond trader in Chicago and died young from lung cancer. For all I know, under slightly different circumstances, the four of them might have become famous writers.
I am not personally acquainted with any successful writers, and it is hard for me to generalize about them. Most of what I now read is just journalism, and my expectations in fiction and poetry are quite low. Biographies and other types of nonfiction are more reliable for my purposes. It seems as if the most successful fiction writers are small businesses with carefully designed products made to suit large audiences. The better writers, in the U.S. at least, now seem to live in the university gulag, which offers them a semblance of job security at the cost of depriving them of diverse experiences and making them more predictable than they might otherwise be. As far as I know, there is no current equivalent to the Beats, though I'm not sure that their work was memorable either. Like Berryman, Lowell and Jarrell, they were good at self-promotion and several had good academic connections.
Rather than rehashing some of my earlier posts, I'll just say that most of the American writers that I come across produce work that is unsatisfactory to me. Whenever I find someone interesting - Julio Ramón Ribeyro or Patrick Chamoiseau - they are almost unknown here. Apparently the American marketplace and the American mind that drives it are more than a little insipid.
For what seemed a lengthy spell, from the late 1950s well into the 1970s, the standard-bearers of American poetry were a group of manic depressive exhibitionists working largely, if not exclusively, in traditional metre and rhyme schemes, analysands all, and with self-inflating personae that always reminded me of those giant balloons of Mickey Mouse and Pluto with Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. They published and reviewed one another in journals like the Nation, Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the 'most important American poet now at work'. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ranking: the top three poets, the top three oyster houses or second-basemen, the three best Ibsen plays–they seemed especially to like the number three.
It has always seemed somewhat arbitrary to me how connections and self-promotion, especially among male American writers, have often led to successful careers. Perhaps because I am less suggestible than many as to what counts as good writing, I frequently find that esteemed writer so-and-so just plain stinks, and I then start thinking about how on earth he or she succeeded. It is not uncommon for college buddies to promote each other as described by Kleinzahler. Of course, going to the right college probably makes a difference. In my last foray into American poetry I noticed that quite a few recent poets attended Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale or Princeton: Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, Robert Pinsky, Robert Haas, William Matthews, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück and J.D. McClatchy. Although poetry seems to be getting more diverse, it still looks as if connections at major universities help a lot.
Four of my undergraduate acquaintances once seemed to be aspiring writers, and I suppose that is fairly common among English majors. The college was better known for producing journalists, not novelists or poets, though the successful writer Barbara Kingsolver happened to attend it - majoring in biology. None of the four actually became writers, though they did produce some writing, which I saw much later and left me unimpressed. One of them became an insurance salesman and apparently sold an insurance policy to Saul Bellow. Another worked for years at a psychiatric hospital near San Francisco. One had mental problems and hardly ever worked: he became a ward of the State of California. The one I knew best seemed depressed all of his life, never married, worked as a bond trader in Chicago and died young from lung cancer. For all I know, under slightly different circumstances, the four of them might have become famous writers.
I am not personally acquainted with any successful writers, and it is hard for me to generalize about them. Most of what I now read is just journalism, and my expectations in fiction and poetry are quite low. Biographies and other types of nonfiction are more reliable for my purposes. It seems as if the most successful fiction writers are small businesses with carefully designed products made to suit large audiences. The better writers, in the U.S. at least, now seem to live in the university gulag, which offers them a semblance of job security at the cost of depriving them of diverse experiences and making them more predictable than they might otherwise be. As far as I know, there is no current equivalent to the Beats, though I'm not sure that their work was memorable either. Like Berryman, Lowell and Jarrell, they were good at self-promotion and several had good academic connections.
Rather than rehashing some of my earlier posts, I'll just say that most of the American writers that I come across produce work that is unsatisfactory to me. Whenever I find someone interesting - Julio Ramón Ribeyro or Patrick Chamoiseau - they are almost unknown here. Apparently the American marketplace and the American mind that drives it are more than a little insipid.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Politics I
Politics is a topic that I'd rather not think about, but we're entering the in-your-face phase of the 2016 U.S. elections and I would like to summarize some of my ideas in order to help clear them from my brain. The way the media handles this is something like nonstop Super Bowl coverage, and I may soon have to refrain from following the news.
In my view, the American political system is a hopeless attempt to simulate democratic participation that could only work on a much smaller scale with culturally homogeneous people and no class distinctions, including wealth differentiation. Not only does the U.S. encompass a large, culturally varied population, but corporations have long played a role in elections and are now de facto people themselves, with significantly greater political influence than any individuals. During my life I've lived in a variety of states, and the influence of businesses on the state governments has been obvious. Wealthy, industrialized states such as New York and Illinois tend to have business-dominated legislatures and high levels of corruption, whereas smaller, non-industrialized states such as Vermont and Oregon have legislatures that more closely represent the population and are generally less corrupt. On the whole, I find the Vermont government satisfactory, and I attribute this to the state's unindustrialized status and its well-educated population. There is no basis for thinking that the political environment in Vermont could easily be replicated in most other states.
As it is, I find the American presidential elections embarrassingly stupid. No matter who wins, the next president will be indebted to corporate contributors and other special interests. Whatever ideas any candidate may have, all presidents are constricted by the explicit or implicit commitments that they made to contributors. This partially explains why Barack Obama has not been much different from George W. Bush and why even the likable Bill Clinton was pro-business and anti-populist. There is little reason to expect that Hillary Clinton would represent any change in thinking from what has been going on in politics here for the last fifty years.
Although I don't think this is a popular opinion among my readers, the goal ought to be to automate government as much as possible, and this would be much easier to do if the capitalist economy were either modified or eliminated. An example of my thesis that humans are ignorant animals is that it is currently difficult for Americans to imagine a life in which they are not chasing paychecks, even when humans throughout most of their existence were not chasing paychecks. There were no employers or currencies before the last ice age, and about ninety percent of our time as a species was spent during that period. If you took business interests out of the equation, I think it would be relatively simple to organize society according to rational rules that could be made into algorithms. We may not yet be at a technological level where capitalism could be drawn to a close, but that may be closer than you think.
What I find annoying about political debate is that technology as I am describing it never seems to be considered. In the U.S., you are supposed to be either a Democrat, implying acceptance of capitalism but with attention paid to the less fortunate, or a Republican, implying acceptance of capitalism with no attention paid to the less fortunate. The only other positions Americans seem to recognize are communism, which they think results in collapsed economies and autocratic leaders, or theocracies, in which the women have no rights and are, for example, required to wear burkas. When you leave technology out of the discussion, you neglect the important fact that human labor is gradually becoming obsolete, with inexpensive technology permanently replacing people at an accelerating pace. I certainly have no difficulty imagining machines doing a better job at governing than the elected officials I've observed throughout my life.
There are too many variables in play to predict exactly how humanity will evolve over the next fifty to one hundred years. Among those are political instability, war, global warming, economic shocks and unmanaged population growth. A fairly probable scenario is that, at least among the developed countries, the need for human labor will decline significantly, even without radical changes such as the development of super-intelligence. Super-intelligence is in a class by itself, because it could result in technological change far in excess of what we currently anticipate. But even short of that, it is clear that social changes will have to occur if people no longer work or corporations as we know them cease to exist. It is quite possible that, as paid human labor declines, taxation will have to be increased sufficiently to prevent social collapse. If people can't find a living wage and the government doesn't support them, how else will they survive? The main alternative is the two-class system that you see in dystopian futuristic films, with a cruel ruling elite and impoverished masses at their mercy. It is plausible that the governments of developed countries will be forced to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to such a high level that the incentive to work primarily for money will evaporate. If that occurs, all of the economic competition and exploitation that we currently see as normal could end.
From my point of view, the national politics that we witness in the U.S. is primarily about wealth redistribution, and the wealthy are winning. To be sure, many other issues are addressed in Washington, but that is barely audible chatter and is drowned out by the roaring torrents of money awash there.
In my view, the American political system is a hopeless attempt to simulate democratic participation that could only work on a much smaller scale with culturally homogeneous people and no class distinctions, including wealth differentiation. Not only does the U.S. encompass a large, culturally varied population, but corporations have long played a role in elections and are now de facto people themselves, with significantly greater political influence than any individuals. During my life I've lived in a variety of states, and the influence of businesses on the state governments has been obvious. Wealthy, industrialized states such as New York and Illinois tend to have business-dominated legislatures and high levels of corruption, whereas smaller, non-industrialized states such as Vermont and Oregon have legislatures that more closely represent the population and are generally less corrupt. On the whole, I find the Vermont government satisfactory, and I attribute this to the state's unindustrialized status and its well-educated population. There is no basis for thinking that the political environment in Vermont could easily be replicated in most other states.
As it is, I find the American presidential elections embarrassingly stupid. No matter who wins, the next president will be indebted to corporate contributors and other special interests. Whatever ideas any candidate may have, all presidents are constricted by the explicit or implicit commitments that they made to contributors. This partially explains why Barack Obama has not been much different from George W. Bush and why even the likable Bill Clinton was pro-business and anti-populist. There is little reason to expect that Hillary Clinton would represent any change in thinking from what has been going on in politics here for the last fifty years.
Although I don't think this is a popular opinion among my readers, the goal ought to be to automate government as much as possible, and this would be much easier to do if the capitalist economy were either modified or eliminated. An example of my thesis that humans are ignorant animals is that it is currently difficult for Americans to imagine a life in which they are not chasing paychecks, even when humans throughout most of their existence were not chasing paychecks. There were no employers or currencies before the last ice age, and about ninety percent of our time as a species was spent during that period. If you took business interests out of the equation, I think it would be relatively simple to organize society according to rational rules that could be made into algorithms. We may not yet be at a technological level where capitalism could be drawn to a close, but that may be closer than you think.
What I find annoying about political debate is that technology as I am describing it never seems to be considered. In the U.S., you are supposed to be either a Democrat, implying acceptance of capitalism but with attention paid to the less fortunate, or a Republican, implying acceptance of capitalism with no attention paid to the less fortunate. The only other positions Americans seem to recognize are communism, which they think results in collapsed economies and autocratic leaders, or theocracies, in which the women have no rights and are, for example, required to wear burkas. When you leave technology out of the discussion, you neglect the important fact that human labor is gradually becoming obsolete, with inexpensive technology permanently replacing people at an accelerating pace. I certainly have no difficulty imagining machines doing a better job at governing than the elected officials I've observed throughout my life.
There are too many variables in play to predict exactly how humanity will evolve over the next fifty to one hundred years. Among those are political instability, war, global warming, economic shocks and unmanaged population growth. A fairly probable scenario is that, at least among the developed countries, the need for human labor will decline significantly, even without radical changes such as the development of super-intelligence. Super-intelligence is in a class by itself, because it could result in technological change far in excess of what we currently anticipate. But even short of that, it is clear that social changes will have to occur if people no longer work or corporations as we know them cease to exist. It is quite possible that, as paid human labor declines, taxation will have to be increased sufficiently to prevent social collapse. If people can't find a living wage and the government doesn't support them, how else will they survive? The main alternative is the two-class system that you see in dystopian futuristic films, with a cruel ruling elite and impoverished masses at their mercy. It is plausible that the governments of developed countries will be forced to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to such a high level that the incentive to work primarily for money will evaporate. If that occurs, all of the economic competition and exploitation that we currently see as normal could end.
From my point of view, the national politics that we witness in the U.S. is primarily about wealth redistribution, and the wealthy are winning. To be sure, many other issues are addressed in Washington, but that is barely audible chatter and is drowned out by the roaring torrents of money awash there.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Quote of the Day
The truth is that the evolution (or if you like the degeneration) from Cezanne to Warhol was inevitable from the moment that royal, aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage was replaced by the market.
Having lost their royal and aristocratic patrons, and finding little in the way of public patronage in modern states, artists from the 19th century to the 21st have sought new patrons among the wealthy people and institutions who have formed the tiny art market. It was not the mockery of Pop artists but the capitalist art market itself which, in its ceaseless quest for novelty, trivialized and marginalized the arts.
—Michael Lind in The Smart Set
Having lost their royal and aristocratic patrons, and finding little in the way of public patronage in modern states, artists from the 19th century to the 21st have sought new patrons among the wealthy people and institutions who have formed the tiny art market. It was not the mockery of Pop artists but the capitalist art market itself which, in its ceaseless quest for novelty, trivialized and marginalized the arts.
—Michael Lind in The Smart Set
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Quote of the Day
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.
—George Eliot, from Middlemarch
—George Eliot, from Middlemarch
Saturday, June 6, 2015
The Grand Inquisitor was Right
For me, one of the most memorable passages in literature is The Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoevsky is not always enjoyable to read, because his novels, this one in particular, are long and rarely to the point, but rambling novels were popular when he wrote. They were often serialized, and both the writer and the publisher had incentive to keep them long. George Eliot, a contemporary of Dostoevsky, was initially offered today's equivalent of almost $500,000 for her novel Romola but declined because she thought she wouldn't be able to write it fast enough and that serialization might interfere with her conception of the novel. A slightly less lucrative deal, also including serialization, was subsequently reached; as it turned out, Romola was a commercial flop anyway. I don't think concise fiction came along until the twentieth century, and this may have had to do with new marketing techniques and an increase in the number of writers as much as anything else.
In case you don't know, the Grand Inquisitor parable concerns the return of Jesus Christ to earth in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor arrests him, lectures him, and finally sends him away, telling him not to return because he isn't needed. Although this may have relevance to themes that occur elsewhere in the novel, I've forgotten the rest and treat it as a stand-alone puzzle. The Grand Inquisitor argues that people are not ready for freedom, which he interprets as what Christ has offered mankind. This seems to be an odd take on Christianity, and I prefer to consider it artistic expression rather than a specific religious commentary. The concept of freedom does not seem central to the Bible as I understand it, and the passage has more to do with human nature than with religion per se. If you look at the parable from a purely religious point of view, it doesn't make much sense. The Grand Inquisitor seems to recognize that Jesus is a divine being who, therefore, could destroy him, yet he believes that he has the authority to banish him. Jesus himself doesn't challenge the Grand Inquisitor and simply departs; he never speaks, and there is no explanation of his thoughts, so there is a temptation to conclude either that he agrees with the Grand Inquisitor or that this is some abstruse sort of test for mankind that has yet to be deciphered. The standard interpretation today, which may or may not be correct, is that Dostoevsky sides with Christ and the parable is a critique of the Roman Catholic Church and socialist atheism, with the Grand Inquisitor as a symbol of both.
My interpretation of the parable ignores religion almost entirely. Although this may not be what Dostoevsky had in mind, I think of it as having to do with the question of how capable mankind is of governing its own affairs and whether totalitarian rule is preferable to self-determination. I don't find Christ at all compelling here. Since he seems to refrain from judging the Grand Inquisitor, the reader doesn't know whether he concurs with him or not. Conceptually it is more appealing to me to conclude that the Grand Inquisitor is right, and in the text he has made a convincing argument that provokes no rebuttal.
The position of the Grand Inquisitor relates to what I've said about democracy. In a contemporary context, I believe that we are at a crossroads in civilization that has been brought about by the limitations of human capabilities in conjunction with advances in technology. Some futurologists seem to think that technology may soon allow us to become immortal, either through medical advances or through robotics, or both. In my view this is an incomplete position, because it doesn't take into account the wild, biological nature of human beings. Like the Grand Inquisitor, I have little confidence in our ability to self-govern.
The history of mankind is a history of conflict, which I believe is part of our identity as organisms. The game-changer, I think, will be super-intelligence, which may arise in the not-too-distant future. Because democratic processes have worked satisfactorily enough in recent years and totalitarian regimes have generally collapsed over time, there is a misplaced confidence in the long-term feasibility of self-determination through democracy. It seems probable to me that increases in computing capacities will change this state of affairs forever. It should be obvious to any observer that the popular vote can easily become corrupted, and even when it isn't, irrationality and ignorance among voters often produce questionable results. Super-intelligence would be able to think better than any human ever has, and would make the future much different from the past. One of the points made by the philosopher Nick Bostrom is that our brains are simply too small to do massive computations. On brain size alone it seems clear to me that we are about to be surpassed in thinking ability. It seems likely that once artificial intelligence is capable of advancing itself without human assistance, progress will be made rapidly. Because this falls within the narrow purview of futurologists and computer scientists, not many people seem to be paying serious attention to it. I suggest that you think about it yourself.
Assuming that super-intelligence comes into existence, there are several possible outcomes, and one can only speculate on what will happen. It would be likely to cause radical change one way or another. Among the possibilities that interest me is what direction humanity will take. Even if the new technology isn't usurped and has no unintended consequences, I'm not sure what human life will be like. On the one hand we may continue to live the way we do now, but without having to work and with enhanced bodies that allow us to live longer than we do at present. It is possible that super-intelligence may somehow be incorporated into individuals despite our brain size. In these cases, the social changes alone would be radical, and a sharp break from the last several thousand years. On the other hand, there are also many less sanguine possible outcomes.
The main aspect of The Grand Inquisitor parable that has bearing here is the question of how we will organize our affairs in the long term. As a skeptic on human competence in this area, I would actually prefer life to be governed by a super-intelligent machine with suitable controls than by any of the systems of governance that have been tried so far. It is a little difficult to envision exactly what this would be like, but there is no question that it would be a radical change. Many would be shocked by the transition from centuries-old intellectual domination of the planet to the realization that we are all second-rate thinkers, not much better than chimpanzees. Anthropocentrism would take a big hit. Ironically, the humility that this could produce might simulate religious humility in the face of a vastly superior power. I don't think that keeping human arrogance, corruption and folly in check would necessarily be a bad development at all, and in this sense the Grand Inquisitor was right.
In case you don't know, the Grand Inquisitor parable concerns the return of Jesus Christ to earth in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor arrests him, lectures him, and finally sends him away, telling him not to return because he isn't needed. Although this may have relevance to themes that occur elsewhere in the novel, I've forgotten the rest and treat it as a stand-alone puzzle. The Grand Inquisitor argues that people are not ready for freedom, which he interprets as what Christ has offered mankind. This seems to be an odd take on Christianity, and I prefer to consider it artistic expression rather than a specific religious commentary. The concept of freedom does not seem central to the Bible as I understand it, and the passage has more to do with human nature than with religion per se. If you look at the parable from a purely religious point of view, it doesn't make much sense. The Grand Inquisitor seems to recognize that Jesus is a divine being who, therefore, could destroy him, yet he believes that he has the authority to banish him. Jesus himself doesn't challenge the Grand Inquisitor and simply departs; he never speaks, and there is no explanation of his thoughts, so there is a temptation to conclude either that he agrees with the Grand Inquisitor or that this is some abstruse sort of test for mankind that has yet to be deciphered. The standard interpretation today, which may or may not be correct, is that Dostoevsky sides with Christ and the parable is a critique of the Roman Catholic Church and socialist atheism, with the Grand Inquisitor as a symbol of both.
My interpretation of the parable ignores religion almost entirely. Although this may not be what Dostoevsky had in mind, I think of it as having to do with the question of how capable mankind is of governing its own affairs and whether totalitarian rule is preferable to self-determination. I don't find Christ at all compelling here. Since he seems to refrain from judging the Grand Inquisitor, the reader doesn't know whether he concurs with him or not. Conceptually it is more appealing to me to conclude that the Grand Inquisitor is right, and in the text he has made a convincing argument that provokes no rebuttal.
The position of the Grand Inquisitor relates to what I've said about democracy. In a contemporary context, I believe that we are at a crossroads in civilization that has been brought about by the limitations of human capabilities in conjunction with advances in technology. Some futurologists seem to think that technology may soon allow us to become immortal, either through medical advances or through robotics, or both. In my view this is an incomplete position, because it doesn't take into account the wild, biological nature of human beings. Like the Grand Inquisitor, I have little confidence in our ability to self-govern.
The history of mankind is a history of conflict, which I believe is part of our identity as organisms. The game-changer, I think, will be super-intelligence, which may arise in the not-too-distant future. Because democratic processes have worked satisfactorily enough in recent years and totalitarian regimes have generally collapsed over time, there is a misplaced confidence in the long-term feasibility of self-determination through democracy. It seems probable to me that increases in computing capacities will change this state of affairs forever. It should be obvious to any observer that the popular vote can easily become corrupted, and even when it isn't, irrationality and ignorance among voters often produce questionable results. Super-intelligence would be able to think better than any human ever has, and would make the future much different from the past. One of the points made by the philosopher Nick Bostrom is that our brains are simply too small to do massive computations. On brain size alone it seems clear to me that we are about to be surpassed in thinking ability. It seems likely that once artificial intelligence is capable of advancing itself without human assistance, progress will be made rapidly. Because this falls within the narrow purview of futurologists and computer scientists, not many people seem to be paying serious attention to it. I suggest that you think about it yourself.
Assuming that super-intelligence comes into existence, there are several possible outcomes, and one can only speculate on what will happen. It would be likely to cause radical change one way or another. Among the possibilities that interest me is what direction humanity will take. Even if the new technology isn't usurped and has no unintended consequences, I'm not sure what human life will be like. On the one hand we may continue to live the way we do now, but without having to work and with enhanced bodies that allow us to live longer than we do at present. It is possible that super-intelligence may somehow be incorporated into individuals despite our brain size. In these cases, the social changes alone would be radical, and a sharp break from the last several thousand years. On the other hand, there are also many less sanguine possible outcomes.
The main aspect of The Grand Inquisitor parable that has bearing here is the question of how we will organize our affairs in the long term. As a skeptic on human competence in this area, I would actually prefer life to be governed by a super-intelligent machine with suitable controls than by any of the systems of governance that have been tried so far. It is a little difficult to envision exactly what this would be like, but there is no question that it would be a radical change. Many would be shocked by the transition from centuries-old intellectual domination of the planet to the realization that we are all second-rate thinkers, not much better than chimpanzees. Anthropocentrism would take a big hit. Ironically, the humility that this could produce might simulate religious humility in the face of a vastly superior power. I don't think that keeping human arrogance, corruption and folly in check would necessarily be a bad development at all, and in this sense the Grand Inquisitor was right.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Biology Trumps Reason
One of the few challenges to feeding hummingbirds is keeping ants out of the feeder. Downy woodpeckers also like the nectar, but they don't summon their friends, create long queues and occasionally drown in it, making it unappealing to the hummingbirds. Fortunately you can decrease the chances of ants finding your feeder simply by suspending it from a long wire. Oddly, seeking sugar reminds me of rock and roll, because I saw something similar to ant attraction when I recently watched a video about Jimi Hendrix. From its early days, rock and roll generated a kind of hysteria among young people. I think you can fairly say that it was mostly about sex and hormones. Smitten girls swooned over the Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix and most pop artists had slews of attractive women awaiting them after each concert. It is no secret why so many teenage boys aspired to become rock stars; Dire Straits said it well in Money for Nothing on their Brothers in Arms album a few years later.
The 1960's were heady times, and I've been a little disappointed that it all came to naught. If there was ever any message from Woodstock, no one knows what it was. Some of the best rock performers of the era, such as Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman, died very young, but the ones who are still alive are hardly worth getting excited about now: Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan.... It is even somewhat embarrassing to me to have been part of the baby boom generation. Abbie Hoffman and Phil Ochs committed suicide. Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker on Wall Street. Perhaps the best known baby boomer of all, Bill Clinton, became a corporate crony and was the first president to be caught getting blow jobs in the Oval Office. Overall, it was an exciting postwar period in the U.S., and many of the talented performers who found their ways to commercial success then would probably be unable to today. Beyond that, the lingering image of the 1960's is a confused mixture of sex, drugs and rock and roll with a little politics thrown in for good measure. These days people who look like hippies are usually considered vagrants or losers.
The U.S. was and is a symbol of materialism and gratification, and the baby boomers did nothing to change that. I had hoped that material possessions and procreation might take a less important role in society, but they haven't. To me, this confirms something that I've witnessed all of my life: biology trumps reason. Basically, the appeal of America is instinct fulfillment, not aesthetics or understanding, and although it has evolved slightly over the years, the American Dream, which entails a house, a car, a family and a prosperous life, has never gone away. During the 1960's, materialism was briefly reviled by some of the young, but that has turned out to be a passing fad, and I see no evidence that any idealism from that period survives. The civil rights movement and feminism were both apparently about reaching parity with the now embattled white male. Today, with flagrant wealth inequality in the news all of the time, there is more emphasis than ever on making materially better lives available to everyone.
This is why although I am enmeshed with American life I'd rather think about something else. I find it simpler and more satisfying to take care of the hummingbirds by keeping the ants at a distance.
The 1960's were heady times, and I've been a little disappointed that it all came to naught. If there was ever any message from Woodstock, no one knows what it was. Some of the best rock performers of the era, such as Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman, died very young, but the ones who are still alive are hardly worth getting excited about now: Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan.... It is even somewhat embarrassing to me to have been part of the baby boom generation. Abbie Hoffman and Phil Ochs committed suicide. Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker on Wall Street. Perhaps the best known baby boomer of all, Bill Clinton, became a corporate crony and was the first president to be caught getting blow jobs in the Oval Office. Overall, it was an exciting postwar period in the U.S., and many of the talented performers who found their ways to commercial success then would probably be unable to today. Beyond that, the lingering image of the 1960's is a confused mixture of sex, drugs and rock and roll with a little politics thrown in for good measure. These days people who look like hippies are usually considered vagrants or losers.
The U.S. was and is a symbol of materialism and gratification, and the baby boomers did nothing to change that. I had hoped that material possessions and procreation might take a less important role in society, but they haven't. To me, this confirms something that I've witnessed all of my life: biology trumps reason. Basically, the appeal of America is instinct fulfillment, not aesthetics or understanding, and although it has evolved slightly over the years, the American Dream, which entails a house, a car, a family and a prosperous life, has never gone away. During the 1960's, materialism was briefly reviled by some of the young, but that has turned out to be a passing fad, and I see no evidence that any idealism from that period survives. The civil rights movement and feminism were both apparently about reaching parity with the now embattled white male. Today, with flagrant wealth inequality in the news all of the time, there is more emphasis than ever on making materially better lives available to everyone.
This is why although I am enmeshed with American life I'd rather think about something else. I find it simpler and more satisfying to take care of the hummingbirds by keeping the ants at a distance.
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Good and Evil are Social Constructs
If you follow American news, you will have noticed the popularity of the word "evil" among politicians. George W. Bush liked to use the phrase "axis of evil" in reference to states that support terrorism. Barack Obama vowed to destroy ISIS's "brand of evil" and called the beheading of Peter Kassig by ISIS "pure evil." Between countries, this kind of language works both ways, and it was Ayatollah Khomeini who started the present trend in 1979 by calling the U.S. "the great Satan." For someone like me, who is not religious and doesn't believe in the objectivity of moral systems, this is in turn annoying and amusing. In academic circles, where ethics is studied as a subject, we are theoretically supposed to be able to resolve these kinds of differences, but I think it is impossible given the current literature, which is written by philosophers more often than by scientists. In political circles, conjuring "evil" is akin to calling for "patriotism," which, as Samuel Johnson put it, is "the last refuge of a scoundrel."
In my conceptual scheme, morality, good and evil are nothing more than manifestations of our genetic and cultural predispositions to behave eusocially. We have a vague sense of wanting to help and cooperate with other members of our group, and in the absence of any obvious justification for this we make up moral theories and ascribe authority to imaginary supernatural beings. The truth is that there is nothing that intrinsically binds all of humanity together, and one of the greatest challenges that we are currently facing is how to trick ourselves into thinking that we all belong to the same group. Thus, when political leaders call foreigners names, they are inadvertently perpetuating world strife. There aren't many options here, because even if, for example, ISIS is a deranged group of mindless murderers, we are not convincing them that their belief system is incorrect. They are equally determined to prove to us that ours is the one that is defective, and there is no higher authority recognized by both sides to mediate the conflict.
When you look at our animal past, all of this chest pounding and violence is easy to understand; it is so easy to understand that no explanation is required. Especially within the political sphere, where politicians vie for public support, the appeal to the lowest common denominator usually prevails. What bothers me more is how intellectuals insinuate themselves into these kinds of decisions and, while pretending to shower us with the benefits of their knowledge, they often only add an unnecessary layer of obfuscation if not outright falsehood. The fact is that most of the thinking about morality in the West can be traced directly to Christianity, and even if grains of truth can be found there, it is essentially one worldview among many and has no particular claim to validity in the universe of belief systems. A more plausible approach, I think, involves recognizing our animal natures, abrogating religion, and shifting the dialogue to empirical research about human nature and plausible methods of conflict resolution. It seems to me that in the West, particularly the U.S., a more conscious effort is needed to break away from the "Christian values" mentality that permeates everything from politics, law and academia to the media.
You've probably heard the term "situation ethics," and I propose as an alternative the idea of "situation atheism," which, if you define atheism as the absence of any historical belief system, might offer a value-neutral way to arbitrate conflicts between groups when cultural beliefs are a primary contributing factor. The idea would be for groups that don't see eye-to-eye to find solutions that optimize outcomes for each group while eliminating all factors from consideration that relate to beliefs. Thus, for example, ISIS might be given land somewhere in the world where their members might practice their religion as they chose as long as they did not violate international law. The U.S. and its allies would agree to the same and not attack ISIS as long as ISIS held to the terms of the agreement. Thereafter, each party could, if it so chose, live according to whatever belief system it favored, no matter how bizarre or ludicrous. An experiment along these lines has already been done with the State of Israel.
My hope is that culturally and theologically neutral super-intelligent computers will one day arbitrate major human conflicts using algorithms which may then be beyond our comprehension. Unfortunately, animals that we are, it is difficult for us to expunge nonsense from our decision-making processes. In the meantime we will have to continue listening to our theoreticians and political leaders spouting out useless or crowd-pleasing nonsense.
In my conceptual scheme, morality, good and evil are nothing more than manifestations of our genetic and cultural predispositions to behave eusocially. We have a vague sense of wanting to help and cooperate with other members of our group, and in the absence of any obvious justification for this we make up moral theories and ascribe authority to imaginary supernatural beings. The truth is that there is nothing that intrinsically binds all of humanity together, and one of the greatest challenges that we are currently facing is how to trick ourselves into thinking that we all belong to the same group. Thus, when political leaders call foreigners names, they are inadvertently perpetuating world strife. There aren't many options here, because even if, for example, ISIS is a deranged group of mindless murderers, we are not convincing them that their belief system is incorrect. They are equally determined to prove to us that ours is the one that is defective, and there is no higher authority recognized by both sides to mediate the conflict.
When you look at our animal past, all of this chest pounding and violence is easy to understand; it is so easy to understand that no explanation is required. Especially within the political sphere, where politicians vie for public support, the appeal to the lowest common denominator usually prevails. What bothers me more is how intellectuals insinuate themselves into these kinds of decisions and, while pretending to shower us with the benefits of their knowledge, they often only add an unnecessary layer of obfuscation if not outright falsehood. The fact is that most of the thinking about morality in the West can be traced directly to Christianity, and even if grains of truth can be found there, it is essentially one worldview among many and has no particular claim to validity in the universe of belief systems. A more plausible approach, I think, involves recognizing our animal natures, abrogating religion, and shifting the dialogue to empirical research about human nature and plausible methods of conflict resolution. It seems to me that in the West, particularly the U.S., a more conscious effort is needed to break away from the "Christian values" mentality that permeates everything from politics, law and academia to the media.
You've probably heard the term "situation ethics," and I propose as an alternative the idea of "situation atheism," which, if you define atheism as the absence of any historical belief system, might offer a value-neutral way to arbitrate conflicts between groups when cultural beliefs are a primary contributing factor. The idea would be for groups that don't see eye-to-eye to find solutions that optimize outcomes for each group while eliminating all factors from consideration that relate to beliefs. Thus, for example, ISIS might be given land somewhere in the world where their members might practice their religion as they chose as long as they did not violate international law. The U.S. and its allies would agree to the same and not attack ISIS as long as ISIS held to the terms of the agreement. Thereafter, each party could, if it so chose, live according to whatever belief system it favored, no matter how bizarre or ludicrous. An experiment along these lines has already been done with the State of Israel.
My hope is that culturally and theologically neutral super-intelligent computers will one day arbitrate major human conflicts using algorithms which may then be beyond our comprehension. Unfortunately, animals that we are, it is difficult for us to expunge nonsense from our decision-making processes. In the meantime we will have to continue listening to our theoreticians and political leaders spouting out useless or crowd-pleasing nonsense.
Monday, May 25, 2015
Winter Sleep
We watch many films in the course of evening entertainment. Most of them are so unmemorable that I don't bother to write about them. Yesterday we finished the very long Winter Sleep, which is a Turkish film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It has much to its credit, so I'll say something about it.
The film is set in Cappadocia and is based on the short story "The Wife" by Anton Chekhov. Its main feature is strong character depiction with exploration of complex interpersonal relationships, but the cinematography is also excellent and displays some of the natural beauty of this area in central Anatolia. The protagonist, Aydin, is a retired actor from a wealthy family who owns a hotel. He entertains himself by writing articles for a local newspaper and is working on a history of the Turkish theater. His attractive wife, Nihal, is much younger. His sister, Necla, who was recently divorced, also lives with them.
The drama centers around Aydin's family, with internal conflicts brought out by an incident with one of Aydin's tenants on a separate property. It becomes apparent that Aydin thinks like an elite patriarch and takes little interest in the concerns of those around him. He often assumes that he knows what's right and avoids direct interaction. Most of his dirty work is done for him by his assistant, Hidayet, without his involvement. Necla initially compliments him on his journalistic efforts but later berates him as self-absorbed and condescending. Nihal, we learn, is highly idealistic and deeply wishes to help the unfortunate in the community. Aydin is indifferent to Nihal's charity work and skeptical of her group, and this adds a tension to their relationship. Finally Aydin attempts to make amends with Nihal by giving her a large cash contribution for the charity. Nihal misjudges Aydin's aggrieved tenant, Ismail, and secretly gives him the entire contribution in person, only to enrage him: he proceeds to burn the bills in front of her.
All three of the family members have weaknesses that emerge during the story. I think American viewers may tend to typecast Aydin as the bad guy, but the others have equally serious deficiencies. While Aydin is aloof and patronizing, Necla is unduly sharp-tongued and inconsistent in her positions. Nihal, though well-intentioned, is obviously naive about the world. The film, I thought, only touched on the problematic marriage of Nihal and Aydin, but a short story would not have offered enough space for further development. Overall it seemed balanced and evenhanded and did not seem to take sides with any of the characters.
One of the reasons why I like the film is that it contains dialogue that reminds me of my family. People speak up and don't hold back: my mother did that as do my sisters to a lesser degree. When I recall this, I feel as if Americans live in an emotionally stunted world and hardly know how to communicate at all. There is a downside to such expressiveness, because it can be destructive, illogical and pointless, yet without it people sometimes seem dead. When people never express their thoughts, they are at risk of becoming disconnected from the world. Culturally speaking, certainly this affects what a country has to offer in the arts. To my way of thinking, both England and the U.S. display a notable lack of emotional range in their arts, and this is one of the factors behind my theme about the inferiority of American fiction. Growing up here, I didn't find much to like in literature until I came across the Russians. Lacking a suitable cultural basis in their environment, American writers may be doomed to careers in which they are applauded for churning out puerile prattle. It is telling that Winter Sleep won the Palme d'Or in Cannes yet was not nominated for an Academy Award despite clearly being one of the best films released in 2014.
The film is set in Cappadocia and is based on the short story "The Wife" by Anton Chekhov. Its main feature is strong character depiction with exploration of complex interpersonal relationships, but the cinematography is also excellent and displays some of the natural beauty of this area in central Anatolia. The protagonist, Aydin, is a retired actor from a wealthy family who owns a hotel. He entertains himself by writing articles for a local newspaper and is working on a history of the Turkish theater. His attractive wife, Nihal, is much younger. His sister, Necla, who was recently divorced, also lives with them.
The drama centers around Aydin's family, with internal conflicts brought out by an incident with one of Aydin's tenants on a separate property. It becomes apparent that Aydin thinks like an elite patriarch and takes little interest in the concerns of those around him. He often assumes that he knows what's right and avoids direct interaction. Most of his dirty work is done for him by his assistant, Hidayet, without his involvement. Necla initially compliments him on his journalistic efforts but later berates him as self-absorbed and condescending. Nihal, we learn, is highly idealistic and deeply wishes to help the unfortunate in the community. Aydin is indifferent to Nihal's charity work and skeptical of her group, and this adds a tension to their relationship. Finally Aydin attempts to make amends with Nihal by giving her a large cash contribution for the charity. Nihal misjudges Aydin's aggrieved tenant, Ismail, and secretly gives him the entire contribution in person, only to enrage him: he proceeds to burn the bills in front of her.
All three of the family members have weaknesses that emerge during the story. I think American viewers may tend to typecast Aydin as the bad guy, but the others have equally serious deficiencies. While Aydin is aloof and patronizing, Necla is unduly sharp-tongued and inconsistent in her positions. Nihal, though well-intentioned, is obviously naive about the world. The film, I thought, only touched on the problematic marriage of Nihal and Aydin, but a short story would not have offered enough space for further development. Overall it seemed balanced and evenhanded and did not seem to take sides with any of the characters.
One of the reasons why I like the film is that it contains dialogue that reminds me of my family. People speak up and don't hold back: my mother did that as do my sisters to a lesser degree. When I recall this, I feel as if Americans live in an emotionally stunted world and hardly know how to communicate at all. There is a downside to such expressiveness, because it can be destructive, illogical and pointless, yet without it people sometimes seem dead. When people never express their thoughts, they are at risk of becoming disconnected from the world. Culturally speaking, certainly this affects what a country has to offer in the arts. To my way of thinking, both England and the U.S. display a notable lack of emotional range in their arts, and this is one of the factors behind my theme about the inferiority of American fiction. Growing up here, I didn't find much to like in literature until I came across the Russians. Lacking a suitable cultural basis in their environment, American writers may be doomed to careers in which they are applauded for churning out puerile prattle. It is telling that Winter Sleep won the Palme d'Or in Cannes yet was not nominated for an Academy Award despite clearly being one of the best films released in 2014.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Seven Billion Points of View
The main purpose of this blog is to articulate various observations and ideas that I've developed over a period of time. Besides the fact that I enjoy writing, it helps me to clarify for myself whatever it is that I might be thinking about. Then there is the more public aspect, in which others read it: they may or may not think about a particular post, and that post may or may not affect any of their views. I am not attempting to be didactic, though readers may think that I'm opinionated and am trying to convert them to my views. In fact my views are constantly evolving, and I am always interested in finding out something that might improve them. However, it seems that reaching coherent opinions is more important to me than it is to some, which may make me appear more dogmatic than I truly am. The reality is that the majority of people are going about their lives without much interest in whether or not they are operating within a robust conceptual schema.
If anything, there are too many conceptions and worldviews in circulation, and it is easy to see why people retreat into private worlds, because that prevents mental overload. It makes sense to think about life in terms with which one is familiar. This is a conservative approach that permits you, if you are so inclined, to build upon ideas collected over time in the hope of improving understanding. In this I am like most people, except that I constantly question orthodoxy, which, historically, has been a luxury. Most of the people who have ever lived did not have the time to think about the relative merits of their belief systems; not being educated in the modern sense, they could not know that there were alternative views to those recognized within their cultures.
There are advantages and disadvantages to being educated. It appears to me that most people these days look narrowly at the advantages in terms of employability and a higher standard of living, and once they've finished their educations they do not concern themselves with the oblique kinds of questions that are of interest to me. This is noticeable in the U.S., which has never had much of an intellectual class and to this day remains broadly anti-intellectual. Americans are relatively well-educated, but they are interested above all in making money. For me the important advantage of an education is that it can provide a perspicacity which one might not otherwise obtain. Without having a variety of ideas to think about and enjoy, one may as well be a chimpanzee.
The disadvantages of education have mainly to do with the fact that educated people tend to become specialists rather than generalists. They know a lot about something and nothing about most things. Up until about the middle of the nineteenth century it was still possible to be a polymath, but now there is simply too much information for any person to absorb. Furthermore, higher education has become linked to business through the growth and funding of research universities. Different academic fields resemble fiefdoms competing for survival, with moneyed interests calling the shots. For example, as Thomas Piketty points out in Capital, the field of economics has drifted away from the other social sciences and would be more useful if it incorporated knowledge from history and sociology. In this case I think corporate pressures have usurped the field by purchasing the so-called experts. Furthermore, ghettoization within academia has created a situation in which there is little unity of knowledge, and there exist conceptual rifts between some academic departments that may never be bridged. Another disadvantage to education is that in large doses it can cause people to lose touch with their instinctive biological roots.
For all its limitations, this blog attempts to create a big picture without depending on the latest ideas from specialized academic disciplines. Based on my explorations, it would in most instances be a thankless task to try thinking about the kinds of things that I like to think about by resorting to an academic approach. Everyone must find a way to make sense of his life, and what academia has to offer typically just complicates the issue. In my experience one soon encounters an infinite regress of ideas that don't collectively increase the clarity or comprehension of what one seeks. In my view, the significant thinkers of any era concern themselves with the big picture, and few do that now. This is why I respect E.O. Wilson and Thomas Piketty: they both at least encourage inter-disciplinary research.
One of my themes on this blog is that no one really seems to be in control of human destiny. It is possible that this will emerge at some point as a recognizable academic discipline or perhaps as a topic within policy discussions, but it hasn't yet as far as I know. From my readings I get a sense that there may yet be another round of prominent big thinkers. For example, even though Thomas Piketty may himself be too narrow a thinker, he has helped precipitate a dialogue that brings into question the long-term viability of capitalism as it is practiced. On a different front, a variety of people are beginning to raise alarms on the potential downside of artificial intelligence.
If, like me, you take evolution seriously as a phenomenon, it is easy to see how the conditions for humans might suddenly take a turn for the better or for the worse with little warning. In this environment I find it concerning that there is hardly any world consensus on major issues such as global warming, capitalism, democracy, religion, artificial intelligence or high population levels. The capitalist model in one form or another seems to be the dominant ideology at present, and nearly everyone is forced to comply with it whether they like it or not. Democracy is a weak tool for dealing with the present situation, and I don't see how anyone in his right mind could expect "the will of the people" to resolve the issues just mentioned. Not only are people throughout the world living according to a variety of conceptual models that have little in common, but even in the West technology has fragmented society in a manner that is comparable to earlier times when people were isolated by physical distances and slow transportation. Now they are isolated by inhabiting virtual realities which allow them to live in the alternate universes of their choice with the help of new technology. Once again I have to say that this is not a guided process. The outcome is unknown, and not many people seem to be thinking about it.
If anything, there are too many conceptions and worldviews in circulation, and it is easy to see why people retreat into private worlds, because that prevents mental overload. It makes sense to think about life in terms with which one is familiar. This is a conservative approach that permits you, if you are so inclined, to build upon ideas collected over time in the hope of improving understanding. In this I am like most people, except that I constantly question orthodoxy, which, historically, has been a luxury. Most of the people who have ever lived did not have the time to think about the relative merits of their belief systems; not being educated in the modern sense, they could not know that there were alternative views to those recognized within their cultures.
There are advantages and disadvantages to being educated. It appears to me that most people these days look narrowly at the advantages in terms of employability and a higher standard of living, and once they've finished their educations they do not concern themselves with the oblique kinds of questions that are of interest to me. This is noticeable in the U.S., which has never had much of an intellectual class and to this day remains broadly anti-intellectual. Americans are relatively well-educated, but they are interested above all in making money. For me the important advantage of an education is that it can provide a perspicacity which one might not otherwise obtain. Without having a variety of ideas to think about and enjoy, one may as well be a chimpanzee.
The disadvantages of education have mainly to do with the fact that educated people tend to become specialists rather than generalists. They know a lot about something and nothing about most things. Up until about the middle of the nineteenth century it was still possible to be a polymath, but now there is simply too much information for any person to absorb. Furthermore, higher education has become linked to business through the growth and funding of research universities. Different academic fields resemble fiefdoms competing for survival, with moneyed interests calling the shots. For example, as Thomas Piketty points out in Capital, the field of economics has drifted away from the other social sciences and would be more useful if it incorporated knowledge from history and sociology. In this case I think corporate pressures have usurped the field by purchasing the so-called experts. Furthermore, ghettoization within academia has created a situation in which there is little unity of knowledge, and there exist conceptual rifts between some academic departments that may never be bridged. Another disadvantage to education is that in large doses it can cause people to lose touch with their instinctive biological roots.
For all its limitations, this blog attempts to create a big picture without depending on the latest ideas from specialized academic disciplines. Based on my explorations, it would in most instances be a thankless task to try thinking about the kinds of things that I like to think about by resorting to an academic approach. Everyone must find a way to make sense of his life, and what academia has to offer typically just complicates the issue. In my experience one soon encounters an infinite regress of ideas that don't collectively increase the clarity or comprehension of what one seeks. In my view, the significant thinkers of any era concern themselves with the big picture, and few do that now. This is why I respect E.O. Wilson and Thomas Piketty: they both at least encourage inter-disciplinary research.
One of my themes on this blog is that no one really seems to be in control of human destiny. It is possible that this will emerge at some point as a recognizable academic discipline or perhaps as a topic within policy discussions, but it hasn't yet as far as I know. From my readings I get a sense that there may yet be another round of prominent big thinkers. For example, even though Thomas Piketty may himself be too narrow a thinker, he has helped precipitate a dialogue that brings into question the long-term viability of capitalism as it is practiced. On a different front, a variety of people are beginning to raise alarms on the potential downside of artificial intelligence.
If, like me, you take evolution seriously as a phenomenon, it is easy to see how the conditions for humans might suddenly take a turn for the better or for the worse with little warning. In this environment I find it concerning that there is hardly any world consensus on major issues such as global warming, capitalism, democracy, religion, artificial intelligence or high population levels. The capitalist model in one form or another seems to be the dominant ideology at present, and nearly everyone is forced to comply with it whether they like it or not. Democracy is a weak tool for dealing with the present situation, and I don't see how anyone in his right mind could expect "the will of the people" to resolve the issues just mentioned. Not only are people throughout the world living according to a variety of conceptual models that have little in common, but even in the West technology has fragmented society in a manner that is comparable to earlier times when people were isolated by physical distances and slow transportation. Now they are isolated by inhabiting virtual realities which allow them to live in the alternate universes of their choice with the help of new technology. Once again I have to say that this is not a guided process. The outcome is unknown, and not many people seem to be thinking about it.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Thoughts on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
Although I generally have no interest in legal proceedings and find lawyers, including most politicians, slightly repugnant, major criminal trials in the U.S. sometimes provide a window into American society through which one may see its strengths and weaknesses. The Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial seems to display some of the characteristics of Americans that have made them reviled within those pockets of the world where people feel marginalized.
From the information that I'm aware of, it appears that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was significantly Americanized after his family moved to the U.S. in 2002, and his elder brother, Tamerlan, somewhat less so. The main fact that stands out to me is that his family did not adjust well to life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents were unable to succeed financially and eventually moved away to Dagestan. Tamerlan did not have the boxing career that he had hoped for and subsequently took a greater interest in Islam. On the surface Dzhokhar seemed relatively well adjusted, but apparently he also had little hope of making a satisfactory life for himself in the U.S. As a college student he was mounting up enormous debts that he could not realistically expect to repay, and he was doing poorly academically.
All of the important facts in the case seem to have been uncovered shortly after Dzhokhar's arrest. The bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon involved only the Tsarnaev brothers and were not part of a broader terrorist plot. The psychological aspects of the Tsarnaevs don't seem particularly complex either. They resented Americans because they saw themselves as economically doomed and because they thought that many American actions were an affront to Islam. These are both plausible claims, yet the brothers might well have become good citizens if only they had found tracks to successful careers. Basically they were somewhat generic aggressive young males who chose violence when they came to see that as their last resort and as a method of retaliation. Similar scenarios have been played out worldwide by frustrated young men throughout history.
While this was a heinous crime, I have found the public response reflective of a country that cares little for introspection. I don't think the court or the media took any interest in Dzhokhar's background and psychological makeup even though these are all that are needed to fully understand the nature of the crime. Rather, the emphasis recently has been on whether Dzhokhar has shown sufficient remorse to warrant a life sentence instead of the death penalty. Whatever narrative he may have has been ignored in favor of the emotions of his aggrieved victims. The trial played into the cookie-cutter terrorism narrative that we have been living with since 9/11 and showed no signs of deviating from the script.
It is apparent to me that there is little appetite in the U.S. for discussing the consequences of America's botched foreign policy in the Middle East, and there is certainly no interest in understanding the nuances of the thoughts of people like the Tsarnaev brothers. In Boston, a region populated by Irish-Americans who until recently cheerfully funded IRA terrorism in the U.K., there exists an unspoken hypocrisy regarding the Tsarnaevs. Apparently injuring or killing innocents in England is not a problem, but Islamic Americans from the former U.S.S.R. are cold and heartless when they harm Bostonians. Up until the mid-twentieth century, Irish-Americans were themselves subject to low status and social disapproval, and their current indifference to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may reflect the lost memory of their own humble pasts. Though I don't celebrate anything about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I am struck in this case by America's unwillingness to reflect on the grievances that it has caused in the world.
From the information that I'm aware of, it appears that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was significantly Americanized after his family moved to the U.S. in 2002, and his elder brother, Tamerlan, somewhat less so. The main fact that stands out to me is that his family did not adjust well to life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents were unable to succeed financially and eventually moved away to Dagestan. Tamerlan did not have the boxing career that he had hoped for and subsequently took a greater interest in Islam. On the surface Dzhokhar seemed relatively well adjusted, but apparently he also had little hope of making a satisfactory life for himself in the U.S. As a college student he was mounting up enormous debts that he could not realistically expect to repay, and he was doing poorly academically.
All of the important facts in the case seem to have been uncovered shortly after Dzhokhar's arrest. The bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon involved only the Tsarnaev brothers and were not part of a broader terrorist plot. The psychological aspects of the Tsarnaevs don't seem particularly complex either. They resented Americans because they saw themselves as economically doomed and because they thought that many American actions were an affront to Islam. These are both plausible claims, yet the brothers might well have become good citizens if only they had found tracks to successful careers. Basically they were somewhat generic aggressive young males who chose violence when they came to see that as their last resort and as a method of retaliation. Similar scenarios have been played out worldwide by frustrated young men throughout history.
While this was a heinous crime, I have found the public response reflective of a country that cares little for introspection. I don't think the court or the media took any interest in Dzhokhar's background and psychological makeup even though these are all that are needed to fully understand the nature of the crime. Rather, the emphasis recently has been on whether Dzhokhar has shown sufficient remorse to warrant a life sentence instead of the death penalty. Whatever narrative he may have has been ignored in favor of the emotions of his aggrieved victims. The trial played into the cookie-cutter terrorism narrative that we have been living with since 9/11 and showed no signs of deviating from the script.
It is apparent to me that there is little appetite in the U.S. for discussing the consequences of America's botched foreign policy in the Middle East, and there is certainly no interest in understanding the nuances of the thoughts of people like the Tsarnaev brothers. In Boston, a region populated by Irish-Americans who until recently cheerfully funded IRA terrorism in the U.K., there exists an unspoken hypocrisy regarding the Tsarnaevs. Apparently injuring or killing innocents in England is not a problem, but Islamic Americans from the former U.S.S.R. are cold and heartless when they harm Bostonians. Up until the mid-twentieth century, Irish-Americans were themselves subject to low status and social disapproval, and their current indifference to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may reflect the lost memory of their own humble pasts. Though I don't celebrate anything about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I am struck in this case by America's unwillingness to reflect on the grievances that it has caused in the world.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Wikipedia II
Last year I discussed an unpleasant episode that I had with Wikipedia. Out of curiosity I have been checking from time to time on the Wikipedia entry for Lorrie Moore, which had caused the controversy, and I've noticed that it has changed a lot during this period. The interesting thing is that the contents vary considerably without necessarily improving. In early 2014, it was predominantly hagiography, presumably entered by her fans or possibly her publisher (or her?). I added some unfavorable reviews of Bark when it was published, which were soon deleted and replaced with positive reviews. Shortly after that, John reentered the negative review by Michiko Kakutani. That stood for quite some time, but was eventually deleted, and then the entry became entirely hagiographic again until recently. Currently the entry is pared back and contains nothing more than basic facts, such as Lorrie Moore's education, works, employment history and awards. The only description of her work is that she is "known mainly for her humorous and poignant short stories." No reviews or blurbs are included.
What I've learned from this is that Wikipedia's model doesn't actually work the way it's supposed to. Rather than producing articles that improve over time through wide discussion among a variety of interested parties, with oversight from Wikipedia representatives, the content of an article can meander unpredictably, with changing information, varying opinions and no increase in clarity. At any given time a small number of people - one or two - may completely dominate the content of an entry. If an entry is of great interest to a large number of people, I suppose there is a better chance of balance than there is for a minor entry read by very few.
Since my interaction with Wikipedia was so off-putting, I have tried to use it as little as possible. Unfortunately, that is what usually pops up first when you Google anything. I find this annoying, because the quality of Wikipedia entries is always uneven. When there is a comparable entry from a different source, it is often more informative and better written. In addition to the problems of bias and incomplete information, one must deal with a disjointed writing style - it's as if a self-appointed committee of teenagers has decided to write a five-hundred-word essay with each member contributing one sentence. This is never likely to result in the kind of coherence one might expect from a single author who has expertise in a subject.
Wikipedia, it seems, is something we're stuck with now, whether we like it or not. It has become the generic "short answer" to just about everything. In a world of tweets and likes, it will probably remain popular among young people, who increasingly seem to lack a conception of "in depth." Wikipedia is similar to a virus that has no antidote in sight. Speaking for myself, I make an effort to restrict my use of it to serious topics such as "George Clooney" or "Taylor Swift."
On a side note, in the process of making space in the bookshelves, I removed all of the books by Lorrie Moore and donated them to the local library.
What I've learned from this is that Wikipedia's model doesn't actually work the way it's supposed to. Rather than producing articles that improve over time through wide discussion among a variety of interested parties, with oversight from Wikipedia representatives, the content of an article can meander unpredictably, with changing information, varying opinions and no increase in clarity. At any given time a small number of people - one or two - may completely dominate the content of an entry. If an entry is of great interest to a large number of people, I suppose there is a better chance of balance than there is for a minor entry read by very few.
Since my interaction with Wikipedia was so off-putting, I have tried to use it as little as possible. Unfortunately, that is what usually pops up first when you Google anything. I find this annoying, because the quality of Wikipedia entries is always uneven. When there is a comparable entry from a different source, it is often more informative and better written. In addition to the problems of bias and incomplete information, one must deal with a disjointed writing style - it's as if a self-appointed committee of teenagers has decided to write a five-hundred-word essay with each member contributing one sentence. This is never likely to result in the kind of coherence one might expect from a single author who has expertise in a subject.
Wikipedia, it seems, is something we're stuck with now, whether we like it or not. It has become the generic "short answer" to just about everything. In a world of tweets and likes, it will probably remain popular among young people, who increasingly seem to lack a conception of "in depth." Wikipedia is similar to a virus that has no antidote in sight. Speaking for myself, I make an effort to restrict my use of it to serious topics such as "George Clooney" or "Taylor Swift."
On a side note, in the process of making space in the bookshelves, I removed all of the books by Lorrie Moore and donated them to the local library.
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