Month: December 2010

As an economic system, Capitalism is nothing but the only economic system that has worked well throughout human history, added to the scientific method and industrialization. It has no moral component, other than the demand for honesty in business, diligence at work, and–for success–imagination.

It is as wrong to say greed has no part in it as to say greed has everything to do with it. All people, for all of history, have wanted more than they had, absent some comforting social narrative, like Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity. What they would normally do is invade other nations, and take their stuff. This was as creative as they got.

Socialism is simply a variant of this, in which the “invasion” is domestic, making the paradigmatic socialist war the civil war. Quite obviously, most deaths from Communism were caused by those in power, and inflicted on those whose welfare they purportedly cared about. Softer versions of this simply lead to economic impoverishment. Tax rates are a tool of war, too, and those enacting them forget that those able to amass wealth are generally much more skilled at keeping it than the State is at stealing it.

The point I wanted to make, though, is that at root much of the driving energy of our economy–at least when it is growing–is that same restless energy that led previous nations to war. Rather than fight with guns and bullets, we fight with aggressive ad campaigns, price cutting, innovation, and business structures.

This is a vast improvement over shooting wars. It is an enormously powerful engine for material prosperity. At the same time, it is not the energy of contentedness. It is not the energy of stability.

In my imagination, I look to a world in the future of villages. I look to a system of economic and social life that is relatively stable, and in which most people feel no need to venture that far from home. This can be brought about, I think, through social innovation, through increased skill at the cultivation of happiness, both as individuals and as communities.

What I would hope to see is a gradual reduction in the restlessness that leads us to fight one another so hard. A key component in this will be winning back the control of our money, and stabilizing it. Building wealth should be much easier than it is currently.

That’s all for now. Things to build.

I have observed this before, but it is interesting to me that the sadness that marks the growth of my children is not associated with their own development, but seeing it in their schoolmates and friends. I suppose I know I will always be around them–to some extent, who knows if they will leave town?–but will not be around their schoolmates. Those children, whose progress I only see in fits and starts, at awards or at sporting events, mark for me I guess times that are now gone. I remember them when they were little. I remember, then, who my own children were then.

Experientially, it is like an odor that just suddenly transports you into a completely different emotional gestalt, associated with another time and place. One marks, by contrast, the slow progress of time, the slow passage on a conveyor belt that ends for all of us sooner or later.

What do children give us? Why do we value the time when they are little so much? I think it is innocence. I think we are all born with the capacity for unreasoning cruelty, but not for intentional cruelty, knowing cruelty.

Deep requited love–and children respond marvelously to sincere love–is a sensation of RELAXATION. This hit me the other day. All of us keep, from necessity, psychological boundaries in place, to prevent emotional injury. Love is dropping those boundaries. It is a risk whose payoff is a profound sense of released tension.

We want to be with others. We want to be with them in an emotional room where you can’t be hurt. Yet that is not how things work.

I wonder, though, how things would be if there were no children, if we all lived as adults our whole lives. Would we not need to recreate or retain some of the innocence that children bring? And as I have wondered before, what if we had no gender, and could not have physical sex? How would we relate to one another? That sense of connection, love, is the real one. Everything else has the potential to include love, but need not. Quite obviously, sex can be loveless, and quite obviously many parents indulge their own need for affection by taking and using the love children offer so spontaneously, without repaying the debt.

Few thoughts, sparked by some dreams I had last night.

I’ve played Trivia in bars a few times. With a couple smart people, I can usually win.

At the same time, I don’t find it very entertaining, or useful. You either know facts or you don’t. Knowing a lot of facts is useful, but it is much more useful to know how to contextualize facts.

What would be interesting and useful to be would be not “name the four cities the Concord flew to”, but “what was the social and political significance, if any, of the Concord jet?”

Everyone could read their answers, and people could vote for the best one. That I would find entertaining.

As things stand, I was pondering the perhaps superficial and inaccurate observation I have that–based on the names of the groups that participate–that Trivia participants tend to be more to the left in their political tendencies.

I was thinking about it, and what I see is that leftists in general are quite educated. Virtually all academics and many professionals (albeit not business owners) are leftists, although many would not use that word. They know a lot of facts.

Yet as I see it, modern education is really not Liberal any more, in the sense that Scientism has coopted Rationalism, with the result that what is really taught is a uniform conformity to intellectual/knowledge Power Elites. Take global warming. We are expected to believe–because it comes from credentialed professionals–that global cooling is an outcome of global warming. Yet when I heat a pot of water, no cooling is generated thereby. Parts of the pot may heat faster–like the part directly over the burner–but it all evens out.

So who do I trust? The “experts”, or my own common sense? If I am properly “educated”, then I trust the experts.

This leads to a situation in which the educated are in possession of vast numbers of data points. Ask them about Vitamin E or the benefits of vegetarianism, or how CO2 acts as a Greenhouse Gas, and they are all over it.

What they don’t do is offer up narratives that rely firmly upon principles. For example, it can easily be shown that the net effect of their prescriptions for poverty actually increase poverty. If there were a principle in place, such as “we need to see to the care, feeding and shelter of the less fortunate among us”, then one could make a simple appeal to efficacy. That doesn’t happen. They just repeat themselves. They don’t adapt. They only adapt when someone TELLS them to adapt.

This is a cultural problem of the first order. We tend to think that if we were smarter the world would be just a bit better, but in my view the world should be RADICALLY different, and we have only just begun to plumb the depths of our collective stupidity.

End note: “tri-via” comes from the Latin word denoting the intersection of three roads. I looked it up, and thought I’d share it. Medieval educational curriculums were also called the Trivium, and consisted in three subjects, which I don’t have time to look up. I think they were Astronony, Rhetoric, and Math, but could be wrong.

I was thinking about Lady Gaga for some reason this morning. I had seen her “Fame Monster” cover the other day, with the mascara that looks like she had been crying. In effect, it looked to me like an invitation to consume her pain. She called her audience “little monsters” once, and I think the reason is that what seems to sell for her is a more or less overt masochism. “When it comes to love, it ain’t fun if there isn’t a gun”. Something close to that.

Unless I miss my guess, I suspect she has fantasies about committing suicide on stage. Who is she? Is she who she used to be–uncertain of herself, craving the approval of others–or this stage persona, this monster she has created? Should she love the people who have granted her fame and fortune, at the cost of what seems to be her soul? Who crave her public displays of more or less self inflicted grief and longing?

Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name we get “masochism”, had a thing for women in furs. One could perhaps generalize and say he had a thing for women dressed extravagantly. I think Lady Gaga qualifies.

What I will say is that there is in my opinion real beauty in her, that is plainly expressed in at least the song “Poker Face”. That song derives it’s somewhat cruel power from the contrast between her potential for beauty–when she lets her voice go–and the continual return to a compulsive masochism.

What I would like to see is her either reinvent this Lady Gaga persona–which is likely impossible–or give it up, and write songs that make her happy. They are in her. I can feel it. At this point, she’s made enough money. If she wants to really not care what people think, that would be the route to take.

I’m not sure why I think about her. I think there is something in her that is common to many of us. That is perhaps part of the reason why she is so popular.

How many of us, I wonder, erect public faces to hide private griefs or aggressions? How many of us are who we appear to be?

As I think I have said before, the process of personal growth, of Goodness, is in my view the progressive reduction in the number of our personalities until we are perfectly congruent in our thoughts/emotions, words, and actions.

It seems to me to be emotionally healthy we need to balance activity with stillness. You have to take chances, do work, get bumped around, and generally mix it up in the world. Then you also have to have time “off” to learn from your mistakes, process things emotionally, and recalibrate/recreate yourself, such that the newer you is better equipped.

On a very deep level, I am not sure that process is as simple in our world as it used to be. One must always be careful, though, about romanticizing the world of yesteryear–we did after all have separate drinking fountains in the South for black people just 50 or so years ago. Go back another twenty, and Europeans were killing one another in great numbers, and samurai swords were getting used in decapitation contests.

Let me put it this way: we exist in a surge of energy, change, emotion and constant activity. We “recreate” with TV and movies and media, among other things. It is a nearly ubiquitous pattern among most Americans to work all day, get dinner, then sit down in front of the TV.

It seems to me you optimally will have a contrast between the change that is a part of life, and other parts of your life that stay the same, that are constant. Things like the Bible, and Shakespeare, that go back at least far beyond the memory of anyone living. The content of this constancy will vary from society to society, and of course the interpretation of those constant themes will vary, but such changes are quite slow, usually, taking centuries.

Stable social narratives are calming. They are a place of rest, so to speak, in that they do not need to be reinvented. Individuals, in all times and places, will need to reinvent themselves vis a vis the social narratives which define their culture: change is inevitable, and will either be somewhat conscious, and somewhat positive, or somewhat unconscious, and either positive or negative.

Yet, what is the backdrop against which we reinvent ourselves? What stable social narratives do we have? The Socialists among us–who are Nihilists in fact if not self understanding–do everything they can to undermine all stable stories, like those of the Bible, patriotism, traditional social forms, and individual autonomy. For these things they want to substitute an as-yet uncreated social order, one which I frankly cannot imagine. Science is not morality. Consciousness will always precede the supposedly empirical conclusions of the post-moralists.

The question I am asking, in effect, is: where do we rest? Upon what can we rely? This is the malady of our modern age. It cannot just be my problem. This is the problem of the goths, and emo’s, and punk rockers, and even the hippies. We see one youth culture after another, each more dysfunctional than the last, all of whom fail to advance our understandings, since they start from the standpoint that silence and stillness are impossible, and all cultural claims are negotiable.

OF COURSE they are negotiable–manifestly the Earth is home to vast amounts of diversity–but can we not let them be until we come up with something better? Can we not slow the destructive energy until we can engage our creative energy?

Destruction is the life of death. It is the energy of a failed effort at individuation. This is what we confront.

I once dreamed of Lucifer. He was very bright, very shiny, so much so that you could barely see him. Yet upon close observation, he was composed of dead bodies, all tangled together. He was Death, disguised as light.

These are a few thoughts on a Tuesday morning. By the way, were you aware that Tuesday, in its end root, means “Day of Mars”? Did you know that Wednesday comes from Woden’s Day, Woden being the god of war also (cognate with Odin), and that some branches of the Vikings practiced human sacrifice in his honor, hanging victims from trees?

As I thought about it, that Joseph of Arimethea tree that was cut down in Britain was almost certainly a sacred tree in the Scandinavian faith that was Christianized. Christmas was a conscious co-opting of Saturnalia, and the tree in the home in winter was Druidic.

I look at these early missionaries, salespeople for a faith, making concessions to close the deal. Sure, you can keep your tree: we’ll just rename it.

I am religious, but it seems to me true religion is a precious flower that blooms briefly in all too few places. The odor remains for some time, then eventually becomes corrupt. I am not at all certain that what Christ taught is what has been passed down to us. I do not think he had symbolic cannibalism in mind when he conducted the Last Supper, complete with cups of blood.

My thinking on this is evolving. I’ll have a post on that topic before long.

There are a variety of stories on this. Republicans are in some respects going too far with it, although in important ways they are quite right to be angry.

What is being offered is counseling, in effect, to encourage old people to not eat up a huge amount of resources on treatments that will only add a few months to their lives. I don’t have the time to look the number up, but some enormous percentage of our healthcare expenses are consumed in the last six months of life. It’s in the 25-50% range.

Think of the thousands it costs daily for Intensive Care, for various chemotherapy treatments, for respirators, for taking a dozen pills a day that each cost $20.

On the one hand, the people who provide these things have an enormous FINANCIAL incentive to continue the status quo, in which the actual costs of things are invisible to the people using them, and their families. This allows, at least potentially, huge profits to be made. Government can always be abused, since it is a system of allocation by fiat, and not by free market decision making.

At the same time, how do we reconcile the fact that we all die, with the ability we now have to prolong life for some period of time?

Ultimately, any system of medical care will have to ration it somehow. We cannot afford to spend, say, a million dollars a day for six months for every American. There has to be a point where enough is enough, and we just accept the inevitability of death. Religion–which the Socialists regularly do everything within their power to undermine and destroy–helps with this.

The question is who makes that decision. What the Democrats have done sneakily here is basically create a sales pitch in which the PATIENT is convinced of the need to end their own lives. This is not a death panel. The death panel will necessarily follow any government run healthcare system, but that is not what this is.

The significance of this story is simply that the slow erosion is patently already happening, in which Obamacare is slowly moulded in the darkness into something that is closer to the Socialists hearts desire. They didn’t feel the need to read the bill since they felt certain they could change it in the 5 years or so they gave themselves into something more congenial to their ideology.

This is the part we need to worry about. This is a process which is anti-democratic, as seen in the patent efforts of the supporters of this change to keep it secret. This is just the first of what have been planned as many steps. In itself, I don’t find this provision that objectionable. I find the PROCESS, however, HIGHLY objectionable.

Identity is something that will always be in flux. Personality is a chaotic system whose parameters are defined by what we choose to pay attention to, and in particular the principles by means of which we live our lives. These principles can be religious. They can be conformity–either to concrete local demands made on you, such as in traditional societies where every last part of your behavior is known to all; or to generalized themes articulated in the mass media, and as embodied in a fluid way by members of your chosen social system.

In many respects, how we view ourselves is the result of a negotiation, a mediation, between our chosen ideals, and our actual behavior. As I see it, this is an active process, and almost the relationship of one person to another. It is like there are people out there giving you advice, which you can follow, reject, or adopt partially.

Existentially, it seems to me we “are” simultaneously the negotiator, and all the components which are making claims on our attention and following behavior.

In the end, all human behavior depends on identity. All science, all politics, and all economics depends on it.

When people look to the Founding Fathers, what we see is adherence to a political system. But that political system–Liberalism–depends in turn on personal, individual identities that are not thereby CREATED by it. By and large, our Founders saw their identities as arising from either their Christianity, or their membership in the Masons. Liberalism is a political system within which moral narratives operate, and consists as a political doctrine upon the epistemological doctrine that no final general moral truth is possible, but that many truths can lead to desirable results.

These are a few thoughts. Do with them what you will.

There can be no doubt that continental America is an Empire in which the conquered peoples have been marginalized and–to a lesser extent–assimilated. The population density of the Indians even prior to the plagues that beset them–and which have every appearance of being simply epidemic reactions to diseases to which they had no antigens, and nowhere the result of official policy, despite much propaganda to the contrary–were nothing remotely like Europe.

We conquered them. We marched them into camps. Many died. The remainder were left to live, more or less in peace.

One thing we never did is enslave them. This fact became clear to me in listening to a history of the Vikings. It was not known to me–and likely not well known generally–that the wealth upon which the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden eventually came to be founded was in large measure the product of slaving. Throughout Viking history, human captives taken in raids were one of their primary commodities. They took many Irish, who were often–like West Africans–only too eager to capture and hand their rivals over.

They took so many Slavs that that is where we get the name “slave” from. They would come into a village, kill anyone who resisted, and take everyone–men, women, and children, provided they were healthy–and sell them to merchants who would trade them on down-river, usually to the Islamic world.

And when one studies world history, it is a litany of atrocities. It is no exaggeration to say that Britain and the United States, as Christian nations, are the first ones to develop a principled basis by means of which to object to what had been going on for all of human history. The Chinese kept slaves. The Greeks kept slaves. The slavery of the Jews in Egypt is part of their foundational narrative, that they remember ritually every year. The Romans kept slaves. And to the point here, the American Indians also kept slaves. The pattern was the same: you raid a neighboring village, and carry off the women you want, and the children to be raised in your way, and to do your work.

When looking at history, there is little use hand-wringing, and judging people by our own standards. What we need to track is the genesis and evolution of ideals, and then figure out how we can best improve upon and better implement those ideals in the modern world. Flogging yourself does no good for anyone but you: the benefit to you is you free yourself thereby from the responsibility of living in the present, and making adult decisions in what will always be a fluid and ambiguous world.

There are those for whom certainty is more important than clarity. Sometimes, I think the best minds just have to admit on a seemingly on-going basis “we don’t know”. This doesn’t sit well with some.

As one specific example–the one that prompted this post–people in the field of evolutionary biology want to reduce all human behavior to artifacts of our evolutionary history. It is logical enough: we are machines, programmed by our DNA, which itself arose as a complex system in response to the adaptive needs of millions of years of periodic scarcity and competition for survival among numerous organisms.

They can categorize observable human behavior, and work backwards to figure out what need each type of behavior may have met on some distant, dark, foggy shore. It all seems so clear. They can derive altruism as a derivation of the group instinct; Love as an extension both of the group instinct and the sexual urge; etc. (Note: these may not be the precise cases presented; what matters, obviously, is the intellectual framework within which it happens.)

Yet, what about this categorizing behavior itself? Can we not point to an evolutionary urge to avoid ambiguity? Can we not posit a coercive urge deriving from our social history to manufacture consent by any means possible? Can we not, in short, deconstruct the evolutionary deconstruction process as one example of itself, and thus flawed instrinsically and at root as a “truth” system”?

What comes first, matter or consciousness? We can’t know, but phenomenologically it is quite clearly consciousness. We don’t know what we don’t know, so we can’t speak to possible experiences which do not include our conscious presence, in some form.

Further, our best theories of the nature of the universe tell us that consciousness precedes the formation of matter. This was the conclusion von Neumann–who wrote the “Grundlage”, literally the book on the topic of quantum physics–reached.

Ideas obviously compete, and the best ones rise to the top, but only in conditions of open competition. And I don’t think we have had open competition in the biological sciences in some time.

That makes what passes for science nowadays much closer to the bloody and zero sum rivalries of chimp colonies, not homo sapiens. It is retrogressive.

I believe I invented this term. As I understand it, “media” is a term taken directly from Latin, and is the plural of “medium”. We don’t think about it, but the term media itself conveys a sense of transmission, of centrality, of connecting one thing, person or idea with another. Chalk drawings can be an artistic medium. A highway can be a transportational medium. We use the term medium for people who claim to be able to communicate with the dead.

Our Media, then, understood collectively, can be understood as mediating the world for us. The world in all its naked glory is out there somewhere, and what we get to see is some small portion of it, as selected for importance, and as sculpted via the direct perceivers. Not everything that could be news becomes news. Not everything that becomes news happened the way it is reported. Something happens somewhere, it enters a tube, then it hits us.

The first point in this regard I will make is that self evidently our own personal experiences–what we see of the physical world, what we observe as the behavior of matter, and social institutions, and human psychology etc–are unmediated, at least in principle. Yet paradoxically they can become mediated, if rather than trust our own eyes or intuition, we instead process things which have actually happened to us by our internalized understanding of what is POSSIBLE.

Common sense, you see, is in my view common. We are more or less born with it, and add to every time we stub our toe, or unintentionally offend someone, or otherwise have an unpleasant bump with “the world”.

This is one point. The more important point I wanted to make, and the reason for the neologism (other than my fondness for them) is a perception I had the other day.

I went to see “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. As always when I go to the movie theater, I was struck by the largeness of everything, and the loudness of everything. I was struck by how our lives are pervaded–filled, centrally–with media. We watch TV as children. We watch TV as adolescents and adults. Our first experience with “sex” is almost certainly via the computer or DVD. We take our iPods everywhere. We listen to music in cars. Many people fall asleep watching TV. Between the internet and TV, most people consume media for probably a third of their lives. I’m not talking waking life: I literally think 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, and 8 hours of internet/TV is not too far off. Obviously, most people surf the internet even while at work.

Always, always, always, we have imaginary figures in front of us. We have movie actors who seem brave and noble–or villainous and interesting, or sexy, or mercurial, or ideosyncratic, or whatever floats our particular boat–who are in front of us all the time. All the time. All the time. In supermarket checkout lanes. On TV. In newspapers.

In the movie theater, I was looking at some young men I would call freaks. They were fat, pale, and unhealthy looking. And I know they spent a lot of time watching movies, and probably playing immersive video games. Many kids nowadays spend so much time consuming media, that they never develop proper social skills. They are like bread that is half baked. They are morally retarded in important ways. You know the people of whom I speak. You see them. They are nice enough, but you always know there is something going on in their heads that is not of this world.

They are not full members of our social order. Yet who can say anymore who IS of our social order? Who are we? Media–in the middle–has taken up all the reference points we used to have. The Bible? Gone for all but those who go to church, which in this country at any rate is still quite a few people, which is encouraging in a way.

It seems to me that where genuine community could stand, in all too many cases there is an array of vivid and unforgettable images burned. It is clear from evidence that exposure to violent media mutes natural empathy and directly supports cynicism and–presumably following–depression.

Can we not say that in many cases where the possibility for the expression of affection and loyalty and goodwill may have happened in another time, now we have this sort of childlike, imbecilic, pseudoconnection, more afraid than open, more symptomatic of a childlike emotional sensitivity, and lack of capacity for mature connection with others?

It seems that way to me. We have created a new type of human being, unlike anything seen before. I literally think our interactions with media, with images of death and love and novelty, are rewiring our physical brains in ways that no one has yet fully grasped or investigated.