Two things. One: Simply disgusting.
That's about
Two: Really?
There are no acorns in the American Northeast.
About the second, again, nobody knows what's happening. It'd be nice if we could go back to a place where we weren't just waiting to see what would happen as a result of fudging around with the environment. (See my post titled "unintended consequences.") Of course, we can't and things are pretty weird. Did we do it? NOBODY KNOWS.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Somewhat troubling
A report in the Washington Post today.
A little troubling. If you can answer the following question in a different fashion, I'd be very happy: why military, if not for population control / martial law?
Oh, come on you far--out paranoid, if there were a terrorist attack on the country, wouldn't we need twenty thousand (at least) soldiers to help out?
No, not soldiers. A terrorist attack would NOT be an invasion. I can't see a reason, beyond population control, that you couldn't do what the military is here to do with a corps of trained citizen volunteers, like volunteer firemen. Logistically, yes, it might be a little more difficult. But it avoids having the military active in the country (in large numbers,) which is just an open invitation for trouble. I guarantee that if they are ever used (why are they there if not to be used) there will be abuses times a billion. Perhaps (but only perhaps) it is better than, say, using Blackwater, at least it's out in the open.
I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it could.
And that's more troubling to me than a terrorist attack. Terrorists do not win when they attack. But they'd win if we deployed the military in response to one.
A little troubling. If you can answer the following question in a different fashion, I'd be very happy: why military, if not for population control / martial law?
Oh, come on you far--out paranoid, if there were a terrorist attack on the country, wouldn't we need twenty thousand (at least) soldiers to help out?
No, not soldiers. A terrorist attack would NOT be an invasion. I can't see a reason, beyond population control, that you couldn't do what the military is here to do with a corps of trained citizen volunteers, like volunteer firemen. Logistically, yes, it might be a little more difficult. But it avoids having the military active in the country (in large numbers,) which is just an open invitation for trouble. I guarantee that if they are ever used (why are they there if not to be used) there will be abuses times a billion. Perhaps (but only perhaps) it is better than, say, using Blackwater, at least it's out in the open.
I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it could.
And that's more troubling to me than a terrorist attack. Terrorists do not win when they attack. But they'd win if we deployed the military in response to one.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Myths about Liberals
Here's a wonderful list of liberal talking points for the Thanksgiving table, a re-branding of the word, if you will.
It's odd why you need the political trade winds to shift so much before any of these come to light. Three years ago, you'd have heard few people on any sort of mainstream media defending what it is and means to be liberal, but since 2006, and then crescendoing after the liberal's wet dream, Barack Obama, was elected president of the united states, you've heard a lot more of this.
Happy Thanksgiving!
It's odd why you need the political trade winds to shift so much before any of these come to light. Three years ago, you'd have heard few people on any sort of mainstream media defending what it is and means to be liberal, but since 2006, and then crescendoing after the liberal's wet dream, Barack Obama, was elected president of the united states, you've heard a lot more of this.
Happy Thanksgiving!
The Meaning of Life.
From Wikipedia.
I just like how it says, "This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject."
Whoever that is, I'd like to meet them.
I just like how it says, "This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject."
Whoever that is, I'd like to meet them.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Peter Fenner, Radiant Mind
Peter Fenner gives about as good, simple and natural an explanation to the space of consciousness as just about anyone I've come across.
A short dialogue, here.
A short dialogue, here.
More on the "End of America."
If you don't have time to watch the video, here's a nice synopsis of Naomi Wolf's 10 steps to closing a society.
The main thing I want to say, connected with yesterday's post about unintended consequences, is that the powers that Bush put into play during his presidency are still valid.
Obama may restrain himself from using some of them, (say, signing statements) but to truly ensure the survival of American democracy, we have to expressly remove certain of these powers, like the ability to declare anyone an enemy combatant, or to use the national guard as a police force, things any president would love to have in an emergency, and keep afterwards.
The question to be determined in Obama's first year or so is, what is he working for? If it is for the good of American democracy, we should see an unequivocal reversal of many of the president's arbitrary and un-american war powers. If it is for the capitalist class, expect no rescinding of these powers, instead some soft words and talk of how it's unecessary to change anything at this point, for whatever concocted reason.
We're in some shit.
The main thing I want to say, connected with yesterday's post about unintended consequences, is that the powers that Bush put into play during his presidency are still valid.
Obama may restrain himself from using some of them, (say, signing statements) but to truly ensure the survival of American democracy, we have to expressly remove certain of these powers, like the ability to declare anyone an enemy combatant, or to use the national guard as a police force, things any president would love to have in an emergency, and keep afterwards.
The question to be determined in Obama's first year or so is, what is he working for? If it is for the good of American democracy, we should see an unequivocal reversal of many of the president's arbitrary and un-american war powers. If it is for the capitalist class, expect no rescinding of these powers, instead some soft words and talk of how it's unecessary to change anything at this point, for whatever concocted reason.
We're in some shit.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Unintended Consequences
An article on National Geographic.
Real quick: unintended consequences. Any system is in a constant state of cyclical flux, (feedback loops, if you will) that is in balance at any point in time. The more complicated the system, the less obvious the connections between individual constituents of the system. For example, the dynamic of a two-child family is more complex than the heating system of their house, and the operation of their society is infinitely more complex than the family.
The more complex the system, the less likely it is that consequences of changing one element can be predicted.
We're seeing this across the board when it comes to climate change, which is why certain pundits now prefer the phrase "global weirding" to "global warming."
Again: 1- the earth's ecosystems are about as complex as they come.
2- We are seriously screwing with them.
3- Anybody who does not take this uncertainty (or, looking at historical examples of assuredness in the face of complete unknowability, the relative certainty of disaster) as the number one most important thing in any talks about climate change has the race handicapped poorly.
Of course, we're not just fudging with one or two things at a time here. We are fudging with everything in the global ecosystem, upon which humanity is precariously balanced. Who knows what's going to happen? Nobody. But, rather than write it off and say, "well, whatever happens isn't likely to be that big," we should be saying, "we're in a balance that has suited us well for thousands and thousands of years, and the likelihood of a new balance being in our favor is probably small."
It's ironic that this conservative value is so outside the mindset of the majority of today's political conservatives.
And, though this is an environmental example, it relates to almost every human choice. At the outset, options may appear clear, but one can never correctly judge what the consequence of the first choice will be. Instead of blindly trudging forward through ever changing circumstances, we need a much more flexible way of operating, one that makes a choice, looks at what happens, and only then moves on. Kaizen: my favorite Japanese word.
Real quick: unintended consequences. Any system is in a constant state of cyclical flux, (feedback loops, if you will) that is in balance at any point in time. The more complicated the system, the less obvious the connections between individual constituents of the system. For example, the dynamic of a two-child family is more complex than the heating system of their house, and the operation of their society is infinitely more complex than the family.
The more complex the system, the less likely it is that consequences of changing one element can be predicted.
We're seeing this across the board when it comes to climate change, which is why certain pundits now prefer the phrase "global weirding" to "global warming."
Again: 1- the earth's ecosystems are about as complex as they come.
2- We are seriously screwing with them.
3- Anybody who does not take this uncertainty (or, looking at historical examples of assuredness in the face of complete unknowability, the relative certainty of disaster) as the number one most important thing in any talks about climate change has the race handicapped poorly.
Of course, we're not just fudging with one or two things at a time here. We are fudging with everything in the global ecosystem, upon which humanity is precariously balanced. Who knows what's going to happen? Nobody. But, rather than write it off and say, "well, whatever happens isn't likely to be that big," we should be saying, "we're in a balance that has suited us well for thousands and thousands of years, and the likelihood of a new balance being in our favor is probably small."
It's ironic that this conservative value is so outside the mindset of the majority of today's political conservatives.
And, though this is an environmental example, it relates to almost every human choice. At the outset, options may appear clear, but one can never correctly judge what the consequence of the first choice will be. Instead of blindly trudging forward through ever changing circumstances, we need a much more flexible way of operating, one that makes a choice, looks at what happens, and only then moves on. Kaizen: my favorite Japanese word.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Four Philosophical Questions on the BBC
This is a response to a piece on the BBC's website, containing four knotty philosophical questions. I can answer each of them to my satisfaction, so I'd like to put my answers out there.
It would be helpful to read the original piece, as I'm not going to put the whole, lengthy questions here.
1- Should we kill healthy people for their organs?
No. While, in all three cases, the phrase "saving five people by killing one" applies, in the first case, "Bill" is in no jeopardy. It would be wrong to kill someone healthy who is not in danger of death against his will. In the second case it is not immoral to kill the individual, because all six people are already in jeopardy. If you don't kill one of them yourself, that person will die anyway, whereas Bill is in no such danger.
Now, in the third case, while the choice of which track to set the train rolling down seems to be taking someone who is not in danger, the single person tied to the alternate track, and killing him/her, it is not equivalent to Bill's case because Bill isn't tied to any train tracks! So, although in both cases you appear to be making a deliberate choice sacrificing one person (kill Bill for his organs, flip the switch to kill the individual on the tracks) to spare five people, the fact that the individual in the train example is tied to active train tracks places him or her in a danger that Bill is not in. I think this is why most people intuitively answer that it is not okay to kill Bill, but okay to let the train kill the individual tied to the tracks, and okay to kill the one hostage to set the five free.
2- Are you the same person who started reading this article?
The dichotomy between the statements "everything is constantly changing" and "nothing changes" is false, as the two statements of truth are only apparently different. In reality, all of these concepts we think of as being fundamentally opposed (say, motion and stillness, or freewill and fate) are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon, "being." Concept and language view separate phenomena, and the mistake is to say that they are separate, and therefore NOT UNIFIED. The paradox in "everything is in constant change" is, of course, that that rule itself is not subject to change, but this paradox doesn't mean there's something wrong with the world, or that this truth itself is wrong, it's pointing to the inability of language to grasp the nature of reality as being constantly changing, continuously unchanging, both constantly changing and unchanging, and neither changing nor unchanging, and all necessarily so. There is no possibility of "being" being anyway other than this, a can of worms for another time.
Similarly, the dichotomy between the subject and the object is conceptual/ perceptual, and built into the structure of reality, but not itself ultimately real. Again, reality is neither subjective nor objective, it is both at the same time. Everything in the phenomenal world is in constant change and only a part of the whole, and also at the same time ultimately the same as what does not change, being itself. The sense of unchanging identity comes from this center of your unchanging being, and this does not change, though everything phenomenal is fluid and changing.
So, what you think you are is totally different from what it was at the beginning of the article, and even from moment to moment. What you actually are, everything, has not changed.
3- Is that really a computer screen in front of you?
Closely related to the above, this question hinges on the belief in some "thing" that is "real," as opposed to "things" that are not real.
There is no "independent" check on your senses because there is no true "independence." There is no "thing" in the universe with any reality separate from the reality of the rest of the universe, a sticking point of materialism. There's no getting outside the system, because everything conceivable in any time point in space or dimension is the system.
But it's not just that it's impossible to verify what's really really real (say, where exactly the buck stops,) it's that the idea of something being really really real independently is mistaken.
Basically, the sentence "There is a computer screen in front of me" loses any meaning if it is meant in an ultimate sense, and not a practical one. Practically, there is a computer screen in front of you, right now. Ultimately, reality doesn't work this way.
4-Did you really choose to read this article?
Again, closely related to the above two questions.
All of these "stickler" questions come at the logical conclusions of two seemingly obvious lines of thought.
Again, we're placing too much emphasis on the "really real, independently real, truly and ultimately real" nature of our concepts and what they refer to. Free will and determinism are not contradictory, they are two ways of looking at determination of process, and are each shortcuts.
All is the Universe, and you are this as well, so, whatever you do is determined, ultimately, by whatever it is that determines everything, and that is also what you are in any real sense, so, really, you have ultimate free will, enough to seriously frighten most people. Saying that all of your choices are pre-determined doesn't rule out that you determined them yourself, but, again, our concept of the free agent of choice is only a shorthand. On the other side of the coin, let's say that the result of a choice is one of two extreme possibilities, either at that moment the universe splits and BOTH happen, ultimately meaning that every infinitely small moment creates an infinite amount of second-moments, and so on (which, though it seems perhaps counter-intuitive that there could be infinite to the infinite worlds out there, is less so if you remember the fact of infinity), or only one thing happens, and all the other possibilities fall back into nothing. Either way is entirely handcuffing the very free will affirmed above. Either every choice is played out in every possible fashion, in which case who "you" are is just an accident of whichever line you happen to be watching, or you can never un-choose what has happened, and can't say whether (since there is only one universe) what happened ever actually had a choice option, both deterministic in their ways. At the end of the day all of this conjecture is meaningless, it all rests on the incorrect assumption that free-will and choice are different possibilities. Things happen. You are a part of what makes them happen, in fact what "you" are is also what this is, so you have free-will, and further, you are not different from what is happening. Even the idea of acting on something different from you is mistaken, it is practical. There is also never any real alternative to what is, so there is no free will. These are both true at the same time, and really, neither of them is true at all, they're only ways of talking, of wrapping words (though not fruitlessly) around something that cannot be corralled. The universe is not what it appears, and, it is. Everything is oneness, everything is nothingness, oneness is nothingness.
Okay, feel free to add your own thoughts.
It would be helpful to read the original piece, as I'm not going to put the whole, lengthy questions here.
1- Should we kill healthy people for their organs?
No. While, in all three cases, the phrase "saving five people by killing one" applies, in the first case, "Bill" is in no jeopardy. It would be wrong to kill someone healthy who is not in danger of death against his will. In the second case it is not immoral to kill the individual, because all six people are already in jeopardy. If you don't kill one of them yourself, that person will die anyway, whereas Bill is in no such danger.
Now, in the third case, while the choice of which track to set the train rolling down seems to be taking someone who is not in danger, the single person tied to the alternate track, and killing him/her, it is not equivalent to Bill's case because Bill isn't tied to any train tracks! So, although in both cases you appear to be making a deliberate choice sacrificing one person (kill Bill for his organs, flip the switch to kill the individual on the tracks) to spare five people, the fact that the individual in the train example is tied to active train tracks places him or her in a danger that Bill is not in. I think this is why most people intuitively answer that it is not okay to kill Bill, but okay to let the train kill the individual tied to the tracks, and okay to kill the one hostage to set the five free.
2- Are you the same person who started reading this article?
The dichotomy between the statements "everything is constantly changing" and "nothing changes" is false, as the two statements of truth are only apparently different. In reality, all of these concepts we think of as being fundamentally opposed (say, motion and stillness, or freewill and fate) are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon, "being." Concept and language view separate phenomena, and the mistake is to say that they are separate, and therefore NOT UNIFIED. The paradox in "everything is in constant change" is, of course, that that rule itself is not subject to change, but this paradox doesn't mean there's something wrong with the world, or that this truth itself is wrong, it's pointing to the inability of language to grasp the nature of reality as being constantly changing, continuously unchanging, both constantly changing and unchanging, and neither changing nor unchanging, and all necessarily so. There is no possibility of "being" being anyway other than this, a can of worms for another time.
Similarly, the dichotomy between the subject and the object is conceptual/ perceptual, and built into the structure of reality, but not itself ultimately real. Again, reality is neither subjective nor objective, it is both at the same time. Everything in the phenomenal world is in constant change and only a part of the whole, and also at the same time ultimately the same as what does not change, being itself. The sense of unchanging identity comes from this center of your unchanging being, and this does not change, though everything phenomenal is fluid and changing.
So, what you think you are is totally different from what it was at the beginning of the article, and even from moment to moment. What you actually are, everything, has not changed.
3- Is that really a computer screen in front of you?
Closely related to the above, this question hinges on the belief in some "thing" that is "real," as opposed to "things" that are not real.
There is no "independent" check on your senses because there is no true "independence." There is no "thing" in the universe with any reality separate from the reality of the rest of the universe, a sticking point of materialism. There's no getting outside the system, because everything conceivable in any time point in space or dimension is the system.
But it's not just that it's impossible to verify what's really really real (say, where exactly the buck stops,) it's that the idea of something being really really real independently is mistaken.
Basically, the sentence "There is a computer screen in front of me" loses any meaning if it is meant in an ultimate sense, and not a practical one. Practically, there is a computer screen in front of you, right now. Ultimately, reality doesn't work this way.
4-Did you really choose to read this article?
Again, closely related to the above two questions.
All of these "stickler" questions come at the logical conclusions of two seemingly obvious lines of thought.
Again, we're placing too much emphasis on the "really real, independently real, truly and ultimately real" nature of our concepts and what they refer to. Free will and determinism are not contradictory, they are two ways of looking at determination of process, and are each shortcuts.
All is the Universe, and you are this as well, so, whatever you do is determined, ultimately, by whatever it is that determines everything, and that is also what you are in any real sense, so, really, you have ultimate free will, enough to seriously frighten most people. Saying that all of your choices are pre-determined doesn't rule out that you determined them yourself, but, again, our concept of the free agent of choice is only a shorthand. On the other side of the coin, let's say that the result of a choice is one of two extreme possibilities, either at that moment the universe splits and BOTH happen, ultimately meaning that every infinitely small moment creates an infinite amount of second-moments, and so on (which, though it seems perhaps counter-intuitive that there could be infinite to the infinite worlds out there, is less so if you remember the fact of infinity), or only one thing happens, and all the other possibilities fall back into nothing. Either way is entirely handcuffing the very free will affirmed above. Either every choice is played out in every possible fashion, in which case who "you" are is just an accident of whichever line you happen to be watching, or you can never un-choose what has happened, and can't say whether (since there is only one universe) what happened ever actually had a choice option, both deterministic in their ways. At the end of the day all of this conjecture is meaningless, it all rests on the incorrect assumption that free-will and choice are different possibilities. Things happen. You are a part of what makes them happen, in fact what "you" are is also what this is, so you have free-will, and further, you are not different from what is happening. Even the idea of acting on something different from you is mistaken, it is practical. There is also never any real alternative to what is, so there is no free will. These are both true at the same time, and really, neither of them is true at all, they're only ways of talking, of wrapping words (though not fruitlessly) around something that cannot be corralled. The universe is not what it appears, and, it is. Everything is oneness, everything is nothingness, oneness is nothingness.
Okay, feel free to add your own thoughts.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Hmmmmmm, I knew that tasted fishy.
An excerpt adopted from "Fast Food Nation," by Eric Schlosser.
Two things I want to say:
1- When you have to over compensate for doing something it should be clear that the original thing is probably the result of ridiculously tortured thinking, and a better and more efficient solution is out there: exhibit A here, you need to add chemicals to processed foods to make them taste like real food (or, for that matter, to keep them from decomposing.) Solution: eat real food. Food that needs chemicals to taste like food is not, in the first place food. This is entirely different from spicing, which you'll surely notice if you read the article.
exhibit B, an example from Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma:" waste products at factory farms. Where waste used to be used as fertilizer, it is now too far from farms to be used as such, and, in the gigantic quantities that you accumulate when your feedlot consists of tens of thousands of animals, is poisoning the water supplies for hundreds of miles. In addition, chemical fertilizers must be used to replace the nutrients in the soil no longer naturally replaced by "waste."
This is not just silliness, it is indicative of a way of thinking that is destroying the very things humans need for their survival. Five hundred years ago, there was no such thing as waste. When there is only so much on the planet to make waste out of, isn't there a predestined end to that?
2- If you want to know what you're eating (say, if you're vegan, vegetarian, keep kosher, halal, etc., simply conscientious) it's impractical if not entirely impossible to do this and eat any processed foods. As an example: I bet you didn't know (if you hadn't read this book or the article) that you've ingested parts of thousands if not millions of bugs called "Dactylopius coccus Costa" whose dessicated shells are used as red and pink coloring in such obviously meat laden products as pink-grapefruit juice and Dannon Strawberry Yoghurt.
Oh yeah, not to mention that we really have no clue what most of the thousands of chemicals the average person ingests on any given day actually do to the long-term health of the human body.
Things aren't this complicated, and there's hope on the horizon. People are finally starting to realize, in large numbers, that things aren't this complicated in the real world.
We just make it that way.
Two things I want to say:
1- When you have to over compensate for doing something it should be clear that the original thing is probably the result of ridiculously tortured thinking, and a better and more efficient solution is out there: exhibit A here, you need to add chemicals to processed foods to make them taste like real food (or, for that matter, to keep them from decomposing.) Solution: eat real food. Food that needs chemicals to taste like food is not, in the first place food. This is entirely different from spicing, which you'll surely notice if you read the article.
exhibit B, an example from Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma:" waste products at factory farms. Where waste used to be used as fertilizer, it is now too far from farms to be used as such, and, in the gigantic quantities that you accumulate when your feedlot consists of tens of thousands of animals, is poisoning the water supplies for hundreds of miles. In addition, chemical fertilizers must be used to replace the nutrients in the soil no longer naturally replaced by "waste."
This is not just silliness, it is indicative of a way of thinking that is destroying the very things humans need for their survival. Five hundred years ago, there was no such thing as waste. When there is only so much on the planet to make waste out of, isn't there a predestined end to that?
2- If you want to know what you're eating (say, if you're vegan, vegetarian, keep kosher, halal, etc., simply conscientious) it's impractical if not entirely impossible to do this and eat any processed foods. As an example: I bet you didn't know (if you hadn't read this book or the article) that you've ingested parts of thousands if not millions of bugs called "Dactylopius coccus Costa" whose dessicated shells are used as red and pink coloring in such obviously meat laden products as pink-grapefruit juice and Dannon Strawberry Yoghurt.
Oh yeah, not to mention that we really have no clue what most of the thousands of chemicals the average person ingests on any given day actually do to the long-term health of the human body.
Things aren't this complicated, and there's hope on the horizon. People are finally starting to realize, in large numbers, that things aren't this complicated in the real world.
We just make it that way.
Smile! Ten Things Science Says Will Make You Happy!
From Yes! Magazine: 10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy!
The title, deciphered, means "10 things supported by scientific research that people who tend to be happy do."
Of course, there's the problem of cause and effect, that is, does this MAKE people happy, or do happy people just tend to do these things more often?
My observation about this comes from experience with number seven: Smile, even when you don't feel like it. A few months ago I had been in a funk for a few days, when, in reading a website about Tai Ji to refine my form, I saw a note: Qi Gong Practice: Smile!
Don't just smile, break out a achingly wide happy-smile, like a proud papa watching his son learn how to ride a bike, the article said, giving step-by-step instructions as if it were a complicated movement in Tai Ji. Doing this, it's hard not to feel happy, or at least to bring that sensation of smiling in contact with whatever and wherever in your body isn't feeling the smile. Repeat. I found that as I smiled, as I remembered to smile, whatever sensation of unpleasantness was in my body was relaxed away, and whatever unnaturalness I had felt about smiling similarly left, and that it was hard to stop smiling! Right now as I write I'm having the same problem: smiling makes me feel too good! I'm literally beaming, for no reason at all, just because I smiled once, purposely and concentratedly, at the beginning of writing this, and I just can't stop.
This dovetails into the first recommendation: Savor everyday moments. Just stop and smell the roses, as it were, or watch children playing. That smiling might just come back of its own accord. That bursting happiness from smiling any other time of the day will also help you to focus on just what's in front of you, the breathtaking beauty of the terribly mundane.
So, is it one, or the other? Does being happy make you do these things, or do these things make you happy?
As with everything, it's both. Being happy makes you do these things freely and joyfully, which makes you happy, which makes you do these things freely and joyfully. What a world!
Really, of course, remembering to smile, remembering to appreciate the littlest moments, is what awareness practice is, and is all about. There is nothing wrong with the world. We get caught up in ourselves, and neglect this simple and ever-present sensation of joy that is the base of everything else.
So, if you are alone, (don't want to look foolish, now,) smile, uncompromisingly, smile as wide as you can, let your eyes come together at the sides, your scalp pull back, and open your mouth up and smile! Then, repeat as necessary.
The title, deciphered, means "10 things supported by scientific research that people who tend to be happy do."
Of course, there's the problem of cause and effect, that is, does this MAKE people happy, or do happy people just tend to do these things more often?
My observation about this comes from experience with number seven: Smile, even when you don't feel like it. A few months ago I had been in a funk for a few days, when, in reading a website about Tai Ji to refine my form, I saw a note: Qi Gong Practice: Smile!
Don't just smile, break out a achingly wide happy-smile, like a proud papa watching his son learn how to ride a bike, the article said, giving step-by-step instructions as if it were a complicated movement in Tai Ji. Doing this, it's hard not to feel happy, or at least to bring that sensation of smiling in contact with whatever and wherever in your body isn't feeling the smile. Repeat. I found that as I smiled, as I remembered to smile, whatever sensation of unpleasantness was in my body was relaxed away, and whatever unnaturalness I had felt about smiling similarly left, and that it was hard to stop smiling! Right now as I write I'm having the same problem: smiling makes me feel too good! I'm literally beaming, for no reason at all, just because I smiled once, purposely and concentratedly, at the beginning of writing this, and I just can't stop.
This dovetails into the first recommendation: Savor everyday moments. Just stop and smell the roses, as it were, or watch children playing. That smiling might just come back of its own accord. That bursting happiness from smiling any other time of the day will also help you to focus on just what's in front of you, the breathtaking beauty of the terribly mundane.
So, is it one, or the other? Does being happy make you do these things, or do these things make you happy?
As with everything, it's both. Being happy makes you do these things freely and joyfully, which makes you happy, which makes you do these things freely and joyfully. What a world!
Really, of course, remembering to smile, remembering to appreciate the littlest moments, is what awareness practice is, and is all about. There is nothing wrong with the world. We get caught up in ourselves, and neglect this simple and ever-present sensation of joy that is the base of everything else.
So, if you are alone, (don't want to look foolish, now,) smile, uncompromisingly, smile as wide as you can, let your eyes come together at the sides, your scalp pull back, and open your mouth up and smile! Then, repeat as necessary.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Barack Obama, and Freedom
Fair enough to say that no one will know exactly what last week's election means for a long, long time. Perhaps this is part of the reason that I've had such trouble articulating what effect it has had on me, and what it has made me feel, beyond an incredible giddiness, and an outpouring of emotion. I think I have finally figured out just why Barack Obama moves me as much as he does, and it starts with the words in his victory speech that moved me the most, playing with Lincoln's (second?) most famous excerpt from the Gettysburg address, that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," has not perished from the face of the Earth.
There were other moments, seeing the first-family-elect step onto the stage for the first time was another, but this moment made me choke up the most. I think this is why:
I believe in American exceptionalism. I think that America introduced something new into world politics, something fundamentally new. This does not mean, of course, that I support every interpretation of this, far from it. I think most of the problems we get into involve some romantic idea of American righteousness, and so while I don't and cannot support "my country right or wrong" thinking, I do think that America introduced something critical for the future wellfare of mankind, something that no other country could have, and something that is slowly leaking out elsewhere (I do not think another country in the world could have elected Obama, (or an equivalent) for those who disagree with the "slowly" part of that) and something that is overwhelmingly beneficial for humankind and civilization.
Obviously, I am an idealist.
Over the last eight years, my idealism has been tempered by a great deal of cynicism and skepticism, (not two words for the same thing, though there are overlaps in certain situations) two other modes of thought that I am quite comfortable with, despite my core of idealism. What the idealist loves about our country, the cynic/skeptic is terrified we are losing, or have already lost. This has not been partisan (i.e., I'm not simply "anti-republican") rather it has been the fear that certain philosophies of governing embraced by the current administration have been threatening to government for the people. The road to fascism is paved with good intentions. Fascism, here, means government that uses its power to subjugate its own people. Not culturally, mind you: I would argue that conformity to cultural practices and, say, death camps, are two entirely different phenomenon. Culture is, at the same time, much more benign a form of "subjugation," if you wish to call it that, and much more insidious, built into the fabric of what people's identities are. But it is not being billy-clubbed for talking negatively about the government. I am following Naomi Wolf here. For a laundry list talk about the road to fascism, watch the following, or read her book, "The End of America."
In any case, for me, this has been the most important thing about the Obama candidacy, and the election. It is the key element that holds everything else in together: the appearance of an unabashedly rational, intellectual candidate; the major step taken for civil rights; the potential return of moral and political authority to america; returning america from the brink of modern-day laissez-faire economics; the face of america returning as being young, optimistic, inclusive, practical, idealistic (at the same time,) humble, etc. etc. opposed to the face we've seen in the last eight years; the excitement and participatory level in politics; the understanding of the importance of issues (the economy, energy, and the environment,) as trumping divisive politics (and the media, by the way;) the emergence of an interconnected citizenry plugged into the media but not dependent upon it: all of these aspects, and more, I see as the natural outcome of a (relatively) free and (relatively) open society in crisis.
Had McCain won the election despite the popular push for Obama apparent in everything and in nearly every demographic and the above, it would have been a symbol to me that the American Dream, not of a chicken in every pot, but of the enshrined ability to say and be and feel whatever one wants, and the belief that this leads to a better world for all, was either being threatened by the powers that be, or was dead already, killed when we all weren't looking.
It is, in a word, the ability to freely agree or disagree without repercussion.
America brought the sense that a country and its government are separable, and that patriotism is not love of government, but love of country, something, under the Bush administration, that was smeared two hundred years into the past. In China this has been one of the most dumbfounding aspects for me, that there is no separation, theoretically or practically, between what "the government" is and what "the country" is. There's an awareness, sure, and a line I often get from people who start interrogating me about how America could be so stupid (often a line of questioning starting with Iraq and Bush) is that "okay, okay, American people are good people, Chinese people are good people, but governments everywhere are bad." Of course, what I couldn't say, because I had had no evidence for it, was "when the people are good, and allowed a large degree of participation, the government can't but be good as well." I have some evidence for that now.
Are we being hoodwinked? Is Obama a Manchurian candidate working to support a global elite against (an important word) the citizens of the planet? A quick reversal of tone and policy by his administration in the areas that Bush has done the most and potentially permanent damage to the fabric of the country would do much to silence those two voices, skepticism and cynicism, so essential to freedom, and well-trained in the last eight years.
It is up to us to keep watch, and our power to keep the world moving towards an open and free society, inclusive and supportive of all. It is our power. And power concedes nothing.
There were other moments, seeing the first-family-elect step onto the stage for the first time was another, but this moment made me choke up the most. I think this is why:
I believe in American exceptionalism. I think that America introduced something new into world politics, something fundamentally new. This does not mean, of course, that I support every interpretation of this, far from it. I think most of the problems we get into involve some romantic idea of American righteousness, and so while I don't and cannot support "my country right or wrong" thinking, I do think that America introduced something critical for the future wellfare of mankind, something that no other country could have, and something that is slowly leaking out elsewhere (I do not think another country in the world could have elected Obama, (or an equivalent) for those who disagree with the "slowly" part of that) and something that is overwhelmingly beneficial for humankind and civilization.
Obviously, I am an idealist.
Over the last eight years, my idealism has been tempered by a great deal of cynicism and skepticism, (not two words for the same thing, though there are overlaps in certain situations) two other modes of thought that I am quite comfortable with, despite my core of idealism. What the idealist loves about our country, the cynic/skeptic is terrified we are losing, or have already lost. This has not been partisan (i.e., I'm not simply "anti-republican") rather it has been the fear that certain philosophies of governing embraced by the current administration have been threatening to government for the people. The road to fascism is paved with good intentions. Fascism, here, means government that uses its power to subjugate its own people. Not culturally, mind you: I would argue that conformity to cultural practices and, say, death camps, are two entirely different phenomenon. Culture is, at the same time, much more benign a form of "subjugation," if you wish to call it that, and much more insidious, built into the fabric of what people's identities are. But it is not being billy-clubbed for talking negatively about the government. I am following Naomi Wolf here. For a laundry list talk about the road to fascism, watch the following, or read her book, "The End of America."
In any case, for me, this has been the most important thing about the Obama candidacy, and the election. It is the key element that holds everything else in together: the appearance of an unabashedly rational, intellectual candidate; the major step taken for civil rights; the potential return of moral and political authority to america; returning america from the brink of modern-day laissez-faire economics; the face of america returning as being young, optimistic, inclusive, practical, idealistic (at the same time,) humble, etc. etc. opposed to the face we've seen in the last eight years; the excitement and participatory level in politics; the understanding of the importance of issues (the economy, energy, and the environment,) as trumping divisive politics (and the media, by the way;) the emergence of an interconnected citizenry plugged into the media but not dependent upon it: all of these aspects, and more, I see as the natural outcome of a (relatively) free and (relatively) open society in crisis.
Had McCain won the election despite the popular push for Obama apparent in everything and in nearly every demographic and the above, it would have been a symbol to me that the American Dream, not of a chicken in every pot, but of the enshrined ability to say and be and feel whatever one wants, and the belief that this leads to a better world for all, was either being threatened by the powers that be, or was dead already, killed when we all weren't looking.
It is, in a word, the ability to freely agree or disagree without repercussion.
America brought the sense that a country and its government are separable, and that patriotism is not love of government, but love of country, something, under the Bush administration, that was smeared two hundred years into the past. In China this has been one of the most dumbfounding aspects for me, that there is no separation, theoretically or practically, between what "the government" is and what "the country" is. There's an awareness, sure, and a line I often get from people who start interrogating me about how America could be so stupid (often a line of questioning starting with Iraq and Bush) is that "okay, okay, American people are good people, Chinese people are good people, but governments everywhere are bad." Of course, what I couldn't say, because I had had no evidence for it, was "when the people are good, and allowed a large degree of participation, the government can't but be good as well." I have some evidence for that now.
Are we being hoodwinked? Is Obama a Manchurian candidate working to support a global elite against (an important word) the citizens of the planet? A quick reversal of tone and policy by his administration in the areas that Bush has done the most and potentially permanent damage to the fabric of the country would do much to silence those two voices, skepticism and cynicism, so essential to freedom, and well-trained in the last eight years.
It is up to us to keep watch, and our power to keep the world moving towards an open and free society, inclusive and supportive of all. It is our power. And power concedes nothing.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
The Rule of Law and China
A great article in the New York Times about the Chinese legal system.
Some pertinent highlights for what I want to talk about:
Some pertinent highlights for what I want to talk about:
'As with the school collapses, the milk scandal involves a web of complicity linking company executives to government officials. Those connections make sorting out responsibility a delicate political task. Rather than allow the courts to weigh in, officials prefer to press complainants to take compensation, said Teng Biao, a lawyer in Beijing who is collecting material for a possible class-action lawsuit. “Traditionally in China, politics is always higher than the law,” he said.
“To protect Sanlu is to protect the government itself,” he added. “A public health crisis like this not only involves Sanlu. It involves many officials from authorities in the city of Shijiazhuang up to the central government. It involves media censorship, the food quality regulatory system and the corrupt deal between commercial merchants and corrupt officials.”'
'Many lawyers find it hard to ignore the entreaties of provincial judicial bureaus or lawyers associations, which they are required to join. Those groups are controlled by the Ministry of Justice, which ultimately makes the rules for licensing lawyers.'
'There was no outright ban on class-action lawsuits, but the association put in place onerous rules, including a requirement that lawyers report conversations with clients to the judicial bureaus[.]'
When I talk with people about China, and they mention democracy, I always say that it's a long way off, and far from the most important thing at this moment. Democracy, as we have seen in Iraq, is not a cure for what ails ya, it is a structure ensuring stability that can be functional only after many props are inserted for it to rest on, and one of the most important, and the one I always mention to people, is the Rule of Law. Rule of Law, basically, is the idea that no one is higher than the law, and that everyone respects the decisions of the law and of due process.
The law has to be basically respectable, of course, or no one would follow it.
As the above quote makes clear, this is definitely not the case in China. Things in China run on a personal basis, not an impersonal one, and the Law, if it is to be effective, must be impersonal. No one above it, and no one below (an ideal the West still has not entirely mastered.) I have written about this before, here.
A student and I discussed this a week ago, and, astoundingly to me, the Chinese reaction to the crisis is, "we should trust the government to handle it and to do what's right." Seeing as how the government is largely, though not entirely responsible, this struck me as foolish. Without a recourse to change, of course, there's little the Chinese people can say. Still, the reaction isn't so much, "we're powerless to do anything, we have to hope the government can help out," it's still "the government will do what's right." There's little sense in China of government ever being the problem, even with people who agree that the Mao years of Communist rule were devastating to the country.
There's also a sense that the government, as monolithic as it may appear in the west, is actually made up of fairly separate entities, and that the local government may not be on the people's side, but the central government will still do what's right, and that's the case here as well. Along with an increasing openness in the media and what's allowed to be reported on, it gives Chinese people the sense of progress.
How long will it continue though, until something bursts? Will the government ever really be able to put the law above the party, or, say, turn the army over to the country, instead of having a private Communist army? Watch and learn.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
A way of thinking about Dennett's theory of consciousness: a vote, and decision making.
I was just thinking about an article I wrote about here when I thought of a much better (and topical) metaphor for the way consciousness works in the human brain according to Daniel Dennett.
For the non-clickers:
(From Dennett:)
'"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."'
(From myself:)
"Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself."
It was the term "political clout" that got me thinking about this, along with a few weeks of staring at polls every day, and a metaphor popped into my head, more helpful perhaps than the negative example of the little man in explaining what (I think) Dennett means: the vote for president.
What Dennett is saying, with this analogy, would be, "the final determination of who becomes the next president of the United States (the outcome of the process, or "consciousness,") is not some extra capital "V" vote, (quale or aura,) it is the activities of millions of voters voting. This may seem like no more than a tricky accounting method, but the distinction is important. It is also fairly obvious when talking about a vote, but perhaps not so much when talking about our own consciousness. There is no president in your head, no controlling piece that decides what to do and what to show, what becomes conscious and what not, but millions of separate components all clamoring for attention (millions of voters with their own individual preferences and requirements.) When they reach a critical mass, they "monopolize certain cortical resources," and you become aware of something.
In fact, when we choose a president we are basically doing what everybody intuits we are doing
and what Dennett says we are precisely not doing: putting a "little guy" in charge of it all at the top of the head who makes the decisions. We choose an arbitrary point (the first Tuesday in November on a four-year cycle) to gather the input of all these little contributors, and then, ceremoniously and ritually assign, for the next four years, the one person that was able to align himself most broadly with the contributors, the voters, to the job of "decider."
There is some feedback, in terms of media and public opinion polls, but for the most part this is not what is happening in our brains: it's what we think is happening. What is really happening, according to Dennett, is more as if there were a constant election, not for a representative but on issues of state, and whenever a person decided to throw his or her vote in a different direction, her or she would do so, and whenever a voting level reached some critical threshold, it would be enacted, or changed, say, at 65% approval a new law would be passed, or at 30% disapproval something would be revoked.
In this way, the brain is a tyrannic democracy.
Some other random thoughts that sprang from this idea:
In this light it becomes much more apparent how ritualized government is, how we try to approximate power and make it more practical and benificial to the most people, and how that changes over time due to the evolution of social and religious (ritual) beliefs, as in how a King, standing in for God, makes decisions that are the best for everyone in the kingdom in aggregate top-down, versus how a president, standing in for a symbolic unity of the country and the opinions of the people, makes decisions informed by the will from below (the people) and not imposing them from above (this is an ideal, obviously a certain current president feels somewhat more like a king according to this way of thinking, at least at times.)
Similarly, what we call the "ego," is no more than a fiction we put in place as a shorthand way of understanding the millions of little bits of information inside, outside, and created in the relation between inside and outside. As noted in my earlier blog, this is why I think buddhist philosophy would be quite comfortable with Dennett's work.
This is why government is ritualistic, the ultimate power is never coming from it, it is legitimized only in so far as it reflects the will of God, or the will of the people, the ultimate powers. What we call the ego is a puppet standing in for the real thing, standing in for "will," (wherever you think that is coming from, an entirely different discussion) acting out ritually as if in a play. It is, first and foremost, an abstraction.
This idea of a threshold being met that changes everything is rather prevelent in nature, and seems to be one of the key ways in which things work. (Chronicled from a slightly different angle in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.) Neuron firings are a good example. Neurons constantly exchange ions coming in and out of their cell bodies, and electrical gradients are constantly changing, without triggering a change in the cell. But as soon as a critical charge is reached, as soon as the electrical gradient is overwhelmingly positive, for example, the electron fires.
Anyone who has watched a baby grow or learned something new him or herself (especially as an adult, when you tend to be more aware of these types of things) would likely be familiar with this as well. Practice (as discussed in the book Mastery) alternates between brief periods of incredible progress, followed by long plateus where nothing seems to change. I have noticed this playing the guitar, and also learning Chinese, as well as in practicing tai ji/ qi gong. Every day for four months it seems like I can't string two freaking sentences together, and then, as if by magic, two weekends ago, I'm babbling along without stopping, my accent got better exponentially, and my accessible vocabulary improved. I had, of course, been working on all of these things the whole time, but they didn't show any tangible improvement, or any steady improvement, until they all did all together all at once.
Think of it this way, perhaps: you are on a certain "level" of your practice, and there are 100 buttons. You need to push 70 of them to move on to the next level, but you also need to learn a certain technique to push each one individually, and learning each takes time and practice, and the buttons only stay depressed a certain amount of time. As you get better and better at pushing certain buttons individually, more and more stay depressed, until finally it "clicks," you've gotten 70 of the buttons depressed simultaneously and suddenly you're in a whole new world, you're on another level, and you have to start all over again exploring from here. Of course, on this new level, the options open to you are much much wider. And, of course, this is a only a silly analogy, though there may be some truth to it.
The worry about global warming stems from this idea. People aren't concerned that gradually, over the next hundred or two hundred years, things will change. Those concerned are worried because in a comparative instant, thousands of species will go extinct, the earth will become five degrees warmer, sea levels will rise in the meters, and floods will inundate lands. Again, not in isolated and separate incidents, but basically all together. The havok that this will wreck on civilization is one thing, but it may knock out the whole species. We just don't know, we don't know what will happen after the moment of change.
There's a variety pack for you to chew on.
For the non-clickers:
(From Dennett:)
'"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."'
(From myself:)
"Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself."
It was the term "political clout" that got me thinking about this, along with a few weeks of staring at polls every day, and a metaphor popped into my head, more helpful perhaps than the negative example of the little man in explaining what (I think) Dennett means: the vote for president.
What Dennett is saying, with this analogy, would be, "the final determination of who becomes the next president of the United States (the outcome of the process, or "consciousness,") is not some extra capital "V" vote, (quale or aura,) it is the activities of millions of voters voting. This may seem like no more than a tricky accounting method, but the distinction is important. It is also fairly obvious when talking about a vote, but perhaps not so much when talking about our own consciousness. There is no president in your head, no controlling piece that decides what to do and what to show, what becomes conscious and what not, but millions of separate components all clamoring for attention (millions of voters with their own individual preferences and requirements.) When they reach a critical mass, they "monopolize certain cortical resources," and you become aware of something.
In fact, when we choose a president we are basically doing what everybody intuits we are doing
and what Dennett says we are precisely not doing: putting a "little guy" in charge of it all at the top of the head who makes the decisions. We choose an arbitrary point (the first Tuesday in November on a four-year cycle) to gather the input of all these little contributors, and then, ceremoniously and ritually assign, for the next four years, the one person that was able to align himself most broadly with the contributors, the voters, to the job of "decider."
There is some feedback, in terms of media and public opinion polls, but for the most part this is not what is happening in our brains: it's what we think is happening. What is really happening, according to Dennett, is more as if there were a constant election, not for a representative but on issues of state, and whenever a person decided to throw his or her vote in a different direction, her or she would do so, and whenever a voting level reached some critical threshold, it would be enacted, or changed, say, at 65% approval a new law would be passed, or at 30% disapproval something would be revoked.
In this way, the brain is a tyrannic democracy.
Some other random thoughts that sprang from this idea:
In this light it becomes much more apparent how ritualized government is, how we try to approximate power and make it more practical and benificial to the most people, and how that changes over time due to the evolution of social and religious (ritual) beliefs, as in how a King, standing in for God, makes decisions that are the best for everyone in the kingdom in aggregate top-down, versus how a president, standing in for a symbolic unity of the country and the opinions of the people, makes decisions informed by the will from below (the people) and not imposing them from above (this is an ideal, obviously a certain current president feels somewhat more like a king according to this way of thinking, at least at times.)
Similarly, what we call the "ego," is no more than a fiction we put in place as a shorthand way of understanding the millions of little bits of information inside, outside, and created in the relation between inside and outside. As noted in my earlier blog, this is why I think buddhist philosophy would be quite comfortable with Dennett's work.
This is why government is ritualistic, the ultimate power is never coming from it, it is legitimized only in so far as it reflects the will of God, or the will of the people, the ultimate powers. What we call the ego is a puppet standing in for the real thing, standing in for "will," (wherever you think that is coming from, an entirely different discussion) acting out ritually as if in a play. It is, first and foremost, an abstraction.
This idea of a threshold being met that changes everything is rather prevelent in nature, and seems to be one of the key ways in which things work. (Chronicled from a slightly different angle in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.) Neuron firings are a good example. Neurons constantly exchange ions coming in and out of their cell bodies, and electrical gradients are constantly changing, without triggering a change in the cell. But as soon as a critical charge is reached, as soon as the electrical gradient is overwhelmingly positive, for example, the electron fires.
Anyone who has watched a baby grow or learned something new him or herself (especially as an adult, when you tend to be more aware of these types of things) would likely be familiar with this as well. Practice (as discussed in the book Mastery) alternates between brief periods of incredible progress, followed by long plateus where nothing seems to change. I have noticed this playing the guitar, and also learning Chinese, as well as in practicing tai ji/ qi gong. Every day for four months it seems like I can't string two freaking sentences together, and then, as if by magic, two weekends ago, I'm babbling along without stopping, my accent got better exponentially, and my accessible vocabulary improved. I had, of course, been working on all of these things the whole time, but they didn't show any tangible improvement, or any steady improvement, until they all did all together all at once.
Think of it this way, perhaps: you are on a certain "level" of your practice, and there are 100 buttons. You need to push 70 of them to move on to the next level, but you also need to learn a certain technique to push each one individually, and learning each takes time and practice, and the buttons only stay depressed a certain amount of time. As you get better and better at pushing certain buttons individually, more and more stay depressed, until finally it "clicks," you've gotten 70 of the buttons depressed simultaneously and suddenly you're in a whole new world, you're on another level, and you have to start all over again exploring from here. Of course, on this new level, the options open to you are much much wider. And, of course, this is a only a silly analogy, though there may be some truth to it.
The worry about global warming stems from this idea. People aren't concerned that gradually, over the next hundred or two hundred years, things will change. Those concerned are worried because in a comparative instant, thousands of species will go extinct, the earth will become five degrees warmer, sea levels will rise in the meters, and floods will inundate lands. Again, not in isolated and separate incidents, but basically all together. The havok that this will wreck on civilization is one thing, but it may knock out the whole species. We just don't know, we don't know what will happen after the moment of change.
There's a variety pack for you to chew on.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Shining
The above is the best video I've seen of a band that I saw last Thursday night in Beijing that blew my face off. They were absolutely revelatory, and I mean that literally. The best part in the video, I think, comes around 5:22 seconds in and lasts for twenty or thirty seconds. I've just been watching it over and over again.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Chinese Nineties Kids （九零后）
I had an interesting conversation recently with an old-china hand about the kids growing up in China today, and his opinion and mine match pretty well: they suck.
Now, some of this may just be crotchety-old-timerism, as he is older than I am, and I myself am a generation removed from these brats, but of course, as my opinion, I think some of it is warranted.
I've written a couple of things about these kids before since I find them fascinating, here, about some of my students and how they don't have any time of their own, and here, about the phenomenon of having a country of single children.
The way my conversational partner put it was that "if you were born in the 40's in China, you had a fascinating life [though not always a great one], if you were born in the 50's (60's, 70's) you're living a fascinating life, even if you were born in the 80's you'll live a fascinating life, but if you were born in the 90's, your life is shit!"
That's in quotes but is certainly not verbatim.
The charge against the kids is that they have no roots, care for nothing but money and personal comfort etc, etc, and as far as I can tell this is true. They are pampered more or less by their elders (sometimes two sets of grandparents and of course their parents) but have little of a real emotional connection to them, are given complete free reign to do as they please within rigidly defined boundaries (you should see these kids in restaurants it's terrifying, but, of course, when seven am rolls around they're off to class lock-step,) grow up isolated from any historical sense of their culture other than what is purely sentimental (of course, sentimentalism seems to be the common thread of modern Chinese culture, a harsh but only slightly exaggerated comment) part of which is that the concept of hardships is really no more than a concept. (We are talking mostly about urban lower-middle class to upper class kids, of course.) There's much more here that I won't go into depth about but, basically, these kids suck. The above, of course, are just theories as to why, you'd have to actually see them and their behavior to really understand what I'm saying. Those of you who have seen them probably agree. I actually give them some slack, I think they're growing up in a real twisted environment. My girlfriend (Chinese) is harsher on them than I am.
On a hike on the great wall, I saw some chalking done by some (obviously) 90's kids that said, basically, "there is no love, there is only fooling people." This is a typical sentiment, I feel, from them. Of course, seeing the culture they've grown up in, it's hard to argue that, from their point of view, it could appear any other way. More later, perhaps.
But this is where it gets interesting.
Apparently, according to the old-China hand, the PLA (People's Liberation Army, which would be the Army of China if it didn't belong exclusively to the Communist Party, a distinction only a naive foreigner would make) commissioned a study some years ago about what the effect of China's rise would be in the world, undergone by the intellectuals, and freed of any official pressure (the warping effects of pressure are applied after the study is published,) that found that China's rise into the world order would start seriously conflicting with other countries in the late 2020's and the 2030's, right at the time when these twits would be taking over the country. After this period, China would be an established world power, and the balance would be restored, but during the period of troubles, the idiots would reign.
Because of the arch-conservative nature of the central party, I am hoping this will not entirely turn out to be true, but certainly that generation will be the ascendant one during this time period, which is just great for everyone concerned.
I just can't wait.
Now, some of this may just be crotchety-old-timerism, as he is older than I am, and I myself am a generation removed from these brats, but of course, as my opinion, I think some of it is warranted.
I've written a couple of things about these kids before since I find them fascinating, here, about some of my students and how they don't have any time of their own, and here, about the phenomenon of having a country of single children.
The way my conversational partner put it was that "if you were born in the 40's in China, you had a fascinating life [though not always a great one], if you were born in the 50's (60's, 70's) you're living a fascinating life, even if you were born in the 80's you'll live a fascinating life, but if you were born in the 90's, your life is shit!"
That's in quotes but is certainly not verbatim.
The charge against the kids is that they have no roots, care for nothing but money and personal comfort etc, etc, and as far as I can tell this is true. They are pampered more or less by their elders (sometimes two sets of grandparents and of course their parents) but have little of a real emotional connection to them, are given complete free reign to do as they please within rigidly defined boundaries (you should see these kids in restaurants it's terrifying, but, of course, when seven am rolls around they're off to class lock-step,) grow up isolated from any historical sense of their culture other than what is purely sentimental (of course, sentimentalism seems to be the common thread of modern Chinese culture, a harsh but only slightly exaggerated comment) part of which is that the concept of hardships is really no more than a concept. (We are talking mostly about urban lower-middle class to upper class kids, of course.) There's much more here that I won't go into depth about but, basically, these kids suck. The above, of course, are just theories as to why, you'd have to actually see them and their behavior to really understand what I'm saying. Those of you who have seen them probably agree. I actually give them some slack, I think they're growing up in a real twisted environment. My girlfriend (Chinese) is harsher on them than I am.
On a hike on the great wall, I saw some chalking done by some (obviously) 90's kids that said, basically, "there is no love, there is only fooling people." This is a typical sentiment, I feel, from them. Of course, seeing the culture they've grown up in, it's hard to argue that, from their point of view, it could appear any other way. More later, perhaps.
But this is where it gets interesting.
Apparently, according to the old-China hand, the PLA (People's Liberation Army, which would be the Army of China if it didn't belong exclusively to the Communist Party, a distinction only a naive foreigner would make) commissioned a study some years ago about what the effect of China's rise would be in the world, undergone by the intellectuals, and freed of any official pressure (the warping effects of pressure are applied after the study is published,) that found that China's rise into the world order would start seriously conflicting with other countries in the late 2020's and the 2030's, right at the time when these twits would be taking over the country. After this period, China would be an established world power, and the balance would be restored, but during the period of troubles, the idiots would reign.
Because of the arch-conservative nature of the central party, I am hoping this will not entirely turn out to be true, but certainly that generation will be the ascendant one during this time period, which is just great for everyone concerned.
I just can't wait.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Conservativism and Liberalism
The following article was sent to me by a friend a few weeks ago, having had an interesting and busy few weeks I have not had time to reply to it, but I finally have some time to sit down and hammer this out. The article is by Stanford economist Thomas Sowell, and its basic point is that liberals are dreamers who are unwilling to see the world for how it is, and that the more experience one has with the world, the more conservative one becomes, barring the sort of buffers (judicial/ academic tenure, trust funds) that keep one from actually facing the real world.
Here is a David Brooks column that came out around the same time I received the Sowell piece, coincidentally. Brooks basically (and oh so gently) says that Sarah Palin is a bad idea, and actually unintentionally provides an argument that McCain would not be a very good man to have sitting next to the big button. More on that below.
Firstly, though, I think the Sowell argument has a terrific number of holes in it, the main one being that the article somewhat assumes that the world is static. While there may be certain unescapable realities, (like the need to defend yourself and country, at least for this millenium) the world has changed quite a bit in, say, the last hundred years, and Sowell fails to take into account that most of these changes a) have been overwhelmingly positive and b) would never in a million years have been allowed if conservatives ran everything. Just as one particularly relevant example, take civil rights. Sowell is a black man, and a hundred years ago, there'd be no chance in hell that he would be able to express his opinion in such a manner.
There is, of course, the argument that the economic progresses spurred on by conservative policies is what ultimately led to the country's social progress. While partially true, this argument misses several things. Firstly, broad social progress was made in many countries without the type of relatively laissez-faire economic system the United States has. Secondly, many of the tangible and legal gains made socially occurred before the Reagan administration and only later started to filter into becoming mainstream culture, and thirdly, even with economic progress, there have still been fights over social equality, it's not like it just happened smoothly or magically.
I will admit that without economic stability much of the social progress we've seen would have been impossible, and yet this is far from a cause of the effect.
Liberals may tend to imagine that things can change overnight, and that human nature is entirely dependent on circumstance, both true weaknesses, and they have a tendency to believe that inequality is simply a matter of reapportioning, which is also extremely dangerous and mistaken. But there are very few mainstream political liberals in America who still subscribe to the above, while there are quite a few conservatives that subscribe to an equivalently extreme ideology in power in the country.
Sowell ignores in his examples maybe the one best popular figure who was sheltered from experience, someone who got through college and then graduate school, and even business life, on the wings of his family: Dubbya. As if. As if being a trust funder would make you automatically liberal, as if most of the people who have to work themselves to go through college and had a tough life automatically would be conservative because of their experience in "the real world," as if experience automatically meant disappointment, or that the harder the life, the more conservative the fellow. All of this is garbage.
If we take (as I think Sowell does) conservativism to mean the political trait of steady-as-it-goes-ism, and liberalism as being the trait of using the engine of government to effect change in society, than there's good reason why the older one gets, the more conservative one gets beyond wising-up (though certainly this does happen.) As I've mentioned before, change is generational and not as often individual, that is, change in society doesn't come because most people want it to, it happens naturally as new generations are born into different circumstances, and the more different their circumstances the faster the wheel moves. This can be disquieting when one can't get a grip on their own society, it can feel like one's lost...(like, say, certain older people writing letters instead of email.)
The above definitions are necessary because we do not live in a static world. Certainly Sowell is not defending the 1750's brand of conservatism, what were called the loyalists in the revolutionary world, right? Saying that conservatives stand for slow change effected by people may seem to take the burden off of this argument, and while there is a strain of conservatism that believes, perhaps heartily, in this, in fact the vast majority of people who are culturally conservative don't advocate any sort of progress towards equality in opportunity but are more likely to react (hence reactionary) against it violently, tipping their hands off as to how they really feel. (See ex-Majority leader Trent Lott's comments about Strom Thurmond being elected president and how that would have kept so much of today's "mess," from ever happening. While again theoretical conservatives are more likely to say that change is a slow process coming from below, in practice this is simply not true.
Experience may well make you examine your beliefs, or disappointment, at least, but that does not mean one will necessarily become conservative, or that those who are conservative have, on average, more of this kind of experience than everyone else. Some kids are idiots, and idealistic, but often kids are stupid in the opposite direction from the left. Kids are blind, but sight does not necessarily improve with age, and one can be blind and walk in many directions.
Another reason people "become" conservative is that as they get older, and have to take care of themselves, they become less concerned with the state of society and more concerned with their own house, not because they've changed their mind about anything fundamental, or because the experience of paying bills every month has made them realize that poor people are lazy, but because things that seemed important earlier in life just aren't so much anymore. It's not becoming conservative so much as losing a system of beliefs never acted upon in a change of situation. Again, this experience is not of the "oops, I made a mistake" variety, just the "oops, I don't actually really care that much about what happens outside of my door as I used to think I did because everyone else did." I think this is probably the line of thinking closest to Sowell's, and yet I see no need to label this process "experience" generically, nor do I imagine that leaving college equals, somehow, disappointment, and that the result is a more mature, wise, realistic adult.
The biggest problem with the Sowell essay, beyond the specific argument, and with others of its type, both on the left and on the right is that, as we've seen time and time again over history, in the last hundred years, and even recently, no side or party is ever right about anything, since an ideology carried forth to its extreme basically always brings the worst things possible. This is what the generation in college (or me, and others informally polled near my age) was so excited about at the beginning with Obama. There is a way that includes certain things that Thomas Sowell would undoubtedly agree with that the die-hard liberals of his age would not that have been shown to be effective, that also includes age-old talking points of the left, and this way is inaccessible from either side exclusively, which has been the promise of Obama, whether or not he can carry that through. In a way, this could ideally be the pinnacle of American government, the compromise between two competing ideas that makes everyone better off. Brooks' article brings up an even more interesting point about the ability to bring conflicting views into agreement and take action.
And this is also basically the best argument I can think of for transparency in government. Transparency creates more record and more fact, and less spin. The more secrecy there is, the more is kept hidden or obfuscated, the easier it is to distort what's happening, in any circumstance.
Prudence is one of the qualities Brooks talks about, but how surreal is it that the candidate who fits Brooks' bill as displaying "the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation... [the] ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together...the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight" is clearly Obama? This is Obama's strongest point as a potential president, and his weakest as a candidate (or at least it ties into his weakest point as a candidate: being unable to boil it down simply, quite likely a structural impossibility.) I've been saying the whole race that this critical ability, so clearly lacking in our current president, is what's needed and what this man has. He may not have governmental experience, but he certainly has this trait of being able to take in multiple points of view and reconciling them. Brooks' words are so similar to some of the profiles of Obama that they could have been cut-and-pasted from them. Clearly, either Obama has experience or prudence does not necessarily come from it. The candidate with the type of experience Brooks talks up has become brasher and even more impulsive the longer the campaign has gone on, taking leap after leap only to come back a few days later and leap in the other direction.
Another side note on this, I've been getting mail lately that's pointing out how much of a disadvantage Obama is running with, partly, though not entirely, due to race. McCain is running with some baggage that would have destroyed any black man immediately (like, say, graduating at the bottom of his class, divorcing his first wife, having a wife who approproiated painkillers from her own charity, Palin's unwed teenage daughter, etc.) while Obama's life story, tacked onto a McCain type character, would be an instant president-maker. Just imagine how different the news organizations and the far right would have reacted if it were Obama's daughter and not Palin's who was pregnant. I don't think anyone with anything like an objective point of view would be able to say with a straight face that it would be able to be turned into a positive in the almost farcical way it has for Palin. This is bullshit, pure and simple, and, for all their experience, it is not likely to be something a conservative today would care too much about bringing up as an issue, or as something that might need to be examined in our collective psyche. But it does.
Here is a David Brooks column that came out around the same time I received the Sowell piece, coincidentally. Brooks basically (and oh so gently) says that Sarah Palin is a bad idea, and actually unintentionally provides an argument that McCain would not be a very good man to have sitting next to the big button. More on that below.
Firstly, though, I think the Sowell argument has a terrific number of holes in it, the main one being that the article somewhat assumes that the world is static. While there may be certain unescapable realities, (like the need to defend yourself and country, at least for this millenium) the world has changed quite a bit in, say, the last hundred years, and Sowell fails to take into account that most of these changes a) have been overwhelmingly positive and b) would never in a million years have been allowed if conservatives ran everything. Just as one particularly relevant example, take civil rights. Sowell is a black man, and a hundred years ago, there'd be no chance in hell that he would be able to express his opinion in such a manner.
There is, of course, the argument that the economic progresses spurred on by conservative policies is what ultimately led to the country's social progress. While partially true, this argument misses several things. Firstly, broad social progress was made in many countries without the type of relatively laissez-faire economic system the United States has. Secondly, many of the tangible and legal gains made socially occurred before the Reagan administration and only later started to filter into becoming mainstream culture, and thirdly, even with economic progress, there have still been fights over social equality, it's not like it just happened smoothly or magically.
I will admit that without economic stability much of the social progress we've seen would have been impossible, and yet this is far from a cause of the effect.
Liberals may tend to imagine that things can change overnight, and that human nature is entirely dependent on circumstance, both true weaknesses, and they have a tendency to believe that inequality is simply a matter of reapportioning, which is also extremely dangerous and mistaken. But there are very few mainstream political liberals in America who still subscribe to the above, while there are quite a few conservatives that subscribe to an equivalently extreme ideology in power in the country.
Sowell ignores in his examples maybe the one best popular figure who was sheltered from experience, someone who got through college and then graduate school, and even business life, on the wings of his family: Dubbya. As if. As if being a trust funder would make you automatically liberal, as if most of the people who have to work themselves to go through college and had a tough life automatically would be conservative because of their experience in "the real world," as if experience automatically meant disappointment, or that the harder the life, the more conservative the fellow. All of this is garbage.
If we take (as I think Sowell does) conservativism to mean the political trait of steady-as-it-goes-ism, and liberalism as being the trait of using the engine of government to effect change in society, than there's good reason why the older one gets, the more conservative one gets beyond wising-up (though certainly this does happen.) As I've mentioned before, change is generational and not as often individual, that is, change in society doesn't come because most people want it to, it happens naturally as new generations are born into different circumstances, and the more different their circumstances the faster the wheel moves. This can be disquieting when one can't get a grip on their own society, it can feel like one's lost...(like, say, certain older people writing letters instead of email.)
The above definitions are necessary because we do not live in a static world. Certainly Sowell is not defending the 1750's brand of conservatism, what were called the loyalists in the revolutionary world, right? Saying that conservatives stand for slow change effected by people may seem to take the burden off of this argument, and while there is a strain of conservatism that believes, perhaps heartily, in this, in fact the vast majority of people who are culturally conservative don't advocate any sort of progress towards equality in opportunity but are more likely to react (hence reactionary) against it violently, tipping their hands off as to how they really feel. (See ex-Majority leader Trent Lott's comments about Strom Thurmond being elected president and how that would have kept so much of today's "mess," from ever happening. While again theoretical conservatives are more likely to say that change is a slow process coming from below, in practice this is simply not true.
Experience may well make you examine your beliefs, or disappointment, at least, but that does not mean one will necessarily become conservative, or that those who are conservative have, on average, more of this kind of experience than everyone else. Some kids are idiots, and idealistic, but often kids are stupid in the opposite direction from the left. Kids are blind, but sight does not necessarily improve with age, and one can be blind and walk in many directions.
Another reason people "become" conservative is that as they get older, and have to take care of themselves, they become less concerned with the state of society and more concerned with their own house, not because they've changed their mind about anything fundamental, or because the experience of paying bills every month has made them realize that poor people are lazy, but because things that seemed important earlier in life just aren't so much anymore. It's not becoming conservative so much as losing a system of beliefs never acted upon in a change of situation. Again, this experience is not of the "oops, I made a mistake" variety, just the "oops, I don't actually really care that much about what happens outside of my door as I used to think I did because everyone else did." I think this is probably the line of thinking closest to Sowell's, and yet I see no need to label this process "experience" generically, nor do I imagine that leaving college equals, somehow, disappointment, and that the result is a more mature, wise, realistic adult.
The biggest problem with the Sowell essay, beyond the specific argument, and with others of its type, both on the left and on the right is that, as we've seen time and time again over history, in the last hundred years, and even recently, no side or party is ever right about anything, since an ideology carried forth to its extreme basically always brings the worst things possible. This is what the generation in college (or me, and others informally polled near my age) was so excited about at the beginning with Obama. There is a way that includes certain things that Thomas Sowell would undoubtedly agree with that the die-hard liberals of his age would not that have been shown to be effective, that also includes age-old talking points of the left, and this way is inaccessible from either side exclusively, which has been the promise of Obama, whether or not he can carry that through. In a way, this could ideally be the pinnacle of American government, the compromise between two competing ideas that makes everyone better off. Brooks' article brings up an even more interesting point about the ability to bring conflicting views into agreement and take action.
And this is also basically the best argument I can think of for transparency in government. Transparency creates more record and more fact, and less spin. The more secrecy there is, the more is kept hidden or obfuscated, the easier it is to distort what's happening, in any circumstance.
Prudence is one of the qualities Brooks talks about, but how surreal is it that the candidate who fits Brooks' bill as displaying "the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation... [the] ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together...the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight" is clearly Obama? This is Obama's strongest point as a potential president, and his weakest as a candidate (or at least it ties into his weakest point as a candidate: being unable to boil it down simply, quite likely a structural impossibility.) I've been saying the whole race that this critical ability, so clearly lacking in our current president, is what's needed and what this man has. He may not have governmental experience, but he certainly has this trait of being able to take in multiple points of view and reconciling them. Brooks' words are so similar to some of the profiles of Obama that they could have been cut-and-pasted from them. Clearly, either Obama has experience or prudence does not necessarily come from it. The candidate with the type of experience Brooks talks up has become brasher and even more impulsive the longer the campaign has gone on, taking leap after leap only to come back a few days later and leap in the other direction.
Another side note on this, I've been getting mail lately that's pointing out how much of a disadvantage Obama is running with, partly, though not entirely, due to race. McCain is running with some baggage that would have destroyed any black man immediately (like, say, graduating at the bottom of his class, divorcing his first wife, having a wife who approproiated painkillers from her own charity, Palin's unwed teenage daughter, etc.) while Obama's life story, tacked onto a McCain type character, would be an instant president-maker. Just imagine how different the news organizations and the far right would have reacted if it were Obama's daughter and not Palin's who was pregnant. I don't think anyone with anything like an objective point of view would be able to say with a straight face that it would be able to be turned into a positive in the almost farcical way it has for Palin. This is bullshit, pure and simple, and, for all their experience, it is not likely to be something a conservative today would care too much about bringing up as an issue, or as something that might need to be examined in our collective psyche. But it does.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Are they really that bad?
This has been puzzling me for sometime.
The picture to the right is of two of the posters for the Paralympics in Beijing, like the posters for the olympics, placed in the subway. The one on the left is of a wheelchair basketball player, obviously, and the one on the right, though at first it looks like there might not be anything wrong with the judoists, shows two blind people squaring off, which you can tell if you look closely at the one in blue's eyes. All well and good. There are about eight of these, give or take, and they're all mostly like this: clearly disabled folk, sporting. There's one of a sprinter with only one leg, one of a fencer in a wheelchair, etc. etc.
And then there's this:
Since my usual pace through the subway is so quick that I don't have the time to rigorously investigate every advertisement, I just assumed for a while that there must be something wrong with this guy's arms, or something. After a few days of spot-checking as I raced past it, though, it was clear that nothing was wrong. I have since found out that deaf and blind people play soccer in the Paralympics, but does that seem like a good thing to represent visually on a poster?
In anycase, since China's soccer team is absolutely terrible, the fact that the man on the poster looks normal begs the question. Are they really that bad?
Saturday, September 6, 2008
The Paralympics, and "Cultural Difference."
The paralympics have begun!
Interestingly enough, "para-" in paralympics does not stand for paralyzed, or paraplegic, as I'd assumed before looking it up on Wikipedia, "para-" instead coming from the Greek, and meaning, "besides." So, it means, basically, an athletic competition to take place besides the Olympics (as in, next to.)
Of course, this was just quick thinking. Originally it did stand for "paraplegic," but the inclusion of people with other disabilities made this unsuitable. That's a pretty lucky coincidence, or it would be if the root of "para-" in paraplegic were not the same. But it is.
Anyway, from the official hooplah here you'd think that the Paralympics were as much of a big deal as the Olympics. (I don't mean to be dismissive, I am merely noting that in spectators, number of sports, number of participating athletes, number of advertising dollars spent, etc. etc., the Olympics overshadow their disabled brother.) I have no recollection of this being the case in Atlanta, and of course, there are basically no news stories about athletes or television coverage, what have you, in the western newspapers, unless a story makes a headline for a different reason (say in an article in the Times recently about the benefits the Paralympic athletes get as opposed to those the Olympic athletes get from the USOC.)
At first, I just thought this was China, well, being China, going graciously over-the-top as a host. They are, after all, trying to win us over. (And win over us, but that's a different matter.)
But, as I've been thinking about it, though the above is certainly still a part of the reason for the overwhelming coverage (the games are on T.V. and are similarly unavoidable on the newspapers and newscasts, plus, in Chinese, the Olympics aren't over yet, by which I mean the Olympics and the Paralympics are considered as one big event rather than, as in English, two entirely separate, if related, ones) I've come up with some other possible reasons.
China, as I've mentioned, is trying basically to pull itself one-hundred and fifty to two-hundred years forward in a generation, plus maybe a half. Part of process is acculturation. Party Elites have to do quite a lot of tugging in many different arenas to do this, since it is so drastic, and one of the areas is in manners, basically. There has been a significant improvement in the spitting all over the place, though you still see some egregious examples, like while walking in the subway tunnels, or (not kidding) hocking one up and spitting it out on the inside of the subway car door. That, of course, doesn't count on the streets, where I am far less grossed out. Lining up, too, is a fraction better than it is in Shaoxing, though mostly, still, the line is a foreign concept, and I usually just wait until everyone else is on the Subway before getting on, since, as I am accustomed to waiting for everyone to get off before I get on, I wouldn't get on before everyone else anyway. (Figure that one out, and you should chuckle.) So, I actually half-agree with the statements of the Director of the Paralympics for China below, when he mentions "cultural difference."
Beijing withdraws advice on disabled
The Associated Press
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Olympic organizers said Thursday that they had withdrawn parts of an English translation of a guide for volunteers because of "inappropriate language" used to describe disabled athletes. Zhang Qiuping, director of the Paralympic Games in Beijing, did not offer an apology and attributed the problems to poor translation. "Probably it's cultural difference and mistranslation," Zhang said.
The Chinese-language version of the text remained online and was nearly identical to the English, using essentially the same stereotypes to refer to the disabled. A section dedicated to the disabled says: "Paralympic athletes and disabled spectators are a special group. They have unique personalities and ways of thinking." To handle the "optically disabled," the guide advised: "Often the optically disabled are introverted. They have deep and implicit feelings and seldom show strong emotions." It added, "Try not to use the world 'blind' when you meet for the first time."
Regarding the "physically disabled," the guide said: "Physically disabled people are often mentally healthy. But they might have unusual personalities because of disfigurement and disability." It went on: "Some physically disabled are isolated, unsocial and introspective; they usually do not volunteer to contact people. They can be stubborn and controlling; they may be sensitive and struggle with trust issues. Sometimes they are overly protective of themselves, especially when they are called 'crippled' or 'paralyzed.
The bit about "mistranslation" is pure crap, and usually "cultural difference" (you have no idea how often this comes up) is a desperate excuse for, say, why it's perfectly appropriate to arrest two women in their seventies for "disturbing the peace" when all they had done was apply for a permit to protest during the Olympics. (If you haven't been following that story, they were released a week after being sentenced to a year of "labor reform," with no further penalties, which also probably includes being under surveillance to a greater or lesser extent for the duration of their natural lives.)
But in this case, strangely, I actually think the guy's actually right. In the mad rush to modernize, the culture (which always lags behind the edge of innovation and social change) has been scrambling to figure out what's going on. One of the biggest changes in the west over the last two-hundred years is the changing relative importance of intellectual and physical labor. Two-hundred years ago, all you needed to be a worker was a strong back and a stupid mind, which of course favored young men. As work became less and less physically oriented, it opened up opportunities for older people (I mean, late-thirties and up,) women, and the physically disabled to enter the workforce, and, as they became more valuable to society, mistaken notions about these groups of people's intrinsic value began to change. But, in the west, this has taken a few hundred years, and lots of fighting. China still has not reached this level, either in percent of workforce engaged in mind work and not manual, or in valuing those who are not "the man," in this case, Han Chinese men.
The gap between most people's thoughts (let alone the more rural part of the population) and the guide for volunteers, then, is still rather large, and the document, even if somewhat infuriating to westerners, actually represents some sort of progress along these lines, even if it's hard to believe that as a westerner. The document, in a way, splits the difference between the cultural mind of the West and the East. Of course, since people have fought for so long to elevate the cultural conception of the disabled in the west, having an official document like this come along and enshrine stereotypes feels like regression. Again, though, this is mostly the effect of juxtaposition.
Having said that, one of the preparations for the Olympics was getting all the cripples out of sight. When I'd first gotten here it was rather common (like a few times a day) to see horribly disfigured people, some who'd obviously had work-related accidents, others with birth defects, pan-handling on the streets. So, obviously, enlightenment is coming slowly. It's another mind-numbing Orwellian contradiction, that is, that a McDonald's could have a poster outside advertising specials and marking it as a Paralympic sponsor, where just a few months ago a man who had his face burned off by something was begging for the equivalent of less than two pennies on the bench next to the store. Where did they go, exactly? I'd really like to know.
They haven't come back quite yet. But the workers have. They're pretty unmistakable. And their camps, say, next to the light rail tracks, are also rather obvious.
To be cynical, the blitzing news coverage and hangover news about the Olympic Champions and all gives the almost straight-forwardly government run news the opportunity to talk about this and relish in the distraction rather than move on to other things, like the fact that the central government just admitted that "maybe" some of the schools that fell over in the SiChuan earthquake only fell over because of "possible" faulty construction, (though no mention of corruption and why those schools were so faulty. It was blamed on the lightening fast growth.) So China's changing after all. "Maybe."
I had a conversation with one of my students recently about Sarah Palin recently that led to some of the above. In some ways, it appears as if there's been progress, and in others it's the same old China.
My student was amazed that Sarah Palin was warmly supporting her daughter (obviously she is not very familiar with the American political process) instead of being visibly angry with her. I tried to explain to her that support is exactly what this young woman needs at this point, and getting angry at her would help no one, leading to bitterness etc. at the perfectly wrong time. In China, she said, a seventeen year old would be kicked out of school immediately for this, along with the boy who got her pregnant. I was trying to get her to see the point of view that that's a terrible terrible punishment, taking away their only means of bettering their lives and supporting their child, and I think she understood that, but the dominant feeling was still, they've done something terribly wrong, they have to pay for it.
Again, very Chinese. Everyone is one huge happy family. But if you step out of line, even a little bit, you're thrown to the dogs.
My girlfriend, when I laugh about people spitting in the subway, always says the same thing "they're definatly not from Beijing," and she, modern as she is, holds a fair amount of contempt for anything not Beijing (or QingDao recently, because of a vacation we took there that was great.) Family matters stay in the family, city matters stay in the city, and country matters stay in the country. If you're in, we love you, but if you step the littlest bit out of line, you're an outsider, and you're never getting back in.
I don't necessarily advocate high-schoolers having sex (not since I graduated highschool, anyway) but they do it. It takes the most draconian of social controls to keep this from happening commonly (it still does happen in China, though it's about as hush-hush as possible) and there's always a trade-off.
So the question is, what are they losing by denying this urge?
Monday, September 1, 2008
Personal and Impersonal relationships, and cultural development
I was talking today with one of my students when I realized something I think is rather interesting, and it opened up something I've been saying about the differences between China and America.
There's a well-known phenomenon among people doing business in China, which is, basically, they have to meet with the Chinese groups that they're doing business with several times a year, having a few meals together and going out on the town, to keep up and maintain a relationship, where in the West a once-yearly conference would be sufficient to maintain a healthy working relationship. It's also well-known that Chinese people put a great emphasis on "guanxi," which means "relations," or "connections," but in a very different way. Put simply, it's basically what we would call nepotism, or preferentialism, times a thousand or so. You do something for me, I'll do something for you. The legal system, and business, basically runs on a series of bribes.
People write this off as just being a feature of "Chinese culture," but I disagree.
I had asked my student to write me a short story and tell it to me for class as homework, and she chose to relate a problem she was having. She had recently bumped into an old college professor, and they had a pleasant conversation, at the end of which they said they'd see each other again to have dinner, and exchanged information, and her professor said he'd call her to arrange things further. But he still hasn't.
This bothered her, as it was not behavior she understood, or could tolerate. At the end of her short story, she said that this was just an example, and that it was becoming something very common in modern day China, and also asked me how to deal with people like this, and how to deal generally, when (in her words,) "society needs the trust of people and honor people."
As I began to explain to her it dawned on me what the problem was here, and it's not "Chinese culture."
Traditionally, Chinese society has been very closed, but not merely to foreigners. It applies equally as well within Chinese society. You belong to a village, and know everyone in the village, but someone from the next village might as well be from Mars. In this system, everything, business and all, is run on the basis of personal relationships.
In the modern world, though, this is basically impossible. You simply interact with too many people on a daily basis to have a personal relationship with them. Most relationships are impersonal, in the sense that you could exchange one person for just about anyone else with the same basic results. A waitress-client relationship, for example (or, a more extreme one, the relationship between a customer at McDonald's and the cashier) is entirely impersonal.
But this is not a difference between western culture, which prefers an impersonal business relationship, and China, which prefers a personal one. All relationships were personal before the modern age, before the age of the rule of law. Western villages and towns, and even cities, relied much more on personal relationships than we do today. The problem, or the only problem, is that China is trying to move their whole society from operating entirely on the personal level of relationships to the impersonal level as quickly as possible (or rather, introducing the idea that a relationship with a person need not necessarily be a personal one,) where the west has had hundreds of years of this experience. While much has already shifted in the direction of impersonality, there is still a clinging to an outmoded way of doing things, which is reflected in the croneyism and bribery necessary to move up in the country. For this, and for so many other reasons, China is fascinating as a whole country of people are pulled forward at lightening speed. Rather than a (not always, of course) smooth transition between two very different value systems, and ways of handling social interaction, it is as if China is taking the two and placing them directly next to each other, an awesome social experiment.
One of the things holding this back is the relative paucity and non-existent tradition of rule of law. In the west (as an ideal) the law applies equally to all. China's society is much more dependent on the unwritten undercurrents of society, and success is still often a case of currying favor with the right people. You cannot impeach a Chinese president.
And, of course, judging people based on connections and relationship works in some circumstances, and has worked for the majority of the history of civilization. There's a reason this is the "Chinese way." Under a certain system (that is, when you can reasonably assume familiarity with everyone you interact with, and when there's no impartial framework of law under which to work) it would be stupid to hire strangers you don't know or have any reason to trust to work for you, or, say, to head to the next town over for a bowl of noodles.
Personal relationships, it should be noted, have not been destroyed, and this is part of what complicates things. It's just that their scope is circumscribed. Normally, if you and your son have a fight, you're not going to call the police or hire lawyers. If there's a falling-out with friends, say, if a friend steals another friend's laptop, the problem is likely to be handled on a personal level, with friends taking sides, and having, possibly, someone or the other shunned from the group, something that was very common in Chinese practice traditionally. The worst punishment possible was being banished from your village. Famously, there is no room for an outsider in a Chinese village. It was, more or less, a death sentence.
In the west, I think we are "facing," a different sort of problem. We've gotten so good at doing things in this way that, in large numbers, people don't have enough personal relationships, or their personal relationships aren't satisfyingly deep. We are coming to understand that we must treasure and work to maintain these relationships with the people that matter to us, even though we would certainly not revert to a society based entirely on these relationships. Notice, of course, that it's basically impossible to jump from the older model to the post-post-modern model immediately. You need to establish rule of law and a healthy impersonal society before you begin to face the problems with impersonality. The Chinese are just starting to embrace the strengths of doing things this way. We have done things this way successfully for a long time, and are just starting to address the problems.
Of course, none of this excuses the behavior of the professor, it only points out that western people don't really see this as a problem which causes a great deal of angst. The professor simply gets placed in the lump of people with whom you have an impersonal relationship with, or in other words, in the group of people with whom you are not going to expend energy to keep up a good personal relationship with. In modern society, there are too many people to interact with to have a personal relationship with everyone, and so one chooses who is "in" and who is "out." Chinese people are only starting to learn (in a cultural values sense, obviously certain Chinese people are adept at this, and of course the level to which one's relationships are personal is dependant on the individual person) that not every relationship need be a personal one, and this, though more natural than it may appear, will take some time to set in.
But it will. The doors have been opened to modernity, if only (as I would argue) slightly, and eventually those that won't, for example, hire the best candidate because their cousin's son is also a candidate, are going to fall behind to the companies that hire based on skill and talent. But, no matter how fast China is trying to do this, it takes time, because power always prefers itself.
There's a well-known phenomenon among people doing business in China, which is, basically, they have to meet with the Chinese groups that they're doing business with several times a year, having a few meals together and going out on the town, to keep up and maintain a relationship, where in the West a once-yearly conference would be sufficient to maintain a healthy working relationship. It's also well-known that Chinese people put a great emphasis on "guanxi," which means "relations," or "connections," but in a very different way. Put simply, it's basically what we would call nepotism, or preferentialism, times a thousand or so. You do something for me, I'll do something for you. The legal system, and business, basically runs on a series of bribes.
People write this off as just being a feature of "Chinese culture," but I disagree.
I had asked my student to write me a short story and tell it to me for class as homework, and she chose to relate a problem she was having. She had recently bumped into an old college professor, and they had a pleasant conversation, at the end of which they said they'd see each other again to have dinner, and exchanged information, and her professor said he'd call her to arrange things further. But he still hasn't.
This bothered her, as it was not behavior she understood, or could tolerate. At the end of her short story, she said that this was just an example, and that it was becoming something very common in modern day China, and also asked me how to deal with people like this, and how to deal generally, when (in her words,) "society needs the trust of people and honor people."
As I began to explain to her it dawned on me what the problem was here, and it's not "Chinese culture."
Traditionally, Chinese society has been very closed, but not merely to foreigners. It applies equally as well within Chinese society. You belong to a village, and know everyone in the village, but someone from the next village might as well be from Mars. In this system, everything, business and all, is run on the basis of personal relationships.
In the modern world, though, this is basically impossible. You simply interact with too many people on a daily basis to have a personal relationship with them. Most relationships are impersonal, in the sense that you could exchange one person for just about anyone else with the same basic results. A waitress-client relationship, for example (or, a more extreme one, the relationship between a customer at McDonald's and the cashier) is entirely impersonal.
But this is not a difference between western culture, which prefers an impersonal business relationship, and China, which prefers a personal one. All relationships were personal before the modern age, before the age of the rule of law. Western villages and towns, and even cities, relied much more on personal relationships than we do today. The problem, or the only problem, is that China is trying to move their whole society from operating entirely on the personal level of relationships to the impersonal level as quickly as possible (or rather, introducing the idea that a relationship with a person need not necessarily be a personal one,) where the west has had hundreds of years of this experience. While much has already shifted in the direction of impersonality, there is still a clinging to an outmoded way of doing things, which is reflected in the croneyism and bribery necessary to move up in the country. For this, and for so many other reasons, China is fascinating as a whole country of people are pulled forward at lightening speed. Rather than a (not always, of course) smooth transition between two very different value systems, and ways of handling social interaction, it is as if China is taking the two and placing them directly next to each other, an awesome social experiment.
One of the things holding this back is the relative paucity and non-existent tradition of rule of law. In the west (as an ideal) the law applies equally to all. China's society is much more dependent on the unwritten undercurrents of society, and success is still often a case of currying favor with the right people. You cannot impeach a Chinese president.
And, of course, judging people based on connections and relationship works in some circumstances, and has worked for the majority of the history of civilization. There's a reason this is the "Chinese way." Under a certain system (that is, when you can reasonably assume familiarity with everyone you interact with, and when there's no impartial framework of law under which to work) it would be stupid to hire strangers you don't know or have any reason to trust to work for you, or, say, to head to the next town over for a bowl of noodles.
Personal relationships, it should be noted, have not been destroyed, and this is part of what complicates things. It's just that their scope is circumscribed. Normally, if you and your son have a fight, you're not going to call the police or hire lawyers. If there's a falling-out with friends, say, if a friend steals another friend's laptop, the problem is likely to be handled on a personal level, with friends taking sides, and having, possibly, someone or the other shunned from the group, something that was very common in Chinese practice traditionally. The worst punishment possible was being banished from your village. Famously, there is no room for an outsider in a Chinese village. It was, more or less, a death sentence.
In the west, I think we are "facing," a different sort of problem. We've gotten so good at doing things in this way that, in large numbers, people don't have enough personal relationships, or their personal relationships aren't satisfyingly deep. We are coming to understand that we must treasure and work to maintain these relationships with the people that matter to us, even though we would certainly not revert to a society based entirely on these relationships. Notice, of course, that it's basically impossible to jump from the older model to the post-post-modern model immediately. You need to establish rule of law and a healthy impersonal society before you begin to face the problems with impersonality. The Chinese are just starting to embrace the strengths of doing things this way. We have done things this way successfully for a long time, and are just starting to address the problems.
Of course, none of this excuses the behavior of the professor, it only points out that western people don't really see this as a problem which causes a great deal of angst. The professor simply gets placed in the lump of people with whom you have an impersonal relationship with, or in other words, in the group of people with whom you are not going to expend energy to keep up a good personal relationship with. In modern society, there are too many people to interact with to have a personal relationship with everyone, and so one chooses who is "in" and who is "out." Chinese people are only starting to learn (in a cultural values sense, obviously certain Chinese people are adept at this, and of course the level to which one's relationships are personal is dependant on the individual person) that not every relationship need be a personal one, and this, though more natural than it may appear, will take some time to set in.
But it will. The doors have been opened to modernity, if only (as I would argue) slightly, and eventually those that won't, for example, hire the best candidate because their cousin's son is also a candidate, are going to fall behind to the companies that hire based on skill and talent. But, no matter how fast China is trying to do this, it takes time, because power always prefers itself.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
God and Science, and Daniel Dennett
***10-9 See an update to the below (concerning visualizing Dennett's theory) here.
I am using as a jumping off point for this post this interview of Daniel Dennett in the Magazine "Search."
From the article:
"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."
Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself. This summary is unfairly short, as Dennett says, so for those of you interested in reading more, you can go here, a site at Tufts University with many articles by Dennett that make this point more clearly and more in depth.
I think that Dennett is 100% right here, and yet I think he makes the same mistake that everyone else makes when talking about religion (which, while the quote above doesn't directly deal with, the article does,) confusing religion with the existence of "God." In the non-dual view of being the idea of a separate "God" that is above and beyond the world, transcendent to it, is seen as laughably impossible in the face of the fact that separation is a conception, an appearance. This, substituting "God" for "consciousness" and "the events of the universe" for "the activities of the neural system" could well give a post-post-modern conception of God. This, I think, is an idea that is emerging, and I do not think it conflicts with anything that Dennett says in this article, or the scientific materialists, though they would all dislike the word "God."
When he says that everything is open to the investigations of science, he is perfectly right, and when he calls "Darwinism a 'universal acid,' cutting through every aspect of science, culture, religion, art and human thought," he is also right. But, I still claim that he is wrong in rejecting religion. The spirituality (a word I dislike) of the future does not reject science, nor its findings. The spirituality of the future does not rely on dogma or myth or literal interpretations.
"Consciousness has arisen from the unwilled, unordained algorithmic processes of natural selection," or, in other words, not from the hand of God. Again, there's nothing to disagree with here, it is the historicity of the dogmatic and literalist claim that God is a real "thing," like a toaster, that necessitates the high board of science. God does not perform magic, and any God worth believing in would not need to.
When God is viewed or understood as simply "being," the metaphors of religion make a lot more sense, even ones as clearly literalist as "God created the world." Well, yeah, the world is here, so, being created it. Of course, the wording of this favors the mythology of God, that some giant man like thing created the world in the way you or I would draw a picture. Created here could be understood better as "the flood created a problem for getting through the center of the city." It's not like the flood meant to do this. It's impersonal.
Is God impersonal? Yes. And no. You're a person, aren't you? So God is personal. But the totality of everything, this is impersonal.
The irony is that, in attacking the idea of a separate unitary self-center of consciousness, Dennett is affirming something that the world's esoteric religions have said since the time of the Buddha, and perhaps earlier in Vedanta: "you," do not exist. What you think you are is only a thought, and the reality is much simpler than that.
When Dennett says that there is no truth that religion can claim as its own without science, he is both right and wrong. In the exoteric sense, he is right. Science has domain over everything in the material world. But in the esoteric sense, science has nothing to do to prove or disprove being. It can do neither, being is self-evident. But what it is, what we are, is so obvious that we miss it constantly. As Einstein said, the fish will be the last one to discover water. In the way I think Dennett is using the term, as in "objectifiable exterior phenomenon," I think he is incorrect. No matter what science gets to about the happenings inside one's brain, you cannot experience what someone else experiences. Even if you could "see" what someone else were seeing, or "feel," it, it would be different, because "you" are doing it, with all the different history and the different system for experience you have. Experience is not falsifiable, nor is it provable. This is precisely beyond the realm of science, and something which religion has always dealt with, in both exoteric (mythological) and esoteric (contemplative) strains.
The problem is that anything "non-scientific" gets lumped in with "mythology," or, to put it slightly differently, any attempt at describing interiorality is seen as necessarily involving supernaturalism. There may be no "privleged center" in consciousness, something, again, esoteric branches of religion would be familiar with, but that doesn't discount subjectivism itself. The objectivist description of the world, perfectly legitimate at that, is not an explanation, and cannot exist without subjectivity. What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? What's in a mirror when no one's looking?
This is not to say that reality needs intelligent aware and conscious beings, far from it, it is just to say that without subjectivity, there is no objectivity. Obviously this uses the word slightly differently than the conscious subjectivity we're used to , but it's none the less valid.
The direct experience of being without an object, the experience pointed at by the esoteric traditions, is shrugged off by science as being equivalent to boogeymen.
There is this fundamental problem between duality and what Dennett argues, that there is no Cartesian duality, and yet I would say that they are only two metaphors for looking at the same thing, like the heads and tails of a coin are actually still both only parts of the coin. There is an interiority in consciousness. But this does not make it dual, since it is entirely inseperable from the exterior occurances of consciousness. They do not arise separately, and they are not independent.
In a Vedantic sense of enquiry (or, for that matter, Cartesian,) the only thing that cannot be doubted, that can actually be proved and believed, because self-evident, is being itself, or, in the human mind, awareness of being. What was before the big bang? Whatever it was was the only thing real, the only thing unchanging, the only thing not subject to the laws of impermanence. What was it? Nothing. Nothingness. This is simultaneously everything, it is all that is real. And, the world is this as well. In the Hindu formulation, the world is illusory, Brahma alone is real, the world is Brahma. The argument between Cartesian duality and materialism is missing the point. Against the Cartesians, there is nothing special and separate, no "privliged center." There are not two things. But, against the materialists, that nothingness is not different from existence, is existence itself, and is the consciousness, the open space within which all else happens, and, it is not material.
There is a new world view emerging, one that believes as strictly as Dennett does in the rigorousness of science, and yet makes room equally for the interior experience of consciousness, the subjectivity that is impossible to describe or prove or disprove, except in the first-person perspective, where it is self-evident. I am. I have no proof that you have an interior, but at the very least, I am, or, rather, am-ness.
This worldview, as Dennett says, must pass through the tests of Darwinism, and science. The Religions of the future cannot be ones that believe in the things science shows are impossible. Oddly enough, believers of one mythological system find others absolutely ridiculous, and yet this does not shake their faith in their own ridiculous stories in the least bit. Lao Zi was not 900 years old when he was born. Mary was not a virgin when she gave birth. There is no Garden of Eden, especially not one that looks exactly like a 17th century English manor's garden.
The myths are beautiful, but they are not true. They are stories, rife with meaning, and are as such not exactly fiction, but they are not true.
The worry about science is not really that it can explain God, but that it can explain God away, and it has explained away quite a few things that believers in former times thought of as being sacrosanct, that is, they thought of as providing a pillar for belief of God, but it can never explain away being itself, which is the ground for all of the mythological religions, and the contemplative. The myths arose because there is no rational explanation for any of this, and again, science is really describing things more than explaining them, at least at the deepest levels. But there's no need for words in the contemplative experience. There's no room for them. Whatever form religion takes in the future, to be legitimate, will be centered on the contemplative.
This, it should be noted, is a far cry from what is called "new-aged spirituality" (a term from which my prickling disgust for the word "spirituality" likely comes.) New-aged "spirituality" is a reversion to beliefs in magic, more or less.
Another article, by Sandra Blakeslee, in the magazine "Science and Spirit," on the neurological basis for spiritual experience, highlights what I have been talking about.
There is still an over-reliance on the external viewpoint, and the point of view (I believe mistaken) that these external and objective interactions cause the experiences rather than correlate with them, but it is an improvement on several things. The structures of one's internal consciousness certainly impact your spiritual experience, so, where a Muslim will see Mohammed, a Christian may see Christ, even though what is happening to them is, at its base, and neurologically speaking, the same.
Of course, the science which crows so loudly (and correctly) as it trumpets, say, the fossil record, also trumpets when it sees neurological signs of meditative activity, as if the experiences undergone can be explained away by science. Yes, breakdowns happen, and this is what the meditative traditions have always asserted. The fact that there's a biological basis for this should have been obvious except for those that thought the literal hand of god reached down from his (likely rather large) throne in the sky and touched one's forehead with a golden finger. Of course, I am downplaying that this viewpoint may be prevalent, but still, the main idea is that the scientific proof of different and abnormal brain states during these activities certainly does not reduce them to being no more than "fireworks in the brain." But, it is not that the biological activity creates this, it is that the release of the constraints and constrictions of one's mind unveils this ever-present experience of reality. It is the same as the Buddhist tradition has always maintained; you're not reaching enlightenment, you're getting rid of everything else. Or, if your mind is a room, you don't need to add furniture to get what you want, you need to throw it all out of the room. Or, as Meister Eckhart wrote, "If you empty yourself, God has no choice but to fill you."
And, of course, there is no "God," as such.
I am using as a jumping off point for this post this interview of Daniel Dennett in the Magazine "Search."
From the article:
"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."
Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself. This summary is unfairly short, as Dennett says, so for those of you interested in reading more, you can go here, a site at Tufts University with many articles by Dennett that make this point more clearly and more in depth.
I think that Dennett is 100% right here, and yet I think he makes the same mistake that everyone else makes when talking about religion (which, while the quote above doesn't directly deal with, the article does,) confusing religion with the existence of "God." In the non-dual view of being the idea of a separate "God" that is above and beyond the world, transcendent to it, is seen as laughably impossible in the face of the fact that separation is a conception, an appearance. This, substituting "God" for "consciousness" and "the events of the universe" for "the activities of the neural system" could well give a post-post-modern conception of God. This, I think, is an idea that is emerging, and I do not think it conflicts with anything that Dennett says in this article, or the scientific materialists, though they would all dislike the word "God."
When he says that everything is open to the investigations of science, he is perfectly right, and when he calls "Darwinism a 'universal acid,' cutting through every aspect of science, culture, religion, art and human thought," he is also right. But, I still claim that he is wrong in rejecting religion. The spirituality (a word I dislike) of the future does not reject science, nor its findings. The spirituality of the future does not rely on dogma or myth or literal interpretations.
"Consciousness has arisen from the unwilled, unordained algorithmic processes of natural selection," or, in other words, not from the hand of God. Again, there's nothing to disagree with here, it is the historicity of the dogmatic and literalist claim that God is a real "thing," like a toaster, that necessitates the high board of science. God does not perform magic, and any God worth believing in would not need to.
When God is viewed or understood as simply "being," the metaphors of religion make a lot more sense, even ones as clearly literalist as "God created the world." Well, yeah, the world is here, so, being created it. Of course, the wording of this favors the mythology of God, that some giant man like thing created the world in the way you or I would draw a picture. Created here could be understood better as "the flood created a problem for getting through the center of the city." It's not like the flood meant to do this. It's impersonal.
Is God impersonal? Yes. And no. You're a person, aren't you? So God is personal. But the totality of everything, this is impersonal.
The irony is that, in attacking the idea of a separate unitary self-center of consciousness, Dennett is affirming something that the world's esoteric religions have said since the time of the Buddha, and perhaps earlier in Vedanta: "you," do not exist. What you think you are is only a thought, and the reality is much simpler than that.
When Dennett says that there is no truth that religion can claim as its own without science, he is both right and wrong. In the exoteric sense, he is right. Science has domain over everything in the material world. But in the esoteric sense, science has nothing to do to prove or disprove being. It can do neither, being is self-evident. But what it is, what we are, is so obvious that we miss it constantly. As Einstein said, the fish will be the last one to discover water. In the way I think Dennett is using the term, as in "objectifiable exterior phenomenon," I think he is incorrect. No matter what science gets to about the happenings inside one's brain, you cannot experience what someone else experiences. Even if you could "see" what someone else were seeing, or "feel," it, it would be different, because "you" are doing it, with all the different history and the different system for experience you have. Experience is not falsifiable, nor is it provable. This is precisely beyond the realm of science, and something which religion has always dealt with, in both exoteric (mythological) and esoteric (contemplative) strains.
The problem is that anything "non-scientific" gets lumped in with "mythology," or, to put it slightly differently, any attempt at describing interiorality is seen as necessarily involving supernaturalism. There may be no "privleged center" in consciousness, something, again, esoteric branches of religion would be familiar with, but that doesn't discount subjectivism itself. The objectivist description of the world, perfectly legitimate at that, is not an explanation, and cannot exist without subjectivity. What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? What's in a mirror when no one's looking?
This is not to say that reality needs intelligent aware and conscious beings, far from it, it is just to say that without subjectivity, there is no objectivity. Obviously this uses the word slightly differently than the conscious subjectivity we're used to , but it's none the less valid.
The direct experience of being without an object, the experience pointed at by the esoteric traditions, is shrugged off by science as being equivalent to boogeymen.
There is this fundamental problem between duality and what Dennett argues, that there is no Cartesian duality, and yet I would say that they are only two metaphors for looking at the same thing, like the heads and tails of a coin are actually still both only parts of the coin. There is an interiority in consciousness. But this does not make it dual, since it is entirely inseperable from the exterior occurances of consciousness. They do not arise separately, and they are not independent.
In a Vedantic sense of enquiry (or, for that matter, Cartesian,) the only thing that cannot be doubted, that can actually be proved and believed, because self-evident, is being itself, or, in the human mind, awareness of being. What was before the big bang? Whatever it was was the only thing real, the only thing unchanging, the only thing not subject to the laws of impermanence. What was it? Nothing. Nothingness. This is simultaneously everything, it is all that is real. And, the world is this as well. In the Hindu formulation, the world is illusory, Brahma alone is real, the world is Brahma. The argument between Cartesian duality and materialism is missing the point. Against the Cartesians, there is nothing special and separate, no "privliged center." There are not two things. But, against the materialists, that nothingness is not different from existence, is existence itself, and is the consciousness, the open space within which all else happens, and, it is not material.
There is a new world view emerging, one that believes as strictly as Dennett does in the rigorousness of science, and yet makes room equally for the interior experience of consciousness, the subjectivity that is impossible to describe or prove or disprove, except in the first-person perspective, where it is self-evident. I am. I have no proof that you have an interior, but at the very least, I am, or, rather, am-ness.
This worldview, as Dennett says, must pass through the tests of Darwinism, and science. The Religions of the future cannot be ones that believe in the things science shows are impossible. Oddly enough, believers of one mythological system find others absolutely ridiculous, and yet this does not shake their faith in their own ridiculous stories in the least bit. Lao Zi was not 900 years old when he was born. Mary was not a virgin when she gave birth. There is no Garden of Eden, especially not one that looks exactly like a 17th century English manor's garden.
The myths are beautiful, but they are not true. They are stories, rife with meaning, and are as such not exactly fiction, but they are not true.
The worry about science is not really that it can explain God, but that it can explain God away, and it has explained away quite a few things that believers in former times thought of as being sacrosanct, that is, they thought of as providing a pillar for belief of God, but it can never explain away being itself, which is the ground for all of the mythological religions, and the contemplative. The myths arose because there is no rational explanation for any of this, and again, science is really describing things more than explaining them, at least at the deepest levels. But there's no need for words in the contemplative experience. There's no room for them. Whatever form religion takes in the future, to be legitimate, will be centered on the contemplative.
This, it should be noted, is a far cry from what is called "new-aged spirituality" (a term from which my prickling disgust for the word "spirituality" likely comes.) New-aged "spirituality" is a reversion to beliefs in magic, more or less.
Another article, by Sandra Blakeslee, in the magazine "Science and Spirit," on the neurological basis for spiritual experience, highlights what I have been talking about.
There is still an over-reliance on the external viewpoint, and the point of view (I believe mistaken) that these external and objective interactions cause the experiences rather than correlate with them, but it is an improvement on several things. The structures of one's internal consciousness certainly impact your spiritual experience, so, where a Muslim will see Mohammed, a Christian may see Christ, even though what is happening to them is, at its base, and neurologically speaking, the same.
Of course, the science which crows so loudly (and correctly) as it trumpets, say, the fossil record, also trumpets when it sees neurological signs of meditative activity, as if the experiences undergone can be explained away by science. Yes, breakdowns happen, and this is what the meditative traditions have always asserted. The fact that there's a biological basis for this should have been obvious except for those that thought the literal hand of god reached down from his (likely rather large) throne in the sky and touched one's forehead with a golden finger. Of course, I am downplaying that this viewpoint may be prevalent, but still, the main idea is that the scientific proof of different and abnormal brain states during these activities certainly does not reduce them to being no more than "fireworks in the brain." But, it is not that the biological activity creates this, it is that the release of the constraints and constrictions of one's mind unveils this ever-present experience of reality. It is the same as the Buddhist tradition has always maintained; you're not reaching enlightenment, you're getting rid of everything else. Or, if your mind is a room, you don't need to add furniture to get what you want, you need to throw it all out of the room. Or, as Meister Eckhart wrote, "If you empty yourself, God has no choice but to fill you."
And, of course, there is no "God," as such.
Refocus
Trying to get this up everyday has been interesting, but I feel I have gotten a little off track. Writing everyday (or every few days, depending on my work schedule) naturally leads to a less in depth sort of article, and leads to a week of articles whose entries are only vaguely connected, which was not my goal. Originally, I had planned to use this site to write slightly longer passages tying all of these seemingly disparate things together. To do that, I have decided not to bother writing a passage every day, and instead come out with one, moderately long passage every week, tying together certain things out in culture with a new framework to understand them in, which was the goal of this blog anyway, to try out certain thoughts in writing and test them before readers.
So, look for a blog post every Sunday (or early in the week,) giving you a whole week to look it all over at your leisure.
Thank You,
Love ya'll.
So, look for a blog post every Sunday (or early in the week,) giving you a whole week to look it all over at your leisure.
Thank You,
Love ya'll.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Bolt
For those of you that didn't see this live, this is was a truly wonderful moment, one I think actually encapsulates some of the greatness of sport. 
This one, obviously, is more impressive.
'What?' You say, 'he's celebrating like an idiot, he added time to his total because of this, and his showboating makes his competitors look like chumps. How does this reflect well on sports at all?'
I actually think his reaction came more out of surprise than anything else. I think, like the rest of us watching, when he saw just how far ahead he was (or couldn't see, couldn't see anyone near him when he glanced side to side,) he was in awe, and he just started doing what was natural, and what a lot of the rest of us were doing, which was jumping up and down and saying "holy crap did you just see that!! That was the finals, right? How the hell did that just happen?"
This is different from Leon Lett's showboating that lost the Cowboys a touchdown back when they played the Bills for the first time, because, while that is a rare occurance for Leon Lett to be sure, he didn't have it in the bag, in the first place (the ball was stripped from him and he didn't get to score a touchdown) and in the second place because the whole "game" (race) was over.
It's also really different from what women's (and possibly men's, but I've never seen a men's indoor volleyball game, I'm sure I will soon) volleyball players do after every single freaking point, like that one point is the most important thing in the world. They run around like rabbits, or five year olds, and they hug and slap each other like they've just won, well, something actually significant.
Bolt's (what a great name) run was significant, and he trounced the competition by so much that I don't think any of them could possibly be sore about it. They simply didn't have a chance. It's not like, when one team wins by an inch and then freaks out and rubs it in the loser's nose like they're a thousand times better. This guy actually was a thousand times better, AND THESE ARE THE FASTEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD! That's why I think what he did was incredible, and why the pictures of him floating above the track as he highsteps it at the end are absolutely beautiful, even if he was, just a little bit, saying, "wow, I'm the best thing in the world."
Haha, also, look at the number two guy (the one to Bolt's right.) I don't know if he's so excited because he just won the silver medal behind superman, which basically makes him the fastest human, or because he just saw what Bolt did. Probably the first, but it kind of looks like the second.
Have fun and run relaxed.
This one, obviously, is more impressive. 
'What?' You say, 'he's celebrating like an idiot, he added time to his total because of this, and his showboating makes his competitors look like chumps. How does this reflect well on sports at all?'I actually think his reaction came more out of surprise than anything else. I think, like the rest of us watching, when he saw just how far ahead he was (or couldn't see, couldn't see anyone near him when he glanced side to side,) he was in awe, and he just started doing what was natural, and what a lot of the rest of us were doing, which was jumping up and down and saying "holy crap did you just see that!! That was the finals, right? How the hell did that just happen?"
This is different from Leon Lett's showboating that lost the Cowboys a touchdown back when they played the Bills for the first time, because, while that is a rare occurance for Leon Lett to be sure, he didn't have it in the bag, in the first place (the ball was stripped from him and he didn't get to score a touchdown) and in the second place because the whole "game" (race) was over.
It's also really different from what women's (and possibly men's, but I've never seen a men's indoor volleyball game, I'm sure I will soon) volleyball players do after every single freaking point, like that one point is the most important thing in the world. They run around like rabbits, or five year olds, and they hug and slap each other like they've just won, well, something actually significant.
Bolt's (what a great name) run was significant, and he trounced the competition by so much that I don't think any of them could possibly be sore about it. They simply didn't have a chance. It's not like, when one team wins by an inch and then freaks out and rubs it in the loser's nose like they're a thousand times better. This guy actually was a thousand times better, AND THESE ARE THE FASTEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD! That's why I think what he did was incredible, and why the pictures of him floating above the track as he highsteps it at the end are absolutely beautiful, even if he was, just a little bit, saying, "wow, I'm the best thing in the world."
Haha, also, look at the number two guy (the one to Bolt's right.) I don't know if he's so excited because he just won the silver medal behind superman, which basically makes him the fastest human, or because he just saw what Bolt did. Probably the first, but it kind of looks like the second.
Have fun and run relaxed.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Summertime, and the living is, crap.
Interesting assumptions break down here for me all the time. At the beginning of the summer, I had been talking to my students about what summer is like in China. At first, I was really confused, but the more and more I dug into it, the more I understood my students inability to understand what the heck I was talking about.
Summer, I have always felt, is a magical time. Things just feel different. BBQs, the freedom of being off from school, (or taking long weekends at work,) going to the beach, or camping, or a lake, drinking a beer outside with friends, playing frisbee in the park or basketball, the fourth of July, ice cream parlors... this is really just the beginning. In short, summer is really different. I tried to get my students to talk about this earlier in the summer, with mostly black stares coming back.
It turns out, summer is no different in China than the rest of the year, and actually, kind of worse for all concerned. There are few individual vacations, everyone has the same national holidays off, and kids, while they aren't in school, are pressured by parents to take more outside of school classes, (like my English class,) plus, they still have to do a few hours of homework every day for their regular school (this was a real surprise to me) and they don't get to see their friends. Plus, it's too hot. All of this adds up as the answer "nothing" to the question, "what's special about summer in China?"
Kids actually like school, really really like school. They get to play with their friends, and, since there's no alternative, they don't know anything else. You might have liked school too if "not school" actually meant more work and less play with your friends. School, for them, is life, and so, since they like life, they like school.
Keep this in mind as you read about China, about how families aren't grieving after the earthquake (see my last post,) or about the post "A beautiful but disturbing day."
Summer, I have always felt, is a magical time. Things just feel different. BBQs, the freedom of being off from school, (or taking long weekends at work,) going to the beach, or camping, or a lake, drinking a beer outside with friends, playing frisbee in the park or basketball, the fourth of July, ice cream parlors... this is really just the beginning. In short, summer is really different. I tried to get my students to talk about this earlier in the summer, with mostly black stares coming back.
It turns out, summer is no different in China than the rest of the year, and actually, kind of worse for all concerned. There are few individual vacations, everyone has the same national holidays off, and kids, while they aren't in school, are pressured by parents to take more outside of school classes, (like my English class,) plus, they still have to do a few hours of homework every day for their regular school (this was a real surprise to me) and they don't get to see their friends. Plus, it's too hot. All of this adds up as the answer "nothing" to the question, "what's special about summer in China?"
Kids actually like school, really really like school. They get to play with their friends, and, since there's no alternative, they don't know anything else. You might have liked school too if "not school" actually meant more work and less play with your friends. School, for them, is life, and so, since they like life, they like school.
Keep this in mind as you read about China, about how families aren't grieving after the earthquake (see my last post,) or about the post "A beautiful but disturbing day."
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