The Future of Social Media: The Open Web

Good blog post here about the future of the web and social media.

It's interesting for a few reasons, even though it's mostly directed at large companies. What I find most interesting is the potential for this kind of interface to lead to a much more open society, something identified here as "Transparency." This has been on my mind recently with this post at the Far Eastern Economic Review, about the near impossibility of producing "hard news" in China. Anyone who has been following China knows of its burgeoning and noisy online community, however. Could direct person to person reporting overcome the collusion of the government and industry? I'm optimistic.

In any case, the potential for this kind of application to create smart-mobs is huge.

Supportive community, longer life.

An article on the "Well" blog in the times.

The article talks about several studies indicating that having a strong social net makes people significantly more healthy. Not just a little bit:

'In 2006, a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with breast cancer found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends. And notably, proximity and the amount of contact with a friend wasn’t associated with survival. Just having friends was protective.' !!! Four times as likely is pretty significant.

If you think about humans as being social animals, as if we were all really just one big human, this makes a great deal of sense. One ant, after all, has almost no purpose, and anything cut off from its support (like a plucked flower) has a short life expectancy.

What does it mean in the long term?

I think that people are going to gravitate more and more towards supportive, open communities, ones that (unlike the communalism of level 6 greens) allow the individual to make his or her own choices, while providing a fluid and open support structure. For more, see this post.

The family may well be on it's way out, not as the bedrock of human culture, but as the discreet bedrock of human culture. Tribes were basically no more than enlarged families; as humans advanced, those 'tribes' became smaller and smaller, interacting with a larger and larger culture. Another way to track this movement would be to say that starting at tribes, where the family/culture unit was the same (the tribe,) the general size of a culture expanded greatly to include huge nations, and the size of the family unit shrank greatly to include, as an extreme, a family of four. Obviously, this is rough, and general. Plenty of extended families are very close. The next step is to extend the size of the cultural unit to include all of humanity, and to shrink the size of the family unit to the individual. But that'll look much better than it sounds like at first:

As the article says:

'Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships'.

Why? My theory would be that family relationships tend to be far more structured, and rigid, than healthy friendships. 'In a six-year study of 736 middle-age Swedish men, attachment to a single person didn’t appear to affect the risk of heart attack and fatal coronary heart disease, but having friendships did. Only smoking was as important a risk factor as lack of social support.' (ONLY SMOKING!) Over the years, semi-healthy to unhealthy spousal relationships may well solidify around a few major interchanges, which would mean much of both of the people involved in the relationship would be closed off from their partner, not allowing an honest exchange of the kind mentioned by one of the subjects of the article when she says it's easier to talk to her friends about the disease than her doctor.

Friendships, however, are much more equal, dynamic, and open, because we view them as being different: "friend" in any case is such a loose term, that instead of approaching your friend as your "friend" you're more likely to approach them as being a person. Contrast this with your Father, or Mother, or even siblings. It's much harder to see these people objectively as people without the heavy baggage these relationships necessarily bring.

What I mean by the individual becoming the "family" unit is not that an individual becomes isolated from the rest of the world, far from it. It is saying that as we begin to become actually comfortable with the idea of individuality for people of all races and sexes/sexual orientations, is that people will become much more consciously free and aware of the relationships they form with other people, and that those relationships will undoubtedly change in nature over time as the individuals do, and that these relationships will constitute that individual's "family," a group that obviously may also include actual relations.

What this ought to create is a culture where both the individual's rights and wishes are respected, and where each individual is embedded within their chosen community/communities as active and valued members, all within the larger human global being. Again, this is far from isolating, in fact, we in the west might be coming to the last wave of that kind of social isolation.

Humans used to be isolated families. Then they became tribes. Then Nation-States, and Nations under God, then Nations of Individuals (with varying de facto rights) under the Law. We are on the way to a Planet of United Individuals, though there's a hell of a long way to go. We'll get there though. Look left, look right. No man is an island.

'Last year, researchers studied 34 students at the University of Virginia , taking them to the base of a steep hill and fitting them with a weighted backpack. They were then asked to estimate the steepness of the hill. Some participants stood next to friends during the exercise, while others were alone. The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.'

And over the horizon?

Transitions?

An article in the Times magazine about a group trying to organize sustainable communities for what they believe will be an awesome and coming crash of our civilization. It's more interesting as a look at where we are now than as where we may be twenty years in the future.

The thrust of the movement:
'“Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.'

'For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.'

'It was all surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has been collecting in the back of America’s throat. Our era has been defined by skyrocketing line graphs, and it’s easy to wonder if we have finally pushed something just a little too far and are now watching everything start to teeter over. Maybe it’s not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have plugged up the atmosphere with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. We’re all starting to career down the other side of that hill — which hill, specifically, is up to you. But it’s the shadowy side, and none of us can see the bottom.'

What makes this different from any other apocalyptic movement? Its dovetail with conscious capitalism and rising Level 6 sensibilities in the mainstream.

'...most people in Sandpoint presumably hadn’t heard anything about Transition. But the ones who had often found a way to interpret the movement as extensions of their own visions. Having watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and tourists rush into Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition’s vague promise of building a better, quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”) Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.'

As noted above, though, this is does not exactly appear to be an integral movement, but more of a snapshot of what's emerging from (more and more) mainstream 6s.

For example, in response to a woman asking if they couldn't just make a rule to cremate everybody:'“Well,” Millard said, “it takes a lot of energy to cremate people. Besides, now we’re getting into rules.”' Straight-up 6.

There's more in this to believe that this is more of a reaction against the evils of modernity than an actual constructive growth into the future:

'Millard’s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American history. In the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series of jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a “phalanx.” A central estate or “phalanstery” would be surrounded by tradesmen’s workshops, cultural institutions and farmland. Fourier was horrified by what he saw at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that dishonest lending and capitalism in general would lead to the enslavement of humans by big companies; “industrial feudalism,” he called it. And, not unlike Transition, he aimed to overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed to have reduced all possible human personalities to a number of essential types. From there, it was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women and children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would — all by merrily following their individual passions — end up satisfying all the phalanx’s essential needs. “The new amorous world,” he wrote, would rise out of “the new industrial world” by the force of “passional attraction.”

Transition insists that initiatives be completely bottom-up organizations. There’s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve slightly differently wherever it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative shouldn’t be controlled too tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the handbook is really more of a mantra: “Let it go where it wants to go.” Like a Fourierian phalanx, a Transition Town should be the product of the passions of its residents — all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, though, Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”'

There's even the sense that the founders of the group want this to happen, which makes sense. Because society today has so recklessly shit in the salad bowl, it's all going to come crashing down, taking everything despicable with it. This is not to say that anyone is consciously aware of this, but 'Transition’s message is twofold: first, that a dire global emergency demands we transform our society; and second, that we might actually enjoy making those changes.' Why in the world would we enjoy this? because humans naturally should enjoy living in this sort of world, so tossing off all of the old barriers to natural humanity would make us all really happy.

Another hallmark of first-tier thinking here is that there's no conception that when things get tough resources-wise, things are going to get rough violence-wise. There's no thought about level 3s coming in to take over whatever sustainable resources a place like this has created; the overall vision is just of people coming together and living peacefully in sustainable communities because that's the way people naturally are. This narrow, if innocently-optimistic-and-lovely-in-its-own-way view of human nature is a call sign of the green 6s. It isn't, however, how everybody is approaching the project: '“Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”

Michael Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his chair during the charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the unflinching cheeriness of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also worried that people didn’t yet understand that “just because you’re passionate about a particular issue like transportation or water or local food doesn’t mean that you have the skills to do the research, analysis or planning around that issue.” He later added, “If I knew how to convey how serious, how urgent the situation is without sending people into fear and helplessness, it would take a great burden off of me.”'

All in all, though, despite the limits of level 6, there are quite a few important contributions being made here. After all, we only have one planet:

'Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.

Lanphear told me, “As long as we get the work going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter who gets the glory or the credit.” Richard Kühnel chose to see it in an even more positive light. He told me, “I feel whoever wants to participate and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that’s who the Sandpoint Transition Initiative is” — whether those people know it or not.

What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

'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.

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.

China, and Sloppy Thinking (v. David Brooks)

An Op-Ed in the Times by David Brooks, where he summarizes an extremely important cultural difference between the West and China, and talks about several theories on why it may be, though, obviously, who knows?

But there are great problems in thinking this way. I don't have the answers, of course, but I would at least like to add something to the conversation.

"When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships."

There are other famous studies exploring the difference in the way citizens of developed nations organize information from rural people in developing nations. What they found was similar to the above: Asked to pick out which object didn't fit in a group, the developed nation's citizens picked "wood," from a group that included "wood, saw, hammer, and ax," noting the relationship between tools, but the rural people were confused, seeing basically no connection, and most often picked "hammer," since both a "saw" and an "ax" can be used to cut "wood."

The point, though, is that there is a relationship between "cow," and "chicken," but it's not a practical one, it's an abstract one. The study, if I remember correctly, was about the effect of education and reading on the way the brain organizes information, and it also showed that adults who learned recently to read also began to make abstract rather than practical connections, that it was not simply children who had been well educated that made this connection.

So, is this an East-West difference, or a difference in educational methods? The East is famous for rote learning, while the West values (ideally) the fostering of thinking itself, as a way to make previously unnoticed connections and to problem-solve. Ask any High school student in China what date an historical event happened, and they'll likely be able to, especially if they're preparing for the Gao Kao, a test that compares to our SATs as The Joker compares to your average bank robber. Ask them why that date is important, and they may be strapped to think of anything. A western student may just be b.-s.ing, but they'll be able to construct some sort of argument, which is ironic due to Brooks' statement that the context is so important to the Chinese. (Obviously, both what and how are important in learning.)

I do not know what the difference is due to, but I would be wary of making claims one way or the other.

He continues:

"But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops."

Really? What about Japan? Famously, Japanese companies are run like feudal empires, and are loathe to change (not change of, say, methods or reacting to markets, with this they do very well (look up Kaizen) but structurally, and yes, culturally. But even this is changing. Articles in the Times a few months ago chronicled the rise of employees suing their companies for various damages. Japanese mainstream society has only existed outside of strict feudalism for seventy years, and China, it could be argued, is still mostly a peasant, folk culture, growing towards modernity and away from traditional roots, and it has only been doing this for thirty years. Change appears to happen quickly, if not all-at-once, but, in reality, it is often a painstakingly slow process, especially in the earliest stages. It takes generations, plural, not twenty years. I cannot say that China will become more liberal and Western internally (though externally they have co-opted quite a bit) but I would certainly be sensible enough to be more patient about it. After all, the Enlightenment started hundreds of years ago, and people still aren't all that enlightened, even though they may personally think they're great.

And then:
"For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the Western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts."

This is certainly true, which is (conversely) why I think it is so important to emphasize every individual's development along the lines they wish to pursue. Like economics, where local conditions reflected in prices contain far more "knowledge" overall than central planners can ever have, the individual knows what is best for him/her, and can make choices accordingly, whether those choices are driven by "free-will" or by the context the choices are made in (obviously, this is far too complex a subject to tackle here.) Ultimately, I think the distinction is irrelevant. No matter how the choices are being made, the individual and the society are better off if someone can make a personal "choice." The problem with putting the emphasis on social contexts is that, as in China, where this is overtly so, it leads to a very rigid social structure where one is expected to do one and only one correct thing according to the circumstances, entirely denying that individual difference exists (I have come up against this again and again here. Fortunately, since I am not Chinese, my choices and conduct are taken with a grain of salt, and quite often admired, in the "Oh I wish I could do that" sort of way.) Again, wherever the "choices" are coming from, it is clear that offered different options, different people will do different things.

In any case, the West is not done developing either. Yes, we're depressed, yes, we need healthier communities, yes, we need more social ties etc. etc., but we're coming to see that, and, as individuals, choosing to deal with it. Isn't that preferable to somebody sitting in an office looking at statistics and saying, "hmmm, we should somehow coerce older people into more exercise." Perhaps the example goes to far, but I'm sure you get the point.

This is why I think this article is dangerous, almost.

"The rise of China isn’t only an economic event. It’s a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream."

This dream, as we have seen throughout history, and this way of thinking about humans and the rights of individuals, has led to the worst tragedies of human history, not the least of them in China itself, during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Importantly, free societies never do this, and Authoritarian societies really like to.

And, as hinted at above, the American Dream has always included a social dream. Making it to the top certainly does not preclude community, and often those who have won their American Dream are the most prominent of social benefactors.

"It’s certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats."

Exactly.

I will be writing later on the rise of China economically and politically, hopefully before the Olympics are done.

Keep Thinking.

Eatin' Meat

I am not a vegetarian, though I have recently sworn meat off again excepting dinners with friends (excluding my girlfriend,) because I am in China, after all (no more than a rationalization) but a recent article in the NYTimes makes the plain case that our meat habits (both growing and eating, which are, of course, connected) are wreaking havoc on just about everything indiscriminately.

To wit:
-"...assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains," leading to "the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests."

-"...an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production," which also "generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation." (Fortunately, with all those gases in the atmosphere, the percentage of land that's ice-free should be growing rather conveniently.)

-"...2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days."

-"More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices." As mentioned later, while this is inconvenient for wealthier countries and people, for the not-so-fortunate this can spell famine.

-"Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams..."

- The "administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people."

-"...grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes."

-"...hog production [yes, 'production'] facilities that resemble prisons more than farms ... pollute streams and groundwater. (In Iowa alone, hog factories and farms produce more than 50 million tons of excrement annually.)" An excised passage provides the technical term for the "manure lagoons."

And this is not even comprehensive, as most of this has nothing to do with how animals are treated in such facilities, or the squeeze rising food prices puts on starving people. (both of which the article and this blog, below, cover.)

Interestingly, the article goes on to say that "[p]erhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production."

I have not seen much of a better explanation of the emerging ethos that is called "conscious capitalism." (Be wary of that label, though; I feel many people who use it may not be particularly "conscious," or "capitalist.") The basic idea is that with an increasingly open information economy, people can choose to support companies whose values they share, even if it means the product is slightly more expensive, basically underwriting one's values. (Buying organic steak is a simple example of this.) In a way, of course, this is a natural extension of capitalism (buy the things you like that you can afford,) adding only a sort of moral sense or duty, and it is already what has been emerging in the last ten to fifteen years, though it is not exactly main-stream. It is still to be seen whether this ethos will have any sort of effect, whether it's a trend of the baby-boomer and post-boomer middle-class generations, or whether the general apathy of people will vote these businesses into bankruptcy with their dollars.

But it shouldn't be surprising that what works extremely poorly for one reason would also be a disaster in every other arena, which is basically what I take from all of this. As I've said, this blog is a way for me to start testing out ideas and to get some feedback on them, to say a few things and ask a number of questions. A friend asked me recently what I believed in, and I replied that it was hard to pin down, but that basically I believed that things are, and that works. There is a basic underlying reality in everything, and everything is an expression of this, and so, as is relevant here, if anything is wrong, it is never wrong for any one reason, but for an infinite amount of reasons, all of which are really only reflections of that thing's "wrongness." This is far from being comprehensive, and I do also believe that ultimately terms like "wrong" are meaningless, but at this level of discussion, on our subjective planet, basically, something that is bad for humans is likely bad for the planet, something bad for the planet is likely bad for humans, something bad for pigs is probably bad for humans, something bad for pigs is probably bad for the economy, (this may need an entire different post to defend if anybody wants to take an easy objection to this) etc, etc. Everyone wins, or everyone loses. With our factory farming, it is clear that everyone is losing.

But there's got to be a reason for factory farming, right? It's economical, and so how would it have become the dominant model unless a) capitalism is terrible, or b) it's just the best way? Somebody's making big.

From the Times article: "factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff [that is, billions of pounds of manure] becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically."

Basically, free pollution, not having to concern oneself with the by-products of one's production, is a sort of subsidy for this whole process. On an old farm, or, as the article notes, even 50 years ago in Seacaucus NJ, manure was used as fertilizer for local farms. Here's another chain of problems caused by one broken link: well, if pig farms are centralized and removed from vegetable farms, how will we fertilize vegetable farms? Aha! Dangerous chemicals. And what to do with the manure? Ummm, let it sit! (Not the only broken link, of course, as is well known, antibiotics must be used extensively on pigs b/c the manner in which they are crammed together makes them crazily bite each other's rumps raw, and makes chickens peck each other silly, though the consequences of these reactions are preempted by antibiotics and the removal of the pigs' tails/ soldering of the chickens' beaks, and if you think this is evidence of less intelligence on the animals' parts, imagine what you would do if your whole life you were on an elevator with twenty people. Yeah, it's where you go to the bathroom too. And eat.) Part of the idea above, that everything done wrong (or right) is not simply wrong/right for one reason, but for an infinite number of them, is that, since everything is in this elaborate conjoined dance, anything that disrupts the natural flow of this dance is detrimental. Solve one "problem," cause a thousand far-reaching ones. I do not have the space to write more about this, so let it suffice to say that I am not, however, a back-to naturist (not permanently at least, though someone who doesn't spend some time in forests might not be human,) far from it. Man is not unnatural, though we do some odd things.

Anyway,

There's another and possibly more important reason factory farming is economical, if you don't buy the pollution argument (after all, 50 million tons isn't that much, right? and Iowa's a big state, with lots of farms!) and that's subsidies. Meat is heavily subsidized, as is all agricultural product in possibly every country in the world (I cannot authoritatively say that it is every country) and accounts for 31% of farmers' incomes. Removing subsidies on meat makes all of the extra expenses required for factory farming much less attractive, not to mention that grain subsidies make feed (unnatural food for these animals) more expensive. But if the cows, for example, produced more than just T-bones, it would still make sense (as it always has) to raise them in pastures.

And, in any case, why the hell, if I find the idea of eating a steak morally repugnant, am I paying for a part of yours anyway? Why is that coming out of my (let's assume pleather) wallet? This is a historical relic.

Of course, politically, the odds of removing subsidies are running about even with the odds of having our first atheist anarchist trans-gendered president.

But, as mentioned above, consciousness on these issues may just pull off the end of factory farming anyway (growth from below) along with some other changing circumstances challenging the model.

"'If price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.'" An expert is quoted in the article as saying.

Animal cruelty? Well, yes, though only mentioned briefly before, these factory farms are hard on a lot of things, the workers, the environment, our hearts (corn leads to more damaging heart marbled fatty meat than grass, which tastes better anyway,) but probably most of all the animals.

Who cares?

Something of a lucky coincidence that this article appears online at the same time in the Times, an article about eating dog-meat in China. (For my cellphone text messaging the number one collocation for the character 狗，or "dog," is 肉，or, meat. 狗肉。Dogmeat.) If you don't read the article, the point here is, what makes it so cruel to torture a cat or a dog if you can do the same to any number of other animals?

Now, as an ex-avid meat-eater myself (still an occasional meat-eater, just without any of the militarism) who is to say that you shouldn't eat meat? Nobody, and that is another rather important point. Conscious capitalism is the economic equivalent of soft power. As a teenaged meat-eater, I always found vegetarians noxious, a cult of self-satisfied whiners and values snobs. Since I've grown up a bit, I realized that this is only the most militant brand of vegetarianism (emphasis on the -ism) but still, it makes it difficult for vegetarians to have a serious conversation without being branded as these people, like I'd imagine it makes it difficult to identify yourself as "Christian," without being lumped in with Jerry Falwell. But, crusade you must, the manner in which you do it can be much more effective, though. Patience backed by fact is perhaps the strongest tool in the teacher's shed. It may not be as sharp as the hedge pruners, but it's as heavy and inexorable as a sledgehammer, when wielded on the side of what is true and obvious. It takes time for people to accept rational arguments in the face of their emotions, but in time, without shouting, or belittling people (this is an especially strong turn-off) it works.

Of course, it wouldn't work in Soviet Russia, but we don't live there, and this displays a requirement of conscious capitalism: the open and unrestricted flow of information without edit or censorship. Given the facts, people will make the right decisions. This has always terrified governments. We're perhaps not quite there now, though that's a whole other topic, the point is, we're certainly close enough to start moving.

In any case, it's perfectly imaginable that eating meat will be around for as long as there are humans, and no matter how much you hate it, it's not within the scope of your power to change any one else's mind about this without their permission, but with an ideally open society, the concept is that what will naturally happen will be the best for everybody, just as in evolution, what does not work, does not pass, as in economics, if you can do an equivalent service cheaper, your competitor will go out of business, as in everything, what is, is, and that always works. (Maybe not for your perceived benefit, but that's another conversation.)

And finally, for those die-hard meat eaters out there, (you ought to understand that I've got nothing against you as people,) the counter to the age-old protein argument.

"The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources." 'Likely' is almost propaganda here, there are vegan triathletes, for god's sake.

Not to mention that an overload of protein has been linked to higher-rates of cancer. (sorry, but you'll have to search on that page, I'm not so tech-savvy yet.)

So, what's beneficial for you is probably beneficial for everyone else, not in the sense that if a bath is good for Reggie, you need one, but in the sense that if Reggie bathes, you don't have to smell him.

Pay attention.

ALV


P.S. I am planning on writing a number of "Google Knols," since so much of what I think on the small things is wrapped up by what I think on the big issues, so I'd like to get those big issues down as reference, so that I can simply offhandedly refer to one of these upcoming links if somebody would like the reasoning behind the reasoning behind something, and I can just write straightforwardly about the task at hand. I'll keep you updated.

The first article, if you wish to look it up and it's no longer there, was called, "Re-thinking the Meat Guzzler," It's by Mark Bittman, and it first appeared January 27th, 2008.