I just read this piece the other day on a blog called Shaman Sun.
It's basically evaluating the totemic role Ken Wilber and AQAL play within "Integral Theory." Wilber's work has been criticized for several different things, some of them raised in this article, including, mostly, 1- it is too complicated, 2- it is too simplistic, and 3- it confuses the map with the territory, that is, it pretends itself to be life, and not merely representative of it.
I will try to defend his approach, as I see each of these arguments as perhaps not groundless, but at least misguided.
For number one, I have to admit I find it frustrating trying to explain all of the jargon involved in integral theory, but have been able to work out a five-minute version. Much of what I'm trying to do is explain this way of looking at reality simply, trying to get people to grasp some of it. Of course, to really get into it, some of the terminology is unavoidable; that is, it's there for a reason: it's certainly possible to explain, say, the difference between someone with a pre-conventional and post-conventional level of consciousness, and even why they may be confused by someone with a conventional level of consciousness, all without using spiral dynamic nomenclature, but to do the roundabout over and over again in every article or post or conversation is a real pain in the ass. I also suspect that any academic theory has much the same problem, which is what makes professors often such boring people outside of the classroom. Just kidding.
It is difficult to get to the meat and bones of an academic theory because the complexity is fairly high. However, just as with any theoretical "step-up," say, from pre-calculus to calculus, where there are a necessary group of skills/ terminologies to be mastered at the lower level in order to manipulate them at the higher one, once the terms are familiar, and what they stand for internalized as experiential knowledge, they are no longer so daunting. Certainly I am not the only Integral Student to see levels and lines and stages and states everywhere I look every day. BUT NOT LITERALLY (complaint number three.) I actually do think that for the complexity of our world, Wilber's model presents a remarkably simple, and yet accurate theory. Which brings us to-----
Number two- it's too simplistic. "With all the complexity in the world, all the randomness and messiness and infinite variety, how could a model ever get it right?" I actually think what Wilber's theory does so brilliantly is make room for all of the mess. It doesn't include it all, that would truly be too complex, but it makes room for it. It took me until the release of "Integral Ecology" to see a practical example of what Wilber talks about when he says that so much more research is needed, and that the AQAL framework can be applied to different areas of research, the operative word being "framework." AQAL itself may not be so messy, but it's just the outline. Integral Ecology (which, disclosure, I have only read a summary of and listened to an hour-long talk about between one of the authors and Wilber) takes that framework and then tries to see the messy study of ecology through it (there are over two hundred different "ecologies.") If it succeeds, it does what any good framework does: takes all that messiness and gives you a method of relating all the different pieces together in a (post?) logical way.
As for complaint number three, "but this isn't the world!" (closely related to the above) it seems to come from a relativistic standpoint used to making this objection against any system of thought. I am, however, still brought to near-confusion when I hear it, since Wilber says so clearly and directly that this map, and any map, is just a map, and enjoins the interested to personal practice beyond intellectualizing and philosophizing. It seems to me to be a keystone of the theory: enter into your own life to see, as it must be experienced. Along with the above, that's where the messiness comes in. Nobody is a level five. No society is at some particular level. It's all fluid. Another connected keystone is that reality is non-dual, and so, just as with the messiness above, it must be remembered that a) all of this applies to you and can be realized directly and b) all of the lines are, if not arbitrary, somewhat artificial. It is, in other-words, built-in to the theory.
Why has this been missed? Perhaps because explicating the framework itself has been Wilber's intention, and that this labor is so large that little room is left to mention the above, though it is slipped in quite often. If it takes five thousand words for a discussion that's the bulk of the chapter, and then there's one twenty word sentence in the chapter saying, "oh yeah, don't forget, this is only a map, you've got to observe how it actually fuctions in real life."
As for Manuel DeLanda, I must conceed ignorance of his work. It sounds interesting and it's certainly integral, but what do we mean by that word? AQAL is comprehensive. It is an integral theory in that it tries to tie everything together. But, there is another way to use the word "integral," and that is, "at the first stage of second-tier thought (Yellow/Teal in Spiral Dynamics SDi.)" DeLanda seems to be a lower-right quadrant (that is, based on the external nature/behavior of groups of people (or whatever holon you're looking at)) theory coming from the stage seven (integral) level of human consciousness. It is in this a way a huge improvement over previous views assuming the coherancy/individuality of holons, but is not integral in the broadest sense.
I do agree that the postmodernists come as a reaction against, a call that the Emperor's got no clothes, something important and necessary before you actually consider what the Emperor looks like naked, and that they had less to offer in this respect.
And no, Wilber doesn't exactly detail the relationships between every thing, other than to say that "it's all actually the same thing," but this is the key insight. Without this, there'd be no question of detailing, investigating, and discovering all of the details, because there'd be no one looking, and nowhere to hang them. Certainly Shamansun's call at the end for "a more dynamic theory of social science [to] emerge in the 21st century, one that is more analogous to the messiness [of] biological evolution," is to be heeded. But the theories that emerge, and continue to emerge, will be within the general framework established by Wilber, at least until it's fleshed out enough for us all to see what's there, and what's missing.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
On "Enlightenment Therapy" in the Times.
As soon as I saw the title, Enlightenment Therapy, I knew I was going to blog about it, I just didn't realize it'd take a few days to digest, or that it would be so personal. After all, it's about the marriage of Freud and the Buddha; what integral blogger could resist?
Reading the article, though, there were a few things that hit home, and I put it down to think it over. Again, this is a fairly personal post, just a warning.
There are two main characters in the story, The zen master/ patient, and the zen student/ therapist. Their names are Lou Nordstrom and Jeffrey Rubin, respectively.
The first hint that this might be a challenging piece for me was '“The agonizing absence of internal unity made me suicidal,”' I've never been suicidal, but boy do I know some about the agonizing absence of internal unity. I always feel torn. Only rarely do I get a glimpse of something I'm finding other people take for granted. I have a sense of self, of course, of being a separate being (I am human,) but rarely do I ever know just exactly what it is I want. It turns out that Mr. Nordstrom and I share quite a few personality traits, and the further I read the more I became worried that I was falling into the same trap that Nordstrom had.
'He sought to protect himself against the trauma of further abandonment by pre-emptively abandoning himself. If he wasn’t there in the first place, he wasn’t in a position to be cast away. The Zen concept of no-self was like a powerful form of immunity.' Unfortunately, I have not spelled out yet my working theory of mind, so bits and pieces will have to be explained as I come to them. In any case, I do the same thing. The drama in one's mind is created by oneself,* and so while I was never physically abandoned by my parents, I have always been terrified of abandonment, rejection, separation, call it what you will. The solution? Effacing myself, preemptively abandoning, rejecting, separating. Afraid that the world would reject the "real" me, I just don't speak up, giving no opportunity for what I want so badly, to be accepted, valued, heard. Again, psychological drama.
'“The Zen experience of forgetting the self was very natural to me,” he told me last fall. “I had already been engaged in forgetting and abandoning the self in my childhood, which was filled with the fear of how unreal things seemed...I always had some deeper sense that I wasn’t really there, that my life and my marriages didn’t seem real...I began to realize this feeling of invisibility wasn’t just a peculiar experience but was maybe the central theme of my life.' Again, check, and check.
'...that subconsciously I want the depth of my suffering to be witnessed by someone. I want to be seen for what a strange fellow I am. As a young guy I got off on the sense of being different. There was some arrogance and elitism in it. The positive spin of the surreal nature of my childhood was that there must have been some special destiny for me. To give up tenure, to become a monk, I embraced an aggrandized narrative.' While some of the words I'd use are different, the feeling, again, is the same, "embracing an aggrandized narrative." There's the desire to be noticed and accepted as being different, because special.
[Opposite for me. It's what caused me to coast through on abilities without any work, because I didn't have to. I'm me, after all, and in the end, oh you'll see.]
“It also killed you.”
'“I don’t know why I constantly deprive or deny myself positive experiences,” Nordstrom said after a while. “There is a perverse self-destructiveness. It’s like the theme from the movie ‘The Pawnbroker’: if my life is in good shape, then my history makes no sense. . . . When I broke my hip the first time, before I fell, I thought, Don’t move, turn on a light, then I thought, Screw it, and I fell.”' Again, the narrative (history in Nordstrom's words) has to be true, because if it's not, one's life makes no sense. If one's life is miserable, the narrative, and the ego it reinforces, makes perfect sense.
'“Stay with that ‘screw it’ voice: are you saying nothing that happens to you that’s good is going to make a difference?”
The ego is a mesh of paradox, that's why it survives so well. Tackle it one way, well, it wasn't ever like that anyway. Nordstrom rejects hope of ever getting what he really wants, because to get it would negate the hope that is that final reward. Hating hope is the surest sign of how dependant you are on it.
Reading this article threw me out of whack, to say the least. Was I fooling myself? Was I only trying to do in a more aggressive and radical way exactly what I was trying to cure myself of? Sitting on this a few days, I've reaffirmed what I've been doing, though this article was certainly a wakeup call. Perhaps because I was born later, perhaps because my childhood was not traumatic, but I'm not running away from life into meditation. Far from it. The further I've gotten along in my self-directed course of growth, the richer and fuller my life has become, the more I've taken responsibility for my life and its direction, the more active I've been able to be to pursue and complete real, practical goals, and the happier and more emotionally engaged I've been. I have not been doing what Nordstrom did, quite the non-opposite. Rather than throw myself into meditation as a solution, or rely only on analytical accounts of the mind, I've been practicing meditation to give me more energy and insight into the ego so that as I heal it I can return more mindfully to meditation, and so on and so forth.
Of course, the basic structure of my ego remains, and I haven't fully reconciled its contradictions in health. I'm thankful that this article revealed this to me, and I'm thankful to you as well, whoever is reading. Even if nobody, getting all of this onto (electronic) paper is extremely helpful. It's real.
'Rubin was convinced that “the marriage of Buddha and Freud” would benefit both disciplines. “When you combine the best of Buddhism and psychoanalysis,” he told me one day last winter, “you get a full-spectrum view of human nature focused on both health and spiritual potential as well as on the psychological forces we struggle with and the obstacles we unconsciously put in our way.”'
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*That is, while you can always draw external correlations to prove your fears, a different person would draw different correlations from the same external conditions. Beaten by a mother, one child develops to fear abandonment, another to fear loss of control, and both point back to the same event.
Reading the article, though, there were a few things that hit home, and I put it down to think it over. Again, this is a fairly personal post, just a warning.
There are two main characters in the story, The zen master/ patient, and the zen student/ therapist. Their names are Lou Nordstrom and Jeffrey Rubin, respectively.
The first hint that this might be a challenging piece for me was '“The agonizing absence of internal unity made me suicidal,”' I've never been suicidal, but boy do I know some about the agonizing absence of internal unity. I always feel torn. Only rarely do I get a glimpse of something I'm finding other people take for granted. I have a sense of self, of course, of being a separate being (I am human,) but rarely do I ever know just exactly what it is I want. It turns out that Mr. Nordstrom and I share quite a few personality traits, and the further I read the more I became worried that I was falling into the same trap that Nordstrom had.
'He sought to protect himself against the trauma of further abandonment by pre-emptively abandoning himself. If he wasn’t there in the first place, he wasn’t in a position to be cast away. The Zen concept of no-self was like a powerful form of immunity.' Unfortunately, I have not spelled out yet my working theory of mind, so bits and pieces will have to be explained as I come to them. In any case, I do the same thing. The drama in one's mind is created by oneself,* and so while I was never physically abandoned by my parents, I have always been terrified of abandonment, rejection, separation, call it what you will. The solution? Effacing myself, preemptively abandoning, rejecting, separating. Afraid that the world would reject the "real" me, I just don't speak up, giving no opportunity for what I want so badly, to be accepted, valued, heard. Again, psychological drama.
'“The Zen experience of forgetting the self was very natural to me,” he told me last fall. “I had already been engaged in forgetting and abandoning the self in my childhood, which was filled with the fear of how unreal things seemed...I always had some deeper sense that I wasn’t really there, that my life and my marriages didn’t seem real...I began to realize this feeling of invisibility wasn’t just a peculiar experience but was maybe the central theme of my life.' Again, check, and check.
'...that subconsciously I want the depth of my suffering to be witnessed by someone. I want to be seen for what a strange fellow I am. As a young guy I got off on the sense of being different. There was some arrogance and elitism in it. The positive spin of the surreal nature of my childhood was that there must have been some special destiny for me. To give up tenure, to become a monk, I embraced an aggrandized narrative.' While some of the words I'd use are different, the feeling, again, is the same, "embracing an aggrandized narrative." There's the desire to be noticed and accepted as being different, because special.
“Re-entry is difficult,” Nordstrom admitted. “I feel I’m going to be blindsided — that I’m being set up. The record suggests that’s what tends to happen to me.” [That is, entering life emotionally is just begging to be hurt.]
“Do you hear your language?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what tends to happen to me.”
“What do you hear — that I sound like a victim?”
“There’s no agency in there — to see that is to open to the possibility of feeling less the victim in your life.” [Perhaps why I'm overly drawn to the opposite archetype, like James Bond. The ultimate anti-victim. There's more than this though, there's also the fear of agency, the fear of my own ability to do things.]
“I know this intellectually. I’ve had this sense of being a victim, a marked man for a long time — marked for bad things and marked for great things.” [I have never felt marked for bad things, though I certainly have always felt marked for great things. Reading this, though, makes me realize that yes, actually, I have always felt fated to meet some wretched tragic end. In my fears, by bloody violent murder at the hands of a random stranger, or by plane crash, mostly. Of course, the one must have its reciprocal. Silly me not to have connected them.]
“I wonder if that isn’t a compensatory fantasy which hides a deeper pain. It’s not that ‘I was horrifically abandoned, unconscionably neglected,’ it’s ‘I have a special destiny.’ ”[This is harder for me because, again, I was never abandoned, I just feel that way. I suppose it's the same narrative, though: I have been overlooked and ignored, but everyone will see in the end how big of a mistake that was when I turn out to be the best Baseball Player / Doctor / Author / Musician / Artist / etc. etc. (fill in fantasy of the year. Some, of course, are fairly outdated.)]
“Yes,” Nordstrom said. “As a boy I consciously constructed this idea that I’m in a situation that makes no sense whatsoever. The only meaning I can glean from it is that there may be some kind of completely different life in store for me. There will be a compensation. I am owed.” [So, for this life to make sense, there has to be a surprise ending. The narrative itself assumes the legitimacy of the ego's drama. They are epiphenomenal, sides of the same coin, or cube. 'I was hurt, but if I bear this hurt, endure it, in the end I'll get my reward.' Notice the words "consciously constructed." Without the original slieght, though, the narrative makes no sense, and one's life has been wasted. The older and older one gets, the more rests on this false narrative. Quite a lot in here, one of these days I'll get that theory of the mind up.]
“What comes to mind with ‘owed’?”
“I’m entitled. That feeling got me through high school. It’s why I excelled at sports and studies.”[Opposite for me. It's what caused me to coast through on abilities without any work, because I didn't have to. I'm me, after all, and in the end, oh you'll see.]
“It also killed you.”
The thought hung in the air.
“Why do you think I say that?” the psychoanalyst said.
“Because it’s true?”
“No, because it’s led to a passive detached relation to your own life. It’s robbed you of your human birthright. It’s like you are waiting for Godot. It keeps you in a virtual life. Do you get that? Do you feel that emotion?” [This is where the similarity really battered me. Just around the bend is the miracle that's going to change my life. It's something I'll stumble on, not work for. I've always been this way (until recently, more later.) There's always something hidden up the road, past a bend, that is, it's never something I'm concerned with at the moment, of course, that's going to super-duper change my life.]'“I don’t know why I constantly deprive or deny myself positive experiences,” Nordstrom said after a while. “There is a perverse self-destructiveness. It’s like the theme from the movie ‘The Pawnbroker’: if my life is in good shape, then my history makes no sense. . . . When I broke my hip the first time, before I fell, I thought, Don’t move, turn on a light, then I thought, Screw it, and I fell.”' Again, the narrative (history in Nordstrom's words) has to be true, because if it's not, one's life makes no sense. If one's life is miserable, the narrative, and the ego it reinforces, makes perfect sense.
'“Stay with that ‘screw it’ voice: are you saying nothing that happens to you that’s good is going to make a difference?”
“There is something I know that I really want that I’m never really going to get. It may be mother. It may be mother.”
“Maybe your pessimistic stance is a defense against that shattering realization. Maybe you see your life as a Faustian bargain: I will not have hope demolish the hope that one day what I want will come.”
“My least favorite word in the English language is ‘hope.’ ”
“And in the meantime you’re knee-deep in it!”'The ego is a mesh of paradox, that's why it survives so well. Tackle it one way, well, it wasn't ever like that anyway. Nordstrom rejects hope of ever getting what he really wants, because to get it would negate the hope that is that final reward. Hating hope is the surest sign of how dependant you are on it.
Reading this article threw me out of whack, to say the least. Was I fooling myself? Was I only trying to do in a more aggressive and radical way exactly what I was trying to cure myself of? Sitting on this a few days, I've reaffirmed what I've been doing, though this article was certainly a wakeup call. Perhaps because I was born later, perhaps because my childhood was not traumatic, but I'm not running away from life into meditation. Far from it. The further I've gotten along in my self-directed course of growth, the richer and fuller my life has become, the more I've taken responsibility for my life and its direction, the more active I've been able to be to pursue and complete real, practical goals, and the happier and more emotionally engaged I've been. I have not been doing what Nordstrom did, quite the non-opposite. Rather than throw myself into meditation as a solution, or rely only on analytical accounts of the mind, I've been practicing meditation to give me more energy and insight into the ego so that as I heal it I can return more mindfully to meditation, and so on and so forth.
Of course, the basic structure of my ego remains, and I haven't fully reconciled its contradictions in health. I'm thankful that this article revealed this to me, and I'm thankful to you as well, whoever is reading. Even if nobody, getting all of this onto (electronic) paper is extremely helpful. It's real.
'Rubin was convinced that “the marriage of Buddha and Freud” would benefit both disciplines. “When you combine the best of Buddhism and psychoanalysis,” he told me one day last winter, “you get a full-spectrum view of human nature focused on both health and spiritual potential as well as on the psychological forces we struggle with and the obstacles we unconsciously put in our way.”'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*That is, while you can always draw external correlations to prove your fears, a different person would draw different correlations from the same external conditions. Beaten by a mother, one child develops to fear abandonment, another to fear loss of control, and both point back to the same event.
NWO or Decentralization?
As often, a thoughtful piece in the Times by David Brooks. (For those of you who might be wondering, no, the Times is not the only thing I read online, I just happen to be getting out from under a huge backlog from my Chinese test, and since I do read the Times everyday, I often find things in it to write about.)
He's talking about centralization vs. decentralization of power in globalism with the swine flu as background. As I said, it's a good piece, though I have a couple of issues with it.
Firstly,
'we don’t face a single concentrated threat. We face a series of decentralized, transnational threats: jihadi terrorism, a global financial crisis, global warming, energy scarcity, nuclear proliferation and, as we’re reminded today, possible health pandemics like swine flu.'
This I disagree with fairly wholeheartedly. With the exception of the swine flu, each of these problems could be argued as one multi-headed problem. The very problem is that the current global power structure doesn't work. But that's minor.
The major issue I have with the article is that it opposes these two arrangements of power, decentralization and centralization, as if we have to choose one of them. Brooks, to his credit, chooses decentralization. I agree with him on this as strongly as I disagree about the multifarious nature of the world's problem. Power must be localized, as local as possible, that is to say, the individual and his or her person-to-person connections must be in charge. If not, as Brooks says, '...If the response [to the swine flue] were coordinated by a global agency, those local officials would not be so empowered. Power would be wielded by officials from nations that are far away and emotionally aloof from ground zero. The institution would have to poll its members, negotiate internal differences and proceed, as all multinationals do, at the pace of the most recalcitrant stragglers.'
These person-to-person connections must of course operate under the rule of law, or you'd get rampant corruption. But Brooks' example of a photo of New York City Health Department officials is a reminder at the opposite side of the spectrum of why localism works, or why the U.S. won out over the highly-centralized U.S.S.R. 'The photo is the very image of a focused, local response. People are wearing polo shirts and casual wear — intensely concentrating on the concrete incidents in their own backyard.'
What's to argue with?
There's got to be somewhere the buck stops. You need a Constitution and a Bill of Rights guaranteed by a Federal Government with power for there to be a civil rights movement, for example. Without one overarching power, there will never be perfect peace. This power must be aggressively limited to allow an open society to develop, but it also must exist to settle differences and set directives for the world's countries.
In fact, for local power to be as powerful as it can be, there needs to be some centralization of power. If, say, Europe does hold back on its vaccines, the U.S. would need some more. But there's a reason we don't have as many, and for the U.S. to put resources towards something it wouldn't need without the artificiality of national borders, and that's a waste.
Brooks writes about centralization as if it means soviet-style planning. But without centralization we'll end up a loose confederacy unable to tackle any of our increasingly global issues.
He's talking about centralization vs. decentralization of power in globalism with the swine flu as background. As I said, it's a good piece, though I have a couple of issues with it.
Firstly,
'we don’t face a single concentrated threat. We face a series of decentralized, transnational threats: jihadi terrorism, a global financial crisis, global warming, energy scarcity, nuclear proliferation and, as we’re reminded today, possible health pandemics like swine flu.'
This I disagree with fairly wholeheartedly. With the exception of the swine flu, each of these problems could be argued as one multi-headed problem. The very problem is that the current global power structure doesn't work. But that's minor.
The major issue I have with the article is that it opposes these two arrangements of power, decentralization and centralization, as if we have to choose one of them. Brooks, to his credit, chooses decentralization. I agree with him on this as strongly as I disagree about the multifarious nature of the world's problem. Power must be localized, as local as possible, that is to say, the individual and his or her person-to-person connections must be in charge. If not, as Brooks says, '...If the response [to the swine flue] were coordinated by a global agency, those local officials would not be so empowered. Power would be wielded by officials from nations that are far away and emotionally aloof from ground zero. The institution would have to poll its members, negotiate internal differences and proceed, as all multinationals do, at the pace of the most recalcitrant stragglers.'
These person-to-person connections must of course operate under the rule of law, or you'd get rampant corruption. But Brooks' example of a photo of New York City Health Department officials is a reminder at the opposite side of the spectrum of why localism works, or why the U.S. won out over the highly-centralized U.S.S.R. 'The photo is the very image of a focused, local response. People are wearing polo shirts and casual wear — intensely concentrating on the concrete incidents in their own backyard.'
What's to argue with?
There's got to be somewhere the buck stops. You need a Constitution and a Bill of Rights guaranteed by a Federal Government with power for there to be a civil rights movement, for example. Without one overarching power, there will never be perfect peace. This power must be aggressively limited to allow an open society to develop, but it also must exist to settle differences and set directives for the world's countries.
In fact, for local power to be as powerful as it can be, there needs to be some centralization of power. If, say, Europe does hold back on its vaccines, the U.S. would need some more. But there's a reason we don't have as many, and for the U.S. to put resources towards something it wouldn't need without the artificiality of national borders, and that's a waste.
Brooks writes about centralization as if it means soviet-style planning. But without centralization we'll end up a loose confederacy unable to tackle any of our increasingly global issues.
Monday, April 27, 2009
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.
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.
Why practice? Flourishing/ Stretching
Had a hard time naming this post, but it's an idea that's been conking around in my head for a while, kicked into focus by an article I just read called The Fine, The Good, and the Meaningful, in The Philosopher's Magazine, via a blog I read called Integral Options Cafe.
Basically: since everything is in a constant state of flux (that is, every thing,) each thing is either growing, or dying. If you take "thing" to mean, say, "My French Language Aptitude," then it's easy to see that either one is practicing their French, or slowly losing it (something I can attest to personally.) There is no "constant state," only a continual balance. Following this, unless one is getting better and better, actively practicing, one will get worse, even with practice. That is, it's not enough to just practice, one needs to continually practice just outside of their level of comfort, in something I call "The Quick of Practice."
In a bodily sense, this is why I feel to be truly content as a person one must exercise their body and their bodily awareness. The body is made to move. Let it. Harness it, be aware of it, and you will become happier and happier. The body is like the soil for the tomato plant in the passage below. With a really unhappy body it's much harder to be happy emotionally. The good news is that once you've started paying attention to the body instead of a neutral resting state you begin to feel a subtle happy playfulness throughout it anytime a stronger feeling (like pain, or sadness, or joy) isn't present (and even sometimes as a discernible background if they are.)
As far as one's life goes, unless one pushes against one's limits, however you want to think of that, one is floating through life without living. Part of the point of the article, and something that I agree with, is that the idea of human life, the goal if you will, is to flower. This doesn't by any means denigrate the majority of people who never truly flower, or people who have yet to, it is merely to say that nobody goes to Washington D.C. in the summer to watch the Japanese Cherry trees photosynthesize.
And, of course (something I am overly aware of teaching here in China) this continual pushing of limits can't literally be continual. A wave must draw back and forth to wear a cliff away. The body needs rest, like a peak needs a trough. Balance. Push out a little too far, heal. Healed, you're able to push out a little further.
So, then, why practice? In a certain way, there are two phases to human life: socialization, or the mostly mandated period of learning before adulthood when one picks up, consciously and not, the rules and skills valued by their society, and post-socialization, when one is an adult. In this second period the opportunity exists to continue self-directed growth, though many do not. But adulthood is not a plateau. You either grow, or die (a maxim of evolution?) With evidence recently that intelligence is flexible and can be increased, even speaking only of one's brain power the case is clear for practice. While children have the most energy and time to study any number of skills, the paradox is that it is not until one has become a self-realized adult that one can really begin to push the boundaries of who one is and what one can do. Practice, in adulthood, becomes not merely the acquisition of skills, but the conscious engagement with life itself.
The below is from the article.
'Flourishing is a biological term, which etymologically connotes flowering – that is to say the healthy, vigorous unfolding of the capacities peculiar to each species. For a tomato plant, flourishing is quite simply its production of strong leaves and shoots, and then its coming to maturity and bearing rich and succulent fruits. But what are the fruits of human life?
The Lotus Eaters are contented enough – but, as it slowly dawns on Odysseus (or Ulysses), there’s something disquieting about them – they never do anything, just loll around eating the lotus (perhaps the ancient Greek equivalent of reaching for the valium). The moral drawn by Homer, and Tennyson, is that the truly happy life must be one where we are stretched. '
Basically: since everything is in a constant state of flux (that is, every thing,) each thing is either growing, or dying. If you take "thing" to mean, say, "My French Language Aptitude," then it's easy to see that either one is practicing their French, or slowly losing it (something I can attest to personally.) There is no "constant state," only a continual balance. Following this, unless one is getting better and better, actively practicing, one will get worse, even with practice. That is, it's not enough to just practice, one needs to continually practice just outside of their level of comfort, in something I call "The Quick of Practice."
In a bodily sense, this is why I feel to be truly content as a person one must exercise their body and their bodily awareness. The body is made to move. Let it. Harness it, be aware of it, and you will become happier and happier. The body is like the soil for the tomato plant in the passage below. With a really unhappy body it's much harder to be happy emotionally. The good news is that once you've started paying attention to the body instead of a neutral resting state you begin to feel a subtle happy playfulness throughout it anytime a stronger feeling (like pain, or sadness, or joy) isn't present (and even sometimes as a discernible background if they are.)
As far as one's life goes, unless one pushes against one's limits, however you want to think of that, one is floating through life without living. Part of the point of the article, and something that I agree with, is that the idea of human life, the goal if you will, is to flower. This doesn't by any means denigrate the majority of people who never truly flower, or people who have yet to, it is merely to say that nobody goes to Washington D.C. in the summer to watch the Japanese Cherry trees photosynthesize.
And, of course (something I am overly aware of teaching here in China) this continual pushing of limits can't literally be continual. A wave must draw back and forth to wear a cliff away. The body needs rest, like a peak needs a trough. Balance. Push out a little too far, heal. Healed, you're able to push out a little further.
So, then, why practice? In a certain way, there are two phases to human life: socialization, or the mostly mandated period of learning before adulthood when one picks up, consciously and not, the rules and skills valued by their society, and post-socialization, when one is an adult. In this second period the opportunity exists to continue self-directed growth, though many do not. But adulthood is not a plateau. You either grow, or die (a maxim of evolution?) With evidence recently that intelligence is flexible and can be increased, even speaking only of one's brain power the case is clear for practice. While children have the most energy and time to study any number of skills, the paradox is that it is not until one has become a self-realized adult that one can really begin to push the boundaries of who one is and what one can do. Practice, in adulthood, becomes not merely the acquisition of skills, but the conscious engagement with life itself.
The below is from the article.
'Flourishing is a biological term, which etymologically connotes flowering – that is to say the healthy, vigorous unfolding of the capacities peculiar to each species. For a tomato plant, flourishing is quite simply its production of strong leaves and shoots, and then its coming to maturity and bearing rich and succulent fruits. But what are the fruits of human life?
The Lotus Eaters are contented enough – but, as it slowly dawns on Odysseus (or Ulysses), there’s something disquieting about them – they never do anything, just loll around eating the lotus (perhaps the ancient Greek equivalent of reaching for the valium). The moral drawn by Homer, and Tennyson, is that the truly happy life must be one where we are stretched. '
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Controlling/Managing the Chinese people?
I'm a little late on this due to my 24-hour weekend working cycle, but if you hadn't heard about Jackie Chan's recent remarks in China: here's a short debate in the Times about it.
There's a mini-debate in Chinese watching circles about whether or not the word he used would best be translated as "managing," rather than "controlling." The word under discussion, "Guan," (“管”) , usually does mean "managing" but this seems fairly unimportant given the context of insulting Hong Kong and Taiwan for being "chaotic" while speaking to an audience including high-level Central Party members. Certianly the essence was "China needs Authoritarianism."
Much of what I found interesting, as often happens with China blogs on the NYTimes, were the comments. Without getting too much into it, There seem to be two sides of the debate, a sure way to miss the meat of the argument entirely: Chan is a moron (or is in it for the money) and Chinese people yearn to be free, or Chan is right, Chinese people have been successful under the control of the Central Party, and would fall apart if not. Unfortunately, of course, little attention is paid to the arguments themselves, and more is paid to ad-hominem attacks on people writing. Basically, everyone in the comments is either rabidly pro-China, or anti-Chinese government. Notice also the conflation here: most of the pro-Chinas take any criticism of the government by foreigners (in public, published places) as being anti-China, as in the country (something the government actively inculcates), even though among themselves, and in private, they are often quite critical of the government.
All of this friction, for an integral thinker, should point to competing vMemes, through even the debate about whether Chan was cynically only doing this for CCP approval. So what's the deal here? Anyone watching China knows the friction created is largely between the up-and-coming 5s in the country and the authoritarian 4s. Moreso than in most cases, the power of the 4s has been used to help foster in some respects the emergence of the 5s as a powerful new class, and for this often the new capitalists in China are the most vocally in favor of the government. Nonetheless, there are plenty of 5s in the country that see right through this, and Gordon Chang is right when he says that voices of online protesters and self-organized groups to aid victims of the BeiChuan earthquake last year to help the survivors before even the governement did displays the yearning and capability for a more open society.
The biggest mistake in all of this whole thing is locating this with something inherantly "chinese." Chan's words "we chinese" make it seem as if there's some sort of essence in the Chinese people that makes them incapable of democracy (something Beijing promotes against reality and the benefit of its own people) and will always do so.
Of course, some of what he's saying is correct. China is still mostly at an authoritarian 4 level, and much of the country is still at a 2. Creating a "one-person, one-vote" system would be likely disasterous at this point, as one of the commenters notes, drawing comparisons with some African countries, and south-east asian. Democracy is not the cure of all ails. However, it ought to be clear that it is the only successful way to run a fully modern country is through a representative democracy. Even if you cannot establish democracy at the highest levels of government, at the local level it ought to be implemented, something which will give the populace experience with it for later down the road. Of course, for all its unintentional help, the CCP is rabidly anti-democratic, which is to say the small concessions made to democracy in village elections are unlikely to be expanded.
The word "chaos" is also interesting. Here, Chan notes the 4s fear of chaos/anarchy, one made stronger by chinese memories of the cultural revolution. Will China ever be able to embrace the kind of "chaos" Chan finds in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and become stronger as a result, or will the party simply not be able to let go this far? Much of the question of whether or not China will be able to fully transform itself into a modern country rests on this. Control only goes so far.
There's a mini-debate in Chinese watching circles about whether or not the word he used would best be translated as "managing," rather than "controlling." The word under discussion, "Guan," (“管”) , usually does mean "managing" but this seems fairly unimportant given the context of insulting Hong Kong and Taiwan for being "chaotic" while speaking to an audience including high-level Central Party members. Certianly the essence was "China needs Authoritarianism."
Much of what I found interesting, as often happens with China blogs on the NYTimes, were the comments. Without getting too much into it, There seem to be two sides of the debate, a sure way to miss the meat of the argument entirely: Chan is a moron (or is in it for the money) and Chinese people yearn to be free, or Chan is right, Chinese people have been successful under the control of the Central Party, and would fall apart if not. Unfortunately, of course, little attention is paid to the arguments themselves, and more is paid to ad-hominem attacks on people writing. Basically, everyone in the comments is either rabidly pro-China, or anti-Chinese government. Notice also the conflation here: most of the pro-Chinas take any criticism of the government by foreigners (in public, published places) as being anti-China, as in the country (something the government actively inculcates), even though among themselves, and in private, they are often quite critical of the government.
All of this friction, for an integral thinker, should point to competing vMemes, through even the debate about whether Chan was cynically only doing this for CCP approval. So what's the deal here? Anyone watching China knows the friction created is largely between the up-and-coming 5s in the country and the authoritarian 4s. Moreso than in most cases, the power of the 4s has been used to help foster in some respects the emergence of the 5s as a powerful new class, and for this often the new capitalists in China are the most vocally in favor of the government. Nonetheless, there are plenty of 5s in the country that see right through this, and Gordon Chang is right when he says that voices of online protesters and self-organized groups to aid victims of the BeiChuan earthquake last year to help the survivors before even the governement did displays the yearning and capability for a more open society.
The biggest mistake in all of this whole thing is locating this with something inherantly "chinese." Chan's words "we chinese" make it seem as if there's some sort of essence in the Chinese people that makes them incapable of democracy (something Beijing promotes against reality and the benefit of its own people) and will always do so.
Of course, some of what he's saying is correct. China is still mostly at an authoritarian 4 level, and much of the country is still at a 2. Creating a "one-person, one-vote" system would be likely disasterous at this point, as one of the commenters notes, drawing comparisons with some African countries, and south-east asian. Democracy is not the cure of all ails. However, it ought to be clear that it is the only successful way to run a fully modern country is through a representative democracy. Even if you cannot establish democracy at the highest levels of government, at the local level it ought to be implemented, something which will give the populace experience with it for later down the road. Of course, for all its unintentional help, the CCP is rabidly anti-democratic, which is to say the small concessions made to democracy in village elections are unlikely to be expanded.
The word "chaos" is also interesting. Here, Chan notes the 4s fear of chaos/anarchy, one made stronger by chinese memories of the cultural revolution. Will China ever be able to embrace the kind of "chaos" Chan finds in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and become stronger as a result, or will the party simply not be able to let go this far? Much of the question of whether or not China will be able to fully transform itself into a modern country rests on this. Control only goes so far.
Friday, April 24, 2009
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.'
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.'
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