OWS in Song & Dance

What social movement worth its salt doesn't give birth to creative arts? I find this interesting as a blend of gospel and high opera music with a gritty visual realism:



I like this poster by Lalo Alcaraz because it is playful. It has a serious message but it tempers it by using the humourous image of the prototypical "capitalist" from the Monopoly game:

Click to Enlarge
In this post he deals with a commenter who tries to take him to task for being anti-corporations when his very job depends on them and that he should be grateful to the corporations. His reply was excellent:

Corporations and Wall St. are not doing us any favors, they are making money off of US. If you believe otherwise, you are not clear on the Occupy Wall St. issue or any of the recent economic disasters going on for the past 30 years!

I want Wall Street and all who benefit from our economy to give up their monopolistic control of the economy so that it is more equitable for all. YOU are suggesting some kind of shadow “communist” critique, no one is calling for the destruction of capitalism, the rich have perverted it enough. We want fairness.

This is the perfect rejoinder to someone who would twist the protest into an "anti-capitalist rant". He points out that he has no problem with corporations. He objects to how they have corrupted the political system and stolen the voice from the people. The goal of the OWS movement is political renewal and economic justice.

And documentary film makers are having a field day "getting out the message" in so many ways:

Quebec Country & Western

I have a soft spot for Annie Blanchard. I love the purity of her voice and the touch of "country & western" in his music.

Here is the her doing a cover for Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make it Through the Night":



And I love her rendition of Longfellow's poem "Evangeline" which recounts the epic story of the ethnic cleansing of the French colonists from Acadia by the British in the 1750s. It is a heart-breaking story and her singing does it full justice with the drama and sorrow in her voice:



Here is a song, Sur l'autre rive, from her latest album which has a wonderful "country & western" feel to it:



And here's one, Marcher vers le nord, with a wonderful video in which she collaborates with Laurence Jalbert:



I find it amazing how rich and wonderful the world of culture is outside the narrow confines of "popular culture" as defined by the big media interests and their stable of "stars".

Here is Annie Blanchar's web site. This text nicely summarizes her music:

La chanteuse s’est inspirée de son expérience de vie de tournée, avec tout ce que cela suppose de difficultés liées à la solitude et à l’éloignement.

Sur un rythme up tempo qui n’est pas sans rappeler la chanteuse Sheryl Crow à qui elle voue un immense respect, Annie Blanchard reste fidèle à ses racines, à sa culture, à cette couleur country qui lui sied si bien.

Pseudo-Science and the Subversion of Science

Magical thinking is wonderful. It lets me be all powerful, it lets me be the centre of the universe, it lets me find meanings behind the appearances. Unfortunately it isn't science. But it is very popular. Not just religious people but narcissist and the lazy minded enjoy developing their "understanding" of the universe via magical thinking.

Here a bit from a post by Carl Zimmer on his Discover Magazine blog talking about viruses and how magical thinking has gone from simply ignoring the science to trying to control the science:

A few months ago I was asked to give a couple talks to the skeptic community. Since I had just published a book about viruses, I decided to talk about the way myths so often crop up around them, and how a properly skeptical person should think about viruses. Over the centuries, viruses have been encircled by urban legends, superstitions, and conspiracy theories. The name “influenza” dates back to a time when European physicians believed the flu was due to the influence of the stars. More recently, HIV has been subject to all sorts of myths, from stories that it was created by the CIA to claims that it is not the cause of AIDS. The autism-vaccine controversy has been fueled in part by myths about viruses–namely, that the risk from vaccines is far greater than the risk from viruses like measles.

In my talks, I speculated that the very nature of viruses makes it easy for people to grab onto these kinds of explanations, and to reject scientific evidence that might argue against them. Viruses are the smallest living things on Earth, and yet they can have worldwide effects. They may only contain a few genes, yet they can hold their own against all of modern medicine. And the reality of viruses can seem downright unbelievable. Rabbits with horns may sound like yet another myth–but there’s some truth at the core of it. So it may be psychologically easy to endow viruses with extraordinary powers, or to deny them any power at all.

At the end of my talk, I told my audiences that we might be at the beginning of another one of these viral episodes. I described how a virus called XMRV had been recently linked to chronic fatigue, a debilitating condition that may affect 60 million people worldwide. Since the initial report, there had been some attempts to replicate the link, but they had failed. ...

... And today in the Guardian, Robin McKie reports that XMRV proponents are now issuing death threats to scientists who have done this research.

The scientists he talks to have some pretty startling things to say. A protestor shows up at a talk by a scientist, armed with a knife. A scientist backs out of a collaboration for fear of being shot.

I should say I take this article with a grain of salt. McKie writes that “according to the police, the militants are now considered to be as dangerous and uncompromising as animal rights extremists.” But the catalog of harassment he presents made up mainly of obnoxious emails. No one’s bombed a lab. And even if there are some people who are sending XMRV-related death threats, they could well just be a handful of people, rather than any sort of broad movement. In other words, I really hope that my prediction turns out to be wrong.

Go read the original article to get the embedded links and additional text.

Science is a great accomplishment of the modern era of civilization. It is the equivalent of the Egyptians building pyramids and of the Middle Age western Europeans building cathedrals. It is even more important because it provides real beneficial results. But like earlier cultural artifacts, it can disappear. The magical thinking crazies can bring it all to an end like the pyramids and cathedrals.

I worry a lot about the US. They have more religious nuts and extremist per square mile than any other country. I expect if science is to be snuffed out, it will first occur there.

An Intimate Picture of Syria

Here is an article by Emma Sky in Foreign Policy that gives a very personal account of a recent visit to Syria. You get a very personal view of people and events in Syria from this account:

In the evening, I chat with a Syrian businessman over a bottle of wine outside on the balcony while the wind howls around us. He has met Bashar a number of times and thinks he is a really decent man. The problem is those around him who prevent change. The economic situation is causing disaffection. People are protesting and demanding "freedom" without any definition of what that entails. The businessman says that in Syria's history it has always been the business class who determines who rules. If the business class withdraws its support from the regime, then it will fall. So far, the business people are staying with the current regime.

...

The businessman tells me that as much as every Syrian says there is no sectarianism, sectarian tensions in the country are rising. There are problems now between Sunnis and Alawites. I tell him that Iraqis claim they did not have sectarianism before 2003, but the introduction of "quotas" for different ethnicities and sects, the collapse of state institutions, and the targeting of the security forces and terrorists, led to the country unraveling into a Hobbesian world. The businessman tells me that many Syrians are waiting to see in which direction things appear to be heading before they commit to one side or another.

He says that al-Jazeera Arabic consistently runs stories about people being killed across the country, how bad the regime is etc. This incited youth in Palmyra to take to the streets and protest. He tells me that the problems in Syria began initially in Dera'a where some school children wrote on the wall the revolutionary chant heard on the streets of Tunis and Cairo: "as-shaab yurid isqaat al-nizaam" (the people want to change the regime). The local security official, detained the children, and had their finger-nails pulled out. This horrified people. The government did not respond in the right way. And protests began to increase across the country.

The businessman asks me if I think the United States will intervene militarily in Syria. I tell him that this is most unlikely. There is not the will in the U.S., nor the support of Russia and China. It is clear that the regime is not going to give up easily. Will Bashar be able to reach a compromise with the protesters, agreeing to significant reforms and free elections, without the Alawites deposing him? Or will the regime try to crush the protests through violence? Can Syrians prevent their country from plunging into a bloody civil war?

...

As I sit in the beautiful courtyard of Beit al-Jabri in the old city, eating my last plate of fuul before I depart, I feel sad. Damascus is perhaps the most beautiful city I have visited in the Middle East. Syrians are the friendliest and kindest of people, as Palestinian and Iraqi refugees attest. Will the Syrians be able to prevent their country deteriorating into a bloody civil war, along the lines of Iraq? I hope so. But I really am not sure.

It is beautiful account of a short visit to Syria. If you read the whole article you get a taste of the complexity of Syria's society and a sense of the current situation. It is only a one-person account and limited to a very personal viewpoint, so it isn't an authoritative or comprehensive account of Syria right now. But that is fine by me.

R. P. Wolff Puzzles over a Liberal Education

I keep an eye on Robert Paul Wolff's blog The Philosopher's Stone and stumbled upon his meditation on "What Good is a Liberal Education?". He poses three transitional justifications for a liberal education:

as the stigmata of the upper classes, as the royal road to upward mobility, and as the entree into the Great Conversation

He rejects these, but I still have a very soft spot for the last of the three.

Here's the key bit that captures my foolish infatuation with higher education:

The ideal of the Great Conversation is merely an elaborate formalization of Wood's charming conceit. Western Civilization is conceived as a perpetual debate about a number of timeless questions, conducted by the great minds of the Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman tradition, with its medieval Arabic variants, through the medium of a small, but continuously growing, library of great works of philosophy, tragedy, poetry, fiction, history, political theory - and, more recently, sociology, anthropology, economics, and anthropology. Homer and the nameless authors of the Old Testament, Sophocles and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Caesar, Paul and the Evangelists, Ovid, Sappho, Philo, Tertullian, Aquinas, Maimonides, Averroes, Avicenna, Erasmus, Luther, Chaucer, Calvin, John of Salisbury, Jean Bodin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Locke, Galileo, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Herder, Marx, Smith, Bentham, Mill - on and on they come, quibbling, quarreling, drawing distinctions, splitting hairs, proving the existence of God, refuting the proofs for the existence of God, reading one another, referring to one another - a grand faculty seminar, captured for all time in no more than several hundred immortal books.

A liberal education - so this story has it - is a ticket of admission to the Conversation. Most of us are mere auditors, much as I was when, as a boy of ten, I sat on the steps of the staircase leading from my parents' living room and listened to my parents, my uncles and aunts, and the neighbors debating politics, literature, and the bureaucratic insanities of the New York City School System in which they worked. An inspired few actually enter the Conversation, and make to it contributions that will be taken up into the immortal lists of Great Books. But for the rest of us, it is enough that we have been initiated into its rituals and shibboleths. Throughout our lives, that eternal debate will be the intellectual accompaniment of our quotidien lives.

I was lucky enough as a dewy-eyed youth to go to an "experimental" college of the 1960s that was ungraded and focused on a "liberal education" and not merely the churning out of technical experts for the factories and offices of the future. I was in nirvana. I blossomed.

But then I went to graduate school and discovered myself back in a "high school environment" of grades and classes and even roll call! I withered. My joy in learning disappeared along with the lack of access to excited and interesting scholars. I had been spoiled as a youth at a college where classes were seminars and not lectures, where professors enjoyed their topics and would linger after class to answer questions. In graduate school I was reintroduced to "education" as a factory for stamping out graded and standardized minds. Needless to say, I dropped out of grad school and went and got a job in "the real world". But my joy in learning continues, but not in an academic setting. I still hold my ideals, I just recognize that contemporary institutions mouth one set of values but lives by another.

It is interesting that R. P. Wolff rejects my rationale and joy.

Here is his view of the purpose of a liberal education:

The true rationale for liberal education, in my considered and passionate judgment, is our society's desperate need for a reservoir of negative thought -and for some protected place in which young men and women can explore what my sons, some years ago, would have called the dark side of the force.

Here is an example from baby training:

One day, something inexplicable, terrible, frustrating, painful happens. The baby makes its demanding noise, with the cookie in full view just outside its reach, and the parent, instead of immediately handing it over, as has happened every day for as long as the baby can remember, now picks up the cookie, holds it tantalizingly before the baby, and says in what can only be construed as a deliberately sadistic voice, "Can you say 'cookie'?" Well, all of us know the rest of this story, for all of us have lived through it. The acquisition of language, the mastery of one's bowels, the control of one's temper - all of the stages in development that make one an adult human being who is recognizably a member of a society - all have a negative side, a side associated with shame, rage, pain, frustration, resentment, a backside, as we learn to think of it, as well as a positive side associated with praise, self-esteem, public reward, power, satisfaction - a front, which, as our language very nicely suggests, is both an officially good side and also a pretense, a fake.

By and large, we do not forget the frustration, the pain, the rage. We repress it, drive it out of consciousness, deny it, put it behind us, as we like to say. But, like our own backsides, and the feces which issue from them, they remain, and exercise a secret, shameful attraction for us.

This brief reminder of our common heritage makes it clear that the repression of "unacceptable" wishes - as Freud so quaintly and aptly labeled them in his earlier writings - is an essential precondition for our development of the ability to interact effectively with the world, and with one another. Mastery of our own bodies, mastery of language, the psychic ability, and willingness, to defer gratification long enough to perform necessary work, the ability to control destructive, and self-destructive, rages or desires - civilization, society, culture, survival depend upon them. But necessary though they are, they are painful; throughout our lives, we carry, repressed, the delicious, illicit fantasies of total, immediate, uncompromised gratification, of instantaneous, magical fulfillment, of the permission to indulge the desires that have been stigmatized as negative.

Personally I think that is a perverse presentation of the facts. The negative (Freudian) aspects are overplayed. Freud wasn't a scientist. He was more a novelist telling "just so" stories that sound credible but really aren't.

My experience of higher education had nothing to do with repressing desires. If anything, it was a romp, a joy, a discovery of an arena of pleasure that was far away from the demands of the workaday world.

As for high culture, I totally disagree with Wolff.

In this project, the great works of art, literature, philosophy and music of our cultural tradition play an essential, and rather surprising, role. Regardless of their manifest content and apparent purpose, these works, which we customarily consider the appropriate content of a liberal education, play a continuingly subversive role. They keep alive, in powerful and covert ways, the fantasies of gratification, the promise of happiness, the anger at necessary repression, on which radical political action feeds.

They don't convey any sense of subversive enjoyment and prod me with an "anger at necessary repression". Nope. I enjoy some high art for the sheer aesthetics. Some I don't care for. Similarly, I enjoy some low art for the sheer joy it brings me while I don't care for other aspects of low art. I get my pleasure from my interaction. I'm not some cog in some grand mechanistic psycho-drama that Marcuse or Wolff want to squeeze me into.

Playing "by the rules" is not some psychological repression. It is simply the game (or work or social environment). If I want to play I am required to play by the rules. But I'm free to reject the game or create my own game. But most people realize that if they "don't play by the rules, they will play alone". That isn't repression. That is just a fact of life. It causes no more anguish than to realize that I can't kick a 500 pound rock and expect to send it over the goalpost. I'm not repressed or compelled by the rock. It is just a fact. If I accept the fact, my life goes more smoothly. If I reject the fact, I'm in for a world of pain. It is my choice.

I just don't buy his argument:

In all seriousness, I suggest to you that this is the real justification for keeping alive the great tradition of liberal arts and letters in our colleges and universities. Not as a patina for modern aristocrats, not as an instrument of upward mobility, not even as an introduction to the Great Conversation, but as a way of putting young men and women in touch with their repressed fantasies of gratification, in such a fashion as to awaken in them the hope, the dream, the unquenchable thirst for liberation from which social progress must come.

But I enjoyed reading it. I didn't feel the least repressed by the thoughts nor did they invoke an "unquenchable thirst for liberation". Nope. That is a fantasy. A fun thought. But it is much like thinking I can punt a 500 pound rock over a goal post. I can enjoy thinking it. But it doesn't make up the reality of the world in which I live.

I do agree with the closing story that Wolff provides, i.e. great art or ideas can reach across decades and centuries and seize a person by the scruff of the neck, and given him a shaking that can liberate him from a lifetime of unthinking subservience to received authority. But that is exactly the joy of ideas without all the fussy nonsense about Freud and Marcuse. It is a chance to knock up against a great mind and realize a new thought, a new perception, a new theory, or a new aesthetic.

Don't take my word for any of this. Go read Robert Paul Wolff for yourself!

Meeting a Stone Age Tribe

Update: I've been punked. If you look at the comment at the bottom of this post, this video is a fake. These "primitives" are natives already in contact with civilization and were staged to make this "first encounter" film. Oh well. It just goes to show that you can't trust what you find on the Internet. There are people out there less interested in sharing experiences and information than they are in taking advantage of gullibility.

The comment on this post points me at this site which states:

This charming video is a fake. The white man you see in the video is Belgian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Dutilleux. The Papua New Guinea natives are members of the Toulambi tribe. This fake "first encounter" between the natives and a white skinned visitor was filmed around 1993. Before then, these excellent "actors" had already met with at least three ethnologists: Pierre Lemonnier in 1985, Jadran Mimica in 1979 and Pascale Bonnemère in 1987.

Anthropologist Pierre Lemonnier who denounced this documentary as fraud in an article for the French Newspaper Liberation, studied the Papuans of the district of Marawaka for over a decade and says that the supposedly "unknown tribe" lives less then four days away by foot from an administrative center with teachers, a landing strip, a radio, nurses and of course a preacher (it's important for the natives to know that they’re going to hell : / ). They also use the Vailala River to travel to the coast to exchange handmade tableware made out of tree back for modern tools.

In an article that Lemonnier gave to the French magazine “Terrain” published in 1999, he explained that a male nurse from the administrative center spread rumors about a new undiscovered tribe. That he send a Papua guide ahead of the camera crew to “coach” the tribe on how to act. They were also told to hide their metal tools, plastic goods and “regular clothes” (jeans and T-shirts).

Why did the nurse do it? Well the tribe lived in malaria stricken zone and the nurse got six months worth of quinine tablets and various other medicines for his troubles.

Sadly, the lead actor of the “skit” told Lemonnier that he felt so much shame from having to pretend to be afraid of his own reflection, tasting matches and spiting out rice that it drove him to tears.

Sources: http://www.liberation.fr
http://www.rue89.com

Here is an interesting series of videos where a stone age New Guinean tribe meets white man for the first time. I always find it fascinating to get this kind of glimpse into the past. Human nature is universal. But first encounters can be very dangerous for both sides. I'm not adventurous enough to run the risk.

From Tribal Journeys: The Toulambi a series by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux.











I get frustrated by the "pre-civilization life is better" nonsense. I prefer an assured food supply, a nice home with all the conveniences, entertainment, education, and medical care. The fact that he is giving them medicine for malaria shows that their lifestyle leaves them with much wanting. I also find it odd, if the narrator is as convinced that "civilization is bad" why create this encounter? There is something dishonest about his presentation. These people have as much right as anybody to decide just how much "encounter" they want to have with the modern world. I'm pretty sure that if they were given a choice, they would take civilization over their current precarious lifestyle.

Remember in the last video he points out they "lost their drums" to another tribe. They live a marginal existence filled with fears and threats that they don't understand. The wonderful fact about modern civilization is that we have science and education which gives us a great deal of knowledge about our world. Knowledge is power and control. Reasonable people want that and not wandering ignorantly in the jungle prey to disease, attack, and accidents.

The Real "Outsourced"

If you have watched the American TV sitcom "Outsourced" about a luckless fellow sent to India to run a call centre, an article by Andrew Marantz in Mother Jones is a healthy antidote. Here are some interesting bits:

Nishant, now 26, moved to Delhi at age 18. His first job was tracking down Americans with delinquent bills. "In training they told us, 'It's easy. These guys have the money, they just don't want to pay.' They told us, 'Threaten their credit score, Americans can't live without good credit.'"

On his first day, Nishant donned his headset, dialed the number on the screen and was connected to a 60-year-old woman in Tennessee. She had an outstanding hospital bill for $400. "I told her, 'Just pay this, what's the problem?' She told me, 'You don't understand, I can't pay.'" They talked for 45 minutes, and the woman cried as she told Nishant about the Iraq War and its toll on American families. "By this time I'm crying also," Nishant said.

The same day, he was connected with a man living in a trailer. "I told him, 'What's a trailer?' He told me, 'It's this tin shed; it gets 90 degrees; we don't have our own washroom.'" Nishant learned more about America that first day, he told me, than he had in his whole childhood.

And here's the soul-destroying aspect of these "westernized" jobs in India:

Today, almost half of BPO employees are women, many of whom outearn both of their parents. Free-market cheerleaders, conflating rising wages with rising spirits, are quick to applaud India's "maturing" markets. But the truth is more complicated: Studies show that once people move out of poverty, increasing wealth does not necessarily lead to happiness.

Call-center employees gain their financial independence at the risk of an identity crisis. A BPO salary is contingent on the worker's ability to de-Indianize: to adopt a Western name and accent and, to some extent, attitude. Aping Western culture has long been fashionable; in the call-center classroom, it's company policy. Agents know that their jobs only exist because of the low value the world market ascribes to Indian labor. The more they embrace the logic of global capitalism, the more they must confront the notion that they are worth less.

This bit is amusing because it is reverse racism:

During our second day of culture training, Lekha dissected the Australian psyche. It took about 20 minutes.

"Just stating facts, guys," Lekha began, as we scribbled notes, "Australia is known as the dumbest continent. Literally, college was unknown there until recently. So speak slowly." Next to me, a young man in a turban wrote No college in his notebook.

"Technologically speaking, they're somewhat backward, as well. The average person's mobile would be no better than, say, a Nokia 3110 classic." This drew scoffs from around the room.

"Australians drink constantly," Lekha continued. "If you call on a Friday night, they'll be smashed—every time. Oh, and don't attempt to make small talk with them about their pets, okay? They can be quite touchy about animals."

"What kind of people are there in Australia?" a trainee asked. "What are their traits?"

"Well, for one thing," Lekha said, "let's admit: They are quite racist. They do not like Indians. Their preferred term for us is—please don't mind, ladies—'brown bastards.' So if you hear that kind of language, you can just hang up the call."

And I found this bit about revolution from the inside interesting:

Most customers are well-behaved, they assured me. Still, each agent had a stockpile of best- and worst-call anecdotes. "I remember quite well this guy who just called me up and said out of nowhere, 'You fucking Paki,'" Arnab told me during a break. "We don't take those things personally; it's part of the job. So I just said, very calmly, 'Yes sir, if I am a Paki, then this Paki would be helping you fix your computer.' By the end of the call, he apologized and gave me a five-star feedback rating."

With his pomaded hair, pearly white teeth, and habit of clapping me genially on the back, Arnab could have passed for a US congressman. Only after several conversations did I learn that as a doctoral student at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, he had been a Marxist student activist. He worked in BPOs because his family needed money, but his dream was to organize the workers. "Not all at once," he said. "Just steadily, over time, I'm thinking how to bring down the system from the inside. Meantime, I'm happy to cash their paycheck."

I suspect Arnab will be "revolutionized" by his work experience rather than him succeeding in bringing "revolution" to the working masses. (And if you read the article, you will find out that Arnab accepts the embrace of "the system". Sadly Arnab ends up alienated and unhappy.)

A Little Light Entertainment

I find that films have evolved over time. If you watch films for 100 years ago the plot plods along. Fifty years ago techniques like flashbacks and changing point of view helped "liven" up the films. And the cutting and splicing continues to increase the pace in film plots. Are we heading toward a singularity? I offer this as evidence that we are on the threshhold of a singularity event...



The point at which the slicing and dicing come so fast and furious that we drop the plot and simply go for the "action" as attention spans shinks to that of a gnat.

What is Happening in China

The following is from the Washington's Blog site. I find the information here is generally right, but sometimes is spectacularly wrong. I have no way of independently assessing the following, but it sounds right to me:

Is the Chinese Economy Sputtering for the Same Reasons as the American Economy?

It was tempting to believe that China was different.

With its command and control economy with some of the trappings of free market capitalism, trillions in reserves, and abundant natural resources, many thought that China would "decouple" from the Western world's problems and sail into a prosperous future.

However, despite its long history, exotic names and seemingly strong position, China cannot avoid the rules of economics which have applied to all countries throughout history.

Corruption and Phony Bookkeeping

Corruption and the failure to follow the rule of law is one of the main factors which has dragged down the American economy.

The fact that - according to the Chinese central bank - Chinese officials stole $120 billion and fled the country does not auger well for China.

Scandals among various Chinese companies are not helping, either.

And then there are the made up statistics. As Warren Hatch of Catalpa Capital Advisors notes:

As Li Keqiang, the vice premier and heir-apparent to Wen Jiabao, laconically remarked to the US ambassador a few years ago, most of the statistics in China are “for reference only.”

And Charles Hugh Smith argues:

Despite their many differences, the economies of China and the U.S. share a number of key traits: both are corrupt, rigged, crony-Capitalist, rely on phony statistics and propaganda and operate with two sets of rules: one for the Elites, and another for the masses.

Despite their many differences, the economies of China and the U.S. share a number of key traits: both are corrupt, rigged, crony-Capitalist, rely on phony statistics and propaganda and operate with two sets of rules: one for the Elites, and another for the masses.

There is much more in the original post. Go read the whole article.

From my perspective, both countries suffer a large degree of corruption because they have an elite which has run amok.

How does this problem get fixed? It isn't clear to me. But it will require a wholesale revulsion by an overwhelming number of people, something like 80% will have to turn their back on the past and demand a new "social contract". Whether that is done through revolution, a new mass political party, a religious conversions, etc. I don't know. But it will take a social change of that order to sweep out the Augean stables of corruption and greed that now reign in both countries.

Hollywood vs. YouTube

Here is Cory Doctorow on the copyright war and what it really means for the culture:



So, Cory Doctorow likes the summer blockbusters, but not enough to give up YouTube.

I enjoy the bit around 2:30 where he looks at the dilemma of "copyright" of sheet music where performers actually played that music without compensating the composer beyond the sale of the sheet music. But once recorded music took off, the pirates of the first decade of the 20th century who actually created another income stream for the music composers. And these recorded artists then complained about radio stations that were "pirating" the recorded music, etc. etc.

The RIAA and MPAA should back off their insane fight over "copyright" and learn the lessons of history and let the next generation build on the past and actually them more money rather than continuing to fight the new digital era.

Ya Gotta Love Those Flash Mobs

Here's kNOTDance doing a flash mob at Pittsburgh's Gay Pride 2011:



My favourite continues to be this flash mob in 2009 in Antwerp, Belgium dancing to the songs of The Sound of Music:



My second favourite is this Christmas flash mob singing Handel's Messiah in Welland, Ontario:



Here's Wikipedia on "flash mobs".

Strangling Culture with the Red Tape of Copyright

When I was a kid stuff would fall into the public domain every day. But as I get older, things stopped going into public domain as governments around the world extended the length of copyright. As I have lived my life, "public domain" has become a mirage in the desert, with every year I pass, the date at which material will become available recedes further into the future. Now, it is getting worse than that, as law-makers bend to corporate greed and change the very definition of "public domain" so that nothing ever ends up there again.

Here's a bit from an excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on a case going before the US Supreme Court:

The conductor's fight centers on the concept of the public domain, which scholars depend on for teaching and research. When a work enters the public domain, anyone can quote from it, copy it, share it, or republish it without seeking permission or paying royalties.

The dispute that led to Golan v. Holder dates to 1994, when Congress passed a law that moved vast amounts of material from the public domain back behind the firewall of copyright protection. For conductors like Mr. Golan, that step limited access to canonical 20th-century Russian pieces that had been freely played for years.

"It was a shocking change," Mr. Golan says over dinner at a tacos-and-margaritas dive near the University of Denver's mountain-framed campus. "You used to be able to buy Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky. All of a sudden, on one day, you couldn't anymore."

Other works once available but now restricted include books by H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, and C.S. Lewis; films by Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, and Jean Renoir; and artwork by M.C. Escher and Pablo Picasso. The U.S. Copyright Office estimated that the works qualifying for copyright restoration "probably number in the millions."

Congress approved the recopyrighting, limited to foreign works, to align U.S. policy with an international copyright treaty. But the Golan plaintiffs—a group that includes educators, performers, and film archivists—argue that bigger principles are at stake. Does Congress have the constitutional right to remove works from the public domain? And if it does, what's stopping it from plucking out even more freely available works?

"If you can't rely on the status of something in the public domain today—that is, if you never know whether Congress is going to act again and yank it out—you're going to be a lot more cautious about doing anything with these materials," says Mr. Golan's lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. "You really destroy the value and the usefulness of the public domain in a profound way if the rug can be pulled out from under you at any time."

...

The change was surprising from a philosophical point of view: Under copyright law, the Constitution grants authors a limited monopoly over their works as an incentive to promote creativity. Over the years, Congress has often delayed the passage of works into the public domain by lengthening the duration of copyright terms. But removing pieces already there was different, Mr. Golan's lawyers argue, a radical change in what one scholar describes as the basic "physics" of the public domain.

That may sound abstract, but the impact on Mr. Golan was direct. When a work is in the public domain—that Puccini opera, say—an orchestra can buy the sheet music. Symphonies typically cost about $150. And the orchestra can keep those pages forever, preserving the instructions that librarians laboriously pencil into scores. But works under copyright are typically available only for rent. And the cost is significantly higher: about $600 for one performance. With the flip of a switch, the new law restored copyright to thousands of pieces.

For big-city orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, that change is like a "mosquito bite," Mr. Golan says. But Mr. Golan's university ensemble gets only about $4,000 to rent and buy music each year. That means it can perform some copyrighted works but must rely on the public domain for about 80 percent of its repertoire. And $4,000 is relatively generous. Other colleges might have only $500 to spend on music. When the Conductors Guild surveyed its 1,600 members, 70 percent of respondents said they were now priced out of performing pieces previously in the public domain.

Read the whole article.

Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing points out that the whole issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is chock full of copyright issues:

New copyright lawsuits and policies have hobbled teaching and research. Now scholars are pushing back. In a special report, the Chronicle of Higher Education covers the copyright wars from several angles:

* A Professor Takes His Fight to the Supreme Court: The ability to teach and research many books, films, and pieces of music may hinge on Lawrence Golan's suit

* Colleges Lock Away Millions of Works: Academic archives are playing it safe, limiting online access to books, images, and artwork

* What You Don't Know About Copyright, But Should

* Pushing Back Against Legal Threats By Putting Fair Use Forward: A dynamic professorial duo leaps to the defense of beleaguered scholars

* Two Universities Under the Legal Gun

Click here to link to BoingBoing and get the embedded links to the articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Bill Bryson's "At Home"

I've enjoyed all the books by Bill Bryson that I've read. He has a style that is both delightful and very readable. He loves detail. And he can tell a good story.

This book uses the 18th century parson's house that Bryson owns in the UK and builds wonderfully descriptive stories about architecture, people, history, objects, and customs. The book is an absolute delight.

Here's a sample where he talks of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington's homes:

Monticello's celebrated contraptions -- its silent dumbwaiters, dual-action doors, and the like -- are sometimes dismissed as gimmicks, but in fact they anticipated by 150 years or so the American love for labor-saving devices, and helped make Monticello not just the most stylish house ever built in America but also the first modern one. But it is Mount Vernon that has been the more influential of the two. It became the ideal from which countless other houses, as well as drive-through banks, motels, restaurants, and other roadside attractions, derive. Probably no other single building in America has been more widely copied -- almost always, alas, with a certain robust kitschiness, but that is hardly Washington's fault and decidedly unfair to his reputation. Not incidentally, Washington also introduced the first ha-ha into America and can reasonably claim to be the father of the American lawn; among all else he did, he devoted years to meticulous effort to trying to create the perfect bowling green, and in so doing became a leading authority in the New World on grass seed and grass.

And this about beds and Shakespeare:

For much of history a bed was, for most homeowners, the most valuable thing they owned. In William Shakespeare's day a decent canopied bed cost £5, half the annual salary of a typical schoolmaster. Because they were such treasured items, the best bed was often kept downstairs, sometimes in the living room, where it could be better shown off to visitors or seen through an open window by passersby. Generally, such beds were notionally reserved for really important visitors but in practice were hardly used, a fact that adds some perspective to the famous clause in Shakespeare's will in which he left his second-best bed to his wife, Anne. This has often been construed as an insult, when in fact the second-best bed was almost certainly the marital one and therefore the one with the most tender associations. Why Shakespeare singled out that particular bed for mention is a separate mystery, since Anne would in the normal course of things have inherited all the household beds, but it was by no means the certain snub that some interpretations have made it.

The above is most interesting as an insight into 16th century customs as is this bit:

In one of his works, John Aubrey,the seventeenth-century historian relates an anecdote concerning the marriage of Thomas More's daughter Margaret to a man named William Roper. In the story Roper calls one morning and tells More that he wishes to marry one of More's daughters -- either one will do -- upon which More takes Roper to his bedroom, where the daughters are asleep in a truckle bed wheeled out from beneath the parental bed. Leaning over, More deftly takes "the sheet by the corner and suddenly whippes it off," Aubrey relates with words that all but glisten lustily, revealing the girls to be fundamentally naked. Groggily protesting at the disturbance, they roll onto their stomachs, and after a moment's admiring reflection Sir William announces that he as seen both sides now and with his stick lightly taps the bottom of the sixteen-year-old Margaret. "Here was all the trouble of the wooeing," writes Aubrey with clear admiration.

A few quotes from the book can't do it justice. You have to read it. It is a delight.

Political Commentary on American Politics by Bertrand Russell

I was reading the section in Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy on Protagoras, the Sophist. I found this paragraph interesting because it provides some social commentary about America written by a very smart guy with the perspective of 1945. It makes clear the changes in the political life of America over the last 65 years. I've bolded the key bits:

In many cities, however, and especially in Athens, the poorer citizens had towards the rich a double hostility, that of envy, and that of traditionalism. The rich were supposed -- often with justice -- to be impious and immoral, they were subverting ancient beliefs, and probably trying to destroy democracy. It thus happened that political democracy was associated with cultural conservatism, while those who were cultural innovators tended to be political reactionaries. Somewhat the same situation exists in modern America,where Tammany, as a mainly Catholic organization, is engaged in defending traditional theological and ethical dogmas against the assaults of enlightenment. But the enlightened are politically weaker in America than they were in Athens, because they have failed to make common cause with the plutocracy. There is, however, one important and highly intellectual class which is concerned with the defence of the plutocracy, namely the class of corporation lawyers. In some respects, their function is similar to those that were performed in Athens by the Sophists.

The world has changed. The plutocrats today are not cultural innovators. They have aligned with social conservatives. The technocratic and cultural elite, who are definitely not the plutocracy, are the ones advancing cultural innovation. Whereas in the 1940s the plutocrats of the Gilded Age had set up foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation which funded liberal causes, today the big money is funding right wing think tanks and socially reactionally organizations like the Tea Party.

Today Catholics and Evangelicals and fundamentalists of all stripes have formed a conservative political coaltion like Tammany Hall to push a reactionary agenda of kirche, küche kinder (specifically an anti-abortion, anti-feminist, anti-gay agenda).

Progressives, the "enlightened", are seen as impious and immoral and are thought to be limp wristed New York elite liberals. They continue the rainbow nation agenda of the 1960s with a hope for "peace and love" with inclusion for all segments of the population. They push an agenda of tolerance and understanding. They still stand for the ideals of The Age of Enlightenment with respect for science and a distrust of traditionalism and old hierarchies.

The real plutocrats in America are Wall Street, big corporations, and the top 1% of the population. Through the Republican party they use social consevatism to get the reins of power to run the government for the benefit of the plutocracy. The progressives, who are painted as New York liberals, in fact are not aligned with the plutocracy, so they are politically weak and have gotten much weaked over the last 40 years as Nixon used the "Southern strategy" to co-opt the conservative right as the base of the Republican party.

Taking Control, Full Control, of Your Life

I found this bit from a post on Dan Ariely's blog very interesting. I've read both his books "Predictably Irrational" and "The Upside of Irrationality". Both are delightful and insightful. I also find his life inspiring: while preparing "fire signs" (a common feature in ceremonies of youth movements in Israel) he suffered third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body from an accidental magnesium flare explosion. He learned many lessons from how he handled himself through this time.

Here is the bit of his post that I found most interesting:

As the American population ages, the debate about the ethics of physician-assisted suicide for terminal patients becomes more important.

...

Outside of philosophical arguments, examination of an interesting finding regarding physician-assisted suicide – know as “The Oregon Paradox” – can add an interesting dimension to the debate. The paradox is the finding that when terminal patients in Oregon receive lethal medication (under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act), they often feel a sense of greater wellbeing and a desire to live longer. In 2010, of 96 patients requested lethal medication, only 61 actually took it. Even more interesting are the many anecdotal accounts of terminal patients, upon receiving lethal medication, that feel a surge of wellbeing and a desire to persevere through their illness.

Why is this this the case? Looking at this question from an expected-utility perspective suggests that given the option to terminate their own life, terminal patients will decide how long they want to live by comparing the value they expect to gain from the rest of their lives to the expected intensity of their suffering. At the point where future utility is expected to be negative – that is, when the patient’s condition becomes so intolerable that living any longer is not worth the cost – the patient would choose to end life if the option were available.

The critical point from this perspective is that patients choose the amount of time they are willing to continue living with their illness, which will depend how quickly they deteriorate. If the rate of deterioration is slower than expected, then patients should delay terminating their lives; if the rate of deterioration is faster than expected, patients should desire to end their lives quicker.

But now let us say that patients have been prescribed lethal medication and have the option of ending their lives at any point of their choosing. As before, patients don’t want to choose a time too soon or too distant, but with the power to control the end of their lives they no longer have a reason to err on the side of haste! The patients can now wake up every day with the comfort of knowing that they do not have to suffer through pain or stress they might find intolerable.

Being given the option to determine the time of our own death can transform patients from powerless victims of their illness to willing survivors of it. Together, the importance of feeling in control and the ability to reduce (but not eliminate) uncertainty about rate of deterioration adds an interesting new dimension to the underlying ethical debate and seems to provide credence to the benefits of legalized physician-assisted suicide.

It is clear is that we need a greater understanding of the decision-making of patients at the end of their lives, and that with this improved understanding we can construct policy to better protect their wellbeing (for an interesting recent movie on this topic see “How to Die in Oregon”).

I'm a bit of a fanatic. I think people should take responsibility for themselves and have the freedom to make their own choices. On the other hand, I realize that some people really aren't competent to run their own lives (mental deficiencies, moral deficiencies, etc.) So I'm in a bit of a bind. I live under a grand banner about "the nature of man' but realize that there needs to be lots of find print and "lawyerese" to handle the fact that we are not all cookie-cutter the same. In short, I don't really have a simple clear answer to all of life's questions that can be printed on a cereal boxtop. I end up with slogans and qualifications. And I leave it open for debate and clarification. That's the best I think anybody can do.

I do know that even though euthanasia is "illegal" my mother in the 1980s told the doctor's "no heroic measures" for her father which was essentially the code words for "let him die". And with my mother, when she couldn't stand her disabilities from a flubbed brain surgery asked me to "get her out of here!", I did the paperwork to move her to a hospice where she was allowed to die. In effect I signed her death papers.

As Dan Ariely's piece above shows, the issue of euthanasia is not black-and-white as the noisy interest groups would make you think. It is complex. Ultimately it is best left to the family with state intervention only if it is clear that somebody in the family is manipulating things for their own interest and things are not being done in the best interest of the person who is dying. That is a broad rule that requires eternal vigilance and interpretation, but that is the glory of English common law. It is law that is "living" and constantly being reinterpreted as we learn more and as things change. Nothing carved in stone like the religious bigots would have you believe. Instead, a law based on the best judgments of your peers and an honest judge.

David Brooks' "The Social Animal"

I enjoyed this book, just as I enjoyed David Brooks' earlier book Bobos in Paradise. But now that I know him better, I struggled with this book more than with the earlier book. I find Brooks' conservatism bothers me. In this book he attacks liberals and libertarians and put forth a kind of conservative agenda that just doesn't ring true for me. The problem is that David Brooks has lived his life among the top 10% of society so this book, which claims to have a main character, Erica, up from the bottom of society who gets ahead in the best traditions of Horatio Alger.

The book follows a man and woman from childhood, through marriage, to death to provide the platform for Brooks to present his social views and what he considers to be the best of "brain research". I have no complaint about the style of using fictional characters to make social observation. He does that well. I enjoyed the storyline. But I just don't buy his "science" and I don't care for his social views.

He holds that modern America has gone off the rails for over 50 years by pushing "freedom" and not looking to "social obligation and social relationships". I'm sympathetic, but ultimately don't buy the argument. I'm more than happy to read criticisms of libertarianism, the dominant right wing ideology of Brooks entire adult life and to which he signed up loyally until sometime late in George Bush's presidency. I came of age in the 60s generation so I'm still quite sympathetic to the ideals of freedom and self actualization that came out of the 1960s.

I understand Brooks' unhappiness with the seedier side of 1960s idealism turned sour. He sees it as "statism" and an attack on the institutions of family, church, and state have created dysfunctional families. I would disagree and say that while state paternalism was dysfunctional (the misguided urban renewal that destroyed communities with sterile Bauhaus functionalist cold concrete high rise "housing" like Chicago's Cabrini-Green). But I view Brooks' romanticization of kind of throwback Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Brooks endows relationships and institutions of the past with more glory than they deserve. He has a Father Knows Best view of perfectly harmonious families before the dissolution of marriage once divorce became easier. Similarly he has a sepia-toned view of institutions which for most of the poor were in fact callous institutions that offered no real help to the dispossessed and down-trodden. He seems to think that people can simply will themselves into a better world in a wonderfully "upwardly mobile" America. The truth is that after 40 years of rampant right wing politics, the US has less social mobility than Europe.

Here are a few snippets to give a flavour of the book. First his attack on rationalist reductionist science in favour a gauzy everything-is-connected-and-complicated view of the world:

Rationalism gained enormous prestige during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it does contain certain limitations and biases. This mode of thought is reductionist; it breaks problems into discrete parts and is blind to emergent systems. This mode, as Guy Claxon observes in his book The Wayward Mind, values explanation over observation. More time is spent solving the problem than taking in the scene. It is purposeful rather than playful. It values the sort of knowledge that can be put into words and numbers over the sort of knowledge that cannot. It seeks rules and principles that can be applied across contexts, and undervalues the importance of specific contexts.

Moreover, the rationalist method was founded upon a series of assumptions. It assumes that social scientists can look at society objectively from the outside, purged of passions and unconscious biases.

It assumes that reasoning can be fully or at least mostly under conscious control.

It assumes that reason is more powerful than and separable from emotion and appetite.

It assumes that perception is a clear lens, giving the viewer a straightforward and reliable view of the world.

It assumes that human action conforms to laws that are akin to the laws of physics, if we can only understand what they are. A company, a nation, a universe -- these are all great machines, operated through immutable patterns of cause and effect. Natural sciences are the model that the behavioral sciences should replicate.

Eventually, rationalism produced its own form of extremism. The scientific revolution led to scientism.

This of course is a completely distorted view. Science isn't "rationalism". Science does build on reason, but it is a community effort that achieves objectivity by relying on the refinement of replicable experiments and a critical community who collaborate to refine thought and experiment into theory that guides further thought and experiment. There is no need to bring in passion, emotion, appetite, etc. Those don't and won't help you build a useful scientific theory.

Even Brooks' rhapsody about emergent systems is misguided because the scientific method is perfectly able to explore and theorize about emergent behaviour. You don't need to get swept up in a romantic anti-rationalist fever to appreciate complexity. Traditional science has been busy for half a century developing theories of complexity and chaotic system, and of emergent phenomena without Brooks telling them how misguided they are in ignoring the unconscious and emotions.

Brooks is right in his attack on the social scientists who have tried too hard to develop a "hard" science. His attack on economics are perfectly correct:

This scientism has expressed itself most powerfully, over the last fifty years years, in the field of economics. Economics did not start out as a purely rationalist enterprise. Adam Smith believed that human beings are driven by moral sentiments and their desire to seek and be worthy of the admiration of others. Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek expressed themselves through words not formulas. They stressed that economic activity was conducted amidst pervasive uncertainty. Actions are guided by imagination as well as reason. People can experience discontinuous paradigm shifts, suddenly seeing the same situation in radically different ways. John Maynard Keynes argued that economics is a moral science and reality could not be captured in universal laws calculable by mathematics. Economics, he wrote, "deals with introspection and with values... it deals with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One had to be constantly on guard against treating the material as constant and homogeneous."

But over the course of the twentieth century, the rationalist spirit came to dominate economics. Physicists and other hard scientists were achieving great things, and social scientists sought to match their rigor and prestige. The influential economist Irving Fisher wrote his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of a physicist, and later helped build a machine with levers and pumps to illustrate how an economy works. Paul Samuelson applied the mathematical principles of thermodynamics to economics. On the finance side, Emanuel Derman was a physicist who became a financier and played a central role in developing the models for derivatives.

While valuable tools for understanding economic behavior, mathematical models were also like lenses that filtered out certain aspects of human nature. They depended on the notion that people are basically regular and predictable. They assume, as George A. Akerlof and Robert Shiller have written, "that variations in individual feelings, impressions and passions do not matter in the aggregate and their economic events are driven by inscrutable technical factors or erratic government actions."

Within a very short time economists were emphasizing monetary motivations to the exclusion of others. Homo Economicus was separated from Homo Sociologus, Homo Psychologicus, Homo Ethicus, and Homo Romanticus. You ended up with a stick figure of human nature.

I wouldn't put it the way Brooks has. Economics ran off the rails because it fell in love with mathematics and modeling. There is nothing wrong with these tools, but when you allow them to seduce you into assumptions and simplification which fundamentally change your subject of study -- from "man" to "homo economicus" -- then you have problems. But this isn't caused by "scientism". This is simply a community of researchers who fell in love with a theory and its simplifications and got stuck in a rut. Physics and chemistry similarly had periods where they made similar misguided assumptions and strayed into wrong-headed theories.

You can use mathematics and model things that are at heart unpredictable. That is precisely the situation with quantum physics! That people have emotions and are unpredictable doesn't mean economics is impossible. It just means that simplistic homo economicus style theories are inadequate. Brooks gets it all wrong when he claims that "mathematical models filter out aspects of human nature". The math doesn't do that. Math is simply a tool. It is the theorist using the math that does that. Brooks has profoundly misunderstood the nature of science, math, modeling, and theory building.

Finally, here is a taste of his thesis that "freedom" of the 1960s hippies and the 1980s libertarians ran America off the rails because it overlooks relationships and institutions:

...the cognitive revolution had the potential to upend these individualistic political philosophies, and the policy approaches that grew from them. The cognitive revolution demonstrated that human beings emerge out of relationships. The health of a society is determined by the health of these relationships, not by the extent to which it maximizes individual choice.

Therefore, freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics. The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society. Political, religious, and social institutions influence the unconscious choice architecture undergirding behavior. They can either create settings that nurture virtuous choices or they can create settings that undermine them. While the rationalist era put the utility-maximizing individual at the center of political thought, the next era... would put the health of social networks at the center of thought. One era was economo-centric. The next would be socio-centric.

I would say that Brooks is guilty of the sin of all great system builders: he oversimplifies. It is not "freedom" versus "relationships". It is both. You need a certain conservatism in society, a respect for relationship, but you also need to give people freedom to realize their potential and the ability to politically organize and overthrow oppressive institutions and outdated hierarchies.

Brooks is too conservative. His lauding "the focus of political activity is the character of the society" sounds too fascistic for my taste. I admire institutions, but they are not the goal. Times change so institutions and relationships must change. He fails to appreciate the balance that is needed between individual, family, and institutions. This is a complex dance that is ever-changing through history. We no longer live under patriarchal families. We no longer have institutionalized aristocracies. Things change.

On the whole, the book is enjoyable and does make you think. But it is too easy to simply fall into Brooks' trap and accept his argument uncritically. You need to question every page. He has insights worth digesting, but don't let Brooks become a spider who quickly rolls you up in the webbing he spins to trap you into his viewpoint.

McDonald's Shows Its "Values"

Sadly. McDonald's is more concerned about repressing facts and maintaining a synthetic "image" than in letting truth be told. They fired an employee for releasing a video of a savage beating in a McDonald's restaurant. Obviously McDonald's policy is: pretend that their restaurants are a haven from the real world with McFood as a synthetic substitute for reality.

Here is a bit from an article by Maureen Dowd in the NY Times. I've bolded the key bit:

April is the cruelest month for Chrissy Lee Polis.

The 22-year-old stopped by the Rosedale, Md., McDonald’s, just east of Baltimore, last week.

Two patrons, an 18-year-old woman named Teonna Monae Brown and a 14-year-old girl, seemed to come out of nowhere and began ferally assaulting Polis.

The savage pair may have been disturbed at the prospect that Polis was transgender. “They said, ‘That’s a dude. That’s a dude. And she’s in the female bathroom,’ ” Polis told The Baltimore Sun.

The attackers spit on her, threw her on the floor, kicked her in the face and back, punched her in the nose, ripped her earrings out of her earlobes, dragged her by her hair across the restaurant and only stopped when she began to have an epileptic seizure and an older woman in a white track suit intervened.

A McDonald’s employee, who captured it all on his cellphone, was fired after his video went viral on YouTube.

Baltimore is the scene of multiple crimes:

• Sexual bigots savagely attack a transgendered woman because they didn't personally approve of this "lifestyle". (I'm waiting for people with perms and hair colouring to be beaten to a pulp by the Puritans who think this kind of cosmetic alteration insults God. In the good old days this got you into the stocks and I'm sure some are ready to put the offenders on faggots and set them afire so that the smoke of the offering can loft up to the heavens and please a most jealous God.)


• The good people of Baltimore who "witnessed" the assault acted more like Romans at the Coliseum watching a gladiatorial fight or Christians being fed to the lions. I'm surprised that the news report didn't identify whether the onlookers offered a thumbs up or thumbs down for the vicious beating.


• McDonald's management tops the list of infamy by deciding that fiction is more real at McDonalds that truth. If you dare show something inside their restaurant that undermines the corporate "image" you get fired. Truth be damned. It is the burnished image that counts.

I find this bit comical:

The suspects have been charged with assault and the Baltimore County state’s attorney office is determining whether it classifies as a hate crime.

I wonder what qualifies as a "hate" crime in this county if this beating doesn't. I can only guess that Baltimore county officials are "hard at work" trying to figure out what "policy position" they should take. On the one hand you have bigots beating somebody to a bloody pulp. But on the other hand, I guess there are just so many transgendered beatings in this county that it is hard to decide if this one is "special" and should be treated as a hate crime, or is just one of any number of run-of-the-mill beat the gays, beat the transgendered, beat the mentally retarded, beat the blacks, beat the foreigner, beat the homeless crimes that go on in that blighted part of the world. It must be tough to pick out "hate" crimes when you have so many to choose from. Right?

The good news from Maryland is that this story helps announce "open season" on beatings:

A week before the attack, Maryland’s Senate shelved a measure extending anti-discrimination protections to people who openly change their gender identity even though, as The Sun editorialized, “It would have sent a powerful signal that transgender people are not fair game for bigots.”

Wonderful. The legislators in Maryland have decided that it is discrimination if you beat up the handicapped and mentally retarded or the homeless, but it isn't a crime if you beat up the transgendered. I guess that since Michael Vick is out of the dog fighting business, maybe the more "progressive" elements of the Baltimore business community figure they can attract tourists to watch the transgendered beatings. Maybe move these from McDonald's to a bigger arena, sell tickets, and put Baltimore on the map as a tourist "destination" for non-hate crime beatings. I can see that the legislators are going to be busy trying to figure out that since transgendered beatings don't qualify as a "hate" crime, what else can they add to the mix to make for a more exciting offering to attract tourists. Maybe beatings for midgets or fly in Finns from Europe that can be put into a ring and beaten to a pulp to excite the tourists. The possibilities are endless!

Academic Treadmill

This brings back bad memories of being a graduate student...



The above is the Hui Zheng lab at Baylor, with their Gaga-esque production of Bad Project.

I got a chuckle from the video. At least they seem to be gelled as a group and willing to have fun and even poke fun at their laboratory lives. I did my graduate work in philosophy and remember it as a wasteland of isolation and indifference. There is a real rift between the two cultures. In the Humanities it is a solo flight. But in the Sciences you realize you are truly building on the giants who went before and you tend to work in teams.

Karen Armstrong's "The Case for God"

This is an excellent review of human religious views over the past 10,000 years. It claims to be a "case for God" but really doesn't argue for God. I'm putting this book onto my list of "favourites" and would love to have time to read it again and again to really absorb all that is in it. It is a great sourcebook that will point you in many directions.

It presents the many views of God over the years and, as the viewpoints are reviewed, it gives away the specific preferences of Karen Armstrong. It is a book that combines a history of ideas with a bit of Karen Armstrong's view of what religion should be. I enjoyed both. Although I differ in modest ways from what Armstrong presents.

• She does what a lot of historians do: she present a fairly linear view of history with a clear "plot line" with various persons presented as iconic and/or heroic. In reality, history is much more muddy & confused and there really isn't as much progress as it would appear. There are collapses of civilization which, when translated into the tale this book is telling, there are regressions in religion. But Armstrong doesn't linger over these.


• She is much more enthusiastic about "ritual" than I am. But this is the great divide in our cultural pasts. She comes from the Catholic side and I from the Protestant. She gives more creedance to authority and discipline and distrusts individualistic practices. I reverse that. But we both agree that there is an innate religiosity in people, that it arises from our social impulses and wonder at the world, that the best theology recognizes the limits of language, and that practice and community are as important as ideas.


• I appreciate her attempts at a global perspective which includes Chinese (Taoism and Confucianism), Indian (Hindu and Buddhism), Greek (mystery religions), as well as the three great monotheistic religions. As is to be expected from a person raised in the Western tradition her book is about 95% focused on the Christian tradition. I'm not competent to comment on much of the various religious traditions, but if her failings in getting the details of modern physics are any indication, she has only a superficial grasp of them. Enough to sound impressive to somebody with no background, but not that profound a knowledge. But I do appreciate her efforts to include these other traditions. I only fault her in not putting up serious "hazard" signs around the most egregious religious horror stories. In particular, she treats Islam with kid gloves which I find a bit hard to stomach. She does mention the horrors in Christianity's closet but blithely ignores those in Islam and she doesn't explore in any serious way the theological concepts of Islam or the divergences within this community over time.


• As always in a book like this there is a problem with traditions that are overlooked or insufficiently explored. I recognize that it is necessary to cut a book down to size. I want more. But it is pretty obvious from Armstrong's writing career, she will be exploring the topics in the book more since her own writings have shown a clear direction toward exploring religious ideas across the cultures and through history. I can hardly wait for her next book. The previous ones have all delighted me.

Enough of generalities, let's look at her book. I want to pull out quotes that will give you a feel for the scope and depth of the book.

She looks at religion starting well into pre-history:

If the historians are right about the function of the Lascaux caves, religion and art were inseparable from the very beginning. Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As meaning-seeking creatures, mean and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. The initiation experience also shows that a myth, like that of the Animal Master, derives much of its meaning from the ritualized context in which it is imparted. It may not be empirically true, it may defy the laws of logic, but a good myth will tell us something valuable about the human predicament. Like any work of art, a myth will make no sense unless we open ourselves to it wholeheartedly and allow it to change us. If we hold ourselves aloof, it will remain opaque, incomprehensible, and even ridiculous.

Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.

...

As the German scholar Walter Burkert explains, it is pointless to look for an idea or doctrine behind a rite. In the premodern world, ritual was not the product of religious ideas; on the contrary, these ideas were the product of ritual. Homo religiosus is pragmatic in this sense only; if ritual no longer evokes a profound conviction of life's ultimate value, he simply abandons it.

Here is what she has to say about early Christian theology:

One of the most brilliant and influential of these early exegetes was Origen (185-254), who had studied allegoria with Greek and Jewish scholars in Alexandria and midrash with rabbis in Palestine. In his search for the deeper significance of scripture, Origen did not cavalierly cast the original aside but took the plain sense of the scripture very seriously.

...

Like a human person, scripture consisted of a body, a psyche, and a spirit that transcended mortal nature; these corresponded to the three senses in which scripture could be understood. The mystes had to master the "body" of the sacred text (its literal sense) before he could progress to anything higher. Then he was ready for the moral sense, an interpretation that represented the "psyche," the natural powers of mind and heart: it provided us with ethical guidance but was largely a matter of common sense. The mystes that pressed on to the end of his initiation was introduced to the spiritual, allegorical sense, when he encountered the Word that lay hidden in the earthy body of the sacred page.

...

Origen's method of reading scripture according to the literal, moral, and spiritual sense became standard throughout the Christian world. The monastic reformer John Cassian (360-435) introduced this type of exegesis to western Europe and added a fourth sense: the anagogical, which described the eschatological dimension of any given text. This fourfold method remained in place in the West until the Reformation.

Here is a bit about Islam which skips over the initial violent coercive history (see here for a bit about this):

Eventually, when the war with Mecca was turning in his favour, Muhammad adopted a policy of nonviolence. Wehn Mecca finally opened its gates volunarily, nobody was forced to enter Islam and Muhammad made no attempt to implement an exclusively Islamic state there.

Like any religious tradition, Islam would change and evolve. Muslims acquired a large empire, stretching from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, but true to Qur'anic principles, nobody was forced to become Muslim. Indeed, for the first five hundred years after the Prophet's death, conversion to Islam was actually discouraged, because Islam was a din for the Arabs, the descendants of Abraham's elder son, Ishmael, just as Judaism was for the sons of Isaac and Christianity for the followers of the gospel.

While the above is broadly true, it ignores a lot of details that aren't as anodyne as presented.

After presenting the religious evolution during the Middle Ages, she summarizes it with:

But the theology of Scotus and Ockham was incomprehensible to all but a few experts. The theology of unknowing had encouraged humility; the new speculations of the schoolmen seemed to inflate their conceit and could be imparted to anybody who had the intelligence to follow it, regardless of his moral stature. Theology was not only becoming aridly theoretical; without the discipline of the apophatic, it was in danger of becoming idolatrous. Europe was on the brink of major social, cultural, political, and intellectual change. As it entered the modern world, spirituality was at a low ebb, and Europeans might find it difficult to respond creatively to the challenge.

Here is how she presents the Reformation:

In premodern society, men and women had experienced the sacred in earthly objects, so that symbol and the sacred had been inseparable. The Eucharistic bread and wine had been identical with the transcendent reality to which they directed attention. Now the reformers declared that the Eucharist was "only" a symbol and the Mass no longer a symbolic reenactment of Calvary but a simple memorial. They were beginning to speak about the myths of religion as theough they were logoi, and the alacrity with which people seized upon these new teachings suggests that many Christians in Europe were losing the older habits of thought.

The theological quarrels between Rome and the reformers and, later, among the reformers themselves were giving more importance to the exact formulation of the abstruse doctrines.

She has an interesting bit about the Marranos (forced Jewish converts to Christianity) who evidence the early modern trend toward skepticism and the loss of religion.

Here is a bit of her review of the Enlightenment:

Scarred by the theological wrangling and violence of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, European Deism was marked by anticlericalism but was by no means averse to religion itself. Deists needed God. As Voltaire famously remarked, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

The Enlightenment was the culmination of a vision that had been long in the making. It built on Galileo's mechanistic science, Descartes' quest for autonomous certainty, and Newton's cosmic laws, and by the eighteenth century, the pilosophes believed that they had acquired a uniform way of assessing the whole of reality. Reason was the only path to truth. The philosophes were convinced that religion, society, history, and the workings of the human mind could all be explained by the regular natural processes discovered by science. But their rational ideology was entirely dependent upon the existence of God. Atheism as we understand it today was still intellectually inconceivable. Voltaire regarded it as a "monstrous evil," but was confident that because scientists had found definitive proofs for God's existence, there were "fewer atheists today than there have ever been." For Jefferson, it was impossible that any normally constructed mind could contemplate the design manifest in every atom of the universe and deny the necessity of a supervising power.

She then talks about the Pietist movement that reacted to the impersonal Deistic universe by focusing on a "religion of the heart" that emphasized a personal relationship with God:

The Enlightenment tendency to polarize heart and head could mean that a faith that was not capable of intelligeent self-appraisal degenerated into emotional indulgence. This became clear during the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening that erupted in the American colony of Connecticut in 1734. The sudden death of two young people in the community of Northampton plunged the town into a frenzeied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. Within six months, three hundred people had experience "born-again" conversions, their spiritual lives alternating beween soaring highs and devastating lows when they fell prey to intense guit and depression. When the revival burned itself out, one man committed suicide, convinced that the loss of ecstatic joy must mean that the was predestined to hell. In premodern spirituality, rituals such as the Eleusinian mysteries had been skillfully crafted to lead people through emotional extremity to the other side. But in Northampton, the new American cult of liberty meant that there was no such supervision, that everything was spontaneous and free, and that people were allowed to run the gamut of their emotions in a way that for some proved fatal.

There was a paradox in the Enlightenment. Philosophers insisted that individuals must reason for themselves, and yet they were only permitted to think in accordance with the scientific method. Other more intuitive ways of arriving at different kinds of truth were now belittled in a manner that would prove highly problematic for religion.

I think her claim that the devotees of the Eleusinian mysteries were "properly" conducted is an unfounded generalization. There is far less known of the personal tragedies of those who "went off the deep end" with the Eleusinian mystery cult. But the conflict between rationalistic Deism and the new Pietism is a sound point. Armstrong is at her best -- in my view -- when she is teasing out these trends in religion over vast time periods.

Here is an excellent summary of the Age of Reason:

For d'Holbach, religion was born of weakness, fear and superstition; people had created gods to fill the gaps in their knowledge, so religious belief was an act of intellectual cowardice and despair. First, men and women had personified the forces of nature, creating divinities in their own image, but eventually they had merged all these godlings into a massive deity that was simply a projection of their own fears and desires. Their God was "nothing but a gigantic, exaggerated man," rendered incredible and unintelligible "by dint of keeping together incompatible qualities." God was an incomprehensible chimera, a mere negation of human limitations. His infinity, for example, simply meant that he had no spatial boundaries, but such a being was utterly inconceivable. How could you reconcile the goodness of an omnipotent God with human suffering? This incoherent theology was bound to disintegrate in the Age of Reason. Descartes, Newton, Malebranche, and Clarke, who had all tried to save God, were simply atheists in disguise.

She traces the roots of Evangelicalism:

The Evangelicals brought natural theology, hitherto a minority pursuit, into the mainstream. Even though they continued to insist on the transcendence of God, they believed paradoxically that he could be known through science as a matter of common sense. Wary of learned experts, they wanted a plain-speaking religion with no abstruse theological flights of fancy. They read the scriptures with an unprecedented literalism, because this seemed more rational than the older allegorical exegesis. Like scientific discourse, religious language should be univocal, clear, and transparent. The Evangelicals also brought the Enlightenment concept of "belief" as intellectual conviction to the center of Protestant religiosity and perpetuated the Enlightenment separation of the natural from the supernatural. Finally, in an attempt to ground their faith in something tangible, they followed the philosophes in making the practice of morality central to religion. They wanted a rationalized God who shared their own moral standards and behaved like a good Evangelical.

As we pass into the modern era we pass into a time of skepticism and disbelief. This is the modern era of "God is dead":

When the German philospher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) looked into the hearts of his contemporaries, he found that God had already died, but as yet6 very few people were aware of this. In The Gay Science (1882), he told the story of a madman who ran one morning into the marketplace, crying: "I see God!" In mild amusement,the sophisticated bysteanders asked him if God had run away or emigrated. "Where has God gone?" the madman demanded. "We have killed him -- you and I! We are all his murderers!" The astonishing progress of science had made God quite irrelevant; it had caused human beings to focus so intently on the physical world that they would soon be constitutionally unable to take God seriously. The death of God -- the fact that the Christian God had becvome incredible -- was "Beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe."

She also talks about the rise of Pentacostals:

At the other extreme of the intellectual spectrum, a form of Christian positivism developed that represented a grassroots rebellion against modern rationalism. On April 9, 1906, the first congregation of Pentecostalists claimed to have experienced the Spirit in a tiny house in Los Angeles, convinced that it had descended upon them in the same way as upon Jesus's disciples on the Jewish festival of Pentecost, when the divine presence had manifested itself in tongues of fire and given the apostles the ability to speak in strange languages. When they spoke in "tongues," Pentecostalists felt they were returning to the fundamental nub of religiosity that existed beneath any logical exposition of the Christian faith. Within four years, there were hundreds of Pentecostal groups all over the United States, and the movement had spread to fifty other countries. At first they were convinced that their experience heralded the Last Days: crowds of African Americans and disadvantaged whites poured into their congregations in the firm belief that Jesus would soon return and establish a more just society. But after the First World War had shattered this early optimism, they say their gift of tongues as a new way of speaking to God. ...

With the Great War, an element of terror had entered conservative Protestantism in the United States. Many believed that the catastrophic encounters at the Somme and Passchendaele were the battles that, according to scripture, would usher in the Last Days; many Christians were now convinced that they were on the front line of an apocalyptic war against Satan. The wild propaganda stories of German atrocities seemed proof positive that they had been right to fight the nation that had spawned the Higher Criticism. But they were equally mistrustful of democracy, which carried overtones of the "mob rule" and "red republic" that had erupted in the atheistic Bolshevik revolution (1917). These American Christians no longer saw Jesus as a loving savior; rather, as the leading conservative Isaac M. Haldeman proclaimed, the Christ of Revelation "comes forth as one who no longer seeks either friendship or love... He descends that he may shed the blood of men."

Then things took an even worse turn:

During their time in the political wilderness, the fundamentalists became more radical, nursing a deep grievance against mainstream American culture. Subsequent history would show that when a fundamentalist movement is attacked, it almost invariably becomes more aggressive, bitter, and excessive. Rooted as fundamentalism is in a fear of annihilation, its adherents see any such offensive as proof that the secular or liberal world is indeed bent on the elimination of religion. Jewish and Muslim movements would also confirm to this pattern. Before Scopes, Protestant fundamentalists tended to be on the left of the political spectrum, willing to work with socialists and liberals in the disadvantaged areas of the rapidly industrializing cities. After Scopes, they swung to the far right, where they have remained.

The ridicule of the press proved to be counterproductive, since it made the fundamentalists even more militant in their views. Before Scopes, evolution had not been an important issue; even such ardent literalists as Charles Hodge, knew that the world had existed for a lot longer than the six thousand years mentioned in the Bible. Only a very few subscribed to so-called creation science, which argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every details. Most fundamentalists were Calvinists, though Calvin himself had not shared their hostility to scientific knowledge. But after Dayton, an unswerving biblical literalism became central to the fundamentalist mind-set and creation science becamse the flagship of the movement.

Here is Armstrong's critique of literalism:

Their literalist approach showed a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of myth, which is "not to present an objective picture of the world as it is. ... Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically but ... existentially." Biblical interpretation could not even begin without personal engagement, so scientific objectivity was as alien to religion as to art. Religion was possible only when people were "stirred by the question of their own existence and can hear the claim that the text makes." A careful examination of the Gospels showed that Jesus did not see God as "an object of thought or speculation" but as an existential demand, a "power that constrains man to decision, who conftonts him in the demand for good."

Here is her summary of the 20th century theological Paul Tillich who tries to get past the literalism of both rationalist and evangelical Christianity:

For centuries, symbols such as "God" or "providence" enabled people to look through the ebb and flow of temporal life to glipse Being itself. This helped them to endure the terror of life and the horror of death, but now, Tillich argued, many had forgotten how to interpret the old symobolism and regarded it as purely factual. Hence these symbols had become opaque; transcendence no longer shone through them. When this happened they died and lost their power, so when we spoke of these symbols in a literal manner, we made statements that were inaccurate and untrue. That was why, like so many premodern theologians, Tillich could state without qualification: "God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essnse and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him."

She also discusses the modern conflict between science and religion and how various thinkers try to resolve it:

[Stephen Jay] Gould revived, in new form, the ancient distinction and complementarity of mythos and logos in what he called NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria). The "magisterium," he explained, was "a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution." Religions and science were separate magisteria and should not encroach on each other's domain:

The matisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)? The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they emcompass all inquiry.

The idea of an inherent conflict between religion and science was false. They were two distinct mageisteria that "hold equal worth and necessary status for any complete human life, and ... remain logically distinct and fully separeate in lines of inquiry."

She finishes with a look at the conflict between theism and atheism and considers the embrace of uncertainty by postmodernism as a possible resolution:

"If modern atehism is the rejection of a modern God, then the delimitation of modernity opens up another possibility, less the resuscitation of premodern theism than the chance of something beyond both the tehism and the atheism of modernity."

I see postmodernism as a poorly grounded movement and do not expect any future solutions to come from it. I do accept that what comes after the modern era will be an intellectual worldview that embraces the limits of knowledge and the uncertainty at the heart of our greatest intellectual edifices, e.g. quantum indeterminism and the incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gödel. But I reject the post-modernist relativity that holds all viewpoints are "equally valid". That simply isn't true. Different viewpoints have much to offer, but not all are equally acceptable or insightful or true.

From the epilogue of the book, you get a glimpse of Karen Armstrong's resolution of this puzzle about God:

Each tradition formulates the sacred differently, and this will certainly affect the way people experience it. There are important differences between Brahman, Nirvana, God, and Dao, but that does not mean that one is right and the others wrong. On this matter, nobody can have the last word, All faith systems have been at pains to show that the ultimate cannot be adequately expressed in any theoretical system, however august, because it lies beyond words and concepts.

...

There is much to be learned from older ways of thinking about religion. We have seen that far from regarding revelation as static, fixed, and unchanging, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all knew that revealed truth was symbolic, that scripture could not be interpreted literally, and that sacred texts had multiple meaning, and could lead to entirely fresh insights. Revelation was not an event that had happened once in the distant past but was an ongoing, creative process that required human ingenuity.

That is an idealized version of religion. In reality people don't rise to that level of insight and tolerance and understanding for others. It is a wonderful goal and a nice statement of Armstrong's religious aspirations, and maybe it is the way the world is headed, but it isn't clear. I accept her thesis that there is a common human religiosity underneath all the world's religions, but I don't buy that they are all equally valid nor do I even accept that historical religions are still a useful tool for our religious aspirations. I think the critiques of the militant atheists have merit. So the resolution is not yet clear to me.

I do buy into her vision of religion as an on-going enterprise that brings together communities through ritual to strengthen empathy and justice. But that isn't any historical religion I know. And, worse, I'm not sure how to get there from here.

The book is well worth reading. It will acquaint you with our cultural history and the evolution of religious thinking in the West (with a taste of religion from other parts of the world). This is one of those books that I would like to read several times because there is much to absorb. It is also a book that provides many jumping off places to dig into persons and historical events to understand them better.

Update 2010jan10: Here is Chapter 1 of Armstrong's book and a review in the NY Times. From Chapter 1 we get a glimpse of the structure of the book:

We need to understand how our world has changed. The first part of this book will, therefore, go back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the people of Western Europe had begun to develop their new science. We will also examine the mythical piety of the premodern agrarian civilization, so that we can see how the old forms of faith worked. It is becoming very difficult to be conventionally religious in the brave new world. Modernization has always been a painful process. People feel alienated and lost when fundamental changes in their society make the world strange and unrecognizable. We will trace the impact of modernity upon the Christians of Europe and America, upon the Jewish people, and upon the Muslims of Egypt and Iran. We shall then be in a position to see what the fundamentalists were trying to do when they started to create this new form of faith toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Fundamentalists feel that they are battling against forces that threaten their most sacred values. During a war it is very difficult for combatants to appreciate one another's position. We shall find that modernization has led to a polarization of society, but sometimes, to prevent an escalation of the conflict, we must try to understand the pain and perceptions of the other side. Those of us — myself included — who relish the freedoms and achievements of modernity find it hard to comprehend the distress these cause religious fundamentalists. Yet modernization is often experienced not as a liberation but as an aggressive assault. Few have suffered more in the modern world than the Jewish people, so it is fitting to begin with their bruising encounter with the modernizing society of Western Christendom in the late fifteenth century, which led some Jews to anticipate many of the stratagems, postures, and principles that would later become common in the new world.