My talents abound

So Chessa hands me the bag of organic CSA green beans that we have been hoarding for almost 3 weeks, and says, "here you go." I cut the ends, steamed them, buttered, salted, and served them on a plate. What does she say? "Kitty, dad doesn't get to cook dinner anymore." I don't think she properly appreciates the degree of perfection of those green beans. Not just anyone could have steamed them perfectly. AND I buttered each bean individually, for her. No respect, I tell you, no respect. It's almost as though she wanted something BESIDES green beans for dinner. How am I to know? Am I a mind reader? I offered to make her toast. Some people are never happy!

On the other hand, we just watched the movie Serenity. I think it might be the start of a new film series. They hit just the right notes, getting the characters just right, and covering a lot of ground well, but not repetitively for those fans of "Firefly" the tv series.

For someone who didn't like her dinner, she's certainly taking her damn sweet time eating it (savoring it, perhaps?)

Turning over a new cat turd

Well, I realize that my previous posts have been WAY too pontificatory. I also just read Chessa's blog, and I realized that blogging can be a pretty cool way to interact. If I write things that Chessa can respond to, and vice versa, plus write about what I'm thinking at the moment, we can add a new dimension to our relationship that has been missing since the days when we courted each other via email. We are both writers at heart, and I think it is kind of exciting to know that there are things that remain unspoken, but that we might read on each others' blogs. The mental discipline and the clever turn of phrase that we both enjoy so much is more possible in written form than it can ever be in spoken form.

So, SHOW ME THE LIBERTY BELL, CHESSA!!!!!!!

The end of the end

Is it possible that the U.S. government is more of a hindrance than it is a help in most aspects of modern life? It is because of the policies of the government that we are in danger of terrorist attack. It is the official policy of the government to thwart every effort to combat global warming and environmental destruction. The irresponsible fiscal policies of the government are costing not only the poor, but future citizens dearly.

If anything is to be done about global warming, it will be DESPITE rather than BECAUSE of the federal government. They are not responsive to the will of the American people, they are obstructionist and obfuscatory. Are they perhaps, now, also irrelevant?

The nations of the world, following the G8 meeting at Gleneagles, Scotland, are working around and basically ignoring the U.S. government when it comes to the environment. I think that as the U.S. dollar loses value, the last vestiges of American power will disappear. Then, rather than being the “city on a hill” that Johnathon Winthrop envisioned, the U.S. will be a defacto lame duck—powerful only in the the minds of the deluded few in office. A history of power and innovation is not enough to sustain this country. It takes leadership, which leads to results. We’re short on both, right now.

As every stage performer or author knows, the opposite of fame is not infamy—it is to be ignored. To be ignored it worse than to be hated, because you simply cease to matter. When the nations of the world, and the wise people of the world, ignore the U.S. they are consigning us to the dustbin of history. A potentially great people, ruined by lack of foresight and petty self-interest. With all of our missteps and immorality, we seem never to have learned our lesson. Perhaps we deserve to fade into the footnotes of history.

Irrelevance: an ignominious end for such a promising people. Why can’t we lead the charge on sustainability? Why can’t we innovate ourselves out of a looming global crisis? In two words and a letter, George W. Bush.

Socrates was wrong

The Socratic dictum "the unexamined life is not worth living for man," is actually a recipe for disaster, when applied too consistently and too forcefully. Despite my constant frustration with oblivious people who could surely do with more reflection in their lives, I think there is a danger that such reflection might be taken too far. Of course, the only ones likely to take it too far are the thoughtful minority in our society, so this should not be viewed as a general admonishment to avoid mindfulness--it should be taken only as a counterpoint to a common view among the thoughtful elite. It might even be viewed as the framework for another aporia (see the earlier entry on aporiae.)

Alfred North Whitehead (a second reference in such a short time--who knew he was so brilliant?) once claimed that decisions, like cavalry charges, should be taken rarely and only at crucial junctures. The rest of the time, one should cultivate productive habits, so as to free one's mind for more important things. Deliberation in every instance is not the mark of enlightenment, as Zen master Nan-in would have us believe. It makes one a slave to one's surroundings.

As Admiral James Stockdale, vice-presidential running mate to H. Ross Perot and self-avowed stoic in the grand tradition of Marcus Aurelius, once wrote, it is naive to show up and say "Okay, what's good and what's bad?" Some of that needs already to be settled.

Time and Scale RTO and RTMO

Everyone lives their lives according to a particular zone of comfort on Stuart Brand’s scale of the clock of now. (According to Brand, Fashion/Art constitute the fastest scale, then commerce, then infrastructure, then governance, then culture, and finally nature--as in the geologic timescale.) We must find a way systemically to respect the different paces.

The key to self governance, as well as to governance of the populace, is to discover a way not to make everything act at the faster paces. This bleed-over between different time scales is what I intuitively react against on a personal level. I thought academia offered a (mostly) non-competitive, slower paced venue for reflection and assimilation. I was wrong. Technology seems to drive the fast pace. If someone somewhere is thinking and writing and disseminating ideas at such a pace that the slower among us cannot keep up, then where does the reflection occur? Brand is correct that this places stress on our “ecosystem” and threatens to throw the world of humans out of balance.

Much of my frustration comes from my own psychological bleeding-over among different time scales. I want culture to take things slowly and to be deliberative, but when I see things like environmental devastation, change cannot happen fast enough. We need a way to distinguish the proper rate of change, and on which time scale a particular problem needs to be placed.

The real goal of human life is to achieve some sort of balance between the different scales as they occur in our lives. "Multi-tasking" usually refers to the immediate, personal level, in accordance with the fashion/art time scale--brushing your teeth while checking your email, for example. I submit that the broader multi-tasking occurs when we try to balance our life’s work with our afternoon plans, our deep values with our need to get the kids to soccer practice. This is a truly productive paradigm for ethical analysis.

Design, which is one small activity among the many that people do, embodies the need to arrange the various elements just so, according to different scales (of time, among others). Design entails problem-solving in the sense of the immediate need (how do this widget and this do-hickey go together?), as well as problem-solving in the sense of vision (what kind of thing does the world need for me to invent?).

On a personal level, I perceive a deficiency of “creativity,” which is really a problem of being too confined to the immediate, and not being able to stand back to apprehend the larger scale of the problem. I get seduced by one or the other, and fluid transition among them causes great stress on my psyche. I can solve a problem, or I can think in visionary ways, but asking me to multi-task those two activities causes a meltdown. What questions must I ask to fracture the world along different lines of cleavage? How to separate and yet integrate the different timelines is a persistent problem. I recognize when others do it brilliantly, but not having the ritual in place for myself, I have difficulty doing it. Perhaps the ritualistic management of time is the key to solving the problem.

How Our Minds and Lives Get Organized, Part Three

Prioritizing, decision-making, goal setting, etc. all require a firm grasp of the most productive taxonomy relative to the task at hand. Ideally, one would have access to multiple organizational principles—efficiency would be key to a taxonomy of household chores, romance would be the key to a taxonomy of date options, RTMO would be key to creative problem-solving, etc. Organizing emails, for example, by which came in most recently, is an abdication. The interest I have had in the past in imposing my will on the world is illuminating through this prism. It is about imposing one’s own order on the world (one’s own taxonomy) and defending the principle by which it is organized.

A sense of self comes from a firm, but not inflexible, taxonomy. Subjecting yourself to the taxonomy of others is an abdication—slavery. In this sense Nietzsche was correct. This is a highly intellectualized way of characterizing freedom.

A disordered existence, or perhaps more precisely, an existence in which one does not seek some sort of integrated organizational principle, is not merely a character flaw—it is non-existence in some normatively ontological sense. Creative people—those who seek the Relation That Might Obtain—impose their own order on the world, thus becoming the selves of true expression. As Guy Sircello wrote in his grand philosophical investigation of the concept of “expression:”

“The man who merely expands his mind on the mountaintop, becoming one with the universe by means of special training of the body and mind, does not thereby express himself. He is a mere follower; and whatever his soul may be like, it does not qualify as the magnanimous self of “self-expression.” It should be quite obvious, therefore, that those persons of “cultivated” intellect and sensibility produced by what we call “liberal education” do not, for the most part, possess the sorts of “selves” which are expressed. Merely being able to “appreciate” the reaches of Beethoven or Dante or, for that matter, to “dig” the sublimer heights of Jimi Hendrix does not make a soul “great.” Of course, in cases of mere “appreciation” there is no expression, so there cannot be any self-expression. But, more significantly, where there is no self-expression there can be no self either. The mere “appreciator” of culture, or of nature, cannot any more than can a mere “disciple,” possess greatness of soul.

…[T]he originators alone are properly described as having a self-identity, as being “unified” selves. In lesser people, the attitudes, feelings, and sensitivities remain merely more or less frequent “perceptions”; the mental qualities remain only occasionally attributable to them. In original persons, however, such things are elevated to the status of characteristic and constitutive over-all personal attributes. Such attributes in turn make a unity of the person and “save” him from being merely a “bundle” of activities and experiences. Self-unity of this sort is naturally quite uncommon. Almost every individual, whatever his work, lacks not only greatness of soul, but personal identity as well. (pp. 338-9)

If the rational person conforms to the world, and the irrational person seeks to make the world conform to him/her, then only the irrational person can create, and only the creative can be persons.

To return to Intellisophic.com, the organization that computers accomplish, by finding patterns that are too large for human consciousness to find, may be the crucial next step to artificial intelligence. Or, they may always fall short of self-hood because they seem necessarily limited to RTO. A computer seems to lack the imagination required for “letness” (when something symbolically stands for something else, which is called semiotics), even though a computer can detect faint patterns. It is the stand-in relation that accounts for true creativity. Computers can “let x stand for y,” but in those cases, both x and y have definite meanings. Metaphor, allegory, and analogy (the sources of imaginative insight) seem outside the grasp of computers as they now exist.

How Our Minds and Lives Get Organized, Part Two

As Larissa MacFarquhar has written of Harold Bloom, according to Bloom, “action requires an inhibition of consciousness—it requires turning away from possibilities, and in the moment of decision, blocking off all those mental motions that work against action, such as futility and ambivalence. The will to act, therefore, is a sign not that a man is full of force [as Nietzsche would have us believe] but that he is empty of human richness. ‘Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion…’” (from “The Prophet of Decline” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the 9/30/02 New Yorker Magazine.)

The bombastic nature of commerce has led Intellisophic.com to overstate the scope of its product. It seems that actionable knowledge must be the goal if a business like Intellisophic wants to provide a useful product to its clients, and only epistemological principles apparently can yield actionable knowledge. One more illustration of how the almighty dollar bleeds over from its proper sphere of influence to colonize every other sphere. Money is like an especially slow-acting, yet virulent, virus that eventually destroys itself by destroying its host environment. When everything is ruled by money, it will be impossible for money to yield any influence. By caring only for money, it seems likely that it will eventually be impossible to HAVE money.

I suspect that no truly COMPREHENSIVE taxonomy will ever be devised, although the impulse to create one is the same impulse as that which inspired Diderot and the other philosophes to undertake their encyclopedia project. I understand the desire to find a place for everything in order to comprehend it, but I also understand the desire to punch Aristotle in the nose for identifying and articulating this way of knowing things through their membership in categories.

How Our Minds and Lives Get Organized, Part One

I have been conditioned by philosophy, which has been turned fundamentally into a knowledge affair, to look for the relations that actually obtain between and among things, ideas, etc, rather than looking for the relations that MIGHT obtain (or that might be interesting if they DID obtain), as artists do. The “Truth” with a capital “T” has made the world flat, and literal. Possibility is always more interesting than actuality, but we have lost the joy of uncertainty. (Where it still exists, it has taken the form of religious faith. NOT what I intend, at all.) Dewey was correct in making this criticism of contemporary philosophy, that all other ventures have been subsumed by epistemology. When cross-cutting taxonomies of the world can no longer compete for attention against the dominant taxonomy (which is itself organized around an epistemological principle of “discovery of the Truth”), we are truly faced with a loss of culture. There is more to life than Knowledge, and science is not the only way of understanding the world.

If the taxonomies and formal ontologies of the world are organized around the epistemological principle—the Relations That Obtain (RTO)—there is still an opening for cross-cutting taxonomies organized around the alternate taxonomic principle of the Relations That Might Obtain (RTMO). This is the engine of change in our culture. This is how originality is possible. There is a finite number of ways in which things DO relate to each other. The ways in which they MIGHT relate is, apparently, infinite.

In many cases, the way of describing people in terms of what kind of taxonomy they are engaged in creating may be a useful prism. All knowledge workers are worker bees on some taxonomy. Is this true of non-knowledge workers? What is the complete list of taxonomy types? Is the two-value RTO and RTMO classification exhaustive? How do RTO and RTMO stand in relation to each other? Is RTO logically prior to RTMO? Is it DEVELOPMENTALLY prior? Is that why so few people ever make it to RTMO? Or, are they two entirely independent ways of processing the world?

An ocean of ideas

Alfred North Whitehead once proclaimed, “we think in generalities, but we live in details.”

I think that an individual’s life is like the ocean—an observer sees the vast expanse at a glance, but the eddies and currents that are the real engines of motion operate only locally.

In the ocean, when warm water meets cold, convection causes motion. The impersonal force of the moon’s gravity generates the tides. So, too, are individual ideas coming into productive conflict with each other the catalysts of activity. Individual activities make up a life. A glance at one’s life as a whole may not disclose the underlying activity, or the ideas behind them. The details may get lost in the vastness of the whole, but it is precisely the details that constitute the whole.

I once concluded, and have clung stubbornly to this notion despite many reasons to abandon it, that energy is a finite resource. I have thought that one has a limited amount of time, and finite energy. When one builds a building, it takes energy to prepare the materials, to lift them off the ground, and to stick them together to make the building. The building becomes a repository of the energy that was expended to create it, so that when the building falls (to a demolition team, or to terrorists on a plane) that energy is released back into the world. (Thanks to William Langewiesche for this metaphor).

My view has been that one might choose to spend these finite resources building a very few, tall, impressive buildings, or very many small, even insignificant shacks and shanties. One fritters away one’s precious energy through busy-ness, or one consolidates it by focusing on specific, visionary goals. I have seen these as the only two options.

It now occurs to me that I have had this all wrong. Energy, like love, is not a pool that one may drink from only until it is empty. In the ocean, water accumulates and water dissipates. Dissipation is not the enemy of creativity, as I have often thought. The sun evaporating water heats the remaining water and sets it in motion. Discordant ideas often generate insight. Unrelated activities accumulate value. To do many petty things is not inimical to life; it is the very stuff of life. We are homo faber—makers. While making things, we also make ourselves. One acts, then becomes the kind of person who acts just so. We might do well to adopt the new name “homo fritterer.” There is no eigen function for life, no algorithm for happiness, no pattern of success. All there is are thought and action. Meaning comes later.

For introverts, like me, the world of people is a drain on our reserves of energy. The counter to this is not to avoid all activity, but rather to find those activities that replenish the stocks. For some, this regeneration requires solitude. For others, it requires socializing. For me, it requires atmospheric surroundings of the kind that only nature can provide. A long hike in the wilderness or a two-tank dive on a reef will restore me like no amount of sleep or computer games can do. That is why Michigan is sapping my psychical energy. Energy, like love, cannot be hoarded. It must be spent to have any value, and in spending it, more comes back to us than we had at the start.

This post was originally lost, so what you see here is an attempt to recreate the original. As always, the inspiration that made the original more fluid and insightful vanished in a bath of the cheap acid of anger when I realized what had happened. If I recapture the muse, I may replace this post with a more poetic and insightful version.

The End of the World

In my whimsical youth, I used to devise means of inflicting the death penalty that were unusual. Inspired by "death by chocolate," I thought that "death by lung cancer" was an interesting idea. Convicted criminals would be forced to smoke 10 packs of cigarettes per day. At three minutes per cigarette, they would spend ten hours a day chain smoking to fulfill their "quota." I assumed that the lung cancer would start within a few short years, and would have claimed their lives within 15 years, or so. That's about how long it takes now to execute a condemned person. Another idea I had was "death by melanoma." It was the same idea, only a different mechanism. Sunburn them repeatedly, until it develops into malignant melanoma. This was clearly an ironic exercise to point out the absurdity of the death penalty.

Well, it seems that the universe is much more ironic than I had ever dreamed. We are using more water than can be replenished. We are cultivating more land than ecosytems can tolerate. We are warming the oceans, transporting invasive species to ecosystems where they have no natural predators (and thus no checks on their growth). We waste EVERYTHING. Now it is catching up to us. The article linked below reports on a recent collaboration among 1,360 scientists, who conclude that we have already depleted two thirds of the planet's "natural resources." We have over-fished, over harvested and under-planned ourselves into a corner. If all the polar ice caps melt, everyone just moves to higher ground. If the days are warmer, just buy a bigger air conditioner. But what if the bees die from the heat, and there is no way to polinate our food crops? (This happened in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.) What if the gulf stream that feeds the fish in the North Atlantic and keeps western Europe habitable ceases? What then, motherfuckers? We all die, and the rest of the planet is left in ruins. Nice legacy, gang.

All is not lost. We should be optimistic that so many people are noticing this, now. There is much to be done, though, if disaster is to be averted. Now is the time to start. It's time to get apoplectic about the right things.

Check out the link to the Guardian U.K.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1447921,00.html