Cobb

Wonders and Signs

For the past two or three weeks I have been immersed in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has been a fascinating character study. I am still singly struck by the life of Jack Shaftoe who became great by winding up in a great number of scrapes. It is the kind of life I could not imagine for myself and  yet in a small way it is the amount of traveling and performing recondite tasks for forgetable bureaucracies that have made me. I like my work, for the kind of sense of completeness it gives when properly done, but I can't say that in the historical scope of things that my work, or anyone's work, much matters.

I've been reviewing at a high school level, which is about all anyone needs to know, the particulars of the Russian Revolution. Or more precisely the two revolutions of 1917. It is a wonder to think that any cabinet member of the Kerensky government in its three configurations might ever be considered at length. Who would know what it took to become the right appointee at the right time? Those close to those doing the doing would know, and most everyone else would never know. That's how the circles of trust have operated. 

I grew up in an odd time in American history, a time when most people believe and thereby gave permission to those who proclaimed that we lived in an era of progress. Moreover it was an era of scientific and social progress defined well in advance of the eventuality. All of the murals had the psychedelic colors of the future, round and pleasing like the shapes of the 7up Submarine. We had already decided what the future was going to be and were so sold on that vision that people still ask why certain dreams didn't come true? Where's my flying car? Where is the colony on the Moon? Where is fusion? Where is world peace? Why didn't the population boom happen? Why didn't Rachel Carson's predictions come true? Hasn't capitalism ruined the world? Why haven't we run out of oil? I once heard an excellent explanation of all this. It was the idea of Pop Culture. 

Pop Culture was more than just the simple thing we think of today. It was, in many ways, the ultimate expression of democracy. It was the idea that by making high artistic concepts accessible to the average Joe, in quickly recognizable forms, that we would extend the benefits of liberty, education and all of the previously exclusive intellectual and aesthetic prerogatives of the ruling class. This is one of those extraordinary ideas that's much deeper than the meta discussion of Andy Warhol. It's one we still grapple with, and I see its evolution in much fascination with network effects and smart mobs ideas which are influential with the digerati. 

So to circle back a moment, is it really true that a high school education is all we need to understand the Russian Revolution? At a certain level, yes. At a Pop Culture level this is probably true. We can all understand the negative connotations of 'Siberia' without reading Solzhenitsyn. Most human beings never will read him. But is that enough for the purposeful wisdom necessary to foreclose the possibility of embracing another version of Siberia? Probably not. 

Here's the other thing. As beneficiaries of real progress and the disintermediation of various gating organizations, we Americans have come to expect more personal power. We can all have in our pockets more compute power than the entire NASA space flight control center of the Apollo Program. We can buy the sort of automatic weapons and communications gear that could enable a single regiment to beat all of Lee's Army. But how would we communicate the wisdom?

I'm saying we could not via Pop Culture or through any but the most demanding disciplines. And that is the sort of thing one tends to believe after having read a 2800 page set of books, which oddly enough I didn't actually read completely - so much as read and listened to via audiobook - a combination I find quite compelling.

We must be suspicious of mass communications and recognize what our literacy demands. 

Black Class Revisited

Starting back in the late 80s when I decided to allow my intellectual curiosity rule my life rather than settle into the square pegs of upscale, buppie, Talented Tenth modalities, I had already formed some reckoning of the class differences between African Americans. I was quite comfortable back in the day dealing with five classes. It was solidified by my recognition of Oliver & Shapiro and Massey & Denton. 

I was fascinated with the 'geography is destiny' theory of American Apartheid, and I must say that it still holds significant sway on both the positive and negative side. You are where you live, goes the wit. And so since I had begun to consider myself a traveler of some experience in my early 30s, I considered at length where I would ultimately want to live and where, not coincidently were the best places for black Americans to live. According to my simple theories, convinced that there was not one 'black community', I split African America into five classes: projects, ghetto, hood, burb and hill. With data from the 2000 census, I started slicing and dicing the population and came up with my own ranking.

It had always been important to me to be able to say something credible about black Americans that I felt had not been said, or said loudly or properly enough. But I have not been disabused of that concern, and it is because I have recognized over many years of dabbling among the chatting classes, that nobody is disciplining the troops. So splitting matters even further, there are those who believe in race and those who don't. Among the believers there are politically correct and incorrect factions, afrocentrics, race traitors, multiculturalists and racial realists to name a few who are compelled to always color their moral pronouncements, if for not their own justifications than to explain to those they say must be properly schooled. And split mostly on the side of the believers are those who explain race in terms of culture. I say split to give some benefit of a doubt, but I've never heard of anyone who give credence to 'black culture' whose explanations don't center around the very same stereotypes as the most vulgar understanding of black race. IE, blacks run fast because ______. Insert 'cultural' explanation. Nobody cares a whit to explain the black cultural proclivities toward either side of the Bacon vs Shakespeare controversy, but there's always someone making apologies for Basketball. In other words, black cultural commentary rarely goes beyond the immediate concerns of race. 

This is a sad state of affairs that I think owes a great deal to the pretenses of hiphop and the commercial success of the New Jacks, ever in opposition to the great orations of Bill Cosby on the one hand, and the prating of that unctuous class of post-modern academics and their vertiginous phrases. All of them going after the singular prize of 'the' black voice which must ever respond to the ironic and idiotic call: "What do you people want?" It comes as no surprise that nobody knows, because those involved in this cultural production like to keep matters open. Accordingly there is the eternal internal question "Who are we as a people?" and its corrolary "What should we be demanding, as a people?"  That is the core existential dilemma, neatly wrapped around a DuBoisian duality, hidden inside a Woodsonian re-education , expressed quixotically in an MLK oration. The best answer, of course is to question the question. But that only works for perhaps the smallest fraction of all, those who put no stake in race whatsoever. 

It is perhaps ironic that my energy spent in pursuit of being such a vessel of the proper black American cultural voice has so disabused me of having any stake in race. On the one hand, to believe in culture, or to believe in religion, or to believe in any such thing people have reduced their worldviews to over history should squeeze racial reasoning out. One can only conclude that, for all of this cultural babble, that the subject remains racial is the enduring testament to racism in America. Americans are always inventing neologisms for the same tired dynamic while claiming to be beyond race, while admiting that most everyone else is more racist than they. Even this essay falls into that category, technically if not spiritually speaking. But if one truly does find racial reasoning being squeezed out, (which I don't care to claim, having really nothing to try to prove there) one finds a curious lack of attention. In other words, the solution to race has always been to abandon it without any effort to remap it. Americans however, want the impossible which is to redefine race and then somehow claim a racial victory over racism. In the end some race is always on the hook. 

There should always be some fraction of all of us Americans, by the mere fact of any understanding of race that we are bound to it. But for me, to look at class is the simplest solution. Naturally this position betrays my interpretation of the predations of racism. What I would loathe the most of racism would be its ability to eliminate all class distinction between myself and those I would be associated with by race. Or put simply that any class distinction I aspire to in the larger society would always be qualified by my race. Yet this is the same bucket I volunteered into and projected onto black America with my five layer cake of projects, ghetto, hood, burb and hill. I should say that there is a Talented Tenth prerogative buried in that which elevates in class among blacks that is not considered significant to class in the larger society, ie the distictions between black fraternities or black undergraduate schools. What difference does it make to be called King of the Jews in the eyes of crucifying Romans? It matters if you really care to be King of the Jews, and enforce that standing with Jews. So it matters what kind of black American you are if you intend to stand tall as one projecting such status over the rest, as I said - a Talented Tenth prerogative. 

I can recall back in the days when Ron Brown was considered by all to be the most likely first black American President. I went to a conference of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation where he was the keynote. Around that time, circa 1992, the CBC itself was under attack as not worthy of receiving Congressional funding because of its special interest. Percy Sutton was in attendance among notables, as were personal friends of mine from LA's Black Women's Forum including the recently departed and greatly loved Lilian Mobley - the woman Maxine Waters could have been were she not... well..that's another story. All of those important people were important to black America in that special sense of their figuring in the poltiical calculations that were the vanguard of 'what we as a people should be demanding'. But in the end, the CBC was defunded and all of the politics of the 'digital divide' fell by the wayside. Nobody was disciplining the troops. There might have been true black strategies, but they never materialized.

I happen to believe that is a permanent pattern because sooner or later, black American individuate. The black shroud fails to cover the toes or the nose, and theories fall apart. Race loses its power to corral and define, despite so many hopes and ideas and theories and wishful thoughts. The prerogatives of American class take over. There are the Americans who get it, and those who don't. 

Today is the end of Julyteenth, my attempt at sustaining some conversation about Cobb and race. There hasn't been a headline in The Root that resonated with me quite yet. The writers write and make sure they put 'black' in the headline - the black of self-selection, the black of the audience that becomes something just by being there. Black as the flash mob of something pronounced black, a black ad-hocracy, which becomes self-sustaining merely by repeating the existential questions and never coming up with a satisfying answer.

Anything is black enough. Anything.

So my conclusion is that it all gets diluted, all that blackness. What black people wanted, some black people got - and so satisfied ran out of questions to ask, leaving some ever-diminishing fraction behind.

Following the Morally Talented

Pops and I had one of our unending discourses last evening, and I was interested to hear his wariness of judgment. While I stayed away from the direct arguments and themes of my Peasant Theory, I did end up asking him a question about the elite vis a vis the mind of God. I had a couple ways of expressing this concern which I will now try with you. But first a little background.

He opened the discussion by telling me that he is considering remaking the Stations of the Cross into contemporary form, and asked me if I remembered whether there were 12 or 14. I hadn't thought about the Stations of the Cross in many years, but I knew beyond a doubt that the answer was 14, even though I went to the web to verify my answer. I was right. And then went searching for the music and lyrics to that song which begins 'At the Cross her station keeping' and finally found the melody on YouTube. It was difficult to find that exact melody and there were not many hits. And so I was reminded what troubled me about all the conveniences we have - and the implications of his dumbing down that Mass for the masses. 

So I began with the quote from Stephenson who put words into Leibniz' mouth, the wit of which is the following: 

“So I ventured into that library which had been closed up since the death of my father and still smelled like him. It might seem funny for me to speak of the smell, but that was the only connection I could draw at the time. For the books were all written in Latin or Greek, languages I did not know, and they treated of subjects with which I was completely unfamiliar, and they were arranged upon the shelves according to some scheme that must have been clear to my father, but to me was unknown, and would have been beyond my ken even if someone had been there to explain it to me.

“Now in the end, Monsieur Fatio, I mastered that library, but in order to do it I first had to learn Greek and Latin, and then read the books. Only when I had done these things was I finally able to do the most difficult thing of all, namely to understand the organizing principle by which my father had arranged the books on the shelves.” 

This is the point. It takes effort to understand the mind of God, but progress can be made and understanding can be gained. Dumbing it down for the masses, is this useful? This begs several Lutheran questions, but we didn't go that way, primarily because he began to argue that in the hands of man, the words, will and mind of God becomes corrupted into such a state that no matter what the man's intention it becomes a project of Man at which point the Devine is lost.

So I pointed out all of the albums we were listening to and asked him to consider musical talent. I said that if you were to find the world's most talented composer, would it raise any concern if in the entire life of that artist he never considered writing sacred music and was never inspired by God. He said it wouldn't trouble him in the least. Wow. So I put it another way.

If I found the two most morally advanced men on the planet, both studying for decades, of equal intellect and one said that he had nothing more any man could teach him, and thus should be the moral authority of the planet. The other said he too had nothing more any man could teach him but humbled himself before God thus claiming he had more to learn. Which would you follow? He said it didn't matter.

Then I took two albums out, one from Herbie Hancock and another from Lisa Lisa & Full Force. I placed them five inches apart and analogized the implication of his arguments (which I do not do full justice in this abstract). That if you looked at the most talented musician in the world and the least

My argument is that I accept that any human healthy enough to survive has enough moral acuity to survive as well. It is a natural endowment. (via Spinoza, meaning it is a gift of God). That this acuity may be improved upon and expressed as law, and that this moral law is permanent and unchanging. Christianity may have 10 Commandments, but that is as insufficiently complete as a human with 10 words in his vocabulary. That for the sake of argument there are 10,000 moral laws analagous to a 10,000 word vocabulary with which we can all acquire full literacy and understanding. 

I will have to leave it at that for the moment.

Talkin' 'bout Mama

I know my father. I knew my father's father. I know the name of his father as well although he died in 1918, long before I was born. I have confidence that my resemblance to all of those men is more than genetic. I inherit their character and demeanor, and I have been well served by this.

The other day, reading in The Confusion, I came across a passage that immediately made me think of contemporary black American society.

“These Malabar women are as free with men, as Charles II himself was with women,” Jack explained. “In these parts, a man can never tell which children are his. Or to put it another way, every man knows his mother but hasn’t the faintest idea who his father might be. Consequently, all property passes down the female line.”

“Including the crown?”

“Including the crown. One peculiarity of this arrangement is that a man, going in to pay a call on a lady, never knows what other man he might discover in her bed. To prevent awkward situations, a gallant therefore leaves his weapon leaning against the door-post when he enters — as a sign to all who pass by that the lady’s attentions are spoken for.” 

Stephenson, Neal (2009). The Confusion (P.S.) (Kindle Locations 11373-11379). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition. 

I don't mean to suggest much more than that there is a well-functioning matriarchy alive and well in black society, and it is significant. Perhaps if it were admitted and understood, then we might find some interesting patterns emerging.

Like most of the Kwaku set, I engaged quite a bit on last week's controversy over who got married in slavery days. And since I wasn't born last week, I have heard all of the generalizations about the greatness and persistence of the African, the legacies of slavery, the refutations of Moynihan, black macho and the myth of the super woman, and my new favorite - the Luther Problem, which is kinda like The Denzel Principle. So let me digress on that a bit.

The Luther Problem is the extraordinary acceptance of black women of the romantic blatherations of gay black men on the reverse DL. IE gay men singing love songs about women. Which is to say there is something profoundly odd about the fact that women fall in love with men who use the romantic proxy of gay Cyranos. A chair is just a chair, even when there's no one sitting there, but a male is not a man and a homo is not a wingman. Unless he is, and Luther was. There is surely something to protest in this point of view, but I won't hear it from anyone who prattles on about Catholic priests. Either love is Platonic or it is not. End of (strange) digression.

So this basically boils down to the fundamental question of whether it is reasonable to make beef about the extraordinary fact of black single parentage. Is it cultural or economic phenomenon? If it is a cultural phenomenon, then the extent to whether it should be considered positive or negative must depend on your view of matriarchy.

What say you? 

I say Moyniahan was right. 

 

The Narrative of the Frankfurt School

For those of you who don't know, this is the drug that Breitbart is high on. And while I haven't gotten a chance to meet a lot of my philosophical compatriots face to face, I suspect that many of the more thoughtful ones might have a course or two at Claremont in common.

I've been waiting for Bill Whittle to get his proper funding so as to not be under the financial thumb of PJTV or whatever the reason was for this video to only recently become freely available. This is one of his more inspired 13 minutes - which covers a lot of ground. You're not likely, I think, to see anything this good on television of any sort. Yet.

Declaration Entertainment is the new home of Whittle and he's taking a slightly different tack from what I've seen. He's getting better. And again this particular message is the one that strikes home for former Progressives like me who were never quite comfortable with all of the Commies who show up for the MLK Day Parade. 

Interestingly enough, the Frankfurt School was exactly where I was pointed when I wanted to understand and make more sense of everything I had been trying to learn outside of my profession. And 'Critical Theory' is a category in this blog because it was the black critical theorists that I began reading back in '90 when I decided that being part of the Talented Tenth wasn't quite enough for me. Since it is Julyteenth I should expand on that a bit.

I can recall the day when, unlike just about every summer weekend before, I began wanting to enjoy the company of books to the company of my black yuppie compadres. I was at a pool party and a day or two before, I started reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. It was the first book by a black author that truly captivated me with its content and style. So much of what I had read before was so shallow by comparison - here finally was the intellectual level of black literature I had been searching for. As I had previously read Gloria Naylor's "Women of Brewster Place" and some others I forgot - I had been so embarassed. There seemed to be nothing to quench my thirst for art and literature above the level of BET, and I spent a lot of time and money looking for black highbrow culture. That Naylor had won a prize as one of the best American writers, I was more than disappointed. It was this kind of disappointment that was more indicative of my needs rather than Naylor's mediocrity. I began to head towards all things Asian, impressed as I was by the films of Kurosawa, the biography of Mishima, the philosophy of Sun Tzu, the manga of Otomo, the fiction of James Clavell and this chick named Maiko. At the same time, I was mightily impressed by both the Graywolf Annual on Multicultural Literacy and the original Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch Jr. 

I was ending my 20s and I wanted more. I figured I had done quite enough of the buppie thing and it wasn't very satisfying. I wanted more than ski trips and a BMW. Well, I wanted those too, but also more. I wanted my black culture to be the ultimate black culture. And when I finally read Toni Morrison, and I finally saw The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe, I began to see where it was. In fact there was something in academia, and I was introduced to the formal Critical Theorists through my associations with UCLA's black professoriate. So I read, in those days before Skip Gates had compiled the selections for the Norton Anthology, those considered on the leading edge of black scholarship Kimberle Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Derrick Bell, bell hooks, Stephen L. Carter and the lord and master of all, my new hero Cornel West. It was Cornel West who finally gave me the understanding, at a philosophical level, what my American intellectual inheritance was. Without any idea that there was any substance to Conservative thought in America or Europe at all, I came to know the American Pragmatists through his survey, 'The American Evasion of Philosophy'.

Amidst the brain rot of Afrocentrism and the 50 page books of rabid bloviators like Juwanza Kinjufu and Francis Cress Welsing I came to the Progressive edge seeking Praxis.

Praxis is a specific kind of obedience that organizes itself around a social theory of reality in order to implement in the society the freedom, inherent in faith. If faith is the belief that God created all for freedom, then praxis is the social theory used to analyze what must be done for the historical realization of freedom. To sing about freedom and to pray for its coming is not enough. Freedom must be actualized in history by oppressed peoples who accept the intellectual challenge to analyze the work for the purpose of changing it. -- James Cone, Speaking the Truth

That was something I could sink my teeth into because Evasion showed me without question that all the philosophical basis for 'freedom' and 'liberty' were the All-American ideas of Emerson, Dewey, DuBois, Mills and Neibuhr and further that there was nothing other than pedantic epistemological nonsense coming out of Europe. I was basically in thrall to this mindset until my son was born and I had to get real. 

But there were cracks in the armor I could perceive before the beginning of the end. The post-modern deconstructionist babble was its own worst enemy. I understood Eco's semiotics well enough to tell that a lot of baffling bullshit was being sold. So when I finally got the recommendation to follow up on Adorno and company (not surprisingly from a friend at Columbia U.) I had just about had enough. Morrison had ironically showed me that good writing was better than coherent Left theory, so as she went off the deep end of suffering and started Playing in the Dark, I was ready to walk away from it all, which I finally did in about 96 in the midst of my Boohabian playground. The last blackified book I (sorta) read was 'Volunteer Slavery', which although it was about Corporate America, also pretty much summed up too much of black writing's intellectual direction. When I moved to the South and started reading 'Pushed Back To Strength', after about eight years of reading, I was pretty much done. 

I settled on reading James Baldwin as the last of my black literature knowing it would return me to the subjects of love and integrity. At least those were the books I wanted to read of Baldwin's. And having done so, I abandoned all of that Progessive philosophy to make money and raise a family in Atlanta, the black mecca. But the last of my high energy New York intellectual pursuits led me to the source and all I could hear was that Marx didn't get everything right, but the only way to really understand capitalism is to master Marxist thought. Therefore, Frankfurt School. Which is kinda weird considering that I actually wanted to get an MBA from Columbia and become a quant programmer on Wall Street. 

I was quite fortunate to have made my first six figure year in 1995 as an independent consultant. And that year I learned what it felt like to walk around a city in a suit because I wanted to, on a day I didn't have to work because I didn't feel like it. I was my own boss. The seeds were sown and the practicality of being that kind of breadwinner set me up for my conservative conversion several years hence. But I had stepped outside one main stream of The Narrative when I left New York. 

Irksome Nosy Moral Dainty Persons

There's somebody preaching gentleness from a blog with a heart symbol in the title. She writes: 

Here's a better list:

• To feed the hungry;
• To give drink to the thirsty;
• To clothe the naked;
• To harbour the harbourless;
• To visit the sick;
• To ransom the captive;
• To bury the dead.

• To instruct the ignorant;
• To counsel the doubtful;
• To admonish sinners;
• To bear wrongs patiently;
• To forgive offences willingly;
• To comfort the afflicted;

In the real world, those acts of mercy can take many, many forms. Perhaps you'll find him ladling soup in a homeless shelter. That would be an easy one to spot. Or maybe he's the young medical student who circles back after a long day of work to read stories to the pediatric patients. Maybe he's the guy who listens patiently as his grandfather goes on and on about a distant memory not quite still within his reach. Or maybe he's the one who's working fulltime and getting his degree because he dreams of a large family and wants the means with which to support them. Is he the guy next door? The one who "only" goes to Sunday Mass, but who also cheerfully picks up two young soccer players and drives them to practice three times a week because their mom is bedridden? And all the while, in the car, he is their friend. Their real friend. A strong shoulder to lean on in a time of crisis at home. Just a real good guy. Look for a real good guy. Someone who will journey with you.

This is somebody who did not grow up where there are street gangs. Which means there are either no streets, or there are cops and/or soldiers who pacified them. Aside from the annoyance such people provide me as they luxuriate in the convenience of all that is, there is a significant problem with this philosophy: it requires a vengeful defense. It requires a hegemonic overlord. It requires the extermination of rebellion without which, the Morlocks win.

I am not saying that these are improper values, but I'm disagreeing with Shakespeare when he says that the quality of mercy is not [con]strained. Mercy does not come cheap. It comes out of the goodness of a well-fed heart. And we must always be aware of how to feed those hearts, and at what price they are defended. When it comes to the care bear extremes, we enable the defensive Beast. 

I remain in the middle of my re-reading of the Baroque Cycle, just having finished a Tom Clancy and the new Seal Team Six memoir of Wasdin. I know why I'm harsh. But I wonder if such nosy moral dainty people know how much they need harsh troops.

 

We know what causes people to doubt the existence of God, or grace, or human kindness. But we should also and equally understand what give people strength from those same things. We are naturally reactive and accepting of all of the qualities of human character. What's troublesome is the idea that we can engineer it for any size society, when in fact we cannot.

I want you to think about nationalism and patriotism, and I want you to doubt it for a moment. In fact, I want you to understand how a built-up aversion to nationalism and patriotism works in your favor. It's a bit counter-intutitive, but it depends upon your actual independence. I want you to imagine that you are a millionaire and that you don't care about patriotism - rather like George Soros but not so extreme. Some terrorist destroys the Statue of Liberty. Your reaction is indifference. What you will be is one vote in favor of not engaging the wrath of 150 million Americans. Do you get it? The Statue of Liberty means nothing to you because you don't need it. You need almost nothing from those things America promises to Jane Doe. Your identity is not wrapped up in such small gifts. Your byline is 'What do you mean we?'

You don't want Sam Jackson to torture the terrorist. You don't want the state to execute the murderer. You don't want the cop to shoot the bank robber. You don't want the vice principle to swat the bully. You don't want any part of any of that violence that gives the masses any sense of cohesion or safety. You want nothing to do with that world that delivers small comforts to small people. You've got your John Donne twisted. 

Do you see how this kind of individualism works in the world? I see it as the same sort of extreme philosophy that asks for only mercy, gentle forebearance and kindness. I say we must be judgmental in all things large and small. We must be prepared for the whole man and so we must be whole men. We cannot disengage when things get ugly, there is not always some proxy to defend us in principle. 

Absolutes

 

Dimensions of Heroism

It has been some time since I read Iron John. I ought to re-read it before I finish this essay, but I'm impatient. 

You see we went to see Green Lantern and we had to decide if he was a better hero than Spiderman. I can't say for sure, but I have some feelings on the subject. Since we've been inundated with comic book movies, we sooner or later have to choose. Courtney brought up the subject, and Chris had the best answer. 

From the movie perspective, the original Spiderman set the standard. But the greater standard is the videogame drama. In that regard, the greatest hero is probably going to have to be Shepherd from the Mass Effect universe. To go into all the reasons why is an essay in itself. Suffice it to say that Halo's Master Chief lacks an heroic arc. He's just the ultimate soldier - he has no weakness to overcome, he's all duty and capability and humble arrogance, a human wrecking ball out exterminating bad guys. 

Green Lantern is a more likeable Thor. Thor has got this ridiculous Puritan streak. We Americans don't like our gods ravenous. Hal Jordan, the human Green Lantern has a fear to overcome, it being fear itself, but the movie didn't do justice to that narrative. I kinda like the ledgend of having the universe split up into 3600 sections, each to be protected by some kinda alien freak allied with the Corps, and of course I dig the idea of the triumph of Will over Fear. I think it was a very appropriate lesson for the younglings. But.

Batman is a better hero than both Green Lantern and Superman because he puts himself more at risk. Spiderman only has to deal with his apathy and small mindedness, but he learned that lesson the hard way in episode one. Keeping a friendship and a girlfriend in episode two was just too cheesy, but it did make for a very good movie. Oh yeah and Harry Potter.. You know, he's still just a kid and as much as anyone can find him admirable does he really scale? I mean from a British author, you'd think he'd compare favorably to Churchill, but you have to say he's still just a kid - what world does Voldemort actually threaten?

So that dimension came into things. Batman doesn't venture beyond Gotham and after all what is the real purpose of being Clark Kent? Maybe he actually has a thing for Jimmy Olsen. Silver Surfer on the other hand, now he has to deal with very large enemies on a planetary scale. 

In the end, Chris and I had to agree that it was Xavier, the head of the X-Men who deserved the honor. He rescued kids, trained them to use their powers for good against a world that doesn't appreciate them, that in fact hates them. In addition he must keep them from the temptations of Magneto. Yep. I think Chris gets it. 

All that said, we pretty much agreed that it would be the most fun to be Ironman. 

American Male Existentials in English Literature

I used to observe that I never met a white man who identified with Bigger Thomas and I never met a black man who identified with Holden Caulfield. But I'm not particularly interested in how American men retrench themselves into racial identies, so I find that identification scheme only as a convenient mnemonic. What's more interesting nowadays, especially given the retarded men of contemporary films, is where our generations (mine and my son's) might find inspiration.

This starts with a personal observation about what kind of man I thought I might be and the points of literature that guided me anywhere. 

When I was trying to make a point, I felt rather strongly about the essay I wrote called Hating Huck. But what I think about that now is that it was important for me to rationalize the entire matter into the context of Tomi Morrison's culture war. I wasn't ever scarred by the books I was forced to read, nor was I particularly hurt by the lack of black male images in film. It seemed to me that Denzel singly sufficed for my generation as Poitier did for his. It wasn't that we didn't know how to *be*, we just wondered what it is we would get an opportunity to *do*. 

I recall a sort of triumph I felt one evening watching an episode of Roots in the common room at the EVK dorm of USC, the hoity white girls' privy. I didn't need to bash a head. But I had read the book a couple years earlier and I knew how it all turned out. Roots was, I suppose, the big deal it had to be for me. I recall being impressed that I read such a large book. It was, at the time, endlessly fascinating. By the time the miniseries was aired, it was all about LeVar and Fiddler, 'My name is Toby' and 'Grits, dummy'. 

The New Literacy

Patrick Clair Motion Design Reel 2010 from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

The new literacy is not literacy at all. It is about being informed about what's changing.

The new literacy is not for you and I. For we grew up in a time when most people believed in meritocracy and progress. We expect that hard work and concentrated thinking will generate benefits that have multiplier effects. We believed that sowing led to reaping. But now we are living at the end of those times, and the value of understanding the natural world is diminishing while the value of understanding the new cultural semiotic swamp that is global literacy is increasing.

In other words, if it's not in Google, it might be worth knowing, but you'll never profit from it.

The new literacy is like the first publication of the Bible. It will threaten the hierarchical Papists, make them defensive. Today's literate Papists are not merely mainstream media, but mainstream education and all the ways that people have come to know what they know during the 20th Century. We forget that the 20th Century invented mass communications, and mass communications has always been propaganda. Now we have alternative propaganda - and we choose which dogfood we eat. Now we decide whose koolaid we drink. 

Let's not forget the origin of drinking the koolaid was Jonestown. There's a need to get a grip on the reality that lies beneath all of the new symbology. I expect that my children will get it. More than any other generation and more than most of their peers, my own children have every cyber advantage. They deeply know the value of real face to face relationships, they cannot be fooled by virtual reality. But there are still masses yet to come.

Through the 80s we used to joke about the price of Levi's jeans in Russia, and in the 90s we saw men in Mogadishu wearing Air Jordans. The masses of people who are moving from the rural areas into cities around the world will next signify their emergence with cell phones and access to the Internet. As false as the status of jeans and sneakers may have seemed to upscale Yanks, it was enough for them. But the sorts of MTVified info-gloop many Americans still are fooled by, say the wit of Tina Fey, the sagacity of Alec Baldwin or the humor of Tracy Morgan, that entire enterprise can become the mental shackles of the next global middle class. It's so appealing. 

America has developed a way to monetize the surplus time, attention and dollars of the Baby Boom. That is what we have created. And to the extent that the 60s showed us the most muscular muscle cars ever, and the 70s and 80s showed us what crap cars we could put up with - the industrial revolution is mostly a done deal for the planet. We are living in that surplus period and settling back to an era of infrastructrual Pinto Pony MPGs. Basic transportation. When the world cannot afford and doesn't look forward to living in the architectural standards of Dubai and the industrial revolution slows down to Pinto quality infrastructure, the quality of life will become less material and more mental. 

I think we in California understand this fairly well. We all have, under the influence of Hollywood and other romantic notions, carved out extra space in our imaginations for meaningless intellectual luxuries. We're attuned to the status that accrues from knowing Bruce Willis' mechanic or Jada Pinkett Smith's hairdresser. Look at the info in the graphic video in this essay. That is intellectual fashion - the fashion of knowing something that is completely beyond our ability to influence (or sometimes even beyond our ability to comprehend), and yet take pride in knowing the narrative. That is the new literacy.

And it's little brother and enabler is the new growing international language of graphics and glyphs. Everybody understands Charlie's bite. And we will all soon understand the new standards of post-industrial light and magic. 

 

Right Here, Right Now. You know it. It's Little Brother. 

Books & Horses

The old grey mare, she ain't what she used to be. Lead her to water. Will she drink? Horse whipped. Horse thief. Horse trader. Horse of a different color. Dark horse. Stalking horse. 

I'm sitting tall in the saddle, up on my high horse thinking about how I've got this digital thing all figured out. What helps me along is my reading of Charles Stross and other writers who have got much more imagination than those people who make all things digital happen in reality. In 2005, I began reading science fiction again, after a significant haitus of about 20 years. I realized that I had pretty much run out of ideas, and having been out of Silicon Valley for 4 years, I was a bit out of touch. That's not saying much. Silicon Valley is clubby and there aren't *that* many wholly new things despite there being all dimensions of clever. It boils down to a big chunk of middle aged humans trying to make money, using the money other people have used to make money. In other words, if a venture capitalist can understand it, it's probably not good science fiction. Only Steve Jobs can sell magic, but what gets bankrolled is an entirely different species of tech. It all boils down to some forms of consumer electronics & media. And really that's all about delivery, and that's all about the T-Mobile chick, the Sprint man and the Verizon dude duking it out. (The nerds who used to compete with the Alltel dude have been vaporized).

I've got the digital thing figured out in the same way the guy driving a Porsche has the automobile thing figured out. I've got the premium consumer products and I'm savvy. In actual fact, I'm a prosumer. So in things digital, I'm like the guy with the Ruf Porsche, I've got the aftermarket afterburners. But we're here to talk about books and horses because they are both commodities that suffered from automobiles and all things digital. Or have they?

I'm ready to talk about books in the past tense the way I talk about horse sense, but that should be your clue that the idiom has legs. We'll be rid of books in the same way we are rid of horse. They will become expensive luxuries in a new economy of more sophisticated transportation. But is a horse more costly than a car? No. Horses are only expensive luxuries because most of us peasants don't learn anything about them as compared to what we learn about automobiles. We don't know who sells horses to whom or how to inspect one. We know how to kick tires but not how to look a horse in the mouth. So too these things will describe our senses of books a generation hither.

I enjoy listening to audiobooks. It's much slower than reading, but the way I'm living I can get more of it done. My audiobook follows me in my drive to work, my lunchtime, and as a companion to drudgery. Im picking a path for several modes due to the transformative presence of my iPad, which is finally the thing I can call a true personal digital assistant. 

But I wonder if the next generation will use the media or be used by it. A book doesn't want to be read, just like a horse doesn't jump under you and take you somewhere. You have to expend a bit of effort to get into a book or break a horse, but the new media follows you around like latest story about Donald Trump. They are insistent and have been designed to be easier and more comfortable, accesible and ubiquitous. That's the whole point of their invention. 

So I am looking for parallels. How will pan-literacy and information change our society? I think, like the way Protestantism changed Europe. 

 

 

Whose Life Is It Anyhow?

Kevorkian is dead. Jimmy crack corn. I don't care.

But I suppose I would a bit more if I thought that many lives depended on those things that Kevorkian did. In an indirect way, we're all better off because his ethics forced us to think about the nature of things. But directly speaking, I don't miss him. 

There is a lot of that kind of attenuated concern for the elderly, and I think it is natural and appropriate for us to consider the death of the aged as less than tragic. And let us also consider the dead. I mean the billions and billions of humans who are already dead. What do we really care about them? Not much. The last time I thought about the dead billions was when the nutcase said the end of the world was near and that the dead would be raised from their graves. Dead children haunt our dreams. Dead babies wreck our lives. Dead fetuses power political movements for decades. 

So there are a couple of problems, the way I look at it. One is hard edged, the other is squishy. The hard edge question is as it ever was: do human beings have the right to make life and death decisions. Since that one is hard, let it be easy. Yes. OK fine.

The squishy problem is navigating the moral gradient of society's valuation of life. IE it's definition of tragedy. Suicide is immoral to the extent that it is a tragic waste of human life. And so it is by degrees. A heroin addict, aside from their possible predations, is tragic because they are wasting their life away. It is only when we start aggregating the statistics of waste that we get involved in our civil religion and start passing statutes and propositions. We do it for the children. Don't we always?

So I am not so inclined to determine the particular merit of any ethos' stenuous arguments for or against suicide other than their basic consistency and force of conviction. But I do say that the question of the morality of suicide begs the question of who is a proper authority to choose the value of life.

 

Social Software Seduction

I had an imaginary fight with some bureaucrat and my killer line had something to do with the ability to write recursive algorithms. But I haven't written one in decades because in the ordinary course of my business, nobody can think of a purpose for their systems that might call for one. 

I write custom code, but around a small universe of systems for which most of the creativity has been squeezed out. It's interesting to do balance sheet forecasting considering the effect of inventory on cash, but only for a short while. 

This got me to thinking about who gets to write interesting code and for what purposes. Like who gets to write interesting books or music, you would be daunted by the mediocrity of the best-sellers. And this is a thing I keep seeing in social software. 

Yesterday, I was actually bored enough to watch ABC news with Diane Sawyer, and there was a segment in which some Silicon Valley dude offered $100,000 for kids with ideas to skip college and go directly into business (with him). All predatory jokes aside, they interviewed a kid who built an electric car. An electric car, well - I never heard that idea before. There's lots of money in the idea of the new, but really. Does anybody actually believe that kid is going to get market share? Market share - especially the mass market, belongs to the big money. Big money grows monoculture. Big money social software expands monoculture.

Now think of all the social software you can. What does it do? It does very little, but it does do it in the same way all software does - by narrowing human focus into the range of interactions the programmers can come up with. In short, it runs you through a maze. 

The interactivity of software is why using it is more mentally stimulating than watching television. I'd take a video game over a tv show any day. oftware does allow to interact but all the right actions are already known, and in some ways it's more restrictive than watching TV. If you are watching I Love Lucy, then you know there is a laugh track. If the joke isn't funny, you don't have to laugh. But with software, you have to interact precisely as the programmer wants you to or you don't get to the next level. Imagine not getting past the commercial break unless you laugh at Lucy's silly foibles.

In this way, even social software is close-ended. It gives you a transaction or two to generation and lets a zillion other folks see 'you' and your transactions. But you must transact to be seen. Social software is never so immersive as any sandbox video game, and never should be (unless you actually prefer There and Second Life to Facebook), but it still directs your attention. It seduces you into believing you are actually being social when you press its buttons, but what is 'social'? Social software processes the means toward shallow ends, like shopping, getting directions, going to a movie, clipping a coupon, getting something to eat. It's marginally more active than being a couch potato, but I say it's creating a new class of morons. Call them mombies. Mobile zombies. 

It's Saturday. You leave the house but not without your e-leash. Heaven forbid you wander into some area where the houses have burglar bars, or even worse no signal bars. You need to occupy yourself and your social software tells you where you can find other mombies who are about your speed. You can follow and friend and like and tweet and yelp and google each other all day long. Mombie verbs, all in sentences with social as the adjective. 

The programmer who sits next to me at work knows better. He spent three weekends putting down new flooring in his house. The programmer who sits across from me knows better. He installed race-quality rollbars in his convertible car. The programmer who sits across the way knows better. He went to catch some 8 foot waves.  I think I know better, I finished two books last week. Call us anti-social. We've always called programmers anti-social. Maybe that's not such a bad thing to be considering what's called social.

The news is that Google stole the executive that Pay Pal wouldn't pay. So now Google is going to create a new market for the masses that makes that very important part of shopping their business. Google will never invent, nor need to invent something as useful as cash. But mombies will use this new fungible as they buy their Starbucks. 

You need to know that there's money involved in all of this. People are figuring out another way to monetize your spare time. The advertizing dollars that once went into television commercials will be distributed to a new set of players in the interactive social software game. Slowly but surely all of the ads that are trapped in your TV will follow you in your mombie quests, so long as there are enough bars.

There will be better and worse social software, just as there are better and worse songs, books and movies. But what I see out there right now is pretty shallow, very seductive, and reflective of the same mass market appeal of television. So far, it ain't literature.

 

War TV

It was a boring day in Boston back in 1993 that I found myself at the central public library on Boylston. I was admiring the architecture of the building in the large lobby when I suddenly found myself face to face with a large life-sized photograph of combat. There was a photojournalism exhibit there that day and the pictures were shocking. I realized that I hadn't seen anything so graphic in a very long time. 

It reminded me that whatever I might think of Boston there were certainly worse places to be. And it also reminded me that all of the media we consume, very little of it sticks. We are addicted to a certain level of 'realism' that is less real than it seems. 

I've had a couple opportunities to remind people in conversation over the past week or so that American journalistic standards, unlike those in South America, do not allow pictures of dead bodies. Go ahead. Try to find one. And just last night, I was watching several comics on Netflix and one of them made that familiar remark about how much violence we allow kids to watch on television, and how little sex we do. But if you were an NBA fan, you surely saw the video of Rajan Rondo getting his elbow dislocated, and you cringed. That's the kind of violence that you never see in all of our media. The simple fact is that we have been exposed to a lot, but within some margins. No you haven't seen it all.

Here at the blog I recall several incidents that the media went close to a limit and the blogosphere went over the edge.Firstly there was the Nick Berg video, the poor fellow who was beheaded by jihadists went around the net like wildfire. I refused to publish it or even watch it where it was published. Then there was that maniac who went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech. There was something awfully sick about 'Richard McBeef' the screenplay he was writing. This morning I found a link to a video taken in Syria showing people shot down in the streets. It immediately reminded me of the lost art of photojournalism of the sort I think we could all benefit from: War TV. 

 

War TV is just that. A new channel on your lineup, in HD, documenting conflicts around the world 24/7. Forget the fake six o'clock news mantra 'If it bleeds, it leads' and show what real war looks like. 

When you show some idiot cracking his nuts from a fall off a skateboard onto a handrail, you generally have to have a disclaimer 'dont try this at home'. When you show somebody's head smacking the pavement after having been shot with an automatic rifle, the warning is superfluous. Slapstick is what it is, and so is brutality. If we showed enough of War TV, our regular instincts would jump in and we would not need the editorial so much. 

Just the other week, a girl fight in a McDonalds had the chatting classes afire with a thousand opinions, clustered into three categories. But wasn't that a waste of bandwidth, or testimony to how civilized we actually are over here in the States? I tend to believe the latter and I do so by keeping our mortality stats in mind.

War TV. It will be coming.

Got Rice?

Once upon a time, when I was a Race Man, I used to look more seriously at questions of identity, politics and identity politics. Now I have shed that burden, but remains marginally curious at the depravity of those endless debates. Still, it has been a very long time since I have seen any update of the stereotypes about Asians in America (not brown Asians, but yellow Asians). It also bears mentioning that Asians themselves were not particularly interested in joining the conversation. I might guess why there is no 'Asian perspective' and that is because Asians themselves are too diverse and have never bought into unity theories as Hispanics and Blacks have. Aside from all that, they don't comprise a big enough voting block for any mainstream politician to give a rat's. 

So now I will (toungue in cheek) promote Kikka to speak for the millions in the context of Byron Hirota's classic Model Minority mythbuster. 

Other criticisms have been raised against the model minority thesis, mainly by researchers associated with the Asian American community organization, ASIAN, Inc., in San Francisco. First, more than half of the Asian/Pacific American population in the United States lives in only five metropolitan areas - Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York - and of these, more than nine-tenths are found in urban centers. These cities are not only high-income areas but also high-cost-of-living-areas. Thus, while Asian Americans (and others) living there may earn more, they also have to spend more.

Second, in areas with the highest density of Asian Americans, the percentage of Asian Americans in low-status, low-income occupations - that is, service workers, laborers, farm laborers, and private household workers - is considerably higher than among whites. In 1970, for example, fully 25 percent of all gainfully employed Chinese men in the United States were cooks, waiters, busboys, dishwashers, and janitors. Such a figure gives an impression of Asian American economic well-being that is quite different from based on consideration of median income alone.

Third, a detailed study of the San Francisco-Oakland Stanard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) showed that Asian Americans were unevenly dis- tributed in the economy. Professionals clustered in accounting, dentistry, nursing, health technology, and engineering and were underrepresented in law, teaching, administration, social services, and the higher levels of the medical professions. Managers were more likely to be self-employed than employees of large firms. Salespersons were retail clerks but seldom brokers or insurance agaents. Clerical workers were mostly file clerks, typists, or office machine operators, and not secretaries or receptionists. Few Asian Americans held jobs in the heavy-machine, electrical, paper, chemical, or construction industries. Most female operatives were garment workers. In short, Asian Americans were concentrated in occupations that did not pay as well as other jobs in the same industries.

I wonder how Asian Americans feel about their competence. Do they feel (or care) about their social capital for social or for inherent reasons? It's funny that I go back to the film Departures noting the biting irony that a Japanese cellist must lose his job due to declining interest in (Western) symphonic music in the big city, and must go back to basics in the country.

No Pledge of Allegiance

In the news are a couple items which remind me of the issue of loyalty. 

The first is the news that I have had my resume picked out of a pile to do some of the grunt work for a very large and popular company. Let's call it Bazillion.com. At the first news I was quite impressed with myself for having done nothing whatsoever to deserve their attention. But I guessed that somewhere in there was somebody who needed my skills and was reaching out. So I had a temporary high that has lasted about a week, and I took a moment to consider what I might do at such a place. It turns out, however, that it was something of a cattle call and they are likely to be singing that famous Flava Flav song to me after the formal process is complete. I can't do nothing for you man.

Still, given the operation of Chris Rock's Rule, a man is as decietful as his opportunities permit, I did give the alternatives some consideration. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that all I want to do is the exact same thing. For me it's all a question of funding and time. Can I get the time and money to build those things I want to build? Can I get the space and opportunity to create those things I wish to create? 

Such are the fundaments of loyalty. 

I stumbled across an interesting definition today. It's the idea of legal positivism. The Wiki says:

Legal positivism is a school of thought in philosophy of law and jurisprudence. The principal claims of modern legal positivism are that:

• There is no inherent or necessary connection between the validity conditions of law and ethics or morality.
• Laws are rules made, whether deliberately or unintentionally, by human beings

I don't quite understand why the second bullet point needs to be said, but that's aside. The very idea that there need be no necessary connection between the validity of a law and ethics or morality is a striking statement, especially given the number of lawyers in this country. They must have learned the term within the first semester of law school, and there must be no equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath for the likes of the JDs. What a setup. Such knowledge makes me want to exploit my own skills in amoral fashion, just to get ahead of the grip of law before the legal crew can understand what they are suing me for. 

That might lead me to cracking beyond mere hacking. But Anonymous has an object lesson of dying by the sword as their realm of anarchy descends into chaos. 

War rages between competing factions within the hacker collective Anonymous after this weekend's drama-filled takeover of the main Anonymous IRC server network. That network, used by Anons to plan and conduct attacks, was taken over by one of its own, an IRC moderator known as "Ryan."

His attack has sparked a debate over the "leadership" of Anonymous.

Hacking the hackers

The main Internet chat servers used by Anonymous have been run by a group called "AnonOps," which provides communications platforms for the group. Pointing IRC clients at anonops.ru or anonops.net would connect anyone to the servers, where they could then join channels like "#OpSony" and participate in various Anon activities.

Though Anonymous is often described as leaderless, factions like AnonOps by necessity have a loose structure; servers must be paid for, domain names must be registered, chat channels must have at least some moderation. Ryan was one of those IRC mods, and this weekend he proceeded with an attack that seized control of the AnonOps servers away from the small cabal of leaders who ran it.

As I said not long ago, the problem with Wikileaks and all such ultra-libertarian organizations is that everybody thinks they are equal and submit to no authority. And so without the rule of a moral law, people come to the daft conclusions that everyone can be equally right which is not only a logical fiction but the beginings of every political nightmare. 

Where are your allegiances, and how often do you renew your pledges?

Social Justice Under God

Here's a very nice problem that goes to the heart of one of the issues I find compelling these days. By what right are moral approbations applied from a religious / doctrinal perspective binding upon secular authorities in a democratic state?

More than 75 professors at Catholic University and other prominent Catholic colleges have written a pointed letter to Mr. Boehner saying that the Republican-supported budget he shepherded through the House of Representatives will hurt the poor, elderly and vulnerable, and therefore he has failed to uphold basic Catholic moral teaching.

“Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings,” the letter says. “From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.”

It brings up interesting questions about from which principles humanism and liberalism are informed. 

Recently, I listened to a seminar from a scholar named Bernard Lewis. He argued that the clash of civilizations is inevitable because only the Christian and the Muslim faiths contend that their worldview is essentially universal. Other religions do not make such universal claims. So it is the idea of a universal standard of morals and behaviors that we ultimately speak of 'human rights'. 

See the contradition? If you want your values to be universal, then you have to have some authority and infrastructure in place to defend them. This is at the center of a great number of discussions here, and I will bring up the point going forward. I call it Modernism - the presumption of the equal and immutable value of the soul.

A Rude Question for White People

I'm disappointed with Adam Serwer. Ever since I started following his blog at American Prospect, he seems to have gone short attention span theatre on me. I know that when you're in the zone, you can keep up with every little thing, but a lot of crap creeps in. For example, I have no reason to expect that any sensible American would pay attention to anything Donald Trump says, and yet he has bought the attention of millions. So one of the things that slipped through Serwer's keyboard was this retweet:

Harvard. RT @KathaPollitt I know, they wouldn't let me in because i'm white. And not a law student. But mostly because I'm white.

My immediate answer is, well hell Katha, if you want to represent that way, you're exactly as white as you want to be. My general goodwill position is equally reflective. If there is something in 'white' that is not racial, then it is entirely the choice of the individual. Same thing counts for 'black'. We all pretty much parotted the same thing all through the 90s and 00s. Race is a cultural construct. That means it can be constructed and of course as the drooling pomo scholars know, it can be deconstructed. But what if Katha is not in charge of her whiteness, at all? What if blackness is an American essentialism and so is whiteness? What if they are inescapable? What if white Americans can never be anything but what non-whites say they are? 

Not that I like getting into the subject, but I cannot avoid the question. How white exactly are white people and do you 'as a white person' believe that you are in control of your whiteness?

If you are in control of your whiteness, what exactly do you want it to mean? Does that work for you? If you are not in control and want to escape your whiteness, what exactly is it you want to leave behind? Can you? If you're somewhere in the middle, how do you see it in other white people?

My opinion, which I'm sure I will have to explain two or three times, is that of course every American inherits a reductionist racial identity and that it is up to them to shed that skin. For some people it's important for others it is not. I say racism is primarily in the gaze, not in the being, so I have reversed my Race Traitor (as in Tim Wise) position on whiteness studies. I no longer say that white people must invest a great deal of thought and energy into undoing their identity for America to be what it should. That applies equally to black Americans and everyone else. The first step in demonstrating your racism starts with such prescriptions as "I cannot fulfill my human potential until  ____ people do the following.."

So white people. What's up with being white? You know who you are. 

Harold Cruse: The Last Organic

Harold Cruse was one of those rare scholars who wrote so much about things nobody ever talks about that you have to stop every 20 pages or so just to absorb it. It has been quite a while since I read 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual' and 'Plural But Equal' so it's difficult for me to disaggregate his lessons from my thinking. Very little of it seems to have distinguished itself in my memory as distinctly belonging to Cruse. But there are some distinct ideas.

Cruse was one of those who asserted that the Brown case was improperly decided. Seperate and unequal was certainly a problem, but the problem was not with separate, but with unequal. Cruse argues that the law should have been used to force the equal funding of public schools in black communities, instead what arose in the ethos of integration was a double strike against blacks. Firstly, the very assertion by Brown that black and white kids be integrated degraded the quality of all public schools by generating white flight. Anywhere there were significant numbers of blacks, many whites left the public school system and created new private schools. It has been noted that many private schools around the South were founded in 1954. This not only hurt blacks but damaged the public support for public schools.

Secondly and somewhat more on point with how many black nationalists feel, the thrust of integration undermined black independence. The famous proximity premise, has by all measures pretty much been discredited. Black students don't become better people simply by sitting in the same schools as white students. The 'goodness' of whites doesn't 'rub off'. There are plenty ways to argue around the matter of the proximity premise, but I essentially don't buy it either. Some of the weakest ideas which have become ossified into the conventional thinking are the root of the fallacies surrounding the Diversity industry.

As many of you might guess, I could bust a gut talking about black political dependence on white liberal spew a la Howard Dean. There is a low intensity war between Integrationists and Aggregationists. (Separatists don't stand a chance.) Perhaps Cruse's passing will re-ignite a debate on the merits. As an Old Schooler, I might seem conflicted, but if you understand that I am an elitist than you'll see how I'm for Aggregation for me and those like me, and Integration for the rest of you who can't afford to do any better. I still say bomb the ghetto.

Many folks are acknowledging Cruse's way of seeing integration. The NAACP famously started questioning the wisdom of Brown along Cruse's line of thinking. What's odd about that is that they seem ill-prepared to do anything about it but give blackfolks a reason to complain. The NAACP is not organized to assist in aggregation, but perhaps they only see their job as 'raising the issue', which is fair. I'm not so sure anyone expects anything more. The question of aggregation is open, and I've seen some efforts going on here in Los Angeles, with regard to the charter school movement. These are mostly done in partnership with other non-whites with conservative lip service support.

Charter schools are all experiments as far as I can see and I'm all for school reform (primarily skills-based promotion starting at middle school). Cruse also speaks of the Blair Bill which, had it been implemented when the idea first arose, the progress of African America would have had a 100 year headstart. I agree with Cruse with respect to colorblindness. In fact I have spent many years arguing in public debates that colorblindness is the moral equivalent of racism in this country. It was most likely Cruse that got me started on this angle.

It's difficult for me to tell how and where Cruse might be influential, because quite frankly, black public intellectuals are not so ready to engage the public outside of the academy, or specifically here on the web. This is an old complaint of mine and I've worn a groove in my mind repeating it, even though it's not as true as I'd like it to be. But I think I've internalized enough of his ideas about pluralism and equality to be an adequate representative outside of the professoriate. I trust my man Spence's judgement that I have been properly informed. If I had the time, I'd certainly reread him, and I'll probably do some skimming this weekend. I'm also going to take the opportunity to see where his name pops up in the 'sphere. Watch this spot for updates.

I think that the most important thing to understand about Cruse is that he regrets the amount of dependence blacks have assumed on the general fairness of society based upon the political alliances between the Negro leadership and white liberal race politics. It has resulted in laws and ideas that have suppressed the vigor of black independence. I agree with him there. Clearly I am interpreting him through an appreciative and conservative lens but I think when we get to the heart of arguments like matters of pluralism vs assimilation or what is meant when people talk about 'equality', Cruse's thought on the matter will be salient. Cruse is exceptional because he writes books that don't read like academic treatises, but deliver scholarship nonetheless. He's a comfort-busting individual thinker worthy of emulation and much respect. Ahh, I guess I can't just put him into the past tense so easily can I. None of us should.

via cobb.typepad.com

Inverted Totalitarianism

A great phrase. Without looking at the definition Chauncy deVega uses to lament the devolution of the American body-politic into what he sees as Red State retardation, I have a very opposite (I think) view. Consider his assertion follows the setup:

Liberalism, which is stronger in richer, better-educated, more-diverse, and, especially, more prosperous places, is shrinking across the board and has fallen behind conservatism even in its biggest strongholds. This obviously poses big challenges for liberals, the Obama administration, and the Democratic Party moving forward.

But the much bigger, long-term danger is economic rather than political. This ideological state of affairs advantages the policy preferences of poorer, less innovative states over wealthier, more innovative, and productive ones. American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine. And this deepening political divide has become perhaps the biggest bottleneck on the road to long-run prosperity.

This is the formula for a reactionary politics that does not serve the collective good. Here, the tail wags the dog and the most frightened, least resourced, and most backward voices rise out of the polity. Elites who have long been disconnected from the masses manipulate this anxiety into a politics that serves to gut the social safety net and chase down the chosen bugaboos of the Right--the "evil" unions, "liberals," "intellectuals," teachers, Muslims, immigrants, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, "overpaid" public employees, and/or anyone who is not a "real American."

I have come to regard the red state of mind according to its strengths which is precisely counter to totalitarianism. But I need you to start thinking about cheap trash properties out in the middle of nowhere and the habits people would need. Start with my John Boyd quote, that in order to be free you must either be rich or reduce your needs to zero. It never occurs to people dedicated to the collective good as deVega that one can be prosperous by reducing their needs to zero.

In the red state of mind, you *should* be disconnected from the masses. That's the only way you guarantee that you are not a party in their exploitation. You get out into the woods and you don't turn on the radio, so you don't miss public radio. Instead, you're growing your own vegetables, hunting your own meat, fishing for your own fish, tending your own herbs and spices. Mending your own wool sock rather than buying them from China inverts totalitarianism, global dependency, national dependency, community dependency. It makes one independent. It makes one king of his own castle, lord of his own land, master of all he surveys.

Poorer, less educated, less diverse all seem to be horrible deviations from a proper norm, but only in America. Because in the small towns just inside the Indiana border where the well-maintained Ohio roads suddenly get all gravelly, they still make more money than in 5/6ths of the world. They still have 12 years of free education, polio vaccines, orange juice in the winter, and electricity that hasn't failed in 75 years.

Of course liberalism is shrinking, because the promises it thinks it can make to Americans who cling to Bibles and guns are too expensive and its benefits are so marginal that it finally realizes(?) it will never change all of those minds. There is no more low hanging fruit. There are no more economic rabbits (except in IT industrialization and bioengineering) to pull out of hats. There are already so many chickens in so many pots that the Left has to attack the chicken industry for operating so cheaply.

Somebody wrote of the culture of Japan in the post-tsunami aftermath that of course there was no looting and that everyone cooperated. Japan pulls together into a uniquely cohesive society, but same thing makes it fragile because there are not hundreds of acceptable ways to do the same thing. Japanese make smaller cars and live in smaller houses because they prefer the urban lifestyle that brings millions of them together in the ways they prefer to organize. They like to follow the same rules for everyone, the exact opposite of the American cowboy spirit. 75 years ago there, they all serve an emperor.

America resists totalitarianism because we have the opportunity to get out of Dodge. There's someplace to go. We can migrate from the South to the North. We can move from East to West. And there are times when we want to be left alone, off the grid, answerable to nobody, off the plantation. It means we have to buy a truck that resists the dents and can go offroad, not a hybrid made for the carpool lane. It means we need to shop at the one Costco in the county once a month, not stroll through the galleria of shops in the CBD. It means we leave our email unanswered, not follow every tweet. It means we try not to follow the fashion of the top 40 as it changes every week, but maybe memorize something our great grandparents would have recognized. It means going downscale, spreading out and being robust and not being affected by the global supply chain that cascades its failures to every Tom, Dick and Harry because your name is Eustace.

There's a story about the MBA candidate who decided to accept at the Ivy League. Just after he graduated, he took a fishing vacation in a small village in Mexico and fell in love with the place. He moved to NY and worked on Wall Street to pay off his expensive loans. He hated his job after a time but kept it so that he could pay for a house in Connecticut near where he could fish. Still every summer he would fly with his friends down to Mexico and catch marlin but he never got the big one.  He worked overtime and took Spanish classes at night so that he could retire early and buy that little house in the fishing village. He neglected his family to climb the ladder and become a partner in the firm. Finally when he was 45 he paid off his house, quit his job, divorced his trophy wife, lost the equity in the house, suffered a heart attack and moved to Mexico. His vacation finally became his life. He realized finally that he could have done the same thing 20 years ago. It was the price he was willing to pay ruining the lives of all the people he hated in NYC. He bought freedom very expensively only to reduce his needs to zero. It wasn't until he became the captain of his charter boat a few years later that he could see in the eyes of his old fishing buddies who still lived in NY how they were slowly dying. None of them made partner the way he did and every summer when they came to fish, they lamented that they would never be rich enough live in a Mexican fishing village.

We will never know if red state of mind, independent America is as happy with their disconnected lives as those in the urban liberal cosmopolitan feng shui. But we will always know that riches are limited and that everybody cannot be better educated, richer, and more sophisticated than average. We will always know that the road towards totalitarianism is straight, well-paved and is designed for mass transit.

What is conservatism? It's a lot of things. But it's important to understand the limits of centrally standarized, synchronized, culture of singular progress of upward mobility. It always needs the attention and support of the masses, and it fails spectacularly.

Closing in on T50

Several years ago, I launched a project for my future learning and reference. I called it T50 which has to do with numbering out fifty thinkers whose works I would follow on my path to wisdom. Driving to work this morning I thought about those I have accumulated. You'll find them often cited here as regulars to Cobb would be familiar with most of their names. So here's the update in no particular order.

• Christopher Hitchens
• Thomas PM Barnett
• Malcolm Gladwell
• David P. Goldman
• Iain M. Banks
• Craig Venter
• Niall Ferguson
• Clay Shirky
• Nicholas Nassim Taleb
• Richard Fernandez
• Steven Berlin Johnson
• Michael Pollan
• John Boyd

All of those are pretty much on the permanent list. I'll pretty much be assured to read every book they put out from now on. Then there is a secondary conditional kind of list of folks who are near, but in whom I may lose interest over time.

• Nouriel Roubini
• Dan Carlin
• Victor Davis Hanson
• Michael Totten
• Gerard Van Der Luen
• Danny Hillis
• Stewart Brand
• Daniel Pink
• Dan Ariely

Then there is a pantheon of dead folks from whom I think I'll find something interesting, although that's harder to tell.

• Spinoza
• Karl Popper

OK well, basically Spinoza is all I can think of at the moment.  Oh yeah and Popper. It's also interesting, I imagine to look at some of the folks I've consumed on my way to where I am now.

• Cornel West
• James Baldwin
• bell hooks
• Derrick Bell
• Umberto Eco
• Noam Chomsky
• James Littel
• Eugene ONeill
• JL Borges
• Carlos Fuentes
• Robert Ludlum
• Moliere
• Ishmael Reed
• Chinhua Achebe
• K. Anthony Appiah
• Hugh Hewitt
• Martin Amis
• TC Boyle
• Nicholas Negroponte

The trail behind me is longer than the one in front of me for sure. And it's interesting to look back and speculate on what I thought I needed to know from each of those, what I got and how much it means to me now.

One of the more profound effects of T50 on me is that I have less patience for the interactivity of blogging, but that really started when I got interested in Ferguson and history a few years back. So I expect to continue to get less and less satisfaction from this kind of interaction and more from finding like-minded folks IRL at various meetups. One of these days I'm going to find the right clique -  it will save me a lot of time and give me a great deal of comfort in reading away from the screen.

Fay Politics in the Never Never

I've become devote to the exploits of Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden and have been trying to figure out something in the well-crafted stories. It is the transcendance of the value of life.

You see, one of the things that happens all of the time in these books is that Harry Dresden and other mortal humans bump heads with creatures that do not die. So I keep wondering why the immortals bargain with humans and find them worthy opponents. The immortals obviously have access to orders of magnitude more information / knowledge / wisdom, and yet with scorn and disgust, they deal with mere mortal humans whose powers are so much weaker. Doesn't it make sense that if you could not die or be permanently injured that you wouldn't particularly hesitate? 

There may be somthing engineered in the narrative of author Jim Butcher that suspends our disbelief, and perhaps there is no need to be logical when we're reading fantasy, but then I came upon an insight yesterday listening to a particular passage. It had to do with the idea of the infinite politics in the Never Never, that netherworld where the magical immortal creatures live. Without the consolation of death, nothing focuses the mind of eternal beings. When you have all eternity to exist, you might very well waste 100 years being a bitch just to be that. You might learn to connive everything possible without the use of intellect, but soley on physical beauty for 200 years. Or you might decide that revenge and dark perfidy is all you want to do for a millenium. 

As a programmer, I am always put in the position of telling people who don't know what I think they need to know about the limits of systems. But that doesn't stop them from wanting what they want, nor does the absolute no of a product limitation stop the politics from trying to squeeze blood from a stone. One might be the general the president wants to defend and indefensible position on the battlefield, and you are just one mortal general in a line of hundreds of men who want your job, none of whom can produce the impossible result. But when you're immortal, you don't need to care. 

When you're immortal, politics are infinite. Every faerie, ghoul, ghost, zombie, and vampire can be what they want, when they want, made real and solid because of their desire. It is the only the drama of desire that animates the spirit world, the laws of physics can be ignored when the time horizon expands.

The other thing I think I figured out was that mortals had to be interesting because they were either foolish of poignantly prescient in the extreme short period of time they have, relatively speaking. It makes each of their limited decisions that more important. Each of their 4000 orgasms more meaningful. All of their energies and discipline directed towards something that had to be transcendent. 

There's a lot to this - exactly why immortals would care about mortals. Perhaps in the same way men care about dogs. 

Soixante-Huitards

I love City Journal.

In his essay “1968 and the Meaning of Democracy,” Mahoney provides critical context for understanding the political, intellectual, and academic transformations of the last 40 years. The uprisings of that year initiated “a bold cultural project to subvert or ‘deconstruct’ authoritative cultural, political, and religious traditions in the name of liberation and autonomy.” The spirit of ’68 institutionalized in education and culture the reduction of democratic politics to consent and radical autonomy: “It [1968] is that crucial turning point when modern democracy lost consciousness of civilized liberty as a precious inheritance to be preserved.”

The “ideology of liberation” of the soixante-huitards (’68ers) informs much of the political and cultural discourse in the West today—in France most of all, but also in America. We see it, for example, in the revolutionary sentimentalism that elevates any thug, no matter how illiberal or murderous, into a heroic icon as long as he is the enemy of “bourgeois” authority. More important, the ideology of ’68 hastened the “radicalization of democracy” that has severed ordered liberty from its sustaining traditions, thus undercutting “the moral and intellectual continuity of Western civilization.”

One consequence of the West’s severing of these roots is an “absolute relativism that denies the very idea of universal moral judgments and a universal human nature”—best exemplified by the ideology of multiculturalism. The default orthodoxy of popular culture and academia alike, multiculturalism incoherently combines claims to universal human rights and equality—whose origins lie in the West’s disparaged classical and Christian inheritance—with a rejection of universal values and of the civilization that has articulated and defended these values.

I am so adamantly in agreement with that second paragraph. It describes very much why I keep bothering to write here at Cobb. 

The Truth About Hairy Chested Men

The first truth about hairy chested men is that they like the hair on their chest. If you can understand that simple fact intuitively, then the rest of this essay will probably sound like common sense to you. If you find that fact somewhat puzzling, it's because you think like a woman. And that can only be an insult to a very few people, mostly men who have shaved their chests.

Some time ago, I forget when, somebody asked me if I had shaved my chest. At the time I laughed and said no, and three seconds later I thought what a bizarre question that is. The funny thing is that as I was answering the question with the implicit understanding that it was something of a backhanded compliment. I thought of an old Eddie Murphy routine about a Jamaican dude named 'Dexter'. And that brought forth the image in my head of a black man walking down the beach who looks roughly the star of the current Old Spice commercials. To be precise, the Old Spice model is broader chested than my image of 'Dexter', whose pecs are a bit thicker nonetheless. In both cases for Dexter and the OldSpice dude, chest hair is absent. Now if you remember, Morpheus tells Neo that what he looks like in the Matrix is his 'residual self image', it's the perfected you of you in your dreams. That was my residual self image. Sorta like this guy here in stone-washed jeans. (me, San Felipe, Mexico circa 1987) I never was able to figure out that diet and excercise thing to the extent that I wanted. I ate a lot of fish and rice and Japanese food in college and couldn't figure out why I still weighed under 170 pounds. For me, all those many years ago, that was too slim, and so I couldn't have what I considered my own perfect pecs, and never bench pressed 175 in my entire life. Odd, now when I think about it. 

At any rate, in my estimation, the cultural event that solidified the new standard of American male beauty was the Janet Jackson video starring Djimon Hounsou. Sure Michael Jordan helped guys like me make the choice to shave the head, but anything that could possibly get us closer to Janet was magic, and Djimon had it.  Looking back, I see that video as a feminine style of thought as well - idealized and fantastic as romantic music videos should be, but fundamentally a female fantasy. Guys who wanted Janet Jackson (like me) wanted to look like the guys she like in her videos. There's an ironic twist to the fact that Janet's actual boyfriend, whom I saw with her at a Michael Jackson concert at then Irvine Meadows, looked more like El Debarge - nothing at all like the models in the video. But that was a few years earlier. My point is that I was in the mode of thinking of conforming myself to a feminine ideal of manly beauty, not the other way around. It just so happens that I didn't have the hairy chest and that was the way I liked me anyhow. 

I don't think I'd be too far off the mark to suggest that today's American manly image is more feminine than it was in the 80s. My adolescence was marked, in the late 70s, by the style of the Marlboro Man (hairy), but in real life most primarily by Mohammad Ali (not hairless), Joe Namath (long hair) and Burt Reynolds, (much hair). In that period  with those trinity of ideals, there wasn't much question about which way men were headed. It was not towards a feminine ideal of manly beauty but something more ruggedly male for male's sake. And that period lasted through the end of Magnum PI and the beginning of Miami Vice. El Debarge, thus, was a bit ahead of the curve for the transitionary period of the mid 80s. (Think 80s metal bands). Sure there was a lot of hair there, but it wasn't hairy chested. It was punky hair and weasel chested. 

It has been a long time since America has embraced the hairy chested man, and I think that's because of the feminine ideal has not wanted such manly implications, and American men have signed onto the feminist agenda for male looks. But I think it is also because gay men have had a larger impact on standards of male beauty. My theory here is thin but my speculation is that there is a sort of anti-feminine thinking in gay male ideals that have undermined the credibility of the Marlboro Man image. To be a man's man in today's thinking is to be considered anti-woman, or to return to my example - to look other than the men in Janet Jackson's video is to suggest that you don't want Janet. So from a woman's point of view there's something wrong with a hairy chested man. There's something wrong with a non-metrosexual man. He's got woman issues to be looking like that. Which might be safe to assume if the man is gay, a presumption that more American men must deal with socially than ever before. 

I have been writing this essay over a period of days, and it has been hijacked by the following image into something that must include class more explicitly. This is the picture of a man who is a rebel in Libya, a foot soldier in a true people's liberation army of irregulars. And I am forced to consider him a Marlboro Man in his country. He is a man for whom I presume many American women would have considerable ick factor to overcome. I can't see his chest, but I find it difficult to imagine it not being naturally hairy, and if it is not, I find it inconceivable to imagine it shaved. There he is with his shotgun, his ax and his cigarette. He claims victory. Forget about geopolitical strife for a moment and think about American men. Think about a bearded, hairy chested American man with a shotgun, an ax and a cigarette. Could he claim any sort of victory with American women, or is he Larry the Cable Guy? 

I don't mean to suggest in all of this that there is something fundamentally wrong with feminine ideals of manly beauty. Like with most things I write about, I see the issue as a matter of degree and balance. My desire is push back to socially acceptable and desirable standards that don't require a man to shave his chest, moisturize his skin or use more than two types of soap. 

As something of a globalist, due to my affiliation with scientific discipline at the crossroads of information technology and the liberal arts, I pay lots of attention to the extent to which America is out of joint with the rest of the world's population. I am far from wanting one world government or culture - heck no to that, but I do tend to focus on philosophical and economic dislocations. An American man should not be so isolated from any man, and vice versa, and therefore the amount of social experimentation we do here in America should be limited. I raise my old Baldwin quote:

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

 It is in our fundamental nakedness that we should gain acceptance. Everything on top of that is functional to a degree, but that degree should not dislocate us from our basic selves. Men need to be men. Women need to be women. The way we think about each other should not ignore what's underneath. 

 

Towards A New Urban/Rural Balance

Nikka raises a sterling point in one word 'Doomstead'.

All these doomsteads, rural, urban, island, suffer from the same problem. No matter how many networks of reinforced concrete pillboxes with interlocking fields of fire you have, they can't save you from stepping on a rusty nail and dying of tetanus and gangrene, or getting bitten by a rattlesnake and dying of the venom. Most doomers have no idea just how vulnerable they'd be to disease and infection if their EOTWAWKI scenarios ever play out.

I'm one of those people who spent a lot of time flying over the country and feeling envious of those denizens below in Flyover Country. Growing up in Southern California, where the concrete goes for 50 miles in every direction except into the Pacific, and 2 bedroom houses go for half a million dollars has twisted my psyche. Driving from Ohio to Indiana one weekend made me thirst for buying some dump on 12 acres of land. So long as I have broadband and a Walmart, what am I missing? It can't possibly be worse than life at the Marriott, can it?

I have every intention of retiring somewhere exurban, but where I can still have satellite access and orange juice year round. I have often referred to Dyson's Utopia and Dunbar's Number. While hundreds of millions of people in the Global South are leaving agricultural living for the raised standards of urban living, I'm heading outdoors. What is the best human scale living we might afford?

Just the other night, I watched the excellent film 'Catfish'. In an important way, it reflects the kind of romance those of us who love New York living have with a horsey life in the country. The prospect of being hooked up virtually with people all over the world - ie the advantage of urbanization, yet living at an uncrowded, low rent distance is the kind of balance I seek. 

There is only a small element of 'doomstead' thinking in my fantasy retirement. In some ways it's exactly what we all want in living in our own literal castle somewhere between the extremes of Van Vechten's salon and Gosford Park. Sometimes I like the idea of some small scale industry - as my brother Doc wants to purchase a few acres in SD for the purposes of a specialty winery. Or perhaps it would be very cool to run a specialty cloud based service out of a repurposed loft building in a small town where the electricity is cheap. I'd like to outsource myself into bigger cheaper real-estate but not all the way to India. I'd like to maintain relationships with sophisticates, but not all the way to some insular group of wankers.

As you can tell, there are a lot of different values and priorities at work in this new balance, but let me add a few more that are out there more in the area of mystery.

Everybody knows that if you are sufficiently wealthy, you can get away from it all and take it all with you. Living in resort areas is always an option for the wealthy. Complete urban oases in 'exotic' locales are always available if you've got the scratch. But where the wealth really matters is how one can get access to superior urban services. Medical. Security. Legal. This is why I don't very often seriously consider any countries other than England, Canada and the US for my retirement. And this is where doomstead starts to be more of a consideration.

First of all, if England, Canada and the US become unliveable, it will truly be the EOTWAWKI scenario. But I don't expect that at all. What I do expect is that the medical, security, economic and legal quality of living will decline for the global middle class and that retirees like myself will need to think a bit more seriously about stepping out of the comfort of that which we have enjoyed by paying the 'insurance premiums' of our work lives in the urban setting. We have to go out towards a more Wild West, where civilization is a bit more feudal. There's a certain appeal of handling human business without third parties mediating the rules of civilization, but it's also a lot of work and all of us are not up to the task.

In the end, I am not seeking solitude. You can do that quite easily in an Omega Man fortress in any urban situation. I am seeking space, because it just occurs to me that man was not meant to live completely away from the land in anything under 10,000 square feet. But in the 21C, how does an American do this?

God = Good

Understanding of this equivalence in my early childhood is what makes me what I am today which is a great admirer of Christian ethics an quite enough of an Episcopalian to pass, but not interested in being either evangelistic nor passive to atheists. 

So the question was asked can atheists and theists find something to agree on. It's actually very simple; they merely need to agree that God = Good. Now comes the question of ego, which is whether any atheist or devotee can assert with certainty that they know everything any human needs to know about Good God. The failures of atheism and faith come from misapplication which is a function of arrogance. It's something atheists ought to know considering the scientistic awe at the greatness of the Universe. 

I find it interesting considering this proposition of equivalence that with respect to arrogance and overproduction that two books come to mind. The first is that by Hitchens: God is Not Great. The second is the famous business book Good to Great. In the stretch between saying that God is Good to God is Great is perhaps that fudging of the supernatural that Spinoza weighed against. Does God have to be Great, or is Good enough? Why, in fact, does God have to be so incredibly transcendent? Is not the proposed greatness of God merely the whip across our backs to get our donkey attention? Perhaps so. The summation of Good is so far and away from us. It ought to be enough for eternal inspiration in our present. But somehow we are not satisfied with that. God must be great, man must strive to understand transcendental greatness. Great becomes unimaginable, which is just enough to twist all the rest of the rules.

I invert something in this passage I read this week.

One of the books I am currently re-reading is C.S. Lewis' THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. For those that haven't read this classic, it is a collection of letters from a senior and experienced satanic demon, Screwtape, to a junior and struggling satanic demon, Wormwood, on how best to snare and keep ensnared the souls of men; how to hold them in thrall until such souls can be harvested into Hell for all eternity.

As I was escaping from the unremitting BS flow that oozes out of the government when it comes to BS budgets yesterday, I found myself reading this passage from Chapter XV of The Screwtape Letters:

We sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make [humans] live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men's affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

 

All afterlife is the Future. And while I don't quite understand the author's use of 'eternity', we can surely see how the overly pious wring their hands in anticipation of a Judgment by a Great God at some point in the Future. A bit of passive aggressiveness I think. 

A Good God, the summation of Good, the concept and the entity only need to be that. Our duty, whether deist or atheist is to approach that good, remembering Cobb's Rule #11: Perfect is the enemy of Good.

Multiculturalism: Dead

If one is to believe Merkel, Sarkozy and Cameron, then Multiculturalism was some sort of government experiment in Western Europe designed to liberalize immigration rules for Muslims. That's one way to look at it. We'll see how far that definition and context lives on in the American academy. Who knows?

Note that there is an error in the translation. Sarkozy says we are a secular nation, not we are a Catholic nation as indicated in the text.

Just this week, I caught the tail end of an NPR broadcast on the matter of how a flea jumps. The researcher who had been vindicated by a high speed slo-mo electron microscope was not particularly excited. He had always maintained that a flea jumps by using their feet, but the prevailing theory said it was its knee. The scientist said he was not surprised by the results proving him right because he thought the other idea was as silly as somebody saying "I am going to jump off this chair by clenching my buttocks". 

So multiculturalism is as dead as the flea's knees theory, but people won't be sure until they see it all in slow motion with electron microscopes. That's what blogs are for. I think everything he says makes perfect sense, and that is that faith is a private matter subsumed within national identity. Whatever one wishes to be in a religious or ethnic sense, it has never really been trans-national, and proper Multiculturalism, as I mentioned many years ago, has not matured in this country or evidently in the UK, Germany and France, outwardly. Instead it has been inwardly focused, and it has been a failure. I review and update my position here:

Class Three - PC
The principles of multiculturalism are well suited to resolving issues but we suffer from a surfeit of dialog about the laziest version, political correctness. PC is nothing more than the "don't ask don't tell" version of multiculturalism, it is the false pretense that everything is relative and that we can all enjoy each other's cultures with a Coke and a smile. So long as we don't offend, we can 'all get along' and society is better off. But PC demands no real understanding nor even an effort.

I should add to this that PC is essentialist. The effort made not to offend presumes that the offense is absolute and that the person to which the offensive comment is made must be offended in ineffible but inevitable ways. Therefore all effort must be made never to offend because that class of person would always suffer. 

Class Two - Diversity & Pluralism
Diversity is one step up from PC and makes pefect sense. However it is misaplied as a principle when it's really just a strategy. The value of diversity is that it stands as an indicator of a willingness to make the effort to be inclusive. The best of diversity delivers a kind of robustness, it fortifies an institution by giving disparate groups an interest in its sucess. But this need be done purposefully with the intention of maintaining that robustness without losing links.

Pluralism is not a consequence of diversity, rather I think it the proper result of a non-chauvanistic secularism in a democratic society. You can have a healthy pluralism without the attempted mutual understanding of diversity. I think they reinforce each other but that they are not the same.

These days I am not so sure that those links need to be strong. In fact I doubt that they can be if the matter of inclusiveness is based on merit. In other words, an institution that embraces diversity in a post-discriminatory fashion will right itself by establshing and defending meritocracy. The previous outsiders, by merit are now insiders. But if the outsiders maintain links to the out group, on what basis should that outgroup feel welcome? If it is by anything but merit, then it defeats the purpose of inclusion. If I say that I want Affirmative Action into Big League Baseball just like Jackie Robinson, then it renews suspicion on the entire enterprise. So 'links' to outsiders who get included on the basis of the point of discrimination makes it nothing more or less than reverse discrimination. That is the kind of hope that should not be kept alive.

Class One - Diplomacy
A proper multiculturalism is probably best described as a 'panglossos'. It involves a non-trivial understanding of history and language of the peoples of different cultures and traditions. It is diplomatic but not necessarily integrative. It is the most difficult to achieve, of course, because bridging such gaps are very difficult. Imagine giving up the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' as the character portrayed by Richard Gere in 'Red Corner'. Respecting alien systems of governance, wedding and burial traditions, oral and written history etc are tremendous undertakings.

Diplomacy can be nothing more or less than the diplomacy of nations and extraordinary global jet-setters. Multiculturalism doesn't help anyone more average establish 'diplomatic relations'. If you want a friend, buy a dog. If you want diplomatic relations, marry somebody who doesn't speak your language and get along with your new in-laws. Outside of that..

Multicuturalism is dead. 

 

Fallacy: Each One Teach One

A little Monday morning mythbusting.

First of all, who taught you to teach one? If they were so good, why wasn't the problem solved in your generation?

The biggest political myth is that the middle class can make the poor into the middle class. Only the wealthy can make someone rich. Only the rich can make someone middle class. The middle class can take care of their families, and the upper middle class can do a marginal bit more. But that's all. Let me give you an analogy.

If you're middle class in America, you probably own a car. And you rightly notice that billions of people around the world don't have a car and never will be able to afford one. You are truly blessed, so you decideto give back. You drive kids back and forth to soccer practice. You help your cousin move his house. You take a friend to the airport at the spur of a moment. You carpool to work. All that makes a difference but you are not in the transportation business. On a good day of being a good samaritan with your car, you may favorably compare with a bad day of being a taxi driver, but that's about it. You are never going to compete with somebody who makes their living as a bus driver, and FedEx? Don't even think about it.

Yet people in the middle class still have convinced themselves that if everybody were as generous with their own automobiles as you are, in your spare time, it will change the world. If you run your car off a cliff it will wreck your world, but the transportation industry won't notice. Similarly, the politics of uplift, each one teach one, and unity are all falacious thinking. You cannot change the lives of millions of people in the each one teach one phase.

I mention this to underscore an old quote of a rather famous dude named Malcolm X. You may have heard of him.

The platform that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, our religious leader, stands on is the platfrom of complete freedom, justice and equality for the 20 million black people or so-called Negroes here in America. And he teaches us that because of the seriousness of the condition that our people now find themselves in that it is absolutely impossible to solve our problems with means other than religion. And he teaches us that the religion of Islam is the only religion that will instill within our people the incentive to stand on our own feet. And instead of trying to force ourselves upon whites or force ourselves into the white society or blame the white man for our predicament and constantly beg him for what he has, he says that the only way that we can solve our problem is to unite together among ourselves, among our own kind, clean ourselves up, rid ourselves of the evils that we've become addicted to here in this society and try and solve our problem ourselves.

So if the question of uplift and unity comes to a matter of values, then how can 'each one teach one' manifest itself to this level? Make no mistake that Malcolm is saying that black Americans need to convert to Islam in order to solve their problems. That is the sort of institution, a worldwide religion, that is in the transporation business. One preacher or teacher does not make an institution. It makes a middle class person proud of their beneficial, but marginal, effect on other people. 

I just wanted to make that clear. And if that one didn't work here's one more:

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat forever.

Give a fisherman a loan for a boat and he can feed himself, his family and sell more fish in the market. With sales tax on the fish you can pay a policeman to protect the fish market from theft. Grow the fish market through hard work and the man can pay off his loan save for a new boat, hire new fishermen and expand his fleet.  More fish allows him to trade with the next village. More spare time allows him to learn new ways of fishing, making his business more efficient, cutting costs, raising profits. Teach a man capitalism and you build a fishing industry.

Village metaphors only work in villages.

The Semiotic Swamp Returns

When I was 31, I read American Mythologies. It was one of the great intellectual moments in my life, an dit helped me to understand the power of what I can probably describe at length but will not. Let's just call it 'virtual truth'.

A great deal of what I experimented with in my early web writing days was a riff on this problem, which was that there was very little 'authentic' culture in American culture. There are signifiers built on top of symbols, which leverage metaphors that are bolstered by analogies all based on myth and urban legend - and this is what most Americans believe. Education is all trivia. You can't walk into a bar with physics degree and find a mate. You have to play the game and it is a mind-numbing game because everybody is hooked into American 'culture' and not much of it is real. This was my attitude towards that called the semiotic swamp. I followed Umberto Eco and Marshall Blonsky for a time and insisted that they knew what was up. Foucault's Pendulum was my favorite fiction just before reading Blonsky. But the invention of the Internet was about to happen, in the mainstream. So I invented Boohab, who was the perfect kind of character to inhabit such a realm, a post-modern racial essentialist. In a world where influentials like Howard Rheingold encouraged the reality of virtual life led by the guiding light of McLuhan who's mantra was 'the medium is the message', there needed to be a black trickster out there keeping it real.

A lot of people resented the idea of bringing racial realism to the new digital frontier, but the fact that I did so persistently was very useful. I sought to inform my experiment with a bit of philosophy which I found in a book called The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. I excerpted something I thought was very important from that moment when there was still a question in the public mind about whether or not blackness belonged in cyberspace.

 

"According to Heidegger, we notice the eclipse of the truth of being occuring already in Plato's metaphysics. Once the truth of being becomes equated with the light of unchanging intelligibility, the nature of truth shifts to the ability of statements to reflect or refer reliably to entities. With the steadiness of propositional truth comes the tendency to relate to being as a type, a form, or an anticipated shape. With being as a steady form, entities gain their reality through their being typified. Already in Plato we see the seeds of the Western drive to standardize things, to find what is dependable and typical in them. Truth as the disclosure process, as the play of revealing/ concealing disappears behind the scene in which the conscious mind grasps bright objects apprehended as clear, unwavering, rational forms. As humans develop the ability to typify and apprehend formal realities, the loss of truth as emergent disclosure goes unnoticed. All is light and form. Nothing hides behind the truth of beings. But this "nothing" finally makes an appearance after the whole world has become a rigid grid of standardized forms and shapes conceived and engineered by humans. As the wasteland grows, we see the devastation of our fully explicit truths. We see that there is, must be, more. The hidden extra cannot be consciously produced. Only by seeing the limits of standardization can we begin to respond to it. We have to realize that each advance in typifying and standardizing things also implies a trade off. When we first reach forward and grasp things, we only see the benefits of our standardization, only the positive side of greater clarity and utility. it is difficult to accept the paradox that not matter how alluring, every gain in fixed intelligibility brings with it a corresponding loss of vivacity. Because we are finite, every gain we make also implies a lost possibility. The loss is especially devastating to those living in the technological world, for here they enjoy everything conveniently at their disposal -- everything that is, except the playful process of discovery itself."

It turned out that only applied to the static web. When the web became dynamic, and populated with jillions, emergent disclosure returned. As it became even larger and more distributed, and as it will be in the future, the only findable stuff will be more and more static. People will need larger narratives to deal with its interminable complexity. The web itself will sustain more and more of these narratives. Certifications will become more important and/but they will tend to be more localized. "Word is bond" will become more important.

But my point here is that for the most part, people will require more and more skill to make sense of all of this meta-literacy. I happen to think it raises the value of war. But during peacetime, the swamp is filling up and overflowing.

This morning it took me almost an hour to find Ms Dewey, and I had lost her before. Her real name is Janina Gavankar and as Ms Dewey she exemplified the sort of woman that is my perfect mate in look, attitude and all that. I used to worry for most of my life that the woman I married would suffer a heartbreaking fate if I were to find 'the perfect woman' sometime during the course of life - and I had this odd premonition that it would happen around when I turned 35. It never did happen with the exception of the fictional Ms Dewey with whom I promptly developed a completely nerdy crush. And so I was a bit extra frustrated when, this morning for some reason, I could not for the life of me remember her name and none of my usual methods could suss her out of the incredible shitpile that is the world wide web. I finally found her.

 

 

It turns out that Ms Dewey was the creation of a marketing outfit known as EVB, short for Evolution Bureau. They are also the creators of Serenading Unicorn

 

And so we are most definitely way, way down the long tail. At some point it must be asked whether or not large fictions are not more useful than small ones. But I'm going to leave that as an exercise, depending upon how many people respond to this particular essay.

I no longer have much of a cultural project out here in cyberspace. I went from the responsibility of Mellow Mike to put a black foot out here, to the provocations of Boohab to get all post-moderny and interactive, to whatever it was I was doing at Slate, Salon, & Utne, Brainstorms, The Well, Electric Minds and then finally to Meanderings, Vision Circle and now Cobb. I have come full circle to the sort of peeved skepticism about the quality of knowledge purveyed on the Web, now that there is so much and the cost is so low. I perceive that the big hunking narratives are larger and more false and that the smaller ones seem more infinitely clever. It's different but the effect is the same. Truth is hard to find. That's because it's so easy to get everything else, so much of which is layered like the Juicy Fruit advertisement, upon very little else but the simple longings of an individual. There's nothing universal in that at all, which is why we'll all end up killing each other. I know it's difficult to understand why that's my conclusion, but trust me on this one. I'll explain it all later.

In the meantime, I will continue to write here, while writing more software code, and attempt to keep my perspective on the world historical, and ignoring that which is right in front of my face.

Howard Dean's Rhetorical Patronage

(from the archives, December 2003)

I've written here in Cobb that there is a dirty little secret in black politics. Perhaps some of Dean's campaign team has taken an object lesson. Those African Americans who hold out for hope in the world of politics of all places have apparently been placated by Mr. Dean's clever rhetoric.

What is astounding about this sleight of hand is that Dean has gotten away with getting endorsements without having made one documentable campaign promise. Sensible people expect politicians to dissemble, and those things that are sacrificed first are campaign promises. So what kind of fool gives the benefit of the doubt to a politician whose not even willing to make a promise? There is nothing so irresponsible as a man who makes no promises and states no case, something most of us recognized when pressing Clarence Thomas. But if there is, then it is the voter who trusts such a man. Fools following liars.

Let us start with the gushing of the Black Commentator.

Howard Dean�s December 7 speech is the most important statement on race in American politics by a mainstream white politician in nearly 40 years. Nothing remotely comparable has been said by anyone who might become or who has been President of the United States since Lyndon Johnson�s June 4, 1965 affirmative action address to the graduating class at Howard University. 

 

BC seems to desire nothing more than acceptance of Dean as a mainstream candidate so that his vague histrionics can give air to BC's studied radical notions. BC is clearly anti-corporate, but do they actually expect Dean to endorse that form of economic strategy?

The core of BC's economic mythology is plain. 

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences � deep, corrosive, obstinate differences � radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual.

 

These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression.

If there is some sense of special failure blacks might have in their poverty, then the Black Commentator would have one believe that some measure of dignity could be recovered in the knowledge that the President 'feels you'. In this way, the black man who gets the 50k job is only half a black man when the president is a [racist, divisive] Republican, but is made whole by the [warm fuzzy Democrat] president who is sympathetic to a radical interpretation of racial history.

 

This is the farce at the heart of Dean's legitimacy in the eyes of the Black Commentator. They refuse to separate economics from racial politics, therefore it is not sufficient that African Americans themselves know the facts of history. There has to be a Great White Father who also sees it that way. Blacks don't recover themselves, they do so under the aegis of a friendly politically revisionist history. This is all Dean delivers: talk and promises to talk.

I said it once, and I'll say it again:

I challenge anyone to show exactly what it is that the Democrats have done for African Americans that they haven't done for everyone else. Whatever you find, I will bet my nickel that it doesn't get any larger than a quarter of a billion in any one program out of the Federal budget. But what the Democrats do that the Republicans don't is insure that they say a lot of nice things about blackfolks. The dirty little secret is that this covers a lot of what the black electorate will settle for. If you ask someone who hates the idea of Black Republicans what it is that the Democrats will give blacks that the Republicans won't, it will all come down to warm and fuzzies. Try it. Get them to name programs when they disagree. Materially, most folks are hard pressed to talk about black patronage in dollars and cents. But they know what kind of rhetoric they like. Ask how much federal money goes to support HBCUs. Nobody knows. Ask what kind of support Affirmative Action should get and you'll hear a litany of legalese words, qualifications, provisos, tests, and other verbal requirements. What a twist of fate! It's not all about the Benjamins.

 

Check out his speech yourself. At least six paragraphs begin "We're going to talk about..". That wouldn't be so bad if the paragraphs weren't so damned thin. But then again, Dean has to prove himself mainstream, otherwise the formula doesn't work. That means he has to sell out principles for the sake of wide acceptability. I keep telling blackfolks that this is the fundamental problem.

Yet the BC keeps hope alive:

Where does this leave Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich? Exactly as they are, preaching the same social democratic, anti-racist, pro-peace message as before, for as long as their energies can sustain them. Dean�s political leap would not have been possible in the absence of Sharpton�s energetic Black candidacy and Kucinich�s principled, progressive white voice from the Left. At this historic juncture they dare not go anywhere. Dean has picked up the torch that Sharpton and Kucinich have been carrying and they must stay in the race to make sure he doesn�t set it down.

 

If there is any mark of delusion, there it is plainly and simply. To imagine that Dean couldn't survive without Sharpton and Kucinich makes about as much sense, as my old feminist buddies used to say, as a fish without a bicycle.

I am willing to bet money that this infatuation will be short-lived. It's too bad that the Black Commentator and those who follow this rationale are so soft-headed and willing to compromise. But that is their fate, tied as they are to the ritual of hope and disappointment which is the standard fare of the African American voters and the Democratic Party.

I know George W. Bush's weaknesses, and as a hard headed Republican, I'm not afraid to call him on them because I am vested in his practical success. Practical success is the difference between Cobb and the dreamers over on the Left. Apparently everybody can have a dream. It's just a matter of time before Dean reveals his dreams to America. "I too have a dream", he'll say. I'll hold back my puke until that moment. But it's coming.

I have one last barb to pitch. Where is the Congressional Black Caucus in all this? I haven't been looking, but if their opinion mattered enough, it would make news loud enough to hear. Considering small incidents that make enough news for Jesse Jackson to be mentioned, I'm sure I hear quite enough. And my ears are telling me that the CBC's opinion doesn't matter

 

Classic Bloviation in Long Beach

There is, my gentle friends, a difference between bloviation and blather. Bloviation is the process of expounding upon passionate intellectual subjects without any sense of purpose. Blather is the product of purposesful rhetoric that has no real intellectual substance. While I enjoy bloviation, I try my damndest to stay away from blather.

After enough alcohol, any discussion of a serious subject descends into bloviation, or bloviated debate. At some point, bloviated debate devolves into blather. I had the good fortune last evening to get into an almost unending zone of bloviation that never dropped off the precipice into the blather zone. My interlocutors were, The Large Professor, Red and Doctor V.  (The Kid left early).

Doctor V offers me a challenge which I am eager to understand completely and I am wary of earning his distrust. You see, he represents the humanist I think it should be my duty to reform. He is a person centered person who requires a revolution. The sort of expectations he has of people and society are both annoyingly high and benign. And so as with most humanists, he requires a thorough undoing of what has evidently been done wrong. It probably wouldn't go too far afield to say that the good doctor is a Liberal, but I am no longer interested in means, so all those political matters are tending towards the insignificant. I hope earnestly that I can learn the proper meaning of revolution and understand exactly how much directed chaos we can sustain for the sake of Progress. But I sense that our great difference may lie in the following matter of principle.

Mankinds great challenge is not with the nature of civilization, it is with the very existence of civilization.

It is for that reason I seek to concern myself not with matters of reform but with the consequences of that with which we don't control. I am conservative because I doubt that we can control what we learn and direct in society in revolutionary ways. But more importantly our economics and wars reflect exactly what mankind actually does, all intentions aside. To talk about reform and making humanity better without any consideration of war and deprivation as the means to that end is naive and shortsighted. My humanist friends don't seem to recognize that they are the scions of victory in war and business, and they are deluded by the promise of improving that which has been achieved by war through peaceful means.

Which puts us on the doorstep of the Large Professor, who is a cherub of deliberate delight. But I'll talk more about those guys next time.

The Post Industrial Business Model

One of the reasons that I have a sort of ambivalence to environmentalism as we know it, is because of my wariness of the alternative. To have a world that is free of the costs of industrialization of materials for the purposes of manufacturing is to have an economy leveraged on information tech. Of course there are other growing economies but most of our focus is on infotech; biotech not so much.

Part of the inevitable necesity of buying and selling in the digital world is the establishment of your presence. Right now there is not a good way of doing that, which is why we have all sorts of privacy concerns. The presence that you establish in cyberspace is distended and distributed and primarily out of your control. It is going to be quite some time before you will be able to control your cyberpresence, and until that combination of techologies, social conventions and laws coalesce, there are going to be myriad 'valid' ways in which you can be represented and approached. Nothing illustrates that quite as starkly as those thought experiments we use now to talk about privacy issues with regard to datamining. For example:

You did actually have that mid-life crisis and get divorced. At the child-custody hearing, your ex-spouse’s lawyer quotes a study showing that football-loving upper income Republicans are 27% more likely to beat their children than yoga-class-attending moderate Democrats, and the probability goes up another 8% if they ever bought a jersey featuring a defensive lineman. What’s more, several of the more influential people in your network of friends also fit angry-male patterns, taking the probability of abuse up another 13%. Because of the sound statistics behind such analyses, the judge listens.

What we have in social media and databases are a new mineral to mine, refine and sell as product. It is access to you. It is basically an attempt to commodify something that is practically infinite - human interest in other humans. When you look at a growing fraction of the entertainment business, you'll find that a nearly inexhaustible supply of energy and money is thrown at capturing the strange proclivities of celebrity. There seems no end of the trivialities that people will pay to know. For the most part these are silly and harmless but they are part and parcel of the same kind of basic human curiosity. And here in America we have a generation that's getting smarter and smarter at monetizing human curiosity.

If you think that Wall Street does nothing productive, imagine a world where 30% of the consumer economy was spent buying and selling the decendants of reality TV online, on mobile, in cars, at work, everywhere. Imagine every highschooler's senior project is trying for the first of 500 times to make a viral video about themselves. Imagine that the only way to instantly get a job is to become the kind of curiosity that is Ted Williams. Imagine that your 15 minutes of fame becomes your permanent resume. 

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It's difficult to tell people how long the long tail is. What I believe is that skill will overcome and that at some point in the future, the sort of value that only comes from discipline, dedication and wisdom will rule. But we are a long way from that, and we do not yet own our own reputations. There is a class of exploiters out there to be wary of, they have got our cognitive proclivities nailed. Their audiences will ultimately eat them alive, like Julian Assange's, but it's going to be a long and tragic road.

 

The Inevitable Racism of Liberty?

The substantive ideals of American conservatism—limited government, states’ rights, individualism, property rights, and the prioritizing of liberty over equality—when applied consistently inevitably result in racism...--Anon

This is the most stunning and revealing argument I think I've ever heard someone say with a straight face. Because if this is provably true then I'm going to have to accept racism rather the way I accept the cholesterol in steak. I don't care if it's not good for me, I'm going to just take my little pill and eat all the steak I want. Just like Cipher in The Matrix.

This sounds to me like a preposterous argument because it suggests that (and this is my immediate counter) that if these were principles at the heart of a post-colonial African nation, that it would necessarily be a racist nation. One must note that this is a blanket statement that does not say that the race of those benefiting from or implementing those ideas is material to the resultant racism, but that racism itself is a result of those principles.  

I do agree that these are the substantive ideals of American conservatism, which is why I am in rapt attention. I also find the statement addresses the level of abstraction which is right up my alley in that (maybe I'm repeating myself) it doesn't suggest the imperfections of the humans in charge have anything to do with it. In other words, if you weren't trying to be a racist when you came up with those five operating principles, so long as you achieve them you will inevitably be a racist. 

Did I say this sounds preposterous? At once I am tempted to find someone out at Claremont to mail it to for a righteous fisking, and I am embarrassed to even dignify it. Be that as it may, it's a square topic for Cobb, and I'm biting.

I put the emphasis on liberty because it seems to me that limited government and states rights are means to an end, with the end being [individual] liberty. I suspect we will get into matters of collective freedom vs individual freedom, as well as the very premises of the point of consent of the governed vis a vis why systems of law and government are preferable over anarchy in the first place. There's probably good stuff to discuss in that vein. I'm also interested to find out a more precise definition of six pounds of racism, because we're going to have to weigh out the balances here. Which is to say how much racism can a society bear? How much property rights can a society bear?

As an example of the latter, I would very much agree that a society that chops off somebody's right hand for the commission of a robbery of $100 would be horrendously unfair and would not serve the purposes of individual freedom - one would question whether such a definition of liberty is just. Note my brackets on [individual] liberty above. One could say that the collective freedom of people who have $100 and don't steal $100 is well served by a society with a death penalty for that level of theft. But nobody could say that serves individual freedom.

Spinoza's God & Evolutionary Convergence

 "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." -- Albert Einstein

There are two notable takeaways for me in reviewing this video by Steve Paulson. The first is the extent to which notable thinkers have used the term 'Spinoza's God'. The second is the alternative evolution.

I rather like the idea as expressed by one of the interviewees, that humanity is inevitable. I believe that the term that he used was evolutionary convergence. It gives me something to consider that both supports and refutes aspects of Vinge's & Kurzweil's Singularity. 

On the one hand, Iain Banks has already determined a very plausible evolution between human and thinking machinery. What we will continue to do is to enjoy what it is our bodies will want to do. That is to say that no matter what consciousness emerges from AIs, human beings will still be trapped in human bodies and most of what we do with our brains will have to do with the combined experience of our sensations and compute ability. Consciousness beyond the context of the human body is something that may give us a sense of contentment, and it may deliver for us the sort of focus needed so that we might compute something useful in our minds. But those things will always serve to deliver us human contentment which will always be in the same shape, as we are shaped by the physical bodies in which our brains are embedded. Along those lines, one of the more fascinating predictions of Culture are the additional glands that can be bio-engineered and put under control of the mind. If you could excrete into your own body at will substances that could alter your moods and emotions with precision, why would you waste any time calculating sums, or solving logic puzzles?

Humanity being inevitable, there is something inherently valuable in conscious intelligence. We may still yet be on the road to our own evolutionary destiny but it won't necessarily be the Singularity. Is the fact that we all wear clothing some sort of singularity between ourselves and cotton? Or are we in a singularity with our own microbes? The alternative evolution in all of the interviews was very earth focused, but it is the mind-body conscious intelligence that makes the difference - that is the profundity. But to play a hand in that evolution, as we build AIs like we build houses and other domains and augmentations puts us in control. It will not be until we are capable of transcending our senses that we evolve.

The highlight was the notion that humanity is the epitome because we incorporate that which is advanced in every other species. Respiration is an evolutionary component. The 'miracle' of design is in these components. Vision is an evolutionary component. Hearing, touch, digestion, echolocation. All of these remarkable biological subsystems are what evolution is about. Having redundancies in combination with a broad selection of these subsystems are what makes us dominant. We are accelerating evolution just by eating. We have more of the subsystems, more of the failsafes, that's why we win.

The Logarithmic Shadow

If you've listened to any gangsta rapper for long enough, you know that he will eventually tell you that he could have you killed. Generally, the person who would do the killing would be one of the rapper's former associates, and the price of the deed will be relatively small.

Knowing that there are people who would never kill and that there are others who would kill for cheap, or even free, poses an interesting problem. It is the problem of absolute vs relative value. This is a problem that I have found particularly troublesome in my rise through American society. It cuts several ways.

I characterize this problem as 'the logarithmic shadow', for my lack of the generally accepted term. I observe that people abstract in such a way that small differences are seen as large and large differences are seen as small. The truth of the differences are obscured in shadow, as exemplified by logarithmic scales.

Hacker's 20%
Andrew Hacker, the famous social scientist, took a survey in his book 'Money'. He found that when he asked people of various income levels what their ideal raise would be - a raise they would say could take care of all of their financial needs, the answer was more or less universal. It was 20%. People's expectations are relatively finite.  For the man with $10 shoes, those costing 2 dollars more would be all he desired, but for the man with $200 shoes, he required 40 dollars. 

Look at it the other way. For the man driving a Ford, he would need to get a BMW in order to be complimented. But for the man already driving a BMW, he'd probably need to buy an Aston-Martin to get a similar compliment from his peers. 

The Cocktail Party
A welder is invited to a cocktail party celebrating the opening of the new building he helped construct. He happens to overhear a conversation between an architect and an attorney, both who make a great deal more money. The architect makes an aesthetic statement about the beauty of a particular archway in the lobby of the building. The welder knows that there were many difficult welds used in the steel of that arch. In fact, one of his subordinates injured himself. The attorney takes the architect's statement and elaborates on the beauty. The welder pipes up, smiling with pride, yeah it cost Joe his finger. The conversation halts, abruptly with embarrassment. The subject is changed.

The Cookie vs The Credit Card
A new technology called e-Commerce becomes available so that ordinary people can shop online. In order to accomplish this, a technology called a 'cookie' is stored on the buyer's computer.  It just so happens that a very sophisticated thief can get personal information from you by hacking your computer and accessing this cookie. People are horrified by the possibility. Yet every day these same people speak to travel agents to book their business travel. These travel agents know their favorite airlines, hotels, car rental, and meal preferences. Whenever people go to restaurants, they willingly hand their credit cards over to waitstaff who make much less money.

Flies on the Belly
Marta is a starving sick illiterate child in a poverty stricken country with a population of 2 million.  A healthy altruist comes on television to tell us that for a mere $20 a month, Marta can get food, clothing, shelter and education. Tens of thousands of people respond netting $20 million in contributions. Two years later the same commercial comes on television. Nobody wants to contribute any longer.

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These are all paradoxes of perception. I could probably structure them more properly were I to spend more time, but they all illustrate to me the difference between effort expended and results achieved, between things of equal import that can generate asymmetric reactions. I am coming to understand very specific kinds of flaws in human perception owing to the fact that I have had a career in translating such perceptions into computer aided systems of representation. A precise translation still often yields misinterpretations. People cheat in over- or underemphasis in order to communication something of value.

What is particularly fascinating in all of this to me are the border conditions of perceptual change and the manner in which shifts are communicated. 

Facebook vs Arpanet
The first time I sent an email, I was still in college. It was through a system called DECnet. I was part of a small project, assisted by a guy named Richard Z. White who was working at Raytheon. We established what was then called NSBENET. It worked for a short period of time, then went unused. Even among college engineering students, it was considered geeky and complicated.  A few years later, in 1985 or 86, I began sending email messages in the current way we do, client server store and forward GUI based email. In fact, I wrote back in 1986 how cool it would be if we could have our computers store and forward digitized music. At the time, CDs were first being sold, and I can remember a time when it was almost impossible to get reggae music on Compact Disk. The social context of spending many hours in a week in front of a computer screen was decidedly declasse. Today, a generation of parents who have probably experienced email for the first time in the late 90s are fretful of how many hours their children spend on Facebook.

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This is the cross-fertilized field of cognition, economics and philosophy. It is fascinating to me. One last example.

The Ignored Prospectus 
Ever since 2007 behavioral economics has become a dominant theme in discussions of what's going wrong in the market. People who have relied on the 'efficient market hypothesis' have now been faced with evidence that the invisible hand is a lot more clumsy and slow than they ever thought. That's because people, whose behavior ultimately determines the price of things in the market, often misperceive risk. These aggregate misperceptions establish themselves as market prices which are not efficient and they generate bubbles which certain conditions can conspire to sustain. There is probably no better example than Greenspan's indictment of 'irrational exuberance'. If there is, it's probably 'too big to fail'. Both are examples of unsustainable prices for which 'the efficient' market did not correct precisely because the aggregate perception expressed a desire that was contrary to rationality. In other words, if enough people suspend disbelief, you can sustain castles made of sand longer than rationality dictates and 'efficient' markets are not exempt.

So one of the many studies coming out to explain where we went wrong had very definite conclusions about how people perceive risk. You could draw very specific warnings out in the language of any security for sale, and people will generally ignore those expert warnings in favor of their feelings on the matter. It's rather like a reverse transferrance. No matter how big the warning label, once people have decided to buy, they go with their gut.

--

I expect upcoming books by Taleb and Ariely to aid my consideration at length of how people's cognitive errors manifest themselves with regard to how they take up information. I'm particularly interested in this from the perspective of abstracts of big data. There are many phenomena that we have heretofore been physically unable to probe, owing to the massive amounts of data. As our technical ability increases, and more computer mediated interpretations become the norm, what kinds of cognitive errors will we make?

The NYT's Deal with the Devil

I've been thinking, like everyone else about the implications of Wikileakery. It suddenly occurred to me as I was reading an article in the NYT about details of the purloined letters how hypocritical the Times is. I wonder exactly how they explain themselves.

As a semi-regular listener to Dan Carlin, I know that there was an earthquake in the world of journalism back at the trial of William Kennedy Smith in 1991. You may recall that the star witness against Smith had her face masked by a blue dot to protect her anonymity. Well one day one of the cameras malfunctioned or somehow caused the blue dot to disappear and some enterprising journalist took advantage of the situation and identified the witness. The earthquake happened when other news organizations published the results without independently verifying the identification. They simply cited the enterprising journalist's scoop and published the discovery in their own copy. The story was simply too hot not to, or so they said. According to Carlin, this marked the beginning of the end of journalistic integrity and why most newspapers don't have so much original content. 

I've always noticed the extent to which AP reports have infiltrated the old media. And what ever happened to Reuters and United Press International? Somehow, newspaper staffs have gotten outsourced and a great deal of breaking news comes not as exclusives to newspaper organizations, but from the AP squad. This state of affairs is particularly galling when it comes to the reporting of conflict. There may be onerous burdens placed on journalists reporting embedded with troops, but at least they can be first hand witnesses. When only a few proprietary journalists report for many newspapers through this method of citation, the end result is that a few facts become a lot of editorial spin.

The blogosphere portended to offer the perfect solution from having grown up as nothing but unleveraged individuals doing the talking. Any blogger seeing something at their ground zero could be a credible witness and they wouldn't be subject to the economic pressures of buying stories from news services to compensate for low advertising revenues. It turned out however that bloggers had some of the same lazy tendencies of news organizations, they just cited the words of some other writer without doing independent fact checking. Of course it wasn't the matter of facts or corruption of journalistic integrity that bothered the big newspapers, it was the nerve of these bloggers to take readership away from the old media. Thus a battle was born. 

Today the NYT is not sending its own reporters to embassies all over the world to report on the work and status of American diplomats. It is using the stolen notes provided by Julian Assange's Wikileak organization. This organization has almost instantly acquired the status and standing of Reuters and the Associated Press. Why? Ultimately for the same reason the blogosphere has credibility - it all represents first hand accounts by individual writers at their own ground zeros. But if anybody can claim that their work has been inappropriately cited, surely the prima facia case would be that presented by a diplomat whose cable was stolen by PFC Bradley Manning, the military stool pigeon now in the brig for his heinous operation. 

I'm sure that the New York Times has a sophisticated consequentialist rationale for publishing this stolen property, but there has clearly been an egregious violation of integrity and ethics. I cannot find a way to respect any claims that paper might inveigh against bloggers. 

The Locus of Humanity

Yesterday I found a new open source map website. I love looking at maps and over the past week or so have been eyeballing rivers in Africa and big waterfalls around the globe. This new map program shows something I hadn't seen in many years, the routes of the electric grid. So I followed the Pacific DC Intertie up to its source at the Columbia River at The Dalles. I remembered that Google built a data center up there to be close to abundant hydroelectric generation. 

The northern terminus of the Pacific DC Intertie is a substation called Celilo. It is named after the falls on the Columbia river that were dammed up 50 years ago. There are videos of natives fishing there as a reminder of what went before and has been lost to modern technology. Where there once was a ramshackle array of wooden platforms and nets to allow people to fish there now stands a complex hydroelectric power plant, locks and spillways spanning the Columbia River. What used to feed a village for hundreds of years now provides electric power for millions. Man uses river. 

Without getting deeply into Bentham or Mill, it is a standing axiom that there is something good in the ability for knowledge to be applied in harnessing the powers and bounties of nature for the benefit of mankind. Progress serves humanity. But where is humanity and which humanity should be served? In particular, why should it be considered right and proper to put a fisherman out of business and put a power company in business? I would say that the best use of the river would be the way that was chosen back in the 50s when the project was approved but there is the matter of consent.

Democratic consent is a tricky thing. At the heart of the matter of Julian Assange's assaults on diplomatic secrets is the question of informed consent and the democratic process. It necessarily brings to mind the matter of responsibility and accountability. Whenever the law and the government act to dispossess one party for the sake of another there are critical questions about standing. 

Another way into this comes from Russell Kirk whose, The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky, I have been listening to periodically. Kirk says that there are no such thing as human rights, but that there are only civil rights. This is a very consequential argument and I am tending to agree with him. I will spare you the details of the implications on my thinking, but suffice it to say that it will put me deeper on the side of radicals and undoes some of the foundations of the premises of the Old School. In short, Lincoln gets knocked down a peg and King up, for if there is no comfortable mezzanine of 'human rights', there is no excuse for the suppression of civil rights. Any constitutional republic should spell them all out and guarantee them, period. There is no comfort in being a 'person' who doesn't fully enjoy the full reciprocal diet of rights and responsibilities of the nation. 

Let us then forget for a moment that there are currently maintained by our State Department at least 300 different status codes for foreign nationals who are granted permanent residency in the United States. Let us forget for the sake of argument the millions of illegal aliens protected as persons living in the US. Let's ignore the distinction in this essay between a prisoner of war and an enemy combatant. You are either a full citizen with full civil rights or you are not. You are either equally protected under the law or you are not. Does this black and white distinction appeal to you? If so, you are in the camp with Russell Kirk. It is thus consequentially hairy, then to consider the implications.

It is that hair suit that is itching me as I read through George W. Bush's memoirs. At stake is my reputation and fidelity to the cause of geopolitical neoconservatism. So far, what's likable about Bush among the many things, has little to do with any convincing he might do about the prospects for a philosophically sound foreign policy - but we already knew he depended on the PNACians. Still, if the endgame is, and I hear no one suggesting substantially otherwise, full citizenship in a democracy, neither Bush nor we need to get pedantic about the details. If 'human rights' of African slaves in America could ever be thought to be insufficient. If Reconstruction in America was a 'recognition of human rights' but still not enough, then by that same principle we should seek full and permanent enfranchisement for everyone everywhere. Black and White.

At Cobb, we've been over the matter of Westphalian sovereignty. I'm for it. I'm a nationalist. I'm against one world government. I'm for ethnic diversity. I'm for single national languages. I'm for full and equal citizenship for all with no permanent exceptions. That means no illegal aliens. That mean no Native American homelands. That means loyalty oaths. That means equal protection under the law. And if I had it my way, then there'd be a separate circuit of courts for everyone who is not a citizen. It might even mean conscription, but that's another debate. You might imagine why an American of African and French descent would be so adamant about a single standard of citizenship, given the this nation's history. The subtleties of legal standing are compromises of the American ideal.

This matters most when it comes to the issue of the legitimate use of legal and political power. Without the consent of full citizens, democratic rule is a farce. All good intentions, all brilliant ideas, all matters of fact have no moral force if they are applied without democratic recourse. That's supply without demand. That way lies tyranny. 

So I think of those native fishermen standing on their rickety platforms across the mighty Columbia as I see them woefully presented in the videos about Celilo. I wonder if those who consider their fate with sympathy would grant them sovereignty over the fate of the river on a blood and soil basis, or if they would ask for a democratic show of hands. I think also, by the way, of the ill-fated HavenCo in the Principality of Sealand. The global everything may be in question in these days of economic uncertainty, but the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States provides a standard towards which we have done the good work of liberty. If there is a greater standard somewhere encapsulating and empowering a nation to defend my civil rights, I doubt that I'll find it in the sentiments that would preserve a fish farm in the Pacific Northwest, or in the statement of purpose of Wikileaks. 

Let me remind you:

WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organisation. Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth. We are a young organisation that has grown very quickly, relying on a network of dedicated volunteers around the globe. Since 2007, when the organisation was officially launched, WikiLeaks has worked to report on and publish important information. We also develop and adapt technologies to support these activities.

WikiLeaks has sustained and triumphed against legal and political attacks designed to silence our publishing organisation, our journalists and our anonymous sources. The broader principles on which our work is based are the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to create new history. We derive these principles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In particular, Article 19 inspires the work of our journalists and other volunteers. It states that everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. We agree, and we seek to uphold this and the other Articles of the Declaration.

There is a simple question that must be asked. "You and what army?"

It will not be an army of soldiers, or an army of accounts, lawyers, academics or an army of spies. It will be an army of all of those and more supported by millions of people. That will comprise the necessary defense needed to maintain in the face of the collection of nations Assange has sought to embarrass and undermine. So it begins. 

I'm prepared to call this Chapter Two in the ongoing drama awaiting the fate of the nation state. It comes at a time when economists are debating and governments in Europe are in the midst of a great crisis determining whether or not international unions can long endure. The odds are in favor of the nations, although it seemed a lot less clear on September Eleventh, Chapter One. Non-state actors may give us iPads or IEDs or state secrets. These things may portend to change the world, but do they really and are we really so loyal to those who produce them?

There are multinational corporations, there are NGOs, there is the World Court and there is the UN. There are all sorts of globalist enterprises. There are even things called Universities who have for centuries educated people from all over the planet and been the source of learning. But these are not things men have defended by their sacred honor and with their lives as home. This they have done for God, King or Country, usually requiring at least two out of the three. 

In matters of international diplomacy, there's more at stake than fish and electricity. Any man who plays at this level needs to be prepared to die. When you say you're speaking for humanity, it's an awfully tall order. It helps if you have been democratically elected by full citizens. I believe that it's going to continue to be that way for at least two centuries to come. 

Spinoza

I have been unable to sleep lately. For one thing I've been staying up late and waking up later and extending a cycle of madness. For another I just got rid of a bad tooth after a weekend of suffering. So in a bold attempt to get some sleep, I decided to put on the most boring podcast I could think of. I made a mistake and put on Will Durant.

Will Durant is one of those names from my childhood that used to arise whenever people asked who was the smartest man in the world. Aside from the typical answer of Einstein, people used to say it was Bertrand Russell who was such a super-genius that took a genius to appreciate him. It seemed that only Will Durant was smart enough to understand Russell, whereas once the bomb was built anybody could steal the blueprints. But I've already talked about information thermodynamics...

So I put on the podcast and this time, unlike the last time I had insomnia, I actually absorbed a bit of it. And so decided to play it during the daytime as well. So now I know what the big deal about Spinoza is, and I am happy to say that I have found in Spinoza's remarks, precisely some of the same troubles I've had with lesser forms of Christianity. 

I'll boil it down thusly. If you are like me, then you simply refuse to gamble that there is no possibility for the existence of God. To put it simply God's mind is the Universe. God's law is physics. God's name is Pi. Or maybe e. Or better yet, e to the power of pi.  People struggle mightily to understand the universe, and the lazy people think such knowledge will be Revealed, in the meantime industrious people are figuring it out. It's not wrong to have faith, but the real value of faith is not found in its ability to explain the working of the world. Spinoza recognizes as do I, the false dichotomy between the natural world and God's miracles and explains religious dogma as the dumbed down version of communicating the nature of things to lazy or otherwise non-brilliant people. If God created everything, why would he need to suspend the rules of nature in order to make himself known? 'He' doesn't and he wouldn't. It's just superstition maintained for the interventions of religion. Something lazy thinkers need to believe.

There are a great number of other quotations I have forgotten, but that one is a stunner I have long believed myself, without of course, the ability to put it concisely before my encounter with Spinoza. 

Who Would Call It Genocide?

If Spence were over here on a regular basis, I'd have to ask him what he knows about research done on family formation. I imagine that's what the academics would call it - but Freakonomically - how do people hook up? What is the mating ritual? What are the expectations of sex and consequences? 

I've had a feudal streak running through my attitudes for several years for a number of reasons. One of them is that I expect to learn from the narratives of kings and royalty. It's a constant through a great deal of recorded human history, and unlike the more modern Materialism, it puts more onus on the head of the monarch. Shakespeare's tragedies are great because of what happens to individuals, not what happens to societies. They are thus instructive to individuals. My interpretation of my American heritage is that I get to be an individual, a king perhaps. So I treat my family as royalty and retain a code of honor for it as well as seek to establish relations and politics through it as a king would. I would sooner marry off a daughter to a more powerful king than have her obtain a scholarship from the government, if you can catch that drift. 

So my obtuse curiosity today goes into this controversial direction which evoke questions of chastity belts and betrothals in the context of modern arrangements which might fall under the heading of 'black culture'. My reaction is that there's a population out there that does not, but desperately needs to think of itself in royal terms, and the large number of them that are failing are piling up the abortion statistic.  Now let me come at it from the positive angle.

Yesterday as I left the house Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up" in my head. I imagined in my bio-pic that there must be a scene of me learning to master the Cha-Cha to this song. The Cha-Cha is, was and will always be to my generation of black Americans a bourgie signifier of momentous import. When I think about my close friends from high school, it was something we all pretty much shared in common. We were generally from the black upper classes and when we went to party, we showed up to do this sophisticated dance to those songs for which it was appropriate. A Soul Train line was not out of the question, but it tended to be more vulgar. Straight out Pop-Locking and doing the Robot was declasse. Cool, but too much enthusiasm for such ostentation was frowned upon. Besides, it was for show-offs and the ladies didn't particularly like to get 'turned out' on the dance floor. I could unpack all of this inside baseball terminology at some later date. The point is that the Cha-Cha, not to be confused with today's vulger Cha-Cha Slide, the black equivalent of Country line dancing and heir to the disco era Hustle, was the dance for ladies and gentlemen of suave black sophistication. 

Whiteboys don't dance.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm a great sociologist here, which is why I would need somebody like Spence to fill in the blanks of what I understand implicitly about the difference between socialization rituals. The tangents of those rituals, vis a vis, what is called 'dating' and what the expectations are for meeting families, pre-marital and other sexual rules all add up to something. And while I'm not obsessed with what people do, Cobb's Rule #2 is There is Marriage and there is everything else and everything else doesn't count. I'm coming from a social context in which fidelity, chastity and modesty are prized. I'm not saying all those dudes in the big afros and polyester bellbottoms getting funky on that Soul Train line are all pimps, but I wouldn't be far off in suggesting that there's a popular pimp thread in some of today's black American music. It's correlated. And the countercultural revolution is correlated. And the sexual revolution is correlated. And all of these peasant rebellions from the chivalrous codes of the Old School are feeding those abortions. As I said, my parents and my aunts and uncles were not born in hospitals. They were born at home by midwives and relatives. That entire culture is lost - dead, gone, in one generation. Black Americans didn't used to go to hospitals for that industry now called Ob-Gyn. Now there are evident unborn millions that go in but don't come out.

In 1976 we had dancing as teens. We had not only the Cha-Cha, but slow dancing - a way to exercise some intimacy in public, to get that sliver of sexual satisfaction which is about all a modest teen can handle out there in the cultural center of gravity called the dance floor. A vertical grind was about as far as you could push the social envelope, and that was good. Kids today get blowjobs in bathrooms and can legally get all sorts of sexual swag without parental consent. Not that it didn't happen then, but it's a far, far more permissive and sexually explicit society now than it was back then. And so I wondered yesterday, listening to Marvin Gaye, wouldn't it be better if kids today could slow dance in confidence. 

There is, hidden in that simple statistic, no clue as to whether that abortion figure is going up or down. It's all too aggregated for nuance. But maybe that's the stark way we ought to look at this problem. It's not all vague and iffy like global warming. It's not subject to legal and economic chicanery like collateralized debt obligations and deficit spending. It's something families can, should and do control. 

As part of the Old School, one of the things I have learned is the limited extent of my ambit. The dangerous ambitions of the Talented Tenth and their race raising aims resulted in any number of foolish ideas being taken for granted, one being that the upper middle class could make the poor into the middle class. Another is the kind of behavioral attitude I myself employ in essays such as this when I'm not expert at all. But I've been conditioned to care and to think my small efforts can contribute to a greater understanding which leveraged by political unity can result in Progressive policy. I know better than to expect truly progressive results from such a process, but the habit dies hard, and the caring has not been sublimed. The bare fact remains out there. There are 13 millions more who might have made a proper difference. How have we gotten so pathologically Malthusian?

The Last Black Economist

As we all learned several years ago to great fanfare, there's a dude named Roland Fryer over at Harvard teaching Economics. He collaborated with the Freakonomists, Levitt and Dubner and made quite a name for himself. Isn't it a wonder that we haven't heard much of him lately, or are we just watching the stupid channels?

I was just rolling back in some of the blog and found a couple posts that mention him. But it was this one in particular that leads me to think that maybe his current is the last project dealing with race he'll take on that gets any traction. He has an attractive and impressive site over at Harvard and has picked some Progressive subjects that cover a variety of hot topics. With any luck, we should learn some interesting new correlations, but I think the chances for that are slim. What I think is really going on is another generation of institutional patronage. 

In The Black Endgame I wrote:

What is the black endgame? At what point does one reach zero marginal utility for blackness? At what point in American history will the need for black politics be obviated? When do African Americans drop the hyphenation?

As some inveterate readers of Cobb know, I have written essays every 5 or so years going back to 1984 entitled 'The End of My Blackness'. And each time I surpass what I thought was black, I find a new reason to reinvest. That's just me, but it's clear that some folks, like Ward Connorly for gratuitous example, have stopped reinvesting. I think the answers to these questions will come all in individual packages - there is no one answer for the nation, but that blackness will fade slowly into distant memory like the sound of a dime going down into a pay phone. People will still talk about 'dropping a dime', but nobody will do that literal thing. People will still talk about 'black community' but it won't exist.

And now Fryer is picking up several blackish subjects. Here's one:

Too many low-income and minority students attend schools that are underperforming. They often have an all or nothing view of success: their typical role models are celebrities or the adults in their community, thus the link between academic success and future opportunities either doesn't exist or "isn't for them". 

We need a cultural movement that makes academic achievment something every student believes that he or she cannot live without. 

It's interesting the extent to which Fryer's experiments rely on cold hard cash as an incentive. And one has to believe that without his particular input these four programs, in Chicago, DC and NYC simply would not exist. He has insured that there will be money for good grades in middle schools. He's eyeballing the center of gravity and I think his weighing will be very precise. The bottom line is that he will do one of the things that I do with my kids, and one of those things that when I was a kid, I wanted - which was bonus money for good report cards. It's an old middle class idea that millions of families have done and continue to do, but now it's institutionalized through Harvard and Fryer. But how long will the subsidy last?

Presumably once the study has been done and some success has been achieved, there will be proof positive that you can, for lack of a better term, purchase good grades for inner-city kids. Of course it would be done not through parenting but through enrollment in a program administered by a progressive political machine. I wonder if in fact this can actually work. Not just now, but later. You see, my conservative knee is reacting against the proposition that governments can do this, but I'm also assuming that Harvard can, but can they? In fact, can anyone and does it actually work? I mean let's take the stereotype in the other direction shall we?

How effective is a trust fund in establishing academic achievement? How effective is any benchmark used in judging the improvement of poor underachievers as compared to that with rich underachievers? In other words, isn't injecting capital into the education of youth merely buying grade inflation? Were the WASP elites of the bad old days really all that smart, or did they just execute passable academic achievement? When we look at standardized test scores, we're all fairly certain that the highest correlation to high scores is with family income, neh? So what are we actually subsidizing here? Academic bling? Isn't that what an Ivy League legacy is? 

I may be a little oversensitive, as the Statistical Morality posts below will show, to those dialogs that engage black Americans through statistical abstractions. Nevertheless, this is certainly a mainstream activity and where would Andrew Hacker be if it wasn't? Where indeed will any economists of race be when the premises of racial equality are finally taken seriously? If we know and accept that genetics means very little and that development and economics means everything else, then we will finally see that this is a cultural and environmental problem and not a moral problem revolving around racism of any kind. That is the breakthrough that Fryer just might provide, and if so, he'll be the last of his kind.

More on Fryer:

• The Future Black Intelligencia
• Acting White, Acting Not
• Black Cultural Transparency: Part 7 
• Statistical Morality: The Logic of Life
• Stats and Morals
• More Statistical Morality
• Poppa Was A Rolling Stone

 

Subrealism & The Substance of Black Cultural Identity

For a number of reasons too numerous, complex and inconsistent to state, I put up with the antics, insights, flippancy, and vituperation, of the occasionally brilliant, constantly cryptic, usefully pessimistic and caustically biting wit of Craig Nulan, aka Xavier Hesychastic Moon the Subrealist. If he didn't exist, I would have to invent him. He is often Moriarty to my Holmes, which to say a challenging fiend whom I believe is genrally wrong and not often a pleasure to deal with. Every once in a while he says something obscenely crude which makes me wonder why I ever put up with him. Every other once in a blue moon he says something the borders on sheer enlightenment which cements the twisted bond we've shared as black cultural critics for nearly a decade online. 

Just the other day he said something of the first sort, and I considered devoweling his comment, it just so happened that I got called off in the middle of doing so, and in the end let the matter slide. But now I need a bit of a refresher to re-adjust my assessment of the relationship. In other words, Craig sweeheart, we need to talk. And of course all others are invited to this retrospective and intervention. 

The last time I went down this alley was three years ago. It pretty much boiled down to the following:

Me:
I think that blacks have a responsibility to conserve the best of our culture independent of politics. I must confess that when it comes to matters Nulan characterizes as the interpersonal communinion, I find that as a compelling argument primarily in the context of culture. That is to say that I think there's a jazz call and response requirement of soul.

Him:
That's EXACTLY the trifling underestimation of the psychological adaptation called Blackness that got the collective membership of the afrofuturist list slapped around for weeks on end, i.e., when you were loving my ruthless dissection of Blackness as a psychological garment. To see you here and now publicly donning this tawdry drag is profoundly disappointing..., try to get with some of MLK's post assimilationist truth!!!

In short, Nulan wants to make a political dollar out of a cultural 15 cents through the bank of King. I'm not invested. 

Here's what I suspect. That having represented myself as a black cultural critic, or black at all, that I am subject to an Intellectual One Drop Rule which I do not respect. It is a subject upon which Nulan declined to speak. In that regard, I am suspected intellectually and personally of being something akin to a traitor. I would actually much rather be considered a heretic, because in the end, blackness is a matter of faith whose orthodoxy is incomplete and always undergoing change. My refusal to update my version of blackness is problematic. Not for me, for 'them'.

I am not really interested in updating or changing, and I'm not sure that I care to explain myself any more than I do, but since I know CNu updates his critique of me periodically, I am willing to discuss the implications of his most recent rumbling. I do so with the bold presumption that over time the difference between his worldview and mine might prove of some use to those curious about where 'black thought' is going, if I could presume to call any of this 'black thought' other than as a convenient tag and mnemonic.  

Here's the thing and backdrop. Nulan percieves that the great American experiment is about to go belly up. As an Eastern Orthodox Christian in tune with a sort of meditation which cannot be easily witnessed or explained around these parts, he is highly frustrated with the ethics of American life. If there is one way to see CNu, it is rather like the protagonist of Somerset Maugham's 'The Razor's Edge'. He's sick to death of the fatuity of American class-ness, and he sees it riven with the sort of corruption that requires purging by fire. Only he believes the fire will spontaneously erupt, so he's actually not the other sort of revolutionary. In other words, he's a doomday prophet and every day we don't burn, he's a scolding misanthrope. Except that he comes from the ranks of the oppressed and in his own self-actualization realized a better way, and latent in the souls of black folk are the tools and embodiment of the only hopeful future we might possibly have. 

Every day he looks at me and my writing he feels the pang of betrayal of a similar soul who has decided to keep hope in Western Civilization alive, and worse yet, I do so without being subversive with the nerve to suggest my investment of self-actualization be branded under the red white and blue - the banner of the winged monkeys since 1776 and before. And worse yet, I do so in the company of a class of morons who have no such deeper aims or understandings. So he sees my patriotism as false. It is either false in the hopeful way of perfidy that under the right circumstances I will abandon with alacrity. Or it is false in the hopeless way of brown nosing a class of vermin I have decided to naively entrust with my loyalty. So he keeps me at arms distance until the real truth of me is revealed, slapping me as Moe slaps Curly on a daily basis. Like Curly, most of the time I'm immune, but every once in a while, he says 'Niagara Falls'.  

In one way, I feel fortunate to have someone who cares enough to give my writings contrast, and I am indebted to Mr. Nulan for his attention. In another way it is very much like a bad marriage and I do so want to run off to Bangkok and forget I ever knew him. But since I've never met the man in person, I don't really have an emotional investment at all - which is why I take the time to put all of this in the context of something we have both cared about from varying perspectives and in varying degrees which is The Substance of Black Cultural Identity.

Before I get into that, I need to get at the thing that annoys me most about his most recent references to Niagara Falls (and for those benighted few who don't know, the phrase 'Niagara Falls' was to Curly of the Three Stooges like a call to his subconscious unleashing his id. It released his beast.)

Nulan has taken in recent months a second prong of a two prong attack which falls more heavily on his assumption of a hopeless patriotism. And so this is, I presume, the basis of his whinging, bleating and blathering on about the 'knuckledraggers' of the Tea Party and his misguided broadsides against proper Conservatism. It is not clear to me exactly how misanthropic Nulan is, but he clearly gives no quarter to the rank and file of the GOP and suggests a very strong correlation between them, white supremacy, errant capitalism, and other sorts of devil worship. So here I stand, a not insignificantly gifted blogger, on the side of what is in his eyes a clear and present danger to the soul of mankind. And I actually forgive those people. So he must exert what pressure he can and call me both 'anti-black' and all that implies on the first prong, and now as defenders of the faithless, idiot whiteboys and their great soul-killing manipulations, worse yet with some of the same slogans that Fox uses.

Anyway, that's what I think he sees, and he's wrong, but I can live with that uncorrected so long as he doesn't get on my last freaking nerve. Except that occasionally he does. 

And so since it's not all about me, I turn to the substance of black cultural identity, which I think having been given a good airing will deflect me from having to ban Nulan for his ad-hominem screeds and glib derailments of otherwise interesting threads.

It should be said that nothing I say with regard to black cultural identity should be considered outside of the scope of my evolving Peasant Theory. If you buy into the idea of native alienation, then black Americans, as the first true post-modern people are only particular and key in exemplifying the universal truth That truth is that as human society advances, those in power become more and more able to promise and deliver greater prizes for the souls of the civilizationally indigent - aka people who have not yet achieved the status of free men of means. The enticements to peasants should be evaluated as should all such social contracts. That provided by MLK and all others mentioned with him in mind are only Constitutional. I defend that as a patriot, but as a human being who doesn't wish to be considered a peasant, I know better. 

What arrangements can black cultural identity make that might be more rewarding than that offered to any and all American peasants? And so why should patriotism be different for anyone? Indeed if America is the superpower and defacto empire of the planet, why should any patriotism be different than American patriotism? Why should anyone want to live under any other sort of rule, and then finally why bother with a racial or cultural nationalist distinction?

The Naked Lady

I broke a promise inadvertently and then somewhat purposefully. I watched an HBO show. This one stars Steve Buscemi and is full of topless women, sadistic cops and sleazy situations. One scene stands out in my mind this morning.

Jean Jacques Rousseau is a foil for my conservatism, as he stands for the more ugly end of revolution, that which is arbitrarily against human institutions in and of themselves. The romance of Rousseau is about the natural beauty of the unadorned human spirit. This morning over at First Things, RR Reno writes of Rousseau:

Here, I think, we approach deepest appeal of the bohemian mystique. Because Rousseau shamelessly reveals his sometimes “vile and despicable” actions, he shows himself to be just that: shame-less, a person free from psychological bondage to the oppressive and corrupting judgments of others. This tell-all freedom functions as a peculiarly modern form of innocence. 

Or at least it functions as a gambit to gain the moral authority of innocence, which involves invulnerability to judgment—and to do so without having to be innocent. If I write a memoir that recounts my romances with transgression in the spirit of proud announcement rather than regret, I’m demonstrating my psychological independence from social norms. I’m outwitting the judgments of others by defiantly announcing my own failures.

There was a scene in the episode of the HBO show that I was watching in which a gangster's moll is trying out new clothes. She stands naked in the mirror as an immigrant woman, newly hired, attends her. This was one of many scenes in which the characters linger overlong in what generally passes quickly in your standard vulgar entertainment. It suddenly appeared to me that the length of the scenes are an invitation for the audience to become that person for that moment which doesn't exist for any other purpose than to embody the basic titillation. 

What you can see in this still I was able to capture is the haughty attitude the woman has towards her servant. What can only be seen by watching the episode is the scene in which the moll holds her hands above her head fully naked as the servant stoops at her feet and pulls up a camisole, head bent down in shame at the crotch level of an utterly shameless woman. 

Nudity means one thing in private with oneself, another in private with a loved one. But what about nudity in front of an one considered inferior? It is a striking moment of powerful filmmaking to stage such a scene and to evoke the absolute power of one over another. It is a moment of contempt that the audience is invited to savor and one of those commodifying images of women that I find so subversive of our dignity. It is the reason I shield myself from HBO as they move their dramatic series from corruption to corruption according to their tried and true formula - the challenged kingpin surrounded by crime and perversion. This time, Atlantic City during Prohibition. 

The characters of the HBO dramatic series are all shameless and innocent by our standards. We in the audience are to understand that they live in a distant and dangerous world in which survival depends on doing dirt. There are no options for their dignity. And so we can manage to ingest all of the 'adult' situations for which their TV-MA ratings are well deserved.  All the main characters suffer little from the misery of their predicaments except for the protagonist, who must be ruthless and sensitive at once. It is by drawing attention to the existential suffering of the protagonist that these shows manage to keep the attention in the more lurid offerings. For example, there is not only the haughty nude, but there is a brutal interrogation, a gruesome surgical procedure and a scene showing the results of a lynching. 

How this has become an entertainment may or may not speak to a problem afflicting America in general. America is not necessarily in tune with HBO. But I think it's a fair assessment of the attraction to the bohemian - the romance to be had with those who are quick to flaunt social convention, and more particularly the emotion of shame. This is the creation of Hollywood that wins awards year after year, and speaks loudly about the tastes of its critical profession. 

It is my hope that this thread of shamelessness will be one of the many that may seem too big to fail at the moment but will eventually collapse. Yet we have seemingly done a good job in preparing a generation to consume that which now commonly goes by the acronym NSFW - not safe for work. There is no irony in that acronym, celebration of the bohemian is antithetical to productive work. When our need to work, which must be invested with meaning and dignity is sufficient, then we will avoid such corruptions, and with any luck we'll see back to Rousseau and find little to admire in the implications of his dirty romance.

Brilliant Corners

Take 24.

I thought this might be a nice complement to 'Facts Are Stupid Things'.

A Look At Women, Family & Nation

Kali Tal was the first intellect online who grasped my attention and reached out to me personally when I was looking at the intersection of race, identity and cyber presence. I have since discussed any number of subject tangential to identity and the metaphysics of online discourse with her. I have always found her to be a good sounding board and sometimes bullseye for that path which I estimate I might have taken were I convinced that our future is best defined by the Progressive politics. In that, we share a classic liberal optimism for objective investigation of what's wrong and scientific discipline in determining how best to solve problems in society. More importantly we share a skepticism of wishful thinking and deceptive populism that informs most of the talking points of America political debate. I welcome her here to Cobb to discuss at some length the issues that face America with regard to its ideas about women, sexuality, the family, marriage how that coalesces into something beyond common sense in our culture and politics.

I started this debate, which I now hope to rescue from the format and control of Facebook, with a pique about the apparent defection of Rebecca Walker from the anti-family provocations of her famous and feminist mother Alice Walker. The younger Walker, a (former?) lesbian mother living with the father of her young son, rejoices in the joys of motherhood much to the dismay and consternation of the elder who refuses to speak to her daughter or even see her now five year old grandchild. Rebecca now stands in rebuke to that which has passed as good advice to women to which I say bravo. 

My fundamental issue is with a raft of ideas which could roughly be called feminist that have arisen to redefine what a family unit is or should be. This arises out of my long standing rejection of the counter-cultural aspects of 'The Sixties' which have been, irrevocably it seems, linked to the liberation of 'people of color', the Civil Rights Movement and the general idea of liberty and progress. I stand with a varied body of critics on the Right who take issues and potshots from the deep trenches of the Culture Wars initiated in the mid 80s around the same time as the term 'African-American' was born and the inception of multiculturalism. 

I find an irascible fetishistic regard for 'difference' as yet another symptom of shallow identity politics and an ever-broadening definition of 'rights' which have no right being called rights, but are ultimately anti-social privileges being demanded by a movement that seeks to dominate moral discourse and quell dissent. I see this as part an parcel of an insatiable demand for all the 'progress' social scientists can promise at a pace which is unsustainable and destabilizing to American society. There is no better example of this than the unequivocal demand for the redefinition of marriage consequent with the rejection of civil union and the utter contempt with which religious traditions are held who seek to protect their own ways. But while that matter boils on the front burner, what has been baking for years are deeper questions about the American family and what our nation (of laws) and society (of men) can and should do to protect and sustain it. 

My critical stance which I am perfectly comfortable as calling 'conservative' or 'Right' is only informed by not defined by those schools of thought. I am not out to bash what's new, I'm oriented towards saving what's true. It must be said that my livelihood exists in an industry that didn't when I was born - there are few things more progressive than the IT business which is constantly suffused with change. But in this as in any human endeavor there are principles which are as immutable as the function of human organs - which is to say, they simply don't evolve on any timescale our politics and thinking might like them to. Just as  010 + 010 = 100 (in binary), the stomach will digest what it can. As much as we'd all like to end world hunger and thirst, we cannot eat wood and we cannot drink seawater. And so there is a finite limit to useful human behavior much experimentation with which is a waste of time, sometimes deceptive and often a distraction from what is true and ought to be.

I am fatigued of the noisome politics associated with the tinkering of gender and identity and family which have suffused American life, not only because it is vapid and vulgar but because so much of it is just wrong. Nuff said. Kali and I and you will engage on a mission to give some insight into how much fiddling we ought to afford and what might be the consequences of such messing about.

--

I'll start with my essential premise which is that for the majority of human history such as I can gauge it, we have been ruled by kings and tribal chiefs and that our ideas about honor and dignity flow from such feudal arrangements. I believe that there is something fundamental and hardwired in human circuitry to give us such ideas as 'honor thy father and mother'. I want, of necessity, to keep in mind the permanence of human conflict - of war - and of the ways and means humans employ to survive instinctively and to maintain their populations in hard times. I think we have the frivolous desire to define ourselves into arbitrary social arrangements that cannot and will not survive human conflict and that these desires fuel the raisons d'etre of today's social fiddlers. Instead, we should reform our society in such ways as it remains fundamentally robust in the ways and means that have gotten us from pre-history to now and that the overwhelming majority of us remain politically and socially invested in these tried and true conventions. I assert that without commitment to conformity all of our experimentation, all of our liberty, all of our tolerance comes to naught. 

Good Mom, Bad Mom: Rebecca Walker Speaks Truth to Feminist Power

Rebecca Walker is in the news again. Why? Because she's more normal than her famous mother, and now she's dredging up the awful truth.

I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son  -  her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.

Well, so be it. My mother may be revered by women around the world  -  goodness knows, many even have shrines to her. But I honestly believe it's time to puncture the myth and to reveal what life was really like to grow up as a child of the feminist revolution.

I couldn't predict at the time that the battle would get to be such a heated one. But I did see that Rebecca Walker was heading to directly contradict a lot of what passes for feminist wisdom a few years ago when I was working in Philadelphia. Back then I wrote:

Walker's audience was largely comprised of women who have not suffered through the cleansing agony of childbirth, and one could sense their conflict and ambivalence from a distance. Walker is a master of talking to them straight and guiding them gently. She's got a writer's honesty and self-knowledge. As I surfed her website and perused her bio, I found she's got much experience talking to young folks such as these.

There is genuine confusion and empathy. A thousand conversations that cannot occur in bars await the patient author on book tours. I could feel the tender tendrils extending as each young person walked up to the table after the talk. With one in particular whom I seem to recall in a denim skirt, the two women reminded me of my own two daughters whispering to each other. Oh how women talk. And where else could they go but to each other?

They can come to me, because in the end, big brother that I am, I spent most of the evening acquainting myself with a universalized version of this ritual. How can I protect this, I kept asking myself. How can I keep this part of society working? How can I recognize this from the fraud of eclexia? Walker invoked he who is Chesterton in my mind when she expressed that family works and has worked for hundreds and thousands of years, and 'we' shouldn't be so quick to dismiss its value. She recognizes what era she's living in, and said that those are dangerous words in some quarters. I imagine she would know that very well.

Well now it's clear that Rebecca Walker is one of us. She has, through her own experience as a mother, found the true meaning of life by creating life and protecting life. I'm going to keep her in mind more and more knowing that she has joined the battle. And in case you decide not to read the full piece that I linked to, let me give you a small piece that makes it all very clear.

A good mother is attentive, sets boundaries and makes the world safe for her child. But my mother did none of those things.

Although I was on the Pill  -  something I had arranged at 13, visiting the doctor with my best friend  -  I fell pregnant at 14. I organised an abortion myself. Now I shudder at the memory. I was only a little girl. I don't remember my mother being shocked or upset. She tried to be supportive, accompanying me with her boyfriend.

Although I believe that an abortion was the right decision for me then, the aftermath haunted me for decades. It ate away at my self-confidence and, until I had Tenzin, I was terrified that I'd never be able to have a baby because of what I had done to the child I had destroyed. For feminists to say that abortion carries no consequences is simply wrong.

Well. Not much ambiguity there. I was just writing about the Peasant Box. Another reason I am conservative has to do with my rejection of the counter-cultural movement that was baked into the narrative of The Sixties. It continues to be assumed, quite falsely, that black Americans wanted hippie, pacifist, sexual revolution as part and parcel of the defense of their Civil Rights. That to be black was to be against the War in Vietnam, and everything white parents appeared to be to their idiot baby boom children. It was that reactionary rebellion that made stars of people like Alice Walker and others who were part of Black Radical Chic. And to this day 'black culture' continues to be a foil for a 'white culture' meaning two parent families, marriage and a lack of radical politics.

The myth continues, but Rebecca Walker is not pretending and playing nice any longer. Good.

Claire Berlinski

Since life is not fair and one cannot become un-famous, unless I suppose one is a victim of a Communist purge, Claire Berlinski will likely live in the shadows of Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter for the foreseeable future. That is, for the public mind. For me however, I have just been astonished to find her - another of the insightful writers at the Manhattan Institute.

She is genuinely of polymathic interest, one of the sorts of individuals I'm sure Gerard Vanderluen had in mind when he took it upon himself to found the Right Network, that thing coming to fruition that appeals to the Right American on more than just a urgent level. Nobody whose company I particularly enjoy is a huge fan of Rush Limbaugh, and for a certain uninitiated segment of the Polloi, there are perhaps six poles of conservative thought, three of whom I've already mentioned, the other three being Beck, Palin and Bush. But they forget the think tanks and serious policy wonks, and those that remember tend to forget that my favorite is Manhattan.

Well, now we add Berlinski. And she writes spy novels too!

So here, I reiterate the great gaping hole in Left thought that leaves them oblivious to the brain-dead obvious reason for my abandonment of Progressivism. Stalin. But I know the name doesn't quite resonate and more than a few Americans are guilty of oblivion. Berlinski sees deeper into this dilemma.

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.

I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to get Google Alerts to find much, though I want to set it up to poke me when 'Pavel Stroilov' crosses its radar. It seems to me that it would be a no-brainer to get the right grant money to have this stuff translated if only for the probability that Condi will get her hands on it and add insight.

Martin Amis, it is rumored, is likely to ditch England to live over here in the States, and so we can expect him to do something altogether proper to alert us to what we've forgotten. One might hope that he can become our equivalent of Rudyard Kipling and bring the message of the appropriate Empire back into our conciousness.

In the meantime, Berlinski gets it in dimensions and flavors that awaken the senses without being so dour and sarcastic as the still funny Mark Steyn. As you can see, I like the literate sophisticates to illustrate the bad ideas against which we properly rail. Welcome Claire.

Seed Vs Feed

In 'The Diamond Age', what is made clear is that the advance of technology, even to ends that appear miraculous, matters of culture still matter. Everything remains earthbound and there is not a post-scarcity scenario in action. Contrast this with Banks' Culture. At the human scale, entire solar systems may be post-scarcity and the only limits lie in the realm of the laws of physics at the galactic level - computability speed, mass and energy conversion are supreme but the human body does not bear any of those burdens, thus human culture needs few restraints on behavior. The conflict between civilizations at the planetary scale in Banks' Culture may be dramatic, but only for their impact on the galaxy. With Stephenson, they are everything and so culturally specific transcendent values take center stage.

In a key passage, the great Confucian mandarin in the book sums up China's encounter with the West. It resonates with certain things Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in one of his books about the nature of Chinese self-dependency in the culture of rice. The Mandarin says that technology is *yong*, an outer manifestation of an inner force, the *ti*. Chinese adaptation of Western technology never worked - it sowed chaos - because Western technology was an expression of a cultural property, cleverness for its own sake, that was alien to the Chinese way. The value of planting rice and working hard and reaping those rewards were so deeply ingrained, that when the technology arrived (in Stephenson's future) of what essentially was a Star Trek replicator for rice, it destroyed the Chinese balance. What they call Filial Piety became threatened, thus the need for the Confucian to seek The Seed.

The Western technology established that which we today essentially call The Grid. It is an infrastructure of service, hierarchically organized and controlled that distributes the stuff of life. You could get most everything, but so long as you were hooked up to The Feed, the authorities knew what you were getting. In this world, only the elite few had access to the resources of The Feed without oversight. The implication in such a hierarchy is as we expect, an aristocracy of merit. Nobody with enough money and brains to build something like an aircraft carrier would do so to the detriment of society - it wouldn't be in their interest to subvert.

The unfulfilled possibility of The Seed in such a world is that any individual would be able, independently of The Feed, be able to grow whatever it was they wanted instead of depending upon the metered and monitored energy from society's grid. This would be a technology matching the Chinese *ti* of growing rice. Any peasant could build nukes if they wanted. Such an idea threatens the Western Feed idea because there is not perceived a benefit of doing things the old-fashioned way if there is a more clever and easy way of accomplishing the same end. With value attached to the hierarchy of society, the Western individual is radically 'free' at the lower socioeconomic level with relatively little diminishment. That freedom comes at a price, he needn't conform his behavior to those of the elite, and therefore must balance his freedom against the conforming aspects of power. Even individuals who bring their own regimes into power ebb and flow taking the entire society in different directions.  The Chinese in contrast must bear his full dignity independent of his standing in society. He grows his rice, he is a full man. Society doesn't change from the bottom up, because there is relatively little power inheritable to the common man. A newer way to grow rice is not a potential revolution in China as it would be here. They are not all seeking to be clever, but to measure themselves to the discipline. Don't show off your Kung Fu. 

This vein is rich.

As the Subrealist often intones like John the Baptist, American society is threatened by any number of catastrophic scenarios that portend to leave us in that well-understood trope of Zombieland. If the electric grid fails, if the oil stops flowing, if the unemployment rate goes about 20%, Americans will lose what little civility they have and Bedlam erupts. I sense something different within my extended association with a different sort of American, in spirit if not in person, which has its analog in the Chinese *ti*. I've called that aspect of my own character many different things, primarily 'organic', and it remains expressed in the Gadsden Flag on my blog. It is that value I place in a kind of yeoman farmer, hunting lodge by the lake, 'howdy' speaking on the John Muir Trail sensibility. It's what I feel like when I put on my red plaid, my Keens and carry a cigar torch, LED flashlite and CRKT M16-13Z in my cargo shorts. It is also expressed in my philosophical explorations here, as I have never been content to be a mere political consumer but have sought to reconcile public debate with first principles. I want a perspective on the world that survives off the grid, it is part of my true education, not just that which conforms me to What's Happening Now. This is one of the reasons I get so aggravated when I am accused of attempting to fit in with bohunkery when I defend the autonomy of the Tea Party (now the latest craze of the con-Cobbian). You may need to recall that my family holds property in South Dakota, where my mother now lives. That's about the establishment of my blood in American soil, not kissing Palin's ring. 

I appreciate the possibilities enabled by Dyson's Utopia, and I would like very much to see some decentralization of power, especially away from the American government, lest it become too much like France - with an implacable Feed of union graft and entitlement. My dreams tend towards the outline of making software millions and taking it to buy land and learning to live off that land without abandoning the sophistication of Western *ti*, the inheritance of my cosmopolitan roots. So my generation and that of my children is aimed at the transition from urban peasantry and the semiotic swamp to the undeniable reality of exurban self-sufficiency, or at least some shabby form of gentry.

Part and parcel of this growth is a continuous sort of hacking, of getting behind the curtains of that which is presented for the empty vessel of the urban peasant. Making my mind immune to the seductions of mass marketing, mass politics, mass spirituality, mass morality and the economic enticements made to the proletariat. This is about determining the costs of independence and weighing the value of being king of a small hill to being a prince at a higher elevation of a mountain on which you have no claim. 

I expect history to be my guide with the explicit understanding that by way of merit, I might inherit, and that by way of skill, I might find fellows of like mind. That somewhere in history is a model I may better appreciate. What is clear to me is that agitation by the masses to secure an ever higher quality of Feed is, in the end, voluntary slavery. It is in this way of thinking that I am convinced that there are few differences between a safety net and a fishing net. 

And so I have come around to this. 

If the politics of the American future are of the same basic principles of the current neo-liberal social democracy, than it will be for the permanent establishment of The Feed. And in that are dangerous aspects of a command economy. The Seed, that which provides for its own organic development, will always constitute a threat and while my bearing finds subversion a threat, perhaps the greater threat to liberty is The Feed. I hope and expect that the true lessons of the American Revolution will suffice to remind us of a better way.

Confucius Again: The Five Virtues

My second reading of 'The Diamond Age' finds me much more interested this go-round with the principles of Confucian philosophy as expressed in the actions of Dr X and Judge Fang.

I like these:

• Ren is the virtue of benevolence, charity, and humanity;
• Yi, of honesty and uprightness;
• Zhi, knowledge;
• Xin, the virtue of faithfulness and integrity;
• Li, correct behavior, or propriety, good manners, politeness, ceremony, worship.

It's interesting the split. Honesty and uprightness seems to imply many of the others, and integrity seems to imply most. But that they are differentiated suggests that there are many shades to them, and interesting stories and lessons for each.

One of the passages that strikes me in today's reading of the book is the following:

Pretty interesting that.

Confucius & The Society of Laws

“If the people be led by laws, and uniformity among them be sought by punishments, they will try to escape punishment and have no sense of shame. If they are led by virtue, and uniformity sought among them through the practice of ritual propriety, they will possess a sense of shame and come to you of their own accord.” (Lunyu 2.3; see also 13.6.)

It is interesting that I come across this quote in my reading. It is yet another way of expressing what I was talking about here.

Now I'm curious to understand xiào, Filial Piety.

Death and Dishonor

"If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels."
-- John Donne 

I'm still riffing off the idea of Hitchens that some civilized people must remain to civilize religions, or at the very least police them. I am not convinced, as Hitchens is, that this is a permanent matter. I observe that we simply have a poor set of self-selected clergy on the whole, and that the organization of organized religion is not quite as our regimes of say bond trading. Hitchens' Boesky is the Pope, and so it goes. 

If you ask me why I don't like Islam, it is because I don't think it scales. What is truly admirable about Islam is that it appears to me to be the kind of religion I would invent were I to live on a desert island with 1000 others. And apparently this is a sentiment shared around the globe, because Islam does a fairly fantastic job of working in tribal areas like Afghanistan. And in such tribal areas seeking to add a bit of supernatural gloss to their authority and mores, Islam accommodates such pre-civil taboos such as tyranny over women. Without much getting into it, tyranny over women is appropriate in desert island situations so long as they are the sort of women who can't do pull-ups, kill snakes or stand still when spiders crawl over their bare feet. To the extent that women don't feel compelled to manage such tasks, it falls to men, and in reciprocity men will define power in such brutally ignorant terms. That's the basic exchange when it comes to the basics, and such arrangements work in small clans and tribal situations. But I think Islam doesn't scale, and thrives best in such enclaves. But then again, so does any faith, fable, superstition, or wives tale. And for the counter-exemplary women who flip the snake over the bar, snap it in two after 10 pull ups, then squeeze the blood out of it's dead head to drown the spider on her big toe, well they tend to be one in 10,000. And in many places around the world, they get stoned.

If you read Robert Fisk's latest piece in the Independent, you will come to understand how gruesome stoning is. All the heinous details are there. 20,000 women per year are murdered for preposterous reasons around the world. 

This is the evil that men do. My point is not to suggest anyone indulge in any sort of outrage, but to toll the sad bell that reminds us that although life is precious, there are a million convolutions of logic inspiring men to forget that. And if there is anything to the universality of the defense of liberty and human rights, then there are a few good ideas that counter all those convolutions. At our best, we will fight with that in mind. 

Here in America we do have our liberty, and we also have our million convolutions and corruptions of moral logic over our million channels over the air and through the broadband. Each tiny corruption is a small piece of evil doing its work chopping away not only our virtue but our ability see the virtue of justice in action. We can watch horror movies and then just go home and watch romantic comedies to soothe them away. Americans watch the true crimes of these killings and those of every other preposterous rationale around the world as if they were nothing more than lessons and fables. We can excuse ourselves from the action of justice as if we were grossed-out teenagers at the slasher flick. Eww. Let's get outta here. So the skill of intervention atrophies. Justice is considered but not clear and present. 

I sometimes have difficulty explaining my friends why America is exceptional. It is a combination of complex interweaving threads that makes for that fabric. It's not just "we are a Christian Country". It's not just "we revere the Founder's and Original Intent". It's not just that we are a Global Policeman. It's the emergent force we can be and it is the reason men like Robert Fisk write to us in our language, alerting us to what happens out there. America is expected to do something, to act, to bring justice. Because we can. Because we must. America is a civilization, and here, like no other place, we civilize ethnics and languages and religions into a highly robust plurality. We have secured the blessings of liberty.

Our domestic liberty is our wedge of gold, and as we withdraw our forces from the world, we hoard it without coining into the money of moral intervention. The world dies without justice, in small bloody pieces. So are we in a Long War Against Terror or not?