25 July 2008
RIP Randy Pausch (1960-2008)
"Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose 'last lecture' about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47." He'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer almost two years ago. More at NYT and at Carnegie Mellon. This is his update page, which I've been following for about a year (servers at Carnegie Mellon must be overloaded; it's taking many tries to download today).
His Last Lecture is moving and inspiring, imo. Watch it.
12:06 Posted in death , education , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Crime Novel Excerpts: In the Woods, by Tana French
In the Woods (2007) was Tana French's debut novel, winner of the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Set near Dublin, Ireland, it's narrated by Murder Squad detective Bob Ryan and moves between two possibly related crimes, both involving children, that take place 20 years apart in the same area. It's marketed as part police procedural and part psychological thriller, but I don't think it lives up to its thriller possibilities. The book was a pleasure to read but I was a bit disappointed with the ending.
What interested me most about it -- besides the well-paced exploration of a few characters and relationships, the intriguing plot, and the good writing (slightly too much 'had she but known" for me, and while in places the writing is beautifully poetic and whimsical, it's also a bit distracting because of that) -- were the Girardian possibilities in the various rivalries and mimetic doubles (two major sets), and the intimations and evidence of psychopathology.
French's second novel, The Likeness, featuring one of the main characters from the first, was published in the U.S. this week. The title plus the synopsis tells me there may be more mimetic doubling going on....
A couple of lines from In the Woods that particularly caught my attention:
"I don't tell people about the Knocknaree thing. I don't see why I should; it would only lead to endless salacious questioning about my nonexistent memories and inaccurate speculation about the state of my psyche, and I have no desire to deal with either." ... Replace "Knocknaree" with a variety of other things and Ryan's reasoning is mine for not talking much with most people about a good deal of my life, experiences, feelings, thoughts, etc.
"I'm not sure what exactly I did for those two years. A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood. I had a prism from an old chandelier hanging in my window, and I could spend entire afternoons lying on my bed and watching it flick tiny chips of rainbow around the room." ... (Similarly -- and that was a fairly industrious day in which Things Got Done.)
08:00 Posted in books and reading , crime , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
24 July 2008
What I'm Reading Lately: Death, Dog Poisoning, Novelty, Flawed Heroes, Psych Experiments, Limiting Generalisations
A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.
>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008):
So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"
"The dogs have often died in great agony.... [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"
There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years.
>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):
"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."
>> Impossible Experiments (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes." (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?) Other never-done experiments.
>> "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.
>> Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?" Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.
>> "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too. Full study (7 pages, PDF).
>> "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."
I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.
The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should.
I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.
(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...)
06:15 Posted in animals , death , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , science and tech , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
23 July 2008
Not Many Dead - Volume II
A magazine I read monthly has a reader write-in column titled "Not Many Dead: Important Stories You May Have Missed." The column is made up of headlines or snippets of 'news' stories that are hardly news. As part of an ongoing series (first one here), I offer these recent non-news stories:
"A study by an independent nonprofit research group, The National Sleep Foundation, found that more than 65 percent of moms drink caffeinated beverages to get through their day." [CNN, 24 June 2008]
Headline: "If Gordon is our Heathcliff, who or what is his Cathy?" First paragraph: "[British PM] Gordon Brown apparently thinks voters are right to compare him to Heathcliff, the brooding figure at the centre of Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Political Editor Tomos Livingstone wonders whether this is one question he should have laughed off instead, while, below right, Catherine Jones explores the true nature of the character the Prime Minister is comparing himself to." [11 July, Wales Online]
"Rapper 50 Cent is free to take a vacation with his son after passing a court-ordered drug test." [18 Jul, NYT]
"Plans for a large human trial of a promising government-developed H.I.V. vaccine in the United States were canceled Thursday because a top federal official said scientists realized that they did not know enough about how H.I.V. vaccines and the immune system interact." [18 July, NYT]
07:05 Posted in media, film, tv, radio , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
22 July 2008
The Mechanism
"In a nutshell: before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their rituals precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That's the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed." -- René Girard, in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture
Quoted by Chronicles of Atlantis, with accompanying photo at that website.
This may not be what was intended, but reading Girard and learning about mimetic theory these last few years has led me to become extremely wary of all sacrifice (making sacred) -- which actually I think is intended -- and also sceptical and even perhaps cynical of self-sacrifice, in myself and others.
Sacrifice seems so often to go hand-in-hand with feelings of righteousness and resentment, and the act of scapegoating, and it offers an enormous payoff both for acknowledging the sacrifice as such and for denying all else. I see self-sacrifice now as mostly an acceptable way to make oneself sacred, a kind of self-divination that can be deeply satisfying and comforting to the sacrificer. (A short time ago I would have agreed that 'we are all sacred,' and yet now I think that such language amounts to a sort of trick, a means of identifying and attacking 'the profane,' that which we think is unworthy.)
I think we are called to compassion -- i.e., suffering with, abiding with, experiencing what the other experiences without clutching onto the experience -- which sometimes entails sacrifice of one's ego, one's desires, and at times one's life; and yet I can't be unaware of the ego-needs and the desires that are met in the act of sacrificing oneself in both mundane and extraordinary ways, in the stories we tell ourselves and others about the sacrifice -- before (if premeditated or foreseen), during and particularly after the fact -- and in the refuge taken in false modesty that seeks to lift up our own altruism and to deny our own selfishness. And contrariwise, even boasting of our selfish motives can itself become a show of ego self-sacrifice, a twisted pretense of appropriate humility that serves only to enhance the perception of oneself as a hero, a god, someone who isn't even aware of the good they've done. We are a tricky, tricky lot, it seems to me, capable often of hiding the complexity of our own motives from our own minds and hearts.
I can imagine self-sacrifice as a consequence of feeling in the flow of all life, as a heartfelt response to feeling loved, as an act intertwined with living an abundant life, though I have a more difficult time imagining that the story about the act could leave it at that without justification, fabrication, meaning-making, and so on.... What I can't imagine is self-sacrifice as a measurement on a moral scale without also thinking about the Pharisees and their sacrifices, abstinences, denials of pleasures, etc., for the sake of God, and how good they felt about their worthiness under God because of those sacrifices.
Self-sacrifice that comes from a sense of duty and a need to 'do the right thing,' and that carries with it a sense of having done right, done well, been worthy and pleasing, feels to me likely to slip unobserved into a self-congratulatory act, and perhaps to leak into resentment, bitterness, anger and eventually accusation when the act is unappreciated, unrecompensed, unacknowledged, unnoticed, and even unaccepted, and/or has an outcome considered bad by the sacrificer. (Or, alternately, the sacrificer may view the lack of appreciation and the bad outcome as yet another burden added to the sacrifice s/he is making, which just enhances the satisfaction s/he feels in making such a sacrifice.)
If such an act derives from wanting to measure up, wanting to do what's right and to be right, then it seems mined with explosive devices that will likely damage the sacrificer, as it did the Pharisees, without their noticing it. If, on the other hand, such a sacrifice derives from a feeling of being loved completely for who one is (and isn't), from a knowledge at the core -- or perhaps simply from a quick glimpse that's never been quite edited out -- that we are the recipients of a gift that our word 'life' doesn't even begin to describe -- Well, that kind of sacrifice could, it seems, be experienced not as giving up anything, not as an unequal exchange, not as suffering at all except in the sense of 'suffer' as 'allow' or 'undergo.' We might then undergo sacrifice as a bit of ash undergoes a lava flow or as a drop of rain undergoes a thunderstorm. What would that be like?
(I ordered Evolution and Conversion yesterday, and a few days ago received a copy of Girard's other book published this year, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, from which I may occasionally quote as I get into it. I'll probably skip around ... Writers whose works he explores include Stendhal, Voltaire, Valéry, Tocqueville, de Beauvoir, Proust, Racine, Sartre, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare ... I haven't read most of the original texts, so it may be hard going. See TOC here.)
08:10 Posted in death , girardian anthropology , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
21 July 2008
Taking A Life
"When it became clear he wasn't going to move out of the way, I closed my eyes, covered my face and held my breath.
"By the time we were stationary, four of my eight cars were in the platform and I was on autopilot. I told the passengers there would be a delay in opening the doors due to an 'incident', and was calling the line controller for assistance when I heard a tap on my cab door. A smart man inquired, 'Do you know there's a person under your train?' I looked at the blood on the windscreen momentarily before assuring him that, yes, I was aware.
"He paused for a heartbeat, looked at his watch and said, 'So, how long before we get on the move again?'"
(from "Last Year I Killed a Man," by Vaughan Thomas, in the Guardian, 19 July 2008, via Scott)
11:36 Posted in community , death , health and medicine , other people said it , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
19 July 2008
Reason-Giving: Four Kinds of Reasons
At the heart of Tilly's book Why? (see previous post) are the four kinds of reasons he posits: conventions, codes, stories and technical accounts.
Conventions and codes don't posit cause-and-effect; they simply appeal to socially appropriate formulas as explanation:
CONVENTIONS -- Conventionally accepted reasons. Examples: My train was late, I wasn't in the mood, she's just lucky, gotta run, I'm so busy,
CODES -- Rules, basically. Particularly relevent in law, medicine, the military, government, religion, diplomacy, sports and so on.
Stories and technical accounts do posit cause-and-effect:
STORIES -- Explanatory narratives, usually used for exceptional, unusual, or unfamiliar events.
TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS -- cause-and-effect explanation used by authorities and specialists in their fields (engineers, physicians, programmers, artists, etc.)
To show the difference among these, Tilly starts the book with a discussion of causes put forth early on, by politicians and survivors, for the 9/11 terrorists attacks:
Story: Terrorists did it, but lax officials let them do it.
Convention: Modern life is dangerous.
Code: Because we have freedom to defend, we must combat terror.
Technical accounts: (Not many given initially. Later, specialists gave accounts of "how airplane crashes brought down supposedly unshakeable buildings, what went wrong with American intelligence," etc.)
He notes that "intermediate forms of reason giving exist. One form sometimes mutates into another as people interact. In religious communities, 'God wills it' stands halfway between a convention and a story, having more or less explanatory power depending on prevailing beliefs about divine intervention in human affairs."
He also makes clear that all of these ways of relating are also used to accomplish things other than give reasons. For example, stories also "amuse, threaten and educate;" technical accounts also "display their providers' expertise and signal where the experts stand on divisive issues;" conventions also "mark boundaries between insiders and outsiders, fill lulls in conversations, and convey accumulated ideas from one generation to the next."
More about each:
CONVENTIONS
Conventions, like etiquette, "mix propriety and self-interest." Etiquette "consists of supplying appropriate, effective reasons why -- for things you do, and for things you won't do. Good etiquette incorporates conventional reasons. The reasons need not be true, but they must fit the circumstances" and, even more, the relationship.
Some conventions consist of 'serviceable excuses' that try to normalise relationships. An example Tilly gives is of someone who's illiterate asking a stranger in a store to read something for them, with the explanation that they forgot their glasses. Other examples of 'serviceable excuses' we give to conceal "our suddenly revealed incompetence" include Sorry - I thought this was someone else's office, These gears always grind, The map was wrong, It's too loud to hear anything, etc. We use these to avoid embarrassment, to "prove that the relation between ourselves and others is not what it might seem." Sometimes, Tilly notes, we give similar explanations not to express our social competence but to "explain a failure as a result of excusable incompetence" (my watch stopped, I'm sick, I'm new in town, I've never done this before, etc.)
Tilly says that justification occurs in all types of reason-giving, but that "justification by means of convention ... has a peculiar property: participants rarely take the reason proposed seriously as a cause-effect account, and more often treat it as a characterization of the relationship, the practices, and the connection between them. A good reason offers an acceptable characterization."
CODES
Using codes as reasons is all about matching the case at hand to the code in the book: "Asked to justify a decision, adjudicate a dispute, or give advice, skillful users of codes find matches between concrete cases and categories, procedures, and rules already built into the codes. Like conventions, reasons based on codes therefore gain credibility from criteria of appropriateness rather than from the cause-effect validity that prevails in stories and technical accounts."
"Sermons, classes, Power-Point presentations, manuals and how-to books often present codes: briefly stated principles followed by practical applications. Their very formats separate them from everyday social interchange. ... Job applications, survey interviews, resumes, obituaries, and citations for honors typically require either their authors or some specialist to convert accounts initially presented in story form into stylized facts to match well-established codes."
Tilly gives lots of legal and medical examples, especially malpractice.
STORIES
Stories "truncate cause-effect connections. They typically call up a limited number of actors whose dispositions and actions cause everything that happens within a delimited time and space. ... Stories inevitably minimize or ignore the causal roles of errors, unanticipated consequences, indirect effects, incremental effects, simulataneous effects, feedback effects, and environmental effects."
(All those errors and effects are what interest me -- as well as what the 'actors' think, feel and do -- and may explain an aversion I have to stories that omit those messy things.)
Stories make meaning, make "the world intelligible. ... Stories provide simplified cause-effect accounts of puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic or exemplary events. ... [T]hey often carry an edge of justification or condemnation. ... The story usually gives pride of place to human actors. When the leading characters are not human" ... (animals, God, storms, etc.) "they still behave mostly like humans. The story they enact accordingly often conveys credit or blame. ... Stories exclude ... inconvenient complications [like those errors and effects named above]. ... Even when they convey truths, stories enormously simplify the processes involved."
Elements of stories and when we choose to tell them:
- Stories explain events in question, when conventions and general principles won't do
- Stories often assign blame to the actors involved, omitting other non-actor causes
- There are master stories that recur frequently[ i.e., myths?]: "A let B down and B suffered," "C and D fought to a standstill," etc.
- Stories usually have some kind of moral, even if subtle through assigning praise or blame
This paragraph was most enlightening for me, articulating something felt but not always consciously understood:
"As with conventions the choice of stories obviously has consequences for later relations among the parties to the stories, and typically involves justification or condemnation of certain practices. If I tell you that a mutual friend has cheated me, I am simultaneously aligning you with me against the friend and warning you not to trust the friend .... That is why hearing stories often upsets us and sometimes incites us to challenge the teller: if we accept the story, we take on the consequences."
"Superior stories" are those that are simplified to the greatest degree and are also closest to truth; that is, they get their cause and effect right. These stories are widely accessible and persuasive.
TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS
Technical accounts "combine cause-effect explanation (rather than logics of appropriateness) with grounding in some systematic specialized discipline (rather than everyday knowledge). ... They assume shared knowledge of previously accumulated definitions, practices and findings. For that reason, outsiders often consider technical accounts inpenetrable because they are so hermetic or ... filled with jargon."
Their relationship work is that they "signal relationships with possessors of esoteric knowledge, saying you're one of us to other sympathetic specialists, marking differences within the field from others with whom the author disagrees, providing introductions to the field ..., and establishing the author's respectablity vis-a-vis respectful nonspecialists."
Technical accounts use codes to match and measure cases against norms and standards, and they go on to posit cause and effect based on this.
Tilly's examples concerns violence, crime, the National Academy of Sciences, privatizaton of common resources, property rights, Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, etc.
(I find most of the examples in this book pretty tedious and very skippable.)
My Conclusion
After reading this book, I have the sense that pretty much every reason we give others or ourselves, or hear from same, is either formulaic or a highly simplified mythic account. Is that it?
I've been trying out reasons in my head -- all stories, so far, because that's the only place where it seems that complexity and doubt could enter -- conventions are not complex per se, codes may be complex but are also pro forma to some extent, and technical accounts aren't that useful for discussing ordinary relationships) -- for various actions I've done, and even when they sometimes include mention of coincidence, feedback effects, incremental effects, etc., they still, I can't help but notice, omit a lot of contributing factors, either because I want to minimise those factors when I present the reasons to myself, or the story gets unwieldy with so many offshoots -- perhaps with cause-and-effect accounts, there is a tendency to weight the contributing factors and to present those writ bold because they seem significant and seem to account for most of the outcome. My life experience, though, tells me that my justifications and reasons-giving after the fact are liable to be misinterpretations of reality, the result of my mind imposing actions, feelings and thoughts (and cause and effect hypotheses) into a biased framework.
I understand, reading this book, why I have felt at times so slighted by someone I considered a friend, when he listens to my story (sometimes a reason-giving story, sometimes not) and responds with what feels to me like a pat convention ("You know it's wrong to do that." "Well, these things happen." etc.) I've done the same thing and felt the chilling effect it's had on the reason-receiver, too. Now I wonder if answering a friend's drama with a conventional response always necessarily reveals either (1) an intention to push the other away, to make an intimate relationship more distant, or, likewise, (2) an intention to change the relationship's power balance -- the one offering the convention is in effect saying, "I'm superior," or is at least making a claim to more power than she currently has within the relationship.
13:10 Posted in books and reading , community , language , lists , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Choice and Happiness
Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) writes (almost a year ago):
"We know from workplace studies that the biggest factor in employee satisfaction is the degree of control workers have over their jobs, assuming other factors such as the pay and the hours are somewhere in the normal range. People like choice more than they like the thing they choose.
"When you make your own choices, you manipulate cognitive dissonance in your favor. No matter what you choose, it seems like a better option than it really is because you chose it."
I don't think any 'real' Buddhist would say this, but it seems to me that most of Buddhist practice, at the core, is meant to be a remedy for this seemingly universal human tendency to equate a sense of control with happiness.
Most of life is not controllable. We don't have a choice about many things. Being born and dying, for instance. :-) We often can't control our own thoughts and actions, much less those of other people, or circumstances. So this tendency to equate control with happiness leads to suffering, as we see again and again that we are not 'the deciders,' and even when we are the deciders, we decide wrong. Still, we try to be the deciders. It feels good to be in charge rather than to be told what to do or to have circumstances forced upon us.
Making choices and feeling in control is a key way of finding ground. Feeling we're in control gives us the illusion, first of all, that there's an "I," an identity that is constant and solid, and second, that we have power, that we can determine outcomes. And we do have power. We can affect some outcomes. There's also luck, timing, and other people's power, which thwart our sense of control, and even when we do exert control, there's our own ambivalence about alternatives (which diverts our power), our indecision, our poor judgment, our lack of wisdom, and the unravelling of unforeseen consequences, which remind us that even when we act with control and power we may not actually control outcomes.
I guess the question is, if I consciously and over-and-over choose to let go of needing to feel a sense of control in order to feel happy, am I still holding on to a sense of control in making that choice? And what then?
(photo: cat, staring up at bird's nest)
07:10 Posted in girardian anthropology , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , politics, government and law | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this
18 July 2008
Reason-Giving
I read about sociologist Charles Tilly's book Why?: What happens when people give reasons ... and why (2006) at about the same time I watched a "House, MD" episode (It's A Wonderful Lie) in which House says, "The only reason to give multiple reasons is that you're searching for what the person wants to hear." That struck me as exceedingly true, and I thought that Tilly might have more to say about what's behind reason-giving.
Tilly says that reason-giving happens only in relationships (and only in human ones) and he makes a direct connection between reason-giving and status within the relationship, or, the perceived equality of the relationship. The main determiner of the kind of reason we give is not the behaviour we're explaining or the situation, but rather the relationship we have with the person to whom we're giving the reason:
"Reason giving resembles what hapens when people deal with unequal social relations in general. Participants in unequal social relations may detect, confirm, reinforce or challenge them, but as they do so they employ modes of communications that signal which of these things they are doing. In fact, the ability to give reasons without challenge usually accompanies a position of power."
Reason-giving can be verbal, and it can also be through pantomime, or "body gloss." He offers the example of a girl entering a congregating area in a ski lodge, who wants to "see and be seen by boys," giving for all the world the "appearance of looking for someone in particular." She's proferring an unspoken reason for being there, for looking around, one that contradicts or hides her true reason.
As Tilly notes early on,
"people do not give themselves and others reasons because of some universal craving for truth and coherence. They often settle for reasons that are superficial, contradictory, dishonest, or -- at least from an observer's viewpoint -- farfetched. Whatever else they are doing when they give reasons, people are clearly negotiating their social lives. They are saying something about relations between themselves and those who hear [or observe] their reasons."
Reasons, Tilly says, are always given to define, or redefine, the relationship between the parties. They are given to create, confirm, negotiate, or repair relationships. "Appropriate reasons vary dramatically with the equality, inequality and intimacy or distance of the relationship." Superiors can give perfunctory reasons to inferiors, as can those in distant relationships. In fact, it would likely be "intrusive or embarrassing" to give elaborate reasons to someone you don't know well. Inferiors, otoh, usually have to offer defensible and sometimes apologetic reasons to superiors, as do intimates. Though there is much social pressure to give appropriate reasons to each other, most of us are skilled at this and so usually don't notice reasons unless the reason given doesn't match our view of the relationship.
I'll post soon about the four types of reasons Tilly identifies and explores. (And yes, many reasons are combinations of the four, not pure examples.)
17:45 Posted in books and reading , community , language , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
16 July 2008
Justification by Theory
From Gil Bailie's mostly dormant website:
"Following another avenue of escape, which seeks its justification in a grandiose theory, there are those who wish to recognize only collective sin, 'objectivized' sin, 'social' sin, i.e. the sin committed by others. A universe is constructed where evil is everywhere denounced, but no where admitted; where it is always endured, never committed. By thus 'transferring the evil which is in man to the evil in the structures' -- called 'structures of sin' -- one is led, in addition, to the idea that man is essentially good, and that it is only society which corrupts him, and that he has no need of conversion of heart." -- Henri de Lubac
I think this is a danger for those of us who use a Girardian lens (seeking "justification in a grandiose theory"?), to see more and more clearly others' violent mimesis, scapegoating, the mechanism of sin for what it is in every interaction we observe, to see it woven into the fabric of society and institutions, while we remain blind to the way it flourishes in each of us.
11:35 Posted in community , girardian anthropology , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Notes from Status Anxiety: Conclusion
Final note on Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the twelfth post on this topic; the first is here.
CONCLUSION
We need status anxiety because "fear of failing and disgracing oneself in the eyes of others is an inevitable consequence of harbouring ambitions, of favouring one set of outcomes over another, and of having regard for individuals besides oneself."
But we can choose the audience from whom we accept judgment, we can recognise that values that seem fixed and immutable actually fluctuate with time, place, the ethos of the age.
"Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy. They have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority while maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and bad, shameful and honourable."
[This all falls flat for me somehow.]
09:00 Posted in art and photography , books and reading , community , other people said it , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
15 July 2008
Solutions: Bohemia (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eleventh post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 5 - BOHEMIA
Bohemians came to prominence in France after Napoleon, 1815. Bohemians are found in all social classes, age groups, professions, and in both genders. They include Romantics, surrealists, Beatniks, punks, situationalists, Kibbutzbiks, et. al.
Bohemians lived simply, read a lot, didn't care much for money, were melancholic, had an allegiance to art and emotion, led unconventional sex lives, and ... some of the women wore their hair short! Most importantly, they did not fit into the bourgeois conception of respectability.
Bohemians don't like the bourgeoisie, private schools, debutantes and 'eligible bachelors,' blood sports, missionaries, bores, and people who worry about their reputations.
Bohemians like men and women, Nietzsche, Picasso, Kokoschka, jazz, acrobats, Havelock Ellis, the Mediterranean, DH Lawrence, those who don't anticipate life after death.
Flaubert: "Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom."
The bourgeoisie are seen as prudes, materialistic, both cynical and sentimental, immersed in trivia and trivial pursuits.
'Real' bohemians were those who "set themselves up as sabatoeurs of the economic meritocracy." They valued 'sensitivity' over worldly ambition. Work and money, they felt, destroyed one's capacity for sensitivity. They thought themselves "deserving of the highest honour for their ethical good sense and their powers of receptivity and expression." [Isn't this just another form of meritocracy, status based on talent, skill, intelligence?]
Thoreau - lack of wealth didn't necessarily mean, as the bourgeois said, that one was a loser at the game of life; one might be impoverished financially because one focused energies on things other than making money, equally enriching in their own right.
Bohemians (and others) realised that maintaining confidence in their values, so at odds with the mainstream, required mixing socially mainly with others who shared the same values, and reading and listening to materials that supported their values. Hence, enclaves of Bohemians in Montparnasse, Bloomsbury, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Venice Beach, etc.
Bohemians redefined failure. For the bourgeoisie, failure in business or the arts was an indictment of character because it's assumed that society is fair in distributing its rewards. For bohemians, there's nothing punitive about failure. In fact, because those who succeed in society are those who can best "pander to the flawed values of their audiences," commercial success was viewed with some suspicion. (Myth of the misunderstood artist)
Bohemians emphasise the "dignity and superiority of the rejected ones," which is a secular counterpart to the Christian message and story of Jesus's marginalisation and crucifixion: "Torture at the hands of the uncomprehending masses" is "evidence of the righteousness of the neglected party."
Sometimes bohemians were "radicals devoted to anything so long as it was taboo in the Mid-West," shocked the middle class, outraged public opinion.
It's "only a short step from valuing originality and emphasising the non-material aspects of life to feeling that almost anything that could surprise a judge or pharmacist -- from crustacean-walking [Gérard de Nerval] to strawberry-breast-cooking [Filippo Marinetti] -- must be important."
Most generally, bohemia has legitimised the pursuit of an alternative way of life." They "articulated a case for a spiritual as opposed to a material method of evaluating both oneself and others."
08:10 Posted in books and reading , community , consumption , girardian anthropology , other people said it , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
14 July 2008
Morality
A couple of thought-provoking posts at Overcoming Bias about morality (among many there lately on the topic): The Moral Void and Is Morality Given. See also the comments.
From the first, the question is posed: "When you cannot be innocent, justified, or praiseworthy," which course of action will you choose anyway?
And this, pointing to labelling and authority as it relates to morality, and to our propensity for letting someone else define 'morality':
"In 1966, the Israeli psychologist Georges Tamarin presented, to 1,066 schoolchildren ages 8-14, the Biblical story of Joshua's battle in Jericho:
"'Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword... And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.'
"After being presented with the Joshua story, the children were asked:
"'Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?'
"66% of the children approved, 8% partially disapproved, and 26% totally disapproved of Joshua's actions.
"A control group of 168 children was presented with an isomorphic story about 'General Lin' and a 'Chinese Kingdom 3,000 years ago'. 7% of this group approved, 18% partially disapproved, and 75% completely disapproved of General Lin.
"'What a horrible thing it is, teaching religion to children,' you say, 'giving them an off-switch for their morality that can be flipped just by saying the word 'God'.' Indeed one of the saddest aspects of the whole religious fiasco is just how little it takes to flip people's moral off-switches. As Hobbes once said, 'I don't know what's worse, the fact that everyone's got a price, or the fact that their price is so low." You can give people a book, and tell them God wrote it, and that's enough to switch off their moralities; God doesn't even have to tell them in person.
"But are you sure you don't have a similar off-switch yourself? They flip so easily -- you might not even notice it happening."
Why, he asks, do we even listen to an "external objective reality" instead of to ourselves?
The second article is a staged debate about whether morality is a given, something beyond simply "human preference"? Here's a little bit of it:
"Subhan: Once upon a time, theologians tried to say that God was the foundation of morality. And even since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers were sophisticated enough to go on and ask the next question -- 'Why follow God's commands?' Does God have knowledge of morality, so that we should follow Its orders as good advice? But then what is this morality, outside God, of which God has knowledge? Do God's commands determine morality? But then why, morally, should one follow God's orders?"
"Obert: "Yes, this demolishes attempts to answer questions about the nature of morality just by saying 'God!', unless you answer the obvious further questions. But so what?"
"Subhan: "And furthermore, let us castigate those who made the argument originally, for the sin of trying to cast off responsibility -- trying to wave a scripture and say, 'I'm just following God's orders!' Even if God had told them to do a thing, it would still have been their own decision to follow God's orders."
"Obert: "I agree -- as a matter of morality, there is no evading of moral responsibility. Even if your parents, or your government, or some kind of hypothetical superintelligence, tells you to do something, you are responsible for your decision in doing it."
"Subhan: "But you see, this also demolishes the idea of any morality that is outside, beyond, or above human preference. Just substitute 'morality' for 'God' in the argument!""
11:20 Posted in language , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
Solutions: Religion (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the tenth post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 4 - RELIGION
Death
Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan llyich (1886) is a Christian memento mori. Ivan Ilyich is all about status. When he realises he's going to die, he recognises he's wasted his time on Earth by leading an outwardly respectable but inwardly barren life. He always wanted to appear important and to impress people whom, he sees now, don't care for him at all. Those around him love his status, not his true vulnerable self.
The prospect of death may cause us to do what matters most to us and to pay less attention to the verdicts of others. We see we cannot "afford to defer forever, for the sake of propriety, our underlying commitments to ourselves."
Ruins! They comfort us, reveal our "punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing," our own exaggerated self-importance. Our miseries are tied to the grandiosity of our ambitions.
Community
We all have the same vulnerabilities and the same two driving forces: fear, and a desire for love.
The Christian would say that there is no such thing as a stranger, "only an impression of strangeness born of failure to acknowledge that others share both our needs and our weaknesses."
Christianity attempts to enhance the value we place on community -- through ritual (a transcendent intermediary) and through music (great leveller and social alchemist -- we see that others respond as we do, which forges connection).
Twin Cities
Jesus is the model for Christians' understanding of status. He has two different sides, as ordinary carpenter and as the holiest of men. We can see the difference between earthly status (determined by occupation, income, others' opinions) and spiritual status (related to one's soul and merits in God's eyes).
The City of God, Augustine, 427 AD: All human action can be interpreted from either the Christian or the Roman (earthly) perspective, which are different. Christian status derives from humility, generosity, recognition of one's dependence on God, etc.
Divine Comedia, Dante, 1315: Dante's Hell is home to many who enjoyed high status while they lived.
Christian lore asserts the superiority of spiritual over material success and endows its virtues with "a seductive seriousness and beauty" through music, art, literature, architecture, etc. "Through its command of aesthetic resources, of buildings, paintings and Masses, Christianity created a bulwark against the authority of earthly values and kept its spiritual concerns in the public eye."
Heydey of cathedrals, 1130-1530.
Christianity never abolished the Earthly City or its values, but that we retain any distinction between wealth and virtue is largely due to the impression left on Western consciousness by Christianity.
06:00 Posted in books and reading , community , death , girardian anthropology , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
13 July 2008
Solutions: Politics (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). The book generally aligns with mimetic theory and Girardian ideas; I've added a G near comments that seem to do so particularly.
This is the ninth post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 3 - POLITICS
"Every society holds certain groups of people in high esteem while condemning or ignoring others, whether on the basis of their skills, accent, temperament, gender, physical attributes, ancestry, religion or skin colour. Yet such arbitrary and subjective criteria for success and failure are far from permanent or universal." G It's the job of the status quo to make them seem absolutely universal and permanent.
Rather eccentric timeline: of who and what has been held in high status:
400 BC Sparta: Soldiers: Men, aggressive, vigorously bisexual, not family men, not business men.
Western Europe 476-1096: Saints: followers of Jesus Christ, shunning of material goods, suppression of sexual feelings, extreme modesty.
Western Europe 1096-1500 (after first Crusade): Knights: Wealthy, killed people and animals. Lovers, poets. Prized virgins. Loved money but not from trade, only from land.
England 1750-1890: Gentlemen: Dancing, dabblers, not merchants. Supposed to like families but OK to have mistresses. Cultivation of languid elegance. Hair. Women seen as taller children.
Brasil, 1600-1960 (Cubeo tribe): Men who spoke little, did not dance or play a part in raising children, and were good at killing jaguars. High status - hunters; low status - fishermen. Shameful to even be seen helping wife make a root-based meal.
London, Sydney, New York, LA, 2004: Anyone who can accumulate money, power and renown through their own accomplishments in some sector of the commercial world. Because culture is now seen to be meritocratic, financial achievements are understood to be deserved. The ability to accumulate wealth is proof of creativity, stamina, intelligence. Other virtues, like godliness and humility, don't matter much.
By what principles is status distributed?:
(1) by threatening and bullying
(2) by defending others (strength, patronage, control of resources, etc.). Where safety is in short supply, soldiers and knights are celebrated. Where the livelihood of the majority depends on trade and high-tech, entrepreneurs and scientists are celebrated.
(3) by impressing others with goodness, talent, skill or wisdom (saints, European footballers)
(4) by appealing to conscience or sense of decency of peers - by moral authority.
Ideals are not cast in stone; the process by which they alter is politics.
For us in the western world now, prosperity = worthiness. And poverty = moral deficiency. Money is ethical. This equation of prosperity and worthiness seems "natural" to us but it only came into being as "the way it is" in the mid-1800s.
Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): "Wealth has become the conventional basis of esteem." Material goods confer honour (hence conspicuous consumption, to give evidence to one and all of one's 'true' worth).
Some have fought the idea of meritocracy, the idea that wealth = virtue, including most notable John Ruskin, and also George Bernard Shaw, Michel de Montaigne.
Modern life also posits a connection between making money and being happy. This connection rests on three assumptions:
(1) that we know what we need to be happy and so we know what careers and projects will help us flourish as humans. Rousseau refutes this (in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1754): We are actually, he says, "dangerously inept at deciphering our own needs. Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be fulfilled, and when they manage to mumble something, their requests are likely to be misfounded or contradictory .... Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied...." G
(2) that all of the occupational possibilities and consumer goods available to us are actually a helpful array that's capable of satisfying our essential needs.
(3) that the more money we have, the more goods and services we can afford, which increases our odds of happiness.
(de Botton writes more about this here: "Americans Were the First People to Worship Work")
Current Events Tie-In: "Will economic growth make Americans happier?" (23 June 2008, Chicago Tribune)
Some posit, in contrast to the money-happiness connection, that those who live in a "natural state" understand themselves much better. (Part of the 'noble savage' idea) E.g., the native Americans, who lived with little yet were reputed to be content. But within only a few decades of the arrival of the first Europeans, what came to matter to the Indians was the amassing of weapons, jewellery and whiskey. This didn't happen spontaneously; the European traders deliberately sought to foster desires in Indians to motivate them to provide animal pelts for the European market.
In 1690, the English naturalist and minister John Banister noted that the Indians of Hudson Bay area had been successfully tempted by traders to want "many things which they had not wanted before." As the volume of trade increased, suicide rates and alcoholism also rose, fracturing communities. Indian leaders called on tribes to renounce their addiction to European luxuries.
Defenders of commercial society argue that no one forces anyone to buy anything. Rousseau emphasised how strongly predisposed humans are to listen to others' suggestions about how to think and what to value. G
Advertisers et al. actually insist that their trades are ineffective because the population is so independent-minded. This is not shown to be true, based on what people once said were luxuries that they quickly came to see as necessities:
Percentage of Americans who say these are necessities:
2nd car in 1970: 20% / 2nd car in 2000: 59%
dishwasher in 1970: 8% / dishwasher in 2000: 44%
A/C in car in 1970: 11% / A/C in car in 2000: 65%
A/C in home in 1970: 22% / A/C in home in 2000: 70%
more than one telephone in 1970: 2% / more than one telephone in 2000: 78%
(Salon article about marketing -- "commercial persuasion industry" -- and consumerism: We Are What We Buy: "'We can talk all we want about being brand-proof ... but our behavior tells a different story.'")
"Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another" and we're not aware of it. G We think achievements and acquisitions will satisfy us but they don't. Not only can we not stop envying, but we envy the wrong things!
John Ruskin excoriated 19th-century Britons for being wealth-obsessed. He said he was, too, but he was obsessed by being wealthy in kindness, curiosity, sensitivity, humility, godliness, and intelligence -- which in the aggregate he called "life."
In his conception, the wealthiest Britons would not be automatically merchants or landowners but rather those who felt the keenest wonder gazing at the stars or who were best able to alleviate the suffering of others. (in Unto This Last)
Ideology and Political Change
Lots of ideas have been seen as so immutable as to be 'natural', e.g.,:
- men's rule over women (Earl Percy, 1873)
- European people are better than Africans (Lord Cromer, 1911)
- women don't have sexual feeling (Sir William Acton, 1857)
- Africans are naturally subordinate to whites (Alexander Stephens, 1861)
Dominant beliefs are at great pains to suggest that they are no more alterable than the orbits of the sun. They are ideological -- "a statement that subtly promotes a bias while pretending to be perfectly neutral." The ruling ideas of every age are those of the ruling class; but they can't seem to rule too forcefully. The ideas have to seem natural and unforced, just "the way it is."
Ideology, like a colourless, odorless gas, is pervasive and yet unnoticed as what it is. It makes light of its perhaps unjust or illogical take on the world and meekly implies that it's only presenting age-old truths.
"When institutions and ideas are held to be 'natural,' responsibility for whatever suffering they cause must necessarily either belong to no specific agent or else to the injured parties themselves."
Virginia Woolf, when not allowed into a college library in England on the basis of being female, became sceptical of the feminine role model she grew up with, the image of a woman who was always charming and utterly unselfish. The model woman sacrificed herself daily. She took the worst piece of meat, the most uncomfortable seat, etc. "She was so constituted that she would never have a mind or wish of her own, but prefer to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others."
"The enthusiasm for materialism, entrepreneurship and meritocracy that saturates the newspapers and television schedules of our own day reflects nothing more complex than the interests of those in charge of the system by which the majority earn their living."
06:45 Posted in books and reading , community , finance and business , girardian anthropology , media, film, tv, radio , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
12 July 2008
Solutions: Art (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the eighth post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 2 - ART
Literature
The history of art is filled with challenges to the status quo.
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (1814): The rich and well-mannered are not ipso facto good, and the poor and unschooled are not necessarily bad.
"Almost every great novel of the 19th and 20th centuries stages an assault on, or at the very least harbours scepticism regarding, the accepted social hierarchy, and each offers some sort of redefinition of precedence according to moral worth rather than financial assets or bloodlines."
Examples: Balzac - Le Père Goriot (1834), Hardy - Jude the Obscure (1895), G. Eliot - Middlemarch (1872), Fielding - Joseph Andrews (1742), Thackeray - Vanity Fair (1848), Dickens - Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White (1860), A. Trollope - The Way We Live Now (1875), Zadie Smith - White Teeth (2000).
Painting
(You have to see the book for this, as he reproduces "paintings of the commonplace" -- which elevate the status of the ordinary -- and discusses them)
Tragedy
"Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as 'losers' - a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing."
Tragedy helps to re-inject empathy into the equation by showing how like everyone else the tragic figure is. G
Examples: Oedipus, Antigone, Lear, Othello, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Tess, et al.
Tragedy doesn't absolve its subjects of responsibility but does offer and elicit a level of sympathy.
At the center of tragedy is an ordinary human being with a tragic flaw who makes an error in judgment from which flows a terrible reversal of fortune. Tragic flaws are defects common to humans, such as excessive pride, anger, impulsiveness, etc. Errors in judgment occur not from evil motives but from lapses in judgment, slips.
Tragedy reflects:
(1) how apparently small missteps can result in grave consequences
(2) the blindness we suffer with regard to the effects of our actions
(3) a fatuous tendency to presume that we are in conscious command of our destiny
(4) the sped and finality with which all that we cherish can be lost
(5) the mysterious forces against which our powers are pitted
Tragedy apportions blame without denying sympathy. We're appalled yet compassionate as we see the universality of the situation. This form of art seeks to plumb the origins of failure.
Comedy
More specifically, satire.
"Jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense."
"History reveals no shortage of jokes intended to amend the vices of high-status groups and shake the mighty out of their pretensions or dishonesty." [q.v. George Carlin]
Comedy also can be used to make sense of and mitigate status anxiety: "Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves.
06:00 Posted in books and reading , girardian anthropology , other people said it , pop culture , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
11 July 2008
Not Many Dead
A magazine I read monthly has a reader write-in column titled "Not Many Dead: Important Stories You May Have Missed." The column is made up of headlines or snippets of 'news' stories that are hardly news.
Examples from the magazine include:
"An overheating lightbulb triggered a fire alarm in the City Art Gallery in York yesterday afternoon. Fire crews were not needed."
"Top jockey Frankie Dettori told the Daily Mirror that he had never had sex in a stable."
"Prince Andrew has worn the same tweed jacket twice in five years."
I'd imagine many of us come across these sorts of items ourselves with jarring regularity, these 'news' stories, or tidbits embedded in news stories, that we read and think "wtf?" or "slow news day, eh?" I'd hate to keep the non-news I stumble across to myself, so I'll share it here from time to time; feel free to contribute others.
"John Mayer admitted on Tuesday night to 'hooking up' with a fan in the past." [10 July]
"Thousands of canceled flights may vex travelers: Fliers should be ready to be flexible as airlines cut capacity and schedules" [10 July]
"Swastika ('卐') tops Google's search list, then disappears" [10 July]
"An initial examination of the plane that had maintenance problems while carrying Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama found no evidence of missing parts or tampering, federal investigators said Thursday." [10 July].
"An elderly Indonesian woman famed nationwide for supernatural skills in lengthening penises has died, reports said Thursday." [10 July]
and
Court: Wisconsin Law Bans Sex With the Dead, which is unfortunately not as superfluous at it sounds ... [Reported today]
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Distraction = Less Hypocrisy, More Impartiality ?
On the face of it, this study (described below) seems to challenge the Buddhist ideas that letting go of distraction (labelling it as such, and not following its threads) and practicing mindfulness are tools towards more compassionate action ... (also, NYT article on distraction and its deleterious effect on creativity and critical thinking), although it seems perhaps that what's actually at stake in this study, and in Buddhism as well, is finding an end-route around habitual thinking (and its attendant fantasies, judgments, status-check-ins, comparisons, opinion-making, ego defenses, etc.) rather than the pure benefits of distraction as one way to do it:
"Why We're All Moral Hypocrites", by Robin Nixon at LiveScience, posits that we are more lenient on ourselves than others, that we "judge others more severely than we judge ourselves. ... [We] are loathe to admit, even to ourselves, that we sometimes behave immorally. A flattering self-image is correlated with rewards, such as emotional stability, increased motivation and perseverance."
The article describes a recent study in which 42 students were asked to assgn tasks to themselves or to the 'next participant.' The tasks might be "tedious and time-consuming" or "easy and brief." The students could also opt to have a computer assign the tasks, randomly. The researchers found that 85% of the students "passed up the computer’s objectivity and assigned themselves the short task -– leaving the laborious one to someone else" and they characterised their decision as fair. Another group of 43 students, merely observers of all this, considered the actions unfair.
Then the researchers "'constrained cognition' by asking subjects to memorize long strings of numbers. In this greatly distracted state, subjects became impartial. They thought their own transgressions were just as terrible as those of others."
The analysis: "[W]e are intuitively moral beings, but 'when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn't that bad.'" [That explains the hypocrisy, in restrospect, but not the partiality, in the moment -- unless perhaps the partiality is habitual, an action formed and/or strengthened by being justified day by day with a succession of persuasive defensive arguments ...]
The lead researcher even went so far as to say that their research suggests that "ubiquitous Blackberries and iPods may make society more just."
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Solutions: Philosophy (Notes from Status Anxiety)
Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the seventh post on this topic; the first is here.
PART II: Solutions
CHAPTER 1 - PHILOSOPHY
Dueling! For duelers, others' opinions were the only factor in forming their sense of self. If others judged a dueler effeminate, foolish, a coward, a failure, dishonorable, he could not remain acceptable in his own eyes. He would sooner die or kill than let an unfavourable assessment go unanswered.
We may not duel but we may have extreme vulnerability to the disdain of others.
Socrates, on the being insulted in the marketplace, was asked, "Don't you worry about being called names?" He replied, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?" <-- misanthropy as a response
Socrates and others refute the suggestion that what others think of us must determine what we think of ourselves.
[Socrates' response in this anecdote, though, seems like a reaction to feeling keenly the sting of the other's barb; he may not 'believe' the other's view of him, but he also has to create some kind of defense against it, indicating to me that it matters more than he wants it to, that it infiltrates his psyche at least a bit. Maybe not, though.]
06:25 Posted in books and reading , community , girardian anthropology , other people said it , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
10 July 2008
Who are the Victims?
Another idea I have for an occasional series: News stories in which some group is labelled 'the victim' of a group, abstraction, or individual. I think it's educational and interesting to explore who or what are identified as victims and perpetrators in the media.
Recently,
American people are the victims: "The whiners are the leaders