January 2011

It Wasn’t a Question We Had Asked

By in getting and spending, unintended consequences No Comments

Robert Butler:

It was a beautiful moment in 1887 when a veterinary surgeon in Northern Ireland invented a new kind of tyre, to smooth out the bumps when his son was on his tricycle. Within ten years John Dunlop’s pneumatic tyre—inflated canvas tubes, bonded with liquid rubber—had become so successful that the American civil-rights leader Susan B. Anthony could claim, “The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world.”
The invention didn’t free everyone. The raw material for the pneumatic tubes came from the rubber vines of the Congo, and the demand for rubber only deepened the damage that had been inflicted in that region by the demand for ivory. A century later, the pattern hadn’t entirely changed: the coltan required for mobile phones comes from the same area, where war has claimed millions of lives over the past 12 years.
…And now “Heart of Darkness” is a graphic novel by Catherine Anyango, with the ivory domino pieces—lightly touched on by Conrad in the opening pages—looming in the foreground of the opening drawings. The theme of traceability, where things come from and the journey that they take, is vividly dramatised. It’s a story for today. One day in June last year, Jeff Swartz, CEO of the leisurewear company Timberland, woke up to find the first of 65,000 angry e-mails in his inbox. These were responses to a Greenpeace campaign that said Brazilian cattle farmers were clear-cutting forests for cattle and the leather from the cattle was going into Timberland shoes. Swartz has written up his experience for the Harvard Business Review. His first action, he says, was to admit that he didn’t know where the leather came from. It wasn’t a question he had asked.
As “Heart of Darkness” has moved from one medium to another, it has made a good claim to be the single most influential hundred pages of the 20th century. If you consider its central theme—how one half of the world consumes resources at the expense of the other half—it’s easy to see its relevance becoming even greater. Only the resources will no longer be ivory for piano keys, or rubber for bicycle tyres.
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
Before cotton, slavery had been in decline in the United States, but now there was a great need for labor because picking cotton remained extremely labor-intensive. At the time of Whitney’s invention slavery existed in just six states; by the outbreak of the Civil War it was legal in fifteen. Worse, the northern slave states like Virginia and Maryland, where cotton couldn’t be successfully grown, turned to exporting slaves to their southern neighbors, thus breaking up families and intensifying the suffering for tens of thousands. Between 1793 and the outbreak of the Civil War, over eight hundred thousand slaves were shipped south.
At the same time, the booming cotton mills of England needed huge numbers of workers – more than population increase alone could easily provide – so increasingly they turned to child labor. Children were malleable, worked cheap, and were generally quicker at darting among machinery and dealing with snags, breakages and the like. Even the most enlightened mill owners used children freely. They couldn’t afford not to.
So Whitney’s gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin. That is quite a lot of consequence for a simple rotating drum.

Kitzsche

By in nietzsche No Comments

A friend of mine is heading back to Germany to spend a couple weeks visiting family. She surprised me by asking if there were anything I wanted her to bring back for me. Put on the spot, all I could think to ask for was any sort of Nietzsche-related memorabilia. The tackier, the better. I’m envisioning perhaps a pair of faux-marble bust bookends, or maybe a giant fake mustache. I already have a bunch of t-shirts, stickers and, yes, the beanie baby you see pictured. Shame? No, I don’t have any of that, sorry.

Anyway, should I get something really awfulgood, I’ll post a picture of it.

Low and Lonely, High as Kites; When Do You Think We’ll Get It Right?

By in foolosophy No Comments

Morgan Meis:

Maybe the discontent that comes to us in winter is in the realization that every moment of joy is but a brief resting point on the greater journey toward oblivion. Or maybe that’s too grand. Maybe the discontent in winter is the discontent about the fleeting quality of the present. Nothing holds still for very long, after all. Nothing that feels good stays good for very long. Even in Los Angeles, the perfect sunny day turns to night; a feeling of contentment is replaced by anxiety somewhere along the line.
If there is a greater contentment to be found, then, it is in the contentment of discontent. It is in the willingness, maybe, to have your winters and to have them in their dreariness and decay, neither surrendering completely to that discontent nor pretending to solve it. The cycle of the seasons is, after all, utterly pointless. It just goes round and round. I do not think any meaning can be found in stepping outside that cycle to explain its purpose from afar. Winter can’t be made glorious, can’t be transformed into endless summer.

Kant’s Joke

By in augean stables, books, nietzsche, philosophy, religion No Comments

Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the whole world, that the whole world was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.

– Nietzsche
Complex logic and leaden, plodding prose do indeed combine to make Kant a grueling chore to read. But if I may quote from Philipp Blom’s book one last time, he again manages to succinctly summarize a difficult philosopher:

In this model of history, Immanuel Kant fulfilled a similar function for the eighteenth century as René Descartes had for the seventeenth: His grand metaphysical investigation left open a door through which God could be introduced back into philosophy. Kant argued that our senses determine how the world appears to us, and that we may never be able to perceive things as they really are, the “things in themselves.” But instead of accepting that we cannot know anything beyond our perception and that it makes no sense to talk of things we cannot know, he conjectured a purely essential, spiritual reality that is inaccessible to human understanding, a reality in which we might imagine a deity beyond the grasp of the senses. One can read Kant safely without compromising one’s religious beliefs, which can always be safely tucked away among the “things in themselves.”

Neti, Neti

By in atheism, foolosophy, nietzsche, religion, science, spiritual-not-religious 1 Comment

Thanks to Shanna for passing along a link to an interesting blog, and even taking the time to ferret out several posts of interest from the archives! I’d say this pretty much guarantees her the coveted “Minion of the Month” award for January! But we’ll have time for award ceremonies later. Cracking knuckles, getting down to bidness. This was one from last summer:
A letter to my fellow skeptics
What if, Dr Dawkins (or any fellow skeptic), you had an experience of a particular kind that you can’t really explain?
You catch a fleeting glimpse of, well, you can’t really say. Words fail you, but you try anyway: “I’ve witnessed, uh, something… some distinct experience in which I’ve seen the perfection and limitless beauty of the world. I believe, no… I know that I was seeing with utter clarity, and that it was not the way I normally see the world. I saw clearly that I was one with the universe, that unconditional love is its basis, and that I am an eternal being and not a hapless, mortal creature.” Already you sound nuts, even to yourself.
You search for the terms to explain the quality of it, and cringe when the only word you can summon is “divine.” Every stab you take at conveying your experience only amounts to a disappointing, evasive-sounding cliché:
•There is something more to us
•Everything is in its right place, we just can’t see that
•There is a higher intelligence behind all this
Whatever it is, you have a very strong sense that its cultivation is immeasurably valuable, not just as a means of achieving peace and ease in your life, but for others to do the same. It is, clearly, exactly what humanity needs in order to overcome — no, transcend — its current palette of troubles. For this reason you feel it is important for others to have this experience too.
Well, I could quibble with some of the specifics, but in general, sure, I have that experience quite frequently, especially via music, and to a lesser extent, writing or art in general. What I don’t understand is why this kind of experience of harmonious… je ne sais quoi is so commonly held out as incommensurate with atheism and scientific materialism. Stephen Asma is currently involved in a back-and-forth exchange that demonstrates how neither of those things require that one jettison an appreciation of the role of emotions and mystery in human experience, for example. And someone like Steven Pinker, as hardboiled as they come, says this in The Blank Slate:

But greedy reductionism is far from the majority view, and it is easy to show why it is wrong. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam has pointed out, even the simple fact that a square peg won’t fit into a round hole can’t be explained in terms of molecules and atoms but only at a higher level of analysis involving rigidity (regardless of what makes the peg rigid) and geometry. And if anyone really thought that sociology or literature or history could be replaced by biology, why stop there? Biology could in turn be ground up into chemistry, and chemistry into physics, leaving one struggling to explain the causes of World War I in terms of electrons and quarks. Even if World War I consisted of nothing but a very, very large number of quarks in a very, very complicated pattern of motion, no insight is gained by describing it that way.

There’s a bit of a “God of the gaps” mindset here that bothers me — just because science has to currently admit not knowing something, or just because we don’t have the vocabulary to express ourselves coherently enough for science to even begin addressing the nature of our experiences, it doesn’t imply a supernatural origin or character to them. For the most part, the reason we can’t explain these experiences is because there’s no way to get an outside perspective from which to analyze them. The nature of language and conceptual thought is such that we can only really talk about things by contrasting them with different things. To what can you compare those moments of bliss that accompany this, uh, god’s-eye view? It’s sort of like not being able to see a tiny star when looking directly at it; you have to look just to the side of it to catch a glimpse of its dim light. Hence poetry and music, which often trace a circle around the experience without ever trying to pin it down. But lacking the ability to put something immediately into words, or to reduce it to its component parts like a piece of machinery spread out on the table, does not necessarily entail that we shrug our shoulders and start talking about God instead. None of these experiences, however awe-inspiring and ineffable, do anything to offset the fact that our personalities do not survive our body’s death, or that there is nothing like monotheism’s personal God overseeing the whole shebang. Did you get that? Let me say it again, because it’s important: None of these experiences, however awe-inspiring and ineffable, do anything to offset the fact that our personalities do not survive our body’s death, or that there is nothing like monotheism’s personal, loving God overseeing the whole shebang.
Even someone like Nietzsche, who famously said that mystical explanations, far from being deep as commonly thought, were “not even shallow”, was familiar with this sort of ecstatic communion with the spirit of life, the ground of all being, the which than which there is no whicher. The difference is, he was well aware that this is an understanding that transcends our limited, partial notions of love, peace, purpose, morality and all that good stuff. The harmony that pervades life itself includes all the notes we would call dissonant. The brief glimpses we have of “a cosmic place for everything and everything in its cosmic place” includes all the things we would call discordant. If you’re seeing only “positive” manifestations of this insight, I daresay you’re projecting a bit. All the mindless destruction and suffering that has permeated life as we know it since time immemorial has been just as necessary to the whole, which is why Nietzsche initially called his idea of the eternal recurrence “the most abysmal thought”. If you want to merge in rapturous union with the sum total of all that is, was, and ever will be, you have to accept all of it. No picking and choosing, no highlighting the parts you approve of and ignoring the rest.
We can’t exist on that level of understanding, any more than we can have a permanent drug high, a neverending orgasm, or an up without a down. Our day-to-day existence requires that we settle for imperfection and partiality. We can only visit there occasionally, and whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.

Them Vultures Robbin’ Everything, Leave Nothin’ but Chains

By in germans supported their troops too, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

That five-sided fist-a-gon
That rotten sore on the face of Mother Earth gets bigger
The trigger’s cold, empty your purse
– RATM
In defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of conversation. Americans should not confuse that talk with reality. Any cuts exacted will at most reduce the rate of growth. The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history.
The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War — this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a “peer competitor.” Evil Empire? It exists only in the fevered imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a rust-bucket Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously the ravings of radical Islamists promising from deep inside their caves to unite the Umma in a new caliphate.
…The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.
But let’s not fail to mention an overemphasis on military expenditures and unused industrial areas, Orlov insisted, describing them as mis-investments made by both empires.
“To this day, the former Soviet Union is littered with abandoned or semi-abandoned industrial sites just as the United States is,” he noted.
By Orlov’s estimation, the US military will never voluntarily quit being the world’s largest oil consumer and largest polluter. Moreover, any plans suggested to the military to end its oil dependency in 30 years are an act of “desperation,” he said.
“They have set their hair on fire and are running around in circles. That’s their drill right now,” Orlov quipped.
And yet, the progressive blogosphere thinks the best use of its time and energy is trying to make it easier for more people to be part of this institution. This is why I barely bother reading political blogs anymore.

No Complaints, but I Wish I Had More Time for My Brain

By in omnigatherum No Comments

Snow. We were promised an inch and a half, and we ended up getting something close to ten. (The ladies in my life have precisely the opposite complaint, come to think of it.)

We’ve been lucky so far, this being the first significant storm of the season. But after the trauma of last year, I don’t give a fuck. I swear by Odin’s icicle-festooned scrotum, I don’t want to see another snowflake for ten years, period, full stop. You know how Caligula ordered his soldiers to attack the water in the English Channel? Well, that’s going to be me; stark raving mad, hacking at snowdrifts with a sword. Or maybe I’ll just run screaming off into the woods, where I’ll become a wendigo and prey on the local hillbillies.
Anyway, I have to hit the road in this mess in a couple hours, so the rest of my day is probably shot. But here’s a story from a few weeks ago to entertain you in the meantime. And if Shanna shows up jeering about how this would barely be considered a flurry up in the frozen tundra of Canuckistan, throw something at her.

Some People Just Aren’t the Type for Marriage and Family

By in bread and circuses, foolosophy, marriage No Comments

But the notion that the most irresistible man in the world has marital cold feet and zero paternal instincts doesn’t sit right with everybody. How can an anguished populace make sense of this crazy news? Theories about what’s really going on here abound. First, of course, faster than you can say, “He must be gay,” Internet commenters have been chiming in that Clooney, who has dated Italian model Elisabetta Canalis for two years, must be gay. “I know agents in Hollywood who, in the strictest confidence insists that Clooney is gay,” confided one CNN poster, while another on E! quickly surmised: “He is as gay as Rock Hudson. He’s fooling no one.”
Others can’t make sense of his quitter attitude, like the commenter on Us who said, “I don’t get his negative view of marriage. He has also failed at some movies yet he tries again.” And then there are those who simply refuse to believe the man. At The Stir, writer Amy Boshnack opined, “We’ve heard so many other celebs (and regular folk) say they were never going to marry again, just to end up eating their words,” and optimistically observing that ” If [Howard] Stern can marry again, I think anyone can!” And E! blogger Bruna Nessif pep talked, “Oh, chin up Georgey! Practice makes perfect,” while musing, “Can’t help but wonder how Elisabetta is taking this news.” Here’s a kooky idea. Maybe he just doesn’t want to get married. Maybe he doesn’t want to have kids. In fact, that’s the theory I’m going with.
I’ve been pretty fortunate in that my mom has only dropped a couple hints about grandchildren and continuing the family line, and even that hasn’t happened for quite a while. My parents wondered if I were gay as a teenager simply because I was a loner (granted, the long-haired, androgynous rocker look probably helped encourage such speculation). I don’t know what they think now that I’ve been single for several years, but at least they don’t bother me about it.
I just think it’s funny how personally people take it when you refuse to identify as fish or fowl for them. You aren’t interested in dating or getting married? What are you, gay? A serial killer? High maintenance? Damaged goods? A pervert with an embarrassing secret? TELL ME WHAT YOU ARE, GODDAMNIT! I’M LOSING SLEEP HERE! WHY DON’T YOU WANT TO BE LIKE ME? WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?
And that, of course, is what I think it’s really about. The spectacle of someone consciously resisting the gravitational pull of custom and habit stands as an implicit rebuke to the thoughtless way so many people stumble into the biggest decisions of their lives. Being forced to consider someone who has made different, contrary, and difficult choices and still attained contentedness is enraging to those who have sacrificed so much in deference to authority and conventional wisdom for the sake of an eventual happiness that may never even arrive. It ruins the illusion of security offered by a herd mentality.

Belles-Lettres

By in socmed, technology, writing No Comments

Adam Haslett:

Geoff Kloske, the head of Riverhead Books, publisher of George Saunders and Aleksandar Hemon, thinks current stylistic variety makes it impossible to claim we are in either a minimalist or maximalist period. “More, I fear, there is a flaccidity and casualness of style that has come from writing habits born out of e-mail and social media.” A kind of death of the sentence by collective neglect. Kloske is right that the incessant dribble of mini-messaging has made most people’s daily use of written language brutally factual in character, more private ad copy than prose. I’m old enough to have written letters to friends when I was younger, which took time and a bit of thought. Like most people, I don’t do that any more, and e-mail hasn’t replaced the habit. The writing of complete sentences for aural pleasure as well as news is going the way of the playing of musical instruments – it’s becoming a speciality rather than a means most people have to a little amateur, unselfconscious enjoyment. This isn’t the end of the world for literature. In a sense, it only intensifies its role as the repository of our linguistic imagination. But it’s a pity none the less; there’s a difference between pure spectatorship and semi-participatory appreciation. The latter is much warmer. It creates more room for fellow feeling and a bit less for the glare of celebrity and the correlative abjection of envy and fandom.

But things change. Will we still have Henry Jamesian prose in an age where popular writing has condensed from concision to near-hieroglyphics? And, is it really social media/technology that’s wrecked how we communicate or has it perhaps rather broadened the audience for text-based communication in a time when no one makes time for long thoughts? Culture: Facebook; Chicken; Egg.
Data will come. For now, we can know that schoolchildren will still read Strunk and White while texting under the table. They will still read Proust while going home to play Call of Duty: Black Ops. The snows of yesteryear are, axiomatically, historic, but we will see the creation of new works of literature. The next generation of great writers will learn how to write in the same way they always have: by reading books that move them.
I don’t fear that good writing, beautiful writing, will disappear, of course; there are enough people out there willing to become modern-day Irish monks, dutifully preserving the know-how even as the overwhelming majority of our culture devolves to communicating entirely in emoticons and lolspeak. I just lament how much of the writing I encounter on a regular basis is flaccid, casual, brutally factual.
I know that words are abstractions that can never come close to capturing all of experience, but as I think back to how much I’ve grown to utterly adore writing, I’m sometimes astonished at how much more substantial I feel as a person in the years that I’ve been systematically trying to write my thoughts down; not just on the blog, but in good correspondence. I always feel some impatience and dissatisfaction with everything I write, still wanting to try again to express things just so, but I can admit that I feel so much better for the effort. I’m not surprised by this at all, even though I’m one of the odd ones who actually greatly prefer typing to writing. Reading and writing facilitate thinking, and when people never make time for the first two, well…

The Room Behind the Shop

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne, philosophy No Comments

Sarah Bakewell, reviewing James Miller’s Examined Lives (another book in my “to read” stack):

Yet his entire book conveys a sense that the genuinely philosophical examination of a life can still lead us somewhere radically different from other kinds of reflection. At the end of his chapter on Descartes, Miller cites the 20th-­century phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whom he identifies as the major exception to the rule that places most post-Cartesian thinkers on one side or the other of the personal/impersonal divide. Apropos of Descartes, Husserl wrote, “Anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must ‘once in his life’ withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting.”
It is an extraordinary thing to do: a project that remains “quite personal,” as Husserl admitted, yet that reaches in to seize the whole world and redesign it from the very foundation. Perhaps this is what still distinguishes the philosophical life: that “once in a lifetime” convulsion, in which one reinvents reality around oneself. It is a project doomed to fail, and compromises will always be made. But what, in life, could be more interesting?
This reminded me of a passage from one of Nietzsche’s letters that I liked:

Now I am engaged in shaking off what does not belong to me, be it people, friend or foe, habits, conveniences, books. I shall live in solitude for years until, as a philosopher of life, fully matured and finished, I allow myself to (and then, perhaps, must) go again amongst men.

A little less directly, it also called to mind something from Bakewell’s book about Montaigne:

We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.

The phrase about the “back shop” or “room behind the shop” as it is sometimes translated – the arrière boutique – appears again and again in books about Montaigne, but it is rarely kept within its context. He is not writing about a selfish, introverted withdrawal from family life so much as from the need to protect yourself from the pain that would come if you lost that family. Montaigne sought detachment and retreat so that he could not be too badly hurt, but in doing so he also discovered that having such a retreat helped him establish his “real liberty,” the space he needed to think and look inward.
Whether it’s having some sort of private space available for periodic retreats, or having one particular, intense period of withdrawal and reflection, I like the general theme here. I often feel a strong urge to retreat into a cocoon, only reemerging when I’ve shaken off everything that doesn’t belong to me, all the habits and ties that formed when I was younger and more impressionable. I want to subject my entire life to a severe audit, consciously choosing as much as I can while letting go of all the aimless orbits I more or less unthinkingly happened into.
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