April 2011

Definitely Maybe

By in alan watts, extraordinary popular delusions, religion, spiritual-not-religious, the madness of crowds

Mitch Horowitz:

For all of its inroads into mainstream life, New Age became a term (and sometimes an epithet) that for many serious people connoted nothing more than a softheaded jumble of spiritual-therapeutic remedies or bromides. But the New Age did, in fact, have a core set of beliefs and a definable point of view. Most people, thought schools, or movements identified as New Age from the 1970s through the early twenty-first century shared these traits:
  1. Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas
  2. Belief in a mind-body connection in health
  3. Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages
  4. Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality
  5. Belief that spiritual understanding is available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine
Most twenty-first century Americans, whatever their background, would probably agree with a majority of those statements.
Well, let’s see how I do:
1. Meh. I’m sure a lot of spiritual or religious ideas are comforting and reassuring, especially those that reinforce core features of our identity, the ones we don’t like to question. On the other hand, Catholicism, to name the most obvious example. Assuming you’re not forced to spend a lifetime in therapy to recover from being raped by a priest, you’re still going to have all that infamous guilt to work through. And on the other other hand, I see intelligent people put themselves through unnecessary anguish over the state of their soul and the purpose of their life, straining their third eye to try to perceive supposedly hidden clues to the Meaning Of It All behind the presumed façade of empirical reality. And that doesn’t even touch on whether believing in manifestly false ideas can be said to be truly good for you in the long run (assuming, of course, that at least some metaphysical ideas are indeed false), regardless of whether they make you temporarily happy or not. Is ignorance truly bliss, then?
2. Given that the mind is part of the body; more specifically, the brain, then yes, obviously. The problem comes when you’re asked to rigorously define “connection”.
3. No. And what does “higher” mean anyway? Better? In what way? I have a terrible suspicion that a lot of people think there can and should be an ideal world in which nothing “bad” or “negative” ever happens, which betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how necessary those things are in order for there to be anything “good” or “positive”. I don’t need to elaborate here, since Alan Watts wrote many fine books about this concept before I even existed. Check them out.
4. Thoughts can determine how effectively you act upon and react to reality, but there is still something going on out there independent of your ego that you simply do not control with the power of your thoughts, no matter how much of a market there is for books telling you otherwise.
5. First, we would have to agree that there is such a thing as “spiritual understanding”, rather than just metaphysical nonsense, so once again, let’s define our terms. Even if we can’t, though, I can certainly agree that ordinary individuals are perfectly capable of coming up with their own nonsense without having to be instructed in the proper methods by any supposed authorities.

Bounded in a Nutshell, a King of Infinite Space

By in foolosophy, the big sleep

Peter Lawler:

Will indefinite longevity be the secret to human happiness? Well, there’s no denying that people would rather not die at any particular time, and that there’s a lot of misery in being governed by the scarcity of time. Time, we can’t help but notice, ruins or undermines at least most forms of human enjoyment. That’s why, we can say, that human beings have always longed for immortality, to be freed from the miserable constraints of their self-conscious mortality. When thinking about immortality, we can’t help but begin with the Greek gods—who were self-conscious but didn’t die. They were, in other words, in many respects like our vampires.
But the immortality of the Greeks gods was even meant to make sense or be a realistic possibility. The poets invented them—like today’s poets employ the Vampires–to show that immortality isn’t only impossible but undesirable. And so if we thought about who we are, we’d actually chose the mortality with which each of us stuck anyway. Our longing for immortality is best satisfied by accomplishments that stand the test of time—the immortal glory of the great political deeds or of the enduring beauty and wisdom of works of art or literature–although even our fame, we really know, doesn’t last forever. And we can achieve a kind of immortality through our minds, through knowing the eternal truth about natural necessity, through philosophy. Everything great that we do—from having children to writing THE REPUBLIC –depends on being mortal. The polymorphous human eros that animates us, in other words, depends upon death. Only mortals know what it means really to fall in love.
Good stuff, preach it, true dat, but I must beg to differ with one of his lines above — time is the necessary boundary marker that defines most forms of human enjoyment. The passing of time is what gives us the impetus to act at all. Without the need to take advantage of a unique, unrepeatable opportunity to act on a possibility that may never present itself again, why bother to do anything but daydream about limitless potential?
I’ve often thought that my late forties or early fifties would be enough living for me. It’s not so much a statement of desire or intent to be dead within the next ten or fifteen years as it is a way to force myself to live mindfully in the meantime. If you didn’t have a vague expectation of living for another several decades, becoming a doddering, senile husk of a person, what might you do differently now? How much more vivid might so many experiences seem in light of that perspective? I’d rather take the decade-plus of focused, intense awareness than the somnambulant daze that so many people spend their long lives in.

I Got Mine

By in waiting for the barbarians

Bill Moyers: But here’s the problem for journalism. When we write about inequality, we use numbers that are profound but numbing. I mean, here’s something I just read: over the past twenty years, the elite 1 percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s income double, from 11.3 percent to 22.1 percent, but their tax burden shrank by about one-third. Now, those facts tell us something very important: that the rich got richer as their tax rates shrank. But it doesn’t seem to start people’s blood rushing.
David Simon: You start talking about a social compact between the people at the bottom of the pyramid and the people at the top, and people look at you and say, “Are you talking about sharing wealth?” Listen, capitalism is the only engine credible enough to generate mass wealth. I think it’s imperfect, but we’re stuck with it. And thank God we have that in the toolbox. But if you don’t manage it in some way that incorporates all of society, if everybody’s not benefiting on some level and you don’t have a sense of shared purpose, national purpose, then it’s just a pyramid scheme. Who’s standing on top of whose throat?
Bill Moyers: Why do you think, David, that we tolerate such gaps between rich and poor?
David Simon: You know, I’m fascinated by it. Because a lot of the people who end up voting for that kind of laissez-faire market policy are people who get creamed by it. And I think it’s almost like a casino. You’re looking at the guy winning, you’re looking at the guy who pulled the lever and all the bells go off, all the coins are coming out of a one-armed bandit. You’re thinking, “That could be me. I’ll play by those rules.” But actually, those are house rules. And most of you are going to lose.
I’ve had some form of this conversation three times in the last five days with friends of mine, puzzling over how we got to this point as a nation, where Wall St. and the Pentagon can keep taking, taking, taking as much money as they want, but the blame will fall on teachers, unions and unemployed people. Circling the drain, we are…

Young Love

By in poetry

My stepson and his girlfriend are finally living together after a year and a half of a long-distance romance. I was watching them yesterday attempting to make a pound cake together, obviously enjoying every minute of it despite getting in each other’s way constantly, and later falling asleep on each other while watching TV. It may not do my reputation any favors, but I can admit to feeling a bit verklempt as I looked at them, illuminated in the cathode glow, and thought of another poem by Auden:
Do not turn, do not lift your eyes
Toward the still pair standing
On the bridge between your properties,
Indifferent to your minding:
In its glory, in its power,
This is their hour.
Nothing your strength, your skill could do
Can alter their embrace
Or dispersuade the Furies who
At the appointed place
With claw and dreadful brow
Wait for them now.
Good luck, you two.

Plink, Plink, Plink, Plink

By in music

John Carpenter:

AVC: The movies you scored have a very distinctive sound. How did you end up focusing on the synthesizer as your primary instrument?
JC: From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them, electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting. I was kind of a half-assed musician.
Gluteally-challenged he may be, but I loved the soundtrack to the first couple Halloween movies. Loved it, I tell you. One of the very first things I did when I got Internet access was look to see if I could find the actual CD, and I ended up getting it from some Wiccan bookstore somewhere. Before that, I had made recordings of myself on a shitty keyboard trying to recreate my favorite tracks so that I could listen to them around Halloween. See, I’ve always felt that one of the most glaring deficiencies of my other favorite holiday is that unlike Christmas, there’s no body of music to help ground the experience of Halloween in the memory. No Halloween carols. And no, novelty songs like “Monster Mash” do not count. Don’t even insult the macabre grandeur of that most sinister time of year with such tripe.
Anyway, yes. Every October, I spend a fair amount of time listening to Halloween 1978 (Laurie’s Theme), The Haunted House, and, of course, the famous theme itself on repeat. Just can’t get enough of that simplistic, spooky piano.

Those Who Help Themselves

By in books, foolosophy, philosophy, spiritual-not-religious

De Botton promised his series would be “a ground-breaking experiment”, offering rigorous self-help books that hark back to the days when – in the hands of Epicurus and Seneca – such tomes were highly valued, rather than the much-ridiculed genre of today. “We need self-help books more than ever before,” he said. “In the age of moral and practical confusions, the self-help book is crying out to be redesigned and rehabilitated.”

Well, I’m interested to see what this will be like. I’ve always enjoyed de Botton’s writing, though others disagree:
Is there a sniffy faction within the world of philosophy that takes a dim view of attempts to make the subject more widely accessible?
“Oh, I’m absolutely sure of it. But I also think that attitude has moderated considerably over time. Ten to 15 years ago, when I started to try to do this, I’m pretty sure there was a lot of sniffing going on.” He does a bit of his own sniffing, though, a moment later, when I mention the popularity of bestselling writers whom he has described as quasi-philosophers.
“Hmm, yes, the [Alain] de Bottons and so on,” Grayling murmurs rather sorrowfully. “He’s a perfectly nice fellow, but it’s not philosophy. It’s cream-puff stuff. What worries me is that someone will go to it thinking, ‘Ooh, this is an opportunity to think and find out something’, and then they find that it’s actually very shallow and doesn’t have deep roots. And I do think that people who do this kind of thing should really have done some work and got engaged in something serious, and then they won’t make too many mistakes when it comes to trying to introduce others to it.”
I’m not aware if de Botton’s books have been marketed as philosophy per se, but I also don’t remotely care. I’ve read a lot of “deep, serious” philosophy that I found useless. You already know I hold Plato directly responsible for at least half of the stupidest ideas underpinning Western culture. Hegel was a human hot-air balloon. Descartes’ mind/body dualism still plagues otherwise intelligent people. De Botton just strikes me as an intelligent guy who uses readings of philosophy to make sense of everyday life. Philosophy in the sense of “how to live” as opposed to an academic discipline. Give it whatever taxonomy you want. I’d enjoy shooting the breeze with him.
Besides, if self-help books were good enough for David Foster Wallace…

A case can be made that U.S. society is very much obsessed with “self-help,” which involves thinking a whole lot (too much, even) about yourself and your own problems, seeing everything only as it relates to the self, rather than seeing oneself as a valuable part of a larger valuable whole; this is one of the themes of The Pale King.

Yes, exactly. I see it as being similar to spiritual-not-religiousness in that regard; reinforcing rather than challenging the very egotism that causes so many problems. Hopefully that’s what de Botton wants to rehabilitate about the genre.

God Hates Flags

By in fresh hell, old dixie

Pew Research:

Fewer than one-in-ten (8%) say they display the Confederate flag in places such as their home or office, on their car or on their clothing; 91% say they do not. The number that displays the Confederate flag is just a small fraction of the 75% who say they display the American flag in their homes or offices, on their cars or their clothing.
Whites who consider themselves Southerners have a more positive reaction to the Confederate flag than do other whites: 22% say they react positively when they see the Confederate flag displayed, compared with 8% of all whites and just 4% of whites who do not consider themselves Southerners.
That’s funny. I think I see five Confederate flags just within a couple-mile radius of my house. Anyway:
I don’t need no country, I don’t fly no flag
– Alabama 3
Don’t pledge allegiance to flags, I burn ’em
– Warrior Soul
Patriots? Little boys,
obsessed by Bigness,
Big Pricks, Big Money, Big Bangs.
– W.H. Auden

Paperless Cuts

By in books, environment, technology, unintended consequences

Ted Genoways:

In July, Amazon.com revealed that sales of e-books were now outstripping the sales of hardcover books, with the possibility that their sales will double that of hardcovers by the end of the year. With the appearance of Apple’s iPad in April—and its stunning sales of four million units in its first four months—Barnes & Noble dropped the price of its Nook e-reader and Amazon announced the release of a cheaper version of its Kindle in July. Each of these companies is expected to unveil souped-up and cheaper e-readers in time for Christmas. All of which has media gurus heralding this as the year that publishing will finally go paperless—and trumpeting that change as the latest step in the greening up of American consumerism.
But the New York Times recently calculated that the environmental impact of a single e-reader—factoring in the use of minerals, water, and fossil fuels along the manufacturing process—is roughly the same as fifty books. At first that sounds encouraging; after all, even the smallest personal library contains fifty volumes. But the real problems come in lifespan. At present, the average e-reader is used less than two years before it is replaced. That means that the nearly ten million e-readers expected to be in use by next year would have to supplant the sales of 250 million new books—not used or rare editions, 250 million new books—each year just to come out footprint-neutral. Considering the fact that the Association of American Publishers estimates that the combined sales of all books in America (adult books, children’s books, textbooks, and religious works) amounted to fewer than 25 million copies last year, we have already increased the environmental impact of reading by tenfold. Moreover, it takes almost exactly fifty times as much fossil fuel production to power an iPad for the hours it takes to read a book as it would take to read the same book on paper by electric light.
By some estimates, small electronics already account for more global carbon emissions than the airline industry, and the wave of new handheld and portable devices—from smartphones to laptops to e-readers—stand poised to wreak untold havoc, much of it in developing nations.
…Taken together, these essays reveal the hidden price of the paperless revolution. Every MacBook and iPad, every Kindle and Droid contains the labor of hundreds of invisible workers, uncounted lives foreshortened by poisoned water and air, and a landscape permanently scarred by our voracious scavenging. No matter how sleek and earth-friendly these devices may appear, they rise from the dirt and are mined with sweat and with blood. This is not to say that our information age is inherently bad. The protests after last year’s elections in Iran were largely organized over Twitter and documented via YouTube. Across Africa, farmers are using smartphones to access daily market prices via the Internet, assuring fairer compensation for their crops. This summer our government used Facebook to enlist and organize volunteers for the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill. But in our rush to embrace the new—the smaller, the faster, the more powerful—we must not confuse revolutionary products with revolutions in production. We must not forget that even in this age of enlightenment, much of the world remains stooped in black tunnels, tracing veins deeper into darkness.
I know a couple gadget-junkies to whom I’m going to enjoy returning their smugness over my extensive book-buying habits. And at least we’re not waging imperial occupations over the trees necessary to produce my books.

In My Room

By in music

I’d never heard of Fred Cornog before now, but if his music resonates with me half as much as his words, I’ll be quite impressed.

Do you continue to work your day job at Home Depot because it gives you access to the kind of people who populate your records?
I am one of those people. I’m basically a working class pawn, a cog in the wheel, who happens to write songs. Maybe I’m more artistically inclined than your average Home Depot employee but, beyond that, I don’t see much of a difference.
Could you ever imagine making a living off of your music?
Of course. But the thing that bothers me is that making a living solely from music nearly always involves a list of compromises that I’m unwilling to make. And, ultimately, the commerce side of things kills the artistic side. When you get semi-successful, you will be asked to tour and promote your music in various ways. Eventually, you’ll end up spending more and more time promoting your music and doing this peripheral bullshit stuff, and less and less time creating music. And, ironically, making music is what made you semi-successful in the first place. An artist must always be aware of this. Don’t fall into the traps. Otherwise, slowly, slowly, the power gets pulled away from you.
You’ve hardly ever played live, and certainly not for well over a decade. Why is this?
When I was a kid, my father used to yell at me constantly to stop playing the piano. He’d scream, “Stop playin’ that damn piano! God damn it, you had all day to play that damn thing! Can’t you see I’m watchin’ the television! I want some peace and quiet, God damn it!” When you’re a kid and you hear this over and over and over, it changes you, and it changes your brain chemistry. Another kid might have started a rock band down at a friend’s house. But me, my father’s wrath drove me inside my mind. It made me want to curl up and hide. So I quietly wrote songs in my room and became a Tascam mini-studio musician. But the catch is, in working alone like this for years and years, and never collaborating with other musicians, my methodology has somewhat crippled me. I’m not complaining and it’s not sad or anything. That’s just the way it is.
Another reason is that I’ve never liked being the centre of attention. I have the absolute worst kind of personality for the rock world. When I go out, I like to quietly sit at the back of the bar. The last thing I want to do is stand at the centre of the stage in a fuckin’ spotlight with people staring at me waiting to be entertained.
Do you consider your refusal to ‘play the game’ to be in any way rock ‘n’ roll?
I don’t think that the rebellious spirit of rock ‘n’ roll exists in roll ‘n’ roll anymore. [It] is inhabiting other artforms. The spirit is moving to where there are fewer rules. The spirit is moving to where there isn’t an expectation of money being made. It’s moving away from the marketplace. It always does.
The power of music, man. I know exactly what he means, to be the sort of person who is content to live an anonymous life, secretly, almost furtively being creative, even if it inexorably draws you into a set of circumstances you’d never choose otherwise. I was absolutely driven to write and record music. I wanted to be able to share it with people. And yet I knew that I would almost certainly hate everything that would result from that. For me, fate intervened in the form of an autoimmune disease and kept me from ever having to make a Herculean attempt to square that circle, but it could have ended badly if I had gotten what I thought I wanted. I have decided, though, that before I become penniless and homeless, I’m going to go ahead and finally get whatever recording equipment I need to be, as he said, a mini-studio musician in my bedroom. I don’t care about anything else at this point besides the joy of doing it.
It’s an inner rebellion, though. Like a lot of people, I don’t believe that popular music has any real power to change the world anymore. That window closed by the end of the ’60s, if it was ever truly open to begin with. The system can package and market anything you throw at it, and most bands are content to just keep recycling various beatnik/hippie/punk clichés anyway. I kind of imagine this ideal as something akin to the concept of Bildung among the Aufklärer, a passive, inward-directed refusal to accept prevailing norms. German mysticism is in my DNA, anyway.
Arthur once wrote something to me about the rebellious spirit of rock ‘n’ roll that affirms what Cornog said:

Schiller wrote about the fundamental contrast in cultural history between what he called the naïve and the sentimental — the original, less sophisticated but more powerful kind of art (Homer, e.g.) and the belated, more sophisticated but less visceral and emotionally powerful (modern) art. Something like a transition from naïve to sentimental has happened in rock music, and probably would have happened even if Reaganism and cynical consumerist manipulation had not taken place. Artistic movements that begin spontaneously tend to become more self-conscious and backward-looking as they develop: revolution cools into evolution, and, as with modern jazz, a creeping classicism sets in where once all was anarchy and freshness. That rock and roll is becoming classical music is just one more melancholy truth coming home to aging baby boomers like me.

From El Niño to Viejo

By in world football

Paul Hayward:

But there is good reason to worry. Torres has become a trudging player, flat-footed and slow to react, no longer the panther of his early Liverpool years. He has not scored in 12 games for club or country. A bright start faded into a muddle of miss-placed passes and doomed runs. A visible drop in confidence accompanied each error, which chimes with a theory popular in Spain. Torres spent so long wanting to get away from Liverpool that when the chance came a worm of self-doubt had burrowed into his brain.

I was impressed with Torres at the 2006 World Cup, enough so that I started following Liverpool once he joined them in 2007 (the presence of several other Spanish stars didn’t hurt, either). Like any other Liverpool fan, after suffering through a solid year of increasing misery, only to finally start to feel the tingling of optimism once Kenny Dalglish returned to managing, followed by a dramatic improvement and an impressive string of results, Torres’ abrupt transfer request was a highly unwelcome dissonant note. Couldn’t he have at least waited until the end of the season to see how it pans out under a new manager and club owners? But once that shock wore off, I had to admit it was a shrewd business deal to unload him while there were still any suckers willing to pay an astronomical fee for him.
Seeing Liverpool go to London and beat Chelsea a week later was sweet enough, but the evil part of me is getting a continued kick out of seeing Torres continue to struggle. All the talking heads seemed to think Chelsea had gotten a great deal by buying an expensive striker they didn’t need, and one who has been made of glass the last few seasons at that. His first touch is often heavy, his passing is woeful, he’s too easily taken out of a game mentally by tough defense, and he’s clearly never recovered from his spate of hamstring and knee injuries. Contrary to what several of them said, he was never even the best striker on Spain’s national team, let alone in the world (and I hope Fernando Llorente starts getting a place ahead of him on international duty as well).
Liverpool, on the other hand, used the money they got from the sales of Torres and the benchwarming Ryan Babel to turn around and grab Luis Suarez and Andy Carroll. Two top-notch strikers for the price of one who hasn’t played consistently well in a couple years? And it’s Chelsea who came out ahead in this? Seeing Suarez’s jaw-dropping slaloming goal against Manchester United (not to mention his impossible-angle goal against Sunderland) should have laid any such notions to rest permanently. Torres hasn’t made a drive on goal like that since who can remember when.

This World Is a Comedy to Those That Think, a Tragedy to Those That Feel

By in books, music

Nancy Shute:

Teenagers are more likely to be depressed if they spend a lot of time listening to music, while teens who read a lot are less depressed, according to new research.
…By contrast, teenagers who read were far less likely to be diagnosed with depression. They were also far less common. Just 0.2 percent of the teenagers said, they were reading a book, magazine or newspaper. The teenagers who read the most were one-tenth as likely to be depressed as the ones who read the least.
Primack figures that may be because reading is far less passive than watching TV or listening to music. “You really have to engage a lot of your brain” when you read, he notes. “It may be that people who are depressed just can’t gather enough energy to do that type or thing.”
I’ve always read and listened to music to an extreme degree, and I’ve been melancholic my whole life, so I’m not sure how I would fit in with these findings. As for music listening, I would guess that people who are in touch with their emotions to such an extent are more likely to feel depressed, especially during those tumultuous adolescent years. But reading also leads to thinking, and hasn’t melancholy been described as the thinking person’s disease?

There’s Just No Future Left for Us to Dream Of, Living in an Era of Instability

By in work

In case you’ve ever wondered, I’ve made my living up to this point within the newspaper industry. Along with the other members of my family, I’ve helped run an independent distributorship, with the New York Times as the centerpiece of a variety of publications we’ve handled (Now you know how I can be so phenomenally well-informed; I’ve had free access to all sorts of publications and newspapers). That will apparently all come to an end by June 1st, which has come as a slightly nasty surprise. It’s just a dying industry doing everything it can in a futile effort to cut costs. The Walmarts of the industry are gobbling up the mom ‘n’ pops. There’s still some details up in the air, but when I asked my Magic 8-Ball if it was indeed time to make a career change, it said, “All Signs Point To Yes.”
The thought of a different line of work isn’t that traumatic; after all, I’ve worked for years in conditions that would send our self-made, independent, don’t-need-nothin’-from-nobody teabaggers sprinting back to their paid vacations, sick days, and employer-provided health plans faster than you could say “Fuck John Galt.” It has frequently been brutal, but feeling content with having done my best, I can imagine being just as content to move on to a job that allows me a break once in a while. It’s just that this has been my entire life. From the time I was six years old, struggling to stay awake past midnight on a Saturday night to go with my dad to deliver Sunday’s Washington Post so I could keep a copy of the big color comics section for myself, to sweeping up the warehouse and emptying the trash as a teenager, to starting part-time work as a Sunday inserter on the cold morning of my fifteenth birthday, to running a small route before school my entire senior year, to going full-time immediately after graduation, running home delivery routes, driving bulk delivery, and even doing office work on the computer at home, my whole life has been spent in the newspaper industry. Finally reaching this point makes me feel very, very old all of a sudden. The finality of it really does hurt, even though we’ve known it was coming for a long time.
The most menacing aspect of all this change is the possibility of not being able to keep making mortgage payments. I’d hate to have to sell my house and find something cheaper, but I also don’t want to start working longer than I want in jobs I hate; those kinds of compromises tend to snowball, in my experience. One of the guys working for us works seven part-time jobs, cobbling them together to make one full-time income. I don’t want to spend all my time working just to have a place to sleep during the few hours when I’m not working that I never have time to appreciate because I’m too busy working just to pay for it. It’s the same reason I always resisted my dad’s efforts to get me to take over the business, or to run my own distributorship. I’d rather drive around in the middle of the night doing grunt work than spend twenty hours a day in the office, talking to people from New York, D.C., White Sulphur Springs and Charlotte all the time. I wouldn’t want my dad’s existence for anything. And seeing him the other day, weary look and hard lines on his face, sparse grey hair disheveled, stubble on his cheeks, talking in a soft, resigned voice about how he would have thought 28 years of service to the NYT with no problems would have meant something, makes me all the more determined to not spend my life chasing after that kind of security. I’d rather chew my own leg off than feel stuck in an indefinite trap like that.
I wish I could have had more time to feel more secure financially, but I’d rather amputate if necessary and find a way to live a simpler life that allows me to do the things that make life worth living to begin with — reading, writing and music. I have no career ambition. I just want to do something I’m competent at, that I don’t hate too much, that allows me the time and energy to pursue my hobbies.
You know what’s funny? The most sinking feeling I got as I listened to this news was wondering if I would have time to keep writing the way I do. My schedule as it stands allows me plenty of time to be online during the day, and I don’t even have to worry about a boss peeking over my shoulder or perusing my browsing habits. But the thought of having to work a “normal” job, having no time until late in the day to read and write online, is really quite scary. I don’t know how things will shake out in the next couple months, but it seems clear enough to me that as long as I can afford Internet access and a few hours a day of spare time, I need to keep doing this, and I don’t want to slip below my nearly-a-post-a-day average. It’s part of the bedrock of my mental health, such as it is.
I suppose I could start entertaining the thought of a marriage of convenience…

We’re All Alone in Time, Someone Has Cut the Line

By in foolosophy, religion, spiritual-not-religious

Tom Jacobs:

It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this knowledge gap, newly published research suggests the key factor isn’t faith per se but rather a benefit it provides that Darwin does not: A sense that our all-too-short lives have meaning.

Okay, but why, then, do Europeans and Japanese manage to accept (not “believe”; accept, goddamnit) evolution and still find a reason to get up in the morning?
I’m also reminded of something Pascal Boyer wrote:

The common shoot-from-the-hip explanation—people fear death, and religion makes them believe that it is not the end—is certainly insufficient because the human mind does not produce adequate comforting delusions against all situations of stress or fear. Indeed, any organism that was prone to such delusions would not survive long. Also, inasmuch as some religious thoughts do allay anxiety, our problem is to explain how they become plausible enough that they can play this role. To entertain a comforting fantasy seems simple enough, but to act on it requires that it be taken as more than a fantasy. The experience of comfort alone could not create the necessary level of plausibility.

It seems to me that the problem is in the fact that we’ve been made to believe that meaning resides “out there”, independent of us, a basic preexisting characteristic of existence itself, and our job is to uncover it rather than create it ourselves. You know who I blame, so I won’t say it again.
Slightly related, while looking in Boyer’s book for that part, I saw this interesting one too:

Reassuring religion, insofar as it exists, is not found in places where life is significantly dangerous or unpleasant; quite the opposite. One of the few religious systems obviously designed to provide a comforting worldview is New Age mysticism. It says that people, all people, have enormous “power”, that all sorts of intellectual and physical feats are within their reach. It claims that we are all connected to mysterious but basically benevolent forces in the universe. Good health can be secured by inner spiritual strength. Human nature is fundamentally good. Most of us lived very interesting lives before this one. Note that these reassuring, ego-boosting notions appeared and spread in one of the most secure and affluent societies in history. People who hold these beliefs are not faced with war, famine, infant mortality, incurable endemic diseases and arbitrary oppression to the same extent as Middle Age Europeans or present-day Third World peasants.

Homegrown

By in world football

Germany general manager Oliver Bierhoff hopes Spain’s players will be too tired after a grueling club season to defend their European Championship title next year, when he expects his squad to reach its peak.
“I can see the difference in our players from 2006 to 2010, the young players coming now are better technically educated, more used to the media, physically much better,” Bierhoff said. “In 2006 we still had problems with a lack of speed and technical issues. With these young players you can see they have had a good education in the clubs’ technical centers.”
I like Germany’s national team and was pleasantly surprised by their performance at the World Cup last year. They seemed to be in poor form in the months leading up to it, so I expected that they might sputter out early, but they managed to pull it all together when it counted. It was especially fun chortling at the looks on Diego Maradona’s face as they destroyed Argentina. The semifinal against Spain was a nice game to watch and very clean — I think I recall it being nearly a half-hour before there was a single contact foul, which is nice, of course, but you would expect a young team in a massive game to be a little more nervous and overzealous. It seemed like they were just too timid, too afraid of making a fatal mistake, and sat back waiting for Spain to come at them, which, of course, probably sealed their fate right there. But overall, they were impressive, and I said at the time I’d be highly surprised if they weren’t serious contenders in 2012 and 2014 at the Euros and World Cup. I still love Spain, but it wouldn’t be a travesty if Germany were to win either of those competitions. Joachim Loew has done a good job, and even admitted to modelling his team’s style after Spain’s with more passing and smaller, quicker midfielders like Mesut Özil and Marko Marin. Fun to watch.
And I always have loved watching Bundesliga games, even though it’s funny how so many players and coaches play a game of Musical Teams, rarely leaving the league to ply their trade in England, Spain or Italy, just switching to one of their rivals. Good to see so many young players coming up through the club systems there.
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