May 2012

Anatta

By in identity, philosophy No Comments

Selfhood. Philosophers from the Buddha (Thus, monks, any body whatsoever… Any feeling whatsoever… Any perception whatsoever… Any fabrications whatsoever… Any consciousness whatsoever that is past, future, or present; internal or external; blatant or subtle; common or sublime; far or near… is to be seen as it actually is with right discernment as: ‘This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am’.) to David Hume (For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.) to Elton John (Although I search myself, it’s always someone else I see) have debated its amorphous nature.

 Now Bruce Hood says the self is an illusion. Will Wilkinson says it isn’t. Is so! Is not! Rabbit season! Duck season! Personally, I think Spinoza had it right; we’re all modes of the one substance, temporary wrinkles in the universal fabric. Also, I would add that calling something an illusion is not the same thing as calling it an error.

Author of the Testosterone Scriptures, Where Did You Go?

By in gender, identity, macho macho men, samesecks, santutthi, Ω No Comments

The Big Lebowski: What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski? Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn’t that what makes a man?
The Dude: Hmmm… Sure, that and a pair of testicles.

Jessa Crispin:

There’s no winning this argument. Because the only acceptable deviation from traditional masculinity is queerness; anyone deviating must be queer. Even if they don’t know it. Suddenly what was good in my life is pathologized. Suddenly there is something wrong with him (secretly gay), and there’s something wrong with me (only attracted to men who are secretly gay). This isn’t about style, about guyliner or wearing a boldly pink tie. It’s about something essential in who they grew up to be, something in their nature that my friends — smart, bright, ambitious, dare I say masculinized women all of them — are reading as less than.

I’ve been reading books about masculinity, the authors trying to challenge what we think of as normal. Boyhoods, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, and Mark Simpson’s Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity. All three writers are queer. When I tried to find a book that challenged society’s ideas of masculinity that was written by a straight man, all I could find was a book defending men’s needs to cheat on their wives.

The stark choice between masculinity and queerness; that sounds familiar. But as intrigued as I am by the idea of a straight male challenge to masculinity, I’m also a little confused. Aren’t there quite a lot of guys who aren’t all about “aggression, muscularity, exhibitionism, dominance, and phallic preoccupation”? In fact, wouldn’t it be fair to say that such a stereotypical jock/frat/brute of a guy is often a cultural punchline? What qualifies as a challenge here?

A relative of mine who died years ago was an electrician. High school education, born and raised in a rural small town. He loved fishing, lifting weights, and listening to heavy metal. He also lived alone in his late thirties/early forties and spent a lot of time cultivating flowers in his garden. I don’t think he was closeted; he just preferred a solo lifestyle after having been through the end of a long-term relationship. And as far as I know, he never had any problem with acceptance from his peers. His basic affability trumped any misgivings guys might have had about the petunias and roses in front of his house.

I find it hard to believe that examples like his are a rarity. I suppose if, by challenges to masculinity, you mean boys who play with Barbies or guys who want to weep openly in public, yes, that might be rare. But emotional restraint is just much a middle-class value in general as much as an admonition that “boys don’t cry”, and it’s hardly a big deal for a guy to list cooking as a favorite activity, or for him to have long hair and sport jewelry that would have been unthinkable for his parents’ generation.

Perhaps we’re talking about challenges to manhood as defined by work, wealth, accomplishment. If so, well, as I said before, I’m all for reclaiming the “omega male” descriptor as a positive affirmation. I played the game long enough to prove I can; now I’m walking away from it, uninterested in proving myself to anybody anymore. But I hardly think the pressure to be a success in a professional career, or to be independent of your parents with a family of your own, is a strictly masculine issue either.

And though I know everyone would prefer to forget the phenomenon ever existed, for sheer gender subversion, what about glam rock and ’80s metal? Cool guys wearing makeup and women’s clothes who nonetheless were more sexually successful with women than all the guys who hated them; what more could you ask for?

What’s Your Definition of Dirty, Baby, What Do You Consider Pornography?

By in conspicuous crusading, media/propaganda, moralizing, sex-you-all No Comments

The Independent:

Alain de Botton has addressed love, happiness and religion. Now he wants to investigate pornography in the belief it can be turned into a moral and noble industry.

The philosopher wants to bring together leading figures within the porn movement and the arts to identify a “new pornography” which is more socially acceptable and is “fit for thoughtful, good human beings”.

…He said society is “awash with porn” which “represents a threat” both to the people who create it and to those who consume it, but he is convinced that it need not be that way and that people can be sexual and virtuous simultaneously.

…“Ideally, porn would excite our lusts in contexts which also presented other, elevated sides of human nature – in which people were being witty, forinstance, or showing kindness, or working hard or being clever – so that our sexual excitement could bleed into, and enhance our respect for these other elements of a good life,” he said.

He really just doesn’t seem to comprehend that not everybody is crying out for a shepherd, a tutor, a father figure. I worry about people with such a propagandist bent, especially when they’re convinced that they’re doing it for virtue.

Florilegia

By in books, eric hoffer, foolosophy, santutthi, writing No Comments

Michael Dirda:

Eric Hoffer was, if anything, even more remarkable than his book. When “The True Believer” was published in 1951, he was a largely self-educated longshoremen, aged 50 or thereabouts (there is doubt about his actual birth date), a barrel-chested guy who earned his living by loading and unloading ships on the docks of San Francisco.
…In the museum world, there is a category called “outsider art,” that is, painting and sculpture created by untrained “folk” artists. Hoffer practiced what one might call “outsider philosophy.” He simply followed his own lights, his own intelligence. …Still, this “longshoreman philosopher” was primarily a reactive thinker, usually developing his own train of thought by building on, or contradicting, observations from earlier writers.
…Whatever his origins, by the 1930s Hoffer was a migrant farm worker in California. When exempted from the World War II draft (because of a hernia), he learned that the longshoremen needed men on the waterfront, and there he found his ideal job — one in which he could work just three or four days a week, leaving the rest of the time for reading, thinking and writing.
Ideal, indeed; be still, my beating heart! Surely you won’t be surprised to hear that Hoffer was, in fact, a bit of a role model for me. I first heard of him by virtue of his mention in Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, read The True Believer, and was deeply impressed by the actualization of what I had thought was a near-mythical possibility in our modern world, that of the non-academic philosopher who makes up with diligence and native smarts what he lacks in specialized training.
A reactive thinker? Technically true, but I can’t help but notice that the manner in which that’s phrased indicates criticism, points being deducted. But I wholeheartedly agree with Maria Popova’s recurring theme on the combinatorial nature of creativity, further suspecting that much academic writing is impenetrable and jargon-laden by design rather than necessity, and that “originality” consists just as much of skillful branding, marketing and self-promotion as it does actual content.

Raise Your Hands, You’re a Sinner

By in bread and circuses, ohferfucksake, race, tribalism No Comments

Evan Shapiro:

The question is not “Is Lena Dunham racist?”; it’s “Is Lena Dunham any more racist than the rest of us?”

Recently, there’s been a firestorm over the lack of diversity on Lena Dunham’s HBO zeitgeist-apalooza, Girls. I will not rehash what has previously been hashed — but if you missed it: Jenna Wortham wrote this critique of the blandness of the characters and casting of Girls; then the Twittersphere went apeshit; then Molly Lambert informed us that it’s not Dunham who’s racist, it’s all of TV.

So, now you’re up to date — except for one thing: It’s not TV that’s racist, it’s us. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: TV (especially right now) is far more of a reflection of who we are as a society, than who we ought to be.

Razib Khan:

What was Leah Dunham’s experience? I think the reality is that her experience probably was mostly white, at least from what I’ve seen in the real Brooklyn. People tend to cluster with their own group. And that’s what gets on my nerves about all the enthusiasm about diversity: it’s a massive demographic token for something which people tend not live out in their own lives even when they have the opportunity.

They’re both talking about the fact that people tend to choose to live in racially homogenous areas. Khan’s essay is interesting and considered, though, while Shapiro’s is an excellent example of the pseudo-contrite confessional genre that irritates me so much.

How does it help anything to use such a powerful term as “racist” in reference to a 25 year-old woman’s admission that she only feels convincing as a writer in creating characters who reflect her own Jewish/WASP experiences? How is it meaningful to apply the term to those of us who live in semi-rural small towns, who would have to literally seek out friends and acquaintances by virtue of ethnicity, as if they were merely tokens in a diversity scavenger hunt, in order to satisfy such standards? (What next, are we going to start unfavorably judging people by the racial content of their favorite music? Oh.) And, as Khan mentions, how many people like these, if you were to glance at their Facebook pages, would turn out to have an ethnically balanced group of friends?

Of course, the aim isn’t really to clarify anything about race in American society; it’s just a way to signal to other progressives that here, we have a cultured, thoughtful guy who isn’t afraid to get at the root of the problem and implicate himself alongside everyone else in his criticism. It may be toothless criticism, and it may appear in the sidebar of the Huffington Post right above the video of a puppy playing with a lawn sprinkler, but it makes the right people feel self-satisfied for a while, and that’s what really matters.

‘Cause the Craving Remains the Same

By in drugs, identity, psychology No Comments

Alan Brody:

Addiction busts up what matters: the condition is capable of creating urges and motivations which bring about highly significant losses to a person’s well-being in spite of the person’s standing preference not to live like that. It’s possible that an addict is able, at times, to control the urge to use; but the addict also might not be able to prevent an urge to use from spontaneously arising and motivating. Other conditions, for instance bipolar or obsessive-compulsive disorders, can also create self-regulatory failures, so that episodes of self-destructive behavior are willingly engaged in which contravene the person’s general preference not to behave like that. Furthermore an appearance, at times, of control – intentionally cutting down, or temporarily stopping – can mislead the addict and others into believing that the addiction really is under control. The ability of the addict to believe that he/she is addicted also typically becomes compromised.

Well, why not just hold that addicts abandon their resolve to be abstinent simply because they change their minds, and not through some sort of compulsion? It’s common to change one’s mind when faced with temptation. Sometimes the choice to go ahead with the temptation is the result of a cost-benefit evaluation – in other words, it seems worthwhile to do it. At other times a person might gratify their desire or urge without entertaining any qualms or even thoughts about it. So although an addict’s habitual behavior might be atypical, rather than seeing it as a result of a compulsion they’re not strong enough to fight against, why not see their addictive behavior as something done in a willing manner, because the person feels like doing it, and/or they regard it as worth doing?

…Support for the moral and other willingness models has been garnered from the fact that some addicts have stopped or limited their drug use when they have had good enough reason for doing so – that is, when they regard doing so as important. For example, it is not unusual for women to stop smoking while pregnant in order to protect the fetus, but to resume smoking afterwards. Also, addicts will often limit when they engage in their addiction, for instance, not at work, or not around certain people. Addicts might also demonstrate an ability to limit their drug use, e.g., their drinking, just to prove that they can successfully control their habit. Some addicts may decide that their addiction no longer works for them, and stop using completely. Furthermore, it is often claimed, that even if there are genetic or biological factors causing an addict to have strong urges, control over them still depend on what the addict thinks it is worthwhile to do, even when the urges are intense. Urges “incline but do not necessitate,” to use an expression of Leibniz’s.

I’ve always been skeptical of the disease model of substance abuse, not out of a misanthropic “fuck ’em if they’re stupid enough to use” sensibility, but because, as with free will, I wonder about the conceptual framework of identity behind it. I wonder if it’s just simply too injurious to our moral sensibilities to accept that anyone could willingly choose to satisfy their addiction at the expense of their responsibilities to friends, family, society.

Practically speaking, I don’t see where it makes a difference. Addicts almost always will need treatment and a lot of support to change their lives. But I wonder about the way in which compulsive, destructive habits are visualized as being insidious, foreign agents that invade and corrupt the integrity of their host. How does it clarify our understanding of the phenomenon to call it a “disease” rather than simply an “addiction”?

Reinventing the Wheel of Existence

By in philosophy, religion No Comments

Andrew Brown:

On Sunday, in a rather more low-key event, Stephen Batchelor and Don Cupitt will be debating with Madeleine Bunting the possibility of religion without supernaturalism at Friends House on Euston Road in London.

Cupitt is a Christian, of sorts: at least, he’s an ordained Anglican priest. But he believes almost nothing of traditional Christianity. “The whole system of Christian doctrine is a somewhat haphazard human construct with an all-too-human history, and … the Bible, when read closely, does not actually teach – nor even support – orthodox doctrine.”

Batchelor, similarly, trained for 10 years as a Buddhist monk in Dharamsala, the headquarters of the exiled Dalai Lama, but believes few of the central doctrines of traditional Buddhism. “The kind of secular Buddhism I am interested in … entails a rethinking of Buddhism from the ground up. And what emerges from this reconfiguration of core values and ideas might not look anything like the Buddhism we are familiar with today.”

Both men believe in the finality of death. They suppose that this life is the only one we have or can have, and that it is absurd to suppose that personality, in any form, survives the collapse of the body. The doctrine of karma is here reduced to a simple statement of faith that the world is made of braided causal chains: every effect has a cause, and is itself a cause of other effects. There’s nothing there about reincarnation.

Speaking of lugging too much stuff around with you… I can’t help but feel that it’s just too much trouble to try to renovate from within a well-established framework that has existed for centuries. It’s too likely to end up as an argument over linguistic minutiae and appeals to authority. The -ism suffix is like a conceptual climbing vine; it slowly suffocates a way of life, renders a body of thought immobile.

You Can’t Take It With You

By in foolosophy, getting and spending No Comments

LRB, in an article on Gary Snyder:


In Kitkitdizze, there are tools everywhere, racks and stacks of them, useful objects respected like artworks. Blades, chisels, axes, boots, helmets, guns. The actor Peter Coyote remembers Joanne Kyger laughing about ‘how much stuff Gary had to store so that he could go off to Japan and live simply’.


George Carlin:

So you keep getting more and more stuff, and putting it in different places. In the closets, in the attic, in the basement, in the garage. And there might even be some stuff you left at your parents’ house: baseball cards, comic books, photographs, souvenirs. Actually, your parents threw that stuff out long ago. So now you’ve got a houseful of stuff. And, even though you might like your house, you’ve gotta move. Why? Too much stuff! And that means you’ve gotta move all your stuff. Or maybe, put some of your stuff in storage. Storage! Imagine that. There’s a whole industry based on keeping an eye on other people’s stuff.



I used to scoff at people who had storage spaces. If you had so much stuff that you needed to put some of it in a place where you couldn’t even get to it, then you had too much stuff! And now here I am having to deal with my own stuff…

There’s an idea that a good Buddhist should have no stuff at all. She should only own one bowl and two robes. She should live off the good graces of people who respond to her calling to the truth by supplying her with food and shelter.

That’s a nice ideal. Buddha’s original group of monks and nuns were able, it is said, to live like that in Northern India 2500 years ago. But times have changed. I doubt many people could live like that in Northern India today let alone anywhere else in the world. I also have nagging doubts about Buddha’s original monks actually having lived that way even back then. For one thing, to “leave home” in those days meant going a few miles or less away from home. Which meant you could leave your stuff there if you needed to. I’ll bet you a case of doughnuts a lot of monks and nuns did just that. Of course, some were probably very strict with themselves about this. I just doubt that all of them were.

There are lots of misconceptions about contemporary Buddhist monks with regards to stuff. For example, one would think that a guy whose nickname was “Homeless Kodo” probably owned nothing but his robes and a change of underwear. In fact, the word yadonashi (宿なし, homeless) that was applied to Kodo Sawaki referred to the fact that he did not have his own home temple like most Zen teachers. He did, in fact, have a home to live in. What’s more, his student Kosho Uchiyama complained that as Kodo’s attendant he was required to lug mountains of Kodo’s books whenever Kodo went out on the road to lead retreats. Homeless Kodo had stuff.

Having come from a family of slobs and borderline-hoarders, I have to say that I’m pretty proud of my ability to be tidy and unencumbered by too much stuff.

We Could Be Just Like Carnivores

By in herbivory, macho macho men No Comments

Sigh:


Men are less likely to choose vegetarian options, because their choices are influenced by a strong association of meat with masculinity, a new study suggests.

“To the strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, All-American male, red meat is a strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, All-American food,” the researchers write in the paper, published online May 6 in the Journal of Consumer Research. “Soy is not. To eat it, they would have to give up a food they saw as strong and powerful like themselves for a food they saw as weak and wimpy.”

Following the logic of “you are what you eat”, I wonder why more hetero males don’t consider it a compliment to be called a pussy. Oh, well.

As for me, if someone rudely asks if I’m a vegetarian, I say no, I’m a Kanamit. Then I return to reading The Most Dangerous Game.

We Had to Multiply Ourselves

By in gender, identity, moralizing, procrusteans, tribalism No Comments

24Frames:

Females were “dramatically under-represented” in the United States’ top 100 grossing films last year, accounting for 33% of all characters at a time when they made up nearly 51% of the U.S. population, according to a study being released Tuesday.

The 33% figure represented an increase over the findings of a similar study in 2002, when females comprised 28% of the movie characters, said the report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

But while there were more female characters overall, fewer of them were “clearly identifiable protagonists,” the study found — 11% in 2011 versus 16% in 2002. “Thus, while there are more female characters on screen today, fewer stories are told from a female character’s perspective,” according to Martha Lauzen, executive director of the center.

Her title for the report: “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World.”

The report mirrored a study of women’s behind-the-scenes participation that the center released in January, which found that women made up 18% of all directors, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors working on the 250 highest-grossing movies last year. That was only one percentage point higher than when the center began studying employment figures in 1998.

Lauzen’s latest report said that, on average, female characters in last year’s films were younger than the male characters, less likely to be portrayed as leaders and more likely to be identified by their marital status. It said that 73% of the female characters were Caucasian, 8% African American, 5% Latina and 5% Asian (with the rest in smaller categories, including aliens and animals).

I’m kind of conservative in the sense that I think equal rights under the law is about the best we’re ever going to achieve with regards to reducing social inequality, and even that ideal takes a lot of effort to get anywhere near attaining (and sustaining). As Richard King noted, the problem with equal rights, for some people, is that they aren’t enough by themselves to guarantee social justice. But social justice is a relative, subjective standard. Perfectly apportioned pie charts of sociopolitical identity do not naturally occur in institutional and interpersonal relationships. Imbalances of power and influence are inevitable, and yet do not predictably lead to uniformly negative outcomes. Precise fractions, mathematical means, and other such abstractions can only be imposed on human activity by diktat. Your parents weren’t just being insensitive when they told you that life isn’t fair.

Partially, I’m annoyed by the implications in such articles, that a perfect numerical balance of male and female (and why stop differentiating there?) film, pop, literary, etc. stars is necessary and, if stymied, it must necessarily be due to some nefarious -ism; attempts to appeal to standards of merit are countered with quasi-Freudianism which brooks no falsification. Partially, the annoyance is with the random bureaucratic metrics of progress, as if 50% of the fame and profit in Hollywood accruing to women will directly correlate with an increase in tips for waitresses and a decrease in domestic violence; or the apparent belief in gender/racial essentialism so similar to early Romantics like Johann Herder; post-colonial guilt rejects the attempt to reach something approximating universal ideals and experiences open to understanding by anyone in favor of cultivating jealously-guarded hyphenated identities.

But it’s also the fact that all around the web, people will link to this story, have the requisite two-minute hate of sexism, take a moment to feel the sugar rush of affirmation that comes with associating oneself with a righteous cause, and go back to posting pictures of cute animals. It’s cheap and easy, and it strikes me as cynical. Let’s fume about the insidious oppression that exists simultaneously everywhere at once and nowhere in particular, all the better to keep us from having to offer up anything like meaningful insight or a practical course of action. Behold my righteous denunciation! Somebody should, uh, do something about, you know, all the things that suck. What matters is being seen, positioning oneself as a crusader for all the right causes.

The point is to make sure the argument never stops. Injustice never sleeps; there will always be an asymmetric ratio in need of rectifying. It becomes a comfortable career, almost, crusading for impossible standards of fairness, secure in knowing that things will only change slowly if at all, thus guaranteeing a stable, reassuring identity for the crusader.

…adding, yeah, sort of like this:

There appear to be two rational explanations for this behavior. One is that Scalzi and the commenters who aped his behavior have a simply atrocious grasp on psychology, human behavior, and politics, and sincerely believed that mocking people would lead to their enlightenment. The other is that John Scalzi’s purpose was never to actually contribute to education and social justice, but rather to demonstrate his superiority to those people he claimed to want to educate, and in doing so show what a brilliant and enlightened guy he is to the liberals he is in cultural competition with.

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