Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension.
(Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)
“You,” Grand argues, “are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.”
Eh. I agree with the basic idea, but the way it’s worded here still seems to imply some sort of mysterious, immaterial essence. “You” are a combination of the stuff of which you are made, the form it takes, and the time and place in which it exists, how’s that?
Indeed it is one of the paradoxes of art that structure, form and convention liberate the artist, whereas openness and complete freedom can be seen as a kind of tyranny. Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy. As Auden suggested in his analogy of Robinson Crusoe, some poets might be able to live outside convention and rules, but most of us make a hash of it.
Reminds me of a Nietzschean aphorism:
It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom. Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned; they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits – and they may be of the first mark – are always out to shape and interpret their environment as a free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly and surprising. And they are well advised because it is in only this way that they can give pleasure to themselves.
You know what else this topic reminds me of? The band Morphine, one of my absolute favorites. A drummer, a baritone saxophonist, and a vocalist playing a two-string bass. And yet, and yet, within those almost-claustrophobic confines, some of the most deeply enchanting music I’ve ever heard was created. Boundaries enhance creativity, in art and in life in general.
In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.
He felt that women writers were “quite different”. He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”
The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.
He’s right, of course. And it’s even worse in the blogosphere, where writing isn’t nearly as polished and sublime as in the upper echelons of world literature. I can’t count how many times I’ve read a passage that may as well have been written with a finger dipped in menstrual blood. Honestly, womenfolk, I know you can’t help it, but writing can only ever be subpar when you get your ovaries all over it. Attend me: a properly written paragraph should greet the reader with a flinty gaze that vaguely hints at violence and a square, determined jawline dotted with three-day stubble, not a beaming grin and a giddy hug. The prose should roll around the tongue like the taste of undercooked meat, not comfort food. Evocative of potpourri, breast milk and clean linen, never; gunsmoke, sweat and freshly oiled leather; ahh, that’s the stuff.
But really, you shouldn’t be worrying your pretty little heads over this literary business anyway.
Those who were born in mid-to-late 20th century America take this for granted; I grew up eating meat seven days a week, usually for lunch and dinner, sometimes for breakfast, too. But the phenomenon is global: there’s more than twice as much meat available per person than there was in 1950. Citizens of most developed nations have gone down the same path, and as the poor become less so, they buy more meat, too.
…The extreme example is China, whose soaring meat consumption is dramatically affecting the global markets for corn, soy, poultry and pork. But even here in Turkey, which is hardly an economic miracle, the diet is rocketing into the 20th century, moving away from the traditional and toward the inevitable.
Turkey’s diet was classic Mediterranean, of course, high in all kinds of plants, olive oil, some dairy (yogurt and feta, mostly) and a bit of fish, lamb or goat. Now it’s a jumble: a rural grocery store I visited displayed American-style breakfast cereal and plenty of soda front and center, along with (good) local vegetables, industrially produced dairy, and a small supply of expensive, stylishly packaged legumes and grains. There was no fish, lamb or goat, but there were at least 10 cuts of beef and lots of chicken. (Chicken consumption has nearly tripled here in the last 20 years.)
As cheap and plentiful as meat is, I’ve still been surprised by the reminder of how much more expensive groceries get when you have an actively carnivorous member of the household adding to the shopping cart. I have a rediscovered appreciation for how far you can stretch a hundred dollars’ worth of plant-based foods.
Although Parks And Recreation is currently in its annual downtime, Nick Offerman has still found a way to bring stability to the world through his facial hair: He’s growing out his reassuringly stalwart Ron Swanson mustache into a full-on beard—not just as a vacation from his character, but as part of an effort to conserve water for World Environment Day, which takes place this Sunday. Offerman has teamed with Budweiser in the “Grow One. Save A Million” campaign, asking other men to join him in not shaving, thereby helping to save the average five gallons of water every guy consumes when he uses his non-electric razor.
So not only does my dashing, smartly-trimmed beard, especially when paired with mirrored shades and my ever-present Fidel cap, endow me with a romantic magnetism, hinting at the secret pain and oceanic depth of sensitivity in my world-weary soul, suggesting that here is a man equally at ease composing poems by candlelight for his beloved or leading a revolutionary uprising of the oppressed and downtrodden, causing ladies to fan themselves and swoon in my presence, eyes a-fluttering and hearts a-thumping, but it gives me environmental awareness cred to boot? Almost doesn’t seem fair, does it?
P.S. Five gallons of water to shave? Fellows, you know you can turn the faucet off when you’re not rinsing your razor, right?
Thomas Friedman, though — now there’s a fella what’s gettin’ paid. Paid handsomely. The man is probably doing the backstroke through his own private bank vault right this minute.
And even though it feels about as sporting as watching a canned hunt, I insist you read this and this.
Again, this man is filthy rich and respected as an intellectual, while countless talented, thoughtful writers are forced to beg a small audience for pocket change to keep their Internet connection on. I have no interest in understanding a world in which this state of affairs can exist, only renouncing it.
Perhaps everyone is fully capable, even after years of brainwashing and indoctrination, of living without religion. Perhaps it is the initial agony of accepting a world without an all-powerful father figure that I am trying to spare my loved ones out of some misguided sense of mercy. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that there would be mass suicides or even homicides as some believers suggest (as if the only thing preventing them from raping and killing is their belief in god.) What I’m suggesting is that those other things that they are currently using religion to cope with i.e. stress, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, loneliness, hopelessness, poverty, etc, would become overwhelming without their beliefs. Surely, most would survive and learn other means of coping with life, but it would be naively optimistic to believe that everyone would. Thousands of people a year commit suicide after getting clean and sober and thousands more run right back to the drugs. There is no question that religion is just as powerful a drug as the pharmaceutical variety and can be just as hard to kick.
…I’m sure many of you have gone through a period of malaise and ennui after realizing at last that all this religion crap was a lie. Many of us struggled mightily on our own roads to intellectual freedom. I’m sure we know many others who abandoned the journey unable to handle the stress of a world without the dream of God and heaven. Tolstoy is probably the most famous example of this and nutcases like Kirk Cameron, the most recent. Should we have dragged Tolstoy screaming into the light when he admittedly found the conclusions reason brought him to “Too horrible to contemplate”? Should I drag my mother and grandmother screaming into the light no matter how painful they might find the experience? Or should I leave them in peace and concentrate on those who are perhaps not quite as brainwashed? Who have not been deluded for quite so long? Does suggesting that some people are unable to change make me an elitist?
What’s so bad about being an elitist anyway? We don’t have to get into that now; I just think it’s a valid question.
But yeah, I agree. It’s not really about whether or not people are capable of living without metaphysical fantasies; of course they are. The question is whether, given the context of any given individual life, it’s realistic to expect them to. The “intelligent and better-educated” people Dawkins mentions are likely to have broader, more cosmopolitan, more cerebral self-images that aren’t quite as bound up in the tight social confines of family, faith, and small communities. And a shattered self-image has more to do with why people find life no longer worth living than the objective material conditions of their lives:
Most people who kill themselves actually lived better-than-average lives. Suicide rates are higher in nations with higher standards of living than in less prosperous nations; higher in US states with a better quality of life; higher in societies that endorse individual freedoms; higher in areas with better weather; in areas with seasonal change, they are higher during the warmer seasons; and they’re higher among college students that have better grades and parents with higher expectations.
Baumeister argues that such idealistic conditions actually heighten suicide risk because they often create unreasonable standards for personal happiness, thereby rendering people more emotionally fragile in response to unexpected setbacks. So, when things get a bit messy, such people, many of whom appear to have led mostly privileged lives, have a harder time coping with failures. “A large body of evidence,” writes the author, “is consistent with the view that suicide is preceded by events that fall short of high standards and expectations, whether produced by past achievements, chronically favorable circumstances, or external demands.”
…To summarize this first step in the escape theory, Baumeister tells us that, “it is apparently the size of the discrepancy between standards and perceived reality that is crucial for initiating the suicidal process.” It’s the proverbial law of social gravity: the higher your majesty is to start off with, the more painful it’s going to be when you happen to fall flat on your face.
For a lot of people, their faith isn’t just a creed they consciously assent to. They couldn’t conceive of changing it any more than they could think of changing their family members, or their relationship with the rest of their community. And most importantly, they wouldn’t want to, regardless of how inescapably rational of a choice it was made to seem. Psychology will usually trump philosophy in these instances.
The line between “can’t” and “won’t” is exceedingly difficult to make out, but it really only matters for the purpose of assigning blame anyway. I wouldn’t feel a need to blame people for failing to abandon all traces of metaphysical belief, as if they were obligated to me, to society, or to their own potential to do so. It’s enough to live one’s own life as a counterexample, there for anyone to take inspiration from if they want it.
If you are a Theory 1 person, you worry that, with so many Americans going to college, the bachelor’s degree is losing its meaning, and soon it will no longer operate as a reliable marker of productive potential. Increasing public investment in higher education with the goal of college for everyone—in effect, taxpayer-subsidized social promotion—is thwarting the operation of the sorting mechanism. Education is about selection, not inclusion.
If you are friendly toward Theory 2, on the other hand, you worry that the competition for slots in top-tier colleges is warping educational priorities. You see academic tulip mania: students and their parents are overvaluing a commodity for which there are cheap and plentiful substitutes. The sticker price at Princeton or Stanford, including room and board, is upward of fifty thousand dollars a year. Public colleges are much less expensive—the average tuition is $7,605—and there are also many less selective private colleges where you can get a good education, and a lot more faculty face time, without having to spend every minute of high school sucking up to your teachers and reformatting your résumé. Education is about personal and intellectual growth, not about winning some race to the top.
…It’s possible, though, that the higher education system only looks as if it’s working. The process may be sorting, students may be getting access, and employers may be rewarding, but are people actually learning anything? Two recent books suggest that they are not. They suggest it pretty emphatically.
I would have surely loved the intellectual environment of college. But I’ve found that certain technical work, the kind you do with your hands in the outdoors, can possibly net you between one and two thousand dollars a week. My brother was telling me that some of his friends are promising him that a plum bartending job can get you even more than that. Even so, I’m casting an appreciative eye on the possibility of sharing a house with two or three other people, all of us making roughly four hundred a week, which would take care of everything we need and most of what we want, while allowing plenty of time and energy for things like, well, a genuine passion for intellectual pursuits. (Another friend was telling me that working an overnight stocking job allows him far more leisure for his writing than he ever would have had in academia.) A good life is very much in reach, even – especially – if you do an end run around the system.
Today is the natal anniversary of a certain Shanna who regularly haunts the comments here. I asked her if she wanted anything for a gift, and, well, you know young girls — she wanted a bunch of fluff that had to do with hearts, flowers, stuffed animals and the color pink. Thankfully, I managed to convince her that Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards might be something she can make use of for her woo purposes, and she was absolutely delighted by my perceptive thoughtfulness.
So there you go. A gift for Shanna, and an article on Eno for Noel. If only I could have worked in an angle on extreme Scandinavian metal, cycling or wine snobbery for Brian, this post could have had something for everyone! I’ll keep aiming for that trifecta.
What’s all this stuff about motivation? If you ask me, this country could do with a little less motivation. The people who are causing all the trouble seem highly motivated to me. Serial killers, stock swindlers, drug dealers, Christian Republicans. I’m not sure motivation is always a good thing. You show me a lazy prick who’s lying in bed all day, watching TV, only occasionally getting up to piss, and I’ll show you a guy who’s not causing any trouble.
Newly published research points to another factor that feeds this ingrained confirmation bias: Our “Just do it!” culture. In both overt and subtle ways, Americans are constantly being encouraged to take action, and exposure to such messages makes us more liable to ignore dissenting ideas.
“The growing need for activity in the United States may contribute to a loss of objectivity in the way citizens gather information,” University of Alabama psychologist William Hart and University of Illinois psychologist Dolores Albarracin write in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. They found that when people’s minds are attuned to the idea of action, their opinions tend to harden, making them less likely to seek out opposing viewpoints.
So, you see, to the untrained eye, it may appear that I’m just a lazy ne’er-do-well goofing off on the Internet, starting pointless arguments over minutiae with the few people who bother to read my ravings, but my heterodox methods actually make me one of the most diligent truth-seekers there is!
The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him.
– Nietzsche
If argumentative theory is true, though, it seems like it would take quite a radical shift for people in general to start valuing the input of those who disagree with them:
Here we have a radically different idea that stands apart from the common wisdom in psychology, cognitive science, and even in philosophy. In Western thought, for at least the last couple hundred years, people have thought that reasoning was purely for individual reasons. But Dan challenged this idea and said that it was a purely social phenomenon and that the goal was argumentative, the goal was to convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.
And the beauty of this theory is that not only is it more evolutionarily plausible, but it also accounts for a wide range of data in psychology. Maybe the most salient of phenomena that the argumentative theory explains is the confirmation bias.
Psychologists have shown that people have a very, very strong, robust confirmation bias. What this means is that when they have an idea, and they start to reason about that idea, they are going to mostly find arguments for their own idea. They’re going to come up with reasons why they’re right, they’re going to come up with justifications for their decisions. They’re not going to challenge themselves.
And the problem with the confirmation bias is that it leads people to make very bad decisions and to arrive at crazy beliefs. And it’s weird, when you think of it, that humans should be endowed with a confirmation bias. If the goal of reasoning were to help us arrive at better beliefs and make better decisions, then there should be no bias. The confirmation bias should really not exist at all. We have a very strong conflict here between the observations of empirical psychologists on the one hand and our assumption about reasoning on the other.
But if you take the point of view of the argumentative theory, having a confirmation bias makes complete sense. When you’re trying to convince someone, you don’t want to find arguments for the other side, you want to find arguments for your side. And that’s what the confirmation bias helps you do.
The idea here is that the confirmation bias is not a flaw of reasoning, it’s actually a feature. It is something that is built into reasoning; not because reasoning is flawed or because people are stupid, but because actually people are very good at reasoning — but they’re very good at reasoning for arguing.
One of the things I like about having a tiny blog is that the conversations in the comments tend to be more nuanced and interesting. I keep saying I would much rather have a few people who argue intelligently with everything I say than a few dozen sycophants who tell me how great every post is. I mean, I know it’s a fruitless, despairing job trying to find holes in my airtight arguments, but I certainly appreciate you guys trying anyway! Keep on keeping me honest!
Although the idea of green burials in wildlife preserves or park-like settings is not new, and it’s likely a desirable prospect for certain future dead soul who’d prefer absolute oblivion, it seems to me that this is not going to appeal to most individuals because we human beings tend to have a pressing need for “symbolic immortality.” This was a term coined by the cultural anthropologist Ernst Becker in his book, The Denial of Death (1973), but which has since been empirically elaborated by scientists working on terror management theory. The basic idea behind the construct of symbolic immortality is that cultural artifacts that survive the individual’s literal death while also containing some reminder of the person’s special existence can meaningfully reduce human death anxiety.
That’s interesting. On a personal level, I can understand wanting to have some sort of object to ground one’s feelings in, something connected to the deceased, but as far as some sort of general object to announce to the wider world that I was once here, whether a typical tombstone or some other sort of monument? Nah. I’d rather go into that good night knowing that I had profoundly changed someone’s thinking, indelibly influenced them in a way they’d always remember. That would be a nice sort of symbolic immortality for me. Music, too. Leaving behind some sort of recorded music would feel like part of me was still alive, still interacting with the living. The rest just seems like silly vanity.
While discussing the failed May 21 Rapture prediction on MSNBC’s The Last Word Monday, Obery Hendricks of New York Theological Seminary said that people like Rep. Michelle Bachmann and Glenn Beck, who focus on the end of the world, divert attention from the real message of Jesus.
…Which was, as I thought to be common knowledge since Albert Schweitzer, that you need to act this way and that in order to be on the winning team come the violent end of the world, which, by the way, is going to happen any day now. If you’re looking for some kind of role model for how to live humanely in the world with all its horrors and imperfections, there are millions of more worthy candidates than some ancient apocalyptic lunatic who spent too much time fasting in the desert sun.
Adam claims that there “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that’s only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn’t true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon’s interior, you don’t really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)
Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.
We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it.
You don’t even need to understand anything about physics to grasp this; many Buddhists have been reasoning their way to an understanding of the incoherence of the idea of a personal soul for thousands of years. The tragic thing about the belief, to me, is that it does nothing to alleviate a much more pressing issue — that of people drifting through the life they’re actually living with no curiosity, no deep appreciation of what they have; their thoughts mired in the future or the past, oblivious to the present. I don’t even mean that a life well-lived has to be devoted to manic thrill-seeking, just that a sense of “magic” is perfectly attainable through mindful awareness. Some would have you believe that the concept of souls and afterlives are necessary to give life meaning; I would counter that metaphysical beliefs can just as easily act as narcotics, or as incentive to procrastinate. Why make the most of this life if you think you’ll have endless chances for more? Why face up squarely to the fleeting impermanence of the most important relationships in your life and the imperative to not take them for granted when you can just assure yourself you’ll meet up again at some point down the road? People talk big about all the things they’d like to do before they die, but look at the reality of how most people live day to day, and tell me why they think they need an indefinite extension at the end. What did you do with the several decades you already had?
I think the science in cases like this needs to be paired with something like therapeutic reasoning, though. Not that it’s not vital to point out the nuts and bolts of why something like a soul couldn’t exist, but it’s probably more useful to try to show people why believing in one doesn’t actually enhance their life anyway.
I certainly hope IOZ’s cryptic post is just announcing a hiatus rather than an end to his blogging career. He’s long been one of my favorite writers on the web. His prose is alternately highfalutin and comfortably familiar, but always highly enjoyable and sometimes even breathtaking (I can easily find several instances in my own writing where I can clearly see his stylistic influence). I love his calm insouciance and even his disdainful sneering, especially when answering angry hecklers with quotations from The Big Lebowski. (I even watched that movie for the first time years ago so I could understand all the references.) And most of all, even though it was an acquired taste, I deeply appreciate the fact that he often forced me to think about things in a new way, not by being cheaply provocative or predictably contrary, but by being a genuinely iconoclastic thinker. I’ve often found myself uncomfortable and even pissed off by the things he wrote, especially early on, but I quickly came to realize that in many of those instances, it was because he was forcing me to confront my own intellectual laziness, that he had essentially zeroed in on something that I had been complacently accepting without careful scrutiny. It was the same sort of irritation that you feel when you’re comfortable on the sofa, and you’re asked to get up and move. Eventually, I came to eagerly anticipate and delight in the provocation, and even when I still disagree with him, I’m glad for having had the chance to be challenged. I imagine he must be a fun person to shoot the breeze with.
If you are done, IOZ, here’s a heartfelt thanks for all of it. Best wishes.
Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude. According to psychologists, one of the main problems with authority is that it makes us less sympathetic to the concerns and emotions of others. For instance, several studies have found that people in positions of authority are more likely to rely on stereotypes and generalizations when judging other people. They also spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person without power is talking.
…But here’s the catch: We still think we do care, at least in the abstract. That’s because power quickly turns us into hypocrites.
…The larger lesson is that Foucault had a point: The dynamics of power can profoundly influence how we think. When we climb the ladder of status, our inner arguments get warped and our natural sympathy for others is vanquished. Instead of fretting about the effects of our actions, we just go ahead and act. We deserve what we want. And how dare they resist. Don’t they know who we are?
This is why I enjoy self-depreciating humor. Not only is it just simply funny in and of itself, it keeps you from taking yourself too seriously, and it keeps people from wanting to give you any power. I’m fugly, stupid, boring and untalented. Don’t ask me to do anything; I’ll just fuck it up. In fact, I can’t write well, either. Why are you even reading this? Don’t you have anything better to do? Go away!
There. Now my immortal soul is safe. Socrates would nod approvingly.
