foolosophy

Attention Must be Paid

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, fresh hell, socmed, technology, work

I was reading yet another positive review of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and wondering if anyone was ever going to point out the fucking obvious. So thank you, Evgeny Morozov:
Had Carr looked beyond the neuroscience, he may have found that many of the problems that he blames on the Internet — constant busyness, shrinking attention spans, less and less time for concentration and contemplation — are rooted in the nature of working and living under modern capitalism rather than in information technology or gadgetry per se. In fact, as Pinker correctly points outs, Carr’s are very old complaints.
Exhibit A: back in 1881 the prominent New York City physician George Beard published “American Nervousness”, a book about the sudden epidemic of “nervousness” sweeping America, which he blamed, in part on the telegraph and the daily newspaper (the book later proved a great influence on Freud).
Exhibit B: in 1891, almost 120 years before The Atlantic published Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the same magazine ran “Journalism and Literature”, an essay by the polymath William Stillman, where he attacked the cultural change enabled by the telegraph-enabled journalism much in the same vein that Carr attacks the Internet. Stillman complained that “we develop hurry into a deliberate system, skimming of surfaces into a science, the pursuit of novelties and sensations into the normal business of our lives”.
The Internet may be amplifying each of these problems, but it surely did not cause them. When the famed sociologist Manuel Castells speaks of the “black holes of information capitalism”, there is as much emphasis on “capitalism” as there is on “information”.
If anyone ever listened to me, I’d have probably bored them to death by now as often as I go on about this, but all of our techno-gadgetry fetishes are merely a symptom of a restless mentality that sacralizes work and accomplishment. We’ve been hearing for a couple centuries that new inventions would relieve us of most of the drudge work that made our lives so punishing…and they did! The problem was, and still is, that we just invent new things to do with all the time we saved, and we expect our gadgets to let us do them all at once. No one knows how to stop and say enough is enough, and quite possibly, they instinctively fear discovering how empty they are even if they did.
The part I found most amusing in the review is that she had to download a ten-dollar program that turns your computer off for you for however long you specify. The idea being, restarting it is such a huge chore that you’ll be less likely to just aimlessly drift back online out of habit. I can’t help but think that if you’re so undisciplined that you can’t turn the computer off yourself and walk away to do other things, maybe you should take that ten bucks and go pay someone to teach you how to sit zazen. That’s been shown to rearrange neural pathways as well!

And It Is True What You Said, That I Live Like a Hermit in My Own Head

By in foolosophy, jests japes jokes jollies

I’m a man who likes to be alone
I’m a man who likes to think alone
I don’t want to be the type of guy
Who lives alone, reading books, and never eats a pizza pie
– The Beta Band
But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doin’ here?
I don’t belong here
– Radiohead
The creep has the respect of the geek, but cannot — usually by choice — enter geek society. The creep can even be social with nerds and non-nerds alike, but if you meet a creep you will feel an impenetrable wall around him. There are, obviously, far fewer creeps than geeks. The creep is usually a man of few words —that’s part of what makes him creepy. The creep is a creature of extremes: for instance, the creep is more likely than other nerds to be a complete teetotaler, but the creep is also more likely to be a severe alcoholic. The creep may have a mild autism-spectrum disorder, such as Asperger’s. The creep is far more likely than the geek to be politically conservative. Libertarianism is an especially popular political sympathy among creeps. The overwhelming majority of creeps are male, though there are anecdotal accounts of female creeps.
Identifying characteristics
Distant, scary look in eyes. Otherwise, most creeps dress and behave much like ordinary people. Creeps usually have no sense of humor: they do not tell jokes or laugh, unless to express derision.
Mating habits
We’re not saying it has never happened, but there has never been a confirmed incident of a creep having sex with another creep. However, the male creep may sometimes have a certain sexual allure to female nerds and non-nerds alike. Often the creep seems entirely asexual—or worse, to have secret sexual proclivities far “kinkier” than the silly and self-congratulatory “kink” of the dork.
Where to find them
Your IT department; houses with Ron Paul campaign signs on lawns; suspiciously sitting alone at unusual times of day in public parks.
Quintessential creep
Theodore Kaczynski, AKA the “Unabomber”
Nervous chuckle. Strained gulp. Um…I’m not politically conservative! My whole blog is a running joke! And doesn’t quoting four different bands in one post add a healthy dollop of “geek” to the mixture?

Middle Finger of the Invisible Hand

By in education, foolosophy, santutthi, work

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

…Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.
This is why I keep saying that on the whole, I’m glad I didn’t go to college, despite the fact that I would surely have enjoyed the intellectual atmosphere. And while I’m taking stock of my good fortune, I’m even more glad I never absorbed the romantic myth that our job should be the culmination of our hopes and dreams, the fullest expression of our personalities. It’s an exceedingly tiny percentage of people who are fortunate enough to get paid well for doing what they love most of all. Bully for them, of course, but for the majority of people who have to settle for doing whatever pays the bills (including the massive expense of that college education), it’s hard to avoid feeling a sense of failure, as if they’ve missed out on their calling (thanks again, John Calvin, for that stupid fucking notion). And as step one in the escape theory explains, there are often catastrophic consequences to feeling that way:
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.” For example, simply being poor isn’t a risk factor for suicide. But going rather suddenly from relative prosperity to poverty has been strongly linked to suicide.
And Ed’s lament is a common one even among those who are fortunate enough to have parlayed an advanced degree into an actual academic career. I have several bright, well-educated friends who suffered like that for years in academia before dropping out entirely.

Very Superstitious, Nothing More to Say

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, psychology, religion, spiritual-not-religious

Maria Amir:

A believer can never truly stomach a sceptic, because the latter’s refusal to take anything for granted is always perceived as a slight. For some inexplicable reason, a sceptic can never simply be acknowledged as someone who has made the choice to stick with the logical over the illogical and it is always, always taken personally.

I think this is true, but not always in such a straightforward way — I have no doubt that many believers are able to tolerate the presence of skeptics by viewing them with mildly amused condescension and pity (if not caricatural contempt), although, of course, you could easily argue that such poses are a way to cover for feelings of inferiority. Defensiveness is usually a sign of a lack of confidence and assuredness. Arguing is simply fun to do, of course, but when you find yourself feeling that little extra bit of emotional urgency to prove that you do so know what you’re talking about, it might be a sign that you aren’t so sure about it yourself. And when it comes to metaphysical beliefs, well, as Mark Twain said, faith is believing what you know ain’t so, hence the understandable anxiety about being challenged.
She’s talking specifically about skepticism with regards to religion, spirituality and superstition, but this same dynamic manifests itself in other ways, too. As someone who, in many ways, just doesn’t neatly fit in with a lot of groups, doesn’t care to join in many popular communal activities, I find myself often having to try to gently deflect such invitations without provoking the all-too-common reactions she mentions. In many cases, I honestly don’t care what other people enjoy doing and don’t think any less of them for doing it, but they do often take a demurral as a personal rejection, not a simple difference of opinion or taste. People don’t seem to trust a person who holds too many things at arm’s length. Someone who appears to constantly maintain a detached, analytic outlook is someone who can’t be counted on (or manipulated). There has to be something you’re willing to entirely (and publicly) give yourself over to without any hesitation to appear to be fully human in their eyes, whether it be church, sports, romantic/sexual passion, drinking with the boys, or popular entertainment. Too much self-control makes you seem dangerous.
In the longest and remotest ages of the human race there was quite a different sting of conscience from that of the present day. At present one only feels responsible for what one intends and for what one does, and we have our pride in ourselves. All our professors of jurisprudence start with this sentiment of individual independence and pleasure, as if the source of right had taken its rise here from the beginning. But throughout the longest period in the life of mankind there was nothing more terrible to a person than to feel himself independent. To be alone, to feel independent, neither to obey nor to rule, to represent an individual – that was no pleasure to a person then, but a punishment; he was condemned “to be an individual.” Freedom of thought was regarded as discomfort personified. While we feel law and regulation as constraint and loss, people formerly regarded egoism as a painful thing, and a veritable evil. For a person to be himself, to value himself according to his own measure and weight – that was then quite distasteful. The inclination to such a thing would have been regarded as madness; for all miseries and terrors were associated with being alone. At that time the “free will” had bad conscience in close proximity to it; and the less independently a person acted, the more the herd-instinct, and not his personal character, expressed itself in his conduct, so much the more moral did he esteem himself. All that did injury to the herd, whether the individual had intended it or not, then caused him a sting of conscience – and his neighbor likewise, indeed the whole herd! It is in this respect , that we have most changed our mode of thinking.
– Nietzsche

Adam’s Curse

By in alan watts, foolosophy, mythology, religion

Wrath James Wright:

Like so many other Christians I had chosen to view the story of Adam and Eve as a metaphor for something. I just wasn’t sure for what.

A lot of people have criticized the myth for what seems to be an endorsement of ignorance, a hostility to the sort of knowledge that has improved human existence. But I always liked the interpretation Alan Watts gave, where he viewed the apple as containing the mixed blessing of self-knowledge. Reflective knowledge, if you prefer. Self-consciousness. The sort of abstract thinking we do with the neocortex. We lost the ability to be “natural” like other animals. Our instincts are constantly at war with our considered values. There is no one way, determined by biology and environment, for humans to live. We truly are free to make our own way, but we often want to be free of the responsibility, and we long for the comfort of simply acting without thinking. We ask ourselves questions of purpose that we can’t satisfactorily answer. We don’t know how to simply be.

Born Against

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

Brad Warner:

The history of philosophy throughout the world has been a struggle between two basic fundamental systems — idealism and materialism. Spirituality is a kind of idealism. It takes the view that the spiritual world, the world of ideas, imagination, and mental formations, is the true reality. Matter is regarded as secondary at best or sometimes even as nonexistent. We are spirits trapped inside bodies made of gross matter – and some bodies are a lot grosser than others – and the way to happiness, according to the idealists, is to get free of this material world and its miseries. In many Eastern philosophies we are told, “I am not this body. I am the spiritual soul within.”

First, let me take a moment to say that our marketing department informs us that readers of this here blog tend to have a significant interest in sex, Buddhism, Nazi garden gnomes and plainspoken philosophizing, so with that in mind, I feel confident in asserting that they may find it rewarding to check out Warner’s new book (and/or his previous ones) as well as his blog, Hardcore Zen, conveniently located in the sidebar to your right for your browsing convenience. (He doesn’t have much to say about the Nazi garden gnomes, but you’ll find the other topics covered in exquisite detail.)
So. Regarding his definition of spirituality, well… yes and no. It’s certainly true, as the “spirit” part of the word would indicate, that there is a strong ascetic streak of denying or devaluing the worth or reality of the physical, empirical world in spiritual practices, but that’s obviously true of traditional religion as well. Now, you know me — I think it’s clear that “spirit” and “soul” are useful only as poetic metaphors at best, and there is no such thing as an eternal, translucent essence to living beings that survives the body’s death and floats on to inhabit a newborn host like a virus, while carrying with it some sort of moral scorecard that needs to be reviewed and validated every so often. But if not taken to Platonic extremes, the world of ideas, imagination and mental formations is a perfectly nice place to spend one’s time. Maybe this more balanced appreciation could be called cerebral, intellectual, reflective, contemplative, or philosophical to indicate a love of “thinking about thinking”, as one definition of philosophy has it, a passionate enjoyment of ideas for their own sake, regardless of any necessarily practical import to them. The ascetic tendency, I think, should just be left to its old description of capital-I Idealism.
Another meaning of the word “spirituality” is one I feel to be much more applicable to the way it manifests itself in Western culture: a different brand of religion for those who feel themselves to be too cool or independent for religion. Yes, I’m being snide on purpose in reducing spirituality to the level of a marketing gimmick, much as I would be toward people who think choosing one brand of carbonated sugar water shows them to possess greater discernment and more refined taste than people who prefer the more popular alternatives. It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: This clearly does not apply to everyone who self-describes as “spiritual”. Some, or even many, of those people are honest, open-minded seekers with an omnivorous appetite for knowledge and a sense of intellectual integrity that keeps them from settling for pat answers. Etymological preferences aside, I have no problem with them, and I trust they can read between the lines when confronted with a quarrelsome bastard like myself and realize I’m not aiming at them. But there are a million other people who will sing their praises. I don’t need to be one more. I’m more interested in presumptuously poking at what I see as a frequent display of smug, complacent ignorance that pervades the whole “spiritual-not-religious” culture, and aside from this dude, I don’t see anyone else taking that approach.
Warner goes on to explain that spiritualism and materialism are both still “-isms”, and as such, are theoretical frameworks about reality rather than the bare perception of reality, which is an important distinction. This is what I’ve always understood Zen to be, a philosophical tool for clearing away the mental, theoretical debris that prevents us from perceiving what is right in front of our noses, not a belief, practice or official uniform to be accepted from authority. Many people have long recognized Idealism as being full of this sort of debris. I think it’s time that we start recognizing that spirituality as popularly described has accumulated a fair share of its own and begin challenging it accordingly.

Onward, No!

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, moralizing, santutthi, unintended consequences, work

It makes no difference in my experience of the world whether Xris continues to consume deep-fried chicken five nights out of seven, playing Zelda every evening with his wife and childhood friends, working at a dead-end job and visiting with his mom every day. It only bugs the hell out of me because of my unspoken assumption that you have to do something remarkable with your life.
It’s easy to believe, given the sheer volume of literature out there touting perennial self-improvement and excellence as the gold standard, that you are a failure for not contributing to civilization.
I think Shanna’s being a bit hard on herself to call it bigotry because, as she says, this sort of attitude is like the air we breathe, taken totally for granted as the natural order of things. Most people never become aware of it at all.
I’ve long been a proponent of principled slacking, and I periodically have to re-explain my credenda to someone or another when they question my lack of careerist ambition. Just recently, I had to deflect yet more importunate attention from someone determined to make me recognize my, uh, calling as a writer. Lord, preserve me from the good they would do in my name…
Look, the vast majority of the human race, past, present and future, consists of people who don’t do anything that “matters” in the big scheme of things. They live simple, unacknowledged lives of piddling accomplishments that are important only to their loved ones before retiring to a grave that no one will visit within a couple generations. To judge by a biased preference for results means having to write off most of the species as a failure, redeemable only by the fact that they served as tiny little cobblestones helping to smooth the way for those with an actual destiny to fulfill, or as minuscule stipples of paint in someone else’s masterpiece. That’s the shadow of this sort of dizzying, utopian optimism that values ends over means: a sour disgust when you finally realize that most people never will actualize their potential for whatever reason.
But even more importantly, there are very few, if any, unalloyed “goods” in the world. Almost anything you can name as a net positive has eventually led to unexpected negative results as well. In an age of mass education, where the average elementary school student is more literate and scientifically educated than most of the ancient world, we’re all too familiar with the strange counter-enlightenment phenomenon of people who have apparently reacted to all this information by taking an insolent pride in being ignorant. Our poor don’t necessarily starve to death anymore, but they suffer disproportionately from obesity-related illness resulting from a cornucopia of food like chocolate-chip-pancakes-and-sausage on a stick. We (at least those of us in wealthy countries) vanquish many of the perennial torments of humanity throughout its history, such as plague, famine and barbarian invasions, only to fall prey to depression and ennui. The Taoists used to shake their heads and chuckle at the earnest way Confucians, in their tunnel vision, thought they had all the answers for how everyone else needed to live. How do we know that the good we do today won’t be the problem someone else has to solve tomorrow?
This isn’t meant to seem like an endorsement of quietism. I, for one, am certainly glad some obsessed geniuses got around to inventing electric guitars, modern medicine and the Internet. And I’m happy to be in unrequited love with writing and music, knowing full well that the more I have, the more I’ll need, never entirely satisfied, always reaching for just a bit more. Striving itself is not necessarily a bad thing. A life devoted to achieving tasks and seeking glory is no more or less valid than a life devoted to happiness. It’s just that too much of goal-seeking places far too much value on the brief moment of satisfaction with one’s accomplishment, which, as we all should know from experience, is never quite as awesome as you’ve imagined it to be while striving for it, and it’s quickly replaced by the hyperactive urge to pick up and get moving again. How many people do we know who spend decades like this, only to conclude that all is vanity because they haven’t enjoyed the time they spent getting there? When it comes to work, the activity most of us spend much of our adult lives engaged in, it seems a lot more psychologically healthy to aim to be content, knowing when enough is enough. The idea that things can endlessly improve along a steady upward trajectory is the product of a historically ignorant, linear-minded culture that thinks we can have good without bad, up without down, or the front of a coin without the back. The idea that our “unique” talent is destined to be recognized and rewarded in the marketplace, of all things, unless we shamefully avoid owning up to it, is a ridiculous fiction, as daft as anything John Calvin or Ayn Rand ever belched forth. And it’s insulting to act as if arête is confined to marketable skills and transactional relationships.
We are not in any way obligated to push everything as far as it can possibly go. I can’t possibly stress this enough.

Friends with Beneficence

By in foolosophy, gender, psychology, sex-you-all

I’ve enjoyed reading Juliet Lapidos’s series of essays on platonic friendship. My best friends have usually been women, come to think of it, and knock on wood, I have yet to experience a cross-gender friendship being ruined by sexual frustration or unrequited love. It’s never seemed like a complicated balancing act in my mind, but as one of those friends once said to me:

Society at large, however, seems to feel that if you share a passion for anything — well then! Eyebrows are raised, sly glances shared.

It does seem like the default assumption is that guys are either fucking every slightly attractive woman they see, or at least plotting to do so. I blame that quack Freud. As does Joseph Epstein:
Eroticizing everything, as is their wont, Freudians find that much close male friendship is at its core homoerotic, while the notion of male-female friends outside sexual interest is generally inconceivable to Freudians, who not so secretly believe that all men wish to do with women is jump their bones.
…If I believed in Freud, I could not have written a book on friendship, because friendship doesn’t quite exist for Freudians; sexual appetite, evident or obscured, washes it away. Fortunately, I do not believe in Freud. In fact, I have come to believe instead that Freudian psychoanalysts, like Germany after WWII, ought to be made to pay reparations to their poor patient-victims.
…The notion that two healthy people of the opposite sex cannot meet regularly and talk about important things without eventually falling into bed with each other is part of the fading but still enduring Freudian heritage. All other Freudian ideas – from the Oedipus complex to feces being symbolic of money – have been laughed out of the court of reason and empirical science, but the notion that at bottom (also at middle and at top), we are sexual beings, ready at the least chance to have at it, has not. A good Freudian is likely to consider most friendships between a man and a woman as erotic, and for that matter close friendships between people of the same sex as homoeroticism, more or less disguised.
As if harboring, on some level, the unavoidable realization that “Hey, my female friend really is a slammin’ hottie,” contaminates and invalidates the pure, otherworldly essence of the friendship. It’s not that the mere idea of sex with my female friends is repulsive; it’s that it would possibly change the dynamic of the relationship in ways that aren’t worth the risk. Why is that not allowed to stand as a valid objection to sexualizing the relationship? Why are our basest urges always taken to be more real, honest and meaningful than our reflective ones? Why is it so blithely assumed that biological attraction will always overpower philosophical restraint?

Pablo Picasso Never Got Called an Asshole

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, religion, spiritual-not-religious

Juan Cole:

But the Maher strategy is a little disturbing, as well, since that she was a religious seeker in her youth is not actually very relevant to her contemporary candidacy. O’Donnell’s story is a sad reminder that many religious seekers, who experiment with a number of traditions, are not actually so much open-minded as in search of a narrative about life that will give them certainty (the Society of Krishna Consciousness is as close as Hinduism gets to fundamentalism in its own right). Once O’Donnell settled on right wing Christianity, she became insufferable. And that is what should damn her politically– that she wants to impose her sectarian morality on all of us– not that she tried out other fundamentalisms when young.

On the one hand, the hypocrisy of fundamentalists is a mainstay of political humor. On the other hand, fundamentalist Christians loveloveLOVE them some redemption stories. The more depraved the former lifestyle, the sweeter the victory at the end when the sinner finally accepts Jesus’s love, and the more raucous the cheering. So I doubt these embarrassing video clips are really going to have much effect on O’Donnell’s candidacy beyond giving the blogosphere some cheap laffs. And I agree — I really don’t care at all what sort of crazy shit she said and did when she was young, whether she was earnest about it or not. I don’t want people like her near public policy, but their psychological issues are their own problem. All in all, none of this is very interesting.
Instead, this caught my eye because of its relevance to what I’ve discussed a few times with Noel and Shanna, Pillars of the Comment Section. Cole points out something that hadn’t occurred to me in so many words before, that the appearance of open-mindedness can be very different from the reality of it. The Huffington Post is glad to hear all and sundry variations on a New Age mysticism theme, but the editors aren’t accepting of criticism any more than most people are. And while many of those who partake of buffet-style spirituality are open to cosmetic diversity, the underlying themes of their world-bazaar beliefs are pretty predictable and uniform, as is their defensive reaction to being challenged and questioned.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with concluding that you agree with what so many philosophies have emphasized to varying degrees over the centuries: live and let live; we’re here to see each other through, not see through each other; all that good stuff. Novelty in one’s philosophical thinking isn’t necessarily a virtue here; it may just be a restless grasping for stimulation. But for some people, being comfortable and feeling reassurance isn’t necessarily enough. Occasionally, it isn’t even desirable. Some of the most valuable experiences of our lives come as a result of pain and stress that we would never have willingly chosen beforehand. And while John Gray may be right that the siren song of pursuing truth for its own sake is a secular holdover from Christianity, and possibly not good for one’s mental health at that, the quest to place one’s convictions upon the firmest possible ground seems a noble one to me; there are certainly worse ways to spend a life.
And some people see life as an ongoing work of art, where the important thing is to live as an intriguing character in a life that tells a compelling story. To the extent that I’ve managed to incorporate elements of this mindset into my own life, I’ve found that I can more easily appreciate the stark differences between others and myself without feeling any need to reconcile them. They don’t appear to me so much as threats to my way of being or insults to my way of seeing the world, they appear as useful provocations that allow me to enhance my own thoughts and character. We’re not all ultimately alike, and I’m glad for it. I don’t want to convert people. I don’t think everyone else could or should end up in agreement with me. I just want them to provide me with some good jousting.
A twofer from Nietzsche to close with:
A very popular error – having the courage of one’s convictions: Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one’s convictions.
Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist: I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have great opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth – otherwise, it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and make us the same.

If the Mountain Won’t Come to Muhammad, Fuck It, He’ll Invent His Own Mountain

By in foolosophy, religion, spiritual-not-religious

The religious message is “less clear when you wear an Om and you have no idea what it means,” says Prothero. “Smooshing the Buddha together with a cross and star of David has a clearer message of someone who is spiritual and doesn’t belong to one religion.”
He adds that even though all of these symbols may be floating through the fashion world on shiny gold bangles or set with diamonds, people should be religiously literate and know what the symbols they’re wearing stand for. “I’m torn. Sometimes I do get annoyed when venerable religious symbols get dumbed down, but when has it never been like that? Besides, all religions are just different paths up the same mountain.”
Of course, those who claim that the world’s religions are different paths up the same mountain do not deny the undeniable fact that they differ in some particulars… It is to deny that those differences matter, however. From this perspective, whether God has a body (yes, say Mormons; no, say Muslims) or whether human beings have souls (yes, say Hindus; no, say Buddhists) is of no account because, as Hindu teacher Swami Sivananda writes, “The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the nonessentials.”
This is a lovely sentiment but it is untrue, disrespectful, and dangerous.
Hee hee. Hope those two can work out their profound differences! Anyway, blatant contradictions aside, I’m actually sympathetic to the devoutly religious who have to see meaningful symbols of their beliefs used as trendy accessories by airheaded celebrities and fashionistas. I mean, I’d be willing to bet that 99% of the time, when you see someone “smooshing the Buddha together with a cross and a star of David”, the “clearer message” you’re actually getting is one of a vapid twit who doesn’t understand anything about any of them, but ooh, shiny bauble look purty, must have, must have!
While I’m being generous toward my bête noire here, let me also concur with a typical complaint you hear from traditional quarters regarding this buffet-style spirituality: it also can encourage a sort of dilettantism, a shallow tendency to stay right where you are and look for various concepts and themes to basically wall yourself in, to tell yourself what you want to hear. Sort of like how allowing high school students to set their own curriculum might lead to them concluding that the Twilight series is the pinnacle of all fiction and there’s no need to try anything that doesn’t cater to the way they feel right here, right now. One of the possible benefits to picking one faith/tradition and sticking to it is that you’re forced to grapple with issues and concepts and rules that might not appeal to you or make sense initially, and out of that, a new kind of understanding might result, if not acceptance. Growth through struggle. Too many of the spiritual-not-religious types are complacent and looking to avoid struggle, having already settled into a comfortable niche, and are now just looking to accentuate it with exotic accoutrements.

The Old College Try

By in education, foolosophy, work

Joseph Epstein:

Intelligent people who hadn’t gone to college began to feel a great hole in their lives, and those who had gone could usually be relied upon to hide from them what is all too sadly the truth: they really haven’t missed all that much. Paul Goodman, the 1930s radical who became something of a guru during the student rebellions of the late 1960s and early ’70s, used to enjoy saying that all going to college meant was that in doing so a person showed how badly he or she wanted to succeed in society as currently constituted. Going to college entails a large expense, lots of useless work, and the acceptance of endless onerous, preposterous trivialities, all of which, Goodman liked pointing out, showed that any young man or woman who was willing to put up with this nonsense could be expected to put up with the even greater nonsense of boring and meaningless work later in life. College, in this view, functioned chiefly to turn out useful, moderately high-level drones, finely honed tools of capitalism.
…Of course, undergraduate education is only ostensibly about producing the sound paper on T.S. Eliot or the Renaissance or the Reformation. What it’s really about, or at any rate is supposed to be about, is the development of young minds, teaching them how to think independently, how to combine common sense with proper skepticism, the whole given a fine texture by the attainment of an at first widened and later (after college, acquired on one’s own) greatly deepened culture. But what percentage of the 65 percent of Americans who regularly participate in one form or another of higher education do you suppose derive anything resembling such things from their education? I would set it at somewhere between 1 or 2 percent, though that may be too generous. Most people come away from college, happy souls, quite unscarred by what has gone on in the classroom. The education and culture they are presumably exposed to at college never lay a glove on them. This is the big dirty secret of higher education in America.
This doesn’t mean that their having gone to college isn’t worth it. Not at all. On a strict accounting, a college education, expensively priced though it nowadays generally is, probably pays off as well as any investment. Endless studies show that young men and women who attend college earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more over a lifetime than those who, for one reason or another, do not go to college. Why should this be so? For the same reason that degrees in journalism, master’s degrees in business, and other (shall we politely say?) not strictly necessary degrees make for success: because, that is, people who have already paid for these overpriced appurtenances wish others to do so, forming a (not so) little group of those who have already pledged the fraternity.
I had an artist friend in high school who said he wanted to go to college even though he didn’t need it for his career plans, “just for the college experience”. (He wasn’t a drinker, or even overly social, so I guess he was referring to the intellectual aspect.) I think I know what he meant; I still enjoy looking through the course offerings that come in the mail from all the nearby colleges and daydreaming about possibly taking the classes that catch my eye if time and energy will ever allow. But dabbling in the odd class with no real remunerative potential would be good enough for me; I know too many people who invested four-to-eight years and tens of thousands of dollars into their education, only to end up with meaningless jobs they hate, a mountain of debt on their backs, and no capacity for intellectual curiosity or enjoyment anymore.

A Place for My Stuff

By in foolosophy, the madness of crowds

Morris Berman:

Even the anti-chic can be made chic. A Canadian magazine, Adbusters, became somewhat famous for ridiculing the need to be chic. It is now one of the chicest journals around–“underground chic,” as it were. If you are not aware of this publication, you are definitely out of it, and not as good as the people who are aware of it and read it on a regular basis. You are leading a diminished, unchic life.
This brings us to the causes of chic. If it really is as frivolous as it looks, why are we all doing it? Why does all of life finally boil down to high school? Alfred Adler, the psychoanalyst whose major concepts were “superiority complex” and “inferiority complex,” argued that the two were intimately related: the desire to be superior masked a deep sense of inferiority. If I care that much about being chic, it must be because I know, on some level, that I am terribly unchic. And this feeling of being inadequate, which dates from infancy, can finally never be overcome; which means that chicness is infinite: you can never be chic enough. Malraux was right: we never grow up.
I had just the other day mentioned a book by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter that examined this topic in detail (even criticizing Adbusters as well). In a nutshell, their argument was that while we typically condemn profligate consumption as something the mindless sheeple do to try to be like everyone else, the driving engine of it is actually the urge to differentiate oneself from everyone else by having different, cooler stuff (which always has to be replaced as the bovine masses eventually lumber onto what was once your exclusive territory). But buying more stuff, whether it be off-brand tennis shoes from Walmart or anti-name-brand shoes from Adbusters, only reinforces the idea that our personalities are defined by the stuff we have (or lack), an idea that the neo/post/whatever/capitalist system we have is perfectly placed to exploit.
That said, I also think the image of the perfectly self-contained, self-aware, unflappable person is largely a myth. Perhaps a useful one to hold up and strive to emulate, but a myth nonetheless. We’re social creatures who mostly derive our pleasure from the earthiness of our social environment, not the thin air of life on an intellectual mountaintop. Not many of us are rugged enough to stand being completely out of step with our friends and peers; most of us would feel twinges of insecurity and self-doubt if we couldn’t find reassurance and agreement somewhere. The attempt to wean ourselves off of defining ourselves by our material possessions is difficult enough; that of trying to consistently value intellectual principle over social acceptance is almost certainly a pipe dream.

Fleurs Du Mall

By in foolosophy, sex-you-all, waiting for the barbarians, work

Micah White:

Can capitalism exist without its foundation of heterosexual monogamy? Is polyamory inherently revolutionary? To all these questions we must answer: capitalism is a master of recuperation. What first shakes it, soon motivates it, later strengthens it. We will never know which tactics bring it down until we try.
To rupture the consumer myth will take more than protests in the streets and boycotts of consumer goods. It’ll require a fundamental shift in the structure of society, a revocation of our libidinal investment. Whether that’ll take the form of polyamory or simply neighbors getting to know each other remains to be seen.
Huh? What difference would it make how many people you sleep with if your spending and consumption habits remain the same? What sort of consciousness shift is this supposed to bring? I mean, check it:

The U.S. economy is predominantly driven by consumer spending, which accounts for approximately 70 percent of all economic growth.

If you want to be revolutionary, stop spending money you don’t have on shit you don’t need. If you want to be sexually revolutionary, stop pumping out more little consumers. Period.

Musical Mysticism

By in atheism, foolosophy, music, nietzsche, philosophy, religion, the big sleep

Let’s fall in love with music
The driving force of our livings
The only international language
Divine glory, the expression
The knees bow, the tongue confesses
The lord of lords, the king of kings
– Mother Love Bone

In keeping with this, we find that the interest inspired by philosophical and also religious systems has its strongest and essential point absolutely in the dogma of some future existence after death. Although the latter systems seem to make the existence of their gods the main point, and to defend this most strenuously, at bottom this is only because they have tied up their teaching on immortality therewith, and regard the one as inseparable from the other; this alone is really of importance to them. For if we could guarantee their dogma of immortality to them in some other way, the lively ardour for their gods would at once cool; and it would make way for almost complete indifference if, conversely, the absolute impossibility of any immortality were demonstrated to them. For interest in the existence of the gods would vanish with the hope of a closer acquaintance with them, down to what residue might be bound up with their possible influence on the events of the present life. But if continued existence after death could also be proved to be incompatible with the existence of gods, because, let us, say, it presupposed originality of mode of existence, they would soon sacrifice these gods to their own immortality and be eager for atheism. The fact that the really materialistic as well as the absolutely sceptical systems have never been able to obtain a general or lasting influence is attributable to the same reason.

The early Christians were, ironically enough, called atheists by the Romans because they refused to recognize the state gods. In somewhat the same way, I call myself an atheist because, as far as the common conception of God in my culture is concerned, I am. I don’t believe in any sort of personal god, which, as I keep asserting, is the only kind anyone is really interested in, and I myself am not interested in a god that has to be defined out of existence to be kept away from the prying eyes and grasping hands of science. But it’s always worth repeating, I think, that I don’t even consider the existence of God or the lack thereof to be all that important. It’s fun to argue about, in a mental exercise, intellectual sparring sort of way, but as the man just said, the only reason anyone even cares is because their ideas about personal immortality are all caught up in it. I’m not aware of any cultures that worship anything like the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent Christian God without a corresponding belief in personal immortality (though perhaps I should check with Pascal Boyer again and see if I forgot some), but some schools of Buddhism have managed to hold a belief in personal identity surviving physical death without any deity being involved. The thought of death, the knowledge of its inevitability, gives us all pause at the least, if it doesn’t inspire outright fear. We want to believe that it’s not really the end for us. Everything else flows from that. In keeping with that, I feel that disbelief in the “self” is far more radical than mere atheism, and more relevant to the heart of religious belief. If you’re not going to experience any reality except life in this world, and the most God is ever going to bother revealing about himself is vague images to thrill superstitious old ladies in the form of a stain on the wall, a burnt section of their waffles, or writing on a cat, then all that existential angst disappears in a puff, and all the tons of paper wasted on tortured attempts at theodicy can be used to start fires in cold weather.
But continuing with our themes of personal identity, life, death and nineteenth-century German philosophy, here’s an interview with Nietzsche scholar Julian Young that touches on a type of immortality I can fully endorse:

How did Nietzsche’s ideas about music affect his philosophy?
“Without music life would be an error” is a great T-shirt slogan, but its meaning is far from obvious. Here is how Nietzsche glosses his aphorism in a letter from 1888, the last year of his sanity:
“Music … frees me from myself, it sobers me up from myself, as though I survey the scene from a great distance … It is very strange. It is as though I had bathed in some natural element. Life without music is simply an error, exhausting, an exile.”
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, dedicated to Richard Wagner, is constructed around the duality between the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.” Apollo stands for intellect, reason, control, form, boundary-drawing and thus individuality. Dionysus stands for the opposites of these; for intuition, sensuality, feeling, abandon, formlessness, for the overcoming of individuality, absorption into the collective. Crucially, Apollo stands for language and Dionysus for music. What, therefore, music does is to–as we indeed say–”take one out of oneself.” Music transports us from the Apollonian realm of individuals to which our everyday self belongs and into the Dionysian unity. Music is mystical.
Since the human essence is the will to live–or for Nietzsche, the “will to power”–the worst thing that can happen to us is death. Death is our greatest fear, so that without some way of stilling it we cannot flourish. This is why musical mysticism is important. In transcending the everyday ego we are delivered from “the anxiety brought by time and death.” Through absorption into what Tristan und Isolde calls the “waves of the All,” we receive the promise and experience of immortality.
Later on, Nietzsche realized that not all music is Dionysian. Much classical music, based as it is on the geometrical forms of dance and march, is firmly rooted in the Apollonian. Yet as the 1888 letter indicates, he never abandoned the musical “antidote” to death. Without music, life would be anxiety and then extinction. Without music, life would be an “exile” from the realm of immortality.

Lowbrow but I Rock a Little Knowhow

By in art, books, foolosophy, music, psychology, the wire

If I told you my taste in movies, would you be able to tell me what kind of music I listen to? How about my favorite reading material, or taste in television?
Peter Jason Rentfrow can — and it’s no parlor trick. The Cambridge University psychologist is lead author of a new study that finds a person’s entertainment choices tend to share certain basic characteristics, which may or may not be immediately obvious.
…The highbrow/lowbrow split, which has dominated cultural criticism for the past century or so, remains alive and well: The researchers report most people gravitate toward one dimension or the other. But Rentfrow and his colleagues also identified an area of common ground. (Hint: It’s occupied by Oprah).
…After analyzing the data, the researchers concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.” They are: Aesthetic (which includes classical music, art films and poetry), cerebral (current events, documentaries), communal (romantic comedies, pop music, daytime talk shows), dark (heavy metal music, horror movies) and thrilling (action-adventure films, thrillers, science fiction). The first two fall under the general heading of highbrow, while the final three are labeled lowbrow.
…For instance, “individuals who enjoy the aesthetic entertainment factor, which may be regarded as abstract, dense and demanding, tend to be creative, calm, introspective and in touch with their emotions,” they write. Those who are drawn to dark entertainment genres tended to rate high on intellect and extraversion, but low on conscientiousness and agreeableness; they “may generally see themselves as defiant, reckless and immodest.”
In contrast, “It appears as though the psychological characteristics most central to individuals who prefer the communal entertainment factor are rather similar to the defining characteristics of that factor: pleasant, lighthearted, unadventurous, uncomplicated and relationship-oriented,” the researchers add.
I seem to be split between highbrow and lowbrow, with my enjoyment of watching professional soccer being the only thing I can think of that would qualify as communal taste. But I’m a little skeptical that there’s much of a common thread to be found between movies and music by Rob Zombie on the one hand, and the complete works of Mozart on the other. Or, to use an example from a recent post, books by Isaiah Berlin versus escapist fantasy novels. And where does an exceptional TV show like The Wire fall within this framework? Even Amazon can give suggestions based on individual purchases as to similar music, books or movies you might like, but this seems to suggest there’s a way to find deeper connections between tastes despite what seem to be wildly disparate surface appearances.

Correlation, Not Causation

By in augean stables, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, technology

Having successfully shown that he doesn’t understand the nature or effects of linking, Nicholas Carr has decided to turn his critical attention to the brain-damaging effects of search engines.

Search engines’ function of providing us with information almost instantly means people are losing their intellectual capacity to store information, Nicolas Carr, said.
The author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, claimed that the web was depriving our mental faculties of the regular workouts they need.
He told the BBC that the internet meant people now found it harder to concentrate, for example when trying to read a book.
Right. I’m sure our addictions to overwork and accomplishment have nothing to do with our difficulty concentrating, not to mention the thousand-and-one other shiny objects and stimuli brought to our attention every day. And oh, how far we’ve fallen from the glory days of intellectual stimulation, when all we had to do for entertainment was watch TV and listen to our Walkmen. But didn’t those supposedly erode our attention spans too? Listening to the doomsayers, I’m surprised we’re able to do much more than drool and follow moving objects with our eyes after all these decades of technological bombardment of our fragile psyches.
But let’s leave aside the implausibility of studies being able to see significant effects on cognitive function in the short period of time that people have been using search engines. Just ask yourself the next time you start to type in a query: how would you have gone about trying to find this information before we had Google to use? Would you have driven to town to search for a needle of information in the haystack of a bookstore or library? Would you call some smart friend of yours, assuming you knew anyone who might have the answer? Or would you have just idly wondered for a moment before shrugging and forgetting about it?
And do you use this kind of information-gathering tool in the same way as a kid in school cheating on a test by copying off his neighbor’s paper? That is, do you simply look for the answer you need, write it down and promptly forget about it, learning nothing? Or when you search, do you find yourself following one or more of those, uh, brain-rotting links to more information on the topic than you even suspected existed? Who doesn’t have bookmarked pages of valuable information that was stumbled upon by accident? Who doesn’t have favorite writers online that they only found by following their nose (or perhaps we should say clicky finger) one day?
Clearly, something has impeded Carr’s ability to gather and process information, but I suspect that whatever it is, it predates the Internet.
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