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Jun 30, 2010 links, philosophy, reading
Michael Mechanic has an interesting interview up today on Mother Jones with Gene Weingarten: “Secrets of a Two-Time Pulitzer Winner.” Weingarten has a book coming out entitled Fiddler in the Subway, a collection of essays he wrote for The Washington Post and the WaPo magazine. After you read Mechanic’s piece, come back here to read the four Weingarten pieces, all of them excellent:
The aforementioned fiddler/violinist is Joshua Bell, whose concert at Suntory Hall in Tokyo is worth watching/hearing in full (part 1 of 5 is linked). For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.
Are you still hard up for reading material? I’m doing my best here. Last week was great because the NYT treated us to five days of Errol Morris’ fascinating series “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma.” I’ve linked to part one, where we’re introduced to the Dunning-Kruger effect:
“…If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent… When you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”
The analogy is to anosognosia, or the disorder where a paralytic can’t/won’t recognize that they’re paralyzed. As if I weren’t already depressed about man’s mental faculties (pace Descartes), we also get this gem from Newsweek‘s Sharon Begley:
One of the strongest, most-repeated findings in the psychology of belief is that once people have been told X, especially if X is shocking, if they are later told, “No, we were wrong about X,” most people still believe X.
God help us; it’s a wonder we can tie our shoes in the morning. By the way, if you’re interested in more of Errol Morris-esque inquiries into “unknown unknowns” (Rumsfeld), I’d highly recommend the book The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — it is, unlike the faux-revelations of Malcolm Gladwell, a true paradigm-shifting (I use that word deliberately) work. Plus, Taleb will spare you years of agony having to learn the same things via the poker table… trust me, reading is quite preferable to bad beats in Texas hold ‘em.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/05/AR2005120501092_pf.htmlT
May 13, 2010 politics, reading, theology
Tim Wise has been all over the Web lately with his article, “What If the Tea Party Were Black?” I had my dose of Wise last week via a six-part series on YouTube that contains his 2007 lecture, “The Pathology of White Privilege: Racism, White Denial, and the Costs of Inequality.” The videos are roughly 10 minutes each and well worth an hour of your time. A transcript of the entire lecture (PDF) is available from the Media Education Foundation. A lot of things jumped out at me, but two things tied in nicely with other reading I’ve done:
1. The self-delusion of the dominant racial group viz. minorities. A Mother Jones piece today by Greg Grandin entitled, “Glenn Beck, America’s Historian Laureate” pointed me to a NYT/CBS poll that found that 52% of Tea Partiers believe “too much [has] been made of the problems facing black people.” For his part, Wise references two polls from 1962 & 1963 respectively — pre-Civil Rights Movement era polls, in other words — where 80% of white people thought black people were treated equally in their community, and 90% of white people thought black children had the same educational opportunities. Tim Wise:
Denial, in every generation: 2007, 1963, the 30s, the 1890s, the 1850s. My point being that, in every generation, the members of the dominant group have said there is no problem, and in every generation, without fail, we have been wrong. And in every generation, people of color, those who were the targets of that oppression and subordination, have said there is a problem, and in every generation,
without fail, they have been right.
2. The white privilege of forgetting. Wise says, “Victims have long memories… But those who create that victimization have short memories. We [white people] have the luxury of forgetting.” I thought this dovetailed nicely with a book I just finished, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost (1998). Hochschild (coincidentally, co-founder & early editor of Mother Jones) has a whole section devoted to the “politics of forgetting,” which in this case means forgetting the mass murder of some 10 million Congolese Africans at the turn of the 20th century.
The story told in King Leopold’s Ghost has something for everyone: tragic heroes, back-room political intrigue, crazy familial squabbles — even “one of the most successful feats of pimpery of all time!” Hochschild’s details Belgium’s King Leopold II and his almost single-handed conquest of the Congo (with, of course, the aid & complicity of the U.S. and most of Europe). I, like Hochschild before researching this book, knew very little of this “forgotten holocaust,” save for tidbits of information gleaned from a cursory knowledge of Joseph Conrad. After Leopold’s mad grab for Africa, he personally net $1.1 billion from ivory & rubber trade (begotten from a cruel forced-labor system, not to mention the extermination of half of the indigenous population of the Congo. “The horror! The horror!” Terrible history, but an incredible book.
So: winners do write History, but I belong to a religion that, at its best, is for losers, for underdogs, for the down-and-out and the forgotten. And if that religion has too often, much too often, sided with the powerful & the upwardly mobile, there are patches of history where believes have been among the most ardent of prophets speaking truth to power. And King Leopold’s Ghost records the stories of a couple of these people; most prominently, that of African American Presbyterian Rev. William H. Sheppard. I’ve excerpted Hochschild’s passages about Sheppard and put them into a 10-page PDF; it’s highly recommended reading.
The complementary photos I added are from The Presbyterian Historical Society, as found in this article on Sheppard from The Journal of Southern Religion. It’s also interesting to note that in an interesting afterword to King Leopold’s Ghost written seven years after initial publication, Hochschild claims he understated the role of Baptist & Presbyterian missionaries; this seems, in part, to have been the impetus for his 2006 book Bury the Chains, about “prophets and rebels” in the British anti-slavery movement. If you never get to King Leopold’s Ghost, at the very least read the chapters on Sheppard — and seriously, watch those Tim Wise videos.
Apr 28, 2010 music, personal
I want to share a song with you that I have really liked ever since first hearing it six weeks ago on The Bob Edwards Show. Edwards was interviewing Boston musician-poet (and former subway busker) Meg Hutchinson about her song “Gatekeeper.” It’s inspired by a man named Kevin Briggs, whom Hutchinson had read about in a 2003 New Yorker article called “Jumpers: the Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge” (cf. The Bridge). The full interview is available for downloading, but here’s the transcript of the relevant portion:
So, I’ve never met Kevin. I read a New Yorker article maybe five years ago about suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. And he was featured in the article — he’s been a patrolman there for many years; I don’t know if he still works on the Golden Gate bridge. But it was his job to ride up and down and look for jumpers, and figure out who was at risk and have a conversation that would save them. I thought, you know, he must do something very dramatic in order to keep people from jumping at that moment when there’s nothing left for them. And I was so struck in the article by the fact that he very humbly said, “I just ask them two questions. I ask them, ‘how are you feeling,’ and ‘what are your plans for tomorrow?’” And that seems so bold, because we know the answer — we know that people are standing there with no plan, and feeling terrible, or not feeling at all. Maybe so low that they’re not even feeling. But it seemed to me that if he’s willing to ask that ordinary question, rather than high emotion — which might frighten people even more — to just approach them like it’s a normal day… that that’s the thing that saves people. And in 200 interventions he had never lost anyone.
So I called the song “Gatekeeper” and I think of him as this gatekeeper to this other world, you know, where we might have lost many people. So I would really like to meet this man. I don’t know how to find him, but if anyone does, I would love to meet him. I was very struck by the work he does.
And I think every seventeen minutes someone in this country kills themselves. And if anything else, we’re destroying people of that demographic especially — affluent, educated people — if anything else was taking them down, there would be such alarm. That would be headline news. I mean, we even think about the death toll from the Swine Flu, and how much fuss there’s been about that. Now, you know, the numbers are very similar. And how can we not still talk about that? Or if we talk about it, why is it such an abstract concept still to us? And military deaths… we talk about casualties from the actual war, but the casualties when soldiers come home are devastating, and that’s still something that we shy away from. So to think of this man who’s doing this work, even in this very small way in his life, that story is something that I think about often and think, how can we do more of that? How can we all be gatekeepers even in the way that we ask questions of each other and can we not be so busy.
Meg Hutchinson – “Gatekeeper” – from The Living Side (2010)
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For B.W.
Apr 5, 2010 politics, reading
When the passage of H.R.3590 kicked up a shitstorm two weeks ago, I thought of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story entitled “The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro.” This 1911 piece tells of Arthur Orton, a ne’er-do-well operating under the alias of “Tom Castro.” When he meets fellow conman Ebenezer Bogle, the two men hatch a plan to scam Lady Tichborne, a grieving mother who is unable to accept the fact of her son’s death at sea. Hoping to squeeze some buckeroos from this rich old biddy, Bogle decides that Orton/Castro should travel to England to impersonate the late Roger Charles Tichborne even though Castro looks nothing like young Mr. Tichborne at all.
Tichborne had been a slim, genteel young man with a reserved and somewhat self-absorbed air. He had sharp features, straight black hair, tawny skin, sparkling eyes, and an irritatingly precise way of speaking. Orton was an irrepressible rustic, a “yokel,” with a vast belly, features of infinite vagueness, fair and freckled skin, wavy light-brown hair, sleepy eyes, and no, or irrelevant, conversation.
…The plan had an irrational genius to it… Bogle knew that a perfect facsimile of the beloved Roger Charles Tichborne was impossible to find; he knew as that any similarities he might achieve would only underscore certain inevitable differences. He therefore gave up the notion of likeness altogether. He sensed that the vast ineptitude of his pretense would be a convincing proof that this was no fraud, for no fraud would ever have so flagrantly flaunted features that might so easily convinced (emphasis mine).
So here’s the Tom Castro Strategy: when an approximation of truth would too easily reveal yourself as fraudulent, shoot for the moon and become as absurdly outlandish as possible.
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Mar 16, 2010 personal
I decided to do some gardening this Spring and was inspired by Frugal Dad to make a “square foot garden.” These are gardens “invented” by Mel Bartholomew, whose website is so unusable that I can only assume it was designed for Windows ’95 and Netscape Navigator. But basically S.F.G. is for people who can’t be arsed to do real gardening, or for those without space to do one. I dragged the Mottas into this since we meet both requirements.
So last week we built a “tabletop” version of a SFG. I used Frugal Dad’s plans, sort of, only I modified them so as to ensure maximum disaster. But our version is also 4×2, only we nailed legs to the bottom of the plywood to create a 3.5′ tall box that’s just tall enough that the Motta’s balcony wall won’t block what little sunlight will be coming our way.
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Mar 7, 2010 movies
Ginny says my posts are gibberish, so here’s a more straightforward one: my picks (not predictions) for the 2010 Oscar winners.
Best picture: A Serious Man
Best actress: Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia
Best supporting actress: Mo’Nique for Precious
Best actor: n/a
Best supporting actor: Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds
Best animated feature: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Best cinematography: Das Weisse Band
Best director: Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds
Best documentary: The Cove
Best foreign film: Un Prophete
No one cares about the rest. I don’t watch many movies so I can’t comment on many of those that were nominated. Also, I’ve decided that Up is not just “overrated,” it’s downright mediocre. This was reinforced when I re-watched a bit of Wall-E again. Oh, and I went to Boston’s MFA yesterday and sadly discovered that I had missed their one & only screening of I Killed My Mother by just 20 hours.
Mar 4, 2010 theology
One of the most horrifying stories in the Old Testament is that of Jephthah, which is found in Judges 11:29-40. The gist of the story is that Jephthah is about to go into battle against the Ammonites, but before he does he makes a foolish oath before God that he’ll sacrifice as an offering the first thing that greets him upon his return from war. Sure enough Jephthah kicks all kind of Ammonite ass, but lo and behold who should he first see upon coming home? It’s Mizpah, his daughter, his only child. So Jephthah decides he has to live up to his vow and goes ahead and kills his daughter as a burnt offering unto God. Terrible story, just terrible.
There are a lot of intriguing questions here, such as Did Jephthah really kill his daughter? or Why did Mizpah submit to this insanity? or Is oath-breaking really worse than human sacrifice? However this story really appeals to me in light of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac; or rather, Kierkegaard’s take on Abraham’s story.
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Feb 27, 2010 philosophy, politics
Adbusters — the de facto magazine of choice for leftist fundamentalists — has an interesting article by Micah White on the (too oft-heralded) death of postmodernism and the birth of “altermodernism.” I think he gets things half-right, and we’ll start with his conception of postmodernism:
“…[A]n essential precept of postmodern philosophy: Western thought has hitherto divided the world into a series of binary oppositions that privilege one side over the other. The political implications of the lesson were clear: Oppression can be traced back to the way we think, and hope of liberation rests on escaping this binary thinking.
The postmodern project of overcoming binary thought, however, is more difficult than it may appear. First of all, one cannot simply flip the terms and privilege what was once diminished – that would merely replicate the binary in inverse. The issue is not which term is privileged but the false belief that existence can be divided into two distinct, competing parts. Thus the task of the postmodern activist became the blurring and problematizing of distinctions in order to destroy dualist thinking. It was all done in the name of political liberation.”
So far I’m fine with this, and he rightly pulls out the political & ethical bent of deconstruction instead of just characterizing it as literary navel-gazing. But I think things fall apart when he starts to spell out how/why postmodernism & deconstruction failed us:
“…[B]y the time the project of deconstructing distinctions was widespread in academia and had filtered down to society at large, oppression lay not in the maintenance of dualism but in the opposite: increasing hybridization. That is the irony of contemporary philosophy: what we take to be a tool of resistance, the application of cutting-edge theory to our contemporary moment, turns out to be a hammer of our oppression. And by rejecting binary thought outright, we were not challenging the status quo … we were helping it along.”
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Feb 9, 2010 philosophy, politics
“…The politics of Western powers, and of the American government in particular, are utterly destitute of ingenuity…”
So says Alain Badiou, in an interview I stumbled upon since my last post. As an interesting complement to that discussion, I read through Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? and he coincidentally discussed some of the very same issues. He led me to Badiou with this extended quote that explains the chief paradox in question here:
We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian– where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone – is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.
The result, Fisher says, is “on the one hand, an official culture in which capitalist enterprises are presented as socially responsible and caring, and, on the other, a widespread awareness that companies are actually corrupt, ruthless, etc.” As I argued previously, this paradox evidences an abject lack of imagination — Fisher discusses how free market capitalism has penetrated our very unconscious — and a profoundly conservative spirit, a total fear of change. So Americans end up having these really absurd public discussions (spectacles, really) in which, for example, it is widely acknowledged that the US healthcare system is deeply broken (inefficient and expensive) and yet absolutely no desire to do anything about it. Even if universal single-payer healthcare had demonstrably failed in every other nation, you would think the so-called patriots on the Right would have enough confidence in “American ingenuity” to believe that we could get it right.
Fisher more eloquently re-states that old “dare to dream” cliche:
…Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable [i.e. neo-conservative free-market capitalism] to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed impossible seem attainable. It is worth recalling that what is currently called realistic was itself once ‘impossible’…
In the same interview quoted initially, Alain Badiou has a beautiful little paragraph that sums up some of my feelings on this:
My philosophy desires affirmation. I want to fight for; I want to know what I have for the Good and to put it to work. I refuse to be content with the “least evil.” It is very fashionable right now to be modest, not to think big. Grandeur is considered a metaphysical evil. Me, I am for grandeur, I am for heroism. I am for the affirmation of the thought and the deed.
Italics mine in both quotes; Badiou quote taken from this excellent Cabinet interview.
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