I've moved on to some of my thesis-oriented reading finally, language politics and rent theory. I think the feminists may be easier to get along with than some of these language people. I certainly can see a need for a language of record for federal and state level business, so that all people are held to a single standard wrt laws and policies. But to try to legislate private language use, or to use policy to bully people into speaking English is just plain wrong. The argument that 'our' common language is what brings us together as Americans is baloney. Just because a house full of Hispanic migrant workers can and do speak English, they would not automatically be accepted as full Americans by those who are against them now for their Spanish. The new law in Arizona that allows people suspected of being illegal aliens is almost certainly put into practice by people watching for poor-looking, Spanish speaking Hispanic people, and no doubt if these people are detained and questioned, they are not always fully informed and questioned in Spanish, in the presence of an attorney, as they ought to be if they turn out to be citizens of the US. I can't actually imagine how the implementation would come about except in big cities. In a small town, no doubt everyone knows who everyone else is, so unless this thing turned into a staged witch hunt to clear out undesirables, who could a small town target? And if I, a white English-speaking person, was in Arizona, out in public, would I be questioned? If so, could I prove my identity as a citizen? I don't drive, so I don't have a drivers' license, and while I have a state ID, my hair is rather different in that picture, taken a few years back, and no one on first meeting me thinks I look 31. But no, I would never be questioned, let alone detained on suspicion of being foreign, because I am white and speak English with a Western accent. Even if I spoke entirely in a French, or German, or Russian accent, no one would be at all alarmed. If I spoke with a Spanish accent even, I'd be safe. It isn't the English then that protects me, but my skin-color. There are Mexicans who speak better English than their US citizen counterparts this side of the border, so the language test won't root out the 'extra' Hispanics, but it'll keep their numbers down, perhaps. (And this language business is bringing us all together?)
Call me old-fashioned, but to my thinking people are drawn together when they seek to understand and appreciate each other as human beings. Last I checked, speaking English was not synonymous with being human, as a necessary and sufficient condition for inclusion in our species.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Seeking the patterns of the universe underlying all things
I think I have settled enough for myself of a coherent theory of gender that I can read other people's ideas, however blatantly and intentionally offensive, and assess them reasonably. Does gender have much to do with my thesis? Not directly. Rent is due to the differences in production costs or productivities of things all operating within the same system. On a very brief timescale gender can operate as this sort of relation, for instance in a place like China, where modernization is accelerated and both genders are expected to work in factories and science/technology positions, and in modern business models, if women were traditionally socialized to be further from the new ideal than men were, then it would cost more to bring women up to speed relative to the cost for retraining the men, This would be a cost that could be assessed by using variations on rent models, but in general gender issues are not this simple or of this pattern.
One criticism of using rent concepts to discuss gender, which I consider pretty weak, is that it uses a cold mathematical construct from with paternalistic knowledge, from economics in particular, to try to discuss something which involves emotions and experiences at an individual level, beyond the reach of economic modeling. It could, indeed, be misused such that this would be good criticism. But using a mathematical model correctly, as a tool to understand the relationships between things, is no more wrong than using a hammer to nail a bench together.
The problem with rent being applied to gender where it is less homogenized than the China example above is that there is no single standard of productivity or value against which all people are measured, and no homogeneous group of 'women' or 'men' to compare. Human beings vary in enough details that the things we might wish to calculate are more likely to run on a continuous distribution, with the male and female mean, mode and average shifting only slightly relative to the overall values. But, underneath the idea of using rent in social and political theory lies the idea of considering the mathematical shapes of systems as they compare across fields. I still want to try mapping chemistry equations against social behaviors like voting, or the matrix and differential equations from parts of ecology mapped against multiculturalism. The importance here is pattern. The details matter, of course, but there are equations with some degree of success in describing complex events in the 'hard' sciences that could be mapped into social systems as well, to get at the underlying dynamics of societies. Would this be useful? At one point many of the physics concept demonstrations were mostly considered cheap parlor tricks, not really of much use, and not worthy of much funding outside the ivory tower of academia. Those demonstrations and the physics behind them lie at the foundation of our whole modern high-tech world. I doubt a computer will ever regulate society any more than a computer really regulates the Internet. Big complex systems have too many complex dynamics, generating emergent systems and all sort of odd singularities, so that for a species as stubborn and vain as humans, there may always be too much going on for a computer to manage. Being able, though, to discover more completely how stable peaceful governments become established might help improve the lives of millions of people, and figuring out how to successfully address the growing population of pets in the US might help prevent the millions of cats and dogs and other animals killed or abandoned to die each year as excess pets. These are the sorts of dynamics where math is a tool our species would be foolish not to utilize.
One criticism of using rent concepts to discuss gender, which I consider pretty weak, is that it uses a cold mathematical construct from with paternalistic knowledge, from economics in particular, to try to discuss something which involves emotions and experiences at an individual level, beyond the reach of economic modeling. It could, indeed, be misused such that this would be good criticism. But using a mathematical model correctly, as a tool to understand the relationships between things, is no more wrong than using a hammer to nail a bench together.
The problem with rent being applied to gender where it is less homogenized than the China example above is that there is no single standard of productivity or value against which all people are measured, and no homogeneous group of 'women' or 'men' to compare. Human beings vary in enough details that the things we might wish to calculate are more likely to run on a continuous distribution, with the male and female mean, mode and average shifting only slightly relative to the overall values. But, underneath the idea of using rent in social and political theory lies the idea of considering the mathematical shapes of systems as they compare across fields. I still want to try mapping chemistry equations against social behaviors like voting, or the matrix and differential equations from parts of ecology mapped against multiculturalism. The importance here is pattern. The details matter, of course, but there are equations with some degree of success in describing complex events in the 'hard' sciences that could be mapped into social systems as well, to get at the underlying dynamics of societies. Would this be useful? At one point many of the physics concept demonstrations were mostly considered cheap parlor tricks, not really of much use, and not worthy of much funding outside the ivory tower of academia. Those demonstrations and the physics behind them lie at the foundation of our whole modern high-tech world. I doubt a computer will ever regulate society any more than a computer really regulates the Internet. Big complex systems have too many complex dynamics, generating emergent systems and all sort of odd singularities, so that for a species as stubborn and vain as humans, there may always be too much going on for a computer to manage. Being able, though, to discover more completely how stable peaceful governments become established might help improve the lives of millions of people, and figuring out how to successfully address the growing population of pets in the US might help prevent the millions of cats and dogs and other animals killed or abandoned to die each year as excess pets. These are the sorts of dynamics where math is a tool our species would be foolish not to utilize.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Escaping Killer Vaginas and Endless Warfare
In the time since I started reading these gender books, I have had several rather long conversations with others, male and female, in conjunction with my readings. Though in my younger days I might have pounced on some poor unsuspecting souls in the student center for these conversations, this time around the people I spoke with are all friends. The sum of my impressions from these many hours of talk, plus lots of thinking and reading, and grumbling and arguing with each essay I read, all together have left me slightly shifted from my last post.
First, as far as essentialist arguments go- There are differences between male and female humans, most obviously bodily differences. I haven't yet read it this time, but years ago when I took my last college gender studies course, some of the authors we read made a huge deal of the experience a young woman has learning about sex, specifically learning that sex means allowing a man to enter/penetrate/violate her body, in a part of her anatomy she may have never really even acknowledged. It was stated by many of these authors repeatedly that control of the knowledge of sex was a part of how men kept control over their sexual relations with women. Boys certainly have a more obviously accessible sexual region for self-exploration, and engage in more masturbation, and in some eras and places were encouraged to explore sex with prostitutes or other lower-status women prior to and during marriage. But the knowledge boys have to gain about sex is not really any nicer than that girls get, according to such models of sex.
Many classic authors, of fiction and non-fiction, drill into their readers that a man's life energy or essence drains out with his semen, prompting some rather visible men to avoid sex entirely, and live as monks. The idea of the sex act, for an uninitiated boy, is perhaps as scary as for a girl, too, in the idea of his most sensitive organ being engulfed/taken/devoured by the body of a woman. Two images from popular media come to mind here. The first is a rather bizarre porn horror film about killer vaginas with teeth, that bite off men's penises. The second, from a book by Neil Gaiman, describes a goddess who consumes men during sex, absorbing them penis-first through the rift in her skin that is her vagina. I am sure if I went looking I could find plenty more. Even if men don't exactly buy into them literally, there are other interpretations of these images as metaphors, which many men seem to accept, such that when they have sex with women they expect sex to be a way for women to entrap them into marriage and domesticity. Meanwhile women, who have grown up on the same range of stories in many ways, expect that they can only get a husband by such entrapments, and also assume they actually want domesticity.
A study I came across in a social psychology course years ago comes to mind. In this study, researchers wanted to know whether men and women differ with respect to visual-sexual arousal. The primary target, still, for pornography is men, and certainly the plots and aesthetics in many types of porn are geared towards men exclusively. That the market is so structured does not mean women wouldn't enjoy porn, yet most women don't use pornography. The researchers set up conditions so that test subjects would view various sexual, semi-sexual and neutral imagery, with sensors arrayed to monitor where the subject's eyes focused, and for how long, as well as gathering heart rate, respiration, etc. Male subjects liked porn, according to the results. Women didn't respond much to the porn, which, was not to surprising either. However, women also didn't really look at the porn; their eyes kept sliding away from the naked bodies on the screen, and especially from penises. Follow-ups to this found that women, if they became used to the idea of it being ok to be sexually aroused by the sight of naked men, they looked at pictures of naked men longer, and their physical arousal began to resemble that of male subjects.
In the decade since reading about these experiments I have paid much closer attention to my own and my friends' behavior with respect to sexuality. Considering that I started out as a 'good' Seventh Day Adventist, this really may just mean that I went from pretending sex didn't exist to acknowledging that it might be fun to try sometime. Still, I think the potential for men and women to be practically identical in their degree of sexual interest is huge. If our parents and communities weren't hell-bent on training us out of being comfortable in our own skins, girls could figure out and enjoy masturbation almost as easily as boys. And, if it is not culturally taboo for women to enjoy the sight of naked men, and sexuality on screen, women can and do find such sights arousing.
All this does in fact link into what else I have been thinking about tonight, though on the surface I am still pitting men against women in endless comparison. Ultimately, though, just as with environmental issues and racial issues, after so man decades of debate and argument, it isn't that the points are unclear, or that there is no sign of a direction in which to move. The biggest problem I see in gender studies is that we are all individuals. We do not have 'man' or 'woman', or 'white', or 'black', or any other category stamps on our hides when we are born. Gender is made up of the interaction between our own individual traits and the gender constructs our families and society buy into. Race, a different concept from gender structurally (one is born with the phenotypic 'race' of one's parents, whereas, one is always born by way of a woman's pregnancy, through the sexual coupling in some form of a man and a woman.) is also socially constructed, as can be seen in the label 'white', which now includes the Irish, and Eastern Europeans, and usually Italians, though all these groups were at various times set apart as racially inferior, and which does not include Japanese or Chinese people even when these people have paler skin. I, as a 'white' woman, am a sort of yellowish orangeish pink color, and the only 'black' person I met who really looked black in color was from a particular Sudanese group. (yes, I see the beginnings of a typical rambling rant starting here. sorry.). . .
So long as we are stuck trying to come to a consensus about who is right and who is wronged, bickering back and forth, training each new generation to pick up the fight where the departing generation left off, we'll get nowhere. If anyone recalls the Doctor Who episode where the Doctor has a daughter by a DNA replication device, that is the sort of war we have going on with respect to a lot of things anymore. So long as we band together as men and women (or human and hath, in the episode) we won't know each other, understand each other, like each other or really be able to love each other. Each of us is an individual person, first, and so long as we can interact with each other at this fundamental level, we stand some chance of shedding the baggage we've all inherited, our parents' parents' wars, that have kept us at odds for these generations. Is this rewriting history? Perhaps, but really it is saying, whatever the history, we are here now, real flesh-and-blood humans, with our brief shimmeringly glorious lives still in full swing. What happened in the past is over, and if we want to thoroughly enjoy the life we have left to savor and enrich, we need to do it by actually living our own lives. The only place gender studies has in this model of my life or of life in general is to the extent that others can force gender upon me and those around me. The only way to really beat such forces seems to be to embrace life even more tenaciously. If Society, or Government, or History, or any force can make me into some sort of boxed-up gendered white disabled woman, it is not because they hold a gun to my head, but because I choose to change myself in response to them. That would, by the way, be a lot easier to say if I was independently wealthy; as an introverted intellectual, I find it hard to attract the supportive network of friends and loved ones that would make it certain that a roof will always be available, a meal always there when needed. I really envy some of those classic thinkers who could afford to just live and write, and think, without worry of homelessness and starvation. I will almost certainly have to find a job that will test my sense of self, in a part of society with plenty of boxes to put me in.
But, where there's a will (or whip?) there is a way.
First, as far as essentialist arguments go- There are differences between male and female humans, most obviously bodily differences. I haven't yet read it this time, but years ago when I took my last college gender studies course, some of the authors we read made a huge deal of the experience a young woman has learning about sex, specifically learning that sex means allowing a man to enter/penetrate/violate her body, in a part of her anatomy she may have never really even acknowledged. It was stated by many of these authors repeatedly that control of the knowledge of sex was a part of how men kept control over their sexual relations with women. Boys certainly have a more obviously accessible sexual region for self-exploration, and engage in more masturbation, and in some eras and places were encouraged to explore sex with prostitutes or other lower-status women prior to and during marriage. But the knowledge boys have to gain about sex is not really any nicer than that girls get, according to such models of sex.
Many classic authors, of fiction and non-fiction, drill into their readers that a man's life energy or essence drains out with his semen, prompting some rather visible men to avoid sex entirely, and live as monks. The idea of the sex act, for an uninitiated boy, is perhaps as scary as for a girl, too, in the idea of his most sensitive organ being engulfed/taken/devoured by the body of a woman. Two images from popular media come to mind here. The first is a rather bizarre porn horror film about killer vaginas with teeth, that bite off men's penises. The second, from a book by Neil Gaiman, describes a goddess who consumes men during sex, absorbing them penis-first through the rift in her skin that is her vagina. I am sure if I went looking I could find plenty more. Even if men don't exactly buy into them literally, there are other interpretations of these images as metaphors, which many men seem to accept, such that when they have sex with women they expect sex to be a way for women to entrap them into marriage and domesticity. Meanwhile women, who have grown up on the same range of stories in many ways, expect that they can only get a husband by such entrapments, and also assume they actually want domesticity.
A study I came across in a social psychology course years ago comes to mind. In this study, researchers wanted to know whether men and women differ with respect to visual-sexual arousal. The primary target, still, for pornography is men, and certainly the plots and aesthetics in many types of porn are geared towards men exclusively. That the market is so structured does not mean women wouldn't enjoy porn, yet most women don't use pornography. The researchers set up conditions so that test subjects would view various sexual, semi-sexual and neutral imagery, with sensors arrayed to monitor where the subject's eyes focused, and for how long, as well as gathering heart rate, respiration, etc. Male subjects liked porn, according to the results. Women didn't respond much to the porn, which, was not to surprising either. However, women also didn't really look at the porn; their eyes kept sliding away from the naked bodies on the screen, and especially from penises. Follow-ups to this found that women, if they became used to the idea of it being ok to be sexually aroused by the sight of naked men, they looked at pictures of naked men longer, and their physical arousal began to resemble that of male subjects.
In the decade since reading about these experiments I have paid much closer attention to my own and my friends' behavior with respect to sexuality. Considering that I started out as a 'good' Seventh Day Adventist, this really may just mean that I went from pretending sex didn't exist to acknowledging that it might be fun to try sometime. Still, I think the potential for men and women to be practically identical in their degree of sexual interest is huge. If our parents and communities weren't hell-bent on training us out of being comfortable in our own skins, girls could figure out and enjoy masturbation almost as easily as boys. And, if it is not culturally taboo for women to enjoy the sight of naked men, and sexuality on screen, women can and do find such sights arousing.
All this does in fact link into what else I have been thinking about tonight, though on the surface I am still pitting men against women in endless comparison. Ultimately, though, just as with environmental issues and racial issues, after so man decades of debate and argument, it isn't that the points are unclear, or that there is no sign of a direction in which to move. The biggest problem I see in gender studies is that we are all individuals. We do not have 'man' or 'woman', or 'white', or 'black', or any other category stamps on our hides when we are born. Gender is made up of the interaction between our own individual traits and the gender constructs our families and society buy into. Race, a different concept from gender structurally (one is born with the phenotypic 'race' of one's parents, whereas, one is always born by way of a woman's pregnancy, through the sexual coupling in some form of a man and a woman.) is also socially constructed, as can be seen in the label 'white', which now includes the Irish, and Eastern Europeans, and usually Italians, though all these groups were at various times set apart as racially inferior, and which does not include Japanese or Chinese people even when these people have paler skin. I, as a 'white' woman, am a sort of yellowish orangeish pink color, and the only 'black' person I met who really looked black in color was from a particular Sudanese group. (yes, I see the beginnings of a typical rambling rant starting here. sorry.). . .
So long as we are stuck trying to come to a consensus about who is right and who is wronged, bickering back and forth, training each new generation to pick up the fight where the departing generation left off, we'll get nowhere. If anyone recalls the Doctor Who episode where the Doctor has a daughter by a DNA replication device, that is the sort of war we have going on with respect to a lot of things anymore. So long as we band together as men and women (or human and hath, in the episode) we won't know each other, understand each other, like each other or really be able to love each other. Each of us is an individual person, first, and so long as we can interact with each other at this fundamental level, we stand some chance of shedding the baggage we've all inherited, our parents' parents' wars, that have kept us at odds for these generations. Is this rewriting history? Perhaps, but really it is saying, whatever the history, we are here now, real flesh-and-blood humans, with our brief shimmeringly glorious lives still in full swing. What happened in the past is over, and if we want to thoroughly enjoy the life we have left to savor and enrich, we need to do it by actually living our own lives. The only place gender studies has in this model of my life or of life in general is to the extent that others can force gender upon me and those around me. The only way to really beat such forces seems to be to embrace life even more tenaciously. If Society, or Government, or History, or any force can make me into some sort of boxed-up gendered white disabled woman, it is not because they hold a gun to my head, but because I choose to change myself in response to them. That would, by the way, be a lot easier to say if I was independently wealthy; as an introverted intellectual, I find it hard to attract the supportive network of friends and loved ones that would make it certain that a roof will always be available, a meal always there when needed. I really envy some of those classic thinkers who could afford to just live and write, and think, without worry of homelessness and starvation. I will almost certainly have to find a job that will test my sense of self, in a part of society with plenty of boxes to put me in.
But, where there's a will (or whip?) there is a way.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Where I stand, so far
Where I Stand
1.People are people. Female, male, heterosexual, homosexual, tall, short, fat, skinny, and all other terms often applied to people are details, but not the essence of any person. A fat person has different traits compared to a skinny person, and a person with a penis has different traits from one with a vulva. Some traits seem to appear most commonly together, for instance penises and lots of body hair, or morbidly obese people and sore feet. But there are always exceptions or potentials for exceptions. A morbidly obese royal person who is always carried everywhere, for instance, is unlikely to have sore feet.
2.Feminism and masculinism are not monolithic. One cannot predict a person's opinions, feelings or beliefs very precisely based on these designations, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Femininity and masculinity are socially constructed concepts, built from traits that naturally occur in people, but trained from infancy within established cultures. Just as a tree can be trained to grow flat along a trellis, a human can be trained to be a “manly man” or a “girly girl.” Just as a tree left untended will begin to regain its natural shape, a human can, if allowed, regain lost aspects of itself. Thus traditional women can learn to enjoy life as independant people, not appended as wives or girlfriends to anyone; traditional men can learn to appreciate and understand their vast emotional repertoire.
3.The way gender conversations often go, it seems the only solution is for all men to pick up their toys and go east, and all women pick up their toys and go west, and forget about playing together. Except that there would be a bunch of people stuck in the middle, who are not sure they want to just be on the men's side, or just on the women's side, for various reasons. There are biological differences between genders that would mean eventually that nobody would exist on the east side, since men can't give birth, and only women would exist on the west side, since cloning women could only produce women. In the middle things might be more complicated, and maybe those center folks would be responsible for restoring healthy civilization.
4.So long as men insist that they are in charge by virtue of their penises, women hold a trump card that only socialization prevents them from playing, unless men choose to go to war against women, bringing violence and rape to bear against all 'recalcitrant women'. If women have sex as much as men do, with as many partners as men have, than no one man out of her selection of partners is necessarily the father of any particular child she may give birth to. Even if she only has one partner, however, there is little sense in talking about automatic 'paternal rights' simply because when she had sex with that man, his sperm met up with her egg. Up to that point, assuming they were consensual and both enjoyed it, they're even. But now, for 9 months, she is pregnant. This doesn't usually mean that she lolls about, munching food and watching movies for 9 months. Even if she isn't working somewhere, she is almost certainly still doing housework, especially if she isn't working. And regardless of how she spends that time, she is still pregnant, with the cramps, sore feet, morning sickness, etc, and then the pleasures of childbirth to cap it off. After that she gets to nurse the baby while her body pulls itself slowly back into shape as best it can, and she gets to find out just how egalitarian her partner really is with respect to childcare and housework. Considering all this, a modern woman may more reasonably choose not to have children with any man, ever. And, without babies, she has less reason to want a man around all the time, since life is simpler living on her own, with a lover she can see when they are both feeling interested. Both men and women would miss out on the fulfillment of deeper, longer-lasting love and companionship, but this may be the best way to go if men and women can't work out their issues any better.
5.I like men. That is, I find male bodies attractive, and I so far only fall in love or in lust with male humans. I would be and am disappointed that there are so few men fully comfortable with themselves and their bodies. I hate being with a man who seems uneasy that he has a penis when he finds himself standing naked in plain sight of his lover. I'd assume the point of his being there naked with his lover is in part because he has a penis, so being shy or ashamed of it is silly. Obviously I am not a passive sort of lover overall, though I have my days, as many people seem to. The men I wind up with are thus men who are more ok with having a more sexually equal partner, at least to the extent that they are happy to try new positions and enjoy being under a naked woman. But, they somehow lost balance; they have so far all been rather passive, unable to be equal, and so unfortunately easily dominated. I'm not sure how men lasted so many centuries having passive sex partners- it's terribly dull, and pointless after a while.
6.I prefer to sort of life and interests for myself that tend to belong to men in our society. I was a boy scout, after all, not a girl scout. I do not see these things as gendered- anyone can like tying knots and building things out of ropes and logs, or riding horses, or practicing archery. But, many men seem to not know how to enjoy a woman who is more a boy scout than a girl scout. They've grown up on stories in which women act in certain ways, and they expect that in real life. Real women, though, in our modern times, are not simpering pretty dolls, to be escorted to movies and treated to chocolate malts on the way home. I doubt women have ever really been that dull, but now it is socially possible for men and women to talk, to explore and discover life together as friends and equals. Somehow I still meet men every year who are my age and have no female friends besides myself, and I certainly know women who don't really have male friends, but they are in both cases the minority.
7.It's not a matter of making mountains out of molehills, but nonetheless, if we don't solve gender this year, life will not suddenly grind to a halt. With ~7 billion people on the planet, there will likely be both men and women someplaces on the planet being oppressed and mistreated, and there will also be michrocosms of egalitarianism where it seems things have finally worked out right. Kids will be born to people throughout this vast spectrum of socialization, and as they meet each other, the boundaries we set on our lives will continue to morph. Despite all the hatred and anger spewed on all sides regarding gender issues, many people do eventually meet a special someone, and fall in love, at least for a while. Even if the genders did all pick up their toys and quit the game, there would be quiet liasons on the borders. Little homesteads would begin popping up towards the center from both sides as people with burning hatreds against “men” or “women” found a man, or a woman wonderful enough to share life with.
1.People are people. Female, male, heterosexual, homosexual, tall, short, fat, skinny, and all other terms often applied to people are details, but not the essence of any person. A fat person has different traits compared to a skinny person, and a person with a penis has different traits from one with a vulva. Some traits seem to appear most commonly together, for instance penises and lots of body hair, or morbidly obese people and sore feet. But there are always exceptions or potentials for exceptions. A morbidly obese royal person who is always carried everywhere, for instance, is unlikely to have sore feet.
2.Feminism and masculinism are not monolithic. One cannot predict a person's opinions, feelings or beliefs very precisely based on these designations, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Femininity and masculinity are socially constructed concepts, built from traits that naturally occur in people, but trained from infancy within established cultures. Just as a tree can be trained to grow flat along a trellis, a human can be trained to be a “manly man” or a “girly girl.” Just as a tree left untended will begin to regain its natural shape, a human can, if allowed, regain lost aspects of itself. Thus traditional women can learn to enjoy life as independant people, not appended as wives or girlfriends to anyone; traditional men can learn to appreciate and understand their vast emotional repertoire.
3.The way gender conversations often go, it seems the only solution is for all men to pick up their toys and go east, and all women pick up their toys and go west, and forget about playing together. Except that there would be a bunch of people stuck in the middle, who are not sure they want to just be on the men's side, or just on the women's side, for various reasons. There are biological differences between genders that would mean eventually that nobody would exist on the east side, since men can't give birth, and only women would exist on the west side, since cloning women could only produce women. In the middle things might be more complicated, and maybe those center folks would be responsible for restoring healthy civilization.
4.So long as men insist that they are in charge by virtue of their penises, women hold a trump card that only socialization prevents them from playing, unless men choose to go to war against women, bringing violence and rape to bear against all 'recalcitrant women'. If women have sex as much as men do, with as many partners as men have, than no one man out of her selection of partners is necessarily the father of any particular child she may give birth to. Even if she only has one partner, however, there is little sense in talking about automatic 'paternal rights' simply because when she had sex with that man, his sperm met up with her egg. Up to that point, assuming they were consensual and both enjoyed it, they're even. But now, for 9 months, she is pregnant. This doesn't usually mean that she lolls about, munching food and watching movies for 9 months. Even if she isn't working somewhere, she is almost certainly still doing housework, especially if she isn't working. And regardless of how she spends that time, she is still pregnant, with the cramps, sore feet, morning sickness, etc, and then the pleasures of childbirth to cap it off. After that she gets to nurse the baby while her body pulls itself slowly back into shape as best it can, and she gets to find out just how egalitarian her partner really is with respect to childcare and housework. Considering all this, a modern woman may more reasonably choose not to have children with any man, ever. And, without babies, she has less reason to want a man around all the time, since life is simpler living on her own, with a lover she can see when they are both feeling interested. Both men and women would miss out on the fulfillment of deeper, longer-lasting love and companionship, but this may be the best way to go if men and women can't work out their issues any better.
5.I like men. That is, I find male bodies attractive, and I so far only fall in love or in lust with male humans. I would be and am disappointed that there are so few men fully comfortable with themselves and their bodies. I hate being with a man who seems uneasy that he has a penis when he finds himself standing naked in plain sight of his lover. I'd assume the point of his being there naked with his lover is in part because he has a penis, so being shy or ashamed of it is silly. Obviously I am not a passive sort of lover overall, though I have my days, as many people seem to. The men I wind up with are thus men who are more ok with having a more sexually equal partner, at least to the extent that they are happy to try new positions and enjoy being under a naked woman. But, they somehow lost balance; they have so far all been rather passive, unable to be equal, and so unfortunately easily dominated. I'm not sure how men lasted so many centuries having passive sex partners- it's terribly dull, and pointless after a while.
6.I prefer to sort of life and interests for myself that tend to belong to men in our society. I was a boy scout, after all, not a girl scout. I do not see these things as gendered- anyone can like tying knots and building things out of ropes and logs, or riding horses, or practicing archery. But, many men seem to not know how to enjoy a woman who is more a boy scout than a girl scout. They've grown up on stories in which women act in certain ways, and they expect that in real life. Real women, though, in our modern times, are not simpering pretty dolls, to be escorted to movies and treated to chocolate malts on the way home. I doubt women have ever really been that dull, but now it is socially possible for men and women to talk, to explore and discover life together as friends and equals. Somehow I still meet men every year who are my age and have no female friends besides myself, and I certainly know women who don't really have male friends, but they are in both cases the minority.
7.It's not a matter of making mountains out of molehills, but nonetheless, if we don't solve gender this year, life will not suddenly grind to a halt. With ~7 billion people on the planet, there will likely be both men and women someplaces on the planet being oppressed and mistreated, and there will also be michrocosms of egalitarianism where it seems things have finally worked out right. Kids will be born to people throughout this vast spectrum of socialization, and as they meet each other, the boundaries we set on our lives will continue to morph. Despite all the hatred and anger spewed on all sides regarding gender issues, many people do eventually meet a special someone, and fall in love, at least for a while. Even if the genders did all pick up their toys and quit the game, there would be quiet liasons on the borders. Little homesteads would begin popping up towards the center from both sides as people with burning hatreds against “men” or “women” found a man, or a woman wonderful enough to share life with.
More reflection on gender
I could probably write a few books' worth on this topic, all my gripes and gut reactions to reading my stack of books on gender studies. But, I've held back a bit, in the interest of anyone who actually reads my blog. I am currently in the middle of several books at once, a state I try to avoid, as it is nice to focus on one at a time.
Women Respond to the Men's Movement, edited by Kay Leigh Hagan
The Politics of Manhood, edited by Michael S. Kimmel
Theories of Comparative Politics, by Ronald H. Chilcote
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Aldous Huxley
These, plus my own background, are the influences behind my current gripes/perspective. I have read many of the key mythopoetic men's movement books, a few years ago as well.
I am particularly concerned about the socialization of gender, having spent so many years in Boy Scouts. I've met the scoutmasters who just can't get over the idea of a female camp counselor at their boys' scout camp, and been a campsite host for several Mormon scout troops where initially neither men nor boys wanted a woman around at camp, especially in a leadership role. I've also seen what happens with these people over the course of a week at scout camp, as these campers almost always learned to accept and appreciate my presence at 'their' camp. I've taught Mormon troops how to put up a dining fly correctly after it blew down over night, when the men in charge insisted on doing things their way, summarily discounting my suggestions. I've also been invited to eat at those dining flies, as an honored guest ("no, let the boys cook. So, how did you wind up at a Boy Scouts' camp?") I've rarely met any man or boy at camp who remained unhappy about my presence at their camp through the whole week, and this was not by my adopting a passive or more "feminine" role while they were around. I taught knots, and led work projects and nature hikes, taught about ecosystems using decaying animals found in the woods, ....
I could be easily accepted at camp because my role and that of the campers had already been well defined. My gender was irrelevant to what I was teaching, and to my staff duties. This was true both when I was an area director, basically middle-management with a staff of 0-5 people, and teaching duties, and when I was in charge as a program director, with a staff of ~50. I wasn't there to flirt with boys, or to do anything outside my official role as camp staff, and I never acted otherwise. There were no rumors floating around about my exploits with the male staff, and while I did have a romance while on camp for a couple of the years I was there, it never necessitated my being perceived differently by campers. I would hardly call my manner as camp staff 'masculine', just straightforward and reasonable. I never pretended I was not a woman, for sure.
I found myself thinking about camp in particular while reading Margo Adair's essay in the first of my current books. She mentions at one point feeling safe while in the midst of lots of men, as if this is unusual and really special. Really? I will admit, I've been around men who made me uneasy, but because they were mean or creepy, not because they are men. I've crossed the street to avoid crossing paths with very drunk men at night, sure, but in my neck of the woods that is it. Men aren't scary. Some individual men are scary. I never, ever got the impression that I was unsafe at scout camp, surrounded by men, even alone with a bunch of 'em a mile or two from anyone else. I met a few men I am still sure are child molesters, among the thousands of adults who came to camp each summer, but in that environment, they might molest a boy they knew would keep quiet, but not a woman they just met. There were just too many other people there who might just lynch any man who tried to rape or assault a woman on camp.
Is camp unusual? Sure. For one thing, everyone has a set role. I've met quite a few young men who shelter in such camps, where they need never learn to relate to women on a personal, romantic level. Indeed, no one at such camps is interacting with a woman as a woman during the week. In our society this is hardly unusual, since most jobs and school settings also allow men and women to interact in contexts where gender is irrelevant. Camp makes it easier to see because it is almost all male, and very formalized. No wonder so few men know how to ask a woman out on a date, if our society stifles gendered interaction so much. Puritanism's influence, no doubt. It is after all still an insult to call someone a flirt, and still a recognized ideal for a man and woman to save their first sexual experience till marriage. Many, if not most sexual hookups among young adults are accomplished at parties between moderately drunk people, and there need never be any hint of romance in such encounters. Such a hookup is not about social gender, just about bodies- not a bad thing necessarily, but something which is bound to get stale after a while. Both men and women have a psychological component to sexuality, which requires a bit more than just a night of drunken sex.
I am sure in big cities women's lives are different, and since many feminist writers are familiar with the cities, New York, L.A., etc, the issues they are describing may be quite real even though the world they describe is not the one I've lived in for 31 years. In my generation, here, women and men are certainly both screwed up, but as people, not as distinct genders. Quite a few of the people I've met flirt with being bisexual in their young 20's, around the same time they are learning about vodka and rent. They talk about everything-sex, drugs, alcohol, music, religion- just as generations before them did at that age. The boys and girls try pairing up, whichever way the winds blow them, and start sorting out what sorts of partners they want. In this environment, women are pursuing men at least as much as men pursue women, and those women may very well just want sex. Everyone is trying to make it in the world, getting educated, finding jobs, making money, and at such a pace that there is no time really for many to bother finding more than just a hookup. Since women are less interested in following a man around, going where he needs to go for work, and men are equally uninterested in following a woman around, both are just looking for fun, until they have found where they want to settle. Presumably, if they never really settle, they'll never really want a committed partner. Meanwhile all of them act like they know they are missing something. Their lives are frenzied emptiness, jitterbugs unable to find the joy and happiness their efforts were meant to achieve.
Women Respond to the Men's Movement, edited by Kay Leigh Hagan
The Politics of Manhood, edited by Michael S. Kimmel
Theories of Comparative Politics, by Ronald H. Chilcote
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Aldous Huxley
These, plus my own background, are the influences behind my current gripes/perspective. I have read many of the key mythopoetic men's movement books, a few years ago as well.
I am particularly concerned about the socialization of gender, having spent so many years in Boy Scouts. I've met the scoutmasters who just can't get over the idea of a female camp counselor at their boys' scout camp, and been a campsite host for several Mormon scout troops where initially neither men nor boys wanted a woman around at camp, especially in a leadership role. I've also seen what happens with these people over the course of a week at scout camp, as these campers almost always learned to accept and appreciate my presence at 'their' camp. I've taught Mormon troops how to put up a dining fly correctly after it blew down over night, when the men in charge insisted on doing things their way, summarily discounting my suggestions. I've also been invited to eat at those dining flies, as an honored guest ("no, let the boys cook. So, how did you wind up at a Boy Scouts' camp?") I've rarely met any man or boy at camp who remained unhappy about my presence at their camp through the whole week, and this was not by my adopting a passive or more "feminine" role while they were around. I taught knots, and led work projects and nature hikes, taught about ecosystems using decaying animals found in the woods, ....
I could be easily accepted at camp because my role and that of the campers had already been well defined. My gender was irrelevant to what I was teaching, and to my staff duties. This was true both when I was an area director, basically middle-management with a staff of 0-5 people, and teaching duties, and when I was in charge as a program director, with a staff of ~50. I wasn't there to flirt with boys, or to do anything outside my official role as camp staff, and I never acted otherwise. There were no rumors floating around about my exploits with the male staff, and while I did have a romance while on camp for a couple of the years I was there, it never necessitated my being perceived differently by campers. I would hardly call my manner as camp staff 'masculine', just straightforward and reasonable. I never pretended I was not a woman, for sure.
I found myself thinking about camp in particular while reading Margo Adair's essay in the first of my current books. She mentions at one point feeling safe while in the midst of lots of men, as if this is unusual and really special. Really? I will admit, I've been around men who made me uneasy, but because they were mean or creepy, not because they are men. I've crossed the street to avoid crossing paths with very drunk men at night, sure, but in my neck of the woods that is it. Men aren't scary. Some individual men are scary. I never, ever got the impression that I was unsafe at scout camp, surrounded by men, even alone with a bunch of 'em a mile or two from anyone else. I met a few men I am still sure are child molesters, among the thousands of adults who came to camp each summer, but in that environment, they might molest a boy they knew would keep quiet, but not a woman they just met. There were just too many other people there who might just lynch any man who tried to rape or assault a woman on camp.
Is camp unusual? Sure. For one thing, everyone has a set role. I've met quite a few young men who shelter in such camps, where they need never learn to relate to women on a personal, romantic level. Indeed, no one at such camps is interacting with a woman as a woman during the week. In our society this is hardly unusual, since most jobs and school settings also allow men and women to interact in contexts where gender is irrelevant. Camp makes it easier to see because it is almost all male, and very formalized. No wonder so few men know how to ask a woman out on a date, if our society stifles gendered interaction so much. Puritanism's influence, no doubt. It is after all still an insult to call someone a flirt, and still a recognized ideal for a man and woman to save their first sexual experience till marriage. Many, if not most sexual hookups among young adults are accomplished at parties between moderately drunk people, and there need never be any hint of romance in such encounters. Such a hookup is not about social gender, just about bodies- not a bad thing necessarily, but something which is bound to get stale after a while. Both men and women have a psychological component to sexuality, which requires a bit more than just a night of drunken sex.
I am sure in big cities women's lives are different, and since many feminist writers are familiar with the cities, New York, L.A., etc, the issues they are describing may be quite real even though the world they describe is not the one I've lived in for 31 years. In my generation, here, women and men are certainly both screwed up, but as people, not as distinct genders. Quite a few of the people I've met flirt with being bisexual in their young 20's, around the same time they are learning about vodka and rent. They talk about everything-sex, drugs, alcohol, music, religion- just as generations before them did at that age. The boys and girls try pairing up, whichever way the winds blow them, and start sorting out what sorts of partners they want. In this environment, women are pursuing men at least as much as men pursue women, and those women may very well just want sex. Everyone is trying to make it in the world, getting educated, finding jobs, making money, and at such a pace that there is no time really for many to bother finding more than just a hookup. Since women are less interested in following a man around, going where he needs to go for work, and men are equally uninterested in following a woman around, both are just looking for fun, until they have found where they want to settle. Presumably, if they never really settle, they'll never really want a committed partner. Meanwhile all of them act like they know they are missing something. Their lives are frenzied emptiness, jitterbugs unable to find the joy and happiness their efforts were meant to achieve.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Gender studies rxn Part 1
After reading critique of Bly's Iron John which pointed out all his rather racist and insensitive borrowing of bits and pieces of other cultures, the next essay in this book has me thinking along similar lines with respect to gender. Just as playing "Indian" with drums and war-paint in the woods takes isolated elements of another group's culture, out of context, and without concern for really understanding the rest of the originating culture, some of the changes in modern masculinity smack of insensitive borrowing. Real life is always more complex than any generalized essay could suggest, of course, and many real men are a lot more aware of women's perspectives now. Still, if helping with parenting, taking an interest in family, and crying in public are mens' attempts at creating a more equal society, they are only a beginning, and a mixed one at that. If a man helps to create a family, it seems only fitting that he should continue to take an interest in it; this is not going above and beyond, but simply taking a bit of responsibility for his own actions. And crying in public, as something that one just does, in response to some upsetting event, does not seem to be very sensible as a men's movement. If they are crying because it is natural for them, great, but if this is supposed to be something along the lines of 'getting in touch with the feminine side', it is as insulting to women as stolen Indian cultural aspects can be to Indian people. Modern women are hardly characterized by the fact of their walking around sobbing in public, after all.
Beneath all of this feminist and masculinist(?) crap, there is a deeper issue. Putting people into categories makes policy-making easier, and may simplify other areas of social life somewhat, but at a cost. It would indeed be silly to assert that men and women are identical, but beyond that, trying to define 'man' and 'woman' precisely is at least as difficult as defining precisely 'dog' or 'chair'. Unfortunately, our society is built on the intellectual foundations of earlier eras, and these foundations assume a central role for gender in shaping society. In addition to this foundation, Western society is still dominated by men, and by so-called "men's interests". To what extent these interests are really gender neutral, and what society would be doing instead if women were in charge remains to be fully determined. Certainly a woman as US president, however important as a milestone, would not change much in US politics, since she would still operate within the existing political framework.
Defining what is masculine and feminine is political, in that it is a group determination, which is then applied to everyone, regardless of their status relative to the general consensus. No law can change this, but it is still valid to ask why such determinations are necessary for lawmaking and policy-making. Is a parent more or less of a parent depending on how masculine or feminine she is? Certainly, any parent who is abusing her children should be subject to the law, but that is a response to an act of violence, not to a state of being.
What is concerning to me about modern masculinity, moreso than femininity, is that the masculine is still largely defined in the negative, as being what feminine is not. A man's physical strength is a partial exception to this, but a strong man is still liable to be considered feminine if he acts in ways considered too soft and feminine for a man. Women have this too, to some extent, but feminist movements exist to back up women who want to act themselves in spite of too narrow definitions. Men all too often lack these sorts of resources.
Beneath all of this feminist and masculinist(?) crap, there is a deeper issue. Putting people into categories makes policy-making easier, and may simplify other areas of social life somewhat, but at a cost. It would indeed be silly to assert that men and women are identical, but beyond that, trying to define 'man' and 'woman' precisely is at least as difficult as defining precisely 'dog' or 'chair'. Unfortunately, our society is built on the intellectual foundations of earlier eras, and these foundations assume a central role for gender in shaping society. In addition to this foundation, Western society is still dominated by men, and by so-called "men's interests". To what extent these interests are really gender neutral, and what society would be doing instead if women were in charge remains to be fully determined. Certainly a woman as US president, however important as a milestone, would not change much in US politics, since she would still operate within the existing political framework.
Defining what is masculine and feminine is political, in that it is a group determination, which is then applied to everyone, regardless of their status relative to the general consensus. No law can change this, but it is still valid to ask why such determinations are necessary for lawmaking and policy-making. Is a parent more or less of a parent depending on how masculine or feminine she is? Certainly, any parent who is abusing her children should be subject to the law, but that is a response to an act of violence, not to a state of being.
What is concerning to me about modern masculinity, moreso than femininity, is that the masculine is still largely defined in the negative, as being what feminine is not. A man's physical strength is a partial exception to this, but a strong man is still liable to be considered feminine if he acts in ways considered too soft and feminine for a man. Women have this too, to some extent, but feminist movements exist to back up women who want to act themselves in spite of too narrow definitions. Men all too often lack these sorts of resources.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Ode to the Internet
After reading a bunch of classic fiction and nonfiction, it is once again an amazing thought that one could access so much information instantly on one's laptop computer. The boys in the Altsheler novel I am currently finishing (Rock of Chickamauga)are impressed by algebra, which really was a greater educational achievement in the 1860's. In my school district it was a graduation requirement for everyone to finish algebra, and most of my friends and I tackled algebra in middle school. The boys in the novel do know woodscraft skills far beyond what I have even begun to learn, so there is some trade-off in going forward. Still, as I am reading about the campaigns in this last leg of the Civil War, I can google the names of the places where they stopped, and look at photographs and maps of those places. If I wanted to I could bring up satellite imagery and look at almost real-time views of those places from above. As an educational tool, the Internet is unparalleled, especially as an aide to other reading and study. I was unfortunately unable as of yet to find key words that would bring up more detailed studies of Civil War weather, to answer my late-night musings (Whether the nasty storm that came up around the time of the attack on Jackson was in fact a low-grade hurricane weakening as it made landfall) but even so, I found plenty on weather during that war in general. Surely someone else has tried to develop a good picture of hurricane seasons during the 1860's and could answer which of the nasty wartime storms were the remains of hurricanes. Anyway, between that and looking at the streaks of sand blowing across the Sahara, I am once again impressed with what it is possible for ordinary people to know now because of technology.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thoughts following General Colin Powell's address
I am so glad I didn't skip this event. It's rare that one gets to be in the audience of really great public speakers, let alone speakers with such entertaining, intelligent speeches. Sure, he is not right all the time, but you get the sense listening to him and watching him that he's a truly wise person. And, he's a great stand-up comedian when he chooses to be.
The speech put heavy emphasis on globalization, and America within a world context of a global community, so it was amusing to me, on a different note, that on my way out, the people in front of me were speaking Arabic, a man about General Powell's age and his adult son. The people being me were speaking Russian, a bunch of foreign students joking (in Russian) about that they should have cheered "Russia, Russia" whenever the General mentioned Russia in his speech. I just wish I knew a bit of Arabic so I could have understood that conversation, too.
The speech put heavy emphasis on globalization, and America within a world context of a global community, so it was amusing to me, on a different note, that on my way out, the people in front of me were speaking Arabic, a man about General Powell's age and his adult son. The people being me were speaking Russian, a bunch of foreign students joking (in Russian) about that they should have cheered "Russia, Russia" whenever the General mentioned Russia in his speech. I just wish I knew a bit of Arabic so I could have understood that conversation, too.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Annotated To Do List
1. Swing-dancing.- I said last term I was planning to try to go swing dancing this term, and there is a place here that has swing nights every week, yet I haven't made it there yet. I even somewhat have a potential dancing partner, though I'd have to be pretty crazy to assume he really ever planned to actually go dancing with me just from agreeing to "maybe go sometime." Still, it's better than "no", and in any case, I can't dance with anyone unless I actually leave the house to go dancing.
2. Get a bike and a helmet. Ride around Fort Collins trails a while to get used to being on a bike again. - It's been almost two decades since I last rode a bike, and when I was riding back then it was just in my own neighborhood, on sidewalks and in schoolyards, so it'll take a bit of riding to get to where I am as comfortable biking as I am walking.
3. Get a sewing machine. - Oh the things I could make! Actually, I'd love to be able to hem shortened pants and sleeves faster, and find a good pattern for tailored vests and jackets. I'll never find suits that fit my torso, with pants that fit and a well-proportioned skirt, AND a jacket whose sleeves are short enough, but I could make such an ensemble.
4. Assemble a short-list of PhD programs in political theory, rural studies, environmental science and ecology. - Realistically I ought to be hunting a school where I can combine landscape ecology and political theory if I wish, and in a place with good public transit. I still really like Aberystwyth, but I have to be able to bring the Cat.
5. Try climbing.- Every time this makes it onto my list, I think that maybe it will result in my actually climbing something. So far I have looked at climbing gear at a store, with a nice, attractive young man explaining to me the merits of different climbing shoes, and way back in 1999 I made it to the foot of what my friend Jackie thought was to be my first climb. However, something that would be fairly easy for a 5' tall person in general is much more difficult for me, with my much shorter arms and less functional hands. On a climbing wall, connected to a safety rope, and staying fairly low, I think I'd make better progress. I still have to be cautious on this one; My spine is irregular, missing a bit of bone in the vertebra in my neck, so the kind of jerk that could result from being caught from a fall by a rope might snap my neck with less force than would otherwise be required.
6. Urban ecology research.- All one needs in order to do urban ecology is an inquiring mind, knowledge of statistical analysis and ecology, and some data, which can be collected by observation or all sorts of other ways. I still have my square, with which to do plot census counts, too.
7. Walk to Horsetooth Reservoir and back- this is roughly a 4+ mile walk/hike each way from my place, so definitely a day-hike, and best done earlier in the summer when it's not as hot.
8. Make art.- I have a set of wood chisels, still, and a stack of linoleum for linocuts, so I've no real excuse not to do more printmaking. And if I need more chisels, the Harbor Freight Tools store where mine came from is just down the street.
9. Find someplace less reclusive to hang out.- It's nice and quiet at my place, but that's not always so great. I don't live close to the bars, and don't really want to, but being away from those parts of town I also don't have a natural hang-out location at my place. I'll probably never find a place quite like Whizzers, but life would be better with a hangout like that. Alternatively, I suppose having people over more would help.
2. Get a bike and a helmet. Ride around Fort Collins trails a while to get used to being on a bike again. - It's been almost two decades since I last rode a bike, and when I was riding back then it was just in my own neighborhood, on sidewalks and in schoolyards, so it'll take a bit of riding to get to where I am as comfortable biking as I am walking.
3. Get a sewing machine. - Oh the things I could make! Actually, I'd love to be able to hem shortened pants and sleeves faster, and find a good pattern for tailored vests and jackets. I'll never find suits that fit my torso, with pants that fit and a well-proportioned skirt, AND a jacket whose sleeves are short enough, but I could make such an ensemble.
4. Assemble a short-list of PhD programs in political theory, rural studies, environmental science and ecology. - Realistically I ought to be hunting a school where I can combine landscape ecology and political theory if I wish, and in a place with good public transit. I still really like Aberystwyth, but I have to be able to bring the Cat.
5. Try climbing.- Every time this makes it onto my list, I think that maybe it will result in my actually climbing something. So far I have looked at climbing gear at a store, with a nice, attractive young man explaining to me the merits of different climbing shoes, and way back in 1999 I made it to the foot of what my friend Jackie thought was to be my first climb. However, something that would be fairly easy for a 5' tall person in general is much more difficult for me, with my much shorter arms and less functional hands. On a climbing wall, connected to a safety rope, and staying fairly low, I think I'd make better progress. I still have to be cautious on this one; My spine is irregular, missing a bit of bone in the vertebra in my neck, so the kind of jerk that could result from being caught from a fall by a rope might snap my neck with less force than would otherwise be required.
6. Urban ecology research.- All one needs in order to do urban ecology is an inquiring mind, knowledge of statistical analysis and ecology, and some data, which can be collected by observation or all sorts of other ways. I still have my square, with which to do plot census counts, too.
7. Walk to Horsetooth Reservoir and back- this is roughly a 4+ mile walk/hike each way from my place, so definitely a day-hike, and best done earlier in the summer when it's not as hot.
8. Make art.- I have a set of wood chisels, still, and a stack of linoleum for linocuts, so I've no real excuse not to do more printmaking. And if I need more chisels, the Harbor Freight Tools store where mine came from is just down the street.
9. Find someplace less reclusive to hang out.- It's nice and quiet at my place, but that's not always so great. I don't live close to the bars, and don't really want to, but being away from those parts of town I also don't have a natural hang-out location at my place. I'll probably never find a place quite like Whizzers, but life would be better with a hangout like that. Alternatively, I suppose having people over more would help.
Positive and Negative Motivational Fantasy
Though I have not yet had this conversation with a fellow grad student, and maybe they would not admit to it anyway, I would be surprised if other students didn't have similar fantasy storylines running through their heads. It's always more common when I am working on grand new multidisciplinary ideas (some of which I find in print ten years or so later from someone else, as grand new ideas, so perhaps I ought to start submitting some of those for publication somewhere), but even more mundane papers and projects can lead to these great daydreams. In these stories, I finish my paper/project, turn it in, get a really good grade (of course), and then am drawn into some world crisis or conference, or offered an opportunity of a lifetime, because of my paper/project and its/my obvious brilliance. It would be silly to really expect many of these to ever really happen, yet for anyone trying to generate new knowledge it may be healthier to believe these stories than to dismiss them.
Lots of students I've talked with lately are going through a lot of self-doubt, brought on by the stress of upcoming finals, term paper deadlines and all the rest. There are often a lot more students dealing with anxiety and depression symptoms around this time, and most large campuses have stress clinics to mitigate this. One thing they don't seem to mention much, if at all, is these larger-than-life fantasies. I would bet that for the students experiencing depression or self-doubt, these stories have been displaced by other stories, about failure and its worst consequences.
Early in a semester, my images of myself in my fantasies are triumphant and happy; I may be a well-respected professor at Oxford, or the behind-the-scenes mastermind for the leadership that unites the world in a great global system not unlike the Star Trek or Babylon-5 systems of Earth governance. If I have a guy I am inclined to weave into my fantasies, one I know or someone off a film, he is also very successful, accomplishing equally great if not greater things, and there is always a happy ending.
At this point in a semester, the stories have changed. The paper/project that was to save the world is now awful, and causes me to fail the whole class, something much easier to imagine, unfortunately, in grad school, where a C is essentially a failing grade. This is never the end though; it gets better. In the slow boring versions, I simply drop out, losing my job in the process of course, lose my apartment, and wind up living under a bridge somewhere, trying to feed my cat as best I can. Alternatively I might wind up living in my mom's unfinished basement, with all the spiders and sand scorpions, and I live out the rest of my days there. At least so long as I am not actually going through a depression at the same time, this is where the stories leave off, though both of these have their preferred suicidal endings too. The most exciting was one where I lived under a bridge along a creek or river, and was swept away to my death by a sudden flood from a dam-breach upstream, an ending I dreamed a few years ago.
The guys who featured in the earlier stories are not necessarily absent, but when they also play different roles. A common plot-line some years is that that the guy in question might have been interested in me, but my awful paper/project has shown me to be just a puffed up fool, and in no way desirable. The really soap-operatic version of this starts out disarmingly pleasant, so the guy and I have a few days or weeks of a nice relationship, out of which when everything falls apart I am not only under a bridge or in Mom's basement, but pregnant as well. (Those who have known me for a while may imagine how truly horrific I might find such a fantasy.) There's a woman in Atlas Shrugged, out in the village near the motor factory where Dagny and Hank find Galt's motor, who looks haggard and old, and turns out to be just a bit older than Dagny- that's the mental image that I turn into in this particular flavor of fantasy.
These contrasting fantasy types, triumphant and miserable, are a carrot and stick of motivation. The bad fantasies, while very effective at keeping my head out of the clouds, provide nothing to strive for. So long as I am struggling to write papers just to keep from failing, or avoiding getting too close to people out of the expectation of future rejection, there is little chance I will ever stray very far from the verge of failure.
The good fantasies, to the extent that I can believe them to be possible, are a shining future, a goal that justifies whatever effort is required to attain it. Far from being arrogant, these are fantasies of self-efficacy, images of oneself as capable and worthwhile, and with this sort of self-image, any set-backs are just temporary and can be overcome. Will I ever actually attain a future life like what I imagine in these stories? Maybe not the power behind a global throne, and perhaps my name won't be as well remembered as that of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, but a professorship and a good academic reputation is well within what my own professors seem to envision for me.
So, for the rest of this semester, at least, here's the overall future I am expecting for myself. I'm a well-known professor and intellectual figure, widely read across most of the social sciences and physical sciences. My academic work is proving quite useful within quite a few fields of study, and my books for the non-specialist public are instant favorites. I live in my favorite fantasy straw-bale walled house, custom built with art gallery, greenhouse and courtyard spaces, and surrounded by a very successful 250 acre land reclamation botanic garden, with my amazing partner, our cats and other animals(otterhound, ?), and an ever changing array of family and friends who come to visit, or to live with us between jobs and other adventures.
Will it all actually happen? The problem with trying to predict life is that anything might happen. I may be struck by lightning walking home tonight, or aliens might invade next week (Exterminieren! Exterminieren!), but so long as I am alive, I'd better believe that this or something better is my future.
Lots of students I've talked with lately are going through a lot of self-doubt, brought on by the stress of upcoming finals, term paper deadlines and all the rest. There are often a lot more students dealing with anxiety and depression symptoms around this time, and most large campuses have stress clinics to mitigate this. One thing they don't seem to mention much, if at all, is these larger-than-life fantasies. I would bet that for the students experiencing depression or self-doubt, these stories have been displaced by other stories, about failure and its worst consequences.
Early in a semester, my images of myself in my fantasies are triumphant and happy; I may be a well-respected professor at Oxford, or the behind-the-scenes mastermind for the leadership that unites the world in a great global system not unlike the Star Trek or Babylon-5 systems of Earth governance. If I have a guy I am inclined to weave into my fantasies, one I know or someone off a film, he is also very successful, accomplishing equally great if not greater things, and there is always a happy ending.
At this point in a semester, the stories have changed. The paper/project that was to save the world is now awful, and causes me to fail the whole class, something much easier to imagine, unfortunately, in grad school, where a C is essentially a failing grade. This is never the end though; it gets better. In the slow boring versions, I simply drop out, losing my job in the process of course, lose my apartment, and wind up living under a bridge somewhere, trying to feed my cat as best I can. Alternatively I might wind up living in my mom's unfinished basement, with all the spiders and sand scorpions, and I live out the rest of my days there. At least so long as I am not actually going through a depression at the same time, this is where the stories leave off, though both of these have their preferred suicidal endings too. The most exciting was one where I lived under a bridge along a creek or river, and was swept away to my death by a sudden flood from a dam-breach upstream, an ending I dreamed a few years ago.
The guys who featured in the earlier stories are not necessarily absent, but when they also play different roles. A common plot-line some years is that that the guy in question might have been interested in me, but my awful paper/project has shown me to be just a puffed up fool, and in no way desirable. The really soap-operatic version of this starts out disarmingly pleasant, so the guy and I have a few days or weeks of a nice relationship, out of which when everything falls apart I am not only under a bridge or in Mom's basement, but pregnant as well. (Those who have known me for a while may imagine how truly horrific I might find such a fantasy.) There's a woman in Atlas Shrugged, out in the village near the motor factory where Dagny and Hank find Galt's motor, who looks haggard and old, and turns out to be just a bit older than Dagny- that's the mental image that I turn into in this particular flavor of fantasy.
These contrasting fantasy types, triumphant and miserable, are a carrot and stick of motivation. The bad fantasies, while very effective at keeping my head out of the clouds, provide nothing to strive for. So long as I am struggling to write papers just to keep from failing, or avoiding getting too close to people out of the expectation of future rejection, there is little chance I will ever stray very far from the verge of failure.
The good fantasies, to the extent that I can believe them to be possible, are a shining future, a goal that justifies whatever effort is required to attain it. Far from being arrogant, these are fantasies of self-efficacy, images of oneself as capable and worthwhile, and with this sort of self-image, any set-backs are just temporary and can be overcome. Will I ever actually attain a future life like what I imagine in these stories? Maybe not the power behind a global throne, and perhaps my name won't be as well remembered as that of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, but a professorship and a good academic reputation is well within what my own professors seem to envision for me.
So, for the rest of this semester, at least, here's the overall future I am expecting for myself. I'm a well-known professor and intellectual figure, widely read across most of the social sciences and physical sciences. My academic work is proving quite useful within quite a few fields of study, and my books for the non-specialist public are instant favorites. I live in my favorite fantasy straw-bale walled house, custom built with art gallery, greenhouse and courtyard spaces, and surrounded by a very successful 250 acre land reclamation botanic garden, with my amazing partner, our cats and other animals(otterhound, ?), and an ever changing array of family and friends who come to visit, or to live with us between jobs and other adventures.
Will it all actually happen? The problem with trying to predict life is that anything might happen. I may be struck by lightning walking home tonight, or aliens might invade next week (Exterminieren! Exterminieren!), but so long as I am alive, I'd better believe that this or something better is my future.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
People-mapping
Another distraction from writing my papers.
I was amused this evening by a friend recommendation for one Eric Binkley. This suggestion makes sense from Facebook's perspective, since I was at summer camp working with a Chris Binkley, who I think still has one of my books, though I can't recall anymore which one I lent him and failed to get back at the end of that summer. I was reading Tom Robbins a lot that summer, so .... Anyway, I have never met Eric, but out of curiosity I pulled up his profile, just to see if he looks like Chris at all(He does.), and it turns out he and I have not 1, but 3 friends in common. Alex Hughes, I was also not surprised about. Chris, Alex and I were all camp folks who studied at CU, so it makes sense that Eric might know Alex. The third, though, no surprise to him, as e knows that he knows Eric, is Paul Kemp, who I know was at CU, and at the same time as Chris and myself, but who I only met this past fall. Not exactly a big deal or anything, just the sort of coincidence that puts that "It's a Small World" song in your head for a few hours. But it got me thinking.
People group together because they find certain commonalities between themselves, but in any really big group of people, like a big university or a city, they can only aggregate to the extent that the have access to one another. This means that those people with whom one has a lot of similarities, but who somehow don't become or remain friends, develop networks of people parallel to one's own. [I want to hunt down literature now on social networks,social circles, and boundary setting in social groups.]
The group I was in during my first degree was for the most part the younger part of Geoffrey Brinker's group, combined with my own physics friends and Whizzers groupies. I never really crossed the road socially between the hard science half of the CU-Boulder campus and the rest. Even Muenzinger, where psychology is located, is the easternmost building before the sports complex, so while it is technically across the road, it's still on the science end. There were a few camp people who had science classes, and at least one who was in engineering, but most of the people I knew from camp were on the "other" side of campus, and did not hang out at Whizzers. So, any commonality I shared with those camp people was in itself insufficient for us to maintain active friendships away from camp. I think, too, that since Forrest and I had such a cohesive group of friends already, we were less likely to draw together any sort of new group out of our camp connections. Anyway, within our group we often met people individually who had multiple ties with others in the group, [read to background instrumental of the "small world song"]. Some of these people linked back to camp, too, through their older friendships, with Geoffrey as the key person to this whole network.
At camp, the older generation, loosely associated with Forrest and Geoffrey, and the guys from Geoffrey's cohort, was ageing out, being replaced by a new generation centered around Alex and his cohort. Anyone who wants to see Kuhn's paradigm shift in fast forward can simply volunteer as a commissioner at a Boy Scouts summer camp that is transitioning between generations. It seems that there is consistently a lot of unrest and eroding standards at these boundaries, which alarms the older set, and since the younger set is still figuring things out, and is changing stuff, they are blamed, somewhat reflexively, for the dropping standards and growing chaos. As the new generation becomes established, things smooth out again. The removal of the old generation, not any individuals' changed ideas, is what changes the overall camp culture, and once the new set is firmly in place they figure out limits for themselves within the context of their own programs. (With a gradual decrease in the stories of overenthusiastic scouts knifing people. I seem to recall a similar story about Kevin or someone in his staff being attacked by scouts when he was playing the masked bandit, so this overzealousness issue is not new, just really funny to hear about afterwords.)
I've been amused by some of the trivial details Paul has in common with others I did know in Boulder(really, I wouldn't be surprised if he and I crossed paths in a computer lab, for that matter- maybe I kicked him out of a computer lab or something). Now I am wondering if maybe he and the Binkleys demarcate a parallel social network to the one I lived in. Different coffee-shop(s), different artsy circles and outdoorsey circles, and perhaps not quite so international, since my group centered for a while on Reed Hall and engineering, but stylistically/aesthetically very very similar. We had backpacking, camping and scouts, but not climbing, and we didn't drink alcohol at all in our gatherings, but these are not what define a culture. Forrest and I did studio art, so we were involved with the studio arts scene, but we didn't have ties into local music. I had a few theater friends, but not within the context of any group; perhaps if I knew were to look I could trace several parallel networks to mine. HMMM. It would be really hard for a sociologist to map such patterns without having familiarity with the people involved, and equally challenging to study such networks if they are made up of people with whom the researcher is friends. Still, perhaps there are a few brash/brave researchers who've looked at such patterns.
I was amused this evening by a friend recommendation for one Eric Binkley. This suggestion makes sense from Facebook's perspective, since I was at summer camp working with a Chris Binkley, who I think still has one of my books, though I can't recall anymore which one I lent him and failed to get back at the end of that summer. I was reading Tom Robbins a lot that summer, so .... Anyway, I have never met Eric, but out of curiosity I pulled up his profile, just to see if he looks like Chris at all(He does.), and it turns out he and I have not 1, but 3 friends in common. Alex Hughes, I was also not surprised about. Chris, Alex and I were all camp folks who studied at CU, so it makes sense that Eric might know Alex. The third, though, no surprise to him, as e knows that he knows Eric, is Paul Kemp, who I know was at CU, and at the same time as Chris and myself, but who I only met this past fall. Not exactly a big deal or anything, just the sort of coincidence that puts that "It's a Small World" song in your head for a few hours. But it got me thinking.
People group together because they find certain commonalities between themselves, but in any really big group of people, like a big university or a city, they can only aggregate to the extent that the have access to one another. This means that those people with whom one has a lot of similarities, but who somehow don't become or remain friends, develop networks of people parallel to one's own. [I want to hunt down literature now on social networks,social circles, and boundary setting in social groups.]
The group I was in during my first degree was for the most part the younger part of Geoffrey Brinker's group, combined with my own physics friends and Whizzers groupies. I never really crossed the road socially between the hard science half of the CU-Boulder campus and the rest. Even Muenzinger, where psychology is located, is the easternmost building before the sports complex, so while it is technically across the road, it's still on the science end. There were a few camp people who had science classes, and at least one who was in engineering, but most of the people I knew from camp were on the "other" side of campus, and did not hang out at Whizzers. So, any commonality I shared with those camp people was in itself insufficient for us to maintain active friendships away from camp. I think, too, that since Forrest and I had such a cohesive group of friends already, we were less likely to draw together any sort of new group out of our camp connections. Anyway, within our group we often met people individually who had multiple ties with others in the group, [read to background instrumental of the "small world song"]. Some of these people linked back to camp, too, through their older friendships, with Geoffrey as the key person to this whole network.
At camp, the older generation, loosely associated with Forrest and Geoffrey, and the guys from Geoffrey's cohort, was ageing out, being replaced by a new generation centered around Alex and his cohort. Anyone who wants to see Kuhn's paradigm shift in fast forward can simply volunteer as a commissioner at a Boy Scouts summer camp that is transitioning between generations. It seems that there is consistently a lot of unrest and eroding standards at these boundaries, which alarms the older set, and since the younger set is still figuring things out, and is changing stuff, they are blamed, somewhat reflexively, for the dropping standards and growing chaos. As the new generation becomes established, things smooth out again. The removal of the old generation, not any individuals' changed ideas, is what changes the overall camp culture, and once the new set is firmly in place they figure out limits for themselves within the context of their own programs. (With a gradual decrease in the stories of overenthusiastic scouts knifing people. I seem to recall a similar story about Kevin or someone in his staff being attacked by scouts when he was playing the masked bandit, so this overzealousness issue is not new, just really funny to hear about afterwords.)
I've been amused by some of the trivial details Paul has in common with others I did know in Boulder(really, I wouldn't be surprised if he and I crossed paths in a computer lab, for that matter- maybe I kicked him out of a computer lab or something). Now I am wondering if maybe he and the Binkleys demarcate a parallel social network to the one I lived in. Different coffee-shop(s), different artsy circles and outdoorsey circles, and perhaps not quite so international, since my group centered for a while on Reed Hall and engineering, but stylistically/aesthetically very very similar. We had backpacking, camping and scouts, but not climbing, and we didn't drink alcohol at all in our gatherings, but these are not what define a culture. Forrest and I did studio art, so we were involved with the studio arts scene, but we didn't have ties into local music. I had a few theater friends, but not within the context of any group; perhaps if I knew were to look I could trace several parallel networks to mine. HMMM. It would be really hard for a sociologist to map such patterns without having familiarity with the people involved, and equally challenging to study such networks if they are made up of people with whom the researcher is friends. Still, perhaps there are a few brash/brave researchers who've looked at such patterns.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Network complexity theory of intellectual ageing
This one I actually have not been thinking about constantly since it came up, but it's a nice psychology theory drawn from a model in policy theory. I am not sure if my professor, with whom I had the source conversation for this, was thinking exactly on these lines, but he probably was. Also there is probably a multidisciplinary networks literature that looks at large scale networks and limits to functionality with increased complexity, whether it has been explicitly linked back to human psychology or not.
A model that seems to have pretty good explanatory power for cognition is the neural net. My old cognitive psychology textbook is a bit disparaging of this theory, but as at least an abstract model it seems pretty decent. The idea is that your brain stores each component of experience separately, so for my cat I'd have separate neurons or groups of neurons for fuzzy, orange, white feet, cat, pet ownership, purring, .... My brain links these together, plus all the visual and auditory patterns that are all reinforced together when I think of Roland, or see him. If I am considering another cat, for instance my friend's orange cat Fluffy, some of these same neuronal components link together with new ones that together create a mental conception of his cat.
This same pattern of linkages and networks exists in human groups, which can form policy networks. The same person can be involved in campaigning against uranium mining in Colorado, volunteer with the Red Cross blood bank, and work in a bank dealing with corporate financing options, for instance, just as the same neuron, "orange fur" could be linked to my concept networks for Roland, Fluffy, and my old guinea pigs Gus and Max.
The conversation today with my professor was about that experience of sitting down to write a paper on one topic, and having a whole bunch of other ideas pop up in your head to distract you from the one you are actually writing. We postulated that perhaps this is due to the fact that one's network of ideas gets overly complex and expansive after a while. As students gather more information in their heads, and make lots of connections between concepts, they reach a sort of maximal utility for outputting these connections easily in prose, sometime before their late 30's or 40's. After this, there are so many connections and so many concepts that it becomes harder to put together coherent, straightforward, linear prose expositions of your ideas. This, we suggested, is why in just about all intellectual fields people tend to do their best work in their first few decades, in their 20's and 30's. Given the nice parallel between neural nets and policy networks conceptually, I'm thinking that there may be some useful insights to be gleaned from the policy networks literature to get a different perspective on why people's concept networks might inhibit productivity in academia.
A model that seems to have pretty good explanatory power for cognition is the neural net. My old cognitive psychology textbook is a bit disparaging of this theory, but as at least an abstract model it seems pretty decent. The idea is that your brain stores each component of experience separately, so for my cat I'd have separate neurons or groups of neurons for fuzzy, orange, white feet, cat, pet ownership, purring, .... My brain links these together, plus all the visual and auditory patterns that are all reinforced together when I think of Roland, or see him. If I am considering another cat, for instance my friend's orange cat Fluffy, some of these same neuronal components link together with new ones that together create a mental conception of his cat.
This same pattern of linkages and networks exists in human groups, which can form policy networks. The same person can be involved in campaigning against uranium mining in Colorado, volunteer with the Red Cross blood bank, and work in a bank dealing with corporate financing options, for instance, just as the same neuron, "orange fur" could be linked to my concept networks for Roland, Fluffy, and my old guinea pigs Gus and Max.
The conversation today with my professor was about that experience of sitting down to write a paper on one topic, and having a whole bunch of other ideas pop up in your head to distract you from the one you are actually writing. We postulated that perhaps this is due to the fact that one's network of ideas gets overly complex and expansive after a while. As students gather more information in their heads, and make lots of connections between concepts, they reach a sort of maximal utility for outputting these connections easily in prose, sometime before their late 30's or 40's. After this, there are so many connections and so many concepts that it becomes harder to put together coherent, straightforward, linear prose expositions of your ideas. This, we suggested, is why in just about all intellectual fields people tend to do their best work in their first few decades, in their 20's and 30's. Given the nice parallel between neural nets and policy networks conceptually, I'm thinking that there may be some useful insights to be gleaned from the policy networks literature to get a different perspective on why people's concept networks might inhibit productivity in academia.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Interpersonal Intellectual Rent
I am going to be distracted for the rest of the night if I don't finish this one, it seems.
I was stumped as of bedtime last night as to how one could have a marginal rent theory for interpersonal intellectual rents, and was still trying to work out exactly what is being invested, and what the gain really is. So, after continuation of yesterday's conversation, here's the solution to the rent problem I was amused by in my last post. I am still a bit fuzzy on some of the details getting from this to something which really uses marginal theory concepts well, but maybe that will be tomorrow night's post.
When people talk things out aloud, either to stuffed animals, or to their cat, or to someone who isn't really being responsive, they often find that in just saying their ideas out loud they gain additional insight or clarification of their ideas. For the sake of my model, I am sticking to the idea of threads of thought here, that one gains new or improved threads of ideas or equivalently of understanding. This initial case yields no rent, just a profit on one's own mental efforts through the work of ordering and examining one's ideas.
Conversing with a person who occasionally asks a fruitful question by accident or in ignorance may yield a slightly gain than the previous case, not by virtue only of one's labor, but by way of otherwise non-productive characteristics of the conversation partner. This extra gain is a small rent.
Conversation with an intellectual equal with respect to the topic being discussed will yield a much higher gain for the same amount of time and effort. This gain is more complicated, but ultimately the ideas in my head from such a conversation, if they are assimilated into my own collection of intellectual threads, represent my own work, even if they originated within the partner's brain. I still had to think through them and evaluate them to assimilate them. These new threads and modifications of my old threads represent shortcuts, saving me time and effort I would have had to expend to reach these same ideas on my own, just as the occasional accidental questions would, only to a much greater extent. Thus, from interacting with this partner, I've gained a higher amount in rent, plus the gain from my own work which is still my profit.
Rent can then be expressed in terms of the time saved, from not having to think through the longer route to the gained understanding/'threads'. This time can then be converted to some sort of labor-value equivalent to allow one to measure such gains against other goods. Thus I could perhaps work out an equation to approximate just how much I owe Paul, for instance, for his economist reference by which I gained rent in the conversation that started all this, and for his inputs towards the model I've laid out here tonight. Of course, he has since gained some understanding of marginalist economics from my inputs into our conversations, so perhaps some of that rent has been exchanged in kind, at least for today's conversation.
A sort of balance of trade model of interpersonal interactions, using this idea of rents, might help in modeling the dynamics of friendship, collaborations and marital conflicts, by allowing dynamics of such relationships to be abstracted, to yield more general patterns that can guide interpretation of particular relationship dynamics. This rent idea could capture at least an important aspect of what is commonly referred to as 'quality time,' too, since one could probably substitute other gains, like interest, esteem, or emotional support, and derive similar rent patterns. A spouse complaining of an imbalance in their marital relationship may very well be responding to an intuitive summation of rents that don't balance, perhaps.
(And now, it really is time that I go back to political theory land again and finish the essay this line of thought was interposing itself into.)
I was stumped as of bedtime last night as to how one could have a marginal rent theory for interpersonal intellectual rents, and was still trying to work out exactly what is being invested, and what the gain really is. So, after continuation of yesterday's conversation, here's the solution to the rent problem I was amused by in my last post. I am still a bit fuzzy on some of the details getting from this to something which really uses marginal theory concepts well, but maybe that will be tomorrow night's post.
When people talk things out aloud, either to stuffed animals, or to their cat, or to someone who isn't really being responsive, they often find that in just saying their ideas out loud they gain additional insight or clarification of their ideas. For the sake of my model, I am sticking to the idea of threads of thought here, that one gains new or improved threads of ideas or equivalently of understanding. This initial case yields no rent, just a profit on one's own mental efforts through the work of ordering and examining one's ideas.
Conversing with a person who occasionally asks a fruitful question by accident or in ignorance may yield a slightly gain than the previous case, not by virtue only of one's labor, but by way of otherwise non-productive characteristics of the conversation partner. This extra gain is a small rent.
Conversation with an intellectual equal with respect to the topic being discussed will yield a much higher gain for the same amount of time and effort. This gain is more complicated, but ultimately the ideas in my head from such a conversation, if they are assimilated into my own collection of intellectual threads, represent my own work, even if they originated within the partner's brain. I still had to think through them and evaluate them to assimilate them. These new threads and modifications of my old threads represent shortcuts, saving me time and effort I would have had to expend to reach these same ideas on my own, just as the occasional accidental questions would, only to a much greater extent. Thus, from interacting with this partner, I've gained a higher amount in rent, plus the gain from my own work which is still my profit.
Rent can then be expressed in terms of the time saved, from not having to think through the longer route to the gained understanding/'threads'. This time can then be converted to some sort of labor-value equivalent to allow one to measure such gains against other goods. Thus I could perhaps work out an equation to approximate just how much I owe Paul, for instance, for his economist reference by which I gained rent in the conversation that started all this, and for his inputs towards the model I've laid out here tonight. Of course, he has since gained some understanding of marginalist economics from my inputs into our conversations, so perhaps some of that rent has been exchanged in kind, at least for today's conversation.
A sort of balance of trade model of interpersonal interactions, using this idea of rents, might help in modeling the dynamics of friendship, collaborations and marital conflicts, by allowing dynamics of such relationships to be abstracted, to yield more general patterns that can guide interpretation of particular relationship dynamics. This rent idea could capture at least an important aspect of what is commonly referred to as 'quality time,' too, since one could probably substitute other gains, like interest, esteem, or emotional support, and derive similar rent patterns. A spouse complaining of an imbalance in their marital relationship may very well be responding to an intuitive summation of rents that don't balance, perhaps.
(And now, it really is time that I go back to political theory land again and finish the essay this line of thought was interposing itself into.)
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Progress and punctuated equilibrium
Almost done with my first year in graduate school, as strange and unlikely as that seems. In the scale of my life's successes so far I have probably never made so much progress in such a short time. A year ago at this time I had just quit Dillard's and was moving into my apartment here, with no job, and no clue what I would do next. I knew that if I was still working at Dillard's by the time I reached my 2010 birthday, my life-expectancy would be considerably shortened, and that there were really no better opportunities for me if I stayed in Longmont, so I leaped blindly off the metaphorical cliff, all the way towards unemployment in Fort Collins. Actually that seems to be a pretty common thread for me, leaping blindly towards something better, from high school in Pueblo to a first undergrad at CU, from physics to psychology, from post-graduation unemployment to my second degree program, and just about all the major decisions I have made since then. It's an exciting way to live, for sure- spend a few months considering all your options and thinking a lot, and then immediately implement whatever radical changes have resulted from all that deliberation. It drives everyone around you crazy, for sure, and can make for a lonely life sometimes, since without incremental changes or at least a lot of discussion and planning, few people from any one stage of your progression keep up with you very well. Even those who might really like to tend to lose track of where you are and what exactly you are up to after a while.
A model or framework from recent political science classes, which comes from other sciences originally describing evolution, is that of punctuated equilibrium. No doubt it is not a perfect model for describing the personal evolution of individuals, but it does apply rather nicely to lifestyles like mine. Of course, there are also other approaches to change, for instance incremental change, adjusting in small doses to changing environments, without the huge dramatic shifts I am so fond of. There is also the possibility of a sort of negotiated planned change, where if one has lots of people in one's life, one might develop changes in concert with those other people. These could be radical or incremental changes, but by being coordinated with other people, they produce little or no upheaval among surrounding people. I suppose this would be equivalent to states developing their own policies, but within the context of negotiated plans and goals. There may be isolated cases where the original biological evolution idea might allow for this dynamic too, but I doubt it. People plan, and can choose the direction of their own evolution somewhat, as well as the direction of evolution of their states, but evolution is not directed.
A model or framework from recent political science classes, which comes from other sciences originally describing evolution, is that of punctuated equilibrium. No doubt it is not a perfect model for describing the personal evolution of individuals, but it does apply rather nicely to lifestyles like mine. Of course, there are also other approaches to change, for instance incremental change, adjusting in small doses to changing environments, without the huge dramatic shifts I am so fond of. There is also the possibility of a sort of negotiated planned change, where if one has lots of people in one's life, one might develop changes in concert with those other people. These could be radical or incremental changes, but by being coordinated with other people, they produce little or no upheaval among surrounding people. I suppose this would be equivalent to states developing their own policies, but within the context of negotiated plans and goals. There may be isolated cases where the original biological evolution idea might allow for this dynamic too, but I doubt it. People plan, and can choose the direction of their own evolution somewhat, as well as the direction of evolution of their states, but evolution is not directed.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Atlas Shrugged, 2010 reading journal/notes/? Part 1
Quotes from Atlas Shrugged that need answers:
"Dagny, the whole world's in a terrible state right now. I don't know what's wrong with it, but something's very wrong. Men have to get together and find a way out. But who's to decide which way to take unless it's the majority? I guess that's the only fair method of deciding, I don't see any other. I suppose somebody's got to be sacrificed. If it turned out to be me, I have no right to complain...."
This is Dan Conway, talking to Dagny right after the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog rule passed, p.80 in my current copy of the book. In this quote we get the idea of valuing the collective good over that of any individual, the power of numbers over that of facts and realty, and individual sacrifice. Rand has definite answers for each of these components, but it is less clear what happens to these answers when one throws in the idea of sustainability, a goal which Rand would either have to reject, or situate within the context of the individual. I think maybe the problem with Objectivist sustainability might not be that it is a contradiction in terms, but that it doesn't allow the government to use force to implement sustainability at all. Rand assumes businessmen are good, but as Murray Rothbard pointed out in his critique of Rand's work, big-businessmen are also politicians, and they play dirty, so that while a man like Francisco d'Anconia or Hank Reardon would be honest and honorable and would not need government supervision, real business as it is done now requires more regulation and regular supervision. This is not to say it would be impossible for 'good' businessmen to come to power in the absence of the more paternalistic or restrictive regulations, and surely some of the big businessmen now are better than people want to admit.
[ Not that I've met people that really remind me of the other men in this book, but it is a very different experience reading about Hank Rearden this time. I never liked him all that much before, but mostly because I had a rather hard time picturing him in my mind. He always wound up looking like Jimmy Stewart, which works well enough for the character, but I was never attracted to Jimmy Stewart. This time someone else's manner is creeping into Hank's character, and he is much improved.]
I still find the term 'Rearden metal' obnoxious, but then again we have Bessemer steel in real life, which is almost certainly the real-world version of Rand's story here. Henry Bessemer was British, and the details of his story are different, but he did end up financing his own development of steel production using his method, because no one else wanted to use it.
Note to self for later: Ayn Rand refers to differential equations in such a way as makes me wonder just how far Rand got in math. I know she liked math and studied it in college, but I also know that the expectations for bachelor of arts degrees have shifted since she graduated. For me, ordinary differential equations was the most advanced course I was required to take for a math minor. Had I continued to finish the major I would have had to take partial differential equations, and a few other higher-level courses. How much math did Rand know? I have always considered the concept of a differential equation quite straightforward, at least since someone told me what they meant by the term. (ref. p 93)
I think I have at least some idea now why Dagny had to choose John Galt over Francisco. Francisco d'Anconia wasn't in love with Dagny. He loved her, but because she was the embodiment of Taggart Transcontinental. John Galt was in love with her; while both men could recognize that she was the true motive power behind her company, Galt's interest in her was personal, in response to who she was as an individual very capable woman, in full recognition of the fact that in the absence of her company she could begin a new one. And, a John Galt played by Brad Pitt would almost have to be sexier than any man they could cast for d'Anconia.
Ayn Rand seems to have believed that it was impossible, or perhaps just unacceptably immoral, to work towards fixing people, and as firmly felt she was alone, having never truly met her equal. Surely since she built up her philosophy, she might consider those who needed her to teach them her philosophy to be less than her full equals, and if she couldn't accept the idea that people could be fixed psychologically, she'd not be able to accept Nathaniel Branden's ideas even if they hadn't had their bizarre romantic drama.
"Dagny, the whole world's in a terrible state right now. I don't know what's wrong with it, but something's very wrong. Men have to get together and find a way out. But who's to decide which way to take unless it's the majority? I guess that's the only fair method of deciding, I don't see any other. I suppose somebody's got to be sacrificed. If it turned out to be me, I have no right to complain...."
This is Dan Conway, talking to Dagny right after the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog rule passed, p.80 in my current copy of the book. In this quote we get the idea of valuing the collective good over that of any individual, the power of numbers over that of facts and realty, and individual sacrifice. Rand has definite answers for each of these components, but it is less clear what happens to these answers when one throws in the idea of sustainability, a goal which Rand would either have to reject, or situate within the context of the individual. I think maybe the problem with Objectivist sustainability might not be that it is a contradiction in terms, but that it doesn't allow the government to use force to implement sustainability at all. Rand assumes businessmen are good, but as Murray Rothbard pointed out in his critique of Rand's work, big-businessmen are also politicians, and they play dirty, so that while a man like Francisco d'Anconia or Hank Reardon would be honest and honorable and would not need government supervision, real business as it is done now requires more regulation and regular supervision. This is not to say it would be impossible for 'good' businessmen to come to power in the absence of the more paternalistic or restrictive regulations, and surely some of the big businessmen now are better than people want to admit.
[ Not that I've met people that really remind me of the other men in this book, but it is a very different experience reading about Hank Rearden this time. I never liked him all that much before, but mostly because I had a rather hard time picturing him in my mind. He always wound up looking like Jimmy Stewart, which works well enough for the character, but I was never attracted to Jimmy Stewart. This time someone else's manner is creeping into Hank's character, and he is much improved.]
I still find the term 'Rearden metal' obnoxious, but then again we have Bessemer steel in real life, which is almost certainly the real-world version of Rand's story here. Henry Bessemer was British, and the details of his story are different, but he did end up financing his own development of steel production using his method, because no one else wanted to use it.
Note to self for later: Ayn Rand refers to differential equations in such a way as makes me wonder just how far Rand got in math. I know she liked math and studied it in college, but I also know that the expectations for bachelor of arts degrees have shifted since she graduated. For me, ordinary differential equations was the most advanced course I was required to take for a math minor. Had I continued to finish the major I would have had to take partial differential equations, and a few other higher-level courses. How much math did Rand know? I have always considered the concept of a differential equation quite straightforward, at least since someone told me what they meant by the term. (ref. p 93)
I think I have at least some idea now why Dagny had to choose John Galt over Francisco. Francisco d'Anconia wasn't in love with Dagny. He loved her, but because she was the embodiment of Taggart Transcontinental. John Galt was in love with her; while both men could recognize that she was the true motive power behind her company, Galt's interest in her was personal, in response to who she was as an individual very capable woman, in full recognition of the fact that in the absence of her company she could begin a new one. And, a John Galt played by Brad Pitt would almost have to be sexier than any man they could cast for d'Anconia.
Ayn Rand seems to have believed that it was impossible, or perhaps just unacceptably immoral, to work towards fixing people, and as firmly felt she was alone, having never truly met her equal. Surely since she built up her philosophy, she might consider those who needed her to teach them her philosophy to be less than her full equals, and if she couldn't accept the idea that people could be fixed psychologically, she'd not be able to accept Nathaniel Branden's ideas even if they hadn't had their bizarre romantic drama.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Depressive episodes from seeing too much?
Probably not, but you never know. In less than 6 hours, I went from something approximating normal to this sort of moodiness bordering on depression, with no new stimuli. Sure, I am still not sure how the hell I can arrange written exams so that I can physically complete them, and I will still be somewhat worried about that until I have talked to all my professors who administer such exams and after I have successfully found a solution, really, but that is the sort of problem that is fairly routine. I am still a bit frustrated at not having anyone with whom I can discuss the ideas in my head, but there has never really been anyone, so nothing has really changed. If I had to characterize in more detail the state of my mind, moreover, I would say it is more tired than depressed, and not as in sleepy. I can still feel the sensation from my reading this weekend, the same sort of 'awareness' that I always feel when constructing lattices of information in my head, or when I am trying to wrap my head around the universe. That is in fact exactly what I was doing this weekend, using the model Mr. Latour created, and drawing it out, using all I know about space and time, and all the bits of science I have ever absorbed, only more of it fit together this time. In fact, it wasn't so much that I had bits I couldn't fit, as I am just not sure how to translate what I ended up with into text, to communicate it to others, let alone how to make it useful.
The Urantia Book, something rather bizarre that can be found in most city libraries, a rather entertaining romp worth trying to wrap your head around just for practice, btw, talked a lot about the idea of the limits to human understanding, and offered the reader challenges to just try to imagine the unimaginable. As a kid, and this was in about 6th grade, so a while ago, I fancied that some of what this book took as impossible for us to imagine was not so hard after all. In college, in physics classes, occasionally professors would mention the gulf between what even the poorer students in those classes could imagine and what they could, especially in quantum physics, because we started out from different assumptions.
All this may not 'go anywhere' tonight, but it came to mind as linked to this tired brain I am about to send off to bed for the night. At the end of the first season of the revived Doctor Who, the Doctor's life is saved by Rose, who takes the whole of the time vortex in her head, and while it might have killed her eventually, she survived a small dose of it. Donna Noble, several seasons later, is forcibly retired from accompanying the Doctor, because she has a timelord's consciousness stuffed in her brain. This all begs the question, what are the limits to what humans can understand. Every so often someone has the balls to suggest that we have solved all the big problems in science and are now just mopping up the details. (So far they all have balls, but if we wait long enough I am sure a woman will come up with something silly like that too.) So far, something has always come along to stir things up shortly after, and if Latour's model, and the glorious 4-D thing in my head are right, there is no end to science, just an expanding event horizon of our collective human understanding.
The Urantia Book, something rather bizarre that can be found in most city libraries, a rather entertaining romp worth trying to wrap your head around just for practice, btw, talked a lot about the idea of the limits to human understanding, and offered the reader challenges to just try to imagine the unimaginable. As a kid, and this was in about 6th grade, so a while ago, I fancied that some of what this book took as impossible for us to imagine was not so hard after all. In college, in physics classes, occasionally professors would mention the gulf between what even the poorer students in those classes could imagine and what they could, especially in quantum physics, because we started out from different assumptions.
All this may not 'go anywhere' tonight, but it came to mind as linked to this tired brain I am about to send off to bed for the night. At the end of the first season of the revived Doctor Who, the Doctor's life is saved by Rose, who takes the whole of the time vortex in her head, and while it might have killed her eventually, she survived a small dose of it. Donna Noble, several seasons later, is forcibly retired from accompanying the Doctor, because she has a timelord's consciousness stuffed in her brain. This all begs the question, what are the limits to what humans can understand. Every so often someone has the balls to suggest that we have solved all the big problems in science and are now just mopping up the details. (So far they all have balls, but if we wait long enough I am sure a woman will come up with something silly like that too.) So far, something has always come along to stir things up shortly after, and if Latour's model, and the glorious 4-D thing in my head are right, there is no end to science, just an expanding event horizon of our collective human understanding.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Back to constructing great glass-bead games
This week's theory reading gets to be a lot more thoroughly read and considered, and decidedly before the day it's supposed to be done, a treatment that really should be the case for everything I read for any and all classes, but thanks to the absolute limits of time and energy is often short-cutted to my detriment. I don't think I could have had a useful interpretation or reaction to this one, if I was trying to read it less thoroughly. Bruno Latour's metaphysics, as explained in Politics of Nature, while brilliant, is the sort of stuff that requires a lot of time and caffeinated sugary soft-drinks, and even then it makes one's brain tired rather easily. Actually, I tried to get this reading started at least once a week every week since the semester began, and until this weekend, as my schoolmates could attest, I really hated it. I in fact hated it until late Friday night, after I had spent a few hours letting my thoughts drift back to Herman Hesse's glass-bead games, that lovely idea of a way to take the beautiful lace of knowledge in my head and put it out into the world, to communicate that intricate beauty to my friends. I am still not thrilled with all of Latour's new terms, especially as I am not sure that the words in the English translation of his French ideas have the connotations necessary to convey his ideas as he would have stated them in French. Not knowing much French, I can't test this idea by reading his French writings, so I am left feeling a bit uneasy about some of it. Still, Latour's model creates out of the chaos of the Universe an emerging lace, as collectives join up the points to create giant abstract bead-games as collaborative, democratic, evolving narrative frameworks.
Actually this unease is not so bad, within Latour's own ideas, because when I have reconciled all that unease and congealed all of my impressions of his metaphysics into something aproblematic, I run the risk of creating out of this complex topic of concern a rigid fact, missing the subtleties that would then remain unexamined by me in my mistaken certainty. I have some issues with some of his language about rationality, still, reading as a Randite Objectivist, but interestingly, I think there is enough reasonableness in Latour's world that Rand's ideas could be quite compatible. I don't know any other Objectivists with whom I could expect to discuss this possibility, unfortunately, and for reasons I won't go into in print just yet, I have little hope of meeting any. I have just the vague impression now of what Objectivism would look like when mapped into Latour's world, but that may be a good summer project.
I am rather curious as to how this book will be received by my class, now. The biggest limitation I can see with approaching the Universe as a complex mesh of interacting propositions/points/glass beads is that we humans are specialized into our respective fields, and it takes a lot of seemingly unproductive time to reach a point where one has read and studied and thought enough to understand more than a small part of the whole mass of the sum total of human knowledge. In reading this book, I have read Plato, and Darwin, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and thanks to my History of Science class a few years ago I've spent a semester looking at how humans have dealt with the concepts of space and time. In addition, I have all these science images- the old idea of ether and of the newer reincarnation of an ether-like stuff, the idea of binomial nomenclature of species and the extent to which that has controlled systematists' perceptions of organisms, the constant redefinition of genetics as we add more information to what we think we know, and my favorite, the image of the light-boundary of our Universe, beyond which we cannot know about the Universe yet, and which is always expanding with time. All of this, plus my readings of Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi/ The Glass Bead Game and of Douglas Adams, was nearly indispensable for me to digest and absorb Latour's model of the Universe. This is not a criticism of the validity of his model, but it is certainly a potential problem, if he is right. How can we adjust our systems to create more people capable of thinking across so many disciplines, so that each discipline is not reinventing the wheel, and so that when these disciplines try to communicate with each other they can actually understand where they already agree?
Actually this unease is not so bad, within Latour's own ideas, because when I have reconciled all that unease and congealed all of my impressions of his metaphysics into something aproblematic, I run the risk of creating out of this complex topic of concern a rigid fact, missing the subtleties that would then remain unexamined by me in my mistaken certainty. I have some issues with some of his language about rationality, still, reading as a Randite Objectivist, but interestingly, I think there is enough reasonableness in Latour's world that Rand's ideas could be quite compatible. I don't know any other Objectivists with whom I could expect to discuss this possibility, unfortunately, and for reasons I won't go into in print just yet, I have little hope of meeting any. I have just the vague impression now of what Objectivism would look like when mapped into Latour's world, but that may be a good summer project.
I am rather curious as to how this book will be received by my class, now. The biggest limitation I can see with approaching the Universe as a complex mesh of interacting propositions/points/glass beads is that we humans are specialized into our respective fields, and it takes a lot of seemingly unproductive time to reach a point where one has read and studied and thought enough to understand more than a small part of the whole mass of the sum total of human knowledge. In reading this book, I have read Plato, and Darwin, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and thanks to my History of Science class a few years ago I've spent a semester looking at how humans have dealt with the concepts of space and time. In addition, I have all these science images- the old idea of ether and of the newer reincarnation of an ether-like stuff, the idea of binomial nomenclature of species and the extent to which that has controlled systematists' perceptions of organisms, the constant redefinition of genetics as we add more information to what we think we know, and my favorite, the image of the light-boundary of our Universe, beyond which we cannot know about the Universe yet, and which is always expanding with time. All of this, plus my readings of Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi/ The Glass Bead Game and of Douglas Adams, was nearly indispensable for me to digest and absorb Latour's model of the Universe. This is not a criticism of the validity of his model, but it is certainly a potential problem, if he is right. How can we adjust our systems to create more people capable of thinking across so many disciplines, so that each discipline is not reinventing the wheel, and so that when these disciplines try to communicate with each other they can actually understand where they already agree?
Friday, February 26, 2010
Arrogance inherent in theory
One of the books I read last week, I think for class, mentioned just in passing the observation that to write the sorts of theory that get at the fundamental structures of the universe requires a certain measure of hubris. Even having been an Objectivist for over a decade now, I am still wrestling this part of intellectual life. If I was not handicapped I probably would have moved on to some mainstream job by now and would not be bothered by any of this any more, but as a handicapped person, my very capable brain is easily my best asset, and intellectual pursuits are easily the best, most rewarding part of my life. I almost never fit in with any social group as well as I'd like, and much of what my friends and schoolmates entertain themselves with is difficult or impossible for me to enjoy, but taking the wealth of ideas from all the subjects I've studied and weaving them into something new- that is what makes this life worth living, even during the rough parts.
Unfortunately the joy that comes of stringing my ever more elaborate glass bead games, seeking the perfection of knowledge Herman Hesse alluded to, that pleasure is private. The magic of the full glass bead game is that it was knowledge-made-art, a way of making all these fantastic connections between factoids and dynamics communicable to an audience. In absence of this medium, the beauty of the weavings in my mind are locked there until I can figure out how to articulate each tedious strand and all the loops that draw the web into its complete shape. It can be frustrating enough just trying to explain this image of the glass bead game, even to folks who read Hesse's book. Trying to communicate any of those incompletely articulated bits of ideas is almost pointless. The game becomes instead trying to design mini-weavings that can be contained in a single discipline, so that in this world I can somehow make myself fit in, to finish enough school, earn a high enough scholarly rank, and find a suitable job, where I can continue to develop the words to enclose and describe my particular Game.
How did I get to grumbling and whining about all this anyway? Well, to any reasonable person, the way all this translates seems to be that I am insufferably arrogant, a know-it-all who isn't at all as good as I think I am. The fact is that while everyone else was getting jobs, learning to drive, playing sports, dating and having an active social life, I was reading and thinking about stuff. I was very fortunate to have been born with a brain capable of genius functioning, because it gave me something to offset everything else, but in any social group none of this context matters much. Nobody likes arrogant people, and very few like people who know too much. Right now, actually, I don't know 'too much,' at least relative to years past. I have ideas as to how to expand models of ecosystems and societies using differential equations and matrix algebra, but I haven't done calculus in so long I don't remember the very basic integrals any longer. And, in every place I have been so far, that loss of knowledge has been somewhat beneficial, allowing people to consider me approachable.
Lately, though I am in school with many brilliant people now, in an environment where I am hardly the only active, creative mind, I am once again growing frustrated. Maybe it is just our culture, but whatever the reasons, I find myself feeling the need to apologize again for what I know, or trying to temper what I say so as to not intimidate other people with my 'brilliance.' I really do not know anyone yet with whom I could discuss my ideas fully, and every time I move into a new discipline the chances of my meeting such people decreases a bit. Surely there are people around my department, perhaps even people I am acquainted with already- there is almost certainly a disconnect between the reality of my surroundings and my perception of it, and knowing other people is so much harder than knowing about inanimate stuff.
In the meantime, though, I am still weaving away at the fabric of the universe in isolation, feeling all too keenly all those popular observations about the loneliness of true genius. It doesn't, after all, make you rich, or even wealthy enough to be safe from homelessness; it doesn't win you friends, or attract more people to love you, and in fact, it tends to make life more solitary and alone, even when people are all around. Being a genius doesn't mean you automatically get great grades in grad school, because there is always a canon of accepted ideas, even in such diffuse fields as political science, and the more you weave together ideas from outside that canon, the harder it is to fit your own world-view into the context of that one discipline. 'Isms' and other such groupings of ideas, especially, tend to weaken, and become fuzzy, as the many other possible orderings of information already in your head make those seemingly obvious disciplinary tools seem more arbitrary.
I suppose maybe the most valuable take-home message I could glean from all this is that while there are, no doubt, coping mechanisms that geniuses have adopted to make it easier to live in society, and enjoy that life, I have obviously not found them yet. I have been reading and digesting all sorts of ideas about my extrinsic universe, and perhaps when I have time to do so, I should be reading biographies and especially autobiographies from some of the geniuses who succeeded, so that, since I am almost resolved that I will in fact continue living past this upcoming birthday, I might have more of a chance at having a truly happy, fulfilling life.
Unfortunately the joy that comes of stringing my ever more elaborate glass bead games, seeking the perfection of knowledge Herman Hesse alluded to, that pleasure is private. The magic of the full glass bead game is that it was knowledge-made-art, a way of making all these fantastic connections between factoids and dynamics communicable to an audience. In absence of this medium, the beauty of the weavings in my mind are locked there until I can figure out how to articulate each tedious strand and all the loops that draw the web into its complete shape. It can be frustrating enough just trying to explain this image of the glass bead game, even to folks who read Hesse's book. Trying to communicate any of those incompletely articulated bits of ideas is almost pointless. The game becomes instead trying to design mini-weavings that can be contained in a single discipline, so that in this world I can somehow make myself fit in, to finish enough school, earn a high enough scholarly rank, and find a suitable job, where I can continue to develop the words to enclose and describe my particular Game.
How did I get to grumbling and whining about all this anyway? Well, to any reasonable person, the way all this translates seems to be that I am insufferably arrogant, a know-it-all who isn't at all as good as I think I am. The fact is that while everyone else was getting jobs, learning to drive, playing sports, dating and having an active social life, I was reading and thinking about stuff. I was very fortunate to have been born with a brain capable of genius functioning, because it gave me something to offset everything else, but in any social group none of this context matters much. Nobody likes arrogant people, and very few like people who know too much. Right now, actually, I don't know 'too much,' at least relative to years past. I have ideas as to how to expand models of ecosystems and societies using differential equations and matrix algebra, but I haven't done calculus in so long I don't remember the very basic integrals any longer. And, in every place I have been so far, that loss of knowledge has been somewhat beneficial, allowing people to consider me approachable.
Lately, though I am in school with many brilliant people now, in an environment where I am hardly the only active, creative mind, I am once again growing frustrated. Maybe it is just our culture, but whatever the reasons, I find myself feeling the need to apologize again for what I know, or trying to temper what I say so as to not intimidate other people with my 'brilliance.' I really do not know anyone yet with whom I could discuss my ideas fully, and every time I move into a new discipline the chances of my meeting such people decreases a bit. Surely there are people around my department, perhaps even people I am acquainted with already- there is almost certainly a disconnect between the reality of my surroundings and my perception of it, and knowing other people is so much harder than knowing about inanimate stuff.
In the meantime, though, I am still weaving away at the fabric of the universe in isolation, feeling all too keenly all those popular observations about the loneliness of true genius. It doesn't, after all, make you rich, or even wealthy enough to be safe from homelessness; it doesn't win you friends, or attract more people to love you, and in fact, it tends to make life more solitary and alone, even when people are all around. Being a genius doesn't mean you automatically get great grades in grad school, because there is always a canon of accepted ideas, even in such diffuse fields as political science, and the more you weave together ideas from outside that canon, the harder it is to fit your own world-view into the context of that one discipline. 'Isms' and other such groupings of ideas, especially, tend to weaken, and become fuzzy, as the many other possible orderings of information already in your head make those seemingly obvious disciplinary tools seem more arbitrary.
I suppose maybe the most valuable take-home message I could glean from all this is that while there are, no doubt, coping mechanisms that geniuses have adopted to make it easier to live in society, and enjoy that life, I have obviously not found them yet. I have been reading and digesting all sorts of ideas about my extrinsic universe, and perhaps when I have time to do so, I should be reading biographies and especially autobiographies from some of the geniuses who succeeded, so that, since I am almost resolved that I will in fact continue living past this upcoming birthday, I might have more of a chance at having a truly happy, fulfilling life.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
New standards or cheap imitations
I am still torn as to what I think about the various pop-Celtic programs that have been around lately. I was never one of the critics grumbling about the lack of cultural authenticity in the music of the Irish Rovers, and frankly I prefer quite a few of their interpretations of traditional Irish tunes over the more traditional arrangements other groups produced. It's easy in today's America-bashing environment to get caught up in non-American music for all the wrong reasons, and I know quite a few people who have been listening to 'world music' for just those reasons. I am currently in a sort of British roots kick that has everything to do with my genealogy research. Knowing where on those islands many of my ancestors lived, I would like to have a mental image of what their lives were like. What did they think about and read and listen to? Thus the YouTube browsing for traditional Celtic music.
Of course, music is not dead, the way ancient history and Latin are. Celtic music is constantly being remade, and some of the newer stuff is quite good. I have reconciled myself to the fact that the Celtic Thunder singers are entertaining and made some good music. Their live video recording of "Caledonia" is by far my favorite, so far, and I have listened to practically every recording of this song on the Internet in making that ranking. The High Kings, a group also linked to this pop-Celtic entertainment spectrum, is also quite good, and I do hope they continue to record together.
I am not so sure, though, about Celtic Woman. My biggest issues with this program have to do with their choice of songs, and here I am confronting the question of song standards. On the one hand I know many songs from recent decades that are known independent of their writers and of any person who sang them. I've heard enough versions of "Sentimental Journey," "Baby, It's Cold Outside," and just about anything else Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby ever sang that I would have to google those songs to find out who actually recorded them first or where they came from. Yet, I find it very hard to imagine songs I know Josh Groban recorded, and especially songs he wrote, being picked up by other singers. It was annoying listening to Rhydian Roberts singing Mr. Groban's songs, even though Rhydian has such a similar voice that his versions of those songs seemed more like poor copies of what I'd already heard.
Celtic Woman, though, takes a bunch of women I've never heard of, and has them sing insipidly sweet versions of all sorts of songs, very few of them having anything to do with Celts. After watching Josh teasing the anthem aspect of "You Raise Me Up," I can't help but laugh a little when I hear that song, but when these ladies sing it, and yes I am listening to their version now, that anthemic pop song becomes this sort of heavenly choir singing elevator music instead. Panis Angelicus turns into something similar in their hands. This production has also included "Ave Maria," "The Prayer." Add to this the Rhydian Roberts recordings of "To Where You Are," "The Prayer," and "Anthem," and its starting to seem like this cheap imitation idea is getting too much popularity for what it's worth. It's not, after all, like these guys are on par with the Beatles, having recorded so much that if there are a few remakes, there are so many originals among them. These remakes are all these folks seem to do.
But, on the other hand, every song is written by someone, and certainly not all of the material in Josh Groban's first album was his, first. "The Prayer" was certainly not new, nor was "Vincent." And he's gone on to write his own songs, making his own original music, much of which may last long enough for people to be remaking it long after he's gone. And Ella Fitzgerald was 'just' a singer, not a songwriter. We don't dismiss her as cheap because she recorded songs people had heard before. I think it was in an interview of David Foster that the idea was mentioned of Josh fitting into a particular musical niche, that he could make it as a balladeer, because even with a glut of pop singers, we really had no one doing ballads any more, and the idea of a standard song is part of that tradition. Maybe we, as a culture, are forgetting just a bit how that part of music making works. In our concern over digital copyright protections and our unfulfillable taste for novelty perhaps the idea of a song as common culture is in need of rehearsal.
Of course, music is not dead, the way ancient history and Latin are. Celtic music is constantly being remade, and some of the newer stuff is quite good. I have reconciled myself to the fact that the Celtic Thunder singers are entertaining and made some good music. Their live video recording of "Caledonia" is by far my favorite, so far, and I have listened to practically every recording of this song on the Internet in making that ranking. The High Kings, a group also linked to this pop-Celtic entertainment spectrum, is also quite good, and I do hope they continue to record together.
I am not so sure, though, about Celtic Woman. My biggest issues with this program have to do with their choice of songs, and here I am confronting the question of song standards. On the one hand I know many songs from recent decades that are known independent of their writers and of any person who sang them. I've heard enough versions of "Sentimental Journey," "Baby, It's Cold Outside," and just about anything else Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby ever sang that I would have to google those songs to find out who actually recorded them first or where they came from. Yet, I find it very hard to imagine songs I know Josh Groban recorded, and especially songs he wrote, being picked up by other singers. It was annoying listening to Rhydian Roberts singing Mr. Groban's songs, even though Rhydian has such a similar voice that his versions of those songs seemed more like poor copies of what I'd already heard.
Celtic Woman, though, takes a bunch of women I've never heard of, and has them sing insipidly sweet versions of all sorts of songs, very few of them having anything to do with Celts. After watching Josh teasing the anthem aspect of "You Raise Me Up," I can't help but laugh a little when I hear that song, but when these ladies sing it, and yes I am listening to their version now, that anthemic pop song becomes this sort of heavenly choir singing elevator music instead. Panis Angelicus turns into something similar in their hands. This production has also included "Ave Maria," "The Prayer." Add to this the Rhydian Roberts recordings of "To Where You Are," "The Prayer," and "Anthem," and its starting to seem like this cheap imitation idea is getting too much popularity for what it's worth. It's not, after all, like these guys are on par with the Beatles, having recorded so much that if there are a few remakes, there are so many originals among them. These remakes are all these folks seem to do.
But, on the other hand, every song is written by someone, and certainly not all of the material in Josh Groban's first album was his, first. "The Prayer" was certainly not new, nor was "Vincent." And he's gone on to write his own songs, making his own original music, much of which may last long enough for people to be remaking it long after he's gone. And Ella Fitzgerald was 'just' a singer, not a songwriter. We don't dismiss her as cheap because she recorded songs people had heard before. I think it was in an interview of David Foster that the idea was mentioned of Josh fitting into a particular musical niche, that he could make it as a balladeer, because even with a glut of pop singers, we really had no one doing ballads any more, and the idea of a standard song is part of that tradition. Maybe we, as a culture, are forgetting just a bit how that part of music making works. In our concern over digital copyright protections and our unfulfillable taste for novelty perhaps the idea of a song as common culture is in need of rehearsal.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Future-oriented thinking and falling
Having finished reading Breakthrough again, post-class discussion, I still really liked this book. However, I will concede a point to my classmates that it does little to really provide practical policy direction. Breakthrough really is strongly rooted in psychology, not political science or environmental science, and while I really did enjoy reading a book the draws together so much of what I know, it may have been difficult to appreciate within the context of our course. Whether their criticism of piecemeal environmental fixes is warranted or not, and regardless of the viability and efficacy of their energy investment and health care proposals, this really is a good read. I am also quite certain from the parallels between this book and President Obama's speeches and online presence that he must have been strongly influenced by these two men and their ideas. Certainly they know each other somewhat, from the mention of Senator Obama's involvement in a policy project in the latter portion of this book. And just as certainly, Mr. Obama has adopted a very positive, future-oriented tone in all of his addresses to his public. His State of the Union address, given within a time of economic uncertainty easily equal to that of the Great Depression, was designed to acknowledge the nation's problems and inject hope and empowerment into the American people.
I've been playing through a few of my newer albums this weekend, while reading, and with all this thinking about optimism in politics, part of my brain went off on a tangent on the word "fall." It occurs a lot in Breakthrough, often in quotes and paraphrases from environmentalists and social critics, usually in a context of man's fall from some past Eden or semi-Utopia to our present depraved conditions. However, in my playlists I have two songs in particular that also center on falling. One is sung by Josh Groban, "Let Me Fall," from a Cirque de Soleil program; the other is "Fall," sung by Clay Walker. Both are meant to be more uplifting/positive, at least in that they both ascribe no fault to the person falling, and imply that the result of falling need not be disastrous, but they differ markedly in explaining what keeps the fall from ending badly.
Mr. Walker's song rests in the realm of community, in that the speaker is there to catch the one falling, cushioning their fall, a fall that has been just waiting to happen. In this narrative, the fall is occasioned by letting go and accepting the weakness and exhaustion underlying the constant effort put forth by the one falling. I am sure many if not all of us have experienced this to some extent, that sense of hanging on by one's toenails in the face of fatigue or lingering fatalism. Certainly when there is someone there to catch you, there's nothing wrong with accepting their gift of support. But too often there is no one, which is what makes this song not just soothing but potentially quite depressing.
"Let Me Fall," on the other hand, puts its faith in the ability of the individual falling to find their own strength and courage to not just deal with the consequences of having fallen, but to let go and fall knowing there is no one waiting below with open arms or a safety net. Where Clay Walker's song is grounding, a story of a fall to the earth, Josh Groban's song is a narrative of falling and quite possibly catching the wind to fly, like the fall of an albatross. This song doesn't pretend falling is any less scary for our being able to fly, nor is it impossible for us to crash, but the only way to get into the air is to let go. Ideally I suppose it would be best to have that strength and courage and still have someone waiting in case of a crash, of course, but why make someone wait on the ground if they could fly too?
I've been playing through a few of my newer albums this weekend, while reading, and with all this thinking about optimism in politics, part of my brain went off on a tangent on the word "fall." It occurs a lot in Breakthrough, often in quotes and paraphrases from environmentalists and social critics, usually in a context of man's fall from some past Eden or semi-Utopia to our present depraved conditions. However, in my playlists I have two songs in particular that also center on falling. One is sung by Josh Groban, "Let Me Fall," from a Cirque de Soleil program; the other is "Fall," sung by Clay Walker. Both are meant to be more uplifting/positive, at least in that they both ascribe no fault to the person falling, and imply that the result of falling need not be disastrous, but they differ markedly in explaining what keeps the fall from ending badly.
Mr. Walker's song rests in the realm of community, in that the speaker is there to catch the one falling, cushioning their fall, a fall that has been just waiting to happen. In this narrative, the fall is occasioned by letting go and accepting the weakness and exhaustion underlying the constant effort put forth by the one falling. I am sure many if not all of us have experienced this to some extent, that sense of hanging on by one's toenails in the face of fatigue or lingering fatalism. Certainly when there is someone there to catch you, there's nothing wrong with accepting their gift of support. But too often there is no one, which is what makes this song not just soothing but potentially quite depressing.
"Let Me Fall," on the other hand, puts its faith in the ability of the individual falling to find their own strength and courage to not just deal with the consequences of having fallen, but to let go and fall knowing there is no one waiting below with open arms or a safety net. Where Clay Walker's song is grounding, a story of a fall to the earth, Josh Groban's song is a narrative of falling and quite possibly catching the wind to fly, like the fall of an albatross. This song doesn't pretend falling is any less scary for our being able to fly, nor is it impossible for us to crash, but the only way to get into the air is to let go. Ideally I suppose it would be best to have that strength and courage and still have someone waiting in case of a crash, of course, but why make someone wait on the ground if they could fly too?
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Rereading Breakthrough
Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia sat on the floor playing marbles.
-Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged
One of those odd discussions that takes on a mind of its own, two weeks ago my environmental political theory seminar was reading a book called Breakthrough(Nordhaus and Shellenberger, 2007). As often happens with school reading, I got behind in my reading just enough that while I finished the book in time for class I had to read the second half too quickly to really get more than the gist of it. In any case, I really liked this book. Their argument is not so much against negative pessimistic approaches to environmentalism, life, etc., as it is in favor of positive optimistic constructive approaches and attitudes. Much of what they are saying refers back to what I know pretty well already from psychology, and makes a lot of sense. The first half of their book focuses more on environmentalism and why it is outdated as a movement. Really a lot of what they said in these chapters has come up in previous weeks' discussions as our own ideas, only their phrasing is inspiring and quotable. The second half shifts to socioeconomic issues, with similar arguments and ideas. Conversations before class with fellow classmates was overwhelmingly positive about this book.
So how did it fare in class? Miserably. I honestly wish I had taken more notes on my class and its reactions, because it would perhaps be more interesting than anything the authors said. What was wrong with this book? It was unrealistic, for one. It somehow was not grounded in reality, and as the discussion grew, practically no one had anything good to say about it. Perhaps some of this had to do with the amount of psychology used in building this book's points, since as far as I am aware, I am the only person in that group who studied psychology, let alone earned a degree in it. Still, the idea was pretty simple, that how people perceive their situation affects their ability to respond to it constructively. If people feel powerless, weak and victimized, or if they feel that they are unable to avoid doing wrong, they are not going to be mobilized by this to improve. Given the same physical conditions, if those same people feel that empowered, strong and capable, they can not only be mobilized to act, but they can become independent agents that will figure out how to act more effectively. In practice, this means maybe throwing out a lot of what is currently done for such ideals as the environment, justice and freedom.
This may be a huge part of the seductiveness of Objectivism, too. Ayn Rand's philosophy insists that each person thinks for himself and makes his own independent decisions about her ideas and about everything else, and teaches that each of us, barring mental illness, is fully capable of this. The various groups and institutes dedicated to teaching her work can subvert or at least undermine this, by spoon-feeding to young would-be Objectivists the right answers to all the 'right' questions, from what to think about economics to how to appreciate art and which musical composers are good. As much as I like the idea of an Objectivist party, I am disinclined to trust that the people at the head of such a group really are a) independent-minded Objectivists, and b) leaders worthy of the trust a statesman must hold to function in politics. In the back of my mind, really since high-school, I have always held the untarnished image of Francisco d'Anconia as a sort of litmus paper, with which to measure those who might earn such respect from me as Francisco could were he real.
-Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged
One of those odd discussions that takes on a mind of its own, two weeks ago my environmental political theory seminar was reading a book called Breakthrough(Nordhaus and Shellenberger, 2007). As often happens with school reading, I got behind in my reading just enough that while I finished the book in time for class I had to read the second half too quickly to really get more than the gist of it. In any case, I really liked this book. Their argument is not so much against negative pessimistic approaches to environmentalism, life, etc., as it is in favor of positive optimistic constructive approaches and attitudes. Much of what they are saying refers back to what I know pretty well already from psychology, and makes a lot of sense. The first half of their book focuses more on environmentalism and why it is outdated as a movement. Really a lot of what they said in these chapters has come up in previous weeks' discussions as our own ideas, only their phrasing is inspiring and quotable. The second half shifts to socioeconomic issues, with similar arguments and ideas. Conversations before class with fellow classmates was overwhelmingly positive about this book.
So how did it fare in class? Miserably. I honestly wish I had taken more notes on my class and its reactions, because it would perhaps be more interesting than anything the authors said. What was wrong with this book? It was unrealistic, for one. It somehow was not grounded in reality, and as the discussion grew, practically no one had anything good to say about it. Perhaps some of this had to do with the amount of psychology used in building this book's points, since as far as I am aware, I am the only person in that group who studied psychology, let alone earned a degree in it. Still, the idea was pretty simple, that how people perceive their situation affects their ability to respond to it constructively. If people feel powerless, weak and victimized, or if they feel that they are unable to avoid doing wrong, they are not going to be mobilized by this to improve. Given the same physical conditions, if those same people feel that empowered, strong and capable, they can not only be mobilized to act, but they can become independent agents that will figure out how to act more effectively. In practice, this means maybe throwing out a lot of what is currently done for such ideals as the environment, justice and freedom.
This may be a huge part of the seductiveness of Objectivism, too. Ayn Rand's philosophy insists that each person thinks for himself and makes his own independent decisions about her ideas and about everything else, and teaches that each of us, barring mental illness, is fully capable of this. The various groups and institutes dedicated to teaching her work can subvert or at least undermine this, by spoon-feeding to young would-be Objectivists the right answers to all the 'right' questions, from what to think about economics to how to appreciate art and which musical composers are good. As much as I like the idea of an Objectivist party, I am disinclined to trust that the people at the head of such a group really are a) independent-minded Objectivists, and b) leaders worthy of the trust a statesman must hold to function in politics. In the back of my mind, really since high-school, I have always held the untarnished image of Francisco d'Anconia as a sort of litmus paper, with which to measure those who might earn such respect from me as Francisco could were he real.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Points to Ponder and a few ideas
Concepts needed to go from the disgusting environmental situation in post-Civil War US cities:
1. Recognition that these situations were problems- flaming rivers may be hazardous, but if they are fairly normal, and if the air in cities is always toxic, then maybe they are not seen as problems.
2. Recognition of the possibility that there may be real solutions to these environmental problems. Money and effort need to be available, but also a vision of what may be possible to make things better.
3. Free time. If life is about struggling for survival, there may be little or no room for much else.
4. Sanitation as normal. If water is always impure, food is always tainted, and life is fraught with illness and early death, more illness and death won't stand out. After all, it matters little whether one died of some illness caused by the pollution in the air, pollution in the water, or some other agent floating about in the neighborhood, or malnutrition, infection, etc.
Environmental issues like burning rivers and smoke-filled city skies are a thing of the past for most Americans, and a thing perhaps of the future for the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian people who are rushing themselves towards greater Western style development now. So long as the model for high living standards is set by the United States, it is perhaps unreasonable and unlikely that any developing states will work out completely environmentally friendly solutions to development. So long as the concepts of gain and working for a living dominate modern economic life, especially gain, development may not be sustainable for long. But it is reasonable at some point to ask a crucial question, "Gain for what purpose?" In my economic theory lecture yesterday, we were looking at the development of the idea, vital to development, of working for gain, not just to sustain one's current status and lifestyle. This concept is lacking in many developing areas, where people still tend to consider a raise as an opportunity to work less for the same amount of money, not to gain more money for the same amount of work. But at some point we have to be able to ask when it is ok to stop gaining and enjoy the fruits of our labor. Instead of worrying about the quantity of our wealth, Americans may benefit from taking a step back and evaluating the quality of what we already have. This is not a call for stagnation, but for a regrouping and reassessment so that as we continue to progress we can be sure we are progressing to something better, rather than just accumulating more of what we never needed so much of in the first place.
Ideas for a better world, in the meantime:
1. Meet the neighbors. Many, possibly most people in Fort Collins, and in the US in general, do not know their neighbors very well. I am no better on this count. I think I know what all my immediate neighbors look like, and I have met the dog across the walkway from my apartment and one of the dogs in the apartment behind mine, but I don't know my neighbors' names, nor do they know mine. If we don't know the people in our immediate community, it is hard to talk of constructing healthy communities anywhere else. And, if our own communities are healthy, they can set examples on their own, and can be much more persuasive really than complicated books and papers on community building.
2. Plant trees. If we are so concerned about deforestation in Brazil and the Asian rainforest, we need to look to our own stock of forests. The Amazon won't be suddenly safe tomorrow, or next year, or in ten years. Nor do we have the right to tell the Brazilian people they can't have decent highways through the Amazon to connect their communities with each other and with the rest of South America. We have built highways practically everywhere we could in the US, and we take for granted that there are decent roads, not just clear and continuous, but usually paved, or at least graded regularly. While we are pestering Brazil about building highways and developing into the Amazon, we still have massive clearcut scars through our own relatively tiny tract of rainforest in Washington, and have no intention of stopping logging in the Olympic Forest, even if it is a carbon sink and regardless of the fact that cutting our trees also cuts into the remaining rainforest on Earth. And, much of the rest of the US was forested before Americans expanded westward. We can't just stop our own agriculture and put the forests back, but we can still plant trees wherever they can be appropriate.
3. Pay more attention to details and seek to imbue existing stuff with interesting details before just getting more stuff. One aspect of indigenous cultures in many places that I find appealing is the extent to which their few possessions are decorated. In many places, primitive dwellings traditionally have carved or painted woodwork around windows and doors, and since more of their possessions are hand-made, these all can also be embellished. There is no good reason why my plain white plastic coffee-maker can't be embellished, or any of my other plain modern appliances and furniture. These artistic details keep stuff from being so cheap and disposable, and infuse our lives with beauty and interest.
1. Recognition that these situations were problems- flaming rivers may be hazardous, but if they are fairly normal, and if the air in cities is always toxic, then maybe they are not seen as problems.
2. Recognition of the possibility that there may be real solutions to these environmental problems. Money and effort need to be available, but also a vision of what may be possible to make things better.
3. Free time. If life is about struggling for survival, there may be little or no room for much else.
4. Sanitation as normal. If water is always impure, food is always tainted, and life is fraught with illness and early death, more illness and death won't stand out. After all, it matters little whether one died of some illness caused by the pollution in the air, pollution in the water, or some other agent floating about in the neighborhood, or malnutrition, infection, etc.
Environmental issues like burning rivers and smoke-filled city skies are a thing of the past for most Americans, and a thing perhaps of the future for the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian people who are rushing themselves towards greater Western style development now. So long as the model for high living standards is set by the United States, it is perhaps unreasonable and unlikely that any developing states will work out completely environmentally friendly solutions to development. So long as the concepts of gain and working for a living dominate modern economic life, especially gain, development may not be sustainable for long. But it is reasonable at some point to ask a crucial question, "Gain for what purpose?" In my economic theory lecture yesterday, we were looking at the development of the idea, vital to development, of working for gain, not just to sustain one's current status and lifestyle. This concept is lacking in many developing areas, where people still tend to consider a raise as an opportunity to work less for the same amount of money, not to gain more money for the same amount of work. But at some point we have to be able to ask when it is ok to stop gaining and enjoy the fruits of our labor. Instead of worrying about the quantity of our wealth, Americans may benefit from taking a step back and evaluating the quality of what we already have. This is not a call for stagnation, but for a regrouping and reassessment so that as we continue to progress we can be sure we are progressing to something better, rather than just accumulating more of what we never needed so much of in the first place.
Ideas for a better world, in the meantime:
1. Meet the neighbors. Many, possibly most people in Fort Collins, and in the US in general, do not know their neighbors very well. I am no better on this count. I think I know what all my immediate neighbors look like, and I have met the dog across the walkway from my apartment and one of the dogs in the apartment behind mine, but I don't know my neighbors' names, nor do they know mine. If we don't know the people in our immediate community, it is hard to talk of constructing healthy communities anywhere else. And, if our own communities are healthy, they can set examples on their own, and can be much more persuasive really than complicated books and papers on community building.
2. Plant trees. If we are so concerned about deforestation in Brazil and the Asian rainforest, we need to look to our own stock of forests. The Amazon won't be suddenly safe tomorrow, or next year, or in ten years. Nor do we have the right to tell the Brazilian people they can't have decent highways through the Amazon to connect their communities with each other and with the rest of South America. We have built highways practically everywhere we could in the US, and we take for granted that there are decent roads, not just clear and continuous, but usually paved, or at least graded regularly. While we are pestering Brazil about building highways and developing into the Amazon, we still have massive clearcut scars through our own relatively tiny tract of rainforest in Washington, and have no intention of stopping logging in the Olympic Forest, even if it is a carbon sink and regardless of the fact that cutting our trees also cuts into the remaining rainforest on Earth. And, much of the rest of the US was forested before Americans expanded westward. We can't just stop our own agriculture and put the forests back, but we can still plant trees wherever they can be appropriate.
3. Pay more attention to details and seek to imbue existing stuff with interesting details before just getting more stuff. One aspect of indigenous cultures in many places that I find appealing is the extent to which their few possessions are decorated. In many places, primitive dwellings traditionally have carved or painted woodwork around windows and doors, and since more of their possessions are hand-made, these all can also be embellished. There is no good reason why my plain white plastic coffee-maker can't be embellished, or any of my other plain modern appliances and furniture. These artistic details keep stuff from being so cheap and disposable, and infuse our lives with beauty and interest.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Scottish Obsession
One might think from my genealogy reading that I am mostly Scottish, lately. I have become obsessed with early Scottish history, trying to work out the family history around the early Bog family, in the Berwickshire area, and trying to get enough contextual background to decide whether any of our Clark/ Clarke/ Clerke family are Scottish. Actually, so far, only the Bogue line is Scottish, and the rest come from among the landed gentry of Cambridgeshire, Devon, Kent, Wales, etc. Many were apparently royalists who chose to leave for America when the Parliamentarians took over in England after the civil war in the 1600's. Some were related to King Henry, or otherwise blood-relatives of royalty, and in several lines the earliest families are associated with castles or manors.
Right now, I am going through old documents available online, looking for records that mention the name Bog and the placename Burnehouse/Burnhouse. At this stage I am not sure I would do any better if I was in Edinburgh or Glasgow looking for information. Actually, I might do alright in the records collections in Edinburgh, but only if I had an idea what I am looking for. I am right now still learning my basic geography. I was in the Morgan library today looking for more books, and while I found a huge one on Devon, I am going to be using the Web to get a sense of place, because there are no clear basic maps in the whole book to orient a non-British reader. This one at least mentions something about the border regions of Devon, but for an American reader, it is not at all easy to keep straight where all the shires and regions are within Great Britain. I also found, but did not check out, a book on the Cumbrians, and several on Galloway; they were all devoid of contextual maps, and actually from my reading so far it is a fair question what each author assumes to be Galloway or Cumbria, especially before the 16th century.
My online explorations have yielded a few interesting things. I did finally find the Bog coat of arms, and a heraldic crest list that lists the Bogs of Burnehouses separate from the Bog family, so that I am more sure this is the one I want. I found a few records as well that mention the various Bog names I know (John, James, Alexander) and among names I am also familiar with by now as the right community for the people I am hunting. Amusingly enough, once again my friend's surname, Kemp, turned up as well, as another burgess in Edinburgh. Actually most of the Kemp families I have run across were associated with the Clarks and the Barringers in Ontario and New York, though, not the Bogues. The social glue that draw and binds the landed gentry class together may have made my parents more compatible. Perhaps it also makes those families' offspring more likely to wind up in graduate school, but I doubt it.
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