Sunday, March 28, 2021

Review: The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly ProsperousThe WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I believe, but cannot be certain, that this book represents something entirely new in science. It is an investigation of our shared reality which includes the living, thinking, observing subject as a determiner of reality, and not just subject to it.

I may have that backward. We are subject to evolution. What I mean is that our definition of reality now must include humanity as an object. There is no objective reality without us. Language fails me. Dang!

Sure, this author is not a practitioner in the "hard" sciences, but is rather more some new combination of anthropologist, sociologist and metareporter of academic writing. That writing includes history and archeology and psychological experimentation.

At various points in my life, I have invested money, time and angst in talk therapy. I think it has helped. But I can't, for the life of me, remember why I did it. I don't remember being unhappy or desperate. Perhaps I needed help through various transitions. Talk therapy is a very WEIRD thing, I know.

I write perfectly useless reviews. I know a competent review when I read one. I leave those to people competent to write them. I'm more interested to note how it is that reading a book has changed me, and then I sometimes go on to urge my (newly revised, yet still somewhat tortured) thinking on whoever might read my review.

Lately, Elon Musk justifies his absurd wealth (to Bernie Sanders!) by saying that he's amassing resources to spread something like the bright beacon of consciousness beyond earth. As though he knows what's good for all of us. He clearly believes that being the richest man in the world justifies his laying claim to be the most intelligent. He could use some therapy.

Well, after our four years of horror under Trump, maybe some of us among the science-following half of the planet will miss our easy calling out of the opposition as idiots. It was ever so much fun! But the trouble is not that they're all idiots. The trouble is that they're not. Intelligent and well-read people seem actually to believe patent absurdities. So much for the beacon of consciousness, especially if by consciousness we mean to say something like intelligence.

What we mean by intelligence is a very local thing. That's one big message from this book. It's a very timely book, not least because human intelligence now feels so meaningless against the idiot winds which set our course (through what canal?).

Same argument: We didn't get to where we Westerners are in the history of the planet because we're somehow more intelligent and better organized; more advanced. We lucked out. One of the burdens of this book is to disabuse anyone of the notion that our futures were ever designed by us. They evolved, and evolution is a process of accidental change aggregating in ways to move us in some direction for thriving.

We may as well be locusts on the planet! Hey, let's populate the cosmos!

News flash: you may think you're not an idiot and that you're on the right side of history, but you're just as subject to the directions money takes for you as the rest of us are. Click bait (selfish meme competition, I suppose) distorts us all.

Can you even imagine someone claiming the right to outsized influence based not on money, but on love? What an absurdity! And yet that very same legitimate claim would belong to Jesus Christ. Intelligence is as over-rated as wealth is if you ask me. Or if you ask Joseph Henrich.

Let's focus on Christ. Henrichs does in this book, or rather, he focuses on the Church. Still, it would be difficult to find any other individual, real or concocted (the way that Trump was), who has had more influence on human life on the planet than Christ has.

Henrichs is interested in the accident of Christian institutions, and how consequential those have been for Western social evolution.

I read (present tense) this book between Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett's The Upswing, and what I might consider its sequel, a book called Mutualism, by Sara Horowitz. Those are books which implicitly assume a kind of steady state to what it means to be human, and which present a hopeful and even optimistic read of how we might improve our condition. Both are powerful books by brilliant authors.

By contrast, this book ventures into understanding humanity as a species undergoing constant change, by way of cultural evolution. Surprisingly, Henrich maintains that the accidents of cultural evolution have also impacted certain aspects of our physiology. Especially our brains, post-literacy. Our WEIRD experience, our self-conception, and our ways of living and of understanding are simply not the same as they once were, and as they still are almost everywhere else.

This evolutionary process is not subject to amelioration. It just happens. The author, Joseph Henrich, developed his thesis across an adventuresome life, driven, apparently, by intense curiosity about how other peoples live, but also, I lately find, by interest in what? Aerospace Engineering!?!

His book regards what it is that makes us in the Western traditions so unusual. (So special?) He documents a set of accidents through history which changed humanity in ways leading up to the industrial and then the scientific revolutions. These revolutions have occurred only among what would become WEIRD people. "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic."

I spent much of my formative education at Yale pondering the 'why' of the industrial revolution occurring in Europe and not in China. That was after re-calibrating from engineering through physics to Chinese literature. Mine has not been a settled life.

We called this the Needham question, or at least I did. Still on my bookshelves now, despite seemingly endless moves across geography and career, I have the near complete print-set of Needham's opus, Science and Civilization in China.

I remember how nervous I was transporting the pirated volumes back from Taiwan, as though the customs agents would open my books. I wanted to study with urbane Nathan Sivin, Needham's colleague, who sometimes paid glancing visits to our Ivy-League classical Chinese poetry club.

So yes, this book is especially important to me. It has answered, to my satisfaction, one of the most important questions in my life.

I am definitely weird.

I live now in a world not changed, in many ways, from the one where I grew up. But, by my read, our stuck social schematic is now in the approximate condition of a skyscraper after the shrug of the demolition charges set to take it down, but before gravity destroys its appearance of integrity.

We live in the end-times of the era of The Spectacle. We are spectators of our very own lives. What a hoot! Really, we should demark our times as the era of the screen. Think about it. Literacy is so yesterday! Update your book, man!

I remember with a clarity as though I'd seen the face of Jesus when I learned to write my name. It was that electrically exciting. I was using a red ballpoint pen ("atomic age" puns with ballpoint in Chinese usage) on a brown paper shopping bag.

That was about when Dad was building a fallout shelter in our basement along the shores of seemingly still-alive Lake Erie.

My prosocial optimism had been wrecked by the time I hit college. A minor thesis of Henrich's book is that such optimism is essential. He calls it "positive-sum thinking." Such thinking is essential to inventiveness and the cultivation of our collective "brain," which is a very Western thing.

Some of the book's thought-streams question the inevitability of science as we practice it, and even the universality of the scientific principles we live by. Was scientific understanding going to come in any case, if the laws revealed are Platonic/cosmic universals? Or is this all some Western aberration? Something to evolve beyond, even?

Whatever the case, the book's author is implicitly asking his reader to step outside our own tradition, to see it as an outsider might. That is in itself the most WEIRD thing to do. It's what science does.

And from the outside it looks very much like WEIRDness is curdling in at least three dimensions.

The first might be our patent laws, which only just barely stopped at allowing the patenting of genes. Those laws, from their origins, enshrine the gold-rush notion of the genius inventor who should be rewarded for specific innovations, largely by being the first to create an embodiment of something that would soon be produced in any case, according to this book's thesis (and according to me). It once did encourage a lust for discovery. What's left is lust for lucre.

Patent and copyright converge in the digital age, and what we now do amounts to slow death to what Henrich calls our collective social "brain." He calls it a brain even as he debases what a brain can do on its own.

Even a social brain requires some context.

The second dimension would probably be our precious individualism, based as it is on the ascription of internal traits as that which constitutes our very specific individual personality. I am happy to read him debunking all the personality type tests, on which I am nothing but a chameleon (matching whatever happens to be my current ever-shifting occupation), and sarcastically wishing us individuals "good luck" in finding our authentic self. You go, man!

Patent law and practice (now in the digital age) no longer serves the people now that patent portfolios - traded on the open (closed?) market - make a perfect proxy for predatory size of firm.

The third would have to be religion, which is credited in this book (the Christian tradition through the Catholic Church and its family definitions, and later and more locally importantly, through the various iterations of Protestantism) as the inventor [sick] of WEIRD.

By now, our religions have returned to primitive form in stark opposition to what is meant by WEIRD in this book. However enlightenment might be defined, it certainly has nothing to do with the belief structure of most evangelical sects, credited though Protestantism might be with the stimulation of mass literacy at their Lutheran origins.

Now I have to ask; what would happen if instead of stepping outside our collective mind, we were to embrace it more tightly? What if we jump right back into the scientific soup and ask such really important questions as 'why has love meant so much cosmically?' Why are religions so full of hate anymore?

Asking those questions would be to separate knowledge of what we still call "supernatural" phenomena from received authority structures, to re-incorporate them into what we call (scientific) "reality." That should, after all, be the final maneuver in the legacy of WEIRD.

No one has the right to tell me that God is a delusion! No one has the right to say that Henrich is not a scientist.

I mean simply that we allow subjectivity back in to science, in a very careful way. It already came in by way of quantum theory, and now by way of the softer sciences. We are just resisting the inevitable. By any meaning, evolution - cultural or genetic - is built on a series of accidents. accidents are both inevitable and random. But random seems to add up to life, weirdly.

Science works along that razor's edge where non-random natural law allows prediction. Genetic replication follows natural laws. Random defines life. which distinguishes itself, from a distance, as different from the dead structures around it.

Those dead structures are the context for our collective, social, "brain."

What if the core of Christian belief is actually, even scientifically, quite true? You know, God is love, and drop the Name already! I'm big on name-dropping! What else do the accidents of evolution - cultural or genetic - add up to? We WEIRD people are all about romantic love, especially as we see ourselves on-screen, though we may be known by our science and our industry. Could love be a cosmic force?

Hell, many of us who consider ourselves sane call all the religious people loonies, even while we - some of us - express certainty that we will someday encounter life elsewhere in the cosmos. Which is to deny that we already have, and that it has nothing to do with UFOs.

If I were religious, I would consider the store of energy contained in fossil fuels to be a gift from God. In those same terms, I would consider humanity as a whole to have sinned by our squandering of that gifted oil to no apparent end beyond, well, the end as caused by our despoiling of the only home we can ever have. Short of breaking light-speed barriers, as though that might be done within the life-span of ours or any other culture.

Who are the loonies in this equation?

And so, what has technology done for us or to us? Has it made economics back into a zero-sum game again? As in, why do many of us feel that Google and Facebook are stealing our wealth along with any stability to a shared reality - rather than to expand the realm for innovation as they promised? Theirs would seem to be a sharing infrastructure which isn't sharing when it comes to their monopoly access and now control of what it is that we might share. They steal our emotional and our cognitive meaning both.

And anyhow it isn't at all clear that whatever we do on our smartphones is on a continuum with the reading habits which once changed the world. We seem only to amplify what we already think that we know. And we are quite literally drowning in words that have almost an urgency about grabbing and keeping our attention. This is no longer the shared "brain" that Henrich says that we in the West lucked into. This is reversion to a kind of beehive mind, where the wealthy are the queens.

I suspect that most readers will prefer the executive summary of this book, which can be had by way of numerous reviews and introductions in the MSM. The arguments presented in the book quickly become tedious for those not steeped already in the torture chambers of statistical reasoning applied to sociology and psychology (and to politics, of course). Games devised to mimic actual human behavior, and then broad (broad!) conclusions drawn.

In the big picture, we no longer seem to believe in human progress. Our "positive-sum thinking" has reversed itself. It would be hard to know if this is because of the wreckage caused by our technologies as we deploy them, or simply that they feel so disruptive of religious comfort words.

Where is the love?

Structures that once kept us looking forward, now have us holding on to what we feel that we've lost.

I sweated more when I brought banned books with me into China than I did returning with pirated books, but still . . .

We must take control of accident! Listen to me. Otherwise, we are doomed!

Drink up please, it's time.

Yours, in Irony. Irony too is a WEIRD invention. Has to do with God.

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Clarity in Retrospect; the Proper Way to Fight the Pandemic

Buckminster Fuller may be a distant relative. He was, in any case, a kind of soul-mate. Among other things, he saved many many lives by influencing the design of highways to take human weaknesses as drivers into account. Banking curves and designing proper turning radiuses to match braking propensities and more that I can't remember. His designs met drivers as we are and not as we should be.

Against this pandemic, we, collectively on the planet, don't seem to be able to move beyond our moral imperative that a life - any life - is more important than the collective wellbeing of us all. And so we seem to have decided that we must inoculate the most vulnerable first.

The elderly and the infirm are the least mobile and therefore the least likely to spread the virus. We are the easiest to contain. Many of us no longer need to leave the house to work. 

We should have inoculated the bad drivers first, and the ones with crappy rides. Start with the poorly paid essential workers, then the irresponsible and irrepressible young adults who will engage in risky behavior no matter what you think they ought to do.

Leave the rich and powerful for last, since they have plenty of options. Or let them have the vaccine at such exorbitant cost that it would subvent the cost for the rest of us. There aren't enough of them to change the overall picture, so they should be out of the picture except as subsidizers. Thank you Dolly!

By leaving our pathetic morality out of the equation, we could have stabilized the population as a whole much more quickly. I'm calling our morality pathetic just because look what we're doing to the planet.

I have been as careful and as isolated as anyone has, and I still caught the virus. I still don't know and can't quite imagine how, since I shopped only every three weeks at six in the morning when I had the store to myself, always wore a mask, and live alone with no socializing at all. I hardly ever left the building!

Given that upwards of half my apartment building, into which I moved mid-pandemic, caught the virus, the most likely thing is that the building became the vector, as it were. I'm calculating by using Occam's razor - the probability that such a population of sick people could occur randomly in such a cluster feels low. But any of us could have contaminated the building.

My own story is, of course, sanitized. Guilty! The very act of moving makes me suspect, right? I wasn't always wearing a mask as I was moving in. I absolve myself by timeline, but does that make me any better morally? Any less guilty? Not!

There is simply no perch for leadership to have made decisions at the level that they needed to be made. The media made all the decisions, and even Doctor Fauci was its subject as much as he might claim dispassionate science. 

We can argue all we want about which is the real fake news, but the fact is that it's all trying to grab our clicks for money anymore. Our reality is hardly formed by science. Part of that trouble is that we've misconstrued science as a search for truth. It's not. It's about truing beliefs, so that we can all agree about the important stuff. 

Perhaps China has a right to boast now. Or perhaps we're just plainly stupid, socially. We can't make a decision to save our lives. Please let's not have an autocrat as our solution! Thank goodness the autocrat that we tried was a nincompoop who simply didn't try.

Just imagine someone in power disclaiming his private beliefs as more true than science. What a nightmare! Oh.

There must be hoards of educated epidemiologists who would agree with me. They must be in hiding, since they don't want to be called out as murderers or worse. But the fact is that someone or some body has to decide whom to sacrifice in the interests of the whole. Not personally whom, the way that certain people in power protect their families. I'm not naming names, but the science of this doesn't allow for personal prediction. It's only the group that matters.

We need at least some guardrails to keep it real. We need to give speeding tickets to all those mask-averse Trumpsters, and set the cost for settlement as getting a vaccine. Invasion of privacy? So is carrying a loaded firearm in public. I have the right to calculate my own risk, but not when I'm in traffic.

Get real. You can't control accident. The virus is predictable only in the aggregate. Along with plenty of other seniors, I will gladly go to the back of any line in favor of my childrens' lives. Hello!? My children may not agree with me, but they're way too young to know better.

They'll do just fine without me. I raised them that way! Yeah right, like I can take credit. Thank goodness they're both their own people, and don't listen to any man telling them what to do.

I only wish that they would obey the speed limits as well as they comply with COVID decency.

And I'm the one who gets speeding tickets! There is no justice.

Friday, March 26, 2021

Notes While Reading *The WEIRDest People in the World*

I write perfectly useless reviews. I know a competent review when I read one. I leave those to people competent to write them. I'm more interested to note how it is that reading a book has changed me, and then I sometimes go on to urge my (revised, and somewhat tortured) thinking on whoever might read my review. Not very polite, probably. But post Internet, who cares? Right?

Lately, Elon Musk justifies his absurd wealth by saying that he's amassing resources to spread something like the bright beacon of consciousness beyond earth. Far far beyond earth. As though he knows what's good for all of us. He clearly believes that being the richest man in the world justifies his laying claim to be the most intelligent and therefore the one who gets to decide for the rest of us.

Well, after our four years of horror under Trump, maybe some of us among the saner half of the planet will miss our easy calling out of the opposition as idiots. It was ever so much fun! The trouble isn't that they're all idiots. The trouble is that they're not. Intelligent and well-read people seem actually to believe patent absurdities. So much for the beacon of consciousness, especially if by consciousness we mean to say something like intelligence.

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the bozos who own more wealth than the rest of us combined are on the same track; that we should pay attention to them because of how much wealth they've amassed. I know people personally who've been enabled in their rudeness in the very same way!

News flash: being wealthy is no indication of intelligence. To say that it is is an insult to rocket scientists everywhere.

Now what if it's the very same money which has been determining the thought processes of that other half? It's hardly a stretch to say that it is. The self interest of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and certainly Facebook and Google (do they have selves?) and how about Hannity, can apparently generate an entire alternate reality, full of the same smug apologists (who write better reviews than I do) who rectify (that's a tiny interjection of Chinese, right there) the real world wherein I live .

Can you even imagine someone claiming the right to outsized influence based not on money, but on love? What an absurdity! And yet that very same legitimate claim would belong to Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, even Mother Theresa, if you don't mind that she was a mass murderer, the way that my renegade but super intelligent Catholic friend designates RBG. Intelligence is as over-rated as wealth is, if you ask me.

Let's focus on Christ. Joseph Henrichs does in this book. I don't think he would ever dare to claim that Christ deserves all the attention he's gotten across two millenia, but it would be difficult to find any other individual, real or concocted (the way that Trump was) who has had more influence on human life on the planet.

I say he wouldn't dare to claim that because he would be ejected from his fine position at Harvard, another moneyed source for authority (Just imagine how few corporate entities could afford a billion dollar fine for sex abuse. And Harvard has better endowment than USC!). You can't quite be a scholar and a religionist, unless you're at a divinity school. Henrichs is more interested in the accident of Christianity, and how consequential that has been for Western social evolution.

I read (present tense) this book between Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett's The Upswing, and what I might consider its sequel, a book called Mutualism, by Sara Horowitz. Those are books which implicitly assume a kind of steady state to what it means to be human, and which present a hopeful and even optimistic read of how we might improve our condition. Both are powerful books by brilliant authors.

In particular, Putnam's book brackets my life, and Horowitz's brackets my experience and my ambition. I've crossed paths with each of them in various ways across my life.

By contrast, this book ventures into understanding humanity as a species undergoing constant change, by way of cultural evolution. Surprisingly, there's even a role for genetic evolution in our recent history, since he maintains that the accidents of cultural evolution have impacted certain aspects of our physiology. Especially our brains (not really genetic change in that case), post-literacy. Our experience, our self-conception, and our ways of living and of understanding are simply not the same as they once were, and as they perhaps still are almost everywhere else. 

This evolutionary process is not subject to amelioration. It just happens. The author, Joseph Henrich, developed his thesis across an adventuresome life, driven, apparently, by intense curiosity about how other peoples live, but also, I lately find, by interest in what? Aerospace Engineering!?!

His book regards what it is that makes us in the Western traditions so unusual. (So special?) His overall thesis regards a set of accidents of history which changed humanity in ways leading up to the industrial and then the scientific revolutions. These revolutions could have occurred only among what would become WEIRD people. "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic."

I am definitely weird. I live now in a world not changed, in many ways, from the one where I grew up. But global warming then was not yet part of our vocabulary, and driving cars had not yet reached the point of saturation to turn a pleasant outing into an exercise in frustration, and sometimes in rage. But the outlines remain the same - it's the same schematic, as I lately reaffirm by criss-crossing these United States and Canada many many (many!!) times by RV.

By my read, our social schematic is in the approximate condition of a skyscraper after the shrug of the demolition charges set to take it down, but before gravity destroys its appearance of integrity. No worries, it has seemed that way to me since about the time that Reagan was elected. I'm sure we have a moment or two remaining to us.

It feels now as though we only just barely color within the lines. This is while I often feel what amounts to a desperation not to let go of the TV life (not in myself for sure - I've already lived that life) that all us white people have envisioned for ourselves. 

And then came the Huxtables. Dang! Me too, me too! We live in the era of The Spectacle. We are spectators of our very own lives. What a hoot! Really, we should demark our times as the era of the screen. Think about it. Literacy is so yesterday! Update your book, man!

One iconic memory from my own preliterate childhood was Dad tossing my silver spray-painted cardboard robot Halloween costume over the cliff and into the roil of Lake Erie at the bottom of the fossil-filled shale at the edge of our back yard. My clever costume with compartment for candy and puffs of flour exiting an inverted funnel on its head was just one piece among frequent disposals into the vast beyond.

Lake Erie's death scarred my childhood, framed to the East by a second sunset as the Bethlehem Steel Plant dumped what we called slag into the lake, and of course to the West by God's increasingly reddening sunset. Our streets were paved by slag, likely held together by PCB-containing tar. 

The rounded pebbles would catch at the runners on the sleds we dragged behind a Bethlehem Steel junior-executive's long tail-finned convertible. We called those pebbles ‘cinders.’ They looked like globs of congealed volcanic lava, as though we understood what lava was. All we knew was that it looked like what must have come from the slag pouring from the steel plant.

Then came the frenzy of one uncle piloting "flying boxcars" overhead, while his brother would head off to Vietnam. Blond and blue-eyed West Pointers both. We watched the Bell Aerosystems research hovercraft destined to despoil Vietnam pass along our beach in the camouflaging dusk. An open secret. 

Dad built a fallout shelter in our basement. Another early memory of hefting "cinder blocks" onto a plank down which they would slide for Dad to mortar into place. Preliterate me worried that the fallout would come in horizontally and that our position high on a cliff would leave us exposed. Dad explained how radiation went in a straight line to explain why we needed only a baffle and not a door. Why there was no concrete roof.

That fallout shelter later became our pantry for all its stored canned goods, and then my photographic darkroom. We all still managed to have fun, even imagining camping out on the four-decker bunks. No wonder I like to live in small spaces!

I remember with a clarity as though I'd seen the face of Jesus when I learned to write my name. It was that electrically exciting. I was using a red ballpoint pen ("atomic age" puns with ballpoint in Chinese usage) on a brown paper shopping bag.

My prosocial optimism had been wrecked by the time I hit college, obviously. A minor thesis of Henrich's book is that such optimism is essential. He calls it "positive-sum thinking" and such thinking is essential to inventiveness and the cultivation of our collective "brain." I guess positive-sum thinking is essential to cultural evolution in our WEIRD direction.

I spent much of my formative education at Yale pondering the 'why' of the industrial revolution occurring in Europe and not in China. That was after re-calibrating from engineering through physics to Chinese literature. Mine has not been a settled life.

We called this the Needham question, or at least I did. Still on my bookshelves now, despite seemingly endless moves across geography and career, I have the near complete print-set of Needham's opus. I remember how nervous I was transporting the pirated volumes back from Taiwan, as though the customs agents would open my books. I wanted to study with urbane Nathan Sivin, Needham's colleague, as it was, who sometimes paid glancing visits to our Ivy-League classical Chinese poetry club.

Well beyond answering that question, which this book certainly does, and which by my memory occupied many fine minds in those not-so-distant days, this new book presents a thesis which brings together and perhaps even concludes many many streams of thought. The thesis is vastly ambitious, and the book - The WEIRDest People in the World - provides evidence both scientific and anthropological/sociological to be convincing in the thesis' (theses? There are at least 95 of them) proof.

Some of the book's thought-streams question the inevitability of science as we practice it, and even the universality of the scientific principles we live by. Where are our choices, really? Was scientific understanding going to come in any case, if the laws revealed are Platonic/cosmic universals, or is this all some Western aberration? Something to evolve beyond, even?

Whatever the case, Joseph Henrich, the book's author, is implicitly asking his reader to step outside his own tradition, to see it as an outsider might. That is in itself a very WEIRD thing to do. It's what science does.

I'm still waiting for him to attempt an interpretation for why we seem now to be disintegrating all those institutions that we celebrate. Are we somehow becoming less "WEIRD?" American exceptionalism by ironic twist?

Surely the likes of Yale Law grad Josh Hawley prove that our collective tendency to be Wealthy Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic - the WEIRD of the title - can make no claims on our individual disposition to act a lout

My own sense of what's happening is that our WEIRDness is curdling in at least three dimensions, and more likely 95. 

The first would be our patent laws, which only just barely stopped at allowing the patenting of genes (partially thanks to a student in the first class I ever taught - claiming serendipity here, not credit!). Those laws, from their origins, enshrine the notion of the genius inventor who should be rewarded for specific innovations, often largely by being the first to create an embodiment of something that would soon be produced in any case, according to this book's thesis (and according to me). 

Patent and copyright merge in the digital age, and what we now do amounts to slow death to what Henrich calls our collective social "brain." He calls it a brain even as he debases what a brain can do on its own. I am, as you know, gentle reader, an adherent of The Spread Mind thesis, and don't credit brains as much as Henrich apparently does. My brain isn't really all that distinguished from the social brain in which it's embedded.

The second dimension would probably be our precious individualism, based as it is on the ascription of internal traits as that which constitutes our very specific individual personality. I am happy to read him debunking all the personality type tests, on which I am nothing but a chameleon (matching whatever happens to be my current ever-shifting occupation), and sarcastically wishing us individuals "good luck" in finding our authentic self. You go, man!

At about the time that we are celebrating gender transitions, the borders that we cross may all be the same borders. Patent law and practice (now in the digital age) no longer serves the people as patent portfolios - traded on the open market - make a perfect proxy for predatory size of firm (they're all predatory, by definition as we practice so-called capitalism).

The third would have to be religion, which is credited in this book (the Christian tradition through the Catholic Church, and later and more locally importantly, through the various iterations of Protestantism) as the inventor [sick] of WEIRD. 

But by now, our religions have returned to primitive form in stark opposition to what is meant by WEIRD in this book. As with patents, the reading of any book as providing just one literal Way can only be counterproductive to enlightenment. However enlightenment might be defined, it certainly has nothing to do with the belief structure of most evangelical sects, credited though they might be with the stimulation of mass literacy at their Lutheran origins. 

Now I have to ask; what would happen if instead of stepping outside our collective mind, we embrace it more tightly? What if we jump right back into the scientific soup and ask such really important questions as 'why has love meant so much cosmically?' That would be to separate knowledge of what we still call "supernatural" phenomena from received authority structures, though to re-incorporate them into what we call "reality." That should, after all, be the final maneuver in the legacy of WEIRD. No one has the right to tell me that God is a delusion!

I mean simply that we allow subjectivity back in to science, in a very careful way. By any meaning, evolution - cultural or genetic - is built on a series of accidents. Joseph Henrich implicitly denies meaning to the Christian religions. They are, rather, the accidental form which the universalising of ancestral objects of worship (was that inevitable?) took. 

But what if the core of Christian belief is actually, even scientifically, quite true? You know, God is love, and drop the Name already! I'm big on name-dropping! What else do the accidents of evolution - cultural or genetic - add up to? We WEIRD people are all about romantic love, especially as we see ourselves on-screen, though we may be known by our science and our industry. Could love be a cosmic force?

Hell, many of us who consider ourselves sane call all the religious people loonies, even while we - some of us - express certainty that we will someday encounter life elsewhere in the cosmos. Which is to deny that we already have, and that it has nothing to do with UFOs.

If I were religious, I would consider the store of energy contained in fossil fuels to be a gift from God. In those same terms, I would consider humanity as a whole to have sinned by our squandering of that gifted oil to no apparent end beyond, well, the end as caused by our despoiling of the only home we can ever have. Short of breaking light-speed barriers, as though that might be done within the life-span of ours or any other culture. Who are the loonies in this equation?

And so what has technology done to us? Has it made economics back into a zero-sum game again? As in, why do many of us feel that Google and Facebook are stealing our wealth rather than to expand the realm for innovation? Theirs would seem to be a sharing infrastructure which isn't sharing when it comes to their monopoly access and now control of what it is that we might share. They are justified only if primacy of genius remains a root value. And only if genius is always a good and not something that 'stable-genius' Trump or even Hitler bequeathed to our planet (damned Godwin!).

And anyhow it isn't at all clear that whatever we do on our smartphones is on a continuum with the reading habits which once changed the world. We seem only to amplify what we already think that we know. And we are quite literally drowning in words that have almost an urgency about grabbing and keeping our attention. This is no longer the shared "brain" that Henrich says that we in the West lucked into. This is reversion to a kind of beehive mind, where the wealthy are the queens.

Indeed I suspect that most readers will prefer the executive summary of this book, which can be had by way of numerous reviews and introductions in the MSM. The arguments presented here quickly become tedious for those not steeped already in the torture chambers of statistical reasoning applied to sociology and psychology (and to politics, of course). Games devised to mimic actual human behavior, and then broad (broad!) conclusions drawn.

In the big picture, we no longer seem to believe in human progress. It would be hard to know if this is because of the wreckage caused by our technologies as we deploy them, or simply that they feel so disruptive of religious comfort words. I would say that, more likely, it has to do with our economic structures and the cynicism those build as the accelerations of technology in the realm of primacy rewards and gold-shaving wealth-building leaves most of us feeling plainly swindled. 

Where is the love? 

He teases us that maybe we’re too disposed to particles in physics by analytical reductionism, and personality traits same. But there remains something of the rah rah we're Western we’re the lucky ones. The author runs a lab, and has tenure at Harvard with the ridiculously high citation "score" of 84 or something.

I sweated more when I brought banned books with me into China than I did returning with pirated books, but still . . . That was after I thought I'd been marked for very publicly sponsoring a commemorative event a year after the massacres in and around Tiananmen square, June 4, 1989. China's customs officers were no more literate than ours.

Yes, it is our civic duty to sneak around paywalls every chance we get, and to steal books from wherever we can find them, and especially to sneak them across borders. It is our civic duty to turn our backs on every sort of social media. We otherwise will have squandered all that we have been granted in celebration of our public emotions. 

Of course this is me talking, spinning off my read of Henrich's fine book. He is too smart to stray into much speculation about how parochial our abstract reasoning may have become. 

He mocks our cataloguing of [subatomic] particles ever so mildly, right along with our search for some authentic self (built of personality traits as measured by psychologists enamored of type testing). He nods to our current political dysfunction, and by implication the crumbing of the Big D in the WEIRD of his title, which would be (would have been?) democracy with a little D.

As are most of us, Heinrich is embedded in the world he might be criticizing. He knows, as I don't, how to stick to his topic. His bibliography, in which I recognize only a few names, makes a stretch beyond even what Steven Owen has read. But that's the academic scientific game. I, too, have been amazed at the length and scope of my own list of citations when I have been an academic writing academic papers. That's the game. 

It's not the game of life, though. Academic thinking rectifies our shared belief structures until the economic activities in the actual game of life overwhelm shared belief structures, which is to say that trust is overwhelmed and undermined, and then all the academics are only howling in the idiot winds.

Along comes a paradigm shift, suggests Thomas Kuhn, and scientific understanding steps up its game, just as it did to bring along the A-bomb. Was that a gift of God? We've been stalled in the overall paradigms of the Standard Model of Particle Physics now for as long as I can remember. Well, long only given the acceleration of change, which has become our main shared belief.

Plus ca change!  

Evolution is driven by love, or what's a meta for? All of those accidents of evolution end up with a creature capable of love, and now we fully intend to throw that all away in favor of intelligence as our defining feature, even while we hang on to such idiotic ideas as that we can improve things on and for the planet and our fellow man by taking control of accident. Think about it.

As I have and will doubtless continue to detail right here in this web-space, the very particles described in the standard model of physics dispose themselves not only by describable and measurable forces, but also in conceptual ways where the only force is emotive. Wanting is not a physical process.

Anyhow, read this incredibly important book with an open mind. I hope you'll be as blown away as I have been.

Friday, March 12, 2021

Is There Time Enough?

I drank my third of, was it?, $150 of fine wine. I drank it together with friends and really bad Chinese food. As usual, I didn't sleep but this time awakened to piss that smelled as bad as that old cat piss smell that I discovered in the bathroom in my new apartment when I put a heater in that corner. What did I eat? What did I drink?

I am disturbed this morning that the precisely described repair kit for the perfectly balanced (and therefore rare and irreplaceable) moka pot which I depend on for my morning coffee each day arrived other than as described. The pot had cost less than the repair kit. The repair kit was precisely what I needed and wanted, but it was too big. Damn!

The Subaru dealer that I'd already decided to like twice now, put in the headlight bulb wrong twice. I paid the price of nearly a bottle of the fine wine my rich friend bought just to avoid the tortuous process of fitting in a new bulb myself. Wrong means no light, but I'm not about to take it back there again after two strikes. And I still doubt that I could ever spend over $50 on any bottle of wine.

I wander inside the discount houses sometimes looking for things not there which are only available on Amazon. Our retail infrastructure is a shambles and the number of boarded up restaurants and bars is distressing. 

Perhaps my malaise is the result of my recent vaccination, for which I feel so lucky. Are things looking up? It cost me nothing, so far as I can tell.

I have demurred for my entire life in making firm commitments to anything in particular, which is surely the greatest sin that there is. Maybe not so bad as the sin of the Republicans, committed as they are to nihilistic nobodaddy, but I am definitely nearing my end before I've even started.

What good has economiseriing ever done me? I should have committed and I should be living the good life.

But at least I know how to fix the system. If someone in authority makes claims about things that they are no authority on, then they should be ipso facto disqualified from office. Done. Fixed. That's all it would take. It's how we operate in all realms except the political and the religious. Done and done.

These thoughts are provoked by random contact with a former colleague and near friend who filled his life with commitment, even to the extent of reading his poetry at St. Marks in the Bowery, where I once had the bizarre chance to witness Patti Smith recite a tone poem in cowboy boots spray painted silver before anyone did such things. No brag, just fact.

My colleague put me in mind of our mutual teacher Stephen Owen, who is at least the most brilliant mind that I have ever encountered. His life's work now has built to the extent of rational impossibility. As in life could never be long enough to be that productive. The trick is to define and limit your scope, but he sure did choose a large scope.

I am in awe, as I ever have been, and I am afraid for his life as he grows older. (Because I want his recognition, oh ambiguous English?) So I gather together what few of his incredibly expensive, because, I suppose, so seldom read, books from my collection. One newly purchased for the cost of a Subaru headlight replacement, seriously! One borrowed from my fine wine affording friend, several from my own shelves which have also gained in value. Can I read them now? Have they aged well? Have I?

I would, of course, like to think that I have deferred my life's work for all the right reasons. My project is, after all, so huge that I knew all along that I could not allow myself to be sidetracked along ways that led to a different end. But now I find mind's degeneration, if not from drink, then surely from age. Frommage, wine, minds, all age differently depending on what goes in. I have some yoghurt fermenting. Bread rising. I fart a lot.

(My favorite memory of any Chinese lit class was one sidetracked on the 'pneumatic theory of Chinese poetics')

Now indulging a non-nomadic life, I blow up like my bread in the oven. It's gross.

I believe that Stephen Owen and I share a pedigree of sorts. His father, as I recall, was a professor of physics at Johns Hopkins. Owen was better briefed on the life of the mind. He had a running start.

I had only my various girlfriends' parents and a towering uncle in his field of electrical engineering as example. So my own background is more compressed. I wanted to study physics, but discovered early on that to squeeze out emotion from the cosmos for the sake of objectivity could only be a destructive project. A viral load of subatomic grey-goo, ultimately signifying nothing.

So, of course, I went over to Chinese poetics, which among other things is at least as concerned about the emotive valence of cosmos as physics is professionally disinterested.

So what is is that I have always intended to do with my life, be it ever so brief? 

Why start a new religion, of course. What else could be worthy of so many promising ways forgone? Byways, highways, pathways I might have taken. I have felt myself a lazy lout. And yet. 

I do continue to fill in so much of the ignorance of my long departed youth when I might very well have blown it all for the sake of a startup if startups had been a thing. Then my life could have been as meaningless as Zuck's life is. No, worse. As destructive. I have only ever destroyed small matters. I have been indiscreet, is all. Why consign oneself to meaninglessness? For the sake of money? Why dost thou forsake me, money, honey?

But it was not fear so much as ambition which has held me back. Go big or stay home, as we say here in my little home in Buffalo roam to which I have returned in splendid defeat. Dreaming of grandchildren. I still live off my whiteness. Duh, doughboy.

The cosmos has always been invested with emotion. That's what we mean by "God" in our fumbling English. In China they still have actual poetics which do religion one better at least. Do they? Now they have a bigger navy. Ahoy!

God is, of course, more an author than a creator, which would have to mean that He Himself was authored somehow else, and anon. There are no spaceships nor time travel to take us there. What we may discover by our physics is just about that parochial. Limited but to this small corner of cosmic all.

Asking whether there remains world enough and time for myself is identical to asking it for the planet. Looking at those store shelves and at the highways and at the mayhem in our capitals makes it clear that we are already too late. The memes have engulfed the mind. 

We are collectively far later than I am with at least as much time in my fullness now as I had before I thought I knew something at my beginnings. By the age of 27 or 28. My younger daughter just turned thirty. How may I honor her?

God is not, of course, engendered and to make God so - to make God a "him" or a "her" is abomination full stop. Authored authorial autonomous author? Nobodaddy by any other Name.

Let’s be real. I don’t have time or life enough even to give thoughtful reads to Stephen Owen’s published production. I made that bed decades ago. But I shall try. I'm very trying, Ouch.

And now my apartment is furnished by the bits and pieces of my life as though I planned it that way across the years. Saving this and discarding that. The things I miss disturb me less than that infernal headlight or the cost of another book I might well not read. 

So, onward, then, onward. As a different former colleague (we were both already old) said when we both were gawking at a blond driving a red corvette, “ you ain’t dead yet!”

(I am no more politically incorrect than Owen is; he married a much younger woman, or so my Chinese informant tells me. It was big news in China.)

Did I say start a religion? Bah! We already have a good one in Christ. Too bad that in this world overrun by destroyers, nano and mega, ready to be deployed in an instant and to replicate faster than even a Trump meme, we have destroyed Christ in the Name of Christ.

I mean aren't you as amazed that I am that the Christians have become the fascist racist haters? Isn't that a bit of a stretch?

The message is simple. Honor the least of us. Clawing your way to the top shall destroy your eternity. He couldn't possibly remember it, but I was pulled aside once after class by Stephen Owen back when we weren't so far apart in age (ha!) if already in stature. I had been indiscreet, I guess, in providing a revision to his read of a poem. I had good evidence. He needed to tell me that 'it would never happen again.' 

Of course I doubted very much that it would, nor certainly could, ever happen again. And I am certain that he didn't mean it as a threat. A useful observation for my benefit, to keep me humble. I suppose that's what Andrew Cuomo meant when he complimented those young women. So he thought, when really he simply couldn't help himself. The sin he committed and can't apologize for was to treat colleagues as something other than colleagues because they were nubile women. String him up!

No, Christ has been overrun by viral memes which turn him into a deadly avatar for hate. While we celebrate the viral startup upstarts still, as though they ever had merit.

You know, after my recent re-read of Thomas F. Torrance' Space, Time and Incarnation, I have become Christian again. I always knew I would. I've kept a life-long bet with God that involved a lot of swearing and challenging and still more outright denial. 

I have made a cursory study of physics and Chinese poetics and sociology and plenty more. I have repaired things better than my betters, and in the end all the rational pursuit amnog knowers in the known cosmos works in denial of Christ's basic message of love. More basic even than subatomic, so-called, particles.

The Christians are the worst. They deny Him in His Name. My Christ is nothing if not ironic. You cannot know me by your ways. You cannot find me by your rocketry. You can only destroy yourself along the way. Otherworldy and everpresent all the same is  life elsewhere.

Other life in the cosmos is always present. 

So yeah, I watched the final installment of the HBO series called "Succession" last night. Brilliant! The old man cons his son into being as ruthless as he was. The son destroys the father and thereby ensures his empire's persistence beyond even his own death. I'd thought it might be allusive of, say, Rupert Murdoch, or the Bush Dynasty. But no, it's about papal lineage or Falwells or Robertses or any other power mongering structures. Supreme court injustices.

No wait! There's the Oprah interview. God save the Queen bee

Be I ever so humble, it would never have been enough. And yet I persist, in all humility, as though I had something to say. How rude!


Saturday, March 6, 2021

Review: Space, Time and Incarnation

Space, Time and IncarnationSpace, Time and Incarnation by Thomas F. Torrance
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Still dancing around my exquisitely difficult read of William Gaddis' The Recognitions (my most recent detour was William Gass' who wrote the introduction, and wrote Middle C, a much more approachable book) I somehow had the intuition to pull this book off my shelves and (try to) read it again. What a surprise and a shock that it does provide much of the vocabulary that I had been lacking in my read of Gaddis!

I was given the book by the minister of the church I grew up in, and around the corner from which I now live. It's also possible that it was lent to me and I failed to give it back. It was a long time ago. Now I recognize some origin, perhaps, for much of my own thinking. I also recognize that there are several Michael Polanyi books now missing from my ever shifting and moving and growing and reducing personal lending library. Those would have been helpful as well.

I must say that just because Torrance is so much more erudite than I could ever be doesn't quite mean that I shall follow him into the Christian faith. I do believe that this may remain the best Christian apologia that I have ever and likely shall ever read. It is truly a beautiful book, packing unwieldy knowledge into the size of a pamphlet. If it doesn't quite make a believer out of me, it most certainly pulls the rug out from under disbelief. (I don't feel quite compelled to stipulate belief in what, though I won't take the cop-out of "spirituality.")

Together with atheist Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, perversely enough, this book nudges me away from atheism. In Dawkins' case, because he opens up a view of life which is as breathtaking in the realm of biology as Einstein's was in the realm of physics. Indeed Torrance was calling for just such a shift for Biology, crediting Polanyi with the insight. (I hadn't known, or remembered, that Polanyi and Turing were friends. Too bad we've (I've) mostly lost the one who should have been the more influential).

Our current state of philosophical (and theological, for that matter) understanding remains in the thrall of technology; which is to say that we are more amazed by the potential of our own creations (religion being one of those creations) than we are by God's.

Now Torrance uses the term 'creation' in relation to God as if there were nothing problematical about that usage. But he does so in a truly glorious way, not by rehearsing the miracle of ex nihilo but by focusing on the impingement of the divine, by way of Christ's incarnation, on the "rational" (knowable) world in which we exist. We exist in a world (not the world) created by God.

I think he should have moved beyond any need for the term creation, since God. as he writes about Him, exists outside of our rational cosmos, which means outside of time and space. No beginnings, no ends. By Christ, we become not creator of our own world, but rather "transformer" in the more worldly usage that we should stick to. Not owner. Not mere life-form. But rather transformative agent. In Torrance's own usage, to say that God created the world rather delimits God, just as does saying that God is the world.

But we need beginnings and endings. Our minds are narrative creators; they depend on narrative meaning to bind the conceptual with the perceptual in some meaningful fashion. Torrance is pretty convincing that there can be no meaning without actual apprehension of something beyond our rational cosmos. Christ, in history, provides that. He invokes Gödel's incompleteness in his argument.

There is far too much specious editorialising, not drawing on someone like Torrance, as it should, which surrounds - shall always surround - the Christian religion for me to become an adherent. But I must say that in this age where we waffle about the importance of seeking for 'other' intelligent life in the cosmos, Torrance does make it clear that we're missing the obvious. The obvious being God, of course.

The vast reaches of space that we catalog may, in fact, be restricted only to our particular cosmos. If God does exist, then there is no reason that all worlds must be the same kind of rational that this one is. The Einsteinian barrier of time and distance is still weaker than the likelihood that 'cosmos' incorporates more than our small version of rationality. Without God, we may indeed be consigned to emptiness.

Somehow I am comforted by that insight. Without question, I find Torrance to be a more compelling philosopher than many I've read, and I find his read of science to be quite reliable as well. What he sets out to do, and to my read succeeds with, is to diminish to the point of non-existence any incongruence between the truths of science and those of theology, as well as to establish that each requires the other. Theology (or whatever broader term might be fitted here) must be part of science, as well as vice versa, perhaps.

So, while I may quibble with terms like 'God' and 'creation,' I can't quibble with his main argument: that we can never know everything about our own rational cosmos, and that there is something beyond it which belongs in the category of everything that we humans must hold dear. Call it God, call it universal love, call it a life force, there is indeed no doubt that it impinges on the cosmos that we increasingly apprehend by human science.

Now, if I can only manage to read William Gaddis on fakery and authenticity. If only I can find it amusing. Well, I will certainly find it amusing - I already have. Perhaps I'll find it literary. I don't expect it to be a religious experience. Reading Dawkins and Torrance have each been religious experiences for me, in the vulgar usage of that term.

View all my reviews

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Heat and Light and Permanence

Permanence. Not here, not now. Not in our future, unless.

We treat this virus as though it were the deviation. We are the deviation, and the virus belongs to the better part of what has kept our personal planet alive for so long.

I continue to be astonished by my own ignorance in my own youth. I am embarrassed by my successes, built as they were on such ignorance. This is even while I feel that crushing tingle crash inside when I encounter prodigies that I left behind. They remind me of all that I have not become. Belying any modesty I might put on.

I open the curtains in my under-heated apartment, watching the ice melt on the windows to confirm that I'm letting out the heat. I want the light more, for the moment, though the light is worthless for keeping me warm. Still, they are the same substance, which is no substance at all. LED lights shift the balance. Direct solar heat is nice, when it doesn't burn. A matter of what our eyes care about in relation to our larger bodies. Show me the way.

I try to update my Microsoft subscription, but things don't seem to be working. I open a chat with an apparently human chatbot, but when he wants me to send the code "he" sends to my inbox, I tell him that I feel skeezy about that (or about him). He apologizes. 

I know it has something to do with moving back away from dot edu and into the general population. The language for that is backwards. "You are upgrading from better to worse." I want to know what the differences are. "He" can't know without impersonating me by way of my account. He wants permission, but needs to know I'm the me who's giving it.

Really, I want to know if he's a human or a bot, and I think it's the evident fact that he's human which bothers me. Bot codes should remain private. But the rules are unclear. We don't quite trust one another, despite the layers of improbability. He needs to be sure I'm me, and I need to be sure he's only an agent and not out for himself. My goal is to spend money, and I don't want him to spend it on my behalf. It's not the same as to stand before a cash register. Wait, are there such things anymore? Are you sure?

We won't get this right in my lifetime or in my kids' kids' lifetimes, but we should at least set a direction. The exquisitely unreadable William Gaddis puts this into the mouth (I think) of one of his characters: "What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology." [ The Recognitions, p 96]

Right, that should make me feel better, well, except that I have left no art behind. In my wake. Nothing I write here is publishable - good enough to be made public. This is but perpetual practice for my legacy. Something to leave behind. I am become a shambles of apology. Even though all I ever do is practice. Never a production.

That's the difference between an artist and a selfish glutton living off their personal gift. I have a beautiful mind, in approximate terms. As might a scientist, I write for posterity, and not for my here and my now. I am certainly no artist. Sure, I want some living, some recognition, don't we all? But not for what must be given freely as a gift. I wouldn't charge you money for saving your life.

And yet we do charge money to save lives, which means that we withhold our services, or submit them to some greater organization. I can't even imagine contributing to Wikipedia. I dread to be the one to see an accident first-hand. How would I know what to do? I remain shaky in every aspect of what I know for sure.

We need balance in our lives. If going to Yale were a public burden rather than a path to private riches, I wouldn't have hated the place so much. Merit is not something that money alone should decide. Merit should be worthless without some return to the public good. And yet we reward the prodigies. There is no art in making money.

Look how long it's taken us to get digital interfaces to be as intuitive as the old dials. I can finally run a microwave (provide that there's a crib sheet behind the door), my oven, not quite yet the thermostat, without a manual! My iPhone? Does a manual even exist? Not if nobody would read it. Is this but our individual recalcitrance, or do we grow together, in step, the interfaces with those who would better profit from us? Why do we submit?

(Frankly, I write here because no-one will read my well-crafted letters. I'm not saying that what I write here is well-crafted. I'd need an audience for that to happen, you know, like the one I used to have writing letters. Fuck digital! It has destroyed the art of the letter.)

We remain amazed at how fast digital technology has transformed our lives, and so, perhaps we remain blind to the ways that increasing profit-driven obfuscation about connections between surfaces and what goes on inside are related to trust in any of our transactions. 

The same is true of human personality that is true of gaming against our money. Distance between motive and face. How can there be trust when love is a transaction? Crusty curmudgeon, I know. Sorry.

But we'll never get anywhere if that is where we start. So let's start from the outer limits. Why the fuck not??

We shall not make physical contact with other mindful life. Not in our lifetimes and to my satisfaction, not ever. The farther away we scan, the farther into the past we see. Presence is hyper local. But for God, of course, with which we've lost contact now that we worship according to patriarchal plan alone. The only alternative on offer is disbelief. In anything beyond the shambles of the me the now the temporary temporal.

I live alone. Who would trust me with their life, and whom would I trust with mine? I live nearby my kids and they keep me going, as I do them, though I'm at the pivot between good advice and domination. Tentative. I want only to be helpful. I wish I had more money. They no longer take my advice. Damned! Except that I wouldn't take my advice either anymore. It's crusty.

So let's go as far as we can go here on planet earth. First off, we need to back off our religious belief in capitalism. Right, as though just saying so can make a difference.

A wise and highly placed and still more highly educated banker from outside the U.S. once explained to me - on the level of Econ. 101 - that when demand or supply are inelastic, then private ownership makes no sense. (I'm probably wrong in the details with my restatement of what he told me.) This is, of course, on par with religion making no sense once God becomes personal. You can't privatize the air we breathe or the water we drink, and you can't privatize God. 

We're moving in the wrong direction in nearly every dimension.

Here in the U.S., we believe that even such things as power utilities and healthcare and education can and should be privatized on some specious argument for efficiency. We think that personal interconnections should be privatized, and so our mail system and our local newspapers go bankrupt. For so long as we continue to believe that this is the proper way to proceed, democracy will be in jeopardy. Democracy thrives only when there are public spaces.

Public spaces are where it is safe to differ. Talk to someone and you probably won't hate them. In the comments section, you probably will. We who hate Trump and by proxy Trumpsters are in denial about how manipulated our own hate is. We take the click-bait as well as anyone. Yeah yeah yeah, please tell me again what I already know for certain.

I have a fine reproduction of Chairman Mao's calligraphy hanging on my wall. "Study Marxist Leninism." I thoughtlessly left it for my Zoom backdrop because of where I have to sit to get a good cellular signal. A well-off friend asked what it was. "Bad message, good art" said one, when I explained. "Irony" said I, thinking of the irony between the message and the patrician calligraphy, but also of the irony with which Mao is now regarded inside China. Except, of course, that China knows not irony.

We're all clear about what's wrong with Trump, and I thought we were clear about what's wrong with Republicans these days, but maybe not. "Trump and Mao have a lot in common." "Thats scary," "Yep."

Ideology tries to pin down where the boundaries are. Our compass needs to point beyond ideology. Boundaries are meaningless except on a map, and when defined by power.

We will not get very far in our present. We might not even survive our present. And we surely won't if we lack a compass. This is not only we as a people. Our direction is putting our very now in jeopardy; the planet is on a crash course. And we feel helpless about it. The compass points could flip. The ocean currents could turn off the planetary climate control. We seem to be going sterile, even as we celebrate the late discovery that gender is a social construct. Duh. It's also an economic vector. 

Reproduction without license is illegal in every other realm for artistic production. 

So yes, we have to get the money out of politics, and out of love. We have to shut down K-Street, by which I mean big-money lobbying. We have to universalize voter registration and access to the polls. These are the trivia. But beyond that we have to leave go of capitalism as religion. 

I don't think that anyone would argue that some kind of market economy works better than almost anything else. Even for food production, when starvation is not at issue, and when food safety and worker wages have been regulated. Even for housing, when there are good building codes and some limits on predatory holdings. 

Fact is we really don't wish to survive beyond our present. We don't care about more than me and more than now. Judge us by our actions.

Any way forward is about balance. Between heat and light and between public and private. Sure, our national boundaries will eventually have to go away, but not tomorrow. Of course we can't be as populous and as mobile as we are for much longer. The balance between local and global is built on irony.

Most importantly, we can't keep allowing meaning to be a private matter. Latching onto ideology is too easily up for auction; especially when the ideology is created and motivated only by and for money. And behind any political ideology is someone's grab for power. Stalin pointed to Marx in just the same way that Mao did. Marx was a scientist, and nobody's apologist.

Making cars a part of our transportation infrastructure by way of Shared Autonomous Vehicles would be a bridge too far, unless those shared vehicles are multi-occupant and the occupants are strangers. I'm speaking for the planet here. No matter how we get our energy, the earth can't afford us to remain as private as we'd like. The COVID message is as mixed as it gets.

Imagine this: Instead of search based on keyterm auctions (where Google now steers you away from "natural language" after implicitly steering your toward it) we move to search as a public utility, like the roads are for now. The way that Wikipedia works. What if idea-domains were not linguistically relative, and what if they were reliable such that everything on the web were reliably available there and only there in the properly defined locus for some "idea" or other, in the proper and easily searchable locus, to whatever arbitrary degree of precision?

First off, you would know what not to look for because it doesn't exist unless you wish to create it yourself. That would be a massive time-saver as you look to expand your knowledge.

Second off, real-estate for advertising would be massively valuable in such identified domains. What if such real estate were in the public domain? Nice diversion for your taxes, right? 

Your behavior in search would not have to be saved or catalogued or parsed to sell to advertisers. We will have reclaimed public spaces, and destroyed surveillance capital. This type of search is trivial compared to whatever it is that Google is doing with its monopoly scale eigenvalues. The only reason that no-one's doing it is that there isn't any money in it.

Third off, Facebook's monetization model would be simultaneously undermined, and revenue from personal correspondence could be returned to the postal system, where it belongs. We all want to connect, but not at the cost of civil public discourse. We don't need quasi public smug ideological pronouncements among our friend connections so that we might feel the obligation to cheer them along.

If we're going to move ahead and if we're even going to survive, we need the return of some sort of civility in all the public spaces. Decorum on airplanes used to be implicit. Now that we scan and screen, passengers seem to feel it's OK to act like a lout, just like politicians do.

Yes, we are talking about the relation between public and private, which is likely identical to the relation between heat and light. It's a balance. There are no rules. 

Our airspace, the climate, our mineral wealth, none of this can be consigned to private interests as it now is, if we are to survive. Meaning and epistemology cannot be private domains, if the planet is to survive.

This will all take time, now that we've allowed a massive infrastructure for advertising healthcare, the law, and even education to pollute our public spaces. Livings will have to be rejiggered. None of that can be done without a true north. Rigid political ideologies can only prevent us from heading in the right direction. Science makes a good start. Religion needs to get out of the gutter. 

But we can do it if we try.

I'm exhausted. I got my first vaccine yesterday and since I've already been sick with COVID I should have more confidence to go out in public now. But what shall I do? Which way shall I go? What sort of contact is to be made that I haven't made already, and that I can't do from home and alone?

Surely in the vast cosmos, my life is as insignificant as is the life of my personal planet. No, that's a phrase too far. Significance is not the same as permanence. Significance is not a matter of scale. It relates as much to death as it does to life. Can't have one without the other.

All heat no light gets us nowhere. Lighten up!