There is No Merit to Merit

Perhaps like many people, I am sick and tired of explaining to people why their invidious observations of particular black people justifies their implicit racism. I believe that this kind of behavior is the purest instance of what is now popularly called confirmation bias. 

The trouble is that it's very hard to find a way to penetrate the idiocy. Racists are stuck and unmovable, especially when they have no actual personal interaction with those they consider congenitally inferior. Sometimes it's still true even when they do. 

When I was growing up, and sometimes even still, I was thought to be extremely intelligent. Observations about my intelligence were often followed by predictions about how wealthy I would become. Now I was a shy kid who truly hated it when some friend of my parents would compliment me (or so they thought they were doing). Why just the other day I got angry to the point of shaking when friends of mine, both immune to anti-racist arguments, wondered aloud and to me why I wasn't wealthy. 

I understand money as a kind of virus which infects the soul, and I no more want money than I want recognition, which just makes me weird, I guess. Well, sure I would like to have lots of money, but I'm not about to waste my time working for it. And I would like sufficient recognition to be able to join in to wider intelligent conversations. But as with wealth, it's not worth, apparently, twisting my thought to be recognized in some disciplinary slice of academia by virtue of an advanced degree. I'm well aware that my fundamental whiteness will still and always provide for me in any emergency. And there is finally no erasing my own fundamental racism. So there! I am a scoundrel and a cheat. No wonder I have no wealth to speak of. Oh!

We all know that some people are more intelligent than others in any given realm. The trouble is that we also believe that there is something like disembodied "merit" to the extent that some people are better or more deserving than others in some general sense. 

But the term better, when applied to people, is generally understood to have a moral dimension. Our usage for terms like "merit" tends in a neutral abstracted dimension. We would otherwise not tolerate the excessive wealth of the one-percenters. We would see such wealth plainly as a kind of mark of evil. An absence of fellow feeling. Ebenezer Scrooge hoarding. A desire for recognition which is pathological and not healthy. Kind of like getting a degree from Trump University (was there ever really such a place?)

Without any grounding in the dismal science of economics, I make the observation that each time the economy, stupid, crashes, there is a kind of ratchet effect which pumps yet more wealth to the top. Generally by way of the central bank refundingt the losses at the top to keep this ship of state afloat. Inflation, for instance, is clearly of service to that same process. And there is, as yet, no relief valve for the pressure of all our money concentrating at the top. I think that's because our treatment of money as a neutral politics-free entity makes it so. If it were water, we would worry about the bursting. Water is more political than money. Water is life, or so say many of the palliative Black Lives Matter signs. Money is merit.

Once upon a time we freed the banks from having to own the assets they were lending. The savings and loans which made for a Wonderful Life were crushed. The Cajas in Spain lost their cajones. The world was washed in American Warbucks. I lived through this at the side of my board of trustees worth well north of a billion actual dollars when a billion was a lot of fucking money. They sat angry on bank boards, some of them, as their banks went under.

My good and fine informant Adam Tooze makes the bland observation that this particular round of inflation is not so much marked by wage/price spiraling as it is by an historically unprecedented expansion of corporate profits. They need those profits to fund the yachts of their C-grade leaders. The private jumbo-jet flying yachts too. 

In a world where the media's job is to keep the economy pumping, there is now a general plague of confirmation bias. That's what got us blimpo Donald Trump and his leveraged jumbo jet. He must have merit, else how would he have gotten so high? He rides high on confirming the confirmation bias of people who know in their bones that they are being lied to and pandered to by the MSM which always hides the real story about wealth. Just like Elizabeth Warren is capitalist to her bones, I also know that I am being lied to.

The real story about wealth as we treat it is that wealth is melting down the planet in just the way that Nazis rendered Jews. Adam Tooze is also the informant of a young professor from Yale at Georgetown who tries to put the politics back in money so that we can do something about our apparently crashing democracy. Getting money out of politics amounts to the same thing as putting politics back in to money. So says young Stefan Eich.

Now it is absolutely true that I did serve as the headmaster of a school for gifted kids whose antics would make even Kurt Vonnegut cringe. I was about Eich's age. (I can't, for the life of me, remember which of Vonnegut's novels concerned such a school in Ilium, which is a realm I've crisscrossed more than he did in his life.) 

I chafed against our use of IQ testing for admissions and thereby alienated many in the community. I did think that such testing could be useful to pluck otherwise invisible, let's say, black kids from a crowd. But it wasn't really such a great way to find those kids who might thrive in our quirky school. Kids who were curious and irreverent and who required no-bullshit smart teachers who treated them as immature equals. Often, they were kids who didn't do well in school. The rewards there didn't work for them, and maybe school felt like prison as it did to me. I did think and still do think that all schools should work the way that mine did.

I also think that for a kid to believe that he has special merit can only be destructive.

Our administration consisted basically of me, the lowest paid and likely most overworked independent school head in all of New York. I had hardly anyone to whom to delegate almost anything. And yet I loved that job far more than Elon could possibly love his, if he even has a job. I guess if Trump had a job then Elon has a job. Fuck them both.

Schools have become places which limit what kids can learn, often with the excuse that they have to be protected from foul matters. That's even as they live in communities where foulness is on display everywhere and all the time, and where school is no longer even a safe place to leave your kids for the day. I mean, if you're going to teach kids how to handle guns, shouldn't you also teach them Marx? We did.

Along with reading (the good stuff) and writing (I learned to read and write myself only after getting my degree, though it would be hard to press my case in this forum, staying half a step ahead of my students as teachers do) and certainly disembodied and abstracted 'rithmetic. It was a damned good school whose grads identify with it more than they do with their universities. 

I only wish I could feel at home in the alumni gatherings. But I'm a public-school kid who therefore hated Yale from where I keep up with almost no-one. Ditto them with me.

So, the only thing that the Left and Right will ever agree on is that we shall perpetually live in the best of times and in the worst of times. I count the awful stuff and strain toward a progressive future, in an almost reciprocal way to how right-wingers strain to keep the good stuff from slipping away. 

Life sucks and then you die. Or alternatively, when you gamify it, life is a lot of fun and then you Peter out and off the field of play. To either extreme you must deny that there is anything cosmic to life, and especially to your life. But there is. So there!

Do The Right Thing With Digital

Let's think of it this way: we can never know ourselves as well as those who love us know us. There are certain kinds of self-knowledge that we really must resist if we are going to maintain our face to the world. The self requires a little varnishing. That's why ad hominem arguments should be expunged from our protestations. There is no better way to hit a brick wall, for the purposes of changing a mind.

I suppose that's why novelists often start with variations on their own lives. Sure I know that the reason I despise FaceBook, apart from its obvious political and organizational guilt, is that I've never felt comfortable on any social scene. People often assume I'm arrogant, perhaps just because I won't join in. As a small child, I would hide to nurse some small hurt, or perhaps just because that's how I felt comfortable. It would take a while before anyone was worried, and still I didn't want to be found out. I'm sure there's medical literature about such behaviors, but I'm not sure that I want to see it.

I'm one of those people about whom glancing acquaintances often say, in a nice way, that I'm trying to find myself. I'm more and more petulant with that. No, thank you, I found myself a long long time ago and now I have work to do. Frankly the whole notion of "finding oneself" has always struck me as a loser from the get go. What could it possibly mean? No wonder the sixties were co-opted by commerce.

I am quite certain that having myriad images, moving and still, and other forms of recording, sound or writing, will almost never allow anyone to know a person better than their friends do, even while you still might know that person better than they do themselves. Sure, it has changed me to see myself on TV, but it hasn't helped me to know myself. I just cringe and look away. Sometimes fascinated as by a train wreck.

Just imagine how unlikely Trump has ever been to know himself, and then just imagine him changing his mind. Why would he? As far as he can tell from his reflection (something he apparently never does) he's on top of the world, and can gather a crowd to his pleasing at any time, even as he warns others who know themselves better never to gather for any other reason. An edited and curated stint on reality TV must really mess with a person's self-image.

I've been trying my whole life to make sense of digital. Now it feels critical. And I still have no way to talk about the dangers of the digital revolution swamping us now. Most people blithely assume that it just another step in the long path of "progress." People seem to believe that, ultimately, this progress is what being alive and human is all about. 

The thing is we don't often agree about progress to what. I would call it progress if we were to preserve those high arts once reserved for the wealthy nobility, but open the doors to the masses of producers and appreciators. I feel like we've made good progress with that, taking a look at hip hop culture. We've done less well with the pleasures of nobility and wealth. Since our culture confuses pleasure with happiness, that part is problematical. 

I've placed up here the actual writing which brought me to an epiphany of sorts when I was a much younger man. My epiphany was rather like what Barbara Ehrenreich describes in her Living With a Wild God. I was trying to make sense of what becomes different in the world through the lense of the Chinese literary tradition, along with what has changed in the world along with the then-new standard model of physics.

One might say that I had two basic insights. The one that tipped me over the edge was by way of the paradoxes introduced by quantum physics and relativistic time-dilation. Now recently with the apparent creation of a stable instance of Bose-Einstein condensate under weightless conditions on the space station, I feel a further boost for my epiphany. But it also would not have been possible without my deep dive into Chinese ways of knowing.

The relevant paradoxes involve such things as Bell's Theorem, quantum entanglement, time dilation, and more. My basic insight is that no object anywhere can be in any kind of basic contact with any other object. Of course everything depends on what is meant by "contact." The real trouble for me and for Ehrenreich is that there is no scientific theory to be disproven by my actual lived experience. There is nothing that one might do with this kind of understanding.

Or, in other words, my insights do nothing for what we call human progress. Agreement with them is not obligatory in relation to any definition for physical reality. Of course I don't really believe that. I believe that these insights make all the difference in the world to our thriving as a world community. But they don't seem to make me any more persuasive in the face of the stubborn recalcitrance demonstrated by that approximately half of our voting population which firmly believes in static and, to me, impossible truths.

So my obligation is as an educator, and indeed I have spent most of my academic life studying education, even while discouraged by actually doing it. As it is for many people who study education, part of my problem is that schooling continues to diverge from education to some terrifying extent. I would be a humble teacher if I had my druthers, but that doesn't seem to have been in the cards for me. I won't go into the reasons here, except to say that my teaching project keeps growing as I grow older. That's what I can't abandon.

I do know myself enough to admit that I arrogate to myself the really big questions. Of course I have no business doing that, but I'm not trying to be in anybody's face. Only once in my life did I ever introduce myself properly as a cosmologist, then quickly demurring that "of course I make my living in other ways." You do hair, then?

Far better to devote one's life to something interesting, like battery technology or gaming. Make a living and be humble. But for the astounding size of transnational conglomerates, and the even more astounding size of a small number of personal fortunes. In no good world would we allow so much power to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, even though I am grateful to him for introducing me to The Three Body Problem. His spoken Chinese is execrable, by the way. He sounds just like an American technocrat, all descended from Jobs.

The task to deconstruct the current order of things is just too massive. Of course global corporations aren't going to care that Black Lives Matter, but oddly they now seem to. Putting a good face on a corrupt body? Deeper change? Time will tell.

My insights involve the ways in which we are embedded in cosmos and not subject to it as object (I do love English for its tortured ambiguity, meaning, of course, that I love to torture English, even while I know that's not very nice to you, gentle reader . . .). I almost have to work backwards from our mistaken apprehension that computers approximate how our brain might work to get to what is wrong with digital. But that almost always seems to get me nowhere.

So let's start from the other end, shall we? Machines in general and digital machines in particular introduce structures which quite simply don't and can't exist "in nature." Sure, there is a continuum from our skeletal bodies as machines and through our hands to our tools as operators on the world around us, but it is at the inception of digital reality that we, literally now, lose touch. Recognizing patterns which are anomalously regular is how we recognize cognition out in the wild. We spend a lot of money on a SETI array to do precisely that. No dial-twiddling, digital requires only instruction.

In physics, of course, there is no actual touch between objects. Instead there are forces mediated by "particles" which define the interactions not of things, but of clouds of probability. Even our very own bodies can be described by those complex equations, though our accurate placement in any cosmos is hardly problematical at the scale of such huge bodily aggregations of smaller "particles." Our position scintillates, which is probably part of what it means to be alive.

We are working now on quantum computers which attempt to harness quantum entanglement for our next step in crypto. This apparently has nothing to do with breakthroughs in computational theory, but rather with the speed possible for certain types of computation. As I understand it, the speed is in turn a function of the fact that there is no time-delay for the transmission of "information" from one stateful cubit to its partner which is at some distance.

But of course, we are not talking about information so much as we are the definition for what may be considered a single "thing." The distance possible between "entangled" quanta has been experimentally shown to approach infinity. Touch "here" may be felt simultaneously "there." But what in the world does touch mean in that regard? Feeling???? Is there an emotional/physical divide too now? Yes!

I am less than an amateur with these matters. Of course, I would like to know more, but as with post-modern critical theory, there is simply not world enough and time. Each of us planes off at some point to focus on some very local problem that we find ourselves interested in. Well, if we're not black and if we have some social capital mostly. IF you're not forced to be a wage slave.

A cosmologist can't be too picky about what he chooses to study. The meanings could come from most anywhere.

I have been graced by resources not available to most of us, and feel a powerful reciprocal obligation to make something of that grace. But it is hard. I don't have the language to be native in any field. I can't get in the door. And I haven't worked hard enough for 'The Man' to be able to choose to retreat from the fray to just simply enjoy my wonderful life, although I do plenty of that. 

To simply enjoy life seems the most irresponsible choice at the moment in our history, and far worse than all the promise forsaken by my not choosing to embed myself in some one particular field. There are many kinds of regret now, aren't there? It's not that life is awful. We're not coming out of a World War. But it sure does feel like a tipping point.

As far as I know, people continue to search for some magic in the brain, as though it were the brain alone which makes us human. I am much more of a whole body (and whole earth) person. I can't separate any part from the whole. I have described elsewhere how and why I subscribe to Riccardo Manzotti's "Spread Mind" theory of consciousness. For me, it means that we are present in much more of the cosmos than the space displaced by our bodies can describe. The title for his book-form summary is The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One. We are not so separate, one from each other.

So the root of digital evil is that digital reality chops off the connection. Much of what we enact now in our history realizes this chopping off in the form of a very American sort of radical individualism. I don't mean that digital reality is causing radical individualism, though I'm sure that a case could be made for that. I'm suggesting that both trends realize the same underlying misapprehension about who and what we are and what is cosmos.

I speak in radically metaphorical terms in everything that I can say. That's because there terms can only be meant metaphorically. Of course physicists don't really deal with actual particles at the subatomic level, starting with the atom in one direction or the other. There is nothing very particular about anything there. And of course I can make only a metaphorical connection between the literal digital divide I'm talking about here and the other one I want to talk about. But the connection is no less real than subatomic particles are. 

I happen to believe that the American experiment is very much worth preserving. That's not because the radical individual is the way into the future, but because, despite our original sin, we are the only place where the arc of history has even a chance to bend toward the good. This is fundamentally because we are structurally not afraid of knowledge. That is a very good thing, indeed.

We still need to figure out how to decide what to do with the knowledge that we gain.

We are prevented from being a great nation (in moral terms) because of our radical individualism and the peculiar form of rampant capitalism which we've adopted as native. Our brand of capitalism tends toward the same results in relation to the open pursuit of knowledge that various forms of totalitarianism do. Even China's approach is better. In China, they're not so much afraid of knowledge as they are cautious about what can count as knowledge in the short term. My problem is that the short term is much shorter than anyone seems to realize. 

Sure, I'm talking about climate change or pandemics or species and planet extinction, but I'm not talking about what we need to do about those things. I think I'm talking more about what we need to stop doing, and I mean in our systems of knowledge and understanding, not even in our behaviors. Well, that's a chicken/egg kind of problem. The trouble is that we have to figure out how to change our minds collectively. The story of Jesus did that once upon a time. Relativity theory did that too, with a very brief sort of boom.

We've tended in the direction of disparaging mind against digital machine, just because signals along the neurons move so slowly. We confuse our mind with our brain. By our brain? By the way we think!

We can't possibly be as efficient in our rational calculations as a machine can be. Heck, we can't even rationalize the decisions we've already made quickly enough to claim to have made them ourselves, and we somehow think that might be infringing on our precious free will. Guess what, free will takes time. That thing that we're running out of.

Manzotti points out that we're conceptualizing how the brain works in the wrong way. It's not about speed. In fact it's about slowing down perceptual information even to the point of holding that information in a kind of near perpetual cycling so that we can perceive it again in the form of memory. 

I came at this realization myself lo those many years ago, but I was coming at it from the perspective of Chinese literature, which isn't so concerned with the inner person. The patterns on the surfaces are what counts, and of course, we know those we love much better than they know themselves. 

So the brain is a complex series of slowed down cycling messages and intersections. It can be repurposed if there are injuries, and the circuits are largely self-healing even as the neurons wither and die. Sleep perchance and death and dreaming are all essential for this all to work. Too much conscious attention just makes a mess of things. The brain largely wants to be autonomous. The cycling from birth to death is also an over-ordering of the brain until it just simply can't track, much in the way that I can't remember which digital article I read this morning, and no matter how good search is, I'll never find it again. 

Immortality, like literal infinity, would just crowd out every other. Not a good result.

Autonomous machines are different. Make enough racial profiling facial recognizing deadly force drones and we can end the world in a jiffy. Not by killing it off, but by the backlash disruption we've been causing to all those feeling the pain of collateral damage. It's the immune response which does the killing. That's what this moment in history means.

We have all been enabled to socially distance ourselves from trouble to the extent that we've won the lottery jackpot of disrupting someone else's industry. And we have all the right and good ideas as we amuse ourselves up to the point of death, which is inevitable in any case. That's what socially distancing social stratification means, and guess who gets left behind to pay our piper? The ones out in the streets now, being called terrorists by our terrorist in chief.

So, not only do we have to deconstruct and rebuild our policing on the model of Camden, New Jersey, but we have to do the same with our military. We create the terrorists and then, just like Vietnam all over again, they outwit us with their very human ingenuity. The end. 

Of course fascists love technology. It keeps the trains on time, and identifies everyone so that they (we) can be pinched in an instant the moment we cross whatever line they've drawn for us. We in these United States think its fine when it's done commercially, but now it's being done politically, and for sure militarily.

Of course Big Business loves technology. It allows it to grow and grow and then the business itself turns into technology, just like the economy turns into finance and a bunch of gig workers. Producing nothing of any value, no matter how pleasant it might be.

Even still the ubiquitous smartphones make it hard for the powers that be to lie. Except why then does our commander in chief get to lie out loud and often and still have his following? Well, duh, it's because of all those autonomous processes which run our newsrooms. I'm not only talking about how Facebook spoons up its newsfeeds to a level of complexity impossible for any human to keep up with. I'm also talking about the actual newsrooms which profit the same way from whatever grabs eyeballs, and then the aggregators who find out what you like to read by the same algorithms used by Google and Facebook.

How the hell can we even know what truth is? What the truth is? One lie is as good as any other, and so it comes down to the stories we like to tell ourselves. And these are nearly all impervious to being educated out once we call ourselves adults. Trust me, I've tried really hard for most of my life and it can't be done.

So, that's why I dig down to the basics. Particle physics. Quantum reality. Chaos theory. Getting rid of the mind/body subject/object dualisms. That's the only thing that can save us or else we're just not worth saving, sayeth Gaia or what-you-will. We are now in the process of stepping out from nature, and if we keep it up we will have succeeded once and forevermore. We will be as dead as an autonomous robot whose plug got pulled.

What then is the difference between the information being held in mind and the information being held in computer memory? I'm going with Manzotti's definition here for information, which is just the stuff which passes among objects which makes them perceptible. Which means to be in touch. Which means that physical information-carrying signals, in the case of animal minds, impinge on our perceptual apparatus. Which means to feel.

In a computer, or should I say for a computer, the information needs to be digitized which means conceptualized which means a static relation among conceptual objects. Ideal Platonic Numbers, say. Conceptual objects are things held in mind for the purpose of organizing perceptual objects. A kind of literal calculus takes place in and by computational representations of reality where conceptual slices are stacked together to form an approximation of actual fluid non-binary reality. 

Irony be my north star.

As with any mathematical calculus, digital reality can only be a very precise approximation of what is being measured. Again, as Manzotti would have it, there are no images in our heads any more than there are images stored in computer memory. Computers can't see. We can. And no matter how many pixels, the stored image can never be the same as the live one. The live one is felt directly.

Our brains don't store conceptual reality. They store perceptual reality, which is much richer. Since we store concepts so poorly, we must construct a narrative frame to hold them. The narrative frame of science is the best and most durable one that has ever been constructed, but it's showing its age already. It apparently can't overpower the Jesus frame. Both have been expropriated for use by the military industrial complex. We need a new frame!

Bill Gates has built his spaceship here on earth, which is the only place such a life would be viable. I'm sure it's more impregnable than Donald Trump's bunker, even given all the secret service, who might, after all, be carrying some kind of virus. The wealthy everywhere have escaped reality and deploy the police and the military to keep themselves safe. They might as well be on Mars, and good riddance!

Why not? If life is only about happiness and if you only have so much time on earth, then why not make that short time as pleasant as possible? Too bad about the marginal classes and the precariat. We'd love to have them join us for the cost of membership.

The trouble is the carrying cost to the planet though, right? 

In my book, conceptual relations are just as real as perceptual relations are. In place of information to define the relation among objects in motion, I talk of e-motion to describe non-forceful relations among objects in free-fall. Love moves through the eons in the direction of life, while hate moves toward stasis in the direction of the dead. The difference then is between the quick and the dead, and we have been moving toward the dead. 

I want to convince the likes of Bill Gates to live more modestly. The party is down in the engine room in the bowels of the ship and not up where you need black tie. 

My changes are definitional and not scientifically testable. That's a shame, really, because I won't be able to convince anyone by showing them what I'm able to do that couldn't be done before because of some new theoretical understanding which is experimentally demonstrably real. This theory requires a different kind of enactment. The kind we're watching (most of us, stuck off in some safe space in our wombs with a view) playing out right now out in the streets. 

There simply is no army powerful enough to quiet the people. That's what defunding the police state has to mean. To the extent that we hold our smartphones high, we still own the digital reality. We will depopulate our prisons by deconstructing our militarized police force. We will depolarize the world by deconstructing our obsolete notions of armed forces. We will jump back into the fray of nature be reconceptualizing what it means to be human, and we won't have to lose a thing about our humanity to do it. We won't have to become beastly. We won't have to forsake our art and our music and our dance and especially not our food and wine. These are what connect us. These are how we touch the cosmic forces. These are our expressions of love in return for the love which brought us this far.

These are the facts of life, fight them though we think Jesus wants us to do. That's not Jesus talking, that's The Man, and he only wants to grab your pussy. Defund the Church (oh, right, that's already happening), and Jesus will come to life again for real.

Numbers don't exist in nature. Numbers are an abstraction from nature, but it isn't only humans who know how to count. Humans learned how to tabulate, and that was the start of all the trouble. Tabulation led to writing as one thing leads to another and we find ourselves in over our head. We have to get it together, people!

Science can't advance without metrics. Metrics means numbers. Before science government needed metrics. Before government, agriculture needed metrics. But somehow we learned to separate the perceptual world from the world of the subject who was doing the observations and working the metrics to abstract theories which would enable ever more fruitful manipulations of the world around so that the subjects could live and rest more easily. 

But now finally we know that mind cannot be abstracted from matter; it can't be separated. We should be culturally grown up enough to know - woke enough to realize - that there is no personal God who's going to rescue us and take it from here. We should also know that we aren't even close to being equal to the complexity of the natural environment in which we live. Our science has barely gotten started, for chissakes!

Along comes digital reality to accelerate everything and we seem to understand that we're going off the rails. That we have failed morally in our development. Not only have we failed our fellow humans, but we're about to destroy the natural homeostasis that we depend on in the same way that all life depends on it. We're acting as though we can destroy nature with impunity. But nature's destruction is what happens naturally when one tries to order it. When one takes dominion. 

I think we need to rediscover balance.

These separations - heart from mind, subject from object, mind from body - they all enable a disconnect not just from life but from our neighbors. By forcing and enforcing social distancing - by wearing masks and building walls - Covid-19 and the various Donald Trumps of the world call the question; what if we were to join together? What if we were never to profit again from illness? What if we were never to prosecute a deal where someone has to be the loser so that we can win?

Numbers to enhance scientific understanding somehow transmuted into numbers to represent reality. We can't know intimately what we can only see on TV.  We can't have a discussion by texting and tweeting. Nobody even reads a long email anymore. What choice is there but to take to the streets?

Man, I sure do wish I could write more better. Well, not more. You know what I mean, by very definition.

Swirl of Cacaphony

I owe it to my punster bro that this is the name of a new Ben and Jerry's flavor. Artificially sweetened chocolate - fake cacao, get it? Cacao phoney?? With a twist.

I don't do puns. There's something wrong or right with my language black-box. I am back working though, this time using Chinese on a daily basis.

Since the Chinese has lain dormant for at least 15 years, and since this is a new job in a new state (of mind - California) and since I'm doing things which are somewhat new to me, I do sometimes feel as though I'm navigating a cacaphonic swirl.

I've been issued an iPhone. It works enough better than the Windows Mobile phone (the one I've been trying to talk myself into loving for so long now), that I almost can't credit it. I don't want to like a smartphone that much, but it handles Chinese natively, which is still a little better than I do, and moves seamlessly among tasks. I think they were smart enough to close off "multi-tasking" since you can only look at one thing at a time on a phone, and it keeps its state way better than Windows did, which was always trying to give me my cake and let me eat it too.

The Windows phone would try "intelligently" to decide how much memory I needed, but to a human there was no predicting when a backgrounded app would be closed according to some kind of better judgement, and its state might or might not be kept depending on the talents of the programming staff. At least Apple exercises some control over what will be allowed on their platform.

The one thing I do miss, however, is that Swype way of entering text. It's quicker, and I haven't learned to thumb on a virtual keyboard. But even still, there are limits to the turn of phrase one will attempt on such a tiny platform. I wonder when they'll make one I can dictate to reliably (ouch, turns out there's an app for that!)? Or something which can monitor my nerve endings maybe the way Kinect does my body movements. So I could just waggle my typing fingers, and the phone would take the cue.

'Till then, there can be no question that the language that we use is being lowest-common-denominatored. I've found that when I'm speaking English to someone I've spoken Chinese with, my English has become that kind of simplified that I often wish they'd use with me in Chinese. It's not that hard for a speaker to bring his language to within what can be followed with certainty, and not to do so would be some kind of rude.

And then if I email the same person, I find that I can't even access my native English stylistics, such as they are. I seem only to have a kind of pidgin - clear enough and precise, but lacking in the nuance which I do so enjoy while writing an email to someone I know well enough to skate the edge of sense with. Gentle Reader.

There's lots of celebration of the Twitter now, for the discipline imposed by such a compact package. No possibility to build any context from which the Tweet can be removed.

Once upon a time, we all learned to be careful with our emails since something about the medium prevented the careful tone with which paper letters once were invested. And bosses and colleagues and would-be lovers would take or give offense meaninglessly, because of a context wrongly inferred.

This defines our political discourse now, no?

Discourse is, of course, far too lofty as a description of what passes for it. Grand notions are reduced now to advertising slogans, obliterating all and any hope that opposing sides might be brought toward some kind of respect for the opposing position. At least I find that some familiarity with the origins of a position, and with the experiences of the people that hold it changes a lot about how you regard those people and that position.

Ad hominem becomes the order of the day, and so you match opposing viewpoints against what amount to cartoon caricatures as offered up by what passes for journalism. Photo and video mediated of course.

Our likes and dislikes are generated in the instant, upon first vocal and visual impression. How absurd to accuse the Obama haters of racism, when whatever happened happened in the same instant that we all formed our opinions of Sarah Palin. And I do try and I have to confess that, well, when I really try I can find Glenn Beck likable. I understand where he's coming from. I get Palin. I know they each connect with people who aren't making connections otherwise. Who feel excluded.

But to like someone is not to evaluate their job performance, right? And when someone else makes that mistake, then we hate them too. We generalize. We fill in all the context because the language we use simply isn't rich enough to provide for context.

And I guess that will have to be enough for this re-entry to my little private blogosphere, after a different kind f re-entry to the world of work. I'll end with a visual pun. I came across it during the course of my new work, where it behooves me to stay abreast of developments in Higher Ed.

I've been aware of modern logistics and warehousing operations for a while now, because of my work in IT. Big box distribution stores now use scan codes and robotics to store and retrieve pallets from their precise slots in massive warrens.

The California desert is dense with such places, each one employing very few humans, while the goods are moved from semi-trailer to shelf and back again using artificial intelligence to minimize latency on the shelf where money can't be made. But the shelves are valuable when they can facilitate volume purchase or taking advantage of price fluctuations. It must be a beautiful thing.

And now the University of Chicago, short of space, has built its new library underground, where books are bar-coded and stacked in crates. Robotic retrieval systems can move the crate to where a human can retrieve his written quarry. And it must be a beautiful thing.

But I have to wonder, and don't you? If the word is the thing, then why does it even matter that the physical object be brought to hand? This feels to me like some sort of bizarre and obsolete gold standard, and I feel my context-building prejudice machines resenting all the money spent to fetishize rare objects.

Shouldn't all this robotic intelligence be used to digitize the books before they're lent? Maybe it is and will be, but shouldn't it also and at the same time be made available to anyone anywhere, and not only to the folks at the University of Chicago with library privileges?

I remember when CD jukeboxes were state of the art, because so much data could be made accessible so cheaply. And now they just seem silly up against data stores so massive that the capacity is given away just for the asking. This library would seem the same kind of future obsolete, as new-age and high tech as it is.

I wonder if they will take my advice to call this travesty what it is - the Dead Letters Office from the long gone age of the missive. When people who wrote took upon themselves also the burden to create a context, and when readers were similarly obligated in return.

There is a design field of which I'm newly aware. It's called Ux or usability experience. It's masters design the interfaces between man and machine, and when you think about it, this is a very important business. One wishes that they would go to work someday real soon on the interface sported by the office copier/network printer/scanner/fax machine, but meanwhile these designers have become the analog to what teachers used to do.

They frame your interactions, as on my new iPhone now I'm constantly amazed at the generous gestures built in for my more fluid interactions. It's wordless, this framing, and therefore multi-cultural. Certainly, there's no need for translation, or, um, has it already occurred by the time the user interface is useful? Is the inter-language translation radically redundant by the time a "user" gets the interface?

Let me think here. Is the instrumentation on the user interface really somehow analogous to the role of the teacher? Some kind of formalization and channeling of the moves which might be made. And what of notions of active learning, or engaging the students with one another. Does that just go right out with the Windows?

There must be a difference between digital reality and real reality.

Bem, Dennett, Yudkowski, Wagenmakers, da bunch of 'em

Like accepting an award at the Oscars, it's hard to know whom to thank, but the list is growing. People arguing about pre-cognition, who should be arguing about something else instead. My list is not the same as your list.

Here's what we know: Statistical analysis falls short of classical proof in at least a couple of dimensions. First it always is and always will be subject to interpretation. After a while, the machinery gets way complex and the various experts sound like they're differing only in point of view.

We also know that definitions for mind, while radically incomplete in a lot of ways, should at least begin to accommodate the notion that there is no strict boundary between inside and outside the mind. And if there is no strict boundary, then it's pretty arbitrary whether you decide that pre-cognition is possible or if it's not, since it pretty much comes down to how you place that boundary.

In any given instance, most candidate boundaries involve volition. If something originates in the mind then it impacts stuff on the outside. But even that quickly becomes a chicken and egg problem where the distinction between paying attention and having your attention drawn is hard to discern.

So it looks as though there's going to have to be an experiment which will skirt the issue of statistical predictive analysis and unambiguously debunk the mechanics of cause and effect. That's already been done in physics to at least the point where we are arguing multiple universes and which metaphors for subatomic are the most consistent among, say, strings, particles and overall strangeness.

I wonder why we remain so skeptical in the macro world? Surely we understand that temporal ordering in the mind is a function of the ex-post-hoc narrative function of mind's threshold for outering or utterance. That is by itself  definition of the boundary between in and out. We assemble perceptions which come at us all out of order, but their condition for utterance is their completion, which includes their re-ordering into a temporal narrative.

You can't really talk to someone meaningfully if you're going to be telling them about what's going to happen unless you can direct their attention to shared perceptual data which is going to assure them you're right. If you refer to something only in your mind, then you have resort only to trust as the "mechanism" to gain that other person's concurrence. Ordinarily, it's no trick to trust that someone in a position superior to yours should be trusted when they shout "duck!"

For most of us, trust is also required to adjudicate among the contending scholars of statistical analysis, since all we really know for sure is that there's lies, damn lies and statistics, and we're getting damned tired of realizing that the experts use these matters against us to sell us quack medicine as often as they use it for our benefit. Practitioners are not always the most informed, especially when they're motivated.

So you end up assessing who has a stake in dreams of immortality, who just wants to get laid and who needs to be incredibly rich. Because he seems a kindred spirit, and doesn't seem to be dissociating from deep psychological hurt, in general I'll go with Dennett.

But his work harbors a deep inconsistency. On the one hand he seems to want to defer questions about pre-cognition off into infinity, while on the other he comes pretty close to saying that there are no clear bounds to the mind.

So, we have a definitional problem here. What is the mind and what is considered to be "in" it.

In my usage a mind is a truly trivial thing, present at creation. What? Creation!? No, that's not what I mean, since what the hell can creation mean? Anyhow, mind is simply that quality of phenomena which involves relations which are not mediated by perception.

In physics, perception involves the exchange of particles, up to the limit of gravity, which seems to implicate virtually everything at the macro level to the extent that gravity is only felt in relation. It seems to be true that there is a divide which cannot be crossed in principle between conceptual and perceptual relations, because the act of crossing collapses the conceptual into the perceptual. Trust me, that's what quantum physics means!

So perceptual reality is outside the mind and conceptual reality is in. I'm not sure how you can test for that, since for me it's by definition; there is no way otherwise to be consistent in what we talk about. Science is all about (actually, I think it's only about) reducing trust issues to as near to zero as can be accomplished, and even then, qua Wittgenstein, you have to have a willing interlocutor. Which hardly happens at the fringes of science, even among scientists who respect one anther. They always end up questioning motives. Sheesh!

And that's where emotion sneaks back into the game. Emotion as in what is it that you really want? Once you show up on Colbert, it's assumed you want book sales, but maybe that's because there's no other way to assert the rightness of your findings. You know they're right and that they will be swamped unless you garner a critical mass of readers to force attention.

But emotion is, you know, always implicated in the life of the mind. Conceptual motion is - and again I'm being definitional which is probably a crime in China, but I'll do it anyhow because around these parts we still believe in free speech - emotion. That's right! If you sense something having only a conceptual relation to something else moving on a collision course, you would be wise to predict actual perceptual implication. And in that sense sensed motion, or I mean emotion, is predictive of events in the outered world.

Since, by definition there isn't any perceptual implication yet, this prediction is not utterable. What you can talk about is your feelings, your wants, your hopes, your aspirations, but you can't assure anyone that these things will come about except by acting on them.  (how cool that even a word like "thing" becomes a metaphor!)

Feelings tend to be shared, and in precisely the manner that Fox TV can predict the future by creating it, you might find that the world's greatest narrative doesn't have to be true. It only has to change the world, Q.E.D. (Quite Evidently Dirty)

Well, OK so this is starting to feel dangerous. I only want to come up with some experimental proof that my definitions are better than your definitions. The presentiment of porn stuff is proving problematical since there are stubborn true believers out there who just won't buy it no matter the discount.

I'll bet if I were to offer a million dollars to the first person who comes up with a good experiment, I'd get it. Of course I don't have a million dollars, but I would have if someone were to take me up on the offer. Still, I'm just not that kind of gambler. Hmmmmm

OK, how about this: After thinking really really hard about why you won't slurp your own spit but you will slurp your lover's spit and more, which should sharpen your mind about the inside/outside boundary thing, now try imagining a world in which you just don't care about anything, but manage to stay conscious all the while.

You have no particular reason to pay attention to this or that, and no pretty asses catch your gaze (gender neutrality is critical here, since we don't want to fall into the Fox TV trap!). No emotional attachment to any sun God or other abstractions, so you can't imagine yourself a monk. A Buddhist, perhaps, but how many of them get to ZaZen in this lifetime? A scientist without passion about his work? Really??

You really can't do it, since you'd be imagining yourself perhaps acting as yourself but not being yourself.

I declare!

I really do doubt that there is an experiment which can be devised, unless it's the one over there among the borderlands of Europe, where they want to capture something metaphorically equivalent to the graviton. But where all the complexity just won't stay still long enough for things to get up and running.

My stars! What shall we do?

I for one am pretty cool with accepting a bit of ambiguity. I'm fine with notions of immortality by reputation and that one day my want will reduce to nil. That my consciousness comes and goes, and my me gets displaced and replaced, but that my desire remains until it to is resolved in crystalline clarity indistinguishable from death.

Or I would be fine to end me with a question mark, and allow as how consciousness is in a bottle, tossed to sea or smashed. Machines are awake already, sure, and not in some dim future. I feel they are already in control, and we have already become unfeeling.

But I will not be fooled by experimental evidence which is but sleight of hand. I want to see the outside in and the inside out before I admit defeat. I want to be educated.

OK, sorry, cheap ending. But I can't come up with a better one. Educate me!

Buffalo Bloodline

Although I'm not settled enough to be a subscriber, sometimes I think the Buffalo News is written exclusively for me. The other day, I saw a notice for the Boom Day ball drop. I rode my bicycle along the breakwater which goes under the Peace Bridge where I was pretty much the only one to watch the event. I'd expected at least a small crowd. What people had come were all dignitaries on the Fireboat, but I still felt the hosing was all for me!

WHAT A HOSER, EH?

Then yesterday, I decided to see how hard it would be to bike down to the Small Boat Harbor, since the News had indicated that one of its new draws is a bike path. Along the way, I found that I could ride up to the top of a parking ramp alongside Pilot field, and watch the ball game as though I'd bought a ticket. Whoops! Coca-Cola field. I find on Wikipedia that I've blown right by Dunn Tire Park. Well, anyhow, it's the home of the Triple-A Bisons. Whoops, I guess that's "International League." I'm so out of touch. Or do even names just go to the highest bidder now?

From my perch on the parking ramp, the stadium looked pretty empty. I had a blast zooming back down the levels, although it sure did look as though the beams were going to clip my head off. You can't ride your bicycle over the Skyway Bridge anymore, so if I wanted to get to the Small Boat Harbor, I was going to have to do the drawbridge thing. It made me a little nervous, since I'd bicycled down there the other day to the General Mills plant, where they make Cheerios, and the young guard told me "you can't be here" even though it looked like a public road. They must have worried I would be secretly counting rats or something.

I'm a little skittish about these things, like the other day when I pulled aside to let the siren by and then the cop figured I must be guilty of something so she followed me off to the side. You know, you try to do the right thing . . . like I eat Cheerios all the time for my high cholesterol. Why don't they want me hanging around?

So I ended up biking down this long and really lonely, and very wide thoroughfare, feeling like I'm in a Hitchcock movie, knowing all the while that this used to be bustling with factories and businesses of all sorts. The one newish and clean  looking plant had a realtor's sign on it, which can't be a good, um, sign. I checked on my handy smartphone, and sure enough the place had been closed down upon buyout. I guess this is more evidence of the efficiency of our capital markets.

Eventually, I did get down to the Small Boat Harbor. It's a Sunday, and the weather is fine (although thunder storms had been called for), but there isn't exactly a crowd there.

But there are people in Dug's Dive, and there is a bike path. It's still early. I'd learned from the News that the Harbor had been opened two weeks early because of our fine spring, and I guess the boats were still on their way in:

You know, it's actually a bit tricky to follow the designated bike paths around Buffalo. Some places have signs, and sometimes you can see the faded outline of the bike path on the roadway - washed down from the famously harsh winter - but then sometimes it just seems to end, and you find yourself on a road where no-one else seems to have ever thought of biking.

The same thing happened in reverse when I biked past the Small Boat Harbor. This time there was a brand new asphalt bike path, which still has yet to be completed and doesn't have it's painted striping yet. I followed it along, past the smoking fishermen - I think that might be a reason to escape to such places; you can smoke in public. Well, it would be public if anyone else were around.

I ended up at the old headquarters for the long since closed Bethlehem Steel Plant, which looked far worse up close than it does from the highway, although its grass was mown.  It is a beautiful structure, and I was struck again how much the old business edifices, striving for a kind of legitimacy, look the same as schools from the era, striving for the same.

I sat there for a while, chatting on my cellphone, feeling very much as though I was still in the Hitchcock film, in some nowhere crossroads, with some catastrophe impending. The building is right next to some offices for the water authority, which did seem to be populated on a Sunday. Since these are Homeland Security protected sites now, I wasn't sure about getting pulled over again. I remember once or twice in Taiwan, innocently taking a picture only to have some guard appear seemingly out of nowhere, becuase I'd managed to take a shot of some infrastruture installation. I think they were paranoid about having targets identified by mainlanders.

Well, that ship has sailed, but still it seemed as though I should keep moving. Heading back along the trail, I couldn't help wondering about the legislative process which created this path, apparently just for me. There was landscaping and new planting, and the bases for what promised to be some nice lighting, although such signs as there were all seemed to indicate "closed after dusk." Government decision-making can be so confusing sometimes.

ROAD TO SOMEWHERE?

See, there's Buffalo rising in the distance. I did notice, on my way out from the Boat Harbor, that there is another paved bike path which would take me down past the Tifft Nature preserve. I almost can't imagine that anyone else would ride this one, but there it was, just for me.

I decided to keep going, heading into South Buffalo. By now, I'd gotten familiar with the expectation that the bike path would end, but I was pretty sure that I could make my way back home along South Park Ave., and that it wouldn't be much longer than the way I'd come. Perhaps less desolate?

But there is a really long stretch of Fuhrman Boulevard where I did actually pass another biker, though he was walking his bike along with fishing gear and looked to be heading to where I was coming from. Another view from another bridge of another way in to Buffalo:

TRACKS WHICH USED TO GO SOMEWHERE?

Anyhow, along I went, catching the flag on the huge South Park high school through someone's back yard. This one doesn't look quite so stately as the Bethlehem Steel offices - it must have come along at some more modern period of efficient production. I used to supervise student teachers in this facility, and let me tell you, there is a kind of martial efficiency going on in there.

Well, further along was an older, more stately school, where the kids had a bit more freedom

Still, you can see the direction of things. Now, a lot of the schools I rode by are special "charter schools" where the thing to do seems to be to find a theme and move backward along the liberating assumption that all kids would benefit from general education, and maybe try to fit them sooner into whatever it is they're most fit for. The funny thing is that this just seems to leave the ordinary public schools whose purpose still is general education full of those kids who aren't fit for much. Anyhow, I'm sure glad I never had to decide about my fate that early. Otherwise, I'd be stuck in it right now, you know, having a clue about what I'd like to do for the rest of my life. 

Well, I have lots more pictures, and thousands upon thousands more words. I really wanted to paste up here the pictures from a recent canoe trip when I saw the other side of all these things from the perspective of the Buffalo River but paddling a canoe in the city is even stranger than riding a bicycle, and you'd probably get really really bored. Or maybe it's just me?

Anyhow, it's really really hard to see any sort of renaissance amid all this vacant space where things used to get made. I even saw the offices of the massive hydroponic tomato greenhouse complex which was being put up during one canoe trip, and magically disappeared before the next one. I should have been reading the Buffalo News every day, and then I would have known what the heck was going on, you know? The headquarters still looked pretty spiffy. Maybe they sold all that glass to Dubai or Abu Dabi or something. Like they need greenhouses in the desert. Oh.

Well, there it is. My city. It used to be a thriving place, just like I used to be a young man. You have to squint really hard to see a bright future. For the city, I mean. Obviously, I won't be getting any younger. You know, we're all doomed by our astrological accidents, like who we chose for parents, what the great roulette wheel in the sky had in store for us, whether we're on this side or that of some border or other.

These are all the accidents of birth. Sometimes they become the accidents of death and dying. Sometimes it's how you look at things. To tell you the truth, when I ride (or paddle) through Buffalo, I see lots of possibility. It's like a blank slate. We could try other things besides letting global capitalism put labor against the wall of too cheap to meter. We could take the oil out of most production processes and bring the work back home. We could make it really costly to commute out to the lawn-belt, and by mixing it up a little better, make it really safe to live in cities. Modern industrial production doesn't even need to be hazardous or exclusive of kids who might want to learn.

These are choices, which bloodlines are not. Or maybe we really don't care about what got us here anymore. Well, at least the cars did stop to let a few geese across the road. If you squint, you can see the chicks. Peeking out behind the old grain elevators are windmills. It's easier to see possibility in Spring, don't you think?

The Educator's Dilemma

Any reasonable teacher understands that not every student is created equal. As regards the heights of academic accomplishment, some seem destined to fall short right out of the gate. Not to believe that would be as absurd as to suppose that every single human may triumph at the Olympics, given the proper nurture and coaching.

Of course, there may be more truth to that than many sour grapes Olympians might credit. But it's also true that to make each of us Olympians be default, at birth, would be nothing short of cruel. Perhaps as cruel as to force a gifted intellect to suffer the slow and plodding training of those around her, who are perhaps gifted in different ways.

We understand now, as educators, the hidden injuries of race and class. We know that sometimes the brightest students are invisible beneath the cover of different cultural and linguistic norms. We even know that we ourselves can be blinded by those things which we hold most dear; our own personal or cultural canon, for instance, or what we think of as proper behavior in the Academy.

You're probably wanting to jump down my throat now, that the problem is the Academy, which must form its own culture and norms which will be necessarily aligned with those of the ruling class, relative to which everyone else must be remediated.

But short of leaving cultures divided, which no longer seems a practical matter given the seemingly inevitable pressures of globalization, there still must be institutional structure to organize our teaching. Short of willy nilly, each to his or her own, which would leave the ruling class that much more fully in charge and distinct from those on its outside.

It would seem that the supposedly universal languages of math and science are what brings us together, ultimately, under a single roof, as it were, to learn. Leaving the elaborations in the realm of what often get called "the humanities" at the fringes, to be sorted out there and suffered.

And how nice it would and must be for educators to have scientific seeming tools, like diagnostic and IQ tests to cut through the large and petty biases and prejudices of the entrance examiners. To give those students who are different from the ruling class a way in, for the benefit of all.

But these tests then become a proxy for the Olympics of life, where everyone else is somehow less than human; protestations about "all men created equal" very much beside the evident truth that some are worth more than others. Just simply because everyone is supposed to go to approximately the same sort of school.

And this process of schooling gets rationalized, of course and naturally, relative to the organization of the economy. So that it is only economic worth which is being graded, and not some sort of core value as a human being. Automatically devaluing the labor of hands and craft and art, unless those appeal, of course, to the ruling class. The class which, according to our Constitution, we weren't even supposed to have.

Why should I be allowed to work out these sophomoric dilemmas so sophomorically? When there is so much written, so much brilliant angst expended on these very questions, dilemmas, and matters. So much well educated debate. Debate whose entrée would and should and must be denied the likes of myself.

Because even this debate is subject to the norms of discourse, which cannot be divided from the norms of the Academy, defined as broadly or as narrowly as you like.

I do call for more slack and less angst. The problems and their resolution can be found only outside the academy. The dignity assigned or allowed to labor which is not schooled. Dignity allowed even to workers in the government, who need not and in most cases should not or must not be elected, as would be their citizen supervisors.

But even there, the civil service exam does as much to prevent as to enforce a meritocracy. Just as has been the case with diagnostic IQ-style tests in education, we now must have a form of academic postmen, firemen and policmen, again defining "academic" as broadly as you please. All to prevent the petty corruptions and prejudices which we still fear would be rampant without these ideally "objective" differentiators.

None of these devices and techniques need be discarded wholesale. But each of them should and must be regarded askance, for the harm they do as well as for the good. How many, drawing on my recent interactions with the health care establishment; how many can retain some humility relative to the certainties of the frames within which they themselves must operate, given that it is their position relative to those frames which defines them? Against whose standards they struggled to gain, first, foothold, and later position and recognition.

It must be as terrifying at any heights, to fear what one would be in free-fall. Frameless.

And yet letting go of our certainties is precisely what must occur if we are to co-inhabit a world which has suddenly gone all one. We must learn to trust and honor one another across all sorts of divides. Of race and class and culture and language and religion. Divides much more extreme than those which divide the ranks in our Academies.

The reason I hold out extravagant hope is that we have filled in all our boundaries now. There are no more frontiers to cross. Science be damned, there are no more fundamental discoveries to be made. It's all about filling in now, as we realize that we have been turned back at every frontier.

You will not credit this. Or very very few of you will, so certain are you that the procedures, at least, of science are what holds out the most and best promise still. And I am as certain as you are that this remains the case. There are massive improvements still to come in the ways that we can harness energy for good, understand our bodies for better health, and even organize the economy for more human distribution of goods.

But as regards the fundamental sense of who we are in the cosmos, I believe there is no further that we can travel. At that frontier, science holds out nothing more. Or rather, what we already have is far more than enough. We are co-creators, participants now, in the processes of evolution and of sense.

Of course, we always have been. But now, via the cutting edge of physics, we have glimpsed the limits of what, in principle, can be known. There are no further procedures according to which we can discover any more of what is "out there" without implicating our mind in the process. We have choices, the most crucial of which is whether, in fact, we will regard each of us as fully human. And the determination of our choice will not be made by what we say. It will be made by what we do.

And even if you are waiting for some superior "intelligence" (such a telling term) to make some kind of contact, you should know ahead of time that without having come to consciousness yourself, He or She or It will only know you as a worm. You will have become just another life form embedded in the struggle for survival, of no meaning or value as an individual.

Making contact, a project of no interest to me, although it might be to some future generation, simply makes no sense prior to some sense of what it means to be human, "intelligent," and worthy of recognition. I'd say drop "intelligent" from the equation, and we might be on our way. The term human alone is enough. Divide off any single quality of humanity, and you lose it, plain and simple.

In Memorium

In Conclusion, the End, Finally, Finished? Hardly.

I took a few friends with me last night to 84, a new and young multi-media enhanced re-presentation of George Orwell's great work up on stage. The reviewer in the Buffalo News was harsh. But I also was left dissatisfied, reaching for that vertigo I feel every time I read the book.

Imagine! Disappointment at falling short of paranoia.

But they didn't bring the work explicitly up to date. There were no direct references to Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. I wasn't informed about how Information Technology doesn't improve our odds. I didn't hear the voices of our current leaders apologizing for what they must do to non-citizens in the name of our vanished dreams and aspirations; in honor of manufactured fears.

There was no palpable sense that we have already traveled through that glass, falling short only in the fact of our creature comfort. We manufacture pleasures, in service to the Sacred Object.

Earlier in the day, walking the streets of Buffalo to discover the Karpeles Manuscript Museum on the premises of the former Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist. Finding a declaration - or was it a proclamation? - of Thanksgiving signed by Herbert Hoover just after the stock market crashed. For our abundant harvest and prosperity. Finding more of his words there, carping about how FDR was destroying all hope that the American spirit could prevail. Feeling powerful deja-vu, all over and over again.

This after learning that I indeed did make the final cut to represent China to the world. Mini-truth or illusion, Martha Washington? Take your pikk. This after another day of talking about whether the past was any more solid than the future shall be. My memory is so terrible for plots.

I only remember that reading 1984 shook me. I can't remember how or why. Watching it again on stage - brilliantly rendered, with multi-media enhancements - felt only like a rehearsal of cliche. As though we all have grown that far beyond what clearly is still omni-present.

Touchpoints in my past are documented, remembered as well by friends. Still, the plot I choose would be the one which fails the most to belittle me. It informs my current actions, in truth to what I do believe I have been. Cringing just a little if someone reminds me of some alternate reading. Something I might have missed.

My future then so much more under my control, based in part on how I do inform my past and so I must be bothered by China's spinning certain facts beyond their peoples' reach. Spinning something which would elicit better resolution toward the future. Still, we do it better here on the other side of the globe. We paper over shortcomings in service to our future dreams. Reaching ever higher for technical solutions to the misery of humanity.

My fear is that much greater that China will be seen only as the embodiment of some yellow hoard without understanding or care for truth, justice and the American way. It would be that much in error to read the Orwellian takes on history as celebrations of what we do. At China's center there are leaders no more (or less) flawed and self-serving than ours are. Two parties provide at least as much cover as does one party prevent internal debates from spilling out in public.

In America, you may easily seem honest by your stated opposition. In China, there is more discretion about what may be displayed in public. Still, the term "communist" rankles. But any more than does "democracy," against what we practice privately in our back rooms?

We still have at our center the fictional Big Brother in the sky. In China, in place of the once and future emperor, they have the Party, resolved will of the people if only they would understand it. Shorn of symbol, they retain the structure which has managed throughout history to assimilate its opposition.

The Heavens are fixed and stable, apart from the occasional wandering star. The Earth, under heaven, will shift beneath our feet. The rivers wash away mountains; earthquakes turn housing to rubble, crushing lives and shattering illusion. Symbolic Man is cosmically in the middle, bringing heaven's constancy to earth.

We do this with dams and irrigation. We plan our cities wisely, right! We study the earth's fluctuations so that we may bring them back in line. Except that earthquakes and hurricanes happen whenever they please, and then we are that suddenly reminded of what we might have done more easily and cheaply had we but planned ahead. Outpourings of love after the fact do nothing about the safety which would not fit in among the clear and present imperatives of daily life.

Outpourings of outrage at the petty corruption which allowed school buildings to be constructed poorly so that they would crush the innocent only children beneath them can only undermine the critical faith in the good will of the party toward future betterment for all. These are not trivial matters to adjudicate. The words cannot come easily; and the outrage, from mothers, cannot easily be assuaged.

There will come a tipping point, after which the people's trust cannot be earned by oil on water calm in the wake. Where the promise of future prosperity is itself undermined by things right in front of the face. Where filters on information can only highlight what has been left out.

And in the meantime, there is surely something Americans can and must learn from China's traditions, reflecting them back in our own words. So the Chinese themselves may see the best in themselves. And find something good in ours.

Pause

I must still sing a song of innocence, in love with guilty pleasures. I mourn the dead of Haiti. I mourn the shattered dreams from Katrina, from Tsunami, from Allah and from Jesus. I mourn that bureaucrats must do what they must do. I mourn the loss of leaderhship, in a world addicted to the promotion of superstars.

Still, I celebrate today, the omni-present, where there is so much left to do.

Is Context Really Everything? (for perversion it is)

Actually, I think it is! Now, the other day's post got all Googled up somehow, with too much html tagging that I don't want to wade through. It's what wrong with computing. That somehow when we make it all too brain dead simple, it goes all wonky underneath.

I'd thought I understood my brother-in-law's sin. That it was the incest. The transgression of forbidden boundaries. Pure and simple. 

But I spent some time with an old and much more literate than me friend. It was one of these conversations when you wish you might somehow take notes. I remembered being there before, in his space of erudition and revelation, and despaired even in the moment that I would be able to recapture it on my own. 

I never can, or maybe it's just the beer we drink together, and that wherever that particular perversion sends me I can't make it back alone? Who knows.

But this old friend maintains that when he, as a child, gave priests blowjobs (or did he let them give it to him?  See, I never can quite remember) it was because he wanted to, and they were known as sure and risk free marks. And he finds nothing wrong at all with his "idyllic" childhood, nor, and I guess he's looked quite hard, any possibilty for actual perversion in life as it could be lived. 

I don't think he's denying crime. He might be denying sin. It's easy for us both to agree that my brother in law belongs in jail, but not exactly why.  Deterrent? No, I don't think so. Punishment? It's not sufficient. To get him out of commerce is what I'd likely think, but I'll have to revisit that one later, in more fullness of time (as if!).

Anyhow, back in my own thoughts now, and a little bit less dizzy, I do find one corrective which fits. It's not the boundary crossing, exactly, quite so much as it is the context which sharpens the transgression, and makes the boundary clear. I confess that I have an impossible time imagining any circumstance where the father/daughter boundary would be OK to cross, but are there other cultures where it might be? Dunno!

In this case, what her testimony revealed was that it was his way of self-righteousness which needed correcting. That without that, the transgression could have been resisted, she felt, because, I guess, it would have been so self-evidently wrong. It would seem he convinced himself too, that what he did was covered, somehow perversely by its absence, in the Bible.

And I hardly can avoid the irony - he is a Creationist - that this also is the error still among evolutioninsts. My friend - it won't shock you that he harbors mild racist tendancies - himself in all his way better read than me brilliance, still, I think, doesn't get how evolution works. 

It's not the boundary between the gifted and mutated for better survival individual and the rest of his crowd which counts. This gift for better survival has to get assimilated back by reproductive sex into that selfsame group. And it's the group's better survivability which over longish time which defines new species, as environmental boundaries get sharpened to some new niche. Which finally leaves out by genetic misfit, wayward one-time members who want to screw back in.

Now that's a mystery worth scientifically working on, and I'm certain there are fascinating books to read (I'll get right on it!). Not my field or niche for sure, but I'm confident enough that I've got the outline right. Better survivability has got to be screwed back in or its just irrelevant. And by very definition - that the offspring are not only better adapted for survival as adults, but also for survival through the grueling reproductive process (which is where the real winnowing gets done) - this survivability becomes exclusive.

Perverse sex is just non-productive sex, but there's no sin to it. Hell, it might be the opposite, as creative practice play must be part of life. It's surely part of growing up! Who even knows what might prove productive (or does fucking monkeys always and only suggest AIDS)?

So, it is appalling when some smooth talking sociopath gets away with stuff. Like that salesman in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, who somehow can't resist the dolled up wailing jilted lover he meets coming last one off the plane. She awake that promised lover was leading her on. He sincere in comforting her in such extremis (how could he not?), but also sincerely moved by her dolling up so sexy for the lying scoundrel lover. One thing leads to another, and the only thing, really, you can blame him for is telling about it. Or is that what exhonerates him?

Jesus!

I don't know. This here transgression now, writing about family and friends. Does that make my own identity forever dicey? Some fictions must be kept?

Or is it more, as my friend and interlocutor did urge, that the real sin is the keeping within ourselves the truth. The hiding. The pretending to more than what we are. It feels dicey, for sure. It is appalling.

And so, the mob, in evolutionary terms, need not cruelly reject any interlopers. Nature does it for them. So, who imitates what when we reject those who don't fit in? My favorite sophomoric question still. A school for gifted kind of thrill, where my friend and I both did teach (he still nurses anger for what I did when elevated, like by his instigation, to become his boss. I disagreed! But it was my role to take those hits, and did so.)

But certainly we must reserve jail for those who harm us, and never those who merely offend. I care not a whit for deterrence or penal theory. I just think away and gone is good, and for enough time to think about it and to come to terms. I favor country club prisons myself, and I'll bet they're cheaper in the long run, just simply because coming to terms would be that much more likely, but I'll save that breath for another time.

In this time here, I simply want to say that it's the bombast which makes him guilty (me too?). It's the proclaiming as knowledge what you can't know. As truth what you've never trued. As God what you could never, as judging by your actions, could ever have experienced. And if you did, then stop protesting so much too much already, and get on with doing something about it.

My daughter helped start a chapter at her college, of Students for a Free Tibet.  She actually used it as an excuse for why she doesn't write me! But she let me in to witness part of one gathering, where the members and interested people were way outnumbered by motivated elite Chinese overseas students, who were there to protest and to correct distortions to their government's fine record.

I was and am appalled. These students should at least know that they aren't allowed to know better. Somehow, even after time in this country, I guess, but then the language barrier is huge, I know, they've managed to keep intact the internal censorship their government imposes (yes, I still harbor much resentment for those who help Chinese Googling that way).

I take cold comfort that this will prove an evolutionary dead end for their country. This much I know; that you can't constrict free creativity without destroying survivability.

Oh hell, I know those naive American students are still more stifled by their own mediated understandings of China, as concocted by now near dead MSM for their own, the students', patriotic indigestion. I know there are distortions to and fro, and that religion also manages to make it into the equation for some likely conspiratorial conversion process. 

After all, the Dalai Lama is on the side of true religionists everywhere. And the Chinese on the side of rational science and progress. But how can patriotic fervor so trump independent thought. I know, I know, we do it here at home all the time. Still!!

So, this much is clear (and then I have to get dressed, take a shower, and compose my thoughts for announcing today to all the quarterly gathered executive directors whom I endeavor to serve, that I'll be moving on, perversely in these economic Hard Times.): That we will destroy our national survivability to the extent that we allow capitalist excess to distort the news and feed us pablum digestible shit.  That to the extent that we allow the ascension of religionists to positions of any secular power, we'll sin against mankind. That to the extent the Chinese manage to continue to quiet all dissent, they'll hand back to us all advantage.

This much is clear.

But also that horse breeding, and people breeding for that matter, have very little to nothing at all to do with evolution. That this bizarre supposition that there is or ever could be any racial priority on some evolutionary scale is not only harmful but perverse as well. That any thought that intellectual giftedness must be nurtured for its survival value is itself a Nazi offshoot (though I'm thinking seriously of a valiant attempt to resurrect my old school - it would make a good last ditch - in service, always and only, to those poor kids themselves, and I might just shill the shameless tout about their otherwise lost utility just to get the funding. But I might not. I still think basic research should have it's own claim to funding dollars, and literary and queer studies too for that matter, so there!)

Motivated research, just like guided evolution, is always and only a road to nowhere. Barbaro legs. Beauty is always and only ever a surprise. Truth too. 

There need be no laws against cloning, I declare. It's just too God Damned boring to worry about. I hope and trust.

I am so fucking sick and tired of bombast. My own too! There has to be grace to be found somewhere. I pray.

Carnevale followup

Well, it wasn't much of a reunion, but it was very nice. Absolutely no one I knew, and all my age, except for my dear friend who was their teacher. I don't think those relationships ever quite change, as witness the difficulty letting go of the "Mister", and so I was rather privileged as his friend. These folks were before my time, and therefore went to the school I actually did refuse in my youth, but not for the reasons they indicated - most peers would regard them as dweebs.

I was gently reminded that the school was not so much founded on the IQ test per se, although it was the age of Sputnik, and such instruments were all the rage. More on a kind of mission to combat American anti-intellectualism, which still needs combating, and to correct American prep school notions of who are and should be the elite. An utterly unsupportable mission, beyond the Sputnik age, and certainly through stagflation, as I would find out to my misery.

Still, when you put these groups into a room, just as when you put hundreds of priests in a room, there are some unavoidable observations to be made, all tending in the direction of reinforcing certain stereotypes. While at the same time tempering the ones you'd have without seeing them in a room together.

So, of course, as to Mom, I do have to revise the observation, since however much I'd love it to be her fault for not having good boundaries (my very favorite piece of psychobabble), I do have to own up, if that's what it is, to my own genetic (are they?) predispostions toward hiding out. I am, by nature, very shy.

But hell, even genetics is far too complicated to master. I watched a NOVA special about how science was made to stand trial, yet again, recently somewhere in Pennsylvania just to my south. Now surely some stop should have been put to the very notion of trying science in court (that's a nice phrase, right there, Larry). And luckily common sense ruled. But a little too narrowly, as in the margin would have to be infinity.

Still, there is surely something to the Creationist complaint. Not to their claims. Just the complaint, since scientific certainty is very very unscientific, and always parochial. I've been reading lots about infinity, its limits (!!!), or more properly, the limits of abstraction, and well for sure to claim anything for sure is to claim too much. Lots of lost minds along the trail.

There still remains much silliness about eugenics, back to the IQ theme. I'm remain pretty sure (but never certain) that species differentiation happens when boundaries occur between groups, and not when some creative genius-style mutation happens to the individual. I think the Good Man Kinsey did demonstrate this fact decisively back in the dark ages before sex was polymorphous and perverse right in the University. Well, you know what I mean.

There are no ideal types, nor certain boundaries. So that there has to be environmental change, group migration, and boundaries abstracted from blurred distinctions, before cross mating stops being possible, right?

Ours, for sure, was language, and more recently, that mighty crossroads of consciousness where language became written down. I draw all lines at beastiality. (and incest, thank you very much)

So here we are, slouching toward that, what did Douglass Adams call it, cafe at the end of the universe. That place off which our words only echo, and there is nothing more. Not, surely, understanding, but rather the dead end for tools' manipulations which don't, by their very exercise, attempt a hoist by our own, very precisely now, petard.  I'm talking the red button, or the frog in a pail over a fire global warming, or simply an overwhelming sense of too much want.

This is not a spaceship we can fly, nor ever should want to, remember. Since I do know that my body extends throughout the biosphere, and is not, finally, bounded from my mind (which bounds and bounds, sometimes quite out of control) and that these mysteries, right here in this cosy logosphere, are oh so much less costly to explore.  

Yesterday's post, truth to tell, was made through an impossibly obsolete instrument. An old laptop I can't bear to toss away, steward of the environment as I try to be. I had to laugh out loud, because I actually do have some understanding of what's going on inside that particular black box, at the battle among virus definitions, memory limits, and Microsoft's very very terminal fixation on prolix code, to where simply turning it on to the point of access to my very own ethereal tablet allowed me to complete an entire chapter of Hot Flat and Crowded.  Now that's good irony, right there, Larry!

I have always preferred hand tools. Frankly, I find them faster, and a whole lot less fuss. I think snowblowers are foolish hangovers from, first, when there actually used to be snow, and second, when machinery was still fun to deal with. Rebuilding my boat went a whole lot more smoothly, and just as fast with a hand plane. You know my feelings about 4 wheel drive, but out here in the middle of nowhere, I'm pretty sure I've shovelled maybe 4 times in the past three years. And I get a lot more snow than Buffalo. (and I DON'T have four wheel drive)

OK, end of sermon. Still, oh gifted humans, can't we do something a little bit more noble than to resurrect our old bad ways? Isn't there something properly post-capitalistic which can help us along the way toward more humanity, and a little less hot, flat and crowded?  (Hint, I'm pretty sure Friedman's still stuck on flatland)

oooh, I'm shivering.  I have to find out why my damned stove won't properly catch. Later.  I have a sinking feeling that it's the wood I bought so cheaply. Can't trust anyone these days . . .