When I look at the results of the Gitmo detainee database, I feel a strange pride. There's something about feeling every fiber of your being over a long time span interwoven into a factual process, into every numerical component of a statistic. You have in some way achieved numerical representation. You didn't fabricate the data yourself, but derived it from empirical reality, so you have not contrived a fantasy. Therefore you are not looking at a monolith of your imagination, but your related thought processes intertwined with reality.
Such are the only profound thoughts of a researcher.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
Why didn't they tell us?
It's a cold feeling when you realize that they didn't tell us because they can't. But surely there's something objective about it, there's something that you can detect in it, some systematic process that all engaged, Hegelian beings understand and follow? They seem to understand one another well enough. Surely they could at least try to impart that. But if they tried to tell us, we would'nt understand. You realize that though the objective good might be out there, it's inaccessible to us except through experience - through the same repetition of experiences. It's so sad to recognize that the reason the literature is still out there is not because the world itself hasn't changed, but because the world itself can't change - that's a task for the individual, and new individuals always appear. It's even more sad to recognize that you can't fully appreciate and recognize what a book has to say until you've experienced it.
Here is where Tommy comes in. The Buddhists similarly have a procedure of particular objective practices that they've passed down over centuries, but that still achieve the same individual results. But the ritualists, who like their intrinsically worthless but traditional practices, try to hide the objectivity as mere opinion. Perhaps in a more conspiratorial, Nietzschean way, they are engaged in an attempt to make us like them
Why couldn't someone tell me how to solve by perceptual problems? Because I couldn't articulate them into a question myself. By the time one can, they don't need the answer any more. There is no advisor, because they know nothing more than the details of their particular program, all the objective things that you can get online. You can't go to people for general counseling, you must go in with a question, put people on their guard for an attack, for a responsive action that responds to you, rather than a mere performance.
Here is where Tommy comes in. The Buddhists similarly have a procedure of particular objective practices that they've passed down over centuries, but that still achieve the same individual results. But the ritualists, who like their intrinsically worthless but traditional practices, try to hide the objectivity as mere opinion. Perhaps in a more conspiratorial, Nietzschean way, they are engaged in an attempt to make us like them
Why couldn't someone tell me how to solve by perceptual problems? Because I couldn't articulate them into a question myself. By the time one can, they don't need the answer any more. There is no advisor, because they know nothing more than the details of their particular program, all the objective things that you can get online. You can't go to people for general counseling, you must go in with a question, put people on their guard for an attack, for a responsive action that responds to you, rather than a mere performance.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Repression by Free Market
During a visit to the Thai King's exhibit of contemporary artwork in the ancient, belabored Thai style, I commented to a fellow visitor about the tragedy that such an art form would prove unsustainable under Western pressures for productivity. I proffered the comment carelessly, expecting a sympathetic affirmation. The answer I received, however, took the comment as an opening spar: "Personally, I don't care that this would never happen in a market economy. If there's no demand, there's no value."
This reverberated through my entire system as inordinately dogmatic, even dangerous. Especially in art as the expression of human creativity, I have always thought that no tiny piece of diversity should be suppressed, no matter the censor or cause. After all, the market is supposed to be the guardian of diversity. The idea that the majority or the consuming population should determine what ideas should exist and therefore justify the death of others confers what I consider an undue moral authority on the market. This is the classic Millian social dialogue in its purest form.
First, the market is easily swayed by prevailing views. This is easily demonstrated by the existence of varying markets across the planet. However, this is not necessarily an adequeate check against the arbitrary disappearance of certain expressions or thoughts, since they may become caught in a contrary market, and there is anyway quite a feedback on demand in weaker markets from supply in stronger ones.
But why need we fight to preserve these crafts anyway? Unless they have intrinsic value, the arbitrary decision to exclude them should scarcely matter, regardless of the agent of exclusion. At the Thai exhibit, I was particularly struck because I considered the inimitable intricacy of the art to be an intrinsically good characteristic. However, in all honesty, perhaps my fellow visitor's comment was based on the opposite view. The key was that consensus was lacking. If only one person thinks the product is intrinsically good, and they aren't strong enough to convince others of the same truth, why need the market paternalistically foster it?
What bothered me was the frightening reality that the selection criterion here was not the intrinsic good of a product - which is, in my view, subjective anyway - but the believer's ability to sell it. It's unclear to me that one's skill as a salesman or debater are indicative of the caliber of one's judgment. The chief problem here is the paradox that, in art, many demands need pre-existing supply and many supplies need pre-existing demand. One thinks immediately of Howard Roark and his employer in Rand's The Fountainhead: their architecture was in a class all its own, edging them from the NYC limelight. Their faith that a clientele would naturally emerge was hopelessly optimistic to say the least.
Of course, every government lacks the resources to prop up every nascent product. Rather, I think what is needed is a certain openness of mind - a realization that the market's declaration is neither infallible nor sacred. I admit this is unsatisfactory as a solution, but I think it is practically necessary to tolerate even the least plausible ideas without dogmatic repression. After all, this is how I was able to see gold textured so beautifully that a barking deer seemed to have fur that looked so real and soft that I wanted to reach through the glass to stroke it.
This reverberated through my entire system as inordinately dogmatic, even dangerous. Especially in art as the expression of human creativity, I have always thought that no tiny piece of diversity should be suppressed, no matter the censor or cause. After all, the market is supposed to be the guardian of diversity. The idea that the majority or the consuming population should determine what ideas should exist and therefore justify the death of others confers what I consider an undue moral authority on the market. This is the classic Millian social dialogue in its purest form.
First, the market is easily swayed by prevailing views. This is easily demonstrated by the existence of varying markets across the planet. However, this is not necessarily an adequeate check against the arbitrary disappearance of certain expressions or thoughts, since they may become caught in a contrary market, and there is anyway quite a feedback on demand in weaker markets from supply in stronger ones.
But why need we fight to preserve these crafts anyway? Unless they have intrinsic value, the arbitrary decision to exclude them should scarcely matter, regardless of the agent of exclusion. At the Thai exhibit, I was particularly struck because I considered the inimitable intricacy of the art to be an intrinsically good characteristic. However, in all honesty, perhaps my fellow visitor's comment was based on the opposite view. The key was that consensus was lacking. If only one person thinks the product is intrinsically good, and they aren't strong enough to convince others of the same truth, why need the market paternalistically foster it?
What bothered me was the frightening reality that the selection criterion here was not the intrinsic good of a product - which is, in my view, subjective anyway - but the believer's ability to sell it. It's unclear to me that one's skill as a salesman or debater are indicative of the caliber of one's judgment. The chief problem here is the paradox that, in art, many demands need pre-existing supply and many supplies need pre-existing demand. One thinks immediately of Howard Roark and his employer in Rand's The Fountainhead: their architecture was in a class all its own, edging them from the NYC limelight. Their faith that a clientele would naturally emerge was hopelessly optimistic to say the least.
Of course, every government lacks the resources to prop up every nascent product. Rather, I think what is needed is a certain openness of mind - a realization that the market's declaration is neither infallible nor sacred. I admit this is unsatisfactory as a solution, but I think it is practically necessary to tolerate even the least plausible ideas without dogmatic repression. After all, this is how I was able to see gold textured so beautifully that a barking deer seemed to have fur that looked so real and soft that I wanted to reach through the glass to stroke it.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Thai Culture?
I've been preoccupied during the last week with a question posed to me very soon after I entered this country: What do you think of Thailand? It's a simple question, but the task of answering it involves a complex characterization of an entire nation.
Thailand's culture is sort of Las-Vegasesque, a description confirmed by the webpages for Vegas versions that spring up when I Google certain tourist sites here. The colors are vibrant pinks and yellows, the presentations are glitzy with glimmering sequins, gold, and silks, and MTV (or ice cream truck music) provides the background for every bus ride, telephone call, and restaurant dinner. Golden Buddhist shrines lurk in middle of shantytowns and over the rear-view mirrors of taxicabs. The culture is very physical, in-your-face: slapstick comedy, dancing, massages; the prevalence of sex tourism appears to be no coincidence.
But there is also the harmonious side to Thai culture. Somehow drivers on the highway are able to weave confidently between the hoards of motor bikers and other cars that use the yellow lanes painted on the road as suggestions rather than rules - accidents are supposedly rare here. Enormous masses are funneled through small entryways, without undue frustration. Despite jostling through crowded sidewalks, I have made elbow-contact with fewer people in the last two weeks than I would in one walk in the UK. I've seen more people sitting idly in groups on plastic chairs, just smoking or people-watching, than I have since reading literature set in 1930s rural America. The pace is much slower.
As a result, inefficiency is rampant. At our tournament, check-in for a hundred people devolved into an hour-long ordeal of individuals filling out forms at the reception desk, problems handled on a case-by-case basis. Stalls crowd together in malls or along streets, with individual sellers and lines in front of good food stands. Roads are planned so that one must drive half a mile past their destination, then u-turn back and drive toward their exit.
For everything but the amazingly high-tech sky train public transit system, the Central Planner seems to be conspicuously missing, both in culture and government. Even the architecture is haphazardly constructed, with Grecian columns randomly thrown on top of modern facades with colonial window frames; one rarely sees uniform design or color in any neighborhood, or even in shopping districts. Street signs often are not marked. Most street trash recepticles are hanging bags placed by individual stall- or shop-keepers, not by the state. Public restrooms often collect 3 baht for the privilege of using them. All of Thailand reeks with the individualism of the marketplace.
The inequalities resulting from government neglect and economic underdevelopment are also glaring. Next to the highways, solid mansions rise in the swampy jungle just next door to the squalor of the shantytowns. Zoning is almost unheard of outside the central city (and almost, inside it). Filthy makeshift stalls selling various pawned goods and manned by individuals missing teeth and shows lean against decently clean laundromats with printed signs and fresh and clean owners. No one seems to bat an eye. However, it makes me wonder whether the gated segregation from but abstract sympathy for poverty that I have observed among the wealthy in America - which actually drives many people, whether the older through charitable donations and foundations or the younger by pursuing public interest careers - is perhaps valuable anyway. Or at least, it seems to offer some prospect for change that seems impossiblt from the callous matter-of-factness of the wealthy Thai, confronted by poverty so close to home every day.
But I think Westerners often forget the downsides of our rules and bustle. Once you emerge from the ever-intrusive ad hoc commercial advertising, hawkers selling everything from tuk-tuk rides to riverboat tours, the Thai easiness seems to translate into a very deep kindness and awareness of others. As I walk quickly down a street, a slow woman in front of me will graciously step aside to let me pass; those whom I apologize to on the street will stop and turn to face me, saying no problem; one person asked about directions will call a conference of five to answer the question; yogurt purchased at any 7-11 receives a spoon in the bag, while Coke receives a straw; taxi drivers at the Henry's gate joke with the security guards whom they've never met. People are also very trusting (partly due to the language barrier) - any excuse will get you into a locked hotel room.
However, I fear that the Thai may prostitute their culture to Western tourists. They often try to truss up their culture, as was done at the Worlds closing ceremony. Few people travel to their National Forest besides tourists, who are driven from site to site in over-priced tourist trucks. They also tend to translate their business communications into poor and - worse - vague English, naming businesses things like Great Insurance and Food for Fun. They also don't seem to care much about the precision of the translations, suggesting that they are not trying to convey a nuanced message about themselves to foreigners. It's unclear to me whether they view the glamorization and translation of their own culture as a compromise for the sake of business or not.
Perhaps it would've helped if I had spoken in-depth to any Thai resident, beyond the occasional haggling and request for directions...
Thailand's culture is sort of Las-Vegasesque, a description confirmed by the webpages for Vegas versions that spring up when I Google certain tourist sites here. The colors are vibrant pinks and yellows, the presentations are glitzy with glimmering sequins, gold, and silks, and MTV (or ice cream truck music) provides the background for every bus ride, telephone call, and restaurant dinner. Golden Buddhist shrines lurk in middle of shantytowns and over the rear-view mirrors of taxicabs. The culture is very physical, in-your-face: slapstick comedy, dancing, massages; the prevalence of sex tourism appears to be no coincidence.
But there is also the harmonious side to Thai culture. Somehow drivers on the highway are able to weave confidently between the hoards of motor bikers and other cars that use the yellow lanes painted on the road as suggestions rather than rules - accidents are supposedly rare here. Enormous masses are funneled through small entryways, without undue frustration. Despite jostling through crowded sidewalks, I have made elbow-contact with fewer people in the last two weeks than I would in one walk in the UK. I've seen more people sitting idly in groups on plastic chairs, just smoking or people-watching, than I have since reading literature set in 1930s rural America. The pace is much slower.
As a result, inefficiency is rampant. At our tournament, check-in for a hundred people devolved into an hour-long ordeal of individuals filling out forms at the reception desk, problems handled on a case-by-case basis. Stalls crowd together in malls or along streets, with individual sellers and lines in front of good food stands. Roads are planned so that one must drive half a mile past their destination, then u-turn back and drive toward their exit.
For everything but the amazingly high-tech sky train public transit system, the Central Planner seems to be conspicuously missing, both in culture and government. Even the architecture is haphazardly constructed, with Grecian columns randomly thrown on top of modern facades with colonial window frames; one rarely sees uniform design or color in any neighborhood, or even in shopping districts. Street signs often are not marked. Most street trash recepticles are hanging bags placed by individual stall- or shop-keepers, not by the state. Public restrooms often collect 3 baht for the privilege of using them. All of Thailand reeks with the individualism of the marketplace.
The inequalities resulting from government neglect and economic underdevelopment are also glaring. Next to the highways, solid mansions rise in the swampy jungle just next door to the squalor of the shantytowns. Zoning is almost unheard of outside the central city (and almost, inside it). Filthy makeshift stalls selling various pawned goods and manned by individuals missing teeth and shows lean against decently clean laundromats with printed signs and fresh and clean owners. No one seems to bat an eye. However, it makes me wonder whether the gated segregation from but abstract sympathy for poverty that I have observed among the wealthy in America - which actually drives many people, whether the older through charitable donations and foundations or the younger by pursuing public interest careers - is perhaps valuable anyway. Or at least, it seems to offer some prospect for change that seems impossiblt from the callous matter-of-factness of the wealthy Thai, confronted by poverty so close to home every day.
But I think Westerners often forget the downsides of our rules and bustle. Once you emerge from the ever-intrusive ad hoc commercial advertising, hawkers selling everything from tuk-tuk rides to riverboat tours, the Thai easiness seems to translate into a very deep kindness and awareness of others. As I walk quickly down a street, a slow woman in front of me will graciously step aside to let me pass; those whom I apologize to on the street will stop and turn to face me, saying no problem; one person asked about directions will call a conference of five to answer the question; yogurt purchased at any 7-11 receives a spoon in the bag, while Coke receives a straw; taxi drivers at the Henry's gate joke with the security guards whom they've never met. People are also very trusting (partly due to the language barrier) - any excuse will get you into a locked hotel room.
However, I fear that the Thai may prostitute their culture to Western tourists. They often try to truss up their culture, as was done at the Worlds closing ceremony. Few people travel to their National Forest besides tourists, who are driven from site to site in over-priced tourist trucks. They also tend to translate their business communications into poor and - worse - vague English, naming businesses things like Great Insurance and Food for Fun. They also don't seem to care much about the precision of the translations, suggesting that they are not trying to convey a nuanced message about themselves to foreigners. It's unclear to me whether they view the glamorization and translation of their own culture as a compromise for the sake of business or not.
Perhaps it would've helped if I had spoken in-depth to any Thai resident, beyond the occasional haggling and request for directions...
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
My charitable ode to (Hegelian) conservatism
The feeling that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that others have felt the exact same emotions before, whether about everything from ambition and compassion to Hegel's great philosophical contemplations of human dependency, is staggering. Rather than receding into anonymity, we thenceforward can act with the belief that our actions are significant - we are freed from individuality in the petty details to launch our own independent projects within it. When you are alone in the world, any new start can seem overwhelming; but if you are simply following a long-traveled trail that you know has led to some goods, your eyes are more peeled for the more efficient shortcut or the more illuminating detour; even a new destination is no longer beyond question.
But the sense of history is also not one to be dismissed: it is the home of empathy and emotional resonance. When we watch a movie Apollo 13, it carries emotional resonance because it is not just a random team of explorers, but the culmination of long efforts to reach beyond the human condition, part of the human project. When someone recites the Gettysburg Address, it can bring some to tears and everyone to chills because we recognize the significance bestowed on it by everything that had preceded it, the mindset that spawned it. Perhaps more importantly, we understand how it would have affected so many people in the future with certain values.
Of course, from the liberal standpoint, we cannot take that emotional resonance as a bearer of truth. Humans can be easily swayed by a force of history (and the weight of human numbers, essentially) behind something that may only be contingent. For example, it is unclear to me that the Civil War really did most perfectly uphold the values of democracy and peace that Lincoln espoused in his battlefield speech. And I think this is the chief danger, even a Nietzschean one: that the old way is not necessarily the most perfect way. Sometimes it is hard to part with that historical association, but we must realize that new histories may be better ones.
But the sense of history is also not one to be dismissed: it is the home of empathy and emotional resonance. When we watch a movie Apollo 13, it carries emotional resonance because it is not just a random team of explorers, but the culmination of long efforts to reach beyond the human condition, part of the human project. When someone recites the Gettysburg Address, it can bring some to tears and everyone to chills because we recognize the significance bestowed on it by everything that had preceded it, the mindset that spawned it. Perhaps more importantly, we understand how it would have affected so many people in the future with certain values.
Of course, from the liberal standpoint, we cannot take that emotional resonance as a bearer of truth. Humans can be easily swayed by a force of history (and the weight of human numbers, essentially) behind something that may only be contingent. For example, it is unclear to me that the Civil War really did most perfectly uphold the values of democracy and peace that Lincoln espoused in his battlefield speech. And I think this is the chief danger, even a Nietzschean one: that the old way is not necessarily the most perfect way. Sometimes it is hard to part with that historical association, but we must realize that new histories may be better ones.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The Collegiate Bureaucracy
So the students milling about Yale at any given time strike me as amazingly part of the bureaucratic machine that I've been reading about in Weber and from the Frankfurt School. One of the central premises of this school of thought about "bureaucratic rationalization" is that modern society creates a number of bureaucratic machines that, due to increasing education, have been hyper-rationalized and organized from above, carving exact roles for members of the society to fill (Sartre would roll in his grave over inauthenticity); to reason externally, to evaluate whether or not these are themselves worthwhile, would be to overthink the system. And this is not a mere matter of doublethink, because indeed these pre-determined roles (five-classes-and-three-recommendations-per-semester, two-internships-for-summer, one-extracurricular-with-at-least-one-leadership-role, two-scholarships-and-a-few-applications-for-law-school-with-backups ones sounds familiar?) actually do guarantee us individual success within public opinion and (sometimes) are genuinely socially utile. But the problem is, are they our roles? Now if only we had a few weeks or hours or minutes to contemplate that question... The frightening thing is that most of us haven't, because we can't spare those thirty minutes for one of the biggest questions of our lives.
For example, until I was a senior in high school, I couldn't multiply by multiples of ten efficiently. I had to visually inscribe the product in my thoughts, carrying the zeros and adding the resulting rows; but I knew there is a simple decimal rule that would reduce this amount by ten seconds. The problem is that I knew it would take me at least a minute to figure this out and it took me no more than fifteen seconds to do long multiplication in my head. It took me four years to "get around" to the decimal rule.
I've realized that I absolutely must go into political science. There's something about reading Peter Heather that actually makes my skin crawl, realizing that the Romans were able to spread the pride in Roman culture to such an immense empire - to the point that barbarians were literally begging - with voluntary taxes, tribute, and home-financed monuments - to join the club. It's this type of analysis of societal phenomena that truly energizes me.
Is this not an item on the syllabus of one component of the five-and-three-per-semester scheme? (By the way, tribute to Perry Link for the best self-referential conclusion in a New York Times Review article).
For example, until I was a senior in high school, I couldn't multiply by multiples of ten efficiently. I had to visually inscribe the product in my thoughts, carrying the zeros and adding the resulting rows; but I knew there is a simple decimal rule that would reduce this amount by ten seconds. The problem is that I knew it would take me at least a minute to figure this out and it took me no more than fifteen seconds to do long multiplication in my head. It took me four years to "get around" to the decimal rule.
I've realized that I absolutely must go into political science. There's something about reading Peter Heather that actually makes my skin crawl, realizing that the Romans were able to spread the pride in Roman culture to such an immense empire - to the point that barbarians were literally begging - with voluntary taxes, tribute, and home-financed monuments - to join the club. It's this type of analysis of societal phenomena that truly energizes me.
Is this not an item on the syllabus of one component of the five-and-three-per-semester scheme? (By the way, tribute to Perry Link for the best self-referential conclusion in a New York Times Review article).
Monday, October 8, 2007
Not so radical hope
Today I read Charles Taylor's Article in the New York Review of Books entitled, Radical Hope," in which he describes the potential for a society whose central tenets have been undermined by globalization/modernization to find another motivating value and meaning for itself, whereby all its cultural actions will regain significance. But he seems to assume that cultures as coherent groups need to continue within a blood-defined set of individuals, even if the basis of their culture, what was significant, is gone. This is a blatant admission that cultures are arbitrarily formed, that what they deem as significant is in fact no more than pluralistically tolerable.
Sharma no doubt wanted us to read this piece as it indicates how war can define a culture's hierarchy and social structure. The Crow Amerindian tribe developed a ranking system based on performance in battle, and a culture around honoring these deeds and those of high rank.
I really just feel like Horkheimer and Adorno are just afraid of losing mysticism, of learning that we really all are just a unique combination of very definable, empirical qualities.
Sharma no doubt wanted us to read this piece as it indicates how war can define a culture's hierarchy and social structure. The Crow Amerindian tribe developed a ranking system based on performance in battle, and a culture around honoring these deeds and those of high rank.
I really just feel like Horkheimer and Adorno are just afraid of losing mysticism, of learning that we really all are just a unique combination of very definable, empirical qualities.
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