I am super tired this evening, but I have to make more of a habit of updating the blog all the time.
I spend a lot of time in my own head, thinking about big Issues, capital-I issues. I haven't been really too aware of this until lately, but once the thought occurred to me, I realize I do this all the time. And I'm not even necessarily thinking, it's almost more like pondering, trying to uncover some strong feeling or insight about the big issues.
I was walking on the way to work this morning, and I thought about this, and I asked myself, what's the biggest issue? Surprisingly, it came to me right away. It's Free Will. The biggest question in life is how much free will we really have, have much control over our own destinies do we really have.
Because we are each of course the product of our genetics and our circumstances. But we cannot deny free will. Imagine if we did so deny it -- it would be hard to find any motivation for anything. We just can't go through life thinking that everything is out of our control. But on the other hand we can't think that through force of will we can achieve or do or get anything we want.
I had an important thought in Argentina last year as I was wondering just what it is that makes Americans so dissatisfied. Lord knows americans are unbelievably lucky, we live in such a rich, prosperous society, where everything is so taken care of for us and there are very few, if any, day-to-day threats. But still americans seem so unhappy, much more so than people I meet from other countries. The thought I had was the root of this widespread dissatisfaction are some of the basic foundation myths or beliefs of americans.
First, the myth of the self-made man. "In this country, you can make anything you want of yourself. Anyone can grow up to be President." This is a beautiful ideal, and to some extent it's truer here than most anywhere else. But the flip side of this belief is that if you find yourself not President, or something equally fabulous, well, It's All Your Fault. You didn't get it together, you didn't try hard enough, you weren't smart enough. You did something wrong, probably lots and lots of things wrong.
Going hand-in-hand with the myth of the self-made man is the belief in Limitless Opportunity. Actually I'm not sure that these are separable, or that i have properly separated them in this explanation. This belief says that in America, the sky is the limit. There are always new doors to be opened, new areas in which you can be a Success.
Again, it's true that there are lots of opportunities here in the US, and that's fantastic. But there's the psychological downside. Because if you're not a big Success, well, again, that means you screwed up somehow. It's a reflection on You, not on the World.
In Argentina, they don't have so many opportunities, especially these days after their economic meltdown that started in 2001. And so, people don't feel that it's their fault that they're not rich and successful and famous.
Back to Free Will, it's not so much that places like Argentina don't believe in Free Will, it's more that they believe there are more limits to free will.
Of course this just scratches the idea of Free Will in a very superficial way. A great many applications of Free Will take place not in the public realm, but in the private realm, where things like economic opportunities and what-not aren't an issue. But there still remains a conflict between Will and Destiny, destiny let's say being what's been determined by your genetic and circumstantial background. I'm going to have to think about this more. But I do think it's a really, really big Issue.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Blindness by Jose Saramago -- review, part 1
I'm reading a book called "Blindness" by Jose Saramago. It has a kind of apocalyptic sci fi premise, a city in which people start going completely blind suddenly, a blindness where they see all white all the time. And the blindness is apparently highly contagious -- the first known victim appears to infect everyone he comes near, and it spreads through the whole city. But most of the book takes place in an asylum where a few hundred of the first sufferers are locked away, for the protection of the public. Things are very difficult for those inside, they are not used to being blind, so the basic necessities of life like eating and going to the bathroom become hugely complicated and troublesome. There is one sighted person who accompanies her husband to the asylum by pretending to be blind, but it isn't until near the end that she tells others.
Inside the asylum, things get very ugly very fast. First there is one gentleman who acts thuggishly, who gets hurt and then ends up getting killed by the guards on the outside, who are petrified that one of the infected will escape and cause them to go blind. There follows one of several incredibly sad scenes where the blind have to struggle to bury their dead with minimal tools and no outside assistance. Later, some real criminal types come in and begin to steal all the food, and all the valuables, and later force all the women to submit to depravations in order for anyone to eat. It's pretty graphic, and totally sickening. I haven't finished the book, but I thought I would write a little about it to get me thinking, and to keep it fresh.
Now this isn't some kind of cheap sci fi book -- it's written by Jose Saramago, who won the nobel prize for literature in 1998. This is serious literature, a great, great book. It's written in a highly stylized manner, no quotation marks, no punctuation except commas and periods. It can be rather confusing, because whole multi-way conversations are sometimes expressed in single run-on sentences. But this would be familiar to anyone who's read any latin american literature or i guess faulkner or others. Another interesting literary device is that no names are give. Each character is referred to descriptively, e.g. the girl with the dark glasses, the doctor's wife, the first man to go blind, the first man's wife, etc. This somehow goes along with the whole disorder of the story, the inability of everyone to know anything because they can't see anything. The inmates, when they first arrive, know this intuitively, and don't introduce themselves.
Reading this book has been hard going at times. It goes by pretty fast, there's beautiful writing, even if it's sometimes a little unclear who is speaking. But the scenes it depicts are so bleak, especially when things get violent in the asylum. You just can't believe it, it's so awful that these men (men, of course!) who had been so strucken themselves, would not have more empathy for everyone else who had been equally strucken. No matter what, they would take advantage of the situation to dominate and overpower as much as possible. Stealing food from the starving and forcing women to submit to gang rape to secure food. Very hard to stomach.
But even the petty deprivations are hard to take. The fact that basic sanitation had not been provided was kind of stomach-churning. Basically people had to resort to shitting just about everywhere. And because they were blind, and not used to being blind, it was hard for them to know where they were shitting. Showers were unavailable, and there was only fetid water, so washing clothes wasn't a possibility. And so these middle class people rapidly became dirty and smelly and bug-ridden, forced to step in shit trying to find someplace to shit. Meanwhile, the sighted, rather than helping, fire at the blind if they step too far in the direction of the exit.
I don't know if you'd call this book an allegory, a parable, or what. (I should really look those terms up!) To me, more than anything, it illustrates our vulnerability. The book makes painfully clear how devastating the loss of a simple (okay, complex) physical capability can be, how it can reduce us so much, putting so much of our previous lives out of reach. Even the most basic aspects of life, eating, drinking, excreting, these become incredibly challenging.
Another theme of the book is our dependency once weakened. The blind in the asylum could do nothing to feed themselves, they had to wait for outsiders to deliver food, which they did according to their own schedules. This sense of dependency in those who had previously been doctors and policemen and generally functional adults was just devastating to read.
And of course there is the cruelty, the will to power and the urge to dominate and take advantage of those weaker than us. There was something so raw and basic about how this was portrayed which made it very vivid. After all, the dominating thugs were blind themselves. They just armed themselves with metal rods removed from the beds, and possessed one gun, and weren't hesitant to use them. And so you have the nearly comic spectacle of a bunch of blind men threatening a much larger group of blind people by waving and jabbing metal rods blindly in the air, and shooting blindly once in a while. Now that I think of it, there may be a little Kafka-esque humor in this story, though it's certainly overshadowed by the surface brutality and suffering, all of which is rendered very elegantly and with a good deal of compassion in the prose.
I still have some 50 pages or so to read before I'm finished, but I had some time just now and thought I'd write these thoughts down while I could. More to come.
Inside the asylum, things get very ugly very fast. First there is one gentleman who acts thuggishly, who gets hurt and then ends up getting killed by the guards on the outside, who are petrified that one of the infected will escape and cause them to go blind. There follows one of several incredibly sad scenes where the blind have to struggle to bury their dead with minimal tools and no outside assistance. Later, some real criminal types come in and begin to steal all the food, and all the valuables, and later force all the women to submit to depravations in order for anyone to eat. It's pretty graphic, and totally sickening. I haven't finished the book, but I thought I would write a little about it to get me thinking, and to keep it fresh.
Now this isn't some kind of cheap sci fi book -- it's written by Jose Saramago, who won the nobel prize for literature in 1998. This is serious literature, a great, great book. It's written in a highly stylized manner, no quotation marks, no punctuation except commas and periods. It can be rather confusing, because whole multi-way conversations are sometimes expressed in single run-on sentences. But this would be familiar to anyone who's read any latin american literature or i guess faulkner or others. Another interesting literary device is that no names are give. Each character is referred to descriptively, e.g. the girl with the dark glasses, the doctor's wife, the first man to go blind, the first man's wife, etc. This somehow goes along with the whole disorder of the story, the inability of everyone to know anything because they can't see anything. The inmates, when they first arrive, know this intuitively, and don't introduce themselves.
Reading this book has been hard going at times. It goes by pretty fast, there's beautiful writing, even if it's sometimes a little unclear who is speaking. But the scenes it depicts are so bleak, especially when things get violent in the asylum. You just can't believe it, it's so awful that these men (men, of course!) who had been so strucken themselves, would not have more empathy for everyone else who had been equally strucken. No matter what, they would take advantage of the situation to dominate and overpower as much as possible. Stealing food from the starving and forcing women to submit to gang rape to secure food. Very hard to stomach.
But even the petty deprivations are hard to take. The fact that basic sanitation had not been provided was kind of stomach-churning. Basically people had to resort to shitting just about everywhere. And because they were blind, and not used to being blind, it was hard for them to know where they were shitting. Showers were unavailable, and there was only fetid water, so washing clothes wasn't a possibility. And so these middle class people rapidly became dirty and smelly and bug-ridden, forced to step in shit trying to find someplace to shit. Meanwhile, the sighted, rather than helping, fire at the blind if they step too far in the direction of the exit.
I don't know if you'd call this book an allegory, a parable, or what. (I should really look those terms up!) To me, more than anything, it illustrates our vulnerability. The book makes painfully clear how devastating the loss of a simple (okay, complex) physical capability can be, how it can reduce us so much, putting so much of our previous lives out of reach. Even the most basic aspects of life, eating, drinking, excreting, these become incredibly challenging.
Another theme of the book is our dependency once weakened. The blind in the asylum could do nothing to feed themselves, they had to wait for outsiders to deliver food, which they did according to their own schedules. This sense of dependency in those who had previously been doctors and policemen and generally functional adults was just devastating to read.
And of course there is the cruelty, the will to power and the urge to dominate and take advantage of those weaker than us. There was something so raw and basic about how this was portrayed which made it very vivid. After all, the dominating thugs were blind themselves. They just armed themselves with metal rods removed from the beds, and possessed one gun, and weren't hesitant to use them. And so you have the nearly comic spectacle of a bunch of blind men threatening a much larger group of blind people by waving and jabbing metal rods blindly in the air, and shooting blindly once in a while. Now that I think of it, there may be a little Kafka-esque humor in this story, though it's certainly overshadowed by the surface brutality and suffering, all of which is rendered very elegantly and with a good deal of compassion in the prose.
I still have some 50 pages or so to read before I'm finished, but I had some time just now and thought I'd write these thoughts down while I could. More to come.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
The moral intellectual's dilemma
If I have one general dissatisfaction with myself, it's that I don't seem like that effective of a person. I mean, I certainly get stuff done, and have made something of a life and all, but conventional success has been elusive.
Naturally, from time to time I've pondered why this might be. And the simplified answer seems to be that it's because of an unfortunate collision between my sense of ethics and my general intellectual orientation towards things.
Permit me to explain.
I'm an atheist, but consider myself highly ethical. That is, deeply concerned with being ethical, with doing the right thing at all times. I consider it pretty much the highest obligation a person has.
And what do I consider being ethical? Let's start with the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's pretty hard to beat. When I was in college, though, I ran into what I thought was a slightly superior formulation, Kant's Categorical Imperative. According to Wikipedia, this says one should "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will it that it should become a universal law." In other words, you should as as you would want every person in similar circumstances to act.
What this seems to do for me is turn ethics into a practical exercise of reason. You are presented with a practical question, what is the best action in this circumstances, the one that in the best of all worlds everyone would take?
This seems to me an eminently reasonable and highly enlightened approach to ethics. It also might make choosing one's actions a little problematic.
If one were to honestly apply the Categorical Imperative to one's actions, then one would be forced for each action to evaluate the possible consequences of that action, and determine which are the preferred consequences. Now this is where the intellectual gets hung up.
Because to honestly evaluate the likely consequences of all possible actions, sheesh, that's a friggin' tall order.
Recycling is an excellent example of this. I think most people by now realize we need to start doing right by our planet. Six billion people, we can clearly cause some damage. So you want to recycle. Now, you get an item that's mostly paper, but has some plastic mixed in. How should you act? Should you throw it in with the recycling, hoping that someone on the other end will somehow separate the paper from the plastic, or do you spend three minutes trying to peel the plastic off of the paper? What about staples? Will they just reject your cardboard and throw it out if it has staples, or will they remove them? Or maybe when they process the recycled paper the staples kind of sink to the bottom or something. Who the hell knows? This isn't the best example, but the point is that when posed with a simple question, what should I do with this box that has so much plastic attached, you're forced to consider a bunch of empirical questions, the answers to which you might no have at your fingertips.
Ergo, the person who's trying to be ethical can get really bogged down in details, and may be slow to act, or maybe won't act at all. And the more of a reasoning, careful intellectual that person (i.e. me) might be, the more likely this inaction.
But then, perhaps this isn't just an issue of morality, perhaps it's just in general a problem of the intellectual. For you could say the same thing vis-a-vis self interest as about ethics. Given a range of possible actions, it can be hard,or impossible, to thoroughly evaluate those actions for their possible consequences not for the world at large, but just for yourself.
This is why, I suppose, successful people, people of action, are often thought of as making decisions more instinctually, more gut-level, than rationally. Rationality bogs things down sometimes.
It's tough being a child of the Enlightenment!
Naturally, from time to time I've pondered why this might be. And the simplified answer seems to be that it's because of an unfortunate collision between my sense of ethics and my general intellectual orientation towards things.
Permit me to explain.
I'm an atheist, but consider myself highly ethical. That is, deeply concerned with being ethical, with doing the right thing at all times. I consider it pretty much the highest obligation a person has.
And what do I consider being ethical? Let's start with the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's pretty hard to beat. When I was in college, though, I ran into what I thought was a slightly superior formulation, Kant's Categorical Imperative. According to Wikipedia, this says one should "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will it that it should become a universal law." In other words, you should as as you would want every person in similar circumstances to act.
What this seems to do for me is turn ethics into a practical exercise of reason. You are presented with a practical question, what is the best action in this circumstances, the one that in the best of all worlds everyone would take?
This seems to me an eminently reasonable and highly enlightened approach to ethics. It also might make choosing one's actions a little problematic.
If one were to honestly apply the Categorical Imperative to one's actions, then one would be forced for each action to evaluate the possible consequences of that action, and determine which are the preferred consequences. Now this is where the intellectual gets hung up.
Because to honestly evaluate the likely consequences of all possible actions, sheesh, that's a friggin' tall order.
Recycling is an excellent example of this. I think most people by now realize we need to start doing right by our planet. Six billion people, we can clearly cause some damage. So you want to recycle. Now, you get an item that's mostly paper, but has some plastic mixed in. How should you act? Should you throw it in with the recycling, hoping that someone on the other end will somehow separate the paper from the plastic, or do you spend three minutes trying to peel the plastic off of the paper? What about staples? Will they just reject your cardboard and throw it out if it has staples, or will they remove them? Or maybe when they process the recycled paper the staples kind of sink to the bottom or something. Who the hell knows? This isn't the best example, but the point is that when posed with a simple question, what should I do with this box that has so much plastic attached, you're forced to consider a bunch of empirical questions, the answers to which you might no have at your fingertips.
Ergo, the person who's trying to be ethical can get really bogged down in details, and may be slow to act, or maybe won't act at all. And the more of a reasoning, careful intellectual that person (i.e. me) might be, the more likely this inaction.
But then, perhaps this isn't just an issue of morality, perhaps it's just in general a problem of the intellectual. For you could say the same thing vis-a-vis self interest as about ethics. Given a range of possible actions, it can be hard,or impossible, to thoroughly evaluate those actions for their possible consequences not for the world at large, but just for yourself.
This is why, I suppose, successful people, people of action, are often thought of as making decisions more instinctually, more gut-level, than rationally. Rationality bogs things down sometimes.
It's tough being a child of the Enlightenment!
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