Verbal Medicine

Interlude: A Moment of Catharsis

2011-06-24T07:07:00.000-07:00

Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not. -- Elias Root Beadle

My late paternal grandmother, Ann Saling, tried to cultivate in me a taste for the finer things, including serious literature, so she introduced me at a young age to Franz Kafka. When she sat me down to read Kafka's Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), I hated it. It repelled me. I could not stand how unrealistic it was, how wrong everyone's reactions were, how nothing strange was explained. It felt like drinking from a cup of sickness, and I pushed it away.

I missed the point of what she was trying to do until decades later, when I finally came to a place in my life where I could tolerate and even cradle a dark place in my heart for the grim humor, the enraged exasperation and contempt, the grief for humanity in Kafka's work. You need to experience the madness of the human world fully enough to accept it, to be willing to have it called what it is. After that point, one realizes that the status quo is the threat and the messenger is just a healer, a Good Samaritan forced to discuss repulsive things in the hope that a diagnosis will lead to treatment and impoved health.

Until then, one feels polluted by contact with ugly truths, feels that one's health, sanity, even purity are being ruined by hearing them. Until that point, the messenger seems like the threat, so we respond in kind. We accuse the messenger of being mad, polluted, sick, dangerous. We react with hostility not to the real threat, but to its revelation and those who reveal it, and we refuse to believe.

We look for excuses not to listen. If the messenger is upset, then we can rationalize away his message as the exaggerations of an overly emotional person. If he says we face intractable systemic problems, we twist his message to something easier to dismiss, accuse him of believing in conspiracies, of being paranoid or otherwise out of touch with reality.

The irony is that we are the ones out of touch with reality, not the messenger.

As we go about our lives, we fight those who try to warn us that our house is on fire, in the same way that a drowning person sometimes fights the lifeguard. We have powerful vested interests in the way we believe the world works, so those who disrupt our view of the world feel like the threats to all we have invested in our illusions.

When I first encountered Beadle's quote, I reacted as I had to Kafka, by rejecting it reflexively and rationalizing my prejudice to make myself seem more reasonable and the author less so - thereby ironically demonstrating the truth of what he wrote. These days I've concluded that either the human world has grown more in love with illusions than in Beadle's time or he underestimated the scope of the problem.

To those who still find Beadle's summation pessimistic, I offer this explanation:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1935

Lappy

2011-06-07T07:36:00.000-07:00

When it comes to the truth, we are lappy. We insist that the world lay the truth in our laps for us, perfectly presented, with no distractions or imperfections, custom fit to our personal prejudices and habits of thought.

We take this habit of the mind for reasonableness, or common sense, or mathematical or scientific rigor (that is, we take it in the most flattering light possible), but it's none of those things. Those are just the clothes our mind wears to feel good about itself. Lappiness is one part laziness, one part obsessive-compulsive disorder, and one part self-centeredness. We expect the world to work the way we want it to, to present truths to us in prechewed form, to satisfy our irrational criteria for what counts as true (such as whether we like it, whether it makes us feel good about ourselves, whether it confirms what we already believe, whether it's easy to believe).

The world does no such thing, of course. Outside the world of theory and math, the truth never comes to us in pure, flawless form. The truths of the real world always come to us in complex mixtures, tangled, clad in imperfections and contradictions, precious metals but only in ore form, gems but only in the rough. If we focus only on the critical role of the mind, on searching for imperfections and pushing away anything that contains them, we will reject every actual truth the world has to offer us and eventually be left with nothing but those prejudices too strong and familiar and pure for us to bear to discard them.

This is one of those unpleasant paradoxes of the real world, that the critical faculty whose intent is to purify the truth will in human beings instead tend to purify their prejudices. Those who give in to this obsessive-compulsive habit of the mind tend to deal less and less with real information (too messy) and more and more in false but pure abstrations (mind versus matter, free will versus determinism, sane versus insane, conservative versus liberal, market versus government). This is how people tend to become caricatures of themselves over time, eventually seeing the world only as a dreamworld of artificial but pure categories that lend themselves to the lappy habits of the mind, reacting to other people not as who they really are but instead as how the viewer has categorized them, sleep-walking through life.

In the authentic search for the truth (rather than just its usual simulation), we do not get to begin with true a priori assumptions, nor do we get to logically deduce the truth like some kind of biological calculator. The mind is not a computer and life is not a logical syllogism. We take the processes of criticism and logic too much for granted as tools in the search for the truth. If we mechanically apply them outside their proper and limited domains, we become the man with the hammer to whom all problems look like nails. We become Procrustes again, stretching, twisting, and chopping the truth until its distorted corpse "fits" upon the bed of our minds.

The impurity, the paradoxes, the messiness and miscegenation of truth in the real world requires a very different approach. We have to start by abandoning the role of the lazy critic who waits for the truth to come to him in perfect, predigested form. On the contrary, not only must we search for the truth actively (to turn over much dirt in our search for gold, as Heraclitus put it), we must also learn to be suspicious of lappy information. The only truths that seem to fit us perfectly are those too consistent with our own prejudices to be true.

So here's an imperfect but useful logical syllogism for us all.

Delusions come easily to us, truths only with much difficulty. Therefore, if we don't have to work for it, it can't be true.

The Content of Their Character

2011-03-09T20:49:00.000-08:00

"We cannot walk alone.

"And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

"We cannot turn back.

"There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, 'When will you be satisfied?' We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: 'For Whites Only.' We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until 'justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.'

"I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

"Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

"And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream," speech delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

Discrimination

2011-03-07T21:36:00.000-08:00

Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior dreamed of the day when we judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Character trumps DNA. Skin color cannot make you a good person.

Neither can physical excellence.

A dishonest, self-centered coward is not elevated by vigorous might - it just serves his vices - but an honest, compassionate, courageous man is elevated beyond frailty. We covet health, but we need character.

If we take the reverend at his word, we must overturn many cherished notions. For starters, all men may be created equal, but some of them grow up to be jerks. We may grant sociopaths, bullies, and liars equal legal rights, but their character remains inferior.

So does their value to the world.

Much of what's wrong with our world is directly caused by dysdaemoniacs - people cursed with bad character. Any person might grow up to love their brothers and sisters and to be willing to sacrifice for the sake of the greater good, but only some do. Many instead treat human beings as things, as abstractions, as resources to be exploited.

The problem is not discrimination; it's failure to discriminate properly. Race can predict a few things, like sunburns, but it cannot predict quality of character, nor value to the world. Character itself, though, predicts many important things.

Failure to discriminate on the basis of character may not only be negligent but dangerous.

For example, we pride ourselves on being a nation of laws, not men, but should we? We have tried for centuries to create a good world by using laws to constrain bad people, to force them to do the right thing. The result? The worst of us, the big criminals, rushed to take charge of that system of laws, to mold it to legalize the crimes they want to commit. Our democracy devolves into kakistocracy, rule of the worst, of those with the strongest vested interest in laws designed to control them.

When laws become the playthings of the amoral and immoral, all we have proven is that the rule of law is just as corruptible, just as prone to become a tyrant over the good, as were the kings of old who our founding fathers did not trust to hold power incorruptibly.

If neither men nor laws can be trusted to govern us, where then should our hope for a better world be placed?

Discrimination.

Maybe it's time to reconsider the heretical idea that not only is it okay to judge people, we must. We cannot possibly create a better world until we do. After all, treating torturers and predators and nihilists as the moral and legal equivalent of saints - and vice versa - really hasn't worked out for us, has it?

Cosmopolitan Crisis

2011-02-13T22:03:00.000-08:00

As Brian Lord wrote in his comment to Cosmopolitan, if we resolve our personal culture crisis by reorienting ourselves to a cosmopolitan worldview, it puts us at odds with most of the people around us.

We will make some people uncomfortable. Some won't like us. Some will hate us.

That is, the solution to our first serious philosophical crisis, shifting to a cosmopolitan perspective, creates a second serious crisis.

It isn't fair, really.

After all, the pre-culture-crisis parochial mindset seems so stable, so effortless (so immune to the broader reality), at least until sufficient contact with other cultures brings an end to that ignorant calm. After all the work it takes to successfully navigate the culture crisis that disrupted that peace, it feels like victory ought to come with some kind of reward, at least a vacation.

Instead, the stable parochial worldview is succeeded by the doubly unstable cosmopolitan one - unstable first because we deliberately destabilize our own worldview over and over in the search for new perspectives and second because we will be treated with variable degrees of hostility for being conspicuously different from most people. We graduate not to a second contentment but to shifting ground with people throwing rocks at us.

That's deeply, inescapably, essentially part of the very definition of the cosmopolitan worldview. Our new, cosmopolitan status quo is a fluxus quo, a state of continuous change, fundamentally different from our mental childhood, different in kind. The cosmopolitan crisis is permanent and sets us in motion for the rest of our lives.

We can never go back to the childhood of our first parochial worldview. Stability and peace are what we sacrifice when we mentally grow up.

Synthesis

2011-02-12T22:15:00.000-08:00

Hybris or philosophy? Why did Alexander do the things he did?

Certainly, like anyone else Alexander had many motivations. He did not conquer widely strictly as a result of his philosophical inheritance, to achieve philosophical goals. He grew up to lead the militaristic culture of Macedonia that had succeeded in developing an outstanding military force, so he was going to conquer someone regardless of Aristotle's input to his upbringing.

But Aristotle did shape the way Alexander chose to express his will to conquer.

For example, Alexander's father had already defeated the Greeks, leaving Alexander with a problem - how could he securely rule both Macedonia and Greece while simultaneously conquering new lands? It was Aristotle who warned Alexander that the people of Athens and the other Hellenic city-states would not stay conquered in the sense of submitting meekly to foreign rule. The Greeks were too ambitious, too competitive, too spirited. If he expected the abject submission an ancient conqueror usually expected from his conquered peoples, he was going to be disappointed.

Aristotle told Alexander that if instead he changed his expectations, he could rule even more securely than a traditional conqueror, albeit in a paradoxical way. The Athenians were too proud to submit, but they could be ruled through that very pride. With the right frame of mind and the right guidance, the Greeks could be made to conquer themselves, to rule themselves on his behalf.

Alexander snake-charmed the Greeks, fascinated them by his personal bravery and energy and vision, to draw their attention away from a galling, shameful past - in which Macedonia defeated them, in which they were victims who needed to strike back - to an unthinkably glorious future in which the Greeks and Macedonians would not be conquered and conquerors but rather fellow soldiers fighting side by side to conquer the known world.

Instead of Macedonia conquering Hellas (Greece), the two needed to merge to become something new, a Greek-derived (or Hellenistic) civilization.

They did.

It worked.

It often does.

That strategy, which was poetically described by Heraclitus as bending a force back upon itself as with the lyre or the bow, was explicated millennia later by the German philosopher Hegel, who named it dialectics. Hegel dedicated his entire philosophical career to developing those ideas because the principle involved, in which the conflict between two irresistible forces either is or can be resolved by the generation of a third force, is one of the core principles of the cosmos and helps shape the course of history.

Alexander could have just focused on winning, on merely using his undefeatable military to defeat as many enemies as possible, but had he done that he would have spent all his time defeating, destroying, leaving the world less than it was when he began. Alexander wanted to create, to unite, to leave a positive legacy, and because of Alexander's expert tutelage he knew that his army could not do that if merely used to win.

Leaving the world better than you find it requires more than zero-sum, winner-or-loser thinking, more than an unbeatable army.

If you want to change the world, you have to be willing to change yourself, too, so that together you and the world can synthesize something new.

Far Outstripped

2011-01-31T23:10:00.000-08:00

"I shall instance the history of science, which I divide into two periods, one ending in 1800, the other coming down to the present. Until the time of Volta, scientific research and speculation had from the beginning been practiced on identical phenomena. For example, no one had yet observed or even imagined that mechanical or chemical effects, or eifects of light or heat, could occur along the length of an oddly twisted wire. In any case, the very idea then held of science implicitly excluded the possibility of absolutely unpredictable facts.

"In that state of knowledge one could speak of the universe and the unity of nature without doubting that one knew what one was saying. There were such things as time, space, matter, light, and a quite precise distinction between the inorganic world and the other; and the expression to know everything, which is the complement of the word universe, seemed to have a meaning and to be a perfectly clear delimiting expression. Laplace was able to imagine a mind powerful enough to embrace, or to deduce from a finite number of observations, all possible phenomena past and to come.

"But once an electric current was set going, the era of entirely new facts began. Each new fact was in its own way an attack on the theoretical structure of universal dynamics, which was thought to have been conceived in the widest possible generality. The very notion of physical theory has in the end been seriously, if not definitively, compromised. First of all, the mental imagery that had done such good service lost all its meaning once speculation was concerned no longer with subphenomena assumed to be similar to the phenomena directly observed, but rather with "things" that in no way resemble the things we know, since they only send us signals which we interpret as best we can. Furthermore, our language, and hence our logic, our concepts, our causality, our principles, have been found wanting: all this intellectual material will not fit into the nucleus of the atom, where everything is without precedent and without shape. Debatable probabilities have taken the place of definite and distinct facts, and the fundamental distinction between observation and its object is no longer conceivable.

"What has happened? Simply that our means of investigation and action have far outstripped our means of representation and understanding."

- Paul Valéry, "Unpredictability" [1944], published in The Outlook for Intelligence, translated into English by Denise Folliot and Jackson Matthews

What a Delusion Most Needs

2011-01-30T22:35:00.000-08:00

"Socrates, Socrates, Socrates! Yes, one may well call thy name thrice, it would not be too much to call it ten times, if that would do any good. People think that the world needs a republic, and they think that it needs a new social order, and a new religion - but it never occurs to anybody that what the world needs, confused as it is by much knowing, is a Socrates. But that is perfectly natural, for if anybody had this notion, not to say if many were to have it, there would be less need of a Socrates. What a delusion most needs is the very thing it least thinks of - naturally, for otherwise it would not be a delusion."

- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Sygdommen til Døden [The Sickness unto Death], 1849

We are Lived by Powers We Pretend to Understand

2011-01-29T00:42:00.000-08:00

"In Memory of Ernst Toller
(d. May 1939)

"The shining neutral summer has no voice
To judge America, or ask how a man dies;
And the friends who are sad and the enemies who rejoice

"Are chased by their shadows lightly away from the grave
Of one who was egotistical and brave,
Lest they should learn without suffering how to forgive.

"What was it, Ernst, that your shadow unwittingly said?
Did the small child see something horrid in the woodshed
Long ago? Or had the Europe which took refuge in your head

"Already been too injured to get well?
For just how long, like the swallows in that other cell,
Had the bright little longings been flying in to tell

"About the big and friendly death outside,
Where people do not occupy or hide;
No towns like Munich; no need to write?

"Dear Ernst, lie shadowless at last among
The other war-horses who existed till they'd done
Something that was an example to the young.

"We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

"It is their to-morrow hangs over the earth of the living
And all that we wish for our friends: but existence is believing
We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving."

- Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), May 1939, originally published in Another Time (1940), excerpted from Collected Poems: W. H. Auden

Possessed by Them

2011-01-28T00:09:00.000-08:00

"[quoting from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe] Vol. i. p. 17. 'But my ill fate pushed me on now with an obstinacy that nothing could resist; and though I had several times loud calls from my reason, and my more composed judgment to go home, yet I had no power to do it. I know not what to call this, nor will I urge that it is a secret over-ruling decree that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction, even though it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open.'

"The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them. Robinson Crusoe was not conscious of the master-impulse, even because it was his master, and had taken, as he says, full possession of him. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual. Now, fearful calamities, sufferings, horrors, and hair-breadth escapes will have this effect, far more than even sensual pleasure and prosperous incidents. Hence the evil consequences of sin in such cases, instead of retracting or deterring the sinner, goad him on to his destruction. This is the moral of Shakspeare's Macbeth, and the true solution of this paragraph,—not any overruling decree of divine wrath, but the tyranny of the sinner's own evil imagination, which he has voluntarily chosen as his master."

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Notes on Robinson Crusoe," collected in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4 edited by James Marsh.

What Box?

2011-01-27T17:13:00.000-08:00

One way to get out of the box is to leave the box; that's what Diogenes did. The other way is to destroy the box; that's what Alexander the Great tried to do.

While Alexander's father, Philip II of Macedon, was building the Macedonian army into the greatest in the world and then using it with diplomacy to conquer Greece, Aristotle was tutoring Alexander to build him up into a wonder of the world, perhaps the greatest ruler Europe had ever seen - Plato's dream of a philosopher king.

Alexander's conquests are much discussed, but they were only part of what he put in motion. He accelerated the melting-pot syndrome in ancient Greece by throwing together Greeks from different tribes, migrations, religions, and dialects. In his armies, the dialects merged into a common Greek called Koine Greek. The different strands of Greek religion likewise melded together into a complex, eclectic blend that added new strands from every culture they conquered together. So too was the learning of the different Greek peoples blended.

Under Alexander, the melded Greek peoples began to think of themselves as one people in a way they never had before, since they were now thrown together in battle against common enemies wherever Alexander led them. The incredible series of victories over even mighty empires had them triumphing together, celebrating together, becoming one people.

Alexander even set in motion the cult of youth we associate with Hollywood and glamour magazines. Until then, men wore full beards to prove they were not children, to prove they were worthy to command respect, but young, beardless Alexander swept them and their pretensions away. After Alexander, it became far more fashionable for grown men to shave to emulate Alexander's youth and vitality.

In so many ways, Alexander redefined the world to the Greeks but in this way above all others - after the experiences Alexander forced upon them, it simply was not possible for the Greeks to ever go back into their parochial polis-centric boxes again. The Library of Alexandria is an excellent metaphor for the Hellenistic culture overall that Alexander and his armies forged - the attempt to gather together the best and the brightest ideas and people from all over the world to create a continually improving culture that becomes better tomorrow than it is today. This idea of progress still haunts us today, of course, thousands of years later.

Phillip of Macedonia may have conquered the Greeks diplomatically and militarily, but it was Alexander who conquered them culturally and philosophically by exposing them to the much larger world they could not only participate in but also help create. He drowned the old Hellenic culture, for better and for worse, under the tidal wave of the Hellenistic culture, proved the superior power of a more world-encompassing culture over any one parochial worldview, however refined or worthy it might be.

Alexander set out to spread a cosmopolitan culture around the world, and though he failed in his goals what he did achieve was so unprecedented that it changed the world.

Between them, he and Diogenes proved there is more than one way out of the box.

Philosophical Inheritance

2011-01-26T20:30:00.001-08:00

Diogenes and Alexander the Great were philosophical cousins. They each inherited some of their ideas from Socrates, their common philosophical ancestor.

Diogenes studied under Antisthenes who studied under Socrates, which makes Diogenes a kind of philosophical grandchild of Socrates. Alexander studied under Aristotle who studied under Plato who studied under Socrates, which makes Alexander a philosophical great grandchild of Socrates.

The difference in their approaches to the parochialism of the polis is due in part to their different resources rather than any serious differences in their philosophical ancestry.

Antisthenes, whose approach to philosophy may have been much closer to that of Socrates than Plato's was, was comparatively down to earth and skeptical. Diogenes himself had few resources - he was just one man, and he gave away almost everything he had - so it only makes sense that he would opt for the minimal approach to transcending his parochialism by changing himself.

Plato, though, was always more poet than philosopher, and his approach to philosophy was considerably less grounded than that of Antisthenes, more abstract and metaphorical. Plato was horrified when Athens condemned Socrates to death, and he retreated still further into his ideal and imaginary worlds. He transferred his loyalties from his polis of Athens to an imaginary philosophical republic of his own devising. Remarkable as Plato was, his ideal Republic may have been the first rigorous description of a totalitarian state. The worst excesses of the Inquisition and the Holocaust owe something to Plato's republic, as those totalitarian movements struggled to purify their own republics according to abstract theories about who should and should not exist in reality, much like Plato had done in theory.

Aristotle, Plato's most preeminant student, learned not just from Plato's strengths but also from his weaknesses. Instead of prescribing, he studied. Like Diogenes he was one of Plato's most severe critics. When Aristotle turned his attentions to the polis, instead of poetically theorizing about perfection, he studied the varieties of governments the polis has had over time and explored the reasons for their successes and failures. He systematically and empirically analyzed the polis to figure out what makes it work and how to make it work best. As far as we know he wrote little or nothing about Socrates's idea of the citizen of the world, perhaps because he had insufficient examples to study - Aristotle preferred the study of reality to speculation about possibilities - but it's pretty clear he talked about the idea because of what his student did with it.

Like Diogenes, Alexander inherited Socrates's ideas about the cosmopolis - the cosmos as the proper focus of our loyalty - but because of his superior resources he didn't stop by changing his own attitude about the Greek polis.

He decided to change everyone else's too. He decided to create a cosmopolitan world.

Cosmopolitan

2011-01-25T21:02:00.000-08:00

Socrates said that he was not an Athenian or a Greek but a citizen of the world.

Everything the man did made an impression. After all, he was willing to die for his philosophical beliefs. So it's not surprising that this statement, too, caught on and changed the Greek world.

After centuries of on-and-off civil war, Greece was almost ready for this idea. Certainly the Greeks needed some alternative to politics as usual, but they didn't quite realize it. The Greeks still had another half-century of civil war to go before they would exhaust themselves with the old idea of parochial patriotism, so when Socrates presented this radical idea, most Athenians wrote it off as just another crazy, provocative statement from crazy old Socrates.

Not everyone ignored him, though.

At least two of his students, Plato and Antisthenes, heard him and were inspired.

Antisthenes, who should be much better known than he is, was the teacher (whether directly or indirectly is unknown) of Diogenes of Sinope. Diogenes was a philosophical troublemaker and one of the founders of the philosophy known as cynicism - which beware! does not mean remotely what you think it does (it's a reference to dogs, for obscure reasons, not to sarcasm or sneering or pessimism).

Diogenes took Socrates's words to heart. He coined the term cosmopolites - the source of our word cosmopolitan - to mean a citizen of the world and, he tried his hardest to live his life that way. He became a living example of a man who could and did transcend parochial loyalties, who gave his loyalty to the whole cosmos.

If Diogenes did it, we can do it.

He transcended his parochial loyalties to a place. We need to transcend our parochial loyalties to any one worldview so we can give our loyalty to the cosmos of ideas.

We have been philosophically parochial. We must become philosophically cosmopolitan.

Politic

2011-01-24T21:38:00.000-08:00

The biggest group the ancient Greeks could feel patriotic about was the polis, the city-state - that is, the city with its supporting countryside. Bigger than that just didn't feel real to most Greeks.

For some Greeks, even the polis didn't quite feel real. For them, only the family and tribe was real, and many city-states in times of stress broke down into factions along tribal lines. For most Greeks, though, patriotism meant loving, serving, and defending your city-state.

The Greeks knew they shared a language, and a religion, and a culture, and a homeland, but somehow that still wasn't enough for them to feel they were a single people, nor that they were a nation. When the Persians attacked the Greeks, they were able to unite to fight their common enemy, but whenever they weren't under that kind of pressure they tended to fall back apart into city-states. The idea of Greece, of all the city-states united and working together, just wouldn't stick with them for long, just couldn't compete with the simpler idea of one's own home polis.

As long as the relationship between people and polises remained Which side are you on? nobody could transcend the polis, and the history of Greece remained an endless civil war interrupted by periods of uneasy peace.

Although the Greeks had most of the makings of a mighty people, they couldn't stop fighting each other, and so their astonishing energies and innovations went into tearing each other down, leaving them vulnerable to conquest.

And indeed, eventually conquest found them, when Alexander the Great and his armies swept down from Macedonia and resolved all their conflicts for them.

I Want It All

2011-01-23T13:07:00.001-08:00

A child may fixate on a hammer as the solution to all life's problems, but the adult craftsman knows it's best to use the right tool for the job.

Most craftsmen become collectors of tools to ensure they always have whichever tool that is the best fit for the problem at hand. Building up a toolbox is part of becoming a craftsman. The best craftsmen also become connoisseurs of tools to ensure that of the available choices for each problem they choose the highest-quality version. But even the best craftsmen learn how to use the lower-quality tools, in case they find themselves in situations where that's all they have access to. They become jacks of all trades, proficient with everything they can in their chosen fields of work.

These practices of great craftsmen are fairly widely recognized around the world, yet when it comes to religions, worldviews, and other forms of culture we reflexively revert to the golden hammer. As Abraham Maslow described the situation in The Psychology of Science: A Renaissance, (1966):

"I remember seeing an elaborate and complicated automatic washing machine for automobiles that did a beautiful job of washing them. But it could do only that, and everything else that got into its clutches was treated as if it were an automobile to be washed. I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

Not everything needs to be pounded, but this is what we're doing when we monomaniacally adhere to a single perspective on the world, even though we ought to know better.

So let's grow up. Instead of mental toddlers, let's become great craftsmen of thought.

Instead of pounding away at the world with just one perspective, let's collect viewpoints - all of them. Instead of putting ourselves inside the soap bubble of any one worldview, let's put all those worldviews inside ourselves.

We must become craftsmen of thought.

The mind of a craftsman of thought is a toolbox of ideas, viewpoints, cultures, and religions. Instead of one opinion, a craftsman of thought collects them all, learns to use them all, and learns to let each new problem shape its own solution. Judgments about "which one is true" are irrelevant to the initial problem of collecting them all and figuring out how they can help.

To rule your own mind, you must not let it become subject to any one perspective. This is the paradox of reserving judgment: that instead of holding one opinion we simultaneously hold all of them and none of them, because we collect them all but commit ourselves to none of them.

What I've described here is necessary but not sufficient. A long journey toward wisdom remains beyond this stage of growing up. This though is the pivotal revelation for this rite of passage. To pass through the culture crisis from mental childhood into the beginnings of true adulthood, you need to give up monomania and learn to put opinions in their proper subordinate role as your mind's servants rather than its masters.

After you free your mind, the rest can follow.

Cubist

2011-01-22T09:50:00.001-08:00

Anyone who tries to create the one true, perfect religion or worldview or philosophy or culture becomes a cubist. We may capture what others miss, but only by distorting reality beyond recognition, and we will still miss most of reality.

Inescapably, a single worldview can only see a limited part of the world, only what is visible from that one perspective. What it does let us see is distorted by proximity or distance, and most distant thing are hidden behind nearer things. Further, the soap bubble of our culture then screens the information, distorts it, by magnifying some things and minimizing or hiding or recoloring others solely on the basis of cultural affinity and prejudice. By the time a single worldview is done "seeing" or "thinking" something, what's left in the brain is a homunculous, a grotesque caricature that we then try to reason with.

Like optical illusions, all cognitive illusions are built upon such limited perspectives. Single viewpoints are easily tricked, and they trick themselves with every act of seeing or thought. Nothing we see or understand through them truly is what it seems to be, and most of reality remains obscured.

The attempt to show the hidden sides of things at the same time as the visible sides was the motivation behind the development of the cubist art movement, to show more than one side at a time. Cubism itself was inspired by exposure to the glorious and surreal art of the Pacific Northwest Indian peoples, who invented cubism to suggest the unseen, spiritual world that they believe accompanies and infuses the material world. Within everything depicted in this art, additional figures and faces peer out at us to remind us that there's more to the world than meets the eye.

Whether glorious and inspirational, as the Indian art is, or thought-provoking but grotesque, as so much Western cubist art is, cubism reveals in the plainest possible way - visibly - the limitations of any single perspective. Picasso's hideous gargoyle of a face that shows both sides at once may suggest the exist of the unseen, but only by grossly distorting it. Likewise, the Pacific Northwest Indian artists would be the first to tell you that no matter how beautiful and complex their art may be, it can only hint at what they have always believed about the nature of the cosmos. The real world achieves degrees of unseen complexity with economy and beauty that no single perspective can possibly portray.

So it is with our points of view. There can never be a perfect culture or philosophy or worldview or religion. No one perspective is capable of capturing or even reasonably approximating reality, because single points of view are inherently distorting.

Thus - the solution to the culture crisis is not to try to create a perfect culture, a perfect viewpoint, because that only replaces one soap bubble with another one, complete with its own defects and liabilities. Or to use our previous metaphor, it's like a cyclops trying to overcome the deficiencies of monocular vision by standing in a different place. None of the choices is "the right one."

Our fundamental problem is not the contents of any specific culture; it is the monomania of thinking that any single viewpoint could ever be adequate to comprehend the world and our place in it.

Our passage to freedom requires us to abandon that old reflex to "pick one" and replace it with the obvious strategy, the best chance we have at the truth.

Soap Bubbles

2011-01-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

"We don't know who discovered water, but we know it wasn't the fish," Marshall McLuhan said on many occasions. The water man swims in is culture, specifically his own.

Evolution created us from our forerunners largely through neotony, through the retention of childhood characteristics into adulthood. Homo sapiens became a kind of child even in maturity. Thus we lost our fur, grew large heads, became more social and affectionate, grew vastly more curious, became profoundly mimetic, and freed ourselves from most of the instincts that governed the behavior of our distant ancestors.

With that freedom came also chaos - a wider range of possible behaviors than any other species can exhibit. Without the frame of instincts to restrict us to sane, healthy, adaptive behavior, everything became possible. Instead, we filled the abyss where human instincts should be with culture, with learned patterns of imitative behavior that most of the time we instinctually cleave to as firmly as though our specific culture were itself instinctual.

Cultures are psychologically totalitarian; they aim to fit every nook and cranny of uncertainty and leave us with what seems to be a perfectly reasonable and indeed inevitable, inescapable view of the world and our place in it. The preconceptions, assumptions, and habits of thought and feeling we learn from our culture steer us toward certain ways of seeing the world and away from others. A culture is defined every bit as much by what is unthinkable and impossible as by what everyone thinks and does all the time within that culture - maybe even moreso.

To the human mind, culture is very much like a soap bubble that encloses us, a pearly, translucent film between our mind and everything we try to think about or look at clearly. Because it is always there, we can't see it. We assume that the colors and interpretations our culture interposes between us and reality are characteristics of reality itself. The very idea that our cultural perspective is arbitrary is itself among the inconceivable ideas to someone within that culture.

If we undergo the culture crisis and come to understand this soap-bubble nature of our worldview, the most common thing to do is deny it and turn away from it - and so most people do. The second most common thing is to accept the arbitrary nature of our previous viewpoint - and then to decide to replace it with a another viewpoint, a better one. That is, if we accept that the defects and arbitrary qualities of our culture are really there, then we usually set out to choose or create a new worldview of our own that repairs those problems, to create a better culture for ourselves.

With such motivations are the ships of a thousand utopian projects launched.

Cyclops

2011-01-20T08:59:00.000-08:00

The cyclops is a monster because he sees with only one eye - with only one viewpoint, one perspective.

Without the context provided by additional perspectives, all his information is tortured out of shape by his mind to fit the only perspective he has. The mind of a cyclops is a Procrustean bed, named after the mythological Greek criminal Procrustes who tortured and killed travelers by altering them until they exactly fit his bed for guests. Every observation, every "fact," every idea is stretched, truncated, folded, spindled, or otherwise mutilated to make it fit into the one viewpoint the cyclops has. By the time the cyclops is done "thinking" about an idea, it bears only the faintest resemblance to reality - though from his one perspective it's a perfect fit.

A single perspective cannot have perspective on itself, so the cyclops is incapable of introspection. Introspection is the capacity to consider oneself - especially one's ways of thinking about the world. It is a prerequisite for significant personal mental development, since until a person achieves introspection he is inclined to believe everything he believes, to take for granted everything he takes for granted. That is, he is blind to himself. His inner eye is closed, so that he walks through life asleep, dreaming a fantasy that bears only a passing resemblance to reality.

Nor does a cyclops have true empathy. The cyclops's eye creates a self-centered perspective, in which the world is perceived only in relation to oneself. As the Native American saying goes, you cannot understand another man until you walk a mile in his moccasins, until you see the world the way he sees it. That requires an act of imagination, opening the mental eye to new possibilities outside one's own perspective, something a cyclops cannot do. This is why the cyclops is so often a cannibal. Without empathy, other people seem to be just phenomena like cattle or rain, of no special importance except as servants or raw materials. A human being without empathy is a sociopath.

Every human being is born a cyclops. Our two biological eyes create a binocular outward vision, but do nothing to improve our perspective on ourselves or our ideas about the world. We still have only one mental eye, and we assume it is correct - without imagination it is impossible to assume otherwise. That is, we appear to be binocular creatures, but in all the ways that matter we are all cyclopses.

As far as we can tell, in the same way a human being has an instinctual drive for language that must be cultivated to blossom into full expression, so do human beings have an instinctual drive to open up their third eye, to acquire a binocular mind and become capable of introspection, empathy, and the other traits that make human beings more than just monsters. Curiosity is built into the healthy child and will readily develop into imagination given the chance. Parenting and culture are needed to help the child with that passage through the culture crisis; they act as midwives for this second birth. When they go wrong, this path of development withers and an infant's naive cyclopean state ossifies into the hostile cyclopean mind we see all too often in "adults."

Heraclitus wrote "Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for people who have barbarian souls." He was thinking of the cyclops in all of us that we must overcome if we are ever to have a meaningful relationship with the real world.

What Everyone Else Does Not Say in a Book

2011-01-19T22:44:00.000-08:00

"I am often asked why, after all, I write in German: nowhere am I read worse than in the Fatherland. But who knows in the end whether I even wish to be read today? To create things on which time tests its teeth in vain; in form, in substance, to strive for a little immortality — I have never yet been modest enough to demand less of myself. The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of 'eternity'; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book."

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Die Götzen-Dämmerung - Twilight of the Idols translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale

Stand a Little out of My Sun

2011-01-18T21:32:00.000-08:00

"Thereupon many statesmen and philosophers came to Alexander with their congratulations, and he expected that Diogenes of Sinope also, who was tarrying in Corinth, would do likewise. But since that philosopher took not the slightest notice of Alexander, and continued to enjoy his leisure in the suburb Craneion, Alexander went in person to see him; and he found him lying in the sun. Diogenes raised himself up a little when he saw so many persons coming towards him, and fixed his eyes upon Alexander. And when that monarch addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, 'Yes,' said Diogenes, 'stand a little out of my sun.' It is said that Alexander was so struck by this, and admired so much the haughtiness and grandeur of the man who had nothing but scorn for him, that he said to his followers, who were laughing and jesting about the philosopher as they went away, 'But truly, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.'"

- Plutarch, Alexander

Monarchy Aristocracy Polity Tyranny Oligarchy Democracy

2011-01-17T21:00:00.000-08:00

"The words constitution and government have the same meaning, and the government, which is the supreme authority in states, must be in the hands of one, or of a few, or of the many. The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one or of the few, or of the many, are perversions. Of forms of government in which one rules, we call that which regards the common interests, monarchy; that in which more than one, but not many, rule, aristocracy (and it is so called, either because the rulers are the best men, or because they have at heart the best interests of the state and of the citizens). But when the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called a polity. And there is a reason for this use of language.

"Of the above-mentioned forms, the perversions are as follows: of monarchy, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of polity, democracy. For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all. Tyranny, as I was saying, is monarchy exercising the rule of a master over the political society; oligarchy is when men of property have the government in their hands; democracy, the opposite, when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers....Then ought the good to rule and have supreme power? But in that case everybody else, being excluded from power, will be dishonored. For the offices of a state are posts of honor; and if one set of men always holds them, the rest must be deprived of them. Then will it be well that the one best man should rule? Nay, that is still more oligarchical, for the number of those who are dishonored is thereby increased....The discussion of the first question shows nothing so clearly as that laws, when good, should be supreme; and that the magistrate or magistrates should regulate those matters only on which the laws are unable to speak with precision owing to the difficulty of any general principle embracing all particulars."

- Aristotle, Politics

Citizen of the World

2011-01-16T18:20:00.000-08:00

"If the things are true which are said by the philosophers about the kinship between God and man, what else remains for men to do than what Socrates did? Never in reply to the question, to what country you belong, say that you are an Athenian or a Corinthian, but that you are a citizen of the world. For why do you say that you are an Athenian, and why do you not say that you belong to the small nook only into which your poor body was cast at birth? Is it not plain that you call yourself an Athenian or Corinthian from the place which has a greater authority and comprises not only that small nook itself and all your family, but even the whole country from which the stock of your progenitors is derived down to you? He then who has observed with intelligence the administration of the world, and has learned that the greatest and supreme and the most comprehensive community is that which is composed of men and God, and that from God have descended the seeds not only to my father and grandfather, but to all beings which are generated on the earth and are produced, and particularly to rational beings - for these only are by their nature formed to have communion with God, being by means of reason conjoined with Him - why should not such a man call himself a citizen of the world, why not a son of God, and why should he be afraid of anything which happens among men? Is kinship with Caesar or with any other of the powerful in Rome sufficient to enable us to live in safety, and above contempt and without any fear at all? and to have God for your maker and father and guardian, shall not this release us from sorrows and fears?"

- Arrian, The Discourses of Epictetus, ca. 108 CE, quoting Epictetus paraphrasing Socrates

The Triumph of Folly

2011-01-15T22:10:00.000-08:00

"Democracy is the worst form of government. It is the most inefficient, the most clumsy, the most unpractical. No machinery has yet been contrived to carry out in any but the most farcical manner its principles. It reduces wisdom to impotence and secures the triumph of folly, ignorance, clap-trap and demagogy. The critics of democracy have the easiest of tasks in demonstrating its inefficiency. But there is something even more important than efficiency and expediency - justice. And democracy is the only social order that is admissible, because it is the only one consistent with justice. The moral consideration is supreme. Efficiency, expediency, even practical wisdom and success must go by the board; they are of no account beside the categorical imperative of justice. Justice is only possible when to every man belongs the power to resist and claim redress from wrong. That is democracy. And that is why, clumsy, inefficient, confused, weak and easily misguided as it is, it is the only form of government which is morally permissible. The ideal form of government is an enlightened and benevolent despotism; but that is an absolutely unrealizable dream much more visionary than any democratic Utopia. There can never be an adequately enlightened and justly benevolent despot. Your philosopher king is not a practical success. Put a Sir Thomas More in power, and you have a Torquemada; your ineffectual Marcus Aurelius is succeeded by a Commodus. Justice is only possible through a diffusion of power, and it is in point of fact by the progress of democratic power that the progress of justice has been brought about."

- Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity, 1919, twenty-eight years before Churchill's famous speech before the House of Commons

Give a Small Boy a Hammer

2011-01-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

"In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientists. I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled. To select candidates for training as pilots, one psychologist will conduct depth interviews, another will employ projective tests, a third will apply statistical techniques to questionnaire data, while a fourth will regard the problem as a 'practical' one beyond the capacity of a science which cannot yet fully predict the performance of a rat in a maze. And standing apart from them all may be yet another psychologist laboring in remote majesty - as the rest see him - on a mathematical model of human learning.

"The law of the instrument, however, is by no means wholly pernicious in its working. What else is a man to do when he has an idea, Peirce asks, but ride it as hard as he can, and leave it to others to hold it back within proper limits? What is objectionable is not that some techniques are pushed to the utmost, but that others, in consequence, are denied the name of science. The price of training is always a certain 'trained incapacity': the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently (children learn to speak a foreign language with less of an accent than adults do only because they did not know their own language so well to start with). I believe it is important that training in behavioral science encourage appreciation of the greatest possible range of techniques."

- Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, 1964

[possibly a variation on an unrecorded quote by Mark Twain]

Dragging Us Whither We Do Not Know

2011-01-13T09:55:00.000-08:00

"I propose to evoke for you the disorder in which we live. I shall try to show you the reactions of a mind as it observes that disorder: how, when it has taken the measure of what it can and cannot do, it turns inward to reflect, and tries to picture for itself that chaos, to which, by its very nature, it is opposed.

"But the image of chaos is chaos. Disorder is therefore my first point; it is this I ask you to think about. A certain effort is needed, for we have come to be accustomed to it, we live on it, we breathe it, we add to it, and sometimes we feel a real need for it. We find it all around us and within us, in the newspapers, in our daily life, in our manners, in our pleasures, even in our knowledge. It sustains us; and what we have ourselves created is now dragging us whither we do not know and do not wish to go."

--Paul Valéry, "Politics of the Mind" [1932], in The Outlook for Intelligence

Earth-bound Creatures

2011-01-12T09:15:00.000-08:00

"While such possibilities still may lie in a distant future, the first boomerang effects of science's great triumphs have made themselves felt in a crisis within the natural sciences themselves. The trouble concerns the fact that the "truths" of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. The moment these "truths" are spoken of conceptually and coherently, the resulting statements will be "not perhaps as meaningless as a 'triangular circle,' but much more so than a 'winged lion' " (Erwin Schrodinger). We do not yet know whether this situation is final. But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is."

- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

The Sick, It Made Ever Sicker

2011-01-11T07:56:00.000-08:00

"There are people who are opposed to all philosophy and one does well to listen to them, particularly when they advised the diseased minds of Germans to stay away from metaphysics, instead preaching purification through physis as Goethe did, or healing through music, as did Richard Wagner. The physicians of our culture repudiate philosophy. Whoever wishes to justify it must show, therefore, to what ends a healthy culture uses and has used philosophy. Perhaps the sick will then actually gain salutary insight into why philosophy is harmful specifically to them. There are good instances, to be sure, of a type of health which can exist altogether without philosophy, or with but a very moderate, almost playful, exercise of it. The Romans during their best period lived without philosophy. But where could we find an instance of cultural pathology which philosophy restored to health? If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made ever sicker. Wherever a culture was disintegrating, wherever tension between it and its individual components was slack, philosophy could never re-integrate the individuals back into the group. Wherever an individual was of a mind to stand apart, to draw a circle of self-sufficiency about himself, philosophy was ready to isolate him still further, finally to destroy him through that isolation. Philosophy is dangerous wherever it does not exist in its fullest right, and it is only the health of a culture - and not every culture at that - which accords it such fullest right."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, translated by Marianne Cowan

Passage to Freedom

2011-01-10T09:02:00.000-08:00

The culture crisis, when we realize our culture isn't the only choice, is our passage to all true personal freedom and higher development. It's also a test, a filter.

Granted, too many people flunk this test and remain behind. Totalitarians, jingoists, bigots, and idealogues do their best to avoid other cultures or drive them into extinction in a misguided effort to resolve their personal crisis by eliminating from the world any choice but the one they know and trust. After all, if there are no other choices in existence, then we don't have to suffer the anxiety of having to choose.

The rest of us, though, realize that if other people can live and think in different ways, then so can we, that we do not have to remain the person we have been up until now, the person our parents and culture molded us to be, but can instead begin to mold ourselves into whoever we want to become.

That is, we can give up the passivity of our mental and cultural childhood to become active participants in creating our adult selves. We can be more than other people's creations; we can become creators of ourselves.

After all, no one and nothing is perfect; every parent and culture does things right, but we also do things wrong and make mistakes. Until we become co-creators of ourselves, we must passively accept not just the strengths our parents and culture imparted to us but also their weaknesses. If we see ourselves only with the ideas they had, we will usually make the same mistakes they did and overlook and therefore preserve and pass on the same weaknesses.

Our development is limited until we transcend our upbringing. The only chance we have to keep the strengths while repairing the weaknesses is to get involved in the process by learning to think about ourselves in different ways than the ways that produced those weaknesses in the first place.

When we instead begin to use more than one culture at a time to evaluate ourselves and the world, our relationship to our ideas and culture becomes qualitatively different - different in kind - than it was before, and we move into a new stage of human development in which we can finally gain perspective on these things, to understand them more fully than the limited framework of their own self-justifying rationalizations would allow.

Resolving this crisis in a healthy way is the pivotal moment, the most important passage, in any person's life between birth and death. Only through this realization is it possible to become an actual adult instead of just the child in an adult's body that so many "adults" remain. We cannot understand ourselves nor can we create any meaningful personal freedom of action unless and until we can see ourselves with new eyes, to gain a new viewpoint on ourselves and our choices that reveals how much more range of thought and action we have than our culture and upbringing alone would have given us.

After passing through this crisis, everything looks different to us, and we need a new way of relating to ideas and opinions. This new way, the way of personal freedom and responsibility, is very different than the childish opinion-mongering that passes for politics in the modern world.

Outside the Box

2011-01-09T08:08:00.000-08:00

It's relatively easy for human beings to think outside the box because we have so little instinctual box left.

Here's the bad side.

We have a powerful instinctive drive to fill the psychological hole where other species keep their instincts with a culture instead, and to bind ourselves to that culture as fiercely as though it were instinctive rather than learned. This is one of the main ingredients in the negative side of our flexibility, in which we can have a complete disregard for the truth because of our fanatical attachment to an arbitrary view of the world.

Unfortunately, the challenge for us is that we unthinkingly accept the assumptions and prejudices of our cultures with such tenacity that we often deny the existence of alternatives (or at least deny their right to exist). Psychologically, human culture is a form of monomania, of obsessions and compulsions orbiting a single idea or cluster of ideas we can't seem to escape, as though our adopted culture were biologically hard-wired.

Here's the good side.

Fortunately, the opportunity for us here is that biologically we don't care which culture we slavishly follow. Almost any conceivable culture, no matter how bizarre, will satisfy our craving. This is why we have created so very many different cultures throughout the world over time. In other words, we throw ourselves into our acting roles with unbridled conviction, but we're more or less as happy in one role as another.

In the absence of one instinctual box for all human beings, our species creates many different cultural boxes to replace that missing box.

This is a very, very good thing for our search for the truth, because it creates the opportunity for us to be jarred out of our cultural monomanias when we are shocked by exposure to other cultures. Magic happens to us in that crisis, because we acquire however briefly a glimpse of the essential human truth that our most beloved, cherished ideas and behaviors are not in fact God's own truth, merely an arbitrary choice imposed on us through the accident of our birth.

After all, from within the soap bubble of our own culture, no other culture seems desirable or perhaps even possible, and to us in our naivete that feels like the essential truth of both our culture and the world, so to see other human beings who not only successfully exist within an alien culture but are even happy and fulfilled within it creates an overwhelming problem for our worldview. Their existence simply cannot be reconciled with our worldview, and one of the two has to give.

When we resolve this crisis constructively, we begin to escape the box of our culture and create true personal freedom.

I Stand Aside

2011-01-08T18:41:00.000-08:00

Three words that should be better known are "I stand aside."

Because consensus-based decision making is so prone to gridlock, it includes decision-making tactics that other political systems overlook. Chief among these is standing aside.

Standing aside lets us disagree with a decision without interfering with it. That is, we don't always have to act on our opinions; just because we don't like something, that doesn't mean it should be stopped. After all, there's nothing sacred about opinions; most of our opinions are poorly informed ones. When we can't make an informed decision, we would all be better off if we stood aside and let more informed people make the decision.

Life's too complex and too short for there to be enough time to become informed enough about every subject to make good decisions. We need to choose the subjects we care enough about to prioritize, and then then we need to become educated enough about them for our opinions to do more good than harm; on other subjects we need to learn how to let go, to stand aside.

This is a problem for most of us because we think standing aside might somehow be irresponsible. As with our irrational fear of acknowledging our ignorance, our fear of standing aside is learned in school.

We teach our children that adults in America are free to have their own opinions, but we forget to teach them that they are also free not to have opinions - as well as not to act upon the ones they do have except when they matter most. As a result, it is widely though unconsciously believed that having opinions should be the normal state of affairs, along with pushing those opinions on everyone around us.

Looking at the state of public discourse today, the pointless, endless squabbling and name-calling, surely we can agree that we're long overdue to try something different.

Fortunately, in the search for the truth there are better options than holding and defending opinions.

I Don't Know

2011-01-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

In the search for honesty, the three most powerful words are "I don't know."

We teach children that "I don't know" is a failure to answer a question, not an accurate answer. Students are graded down for saying they don't know, thereby teaching them that aditting ignorance is punishable behavior. When in popular fiction we try to portray a genius, we always (foolishly) portray someone who knows all the answers.

This is a source of great folly in the modern world.

Open-minded, scientific or philosophical inquiry is impossible for anyone ashamed to say the words "I don't know," yet even in science classes we punish students who say that.

As we learn in childhood education, so we practice in the modern adult world.

One of the worst problems that afflicts both our democracy and our economy is the combination of willful ignorance - people who have no idea what they're talking about and yet are unwilling to admit it. Both a market economy and a democracy depend upon people being able to act in their own best interests, but the majority of people act against their long-term interests - and frequently even against their short-term interests. Modern adults are surprisingly ignorant of what is healthy or empowering for them and instead act according to how ideas have been marketed to them, that is, they act in ignorance.

Sadly, although it is de facto considered acceptable to be ignorant, it is not considered acceptable to admit to being ignorant.

In almost all of the adult world, to tell someone they're ignorant about a subject is considered an insult - but it shouldn't be, any more than telling someone they have brown eyes is. People should know when they're ignorant, and they should deal with it tactically, as a condition to be taken into consideration when planning.

After all, the best thing every human being can do for themselves most of the time on most subjects to get closer to the truth is to forthrightly admit that we don't know the subject. That recognition gives us the chance to learn, because until we admit our ignorance we aren't likely to recognize that we need to learn.

Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, wore a medallion around his neck that read Que sais-je? (What do I know?) to remind himself and his friends that acknowledging ignorance is the beginning ot any honest inquiry.

If we all did likewise, perhaps we would be better, more honest people, and the world would be a better place.

Willing the Void

2011-01-06T22:53:00.000-08:00

"Man would rather will the void than be void of will." That's what Nietsche wrote for the final sentence of The Genealogy of Morals. As usual, Friedrich spotlights an uncomfortable human quality.

Some parents of adolescents notice how often their children will do something self-destructive of their own choice rather than take the healthier action proposed by a parent or other authority figure. Like the terrible twos, adolescence is another period when human beings feel the compulsion to exercise their will for good or ill.

Of course some people never get over the need to overuse their will. I continue to be surprised in life when I run into people who insist on making decisions even about things they know little about. The urge to have an opinion, however poorly formed or misguided, and to impose it on others is irresistable to each of us from time to time - and to some people far too often. Some people would rather be wrong and suffer terrible consequences than let others decide for them - or even let others decide for themselves.

This compulsion is not as widely recognized as it ought to be because it makes so little sense, is so difficult to reconcile with our popular conceptions of human nature. Why would people do this if we are reasonable or spiritual beings?

Likewise, that some people suffer from this affliction (or more accurately inflict it on everyone around them) while others rarely behave this way is yet another example that refutes the idea that we're all the same. There are crucial patterns of differences among people, mental subspecies of the human species, and the unrecognized conflicts among these nongenetic subspecies cause untold suffering in the world.

Reasonable people can usually sympathize with the occasional frustrated cry of "Let me drive," but when the same people always insists on being in charge (and often with an aggrieved air), patience wears thin. Anyone who has served on committees or attended panel discussions is familiar with the type, the one who can't share control.

The Greeks noted that democracy only works when you have a demos (people) fit to kratein (rule). Among the requirements of being fit to rule is knowing when to let other people make decisions - which should be most of the time in any properly functioning democracy. True democracy in this more sophisticated Athenian sense rquires more than elections and polls, requires more than everyone getting a say. It also requires that people lead where they have expertise and needs but follow when they don't.

Whether in democracy, aristocracy, or tyranny, to be an effective ruler requires that we create the conditions in which we are not usually the one making the decisions. To rule effectively requires the ability and propensity to follow as well as to lead.

Man and Beast

2011-01-05T23:10:00.000-08:00

Human beings think they're better than other animals.

When we want to insult someone for acting crudely, we accuse him of behaving like an animal. Almost no one uses beastly as a compliment. Some religions describe the superiority of the divine by arguing that God is as far above us as we are above the beasts.

The problem is that we're not better than the animals. We are animals.

This is why biologists and the biologically sympathetic work so hard to argue that man is an animal, not to be treated as better than other animals but as a peer. Over the years, some of us have taken this too far and made the mistake of treating man as identical to the other animals, not different at all.

That exaggerated position overlooks the obvious. After all, no other animal is exterminating other species at the pace we are nor changing the face of the Earth as dramatically as we are. Nor has any other animal developed the technology to travel to the moon and back. Certainly, we are animals, with seemingly endless similarities to our species-cousins, but at the same time we are also different than they are in myriad ways we find difficult to characterize.

Here's my first attempt.

We are not better than the other animals, nor as some animal-rights activists would have it are we worse. We are to the side of them, on a different scale. It is foolish to say human beings are either better or worse than the other animals. The reason is simple.

Biologically we are animals, but psychologically we are something else entirely.

Psychologically and behaviorally we are more variable than any other animal. We are both better than the other animals and worse than them. Lumping all human beings together behaviorally is deeply misguided, let alone comparing them psychologically as a whole to any other species. We may or may not all be created equal as Jefferson asserted, but we sure don't end up that way, as Dr. Mengele and Dr. King demonstrated. Our legal equality is not the same as being psychologically or behaviorally identical.

That variability is our essential character, as Shakespeare noted.

At heart, human beings are actors able to assume many roles in the world rather than a single role. As I wrote in Sleepless almost two years ago, it was our evolutionary neotony that made us so flexible, freeing us from the frame of our old instincts to create the widest range of psychological and behavioral possibilities of any animal on Earth. That wide range created both the possibility of behaving far better than any other animal but also far worse. We can be angels or demons or anything in between.

Our freedom from instincts and our dependence on nurtured culture to replace those instincts is both our heroic strength and our tragic weakness. It is precisely that one evolutionary leap that makes it possible to be passionately consumed by the quest for the truth or to have a complete disregard for it.

What I posted yesterday described the downside of that flexibility where the truth is concerned. What I post tomorrow will describe the upside.

We Hold These Truths . . .

2011-01-04T10:18:00.000-08:00

Everything in the cosmos is self-evident - it is what it is to anyone with eyes to see it - but not to us. We do not have such eyes.

The human mind is not only capable of deceit and self-deceit, it is rarely capable of anything else. Unlike the inherent truth of everything in the cosmos, everything we believe is flawed by our Midas touch, which sucks the truth out of our every idea and replaces it with what we want to believe or have. The philosopher Heraclitus was right to warn us about the things we want.

The same passions and ideologies that lead us to engage dishonestly with the honest world also lead us to misunderstand everything about it, to project our priorities upon it. Those interpretations and meanings we project do not directly change the real world. They change the picture of the world - the map - we carry around in our heads. They create inaccuracies in that map, flattering the things we like, insulting the things we don't, and generally omitting everything we fail to recognize.

The picture of the cosmos in our heads is the only one we really perceive most of the time, which is why human beings repeatedly do the wrong things - they would have been the right things to do if their picture of the world represented reality, but it doesn't.

So as bad as the problem of truth is for human beings when we just consider the ways in which the surface appearances of things can deceive, the problem reveals itself to be shockingly, confoundingly worse when we realize that we rarely perceive even the true appearances of things because we're too busy reacting to the imaginary appearances of things in our heads, the ones overlaid with years and decades of assumptions, desires, prejudices, and defense mechanisms.

Clearly put, if we were such fools as to treat the appearances of things as though they held the truth, we would still be vastly wiser than we are, because we are a step further removed from the truth than that, treating instead our mental pictures of the appearances of things as though they held the truth.

But the problem is far worse than that. Each of us holds our own picture of the world, with our own idiosyncratic prejudices standing between us and reality. It is not one labyrinth of assumptions we have to navigate to reach to the true appearances of things. It is six billion competing labyrinths.

Then it gets worse, because in any modern culture the political process takes us further from reality. As history shows repeatedly, compromising between those labyrinths suppresses the vestigial truths left in them, because the average human delusion - the things we can all agree on - is what is least likely to be true because it's most likely to be what we want. Instead of correcting for our labyrinths, we build a new one that takes as its bricks and mortar not even the appearance of the truth but instead our manifold delusions.

The idea that anything can be truly evident to us as a species is refuted by the human condition. The idea that any "truth" can or should be "self-evident" to humanity, that we do not even need to work for certain truths because it's obvious that they're true - that's trying to make a virtue out of a human defect so vast it is the very wailing abyss where our respect for the truth ought to be.

The most certain thing you can say about the sef-evidence of truths is that the actual truths of the cosmos are indeed inherently self-evident, but never to human beings. We are indeed special among animals in the profundity of our benightedness.

Story and Anthropoculture

2011-01-03T07:31:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time, stories were sacred, dedicated to the gods, designed to accomplish culture's highest calling - anthropoculture, the cultivation of good human beings.

The classical Greeks (among others) recognized that human nature is extremely variable, that people can be as good as angels, as evil as demons, or anything in between. The people who come out on the evil side of the human spectrum together with the many average people who foolishly follow or support them are the source of most of the problems humanity has faced since long before the dawn of history. Of the remaining problems, most of those are caused by people who come out on the good end of the spectrum, since even the best human being is still deeply flawed. In other words, as the wise cartoonist Walt Kelly wrote, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

The Greeks realized - as did other cultures such as the Navajos and Hopis - that to make a safer, better world we have to learn how to make better people. Anthropoculture, then, is our most vital responsibility, to make sure that people come out on the good end of the human spectrum.

These cultures also realized that it's very hard to succeed at anthropoculture. Therefore, they decided that to count as truly civilized a culture would need to reinvent every part of itself so that every part of the culture helped cultivate goodness and virtue in people.

For example, the Greeks deliberately reinvented their entire religion. They replaced their many separate tribal faiths with a new Olympian religion, that helped them reduce civil warfare and that also helped them replace their old tribal conflicts with peaceful competitions at festivals like the Olympic games.

As another example, the Navajos integrated their religion so completely with every aspect of their life that when European invaders first met them they couldn't identify a separate religious part like they had. Europeans mistakenly concluded the Navajos had no religion, instead of realizing that on the contrary the Navajos were profoundly more religious than the Europeans were. Everything about Navajo culture, including the layout of their houses and even the structure of their mocassins was designed to reinforce their cosmological and ethical beliefs, which made separate churches and periodic religious services superfluous.

In the cultures that made this breakthrough, those that committed themselves to anthropoculture, even the spinning of yarns was reinvented to replace a simple pastime with an indispensible tool in the struggle to understand and improve human nature.

Maybe we should do likewise.

The Discovery of Story

2011-01-02T13:46:00.000-08:00

In the modern world we overuse invention as a metaphor. For example, we call even language an invention even though it seems to be built right into the structure of our brain. A few specific languages are inventions, sure, but language itself clearly isn't. We invented it no more than we invented our hands, or our DNA.

Lately I've begun to suspect that story itself is not an invention either, though almost all specific stories are. Story may be an innate property of our minds, something we discovered rather than invented, the discovery that our minds need to understand events in a certain kind of way or else we can't pay attention to or remember the truth no matter how important it is.

This builds off an earlier observation by Harold Bloom that Sigmund Freud's revolutionary invention of psychoanalysis may be completely dependent on Shakespeare (!), that it was Shakespeare who first began writing about characters who could speak aloud their feelings and plans, listen to their own words, react to them, and decide to change their minds about what they would do or who they wanted to be based upon overhearing themselves. Bloom noted that Freud had studied Shakespeare's revolutionary introspection and written about it early in his career, that Freud created a therapy out of Shakespeare's art.

Bloom's theory is worth investigating partly because it's so surprising, but partly because it holds water. The more you study Shakespeare, the more depth you find to his portrayal of human characters. After all, a great writer must first be a great observer of human nature.

Once we throw off our assumption that Shakespeare was mainly an artist in the modern sense of an entertainer and instead begin to consider him as an artist in the archaic sense of one who searches for profound insights into reality that can be captured and represented in ways that move us, his works surprise us again and again.

For example, his "All the world's a stage" quote seems more profound the more thought we give it, shedding the initial appearance of a metaphor and taking on increasingly the shape of one of the most important observations ever made about the core of human nature, that above all we are mimics, that almost everything we do or think or feel is some kind of monkey-see-monkey-do role playing, the memorization and imitation of other people's behavior. In this Shakespearean sense, the path to enlightenment has to begin with the realization that very little of our behavior is intrinsic to us, that we are the actor, not the role, and that we contain within us the potential to behave very differently than we now do if only we can break out of our roles long enough to remember who and what we really are. Much of human behavior and history only makes sense if this is true.

If Shakespeare is right, and I've come to think he is, then not only is the acting we do more than mere entertainment, so too are the roles we play and the stories we tell. That is, if we are essentially mimics then we can learn more about our species by studying how we imitate, the kinds of roles we adopt, the kinds of stories we try to create around ourselves, and what all of those stories have in common - the deep structure of story itself.

Story may be more than an arbitrary means of expression. It may be a universal, innate mental template that helps define what we can and cannot remember and learn, an essential characteristic of the human species.

If we are not essentially rational beings, if we are instead fundamentally mimetic creatures, it changes everything. The discovery of story might then help tell us who we are, which we need to find out to solve the greatest problem facing the human species.

Ourselves.

The Two Threads - Plot and Story

2011-01-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

Stories have to be told as two threads.

On the surface, stories seem to consist of just one thread. Words follow each other to form sentences, which follow each other to describe events. That's the obvious thread, the first thread, one event following another from beginning to end to create the plot.

That first thread, though, cannot stand alone. We've all read or watched or heard too many plots that tried to make do on their own, and the results are always bland and empty. No matter how clever a plot may be, it cannot satisfy us on its own. The characters won't interest us. The events won't matter to us. Soon after reading, we forget such plots because they aren't memorable; they don't seem to matter.

A subtle, invisible thread must be woven into the plot to make it come alive for us and stay with us. The author needs to choose the characters and events well to weave that second thread, so that hidden under the surface events of the plot will be a sequence of emotional and philosophical charges set off by those events.

This thread acts as a hidden harmony within the story. It is where we come to care about the characters, come to have expectations about what will happen to them. Those expectations make the events of the plot matter to us; they alternately reward and frustrate us as they occur so that we are emotionally and philosophically involved with the story until the end, and they're what make the ending matter to us.

It is the interplay between these two threads, the plot and its hidden harmony, that create a story. When a story fails to satisfy us, it's almost always because too much of the author's effort has gone into the plot and not enough into the story. When they're properly woven, though, there's something about stories that captures us heart and soul. We crave them as though our need for them were stamped into our blood and bone or written in our genes.

Maybe it is.

Charter for Compassion

2010-12-25T11:02:00.000-08:00

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others - even our enemies - is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge
that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~
to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings, even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

Twenty-five Things about Me

2010-12-22T21:54:00.001-08:00

On Facebook, ideas for things to write about pass over the Facebook community in waves. Many of them are like this one, in which you are supposed to answer a set of questions or build a list based on some idea.

Usually the instructions urge you to write as quickly as possible according to the questionable idea that your first impulses are the most authentically you. I reject this idea. I spent twenty-three years in therapy exploring what is authentically me, and during this time I discovered over and over that my first impulses are my defenses, not my core self. Sometimes my first answer to a question represents my truest answer - rarely - but usually it represents the least true, least authentic answer, the rehearsed answer, the practiced answer, the pretense.

Plato wrote that Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living," in criticism of the many people who lack all introspection. Sometimes I think this "answer as quickly as you can" meme is unphilosophical "culture's" crude attempt at revenge, by trying to spread the idea that introspection should not be trusted, that only thoughtless reflex is authentic.

Preferring a mindful way of life, I answered this particular essay slowly and carefully, thoughtfully, paying attention to things that I have strong feelings about, that mean a great deal to me, but that maybe I hadn't yet shared with a lot of people. I wrote it between Thursday, July 1st and Monday, November 22nd this year.

Likewise, preferring communication to mere self-expression I also wrote more than a word or two about each thing, on the theory that the short, generic answers are rarely as interesting as the whole truth in personal context.

So, for what it's worth, here are twenty-five things about me:

1. I almost never have nightmares; even the dreams with death and monsters in them are happy or exciting dreams. I rarely remember my dreams because I don't sleep enough, but when I do about half of them are lucid dreams in which I know I'm dreaming and can fly or change the dreams at will.

2. All day long - while I'm talking to you, while I'm programming, while I'm hiking, while I'm thinking - and even all night as I sleep, one of the seven or so tracks in my brain is playing music nonstop. You can ask me any time what I'm listening to and I can almost always tell you; sometimes I'm listening to two songs at once, and let me tell you, that's weird (when I started writing this on July 1st, my head was playing both Ryan Star's "Brand New Day" and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade; when I revised it in September it was alternating between the second movement of Brahms's Symphony #4 and the second movement of his Piano Concerto #2; as I finish it in November, I hear Wilhelm Kempff playing the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata number 8 in C minor, "Pathétique"). I rarely listen to music out loud any more because in my head I hear it all the time, in perfect detail, the way I imagine Mozart must have heard music. For example, while Scheherazade is playing in my mind, I can hear every single instrument, their pacing, their expression, the pauses, the musician's inhale before playing a note of woodwind to break a momentary silence, everything. Sometimes I think I chose the wrong profession, that I should have been a composer or a musician, but ironically, I never learned how to play an instrument, though I love to sing.

3. That said, although I took a long time to start playing Rock Band after my cats bought it for me for Father's Day a couple years ago, once I started it immediately became my favorite video game. I love being physically immersed in the flow of music.

4. I remember tasting colors even before I could walk. Sometimes I still do.

5. I was born an alcoholic. I grew up surrounded by alcohol and alcoholism; almost every adult member of my family for generations on both sides has struggled with the bottle. I never have, at least not as an adult. The only time I drank was before first grade, when a friend taught me to steal the nearly empty bottles out of the trash behind a tavern across the street so we could drink the last drops out of each one. I haven't touched alcohol since, though I have no problem with people drinking around me. When I smell a fine wine, I remember my childhood, that tavern, those bottles, but I also feel safe knowing I can trust myself not to go down that road again.

6. Likewise, no drugs. I'd rather suffer with a headache than take aspirin. When my fillings were all extracted and replaced in my early twenties, I had the dentist drill on my teeth without any painkiller at all. No drugs, except under extraordinary medical conditions. There are worse things in life than pain.

7. When I was a young boy, maybe as a result of my drinking out of empty bottles, Grandma Ann taught me to avoid alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. She used to teach me little slogans and rhymes, which she would encourage me to say around my other relatives, especially my Grandma Pat. I'm sure it made me seem like a sanctimonious little brat at times, but it also helped keep me safe from peer pressure growing up.

8. Speaking of Grandma Pat, she once saved me from drowning. Her alcoholic boyfriend du jour thought he'd teach me to swim by throwing me in the deep end. I remember splashing frantically and inhaling water. Grandma Pat was also an alcoholic, and drunk at the time, and even in the best of times throughout her life she was often self-destructive and had scarily bad judgment, but that day something clicked for her, and she dove in and fished me out. I'd probably have died that day if she hadn't saved me.

9. My dad wouldn't let me eat candy as a child, so I did so every chance I got when he wasn't around. Even in first grade I used to spend my lunch money on candy from the little store near my elementary school. I remember vividly how many different candy flavors there used to be - by second grade I thought myself quite the candy connoisseur - but as I grew older and companies began cutting back on quality to save money, candy all started to taste more and more just like sugar and chemicals. I wouldn't touch candy today, and I'm allergic to most of it anyway, but I still remember those old wonderful flavors fondly.

10. My dad also preferred that I not watch TV, except for nature programs, so at midnight on Friday nights, after he went to sleep, I would creep downstairs to watch horror films on Nightmare Theater with the volume turned almost off. I still love horror films, the way they take me back to my childhood, the way they let us explore and come to understand otherwise taboo subjects; the way the classic horrors help us learn sympathy for the monster, the misunderstood outsider, the tragic loss of control of madness; and the way horror can help us reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of pain, loss, grief, and death. I believe the reason I have no nightmares is that I was able to experience these things in my own life and because what I couldn't directly experience I was able to explore in horror films.

11. Were it not for my Aunt Marilyn, my nephew Alex and my nieces Elizabeth and Wyatt would never have been born, because their father - my brother Rob - and I would never have been born; she introduced my mom and dad to each other.

12. I was born honest. Childhood neighbors and classmates taught me to lie in first and second grade, but my father and my stepmother Jean beat it out of me before adolescence, so I went back to being honest. I'm grateful to them that I was punished so severely for lying. It helped to make me who I am today.

13. I'm intensely curious, like everyone in my family. I find just about everything fascinating and will read voraciously about anything. The less I know about a subject, or the more an opinion disagrees with my own, the more I want to read about it.

14. I like to be criticized, but not insulted. Pseudo-criticism, insult disguised as criticism, really pisses me off because I hate to be reminded how petty and vicious some people are. Real criticism, though, I love, the more deeply insightful the better. If someone can rock the foundations of my worldview with a revelation, I'm delighted and grateful, even if I'm frowny and grumbly at first. It's not easy to do, though, because I'm always looking for new ways to criticize myself, for opportunities to become a better person, so most of my obvious flaws I already know about and am working on. I assume there are vast attics and basements of serious but subtle flaws just waiting to be found.

15. Jerry Gould, my karate sensei from third through ninth grade, is one of the most important influences in my life. He taught me discipline, respect, spirit, character, philosophy, hard work, tradition, standards, the aspiration to become something better, how to teach, how to defend myself, but most of all how to be truly gentle from a position of true strength. I use his teachings in my life every single day, and I think about him and the things he taught me all the time.

16. I remember my Grandma Ann driving me with her in her old VW as she did errands. After dropping some letters at the post office in Edmonds, she saw a small moth fluttering against the inside of the windshield, she grabbed a tissue, reached up, and crushed it, while saying in a sing-song voice "Kill kill kill." As I write this, it's so vivid to me that I'm sitting next to her as she does it, but if you and I talk right now I can't repeat any of the conversation word for word afterward - I only remember the meaning, the conclusions we came to, the sound of your voice, where we were sitting, everything but the words themselves.

17. When I was a young boy starting out in middle school, my friend Jason Richards (later Jason Nealy), taught me to shoot a gun, a pellet gun. We were in his bedroom in south Seattle on that sunny day. He opened the window, and the sound of birdsong lit up the room. He pointed to the bird that was singing in the bushes in his back yard, showed me how to hold the pellet rifle steady, how to aim, how to squeeze the trigger. Click! The bird fell out of sight. The backyard was silent. I felt a cold wave spread over me, felt a powerful shame. The ringing in my ears seemed so loud. I handed Jason back the rifle, and I never fired a gun again at a living thing. I've never forgotten that happy bird, that silent backyard, or what it feels like to commit an evil act in lighthearted, confident ignorance. This is when I learned that evil does not come from The Devil, or from The Bad Guys. It comes from us.

18. I used to want everyone to be happy. It took me many many years to understand that what makes some people happy is hurting other people. Even for people who aren't angry and cruel, most people are made happy by things that indirectly make other people unhappy, or that otherwise injure the world - and they really don't care. A surprising number of people have no empathy at all, though in their personal lives they may try to simulate it. Either they were born without it, or somehow it withered and died, either way leaving them going through the motions of being human but without a soul. If you try to point it out to them, they just get bored with or angry at you. Most people are perfectly happy making other people unhappy as long as they don't have to notice it or think about it. I also learned early on that many of the things people think will make them happy actually make them unhappy or even sick. When I learned these things, I stopped wanting everyone to be happy. Now I want everyone to be healthier, better, kinder, and wiser. If they were, I think they would be sadder but also more content and more deserving of happiness.

19. When I walk down the sidewalk on a sunny day, I step carefully to avoid stepping on beetles or ants. When I walk down the sidewalk after the rain, sometimes I pick up worms and move them to the grass so they won't get stepped on. I worry about the health of the spider who lives behind the driver's side mirror of my car, and I adjust my driving to be sure she doesn't get blown away.

20. I'm often ill. It gives my life a stop-and-go quality that makes things difficult for me, my coworkers and clients, my friends, and my family. I strive to become heathier and steadier, but intermittently the decision is taken out of my hands. This contributes to my odd views about the nature of human will and whether our choices are free or predetermined. I think the answer is . . . yes, some of each. Many of our qualities and choices are predetermined, and unless we intervene to prevent it we become more and more predetermined, more and more caricatures of ourselves. But, if we strive to master ourselves, to tend the garden of our character, to increase our discipline and self-awareness, and to focus on those things we can influence and change, we can instead over time grow a larger and larger part of our lives in which we can freely choose who we will be and what we will do, clear more and more of our time to awake from our dreams as human sleepwalkers so we can know ourselves enough to do some good in the world. It's too much to expect for us to always be healthy and free and truly conscious, but if we always try to do better when we can, eventually we will do better.

21. I often fail, and I often need breaks to recover, but I keep trying until I succeed. This often frustrates people, some of whom wish I would either always succeed or always fail so they'd know which bucket to sort me in. Sooner or later, I frustrate everyone, but sooner or later I will also delight them.

22. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but so is the road to Heaven. I abound with good intentions, but I figure I'm bound for the soil of the good earth. I hope I can become worthy of such an honor.

23. I'm a goody two-shoes. I want to be good, to do good, to give back, to make things better. Like the track in my brain that's always playing music, another is always looking for ways to do some good in the world, to make things better. I'm not naive or idealistic about it - I'm darn near cynical about it - but I am sincere and persistent about it. Don't believe me? Next time we're in a conversation, listen to me from this perspective and you'll hear it. I can't stop thinking about it, and whenever I'm talking about something I'm always also talking about this. As a child, I never wanted to be the cool bad boy; I always wanted to be a good boy. As an adult, I'm always thinking about how to be a good man and often reflecting on the ways I fall short.

24. I have a dark view of human nature. As a child, I was conspicuously naive, trusting, and hopeful, but I became a student of history and learned how far short we fall. If we want to survive as a species, we're going to have to do much, much better. I also have a bright view of human nature, because I know that when we make up our minds to do the right thing, we have a remarkable capacity to make things better, including ourselves. Here's hoping the better angels of our nature prevail.

25. I'm susceptible to cuteness. I think my wife is adorable, I adore my nieces and nephews, and my cats ply me shamelessly.

Human Nature, Part 2: We Do Not Know What We Know

2010-10-20T23:59:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare is widely acknowledged as the greatest writer of the English language, the person most able to express insights powerfully and memorably. One of the best things he wrote is that deceit, pretense, play-acting, role-playing is at the core of human nature.

Of course, since we're so sure we know who we are, we cannot possibly hear even the great virtuoso of the English language when he tries to tell us as baldly and eloquently as possible that we're wrong about who we are, that we're not who we think we are, that we're people pretending to be who we think we are. As Simon and Garfunkel wrote, A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, or as William Blake put it so pithily long before As a man is, so he sees.

So there's another part of our answer - we can be wrong about anything. We are even capable of being wrong about the most central issues in our lives (like who we are) and yet be completely convinced that we're right. The idea that we're capable of meaningful objectivity about the things that matter is refuted even before we open our mouths, just by the things we imagine about ourselves - like who we are. The truth is a foreign language to us; we speak something else. As the Christian apostle Paul put it rather poetically in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, we see through a glass, darkly. As Heraclitus put it rather philosophically in his lost work On Nature, Most people do not take heed of the things they encounter, nor do they grasp them even when they have learned about them, although they suppose they do—and, more bluntly, Human nature has no real understanding; only the divine nature has it.

Our essential subjectivity, our incapacity to recognize, observe, or understand the truth shows clearly in our efforts to be objective—we can collect "facts" (Hegel: There is precisely no such thing as a fact.), but nothing ensures we collect the right facts, nor that we interpret them correctly. Oh, does E equal MC squared? Surely that must be true so that I can find a new way to dominate the other monkeys. Obviously, the profound truths of the cosmos exist so we can pursue the pettiest of aims with greater efficiency! The twentieth century all by itself is sufficient to disprove any possibility that human nature is essentially capable of objectivity.

Too often we choose between either lying to ourselves and others about our biases and pretending to be objective or else abandoning that pretense and openly embracing superstition, bigotry, and other forms of extreme irrationalism - which is just another forms of pretense. There are better choices open to us, if we have the courage to take them. At our best we could openly acknowledge and accept our subjectivity and try to approximate objectivity not through pretense but through taking our biases into account, factoring them into our decisions - and then embrace humility and acknowledge that our ideas are tentative, that we do not really know anything but are guessing as best we can.

To get closer to the truth, we first have to admit that we don't already know the truth. If knowledge is power, then for human beings humility is the root of all real power.

A Journal is Not a Story

2010-10-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

Not everything can be expressed as a story.

A story is a specific kind of thing, and as most books, movies, fans, and reviewers show, most people don't know what that kind of thing is. Most people think a plot is a story, for example, or a rollercoaster, something that has a beginning, middle, and end, and uses up time in a satisfactory way. I suppose that would make sex a story, or going to the bathroom.

Story, specifically, is a kind of tale invented to tell difficult or subtle truths about human character by subjecting a character to stresses in a specific way to reveal things the character may not have known and certainly would not have wanted to reveal about themselves. Story is a tool for exploring human character in ways that would be cruel and unusual to inflict on actual living people, a way to clarify some things about life by creating a simulacrum of it.

Hardly anyone writes actual stories any more, though there are plenty of writers creating plenty of things that substitute for stories in modern culture.

I, for example, am not a story-teller. I appreciate stories greatly and study them voraciously, but I don't create them. If I am required to express my life in stories, it will have to go unexpressed because I can't do it.

More importantly, stories can only represent certain kinds of truths, not all truths, nor even most truths. As incredible as it may seem to people living in a culture most of whose pleasures derive from fictions, fiction is a limited form of expression. It can only describe things that fit its form. When we try to squeeze other things into the form of a story, we do violence to the truths of those things. That is, we lie.

I don't want to lie. I am journaling so I can tell the truth, as best I can, so I can tell truths that matter to me and to my family and friends and maybe to others, and especially so I can tell truths that are not often publicly discussed, to break the code of silence and secrecy that surrounds so many important truths.

I can't do that in story form. I'm not convinced anyone can, since many of these truths have the wrong form for a story, but I know I can't. Therefore, I'm not going to try.

At the same time, though, I won't be dissuaded from trying to express these things in my chosen form, as journal entries and short philosophical essays. If that means I write boring things, dry things, repetitive things, confusing things, then that's what it means. If it means I never command a large audience, nor even a medium-sized one, then so be it. I don't want to be famous anyway.

I need to express these things in part because it's therapeutic for me, in part so my nieces and nephews have the opportunity to get to know me better and be exposed to these ideas, and in part because there is a powerful social value to coming out of the closet as who one really is rather than continuing to pretend to be another "normal" person. The only way people give up their hateful and violence-catalyzing prejudices about unusual people is when they get to know them for real and come to realize that they don't fit their stereotypes, that *gasp* maybe they need to change their opinions about their fellow human beings rather than eliminate them.

So, I'm writing a journal and some short essays, not stories. Most of it won't be to most people's taste, and it won't be fun or easy or comfortable enough to help you pass the time. That's okay. There are better things to do with life than just to get it over with as quickly and entertainingly as possible.

Human Nature, Part 1: We are Not Who We Are

2010-09-29T23:05:00.000-07:00

A Modern (that's you and me) can understand the gods asking us not to kill or covet or bear false witness - after all, we don't want anyone to do those things to us, and at times we might allow as how we could use that extra nudge to help resist the occasional temptation ourselves.

But a Modern cannot understand the gods asking us to know ourselves. What kind of sense does that make? We already do; just ask us and we'll tell you all about ourselves. First of all, it's common sense that no one knows us better than we ourselves do. Second, it's also common sense that we are whoever we want to be, that we are free to be whoever we want to be. Third, it's common sense that common sense is right, or close enough. So, a priori case closed. Why would the gods need to exhort us to do something so trivial that's already done anyway?

The point of the question is that the gods do not agree with us or they wouldn't have had it carved in stone on the oracle at Delphi. They think we're full of it, that we do not know ourselves. They think we are not who we think we are, nor what we think we are, that who and what we are is something we would never think to give as the answer, something we do not identify with, something alien to us.

So there's part of our answer to begin with - we are people who can be firmly convinced we are someone when in truth we are someone else. This is the meaning too of the Italian saying about great opera actors, that they're not bad but the best actors are the ones in the audience, playing the roles of their lives. Shakespeare warned us about that falseness of our sense of identity when he wrote All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.

This is Depression (Sunday, 30 May 2010)

2010-05-30T23:53:00.000-07:00

I can't sleep. I feel like I'm burning up and itching, like I need to get out of my skin. I feel my life is worthless and pointless. I have nothing I can say of any interest. I feel like I know things I ought to share, need to share, important things, but I can't say them. I feel my efforts are futile, my skills inferior. Even if I could share these things, who would care? I have no children, no future, nothing to survive me when I'm gone, nothing to work toward. I've lost my passion, my zeal, and now I write like a textbook even when I'm trying to describe the bottom falling out of my world.

Even as depression skews my perspective it also expands it to encompass everything. I feel there is no depth of nihilism and destructiveness to which humanity will not sink, which bodes ill for the future of life on our little planet. The greatest act of pollution of our age triggers not mass protests but mere dismayed interest, a shrug, a change of the subject. Like rats in an experiment, we are learning how to tolerate anything, no matter how bad. These are the steps toward totalitarian dystopia, one additional tolerance for the intolerable after another, until we lose the ability to react properly to anything that matters. How we have shrunk in our powers for good, as a species!

I feel that none of this is real, that this is a feeling, a mood, that has swept me up before and will sweep me up again. I feel that I know my way out of this labyrinth of temporary despair, but that it doesn't matter, that in depression nothing matters.

I thought at first that this was my emotional overreaction to my friend Mike's just criticism that the public journal entries I was writing were boring, but I've realized that this isn't what's causing my tailspin. I have a lifetime of engaging positively with even harsh criticism to back me up on this.

Instead, this is an unexpectedly powerful reaction to a loss of faith.

During my two-week vacation with my niece Elizabeth, I had briefly mustered a fragile faith in the idea that my nieces and nephews value me, want to know me better, need me in their lives. I had not realized what a change this was for me, to think that someone in addition to Beverly and Linda gave a shit about me. In publicly journaling, I was trying to write for them, for my nephews and nieces, the ones who inherited the demons of our family's past and wanted help in the emotional alchemy needed to create a healthy future for themselves. I thought that I could show the life strategies and meaning that underlie even the most seemingly ordinary parts of our day-to-day lives, how everything is connected, how everything matters and is part of a larger pattern.

But Mike's right. I can't do this. Where I should be telling compelling stories, instead my writing sucks the life out of the things I describe. My struggle for equilibrium, to thread my way through mania and depression without resorting to drugs, should be a powerful story that has meaning for millions of people who struggle with these twin curses - including many people in my family who I care about and worry about - but instead I reduce it to dry, boring narrative. Instead of the Midas Touch, I have the academic touch - every subject I turn my hand to collapses into intellectual dust.

Mike thought I could just skip the journal and get on with telling the stories that will make up the book I wanted to write, the story of our family and its astonishing struggles - he thought I could skip to the good stuff - but what Mike didn't realize is that I can't even try to write that book without that faith, that hope, which is gone again. It's funny, because in the entry "Journal" I even put my finger on this problem and explained the leap of faith involved, but I guess he thought I was writing for rhetorical effect, not warning about the fragility of the endeavor. Unless I have faith that this matters to my target audience, there will never be any of the interesting stuff written. It's a Catch 22, and not the only one in my life.

Well, it's done now. I doubt that house of cards is going back up any time soon. For now, I'm done with Verbal Medicine, and I'm back to writing only what I can't tolerate keeping to myself any longer (though now here in Live Journal instead of publicly), to writing what I have to write in order to heal.

I had planned to sleep my way through this depression tonight to reset my mood and start over tomorrow with a new perspective, but unfortunately in just a couple hours it has entrenched itself deeply enough to destabilize my sleep cycle. I can't sleep now, which is going to destabilize me further. Damn this delicate balancing act! It's frustrating as Hell trying to keep everything lined up enough for my life to cohere when it's so easily disrupted.

Still, it is what it is. This is the hand I've been dealt, and I have to play it. If I want to leave anything of value behind me after I'm gone - assuming that's even possible, contrary to my present mood (speaking of leaps of faith) - then this is the balancing act I have to stay on top of, no matter how frustrating it is.

Or Not to Journal

2010-05-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

Well, after a week of experimenting with public journaling, I've been convinced to journal privately instead. I've moved my first six journaling entries to my private journal and removed them from Verbal Medicine.

I'll continue to use this space to work on the biography of my family (which if I write it correctly may be more interesting), but there's no need to inflict my day-to-day life on the innocent. I make no promises about how often I'll be able to write entries about the story of my family, which is a much more difficult subject to grapple with and may well prove beyond my capabilities. I may take a hiatus from this blog for a while until I figure out how to proceed.

Return of The Nap (Monday, 24 May 2010)

2010-05-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

Monday the 24th, after my Songs and Nieces day Sunday, launched my week well.

I put in five hours of work taking care of Oroville Hospital for my nonprofit. One of the hard things about my job is how many things I have to keep track of as executive director, engagement manager, and project manager (not to mention programmer). I spent four and a half hours just reviewing where I left things when I left for my vacation, and another half hour reviewing the progress of our work on Oroville's Pharmacy package.

Beverly, Linda, and I ate sushi from Sam's Sushi in Ballard (well, I suspect Linda ate teriyaki; and I ate salmon teriyaki, salmon shioyaki, seaweed salad, and agedashi tofu; but I think Beverly had some sushi).

After lunch and after the Pharmacy call, Linda and I walked around Green Lake together to keep our exercise program on track and discussed Elizabeth and Wyatt (yes, we talk about you when you're not around). I told Linda earlier this year that any day I don't exercise when I should is a failure regardless of what else happens, and any day I do exercise is a success regardless of other events. With this in mind, we were pretty happy with ourselves when we stumbled up the stairs to the porch at my house.

When we returned home I planned to resume work, but life happened instead. What I didn't realize was that my work day was over and the next two hours would be spent on my body's needs, specifically, to accelerate its rebuilding in light of my ongoing higher exercise level.

When we got home, I sat down at my computer and did nothing productive for the next hour. I vaguely remember reading e-mail, Facebook, and other webpages, but I'm not entirely sure what all I looked at because I was semi-sleep-walking through the process. You see, my body needed to recover after the walk and it wanted me to take a nap, but I'd planned to work so I resisted. The end result, a groggy hour at the computer, made neither my brain nor my body happy. These are not the kind of hours you get to bill for as a contractor, since nothing of value takes place.

In the end, my body won, as bodies always do. After an hour at the computer futilely resisting a nap, I finally dozed off and slept for an hour. I felt vastly better afterward. If I only had a brain, I would have remembered then what I finally remembered this morning, that when I ramp up my exercise level I also need to ramp up my sleep - I don't know why, and I'm sure plenty of other people don't need to do this, but I've always had to do so, so I really should have remembered. But no, no brain, so I didn't figure it out then, which led to Wednesday's grogginess and Thursday's illness. It is not, in fact the thought that counts, since the road to Hell is paved with good intentions; the things we do or fail to do have consequences, such as my failure to increase my sleep leading to the return of The Nap as well as to a rocky and comparatively unproductive work week.

Your Aunt Beverly woke me up (with a start) at 5:22. My first thought was alarm that I'd slept away the rest of my work day, followed by the realization that I felt vastly better, but not the further realization I should have drawn, though I was looking right at it. I believe I may have made it as far as thinking "Wow! I feel great. I have to remember that I like naps," but otherwise my brain just did not follow that logical train to the important station with the big neon sign. I have a reputation for being a very smart person, but I'm saved from excessive pride by my overfamiliarity with incidents just like this one, in which I walk right up to an important realization and then stop just before it, sometimes repeatedly, before much later eventually realizing the big truth and that I've been staring blindly at it for weeks or months or years. The word "Duh" comes to mind.

Beverly reminded me I said I would review chapters seven (Skylands) and eight (Reunion) of Sunflowers, the Bella Sara book she's writing, so I spent the next hour reading and giving her feedback. A year ago Beverly made the change from being an editor, which she'd done all her career until then, to becoming a writer, something she'd played at being as a child but abandoned in her professional life until then. As an adult she'd always felt more comfortable making writing better than creating it from scratch. The empty page oppressed her, as it does so many writers. But now she's a writer and determined to learn as quickly as she can how to be good at it. One of my jobs at home is to be her training wheels, to review her chapters and help her find ways to improve it before she submits it to her editor. Chapters seven and eight were much better balanced than her early chapters. She's improving. The first five chapters of her book are published online as a free download here: http://www.bellasara.com/images/teasers/snf_book_sample.pdf.

After the review we fended for dinner. I don't remember what she ate, but I'm pretty sure I ate breakfast: soy yogurt, and granola in soy milk. We watched TV, continuing our way through the backlog of shows that piled up during my vacation in the Southwest.

While we ate and watched TV, on Facebook I chatted with Wyatt for forty-five minutes. When I mentioned that I was reviewing Beverly's chapters, Wyatt wrote that she hoped to become a writer. I pointed her at this journal, which at the time was still published on my Verbal Medicine blog (http://rickmarshall.blogspot.com) and she directed me to Ruby Moonlight, a wolf role-playing website where she's been prolifically writing for two years (http://rubymoonlight.proboards.com/index.cgi).

After dinner I browsed Ruby Moonlight and began to realize just how much Wyatt had written there. I quickly shifted tactics from looking for her stories, to scanning them, to cataloging them, which is mainly what I spent the next two hours doing. She's interested in feedback, which is commendable, but to do justice to her writing I'll have to study it and think about it a while.

That reminded me I hadn't journaled yet, so I spent the last two hours of Monday writing "Bipolar Judo" before going to bed and falling asleep around midnight.

I went to bed feeling good about returning to work, and about walking Green Lake, and about journaling, and about getting more involved in Wyatt's life, all of which are good things no doubt, which is partly why I failed to realize that the most important thing about Monday was the post-walk nap.

A Salmonberry Mush Kind of Day (Wednesday, 26 May 2010)

2010-05-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

Some days you wake up with an empty tank of gas.

I used to confuse days like this with depression, but they're nothing alike. On depression days, it's not just my energy level that shifts but my mood, and the mood is the crucial indicator. If I think I suck, my plans for the day suck, the world sucks, then I'm depressed. If I wake up out of gas, feeling like I just ran a marathon or stayed up twenty-four hours straight, then it's not depression; it's this other thing.

This other thing doesn't happen very often, which is partly why I don't understand it - insufficient data. Also, my cognitive skills are fine (if skewed) when I'm depressed, but when it's this other thing my brain only has brief periods of being fully awake. I had several of them today, but not enough to string together. So much for my plans to make a magic necklace of wakefulness.

Here's what I think causes this other thing: when I have been comparatively inactive for a year or more and I abruptly shift into a high-gear exercise program and drive my way back to fitness, which I've done several times in my life and am doing now, every so often I hit a day like this one.

My hypothesis about them is based on how much they remind me of my adolescent years, when from time to time usually right before or after a growth spurt I would be exhausted and sleep all the time. So my hypothesis is this - this is what happens when my body's rebuilding itself in response to the early stages of an intensive exercise program. My body has more reconstruction work to do, but instead I get up and try to have a day. My body disapproves and chatters to me all day long on my inhibitory nerves, but instead of having the good sense to go back to bed, I press on ineffectually. Eventually, I fall asleep again and my body goes back to finish its interrupted work.

In other words, although it's not pleasant and basically blocked my ability to work or do anything else constructive today, I think it's basically a good thing, a piece of the work I'm demanding my body do in my 2010 overhaul of myself. I'm not committed to this idea, but it's the best guess I have about what happened to my fabulous plans for Wednesday.

So what can you do with a day like this? This is what sick leave is for; I can't do any of my work tasks with my brain half asleep. Instead I slept in, ordered my brother Rob a Greyhound ticket to get to Seattle for Folklife Festival, read (a lot), went to counseling, ate three cups of lentil soup for lunch, walked around Green Lake with Linda in defiance of my grogginess and then promptly passed out asleep in retaliation when I got home, ate vegetable dishes from Genghis Khan restaurant for dinner (the mu shu vegetables in plum sauce are strangely delicious), watched the TV series Parenthood with Beverly, made plans to hang out with my nephews and nieces this weekend, and then discovered I didn't have enough gas in the tank to write about more interesting days like Monday or Tuesday, so I settled for writing about how groggy today has been.

Thrilling, right? No? I didn't think so, but from days like this you make what you can. They say when life hands you lemons, make lemonade, but days like this are far too blah to count as lemons. Lemons are exciting. This is more like life handed you salmonberries, whose flavor your great grandpa Fred aptly described as "insipid" (look it up), from which you get to make a bland, slightly bitter and seedy mush. Yay!

Incidentally, "Yay" is what little Navajo children say when they need to go to the bathroom, an appropriate response to salmonberry mush, which doubtless contains lots of fiber. Clearly, I need a new exclamation of joy. To avoid confusing anyone, I'll be sure to say "Yay" only when the bathroom calls. And perhaps when I'm about to eat a high-fiber meal. I'm sure that won't confuse anyone.

Good night, dear nice!

Songs and Nieces (Sunday, 23 May 2010)

2010-05-25T22:42:00.000-07:00

After a good night's sleep and with my mood recentered, I embarked on my plans for Sunday with a will.

I was at Wyatt's door at 10:10 a.m. After family greetings all around, Wyatt hauled me back to her room to meet her two eight-week-old kittens, Ducky and Pie, who were obligingly adorable, meepy, and pouncy. I was struck by how clean her room was - is my niece a very tidy young woman, or had she cleaned the room knowing I was coming over? Or was it a coincidence; had I just happened to arrive after a rare room cleaning? This bears further investigation, I'm sure.

But not just then, because we returned to the living room to watch Lion King 2: Pride of Simba, which is among the better Disney animated sequels. Wyatt clearly loves it, and I enjoyed it too. She and I share a high appreciation of the value of our animal cousins, but for me there was an added charge; there's something about seeing chapters of your life coincidentally reinterpreted in public art that never fails to surprise.

When I was young, I learned the hard way a lesson about the ways in which good people will oppress you if they misjudge you as a bad person. That can happen either through prejudice against a good person or through failure to see the emerging goodness in someone who has publicly made mistakes in the past. Redemption, although a powerful story, is unfortunately something many good people block in their efforts to avoid having their trust betrayed again. It's understandable but it's more than regrettable. It can make good people the enemies of rehabilitation, make them actively struggle to keep people down when they're sincerely trying to be better.

Ask me how I know.

Good people in America rarely like to reveal the ways in which they can fall short of the mark, the ways in which they can behave like bad people. Our culture twists us into purity freaks, neo-Platonists (look it up), anti-miscegenationists (look that up, too); we want our heroes to be all good and our villains to be all bad, angels and demons - at least when we're not trying to pass off villains as heroes. What we can't stand is the recognition that everyone contributes to the problem, that the supposedly pure good people themselves help make the world the mess it is. Evil mostly comes from people who believe they are doing good.

The film fumbles in some ways, of course, but there are other good qualities to Lion King 2. We'll save those for another time, maybe another viewing.

When I returned home with groceries from Puget Consumer's Co-op (buy organic, buy local, and vote with your money), Beverly and I made lunch and started into our project together.

Around the campfire on the Navajo reservation the night of Wednesday, May 12th, Guitar Tom and Harry Walters played guitar and sang as usual, and I sang my two songs a capella, like last year, but Thursday night Anna Lee Walters encouraged us to improvise, to get everyone involved in the music, so after some fumbling around for the right format we settled on going around the circle and having each person sing something they knew. I discovered it's been too long since I sang freely and often, and I've forgotten the words of many of the songs I once knew. I also discovered that of the songs I do remember, few are songs known to many, songs that anyone else could sing along with. So on the drive home Elizabeth and I discussed the need for a songbook containing an excellent selection of songs to sing and the printed lyrics.

This was Beverly and my project together, which we began Sunday. Song by song we went through our music lists proposing songs to each other, listening to them, singing along, deciding which could stand alone without instrumental accompaniment, which had enough soul to them in a campfire setting. We'll be at this off and on over the next year, I'm sure.

As planned, we were interrupted at 3:30 in the afternoon by the arrival of Elizabeth and Raoul. Introductions were made and then my niece, her sweetie, and I headed off to join the crowds strolling around Green Lake. During that pleasant hour we discussed our past, our present, and a little of our future together. Elizabeth and I had talked extensively about her life on our vacation together, and I was eager to begin getting to know this man who's become so important in her life. So I did.

After our return and recovery, they headed back home to House Decided to clean up and prepare for Sunday potluck night dinner. I remained behind with Beverly converting three cans of vegan Indian food I like into an Indian stew I could take for my last-minute contribution to the potluck. As I prepared the food, Beverly and I continued work on our project, listening to and critiquing music for its suitability for our songbook.

Having arrived at House Decided in the nick of time at 6:30, I joined the household and its guests for two hours of dinner and conversation together. I was fortunate enough to spend time afterward speaking at length with Canth, the woman of the house, whose company I enjoyed greatly, but not enough time to find the opportunity to tell her how much it means to me that she and Raoul took in my niece and gave her a home. That will have to wait for another time.

When I returned home, Beverly and I finished off the day refining our first-draft songbook list. We still have a long way to go, but by the time we went to bed at 11:30 p.m. (later than I prefer), we had forty-five songs initially selected, including an agreement to write an original song together for Harry and Anna Lee Walters in time to sing it to them when I return to the Chuska Mountains with Wyatt in May 2012.

We still have a long way to go, but it was a good start, a good day, a good weekend, and a good note to go to bed on, with family and music on our minds.

Bipolar Judo: Rolling with the Fall (Saturday, 22 May 2010)

2010-05-24T23:17:00.000-07:00

If you work hard to cultivate a regular sleep cycle, your body will learn your rhythms and help you protect them. Though in my slight manic spike I stayed up until 1:30 a.m. journaling, my body woke me up at 6:30 a.m., which was too early so I rolled over and went back to bed, and then at 7:30 a.m., which I accepted.

There's a tradeoff with these things. Get too little sleep and your day is shot, so you have to decide whether you can afford to be less than fully functional in return for protecting your sleep cycle. If your immune system is like mine, another risk of inadequate sleep is falling sick - no risk at all but an easy recipe for bronchitis in my case if I let it go on for a few days in a row - but even I can short myself sleep for one or two days in a row without risk. Get all the sleep you want after staying up too late and you risk not being sleepy when bedtime comes. Six hours seemed a reasonable compromise.

If you're bipolar, the other risk of inadequate sleep is further destabilizing your mood. Since I was a bit up the night before and come from a family of rapid cyclers, I knew the odds were high that my mood on inadequate sleep would overcorrect downward, and so it did.

Knowing it would, I could prepare a little judo for it.

Some people try to fight the downward swing, but that's a mistake. It's not just an arbitrary change, an undesirable symptom you need to suppress. If you're bipolar you're swinging downward because you emotionally overextended yourself with your manic spike. Mania may feel good but it burns through your neurotransmitters and other emotional-nutritional reserves too quickly, leaving you depleted. Afterward, you physically need the recovery time; trying to keep yourself amped up when you need to swing down just results in a larger and more catastrophic crash later, so go with the flow to help keep it mild.

Some people just ride the rollercoaster downward revelling in the plummet, though many won't admit they do this. This is also destructive. The point of the drop is not fun or drama; it's healing. Your body needs to recover.

If you choose the golden mean here, a low-energy recovery day structured around what your mood and body need, you can gently recover from a manic spike without crashing.

So I took the day off from my exercise program to lighten the load, but ate nutritious food high in amino acids, essential fatty acids, complex carbs, and vitamins and minerals to help my body reload my neurotransmitters.

Another problem with bipolar days - spikes or crashes - is a lack of continuity with the days before and after. It makes it difficult for your mind to create a whole out of your life when each day is too radically different; the high days can feel like bizarre adventures and the low days like black holes, making them impossible to knit together into any coherent life story. The best days for trying new things are neither the highs nor the lows, but the ones in between, when your emotional baseline is most stable and therefore best able to fully accept the novelty as real.

For a post-manic crash, even a mild one like mine, I've found mild entertainment and mild socializing with a high degree of continuity to the day before and the day after to be the best recipe. It helps fight the impulse the withdraw into a shell - which isn't actually what you need, just what you feel like you need on a crash day - and it deliberately weaves the days together into a multi-day story, a whole, part of a life, not just disjointed events.

For the entertainment and socializing, Beverly and I decided to spend the day catching up on the TV shows we follow, which had piled up on our Tivo during my two-week absence. We watched The Mentalist, In Plain Sight, Castle, and Gray's Anatomy over the course of the day - nothing too emotionally overwhelming, but gently stimulating and diverting, and B and I talked over the episodes in between. We always enjoy disecting Hollywood's efforts to depict highly intelligent people.

For the continuity with Friday, I finished cycling through some laundry and continued journaling. I wrote Honesty as Faux Pas in the morning, which I greatly enjoyed writing, and then after discussing my posts with B added Nephews and Nieces.

For continuity with Sunday, I made plans. I called my sister-in-law Niki to catch up on life then texted all day with my nieces Elizabeth and Wyatt, discussing everything from family dynamics to kittens to silly You Tube videos to Navajo culture. By the time I went to bed (on time, around 10:30), I had Sunday scheduled up to be an active day. I planned to sleep in to recover from today's sleeplessness and from Friday night's mild manic spike, and then to use Sunday's activities to get me good and tired in time for bed Sunday night.

The little bipolar judo worked out just right. By Sunday morning I had my emotional feet back on the ground.

Considering how mild the manic spike was Friday night, this might all seem like overkill to the casual observer, but it's not. The way to keep bipolar in check is to stay right in sync with your mood, learn its patterns, and use them to help yourself keep an even keel.

There was nothing florid or dramatic about my ungrounding Friday night - those who let Hollywood define their understanding of mania would have had no idea anything at all was amiss - but after twenty-two years of therapy I know my patterns well enough to know that my oscillations always amplify over time if I let them. The trick for my emotional wellbeing is to nip them in the bud when the oscillation first begin, to damp them back down gently and naturally and recenter my mood so I can experience the full range of emotions without swinging my mood along with my emotions.

To put it more bluntly, if I keep my mood on an even keel, my emotions are free to range widely because they have a home base to return to. And - bonus - I can use my more clearly expressed emotions to help diagnose whether my mood is stable by whether the emotions return there or not, which lets me plan corrective days like this one for when they don't.

Days like Saturday are an essential part of my mental health, part of what keeps me fit for life in general, and particularly part of what keeps me fit for the work I do for my nonprofit, where reliability and consistency are crucially important. In my experience, managing your mood with responsible life choices is a far more effective treatment for bipolar than artificially damping down your emotions with prescription drugs.

Your mileage may vary, especially if you have a different form of bipolar than I do (type two), but this strategy has been working well for me for seven years now, and it's the first strategy I can say that about. As other elements of my lifestyle management approach come up over the days ahead, I'll point them out so that over time you can get a good picture of how I keep my life together despite the rollercoaster our family's moods predispose us to.

Honesty as Faux Pas

2010-05-22T10:55:00.000-07:00

I avoided keeping a public journal for two main reasons. I wrote about the main reason last night, but the second deserves a little exploration since it will shape everything that follows.

Despite the CIA's motto "And the truth shall set you free," despite the courts' admonition to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God," despite the media's claims to show you "all the truth that's fit to print," we're a culture of liars. Our commitment to the truth is precisely skin deep. We're committed to the appearance of the truth, to the appearance of honesty. We strive to appear admirable regardless of whether we are. We're so concerned with controlling how others perceive us that the truth itself cannot possibly compete for us. The race is over before it begins. We're committed to crafting the message, to spinning the revelation, to shaping the truth into something much more to our advantage, that is, shaping the truth into varying intensities of lies.

Everyone in our culture does it, and we all do it all the time. And we do it so automatically and thoroughly that we often convince ourselves of the truth of our lies. Indeed, many people are deeply convinced that they are strictly honest people, because their commitment to their performances and delusions is so total that they can no longer distinguish the truth from the lies.

In such a culture, honesty causes problems. There is a price to be paid for the truth, always, but in modern cultures the price is very, very high. Here are three problems you'll have to deal with.

First, when you sacrifice for the truth, you must accept that society holds your sacrifice in contempt.

In the eyes of the law, no matter how hard you work to break free of the delusions and sleepwalking, no matter how you end up suffering for speaking the truth, the law holds you the equal of the vilest liar alive, just like everyone else. All of society's institutions, which evolved within a culture of deceit, are built under the assumption that you're probably lying, and you will be treated as such by government and corporations alike no matter what you do. Our institutions respect no one and nothing. They have the heart of machines, the soul of the abyss, and they act not from any human motives but only according to their rules, which change from time to time to benefit those who have the power to change them. If you want respect, you must seek it from individuals, not institutions; you must appeal to the person, never to the office. This is one of the unchangeable evils of the modern world. Unless you steel yourself to it, it will break your truth-seeking heart.

Second, even from individuals you'll get a mixed response to your honesty.

Most people can't distinguish honesty from deceit, except that in general lies have been crafted to be delicious and the truth is often bitter, so they'll tend to prefer the tasty tasty lies. You can sometimes get away with saying the truth around most people on the questionable but widely accepted grounds that "everyone's entitled to their own opinion," but if you try to push the truth on most people they'll push back, redefining you as "not one of us," not a part of the herd. In general, the herd won't attack one of its own, but if it can define you as a true outsider you'll be amazed how quickly your life can be put in danger. Never underestimate the danger of the herd.

So if you're going to speak the truth as best you can, you're going to have to cultivate manners, learn how to de-escalate angry people, learn how to mediate between angry people, develop your empathy and appeal - in short, you're going to have to make yourself as nice and appealing as possible to overcome on an emotional level the herd's sometimes violent antagonism to the truth. After all, in speaking the truth you're causing them real pain, so you're going to have to give them enough happiness and pleasure in return to make it worth it to them.

A few people will share your commitment to honesty, to the struggle to be true. These people are treasures. Be willing to turn over a lot of weresheep and werewolves in your search for these actual people, and when you find them make sure you hang onto them. I've been lucky enough in my professional life to find and work with many people who share my attachment to honesty and are willing to suffer some for it. Usually, though, you're lucky to have one or two people like this in your life, and to find more takes many years of diligent searching.

Also, keep in mind that even people who want to be honest have their limits. Most honest people are only willing to suffer up to a point for the truth, and after that point they just have to have the relief of more lies and lying to stop the pain. Hardly anyone can hear or speak every truth. You don't really know your friends and family until you know where their limits are, where their tolerance for the truth ends and their need for another hit of the soothing lies begins.

Third, honesty attracts crazies who make it their mission to stop you.

We pretend to have a commitment to free speech, but that's just another lie. When you cross certain lines - and everyone has different lines, so those lines are all over the place - you identify yourself as an alien, an outsider, an outlaw, bootless, a legitimate target for persecution, and some people with no real meaning in their lives will make you their meaning, will define you has a threat and make it their job to hound you. Although the compassionate truth lover in you will want to engage with these people, you shouldn't; every time you engage with them, you make them feel more alive and meaningful and reinforce their need to hound you to try to make their lives mean something. Unless you want to end up like John Lennon or Doctor King, you need to be on the alert for the crazies and always be ready to practice gently disengaging when you can.

Some of the crazies will be too subtle for you to notice. These crypto-crazies will identify you as dangerous and remember you, but they won't stalk you; they'll just calmly and persuasively spread stories about you to poison your social wells, to hinder you subtly from a distance.

There's nothing you can do directly about these people, so you just have to accept that this is a price you will pay for your openness and honesty - some things in life are just going to be harder for you than for friendly liars. You need to make peace with that and with the cryptocrazies and weresheep and soulless institutions out there. You aren't really being cheated. They can't help themselves, since they aren't really sane, and you know in advance that this is the price of being a truthseeker, so don't complain about it. Just decide whether that price is worth paying to become an honest person, and if you decide to pay the price then pay it as cheerfully as you can and move on.

For what it's worth, my advice is to pay the price because the costs of honesty, however painful, are finite, but the costs of deceit and dishonesty are bottomless.

Which brings us finally, in my overly wordy and cumbersome way, back to the second sentence of this entry.

Some people know about the choice you have to make in life between open honesty or secrets and deceit, and pretty much all of us choose some degree of secrets and deceits in order to get along in this world. Although like most people I self-identify as an honest person, and although I'm open about some things (alcoholism and manic depression, for example) that most people try to hide, I have my share of things I don't talk much about. I'm about to break my own rules for you, dear nice, and talk openly and publicly about some things I've kept quiet about.

The problem is this.

Much of our professional life is about role-playing, and in my life I play the roles of programmer, VISTA expert, and executive director. Just as with the roles people play in their sex lives, professional roles only succeed if people feel a certain way about you, if they can emotionally commit to the idea of you playing those parts. If I jar them too much emotionally, if I don't fit their idea of those roles, then they won't accept me in those roles and I will suffer professionally.

The most fragile of the roles I play is executive director, because I'm already a very unusual looking and behaving person to be running an organization. I came out of the closet about my manic depression and my family's struggles with alcoholism long ago, and I have long hair, and I have weird opinions about things, and I don't give presentations the way normal people do, so people have already made a lot of concessions to accept me in the community as an authority figure. No one thinks of me as any normal kind of authority figure. They're already making allowances and accepting me only provisionally or as an exceptional case. They're a bit too aware that I'm playing a role, whereas with people who hide more of themselves they more fully believe those people are leaders.

Other leaders are pretty aware of this necessary quality of leadership and work hard to groom themselves for the role, to be acceptable to people as a replacement parental figure. Experienced and effective leaders are usually the ones most aware that they're playing a role, the ones who are least open and honest about who they are but who can pretend to be the most genuinely present. Such experienced leaders are critics of the performances of other leaders and recognize a failure to act the role properly as a naive character flaw. That is, would-be leaders who don't lie sufficiently well are seen as at best immature leaders who will need to become better liars to reach their true potential, and at worst as people who will never really be capable of leadership.

To such people, some of whom I need to work with in the years ahead, what I'm about to do with this journal is proof that I'm unfit to lead. Most people think a real leader reserves his true self and only offers people the confident, commanding persona, the act, that proves he's worthy. To do what I'm about to do is considered an amateur move, like accidentally belching very loudly through the microphone at a State of the Union address. In such circles, excessive honesty (defined as hardly any honesty at all) is a political faux pas, so I'm going to pay a professional price for this journal.

It's worth it, though.

On a professional level, I will probably benefit as well as suffer for it. Engineers respect the truth and feel contempt for those who lie or evade to make themselves look better. Some of them will respect me more for trying to be a different kind of leader, someone who doesn't just pretend to be what they want but who actually tries to become that person with his whole heart. By showing who I really am and where I came from, they'll be better able to estimate my true worth and decide whether I'm good enough to meet their needs. That will give me an advantage over those they know are merely playacting, however convincingly. So I'll lose some ability to negotiate with the powerful, but I'll be able to work more easily with the people who really understand or need the software.

Sure, it's considered more noble to suffer purely for the truth, but life rarely works out that way. There are almost always benefits to striving for virtue, however imperfectly. The benefit of virtues is not a matter of opinion, which is what makes them virtuous.

On a family level, though, the main reason I'm going to do this is that you deserve it, dear nieces and nephews. You deserve honesty and openness, freedom from the tyranny of secrets, and you deserve to see by example that it really is possible to escape our family's cycles of shame and pretense. You don't have to be afraid and angry. As long as you're polite about it, and generous, and friendly, and careful, you don't have to hide who you are. You can be real with people and have them still like and accept you, even if they think you're a weirdo.

And because I'm doing this for you, I also get to be just that little bit more whole myself, a gift I was unable to give myself until I decided to give it to you.

See how powerful love is?

Journal

2010-05-21T23:02:00.000-07:00

A few times in my life I kept journals. They helped me remember and process my sometimes difficult experiences and practice the art of writing. My older niece, Elizabeth, keeps one now, as did my paternal grandmother, Ann Saling, who wrote for a living, who taught me to read, who encouraged me to write, and who nurtured my love of this ancient craft. They both wrote about some very difficult experiences indeed. Reading their journals has brought me closer to them and helped me better understand the story of my family.

My friend Gary Tepfer thinks I should write that story. I'm slowly coming around to his way of thinking.

For a long time I thought our pains and joys, our political and religious arguments, our moments of brilliance and periods of madness and addiction would be of little use to anyone else, that they were mainly the grist for our own mills, for my family's struggles for sanity and health. Over the course of twenty-two years of personal therapy, though, I've learned lessons from my family's experiences that have made the difference in my life between success and disaster and between vitality and malaise. More importantly, these lessons have sometimes helped others who battled the same problems. Most importantly, every day in the world I see people suffering needlessly because they haven't yet learned these same lessons.

If I share my family's story, maybe some of you can learn from our sorrows and joys, or at least recognize the truth of them and know you're not alone.

For the rest of you, for those who think life is just supposed to pass the time as entertainingly as possible until you die, the ups and downs of my crazy family are at least as entertaining as half of the stories I've read. Maybe you'll agree.

In my life I've learned two stories worth telling that I might be worthy to tell. The story of my family is the first one. This journal will in part be my practice space, my story sketchbook.

The other part of this journal will be my remedial diary for keeping track of what's left of my life. Doing this is not at all easy for me. It is an act of faith, a suspension of disbelief. Without meaning to, my parents taught me early on that I'm unimportant and uninteresting; how I came to learn that will doubtless emerge over time within this journal. Horrified that I drew that lesson from our life together, they've struggled mightily for decades since then to unteach me that lesson. Even as I appreciate their efforts and love them the more for it, I've come to realize that some early lessons cannot be unlearned. I've been given the gift of humility (however imperfect), it seems, at the price of self esteem - a fair trade considering the hubris that plagues humanity.

So.

In a nutshell, I don't really expect anyone to care about my life enough to want to read such a journal - I can't emotionally truly believe it - but I recognize that enough friends and family members have asked to be more a part of my life for long enough that I'm willing to take the leap of faith and try it. I do this partly for their sake, to be a better friend and relative.

My passion for journaling died with my hopes of having children, but it seems I have nieces and nephews who insist upon taking an interest in me. I do this mainly for their sake, because I love them and want to invest in their future by sharing my life more fully with them.

For those who fall into neither camp, those who find what follows to be just more noise taking up precious bandwidth, you have my sympathy and my genuine apology.

To use my blog as a journal represents a big change in the tone of this blog, but more of an addition than a replacement. I still love philosophy and will continue to write about it with the same frequency as before, but now the times in between will be filled with entries about my life rather than the barren desert of silence it has so often been.

Gibberish, Part One Redux Redux (Text Choice)

2010-02-07T23:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Text is perishable, so the original manuscripts of older texts are usually lost, leaving us to read copies, or copies of copies, or worse.

Comparing Red Pine's translation of these lines to the work of other translators - or even reading the Chinese text - might bring us closer to understanding Laozi's original meaning, but that's only true if Laozi wrote those words. New research has uncovered evidence that those two lines may have been added to chapter 81 long after it was written, replacing two very different lines.

Between 1972 and 1974, at Mawangdui in Changsha, China, three tombs were excavated: (1) the tomb of Xinzhui, Lady Dai; (2) the tomb of her husband Li Cang, the first Marquis of Dai and the chancellor of the Kingdom of Changsha, who died in 186 BC; and (3) the tomb of a man in his thirties believed to be a relative of Xinzhui and Li Cang, perhaps their son, who died in 168 BC. Although tomb two had been plundered repeatedly by grave robbers, in tomb three archaeologists found a treasure trove of manuscripts written on silk, including two copies of Laozi's Daodejing older than any other version we know of.

These older versions are clearly the same document overall, but equally clearly they are not identical. Studying, translating, and trying to explain the differences from the versions we know has helped keep a number of scholars busy since then.

Interestingly, chapter 81 is one of the chapters containing an interesting difference from the text we've all taken as authoritative. Here is the text as translated by Robert G. Henricks in his 1992 book Lao Tzu: Te-Tao Ching - A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts (Classics of Ancient China):

Sincere words are not showy;
Showy words are not sincere.
Those who know are not "widely learned";
Those "widely learned" do not know.
The good do not have a lot;
Those with a lot are not good.

The Sage accumulates nothing.
Having used what he had for others,
He has even more.
Having given what he had to others,
What he has is even greater.
Therefore, the Way of Heaven is to benefit and not cause any harm;
The Way of Man is to act on behalf of others and not to compete with them.

Contrast that first stanza with this more classic fusion version based on Red Pine but including Henricks's correction and with two parenthetical amplification from me to cover the range of translations:

True words aren't beautiful
beautiful words aren't true
A good (/knowledgeable/wise/virtuous) man does not argue;
He who argues is not a good (/knowledgeable/wise/virtuous) man.
the wise aren't learned
the learned aren't wise.

The first couplet matches, and the third couplet of the classic version matches the second couplet of the Mawangdui version pretty well, but then we're at the crux of the difference.

In the classic version, the second couplet repeats much of the meaning of the first couplet, recasting it in terms of the man rather than the words, and argumentation/persuasion rather than mere attraction. That is, it reads like an elaboration of the prior couplet. By contrast, in the Mawangdui version, the newly discovered (original?) third couplet sounds like a line out of Jesus's beatitude, blessing the poor in an eloquent echo of Rabbi Hillel before him, which here in chapter 81 is more of an original thought than an elaboration of the lines before, which better fits the terse style of the work overall.

This Mawangdui line seems to add a new dimension to the message of chapter 81. And thus, in a nutshell, the problem.

For two thousand years we thought that in chapter 81 Laozi wrote one thing, and now we come to find out he may have written something meaningfully different. Or did he? Are the newly discovered but older Mawangdui manuscripts more authentic than the classic but younger manuscripts? Or are they a parallel tradition, or maybe even an attempted editing of the classic line that died out because it was not authentic?

The immediate truth is, we just don't know.

But of course, the underlying truth always matters whether we think it does or not. It is not the responsibility of the cosmos to lay the truth in our laps for us. If we are not willing to work for the truth, sacrifice for the truth, suffer for the truth, then what we get as "truth" will be worth exactly what we paid for it.

We may not like the problem of having variant texts, but that's just our human foolishness talking. As Heraclitus wrote, It would not be better for men if they got what they want; or as the colloquial puts it, Be careful what you wish for. Up until 1972 or so, we didn't have this problem. We were "fortunate" enough to have only one version of chapter 81.

And it may have been the wrong one.

Your truly,
Rick

What's Your Name

2010-01-31T11:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Due to the high volume of spamming by anonymous posters, I have reluctantly banned further anonymous posting to this blog. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Yours truly,
Rick

Gibberish, Part One Redux (Word Choice)

2009-12-27T00:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Several different problems make translation hard. Word choice for example:

A word in the original language rarely means exactly the same things as any one word in the new language, so the translator has to pick a translated word that only means part of what the original meant, or means extra things the original didn't mean. Exact matches occur less often than most people think, and less often than even the translators themselves think.

For example, Red Pine's translation of the first half of chapter 81 is this:

True words aren't beautiful
beautiful words aren't true
the good aren't eloquent
the eloquent aren't good
the wise aren't learned
the learned aren't wise.

but the usual translation of the middle two lines is more like this (courtesy of Robert G. Henricks):

A good man does not argue;
He who argues is not a good man.

That's different! And Henricks is right: this is closer to the usual reading. Here are a few others for comparison:

J. Legge translates this as:

Those who are skilled (in the Tao) do not dispute (about it);
the disputatious are not skilled in it.

Frederic H. Balfour's translation is:

The virtuous do not bandy arguments.
Those who bandy arguments are not virtuous.

Stephen Mitchell suggests:

Wise men don't need to prove their point;
men who need to prove their point aren't wise.

And Aleister Crowley's take is:

Those who know do not argue;
the argumentative are without knowledge.

To argue effectively we have to be persuasive, and to persuade it helps to be eloquent, but given just the word eloquent we wouldn't understand it to mean argumentative, even though given the rest of chapter 81 that is almost certainly closer to what the author meant than eloquent. Red Pine's book is an excellent resource for studying the Daodejing for many reasons (including his translation), but in this specific case he probably chose a word that scans beautifully and reveals nuance but obscures the text's primary meaning.

This problem is not specific to Red Pine. Any translation of the Daodejing has this problem in multiple places, because for difficult-to-translate words there is no right choice. To understand the original text, we have to read it in the original language or at least read multiple translations, preferably including some that identify and discuss difficult words and phrases.

Now for the kicker: there are worse problems with translation than word choice. More next time.

Yours truly,
Rick

Oaths and Fates

2009-11-29T20:36:00.001-08:00

Dear Reader,

I've started a third blog, Oaths and Fates (http://oathsandfates.blogspot.com), where I'll be discussing Dungeons and Dragons.

Yours truly,
Rick

Interlude with Li Po

2009-11-28T22:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Thanks again and again to Wikipedia and the wikipedians for their continuing mission to make so much information so widely available, including little gems like this one.

For those of you unfamiliar with the exquisite Li Po, I'm so happy to share with you this moment of beauty from over a thousand years ago.

Yours truly,
Rick

Drinking Alone by Moonlight (月下獨酌, pinyin: Yuè Xià Dú Zhuó)
by Li Bai (aka Li Po) (Chinese: 李白; pinyin: Lǐ Bái, or, Lǐ Bó) (701 – 762)
translated by Arthur Waley

花間一壺酒。 A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
獨酌無相親。 I drink alone, for no friend is near.
舉杯邀明月。 Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
對影成三人。 For her, with my shadow, will make three people.

月既不解飲。 The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
影徒隨我身。 Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
暫伴月將影。 Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
行樂須及春。 I must make merry before the Spring is spent.

我歌月徘徊。 To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
我舞影零亂。 In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
醒時同交歡。 While we were sober, three shared the fun;
醉後各分散。 Now we are drunk, each goes their way.
永結無情遊。 May we long share our eternal friendship,
相期邈雲漢。 And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.

Gibberish, Part One

2009-11-24T21:56:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

In my blog entry on Saturday, April 28, 2007, I quoted verse 81 from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:

"True words aren't beautiful
beautiful words aren't true
the good aren't eloquent
the eloquent aren't good
the wise aren't learned
the learned aren't wise
the sage accumulates nothing
but the more he does for others
the greater his existence
the more he gives to others
the greater his abundance
the Way of Heaven
is to help without harming
the Way of the sage
is to act without struggling"

In response, an anonymous commentator responded:

"sounds like giberish to me"

Today, two and a half years later, I've finally decided to respond. I waited in part because the incomparable Johnny Ringo responded to Anonymous with a delightful improv riffing on the difference between gibberish and "giberish." In part I waited because anonymous commentators lack commitment to their words, since they won't even put their name behind their statements. Finally, in part I waited because sometimes it's hard to know how to respond to people whose perspectives are so profoundly alien to your own. For a long time, I honestly wasn't sure what to say to someone who would read a passage like verse 81 and see only gibberish (let alone giberish - shades of Charles Dodgson!).

Maybe it's because these days I do a lot more teaching than I did in 2007, maybe because Anonymous's complaint has finally cooked enough on my mental back burner, but my answer's finally ready. Here you go, Anonymous, in three parts, the first in this post.

First, human languages are optimized to say the kinds of things people from that culture say or think a lot, the commonplace ideas. They are anti-optimized against the things people do not often say or think in that culture.

The more you need to talk about something outside the range of your culture's usual concerns, the more like gibberish you're going to sound because that language will fight you, forcing you to choose between clumsy but literal prose or elegant but abstract metaphor.

You can see this clearly when translating certain works from one language to another, especially when the works in questions are masterpieces of their language, meaning they express exactly those kinds of things that language is great at, meaning the one you're translating into is likely to be quite bad at.

For example, translating Hegel from German into English does real violence to Hegel's ideas and renders clear but abstract and difficult ideas in German into simultaneously misleading and impenetrable prose in English. German is just plain better suited to expressing the kinds of ideas Hegel wrote about. In English, he often sounds rather like gibberish. This is ironic since there are fewer writers in the history of world literature whose ideas are less like gibberish. The clarity and force of his ideas make what most of us write seem as incoherent as fever-dream babbling by comparison, but in English - gibberish.

For example, here's a comparatively clear sentence from Die Philosophie des Geistes (The Philosophy of the Mind. Or should that be The Philosophy of the Spirit? Even the title doesn't translate into English. You're better off keeping the German word Geist):

The self-feeling of the living unity of mind inherently sets itself in opposition to the splintering of this same unity into distinct, mutually opposed, independently represented faculties, forces, or, what amounts to the same thing, likewise represented activities.

You have to be very comfortable with Hegel or German or both to really comprehend this translated sentence, and this one's pretty easy to translate. The ones that try to distinguish the "Idea" from the "Notion" (which are grossly butchered translations of clearly distinct German words whose distinction makes very little sense in English) read like pure gibberish.

The case of translation is not nearly so difficult as another case. Some writers write things not only difficult to translate into other languages, but even difficult to express in the language most suited to expressing it. That is, some writers build upon the linguistic strengths of their language by pushing beyond the limits, stretching the language to say things even it cannot easily say.

These writers tend to be the great thinkers, like Heraclitus of Ephesus, who understand things that no one has ever effectively expressed before in any language, who in their role as teachers have to find some way to bend the language to give them a chance to put this insight into words. This case most often arises from the need to simultaneously express many different ideas that are intertwined with one another, to reveal some important result of their interdependency.

For example, when Heraclitus writes Ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων (Êthos anthrôpôi daimôn), he says in three words what it takes an entire book to express in English; in those three words he takes a bold and original position on the classical philosophical debate about whether or not human beings have free will. Any attempt to "translate" this powerful statement into just three "equivalent" English words - or six, or thirty, or three hundred - reduces it to either a trivial statement or gibberish. Many of Heraclitus's statements still baffle even dedicated Heracliteans to this day for this very reason, because his ideas were barely expressible in Classical Greek and are more or less inexpressible in English. To truly understand what he's trying to say, you have to build up the vocabulary you need by studying Classical Greek. As with Hegel but even more so, the apparent gibberish of an English translation of Heraclitus (like G.T.W. Patrick's "A man's character is his daemon") is actually a desperate attempt to make accessible a profound truth.

Laozi's magnificent Daodejing (The Classic of the Way and the Virtue) falls into the same category as Heraclitus's Peri physeos, an attempt to put profound but nearly inexpressible ideas into words in a language far better suited to it than English. For example, writers like Laozi and Heraclitus often resort to paradox or even simple contradiction to slap the reader across his expectations, to force us to slow down and consider what he really means, to break out of our usual mental ruts long enough to consider a profoundly different perspective on something we've been taking for granted.

So, Anonymous, in short my first answer to your complaint is that sometimes gibberish is a good thing, an important thing, a sign of untranslatable profundity. Sometimes gibberish is how you know you are in the presence of one of the most important ideas you will ever encounter in your life.

More in part two.

Yours truly,
Rick

Busy Busy Busy

2009-09-17T10:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

I haven't forgotten about my blog here, but I've been distracted by (1) six deaths in my family in six months, and (2) my work-related blog, the VISTA Expertise Weblog. That blog for now and the immediate future is consuming most of my writing energy. Although it's mainly VISTA-related, there's an unavoidable amount of philosophy to it given its author, so you may find it interesting.

I'll resume my more directly philosophic explorations in the not-too-distant future. Until then, be well and struggle for wisdom.

Yours truly,
Rick

Sleepless

2009-03-13T02:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Ironically, for a man from a race of sleepwalkers, I can't sleep tonight.

My Grandma, Ann Saling, died a week ago, and we held her service two days ago. The service was a trainwreck, horror after horror with a few grace notes mixed in whose contrast sharpened the pain. It was so bad I was actually struck dumb when it was my turn to speak, and even now I cannot write about the details. I've been a fan of horror films all my life and watch the most astonishing fictional horrors, yet now I feel like a Lovecraftian protagonist who collapses in the face of true horror. Nihilism is so much worse a violation than death or mere grotesquerie.

Although I spent yesterday shying away from the trauma of the previous day, distracting myself, I find myself tonight unable to stop replaying the worst of it when I should be sleeping. After two sleepless hours I gave up trying and thought to fall back on my old comfort of writing to achieve emotional alchemy.

Rereading my last entry, from October, about pathei mathos, I found that it still rang true to me. Moreover, in the depths of pain now, stripped of abstract intellectual imagining by the direct grip of experience, I feel its truth more profoundly now than when I wrote it.

Why pathei mathos? Why do we only question ourselves under duress?

I think the problem lies in our mimesis, which I believe to be the essence of human nature, the very heart of our species. Intense mimcry seems to be the strange attractor that organizes all the anomalies and general weirdness of this species into a coherent pattern. It is an evil joke to call ourselves Homo sapiens, wise man, when wisdom is the surest thing we are not. Homo mimesis names the core of us better. For man all the world is indeed a stage, and the best actors are in the audience, playing the roles of their lives.

To fully immerse ourselves in our roles we must believe in our performances, which requires the complete shutdown of our critical faculties where perspective on ourselves is concerned. Great performances require commitment; one cannot be convincing and self-conscious simultaneously. Thus our mimesis and our profound resistance to self-scrutiny depend on each other, evolved to reinforce one another and create one of those powerful harmonic feedback loops evolution loves.

The more clearly we look at this nexus of drives within our nature, the more singers we find contributing decisively to this harmony.

Consider the psychological effect of acclimation, in which any stimulus, no matter how anomalous or unpleasant, can be adapted to by the human mind until we no longer notice it, like how sanitation workers get used to the odors associated with their job. Acclimation helps counteract the disruptive effect of sudden jumps in pain, ensuring that we sink back into our roles as we become used to the new conditions rather than breaking out of our mimesis completely, likewise ensuring that any wakefulness from our sleepwalking through life, our self-unconsciousness, is kept as brief as possible. That is, evolution's priorities for us placed mimetic immersion above disruptive wisdom as a survival trait.

We usually think of acclimation as the balm that soothes our pain, that allows us to adapt to it, but for that very reason it is also the chloroform we place over our own mouths whenever we become momentarily conscious, protecting us from insights and ensuring our operation can continue.

Or as another example of a powerful drive within us that makes the most sense when considered as a contributor to our essential mimesis, consider our species's notorious dearth of instincts compared to other mammals. Instincts place limits on a species's available range of behaviors by hardwiring them for specific behaviors. The more instincts you have, the less range you have as an actor, because the more of your behavior you cannot alter to fit your role. The greatest actors would have to have the fewest instincts (using the term here strictly biologically, not in the colloquial jargon of acting itself, in which instincts are—typical of English—something entirely different than instincts in biology (hardwired behavior); acting instincts are closer to intuition or the capacity to be true to the character you are playing, and these are the not the kind of thing our species lacks).

A third drive that contributes to this harmonic is the remarkable capacity for doing things unprecedented in the history of evolution, or doing things to an unprecedented extent. Sure other animals use tools, but none as wildly and intensely as we do. Sure others change their environment, but none as wildly and extensively as we do. Sure, other animals use language, but none so wildly and diversely as we do. The list goes on forever, because our capacity to do the unexpected does. This seemingly infinite, Protean malleability permits us to completely lose ourselves not only in precedented roles but unprecedented ones as well. That is, we can not only organize ourselves around any natural roles for which there are precedents, we can also organize ourselves around unnatural and artificial roles without precedent. The dynamic range in human cultures far exceeds the behavioral range of any other species, which is necessary for a species organized above all around imitating anything.

Each of these harmonic factors reinforces each of the others. Our wild dynamic range would not be possible without our capacity to acclimate to anything, however alien it might be at first. Thus, a stable civilization can be created around the idea of (among other things) tearing the hearts out of other people on top of enormous artificial mounds oriented to the stars. Likewise, our wild dynamic range would not be possible if our behavior were constrained by an evolved system of instinctive behavior. You don't find wolves deciding to organize themselves around the building of monuments to their own dead, because wolf instincts create an intricate and consistent worldwide wolf culture that constrains their behavior within functional and sustainable limits, whereas humanity's poverty of instincts permits us to organize around almost anything.

Finally (for this essay) a fourth example of an essential human characteristic that powerfully harmonizes with all these others organized around mimesis is neotony, an evolutionary principle first brought to my attention by Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape. Neotony is a process by which a new species evolves from an old one by interrupting its normal course of maturation to prevent adult characteristics from developing, that is, by retaining childlike characteristics into adulthood. Morris noted that many of our species's differences from the other apes are almost entirely explained in terms of neotony. Young apes have less hair than adult apes, and we have less hair than other primates. Young primates have larger heads relative to the size of their bodies, and so do we. Young animals have more generic, less specialized bodies and so do we. Young mammals are more social, and so are we. Young mammals are more curious and so are we. Young animals learn new behavior more easily, and so do we.

Overall, our species is an ideal case study in how neotony can turn one species into another, and I have long recognized that it is pivotal to understanding what we are, but now look at neotony in terms of the components of our essential behavioral harmony and its importance increases. Many of the instincts animals develop are not present at birth but instead activate later in the development process, so by interrupting that process neotony would cause these instincts never to develop in the new species; if humanity is one of the most intensely neotonous species, then we would expect to find a correspondingly extreme reduction in the number of instincts present in an adult human being, which we do. Our extreme capacity for unprecedented behavior is most closely associated in other animals with play, curiosity, and learning, all features more typical of young animals than of adults, except in human beings, who retain this childlike capacity for highly variable behavior into adulthood. Our capacity for mimicry is just the neotonous retention of learning-by-example that all young mammals do taken to an extreme because it is never switched off in adulthood as it is in other animals.

Neotony, extreme behavioral range, instinctual poverty, acclimation, self-unconsciousness, and mimesis together (along with other harmonizing human drives) create in human beings an extremely effective talent for mimicry, a paradoxical combination of extreme flexibility in the choice of behavioral models combined with an intense commitment to whatever roles we find ourselves in.

Our essential mimesis makes us very good at what we have evolved to do, but extraordinarily bad at wisdom. We are anti-evolved against genuine introspection, though we have the capacity to imitate the surface of it trivially. We have the capacity to be convinced by ourselves and our own roles, but almost no capacity to genuinely question ourselves or even to perceive ourselves in context, since that would interfere with perceiving ourselves according to the roles we have adopted.

In short, by means of our most essential survival traits we must and will subvert any chance of breaking out of our perpetual dream states. By our commitment to our roles, by being convinced of our own authenticity and our own understanding of who and what we are, we are guaranteed to be unable to question those roles, that authenticity, or that understanding, and without such questioning wisdom is quite impossible (though the imitation of the surface of it, the intense desire to be thought wise, the aping of wisdom, are not only possible but inevitable for a mimic).

That is why our only opportunities for advancing in wisdom can occur during those all-too-brief windows (1) after a sharp, unprecedented pain has shaken up our worlds so strongly that we groggily awake from ourselves, and (2) before our powerful capacity for acclimation adapts us to our new condition and puts us back to sleep.

That is, to that list of powerful harmonizing drives and effects that make us Homo mimesis, we can finally understand pathei mathos not as a curse of arbitrary gods to make wisdom unreachable except through pain—no jealous Olympian gods withhold from us the fires of enlightenment—nor as the idle speculation of ancient philosophers and storytellers—no fiction invented for our entertainment or catharsis—but rather as the necessary and inevitable consequences of our evolutionary recipe for survival. Wisdom is incompossible with mimesis, and mimesis is our specific, special priority and mission.

That is why it is impossible for us to know ourselves or to reflect upon ourselves as we actually are—the prime requisites for wisdom—except during the briefest of windows here and there in our lives when we suffer from fresh pain so intense that for a short time we cannot sleep.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: If only it were the nightly sleep we needed to interrupt, perhaps we could all become wise, but alas, it is the sleep of a lifetime from which we must awake, and that we cannot do for long. The only permanent end to the sleep of mimetic personality comes with the sleep of the dead, the eternal sleep from which we none of us ever awake, and in which, alas, wisdom does not await us, only the dissolution of the self back into the selfless cosmic realms of soil and sea.

Spelling

2009-03-13T02:47:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

I just corrected the spelling in my comment about myself, which previously read "curioser and curioser." My wife is an editor, and I'm no slouch at spelling, but I've had this wrong for years. Heraclitus is right—we really are sleepwalkers.

Yours truly,
Rick

Pathei Mathos

2008-10-09T00:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

I have started reading William Chase Greene's Moira: Fate, Good, & Evil in Greek Thought (1944, reprinted 1963) and I'm blown away by the first five pages, which include one of the most agile sweeps through core Greek concepts I have read anywhere. Those pages sketch relationships among dozens of crucial elements, though in-depth exploration of their meaning is left to the rest of his book. To aid my own milling of this nutritious grist, I'm going to explore the vocabulary here for a while to help explore the Greek cultural context of its philosophers, starting with this paragraph from page 5:

The spectacle, and still more the experience, of life’s vicissitudes has always been the parent of perplexity. Disappointed hopes, the prosperity of the wicked, the suffering of the innocent, even the little ironies of circumstance, invite men to question whether the ultimate power in the universe is good or evil. One type of answer, common among the ancient Greeks, takes a dark view of human life. It ranges from brooding melancholy to stark pessimism and the cry that “it were best never to have been born” (μὴ φῦναι [me psunai]); from kindly consolation of others, and counsels of moderation (sophrosyne) and the avoidance of risks (“the half is better than the whole”; “excess in nothing,” μηδὲν ἄγαν [meden agan], “live in obscurity,” λάθε βιώσας [lathe biosas], “endure and renounce,” ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου [anechou kai apechou]) to manly endurance of hardship (tlemosyne), or even to the discovery that wisdom may come through suffering (πάθει μάθος [pathei mathos]), which is a school of character. . . .

Greene's strength is not in his priorities or even his conclusions but in the wealth of the material he works through. That is, although he does not always interpret the material correctly—indeed, most moderns fail to understand the Greeks at the level of profundity they require—he is right about as often as he's wrong, and more importantly he picks the right material to reveal the Greek preoccupations. In this opening chapter he turns over one vital, pivotal Greek term after another. If you truly wish to come to grips with many of the core concepts that so completely separate the classical Greek worldview from your own—and if you ever want to truly think, to understand yourself and your world, then you must find some worldview alien to the modern from which to triangulate, to gain perspective, without which wisdom is impossible—then here they are in these opening pages of his book, laid out in sequence for you to begin researching.

Yet to take an example from this paragraph, neither Greene nor most commentators on the meaning of pathei mathos truly come to grips with it. Here, for example, he summarizes its meaning as "the discovery that wisdom may come from suffering, which is a school of character." This is barely the beginning of what pathei mathos means. It obscures as much as it reveals, and the quirky, optional tone of his interpretation is a typically modern way of trying to distance himself from the core Greek concept here, which was intended as an indictment of human nature, something not optional at all nor arbitrary but essential to the nature of what we are, the problem we create for ourselves, the very reason why "know thyself" was considered such an essential mission for the classical Greeks that it was inscribed on the entryway of the Oracle at Delphi.

Pathei mathos must have been a very widely quoted expression in classical Greece, but today we know it best from Aeschylus's tragedy Agamemnon, and in that context its meaning and implications should be unmistakable, had we not a powerful drive not to hear what Aeschylus strives to tell us.

For the Greeks, the centerpiece of their literature was Homer's Iliad, which chooses a crucial sequence from the cycle of stories about the Trojan War, the war that effectively ended their heroic age with the utter devastation of their best and brightest upon the plains of Troy, squandered over a domestic dispute.

The culture that made that act of horrific shame and loss their first national epic paired it with their second, Homer's Odyssey, a selection from the cycle of stories referred to as The Returns, in which the surviving "victors" in that great debacle almost all died on the journey home or upon their return. Homer's epic chooses the ten-years of horror and despair through which Odysseus struggles to go home, one of the very very few to survive both the terrible war and the harrowing return home.

This is the context for Agamemnon, which is about the great king of the Greeks who led that fabled fleet of a thousand ships to its ruinous victory over Troy, and whose own return home ended rather less well than Odysseus's. Even beyond the sheer wasteful futility of the war itself, Agamemnon returned home reeking of the blood guilt of sacrificing his own daughter Iphigenia to change the winds to permit the Greek fleet to leave for Troy in the beginning; returned home with his concubine Cassandra, the Trojan prophet who foresaw all of the horrors to come but was cursed to be universally disbelieved and ignored, even by those she loved most, doomed to live through helplessly what she foresaw to no avail; returned home to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra for murdering their daughter Iphigenia; returned home to become the reason their son Orestes would murder Clytemnestra for murdering Agamemnon.

The great Gilbert Murray, in the preface to his masterly translation of Agamemnon (available free from Project Gutenberg), takes us to the heart of things:

The trilogy of the Oresteia, of which this play is the first part, centres on the old and everlastingly unsolved problem of the ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth wrong. Every wrong is justly punished; yet, as the world goes, every punishment becomes a new wrong, calling for fresh vengeance. And more; every wrong turns out to be itself rooted in some wrong of old. It is never gratuitous, never untempted by the working of peitho (persuasion), never merely wicked. The Oresteia first shows the cycle of crime punished by crime which must be repunished, and then seeks for some gleam of escape, some breaking of the endless chain of "evil duty." In the old order of earth and heaven there was no such escape. Each blow called for the return blow and must do so ad infinitum. But, according to Aeschylus, there is a new Ruler now in heaven, one who has both sinned and suffered and thereby grown wise. He is Zeus the Third Power, Zeus the Saviour, and his gift to mankind is the ability through suffering to Learn.

Implicit but not quite clear in Murray's summation is the nature of that gift—to repair a defect in human nature that made it possible for us to be so abysmally stupid that we could commit crimes in the name of justice and fail forever to realize that this must inevitably perpetuate the cycle of crimes. This gift is not one way among others to learn, as Greene implies in the paragraph I quoted above from Moira. The specific usage of pathei mathos within Aeschylus leaves us no doubt, if translated clearly enough. Murray, who understands this work so well unfortunately obscures the point a bit by molding the language into verse, but Herbert Weir Smyth's translation is clear enough:

Zeus, who sets mortals on the path to understanding, Zeus, who has established as a fixed law that "wisdom comes by suffering." But even as trouble, bringing memory of pain, drips over the mind in sleep, so wisdom comes to men, whether they want it or not. Harsh, it seems to me, is the grace of gods enthroned upon their awful seats.

In response to the cognitive dissonance of the alien nature of classical Greek culture clashing against our modern prejudices we tend to glide past or willfully twist the most profound passages. The full import of this fixed law we do not care to face.

First, only suffering can lead us to wisdom. Because of the defects of our human nature, we will do anything to avoid overturning our cherished delusions, so that the metamorphoses of wisdom can only work upon us against our will and under the duress of pathos (helpless suffering).

Second, wisdom does not always or even usually come to men, even by suffering, or else the great chain of crimes and punishments that constituted archaic justice would have been broken long ago by the wisdom it imparted to those upon whom it inflicted suffering—they suffered but did not gain the wisdom they needed to break the cycle of violence that Agamemnon is about—but whatever wisdom any given individual is capable of will have to be beaten into him. A modern will chafe at this interpretation, will insist on reading this passage in isolation from the entire rest of the play, indeed cycle of plays, of which it is a part, but that is merely an illustration of the first point, that we will do anything to avoid overturning our cherished delusions.

This gift of Zeus to mankind is not a Christian gift, like a salvation offered to all men (despite Murray's wording in his preface), nor is it a Modern gift, like a self-evident truth that we all share equally as birthright; it is a gift as understood by the classical Greeks, to whom the bad were many, the good few. This point emphasizes not that wisdom comes to all men but rather always against men's will. Heraclitus certainly agreed with the Aeschylean conception of pathei mathos: "Every beast is driven to pasture by blows," and "It would not be better for men if they got what they want." We want the wrong things and left to our own devices we veer away from wisdom in favor of petty, vitiating pleasures.

Greene's quick reading of pathei mathos overturns its distinctively Greek meaning in favor of a Modernist reading—hey, man, do whatever you like, you might even try suffering so you can grow wiser, that's one way to build up your character—but he does bring this powerful concept to our attention right up front, a service for which I'm happy to forgive him his perfectly understandable lapse in interpretation.

As an antidote to Greene's sketchy interpretation, I offer this transcription of Texas philosopher Kenneth Smith from his course on ancient Greek philosophy:

Taught by suffering: drop by drop wisdom is distilled from pain. This is the link between aristeia and the tragic ethos. A Greek aristos would rather be educated by suffering than be happy his whole life long, because you don’t get educated by happiness. No one is wised up by getting things the way he wants—that just consolidates the idiotism in him, makes his ego think the world exists for its sake, as the ego has always suspected. Suffering shows the schism between what we want and how the world is organized, the contraindication the world gives us that we’ve been strategizing from totally wrong precepts. Suffering is the collision between human delusions and real truth. Not every human being has equal potential to learn from suffering. Some people just suffer, or just respond with alternative tactics.

Finally, although there have been many attempts to translate this difficult but vital quotation, I should draw this one at least to your attention. Evan Thomas's article "The Worst Week," from the 19 November 2007 issue of Newsweek, discusses the connections between the collapse of Lyndon Johnson's presidency and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Junior and Robert Kennedy. He tells the story of how Kennedy wanted King's endorsement for the presidency and was on the verge of getting it when King was assassinated. On April 4th, 1968, at what was supposed to be a campaign speech in Indianapolis it instead fell to Kennedy to bear the terrible news to the people who had gathered to hear him speak. He abandoned his prepared speech and instead spoke from notes he had written on the plane flight, capturing his initial shock and grief. The turning point in his speech was his take on this passage from Agamemnon: "My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote, 'In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"

Yours truly,
Rick

Tripping over the Voids

2008-04-16T21:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

I noticed when Michael Distaso died. Death is not the five stages of grieving, neither like a program nor even like the authors of that model meant it, as five fluctuating states, strange attractors for the force of loss.

Every death is different. Different feelings felt differently, different holes in our lives found at different times in different places. Shakti's death was a slap; I wept and sobbed and staggered, felt the full force at once, fell apart and fell over every day for a long time, only a little less day by day. Morgana's death is a creeping numbing, a slow, soft fading of strength from many little places throughout my day; I cried hard while I held her on Monday before she died that night, but since then I have been empty-quiet inside.

We are not individuals but communities. We are all Swiss, full of holes filled with one another. When one of us dies, the rest of us find ourselves full of confusing holes. Where we thought we were ourselves, we find we were someone else now gone. Where we thought our day was a whole, we find holes instead. We turn to look at our life but find an empty room instead.

But then Rashid gallops down the stairs like a maniac, lands facing me, stands stock still, wide green eyes like surprise, a pause, Meeps! once decisively, then turns and tears back up the stairs.

What the Hell was that? Which stage of grieving is this supposed to be?

Yours truly,
Rick

Morgana LeFaye Marshall

2008-04-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

2 February 1989 – 15 April 2008

Morgana in Passing

2008-04-14T01:33:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

I am sitting up with Morgana, our nineteen-year-old kitty. She is dying.

Her decline has been rapid. A week ago she was still jumping up onto counters. She has had trouble getting around increasingly this week, her jumps deteriorating into crashes, and as of today she cannot walk at all. If I hold her upright and support her weight she can stagger to where she wants to go, and thus we communicate enough for me to help her get what she needs.

Most of today she has spent in her kitty bed, breathing shallowly, eyes not quite closed, not sleeping, watching me, periodically meowing silently. When she needs my help, she either struggles to move or makes a low, short moan, and we work together to figure out what she needs. She has drunk only a little water today, eaten only a little food, and grown quieter and weaker throughout the day. I doubt she will last another day, perhaps not even the night.

Over the course of my life, I have had many cats in my family, but for almost half my life my immediate family was Beverly, Shakti, and Morgana. Of our two kitties, gray-tabby Shakti was the smarter, weirder, and antisocial of the two, and tortoise-shell Morgana has been the fearless one with the indomitable will and expressive, sometimes operatic voice. Morgana, no slouch in the smarts department herself, learned to open closed doors at our old house and likes being read to (especially children's books about cats), but it is the core of her personality that shines at the end.

When we first brought Shakti and Morgana home all those years ago, they had just been spayed and were still recovering from the anesthesia. They were both dizzy from the drug. Shakti just lay down on the carpet, her head swaying as she focused on looking around without falling over. Morgana, true to form, would not be subdued by the dizziness, and staggered around the room exploring, falling over, and getting back up repeatedly. She even tried to jump up onto furniture in the room, with predictable results, and once fell over onto Shakti. Although Shakti was six months older than Morgana and rapidly grew to be twice her weight, for the first half of their lives with us Morgana was clearly the top cat, dominating by her inexhaustible energy and sheer will to have things exactly the way she wants them (a classic tortie trait).

We lost Shakti to renal failure two years ago.

Now, at Morgana's end, she is still true to form. Although exhausted and unable to bear her own weight most of the time today, five times today when sufficiently motivated she still dragged herself to her feet and staggered to her destination, be it the pee pad we put down for her or back to her little bed. She teetered up onto all fours, tilting crazily, staggered forward a few steps, fell, and got back up again and continued on until she reached her destination, much like she did eighteen and a half years ago. Step by step, she reverts to the helpless kitten and I to her surrogate mama.

I have written at times about the inadequacies of language for genuine communication, as well as about my own linguistic inadequacies, and these both strike me strongly at times like this. I cannot convey what it means for a man without children to lose a cat who has been a beloved member of the family for almost half his life. My life so far, my prospects for the future, my priorities, are all slightly clarified by these passages of mortality, by these periods of caring and waiting and comforting and weeping.

Grief can be more than just a pathos, a suffering; it can also be a lense or a still. Aeschylus, in Agamemnon, wrote "drop by drop, wisdom is distilled from pain." A bitter bargain: an alchemy of loss with a reek of necromancy to transform dumb suffering into a faintly wiser suffering, to extract a hair's breadth more clarity in exchange for a beloved life.

Yours truly,
Rick

The Blessing of Paralysis

2008-04-13T23:56:00.000-07:00

[Originally written Sunday, 24 December 2006 at 12:27 PM]

Dear Reader,

When I force myself to do the wrong thing, eventually I lose my ability to continue. Although my coworkers see this as a great curse and inconvenience to them, it is a great gift. I do not know how I came by this gift, but I appreciate it. I used to curse it as well, used to revile it as an inconvenience, but gradually my counselor and I managed to sort out the patterns in it and figured out that I am only paralyzed when I am doing the wrong thing or avoiding doing the right thing.

Often, the incorrect direction in my life results from my willingness to sacrifice my own needs or goals to further someone else's. More often, I am postponing what I understand to be the higher priorities in favor of what someone else pursuasively argues to be the top priorities. Most often, I am giving up top priorities not even for that but for expediency, for "practical" considerations, postponing the important for the urgent. In my gut, in my bones, in my soul, I believe in how vital it is to align yourself with the deep principles of the cosmos, not to let yourself be distracted by apparent self-interest or even apparent expediency, and history is an open textbook on the reasons for sticking with deeper priorities regardless of the tides of fashion or pragmatism.

Unfortunately, this is an easy way to disappoint people. Lack of follow-through, not finishing what you start, indecisiveness, changing directions—all these things are easy distractions for other people, easy targets, easy excuses for complex problems. When there is a goat among the sheep and something goes wrong, sheep will look to the goat every time, not to what the sheep might all have in common, might be generating themselves from the imperatives of their sheepish character. It is harder still for the sheep or the goat to look to what they might have created together as the source of their problems, to look to the complex culture they have created in their off-kilter interactions.

Though we wear the masks of adulthood, we are still children, especially those who most wrap themselves in the cloak of adulthood, those who care the most about believing and seeming to be distant from childish things. This inherent childishness in all of us is stamped on everything we do and say and think. To anyone with a nose for it we reek of childishness and everything associated with us gives it off as a miasma. It is painfully obvious, except to us, that our oh-so-adult rationality is merely a way of formalizing our childish impulses and prejudices. So it is that faced with problems, we seek easy explanations that excuse us from any blame.

My periodic paralyses makes me a goat; I stand out and am available for scaping to anyone associated with me who does not care to look within themselves for their own contribution to our mutual problems. Often, those very mutual problems will trigger my retreat, as we lead ourselves into doing the wrong things, but it is my retreat that is visible and hence as the only apparent choice my retreat becomes the explanation of our ills.

In my latest bout of paralysis I have finally taken into my heart that earnestness, good intentions, hard work, followthrough, and communication are no guarantee of doing the right thing. I have come to understand that you have to know what the right thing is and do that, or all else is irrelevant; you can't just think you know what the right thing is—it has to actually be the right thing. It turns out that one of the roads to Hell really is paved with good intentions, and travelled by intelligent, well-meaning, conscientious people who fell prey to the delusion that they contained an innate ability to sense the truth. Such an ability would be a characteristic of the divine, not of the human. Thus, hybris. Again.

Yours truly,
Rick

EFL (English as a First Language)

2007-12-27T11:25:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

As far as I know, I coined this sarcastic term about a decade and a half ago, but with modern cultural churn who can tell anymore if they invented anything or just heard it, forgot it, remembered it, and mistook remembering for inventing. My hope here is that since I have never encountered it anywhere else since "inventing" it maybe I really did.

But first, a few words about its well-established counterpart, ESL.

Standing for English as a Second Language, the term ESL is a useful aid to remembering that when non-native speakers of English struggle grammatically, it does not necessarily indicate the kind of mental confusion it does when native speakers so struggle. On the contrary, a below-average communication in English by an ESL student usually indicates an above-average mind at work, since the student is breaking free of the linguistic, mental, and cultural confines of a single language to embrace others, unlike the majority of Americans. Clearly, how far above the average varies widely, but too often we focus on the linguistic struggle; when we peer past the tangled structure of the communication to the better organized thoughts behind it, we work to do justice to the person's greater-than-apparent mental depth, but rarely do we really do justice to the person by peering past both to consider the kind of person who makes the effort to transcend linguistic boundaries.

Many people throughout the world are polyglot, more than here at home, but this is more than a value-neutral, statistical difference to be measured and recorded as a fact. There is an ethical dimension to the recognition that other languages have value as do the people who speak those languages, as there is to assuming anyone worth speaking with will learn English. Likewise, there is a philosophical dimension (that is, a moral imperative) to the lifelong struggle to break out of one's psychological and cultural blinders, and learning additional languages is a valuable tool in that struggle to become a better person. Every language carries its cultural and cognitive context with it intrinsically, and each language has advantages over others, lessons and concepts best expressed in that language. Someone who speaks but a single language frames his mind narrowly, denying himself access to the realms of thought to which other languages are better suited.

The relationship between thought and language is by no means mechanistic or deterministic. Even within a single language there are layers of understanding and development possible to those who more fully master their language than to those who do not, ideas that can be expressed and therefore considered but that require more effort to do so than the simpler, foundational concepts that come more naturally to speakers of that language. Likewise, spending time with ESL speakers gives one the opportunity to discover how English can be bent to encompass concepts that come more naturally to speakers of a different language when they work to express their own natural ideas in English. Spending time reading and working to truly grasp translations of works originally written in other languages offers one the same kind of portal; the more difficult the work (that is, the more alien the ideas the translation attempts to put into English) the better leverage it offers against one's own conceptual limitations. These and other opportunities for pushing the limits of English help create a wide scope of differentiation among even monoglot English speakers as to their cognitive dilation or constriction.

English in particular, being such a borrower from other languages, offers great variation in the cultural aperture of its speakers. (I do not single it out as unique in this regard, unlike so many English chauvinists who leech their self-esteem from association with what they perceive as the linguistic winner. For one thing, I do not speak anywhere near enough languages to judge fairly (can anyone?), but more importantly I know there are other strategies for linguistic expansion than English's borrowing approach; for example, German grows by borrowing concepts but fully translating them into (sometimes extremely polysyllabic) native German terms. I'm sure there are other strategies available to other languages. For purposes of this discussion, English's advantage is that its approach to borrowing is so crude, so obvious, that it wears its borrowing on its sleeve, calling attention to the issue.) I do not mean all English speakers are cosmopolitan, but rather that the difference between the most and least cosmopolitan English speakers is great.

Interestingly, we find English chauvinists at both ends of that spectrum. When a master of English with a daunting command of the language asserts the superiority of English, we may disagree but we are at least impressed by the speaker's own fluent superiority over ourselves. The most annoying group (yet amusing in their unintentionally ironic way) are English speakers who tout its virtues and propose the extermination of as many other languages as possible yet who speak English itself as badly as a beginning ESL speaker.

These illiterate chauvinists are part of a larger group of English speakers who think as badly as they speak; their waking life is like a dream state in which ideas never clarify and thoughts flow only partly formed from one to another with no greater context than the speaker's shifting emotional state. Although an ESL student's appearance of cognitive poverty is usually a linguistic illusion, this kind of native English speaker's appearance of cognitive poverty is genuine. English is their only language; they have no superior linguistic resources to fall back on to help them organize their thinking. They can only be said to have language skills in some kind of stripped-down, reduced definition of the term; in truth they hover somewhere between pre-linguistic and genuinely linguistic, with just enough language skills to pass for normal and pursue their appetites and drives. The contempt usually wrongly laced into the term ESL is far better deserved by this group of speakers, for whom I coined the term English as a First Language, or EFL.

Yes, in this era of dividing emotions into good ones and bad ones, contempt has been labeled bad and we are all to strive to purge it from our personalities, but in truth contempt is a vital emotion for helping give us direction, for helping to stimulate a profound aversion to those ways of being we must avoid if we are to become better people. Judging contempt as bad and eschewing it goes hand in hand with sliding into contemptible behavior oneself, making it easy to be lazy, ignorant, and selfish (since after all we must not judge). Any mature human being without a preprogrammed, reflexive aversion to contempt can easily combine contempt and compassion to put it to good use. Consider the poor EFL student whose mind is a fog, whose life is but a semicoherent waking dreamstate, struggling to pass for normal and defensively avoiding criticism and other opportunities to grow for fear they might expose his true ignorant nature. We have all been there. That is what those of us who are lucky and disciplined grow out of. We can sympathize with the plight of the EFL student, pity him and try to help him improve, but we should not let that dull our contempt for him, because we never want to be like that again and we do not believe it is okay for anyone to remain that way.

Even aside from simple defensiveness and our unwillingness to show contempt when it is deserved, a foundational delusion helps prevent many EFL students from improving, the delusion of adulthood. In our culture, we have a polarized, quantum model of maturation that by law divides life into completely helpless (younger than eighteen years old) and completely competent (twenty-one years or older), with an odd semi-adult stage between. This model has nothing to do with the individual, who is stamped with these Procrustean labels regardless of personal characteristics. The complete vacuity and irreality of this measurable, objective, mathematical system of "adulthood" warps us all psychologically to an extent unthinkable to most of us. Since at "adulthood" we acquire a host of legal and financial responsibilities (though with increasingly less authority as our civilization senesces into explicitly infantilizing us all) regardless of our personal resources, we simply have to fake it to convince ourselves we're ready and able and mature enough to handle those responsibilities. At adulthood, society offers us that or the asylum or prison so deceit and self-deceit in order to pass is the obvious choice.

Very few "adults" are willing to be open about their ignorance, which is a precondition for addressing it. Culturally, we do not model good behavior for becoming a genuinely mature human being, which requires a lifetime of study and practice to improve; instead we offer the polarized ignorant/educated model in every facet of life: there is the helpless & ignorant period of imposed study followed by graduation and acceptance and empowerment.

Embracing ignorance and studying to improve is separated from being empowered and respected, all of which is captured by the concept of "done." When we are "done" studying we graduate, but not until we are "done." But then, if we are "done," why would we need to continue studying? If we are still studying, we are clearly not yet "done."

The very framework of legal and economic reward in our culture reinforces this dichotomy, which is partly why so many of us fall for it. After graduation, most of us stop studying, and that includes studying to improve our linguistic skills. The cultural model for those who continue is that they do so for entertainment or as a hobby, but not as a vital, necessary part of becoming an adequate human being. Readers in our culture are a minority, serious readers a minority of a minority, and people who continue to study and discuss English itself are considered as fringe and eccentric as philatelists or birders (or philosophers). In our licentious culture, such quirks as continuing to study English after graduation may be permitted but they are by no means considered necessary, let alone something that all English speakers should emulate lifelong.

We have a static notion of maturation—it is a goal to arrive at, and then you are "done"—and we have an artificial and arbitrary notion of maturation—it has nothing to do with your intrinsic characteristics, only your age and perhaps certification by academic authorities. This model of maturation perfectly misfits the reality of language and thought. English, for example, is to spoken communication what Chinese is to written—a subject so complex and open-ended that precisely no one will ever truly master either one. Practical "mastery" of either one consists of having got a lot further in one's studies than most of one's peers, far enough to realize that (a) one will never finish and (b) it is worthwhile and necessary to continue studying it lifelong. That combination of education, dedication, and humility is about as much as one can hope for in open-ended fields like this, and such people are the ones who usually discover and share the insights that advance the field.

By contrast, those who stop studying English when they are "done" remain linguistic and cognitive cripples lifelong, with enough skills to pass, to fit in, to be accepted into the herd, but not enough to genuinely think or communicate. This truth about our situation is so important yet underrecognized that it needs terminology. Given the moral imperative of the situation and my distrust of affectations of objectivity, I prefer a judgmental term like EFL.

And just to clarify, usually when snooty, discriminatory types like I doubtless appear to be throw about standards and judgments on subjects, our ulterior motive is almost always to split the world into good and bad with ourselves (oh so coincidentally) on the good side. I hope I have made clear that I am doing no such thing here. EFL syndrome is a side-effect of intrinsic factors in our shared culture, the one I belong to. We all have it to greater or lesser degrees. We are all struggling to some extent with our linguistic and cognitive inadequacies.

I am studying language and philosophy remedially, not just to get better but also to make up for lost decades of inadequate study. My command of language is crude and I have no coherent style, and my thinking is riddled with cultural viruses. I am usually at a loss as to how to communicate with other human beings. If ever I slip into hubris, I always have Shakespeare and Austen and Vidal and so many others to remind me what real fluency looks like and Heraclitus and Hegel and Arendt and so many others to remind me what real thinking looks like. And between me and them are layers of expertise—I am not one step away from their fluency but rather many stages of development away, some of which I understand sufficiently to identify them as absent from my language and thought, and doubtless others of which I can do little more than suspect their existence.

In short, if you feel I am judging others harshly, fear not: I am judging myself by the same standards and found wanting. Why not be "compassionate" or "reasonable" and lower my standards? Because they are not mine; they are the requirements imposed by reality on what constitutes a genuine capacity to comprehend the actual cosmos and communicate meaningfully about it. Rather than ignore our responsibilities or whine about them or lie to ourselves about them, we need to impose some standards and discipline on ourselves and resume the lifework of uplifting ourselves enough to be worthy of the civilizational—nay, special—task we face. We have met the enemy and he is us. If we want a better world, we must become better people.

Why would anything less constitute maturity?

Yours truly,
Rick

[Final two-and-a-half paragraphs completed Sunday, 13 April 2008 at 11:45 PM]

Three New Volumes of Serge Mouraviev's Heraclitea, Part 1

2007-10-31T17:48:00.000-07:00

Cover of Serge Mouraviev's Heraclitea volume III.3.B/i, published by Academia Verlag

Dear Reader,

I last discussed Serge Mouraviev's magnum opus, Heraclitea, in my blog entry of 27 May 2006. Much to my surprise and in the highlight so far of my blogging endeavor, on 10 February of this year (2007), Mr. Mouraviev himself contacted me by email to thank me for my discussion of his work. He also wanted to add to that discussion:

another very important reason of the difficulty in understanding Heraclitus: the present fashion, very widespread among scholars, to cast doubt on the genuineness and/or credibility of any non corroborated or "suspicious" piece of information. I call this the presumption of guilt and consider it to be the methodological original sin of many a student of Ancient Greek philosophy as such.

I quite agree with Mr. Mouraviev. Any serious effort to understand Heraclitus from the second and third-hand fragments that remain must involve at least two quite distinct phases—analysis and synthesis—and the analysis phase must begin with the gathering of all fragments attributed to him regardless of the analyst's judgment about their authenticity. Mr. Mouraviev is the only Heraclitean analyst to date I have encountered who has done this.

Also very much to my surprise and delight, he arranged to send me review copies of the three Heraclitea volumes published in 2006, all part of section III.3.B of the series (the pertinent texts of the fragments of Heraclitus's book):

Heraclitea Volume III.3.b/i: Texts, Translations, and Materials (ISBN 3-89665-368-7)
Heraclitea Volume III.3.b/ii: Language and Poetics (ISBN 3-89665-369-5)
Heraclitea Volume III.3.b/iii: Critical Notes (ISBN 3-89665-370-9)

Even for someone like me whose French is tres rusty the value of these volumes to the serious student of Heraclitus makes the slow work of translation easily worthwhile. These volumes are concise, systematically organized, and thorough in their exploration of the fragments. This is the most complete collection of Heraclitean fragments I have seen to date, since Mr. Mouraviev includes not only relatively unknown authentic fragments but even every spurious fragment attributed to Heraclitus. He uses a simple three-part ranking system for each fragment to rate (1) the reliability of its attribution to Heraclitus, (2) its fidelity to Heraclitus's text, and (3) its fidelity—if correctly interpreted—to Heraclitus's message.

This is all in French and Greek, except that the first of these three volumes, which translates the fragments themselves, also translates them into English and Russsian. The Greek is presented not only in the form familiar to students of classical Greek (which is actually taught using the bicameral, polytonic Greek alphabet invented by Byzantine scholars in the Middle Ages, and thus only tenuously related to Classical Greek) but also in the actual Classical Greek (unicameral, unspaced form of the words in both Old Ionian and Old Attic) matching as closely as possible the way Heraclitus would have written them; he includes the ancient Greek only for those fragments whose text we can trace back to the Greek. For fragments whose oldest remaining source is Latin, he offers the Latin with translation into polytonic Greek. Where the oldest sources are Medieval Greek, he offers the polytonic Greek but again not the genuine Classical. These choices are exactly what we would expect from a man who in every other way throughout this series shows the most serious concern with doing justice to the material, reconstructing as much as we can fairly reliably do but no more.

The English translations are eccentric and entertaining, set in Medieval blackletter with a King James Bible approach to the language (conspicuous use of "evadeth" and "'twas" and "whate'er" and such). The grammar is spun about because he is opting for a fairly literal translation, tying word order more closely to the original Greek than English grammar can successfully bear; this word order is a legitimate approach as a step between the two languages, but it does not make this the most accessible English translation of the fragments. Clearly the translation to French is his first priority here, but in addition he has indicated that in a separate volume he will make his attempt to synthesize all of this material into as close an approximation as he can of Heraclitus's original work. Given that, it is easy to see that in these volumes his priority in translation is not to bring the reader close to Heraclitus's thought but instead close to the raw fragments as we have them. That is, these volumes are primarily concerned with studying the vestiges.

To be continued in part 2 of this review.

Yours truly,
Rick

How Quick in Temper and in Judgment Weak

2007-10-14T22:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Rudeness, aggression, rage, paranoia, and addiction to crises make a wretched brew, make it difficult to help or even be close to someone you care about. If these vices grow they too easily creep past unpleasant and become unacceptable. When intolerable behavior will not be mended you must separate yourself from it or risk your self-respect and sanity.

But how easy it is to confuse the mad with the bad! If a loved one drifts into irreality and you mistake it for sheer cussedness you risk abandoning the sick instead of healing them. Oh, but how easy too to confuse the other way around! If you coddle a jerk, you hurt yourself and only invite more.

No stones mark these bounds, only nuances that weave snag by fray by twist into benightedness. Our fevered culture and medicine respond clumsily, blind to the flowering of illness. Not until madness blooms into destruction does the penny drop. Until then we can only watch and grieve as a fair child unravels in fits and starts smeared across the slow passing of seasons.

Yours truly,
Rick

Nonpersistence of Memory

2007-10-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

I based my description of the picture in the previous entry on the photo's timestamp recorded by the camera, but Beverly pointed out that (1) the timestamp was wrong and (2) the kitties are wearing their collars. Surya hates to be restrained and escaped her collar within the first few days we had her home, and only a day or so later she got Rashid out of his. Hence, this photograph was probably taken the day we brought them home.

Once my brain is in the proper time framework, other elements of the photo corroborate the true timeframe. First, when we brought Rashid home his fur was wiry, but after a month on the good food we fed them it turned soft and glossy. In this picture, you can see how coarse it is. Second, knowing the size of the chair, the size of the kittens is revealed to be much smaller than I interpreted it when I first posted this picture, too small to be a month after we brought them home. A month of gorging themselves on yums helped them grow rapidly.

I had forgotten about Surya's immediate escape act, so the purple of Rashid's collar failed remind me of the timeframe, and the subtler clues escaped me, too.

This all illustrates a central tenet of Heraclitus's philosophy, that we look the cosmos in the face and fail to recognize it for what it is, that the truth is right in front of us and sometimes fully visible but we still fail to attend to it properly. When he wrote that the hidden harmony is best and that nature loves to hide, he was writing as much about the subjective as the objective; that is, it is not just that the deep principles that organize and power reality are often literally invisible, but also that when the meanings of things are overt and visible usually we still fail to recognize them.

Contrary to the fairy tale of objectivity, we perceive the world through the lenses of ourselves, with our minds packed with preconceptions and preoccupations before we even begin to perceive a situation, with every perception premolded to conform to the shape of our mind and its current concerns even before we begin to pay attention. The attending itself that we imagine involves a direct transfer of the complete reality before us into a reliable and continuously accessible memory instead consists of moving a laser-pinpoint spotlight of consciousness across the field of "perception" before us, haphazardly selecting isolated details and impressions according to whatever combination of mood, questions, and attractions has us in its thrall at the moment. Once the direct stimulus of perception has passed, when we turn away, every other element of the reality we faced vanishes from our "awareness" as though it had never been present, and of the isolated details we abstracted into our memories few survive more than a handful of minutes. When later we ponder what we "saw," in truth we use the few blurry points of detail we remember as an empty framework we fill to "remember" it; we connect the dots with our own idiosyncratic inner logic and flesh out the details with our imagination and expectations about how things work in the real world, and we call the result a reliable memory. With that chimera as a starting point, substituting for truth, we then begin to make associations and deductions, deriving meaningful conclusions that were we wise and awake enough we would realize carry more meaning about ourselves based on how we composed the memory than about the reality left so far behind.

All this activity involved in recollection is unconscious to us. For us memory is like magic: it just happens or it doesn't. Though we claim it as a deliberate act, its actual workings are never visible to us while we engage in it. This is why almost everyone believes more or less in the integrity and validity of his own memory, why so few of us attend to studies that demonstrate the radical unreliable of witness testimony, why the few who do attend so often fall into the religion of numbers, believing that if they can discipline and organize this horrifically unreliable process to generate numbers, that the resulting precision will somehow substitute for its lack of reality.

Also Heraclitean is the realization that man does not stand apart from nature but rather that we are of it, that it flows through us, creates us, develops us, erodes us, and disperses us. So we should not be too surprised that we can look directly into the face of human nature too and not see it for what it is either, "seeing" instead evidence of whatever faith we cling to, scientific or otherwise, proven by the details of human nature our own unconscious natures have selected to fit their own preconceptions and preoccupations.

In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul writes "for now we see through a glass darkly . . ." but he does not linger over this Heraclitean insight to explore why we do so, eager as he is to move on to his revolutionary vision of emancipation from human nature. But Heraclitus, skeptical of such self-escape, would linger over this, one of his favorite motifs, would stress that we see darkly through the glass of ourselves, that if we would see more clearly we must improve that glass, cultivate excellence in ourselves, struggle always toward wisdom. Where other men imagine wisdom to be an extravagance they can safely postpone until their end of days, when they can spare the time, as their last duty, Heraclitus realized that the cultivation of wisdom is man's first duty, the prerequisite for doing anything else, because without it we are fools who will do the wrong things, remember the wrong things, see the wrong things. Even with a photograph to help us remember.

This is why Heraclitus wrote "wisdom stands apart from all else."

Yours truly,
Rick

Rashid and Surya a Year Ago

2007-09-18T20:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

July of last year we brought home Rashid and Surya from PAWS. He was snuffly with a cold, which it took him a week and a half to shake; by the time he shook it, she had the cold. By August, they had both shaken their colds, and grown to boot, but they were still bitty things and devoted to each other. I was sorting through recent photos to post when I ran across this and was reminded of the relief we felt at finally having them both well and happy.

Yours truly,
Rick

True words aren't beautiful

2007-04-28T20:06:00.000-07:00

Dear reader,

One last verse, 81, from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:

True words aren't beautiful
beautiful words aren't true
the good aren't eloquent
the eloquent aren't good
the wise aren't learned
the learned aren't wise
the sage accumulates nothing
but the more he does for others
the greater his existence
the more he gives to others
the greater his abundance
the Way of Heaven
is to help without harming
the Way of the sage
is to act without struggling

Yours truly,
Rick

The Way begets them

2007-04-28T20:01:00.000-07:00

Dear reader,

Here is verse 51 from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:

The Way begets them
Virtue keeps them
matter shapes them
usage completes them
thus do all things honor the Way
and glorify Virtue
the honor of the Way
the glory of Virtue
are not conferred
but always so
the Way begets and keeps them
cultivates and trains them
steadies and adjusts them
nurtures and protects them
but begets without possessing
acts without presuming
and cultivates without controlling
this is called Dark Virtue

Yours truly,
Rick

The Tao Moves the Other Way

2007-04-28T19:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Here is verse 40 from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:

The Tao moves the other way
the Tao works through weakness
the things of this world come from something
something comes from nothing

Yours truly,
Rick

Lao Tzu's Taoteching

2007-04-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Heraclitus and Lao Tzu were probably contemporaries, though Lao Tzu was probably the elder. Any reader of their books is struck by the similarities in their philosophies (though closer reading shows important differences as well). How few great thinkers are so fluent with the paradoxical, gnomic, compressed wisdom that best approaches nature's own dialectical weave!

Understanding either writer requires a deep immersion in his culture, as I have written about before. Likewise, neither writer can be understood unless you begin to see the cosmos as they see it, for even from their own highly original cultures they each stood out as unique thinkers. Each is a hazard to translators and readers alike.

Which is part of why I love Red Pine's translation of Lao Tzu, Lao Tzu's Taoteching. Here is a nuanced translation that includes an obvious and essential yet all-too-rare feature: each verse is accompanied by selected commentaries from a stunning pantheon of great Chinese thinkers, including some of the greatest students of Lao Tzu's masterpiece—Confucius, Mencius, Sun Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Chang Tao-Ling, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Han Fei, and many, many more—and even an opening quote from the Buddha to go with Lao Tzu's first verse. The commentary is extremely well chosen, and severely concise, with only a two-page spread given for each verse. Red Pine restricts the majority of his own commentary to the Introduction and Glossary; in the verses themselves, he tightly restricts his own comments to brief and vital notes on the choices he made in his translation and occasional points of clarification. The overt interpretation itself he leaves largely in the hands of the masters, whose commentary is (not surprisingly given the star power at work) enlightening.

I have Arthur Waley's classic translation The Way and Its Power, and I am eagerly looking forward to reading Ursula LeGuin's translation recommended to me by Jerry Goodnough, but reading Red Pine's version is one of those delightfully surprising experiences that reminds me there are still writers of taste at work here and there in the modern world. Within my admittedly limited experience, this is the way to read Lao Tzu in English.

Yours truly,
Rick

The Finger

2007-03-01T19:29:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Yesterday, I resumed the Ancient Greek Philosophy course I am taking from Kenneth Smith. We are still working our way through Heraclitus, carefully and deeply, attending not just to problems with the translations but also with the greater cultural context for each fragment to illuminate it as fully as possible. Tonight over dinner, Beverly and I discussed a group of fragments that deal with people's paradoxical gullibility toward finite details but cynicism toward the infinite principles and powers of the cosmos. We discussed the use of myths and metaphors and imprecise language to try to stretch beyond the limits of language - with its emphasis on the finite - to indicate the existence and nature of the infinite beyond.

Beverly noted that in Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, Sallie McFague defined metaphor as a finger pointing at the moon. Beverly then noted that most cats cannot comprehend the human act of pointing. When we point behind a cat at birds out the window, the cat instead of turning around to follow the path of our finger simply stares at and perhaps sniffs our finger. The metaphorical act of pointing, in which the finite becomes a symbol for the not-yet-seen, is beyond most cats. Likewise, when Heraclitus, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Mohammed, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Buddha, or other great thinkers point with finite words to the infinite cosmic forces that steer all things through all things, we stare and sniff at the words. Maybe human beings are more like cats than we thought.

The Buddha responded to this human limitation with his Flower Sermon, in which instead of preaching to the huge gathering at Spirit Mountain he simply held up a golden lotus and waited. Most people saw only a flower where they were expecting words of wisdom, and so were confused, believing that his "sermon" was gibberish. Yet it was among the most profound, indicating clearly and directly our attachment to words and doctrines, our inability to see through these metaphors to the reality they try to indicate.

Lao Tzu and Heraclitus responded to this human limitation with their extraordinarily concise tomes Tao te ching and Peri physeos, in which they bent and stretched language into paradoxes that point to the infinite. Doing so requires coming into conflict with our petty attachment to linear thinking, our arbitrary distaste for contradictions, and our abhorrence of rethinking the fundamental assumptions of our lives. We respond by lashing out, accusing them of being nonsensical, or perversely obscure, that is, of making no sense on purpose, just to bother us.

We attack them, and well we should. They are committing the ultimate crime. They are giving us the finger.

Yours truly,
Rick

Communication

2007-02-27T12:14:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

I go through phases in which I cannot bear to "communicate" with my fellow human beings. Communication would be nice, but "communication" is sheer torture.

If I use words that I know will be misinterpreted, then I am writing something I know will cause my readers to come to a false conclusion. That is a reasonable definition of lying. "Self-expression" is this lying, this urge to spew words without regard for how they will be read. To communicate we have to know our audience and be able to use the words that will convey what we mean to that audience. Since none of us speaks exactly the same language, no set of words will communicate the same message to more than a few people.

Since language is a drug to us, as is our own ego, we will want to deny this truth about the limits of communication, will want to argue that if we feel we understand then we do, will want to argue that any discrepancy cannot matter, will want to argue that our efforts at communication are close enough. Close enough to what? For what? For us to go through the motions of communication and feel we are successfully mimicking it? Although the Homo sapiens we dream ourselves to be would communicate easily and fluently with all others of our kind, the Homo mimesis we actually are can manage it only rarely and imperfectly. Some of us find that difference exquisitely painful.

Yours truly,
Rick

Fame

2007-01-27T16:15:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

I hope I never become famous. I certainly do my best in this blog to ensure I never will.

Yours truly,
Rick

Humanism, the Modern Temper

2007-01-27T14:47:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Man, Nature, and God: what are the relations among these three? What is the rightful source of values, morals, behavior, culture, civilization? In short, what is the source of rightful authority?

In the Modern world of science and the market, Man (the human, not the male) is the source of authority. Nature, whether conceived of as mechanistic, relativistic, or quantum, is conceived of as a realm of causes and effects, of forces and precipitates, of things in motion, whether those things be matter or energies, and we rightly recognize that mere things in obedience to mathematical laws can hold no moral power over us. The Modern conception of a hammer is neither moral nor immoral. It can be used for good or evil or neither. Its moral quality must be imposed upon it by Man based on how it is used. Likewise a rock, or a gun, or a brick, or electricity, or any other thing, and to the Modern mentality Nature contains nothing but things and therefore is incapable of being the source of rightful authority. Nature is our playpen, our toy, our tool, our resource-pool, our realm over which we rule as kings and impose our moral (or immoral or amoral) will.

Likewise, to the Modern mentality, concerned above all with pragmatism and immersed in the reductionistic frameworks of mathematics, physics, and other hard sciences, God cannot be the source of rightful authority, because as the Modern mentality has purged Nature of values so it has purged the cosmos of super-nature, the realm of the Gods that the Modern mentality inherited from its Medieval parents. By proving either the nonexistence or at least the irrelevance of any realm beyond a reduced Nature obedient to natural laws, the Modern mentality effectively defined away the Medieval God. The Modern mentality is atheistic, or agnostic if it prefers not to be pinned down (which is a stereotypically Modern preference), or religious in a fashionable cultural sense only. A genuinely religious Christian, someone who genuinely derives his moral guidance from God, either retreats from the world of Modern power or is quickly nailed to a cross or sent to Guantanamo. In the Modern world, invocations of God by the mighty are never honest, never genuinely religious, always calculated and predatory manipulations of religious individuals for nihilistic purposes. To the truly Modern, the religious impulse is just another natural resource to be studied, harvested, or harnessed as a source of power. In science and the marketplace, God has been reduced to a handle on other human beings, much to the dismay of the genuinely religious among us, and every effort to reverse this historical direction has only succeeded in further corrupting many churches by making them the pawns of the powerful.

Which leaves only Man himself as the remaining realm, our source of moral authority. This is the dream of Modern democracy and the Free Market, that human needs will be met and human virtues uplifted for the betterment of the world, that an educated population will become wise custodians of the world for future generations. We hope that enlightenment will lead to a better world, but increasingly we have to struggle with the reality that value-free power is more typically put at the disposal of immoral or amoral human agents who believe in nothing at all. Science itself increasingly demonstrates the futility of appealing to Man as a reliable source of moral authority, since Man can be almost anything depending on how he is educated. We are not wolves, who have a predictable culture worldwide wherever we find ourselves, who have an instinctual center that lets us be accurately described as a whole as well as individuals. We are Homo mimesis: imitative Man, who is so remarkably malleable, so astonishingly natural as an actor who assumes roles reflexively, that we cannot even be sure when we are being authentic and when we are just playing a role we have learned.

Indeed, the scientific investigation into just what may genuinely be called essential to all human beings turns up surprisingly little of any help in establishing a moral center based on humanity. Man may be raised to light himself on fire to protest the slaughter by his own country of foreign people he will never meet, to give his life for strangers, or he may be raised to machine-gun down naked and starving Jewish prisoners by the dozens day after day and go home each night to a nice dinner with his family and no qualms whatsoever about resuming the slaughter in the morning. Man may be raised to sacrifice everything for the sake of the truth, or to sacrifice everything to protect lies. There is no there there (as Gertrude Stein famously said of her childhood home Oakland), no center from which to draw moral authority, and that is precisely the pattern of Modern morality. By apotheosizing Man as the God over nature, as the God over himself, as the God over God himself, we have upraised precisely the kind of moral vaccum that would create the world in which we find ourselves. Torture camps, nuclear bombs, electoral corruption, religious hypocrisy, self-serving rationalization, appeal to abstract conditions that do not actually exist, a lazy and self-indulgent unwillingness to do the real work of cultivating personal excellence, a capitulation to existing conditions and institutions, a belief that being a responsible citizen requires no more than holding down a job, consuming market goods, raising children, and occasionally voting, and an eagerness to demonize anyone and everyone except ourselves as responsible for this mess: all of these things flow directly from our moral vacuum. The great Modern craving for entertainment and distractions is a craving to look away from what we have wrought, never to look at it, to tell ourselves any kind of fantasy about ourselves and our situations but never to come to grips with what we have done by exalting ourselves as our own moral authority. Our future looks less and less like Star Trek and more and more like 1984, Brave New World, V for Vendetta, or The Matrix but with us as the machines who enslave and prey upon and delude ourselves.

If we are to have a future, we must find a moral center, a source of authority. Intellect and reason can do many interesting and useful things, but establishing a moral center is not among them, since there is no moral basis that cannot be questioned and torn to pieces by reason; reason is a tool, not a moral compass, and its teleology left unrestrained is ultimately nihilistic. The tools we used to free ourselves from Medieval superstititions we hoped would save us from Inquisitions and Crusades in this new era of enlightenment, but instead we have moved on to Holocausts and the promise of Apocalypse. We have moved from slaughter motivated by religious hysteria and corruption to slaughter motivated by industrial calculation and corruption. If there was ever a species in need of a wise God, it would be these mimetic, chattering apes.

Most people assume this will all sort itself out, and they naturally fall into three mentalities; I personally know examples of all three. Some of them believe in scientific prophecies about the great forces of history sweeping us forward to evolve. Others believe God will fix everything, or that none of this matters because there is another world somewhere that we haven't wrecked yet and can retreat to after we total this one. The third group believe other people will fix things, that the ingenuity of (other, usually future) people (or their institutions) can solve any problem we will ever face. All such faith in the future is hybristic. It is all an attempt to sweep our responsibilities under the rug so we can justify not doing our best to make a better world, and all of it is predicated on an arrogant assertion that the future is ours to dispose of, that we can nominalistically declare what the future will be and it must obey, that our chosen article of faith commands the cosmos. Even if there are great forces of history sweeping us along, it does not follow that they exist to please us, to make things better for us; if the fossil record is to be believed those forces of history swept most species to extinction, so the scientific assumption would be that they are sweeping us too to extinction unless we do something about it. Likewise, even if there is a God it does not follow that his purpose in the cosmos is to wipe our noses and change our diapers; maybe God needs us to grow up and has figured out that if he cleans up all our messes for us we never will; and maybe Heaven is for people who have grown up, of whom we have few examples. Likewise, other people will not fix things because they are all busy assuming we will, and frankly when you come to understand the structure of our society well enough you learn that it is precisely no one's job to address the kinds of problems that are sweeping us along; everyone is busy doing other things.

In short, the future is not our plaything. A genuine scientific attitude begins with humility, especially about what cannot be tested and evaluated, and the future by definition is out of reach. Likewise, a genuine religious humility recognizes that the future is God's to dispose of, not ours, and to dictate terms to God about the future is to claim God's omniscience as one's own, the very kind of nihilistic arrogance typical of Modern atheism. There is no sound moral ground for arrogance about our future; it could go well or ill for us. Our responsibility is to culture ourselves to meet whatever comes as well as we can, something we cannot do if we have invested our moral center in Man.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: In the interest of exploring alternatives, in the next couple of posts I will spend some time with each of the European alternatives I know anything about, the Medieval investment in God as a moral center, and the Classical investment in Nature as a moral center. The centering of my discussion in European religions and history is not done out of any myopia about the importance of European history and culture but rather because I am incompetent to write meaningfully on any other, fascinated though I may be by them.

Postpostscript: When Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It that All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, . . . he may have had the stages of life in mind, but here and elsewhere the Bard hints at his great comprehension of the fundamentally mimetic nature of our species. He expresses this truth clearly and beautifully, though it is in our nature to dismiss even the greatest artistic formulation of our essential nature as mere entertainment rather than incisive truth. Ultimately, it is that shifting, imitative, Protean nature of Man that makes us unreliable as a moral authority.

Rethinking My Approach

2006-12-25T20:27:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Three entries in three months tells me I am taking the wrong approach, and usually this kind of blockage means I am following a broken system, a Procrustean way of organizing my material that does not fit it well. Such is the case here. So far my mistakes include 1) trying to fit the material into a fixed number and sequence, 2) trying to present them as distilled down into principles, 3) presenting them as a teacher rather than as a student.

I am in no way prepared to teach this material, which I am still wrestling with myself, but I am prepared to share my explorations with you, and to discuss them with anyone who wants to comment.

Yours truly,
Rick

Culturing Our Wants

2006-12-24T13:13:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader,

Heraclitus wrote Anthrôpoisi ginesthai hokosa thelousi ouk ameinon, which Philip Wheelwright translates as It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish. In other words, if things turned out exactly as we want them to turn out, we would be sorry.

In a simple-minded, caricatured way, this theme is played upon in stories about how genies freed from bottles or lamps always twist our wishes to make us sad, but what Heraclitus is saying is far more profound: if the wishes were not twisted at all, if things turned out exactly as we want them, without any tricks, we would be sad. What we want is not healthy for us. We understand ourselves, the cosmos, and our place in it so poorly that want the wrong things.

This is heresy to us, whether we recognize it as such or not, which is why our stories mock this profundity with our petty stories of malicious genies trying to cheat us out of what is rightly ours. We love our appetites; we adore them; we worship them. We long for fortune to bless us so we can indulge those wants, passionately sure that satisfying our cravings will bring us lasting happiness. Those "sophisticated" enough to give in to despair, who believe they are free of such illusions about their desires, in their ironic detachment do not find happiness either; they are dispassionate and flat personalities because all their passion is still tied up as faith in the things they used to want, and now that they have moved past those wants they have also left behind their zest for life. To the ego, whether naively clinging to its longings or half-dead from bitterly amused detachment from them, desire is the only fuel it has to stoke the fires of a passionate life. For Heraclitus to say that the things we want, our goals, our dreams, our aspirations, our hopes, all will lead us to misery, is a kick in the gut to tell us to stop "thinking" with our gut.

At this point in my entry, I have lost all the intellectuals, since they think this applies to everyone but themselves. Much of my life has been a case-study of the futility of overintellectualization, the discovery that the attempt to identify oneself strictly with the intellect instead of the emotions merely puts an intellectual rationalizing veneer over what then become more unconscious and barbaric emotions. The solution to Heraclitus's puzzling insight is not to try to escape from our wants nor to strive to create a personality that somehow replaces desire with some other kind of passionate furnace - such things are impossible for us. We are not Protean, angelic beings of pure reason who can will ourselves into different forms; we are animals evolved within the matrix of nature and given form, drive, and direction by the forces of nature within us.

We can only become what we already are, like seeds unfolding into flowers. If the things we want drive us, then to improve ourselves we must improve the things we want. We must culture our wants to want better things. To do that, we have to achieve a profoundly better understanding of the cosmos, ourselves, and our place in the cosmos, since only in an accurate understanding of such things have we any basis for knowing what we ought to want. And in the end, although we cannot escape our investment in wanting, since that is the foundation of human personality, we can at least learn not to strive for happiness (that transient fool's-gold that the wheel of fortune gives and then takes away) but for eudaimonea or eucosmia (the well-order inner cosmos of character that results from the process of culturing oneself and one's wants), which creates the ability to make the most of whatever life offers us.

Lit by such ancient Greek ideas, Heraclitus's statement takes on a radically different meaning than it would if read merely as pessimism, fatalism, or schadenfreude. Read deeply, his statement demands that we change. Like many of his statements, this one implies that to make a better world, we need to become better people.

Yours truly,
Rick

Critique of My False Analogies

2006-10-23T19:57:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

You are not in as much luck as I predicted. Not only the title of the previous post is confusing, but also the initial parts of my explanation. The second half of the essay, which explains why this principle is necessary to understanding the ancient Greek philosophers, is largely correct, but the preceding explanation of what those two cultures were is misleading. I conflated four different pairs of ideas and omitted a far more direct explanation necessary to understanding that first principle.

Rather than retract, revise, and republish the previous post, we will find it more useful to critique it instead. I am not interested in striving to create an illusion of perfection in my writing. If we are fortunate and disciplined enough, our ideas begin in obscurity but develop greater wisdom and suppleness over time. That is certainly my aim, and exposing my weaknesses is a better way to foster my own development than hiding them.

So what is wrong with the previous attempt to explain the ancient Greek transition from a Mythos culture to a Logos culture?

I tried to explain the dichotomy between the two kinds of cultures by analogizing to three other dichotomies: between the rationalist left-brain and the intuitivist right-brain, between the conscious and the unconscious parts of the mind, and between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. None of these analogies is quite right, and the poor fits confuse. In her comment on my essay, Linda Yaw noted some of the implications of these conflations and questioned whether she was understanding the idea correctly. Her comment helped me realize that although she was understanding what I wrote, what I wrote was not quite right. I will try to improve my explanation first negatively in this post, by explaining the kind of confusion I created, and then positively in the next post, by explaining the difference between the two kinds of culture directly with minimal recourse to analogies to other dichotomies.

The dichotomy between rationalism and intuitivism is not accurate because it is an effect, not a cause, of the difference between Logos and Mythos cultures, nor is it a parallel dichotomy. In a Mythos culture, the emphasis is on traditional wisdom, values, and other norms that have accumulated over long periods of time, rather than on the use of any particular mental faculty. In such a culture, rationalism and intuitivism will have whatever balance of emphasis they naturally acquired within that culture over time. In the case of Greek Mythos-culture, the balance was fairly even, with different aspects of the culture favoring different mental approaches. In a Logos culture, however, the emphasis is on rationalism above all else, leading to a radical imbalance that ultimately erodes all traditional wisdom, values, and other norms. It is not the rationalism per se that leads to this result, as rationalism was already present in the preceding Mythos culture, but rather how and why it is used, which I will explore in the next post.

The dichotomy between consciousness and unconsciousness is far more misleading and yet also paradoxically points to the true issue. All individuals and cultures operate consciously, but that consciousness grows from a far greater unconscious realm: all cultures, so this applies to both Logos and Mythos cultures. With respect to this dichotomy, the difference between them is one of attitude. A Mythos culture reveres and operates consciously within its traditional, inherited, natural, unconscious matrix, but a Logos culture despises and struggles to escape from that matrix. That quest for freedom from the unconscious is ultimately futile and does violence to the integrity of the culture itself, since consciousness is not possible without a healthy unconscious foundation, which I will explore in the next post.

The least revealing analogy was unfortunately the clearest, between the Apollonian and Dionysian. This dichotomy, popular and seemingly coherent though it is, is far more complex and means something quite different than authors or readers realize. It is usually taken to be a richer, more poetic, more mythologized version of the dichotomy between rationalism and intuitivism; that was how I meant it, and that usage was wrong for the reasons described above. The more serious error is that Apollonianism and Dionysianism, although intended to describe the differences between left-brained and right-brained mentalities, do nothing of the sort. Instead they describe a whole-brained mentality's wistful, romanticized fantasy of what those two modes might be like; the truth of the two half-wit, crack-brained mentalities is far darker and more dysfunctional than the Apollonian and Dionysian fantasies allow. All three mentalities, the whole-brained and both half-brained imbalances, exist in both Logos and Mythos cultures, but in different ratios. A Mythos culture will have whatever proportion of these three mentalities in its population that naturally developed there, but a Logos culture will tend to elevate left-brained mentalities to domination over the right-brained, with the whole-brained mentalities marginalized. None of this corresponds to a simple Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, even if that dichotomy had any validity outside the realm of poetry. Explaining Logos and Mythos culture using these terms was quite unhelpful.

Stripping these three false analogies back out of my explanation, we are still left with the original pair in the dichotomy underlying this first principle: Mythos culture and Logos culture. Aside from the confusion introduced by trying to explain them in terms of three supposedly analogous dichotomies, the most important problem is that in doing so I danced around the heart of the matter. Rather than draw further analogies to other dichotomies I will do better to explain Mythos and Logos cultures in terms of what they have in common; they are cultures first of all, so explaining them should begin with the nature and function of culture before contrasting their divergent expressions of it. I hope my next post will explain this crucial first principle underlying ancient Greek philosophy far more clearly.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: And I hope I get my explanation of the second principle right the first time.

Principle 1: Cultural Transition from Mythos to Logos

2006-08-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

Logos-culture authors Plato and Aristotle from The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio

Dear Reader,

You are in luck. The first principle is the easiest, because you find its title confusing. That means you will question your assumptions about it. The others will be harder because you will be tempted by the titles to believe you already know what they mean, and you will be wrong about that.

We would identify ourselves as a logos culture. A logos culture distances itself from the immediacy of life, trusting rather to theories, principles, mathematics, and overt, conscious, analyzed information than to the naive, immediate, felt experience of being immersed in the details of life. That is, a logos culture trusts the conscious mind over the unconscious, trusts logic over feelings, intellect over intuition, the mind over the heart. Taken to extremes, nothing is to be respected as inherently authoritative; everything is required to justify itself; only things that pass our tests of the intellect are permitted to be considered true or valuable. That is, a logos culture trusts only reason, nothing else. Outside of the framework of rationality and the meaning we assign to things, we believe the cosmos is ultimately inherently meaningless, and hence, for our use and disposal as we see fit.

Although logos cultures pride ourselves on our objectivity and reason, like all cultures we have our irrational, subjective sides; we just do not identify ourselves with our irrational sides, pretend that side of us is not part of ourselves. This results in a certain ahistoricality, since the contempt of logos cultures for non-logos cultures is so intense that we cannot bear to identify ourselves with them in any way. Logos cultures insist on treating non-logos cultures as primitive versions of ourselves, unenlightened, pre-renaissance, lacking the preeminent value of all values to a logos culture - objective reason. We organize these two kinds of culture into a nominalist history of rational progress with ourselves - what a coincidence - as the advanced form. This polarization leads to an inability by logos cultures to explain our own origins, since we magnify the distance between ourselves and non-logos cultures to create a safe, impenetrable chasm, to assure ourselves there's nothing irrational left in us. In our mania for purging ourselves of the irrational, logos cultures create the ideal breeding grounds for two sets of delusions: 1) to overlook our own irrationalisms, since we hold them in such contempt, and 2) to overlook the wisdom of non-logos cultures, since we hold them too in such contempt.

The result is that the great blind spot of logos cultures is ourselves - our own origins, our unconscious natures, our wholes, and therefore the essence of what we really are. By the time logos cultures become logos cultures, we have lost the ability to explain honestly to ourselves where we came from, and as we will see, non-logos cultures cannot speak the language of logos cultures and so are equally unable to enlighten logos cultures as to our origins or ultimate nature.

Mythos-culture author Homer in Homer and His Guide by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

But how do non-logos cultures see themselves? Do they imagine they are primitive, irrational, dangerous versions of us? Our culture prefers not to examine this question closely, to at most propose that non-logos cultures are so caught up in irrational systems of superstition that they cannot see the world clearly, let alone themselves or us. The idea that there might be an alternative form of logic about which cultures can be organized is threatening to our totalitarianizing culture, so we look away, distance ourselves as is our logos-cultural reflex with all things too intrinsically meaningful to submit to the rule of objective reason.

The alternative to logos cultures are mythos cultures, which dominate the history of the human species until recently. Mythos cultures are saturated with values, principles, feelings, stories, intuition, the unconscious, the soul, the mysterious, the divine. Where logos culture sees an objective, meaningless world to be ruled by the awesome power of human reason, mythos culture sees human reason at the mercy of a vast, powerful world ruled by powers beyond our comprehension and saturated with meaning. As Hans Jonas argues in The Phenomenon of Life, until recently the idea that the cosmos is largely lifeless and that life is extremely unusual - the commonsense belief of our logos culture - would be inconceivable in a mythos culture. Imagine a world without roads, parking lots, cities, dust bowls, massive garbage dumps, strip malls, strip mines, clear cuts, and so on; think about those stories of salmon runs so thick you could walk across their backs, herds of bison that stretched from horizon to horizon, flocks of birds so vast they covered the skies; imagine life pressing in on you from all sides - that is what the world used to be like. In such a world, life is the norm - lifelessness the exception - and for the longest time in human history the obvious conclusion is that there were no exceptions, that everything is alive, everything is conscious, everything is divine. As the early Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus wrote, All things are full of gods.

Mythos culture is a form of paleopsychology, synthesizing millennia of painfully accumulated folk wisdom and aiming to explain the opportunities and liabilities of human mind and culture in terms every member of that culture can understand, in stories. Every god in the Greek pantheon is a power that has authority over people - lust, greed, death, war, wisdom, envy, love, and so on - and the intersection of gods and men in those stories describe the relationships among those powers in our lives. As Moderns, we read the stories as either light entertainment or as opportunities to poke fun at what we perceive to be weaknesses in their explanation of the material world we have mapped so carefully, but we skim past the morals and object lessons. As a classic example, we think Oedipus is about some freak who slept with his mother, when instead it is the definitive treatment of how hubris can take even the most apparently blessed of people and transform him inexorably into the most cursed. We think the Iliad is the story of brave Achilles, or wily Odysseus, or powerful Agamemnon, when it is truly the story of doomed Hector who knows he is going to lose everything he ever loved and must nevertheless lead his people into the most glorious loss possible to teach the future about virtue because that is all that is left to salvage; and also it is about the squandering of an entire generation of the best and brightest Greeks and Trojans left dead on the plains of Troy over what was ultimately a domestic dispute. There are grim and vital lessons for humanity in the mythos culture of the archaic Greeks, not by coincidence but by design - this is what mythos culture is better at than logos culture.

In a logos culture, we teach history sliced into discrete facts and assemble them to achieve some kind of power over the world by predicting the future based on the past; logos culture prides itself on inventing history. In mythos culture, they taught history in terms of stories, geneologies, cosmologies - wholes impregnated with life lessons to create a population of people with shared values. Logos culture drives toward a system of laws, not men; mythos culture a system of men, not laws. So it is with every other field of study. Logos culture uses systems of dissection - analysis - to divide the cosmos's web of logic into abstract formulas each of which describes a tiny fragment of the cosmos which can then be controlled according to that formula, driving toward a view of the cosmos as an elaborate machine composed of manipulable parts. Mythos culture uses systems of composition - synthesis - to assemble the fragments of our understanding of the cosmos into a web of meaningful stories that describes that culture's lessons about Man's place in the cosmos. Logos culture uses abstraction, distance to acquire power; mythos culture uses intuition, immediacy to share meaning. The drive of logos culture is to put Nature in harmony with Man under Man's authority; the drive of mythos culture is to put Man in harmony with Nature under Nature's authority.

Logos-culture divinity Apollo in the Apollo Belvedere

Where logos culture trusts the conscious mind, mythos culture trusts the unconscious. Where logos culture emphasizes the abstract and universal, mythos culture emphasizes the concrete and particular. Where logos culture is left-brained, mythos culture is right-brained. Where logos culture is Apollonian, mythos culture is Dionysian (no, not in the drunken, party animal sense, but in the embrace of the rest of ourselves beyond the rational mind, the embrace of mystery). Mythos culture is weak on analysis, on questioning assumptions, on disrupting moribund cultural structures, but logos culture is weak on synthesis, on promoting shared beliefs and values, on preserving and strengthening healthy cultural structures. Mythos culture is a nest, logos culture a knife. Neither is sufficient in the long run, which brings us back to the ancient Greeks.

In ancient Greek mythology are all the seeds of ancient Greek philosophy, and when the Greeks began writing theirs was thoroughly a mythos culture. The Greeks began their transformation as a collection of tribes with a common language and military culture of excellence but with diverse religious and political practices. A series of crises and opportunities drove the Greeks to unite as a people, forcing them to analyze their separate religious and tribal practices and deliberately, consciously weld them together into a single, shared culture, essentially crafting their new religion and laws by hand to accomplish this. Although they largely succeeded, the effort so transformed them as a people that they were driven into that explosive cultural revolution that transforms a mythos culture into a logos culture, but unlike almost any other culture in the history of the world, they wrote their way through the whole thing, essentially documenting the stages of thought and culture along the way from one side to the other, leaving us with all the evidence we need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of both types of culture.

Early in this transformation, their mythos culture began taking on logos characteristics as they began philosophizing about their culture, resulting in a remarkably self-aware mythos culture. Later, as they shifted into a logos culture they brought the mythos culture's emphasis on principles and values into their notions of objectivity and reason, resulting in a remarkably principled logos culture. In the end, they passed so far into logos culture that a nihilistic movement known as the sophists arose, arguing that nothing mattered but manipulating others to advance one's own self-interest. Greek culture dissolved into such a nihilism that later-stage Greek culture began to resemble our own, at which point Greek civilization collapsed into a series of devastating civil wars ended by conquest first by Macedonia and later by the Roman empire. The ancient Greeks rocketed through this entire arc of transformation in high gear, passing from mythos culture to logos culture to complete collapse in just a few centuries, analyzing themselves and documenting what they saw as they went.

Mythos-culture divinity Dionysus in Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian

There are three reasons why this principle of reading the ancient Greek philosophers in terms of their transition from mythos to logos culture is so crucial:

First, each ancient Greek philosopher wrote at some specific point along this arc of transformation, and many of them influenced the course of their culture's development by what they wrote. To understand any given philosopher of the ancient Greeks, we must understand when they wrote, what they would have so taken for granted as not to bother saying explicitly, what within that culture they were criticizing and why, and how and why their successors reacted to them as they did. Without understanding these things about each ancient Greek philosopher, we are guaranteed to misunderstand their intent. For example, although later logos philosophers are often as literal as we might be writing today and often focusing on dividing the cosmos up into analytical pieces, earlier mythos philosophers are often writing metaphorically, allusively, focusing on relating the cosmic forces with one another in order to understand the overall pattern. Where later philosophers are alarmed by their culture's decay into sophistry and arguing against nihilism, earlier philosophers are often criticizing mythographers for being overly rigid and credulous about their articles of faith.

We cannot understand Xenophanes unless we understand how early he came in this cycle, so we know he is writing so much about the gods because his culture is so steeped in religion that he has to grapple with that subject in detail if he is to move his culture ahead on any subject; from this perspective, we begin to appreciate his efforts to create the concept of philosophical inquiry, as well as his insistence on treating the cosmos as an integrated organism rather than just a space or a collection of things. We cannot grasp Thales when he writes everything is water unless we know he was the first to argue that there is a common material basis for all things (which is true and will later develop into Democritus's atomism), and that furthermore all things that appear stable actually flow (which is also true and will later develop into Heraclitus's dialectical materialism). His insights were revolutionary and necessary for everything that came later, but a modern, literalistic reading (how stupid - not everything is H2O! - what nonsense) misreads both his intent and his significance. So it is with each of the great Greek philosophers.

Second, beyond this principle's necessity for us to begin to comprehend any of these philosophers, we need to understand it in order to know what kind of perspective is being assumed relative to our own logos culture, whether we are looking at a mirror or criticism of our own type of culture, or of the mythos type, and to consider what that means for our own culture accordingly. This is a powerful source of insight if we use it correctly.

Third, this principle is the core explanation for why some of these thinkers were able to anticipate what we think of as purely modern thinking by over two thousand years. Without the benefit of modern technology, Democritus reasoned out the atomic basis of all matter. The scientists of the European renaissance all openly acknowledged their complete indebtedness to the Greek thinkers before them. The Greeks formalized the principles of democracy likewise. The invention of the alphabet, hyper-realistic art, the invention of philosophy along with the definition of all major subjects and boldest statements of all the alternative positions on each of those subjects - no matter where we look, we find the Greeks ahead of us in breadth and depth of innovation; we depend upon and build upon their much earlier work in the same areas. They could not have done these things had they remained a mythos culture - they would have lacked the systematic rigor and emphasis on an objective posture - but neither could they had they been merely a logos culture as we are - they would have lacked the rich foundation of values and principles, cultural assumptions that drove them to an excellence they took for granted, assumed as their debt to their divine ancestors, achievements of personal excellence and accomplishment that they needed as their only shot at immortality because of their beliefs about the afterlife. The ways in which their mythos culture enriched and even made possible their logos culture should teach us something fatally important about the limitations of logos culture alone, about our form of culture.

Philosophy was only made possible for them when the logos-impulse to shape themselves rationally as a people intersected with millennia of accumulated mythos-folk wisdom about the meaning of Man and Nature and the Divine. When their logos-rocket kicked in, their slow mythos liftoff had already done half the work for it, including build the rocket. The Greeks offer us a hint of what is possible if our systems of inquiry are grounded not in value neutrality but in complete dedication to principles and to the cultivation of greatness rather than mere satisfaction of appetites or pursuit of personal power, that is, to a marriage of both kinds of culture.

Yours truly,
Rick

Principles of Ancient Greek Philosophy

2006-08-29T20:58:00.000-07:00

Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus in Heraclitus by Hendrick ter Brugghen

Dear Reader,

Just as good writing requires the author to understand and write to his audience, so good reading requires the reader to understand and read from the author. Though the first requirement is rarely followed, the second is rarely even acknowledged. To comprehend the Greek philosophical authors of twenty-five hundred years ago, who stretched their language and culture dramatically in the quest for unprecedented insights, such discipline on the part of readers is crucial.

Understanding Heraclitus or any other ancient Greek philosopher is a challenge. Neither just like us nor primitive versions of us, the ancient Greeks conceived of the world very differently than we do. Where the range of our ideas is preformed by millennia of thinkers and writers formatting the world for us before we even begin to think for ourselves, the ancient Greek philosophers were fresher, more original, having to invent new ways of seeing the world from scratch. The Greeks were diverse and experimental, so writers from different places and times in the Greek world brought surprisingly different perspectives and assumptions to bear on their philosophizing. It is difficult to conceive of a philosopher as different from Heraclitus of Ephesus as is Parmenides, his contemporary from Elea. Nevertheless, the ancient Greeks interpreted the world not just from the viewpoint of their local customs and cultures but also through the unifying field of a common culture evidently created quite deliberately by the Greek tribes to help unite them into one people.

The unifying cultural principles underlying ancient Greek philosophy are the necessary context for interpreting those ancient writers, not only in the case of philosophers like Heraclitus of whom we have lost all but fragments but also of writers like Plato and Aristotle for whom we are lucky enough to have extensive collections of their books. When we do not understanding these principles, our cultural blinders drive us to misinterpret almost anything these philosophers wrote, to understand their words as we might have meant them had we written them rather than as their authors did, but once we begin to comprehend the principles, we find them everywhere referred to in various ways and begin to smell their implicit presence even where they are not referred to explicitly. These principles permeate their thought and writing.

Over the next seven blog posts, I will introduce and explore each of the seven principles.

Yours truly,
Rick

Rashid and Surya are Growing

2006-08-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Although you cannot see it in this picture, Rashid is larger than Surya, though both are still small kitties. Rashid's coat is glossy but a little coarse. He is a hands-on kind of boy, wanting to rub himself along everything, toys, legs, bedposts, your face, from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, and he likes to hug things and bat them with his paws. He likes to give kisses, and will stretch or reach or climb up to your face to do it.

Surya is long and slender and has soft, soft fur. She has become very fast and tenacious, racing after toys and hanging onto them far more fiercely than Rashid. She is more impatient than Rashid with being held, wriggling after only a few seconds, except every once in a while when she lolls in my arms and purrs and purrs. When she freaks out, her thin tail puffs up to become unbelievably huge. She finds everything fascinating.

This is the week we're going to let them and Morgana start working out their issues together.

Yours truly,
Rick

Postscript: We took a host of photos this morning, but our babies do not like to sit still, and we had to chuck almost all of the photos because of blurring or empty frames.

The Queen of Eene

2006-08-26T15:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

The ongoing challenge in our household is to introduce our new kittens Rashid and Surya to our seventeen-year-old cat Morgana, aka The Queen of Eene. Morgana is very verbal, having much to say about things, and very particular as is typical of tortoiseshell cats; she's a tortie's tortie, and she wants things the way she wants them. She would rather not eat at all for days on end if the food, its presentation, its timing, and everything else about it isn't right, and as with food so with most other things. She's a gentle cat, surprisingly tolerant of children, very affectionate on her own terms, loving the rhythms of her day spiced with occasional novel curiosities. She used to be an unbelievable jumper, but settled down over the years. She still hates noises and loves fires and sunshine.

We got Rashid and Surya particularly for her, since after Shakti's death she has wandered about the house crying and looking for her. Unfortunately, so far she is very uncomfortable with the kittens, and they with her. Most likely, we will need to just let them work it out with however much hissing and posturing it takes for them to figure out their new relationship.

Yours truly,
Rick

Something New to Think With

2006-08-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said or written "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." Or perhaps it was "The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them." Maybe "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." Or is it "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them?" Could it be "No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it?" Perhaps he wrote or said none of these things. Perhaps all of them.

These are popular quotes to attribute to Einstein, but most people attributing any of these things to him do not seem to care whether or not they are really his words. They are putting words in his mouth to strengthen what they want to say with an appeal to authority, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry. If we are fortunate, the words they are putting in his mouth are indeed his own. They do not know, and neither do I.

Whoever wrote or said these words, I believe them. Or more correctly, any mode of thinking permits an individual or a culture to solve certain problems and requires them to create others, and those it creates it cannot solve because they tend to accumulate around its blind spots and Achilles' heels. These occur as the necessary flip sides of its strengths, and so cannot be removed without also removing those strengths and indeed the very character of that mode of thinking. That is, the distinctive strengths of any system simultaneously and necessarily generate equally distinctive weaknesses that can only be avoided by radically transforming that system at its roots, changing the very strengths that gave it its character and identity. To break free of those genetic defects, the only option is metamorphosis, which unfortunately is anathema to hubristic ego, so the defects stay.

We create most of our own problems, and not by accident but by the very forms of our character, by our mentalities, that is, our forms of reasoning and motivation. This is why technology will never solve our primary problems. New science and new technology are something new to think about, but we think about them with the same minds that created the problems in the first place. Science does not lead to enlightenment; the Nazis loved science so much that to advance certain scientific programs after World War II America had to import Nazi scientists. Science is proudly value-neutral, focused on utility, a tool at home in the hands of sinners and saints alike. Tools operate upon extrinsics. Our core problems are intrinsic, where tools cannot reach.

Somehow, mysteriously to us, every new promise of utopia ends up just another market commodity. We focus on changing the externals that were never truly responsible for our predicaments, then wonder that the problems persist or even accelerate under the new conditions, like bacteria growing ever more virulent under the pressure of our wonder drugs. Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite was appalled when his fabulous new tool for construction was promptly put to work blowing up his fellow human beings, and created the Nobel Prizes as an apology to humanity, or so the story goes.

In other words, the problems we face are primarily ad hominem. There is nothing so noble that a barbarian will not put it to barbaric purposes, and in the great scheme of things we are all barbarians. The problem is not the tools at our disposal, not the things we have to think about. The problem is what we are thinking with. If the human race is to survive, we need something new to think with. The current model is dangerously defective. And no, the answer is not artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, or genetic engineering; those answers represent more of the same level of thinking that got us into this mess.

My friend Kenneth Smith likes to say "Every other field of study gives you something new to think about. Only philosophy gives you something new to think with." This philosophy is not the empty academic cataloging of philosophical writers and their dates and titles and quotations, nor is it the abstracted, schizophrenic elaboration of complex but arbitrary schemes of ideal forms and their interrelationships beloved by timid intellectuals. Rather, what gives us something new to think with is the lifelong project of cultivating a better character in the Ancient Greek sense, of striving to develop eudaimonea,a coherent inner cosmos, of struggling against ourself to find our blind spots and feel out the architecture of our character so we can figure out how to grow beyond what we are today - to deliberately undertake our own maturation.

In a culture like ours, none of us has eudaimonea. We all have dysdaimonea - dysfunctional characters that afflict us so that we in turn afflict the world. In the immortal words of Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr., creator of the classic comic Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us." If we want to make a better world, we must first make better people. The kind of world we have is what the kind of people we are can and must create. Above all, the problem is not all those other people - it is ourselves. We must make ourselves better from the inside out. Doing this will change how we see the world, how we value it, and how we think about it, and that will change what we do about it.

Yours truly,
Rick

Verbal Medicine

2006-08-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

When I was younger, I believed we were all created equal, that anyone could do what anyone else could do. I well understood some of the depths to which we could sink, having read extensively about the Holocaust, but I believed education and communication could save the human race. I idolized and idealized science.

Step by step, I was compelled out of these illusions. I came to understand that most people work very hard not to hear or learn anything that requires them to transform, that they resent anyone who tries to reach out to them through their walls. I learned that science is what it is, not what it could be, and the two are worlds apart.

So, step by step I learned to say less and less of what I truly believed outside my circle of friends. Ironically, in some quarters of my life this too was unacceptable: I could neither say the things I believed without incurring arguments that seemed never to progress to understanding, nor was I to be permitted to withdraw from those pointless, soul-killing conversations. My faith in communication has bounced off the bottom many times in the last few years.

I learned, though, that it is too late in my life for me to stop trying to communicate. It has become a need. Verbal Medicine may be a pun, but for me it is also serious business. Even if no one listens or understands or responds, I cannot be healthy unless I strive to put my thoughts and feelings into words, unless I try to reach out not just to those I know and love but also to others I do not yet know but who may find in my words a kindred spirit.

It is a bit ridiculous to do this, to cast my words out and entertain even a faint idea that they may find their intended audience. I am put in mind of that first tarot card: The Fool, stepping off the cliff, as we are all fools who try to make anything happen in this world, never even remotely comprehending what we will set in motion nor how crazy it is to imagine the cosmic forces that invisibly crowd our lives will ever permit our arrow to hit the mark we intend for it. Yet without that ridiculous hope and effort we would be no more than jetsam.

We attract more flies with honey than vinegar. I could be much more entertaining in this blog than I am. I do know how. I have written for decades now, and have run Dungeons and Dragons games since 1978. I could spin the fun stories, be witty, work harder to be the entertainer, but I do not want flies. I want to reach out neither to the walking appetites who make up the vast ballast of our culture, nor to the walking calculators who run it. I hope my writing style and topics are as unentertaining for such people as possible. I hope that somehow the fewest of the few, the adults out there, the ones who bring their heart and head into everything they do, the ones with the endless curiosity, the paradoxically playful and serious ones, the ones who care more about truth and justice and art and hope and other people and other species than they do about feeling good or acquiring status or power . . . crazy as it may be, I hope that something in my vinegar writing draws such people.

Because the verbal medicine I really need is not just self-expression, which I worshipped as an end in itself as a teenager and which now I find fairly futile, but dialog with other nuts like me. I know you are out there. We are not alone. We are just atomized, segregated from each other by the lack of the kinds of social contexts that would nurture us as a permanent community. Perhaps we could consider some kind of mutual activity together other than merely satisfying our appetites or indulging in temporary pretend-escape from this mess we all find ourselves in. Maybe we could heal ourselves with a little help from each other. Maybe we could heal more than that, if we worked together. Who knows?

Like I said: crazy; The Fool. But there it is. I gotta try.

Yours truly,
Rick

Gender in English, Ancient and Modern

2006-08-17T00:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Many writers have remarked on the problem of expressing or not expressing gender in Modern English. Women ask why man is the generic form, as in mankind, and why woman is derivative, as though lesser. I have heard people attempting to justify this on religious grounds, since Eve was created from Adam's rib, and is therefore derivative.

Efforts to correct the perceived male bias in the language has resulted in fireman being replaced with fire fighter, mailman being replaced by mail carrier, and so on. Although these efforts to repair our lopsided language are now a fait accompli, and occasionally strengthen the term so changed, they all miss the point. The use of man as the male form of human is a corruption of the original definition in Old English, which was balanced with respect to gender. The reason we sometimes use Man in a generic sense, as in "Man is a tool user" is because Old English Mann meant human only in the generic, gender-independent sense of a person. A male human is a mann, and a female human is a mann.

Woman is a corrupted form of wifmann, or wife-person. As Kathleen Herbert writes in Peace Weavers and Shield Maidens: Women in Early English Society, the origin of wif is a bit of a mystery, but the best guess is that it is related to wefan, to weave. Old English writing is full of references to the primary role of wife-people as Peace Weavers. This weaving role of wife-people was not restricted to physical weaving. A study of Old English social rites and rituals, legends and stories, makes the original gender role of wife-people very clear as the bearers of culture and the weavers of civilization. The whole purpose of the striving of the males, the wars, the hunting, the building, was to create a safe haven within which wife-people would create civilization. Their role originally was not to be a mere helpmeet; that is a foreign gender role introduced into Old English culture later.

The lost word in Modern English is the specific term for a male person. In Old English that was waepmann, a weapon-person. The Old English world was very dangerous, and every weapon-person carried a spear starting in boyhood. The role of a weapon-person was to place his body and weapons between wife-people and danger, to protect the hall, the village, the gardens, and the fields where the wife-people worked to create the civilization that made life worth living. The weapon-person was a living contradiction, on the one hand striving for individual prowess and excellence at any cost, on the other needing to submerge his ego for the good of society, to bond together with other weapon-people to create a reliable shield wall. Weapon-people bound themselves together by personal oaths and vows not to abstract, corruptible organizations, but to each other and to their future actions, and the cornerstone of that Old English culture was the witnessing of those oaths and vows and how they were carried out. It was not the original role of weapon-people to rule the world and dominate the wife-people; that is a foreign gender role introduced into Old English culture later.

There was a pun in the name weapon-person, one noted by Shakespeare and others, as to whether the male's weapon referred to his instrument of war or his instrument of sex, captured in the modern word tool. This pun was seriously meant, because the other role of the male was to beget children, but this latter meaning was more directly captured by a second word for a male person: wermann. This prefix is related to the modern were as in werewolf. It meant male specifically in the sense of a person capable of getting a woman with child, which after all is pretty much the core definition of male. Were also meant a husband, the companion of a wife, so a newlywed couple were pronounced were and wife, that is, man and woman.

Obviously, the noun forms are not the only ones lacking balance in Modern English. The adjectives (male and female) and pronouns (he and she) both lack the general form as an option, though English is clearly evolving toward having they become the general pronoun, and the adjectives also perpetuate the false sense of the male term as the original and the female as the derivative (curiously, the two terms male and female come from two different languages and were originally unrelated and spelled unalike).

Language permits thought in human beings, and limitations or deformations of language limit or deform thought. It is a typically Modern thing to do to let the limits and deformations of our gender terminology spread throughout the language rather than repair them even at the foundations of the language.

These ancient gender terms were not the denatured, abstracted, empty designations of sex to the Old English that man and woman are to Moderns. They carried powerful cultural meanings that went to the heart of how ancient English society was structured and why. The loss of so many unreplaced terms, and the erosion of meaning from those we have kept, has left holes in our ability to comprehend ourselves and our respective roles in the world. As those roles shifted over time, the meanings of the words could have shifted with them, but instead most such meaning has been stripped from them, leaving them empty abstractions. The many new terms borrowed from other languages or invented wholesale have not filled those gaps, but rather have expanded our language and ideas in new directions, changing the overall shape of our minds and culture, altering what we can or cannot express or even conceive of. We imagine that the changes must be improvements only because it flatters us to believe it. Rather than striving to skip past these changes with quick judgments of whether they constitute progress, we ought to look at their pattern and ask ourselves what they mean. As individual personalities and as a culture, over the last two thousand years how have we been changing? What are we becoming?

Unless we honestly examine that question, we cannot know ourselves.

Yours truly,
Rick

Don't Fear the River

2006-08-16T01:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Prior to Serge Mouraviev's current project, there have only been a handful of serious efforts to collect together much of the Heraclitea. In general, scholars have been too busy advocating their interpretations of Heraclitus to be bothered with evaluating the whole field of prior interpretations. Likewise, few authors have bothered to review and evaluate even just the variant sources for the surviving fragments, to assess the discrepencies and try to understand what the original text may have been. Most translators have simply selected a trusted or favored collection, such as the Diels-Kranz collection, and assumed that their chosen collection adequately separates genuine Heraclitus fragments from spurious ones.

This is a dangerous assumption. With so few surviving fragments, many of which are so profound as to cast all of Heraclitus's philosophy in a different light, omitting even one genuine fragment can cause the translator or interpreter to misread everything.

I happen to have an example with which you may be familiar. Both Plutarch and Plato write that Heraclitus said you cannot step twice into the same river. This must be the best known Heraclitus quote, and for many of us it represents one of perhaps a half-dozen truly crucial keys to understanding his philosophy. If you accept this as a geniune Heraclitean quote, it changes everything about how you read Heraclitus.

For that reason, numerous scholars have labored to discredit it. If Heraclitus is a philosopher of universal flux, then he stands in opposition to Parmenides and Plato, who argued that only unchanging ideal forms are real and that all flux is illusory. To many, Plato is a sacred ox who must not be gored. Heraclitus's philosophy is too potent to ignore, so for Platonists Heraclitus must either be discredited or coopted.

For years the standard approach was to discredit him by arguing that he did indeed advocate universal flux, and that the idea of universal flux leads to such logical inconsistencies that his entire philosophy collapses in upon itself. The problem with this approach was that it is patently untrue, and philosophers and scholars free of the sway of neo-Platonism continued to explore the coherency of his philosophy.

In recent times, therefore, Heraclitus's opponents have changed tactics and tried to coopt him by a variety of devices, all of which hinge on demonstrating that universal flux is a misreading of Heraclitus, that perhaps after all he was a safe proto-Platonist. All such attempts have to deal with that river quote, along with its two friends. Here are all three along with their sources (I am using Charles H. Kahn's translations from The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary here, and can recommend his book to others readily, though Philip Wheelwright's Heraclitus is my favorite interpretation):

First: As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them. This is quoted by Arius Didymus, and also by Cleanthes, and most scholars accept it as a legitimate fragment of Heraclitus's writing.

Second: According to Heraclitus one cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but by the intensity and the rapidity of change it scatters and again gathers. Or rather, not again nor later but at the same time it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs. This statement is from Plutarch and contains the most familiar form of the fragment, that one cannot step twice into the same river. Although this is a paraphrase, it must be very close to Heraclitus's original form, because another paraphrase of the same idea, this one by Plato, uses the same wording: Heraclitus says, doesn't he, that all things move on and nothing stands still, and comparing things to the stream of a river he said that you cannot step twice into the same river. Charles Kahn's analysis of these two independent yet converging paraphrases is compelling, i.e., that none of the attempts that have been made to make them go away carries anything like the strength of the evidence itself, that the convergence of these two separate but reliable sources almost certainly means Heraclitus wrote something very much like this.

The attempts by Kirk, Marcovich, Reinhardt, and others to argue that this most famous fragment of Heraclitus is merely a misquotation say less about the evidence than they do about the intentions of those making the attempt. Their arguments amount to little more than the a priori decision that Heraclitus would only have made one statement that mentioned a river, so they can reduce the discussion to arguing over which is the most authentic or the most clearly a literal quote. Since the second statement is a paraphrase, if a close one, they discard it in favor of the first one. Of course, why there can only have been one statement about a river is passed over by these interpreters, since that assumption cannot bear scrutiny, and once one questions that the next question that comes to mind is why these commentators are so eager to get rid of two of the river statements. Given the profound, two thousand five hundred year history of hostility between the philosophers of change and the philosophers of permanence, it cannot be a coincidence that the form favored by these scholars is the one most compatible with a philosophy of permanence. Scholars like to pretend to objectivity, and for this reason they especially need their motivations scrutinized closely to understand the real import of their arguments.

Other scholars, not motivated by the age-old antagonism, may yet be misled by the fragmentary nature of Heraclitus's surviving text into believing the original was fragmentary as well, but we do have a couple of compound fragments. In those compound fragments we have from Heraclitus, we can see that he loved to juxtapose similar statements that clarified one another, especially if the second amplified or developed the paradoxes of the first, and these two statements fit that pattern very well. Kahn rightly argues that these first two statements most likely occurred together, one after the other, in Heraclitus's original text.

Before Plato, Cratylus amplified this second statement of Heraclitus's about the river with his own argument that you cannot even step in the river once, since you are changing even as you make the attempt. Although Kahn reads this as Cratylus seeking to one-up Heraclitus, I believe it was meant more as explanation, since it is an inescapable conclusion of Heraclitus's philosophy of dynamic flux if you fully come to grips with it. With Cratylus's statement in mind, consider this third statement about the river attributed to Heraclitus:

Third: Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and we are not. This is quoted by a much later writer named Heraclitus Homericus, who wrote a commentary on Homer; that is, the later commentator Heraclitus Homericus is quoting the earlier philosopher Heraclitus, if we accept this as a genuine fragment. The later Roman writer Seneca also quotes this line as the philosopher Heraclitus's. Scholars tend to agree that Seneca and Heraclitus Homericus were quoting a common source, but disagree about whether that source was the philosopher Heraclitus or perhaps some later writer, possibly a skeptic. For example, despite Kahn's position that those discounting the second statement are defying the evidence, three seems to exceed Kahn's own limit, for he argues that this third form is not authentic, despite reasonable sources. His argument: he "can only see it as a thinly disguised paraphrase" of other fragments. That's it. No careful evaluation, no additional evidence not available to the reader, just a strong feeling based on its resemblance. Ironically, this is the same reasoning in Kirk, Marcovich, and Reinhardt that he earlier dismissed, rightly, as flawed.

How can Kahn fall prey to the same reasoning himself that he so clearly identifies and refutes in others, and on the same subject? Even a casual reading of Kahn reveals he lacks the motivation of the others to miscast Heraclitus as agreeing with Parmenides and Plato about the unchanging nature of the true cosmos; after all, he is quite careful about showing the many ways Heraclitus exhorts us to see flux as the true nature of the cosmos. We cannot really know, but a reasonable guess would be that most common of human failings that afflicts us all, fools and wise men alike: hubris, in this case the temptation to mold the material with unwarranted confidence, to feel that even without access to the original text he nevertheless knows its character so well that he can feel his way to the truth. Unfortunately, if this is the case, and he gives us no reason to doubt it, then he like so many others has forgotten that we all know things that are not true, and so we should beware such confidence.

All we have of Heraclitus are fragments attested by later writers. We must tread very cautiously, ruling out possibilities with the humble recognition that we have not one original scrap of his book with which to make a definitive statement. We must resort to that proper default position of the natural philosopher in the face of the cosmos, humility, the acceptance of the limitations of our own reason, and consequently the need to become comfortable with uncertainty. If the only defensible criteria we have for choosing legitimate fragments are 1) the reliability of the sources, and 2) the consistency with the style and content of other fragments accepted as legitimate, then we have to accept this third fragment, however tentatively as legitimate, no matter how we may feel about it or how clever an argument we may construct about it. Kahn's failure to define his criteria and stick to them, left him making judgments based on how they, in his own words, "seem to me," which is ironically precisely the translation of the Greek expression doke moi, origin of the term doxa, which the Greek philosophers including Heraclitus defined as the uninformed, unphilosophical, unreliable opinions of the masses; they held doxa in the utmost contempt, which is why they became philosophers.

As a development of the previous two statements, this third one shifts the emphasis from the flux of things to the paradoxical nature of things in flux, a necessary development of the explanation, especially to Heraclitus whose writing thrives on paradoxes. He implicitly argues repeatedly throughout his writings that the mathematician's aversion to paradoxes is perverse in a cosmos that teems with natural paradoxes. Indeed, he argues that the cosmos can only be understood through layers of paradox, both in the contradictory forces that bring about the phenomena we perceive, and in the paradoxical resulting nature of things. After all, if you are continuously changing, as science would agree, then you both are the same person from one moment to the next and also are not exactly the same person. Likewise the river into which you step changes and becomes different, even as it remains identifiably the same. Identity, according to Heraclitus, is a paradox, and this third statement is completely in keeping with his emphasis on paradox, making it a fitting conclusion to the argument developed by the first two statements, whether or not they originally appeared in that order.

All of which is to say I agree with Kahn in accepting the validity of the second statement, and I disagree with him by accepting, however tentatively, the third as well. I see no good reason to doubt that Heraclitus wrote all three statements and placed them closely together to illustrate the nature of our relationship to the cosmos when both it and we as part of it are in endless flux. Although he has a reputation for being obscure, in the few compound fragments we have and in the other potential ones we might try to reconstruct by rearranging closely related fragments Heraclitus does appear to make some effort to explain his ideas through metaphor and development rather than restricting himself to the most pithy, paradoxical possible formulations of these concepts.

After all, later in the same dialogue in which Plato paraphrases Heraclitus's second statement, he adds another paraphrase: panta rhei, that is, all things flow. This is the most succinct form of this thread of Heraclitus's teachings, and all three river statements, as well as Cratylus's extension, are inevitable implications of this two-word explosive nugget of wisdom. Had Heraclitus been the obscurantist he is reputed to be, he would have left it at that, but instead in the image of the river he worked out a reasonable metaphor for explaining the flow of change. These three river statements by Heraclitus are therefore not problems to be avoided but opportunities to more fully comprehend the profound and vital nuance of his philosophy.

Returning to the subject of hubris, if you conduct a few careful web searches for variations on the famous "You cannot step twice into the same river" statement, you will find truckloads of authors declaring with great confidence that smart people know Heraclitus never actually wrote this. They ape the empty reasoning of Marcovich and others on this subject without actually working out even so little on their own, yet present their "conclusion" with authority. Here again, as in so many other ways, humans display their love of appearing wise without working for wisdom, of pretending to authority they do not possess, of attracting followers they can not lead, of simultaneously casting themselves as unusually observant and independent-minded when they are instead typically blind and prone to follow the lead of others unquestioningly. As Heraclitus argued, most people do not know why they want the things they want, nor why they believe the things they believe, and you certainly cannot trust them to tell you those things accurately. Even the most seemingly objective and rational person builds his arguments as mere rationalizations of his prejudices and urges.

Critics of the World Wide Web decry its lack of quality control, but the information you can observe about human nature on the web is worth all the misinformation about lesser topics. Here are all these people laboring to miscast Heraclitus as not fundamentally in conflict with Parmenides and Plato, and most of them clearly do not even realize what the larger conflict is about or what the implications might be of their position. Truly, most of what people do with their brains should not be called thinking, and most of what is written does not qualify as communication. This is part of makes Heraclitus and his work so remarkable, and also part of what makes Serge Mouraviev's Heraclitea project so welcome and necessary.

Yours truly,
Rick

Rashid and Surya

2006-08-08T21:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

The picture is of Rashid sleeping on Surya the night we brought them home. He's all black except for pale nipples when he rolls onto his back and stretches, and he tends to express affection as fiercely as he plays, butting his face into yours and purring passionately. She's a tabby with tortoiseshell coloring, as you can see in the stripes on her leg; she's more likely to curl up and purr in your lap, and in play she's more careful in her stalking but more determined in hanging onto her kills. Although they are not brother and sister by blood, as you can see they act like it. They have only two speeds, and here you can see them in their lower gear, when they purr and purr. Neither has yet mastered the meow, although Rashid occasionally mews, but Rashid has been making hilarious efforts to growl and hiss during play; Surya is remarkably silent when not purring, though she is the more ardent purrer.

The collar tag you can see is a thing of the past; she stripped him out of his in the second week--what a great toy!--and we had to remove hers last week because it was too tight and the end had been cut too short to loosen it successfully. Fortunately they are strictly indoor cats; more than that, until tomorrow they are strictly guest-bedroom cats. We introduce them to the rest of the house, at least the parts we are opening up to them, tomorrow.

Yours truly,
Rick

Kitty Day

2006-07-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

July 12th in the Phinney Creek household will hereafter be known as Kitty Day, when in Shakti's memory we brought home a pair of kittens for Morgana. We are busily engaged in preparations, and hope to have the kittens home by 2:00 this afternoon. We are adopting them from the Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), at their Cat City location at 85th and Greenwood. I go now to gather toys and other supplies.

Yours truly,
Rick

The Gifts of Grief and Fear

2006-06-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

When I was young, I wanted to be like Mr. Spock from Star Trek, free from emotion and able to think rationally at all times. At least, that is how I interpreted the character when I was young.

Later, I came to understand that he was not free of emotion, as the alien Vulcan race on that show is described, because only his father was Vulcan; his mother was human. He was trying to be a pure Vulcan, but he was not. He had feelings, which he did not want, so he repressed them, and several episodes and movies hinged on the difference.

I followed suit in part, and struggled to supppress feelings I believed were negative, such as fear, anger, and grief. I succeeded to a surprising degree, but in doing so I incurred the liability of all those who separate their intellect from their feelings. Seeking to become free of certain emotions, I instead made them invisible to me, lost that sixth sense most people have that allows them to use their feelings like antennae to help them think, lost the ability to keep my feelings in true balance by integrating them into my personality (since I was unaware of them) and instead became controlled by them. They had free rein down in the dark places of my unconscious. For decades, it was as though I had lost a sense other people have, a kind of blindness, and also could not at times predict or explain my own behavior.

When I began counseling in April of 1987, my counselor noticed these blind spots in my emotions and struggled for years to get me to even realize they were there. For almost nineteen years despite discussing sometimes harrowing things I never cried in therapy. About halfway through that time I finally came to agree with my counselor about the consequences of my emotional blindness, and particularly came to agree that my cycles of depression were directly related to it, that escaping from those debillitating crashes was in part going to require regaining the use of those feelings. After much work we finally began to push through and find the anger, but we never did get to the grief and fear in any depth . . .

. . . until my kitty Shakti fell seriously ill in January, rapidly weakened, and died February 21st.

Her illness and death changed everything for me. It was very much like the experience of someone blind since childhood regaining sight. I cried more during that month and even since than in the last thirty years combined. I can feel sorrow and grief in response to movies and songs, in parting from friends and relatives, in thinking back on other friends and relatives who have died--in short, I am beginning to feel appropriate shades of grief now at all those times when an emotionally healthy person would.

And during my recent vacation on the Navajo reservation, I discovered fears I had never known while hiking on steep cliffs, not crippling fears, but good, healthy responses to risky situations. I am starting to feel the nuances of concern and fear that characterize emotional health.

This restoration of my so long atrophied inner senses is precious to me, a parting gift of emotional alchemy from Shakti, as her gradual loss dilated my heart. Although many people are so dead to the living world around them that they cannot imagine why a person should feel any strong attachment to a cat, Shakti is probably as close as I will ever come to having a child. We were part of a family together for seventeen years and eight months.

When I was young, I imagined that the feelings I categorized as negative were bad, weaknesses even, and I struggled to overcome them. It took me decades to undo the damage I inflicted on myself as a result. If you can help it, do not make the same mistake I did. We have our suite of emotions for a reason. We need them. We cannot think rationally without them, an idea that only sounds confusing because we have such screwball ideas about the nature of intelligence. Also, as easy as it may be for us to inhabit our feeling life so exclusively that we remain infantile and self-involved, nevertheless we cannot even perceive the world accurately with intellect alone. Reason, sanity, happiness, and health depend on integrating analysis of information with subtle and fluid assessment of our shifting emotions. We cut ourselves off from those emotions at our peril.

My fear and grief were restored to me by my cat's illness and death. If you too have lost part of your inner sight, may you also be lucky enough to receive such a gift to help you find your way back to health and wholeness.

Yours truly,
Rick

A Few New Links

2006-06-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

If you have not yet fallen in love with Judith Martin's column for the Washington Post, Miss Manners, you are in for a treat. She explores the crucial but neglected realm of etiquette with insight and wit worthy of Jane Austen. Yes, crucial. Without the refinement and nuance of manners we must resort to the law to try to club each other into submission, that is if we don't descend outright into violence. How do you think America became so litigious and violent? We mock Miss Manners at our peril.

Speaking of Jane Austen, a team of admirers has created a snarky blog about all things Austen.

And now for something completely different, dessert from Jim Woodring, one of the few artists whose claims to originality we acknowledge trembling. He will furrow your brow, slip your moorings, and shiver your timbers.

Yours truly,
Rick

The Big Picture

2006-06-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Beverly just handed me the following quote:

If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

--Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Yours truly,
Rick

Culture and Cultivation

2006-06-01T21:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

Of course, even if we do cultivate our characters we will suffer the fatal consequences, since character is fate; cultivating our character changes it, and therefore changes our fate, creating new fated consequences.

Those who believe in free will do not bother cultivating their character, because they do not understand that they are constrained by it.

Those who believe in determinism do not bother cultivating their character, because they believe it is futile since everything is predetermined, which represents a different kind of misunderstanding of the way in which their character constrains them.

The interesting thing is that those who believe we have free will end up with the same conclusion as those who believe we do not; they are on the same side. They are united against the Ancient Greek position that only by cultivating our character can we influence the main dynamo of our fate, our own naive character, cultivate it into something more worthy, something that might truly create a small space of meaningful freedom in our lives.

This is not a difficult idea, but almost no one in the Modern world seems capable of grasping it. We all let the terms of the debate about how much freedom we have in the world be dictated to us by those who think in simplistic, polarized ways, even though out of the range of possibilities we are effectively only offered a single choice in two guises. Idiot and genius alike find themselves completely fooled by this simple and misleading framing of the question of personal freedom, and argue back and forth about which of the two falsehoods is true.

The reason we are all stumped by this is the same reason we are all stumped by most things.

Just as there is no viable species anywhere composed of a single member, so too there is no such thing as an individual person, or an individual mind. Without the help of a cultural framework, a person cannot learn to speak a language, nor even to think in any meaningful way. Our culture is so much a part of who we are that it is more accurate to say we are a part of it. Cultures frame the world for us in such a way that only certain ideas are considered possible; everything else is truly beyond the pale for us. Although when young, or tired, or feeling playful we may toy with a wide range of choices, our serious debates inevitably fall back on what seems realistic to us, plausible, and that determination of plausibility is fundamentally an irrational process that is done for us by our culture.

Each culture rules out different swaths of reality as stuff that only crazies or extremists would believe; whatever pitifully small field of possibilities remain "plausible" becomes the range of allowable "responsible" discussion in that culture. Even more clearly put, even the narrow range of ideas allowed to extremists and crazies is defined by the culture; ideas outside those bounds are not even expressible in the culture's language without extreme wordiness, awkwardness, and distortion. No matter how rational we think we are, no matter how much the scientist, the iconoclast, the rebel, the outsider, the freethinker, the genius, nevertheless our range of "independent" thinking remains within the boundaries set by our culture, or cultures if we have been deeply enough influenced by more than one.

We cannot meaningfully cultivate our character to create some kind of personal freedom for ourselves unless our culture imagines the possibility for us, unless our language expresses it, unless it comes within our limited range of conceivable thought. The reason we cannot imagine a choice other than free will or determinism is that those are the only two positions allowed within the range of responsible thought; those who want to prove how smart they are may choose from refinements of determinism, such as nature versus nurture, so that is how they express their "individualism" and "free thinking," in the culturally approved way. We pick off our culture's menu of ideas and call it creativity.

Since the Ancient Greek position on personal freedom isn't on our cultural menu of ideas, it is quite literally inconceivable to us unless we immerse ourselves fully enough in that quite different, almost alien culture of Ancient Greece, and even then it requires enough immersion in the corresponding language to even be able to express the ideas clearly. When I write "character is fate" in English, I am misusing the words, trying to bend them enough to convey something they do not naturally convey because of their culture of origin (character used to be an Ancient Greek word, but in English we have long since smoothed down its rough edges to redefine it in terms we find more comfortable). I could write a book on the problem of what Heraclitus meant when he wrote that character is fate, and still most Moderns would be incapable of grasping it, whereas most Ancient Greeks would readily appreciate the import in the original language. Each language naturally expresses a different range of possibilities to its culture.

So, the problem.

To create some limited personal freedom we have to understand it the right way, so that we can understand why cultivating our character is necessary and what that might mean, but that requires the support of a culture that conceives of fate, character, and freedom in the right ways. Our culture does not, which is why we end up splitting into hedonists and nihilists, none of whom are free nor understands why not.

We also need a culture that supports our efforts to become better people. Without that, even those who through exposure to Ancient Greece or other cultures do stumble upon the right ideas about personal freedom and how to develop it are extremely unlikely to get very far in becoming better people. For example, in Modern culture the struggle to stay afloat financially trumps all other concerns, especially anything with as negligible market value as the struggle to become a better person.

So there is some pithy saying missing here, something to add to "character is fate," something about culture framing character. Maybe that is among the many things Heraclitus wrote that we have lost, or maybe it was so obvious to the Greeks it didn't occur to him to write it down. If we want to make it easier for people to cultivate good character, we need to find the words to help them conceive of doing so, and then we need to change our culture to make it possible.

Anthropoculture must be the highest priority for a good culture, a sustainable culture, but in our culture it is barely expressible.

Yours truly,
Rick

Free Will and Determinism

2006-06-01T14:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,

We are taught to believe we have free will. We are also taught not to question that teaching. In the spirit of Modernism (i.e., nihilism--ah, the awesome power of the negative), let us question it.

Free how? Free from what? Free to what?

The answers to all these questions are the same: Don't ask. The implication is that we are infinitely free because we say we are. This is patently false.

First, nothing is true just because we say it is, or because a document says it is. Belief that we can dictate terms to the cosmos--I can fly because I say I can fly; you are a bad person because I say you are--is properly called nominalism, and it is a common and obvious fallacy, bad logic.

Second, we are obviously not infinitely free. Your freedom interferes with my freedom, and vice versa, and once you spin that web of interferences out across six billion people you find quite a tangle of unfreedom. Further, reality intrudes on our precious fantasy of infinite freedom. The sun will not rise one instant sooner just because I will it to, nor will I live one moment longer than the cosmos permits. We are profoundly bound. And finally and most importantly, we obstruct ourselves. An alcoholic reaches for the bottle even--especially--when that is exactly the wrong thing to do to achieve what he believes he wants, and we are all special cases of the alcoholic: the neglected child, the victim of bullies, the overachiever, the exhibitionist . . . the more psychology identifies the patterns of human behavior, the more we realize these patterns constrain us.

So long as we believe the choice is between free will and determinism, any reality-seeking person has to choose determinism, because there is no good argument to be made for free will in the face of a cosmos of evidence to the contrary.

But why should we believe free will and determinism are the only options for explaining the human condition? Contemporary writers may lack the profundity to imagine any more than two explanations, but fortunately we have the far more insightful authors of the past to consider.

The Ancient Greeks did not believe in free will because they weren't that stupid, but neither did they settle for the simple determinism of Moderns. Put more bluntly, contrary to what the brilliant Philip Rieff writes in Sacred Order/Social Order Volume One, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, the Ancient Greeks believed in fate but not in fate alone. To characterize them as fatalistic is one of those partial truths that is better characterized as false than true.

The Ancient Greeks believed that Man is ruled by his character, and that character is fate--Êthos anthrôpôi daimôn, wrote Heraclitus--but what is the source of character?

Each of us inherits a character (whether by genetics, or upbringing, or some combination, or something else, really does not matter for this discussion) from our parents, and by the time we figure this out (if we ever do) we have been living under the rule of that character for some years, usually decades. If we are lucky, we have eudaimonia, a good daimon, giving us good character; if unlucky, dysdaimonia, a bad daimon, giving us bad character. Our character is a daimon that rides us and steers us as a man rides a horse, nudges us through our unconscious mind, through our appetites, desires, urges, and impulses, toward certain ends and away from others. Because, as psychologists have known for over a century, the conscious mind, the ego, although it imagines itself to be in charge of the self is really just the plaything or tool of the unconscious mind that does all the steering, we often find ourselves doing things we never would have imagined, living lives quite different than those we consciously chose when we were younger. The intersection of fates where the teleology of our character meets the web of causes and effects of the cosmos steers us on an unpredictable but (from a divine perspective) fated path.

So far this accords with Rieff's dismissal of the ancient world view as organized around fate, but here is the crucial ingredient missing from his perspective: the Ancient Greeks believed in a second source of character as well.

Just as a gardener, regardless of whether the garden begins as glory or travesty, may either let it go to pot or may carefully coax it into a wonder, so each of us may cultivate our own character or not, may give in to our worst impulses and so strengthen them or may work to improve ourselves internally. We act upon our own inner cosmos or character, and thereby shift it continuously. Heraclitus wrote that all things change, and our innermost character is no exception. Our character is not software or genetics, it is more like an organism that learns and responds, changing. In the end, our character when we die may be unbelievably different than when we are born, depending on how we tend to our character, on how the cosmos treats us, and on how our character reacts.

This is a far more complex relationship to both freedom and fate than is embodied in the trivial, reductionistic, childish, Modern opposition of free will and determinism. The Ancient Greeks believed that although our character drives us to our fates, the forces both internal and external operating upon our character were so complex that not even we can know ourselves well enough to predict for sure what we will do until submitted to the trials of life. Indeed, this was the sacred purpose of story, to put a protagonist under just the right pressures to compel the truth about that character to emerge, to remind ourselves of the limits and liabilities of character and self-knowledge in an attempt to keep cancerous ego in check.

Thus, the ancient worldview is not about strictly fate but about nature, which is a domain of fate and choice, each of which influences the other in complex and changing ways. Here, in this endless dance of powers, we can imagine forces of human nature intricate enough to explain the complexities of observed human behavior far better than with any trivial choice between free will and determinism.

Character is fate, so we must cultivate our characters or suffer the fatal consequences.

Yours truly,
Rick