Mark W Tiedemann

Category: culture

  • Truth and Power…and Other Stuff

    On Dangerous Intersection, an article was posted recently about the problem of Power in relation to truth. I wrote a response and decided to post it here, as a short essay on the (occasionally etymological) problem of Truth.

    When people start talking about what is true or not, they tend to use the word like a Swiss Army knife. It means what they want it to mean when they point at something. Truth is a slippery term and has many facets. Usually, in casual conversation, when people say something is true, they’re usually talking about something being factual. Truth and fact are conjoined in many, possibly most, instances, but are not the same things. The “truth” of a “fact” can often be a matter of interpretation, making conversation occasionally problematic. The problem is in the variability of the term “truth”—like many such words, we stretch it to include things which are related but not the same. There is Truth and then there is Fact. 2 + 2 = 4 is a fact. It may, if analyzed sufficiently, yield a fundamental “truth” about the universe, but in an of itself it is only a fact.

    When someone comes along and insists, through power (an assertion of will), that 2 + 2 = 5, the “truth” being challenged is not in the addition but in the relation of the assertion to reality and the intent of the power in question. The arithmetic becomes irrelevant. Truth then is in the relationship being asserted and the response to it. The one doing the asserting and the one who must respond to the assertion.

    Similarly, in examples of law, we get into difficulty in discussions over morality. Take for instance civil rights era court decisions, where there is a conflation of ethics and morality. They are connected, certainly, but they are not the same thing. Ethics deal with the proper channels of response within a stated system—in which case, Plessy vs Fergusson could be seen as ethical given the criteria upon which it was based. But not moral, given a larger criteria based on valuations of human worth. To establish that larger criterion, overturning one system in favor of another, would require a redefintion of “ethical” into “unethical”, changing the norm, for instance in Brown vs The Board of Education. The “truth” of either decision is a moving target, albeit one based on a priori concepts of human value as applied through ethical systems that adapt.

    Bringing this into the realm of religion, it gets tricky. Because the concept “god” can be formulated according to personal criteria that have only desultory relations with what we might call Fact (for instance, “god” can be seen as purely a philosophical notion identifying certain characteristics of human response to the sublime as well as characterizations of personal assumptions about states of being which cannot be derived by deductive reasoning), to make the claim “there is no god” is functionally devoid of truth. The best you can say is “there is no god for me.” If I acknowledge, for example, that my “god” is purely a mental construct I carry around inside to allow me to function according to a set of precepts, your claim that there is no god is merely opinion, just as unverifiable or testable as my assertion that there is. The “truth” lies outside those opposing statements, which are really trying to establish fact in a realm of ideation. Conversely, to say “there is no god but god” can only ever be a personal statement of belief, unattached to any factual content. The truth is personal, disconnected from material fact.

    (Agnostics and atheists get into a lather over the validating quality of religious documents, and contest the “facts” stated in the Bible and other tomes, claiming that because these facts do not conform to reality, it invalidates the assertion that there is a deity behind them. All it really does is take away the material foundation of religious claims—belief remains a personal choice. This is no mere equivocation. Finding Truth in this quandary is difficult at best and finding proper expression for deeply held beliefs or disbeliefs drives political discourse.)
    Likewise, then, you get into the difficulty of determining moral behavior as opposed to the simply ethical based on these personal apprehensions.

    Power introduces a third element that distorts all sides of the Truth/Fact, Moral/Ethical discourse by rendering all elements subject to arbitrary force. The force is a fact and may well establish an ethical ground, but it will always have a tenuous (at best) relationship to Truth and Morality.

    Power should always be suspect and expressions of it always discounted in considerations of truth, even though expressions of power are difficult to ignore. For instance, the legal power of a religious state may well assert its right to put someone to death for a lapse in religious expression. This in no way establishes the truth of the verdict or the guilt of the victim in moral terms. This is no more than power asserting itself and demanding conformity. But the discourse becomes thoroughly distorted by the acknowledgment that certain expressions may not be uttered. While within the strict confines of the system in question, the death penalty may be construed as ethical, in a larger context (the innate value of individual thought and expression of conscience) it cannot be construed as moral, even though the state in question claims adherence to a moral dictum.

    Teasing these elements apart is essential in deriving a sane methodology of community.

  • De Stael Conference

    This past weekend I attended an intensive three-day workshop on the apparently much debated, highly-regarded Germaine de Stael.  I audited this because Stael (pronounced, according to these folks, Stahl) is going to be a central figure in my alternate history.

    Well, not “going to be”, she is, but so far she’s been mostly in the background.  In the second book, she will be onstage, although in slightly bizarre, nonhistorical form (this is SF after all), but in the third book she will be central—my protagonist will be in her entourage from 1797 until her death in 1817.

    Germaine de Stael nee Necker was at one time one of the most popular and well known intellectuals in Europe.  After the fall of Napoleon, the quip was made that “there are three powers in Europe now—Russia, England, and Madame de Stael.”  When I began researching her, I had no idea.  Never heard of her.  I was told this weekend that in France, she is still widely regarded and talked about, but here in the U.S.A. I’d never heard of her until an odd paragraph in a Napoleonic biography—which did little to illuminate just how significant this woman was.  (I’m particularly annoyed at the short shrift Simon Schama gave her in his otherwise marvelous history of the French Revolution, Citizens.) Well, this is the sort of thing that feminist writers are always complaining about, and rightly so.  Napoleon’s ultimate fall can be directly laid at Germaine de Stael’s feet—she brokered the Grand Alliance that defeated him (the first time).

    (She was instrumental in keeping the Republican spirit alive even in the face of Napoleon’s destruction of everything the Revolution had aimed at achieving—and largely missed, to be sure.  She was a networker par excelence and a philosopher of the first water.)

    In that she will be a major character in my trilogy, I wanted to know as much about her as I could find out, and through the machinations of internet serendipity I found a blog that led me to a woman who is a specialist on Stael and  got me invited to attend this conference, which fortuitously was held at Washington University right here in my home town.  It may be two years before the material I gathered will be required, but the conference—only the Second International one, the last held 11 years ago—was now, so I had to go.

    Very worthwhile, extremely informative, I have a wealth of data to work on and several contacts who will gladly answer emails, etc etc, and maybe even one or two new friends.  My head feels stuffed to bursting.  My thanks to the co-organizers, Karyna Szmurlo from Clemson University in South Carolina and Tili Boon Cuillee here at Washington University.

    I say all this up front because I want it clearly established that 80% of this conference was worth the money and the time and I am delighted that I went.

    One problem.  And this is an academic problem.  It has always annoyed me in books, but this weekend I ran into it in lecture form and it just, well…

    At least four of the presentations and virtually all the direct quotes in the course of two and a half days of lectures were done in French.  Without translation.  I was apparently the only person out of about 35 or so attendees that could not speak or read French.  I did not make a fuss—what would be the point?—and I ended up blaming myself for never have acquired another language, especially when one lecture was conducted partly in Italian as well.  I missed what were evidently excellent talks through being hopelessly monolingual.

    But what really annoyed me was that in two or three of these instances, handouts were passed around containing the major quotes from the lecturers, and these were likewise all in French.  No translations.  I have the papers, I have at least three friends who can read them to me.

    As to the rest, well, like I say, it was excellent and I have much to work with.  So it’s a minor complaint, really.  I sat there, expression neutral (I hope), feeling stupid, and said nothing, then or later.

    This practice really annoys me in history texts.  I wonder if it is done that way in other languages—say, for instance, a book published in Brazil and written in Portugeuse, but with direct quotes in another language without benefit of translation.  I realize Americans are notoriously monolingual, but I doubt everyone everywhere with an interest in history is multilingual.  Making that assumption is, forgive me, rude.

    At the final banquet, we were treated to an address by another scholar who is working on a book about the French experience in North America, and he began the talk in French, and I thought  “shit, not again…”  But he switched to English after a few paragraphs and the rest of the speech was fine.

    The thing that really bothered me about not understanding the French parts?  I missed the jokes.  Sitting there, listening to the musical meanderings of the presenters, all of a sudden the room would erupt in laughter.  I didn’t get it.  Obviously.

    But.  I think now I ought to go to work on the alternate history.  I feel charged up now.

    What was also nice was the reception by these folks of the idea behind my novel.  You know, you’re never sure how that’s going to go over.  But generally, there was sincere interest and a little excitement.  Even the suggestion by one of the organizers that when I finished the project, perhaps I could come to a future conference and read from the novel.  Well.  Not too shabby.

    I am thoroughly mentally exhausted, though.  I am not a formal scholar and “keeping up” can be something of an effort—a lot of assumptions get made and acted upon in such a narrowly-self-defined group.  But I managed to “decode” enough that I kept up and even, finally, contributed a modest remark or two.  All in all, really great stuff.

  • Atheists Are (Perhaps) Us…Or Not

    There was a time in this country that an open admission of atheism could get a person severely hurt in any given community.  Ostracism, mainly, which over time can be very damaging.  But like so many other “out of the mainstream” life choices, this too is no longer the case.

    According to this article in the New York Times, “No Religion” has more than doubled on surveys in the past ten to twenty years.  Now, that does not mean all these folks are atheists or agnostics.  It means, quite specifically, that they align themselves with no organized religion.

    Some folks might wonder at the difference.  What is having faith if not in the context of a religious umbrella?

    When I was fifteen I left the church.  I’d been educated in a Lutheran school and received a healthy indocrintation in that faith.  After entering public high school, I found myself growing less and less involved or interested.  There was in this no profound personal insight or revelation.  It was adolescent laziness.  I’d never been a consistent Sunday church-goer, and although there had been a year or two when I actually practiced Testifying, born out of a powerful belief in Christianity, other factors managed to draw my interest away.

    I stopped attending church at all.  I didn’t give it a lot of thought—some, but not a lot—until some visiting teachers showed up at my door from my church.  They were nice, they were concerned.  I’d been receiving the newsletter and so forth.  They wanted to know where I’d been.  I handed them some sophistry about finding another path.  At that point, I still believed in god and accepted Jesus and all that.  And in truth I had begun to suspect that the whole church thing had some serious problems.  But basically, I just didn’t want to be bothered, and all my new friends came from other backgrounds and didn’t go to that church.  I hadn’t especially liked the whole school experience there (having been bullied, mostly, till almost 8th grade) and didn’t have much motivation on that score to go back and make nice with people who had basically treated me like shit.

    They accepted my explanation and went away.  A few months later I received a letter from the P.T.L. and church board telling me my soul was in jeopardy if I didn’t return to the fold.  It took two pages, but the bottom line was I needed to get my butt back to church and beg forgiveness (and pay my dues) or I’d end up in hell.

    I was furious.  My father read the letter, laughed, and pronounced that they were obviously hard up for money, and suggested I ignore it.

    I did for another nine months.  Then I got another such letter.  Shorter, more to point, and the financial aspect was sharper.  This time I didn’t ignore it.  I went to the next open P.T.L. meeting there and when they asked for questions from the floor I stood up, read the letter, and then told them that this amounted to harrassment.  I didn’t care if they needed money, this was a threat and if I heard from them again, especially this way, they would hear from my lawyer.

    I never heard from them again.

    My anger did not subside.  It drove me into a frenzy of religious questioning.  Over the next two years I visited dozens of churches and more than a few off-the-wall sects (even the Church of Scientology), looking for…something.

    I found bits of it here and there.  Being a rather idealistic youth, having not found a satisfying answer in any of them, I opted to have faith my own way and to hell with all of them.  I was done with Organized Religion.

    And that’s how I felt about it for a long time—that it wasn’t god I didn’t believe in, but the church.  The more I studied the more I came to see how the church had become an institution that looked out for its own interests and my personal moral salvation was but a product sold to make sure the slate roofs didn’t leak and the clergy could dress well.  It wasn’t until I almost married a Catholic and went through some of the courses offered that I came to my final revelation that it was all just an extra-governmental method of social organization and control and had no real connection to anything holy.

    Whatever that might be.

    For several years I was militantly anti-religion.  I’ve mellowed.  All that I felt then about the church I do still feel, but not to the exclusion of much else.  I no longer view “church” as evil or even remotely culpable in social ills.  I’ve come to feel that many individual parishes and congregations have staid the tide of harm that sweeps over communities periodically and that without them communities would suffer more because frankly there isn’t anything else that does what a church does.  I believe that if all churches vanished tomorrow, by the end of the year there would be new ones, because people seem to need them.  They might not be called churches, but, like the organization in the Times piece, would serve all the social functions of one.

    I also feel that belief in god is not something that will ever go away.  There is a connection people need to feel to things larger than themselves and for many the amorphous thing they call god is it.  I dropped that notion when I realized that I felt exactly—exactly—the same feelings I’d felt toward god when in the grip of great music or in the presence of great art.  It is, in any of its manifestations, a human thing that takes us out of ourselves and shows us what the universe can mean, and there are many ways to tap into that.  There was a time when for the vast majority of people the Church was the only place to go to find that.  Seriously.  In one place, people could stand in the presence of grandeur that took them out of themselves and connected them to a larger realm, through the architecture, the music…and the stories.

    We live in a time when all those things can be experienced by many more people than ever before and in contexts shorn of the rather monopolistic trappings of religion.  Perhaps people do not consciously make that connection, but I think more and more people find that they are, for lack of a better term, spiritually fulfilled in the course of living a full life than was ever possible before.

    So I am careful about associating labels that may not be exactly correct to this growing phenomenon of people rejecting churches.  They are not all atheists.  Many may not be agnostics.  But all of them have discovered that the thing they sought in religion can be found without it.

    The best thing about this is that for all these people there is no one who can write them a threatening letter about hellfire and make them dance to a tune they no longer find danceable.

  • On Knocking ‘Em Dead

    By now I think everyone on the blogosphere has heard the story of Susan Boyle.   It is an amazing moment and I hope she goes on to do more, because this woman has the fire and the talent.

    You can tell, when you watch the video, that everyone in the audience and the judges thought this was a joke.  Here’s this dowdy, middle-aged woman with no looks and from a small town and with no creds who claims to want to be great and is going to sing a sentimental song from a musical and, well, shame on them and shame on us, she looked like she was going to croak like a frog.  So many people of like appearance do.  They step up on stage at the karaoke lounge and bellow or whine and it’s terrible and embarrassing and one hopes everyone was drunk enough not to care, but expectations get set.

    To be clear, people who look like that ought to have this kind of talent sound like frogs, too, but somehow we don’t characterize them that way.  We keep expecting beautiful people to be beautiful in everything, or at least to have the good taste to not try what they can’t do.

    One of the judges said that Susan’s performance was a wake-up call.  Indeed.

    I can’t sing.  I know this.  Even though, on occasion, with the right amount of brandy in my belly, I’ve been known to surprise a roomful of people, this is not a talent I have in any reliable measure.  And when I get nervous, it gets worse.

    But I can play piano and guitar and from time to time I’ve actually pulled off a minor coup in public performance.  The hindrance is always the nerves combined with my expectations.  I want to be great.

    And I know I’m not.

    I’m okay with that, though.  As much as I love music, it is not my first love, and playing okay is, well, okay with me.

    But it’s the guts to actually overcome self-consciousness enough to do what you know you can.  Susan Boyle has that.  I have no doubt there are many people who go onto those kinds of shows who really do have talent and blow it because, standing there in front of that audience and those judges, the little troll in the back of their brain tells them they can’t.  It is as much a talent and an ability to ignore that little shit as it is to then perform.  To some extent you have not care.

    But how do you do that when really you care so much it’s painful?

    The only way to shut that troll up is to do this kind of thing at least once.  And then again.  And again.  And so on.

    There was a girl in my grade school, a couple years behind me, who was the epitome of wall flower.  She could never manage to keep her hair combed right, her clothes never fit the way they should, and she muttered in class.  I found out later that she got straight A’s all through school, but she as unremarkable as they come.

    Because I was bullied through most of grade school, I made a deal with the teacher one year to be allowed to come in and play piano during recess.  I did this for a few months until I got in trouble for playing Never On Sunday (it was a parochial school).  A few others would come in, mostly girls, and listen.  I was not a great player by any stretch of the imagination then, but I was 12 and I could play I wasn’t playing hymns, so it was special.

    This girl came in a few times and once she asked if she could try.  There were giggles, but I slid aside and she sat down.

    She was 10 and proceeded to play Claire de Lune almost note perfect.  I recognized it because we had a lot of classical records at home, but the others didn’t.  Still, for about three minutes, it was mesmerizing.  Small hands, they nevertheless flew over the keys during the latter sections of the piece.

    When she finished, I said “That was terrific!  What else can you play?”  Whereupon she turned a brilliant red and ran from the classroom.  I never heard her play again.

    Now I hadn’t thought of her till I saw Susan Boyle.

    Never underestimate the power of human potential.  People will surprise you every time.  If they get a chance.  If they get a shot at living a dream.

    And we should never, ever laugh at someone’s dream.

  • Look What Amazon.com Is Doing

    Amazon.com has just initiated a new marketing policy. They are stripping away the sales ranking of any book with so-called Adult Content. Here’s their little explanation:

    “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

    Best regards, Ashlyn D Member Services Amazon.com Advantage

    What this mean in effect, however, is that books primarily with gay and lesbian content are being singled out for exclusion from database searches. It is being applied in a bigoted and surprisingly hamfisted manner to conform to someone’s standard of what constitutes Offensive Material. Adult Content generally means anything with more than coyly suggested sex in it.

    However, as a sample of the books not having their sales ranking stripped away, consider these:

    –Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)

    –Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love” (explicit heterosexual romance);

    –Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);

    –Bertrice Smal’s Skye o’Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances

    –and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

    These book sell very well, generally, so it’s obvious that there’s a dollar connection to this new policy. Midlist—the vast majority of books—will be targeted. Why is this important? Because this will delete titles from amazon search engines. It will make a dent in writers’ incomes. It will render invisible Those Sorts of Books. This is 1950s Era censorship and it is a threat to livelihoods as well as the general public’s right to choose what to read.

    Here is a cogent article about this.

    What I want to say right here has to do with the whole notion of isolating Adult Content to appease the screeching of those who would defend us from our own choices. We see this time and again and it is always the same appeal to Family Values, often expanded with a plea to Protect the Children. I see billboards in certain parts of the country now that declare that Pornography Destroys Families. We are meant to hide that part of ourselves from any kind of public display in the name of some sort of imagined “purity” that must be preserved among children so that they aren’t “damaged” by early exposure to human sexuality.

    I’m tired of it. It’s absurd. Not that I think kids ought to be exposed to pornography—not at all—but the whole idea that adults do not have a right to indulge in adult things, without being ashamed of it, from fear that junior might see something he or she is too young to deal with. It does not proctect the children, it makes adults self-conscious, and it falsely assumes that Adult Content is about things none of us should indulge or admit to indulging. It is the age old game of trying to shame people into denying their own sexuality because some people can’t deal with their own.

    And in this instance it has serious consequences for writers and publishers. Amazon.com is an enormous source of income for the publishing industry. Along with the mega-chain booksellers, they have the power to influence the acquisition choices of publishers. Which means that something like this can have a direct impact on the kinds of books that get bought and published.

    This is an offensive against a wide range of subject matter, topics, authors, and sensibilities. Not to mention that it is hypocritically applied. There is a petition here.

    To be sure, we are not talking exclusively or even largely about pornography. We are talking about work that addresses topics that include matters of adult concern regarding sex. By rights, this kind of policy would once again cast Catcher In The Rye back into the shadows of censorship. Censorship.

    It is illegal when the government does it to an already published book. But this is private industry and they set policy any way they please.

    However the power of the purse ultimately is in the hands of the consumer. We have been in some ways tyrannized over the last three decades by the persistent sensitization of protecting children from adulthood. We have been inundated with the suggestion that the private proclivities of some adults are too odious to be revealed or publicly discussed. In the seventh grade I was caught in class reading Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers. The principle thought this was serious enough to call my mother in for a conference. He made it clear by his word choice and body language that he expected my mother to be appaled at my choice of reading material. Instead, she said that she never censored what I read and that if I couldn’t handle something I wouldn’t read it and she would appreciate it if in future he would not censor me.

    She was largely correct. Most of what I read in that novel then went right by me. I don’t advocate handing out Harold Robbins novels to 14-year-olds, but I believe our readiness to panic over such things is ill-advised. Better to discuss these things with kids rather than slap them down or, worse, pretend such books don’t exist. But most importantly, we have to stop behaving as if becoming and adult and embracing adult things is somehow a degradation. I have said before, quite simply certain things are just not for children.  Parents should deal with it.  I do not accept for an instant that the world ought to be ordered exclusively for their level.

    I will not say for their benefit, because people who engage in this kind of idiotic social engineering are not, by and large, doing it for the children—they’re doing for themselves, for what they think the world ought to be like. Using the children is just an excuse.

    I’m tired of it. I think we should all be tired of it.

  • Oh, Please!

    Oh please, is there no respite from this sort of thing?  Over on Pharyngula is this little bit on the Vatican’s newest attempt to recruit an ideal priesthood, this time free of gays.

    Now, the Catholic Church has done screening for centuries.  They actually work hard to dissuade people from attempting to be priests because they know how difficult the various vows are to keep.  I don’t doubt for a minute that some of this screening is responsible, in kind of an unfortunate “unintended consequences” way, with the number of child sexual abuse cases that seem rampant more in the Catholic Church than in any other.  You screen for people who have “normal” sexual proclivities and eliminate the ones who probably won’t be able to maintain celibacy, you end up with (probably) a higher percentage of those who exhibit a lower than average normal sex drive, but may have a higher, shall we say, alternative proclivity…

    Anyway, that’s just my opinion.  But apparently the Vatican has decided there’s something to looking at alternative sexualities as a deal breaker, but for goodness sake the question still needs to be asked, just what is it they find so offensive and, we assume, dangerous about gays?

    By and large, the Catholic Church, for all its faults, possesses one of the more sophisticated philosophical approaches to life in all its manifestations among the various sects.  As a philosophy teacher of mine said once, “they seem to have a handle on what life is all about.”  Despite the very public embarrassments that emerge from the high profile conservative and reactionary elements within it, the Catholic Church probably has the healthiest worldview of the lot.  (I was a Lutheran in my childhood and believe me, in the matter of guilt the Catholics have nothing on Lutherans.)

    But they have been electing popes who seem bent on turning the clock back to a more intolerant and altogether less sophisticated age, as if the burden of dealing with humanity in its manifold variation is just too much for them.  They pine for the days when priests could lay down the law and the parish would snap to.  They do not want to deal with humanity in the abstract because it means abandoning certain absolutes—or the concrete—in lieu of a more gestalt understanding.  It would be hard work.

    And they have an image problem.  I mean, if you’re going to let people be people, then what’s the point of joining an elite group when there are no restrictions of the concept of what encompasses human?

    But really…this is just embarrassing.

  • The Irony of Conservatism

    Politics dictated FDA policy?  Say it isn’t so!

    According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda.

    What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call.

    The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue.  I mean, really—it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them.  You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one’s own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one’s life free from government meddling.  Handing both men and women the tools—provided by the free market, to boot—to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives.  They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger.

    What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism.

    Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol’ fashion American Values!  It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and  true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children.

    How did this happen?

    Well, it has occurred to me that one of the singularly binding features of human political reality is the in-built hypocrisy of claiming that you (whoever you are and under whatever system you live) wish to be free.  When you look at that claim—and Americans are by no means exempt—what it means in practice is the freedom to be autocratic in your own way.  Even back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan you heard members of the Mujahadeen claiming thay they were fighting to be free.  But free to do what?  And for whom?  Certainly they didn’t mean freedom for their womenfolk.  No, they meant freedom to be oppressive in their own unique way, and apparently it’s not much different here.

    Freedom is a slippery term.  Anyone with half a brain realizes that absolute freedom is not viable.  Freedom must be tempered by responsibility.  The edges of what constitutes responsible use of form is fuzzy, of course, and so we have laws to constrain those whose situations or philosophies run counter to the common good.  The irony of the pioneer image, the Mountain Man who went west to escape the constraints of civilization is that they never did and for the most part really didn’t want to.  The first thing settlers wanted once they had established themselves was law and order.  The mountain men were by and large entrepreneurs who depended on the civilization they supposedly disdained in order to make a living.  And they had to perforce accept the local laws of the native populations with whom they trafficked.  Freedom does not mean lawless.

    What it means is living within a framework according to your own desires.  You accept the framework while making your own place within it through your own choices and actions.  How well this works out depends on many things.

    When conservatives claim to represent American values for freedom, the image they seem to have in mind is one locked in the amber of time that discludes equality for women.  It is freedom for men.  Not that they do anything and whatever they might wish to do.  No, it is that men determine the framework and then work according to their will to build something within it.  But the image tends to ignore the framework, seeming to take it as given that it exists as something out of nature, god-given, pre-extant.  It is an old, hoary, knotty kind of image that harkens back to notions of the frontier and the need for growing populations and the presumed biblical virtues that allowed us to dominate this continent (displacing, killing, and otherwise bilking the natives out of the land along the way).  What it did not include was the image of women running businesses, holding political office, and certainly not bedding down with anyone they liked any time they liked just to have fun.

    Basically, though, women as equals alters the framework, and everyone has to shuffle to find a new way to live within it.

    So much for the vaunted champions of American individualism.  But still, it is a profound irony that the rhetoric—so powerful, so eloquent, so persuasive—should represent the polar opposite of what it is intended to.

    But some of them, apparently, seem to get it. Good for you, Judge Korman.

  • No, um, well, You Know What Over 18!!

    I have said for years that the convulsions of the Religious Right over abortion has less to do with fetuses than with sex.  Now that we have proof over time that Abstinence Only education DOES NOT WORK, these folks have decided that rather than recant they will go on an even wilder offensive by attacking university level programs.

    All I can do anymore is shake my head and wonder  “Just what is it with these people?”

    But what really annoys me are the many politicoes who go along with this nonsense and can’t seem to muster the nerve to tell them to, well, fuck off.  I mean, really—they can’t honestly be that numerous.

    Or can they?

  • Reading On The Rise

    According to this report, reading is on the rise in America for the first time in a quarter century.  It’s difficult for me to express how pleased this makes me.

    Civilization and its discontents have been in the back of my mind since I became aware of how little reading most people do.  To go into a house—a nice house,well-furnished, a place of some affluence—and see no books at all has always given me a chill, espeically if there are children in the house.  Over the last 30 years, since I’ve been paying attention to the issue, I’ve found a bewildering array of excuses among people across all walks of life as to why they never read.  I can understand fatigue, certainly—it is easier to just flip on the tube and veg out to canned dramas—but in many of these instances, reading has simply never been important.  To someone for whom reading has been the great salvation, this is simply baffling.

    Reading, I believe, is the best way we have to gain access to the world short of physically immersing ourselves in different places and cultures.  Even for those who have the opportunity and resource to travel that extensively, reading provides a necessary background for the many places that will be otherwise inaccessibly alien to our sensibilities.

    A book is a significant encoding of someone’s mind.  A life, if you will, which is why I tend to see bookburning as a form of homicide (euphemistically, mind you, but that’s about how strongly I feel about it).  When you read a book—and in this instance I mean a book of fiction or memoir or essay, something written in response to a desire or need to communicate something of the self (as opposed to instruction manuels or the like)—and comprehend what is there, you are sharing something profound with another human being whom you may never—can never, sometimes—meet.  The characters live when you let them, they walk around in the imagination, they show you things and take you places and teach.

    Oh, yes, they teach.  They give us the opportunity to know different kinds of human being, in different ways, and while we might not embrace those ways or people or wish to emulate them, we can know them.  Deep reading opens the world for us.

    Movies and television do not do this.  Not that they can’t, mind you, but because we are passive receptors to what passes pre-digested before us, our participation—our active interrogation of the text, if you will—is barely brought into play.  Where in reading we must participate by “decoding” what is on the page and partner with the author is bringing the images to life in our own imaginations, film does all that for us.

    For those who are deeply read or deeply sensitive, what can be derived from film and theater can certainly be rich in its own way, but I have found over time that those who read as much as they watch have richer reactions to what passes on the screen, have better conversations about what they have just seen, have more to bring to the piece than those who do not read.

    Reading builds intellectual muscle in ways that cannot be done by other media.

    This is, perhaps, mere personal prejudice, but I think not.  I think the broad, multifaceted internal lives developed by the habit of reading over time makes us better able to understand more of the world around us.

    Granted, one could spend one’s life reading nothing but one kind of thing, being stuck in a rut with a single strand of literature, and thus trapping the very process which reading ought to enable…

    But to not read at all seems to me a self impoverishment.  A tragedy.

    So for me this NEA report is nothing but excellent news. For the first time as a reader and writer and an advocate of reading, I am hopeful that I will not be continually in a shrinking minority.

    It’s a good day.

  • The Future On The Chopping Block…Again

    I should state up front here that I really don’t have a problem ideologically with Federal Spending.  That great boogieman of right vs. left.  I pay taxes, I want things for it.  And I frankly like most of what I end up paying for.  I’d like to see priorities shift, but I don’t believe cutting the budget will accomplish that.  I’d like to see an expand space program.  I would like to see an expanding educational budget.  I would love a sensible national health care program.  I would like to see less spending on weapons systems that never get out of planning or away from prototype and I would certainly like to see less government subsidy of pointless corporate programs that would best be served by shareholders telling their boards of directors what to do with company money.  I dislike intensely public funding of sports arenas, for instance, particular for corporations that could pay for them out of petty cash.

    It’s not that I desire a welfare state—I agree with many of the opponents of welfare that it tends to be destructive over time, but I disagree with them that it necessarily must be so, but we’re not going to settle that argument any time soon.  (The problems are in implementation and then a lack of any kind of support that would meaningfullly get people off the dole and self-sufficient—like child care, free health care, and jobs training.  We get those things here and there, occasionally, depending on the whims of the prevailing party, and when they are there they are shown to work, but we can’t quite get out of the mindset that tells us that these things are handouts to the undeserving, statistics to the contrary notwithstanding.)

    Just so we’re clear about how I stand on government spending. Now, then.

    The rhetoric that accompanied Obama’s election included much from the downsized Republicans about looking forward to working with the new president and coming to grips with national problems in the spirit of a fresh start.  However, the stimulus package—which may well be too big—has forced the Republicans to declare themselves.  We’re hearing a lot about wanting more tax cuts—almost exclusively tax cuts—in lieu of spending in the form of direct aid.  This is a Republican mantra now.  Tax cuts.  The question, of course, is really this:  what good are tax cuts when you’re already buried in debt?  Granted, it frees up (theoretically) money for critical and immediate payments, but if the idea is to put people back to work tax cuts are not the solution.  Because corporate America is mired in over-leveraged debt burdens that must be paid down before something mundane like hiring can happen.  Tax cuts, therefore, won’t have any kind of immediate impact on the jobless rate.  In time it might, depending on several other factors, the most significant of which would be a newfound corporate sense of ethics which would prevent them from continuing the pillage of their own capital for all the things that have gotten us into this mess in the first place.  Labor is at the bottom of the ladder of what they see as important—hence the tongue lashing Obama gave them for paying out bonuses while asking for federal aid.  As for working people?  What good does a tax cut do someone who isn’t paying taxes because he or she has no income?

    But this was to be expected.  It is an attitude born out of the mixed priorities of what has become the Right, one of which is fiscal responsibility (I used to support Republicans on this count) the other of which is the more Libertarian view (borne of the Grover Norquist faction) that government is always the problem and must be pruned back radically.  Hence tax cuts, in order to curtail revenues in order to force the government to reduce its size and, one must realize, its influence.

    This was to be expected, though.  They have to stick by their perceived brief in the hope that not all of their program of the last eight (or twenty-eight) years was rejected by the part of their constituency who switched parties to vote in Obama and Democratic majorities in both Houses.

    But now we have a fairly clear statement that these folks are a new form of Ostrich.  Obama made it clear during the campaign and since taking office that he intends to put science back in the forefront of our national life.  The steady erosion of science by continual right wing gnawing since Reagan took office has left us in a bad state in relation to the rest of the world in terms even hard core Republicans must grasp—competitiveness.  The canceling of the Super Colider in Texas was bad enough, but we’ve seen all manner of sidelining of science, most especially during the Bush years, most prominently (but not exclusively) with regards to environmental science.  Basic research is down, exploratory science is struggling.  While the late and (by many) unlamented Senator Proxmire did inestimable damage to science by making it the object of ridicule and derision, the fact is that during the Fifties, Sixties, and good part of the Seventies it had been because of our national investment in Pure Research that America ended up at the vanguard of science.  The payback from NASA’s Apollo program alone in areas as disparate as meteorology and medical technology is almost incalculable.

    What characterized this was the willingness to take risks.  Let scientists research what they would on the assumption that somewhere along the line something would emerge that would benefit everyone.  It was a gamble, but of a win-win vareity.  Things did result, technologies and fundamental insights that propelled our education, our understanding and, yes, our economy in ways that could not have been predicted.

    The unpredictable nature of it drives certain types of people insane.

    Reagan’s assumption when he took office was that if we cut out the government involvement in—well, in anything—then the private sector would move in and take up the slack.  Nice idea and on paper there was nothing wrong with it, except it didn’t happen.  (Personally, I think Reagan was one of our most gullible presidents—big business told him “Ronny, take the restraints off and we will make this country great, we will be responsible corporate citizens, we’ll do great things for America” and he believed them.  (Top be fair, in some cases those corporate entities probably did do their best, but most just entered upon the feeding frenzy deregulation permitted and we’re paying for it now.)  Reagan believed them and they took what he gave them and screwed the country.  In terms of fundamental scientific research, corporate spending on it declined fairly steadily since them.  (One of the most productive research facilities in history, Bell Labs, is pulling out of basic research (an announcement made in August 2008) after years of declining funding which left only four scientists in the institution doing any kind of pure science.)  Corporate America cannot stand paying for gambles, even when historically this gamble pays off magnificently.  (The shareholders would rather have the money in their dividend checks.)

    So when Obama declared a recommitment to science, given his otherwise pragmatic vision, it was clear that he understood that in order for there to be a future, we have to look for one.  And to look for it in such a way that it will benefit us as we go.

    The stimulus package included a great deal of money—minuscule compared to the overall amount—for the various science departments which have been all but strangled over the last decade.  According to this link through Panda’s Thumb, Republicans want to cut deeply into science.

    The most egregious cut in this list in the excision a billion dollars—the whole stimulus allocation—for the Nation Science Foundation.  But nothing is left untouched.

    The most obvious conclusion to draw, as if that had not already become clear from all the other wrangling over this, is that the Republican leadership simply doesn’t get it, that they don’t see the connection between the free and subsidized exploration of all those things coming under the heading “Science” and the growth of both economic prosperity and the human spirit.

    A less obvious conclusion, and perhaps a bit on the fringe of reasonable, is that Republicans, conjoined as they are to elements in our society which have for lo these many years done everything possible to destroy our confidence in science and our attachment to its products, both intellectual and material, cannot countenance increased support of the very institutions whose pronouncements they have denied and thwarted at every turn.  It is disconcerting to see such a thorough-going denial of investment in the very fields that might—will probably, in fact almost certainly given its track record—do the most to improve our future.

    But it is the future that is the enemy.  It is the certainty that it will be different and that we must change in order to live in it that disturbs what has become a large segment of the Republican Party’s natural constituency.  It is a denial of all that we must face and, more importantly, all that we must embrace in order to become what we’ve been declaring since WWII that we are—the bright beacon of freedom in the world.

    The spending on infrastructure, on schools, on basic support mechanisms is being condemned by Republicans as unnecessary spending, because it is not stimulatory.  But everyone will use those things and because they won’t have to rely on some private entity to do or not do them depending on the whims of the shareholders they will be there for everyone to take advantage of.  (The interstate highway system enabled a huge spurt of economic growth once it was constructed.  The benefits to transportation allowed business to increase profits.  True, it also enabled White Flight and has created the problem of Suburban and Exurban sprawl, but that too was a spur to economic growth.  Yet critics at the time saw it as “wasteful” spending.)

    There is a link in the article to the legislators who are part of this demand to shut down a potential road to a better future.  Perhaps we should gear up now to see that they are ousted in the next election cycle.

    But then, maybe you think all this money for basic science is a bad idea, too.  After all, science is all about the future and the world and the universe and tells us things that make us different.  Scary.

    And exciting.