The Compulsive Explainer

Liberals are Useless

Chris Hedges in Truthdig

The photo is of a German woman buying a box of candy with Obama's picture on it.

Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.

He goes on to say:

The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

He is referring to his fellow liberals here.

I have Chris Hedges latest book: Empire of Illusion, the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle. Like many others, he describes the pickle we are in.  But he doesn't back off enough to get an historical perspective on how we got here.

Neil Postman, who followed in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan, did a much better job of this. He masterpiece was Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). It was translated into eight languages and sold 200,000 copies worldwide - but has since has been smashed by the landslide he warned us about: television culture.

We know more and more, and therefore we know less and less

Much of the following is taken from the book The Tyranny of the Moment by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, first published in Norwegian. He is saying much the same as Maggie Jackson in Distraction, which I have mentioned in my posting Cultural Attention Deficit Disorder.

At first glance, what he says makes no sense, surely we should try to know as much as possible. But I, for one, have reached the limit of what I can absorb, and I am sure others have too. What I write is falling on deaf ears - not because the owners are stupid or lazy, but because they are into terminal overload - and they have to shut down to protect themselves.

But they are completely unaware of this; cannot see the danger in their situation; and cannot slow down.

I quote:

When there is a surplus, and no scarcity, of information, the degree of comprehension falls in proportion with the growth in amount of information.

One has to limit one's information out of consideration for one's knowledge. Often, students write their best papers about the topics they are least familiar with; this forces them to structure, justify and argue better than they usually do, and the main argument does not drown in details. Put differently: after spending six months in a foreign country, you can write a book. After ten years, you can I write an article. The more you know, the more you do not know. This general principle is part of the human condition in the information society. 

I must repeat the premise of this argument: this happens when too much information is available - something we are normally proud of. Is there a solution? Yes, and he goes into it later:

The main scarce resource for inhabitants of the information society is well-functioning filters.

Often this means giving yourself some time out - something our hectic life-style makes difficult. 

I will be coming back to him in future postings.

The Latest from John le Carré

From Wikipedia:

John le Carré (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell, born 19 October 1931) is an English author of espionage novels, several of which have been adapted for film and television. He worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s, before leaving the secret service to devote himself to writing after the success of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.

Le Carré states he did not know his mother, who abandoned him at the age of five, until he was reacquainted with her at the age of 21. He had a difficult relationship with his father, who had been jailed for insurance fraud and was constantly in debt.

I knew none of this; I only knew he wrote excellent spy-thrillers, which I have enjoyed. He has not hesitated to expose the high-level incompetence that seems to pervade the profession - and this is part of his appeal.

His latest is A Most Wanted Man, and it is up to his usual standards. The enemy now are Islamic radicals, but the operators portrayed here are probably innocent. The man in the middle is trying to develop them as leads into a terrorist network - resources that are badly needed. But he is opposed by those who not interested in anything so subtle - they want to arrest them, using dubious means, and torture them: mainly American operatives.

A Comic Book about the Foundations of Mathematics

I buy too many books, and I spend too much time reading. But this book is an exception: it's like nothing else I, or anybody else, have ever seen. 

First, the authors: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou. Greeks obviously, although the later is the C. Lester Hogan professor of Computer Science at the UCSB Berkeley. The artists are Alecos Papadotos and his wife Annie di Donna, who is French. The book was published originally in Greece - where it became a best-seller. It should become a best-seller here. 

I haven't read a comic book since I was a wee tad, but I am thoroughly enjoying this one. Lots of humor and great graphics. It's about Bertrand Russell, with a heavy emphasis on his early life, which was far from ideal - even though he came from one of the first families of England. They had lots of skeletons and lots of closets to put them in. 

The book is called Logicomix. 

The Devil in History

From the NY Review of Books

This was a lecture given by Leszek Kolakowsky at Harvard in 1987. Even if I had been there at the time, I would not have gone. Kolakowsky was a renowned scholar of Marxism:

Kołakowski's perspective is further complicated by the skeptical distance that he maintained from the uncritical nostrums of official religion (not least his own, Catholicism) and by his unique standing as the only internationally renowned scholar of Marxism to claim equal preeminence as a student of the history of religious thought.^[3] Kołakowski's expertise in the study of Christian sects and sectarian writings adds depth and piquancy to his influential account of Marxism as a religious canon, with major and minor scriptures, hierarchical structures of textual authority, and heretical dissenters.

Among his criticisms of Marxism was this:

It was a defining feature of Leszek Kołakowski's intellectual trajectory that he took evil extremely seriously. Among Marx's false premises, in his view, was the idea that all human shortcomings are rooted in social circumstances. Marx had "entirely overlooked the possibility that some sources of conflict and aggression may be inherent in the permanent characteristics of the species."^[1] Or, as he expressed it in his Harvard lecture: "Evil...is not contingent...but a stubborn and unredeemable fact." For Leszek Kołakowski, who lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Soviet takeover that followed, "the Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously."^[2]

I have just spent part of an after noon explaining my reservations about Socialism, or Marxism, - and haven't done a very good job of it, but he puts the whole thing very well:
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He had little patience for those who supposed, in the teeth of twentieth-century history, that radical political improvement could be secured at little moral or human cost—or that the costs, if significant, could be discounted against future benefits. On the one hand he was consistently resistant to all simplified theorems purporting to capture timeless human verities. On the other, he regarded certain self-evident features of the human condition as too obvious to be ignored, however inconvenient:

There is nothing surprising in the fact that we strongly resist the implications of many banal truths; this happens in all fields of knowledge simply because most truisms about human life are unpleasant.^[5]

On the other hand he summarizes its contributions well also:

Whatever has been done in Western Europe to bring about more justice, more security, more educational opportunities, more welfare and more state responsibility for the poor and helpless, could never have been achieved without the pressure of socialist ideologies and socialist movements, for all their naïveties and delusions.... Past experience speaks in part for the socialist idea and in part against it.

California's Golden Age

Book review in Truthdig

His most recent volume, “Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance 1950-1963,” covers what might be seen as the state’s true Golden Age. To be sure, there is some intriguing history before—the evolution of Hollywood in the 1920s, the reaction to the Depression and the fevered buildup during the Second World War—but this was California’s great moment, its Periclean peak or Augustan age.

“It was a time of growth and abundance,” Starr writes in his preface, and provides the numbers to prove it. In 1950, California was home to 10.7 million, making it a large state to be sure, but hardly a dominant one. By the early 1960s, the population passed 16 million, slipping by New York state in population.

Yet it was not a mere matter of numbers that made California so appealing or important. It was the idea of California as not only a part of America, but also something more. To millions in America and around the world, California grew to mean opportunity, sunshine and innovation.
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I missed this Golden Age: Beth and I got there in 1968. But there were still echoes hanging around, and I wished I had been there then. And when I got to Silicon Valley in 1990 (no longer married), it too was past its peak.

Glamour and Deep Feelings of Inadequacy

I have a young Tico friend who wants a glamorous career in Hollywood desperately: he can't resist the allure of fame and fortune. He is cynical of American culture in general, but not this. He is not the first one to be trapped by Tinsel Town, and he knows that, but he cannot bear to see the problems he is fleeing from: probably deep feelings of insecurity and inadequacy - no doubt bequeathed to him by his parents. The same feelings that drove Norma Jean Baker.

I just finished listening to a book by Richard Russo, an author new to me. His latest: That Old Cape Magic is awesome. It goes into these same problems: the parent and glamour trap (the main character was once a screen writer in Hollywood). This is one of the oldest stories in history, updated for contemporary America. When I first heard it, I immediately hoped it would translated into Spanish - and this would help Latinos understand America - something they do not understand at all - and something that impacts them enormously, economically and culturally.

Their universities should offer courses on it, but do not. Their culture continues to be spell-bound by ours, and they have no way of resisting it. To put it another way: America's most powerful export is American popular culture - in my opinion, the worst part of ourselves.

I was scuba-diving in the Maldives once at a resort that catered to Germans, I was the only American there. What kind of music did they play? The latest American popular music. I was astonished - but I found that true all over Europe. I suppose that is true all over the world - American fashions are now the world's fashions. But I see I have digressed, I started to write about parents and feelings of inadequacy. I would not be surprised to find this also is a world-wide phenomena, it certainly has become so in Costa Rica. Another gift of America: dysfunctional families.

It amazes me that at the same time this tragedy was becoming common on America (in my generation) there was also a nearly-religious belief in family values. The horrible family was being worshiped!

Here again, the vast split in America culture is obvious: the more advanced are well-aware of the problem, and have been for a long time, but conservatives resist this knowledge viciously. (The world vicious is appropriate here.) They insist nothing was wrong with their families-of-origin, and nothing is wrong with America - except for those damn liberals who are trying to destroy the country - and destroy family values! 

John Irving, Literary Novelist

I have listened to two of his books, and don't know what to make of them. They are long and I keep asking myself "Why do I keep on I listening to this?" But I keep listening anyway.

Usually, you get hooked on a book because it is emotionally satisfying. I recommended the movie The Bridges of Madison County to a woman friend, she bought it, and couldn't stop watching it. There was so little love in her life (as she never tired of telling me) that she couldn't get enough of it. 

Irving's novels are not about love, they have only as much love in them as most person's lives do (not much). The plots are complicated - only because that makes the story more interesting. There is a considerable interest in violence and perversions - but these are not overemphasized. 

I am almost finished with A Widow for a Year, which includes a lot about novelists and novel writing in with the plot - obviously one of Irving's personal obsessions.

It made me glad I am not a novelist - in my experience, some of life's saddest, most disappointed people.

The Warped Genius Novelist

Novelists must have a strange outlook on life; they must be strange enough to be interesting, but not so strange it turns people off. They must appeal to certain groups of readers, but not others. Nobody can please everybody, no matter how hard they try.

This posting is about John Irving, who became wealthy from his novel The World According to Garp. This book was strange, no doubt about that, but the kind of strangeness many people liked. He instantly had a global audience—something any writer—or almost anyone else, would die for.

My grandmother was a novelist too, albeit one with only modest skills. She would analyze successful books and try to imitate them—and failed completely. In that racket you gotta be original, and keep being original. You gotta keep everybody guessing. Poor grandma could do neither. She was a wonderful grandmother to me—but this was not what the world wanted to hear about. It was not perverted enough.

She was gifted at one thing, however: writing homilies. She would think of some devout idea during church services—then rush home and type it up before it got cold. She supported her family during the depression by writing what she called homilopes: homilies on offering envelopes. One company supplied boxes of offering envelopes sufficient for entire year in advance. Churches would then give these to their faithful so they could make generous gifts without anyone in the congregation knowing how much that was.

Only the Internal Revenue Service got to know how much—and you could be sure they checked that carefully. The church financial officer kept all those envelopes, with the amount carefully noted on each. Even the IRS knew they had to trust someone like him.

Unfortunately for our family, a large extended family, not a single one of Grandmother's homilies has survived. She never even tried to save them; they were just something she dashed off in her spare moments. How strange fate is.

But I digress, I started to write about John Irving—and entirely different kind of creature without a religious bone in him. Something that has evidently not bothered his readers. Religious types would find him offensive—very offensive, for his sexually explicit content. Exactly what most sexually deprived readers eat up with a spoon. There must be a lot of them.

I am not only a depraved consumer of Irving's stuff—I like him recorded. I save it for the last thing before I go to sleep—that way it has a direct path to my receptive brain. My dreams are creative, like Irving is—but sometimes disturbing. I sometimes have to get up in the middle of the night to write myself.

The Deterioration of the American Mind

America has fallen both externally and internally. Our external situation, our pecking order in the world, is well-known to everybody. Our internal situation, the state of our minds, is practically unknown - especially to us, the people who should be thinking the most about it. This is probably because we don't do much thinking about anything - our thinking skills have deteriorated dramatically - and we could care less.

We seem to think that thinking is only for stupid people - people who aren't already in the know. People who know the right way to be intuitively. People who know nothing, and don't want to know. The perfect people for today's world - at least in America.

I have an expert to back me up: Maggie Jackson in her book Distracted. From page 233:

The American Philosophical Association in part defines critical thinking as purposeful self-regulatory judgment. Americans are missing the self-regulation part. 

Unless people develop the competencies to sustain delay and continue to exercise their will when they want and need to do so, the choice itself is lost.

Perhaps attention is the true missing key to better learning. Without the powers of focus, awareness, and judgment that fuel self-control, we cannot fend off distractions, set goals, manage a complex, changing environment, and ultimately shape the trajectory of our lives.

We should be concerned by the fact that most campuses are plagued by high dropout rates, lukewarm gains in critical thinking and reflective judgment, and low engagement with the life of the mind.

A disturbing 35-year old longitudinal study by Alexander Astin reports that 80 percent of incoming college students in the 1960s called "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" their most essential goal, while 45 percent chose "being very well off" as their primary aim. Today, their values have shifted markedly. Nearly 74 percent of freshmen rate being wealthy as essential, while 43 percent chose life philosophy as most important.

Most Americans agree that ADHD is an American disease, as I wrote earlier.

Those with ADHD suffer from forgetfulness and impulsivity, traits that impair their ability to shape the course of their lives."The child with ADHD will be more under the control of external events that of mental representations about time and future, under the influence of others rather than acting to control the self, pursuing immediate gratification over deferred gratification and under the influence of the temporal now more than of the probable social futures that lie ahead."

ADHD is a disorder of "attention to the future and what one needs to do to prepare for its arrival. It is a disorder of time."

I suffer from this too. My stomach walks in the door before I do, fed by lots of instant gratification. My bank account is just the opposite.