New York Diary

a link

Okay, so it turns out I'm not housing my new blog at worlddiary. Instead, link here:

http://thiswideworld.blogspot.com

And that really is the end.

posted by Skay @ 10:32 PM 1 comments

-end-

Dear friends,

It's been two weeks since my last post and I think it's fair to say that this blog is now defunct. I've really enjoyed this excercise in virtual community, and I think there have been some good and interesting exchanges. Thanks to all who read and all who have posted comments. I'm surprised to say that I feel I've made a couple of friends this way (which is something completely unexpected--I was just hoping to keep thinking about the world around me, and possibly to keep distant friends and relatives posted on my whereabouts and activities). For those of you who I don't know in person but who sent me emails or replied to various posts, thank you. I am much more optimistic about "new media" and much more willing to accept that online communities really ARE communities now that I've spent a reasonable amount of time perusing them.

I rarely post about my personal life, but (oddly) I feel I owe some sort of explanation for my sudden departure. For those of you who know me personally and were shocked to see that I became a corporate hack, you'll be pleased to know that I've handed in my resignation. Don't get too excited: the exercise in shameless capitalism was a good thing, and I'm certainly not ruling out a glorious return to the private sector. I freely confess I've grown partial to lavish quarterly parties and snazzy corporate logos, not to mention my 401(k), dental insurance, and year-end bonus check. I know what I'm leaving behind, and it is a lot.

But I've always had vague plans to travel extensively. Now I will indulge them. If there's anything that being established in New York has given me, it's a renewed sense of wanderlust, along with a bankroll to finance it. In March, I fly to my home away from home in Indonesia, where I will meet old friends. From there, the world awaits.

I do love this city, though. When I started this blog, I was very much an outsider commenting upon this one-of-a-kind, crazy, glamorous, wonderful place that I was watching from my balcony. Now I'm as much a part of the scene as an observor: I care who the mayor is, whether the baseball field has artificial turf, and that too few people visit the Brooklyn Museum of art. I know where to get fantastic sushi and stylish drinks and I can wander around the Village without getting lost in the backstreets. I like it here.

But I don't think I could live in New York long-term. I miss trees and yards, beautiful vistas, knowing my neighbors, driving fast on empty roads, and a million other things that simply have no place in this city. I think I miss the academic world, too; getting paid to read is perhaps the greatest luxury there is. I'll probably go back to school before I get another "real" job (though, having had an intellectually stimulating job with great friends already, I'm still not entirely sure about this).

The next month or so is a haze of planning for my departure: moving out of the apartment, finalizing visas, wrapping up at work. I'm going to try to keep a blog while I'm on the road, too; check back at www.worlddiary.blogspot.com in March. (If I use another site instead, I'll let you know in an update here.)

Finally, you can all write to me at the addresses below. I promise a post card to anybody who does so (if I get your letter, at least). Also, if you're one of those regular readers who lives in Europe, Asia, or Africa, I'll be swinging through your neck of the woods in the next year. Want to meet up?

So long, all. It's been an awful lot of fun.

posted by Skay @ 10:35 AM 0 comments

ADDRESSES, as promised

Yogyakarta (mail by March 1):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
Poste Restante
Kantor Pos Yogyakarta
Java, INDONESIA

Bottom right-hand corner:
Tolong simpan sampai 19 Maret 2007.

---

Vienna (mail by March 18):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express Travel Service
Kaerntnerstrasse 21-23
Vienna, Austria A-1010

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until April 15 2007

---

Moscow (for first pickup, mail by April 2; for second pickup, by May 15):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express Travel Service
Улица Усачёва 33
Дом 1
Москва 119048
RUSSIA

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 8 June 2007


LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM c/o American Express Travel Service
Usacheva Street 33
Building 1
Moscow 119048

You can try the English address above if the Cyrillic is giving you a hard time, but no guarantees it'll make it there.

---

Beijing (mail by April 15):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
Poste Restante
GPO Beijing
Jianguomen Beidajie
Beijing
CHINA
(phone 6512 8120)

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 26 April 2007

---

Istanbul (mail by June 4):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
Poste Restante
Merkez Postanesi
Istanbul
TURKEY

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 27 June 2007

---

Cairo (mail by July 2):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express
15 Sharia Qasr el-Nil
Down Town
Cairo
EGYPT

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 13 July 2007

---

Casablanca (mail by July 20):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express
4 Rue Turgot
Quartier Racine
Casablanca 20100
MOROCCO

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 15 August 2007

---

Rome (mail by August 15):

LOWEY-BALL, SHAWNAKIM
c/o American Express Travel Services
Piazza Di Spagna 38
Roma 00187
ITALY

Bottom right-hand corner:
Please hold until 30 August 2007

posted by Skay @ 2:40 AM 1 comments

Experiment, Part 2

Hey folks. I've been kind of out of commission, but now I'm back, ready to pick up and see if anybody other than Noir actually read the Chesterton story. (Tangentially, in the meantime I read Corelli's Mandolin, and it was great. Highly recommended, especially as a study in human and humane moral ambiguities. Nobody is precisely evil, though many do terrible things; no one is precisely good, though we are nonetheless compelled to sympathize with a few main characters. Obviously, this contrasts distinctly with the Chesterton piece.)

On to Chesterton. I really like Thursday, both the straight adventure/detective story and because of the surreal twists at the end. Surely the chase scene must win some sort of award, too: foot to steed to car to fire engine, elephant, and hot air balloon... what more could one desire?

Oh, you desire questions, too, and attendant thoughts? It's your lucky day.

The Questions

1. Is this a book about the superiority of order over anarchy? Or is it a book about the unity of order and anarchy?

My first impression was the former; Zq's was the latter. Both seem plausible to me. To be sure, all of the heroes idealize order and are fighting against chaos in the world in this book; indeed it is just this struggle that is going on when the book opens and Gregory and Syme are facing off about the nature of poetry. If Syme is the hero and Gregory the villain, then perhaps we should say with Syme that "the rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.... Every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos." This is Syme's battle, and Syme is Chesterton's hero.

But there is a compelling counterargument which points out that it is evil and chaos in the world that make order a possible choice for Syme. If Syme is a hero because he makes right choices, then surely there is some great value in the chaos that he tries to eschew (and, despite that fact, in which he constantly finds himself embroiled). Most importantly, the seeming chaos in Syme's world is not random; it is in fact a carefully controlled anarchy that leads Syme inexorably to his preordained place at the end of the book. If it is chaotic, it is also both predicted and ordered. Perhaps, then, we should say that, on a human scale at least, Chesterton is arguing for a kind of unity of the passions.

But to me, Thursday just doesn't seem to be drawing the necessary sort of equivalence between anarchy and order. It seems instead to be an apologetics for evil in the world, and it asks us to equate evil with anarchism. Perhaps Chesterton is indeed saying that most evil is illusory, or that it is necessary that even good people surrounded by uniformly good people should feel themselves alone and embattled--but this is because they have right opinions about real evil (even if that real evil is, well, unrealized), not because there is no real evil. It does seem to me that we are meant to take a passion for true chaos to be the great evil in the world, and quite distinct from a love of order and right and goodness.

2. What does it mean that the book is subtitled "A Nightmare?"

Of course this suggests the dreamlike, surreal, and unbelievable ending to what began as a well-grounded and recognizable thriller. But it also seems to suggest that Syme's world is undesirable. This seems nonobvious to me. Can we tell from this book what would be more desirable? Perhaps a world in which there is no struggle between good and bad? Or a world in which nobody has a predisposition towards anarchy?

Or perhaps this book is nightmarish simply because nothing is as it seems. Everybody goes around in disguise; good people fight against other good people; the biggest bad guy is also the greatest moral force in the world. I don't know.

3. Do you think the book has any real implications for earthly governance?

Thursday is, of course, allegorical, but on its face it is also about anarchy and government in our world. Must Chesterton think--well, anything coherent at all--about governance here on this earth, in order to maintain a consistency with his allegory or his theology?

The obvious claim, I think, is that privileging predictability over revolt and order over anarchy would argue always against revolution. There some big differences, however, between trying to overthrow God and trying to overthrow one's government (not the least of which are 1. God is definitionally good, and 2. It is possible to successfully overthrow one's government). So much of the dialogue is political argument, though, that I wonder if there are any real political opinions being expressed.

4. What the hell is going on with the notes during the chase scene?

I mean this most sincerely. I just don't get it. Here I'm talking about the notes that Sunday leaves for Our Heroes the Days of the Week as they chase him around: "The word, I fancy, should be 'pink'" and "Your beauty has not left me indifferent.--From LITTLE SNOWDROP" and "What about Martin Tupper now." Are these just random? It seems so unlikely. Beautifully, Chesterton's book is tightly ordered from the start (much as it claims all things ought to be, if you buy what I'm saying under question # 1). This is allegory, and from the beginning each secret agent somehow embodies the day of Creation that he represents. Having finished the book, if one goes back to the beginning and restarts it one finds right away that Chesterton is giving away the game to anybody who is paying attention. (The obvious fact that the police commissioner is the same fellow as Sunday only reconfirms this consistency from the start.) The story develops in unexpected ways, but it is anything but random. (In fact, this might itself be another remove of allegory: just as Syme's story is carefully crafted by Sunday, but seems chaotic, desperate, and uncertain to him, The Man Who Was Thursday has been similarly organized and pored over, despite the fact that it seems to us to be moving swiftly and wildly towards the absurd.) As a result, I feel like there should be some satisfying interpretation of these notes that Sunday sends to the members of the Council. But what could it be?

5. Doesn't Thursday imply that human suffering imparts moral force?

Chesterton seems to be answering the "Why is there suffering in the world?" question not by the (perpetually unsatisfying) appeal to free will, but rather by saying that the suffering of his heroes provides an answer to Gregory's otherwise-valid sense of moral superiority. This seems at first to be a much better answer than saying, "Well, we must have suffering in order to have free choice." By making his agents know loneliness, fear, faithlessness, and battle, Sunday negates Gregory's ability to take the moral high ground when he stands alone against a much greater power. No longer can Gregory portray his anarchism as a noble struggle against those who are perfect and who, consequently, have never have known any sort of suffering at all; we all know that it is precisely playing into the hands of Chesterton's God when Gregory expounds, "The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme.... You sit in your chairs of stone, and have never come down from them. You are the seven angels of heaven, and you have had no troubles. Oh, I could forgive you everything, you that rule all mankind, if I could feel for once that you had suffered for one hour a real agony such as I...." Of course the "seven angels" have come down from their thrones, have suffered real agony, and are therefore entirely unconvinced (as are we, the readers).

But what kind of world is it where suffering imparts moral force? We can see that Gregory's monologue is deliciously misguided, but taking a step back from the literary, I just don't see why it is necessary to have good people suffer real agonies just to deflate his victories. Is it such a great good, after all, that the good folks should, by virtue of their own harships, be able to ignore the sufferings of the bad people? If Gregory's stance appeared noble, is it less so because of what another, unrelated person has experienced? And if it is actually ignoble, is that affected by what Bull or Syme or the Professor has been through? Surely not. Yet Chesterton does seem to require this reading. Gregory's anarchism is base because one can suffer nobly for a good cause just as well as for a bad one.

How odd. And how undesirable in a world.

Perhaps that's why the book is a nightmare?

posted by Skay @ 7:27 PM 3 comments

Life, Love, and Death at the Operahouse

Zyl and I went to the opera tonight. Regular readers of this blog already know about my predeliction for opera and they're good enough not to be too harsh about my lack of modern cultural literacy (I don't even own a TV, for goodness's sake, but I do like to go hear the Verdi), so I'll spare you the full-blown account of tonight's awesomeness. Suffice it to say that Hei-Kyung Hong was uncomfortable on the high notes; Wookyung Kim was a very, very solid Alfredo; Charles Taylor made a fantastic Germont with an easy, rich, well-developed baritone; the set was as impressive as ever at the Met; and somehow Zyl managed to score us seats in the center of the front row of the balcony at a Metropolitan Opera production of La Triviata. Surely these were the best seats in the house.

There is a fine line between being so brilliant that people don't understand what you're saying and being so crazy that they don't believe you even when they do understand. Most of the time, I think, Fred Ahl finds himself on the more desirable side of this line (though he certainly has his wacky moments). Operas tend to end in ways that are rather melodramatic--and rather depressing. There are exceptions, of course (The Magic Flute comes to mind), but even when circumstances turn out exactly as one would hope, the main characters tend unnecessarily to die and to do so in dramatic fashion. This is especially true in Triviata, where Verdi manages to stretch a death scene into a whole act, and where about seven times you are convinced that our heroine is well, is cured, is feeling better, is renewed by having the love of her life back in her life, etc., only to suddenly see her collapse once again and then finally die with her repentant lover by her side. It could have been such a happy ending! And the give and take, the "now-I'm-feeling-better-and-I-shall-go-out, oh-wait-now-I'm-feeling-ill-again-and-I'm-sure-I-shall-die" literally made me laugh aloud at the operahouse. Verdi must have had a grand time watching his first audience react: "Oh no! She'll die!" "No, wait, she's well again!" "No, she's deathly pale!" "Yes!" "No!" "How will it all end?" The whole thing is very silly.

Fred Ahl (remember him?) introduced me to the very clever notion that Frenchmen and Italians are far more likely to think of love and death as ready compliments, while ourselves and the Germans are wont to find this notion a bit odd. This is for the simple reason that "l'amour" is nicely alliterative with "la mort" (as is "l'amore" with "la morte") while "love" and "life" (and "liebe" and "leben") are natural poetic partners in our more Germanic, less Latinate language. This has snowball effects: we might not remember Marlowe's

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields...

But his turn of speech has made it down through the years and is engrained in popular culture. Indeed, we hear resonances of the same idea all the time when we urge others to "love life" and even when we talk about our "love lives." Love and life are very close things in our language.

Not so for those who speak romance languages. For them, rather, the poetry of the ages is more "L'amour et la mort" (a real poem by 19th-century poetess Louise Ackermann) than "Live with me and be my love." This darker love-and-death set of associations has also entered popular culture, even yielding entire academic subcultures focused on the natural polarity of love and death.

I myself have nothing brilliant to add to this (I'm no Fred Ahl), but perhaps it does give some insight into the French and Italian operatic obsession with killing off all the main characters just before the curtain falls.

Oh, and if you want an example of good thinking taken just across the borders of craziness, feel free to check out Fred's (very interesting, very clever, and, ahem, rather overly bold) Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self Conviction.

posted by Skay @ 1:10 AM 2 comments

An Experiment

I think it was Guy Noir who suggested a while back that we all read something together. Well, I'm going to propose now that we do this, with absolutely no idea whether or not it will take. We shall see, I guess.

Zq read a book: G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. He then gifted me this book, which I've read. In the meantime, V, Al, and Q (none of whom check this blog, so I guess they won't be participating in our little conversation) picked it up, because I was talking about it. Well, that seems promising. And the book does have many merits that make it particularly well-suited to an experiment of this sort, namely:

• It's short.
  
• It's out of copyright, so you can get it for free on the internet if you like that sort of thing.
  
• It's an easy read, kind of detective story-meets-adventure thriller-meets-philosophical and theological playground. You could imagine a joke: A detective, an anarchist, and God walk into a bar...
  
• There are parts of the thing that I just don't understand, even though I really like it. It would be cool if somebody else could jump in and offer ideas (serious or wacky--whatever).

posted by Skay @ 6:31 PM 1 comments

Zeroes and the Infinite

I recently read a book about the history of 0 (that is, the number, zero) and its place in the development of mathematics. The author talks about ancient Greek math towards the beginning of the work, and he suggests that the reason the Greeks had no zero was that they were fundamentally geometers who thought about numbers primarily as measures and mathematics primarily as a study of relative proportions. Ratios don't make much sense when you start to stick zeroes in there; the length of my big toe might be 3/2 as long as your big toe, but it's nonsense to say that anybody's toes could be 4/0 the size of somebody else's (and surely there's no need to compare two things if I've only got one of them, which is essentially what one is doing when one says that the ratio of apples to oranges is 0 to 52--I mean, there just aren't any apples to be dealt with in the first place).

The most interesting part of this account is not the math and it's not the history, either (both of which are really quite rudimentary here). Rather, it's the passing mention of the fact that the Greek word for "ratio" is logos. This struck me; I've always taken logos to mean something like "word" or "discourse" or even "reason"--all with very verbal connotations. The reason I was so taken with logos as a mathematical term is because I know it primarily through John 1:1.

      en arch hn o logoV, kai o logoV hn proV ton qeon, kai qeoV hn o logoV.
      In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

See? Even in its more philosophical uses, logos has clear cultural, Biblical connotations as a word to do with words. This it is; it is much more, as well.

Q offers a good historical account of where the above (KJV) translation came from--namely, the Latin Vulgate, which we presume to have used verbum in the place of logos. That sounds plausible to me, and is the sort of thing that Q would know.

But come on! Why on earth, given all the salient possibilities to do with rationality (in both the logical and the mathematical senses), would you think that the best translation of this little bit of the Gospel--the translation most likely to highlight God's inherent reason, order, and place in nature--is the one where we use the word "word" (or, for that matter, the relatively boring Latin "verbum")? Doesn't it make more sense if you say, "In the beginning was reason and mathematical truth, and these things were with God, and they were God?" That seems far more compelling to me.

Or does this just highlight that I don't really understand the compulsions of religion?

posted by Skay @ 11:02 PM 4 comments

Corpo Desko

My favorite cartoon currently in syndication is the politically incorrect, occasionally dark, sometimes self-referential, and often pun-filled Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis. I love the wordplay of the strip; I love the sheer idiocy of many of its various characters; I love the cowboys who settle their disputes by discussing their feelings, the vikings who like to watch Oprah, and the nonsequitorial misadventures of the ill-fated Angry Bob.

This is why, for Christmas (or Hannukah, or New Year's Day--it's not entirely clear to me), a friend gave me the 2006 Pearls Before Swine desk calendar.

This is how I know I'm a grown-up now.

The corporate desk calendar was always the domain of my father. Round about December 20th, my brother and I used to coordinate closely in order to make sure that my dad received one, and only one, desk calender at Christmas. (This has dropped off now, but it certainly used to be de rigeur.) I find it a bit odd, to say the least, that such a gift has now become practical and appropriate to give to me.

The trappings of adulthood are interesting. How is it that flying off to Ireland on my own, hosting dinner parties for friends, and reading serious history books don't appear to me to identify myself as particularly grown-up, but the possession of a calendar full of amusing comic strips does?

posted by Skay @ 6:10 PM 3 comments

Weird and Wonderful World

This wired, interconnected world of ours is amazing. I am writing this from New York, where I've just eaten supper. I had lunch in Charlotte, breakfast in Jacksonville, and I'll wake up tomorrow in Dublin. I've got a wireless daypass, which means I can surf the web in these airports. I have a Skype headset, which means I can chat to friends in Europe and New York.

But what really gets me is how easy and accessible these things are. I was given my headset for free, and Skyping people the world over costs precisely zero dollars. I say I have a wireless daypass, but the fact of the matter is that in neither Jacksonville nor Charlotte did I have to pay to use the airport's internet (and it seems that, by some fluke of the system, I'm on for free here in New York, too--though I don't think that's supposed to happen). It's not just possible for me to call Dublin to confirm flight times--without a phone, from an airport--but it's free.

Of course I had to buy my wireless-enabled laptop, and I had to hang out near an expat cafe in the city (where Skype was giving away free headsets), but these particular services still really do cost nothing. I didn't buy my laptop in order to chat every once-in-a-blue-moon when I'm having a long day of traveling.

And of course, the travelling isn't free. (In fact, given the decline of the dollar, international travel is insanely expensive.) But it still never ceases to amaze me. How the ancient Greeks--or even the colonial Americans--would have been stunned to see our cell phones, satellites, airplanes, and internet!

I'm stunned, too.

posted by Skay @ 7:29 PM 0 comments

The Value of Money

Unusual Sign the American Economy is Going Down the Tubes: Last Thursday, the U.S. Mint banned people from melting down their pennies and nickels. Given the price of metals on the open market, a new penny is now worth 1.12 cents, pre-192 pennies are worth 2.04 cents, and nickels are worth 6.99 cents. (Note that it costs more than this to make a penny; this is just the market-value of the copper and zinc (and it's the same with the nickel - 6.99 cents is the fair market value of the nickel.) Making a coin also requires paying for the shaping, melting, setting, and stamping that go into the whole deal, of course.) People are also banned from exporting the coins (because, obviously, somebody in Nefarious Foreign Country X could melt them down perfectly legally), though this has some practical exceptions for tourists and pneumismatists (and banks?). Now you tell me that if this keeps up there won't be a black market in United States coinage.

Surely the whole point of money is that it is a convenient proxy for a thing of inherent worth, not a way to artificially legislate that something inherently worthy... well... isn't.

If you go to www.coinflation.com, you can get a live tracking of the inherent value of coins currently in circulation.

Thinking about this stuff is really quite an interesting exercise. That's because, for money to work efficiently, we have to pretend that it doesn't have any inherent worth. This is an illusion, of course, and it's an illusion that financiers take advantage of all the time (even without melting coins--all they have to do is a bit of exchange rate arbitrage to show that money is itself valuable.*)

But, when I go to spend a nickel (or, more practically, a greenback), I never keep it in my pocket because of the worth of its constituent parts--and that's the idea. This is not the same as a claim about inflation. It might well be that my nickel doesn't go as far these days, and so I am more careful about how I spend it--but then, I'm hanging on to it because I'd rather spend it on product X instead of product Y, and it no longer is worth enough in the market to buy both X and Y together. But that's a different scenario. What I'm talking about is the kind of scenario where I say, "Look, I could pay for this $4 item with four one-dollar bills--but I'd be willing to give you 200 pennies instead." Nobody ever thinks that the 200 pennies would be a better deal. Why? Because the penny is a proxy for 1/100 of a dollar. That's the whole purpose of the penny--to stand in some relationship to money itself, to allow us to easily exchange our work and worth for our things (and for other peoples' works).

But if you really think about it, if those were old-style pennies, at 2.04 cents-on-the-dollar, you'd really rather have those penny rolls. And that's a bit screwy.

It seems counterintuitive to want your money to be inherently worthless, but in fact, it seems to me that that worthlessness is ennabling. It keeps people from hoarding what is, essentially, an instrument of exchange (unless, of course, they want to be able to exchange it for something else in the future). If we do hoard dollars, it's not because we want the paper they're printed on; we hoard them because we're going to buy that yacht in ten years' time, or because we think inflation is going to fall and they'll be able to buy more stuff tomorrow, or for some other reason that actually has to do with the economy and not the dollar bill.

This makes me optimistic about the cyber-economy.


*Exchange rate arbitrage: a simple concept that people like to pretend is complicated. Let's say I have 10 US Dollars. Here in New York, I can buy 1,200 Japanese Yen for 10 Dollars. Well, in Tokyo, perhaps I can buy 6 British Pounds for 1,200 Yen. And back in New York (or in London, or Chicago, or wherever at all), maybe I can buy 12 Dollars for 6 Pounds. Voila! I have just made Two Dollars, a rather ridiculously high return for rather ridiculously little risk. (Oh, and yes, of course we can buy currency--it's what you do when you go to the foreign exchange window when you get off the plane in Paris, it's what companies do when they need to pay producers in a foreign country, and it's what banks do when they want to hold their reserves in stable dollars or when they need to cover massive withdrawals in a different currency.)

posted by Skay @ 4:35 AM 2 comments

This takes the cake.

New York has just passed a ban on trans fats. I'm having philosophical troubles as a result.

I'm all for a reasonable amount of health-consciousness, but I just can't quite stomach the idea of the government dictating what I am allowed to eat when I go out. (I can't stomach it! Get it? I'm so funny.) In a nation formed with deference to Liberty and Freedom--instead of, say, universal health care (not that the welfare state is a bad model, mind you, but it is a different model)--this strikes me as quite an intrusion.

And it's different even from the oft-maligned no-smoking-in-public-establishments laws (with which, frankly, I have no problem). We ban smoking in commercial establishments because we are worried about how one person's carcinogen will affect another person's lungs. This is an extension, albeit a very great extension, of the ban on murder: sure, it limits your freedoms, but it does so in order to protect that guy standing next to you. The same concept informs all sorts of socially responsible legislation: pollution laws, public drunkenness laws, gun laws at a stretch. We limit what you can do because we are worried about the harm it will cause others.

But no amount of stretching makes it reasonable to ban me from publicly eating foods that are bad for me. If I like my flans nice and fluffy (that is, made with shortening) instead of densely rock-like (made with trans fat-free butter), I kind of think that should be my call.

There are all sorts of things a health-conscious legislature can do to make sure that I'm not accidentally jeopardizing my own well-being when I bite into my flan, too. It could force all restaurants to publish ingredients lists. It could run a public campaign explaining the dangers of trans fats and telling us which foods contain them. It could give tax breaks to restaurants that don't serve trans fats, or could institute a sin tax on those who do. I'd stand by any of those moves as well within the prerogative of the government (even if, separate from that issue, I might find some of them a bit silly). In fact, enabling the transfer of information really seems like an ideal government project, allowing me to make my own choices in that much more confident a way.

But banning the public serving of, say, Crisco-laced biscuits? Oh, come on. That sounds awfully like a Big Daddy State to me.

There is, of course, some real public justification for this move. Obesity in America is a true problem. Moreover, your health issues very well might affect me: if you have a heart attack and are on Medicare, or welfare, or Family Health Plus (New York's free health insurance for anybody who is 1. uninsured and 2. too rich for Medicaid), then my tax dollars are subsidizing your hospital stay. Your good health is good for my wallet.

But somehow, I think that basic universal health care is compatible with the preservation of a person's ability to do what she wants when it causes neither mental nor bodily harm to another.

Maybe what I mean is this: a higher financial cost to me--that is, slightly higher taxes--seem a worthy price to pay for the assurance that I mostly get to be in charge of my own decisions in life. It's one of the most desirable government expenditures I can think of, in fact. If your gastronomic choices had a 40% chance of giving me cancer, or if they predictably caused me serious mental anguish, then I'd say "legislate them away!" without much hesitation. But there is an essential tradeoff between the individual and the community. If the communal costs of this bit of individual choice are mostly financial, then I have to say that we privilege a person's ability to eat what they enjoy, cooked how they enjoy it.

I'm generally in favor of ensuring collective welfare through our governments--and I think, as a result, that things like Social Security and universal health care are broadly good. But, what can I say, I do detect in myself some strong libertarian tendencies when it comes to messing with the menus of my favorite restaurants. I maintain, perhaps ridiculously, that this is not a double standard.

posted by Skay @ 10:44 AM 0 comments

L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. Peut-être ils sont les chaînes d'une ignorance inculte et stupide, heeuuu?

I've been reading Rousseau lately--not The Social Contract, which it seems that everybody reads at sometime or another, but Emile, which I first encountered when I was a freshman in high school. I didn't read it then, but I recently encountered an unglamorous Everyman's Library copy of that text in my grandfather's library, and I remembered the old intention to read it. My grandfather generously gifted the book to me.

Let me say two things upfront, for those of you who may not be familiar with either the book or its author. First, Emile is primarily a discourse on education, a hypothetical educational project in which Rousseau explains the best way to teach a child so that he grows into a self-aware, happy man. Second, Rousseau himself is a right bastard: sexist, racist, and full of himself to boot. This is not obvious from The Social Contract (or at least, I don't remember it much in that work), but it is clear as a bell in Emile

This does not make any of his educational ideas self-evidently false.

But there is something else that I dislike about Rousseau's weltenschuang (if one can appropriately mix the French and the German here)--something that I dare say is a bit more intellectual and a bit more to the substance of Rousseau's educational claims. Fundamentally, I really just don't like philosophies (and theologies) which privilege innocence, the "state of nature," and stupidity (not that their proponents would use that word, of course). Rousseau is the creator of the "Noble Savage." He is perhaps best known, in this day and age, for his declaration, "Man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains." His educational program consists, primarily, of shielding the child from the "corrupting influence" of other people and the things that they have created in this world; he suggests that we should not force a child to learn, but rather that, by secretly controlling everything from his friendships to the activities which he witnesses, we will create a world in which the child decides he is interested in "the right" things, and then chooses to learn about them on his own.

But I don't buy it. Of course it is desirable for a child--or an adult, for that matter--to be interested in the world and eager to learn things about it. But Rousseau's Noble Savage idea is a direct descendent of the Church's weird privileging of innocence and ignorance (consider the ideal state in the Garden of Eden: very, very like the state of Rousseau's ideal modern man). The problem with both of these conceptions is the idea that growing up, becoming a mature, well-educated, industrious, sexually desirable and desirous adult, is taken to be a bad thing. For both Rousseau and the church against which he so often thinks he is arguing, experience distances one from the ideal (whether we style that ideal as "savage freedom" or "Godly innocence not yet sullied by our inevitable human failings"). For Rousseau, education consists in giving a boy enough self-knowledge that his natural virtues overpower the corrupting and unhappy ways of the other people that he will meet when he is an adult.

Rousseau takes this to be a claim about freedom and happiness. His educational program is geared towards letting a child choose his own interests from the beginning, and stumbling and having to work through his own (albeit child-sized) hardships (even suggesting that it is better that a child be allowed to make his own mistakes and die in the process than to have him grow into an adult who did not have the same liberty-filled education). A self-directed life like this is, for Rousseau, the only truly happy life. So, while at the beginning we only give the child the perpetual illusion of choice while simultaneously carefully controlling all the aspects of the world he sees, later on the man benefits from always doing that which he is naturally predisposed to do, and by acting in harmony with his desires instead of getting sucked into doing what other people think is important.

In a world where there is prestige in the acquisition of things we neither particularly want or need, in which we let magazines tell us we are too fat or too ugly or too sexually incapable, in which people with all the luxuries they could want are chronically depressed and engage in all sorts of self-harm, what Rousseau says is somewhat compelling. He might be right that people are unhappy and unfulfilled in life if we do not have full moral control over our selves; he might be right that psychological pressure is the source of many of our gravest ills; he might be right that we ought to reconsider what we mean when we say that we are "free."

But Rousseau is naive to think we can escape society in the way that he suggests. He wants to educate Emile to be an individual among men - but he runs into deep and untenable difficulties when he considers love and marriage, for example. (He decides, ultimately, that the only way for Emile to continue to act as an individual is to have his wife act always according to his will, as an extension of himself: "The whole education [of women] ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them and to make life agreeable and sweet to them--these are the duties of women at all times." Note that this is not just an unconsidered sexism; Rousseau has written himself into a wall, strongly privileging the family unit but also placing as his first goal the absolute autonomy of his student, and that man's ability to always act freely on his desires. If Emile must always be able to make free choices, and if he is also to be able to live a life with somebody else, then it follows that she's going to have to always go along with his choices.) Rousseau finds himself in a tight spot when he dismisses everything but practical education, too, suggesting that for their own benefit all children should learn a manual trade so that they can work and be their own bosses--but this at the same time deprives society of everything from firefighters to doormen. And Rousseau doesn't even consider the possibility of the occasional failure of socialization under his progam; his entire scheme rests on the assumption that a child will on his own choose to have principles which are broadly compatible with the principles and values of the society which he will grow up to join. But what if he never wants to study basic math? What if he takes pleasure in hurting animals? What if he just learns to kill his own food--a perfectly morally defensible position, yes, but perhaps not if he later lives in an American suburb and takes this to mean that he should strangle the pigeons and shoot the dogs.

And this is precisely the problem. Rousseau pretends he wants his child to learn about himself and to discover his own desires, but in fact he wants the child to discover on his own the desires of the society away from which he is being diligently kept by his loving parents. In the meantime, he may well be discovering a great many natural principles on his own, but he is also being deprived of much of what we know, and of the kind of rigor with which we come to know things well. It may not be pleasant to memorize verb conjugations or to study the laws of physical motion (though it might be), but it is effective--and it is by doing the hard intellectual work of learning (at whatever level) that we come to know something well. Experts are made, not born.

Moreover, knowledge is progressive. The idea that a child should start from scratch when we already know so much seems to me at best ignorant and at worst immoral. The reason we teach what we know is that we already know it. A man might feel a sense of accomplishment when he invents the wheel, but surely that's nothing more than an illusion if in fact the wheel has already been around for millenia. Better to teach the man about kinetics and let him undertake a real accomplishment, let him invent a real new thing.

And better to grant that the relationships we make, the things we learn, the education we foster, is a good thing representative of very real and very desirable growth and maturity--rather than a continuous progression away from the ideal of self-centered desire fulfillment. For if it is instead the latter of these two options, then surely the prescription must be to stop our social interaction, our education, and, in the final estimation, our life as a respectable, caring, productive human being. In the final estimation, this is a philosophy neither of hope nor of happiness.

And besides all that, the whole darned program is entirely impractical and impossible to implement anyhow. I find that reassuring, I confess.

posted by Skay @ 12:42 AM 1 comments

this is what happens when you don't democratize science

Today's Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the best football roundup on the web (or in the papers, or on TV), explains that the Chandrasekhar limit isn't actually a limit. Gregg Easterbrook (who writes TMQ) elaborates better than I could, and I urge you to read at least that bit of this week's column, because the implications are dazzling.

But you're not going to go read it, are you? No. I know at least some of you are never going to make your way over to ESPN just to read about the latest research into type Ia supernovae. But you should.

That's it. I was going to give you the rundown myself, but Easterbrook is so readable, and this is so cool, that I really mean it when I say you ought to go over there and read it yourself. I will give you the implications, though:

1. Cosmic expansion is not accelerating
2. There's no such thing as dark matter or energy (or at least, no reason why there should be, which amounts to very nearly the same thing)

Now. Today is Tuesday, day not only of ESPN.com's TMQ, but also of the New York Times's Science Times. Why is it that the latter is not telling me about Chandrasekhar? (I did a historical search. The latter never told me about this.)

And here's an interesting story that Easterbrook doesn't tell: Chandresakhar himself was an Indian Astrophysicist. He won the Nobel Prize for his work, basically hypothesizing the existence of black holes, neutron stars, and (as yet undiscovered) quark stars. But when he presented his work to the Royal Society in the 1930s, his old Cambridge advisor Sir Arthur Eddington attacked him with what Wolfram calls "nonsensical and contradictory arguments." It was a particularly vicious move: Eddington had been inquiring into Chandra's work for months and had never commented upon it. When Chandra was finally invited to lecture to the Royal Society, Eddington had the secretary schedule himself into the following timeslot, which he used to roundly denounce what Chandrasekhar had just said. Chandra was prevented from replying, and (because of how the very influential Eddington had closed the doors to the young man) he only really had an opportunity to publicly defend his conjecture four years after the whole episode. Chandra wrote home in anger (some choice words: "Prejudices! Prejudices!" and "Eddington is simply stuck up!"). Then he packed up and moved to America.

Oh, to read the relevant TMQ bit yourself: go to http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061128, search for "Chandrasekhar," and read Easterbrook's brief, clear explanation of the whole thing. (You could also read it in Nature, but that version is rather less comprehensible to the intelligent Average Joe like me.)

posted by Skay @ 9:14 PM 2 comments