Category Archives: Art and Ideas

Maya Angelou On What People Remember

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“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Marketing saw, quoted by Maya Angelou

My Comment:

This quote led me to think of the way in which political debates these days have become entirely devoid of emotional intelligence. I’m convinced that the way we debate things is at least as important as what we debate. Maybe even more important.

There’s something fundamentally wrong with the media when it humiliates public figures, either directly and anonymously on the internet, or indirectly though misrepresentation and innuendo in print. There’s nothing funny, liberated, or “free speech” about any of it. It’s an abuse of speech… a form of violence.

Now if you cuss out someone who’s provoking and attacking you directly, that’s one thing. Turn about is fair play.

But using sexual humiliation as a tool to demonize political candidates (Sarah Palin) or feeding public voyeurism about prominent figures with no political relevance (David Letterman, John Edwards, Tiger Woods) is morally wrong and socially dangerous. It feeds a constant cycle of partisan retaliation that drives everyone but the most insanely ambitious out of politics.

Then, of course, the media turns around and complains without irony about how insanely ambitious politicians are.

Reporters are professionals. They have standards to adhere to. It’s not their job to simply supply a demand. It’s one thing to follow stories that interest people (within certain boundaries of what’s relevant to public discourse). That’s fair enough. But reporters can’t just cave in to whatever it is they think people want to talk about.

You could, after all, argue that people like watching snuff movies. Does that mean the media feeds that appetite too?

Demand doesn’t just come into being. It’s created. And that’s not a one-way thing. There’s a feedback loop. Demand feeds supply, which feeds demand. There’s an addictive element to the whole thing.

That means writers can’t just give up their own moral freedom to feed a demand for immoral things. They have to make a conscious choice to go against what’s in their (or their publisher’s) economic interest and do what’s right.

Admittedly, it’s hard.

As for the so-called hypocrisy of politicians, politicians (and entertainers) aren’t meant to be moral exemplars, so the question really shouldn’t arise at all.

Since the public expects a certain image, politicians have to conform if they want to get elected. Wanting that image to reflect reality strikes me as an example of the foolishness of the public, not of the hypocrisy of politicians.

Public figures are more and more simply the victims of mob mentality. From that perspective, John Edwards did quite right to deny the scandal until the end. It’s no business of the mob’s to know everything about a politician’s marriage and demand a standard from him that the vast majority of people don’t hold to.

Now, Edward’s team members are a different issue. They sacrificed money and time and they might naturally feel betrayed. That’s a different matter. Perhaps they should have researched him a bit more before latching onto him. That they didn’t suggests they have a problem too – mindless hero worship.

People can have extraordinary talents but it doesn’t follow they’re perfect human beings, and there’s something deeply troubling about the urge to demand perfection from mere human beings…. and then attack them when they can’t supply it.

If I were Edwards, I would have banged the door on reporters who hounded me, a long time back. I would have turned the tables and started asking them a few questions about their private lives.

I suppose that’s why I have a degree of sympathy for people who’ve played the game back at reporters, like CEO Mark Cuban..and lately, Patrick Byrne.

Cuban has used Web 2.0 to his advantage against regulators as well.

A New York Times article in 2007 described how John Mack Mackey of Whole Foods and even disgraced and convicted financier Conrad Black of Hollinger International posted anonymously on message boards to counter negative posts about their companies. [The articles noted that they ran the risk of violating securities laws, especially if they disclosed company business in their posts].

Perhaps that’s where the problem lies. We have laws to stop CEO’s of companies defending themselves against attacks, but none for the people who do the attacking, even if they have a financial motive for it and even if their attacks are founded on semi-truths and lies indistinguishable by casual readers.

Mack Mackey used the handle rahodeb, an acronym of Deborah, his wife’s name, and he even commented on how cute he looked with a new hair-cut.  Byrne, on the other hand, has used a pseudonym Hannibal (the ruler of Carthage, not the star of “Silence of the Lambs”), but always signs his name underneath. Both took up the pen to counter attacks on their companies by anonymous internet posters.

It seems to have become a real problem.

In 2008 Apple CEO  Steve Jobs finally had enough of the rumor-mongering about his health and called Joe Nocera of the New York Times a juicy epithet I will chastely refrain from repeating.

[Since I’ve begun contributing to Deep Capture and enjoy a degree of bloggeraderie with them, I’m refraining from commenting directly on Byrne’s running battle with the media, about which I’ve written before. I will just admit to being on their side versus Goldman and the short-raiders. I think they tell it like it is. But any obscene rants at reporters’ expense don’t earn brownie points with me. And I maintain a neutral rating on Overstock, since I just don’t know enough about that end of things].

Either journalists act like a responsible press, or they are paparazzi, in which case they should expect to be hounded and harassed in turn. If reporters want access to the highest levels of business and government, if they want to report on subjects that are socially and politically important, then they should show some respect for their jobs, qualify themselves, adhere to professional standards of behavior, and avoid tormenting other human beings just to make their names.

Remember these are the same reporters who failed to report accurately or in time on one of the biggest stories in a hundred years. And why was that? Because (with honorable exceptions) they were either too comfortable with Wall Street, too lazy to do the research, too ignorant to know where to look, too provincial to read the people who could tell them, and too venal to go against their interests…. or all of the above..

This kind of public exposure we subject people to is not a one-time business. There is a record of the Edwards saga for ever on the net, visible to the whole globe….every little painful detail. What kind of sensitivity to a sick woman does that show, just to take one angle.

Or consider their children..

Isn’t it a kind of torture?
And doesn’t it make us, as it makes any kind of torturer, bestial?
Meanwhile, the victims never forget…..

Games of Knowledge, Games of Power

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“The academic game is the game of knowledge (and ignorance) which is inextricably, if not always intentionally, also a game of power. The only way to put an end to this game (…under conditions of domination…) is to play it better than the players themselves. The only way to undermine the power of Western definitions of the world that burden the rest of the world is to beat the powers at their own game….play enough or as much as necessary to expose it for what it really is — only a game — a game not because it is innocuous but because it is arbitrary and cannot be grounded anywhere.”

—   Vassos Argyrou, “Anthropology and the Will to Meaning”, cited at Zeroanthropology

(My only caveat with this is to suggest it needs the word imperial added before the word West. It is the fundamentally imperial (state-centric) nature of the organization of knowledge – the privileging of elite schools, of certain forms of learning, of certain evidence of expertise – that is the problem. It is Western in so far as the west is the predominant carrier and transmitter of the virus. But the state everywhere is infectious….)

The Machinery of Habit

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A piece I wrote four years ago, The Burgh: Downsizing,” examines the nature of change and habit in relation to urban economies transformed by globalization and war.

“The boys come in and the beer flows. Ricardo tells us about training. Four-mile runs, 200 push-ups every morning, wall-climbing. “They break you, man,” he shakes his head.  “They make you tough.

“I said I hoped so, considering where he was going. But Melanie, who studies the theology of the medieval anchoress Juliana of Norwich and sells papers on a corner in Oakland for the Socialist Worker, is more worried about his getting into what she calls killing mode. I ask her if a mode is the same as a habit. It takes time after all to form a habit. A mode on the other hand sounds like a gearshift on an Audi. And if you can shift into a gear, you can shift out. Maybe it’s really a question of what sort of habits. Learning, retraining, moving need effort. They don’t come easily. But war is a machinery that moves on its own and blood-lust, like a winter flu, might be easy to pick up and impossible to get rid of.

War and demolition come too easily to human nature. And take away too much. Anything worth pursuing, on the other hand, needs to be stalked through the years with the patience and vigilance of a hunter, cultivated through seasons of scarcity and remembered in times of forgetting. In our sophistication we laugh at those who buy dear and hold dearer. Who stay when they should have left. Bag holders. Fools. Who step into the river and expect the waters to stay the same. The immobilized in our mobile society. What is the value of an abandoned church, an obsolete mill, an aging worker? Flux, we shrug, is the only certainty. Change is the first law of nature.

“People talk about joining but they don’t,” says Ricardo,  “I’m the only one who did.” He sounds proud.
“I ask him if he thinks good health insurance and tuition money are worth risking his life for.  He laughs.
“Look — I ain’t gonna die. Most of the guys who teach me, they’ve been there. They got through. More chances I’d get shot in a ghetto. So some guy’s lost an arm…or a leg. So what? All this new technology now, reconstruction…they can make you another leg; it’s really no big deal.”

At 26, you can think of that as a good trade. An amputation of the body or the mind is all it takes to keep up with change. Like those translucent lizards which shed their tails seasonally as they wait immobile and vigilant for flies on dusty window sills, we might grow new limbs just as good. New memories to replace old ones. Here in the hills, at the confluence of three rivers, we have learned not to resist the laws of nature.

“But perhaps we don’t live by nature alone. Perhaps, as Juliana of Norwich said, we also need mercy and grace.”

“The need to change and the machinery of habit that makes it difficult – a theme I find myself returning to , over and over, especially when I’m confronted with the depressing spectacle of people going back to the same propaganda, the same bogus assertions that caused this global catastrophe in the first place.

Going back, like dogs to vomit.

I’m sorry if that sounds ugly, but what’s happening now in DC is ugly….and very very dangerous.

Anarchism In the Kibbutz Movement

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Haaretz on a study of anarchism in the Kibbutz movement:

“If there is a vision of Israel that can avoid the polarization and mythmaking of much Diaspora and Israeli discourse, it requires an appreciation of the complexities of Israeli society. James Horrox’s “A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement” provides a welcome reminder that Israel wasn’t always seen by radicals as an outpost of Western imperialism. Horrox unearths the utopian, anarchist influences behind the growth of the kibbutz movement in pre-state Israel. Anarchism may be a highly flawed ideology, but at the very least it offered a vision of Zionism that, in not aiming to build a Jewish state, held out the possibility of a land in which Jews and Muslims could coexist peacefully. This was never likely to happen, of course, but at the very least it’s important to remember that Israel didn’t have to be the place that its contemporary detractors and defenders imagine it to be – and it doesn’t have to be that place now.”

My Comment:

Notice the reflexive genuflection to the state. Why is anarchism that promises coexistence a flawed ideology? Isn´t “flawed” a much truer description of the statist ideology rooted in race and faith (Zionism) that guarantees displacement of one people by the other?

Oscar Wilde On Incarnation

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Oscar Wilde in De Profundis

“Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow, – He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’

They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her humiliation and exile….

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension. Continue reading →

P. J. O’Rourke On Santa And God

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P. J. O’Rourke via Samizdata:

“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on virtually everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club. Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. His nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

Peter Boettke On Paul Samuelson

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Peter Boettke writes a sobering obituary for Paul Samuelson:

“John Hicks once wrote that the story of economics in the 1930s was the battle between Hayek and Keynes. I think Hicks is right, and that this battle continues to this day as witnessed in our current policy debates.  But I think there is a deeper debate that goes at the very project of economics as a scientific discipline. And that battle is the one between Samuelson and Mises, and the fateful choice was the late 1940s.  Rather than following Mises’s Human Action, the economics profession went the path of Samuelson’s Foundations.  Formalism was interepreted as synonymous with logical rigor, and in the subsequent decade positivistic testing was interpreting as synonymous with empirical analysis.  By the 1960s, formalism and positivism transformed the science of economics so that the Misesian understanding of “theory” and “history” was actually completely dismissed as a relic of a pre-scientific age.

Since then a large part of the great efforts by economists have been directed at recapturing insights that Mises-Hayek possessed already by mid-century — whether we are talking about cognitive limits of man, the role of property rights (and legal and political institutions in general and behavior related to them), and the microfoundations of all macroeconomic phenomena. New institutional Economics, New Classical Economics, New Economic History, Experimental and Behavioral Economics, etc. all deviate in significant ways from the scientific and policy project that Samuelson initiated in the late 1940s and which dominated economic thinking from that time until the 1980s.  The Samuelsonian project had to be pecked away at for progress in economic understanding to take place. Yet the ‘scientific’ allure of the project still remains — unfortunately even among many of those who pecked away at the Samuelsonian project.  The pretense of knowledge (see Hayek’s Nobel) and the claim to the mantle of science (see Rothbard’s paper of that title) have a much stronger grip on the minds of economists and intellectuals than what might be reasonably expected in the wake of repeated failures.

Samuelson argued that like all great scientists he was only concerned with the applause of his peers. And he received great praise in his lifetime and will be celebrated in the short-run in his death.  But I have stated on more than one occasion that I believe Samuelson will be remembered in the same way as Sir William Petty is remembered, not as Adam Smith is remembered.  His substantive contributions (as oppopsed to the form in which he stated arguments) are not immediately obvious to pinpoint.  We must always remember that Samuelson was the great anti-Misesian of 20th century economics, and in my book that translates into a force for anti-economics despite all the scientific accolades, awards, honorary degrees, and reverence by his peers he was granted in his lifetime.”

Libertarian Living: Expat Belonging

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My first year as an expat. Come New Year and I will have done the necessary time outside the country.

I must say it´s a relief. At the best of times I never quite fit into America, although I think I fit in better there than I would ever have fit into India…but I´ll never know, since I left India as a student.

Honestly, I think I wouldn´t really fit into any country, except as an observer of sorts. A kind of partial citizen. That´s me. I spend a lot of my time alone, because people tire me out. Yet I like them around me anonymously…. preferably talking a language I don´t understand.

Loren Eisely, the anthropologist, once wrote somewhere in some essay of his that he liked spending time by himself in dark theaters (or was it bars?). I´m like that.

I like a seat in the corner of a crowded restaurant or lobby where I can watch people. The current of voices, as long as it doesn´t impinge too much on my thoughts, soothes me. A  dark hum of water whirring around me. A kind of return to the womb.

Airport lounges…small coffee shops, one-star hotels with wooden cupboards that tilt precariously when you open them late at night…unfamiliar streets that open up suddenly as you turn a corner ..a grey sea… I feel at home around  them.  Anonymity seems to make my own self clearer to me. In a group of friends, on the other hand, I lose a sense of who I am.

People yearn to belong somewhere. I spend my time elaborating ways of not belonging. And when I begin to feel at home, it´s always a warning sign that soon, very soon, I will want to leave.