In spite of my planned abstinence, my favorite part of this election obviously is that Hillary or Obama, whichever triumphs, is going to be striking, through their victory, a resounding blow for the continued oppression and marginalization of minorities. This is because if Hillary wins it will be white America once again excluding the black man, whereas if Obama wins it will yet another demonstration of the inability of women to remove the glass ceiling. All the old cranks in the anti-war protest that might have just turned into a rally for cheaper prescription drugs seem to be in massive denial about this fact. Hopefully the irony will propitiate all the disgruntled conservatives a little when President Jesus is causing civilization to capitulate to barbarism and violence by sitting down and talking peacefully to the beards rather than bombing the holy shit out of them.

My family has an old cat–a paradoxical, or at any rate a relative concept, given that she hasn’t yet crossed her 16th year. But she has diabetes and probably some other health problems, so she is suffering real indignities of age. She reminds me of what Claude Lévi-Strauss said about the cities of the New World: they go from freshness to decrepitude without stopping at agedness. The amount of memories and experiences you have isn’t totally dependent on how much time has passed in your life, so I suppose cats are probably about as well acclimated to the amount of time that they have on earth as we are to ours, which is to say not very. The fact that she hardly does anything all day long also no doubt makes the time pass more slowly. Even so, having to deal with getting old just a decade after being born is something no human has ever had to endure (unless they have some weird genetic disease), and it does seem like a burden in its own right on the bendy, elasticky back of a cat. Surely even in beings that look like walking lint balls that deserves our respect enough to temper any over-idealizations of their “carefree” lives.

An attack ad against Kant: the narrator seems to have borrowed the narrator’s voice from the “Perelman Adventures”.

Editing Shakespeare: with Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie essentially reprising their personas from Blackadder. Granted, the comedy here is about 90% in the delivery and 10% in the material, but a must for those who love that show nonetheless.

–Why didn’t the player’s union defend Michael Vick? Writer inadvertently reveals the essence of the reductionist insanity at the heart of many “slippery slope” arguments. “If we don’t defend the indefensible, then how are we going to defend the…defensible?”

–Franklin Roosevelt once said: “When You See a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.” He should have added: “I did.”

It’s interesting to me how easy it is to paddle through life surrounded by one’s little boat of self-affirmation and yet, when challenged by someone else and threatened with a breach, it becomes disconcertingly obvious that one’s principles and assumptions about the world are only worth as much as the energy and skill with which one defends them personally. Because the sight of someone else conducting their lives according to very different ideas confronts one with the specter of an equal and opposite reality. It seems that any set of values, no matter how ludicrous they might seem, acquire a certain validity simply through their centrality to someone’s life; each life itself possesses that quality of undauntable validity, because no one’s existence can simply be refuted intellectually.

And of course the larger the numbers, the more true this is, which is why most people conform themselves internally to some extent to their society’s morays, no matter how little they may correspond to an individual person’s temperament. And why so many in the intelligentsia are suddenly coming alive to the interest of religion, as if they had stumbled on some half-witted intellectual terra incognita, when 20 or 30 years ago many of them would have concluded religion to be positively refuted by the various materialist philosophies or at least sunk from the view of the well-educated, and would have considered any open consideration of religious claims, as opposed to merely the supposed sociological facts about religion, much less important than addressing rising inequality in allowances in the 10-14 age group, or deciding whether a more pressing need exists for a hermeneutical theory of transgenderedness or a transgendered theory or hermeneutics. Since then, nothing has increased or decreased the inherent interest and attractions of the Bible or the Qu’ran, but even the most die-hard Marxists and queer theorists have to see that there are a lot more committed Muslims in the world than there are of them–and no one wants to be on the wrong side of a gathering storm. Similar to how increasing hordes of Western students are going to China, even though for most of them there’s probably very little to attract them about the daily life of the average Chinese student. Some will acknowledge the role of prevalence and popularity in shaping their thinking, others will insist that their new-found interest in religion or Chinese culture or Arcade Fire arises purely from its own merits.

The remembrance of the dead is an important component of almost all cultures, but despite the assertions of Joseph Bottum, the preponderance of tombs and other memorials of the dead among the ruins of ancient cities doesn’t exactly prove that the commemoration of the dead was the foundation and originally the most important function of civilization. Since lasting, remaining intact indefinitely, is not just the instrumental but the ultimate purpose of memorials, it seems pretty logical that they would outlast most of the other constructions of civilization, and the older the site, the more they will probably dominate.

It’s not necessarily always true that democracies are more peaceful than non-democracies, and it’s certainly not true that they never fight each other, but war in almost all cases represents a net loss for the populations involved as a whole, simply because presumably everyone on the losing side suffers, as does at the very least all those on the winning side who are killed. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that a majority of the population, even if they only consult their self-interest, will not support a war if they believe there is a high chance of winning and a low chance of being killed or maimed, but self-interest would definitely dictate against war as a long-term or normal state of affairs, which would pile up the costs of war without the benefit of permanent victory. Ony an élite which doesn’t bear those costs could coutenance that sort of policy.

Heroism depends on the existence of bad conditions and crises by which to distinguish itself. People in comfortable surroundings may regret the absence of grandeur in their lives (although the opportunities for risk and self-sacrifice are rarely as far away as one might feel comfortable with), but they ought not forget that just as taboo-breaking depends on the existence of censoriousness, freedom-fighting depends on that of oppression and charity on that of poverty.

In recent years, computer programmers having failed to invent HAL, despite have created some pretty good chess players, various scientists and philosophers, like noisy Dennett and quiet Hofstadter, sort of the Penn and Teller of neuroscience, have been trying to objectify the thinking process, to classify it as essentially a system of information-processing, while taking into account the massive apparent differences between human minds and computers, leading to models of parallel processing, self-referential systems, and so on, all while still reducing the function of the mind to some extent to the similar task of processing information. And it’s true that in the past many have probably insisted too much on seeing consciousness as some sort of tangible medium rather than as a series of functions, like some sort of watery drama in miniature reproducing the events of the outside world inside people’s heads. Much, maybe all, of what goes in our thoughts consists of receiving information and reacting to it. To speak of the contents of the mind being exclusive to one person seems rather arbitrary in that light, even solipsistic. Computers don’t own the information that is put into them, nor, if they function properly, does that information have any relation to the uniqueness of the individual machine. The intellectual contents of the computer are general and easily transferrable, even if they exist in some particular system. Hofstadter apparently is now even taking this principle of the transferrability of information to mean that in some sense he can still preserve part of the mind of his dead wife.

Of course a large amount of the contents of the mind, namely conscious thoughts, can be transferred between people. That is pretty much the essence of linguistic communication, and sense conscious thoughts are almost by definition expressed through language, they can be transmitted, shared, or imbued between people. At the same time, exactly what makes them transmissable and objective is also what renders them somewhat impersonal. What really makes them personal are one’s feelings towards them, and those probably cannot be easily reproduced without the whole enormously sensitive and complicated machinery of the human organism and as well the entire particular history by which its components have been modified and conditioned. Nor is sharing a few of the conscious ideas of a lost loved one probably a great deal of comfort, since one misses the sight of them, the touch, the presence and the sense of mutual feelings much more immediately than the abstractions of conscious thought. Still and all, I would stake a career on the deceivability of the human heart before I would on its countenancing the abandonment of hope, so some people will probably keep their hopes invested in computers and existing minds until the day when they can upgrade to realistic hope for biomorphic replicates.

One of the more irritating questions I’ve been confronted with in the discussions I’ve had in my life is: “But what if everyone acted that way?” This kind of objection tends to get thrown up against everything from someone choosing not to vote all the way up to its most grandiose manifestation as Kant’s categorical imperative. And of course sometimes realizing that you wouldn’t necessarily want other people to behave the way you do leads to the realization that it’s not a very upright thing to be doing in the first place, which is the essence of the Golden Rule. But at the same time it’s pretty obvious that not everything you do in life is somehow an expression of the conviction that everyone should be doing the same thing. If a general orders his troops into battle, no one would conclude that all the soldiers should hence start ordering each other around. Nothing would ever get done. Not only are exceptionless general rules too clumsy to deal with every unforseen occurence in life, they tend to undermine the conscience as a guide to integrity and decency in the world in favor of inflexible dogmatism.

Something similar comes about from the continuing belief in some quarters that ethical rules somehow represent objective existing things in the world. 100 years ago the logical positivists, soaking in their hermetic stew of scientism, were claiming not only that all of language describes things out there in the world but that in some sense the representations were actually equivalent to the things they represented. Then Wittgenstein came along and received all the accolades in the world, as well as becoming the golden calf of idol-worshipping college students ever since, by pointing out that this obviously isn’t true, a common reward for those that happen to be in a position to puncture ridiculously over-extended theories and bring them back to earth. One would think that “you should” statements would be a pretty clear example of an area where the theory lacked, even if it hadn’t been for J.L. Austin and the “speech-as-act” school. To claim that such a statement is really a description of something existing, as opposed to an assertion in favor of something ideal, makes about as much sense as claiming that ordering a beer at a restaurant is a description of an existing reality. It goes against the very essence of proscriptive statements. To erase the distinction between them and descriptive statements loses the meaning of both.

I understand the impulse to ground claims about what should be in objective reality, but this attempt shows no courage, no confidence in the strength of subjectivity. Something should be because I believe it should. No one else need share my belief, and my subjective conscience grants me license to judge the actions of others. The mania for “objective” moral truths is consensus-building shit. There’s no use appealing to a higher source of affirmation than one’s conscience, because it doesn’t exist. Anything else is just deference to authority. Surely even the religiously-inclined might be persuaded to trust to the conscience God imparted to them, the divine flame, as surer guidance than various statements issued in the past that, as issued by mortals, could not have anticipated every twist of fate in the future. Of course people often lull themselves into equating their own self-interest with righteousness, but the problem isn’t exactly dismissed by shuffling the responsibility off on someone else. When people choose which parts of doctrine to obey and which to ignore, it all comes back to personal affinity and intuition in the end anyway.

From an e-mail I wrote a few days ago (why let material go to waste?):

I can understand a non-prejudiced economic argument against mass immigration, on the grounds that it will lower the wages for American workers. But isn’t the issue a pretty exact parallel to the outsourcing debate? There too the anti-globalization crowd have been complaining that American workers will suffer as their jobs are taken by lower-paid foreigners (or in the case of immigration recently foreign workers). In fact, the immigration debate is simply the counterpart to the outsourcing debate for service-sector jobs that can’t be exported. In both cases however it seems likely that overall there’s a net economic benefit: corporations benefit from lower costs, foreign workers should benefit in equal numbers (from getting new jobs) as the American workers who suffer (from losing them), and consumers should theoretically benefit from lower prices, though I’m rather skeptical that that’s actually happening. But even if it’s not, the economic anti-immigration argument still seems ethically suspect to me because even if not overtly prejudiced it still seems to be implicitly predicated on the idea that American workers somehow have a God-given right to have jobs, and with much higher wages, than non-Americans, which may fit with an egalitarian agenda on a national level but not on a global level. I think the issue of jobs and poverty is the same whether the workers are American, Mexican or Chinese. So for me it doesn’t really matter that jobs are being transferred from one part of the world to another. And maybe even at that it’s still better, because the foreign workers are being lifted out of greater poverty than the American workers whose jobs they’re taking. We know this because if American workers, even the now-unemployed ones, were at the same economic level, and hence willing to compete for the same jobs, immigrants would not have a competitve advantage. Of course I understand there are other rational reasons to not favor relatively open borders, like the possibility of political destabilization from a restive, non-integrated Latino minority in the Southwest, but those can I think at least be separated from the economic rationale.

p.s. A fairly large number of politicians, including the president, seem hell-bent on pushing through some sort of amnesty plan for illegal immigrants in the hopes, among other reasons, of capturing the loyalty of the immigrant, especially Hispanic, voters. And it might work if those who benefit from it vote in the future based on gratitude, or simply out of ethnic or national loyalty. But if they vote based on economic self-interest it seems almost inevitable that this kind of legislation would be most unpopular among recent immigrants, since they’re the ones that are most likely to suffer from further waves of immigrants driving down wages in their sectors. And if this is true then the attempt to win future immigrant voters will always alienate current immigrant voters, hence an intrinsically self-defeating tactic.

It’s often claimed that in distinction to modern societies the chiefs of neolithic tribes were/are the wisest members of their community. In his memoir Tristes tropiques, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss implies this as well. This might seem little more than the glib sanctimoniousness of a committed noble-savageist. But for one thing his considerable first-hand experience among neolithic tribes probably makes his testimony count for more than the opinion of a Rousseau, even if people inevitably view even first-hand experience through content-laden eyes (i.e. through a filter of preconceptions), and in fact I think there may be something to his idea. I know from my own first-hand experience working in small organizations that it’s often surprisingly easy to pick the best leader. In my fraternity, for example, in my four years of college all but one year I would say that, within certain paremeters of seniority (it’s almost always a senior, or if need be a junior–but then, underclassmen get their chance eventually), the president chosen by election was arguably the best leader in the group (and even in the case of the one exception there were various mitigating factors that probably justified the result in the end, and my preferred candidate became president a couple of years later anyway). Why? Becasuse, as I say, most people can probably tell intuitively who is the most dedicated, the most level-headed and logical, the best at organizing people, even when most of them may not fully understand what the job entails. Of course, for subsidiary positions that require specific skills other than who’s the most popular, the democratic system is much less successful.

Of course, not all, or even most, neolithic tribal chiefs are chosen by election (although probably more than democracy-is-solely-a-Western-invention-created-in-Athens dogmatists would be willing to admit), but as Lévi-Strauss argues fairly persuasively, in a small group where everyone knows each other it’s probably not very realistic to lead if most of the members don’t support you, at least tacitly. And at that extremely local level most people seem to be fairly decent at recognizing who natural leaders are. So the problem with politics, especially democratic politics, is not that people are idiots. But think about the situation in a large nation-state: with millions (or billions) of people, no one can possibly know everyone else. Therefore, those who are vying for leadership are those who have had to devote themselves to pushing themselves into the spotlight, i.e. generally ambitious opportunists. Not that those people are always bad leaders, but in any group larger than a few hundred people they’re going to be, with a few exceptions, the only pool of people from which to choose, almost by definition. Even in student government, with only a couple of thousand people to choose from, it was generally student-government people that fought with each other for the honors, not those that you would necessarily actually want representing you (of course the problem there might also be that nobody else cared because the positions were meaningless–even more meaningless than fraternity president, since they at least have to attend to the continued existence of the organization, especially nowadays). So the problem isn’t so much how people choose a leader, but the framework that defines those choices even before they get the chance to decide. Because it’s not so hard to choose someone when you can weigh the alternatives among everyone in the group, but in a large-scale political system the potential nominees essentially have to nominate themselves first, then kick and fight their way into a position of prominence first before people even become aware of them. Of course, if you’re half as cynical about human motives as I am, that makes it seem almost impossible that leaders of large organizations could be as good as leaders of small organizations. There’s a reason that people that nominate themselves in small-group elections never win. At any rate, it seems there may not be such a contradiction between having good leaders on a small scale and bad ones on a large scale as it might at first seem, nor that the idea of sage tribal chiefs running around the jungles of the world is as entirely absurd.