The News of the Times

From Fukushima to Tahrir, the days take on apocalyptic fervor. The last days will come like a thief in the night, Jesus said. For some, Fukushima is simply an accident to either bad-aid or encase in concrete. Tahrir is more promising since the freedom of people we see inspires and motivates. Yet our lives - in the west - become more and more digitalized. Is there something essential that could be lost or are we, as Floridi says, simply adapting to new environs, new modes of doing what we as humans must and will always do? The apocalypse may be televised or tweeted, but we must hope that it always brings us to who we can and should be.

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Getting to Santa fe

My first journey to SF in '79. Didn't know not to fly into SF airport. I guess I had figured that I could get a taxi - it was an airport after all - to get up to school. Well, afte deplaning I was somewhat taken aback by the lobby - if you could call it that - being greeted by a coyote, some lizards, and a roadrunner. Seriously, though. The place was just a museum of old planes or something. And there definitely was not a taxi in sight. For that matter, no cars at all.

This was before that end of Agua Fria was a main thoroughfare. It was maybe even dirt. So I ask the coyote where the taxi is. He kinda looked @ me funny. Maybe he mentioned the yellow pages or maybe he just walked away shaking his head. So I call the taxi company - there was just 1. Woman answers phone, saying "hello." Not Juan's Taxi or something like that, like maybe you'd expect. So, noting this, I ask whether I could be picked and taken to the college. She said, "yeah, he'll be out." How long. "Well he's working on the car, so he'll be out as soon as it's fixed." No shit. True story. Read more!

Torture and the Human Image

Update 3/15/09: The NYTimes has released transcripts of interviews of those tortured at US "black sites."


The following published 06: I've meant to write about the decision by the US Congress last month to effectively legalize the torture of people. I haven't done so yet because of personal emergencies and time constraints. I've also been trying to weed through the various angles taken by the political and legal commentators on the issue. My take--strangely to me at least--always comes back to the ethico-religious perspective. ...

I say strangely because it seems to me that there are viable arguments from a pragmatic and ruthlessly mercenary perspective wherein torture can be justified. I do not agree with these, and I think they can be undermined logically, yet I think that people are rarely persuaded to act by either logical or rational arguments. That is, as I have argued before, when it comes to "skin for skin" as the Accuser in Job says, people will resort to distinctly seemingly irrational--although understandable--actions to save themselves.

Often, these avenues of saving oneself can occur against one's will. That is, biological and psychological forces take control of a person and the survival imperative becomes paramount in how one acts--and why one acts is often incommunicable, at least at the time. It is perhaps only after years of having done something that why you did what you did that the "reasons" you acted that way actually ever becomes sayable, to use a Wittgensteinian phrase in a rather superficial manner.

The Christian apostle Paul once had a chance to undergo torture for his belief in the Christian message he was hoping to spread throughout the world. Given the choice of suffering for his good news, Paul did something that his tormenters perhaps least expected. Paul invoked his Roman citizenship. Somewhat unique for a Jew of the time, Paul’s Roman citizenship brought with it a protection against the one thing that probably evoked one of the profounder fears in his contemporaries—the usual torture to elicit a confession that was normal operating procedure in the Roman provinces.

Roman citizenship brought with it the protection from mandatory torture. Besides the other economic and social privileges that came along with being a Roman citizen, this legal protection against being tortured—whether innocent or not—is perhaps the one right that stands out for us who look back over the millennia. That is, we take our protection from torture for granted, seeing it as the mark of a civilized nation.

No doubt, the Romans used the threat of torture as a coercive means of maintaining control over those who refused Roman rule. Indeed, this one right could be seen as a stick and its promise a carrot. How much subservience would a person give to the ruling powers if they’re faced with the instruments of torture?

In passing legislation that effectively legalizes torture, the US congress turned back the clock on civilization two millennia. Given the most likely fact that US citizens themselves could be tortured, this clock is set even farther back—back before the establishment of the Roman Republic, 2700 years ago.

This disturbing historical fact is further aggravated by the notion that the US has effectively set itself up as arbiter for determining who is and who is not a human being. This goes beyond a simple political dimension—it carries with it something of a metaphysical aspect that delegates to the US a power of life and death that in many religious or philosophical systems belongs to a transcendent power alone. It is this immense power over who’s determined to be human or not—who deserves the concern of human integrity—that led many early Christians in writings like the book of Revelation to characterize the Roman Empire as a Beast or demi-god that tries to usurp the power of control of the world’s maker.

The French thinker Simone Weil carried these images to their ethico-religious conclusions. Basing herself on the perception that humans turning humans into things--as they are in war or via slavery and torture—is the main feature of every evil regime throughout time, she appealed to a basic sentiment in humans that revulses from watching the suffering of others.

For Weil, the basic feature of the Beast’s method is to create an environment of illusion wherein people are alienated from their consciences. Dealing and doling out various fantasies, the Beast attempts to create in people a world free of pain and suffering or one where pain and suffering have no reality except as the cries of characters in a fantasy world without gravity of depth.

Weil’s appeal to primitive conscience is perhaps the last gasp of an unrepentant idealist. He was without a doubt a Platonist who attempted to integrate the Platonic world of ideas into political and social dialogs. For many post-modernists, this attempt already marks her work as trying to resurrect a defunct superstition of ghostly worlds where the disconnect between that world and this world creates an inherent illusion and self-deception. One places one’s will and its dispositions in that world rather than dealing with the world as it is in this world.

Be these philosophical questions be as they may, Weil’s central point about whether there’s a conscience and a human sentiment of sympathy for another’s suffering seems unreducible. Answering that question in the affirmative—whether via scientific research or based on introspective analysis—goes a long way in answering questions about why or why it’s not moral to torture others. Certainly, there are factors that come into play to undermine this basic human sentiment. In some religious contexts, it’s called original sin, in philosophy a matter of mistaking evil for the good.

Once you accept the basic notion of a human aversion to suffering of others, as well as the desire to make others suffer, then any time that such practices of condoning suffering and institutionalizing them becomes a matter of dealing a severe blow to what old-time humanists used to call the human image, and which various religious and philosophical apologists have termed the integrity of something that transcends the merely socio-biological human animal.

Related Link Against the Grain: Series on Christian Teaching and Torture: 1, 2, 3, 4 Read more!

Letter in Support of Shirin Ebadi

To:
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Ayatollah Shahrudi,
Head of the Judiciary
Mohammad Khazaee,
Ambassador and Permanent
Representative of the Islamic Republic
of Iran to the United Nations

I want to add these words in support of the recent letter asking you to help stop the attacks on Shirin Ebadi and the organization she heads. If the stories of these attacks are true, they represent a stain against the honor and words of the people and land of Iran. They surely represent an assault not only on a noble and courageous person but on the very being of justice itself.
Ms Ebadi's work has always been to bring the peace of Allah and the justice of the Most High into reality. The words she has written have inspired many to see Islam, Iran, and the revolution as beacons of hope and potential joy. I have taught her work to others in America and their hearts were softened from ignorance of Islam and its teaching to openness and dawning awareness.

I personally have opposed on my blog and website any attack by the United States or any other nation on Iran. I have defended the good faith and rational actions of Iran in seeking its best interests.

With these thoughts in mind, I therefore beg the Supreme Leader to personally seek the swift and immediate stop to all attacks and efforts to silence, threaten, intimidate, or harm Mrs. Ebadi. Please find the mercy of Allah in your heart to seek understanding of her words and actions where you may now see something more sinister. I believe that a woman with the purity of heart that she reveals in her writings harbors no harmful intent to you or to Iran.

May the Will of Allah Be Done and His Peace Be Yours,
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Dick on Ideas That Live Us

Very interesting short talk by the author Philip K Dick on ideas--"realizing" them, understanding them, and living them. I'm in the midst of reading several of Dick's 60s and 70s novels. He's not only a very good writer--many notches above pulp hacks--but also a thinker, in the way that Heidegger writes about.

In philosophical terms, this speech might be an interesting, perhaps poppish, version of his Kantianism. But I think that his primitiveness adds a special quality of genuine awareness of the newness and aliveness to ideas as they live us. The speech...

...is expressed in much more existentialist frame-of-reference, and perhaps owes something to Heidegger; allusions to the pre-Socratics might bear this out.

If You Think This World Is Bad, You Should See Some Of The Others Read more!

The REAL Maverick: Present Economy worse than Depression

Be afraid... be very afraid. Unfortunately, I find this man's opinion difficult to believe, since he has not understood Wittgenstein. He has also a lot of money from his theories. That Mandelbrot sits alongside him and speaks little says something, perhaps, about how seriously we should take this. As they say, a grain of salt. But then I am looking to move whatever money I have to under my mattress.

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Once upon time in the west - Final showdown

Is Obama the Charles Bronson figure in this film, come to exact vengeance for the rapes, pillaging, and murders perpetrated by Bush and his gang?

To be continued...

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I heard several commentators expressing their awe and feelings of transcendence they are experiencing now. The quasi-religious expressions and emotions felt have been striking. I myself do not feel this–even the sense of the historical has of yet escaped me. I thought it might be that I believe this should have happened years ago–that the time is well-nigh for a black person be elected to higher office be a simple reality, unastounding but nonetheless just and wonderful for that.

I do believe in the hope this man’s words and the symbolism evoke. But I am unmoved by the religious iconography, I think, since there is little that can or should approximate to the immensity of the inifnite in this world’s flux. I hope no one hears pessimism or sarcasm in these words. Irony-well that is a cleansing mood, as Kierkegaard argued. The irony is tempered at its harder edges by the words and hollow epithets I have had to endure from Republican and conservative pundits on the mass media. While countries lie in ruins, lives decimated and hundreds of thousands of dead crying from death’s maw, there is little that can assuage my feelings that there should be an avenging angel flying overhead somewhere. Obama’s words of peace and hope can certainly take away the brine of these tearful thoughts, yet one must surely hope for the knell of justice to be rung for these unjustly killed.

Some say that this election shows how good and right Americans are. I sit back and wonder whether this side of light can ever be balanced against the darkness visited on others by the past eight years when 95 percent of these good and right people believed that their princes and principalities acted in the right. Read more!

Promises

The US News & World Report, seen at a newsstand as I waited for the train in Penn Station, read: Promises to Keep." A picture of a young and intelligent Barack Obama graced the cover as well.
And I thought, "Promises from a man of promise, a man gifted with youth, eloquence, and intelligence. It is easy to think that he can keep the promises. Anyone older, less graced with handsome vigor would not inspire such promise of keeping promises." Read more!

ABC News Updated Milgram Video

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Disneyland in Iraq

I refused to give in to peer pressure and family and child pressure when it came to taking my children to Disneyland or Disney World. While I have been the beneficiary of Mickey Mouse coulture and used to watch the Mickey Club as a child, as I grew older and educated myself about culture, I came to despise everything associated with what the East German playwright Heiner Muller once derided as America's greastest contribution to world culture.

As I say, I have benefited from Disney's worldwide attempt to monopolize the fantasies and dreams of our children. My kids spent hours watching their movies while I continued those same cultural studies alone in my bedroom. It's a tangled tapestry to unweave and perhaps overgeneralized to blame anything and everything on such cultural factors. Disnetangling the effects that consumer culture, perhaps no better epitomized than by Disney, has preoccupied me for some time now.

Is Disney the heart of Darkness, the bedizened corrupt core that we can point to when we say what's wrong with American culture? It seems that to say so in the mouth of an American can only seem a bit supercilious if not downright dishonest.

Yet, this notion in the mouth of others loses its superficiality and opens up a dimension of awareness that perhaps only suffering and its assciated emotions can evoke. The following words, therefore, are perhaps worth more than numerous essays and books that critique American culture.

In his description of the US Army's destruction of Fallujuah, Dahr Jamail quotes an Iraqi as saying:

"This is the freedom. In their Disneyland are there kids just like this?"

The last question is not rhetorical. At first reading, I thought it referred to the soldiers devastating the man's city. Just now, though, I also see that it might refer tot he man's own children, who no doubt clung to him like reeds scared by the end of the world. The end of the world that will visit their nightmares for years and years, just as it will perhaps visit the soldiers whose hearts of darkness opened so many doors to the pit of hell.

There is perhaps a bitter irony in the ambivalence about which children the man referred to. It points to the idea that we are all indeed the same, yet also so vastly different. The children bred by Disneyland visited Iraq and brought death and desolation to the land. Like some B-movie horror show, these Mickey minions roamed and marauded the desert to the bane, experts estimate, of over 1 million dead.

Yet, the mirror show does not end there. It also belies a terrible irony, one that builds on a theme that Jamail himself brings to light: the dehumanization and beggary imposed by Americans on those too distant others, too far away to be considered "thy neighbor" to fit into the category of those we must love.

Jamail writes:

None of this -- from the unending "incidents" themselves to the way the Pentagon has dominated the reporting of them -- would have been possible without a widespread dehumanization of Iraqis among American soldiers (and a deep-set, if largely unexpressed and little considered, conviction on the American "home front" that Iraqi lives are worth little). If, four decades ago, the Vietnamese were "gooks," "dinks," and "slopes," the Iraqis of the American occupation are "hajis," "sand-niggers," and "towel heads." Latent racism abets the dehumanization process, ably assisted by a mainstream media that tends, with honorable exceptions, to accept Pentagon announcements as at least an initial approximation of reality in Iraq.

Whether it was "incidents" involving helicopter strikes in which those on the ground who died were assumed to be enemy and evil, or the wholesale destruction of the city of Fallujah in 2004, or the massacre at Haditha, or a slaughtered wedding party in the western desert of Iraq that was also caught on video tape (Marine Major General James Mattis: "How many people go to the middle of the desert.... to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive."), or killings at U.S. checkpoints, or even the initial invasion of Iraq itself, we find the same propaganda techniques deployed: Demonize an "enemy"; report only "fighters" being killed; stick to the story despite evidence to the contrary; if under pressure, launch an investigation; if still under pressure, bring only low-level troops up on charges; convict a few of them; sentence them lightly; repeat drill.

To think that hatred is manipulated in this way--that we buy into such hateful images of those we should call brothers and sisters--it does indeed call into question how deeply the supposed sympathy for others delves into the human soul. Read more!

They're Such Nice Boys

From an article by Conn Hallinan trying to explain why occupations fail:

Israeli psychologist Nofer Ishai-Karen and psychology professor Joel Elitzur interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories. They found that the soldiers routinely engaged in murder, assault, threats and humiliation, and many of them enjoyed it.

“The truth is that I love this mess—I enjoy it. It is like being on drugs,” one soldier told them. Another said, “What is great is that you don’t have to follow any law or rule. You feel you are the law, you decide. Once you go into the Occupied Territories, you are God.”

One soldier told a story about seeing a four-year-old boy playing in the sand in his front yard during a curfew in Rafah. The soldier says his officer “grabbed the boy. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock…the next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.”

And on the Napoleonic army in Spain:

A few hours with the works of Goya will give one an idea of how the French army behaved in Spain.

These quotes, as well as the stunning statistics of American soldiers' indifference to Iraqi suffering testify to the validity of Milgram's experiments on the dark heart in every human, I think. Read more!

Henwood on Economic Crisis

Left economist Doug Henwood and guests on the recent US economic crisis. Read more!

One Nation Under Urizen (God)

Of the primeval Priests assum'd power,
When Eternals spurn'd back his religion;
And gave him a place in the north,
Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.

Eternals I hear your call gladly,
Dictate swift winged words, & fear not
To unfold your dark visions of torment.

-- Blake. "Urizen"

I missed a posting on William Blake's 250th birthday a few weeks ago. Sadly, because I cut my prophetic teeth on Blake. I respected his poetry and vision so much that my second son's middle name derives from the poet. Due to a very busy schedule and some anxiety about the future, I couldn't get off the floor to say thanks to a person whose work fprmed much of my adolescent psyche.

Much of Blake's poetry was directed at what he deemed the demonic side of the Enlightenment. Locke and
Hume were targets of his sarcasm and venom.

These memories are roused by this response to Mitt Romney's speech on mormonism and religion the other day.

Geoffrey Stone writes:

To be sure, there were traditional Christians among the Founders, including such men as John Jay, Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams. Most of the Founders, however, were not traditional Christians, but deists who were quite skeptical of traditional Christianity. They believed that a benevolent Supreme Being had created the universe and the laws of nature and had given man the power of reason with which to discover the meaning of those laws. They viewed religious passion as irrational and dangerously divisive, and they challenged, both publicly and privately, the dogmas of traditional Christianity.

Stone's message here is important. As he says, the common understanding that is gaining steam in popular culture is that the US was founded by Xtians. Stone's points show the misunderstandstood and superficial historical record on this.

Newt Gingrich, for example, is showing up on the talking-head sphere with a CD and book, "Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation's History." In conjunction with Huckabee's rise and Romney's attempt to align his Mormon heritage with evangelicalism, it behooves us to keep the historical record in mind.

Without a doubt, the Deist religious view espoused by the so-called founding Fathers was of the form that Blake attacked to his dying breath. For the poet, those who espoused rational light and clarity only did so to blind us to the darker recesses where the starving children and dead bodies huddled and were buried. For Blake, humans could only be spiritually healthy when they balanced reason with imagination and the emotions.

A more nuanced historical view than the one presented by Romney et al is that even their religious views are built against a background of Enlightenment assumptions. Like the shrill ghost that Bush is quickly becoming, these politicians may mouth anti-enlightenment rhetoric when they rant against secularism, the Republican foreign policy agenda assumes Enlightenment principles.

This point itself may be one of those things that liberals and conservatives either like to forget and perhaps don't even know. As with many things, the dividing point between the two does not emanate from a complete difference of world view but rather from a shared world-view parts of which each party emphasizes at the expense of others.

The importance of Blake and other of those who rebelled against the dictatorship of Reason is that there must be a regeneration of vision, a new world, where love and forgiveness are placed at the highest pinnacle--far ahead of reason and prudence.

Related Link

• Linguist George Lakoff on Reason and Propaganda

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Civilization@Risk

Is there anything that provides a grimmer testament to human frailty than the Abu Ghraib pictures now available on the web? When you see these pictures, many react with disgust, anger, horror, or perhaps pity. Maybe you even react dumbly and uncomprehendingly. After all, they are pictures of men stripped naked and put into positions that make no sense. You have to think the brute reality of their physical discomfort into the pictures. The pictures themselves don't breathe the sighs or the smell of bodies contorted into shapes and positions meant to humiliate and demean. Pictures don't bleed.

But there's more to a picture than what's seen. That we fill that unseen void with our own nightmares or lack of feeling or overblown sense of pity--is it there where the gulf between human and human eventually erupts and discharges its foul poisons? For no picture can grasp that image that eludes every camera, that sense of who we are and that no word will ever inscribe on paper or sand but whose carcass can taunt with nagging ignorance.

These pictures tell a mute story of desolation and desecration; the profane shock of nude men that have become nothing but masses of flesh and hooded mannequins. They elicit more of that final and ultimate irony: our safe securities are nothing but lies and self-deception. ...

One thing that the photos from Abu Ghraib do not document and perhaps cannot show is the fragile hold that custom and ritual have on our lives. You have to delve deeply into the literature to see the concerted regime undertaken by the torturers to reduce these men to mere zeroes. The awful truth revealed by this psychological desecration is that what binds us to each other is quite tenuous and that it breaks quite easily in times of crisis and stress.

Humans are indeed a product of their culture and environment. This is a sad truth that the torturers and their medical gurus know well how to exploit and destroy. To break someone down, attack, mock, and crush their most sacred customs and ideals. Isolate, intimidate, deafen with noise to disconstruct a human being into its most elemental parts. And when the human grovels at your feet begging for mercy, start to retrain it and make it compliant and scarred for life. In this condition they might even learn how to kill for you.

Humans can and will mistreat each other much like a bad dog trainer treats an untrained dog. Given the right circumstances and the right conditions, to paraphrase Simone Weil, humans are capable of the most despicable crimes. The problem is, she said, that most of us will not admit that truth to ourselves. Instead, we work under the illusion that we wouldn't do it, we couldn't do it. ...

Our leaders want us to believe that what will save us is something called civilization. The Pope, for example, has joined the choir of those singing the hosannas of western culture and civilization. (Also see 700 Club reporter's comments.) Along with Pres. Bush, the Pope tells us that Christianity itself is threatened by the terrorists. This choir makes common cause on the Scylla and Charydbis of secular relativism and Islamic fundamentalism.

Were we to sacrifice a billion lives on the altar of western culture, would it produce a society where these crimes would never again arise? Given the assumption of original sin shared by the Pope and Bush, they cannot guarantee any such thing. And given the inability of social and cultural constructs to ensure this, why should I care whether western civilization survives or not?

The Pope’s and Bush’s view makes the basis for individual salvation count on belonging to a group of believers; belonging to this group somehow works magically to obviate the consequences of individual evil--that is, just as long as I belong to the group I am saved. Like those terrorists that say their group is the one to belong to, civilization has now come to a war between what group guarantees salvation or not.

Nothing in culture or civilization will save me from having to face the evil over and over that might face me as a possibility. Never, until time itself ends. The trumpet blare to fight for and save civilization as though it means the salvation of myself is just as much a manifestation of nihilism as the nihilism that these politico-religious leaders say they are out to destroy.

Religiously minded nihilism destroys values and guts self meaning as surely and widely as does the nihilism of secularity. Both purvey a type of self-consciousness that means joining the herd. Like any other consumer movements, religious institutions cannot but mirror this process since they have bought into the presuppositions of nihilism itself. And they themselves are part of the problem.

There are millions of ways that religious nihilism accommodates with purely temporal productions a universal human desire for happiness. Not only does the loss of cultural and social roots create the types of nihilism and violence exhibited by various religious fundamentalisms--Islamic, Jewish, Xtian, and Hindu--civilization and the need to ensure its survival also produces various forms of fascistic political regimes that fill the ennui and despair with repressive and nihilistic gestures.

As Kierkegaard noted long ago, modern individuals face a stark choice: join the fundamentalist charge back to the "origins," the culture of mass mind (mirror image of secularism itself) and thereby lose your real self in mindless despair. Or one can choose to realize the temporality of existence and in radical self-choice disengage oneself from the surrounding world; self-consciously aware of one's eternal destiny.

The way of the solitary individual is a narrow gate that few will enter. The modern age is a time when the spiritual is gutted and enervated to the point that even understanding that one has an eternal self is a joke and a scandal. Unless you can regain primitivity your only health will be envy, resentment, and the anger of the mutant lashing out an alien world.

False religion and its call to group identity destroy the true desire for love and community. Merge into the faceless herd of civilizattional religion or respond to the task of becoming a self, an individual of true faith striving to attain a perfection that you know in dreams but that existence itself tells you is impossible.

Related Links

• Silence Hate With Truth
  
• The End of Tolerance
  
• The Danish Cartoon Protests: "Clash of Civilizations"? - Reactions & Commentary
  
• Religious Riots Continue in Nigeria
  
• Report: Pentagon Warned on Torture, Abuse
  
• Why I Published Those Cartoons
  
• U.S. Firms Balance Morality, Commerce
  
• n N.C., GOP Requests Church Directories
  
• The Decline and Fall of Europe
  
• Can Jihadis Ever Be Released?
  
• The Danish Cartoon Protests: "Clash of Civilizations"? - Reactions & Commentary
  
• Vatican Calls Turkey Trip a Critical Test
  
• Iraqi President Condemns U.S. After New Abuse Footage

Read more!

Driven to Distraction (1)

What does it mean to be distracted? Are we as Americans more distracted than people from other countries or perhaps than others in different times and places? What does it mean if we are distracted?

On a recent radio show I heard someone talk about Americans being distracted. The person making these remarks appeared somewhat skeptical of the view that Americans are distracted--voiced perhaps by pundits and other intellectuals of the public sphere.

The speaker seemed to want to counter an assumed view that Americans are becoming more distracted in their daily lives. What remained unquestioned in the speaker's talk was what it means to be distracted.

Note the passive voice construction already used here. The view under discussion assumes that something or other is distracting us, distracting you, me, from what is or should be the most important thing in life perhaps. That is, we are the passive victims of forces or apparatuses that divert or move our proper focus from a proper goal or objective. And, of course, we all know what that most important thing is, right?

What is doing the distracting? Certainly, again, the assumption--the unspoken answer ("You must get it don't you see, or you will be deemed illiterate, dumb, or just plain stupid, don't you see?") is that modern culture, especially the variety of entertainment venues, distracts me. I am pictured here as a passive imbiber of stuff out there that is meant to grab my attention. This stuff includes everything from TV to the Internet to various other media. It is meant to make me look at it, take note of it, and perhaps understand it.

Leaving aside numerous assumptions about a passive viewer somehow influenced unconsciously by outside sources, one thing that demands immediate question might be: what would prove that I am distracted or not? or that the majority or even a minority of the public is distracted?

And what does it mean to be distracted? In its apparently most obvious sense, distraction is where I am diverted from looking at something I need to be looking at and instead look at something else. My attention is drawn for whatever reason to something else than what I should focus on.

The analogy to seeing is obvious here. I say obvious but it also seems right to say that it could be otherwise. The image of the seeing eye--the eye that sees all seems right in our culture that focuses on the image. But the mind is not an all-seeing eye, or at least it does not seem that is anything else but a metaphor, right?

Given the vast resources to flood our environment with images and sensory input meant for the sense of sight, it is perhaps inevitable that when we describe being distracted we use the analogy with sight. So--this line of thought goes--when I am distracted in my thoughts I am thinking or pondering a thought or idea when I should be focused or concentrating on another, more important thought. I should be looking elsewhere, concentrating on a single point or visual image that will by pointing me in the right direction. It might even be that I should be seeing the picture--like a movie or maybe a painting of what it is that the world should be or look like.

This last remark seems very interesting. I could go in several directions here, but I want to get at this picture of a picture, so to speak. I say picture of a picture because the thought that we should see reality as a film or picture is itself a picture of what supposedly should or should not be. I feel as though I am looking into one of those pictures that depicts a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror and so on to infinity.

What I want to question is whether the image of an image is indeed inevitable--that is, is it somehow a fact about thought and the way we think and see reality really all about seeing images and pictures inside pictures?

And I still want to look at what it might mean to be distracted--what that might mean, whether it matters, and the perhaps many different ways it could matter.

And, of course, the question remains: are we distracted?

Driven to distraction (2) Read more!

Where Does Your Heart Lie?

Reading the obituaries to my home-bound mother, I discovered the following as part of the final memories of a deceased woman:

"She loved shopping."

The statement speaks for itself. With all due respect, I wonder what it is that would place this in the obituary writer's mind as the most important thing to think about when someone has gone to the other side. The answer probabkly refers to information the writer received from a family member. Still... Read more!

Freud Converts the Masses

This BBC video, "The Century of the Self," explores how Freud's theories influenced propaganda efforts, especially through his nephew Edward Bernays. I believe that Bernays was a type used by Dos Passos in his USA trilogy.

One fact I did not know is that Bernays' spearheaded the translation of Freud's works into English. Does this mean that Freud's works would have remained a blip in the history of the history of ideas? Though I had an inkling that Walter Lippmann was influenced by Freud, this documentary makes that plain.

In part 2, I discovered the role that Freudians played in working with the Army during and after WWII. Compare this fact with recent stories of psychologists working with the CIA and others to develop forms of torture. (See this Salon article on one man's experiences at a CIA black site Also see this translation by Juan Cole of a US soldier's eyewitness account of torture at Bagram.)

I accept the notion that political reality is manipulated via emotions, aka the will, and not reason. The challenge, then, is to identify a way to bring to bear on the will the desire for justice over the destructive and selfish wants and desires. I also believe that the reason why many Leftists simply don't get this, some like Zizek are important because they understand--through Lacan--that the reality underlying political and ethical behavior is inherently irrational.

This statement does not mean that I am a Lacanian or Zizekian, yet I do think that the latter understands things that others simply disregard because it does not fit their Enlightenment models.

This documentary can also be put into a wider historical perspective. As JGA Pocock notes in several of his books on English history, the beginnings of capitalism included an awareness that it opened up a vast reservoir of anxieties and dark passions. Economic theorists of the day spent numerous pages on trying to figure out how to stem the tide of these passions from overwhelming the economic stability of the country.

I was reminded of these remarks the other night when I saw a TV ad for an online stock trading program, TDAMERITRADE (the video loads very slowly, even on DSL). It quite overtly assures the prospective customer that the software would allow them to make stock-buying decisions rationally as opposed to emotionally. Read more!

Driven to Distraction (2)

Are we distracted? Does the outside world distract us from some important truth or reality that we should otherwise be looking at or doing or both?

Right off, there seems to be something wrong with this notion of a passive viewer. It assumes a lot about consciousness and the way that I engage the world and what's "out there." (And I think of the motto for one of my favorite TV shows, the X-Files: "The truth is out there.")

What's askew--and perhaps not exactly wrong--here is the opposition between an inside and outside to how I live in the world. The reason this is important to realize is that this notion of inside and outside leads people to think that there's an inside world inside me as opposed to an outside world that somehow influences me in ways that the inside sometimes does not perceive.

Why it's not wrong to think this way is because we often find ourselves thinking about memories and ideas and perhaps images that only we personally can access. (actually do we really "think about" memories, etc. or just remember--no thinking about occurring at all.)

These things are private to me, it's said. They make up "my world," as distinct from what others have or have not perceived. In this sense, I can therefore seemingly ask whether I can ever really know someone else. Since their world is cut off from mine, since they have memories and perceive the world by way of these memories (apparently) then I have no way of really knowing what they're thinking.

Yes, we cannot really know anyone. We can't see into their heads, so to speak. But who says we could? While it makes sense to talk about really knowing someone, things go awry when we take that talk and try to literalize it. To make like there is an actual room or space in the brain where--if I had god-like powers, say, or a special instrument--I'd be able to see what you or anyone else are thinking.

And isn't this notion really attractive or alluring? Isn't it perhaps related to the notion of the "fly sitting on the wall" seeing and overhearing unseen what others are doing? The wish to really see what others are like--what they really do in secret--goes at least as far back as Plato and the ring that makes one invisible.

So the idea of an inside versus an outside is compelling and perhaps reflects old desires to see the world as if we weren't there. The notion that if I didn't exist or weren't somehow perceived, I'd be able to see the world as it really is.

This desire to see the world as it really is seems to be something that science can give us. The world as it is--unskewed by personal concerns, memories, biases, or what have you--can be given to me by scientists with their tools of objectivity. This is a very attractive and appealing notion: to be given the world as it is, unvarnished and throbbing with the very juices of life, so to speak, drives a deep well into our inmost desires and needs.

What many thinkers of one branch of philosophy question, though, is whether science or even philosophy itself can deliver this viewpoint. Can we really detach ourselves from what time and personal histories have made us? Can we really disengage from our bodies and its needs and desires to attain that god-view? Are we really unable to know other's in such a radical way that they are closed to understanding?

Though some of these questions are more obvious than others, neither seems easier than any other to answer--at least in a way that everyone would agree on. Maybe there is no one answer and the fact that we tend to want an all-comprehending answer that covers questions of this kind is a problem of its own.

That suggestion, or insight, is what the philosopher Wittgenstein suggested. Seeking what I call the decoder book to all questions is the sign of a common human failing. It's a failing in the sense that such a decoder book leads us to think that we have answered questions that really aren't questions to start with. Indeed, the notion of a decoder book leads people to seek that which covers up what is ultimately in front of us all the time.

The preceding remarks are a short introduction were meant as a way of getting at what it might to be distracted. I launched into the introduction because I wanted to see why we want to differentiate a world inside from a world outside us. The argument itself is the barest outline of what is called Wittgenstein's rebuttal of the idea that there can be a private language that no one else could understand.

What the argument seems to describe are fundamental facts of human language. That is, language is not some individual accomplishment. It is a socialized phenomenon that we learn via numerous linguistic and non-linguistic practices. The ability to learn language is inherent to the human animal in its biological and social existence.

Language, then, is important in understanding that in understanding being distracted we should be discussing what words and stories relate to being distracted. Read more!

New country (Iraqi song)

This video is very powerful. It made a big emotional impact on me. I can only imagine how it affects someone living in Iraq who knows what the "impure footprints" dredging ruts of sand have meant in their lives. The video comes from Last of the Iraqis blog. According to his blog posting, the song in the background is so popular that 80 % of Iraqis have saved it in some digital form. Check out the blog.

Read more!