Privacy inverted

I think we've almost reached the end of an extraordinary ten years or so. Immense amounts of information that should have been public has been kept private. Consider, for instance, eight years where the Bush administration classifying almost anything controversial to be "secret." More recently, we've seen the supposedly transparent health care debate become shaped by opaque dealings because, for instance, Big Pharma and the White House. We continue to see the Federal Reserve successfully prevent tax-payers from learning the inner-workings of an extremely power organization, the actions of which affect us all. But there's more to this decade than secret things that should be public. It's public things that should be secret, and I think this second phenomenon is well-illustrated by the following video: What should, for all intents, be a private moment, the marriage proposal by a pleasant-seeming fellow to his weather channel forecaster girlfriend, has been turned into a public spectacle. I'm sure that no one meant any harm, but as I watched this, it was as clear as can be that I didn't belong there. This should have been a private moment between the two lovebirds, but the decision to broadcast what appeared to be a surprise proposal (from her standpoint) just couldn't be resisted. The draw of the limelight was just too alluring. And proposing in public warped the situation in several major ways. She seemed to be willing, but was she really? Did she really want to make her lifetime commitment, and the tremble of her voice, a spectacle for numerous people who had actually tuned in only for the weather? And consider what this sort of thing does to the viewers. Watching this exchange turned me into a voyeur. Did you feel that way too? Here's more information on this TV proposal. Nor is this private-things-made-public situation unusual. Anyone turning on TV these days (TV is foisted upon us in waiting rooms, airports, stores, and even the courthouse where I served as a juror two weeks ago) sees numerous what-should-be private moments, including families airing out their dirty laundry on TV. We also see it on numerous blogs--I've read one where the woman advised the world that her husband is a drunken bum and that she's going to leave him--she wrote this to total strangers before telling him. You can also get a regular dose of what-should-be-private information just by browsing Facebook or, better yet, MySpace. And the mainstream media simply just can't get enough of what should be private family matters regarding politicians, actors, musicians and, of course, athletes. So there you have it. We are simultaneously seeing a continuing explosion of public private things and private public things. This just can't be healthy.

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An Alternate Look At The Way Things Did Not Go

Alternate history is a subset of science fiction. Stories and novels of this sort have been written for a long time, but in the last three decades or so the form has come into its own. Many of them are playful What-Ifs that look at how things might have gone had a detail or two gone differently. They are then excuses for adventure or thriller plots that quite often have little real poignance, not least because often the point of departure for the changed history is quite unlikely.

The best ones, however, play with changes that actually might have happened given just a nudge in one direction or the other, and the unfolding drama gives a glimpse of worlds that could easily have come about, often forbidding, thoroughly cautionary. We tend to assume, unconsciously at least, that things work out for the best, even when there is evidence to the contrary. An understandable approach to life given the limit power any of possess to effect events, change the course of history, or otherwise fight perceived inevitabilities. But unlike in fiction, it is rarely up to one person to fight evil or correct wrongs. It is a communal responsibility and the only tool we possess collectively is the wisdom accrued over time from which we might draw clues what to do.

Word War II provides a wellspring of speculation on what might have been done differently if. It seems occasionally that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Seen purely from a military standpoint, perhaps so. For all its formidable abilities, Nazi Germany was ultimately limited by available resources, something certain generals tried to address on multiple occasions but ultimately failed to successfully repair. But politically? The world at the time offered faint comfort to those who thought the democracies could win in a toe-to-toe fight with the tyrants.

Allow me, then, to recommend a trilogy of novels that represent the better aspects of alternate history and effectively restore the chilling uncertainties of those times.

[more . . . ]

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Celebrity nontheists

I hadn't read a list of prominent nontheists (atheists, agnostics and other religious skeptics) for awhile. Here's a recently updated list with lots of prominent names. Here's another. Both of these lists include background information regarding each name on the list. Some famous contemporary atheists, agnostics and skeptics are: Daniel Radcliffe Bill Maher Pat Tillman Oliver Sacks Bill Gates Omar Sharif Dave Barry Warren Buffet Phil Donahue Katharine Hepburn Angelina Jolie Lance Armstrong This list includes numerous scientists, along with many actors. Noticeably absent are politicians, which brings to mind polls showing that half of Americans would absolutely refuse to vote for any atheist politician. What follows are the percentages of people indicating in 2006 that they would refuse to vote for "a generally well-qualified person for president" on the basis of some characteristic; in parenthesis are the figures for earlier years: Catholic: 4% (1937: 30%) Black: 5% (1958: 63%, 1987: 21%) Jewish: 6% (1937: 47%) Baptist: 6% Woman: 8% Mormon: 17% Muslim: 38% Gay: 37% (1978: 74%) Atheist: 48%

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Attenuating friendships

At the Chronicles of Higher Education, William Deresiewicz writes about our long-evolving idea of friendship, and it's not a good thing. The more friends we claim to have, the more we are diluting the idea of friendship. Deresiewicz makes many worthy observations along the way, including the suggestion that the classical idea of a committed friendship conflicts with the expanding notions of freedom and equality. When I commit in real-life ways to particular friends, I seem to be acting in an exclusionary way toward all of those people who didn't make the cut. In modern times (says Deresiewicz), deep and committed friendships make some of us uneasy. "At best, intense friendships are something we're expected to grow out of." The comments to the article divided rather evenly into those that found the article poetic and inspiring versus those that found the author to be verbose and "howling at the moon." Reading this piece, I repeatedly thought of Robin Dunbar's research regarding friendship. We are not physiologically capable of having more than 150 good friends at one time. But networking tools certainly seem to expand our contacts (if not our friendships) well beyond 150. How should we really describe those people to whom we are linked up, but not in a deep way or a flesh and blood way? Reading this article, I was also reminded of several friendships that I would absolutely positively claim to be deep meaning friendships, that were started and maintained through the Internet. None of these are mere Facebook "friends"; they each involved substantial amounts of private email and, eventually, some face-to-face discussions. I mention this to fend off any suggestion that "real" friendships should be limited to those relationships maintains primarily through flesh and blood encounters. Here's a bit more from Deresiewicz' thought-provoking article:

If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.

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Gifts that tell good stories

Geoffrey Miller has written an extraordinary book, Spent, that challenges us to recognize that our ubiquitous efforts to decorate ourselves and others with goods and services are primarily to project image and status. (and see here and here) "Many products are signals first and material objects second." The result is that we often engage in a vast orgy of spending mostly to look good in the eyes of others. What does this have to do with Christmas? We humans are also creatures who are always looking for shortcuts. Many of us have deliberately chosen to work long hours as part of "career" choices in order to make more money. Most of us who have who have made extra money as a result of those long hours at the office would much rather burn off some of that money at a store than to spend our severely limited amounts of time creating goods or providing services. We'd like to believe that our gift-giving is a display of our good intentions and of who we are, but as Miller points out, the store-bought gifts so many of us buy serve only to display only a narrow range of qualities regarding who we are:

Buying new, real, branded, premium products at full price from chain-store retailers is the last refuge of the unimaginative consumer, and it should be your last option. It offers low narrative value--no stories to tell about interesting people, places, and events associated with the product' design, provenance, acquisition, or use. It reveals nothing about you except your spending capacity and your gullibility, conformism, and unconsciousness as a consumer. It grows no physical, social or cultural roots into your local environment. It does not promote trust, reciprocity, or social capital. It does not expand your circle of friends and acquaintances. It does not lead you to learn more about the convention, manufacture, operation, or maintenance of the things around you. Retail spending reveals such a narrow range of traits: the capacities to earn, steal, marry, or inherit wealth, and the perceptual memory and media access required to spend the wealth on whatever is advertised most avidly now.
(p. 271 ff). Those who procure gifts with a moment's thought or two, and with the help of credit cards, often fail in their attempts to impress. Retail spending pointedly fails:
[a]s a costly, reliable signal of one's dedication to a particular person (in the case of gifts), or to a particular acquisition (in the case of things bought for self display).
Miller reminds us that creating something yourself speaks much more loudly than a premade thing purchased at retail. The proof is that gifts which require personal time and creativity make much better "stories" to tell to family and friends. I largely agree with Miller, though I think that retail spending can make a compelling story in some circumstances. For instance, what if someone has limited financial means, yet digs deeply in order to purchase a nonfrivolous gift that another person truly needs (e.g., assume that someone of limited means provided a student with books that were desperately needed for a coming semester). During the Christmas season, however, Miller's version of retail spending is a common occurrence. Most of us patronize retail stores in order to send out ready-made gifts. This much is not disputed. What can be disputed in an interesting way, is why . Many people would claim that we give gifts to each other because we "care about" or "love" each other. Miller's writings dig several levels deeper, recognizing that we are human animals who have come equipped with deeply felt needs to display our traits to each other, and that we resort to retails gift giving to serve these deep urges. In other words, Miller resource to biology rather than folk psychology:

Biology offers an answer. Humans evolved in small social groups in which image and status were all important, not only for survival, but for attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children.

(p. 1). During this Christmas season, and at all other times of the year, it is fascinating to re-frame the widespread displays of gift-giving as anciently-honed and deeply-rooted biological impulses geared to ensure survival. For more, consider this post, entitled "Shopping for Sex" and this post on The Church of Stop Shopping.

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