But what’s puzzlin’ you is the nature of my game…

That’s about the only song I can stand to listen to the Rolling Stones do.  Musically, thematically, it all comes together for them.  It’s perfect.  Beyond that, while I certaiinly like a lot of their songs, I cannot abide listening to the Stones.  Particularly, I can’t tolerate Mick Jagger’s sorry excuse for a singing voice.  Call me old fashioned, but a hoarse tenor croak is not pleasant to listen to.

(To be fair, I can’t stand Tony Bennet, AC/DC, Rod Stewart. Or Bruce Springsteen, largely for the same reasons.)

I start this piece with that bit of personal revelation for a reason.  Voice, to me, is very important.  Getting it right, using it properly, saying something meaningful…they all work together.  One may argue over style vs. substance—and there is validity to the argument, for certainly some people have nothing but style (Celine Dion comes to mind) and it would be nice if they had something to say—but ultimately, to get across what you mean, the two must work hand-in-glove.

When Erich invited me to contribute to Dangerous Intersection, I agreed under the proviso that I use a pseudonym.  My reasons were many, but mainly I wasn’t sure how good I’d be at it, and I wanted to practice.  But practicing in public can be…dicey.  So while I learned better how to do this, I elected to do it behind the cloak of an alter ego.

Jason Rayl is my creation.  In many ways, he is me.  He is a character in an unpublished novel I wrote in my late teens and early twenties, the first novel I ever completed.  It’s a big sucker and may never see the light of day, but the main character is very much me.  Or, at least, a very idealized version of who I thought I was and who I thought I’d like to be.  I grew out of him, but from time to time he’s been useful.

My name is Mark W. Tiedemann and I write science fiction.  You can find my books on Amazon.  I’ve posted a link to my own website, which I’ve just finished revamping.  It’s not all done yet, but done enough.  There, you’ll find a page called The Distal Muse, which is where I post news and assorted ramblings, and may now be posting much of what I’ve been posting here.  If Erich permits, I may cross post.

It’s not so much that I think I’ve mastered this form of writing—I wonder how many ever master their words—but I think the experiment has paid off and frankly I’m not in the least ashamed of anything I’ve put on Dangerous Intersection.  I would not be ashamed of the content in any event, but the voice….ah, the voice.  From time to time in my life I’ve committed actual songwriting.  Whatever other merits my attempts may possess, I do not sing them myself.  I don’t have the voice.

When Stephen King did away with Richard Bachman, he declared that Bachman had died “from cancer of the pseudonym.”  In Jason’s case, it was bad cold.

I said I write science fiction.  I’ve published ten novels, fifty plus short stories.  Writing fiction of any kind forces one to grow perspective.  Writing science fiction requires an appreciation if not a full understanding of how systems work and why things come together the way they do.  Historical writing shares this.  What it has done for—or to—me is cause me to see as many sides of an issue as I can grasp.  Consequently, I cannot abide doctrinaire positions, ideologues, Us Or Them thinking.  This has also caused many friends to view me with frustration and consternation, because they can’t pin my sympathies down.  Am I a liberal?  A conservative?  Reactionary, radical, libertarian?  Relativist?

See all of the above.  More often than not I take a “curse on both your houses” approach, because more often than not the primary issues are overlooked, run down, trampled, or twisted in the name of political expediency.
This has caused me to draw back from posting on some topic on which I have strong feelings, but can’t quite find the center of, and don’t wish to shortchange the complexities of what may really be going on in the interest of presenting a solid front for one position or another.

For instance, this whole mad, trendy, fashionable rush for bio-fuels.  I have friends who two years ago would never have admitted to any sympathy with Green anything and are now on the bandwagon for ethanol.  Why?  “We need to become independent of foreign oil.”  And when I say, “oh, so we should become dependent then on foreign sugar?”  they look at me as if I’d just farted at the birthday party.  See, they now support this for political reasons, not environmental reasons, and I find that just as objectionable as unthinking support for Big Oil.  It will solve nothing, just shift the focus of the problem.  The issues are far more complex than party politics allow.  Even though the bedrock issue is as simple as first-year algebra, and no one really wants to talk meaningfully about it.

Which means I stand outside both groups and lob stink bombs.  Not a comfortable place to be.

But it’s where I am and where I live.

So I thought it would be a good time to introduce myself.  So now you know who and what I am and can accept or reject what I say with full knowledge that you’ve been addressed by a Science Fiction writer.

Excuse me?  The bedrock problem?  Oh, sorry.  Population.  Very simply, there are just too damn many people on the planet, with no obvious possibility of curtailing the growth rate.  People don’t want to talk about that.  In order to live, to survive, to be what we may potentially be, we have to burn energy.  We have to burn something.  What that something is, frankly, is less important in the long run than the fact that we have to burn it.  Solar is passive, sure, but make solar panels we have to use petroleum, heat, the kind of high tech that has emerged as a legacy of a burning economy.  Hydropower is also pasisve, but building dams has other environmental drawbacks and is not transportable everywhere.  Geothermal?  Well, sure, but we may be releasing heat.

No simple answer.  The one factor, which if addressed could begin to solve some of these problems is population, but people insist, in aggregate, that they are separate from “nature” in this instance.  We take for ourselves the unhampered right to reproduce at will, without restraint, and that means that all the solutions we come up with for this overcharged fossil fuel existence are band-aids.  What could be sustainable and manageable at a billion people is a horrific problem at seven billion.  The planet isn’t getting any bigger.

There have been science fiction writers talking about this for decades.

Anyway, if you’ve a mind, come over to my website occasionally.  Or, if the whole pseudonym thing has put you off, stop reading me altogether.  I’m done with the experiment and feel that I have gotten from it what I needed.  So from now on, it’s me you’ll be dealing with.  Not Jason.  Oh, he’s not gone.  He always was part of me and always will be.  But he’s on my advisory board now.  Retired from public life for the time being.

Pleased to meet you…hope you get my name.

In the midst of making a quite reasonable economic prediction regarding the extent to which China owns our national debt, Grumpypilgrim makes a linguistic prediction that may not be as well-founded: that parents should enroll their children in Mandarin classes because Mandarin will become the new language of commerce. In fact, Victor Mair points out in a recent post on Language Log, English may be emerging as the new language of convenience in multilingual China:

As Exhibit A in support of this proposition, Mair submits the following poster from the restrooms at Beijing Normal University:

Mair writes:

First of all, the handsome young man is enjoining everyone to speak Mandarin **in Beijing**. This must mean that a lot of people at this university and elsewhere in Beijing (much less outside of Beijing, which is supposedly the epicenter of Mandarin usage in China!) do not speak Mandarin to each other.

The campaign against multilingualism is underscored by the fact that the spokesman pictured here might be a translator, which would not be necessary if everyone in China spoke the same language, viz., Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]), the designated national tongue. Even if he’s not a simultaneous translator with the headset of his profession, one wonders why an operator, an announcer, or whatever he’s supposed to be, is pictured making this particular gesture and wearing that type of headset.

A further irony is that the administration of the University felt it necessary to post this slogan both in English and in Mandarin, which raises the very real questions of HANZI literacy and the emerging role of English as a rising lingua franca of convenience (as it is in the world’s other most populous country, India).

(he then goes on to describe the pun on the Mandarin phrase translated as “convenience” - just like the English word, it can be used as a euphemism for “toilet,” which is interesting given where the authorities chose to post this particular public service message.)

Mind you, I’m not suggesting that Americans continue in their complacent monolingualism. Foreign language instruction should start in the elementary grades and continue through high school - high school grads should be required to learn at least one foreign language and have the opportunity to learn more than one. But Spanish or Arabic might be just as strategic a choice as Mandarin. Though marketability of a foreign language can be hard to predict. The demand for Russian translators certainly isn’t what it was.

Here’s another educational poster from Victor Mair which suggests that employees in Beijing’s shopping center have a different conception of the term “customer service” than most salespeople in this country:

If you want to find out why the last 3 forbidden words could not be translated, read about it here.

One of the things that sends me straight up a wall to paw helplessly and violently at ceilings comprised of crushed glass, old nails, and asbestos fibers is when I hear a young woman blithely claim that she isn’t a Feminist and, in fact, “wouldn’t want to be one.” They make this claim with all the insouciant self confidence they might apply to choosing a new dress or deciding which shoes to wear or whether this or that club is trendy enough. Inside, I rage, and want to scream at them “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? DON’T YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT YOU’RE SAYING?”

Of course they don’t. They’ve grown up in a world that has been substantially changed by feminism, a world in which it would no more occur to them that they couldn’t do a particular job if they wanted to than it would occur to them that they might be forbidden to vote, drink or smoke in public, or get a divorce from a man and expect to leave with actual belongings. They don’t understand that the very fact that they can choose not to be a feminist is because of feminism and the struggles of those they now see, probably, as dreary, frumpy, unromantic, possibly man-hating, poorly groomed sexless harridans.

And who wants to be bothered with all that politics and political correctness anyway?

I want to shake them, open their well-coifed heads and pour history into their brains. On the one hand, I’m thrilled they can make that choice, that it is a matter of choice, that they can go on about whatever lives they choose and not be concerned about the fact that some Male might decide—because they have no penis—that they should be barred from certain career choices, or prohibited from opting out of a marriage, or committed to an asylum because of a hysterical dissatisfaction with limitations they shouldn’t question anyway because, after all, women who work out of the home are “unnatural” and “neurotic” and women who want things beyond that which society deems appropriate for them to have are suffering delusions of self-ownership. I am happy about that.

But like any freedom, the utter ignorance of how it came to be infuriates me. As if the freedom now enjoyed is somehow permanent and will never go away.

I’d like to recommend a new book. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon. For those who may know a little something about science fiction, James Tiptree jr. was one of the finest writers of the Seventies. To my mind, it would not have mattered which genre the work came out in, Tiptree was a first class thinker. As suggested by the title, he was also a woman, one Alice Bradley Sheldon.

Myth surrounded Tiptree almost from the moment the stories began to appear in 1969. He was reclusive to the point of insanity, there were hints that he worked for the CIA, no one knew anything about him, not even the editors soliciting stories. Sheldon allowed and later fed the myths through voluminous letter-writing. It was finally revealed that Tiptree was a woman, after several major figures in the field had made pronouncements about her gender (Robert Silverberg’s is the most famous, made in print, that there was something “ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.”), and it turned a world-full of preconceptions on end.

The Seventies was the decade of rising Women’s Consciousness. It came after a century of preparatory work and followed hard upon the Civil Rights movement. What women enjoy today in terms of freedom of self and action was established in that decade. So you can imagine that the dialogue was heady and a lot of bad ideas were being touted and shot to pieces and we were all learning a new language. Tiptree, in the small pond of science fiction, had a huge impact simply by virtue of writing work that transcended gender.

But the story is infinitely more complex. Alice Sheldon came from a famous family and had the kind of life we imagine for writers like Hemingway or Genet or Joyce. It took decades for her to come out from beneath the shadow of a very famous mother and find her own voice—and when she found it, perversely, she had to write it in the guise of a man.

Julie Phillips, a freelance journalist, became intrigued, wrote a couple of articles about Sheldon, then produced this superb literary biography which is also a textbook on the struggles of women in the 20th Century. She never makes the mistake of coopting Alice Sheldon’s story for larger purposes of politics, because she recognized how her life and the politics around it were essentially inseparable.It is a book I would like to thrust into the hands and down the cranium of any young female who disses feminism while clearly understanding nothing about it. One passage alone should suffice to suggest that things are Really Different Now—Alice Sheldon was one of the first to join the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in the early days of World War II (The WAAC preceded the WAC). Her company was part of a WAAC parade for the benefit of Eleanor Roosevelt in Des Moines. And—

“As the women marched in formation through the city streets to receive the first lady, they drew a large crowd of men who kicked slush at them and bombarded them with garbage.” Pg. 113

I suggest it as invaluable reading also for its psychological insight into the problem–the challenge–of any Out Group struggling to be heard by the majority culture. It is brilliant, well-written, and timely. A great antidote for the mindless acceptance of rights and liberties that, for no better reason than simple biology, a world of men are struggling today to remove.

When developing buildings or ideas, it is critical to start with a good solid foundation.  In fact, when people fail to build with a solid foundation, is usually not even worth one’s while to correct the work.  It’s best to trash the entire project and start over with a worthy foundation.

When it comes to ideas, there are three intellectual foundations that become indispensable.  These three foundational ideas were set forth in the opening words of Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999):

The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Based upon evidence proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (and numerous other cognitive scientists), the battle over these ideas is utterly over.  To argue otherwise is, in fact, to argue foolishly.  Yet, for many, these three principles have not soaked in.  There is constant deep resistance to these ideas among many of the people who present themselves as today’s premier philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, theologians, teachers, and political leaders.

As to why these ideas are so often ignored, there could be many potential explanations.  I suspect that many people fear each of these principles because they suggest that we humans lack complete power and control over our lives.  That thought makes all of us uncomfortable, of course, though a few of us are willing to take our harsh medicine to heart.  Most people, however, are not willing to re-conceptualize traditional accounts of what it means to be human.  They are not willing to dispense with a believe that each of us has an ethereal soul that is “free” to think any thought, a soul that is unencumbered by our clunky, fallible, poop and saliva-laden bodies.  They like to believe that our conscious thoughts fully capture the full importance of every moment and every drop of sentience and proto-sentience.  They prefer to believe that when it comes to words, Humpty Dumpty correctly declared: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less.”  They want to believe that humans have the power to speak forcefully without first having to develop a coherent theory of language, as though words serve as infallible conduits for transporting our purified ideas from here to there. 

The three principles presented by Lakoff and Johnson are dangerous to each of those who crave control more than truth.  To those of us who seek truth above all other things, however, these three principles constitute our new foundations for any meaningful metaphysics.  They constitute three indispensable acid tests for any highfalutin theory for the meaning of life that happens to stroll into town. 

Lakoff and Johnson discuss these three concepts in the first several chapters of Philosophy in the Flesh.  The main purpose of their book is to ask how philosophy would be practiced if it were faithfully constructed based upon these three principles.  Their answer is that philosophy (in psychology and politics and everything else) would be radically different.

Lakoff and Johnson argue that it is “shocking” to discover how different we are from what are philosophical traditions have advised us.  For starters, reason is not disembodied.  “The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason.”  It is for the same reason that the study of evolution is intimately related to the understanding of human cognition. 

There is no evidence that a physically unencumbered soul floats over each human body.  To the contrary, “Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them.”  In short, Descartes was incorrect: there is no evidence for any sort of dualism.  Human reason is shaped by the body.  Human reason “is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains.”

How well can we know our own cognition? Not well, if we limit ourselves to introspection.  (more…)

In a recent poll, reading in America is revealed to be, well, less than appreciated by large swaths of the population. This ought come as no surprise. We live in a time of stupendous ignorance, which allows for the expression of epic stupidity. The Founding Fathers were suspicious of democracy (I learned this by reading several books on the subject of the early republic), believing that the vast majority of people were incapable of the kind of intellectual comprehension necessary for an informed plebiscite. In short, they knew people were ill-educated and believed this meant they could not parse abstraction. By the mid-19th century, though, reading was probably the most common form of home entertainment.

America has championed the idea of public education. Our publishing companies have been at the forefront of issuing special editions of “Great Books”, and we have turned our economy into a college degree-driven dynamo. Yet the most basic reasons to read seem ignored by most, along with the habit of reading after leaving school.

A few quotes:

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” Mortimer Adler

“By reading, we enjoy the dead; by conversation, the living; and by contemplation, ourselves. Reading enriches the memory; conversation polishes wit; and contemplation improves the judgment. Of these, reading is the most important, as it furnishes both the others.” Charels Caleb Colton

“The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.” Oliver Goldsmith

“Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.” Horace Mann

And finally, a lengthier quote from someone who knows a thing or two about the subject.

“There is no single way to read well, though these is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.” Harold Bloom

I have been an avid reader virtually all my life. I caught what is known as the Reading Bug around age 10, and ever since there has rarely been a year when I did not read at least thirty books cover to cover, averaging sixty to seventy a year. My senior year of high school I cut most days and spent them in the local public library, where I achieved an enviable (and now inconceivable) rate of a book a day, and tore through most of the so-called Classics that year.

“Why do you always have your face in a book?”

This question was never asked by my parents. My parents, when early on they realized I was reading so much, increased my allowance so I could buy more books (a paperback then was sixty cents). No, this came from “friends” who rarely read, who equated reading with school, which they disliked, and for whom reading had unfortunately become a chore.

I blame the educational system for that. English, as taught in the schools then, had the unfortunate effect of beating a love of reading out of most kids. They could never just have fun with a book, they had to analyze it and “find meaning.” The fact is, meaning is such a individualized thing, it must be discovered individually. Telling someone that what they thought was important about a book is wrong because they do not pick up on the “deeper meanings” of the text is a sure way to turn them off unless they are already dedicated readers. And ridiculing the literature of choice of a student will put the nail in the coffin.

“Why should I learn how to jump through those hoops? This reading stuff is a pain.”

Add to that the simple fact that reading is Not Social, and you have the makings of a functionality illiterate society.

Not illiterate in the sense that they cannot read a sentence, but in the sense that so many people do not know how to access literature.

It takes practice. Learning how to decode the words on the page and make the images in your mind the author hopes you do takes learning. It’s an acquired skill that improves over time and repeated exposure, and those who figure it out become those people who are content to sit alone somewhere with a book.

Is this really important?

Reading enlarges the capacity of the imagination. No other medium does that, with the possible exception of music (but only in certain limited respects). How else does one get to a point where empathy becomes so developed that we can literally understand a person from another culture without having gone through their experiences?

I do not mean understand them as if we had lived their life, but understand the differences and the depth of similarities that hang on those differences.

Movies do the work of the imagination for us. Video games as well.

When asked whether I believe violent movies and television feed violence in society, I have to admit that, yes, I do. But only because there’s nothing between the raw, unformed pysche of the young and the insistent imagery, nothing to mediate, to give context, to offer viable alternatives, and nothing that has aided the development of skeptical buffers. Reading does that. It does it by forcing the mind to do the work of contextualizing, of comprehending meaning. When you read, you are an active participant, engaged in the process of judging, of analyzing, of making sense of the text—and the text itself offers context that is often missing from a visual experience.

I hasten to add here that this is true of all reading, but more true of broad reading. People who basically read the same book over and over again may begin the process of enlarging their imaginations, but then it falters, ill-fed and poorly exercised.

People who read a lot are often more interesting—mainly because they start off by being more interested, by virtue of the worlds they’ve encountered on the page.

Lastly, though, books are the connective tissue of our civilization, past to future. You cannot talk to Ben Franklin in the flesh, but he’s there, in print. Likewise Aristotle, Plato, Cyrano de Bergerac, Twain, Tolkein, all worthy minds who left their vision behind to talk to us. Books are the avatars of their creators, and once opened are fully interactive.

I have no idea how to turn this trend around. Many things conspire to rob us of a literate culture, not least of which is a sheer lack of time. We work longer hours, necessities cost more, there are people around us demanding attention. But it’s a mistake not to see reading as a necessary thing.

Those who are parents might consider easing up on the team sports and the implicit ridicule of always forcing the child to go play with friends. Books are friends. Spending all the time with a book is no better, though, than spending no time with one at all.

I grew up in a house in which it was ordinary to see everyone quietly reading. I’ve been in houses where there wasn’t a single book to be found.

But most importantly, we need to stop asking that reading be defended. “What’ good is it? What use is it?” The use and good of it is self-evident over time, but just reading, at any given moment, should be no more odd than having a conversation with someone—which no one really questions.

Given the recent stupidity expressed in much of our public life these past several years, I think it’s time to advocate reading a bit more. And not just “prescribed” reading. I have a poster on my wall, a picture of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones—yes, the one the magazine was named for—and the quote says “Sit down and read. Prepare yourself for the coming conflict.”

The political season is getting into high gear, so it’s a good idea to have a list of types of fallacious arguments handy. I recently found this collection, titled “The Nizkor Project.”  All of your favorite fallacies are here, including these:

Ad Hominem
Ad Hominem Tu Quoque
Appeal to Authority
Appeal to Belief
Appeal to Common Practice
Appeal to Consequences of a Belief
Appeal to Emotion
Appeal to Fear
Appeal to Flattery
Appeal to Novelty
Appeal to Pity
Appeal to Popularity
Appeal to Ridicule
Appeal to Spite
Appeal to Tradition
Bandwagon
Begging the Question
Biased Sample
Burden of Proof
Circumstantial Ad Hominem
Composition
Confusing Cause and Effect
Division
False Dilemma
Gambler’s Fallacy
Genetic Fallacy
Guilt By Association
Hasty Generalization
Ignoring A Common Cause
Middle Ground
Misleading Vividness
Personal Attack
Poisoning the Well
Post Hoc
Questionable Cause
Red Herring
Relativist Fallacy
Slippery Slope
Special Pleading
Spotlight
Straw Man
Two Wrongs Make A Right

What is a “fallacy”?  Here is the Nizkor Project’s description:

A fallacy is, very generally, an error in reasoning. This differs from a factual error, which is simply being wrong about the facts. To be more specific, a fallacy is an “argument” in which the premises given for the conclusion do not provide the needed degree of support. A deductive fallacy is a deductive argument that is invalid (it is such that it could have all true premises and still have a false conclusion). An inductive fallacy is less formal than a deductive fallacy. They are simply “arguments” which appear to be inductive arguments, but the premises do not provided enough support for the conclusion. In such cases, even if the premises were true, the conclusion would not be more likely to be true.

I found this topic to be of special interest after looking through the list, reading the descriptions and noticing how incredibly often these sorts of fallacious arguments are made by pubic figures and public officials. 

Maybe my project of calling officials on their fallacious reasons is naive, however.   Maybe we no longer care whether our logic is intact, whether we are consistent or whether there needs to be any rhyme or reason for our assertions.  Perhaps we’re living in the age of the ascent of “Personal attacks,” “Special Pleading,” “Straw Men” and “Appeal to Ridicule.”

For the past couple years, I have had the privilege of working as a consumer attorney.  I’ve occasionally written about some of the topics I’ve encountered as a consumer lawyer.  In this post, I’ll address another issue that I commonly encounter in my practice: illegible forms full of fine print that deprive consumers of fundamental rights.

What provoked this topic is a lawsuit I am currently handling.  My client sued a payday lender based on a payday loan that she alleges the defendant repeatedly processed and renewed in violation of the payday lending laws of Missouri.  This is a big deal to my client and to all of the numerous potential class members of this class action.  Why is it important?  For starters, this particular payday lender (and many others) charged 469% interest.  This is not a typo.  I have often asked friends and acquaintances whether they’ve heard of payday loans.  They usually say they have heard of those sorts of businesses.  I then ask them how much interest they think payday lenders charge.  Most people say something like this:

“Oh, I hear that it is an exorbitant rate of interest, perhaps 25%.” 

They are shocked to hear that it is legal to charge consumers 400 or 500% interest on a small consumer loans.  They are shocked to hear that some of these companies make it part of their business plan to repeatedly violate Missouri lending laws.  They are also shocked at one other thing, the topic of this post.  They are shocked to see how unreadable and one-sided many business forms have become.

I should mention that the above lawsuit is not about the exhorbitant rate of interest, which is entirely legal.  How can that be?  See here.  The suit concerns allegations that the lender violated numerous laws concerning renewals and paydown of the loans.

Take a look at the actual form here: arbitration agreement.pdf   If you make it all the way through the form, send me a comment and I’ll publish it so that you get full credit for your diligence.

The above form is an arbitration clause that is printed on the back side of every loan application by one of the businesses that I have sued.  This arbitration form is very much like the forms used by numerous other payday lenders and numerous other providers of goods and services to consumers from coast to coast.  The above form runs more than 1400 words.  All of those words are jammed onto one page in tiny type (about eight point), with fully justified margins running the width of the page (this makes it difficult to find where the next line begins).  The title of this all-important arbitration provision does not even mention “arbitration.”  The lines of this form are less-than-single-spaced to the extent that the lower strokes of a line actually touch the upper strokes of the letters on the line beneath it. 

This form is so badly congested that I scanned the form at 400 dpi, then ran OCR (optical character recognition) on it using two separate programs (OmniPage Pro 14 and Adobe Acrobat Standard).  Both of these programs failed pathetically, because the words and sentences are jammed together too closely for a machine to distinguish between the words and lines.  If a person were to reformat the above form to double-spacing with one-inch margins, the form would take almost 7 sheets of paper.

This printed information on the above form is so absolutely unreadable that the corporate representative of the company that implemented this form stumbled several times while trying to read it at a deposition.  It is written so poorly that a lawyer who works for the company could not explain a key provision of this arbitration clause immediately after being asked to read it.

My client’s readability expert explained that this form was not readable, based upon an analysis he conducted. It could not comfortably be read by anyone with less than a first-year graduate school level of training, he testified.  Further, the form was not legible, based upon the appearance of the words on the page.  Only a tiny sliver of consumers in America could be expected to make any sense out of this form.  (more…)

The other day I heard a local talk show host, bemoaning a recent case of child molestation involving a 14-year-old and a 5-year-old, wax problematic on how times have gotten so harsh for kids, that he wished we could return to a “time when kids could just be kids.  Could be innocent.”

I wondered, twisted that I sometimes am, when exactly that was.

I’m not being rhetorical.  I hear people go on from time to time about how kids used to have it so much better when they didn’t have all these modern problems with which to contend.  Things like drugs, child molestation, abusive parents, absent parents, gang violence.  You know, back in the day when Tom Sawyer was the model for rural youth and Little Lord Fauntleroy seemed to have been the model for everything else.

Everyone coinveniently forgets about Huck Finn.  Who smoked and drank and cussed.  Whose father was largely absentee, a petty criminal, and an abusive drunk.  Who ended up running off with a slave as the only option out of a situation that could, in his estimation, get nothing but worse.  We forget about him, and if we have romanticized Mark Twain overly much it would do to reread that book and pick out the life that Huck was clearly living, which was pretty awful.  He was poor, underfed, undereducation.  Compared with his buddy Tom he was what we’d identify as street trash.  His denials about freedom notwithstanding and the humor prevalent throughout the book, Huck’s “idyllic” childhood was anything but.

And then we have examples like Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger.  Wonderful life.

I wonder when that period was, when kids could “just be kids” and what, furthermore, that really means.

For me, it seems to be a fantasy substitute, sometimes imagined about our very own lives, when we did not–in fact could not–worry about the things we worry about as adults.  When the complications of wanting did not intrude to ruin friendships, bank accounts, or opportunities.  When we still wondered what it was like to be with someone else, intimately, and the mystery seemed to exceed the actuallity.  When we could pretty much do whatever we could get away with and not face dire consequences.  When the most exciting thing to do would be summer camp or boy scouts or…

Are we really that desperate?

My father told me stories of having to take a baseball bat to school (in the Thirties) because some bigger kids always met him on the way to steal the nickle his mother had given him for lunch.  When he was a teenager he ran with a gang called the Brooklyn Barons and he acquired a couple of scars from knife fights.  My mother was sheltered and remembers nothing bad about her childhood except that they didn’t have a lot of money.  My uncle, her brother, recalled getting beaten up regularly because he was a bit swarthier and everyone thought he was either Italian (dego) or mulatto, rather than Irish.  Of course, once that was understood, it still didn’t do any good, because he was either Black Irish or Shanty Irish, no matter how clean his house might have been.

Three or four kids in my grade school smoked.  One was a petty thief and as an adult committed murder, for which he’s still in prison.  A classmate of mine (grade school now) had an older brother who was a heroin addict and I got to watch him go through withdrawal one summer.

I listen to the sanctimony of those who would protect children from themselves–as if somehow they are really not actually human beings, but proto-humans, unstained by the emotional confusions of adulthood–and I have to wonder what movies they think represent that curiously idyllic childhood they think was once real.  I remember the original Bowery Boys, before they were transformed into camp, in movies like Angels With Dirty Faces and I ask myself “Idyllic?”  Oh, but that was New York, and we all know how bad New York always was.

We kid ourselves about the nature of children so much that we forget to apply reason.  We’ve been reacting, I think, against Freud, and even though much of what he said was in error, our counterreaction has become pathological.

I don’t know when that idyllic time was.  I suspect it was true for some kids, in some places, at some times.  But it was never universal, and seems to have been remarkable enough to become a kind of ideal goal which we have somehow miscast as authentic history.

On the other hand, there are days when I wistfully remember my own childhood.  Not so much for the utopian elements (there were none), but for the simple fact that so much was brand new for me then.  I looked forward much more eagerly, not knowing what to expect from what life had to offer.  Now that aspect retains the patina of innocence, simply because all experiences were unsullied by disappointment.  I wonder if perhaps people have taken that attitude of ignorant anticipation and translated it into some kind of innocence.  It has nothing to do with the thing anticipated, of course.  All those things, good and bad, licit and illicit, which by virtue of being there, before us, denied or allowed, offer the same potential for novel experience.  Once experienced, we then begin the process of categorizing them into the moral slots we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.

But misidentifying the “purity” of innocent anticipation as some kind of innate innocence of “being” has led us as a society into a peculiarly absurd attitude toward children and childhood, and in the process gives us a distorted view of our own maturity.

So next time someone goes on about how wonderful childhood “used to be” ask them when that was?  And then if they really thought it was like that and don’t they remembered being a little monster from time to time?

Remind them that kids are people, too.  With all that that implies.

A significant difference between humans and most other animals is that we have the innate ability to abstract ideas. That is, we can manipulate symbols as though they were things. We do this so well that most people are unaware that the symbols aren’t actually the things they represent.

If a map is wrong, we get angry at the roads for daring to deviate! I’m using the word “map” as both a representation of a literal road map, and as the semantic entity of a symbol used to abstract information about an object into a more manageable form.

What, you might well wonder, is “abstract”? There are many definitions, but I am using it as the verb meaning to construct a semantic entity (idea) that represents certain aspects of a concrete object. This latter phrase simply means “something”. The drawing of an apple in a book of A-B-C’s is an abstraction of an apple. It represents the idea of apple, and is used as a bridge to try to teach children to further abstract the sound sequence they learned (”apple”) to the written symbol loosely representing the first sound in that sequence (”a”).

Enough of a primer. Fundamentalist Christianity is trying hard to teach people that only one higher-level abstraction is needed: All things come from God. To these thinkers, Man invents arbitrary abstractions such as “atom” and “electron” and “gravity” and “evolution” and other theories based on evidence to explain things that are all obviously given by God.

The Bible” is a collection of abstractions (stories) collected at various times in history (different for each book), edited and translated through a series of languages, and viewed through the prejudices instilled into the reader or listener by a particular community. In other words, the unadulterated, pure Word of God. Poe-tay-toe, Poh-tah-toh.

But, I wander from my point. Man loses sight of the idea that an idea is a mental gymnastic that directly or indirectly represents something concrete. What is something concrete? Anything that can be repeatably measured, or reliably modeled and tested by measurement.

Example: There are 92 “natural” elements out of which everything on Earth is made. You can even buy or make sample boxes of them all, arranged as Mendeleev did. Of these elements, most have one (or a few) “natural” isotopes, and other more fleeting ones. Why do I quote natural? Because the word was commonly used before it was widely understood how old the world was. There are at least a dozen more elements that occur in nature, but their half-lives are shorter than the time they have been in the crust of our planet. Even some of the “unnatural” elements have been recently discovered in naturally occurring nuclear reactors.

The thoroughly proven concept of isotopes is a great stumbling block for Young Earth Creationists and Global Warming Carbon Skeptics. These groups have to claim that the Laws of Nature (a simple set of abstractions the consistently explain everything) must have been arbitrarily, discontinuously, and undetectably different at some time in the past to contradict all the directly measured evidence of isotope concentrations. Fortunately, the simple abstraction that God Can Do Anything allows them to believe this in spite of any evidence.

In conclusion: Choose your levels of abstraction carefully, and be aware that you are doing it.

I’ve been reading intriguing reports over at the Language Log about an Amazonian group called the Pirahã whose language is challenging some central tenets of modern linguistics. Recently there have also been articles in the New Yorker and on National Public Radio.

Daniel Everett, claims in his 2005 article Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Coginition in Pirahã that Pirahã lacks numbers or any terms for quantification, has no relative tenses, no color terms, the simplest pronoun inventory known, and no creation myths or fiction. Most importantly, Everett claims that Pirahã lacks embedding or recursion - the language feature that lets us embed phrases in other phrases. For example, embedding the phrase “that Jack built” in the sentence “This is the house that Jack built.”

This totally flies in the face of the Chomskyan view of language that has dominated linguistics for the past 40 years. According to Chomsky, recursion is an essential feature of human language. Recursion allows for productivity, the ability of human language to produce novel structures and express an unlimited number of concepts.
The Chomskyan view also holds that grammar is innate or hard-wired, and that culture can have no influence on syntax. But Everett holds that the unique characteristics of Pirahã are due to a central, unique aspect of their culture, namely that it constrains communication to things that the speakers have directly experienced:

Pirahã culture constrains communication to nonabstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors.

This aspect of Pirahã also had a huge influence on Everett. He came the group as a young missionary, out to learn the language in order to convert the Indians. It worked out a little differently, according to the National Public Radio report.

Everett describes the Pirahã’s reaction to his telling of the Gospel story:

A guy died and he came back from the dead! That’s amazing! What did he tell you when came back ?

Everett was of course forced to admit that he had never actually met the guy who had come back from the dead. The Pirahã completely lost interest at that point:

Why are you telling us about if you didn’t see it, and you don’t know anybody who saw it?

Eventually, after enough conversations like this, the Pirahã converted Everett to a scientific world view.

(more…)

If you’d like to know what curse words are the most offensive, Cognitive Daily has the answer for you, based on a recent survey.

I’m really tired of hearing the sorts of things most patriotic Americans utter to express what they believe to be the national character of the United States.  Consider some of the most common expressions: “The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.”  Or consider “The Greatest Country in the World.”  Many Americans proclaim America to be a “Shining Beacon” or “The World’s Greatest Democracy.”

The problem with these mottos is that they are dead-end declarations.  The people who repeat these platitudes are spending their time spinning propaganda rather than spending their energy and time to improve their country.  This is an extremely important point, because running a democracy is a process that is never ending. The mottos most Americans use to describe America do not inspire Americans to work hard so that their country conforms to these mottos.  Instead, these mottos are questionable declarations that we are an inherently “great” country, no matter what we do.

A couple days ago, I spent some time at the grade school my daughters attend: New City School in St. Louis.  Posted prominently at the school are the following inspirational words:

Truth, Trust, Personal Best, Active Listening, No Putdowns.

As I read this, it struck me that the Bush administration aspires to be the antithesis of each and every element of this school motto.  This thought stopped me dead in my tracks.  Isn’t it surreal that our government leaders have excelled at trashing the words of wisdom that we teach to our children?  Consider these words, one by one:

Truth?  Not from this administration.  We’ve seen this administration uttering a quantity of bald face lies that was unthinkable prior to the 2000 election.

Trust?  They got to earn it and they haven’t.  The current administration is living in an alternate reality. We can only trust that members of this administration, the inner cabal, who will continue to act out their fantasy world until they are removed from office.  Trust a Muslim country?  Only at the end of a barrell of a gun or a barrell of oil.

Personal best?  Iraq?  New Orleans?  Investigating 9/11?  Abu Ghraib & Guantánamo, the firings of federal prosecutors?  Dozens of other things to choose from, so take your pick.

Active listening?  Forget about it.  Instead of active listening, they have staged press conferences and transparent doublespeak shamelessly shoveled to the citizens.  They talk at other people, not with them.

No putdowns?  Consider all of the neocon putdowns we’ve heard: Thoughtful citizens who were opposed to the Iraq invasion.  Gays.  Democrats.  Liberals. Those who believe that the Patriot Act stripped Americans of their civil liberties.  Those who question the President are the enemy. 

My point is that what is good for children is good for our country.  We would be much better off to adopt a national motto that inspired us to become a better nation.  Therefore, I hereby nominate the inspirational words used by my daughters’ school as the new national motto for the United States of America: Truth, Trust, Personal Best, Active Listening, No Putdowns.

Oh yeah, and for all of those neocons that haven’t yet jumped ship, implicit within these principles is the right to defend our country when it is actually being attacked, but only by using physical force against those who are actually attacking the United States.  Or is that too radical an idea?

I sometimes shake my head at the futility of debating the dedicated faithful.  By that I do not mean those who are serious about their religion and think it through, but those who attached themselves, limpet-like, to a movement and then abandon all introspection and attack all dissent aimed at it.  Creationism vs Evolution is a good example.

Now, there are some Creationists who know perfectly well that their arguments won’t sustain a scientific examination, but it doesn’t matter.  They see their mission as one of “saving” those who can’t (or won’t) parse such distinctions from the murkiness of science, and in that cause they have adopted what amounts to a tactic–formulate their arguments in the language of science so as to reassure those who already dislike Evolution that there is no monopoly on reasoned analysis, and that god can be found in the epistemology of creation science just as in evolutionary science god is eliminated. 

Why bother with this?  Well, for aesthetic reasons.  We live in an age wherein the jargon of science, wherein the fruits of a scientific approach, wherein the Scientist has enormous cachet.  Even while rejecting the conclusions of much science, people sort of know that there’s something to it, even while they don’t understand it.  And that if you can couple your old wive’s tales, folkore, New Age poppycock, or religious viewpoint with a scientific explanation you can pretty well cover all bases and stop worrying about Anything Changing.

That last bit is important.

What the faithful follower really wants is a cake that never disappears, even after you eat on it for a whole lifetime.

Science is just a downer.

Example.  My father is an engineer.  My whole childhood, we had conversations that went something like this.

“I want to go to the moon.”

“Okay.  You need X amount of fuel per pound.”

“But that means the ship will be too big.”

“Too big for what?”

“For everyone I want to take along.”

“You need several ships then.  You’ll need x amount of fuel for each one.  And when you get there, you have to have oxygen to breathe.”

“How come?”

“There’s no air on the moon.”

“Where will I get it?”

“You’ll have to bring it with you.”

“But that means the ships will be even BIGGER!”

Frustrating.  I just wanted to jump in the family car and launch it moonward and NOT WORRY ABOUT ALL THE DAMN DETAILS THAT SEEMED INTENT ON TELLING ME IT COULDN’T BE DONE!

Better to just fantasize about going to the moon.

Or, when a bit older, and the subject was pollution.

“I think we should go back to using horses instead of cars.”

“Why?”

“Less air pollution.”

“Okay, but everyone would have to have a barn to store the hay for them to eat.  A horse needs x amount a day.”

“The garage isn’t big enough.”

“No, it isn’t.  And then there’s another thing.”

“What?”

“What do you do with all the feces?”

“What feces?”

“The horse feces.”

When you’re young, these kind of “How do you pay for it?” arguments are intensely frustrating.  Some on your most cherished ambitions get shot down by bookkeeping, it seems.

To the followers of creationist arguments, I think something like this is in play.  What they adamantly do not want is to think about how all this stuff–the universe, you know?–works.  They want to repeal the three laws of thermodynamics and continue on as if nothing they or their parents or their children do to live “good lives” has any impact on anything.

For their part, though, Evolutionists and the like seem to misunderstand this psychology and get frustrated by the appeal of the religious approach.  The psychology is different, the aesthetics are different, and for the most part the two sides are speaking different languages.

What the faithful do not want is to feel (a) powerless and (b) responsible.  They avoid both by allying themselves with an omnipotent god who does good things for them when petitioned by prayer (evidence notwithstanding) and by believing that this same god has a plan and wouldn’t let all the dire consequence those scientists keep harping on about happen. 

Unless we deserve them to happen, which means we’re sinners and deserve it anyway, so trying to do something about it is human arrogance and in defiance of god.

But ultimately it’s the ducking of responsibility that’s so wired into the antiscience religious approach that’s attractive.  That cake will never vanish even as we eat our fill day in and day out.

The other part of this, of course, is the way people take things so personally.  I recall back in the Seventies when a prominent scientist announced that the sun will burn out in eight billion years and following day the stock market took a serious dip.  People are reactive and, at least in aggragate, seem incapable of a sense of proportion.

Not that we should stop trying to debunk Creationism.  But I think we need to realize that as we argue with these folks, we’re facing desires and needs we may not be acknowledging.  All they see is an argument that’s bent on telling us the cake isn’t there.  Or that we’re diabetics and can’t have any.  They’re not seeing the positive side.

Anybody have a spare fork?

George Lakoff has once again weighed in on a critical issue of word meaning.  This time, his focus is on what it means to be “responsible”:

Accountability is what is called a contested concept, that is, a concept with different meanings for different people, depending on their values. What we have found is that conservatives and progressives mean systematically different things when they use the word  . . .

Responsibility itself is contested. To progressives, it means social as well as personal responsibility — responsibility for both oneself and everyone else who could be harmed by one’s failure. To conservatives, it means individual responsibility only. The difference is not surprising, since conservatism is about individual responsibility while progressivism centers on both individual and social responsibility . . .

[For conservatives], individual responsibility and whatever accountability they have is satisfied when they hold others beneath them accountable and carry out punishment . . .

To progressives, one is accountable to those one is responsible for — those affected and possibly harmed by one’s actions. In government, accountability is paired with transparency. Government officials are supposed to be “transparent,” that is, to tell the public what one is doing and why. The why is an “account” — an explanation for one’s actions. . .

There is thus a huge difference in the meaning of accountability between progressives and conservatives. To progressives, conservatives look like they are invoking accountability in order to avoid responsibility. Here’s why. A conservative in authority holds other people below him accountable, and upon meting our punishment to those underlings, his personal responsibility is met. Story over. But to progressives, such a person has a social responsibility to everyone who can be harmed by his actions. He has public accountability. Holding an underling accountable and meting out punishment is not enough. He remains socially responsible. When he just holds others “accountable,” he is avoiding that responsibility.

Lakoff gives various examples to illustrate various uses of “responsibility.”  His acount rings true to me.  It often does appear that conservatives think they’ve done their part to address malfeasance by pointing fingers and doling out punishment. It easily follows, of course, that making one “responsible” for a life badly lived requires throwing ”bad” people into hell.  Progressives much more often take a forward-looking view when they use the word.  For progressives, being accountable primarily means making the system transparent.  Sunshine is powerful disinfectant. 

In light of Lakoff’s analysis, it appears worthwhile to take the time to explain one’s use of this important and ubiquitous word before using it when addressing a wide audience. 

Ever since I started doubting the existence of God, I have frequently encountered confusion between the numerous labels used to describe non-theistic belief systems. This is most commonly seen between the words “atheist” and “agnostic,” both of which signify the absence of definitive belief in a deity. At first glance, the distinction may seem obvious: an atheist disbelieves the existence of God or gods, while an agnostic believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God and thus refuses to commit to either belief system. However, in reality these two terms tend to overlap to the extent that two people holding exactly the same (non)belief may label it differently, one identifying as an agnostic and the other, an atheist. Further, one’s label of choice is heavily influenced by the public perception of these terms, the word “atheist” being the more pejorative of the two in the eyes of the public. This probably convinces many non-theists to describe themselves as “agnostic,” as this label seems more palatable and less presumptuous than “atheist.” If one carefully examines the definitions of these terms, however, one should become more hesitant at rejecting one label for another.

I will begin my exposition by quoting from Bertrand Russell’s 1947 pamphlet, Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?

[. . .] As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods. [. . .]

Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.

It seems fair to say that nearly every self-identifying atheist would agree with Russell’s strictly epistemological stance regarding the impossibility of ultimate proof. However, the word “atheist” by itself should not imply complete certainty in the nonexistence of God, although it is commonly misconstrued to do so. Indeed, this term would fall out of use if it had to imply absolute certainty, and “agnostic” would take its place. In response to people who believe they are obligated to call themselves agnostics unless they are 100% sure about what they believe, Richard Dawkins points out:

“There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”

Well, alright; you get the point. But this begs the question: exactly how improbable do you need to perceive God’s existence to be in order to call yourself an atheist, instead of agnostic? In other words, where do you draw the line? There seems to be no definitive answer to that, and it’s entirely subjective. However, on page 50 of his book The God Delusion, Dawkins suggests a probability spectrum of individual human judgment about the existence of God (mind the British spelling):

1. Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C. G. Jung, ‘I do not believe, I know.’
2. Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. De facto theist. ‘I cannot know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.’
3. Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. Technically agnostic but leaning towards theism. ‘I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.’
4. Exactly 50 per cent. Completely impartial agnostic. ‘God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.’
5. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. ‘I don’t know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be sceptical.’
6. Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”
7. Strong atheist. ‘I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung “knows” there is one.’

Note that this spectrum is continuous and the seven categories represent milestones along the way. Dawkins considers himself to be “in category 6, but leaning towards 7” (51). He also mentions that he would be surprised to meet many people in category 7 because “Atheists do not have faith; and reason alone could not propel one to total conviction that anything definitely does not exist” (51).* He mainly includes this category for symmetry with category 1, which has a substantial number of members.

Still, there’s a lot more to the definition of “atheism.” Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

Atheism is commonly defined as the positive belief that deities do not exist, or as the deliberate rejection of theism. However, others—including most atheistic philosophers and groups—define atheism as the simple absence of belief in deities (cf. nontheism), thereby designating many agnostics, and people who have never heard of gods, such as newborn children, as atheists as well. In recent years, some atheists have adopted the terms strong and weak atheism to clarify whether they consider their stance one of positive belief (strong atheism) or the mere absence of belief (weak atheism).

Thus, the term weak atheism is a very broad category encompassing a whole slew of nontheistic belief systems, including:

• Apatheism (a.k.a. apathetic agnosticism)—neither believing nor disbelieving in God because one doesn’t care enough about the issue to make a decision
• Ignosticism—believing that the question of God’s existence is meaningless because it doesn’t have any verifiable consequences
• Implicit atheism—lacking belief in God because one has never been introduced to such a concept or has no way of comprehending it; this is the category that includes infants and young children, individuals with severe mental disabilities, animals, etc.
• Many agnostics—people who believe that they personally have no way of knowing whether or not God exists

Looking at the etymology of the word “atheist” (Greek, a-theos) supports the notion that it shouldn’t imply anything other than a lack of belief in deities. In that sense, it should be synonymous with the word “nontheist” because they both share a prefix of negation and the same root word; however, there are certain connotations that have become associated with the word “atheist” that make many people reluctant to use it, most of which stem from a common misunderstanding of that term and cultural intolerance towards people who use it to describe their beliefs. To avoid sounding arrogant or absolutely certain whether or not God exists, many people who regard God’s existence to be considerably improbable choose to use the word “agnostic,” or a similar term, to describe what they believe. To be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing this; perhaps one wants to put emphasis on a certain aspect of non-theistic philosophy that is best captured by that particular word, thus conveying a more desirable or accurate image of themselves to the public. However, it is important to realize that most of these terms are completely compatible with atheism, so one can very easily be both an agnostic and an atheist. (more…)

One of Diane Rehm’s recent shows featured Marietta McCarty, who advocates teaching philosophy to children to develop critical thinking skills and to deepen their sense of empathy for others.  Here’s the interview.  McCarty, who has taught at both the elementary school and community college level, has written a book titled Little Big Minds.

According to her website, McCarty is:

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has brought philosophy to children in rural, suburban, and city schools in the central Virginia area for over fifteen years, as well as schools around the U.S. “Her Philosophy in the Third Grade” program is nationally acclaimed and she lectures and gives demonstrations around the country on this one-of-a-kind program. While focusing on third graders, she philosophizes in kindergarten through eighth grade classrooms.

McCarty starts with the premise that children are natural philosophers.  They are “the best philosophers.”  Children have a natural curiosity and an innate sense of wonder.  Even young children are capable of studying philosophy.

Philosophy, according to McCarty, is the art of clear thinking.  Philosophers are people who “hold many ideas in their mind at once.” Philosophers “empty their minds of clutter and confusion.”  She stresses that children need to exercise their minds just like they need to exercise their bodies.  Philosophy can help children “gain clarity about ideas.”  Underlying McCarty’s strategy is her belief that ideas have consequences.  “What we think motivates all of our actions and all of our decisions.  If we don’t think, that also motivates our actions and decisions.”

In McCarty’s experience, the children are always fascinated by Plato’s myth of the cave.  The children are told to imagine that everyone has been shackled in a cave since birth causing them to confuse the shadows on the wall for real things.  Eventually, though, a curious prisoner breaks free and climbs up a steep incline toward a point of light at the mouth of the cave.  Emerging to the outside, the light is so bright (in the “daylight,” representing the world of ideas) that it is difficult at first to see the meanings of important concepts such as love and compassion.  McCarty explains to the children that we are those prisoners, unless we spend time working to get clearer on the ideas we use.

McCarty stresses that children should use their own minds to expand their views of life.  During the show, one listener called in to suggest that abstract thinking stifles creativity.  McCarty disagreed. She described some of the ways children study philosophy.  One of the sections of her book is dedicated to “courage.”  According to McCarty, some children think that courage is bestowed only on a few special people.  Through the study of philosophy, however, they distill the idea of what courage is, and are thus able to recognize acts of courage in themselves and others. As the result, the children learn to keep on trying in the face of adversity.  They can also learn that even admitting their own weaknesses and fears can require courage.

McCarty encourages adults to actively listen to the observations and questions of their children, without interrupting at all.  Children are “used to being talked over by adults” constantly. There is a big payoff to not talking over your children. Only by such careful listening can an adult learn what their child is really thinking.

Here’s another big payoff.  This idea stems from Bertrand Russell’s idea of “impartial love.”  As exposure to ideas expands, the heart expands too.”  McCarty explained her point to Diane Rehm: “We’re all woven together in a tapestry and were all related to each other.” Consequently, McCarty emphasizes to the children that they need to put the ideas they explore (e.g., compassion) into practice.

As part of her program, McCarty encourages children to keep philosophy journals, even when they are as young as six or seven.  Over the years, she has found that the children treasure their early thoughts as they get older.

I find much to like about McCarty’s work. I was brought up in a household where one parent invited the wide open exploration of philosophical ideas whereas the other parent was extremely uncomfortable with freethinking.  Many adults resist the free exploration of philosophical ideas.  Why? This resistance raises an issue that McCarty did not discuss on Diane Rehm’s show: Because it involves wide-open questioning, philosophy is inevitably subversive.  In the eyes of many, it is dangerous.   (more…)

You don’t know the word “palter”?  I didn’t either, until I read a recent paper by Frederick Schauer and Richard J. Zeckhauser of Harvard.  The paper’s abstract defines this incredibly useful term, palter:

Abstract:     
A lie involves three elements: deceptive intent, an inaccurate message, and a harmful effect. When only one or two of these elements is present we do not call the activity lying, even when the practice is no less morally questionable or socially detrimental. This essay explores this area of “less-than-lying,” in particular intentionally deceptive practices such as fudging, twisting, shading, bending, stretching, slanting, exaggerating, distorting, whitewashing, and selective reporting. Such deceptive practices are occasionally called “paltering,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as acting insincerely or misleadingly.

The authors suggest that paltering “has received little systematic study.” They also suggest that when harmful paltering is established, “the sanctions against it should be at least as stiff as those against lying.”

At this page you can find the link to the entire article.   I’m definitely going to incorporate “palter” into my vocabulary. 

“Paltering” is going to be an extremely useful word, unfortunately.

Below is a link to a blog called 101 Reasons to Stop Writing.  It is a blog about writing and actually does have a list of reasons to stop, which, when one considers the amount of verbiage being generated by the human race, might seem like an impossible challenge.  Those of us with presumptions to actually be  writers–professional, that is, receiving coin for our sentences–are afflicted, I think, with a singular mix of obsession and insecurity. 

There is, however, no Twelve-Step Program for us, and even if there were, the initial admittance–that we are powerless to control the urge to run out streams of words on the off-chance someone might actually read them (or, more, enjoy them)–means for us that we are subsequently powerless to continue with the 12-step.  But, on the other hand, explaining our affliction, paradoxically, feeds the monkey–more words.  And explaining to each other about our affliction sustains us in times when we feel ignored by those who only read what we write.  We are subject to puzzled bemusement by people who “don’t understand”; made sometimes to feel guilty by people who want us to come out and play who, when told we are busy writing, complain that we’re not doing anything.

Writing requires both solitude and congeniality–to write about people, we must know them, but we are by nature prone to misanthropy.  The more we know people, sometimes, the less we like them, yet we must be sympathetic lest we ostracize the very public we need to support our habit.

But enough about me.  I have fiction to write.  I shall leave you all with the analysis.