If I were asked to divide the world into two groups of people, I would flatly refuse. It is extremely unfair, I would argue that it would be absurd to divide humans, as ineffably complex and diverse as they are, on the basis of one quality or trait. But then again, that would just be me being politically correct. I actually believe that on some level, all of us tend of categorize people into two groups on the basis of one overarching quality. We tend to empathize with individuals who ‘have’ that quality, and believe that the world would be a better place if everyone were like them. For some this ‘vital’ quality is hard work, for others humility, and for some others, it may be looks, or a sense of style. The quality that I regard as most important is the ability to be affected by your surroundings.

I have to come to realize that I have always tended to view the world as consisting of two groups of people. The first group consists of individuals who only concern themselves with the interests of their own selves and that of the immediate circle of family and friends. These individuals do the work that is expected of them, and have no interest or concern for people who are not directly related to them. The other group, whose members I admire, consists of individuals who feel connected to and, hence, are affected by the larger environment they live in.   They take a keen interest in their extended surroundings. Some of them even have a sense of moral obligation to alleviate humanity and human condition as a whole. I term people who belong to the former group as ’shallow’ and people who belong to the latter group as ‘humane’. Lately though, I have noticed, in many instances, an inexplicable overlapping of these two groups. Some people are so difficult to categorize into either of these groups that I have begun to question the very foundation of my system of assigning worth to individuals. Are the “humane” people of today genuinely humane, or are they merely a more fashionable manifestation of an all-pervasive shallowness?

In this context, I would like to mention two movies which dwell on moral ambiguity amidst urban decadence, the first being French film director Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1960’s movie Masculin Feminin. A fragmented and frustratingly abstruse movie, the movie documents (and comments on) the attitudes among the French youth in the 1960’s, is universal in its significance.  The filmmaker’s thoughts are equally valid for any youth almost anywhere in the developed or developing world today. The movie is about the doomed relationship between Paul, a young, politically aware, conscientious, idealistic man, and Madeleine, a girl who is an ardent consumer of pop culture, whose conscience has been rendered inactive by the self-indulgence encouraged by the consumerist culture around her. Through most of the movie, Madeleine is shown to be an insouciant creature. An aspiring pop-singer, she generally sports a blank expression on her face, inert to almost any problem around her, and most of her time is spent in combing her hair and applying make-up.

It would be easy to think that the director uses these two characters to represent the two ends of our modern moral spectrum: Paul, as an “ideal” human being, someone whom we must aspire to be like, and Madeleine as a symbol of urban decadence, the modern automaton, devoid of soul. But that is not the case, as the director is equally critical of both characters. The criticisms levelled against Madeleine, the quintessential consumer of modern capitalism, may have seemed unique in the 1960’s, but by now are commonplace in social and cultural criticism. She is a self-obsessed, vacuous woman who, despite her lack of intelligence and talent, manages to find success as a pop star.  This woman represents the modern individualistic and anti-communal notions of success. In a striking segment of the film entitled “Interview with a consumer product”, Paul interviews a young teenaged girl who has been chosen as the face of a fashion magazine. The girl has no qualms in admitting her ignorance of almost all political events around the world. Yet, she admits she is drawn towards rebels, and dislikes ‘yes men’. The last point made by her is quite telling.

In this context, I would like to reference another movie, “Network”, directed by Sidney Lumet in 1976.  (more…)

The state of Missouri has never had an official poet laureate.  Like many people, I didn’t know that, although unlike many of those many people, I should have.  One of the hats I wear (besides the one in the cool profile photo above) is the president of the Missouri Center for the Book.

What, you may ask, is the Missouri Center for the Book and what, furthermore, does it have to do with state poets laureate?

I’m so glad you asked.  The Missouri Center for the Book (hereafter known as MCB) is the state affiliate to the Library of Congress Center for the Book.  All 50 states have such an institution now, and we are all as different in our structure and specific goals as those states.  The common thread is that we are all dedicated to promoting what we call the Culture of the Book.  This includes authors, certainly, but also publishers, editors, reviewers, literature teachers, schools.  We see all these things as inextricably part and parcel of that culture, though obviously authors are the most visible part.

We do not do remedial reading work.  There are other agencies that do that and do it far better than we could.  That’s not our mandate.

In our heyday, the first several years after our founding in 1993, we did all sorts of things to promote the idea of books and reading, mostly through the mechanism of conferences which addressed certain themes.  We had notable guests, lots of writers and publishers, an open forum.

And then, as happens in such things, funding slipped away and we did smaller and smaller programs.

Among the things we do is administer the state Letters About Literature contest, which is a very cool program for three levels of students, primary to secondary, in which a student writes a letter to the author of a book that has had a significant impact on that student.  We select the best, the winners go on to a national contest.  Some of these letters, even from very young students, are tremendous.  They give me hope for the future.  Quiet hope, a confidence that we have a chance, that the young are not dumber than their parents or grandparents, but are generally smarter.

As president for the past three years, I’ve been reorganizing and rebuilding the MCB.  We have plans to relaunch the conferences.  We intend to rebuild our website, which contains an author database which was, when it was instituted, the first of its kind in the nation.  We intend that it be made interactive.  That’s going to be a bit pricey, but once done it will be a great tool.

There are other programs we’d like to do.

But one thing we’ve been working at for the last eight years, doggedly and consistently, is the creation of a state poet laureate.  I won’t go into the details of that effort, they would bore you.  Mostly the work consisted of letter writing, long conversations with “influential” people, planning the structure of the post, often just being a pest.  MCB itself could not do this—for it to be “official” it must come from either the governor or the legislature.  Most states, it is an appointment of the governor.  It boils down to convincing the governor to do it.

Governor Blunt has decided to do it.  Last month we received word that the position would be created and the first poet laureate will be named in mid-December.  MCB has been named the agency which will administer the post and work on selection.

Warning:  what follows is an unapologetic promotional request for financial support.

I canvassed a number of states about their poet laureate programs.  There are about 8 or 9 states that do not have the position.  Among the others, the post is largely honorary, with no funding.  From the beginning, we thought the post should have some money behind.  It is incredibly difficult to make a living as a writer, triply so as a writer of poetry.  Besides, we intend for our laureates to travel the state, speaking on the matter of the literary arts.  That shouldn’t come out of the laureate’s own pocket.  But we’ve already learned that Missouri’s laureate post will also, as far as the state government is concerned, be honorary.

So I am asking for donations.  MCB’s future programming efforts will be built around the poet laureate–not specifically so much as thematically.  Missouri is stepping up to the plate, symbolically, to declare that literature, that reading, that authors are actually important.  In order to move forward and take advantage of the very public opportunity this is giving the Culture of the Book, we want to put some teeth behind it.

You can go to our website– books.missouri.org –and read a bit more about us.  Mind you, the site as it stands is going to be changed in a year or so, but there’s still worthwhile content.  If given the chance and the support, we intend doing a job of elevating the stature of the written word in Missouri.  So if you are so inclined, please send your tax deductible donations to:

Missouri Center for the Book
600 West Main,
P.O. Box 2075
Jefferson City, MO 65102-2075,

or call 573-751-1821

Before you ask, I cleared this with Erich.  MCB is a 501c3 nonprofit organization (which receives no money from state or federal sources).

As I said, I am unapologetically, unabashedly, unashamedly asking for money.  We want to pay our poets laureate a reasonable honorarium and we want to fund programs that will do for books what PBS does for documentary film or NPR does for radio broadcasting.  Granted, on a more modest scale, but still.

The governor has decided to announce this before Christmas.  Seems like a good time to give a present to the state and to make a stab at doing better for one of the things we all love and need so much—good books.

Thank you for your time and attention.

On October 20 and 21st, 2007, Blumenthal attended the Value Voters Summit, “a massive gathering hosted by the Colorado-based Christian right mega-ministry, Focus on the Family, and its Washington lobbying arm, the Family Research Council.”

I admire Blumenthal’s work.  He sticks his nose under the tent to allow us to see what ordinary and celebrity neocons really think.  We get access to unvarnished ultra-conservatism at the click of a “Play” button, thanks to his persistent digging.  

This particular convention, the Value Voters Summit lets you see the far right the way they see each other.  It’s not the diluted version that they present when the national news shows come calling.  

For other videos by Blumenthal, see here (The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour) and here (his personal effort to draft College Republicans).

[If you found Blumenthal's video interesting, check out this 2007 Bill Moyers video regarding yet another ultra-conservative convention]

Here’s another of those memorable videos making the rounds on Stumbleupon.com.  It’s well worth a viewing or three or five. 

I have a friend who wrote a song to me. (Free mp3 download courtesy of Anderson Productions, Ltd.) “Dear Friend” appeared on Russ Anderson’s 2003 album, “Arsenal Street”. All his CD’s are Available here. I recommend listening to the song before proceeding.

This nice, eerie, and sometimes psychedelic song is a heartfelt plea for me to discard my narrow, science-informed view of the world and just try to accept the ultimate truth of his favorite, ancient, re-translated book.
When my very Christian 11 year old nephew heard the song, he worried that it would anger me. He is fond of both Russ and myself, and the song conveys a basic disconnect. Conversations I’ve had with other Absolute Biblically Literal Truth Christians indicate that these are common misperceptions of atheist ideology.

Let’s examine some of the contentions in the song:

(more…)

I just finished reading the October 2007 issue of National Geographic.  I’ve been subscribing to the National Geographic for more than ten years. As I read the October issue, it struck me what an incredibly informative magazine it is.  Truly, in a single issue of that one magazine there must have been 50 photo spreads or articles that were each highly worthy of careful consideration.

Photos by Lana Slezic were featured in the Photo Journal section.  She captured magical and sometimes sad images of Afghan women, including a haunting photo of a group of Afghan women, covered from head to toe, looking at modern dresses displayd in a store window (I couldn’t find that photo online at NG, but it is available at Slezic’s own site). Her photos were each presented in context.  For instance, two schoolgirls are photographed.  Under that photo is a caption advising that one million Afghan girls who should be in school are not going to school.  Further, the female illiteracy rate in Afghanistan is more than 80%.

On page 14, you can see a two-page spread of the blue walls of Jodhpur, India where langurs are perched on many rooftops.  The langurs are free to roam because they’re considered to be avatars of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman.

There is a short article about the efforts to preserve the ancient manuscripts found in Timbuktu.  Yes, there really is a place called Timbuktu.  It is a city in Mali, Africa.  As a matter of fact, my sister-in-law, a Norwegian woman working in coordination with the United Nations, spends considerable time in Timbuktu each year helping to scan and preserve these literary treasures.

There is also a short article about the world’s loss of languages, indicating that every two weeks another language dies “taking millennia of human knowledge and history with it.”

Or would you like to read about the anatomy of a woodpecker.  How is it that these birds can bang their heads against trees without suffering injuries?  Those questions are answered in a well-illustrated easily comprehend way.

Do you have a dog?  If you do, there are numerous foods that could be harmful to your dog.  These include alcohol, coffee, chocolate, garlic, onions, macadamia nuts and grapes.

What will climate change to to the world wine map?  Climate change is could change that map dramatically, based upon color overlays over a map of France.  Here’s another example: in the 21st century, no significant wine grape crop will be found in a “scorching Napa Valley.”  Instead, you’ll need to head north to Puget Sound and British Columbia, or east to Ontario.

If you want to see a spectacular photo, you can find it on a page called “Expeditions.”  There, you will see a picture of “smooth, luminous crystals, some 36 feet long” in a Mexican cave line 950 feet below the surface.  These are not Quartz crystals, but gypsum, and they have taken the form of “massive moon white beams.”

What else would like to know, honey?  How much this?  There are up to 60,000 bees in a beehive.  In order to produce 1 pound of clover honey, it takes 7000 bee hours.  You will also be updated on the incredibly disturbing phenomenon called “colony collapsed disorder.”  It’s disturbing because it huge proportion of our food crop (33%) depends upon the work of bees to do the pollination.

Are you tired of seeing global warming kicked around like a political football?  Check out “Confronting Carbon,” an extensive essay that explores what really needs to be done about global warming (beginning of page 33).  This article is a no bullshit plan of action that tells us what we need to do in order to avoid catastrophic changes to our planet and a horrifically decreased standard of living. Take this for starters: we need to improve automobile fuel economy from an average of 30 miles per gallon to 60 miles per gallon by 2057.  We also need to reduce the miles traveled annually in each of the world’s 2 billion cars from an average of 10,000 to 5000 miles.  And that’s only the beginning of what we need to do. This information bears no resemblence to what you see and hear from local news sources and even many national news sources.

If you want to know how to to grow fuel and to see why corn-based fuel is not a reasonable approach to reducing our dependence on gasoline, you can check out “Green Dreams,” starting on page 38.  You’ll see a claim by Cornell University’s David Pimentel, who states “Biofuels are a total waste and misleading us from getting at what we really need to do: conservation.”  On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for biofuels.  For instance, you’ll learn about the immense progress occurring in Brazil, where they are successfully turning sugarcane into alcohol-fuel, which powers a significant proportion of the Brazilian automobile fleet.  You’ll also learn of a facility outside of Phoenix where researchers are producing fuel from hanging bags of algae.  These researchers claim that, someday, they could soak up carbon dioxide “while cranking out 5000 gallons of bile diesel an acre each year.”

This little tour takes us only about halfway through the October edition of National Geographic. 

If every person in America read National Geographic, we wouldn’t have neocons. People who read these articles and view these photos from around the globe know that the United States is not the only country in the world. They know that our lifestyle is not the only lifestyle. They also learn to appreciate the common issues facing the peoples of the world.  They see other cultures in depth, not as a cartoon to scoff at laugh at.  I do think that parochialism and self-centeredness are the heart and soul of the neocon and that in-depth information of things beyond one’s self and one’s community is the best remedy.  Not only are the National Geographic’s article far-ranging.  They are also up-to-date with relevant and thoughtfully presented scientific issues, unvarnished by partisan politics. 

Here’s the kicker: you can subscribe to the National Geographic for only $15 for 12 issues (that’s an entire year’s worth).  The question for you is this: wouldn’t it be worth $1.25 per month to support such an incredible organization as National Geographic, including substantial amounts of cutting edge research and to have this high-quality reading material mailed to your home each month?

I have a seven year old daughter. It would be fun to watch her play the drums as well as this seven year old guy, but that will never happen. Not that I’m at all disappointed!

This is a truly extraordinary exhibition. This video left both of us shaking our heads. It is a performance originally aired on the Johnny Carson Show many years ago. I don’t know the specifics, and I can’t quite make out the name of the drummer. I’m wondering whether he ended up making a living as a professional drummer . . .

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.

What does “No Child Left Behind” mean in real-life classrooms? I’ve discussed this topic with several grade school teachers. They are uniformly distressed that NCLB narrows the focus of classroom instruction to the point where children are too often “taught” factoids, ephemeral bits of information that will allow them to pass a test without significantly advancing their ability to understand the world around them.

Jonathan Kozol writes passionately about this point at this Huffpo post:

The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation’s schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic “teaching to the test” it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.

When I ask them why they’ve grown demoralized, they routinely tell me it’s the feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of “state of siege,” as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in school.

“I didn’t study all these years,” a highly principled and effective first-grade teacher told me — she had studied literature and anthropology in college while also having been immersed in education courses — “in order to turn black babies into mindless little robots, denied the normal breadth of learning, all the arts and sciences, all the joy in reading literary classics, all the spontaneity and power to ask interesting questions, that kids are getting in the middle-class white systems.”

Kozol raises the issue of what to do about the many dysfunctional inner-city schools. It is, after all, a tragedy that we have so many buildings that look like schools but don’t function like schools. I happen to live near several dysfunctional inner-city schools. No thoughtful parent with options to do otherwise would willingly send their kids to such “schools.” I wrote about one teacher’s experience in one such school. I invite you to read the words of this conscientious teacher, who I called “Geri Anderson.” The epilogue to that troubling story is that “Geri’s” contract was not renewed. I have heard it over and over (from teachers and ex-teachers) that inner-city school teachers who show heartfelt enthusiam and creativity can expect to burn out or get fired in short order. In fact, one of my neighbors volunteered to tutor at that same school for several years. She spoke up last year when she noticed that a 2nd grader was getting none of the special education he required (and that school documents indicated he was getting). Epilogue II: My neighbor, the volunteer, was consequently “fired” (told that her services were no longer needed).

How do we fix these problem schools? I hate to sound like a broken record, but media reform is a big part of this problem (and most other big problems too). Stories of what it’s really like to go to these types of schools should be on the front page of local newspapers every day until we address the situation with real changes. We do have lots of available space on the newspaper front page–it’s often filled with advertising disguised as articles and other feel-good stories such as how to purchase a special Halloween-theme leash for your dog. Advertisers don’t like stories about failing schools, though. It makes people feel that they should tax themselves enough to fix the problem. It makes them feel guilty about buying those diamond bracelets, sporty new cars and the other non-essentials advertised in the paper.

Depriving children, our next generation of adults, of real education is a bill we will pay, within our lifetimes, with the high costs of prisons and social services. That’s the message that should be front and center every day.

Kozol is correct, in my opinion, that one important way to help the schools is to quit foisting NCLB onto teachers. Great teachers and good teachers don’t teach in ways that obsess with the narrow-minded tests required by NCLB. After all, when they grow up, these kids aren’t going to find jobs that require them to take trivial quizzes. They will need to know how to think so that they can continually tool up to meet the needs of jobs that don’t even exist today.

Kozol goes further, advocating a new round of inter-district busing, a system not based on race. I’m wary of such an approach for many reasons, however. Mainly, it’s an approach that doesn’t force bad schools to become better. Why not spend limited money on more teachers and better teachers rather than bus drivers? Politicians advocating another round of busing have no chance of getting elected in most of the U.S.

Instead, why not publish a constant steam of media stories about what it’s really like to attend class in a dysfunctional school. Cut the classroom photo ops and show the citizens that too many of the kids in the classroom are not getting a meaningful education. Do it until people can’t stand to see these articles anymore. If people stop reading the papers because they don’t want to do anything about this massive problem, then we have a much bigger problem, indeed. Especially in light of the fact that it makes economic sense to address this problem. Fixing this problem should appeal the self-interest of everyone.

In the meantime, Kozol is right that the status quo is intolerable. We need to put an end to fake education; no more bandaids. No more big government programs that actually make education worse. NCLB is a fraud being perpetrated on the public. It defrauds parents who send their kids to the horrible schools and it defrauds a public that assumes that other people’s kids are being educated when they are actually being turned into resentful robots. Those kids are being taught to be turned off by anything that goes by the name of “education.” That’s the state of education in all too many of our public schools.

I realize I’m on a Youtube kick these days. But there are some pretty amazing things to see. For instance, this impressive collection of tornadoes.

Here’s another fun site. 15 dots walking–a walking animation. It’s amazing how much emotion can be conveyed by 15 dots.

Visit this site and enjoy a lush minute of sites and sounds from BBC Motion Gallery.

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…)

Freethinkers, in their attempts to cast light on culture’s many logical foibles, can lose focus. Like the more traditional naysayers, who bemoan our times while looking foggily to those good-old-days that never existed, liberal critical thinkers can come to a similarly deluded doom-and-gloom conclusion. Of course, the evidence used by both camps differ completely- people like us at DI don’t mourn the decay of some imaginary moral backbone, but instead the rotting of clear-thinking minds.

It can seem at times that only the present U.S. suffers from ignorance, sloppy logic and woeful gullibility. This probably comes from our own faulty thinking- the availability heuristic at work. We see neighbors and coworkers buying into bogus alternative medicines and celebrity gossip, and the U.S. seems doomed to crumble into total sensationalism or idiocy. As if silly, baseless thoughts flourish only in the cultural Petri dish we have created.

But humans think silly, baseless things everywhere. Take the South Korean fear of “fan death” for example. As recently reported on Public Radio International’s program The World, many South Koreans believe in a unique urban legend that claims if you sleep with a fan running in a room with closed windows and doors, you die. No explanation why, mind you- it just happens. This zany, senseless belief apparently has had a profound impact on South Korean culture- every fan in the country supposedly comes equipped with a timer to prevent a deadly fan death disaster. South Korean researchers have even devoted studies to debunking the pervasive myth. Yet despite the evidence, the fear carries on successfully, and the superstition just won’t shake free from the minds of the people. That sounds almost American, doesn’t it?

The South Korean “fan death” urban legend reminds me that we cannot place all the blame for stupid people and idiotic thoughts on the media, the education system, religion, or the American culture at large. Sloppy logic appears in any group of human animals, and our species will likely always struggle with this aspect of human nature.

According to this article, Barry Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, is being reissued. Timely reading? Depends on what audience at which this is aimed.

I seriously doubt conservatives of the Rove/Norquist stripe will have much sympathy with Goldwater, who now seems admirable and even iconic compared to the dunces dancing to the tune of the Far Right today.

It might be well to remember that traditional conservatism bears little substantive resemblance to what passes as popular conservatism today. Since Reagan, the Right has taken up the gauntlet of attack as its primary ethic, and this is now costing them.

It has been asked in recent decades just what Liberals stand for, but I think the question is better applied to Conservatives. A quick glance at the Right’s c.v.s suggests they stand for fewer taxes, more rigid controls on judicial interference with private business, fewer taxes, banning sex, fewer taxes, weakening environmental conservation, fewer taxes, more expensive health care, fewer taxes…

Not an impressive list. They have become reactive, even when they clearly had won the field in popular support, shouting back at the Left as if people still weren’t listening, and it has become all they seem to do. Goldwater’s considered conservatism is almost balm-like in its relative rationalism.

Conservatism itself has never been a bad thing. Harkening back to an earlier time, all it meant was being more cautious, being less willing to spend public money on “What if?” proposals, and being averse to change for change’s sake. It meant relying on the vast resource of the private sector to solve most problems instead of assuming that corporations automatically meant bad things about to happen.

Liberalism, on the other hand, was once all about Free Markets. Laissez-faire capitalism is a liberal invention. It meant, in this formulation, opening up opportunities for those kept artificially out by a staid and traditional set of procedures.

Things change. We have now devolved in politics to what amounts to screaming matches, cut fights, and ritual playground games, with both sides lining up on opposite sides to denounce anything the other side offers. It has perverted the discourse.

Consider: birth control is a privacy issue. It ought to be the most conservative issue we have. Conservatives who traditionally would denounce any invasion of privacy as an infringement on fundamental rights should embrace the notion of a right to choose almost reflexively.

Consider: Barry Goldwater became a mighty advocate of environmentalism. Preserving the land, nurturing natural resources, ought to be a seedbed for conservative activism.

Consider: Involvement in foreign wars has been the legacy of our most progressive and (in a contemporary sense) Liberal presidents. Conservatives have generally been averse to what amounts to gunpowder diplomacy, yet that situation has now reversed itself profoundly.

Since the end of WWII, a brand of conservatism has evolved, exemplified early on by writers like Phyllis Schlafly, that has less to do with authentic conservatism and mostly to do with the creation of an established order wherein public policy amounts to little more than protectionism of the privileges of an elite. The desire for a preconceived social order, supportive of the self-selected “natural” rights of those on the top end of private money, has predominated this strain of rightwing thought. Fewer taxes, to these folks, does not so much equate with less public service as it does to less government oversight. Environmental policy ends with what one of these folks can see from the front porch of his or her mansion in the midst of a vast estate. Denial of birth control has less to do with any moral right than it is a method of keeping the lower incomes population bound to a cycle of child-rearing that makes it virtually impossible for most of them ever to rise up economically–or intellectually–to challenge the status quo. (When I say intellectually, what I mean is this: how many people have the time or resource to continue an education when they have children to raise and more children to raise? Some can manage, but without a viable method of child care, this becomes categorically impossible—and what is one of the chief failures of the welfare and antipoverty programs of the past four decades? No child care.)

Rove, Norquist, Reed, Schalfly, Coulter, Riley, Limbaugh, Lott….these folks would not be recognized by Barry Goldwater as conservatives. They are wanna-be aristos.

But this just makes the response of the Left even more problematic. Not all aspects of conservatism are repugnant, and not all conservatives are fascists. It is a mistake to shut out their voices simply because they’re on the other side of the playground.

Maybe checking out Goldwater’s book would be a good place to start over. We might discover, under the detritus of 27 years of ugly schoolyard rumbles, that we have more in common than we think.

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.”

I caught this on Andrew Sullivan’s site, The Daily Dish.

The premise? What if Mary Poppins was made into a horror film? Here’s what:

This is the title of a newspaper commentary column that I stumbled onto recently. It was less annoying than I thought it would be. The “New Facts” turn out to be mainly the testimony of Ken Ham’s Creation Museum (Here’s my earlier post about that).

One gripe I have is the idea of testimony as evidence. This is a very human concept, the basis of legal evidence, and anathema to good science. In science, testimony is merely a claim of observation intended to lead others to be able to repeat the observation. Furthermore, in science an observation is meaningless unless it can be objectively measured with unimpeachable instruments.

Author Tom McVeety brings up a couple of measurable data tidbits free from their context, but responders to his column neatly provide the missing framework for some, and politely attack the innumeracy obvious in others.

It is worthwhile to read many of the comments to the column. Among other threads, they get into a clash between Christian denominations that accept scientific conclusions, and those that deny science when it disagrees with a particular narrow interpretation of the Bible.

Just for grins, here’s a rebuttal on BadAstronomy.com

Television is part of the American political problem, but not only for the obvious reasons.  See Ebonmuse’s review of Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason.  Here’s an excerpt:

[T]elevision is a time- and space-limited medium with high barriers to entry, making it in its essence a medium of the rich and powerful. It is not a place where people can have a two-way conversation; rather, it turns people into passive receivers of information, unable to respond as they see fit. Worse, television is not a meritocracy. One’s ability to participate in the medium is not based on the merit of one’s ideas, but rather on how much money one can afford to spend to purchase airtime for them . . . Unlike print, television can present vivid, visceral images that bypass the faculties of reasoning and trigger emotional responses - especially fearful responses - far more directly, overwhelming the faculties of deliberation.

There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.TANSTAAFL.

Anybody recognize that? Where it comes from? What it refers to?

This past weekend was the 100^th birthday of Robert A. Heinlein. I was not there, though I’d wanted to be. You see, Robert A. Heinlein was one of the greatest science fiction writers in the world, and when I was a child, his books informed my apprehension of just about everything. It might be questioned whether one man deserves the kind of press Heinlein gets. Even when he was alive (he passed away in 1988) he was controversial but there were still many places you could walk into where not a soul would know who he was. I think he’s important because, in a way, he made modern America.

What? A science fiction writer? Made America?

Such a statement demands clarification.

A biography is soon to be out by a gentleman named Bill Patterson. You can read it, read about the man who once wore the title “The Dean of Space Age Fiction”, and judge for yourself. I won’t go into huge detail about his life or work here. I want to make a smaller, more pointed observation.

In 33 novels and a significant number of short stories, Robert A. Heinlein established a didactic approach to science fiction that has been copied, improved, debated, revered, and hated since he began his career in 1938. Heinlein was born in Missouri. He graduated from Annapolis. He received a medical discharge from the Navy in the early thirties for TB. He eventually moved to California and worked ardently for Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign during the Depression. This surprises most people today because after the Cold War was fully launched and engaged, he became an icon of right wing militarism, a reputation solidified by the 1959 publication of his novel Starship Troopers. In it, Heinlein lays out the notion that the vote is too important to simply be handed out. It must be earned. He has a society in which only military service grants the franchise. It is otherwise mildly socialist, an aspect which most people seem to overlook. Humanity, in the novel, is at war with the Bugs, a hive species bent on our destruction. Heinlein lays out philosophic justifications for the kind of total war that seems necessary. He stops just short of glorifying militarism, portraying as a necessary component of survival of culture.

Heinlein was an early defender of our incursion in Vietnam, which forms the springboard from which his novel Glory Road is launched. He believed nuclear war was likely and thought people who refused to come to terms with it softheaded and bound of extinction. He wrote about it in a couple of stories and one novel in particular, Farnham’s Freehold, which drew criticism for other reasons.

Paradoxically, for a man so identified with the Right, he was also an advocate of sexual laissez faire and in his later novels portrayed all manner of novel association between men and women. He did in fact “invent” the waterbed, though he did not patent the idea. He was also anti formalized religion. There are facets to the man the Right, as we see it today, would be hard pressed to accommodate. He virtually launched the counter culture with Stranger In A Strange Land, published in 1961. (more…)

Long before political Bush-bashing became popular, or even widely accepted, critics still jabbed him repeatedly for his speech. Books of “Bushisms”, videos of Bush’s misspeakings spliced together, and comedic reproductions of the man’s halting, confused language have always dominated the pop culture reception of the President.

I use the word President specifically because Bush didn’t always speak this way. As Governor, he had at least a modicum of eloquence, and certainly much more speech-giving poise. How could a skilled and well-prepared speaker become the awkward cannon-fodder mess of a President we have today?

Back in 2004, James Fallows, a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, weighed in on the Kerry/Bush debates. Fallows ended up ruminating, however, on the great disparity between Bush’s past speaking ability as Governor, and his blundering debating skills of the present. The initial, layperson’s diagnosis held that perhaps Bush had developed some kind of dyslexia.

But dyslexia doesn’t just pop up, out of nowhere, to plague a middle-aged man. Upon viewing the in-depth comparison of young Bush’s and old Bush’s speaking skills, some physicians saw the clear signs of presenile dementia. The connection broke when one such physician sent a letter to The Atlantic, saying:

“Bush’s problems have been developing slowly, and that just a decade ago he was an articulate debater, ‘artful indeed in steering questions and challenges to his desired subjects,’ who ‘did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones.’

Consider in contrast, the present: ‘the informal Q&As he has tried to avoid,’ ‘Bush’s recent faltering performances,’…’his stalling, defensive pose when put on the spot,’ ’speaking more slowly and less gracefully.’

Slowly developing cognitive deficits, as demonstrated so clearly by the President, can represent only one diagnosis, and that is ‘presenile demential’!”

This informal diagosis shook up the blogosphere, and inspired a few other doctors to give an opinion on Bush’s degenerating language ability. These distant, unofficial conclusions can tell us nothing for certain, of course, but they nonetheless pose an interesting matter to consider. To witness the “evidence” of presenile dementia yourself, check out this video, which compares speeches given by Governor Bush with President Bush.

If you Google “Paris Hilton Jail” you’ll get 15 million hits. If you Google “Downing Street Memo” you’ll get only 800,000 hits. A terrifying real-world topic, “Greenland ice sheet,” will only return 900,000 hits. I suppose it’s because there are no videos of memos or glaciers having sex.

What brought me to the topic of Paris Hilton (other than my world salad mood) might be my fascina