All In Against Efficiency

Posted on by Derek Neal

by Derek Neal

I was recently subjected to an hour of the “All In” Podcast while on a long car ride. This podcast is not the sort I normally listen to. I prefer sports podcasts—primarily European soccer—and that’s about the extent of my consumption. I like my podcasts to be background noise and idle chatter, something to listen to while I do the dishes or sweep the floor, just something to fill the void of silence. On the way to work this morning I had sports talk radio on—the pre-podcast way to fill silence—and they were discussing the physical differences between two football wide receivers—Calvin Johnson and DK Metcalfe—before switching to two running backs—Derrick Henry and Mark Ingram.

You think DK Metcalfe is big, one host said, but then you see Calvin Johnson and you’re like, whoa, this guy is massive! How does a human get that big? Yeah, another host said, and then you see Derrick Henry next to Mark Ingram, and you’re like, how do these guys even play the same position? Ingram is tiny next to Henry! It doesn’t make sense! After this exchange, the first host remarked sarcastically that this was great radio—just naming some guys and talking about their physical stature. Yes, I nodded my head, this is great radio, this is what I want on a frigid December morning, the first morning I’ve had to sweep the snow off my car and let it idle in the driveway to warm up. The silence is deeper in winter, and I remembered padding down the stairs of my childhood home before the sun had risen, 15 or 16 years old, hearing Mike & Mike on ESPN Radio blaring out of the living room speakers as I quickly ate cereal before rushing off to school, wondering why in the hell my dad was blasting this stupid sports talk radio at six in the morning. But now I know. When you get older, sometimes the silence is too much, and the only remedy is the sweet nothings of sports talk radio.

The All In Podcast also had a lot of chatter, but the topic was finance and politics rather than sports. The hosts, who were all venture capital millionaires/billionaires in the tech industry, cracked jokes and were occasionally self-deprecating, but I was left with the disconcerting feeling that the four hosts believed in their own importance. These guys think they have something important to say, I realized, and even worse, this is the sort of podcast people listen to to learn something. Reader, I have a general suspicion of people who claim to have something important to say, especially those who claim to be able to teach me something. The only people I immediately trust are the ones who foreground their own stupidity and failures, like the journalists on my rotation of European soccer podcasts. Read more »

Monday, December 9, 2024

Art Or Artifice: Agency And AI Alignment

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

The leader of the Luddites, the (possibly apocryphal) weaver Ned Ludd who is said to have broken two knitting frames in a ‘fit of rage’. Image Credit: Public Domain.

When the Luddites smashed automatic looms in protest, what they saw threatened was their livelihoods: work that had required the attention of a seasoned artisan could now be performed by much lower-skilled workers, making them more easily replaceable and thus without leverage to push back against deteriorating working conditions. Today, many employees find themselves worrying about the prospect of being replaced by AI ‘agents’ capable of both producing and ingesting large volumes of textual data in negligible time.

But the threat of AI is not ‘merely’ that of cheap labor. As depicted in cautionary tales such as The Terminator or Matrix, many perceive the true risk of AI to be that of rising up against its creators to dominate or enslave them. While there might be a bit of transference going on here, certainly there is ample reason for caution in contemplating the creation of an intelligence equal to or greater than our own—especially if it at the same time might lack many of our weaknesses, such as requiring a physical body or being tied to a single location.

Besides these two, there is another, less often remarked upon, threat to what singer-songwriter Nick Cave has called ‘the soul of the world’: art as a means to take human strife and from it craft meaning, focusing instead on the finished end product as commodity. Art is born in the artist’s struggle with the world, and this struggle gives it meaning; the ‘promise’ of generative AI is to leapfrog all of the troublesome uncertainty and strife, leaving us only with the husk of the finished product.

I believe these two issues are deeply connected: to put it bluntly, we will not solve the problem of AI alignment without giving it a soul. The ‘soul’ I am referring to here is not an ethereal substance or animating power, but simply the ability to take creative action in the world, to originate something genuinely creatively novel—true agency, which is something all current AI lacks. Meaningful choice is a precondition to both originating novel works of art and to becoming an authentic moral subject. AI alignment can’t be solved by a fixed code of moral axioms, simply because action is not determined by rational deduction, but is compelled by the affect of actually experiencing a given situation. Let’s try to unpack this. Read more »

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part One—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin
Photo from https://wel-metcamps.com/

by Barbara Fischkin

People who have never been to sleepaway camp, don’t get it. They tease me when I speak about memories that are decades old, as if I am recalling a past life that never happened. They find it strange that I view my many years at camp as not merely summer vacations but as forces that helped to make me who I am. These camp memories visit me more deeply when the winter sky sets early, fooling me into believing that 4:30 pm is really past midnight. If I am roaming, I wonder if it is already time to go home. I linger. Yes, my summer camp taught me to roam physically—and in my imagination. It was free and free-range.

I’ll tarry briefly where many good tales begin. In the middle: My teenage years, as a camp clerk and then as babysitter for a camp director and finally, as a counselor. These summer jobs were woefully underpaid. But the fringe benefits were great: Opportunities to break rules that were often not enforced, anyway.

I smoked my first joint, out in the open, sitting with friends on a large rock by the lake, right after a late summer sunset. If caught by a camp director, we would have been fired. I don’t think they wanted to catch us. They were somewhere else, smoking their own joints. Romance, along with pot, seemed to be part of the plan for young employees, particularly in regard to the kitchen boys over whom we swooned. My camp, socialist at its core and run by lefty social workers, did not believe in waiters. To check out a kitchen boy, campers and staff had to go to one of several pantries to pick up or deliver food, plates and utensils. A chore made joyful.

 In regard to specific romance, I remember the night I spent with a slightly older male counselor, sleeping with him in his tent—and not doing much more than sleeping. (Maybe it was the pot). Before dawn I shoved him awake and said: “I have to go, I will get into trouble.” He laughed a sleepy laugh, perhaps a stoner laugh and said: “Barbara,  this is Wel-Met. Nobody gets in trouble for sleeping with someone.” Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Fun In Space

Call me nomad.
Rootlessness is my routine.

From where I stand
space seems to beg for exploration
not occupation. Occupation of space
requires a military state of mind,
armies train for it. But individuals
grow dull and lethargic just occupying space

~~

There’s no substitute for dynamism
when facing space.

When I stumble upon a new chunk
I like to engage it many times over
laying out alternate trajectories,
bisecting circles,
flying off on tangents,
or just nosing around looking for
shortcuts.

If the wind’s right you might catch me
boogalooing along an hypotenuse
or oscillating between the foci of an ellipse.
I go at it from all angles by any means.

For instance, I’ve found a trampoline’s
a great way to explore space:
up, down, up, down.
Along similar lines (if you have the bucks)
a space shuttle’s good too:
up, down, up, down.

~~

There are various ways to approach space:
We can grid it off and tackle it one little block at a time
or go at it whole, working it as Jackson Pollock would a canvas.
Our choice depends upon our depth of indoctrination,
or personality disorder.

Whatever our milieu, space can be an exhilarating place
–or is it places?

In fact, space is full of surprises
(moving beyond bland Euclidean space that is,
the plainest of all geometries). Still,
you gotta hand it to the guy.
Euclid’s space may be old hat,
but it’s a space that’s served us well over the years,
try getting from here to there without it.

~~

But what really psyches me
are novel topologies of space.
There’s nothing more exhilarating
then space that pushes the envelope.

Consider the tasty appeal of a torus
(the deep-fried, sugary cuisine of cops),
the intriguing infinity of a Möbius strip,
or the warm and cozy feel of a
conversation-laced pub.

Those are boundary-pushing spaces all,
but they’re nothing up against the
reality-bending possibilities of warped space
as given by Einstein, or the mystically tangled
theory of strings.

Just the thought of Einsteinian space
trumps any sense of metaphysical claustrophobia
left over from grade-school catechism
under hard nuns.

~~

Now?

I never miss the chance to savor space.
With seven billion of us on the planet,
at our present rate of consumption,
you never know when
we might run out.

Jim Culleny
June 2007

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Sunday, December 8, 2024

In the Field

Posted on by Monte Davis

by Monte Davis

Only a moment ago he asked Mrs. Murdoch to fetch his parents. Now all three are standing in the kitchen doorway, watching the reflected sunlight that skitters above the stove, across the ceiling. When he notices the adults, he mischievously directs it into their eyes. John Clark Maxwell squints and raises a hand to block the glare, but his  voice is indulgent. “What are you up to, Jamesie?”

“It’s the sun, papa. I got it in with this tin plate.”

Before the afternoon is over, Jamesie will roll the plate around the pantry floor until Mrs. Murdoch sends him outside; beat it as a drum, marching against Napoleon with the Iron Duke; fill it with pink granite pebbles; empty it again, set it afloat on the duck pond, and bombard it with pebbles until it is swamped by the interlacing waves.

1

The antenna turns slowly against the spin of the earth, tracking a galaxy eight billion light-years away. That far away, that long ago, the galaxy’s core was exploding with unimaginable violence. Here and now, the radio outburst is almost lost in background noise. Penzias and Wilson thought that the noise in their antenna might be caused by pigeon droppings. Instead, it was the echo of the Big Bang.

Where did the Big Bang go? Into waves.

Waves in what?

In the field. The electromagnetic field. Maxwell’s field.

What is the field?

It’s like the water for ocean waves. It’s like the air for sound waves. It’s like the earth for seismic waves. It’s like…

No, it isn’t. We’ve just forgotten how strange it was.

Penzias and Wilson weren’t the first to have noise problems. Their radio astronomy traced back to Karl Jansky, trying to understand annoying static from nowhere on earth. Which went back to Marconi, who made a revolution out of a laboratory curiosity. Which went back to Heinrich Hertz in a darkened room at Karlsruhe, adjusting the gap between two brass spheres until he saw a spark: the first deliberate radio message. Which was only part of a message from James Clerk Maxwell that is still unfolding. Read more »

“Their Wives Wind Them Up While Asleep”

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

A line of about half-dozen men, bundled up against cold, affix bolts and assemble magnetos for Ford's Model T. The image shows the first assembly line created for Ford's car assembly line in 1913.
Workers on the First Moving Assembly Line Put Together Magnetos and Flywheels for 1913 Ford Autos, Highland Park, Michigan. 1913. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1633486. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_assembly_line_-_1913.jpg.
Rights: Public domain

Restoration of my old car took well more than a decade before it again powered itself along US Highway 501. With time and experience, differences between a craftsman and me would continue to diminish, as my inexperienced hands layered their actions into bodily remembered history and embodied knowledge. My hands remained bumbling and hesitant, though in time a little less than when I began. A craftsman’s hands would be effective and confident, mastering both tools and materials. The craftsman’s eyes, hands, and mind work in concert—far better tuned than mine. But despite the gulf of experience between craftsmanship and my labor, the years hunched over the car opened or, better, finely textured my understanding of how work helps to fulfill human life. That seemingly basic understanding was, paradoxically, obscured by the automobile itself.

A common element that the craftsman and I shared throughout the process amounted to the perspective of the whole project. Even when the car’s parts were contained in Ziplock bags, its chassis stripped to bare metal (much rusted through, too), my mind saw the product that my work, bumbling or not, could bring forth. Mine was an unjustifiably sturdy and very hopeful vision; the same would go for the craftsman, though he had skills to justify the hope. That hopeful perspective, justified and not, formed the strongest bond tying the craftsman and me.

A stripped down chassis of a 1963 Jaguar E-type with badly worn light brown "sand" paint. The chassis has no engine and is stripped bare. It stands on jackstands.
Barely a bolt remains on the car chassis a week after it was pushed into the garage. The rest of the car’s parts were stored in Ziplock bags or boxes. Putting it all back together took about fifteen years, and a lot of learning. Digital photograph by Mark DeLong, September 20, 2002.

In the mid-nineteenth century, William Morris used hope to draw the distinction between “useful work and useless toil.” “What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?” Morris asked in Signs of Change (1888). “It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality.” Morris along with William Blake and John Ruskin nostalgically revered craft, and Morris particularly romanticized it. Yet, if nostalgia and idealism colored his vision of work somewhat, Morris understood the special qualities of craft work: its connectedness to meaning, its close tie to qualities of uniqueness, beauty, and durability—its reverence for things and the making of them.

Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” loomed in the factories of the time. The three men yearned for the good old days of craftsmanship as a reaction to the indifferent brutality of the Industrial Revolution, though what they desired—a pleasantly medieval fantasy, really—may never have supplied the needs of their own time. Read more »

Friday, December 6, 2024

In the Footsteps of Du Fu

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

American poet, essayist, and translator Eliot Weinberger opens his new book, The Life of Tu Fu, describing a seminal moment in the Tang dynasty poet’s life, when he had just failed the Imperial Examination —for the second time. Weinberger, it should be said, has not written a biography of the eighth century poet as the title of the book might suggest. Nor has he come out with a new translation of Du Fu’s work. Rather, Weinberger has created a montage of fifty-eight original poems inspired by Du Fu’s life. And in his opening gambit, taking on the voice of the young poet, he compares all the candidates who failed the examination that day to hundreds and hundreds of chickens:

They say this is the only tree in the world that has these pears, for these pears have no desire to propagate elsewhere.

I thought of The Old Man Who Called His Chickens. He had hundreds of chickens, each with its own name. He could call its name and the chicken would come. I thought of him when all the candidates, including me, failed the exam.

One wonders: how is it possible that one of the greatest minds the world has ever known failed the examination not once –but twice? Scholars continue to argue about it. But one thing is clear: this second failure was only the start of Du Fu’s troubles!

2.

Considered by some people, and I am one of those people, to be China’s greatest poet, Du Fu’s work never went out of style in China. Not even during the Cultural Revolution, when so much traditional culture was canceled, did Du Fu’s light fade. The reason usually cited for this is that Du Fu has always been considered the poet of the common people. He gave voice to their suffering. And he also understood that violence, natural disasters, and war fell disproportionately onto their heads; for unlike the elite, the poor had few options open to them when things got rough. British historian and documentary film-maker Michael Wood, in his wonderful 2023 travelogue In the Footsteps of Du Fu, writes about China’s millennium-long love affair with the Tang dynasty poet. Tracing Du Fu’s life across the vastness of China, from the mountains of Sichuan to the great lakes of Hunan, he wonders whether there has ever been any other poet in the pre-modern world, who “so urgently recorded what it feels like to be a refugee, fleeing for your life?”

When asked: “Why Du Fu?” Wood replies that Du Fu is fascinating for many reasons, not least of all having been born at the precise moment of lift-off of the glorious Tang, considered to be one of China’s great ages of cultural and literary flowering. While Du Fu began life comfortably well-off during the heyday of the Tang, by mid-life he was suffering through the worst of the great chaos following the An Lushan uprising, which saw millions dead with countless more people fleeing for their lives. Read more »

Lessons From Singapore: Urban Planning and Garden Spaces

Posted on by Eric Feigenbaum

by Eric Feigenbaum

Anyone who has ever watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit knows Los Angeles’ entire trajectory was changed dramatically in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when politicians and planners of the day  – perhaps spurred by some alleged corruption – believed cars and freeways were the direction of the future and invested massively in roads instead of the Pacific Electric Railway system (aka The Red Car) that provided a vast network of affordable public transportation.

The result was the quintessential example of urban sprawl. Within twenty years Los Angeles quickly grew into one of the world’s physically largest cities, eventually encompassing 502 square miles – 44 miles north to south and 20 miles east to west. And that ignores the areas around it that comprise the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area.

As a result, my hometown, is a patchwork quilt of architecture, design and landscape. Some neighborhoods have charming homes and duplexes built in the 1930s while others are filled with rundown Victorians and still others composed of 1950s cookie cutter bungalows. There are Frank Lloyd Wright houses tucked in obscure locations around the city and ostentatious palaces in the Hollywood Hills or overlooking the coast in Malibu. And we won’t discuss the San Fernando Valley which was developed as a sort of suburb within the city – only with power lines, billboards and all manner of lit-up business signs lining the main thoroughfares.

Perhaps that’s why when I first visited Singapore in 2003, its neatness and composure were striking. Even the drive from the airport to city center – or maybe especially the drive from the airport to the city center – along the East Coast Parkway was remarkable for the rain trees forming a canopy over the neat, clean, fast-moving highway which winds along the water. The City Center had people, but also a sense of calm I’ve never seen in any other major metropolitan.

Singapore is planned city and nation.

Prior to Singapore’s independence in 1965, the island was mostly a dry red sandbar. Singapore’s founders sought to put the nascent nation on the fast track to foreign direct investment and while there were many steps involved, they realized first impressions mattered – a lot. If executives and bankers were going to choose Singapore, they would need to have confidence in the country – and aesthetics played an important part.

“After independence, I searched for some dramatic way to distinguish ourselves from the other Third World countries. I settled for a clean and green Singapore,” wrote Lee Kuan Yew, founding Prime Minister of Singapore. Read more »

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Great Awakenings of the American Man

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

There’s a lot going on right now. Lowlights include racism, misogyny, and transphobia; xenophobia amid undulating waves of global migrations; democratic state capture by right wing authoritarians; and secular state capture by fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu nationalists.

Among the many factors causing and influencing these complex phenomena are: the rebound from Covid lockdowns and the years-long economic upheavals they wrought; brutal warfare in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa among other places; and intense weather-related fiascos stemming from the rise in global temperatures. But one I’d like to focus on is a growing sense of male insecurity.

The latest “crisis” in masculinity is not more important than other issues. However, I’m currently attuned to it for several reasons. One is that as I wade through late middle-age, I’m becoming ever more secure in (ie. relaxed about) my own masculinity, which in turn leads me to better notice gender insecurity in other men. Another is that I believe American male insecurity played a vital role in the recent election of Donald Trump and, as such, demands attention. Qualitative and quantitative data about Trump getting more votes than expected from young men with college education, from black men, and from brown men, signal something. And finally, as a historian, shit storms rising up from perceived crises in masculinity are not new to me.

In the United States, a broad crisis of white masculinity first emerged during the early 19th century. Then, as now, it was driven by economic changes and by challenges to established patriarchy, and it found expression in religion and politics. Read more »

Jury Duty

Posted on by David Winner and Angela Starita

by Angela Starita

Ottoman-era manuscript showing Rumi meeting fellow poet Molla Shams al-Din.

In October, I received a jury summons for Kings County Supreme Court. The first day—exactly two weeks before the presidential election—lawyers vetted potential jurors for a case made against the defendant, David Cruz, who was on trial for second-degree murder and related gun charges. Looking down at my hands when the charges were announced, I had to consciously take in the severity of the case since, of course, the judge had taken a dispassionate tone, the same one he might have used in a civil trial around a sidewalk fall or a landlord withholding heat. I immediately began dreading the possibility of being on the jury, fearing an ambiguous case with vindictive or thoughtless jurors. With an hour to go before dismissal, the lawyers choose me to serve. The judge told the 17 of us to return the following Monday, the day the trial would begin.

I spent the week trying to stop myself from imagining possible scenarios. I met up with a friend whose mother, a smart, generous woman who like most of her family loved Donald Trump, was dying of lung cancer. At the end of the evening, I told my friend my fears about jury duty, possibly jailing the wrong person, and even jailing the right person considering the state of our prison system. Though I hadn’t named the crime, he assumed murder and then stood over me and said, “Well, you’re just better than the rest of us. I guess you’re ready for your robes and sandals.”

Like the rest of his family, my friend is witty, quick with a comeback, and much of our closeness rests on my appreciation of his humor. So standing there on that subway platform, I wondered if he were joking. I said nothing, not quite sure what had just transpired. He took a step back looked worried, then asked what was wrong. Not yet sure what had happened, I made some sort of excuse for going still. Another beat passed, and then he stepped close again and made another holier-than-thou crack. This time, it was clear there was no humor intended.

To be fair, he was drunk and exhausted after months of worry about his mother.  At the same time, his wife has been searching for work, and he really couldn’t see how he could build a reasonable future for his son with only one income. His stress was palpable. Read more »

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Their Eyes Weren’t Watching God

Posted on by Rafaël Newman

by Rafaël Newman

View upward from the men’s prison at Elmina Castle

Saidiya Hartman made her second trip to Ghana in 1997. She had visited the country briefly the year before, as a tourist, but now, having recently completed a doctorate at Yale and published her first book, she was in Ghana as a Fulbright Scholar searching for historical evidence of local resistance to slave raids. She was also, as a Black American, in quest of a connection with her putative ancestral homeland, and hoping to flesh out her work, both scholarly and personal, in the archives, where she had had a fleeting glimpse of her heritage as the descendant of people kidnapped and indentured, as “chattel,” to slave-owners in the New World.

I chose Ghana because it possessed more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country in West Africa—tight dark cells buried underground, barred cavernous cells, narrow cylindrical cells, dank cells, makeshift cells. In the rush for gold and slaves that began at the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes, and Brandenburgers (Germans) built fifty permanent outposts, forts, and castles designed to ensure their place in the Africa trade. In these dungeons, storerooms, and holding cells, slaves were imprisoned until transported across the Atlantic.

Until it wrested its independence from the British in 1957 Ghana was known as Gold Coast, a name that commemorates the commodity that had first brought Europeans to the region in the 1400s, but which belies the more nefarious commerce that kept them there four centuries long. The country we now call Ghana, named by its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, for a revered but defunct medieval kingdom to its north, was until the 1800s the crossroads for several slave routes from the inland to the sea, and to passage, for those kidnapped, across the Atlantic to a life of servitude. Ghana’s coastline is studded with forts and castles—command centers and entrepôts for the trade in people enslaved from throughout west central Africa: effectively concentration camps—like a string of poisoned beads. Read more »

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Bouncing Droplets Refute the Multiverse?

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

There’s an old story, popularized by the mathematician Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) in A Budget of Paradoxes, about a visit of Denis Diderot to the court of Catherine the Great. In the story, the Empress’s circle had heard enough of Diderot’s atheism, and came up with a plan to shut him up. De Morgan writes,

Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented: though the name of the mathematician is not given, it was Euler. He advanced towards Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: Monsieur, (a + bn) / n = x, donc Dieu existe; répondez! Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarrassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter rose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted.

De Morgan concedes that the story may not be true, yet even at face value, it’s a puzzling anecdote. De Morgan tells us that “Euler was a believer in God, downright and straightforward.” It’s obvious that an algebraic expression has no bearing on God’s existence. In the story, Diderot misses that point (the historical Diderot was not, in fact, so ignorant), but it leads the modern reader to wonder…so what? Diderot may or may not have been an overly dogmatic atheist, but should a “downright and straightforward” believer really defend his beliefs with bullshit?

The modern reader might then ask a followup question. What questionable claims today have been made harder to dismiss by cloaking them in math?

A few possibilities from economics and psychology come to mind, but this column will discuss a new book that advances the charge against quantum physics. Escape from Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory, by Adam Forrest Kay, forwards some complaints that readers of popular physics may find find a little familiar (cf. Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math, or Adam Becker’s What Is Real?), but Kay introduces enough historical and philosophical breadth to make his version my new favorite of the bunch, if with some reservations about its conclusions. Read more »

Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

Physiognomy of the melancholic temperament, drawing by Thomas Holloway, c.1789. Wikipedia.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0

If Harold Bloom is correct in asserting that, in some sense, Shakespeare invented the human, not in the sense that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, Thomas Edison the light bulb, Hedy Lamar got a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, not to mention Yahweh’s work on Adam and Eve, but in the modest sense that he bequeathed us a deeper understanding of ourselves through giving voice to aspects of human behavior that had hitherto gone unremarked. Bloom singles out Hamlet for special consideration, arguing that he is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest gift – though Falstaff is in the running. Hamlet has come down to us as the melancholy Dane. Accordingly, let us conjecture that modern man was born in melancholy.

A few years later Robert Burton would publish The Anatomy of Melancholy. It was a smash hit and went through five more editions during Burton’s life. It made Burton’s printer a fortune. While the book is indeed about melancholy, it is also about damned near everything else under the sun. It was subsequently parodied in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, no mean feat as the original has something of a parodic character unto itself.

Here is how Burton defined melancholy:

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.

To live is to know melancholy. We post-moderns are more likely to call it depression.

That’s what this post is about, depression, but also growth. Read more »

Monday, December 2, 2024

A Requiem For Postmortems

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

We might have been a free and a great people together, but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. —Thomas Jefferson, “Jefferson Draft” of the Declaration of Independence, 1776. 

“Despair,” by Edvard Munch, 1894. Munch Museum. Oslo.

George Washington may have been the “Indispensable Man” whose strength we used as our North Star, Benjamin Franklin the cherubic, ever optimistic face we showed to the outside world, James Madison the primary architect of our Constitution, but, for raw emotion wedded to soaring eloquence, no other American of the Revolutionary period quite approached Thomas Jefferson. 

I have never been a big Jefferson fan. He runs a little hot for my taste. I prefer the brooding-yet cerebral miniaturist approach of Lincoln, who says, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

My passion right now is somewhat strained, and I’m concerned that being a free and great people together might be a bit far-fetched. Like just about everyone else on my side of the divide, I want to know what happened and why. How on Earth did we manage to break the GPS and end up right back where we started? 

Let us take a deep breath, and, with the cool professionalism of the Federal Railroad Administration’s Accident Management Branch, examine the wreck. Yes, I know, Trump has targeted the Agency and plans to roll back safety regulations on hazardous gas transit, crew member requirements and fatigue risk, but this is only December 2024, and we are still living the good life.  

OK, exhale. 

This was not a landslide, not actually, and not by any historical metric. Harris clearly lost, Trump clearly won, but Trump’s popular and Electoral Vote margins are more in sync with the trench-warfare-limited-gains of the non-Obama elections we’ve had since 2000. Similarly, it was not a mandate for anything, no matter how often Trump and his team in Congress and the media claim that.    

Why does this feel like a landslide, when historical context tells us it isn’t anywhere near one? Read more »

Developing the Capacity for Rational Choices

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

“As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” —Furiosa 

Imprisoned climate activist, Roger Hallam, recently wrote about the necessity of expanding emotional well-being as we face bleak events happening around the world. While climate scientists try to “help people through the horrific information that they are being given,” they also need a way to manage their emotional reactions. We can no longer afford to merely distract ourselves from the inner turmoil. Beyond climate, we could very well be entering into a period of much greater conflict at a time of even more viruses, some destructive to our food system. When the watering hole gets smaller, the animals look at one another differently.

To move forward with compassion, at a time when divide and conquer strategies have created polarization and infighting, seems to require an effort from each one of us. 

Hallam writes,

“We might want to think about why saint-like people are enormously influential, even powerful. . . . They see the world as dependent upon the mind. . . . They are not enslaved by the world; their minds are intent, driven even, to change it. They do not see this as an end in itself.”

He explains the journey toward collective action as beginning with exploring the self as it relates to reality. The part of interest to me is this: 

“Some people are so into themselves that they find it almost impossible to get out of themselves. They are stuck, enmeshed. Children are often like this. They are literally overwhelmed by their emotions. . . . You see it a lot in prison–people so full of their distress, their anger, and rage, they cannot see themselves at all. . . . The ability to reflect on yourself, on your emotions and your behavior, leads on to a more general idea, and that is transcendence. This might be described as a deep ability to move outside of oneself, to look at oneself from the outside, simply to watch. . . . The more you practice doing it, the stronger you get at doing it. . .  . The essence of being human is nothing to do with our being in this world–it is to do with having a choice.”

The ability to choose to be responsive instead of reactive can be developed and refined through intentional introspection. This isn’t anything new; it’s an old truth ignored until it becomes crucial to our survival.   Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Purse Strings

My mind’s a purse in which
I keep my stash
if its purse strings are loose
I might add to its load
when new coin comes to town
but if I tighten down
the purse strings of my mind
they’ll garrote its capaciousness
and all that God might have me be
may be hopelessly consigned
to dangle from their noose

Jim Culleny, 2014

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