with poise and arrows

Redeeming Value

2010-11-04T21:31:00.000-07:00

The elections in the States are mostly decided, now, with Patty Murray having locked up Washington and clearing up some of that unsettling picture: we have, as a nation, shifted the balance of (especially financial) power in government to a party which seems to have no platform. I do know what their platform isn't, but a lot of stuff isn't. Like Louis C.K. would advise, "Some things are, and some things are not. Because you can't have 'everything is'--then, nothing wouldn't be. You'd have giant ants in top hats, tap dancing, all sort of crazy shit." And as a result of what we now don't know anything about, I have discovered something.

First, what we do know. Most clearly, we do know that we have elected three new congressmen who are categorically opposed to abortion, and one in particular from Kentucky, who is against it even in the case of the mother's life being compromised. I don't agree with it, not least of all because it's logically inconsistent--if you're for small government and for government charge over women's right to choose, your brain is either non-functioning, or you just don't like women very much, or you're religious, which fervently compels you to both. And speaking of inconsistency--and incompleteness, while we're at it--we know that there is a huge groundswell--a thing whose type I quite like--which has an aim that I very much do not, to the point of being scared of it. This is one of the principle points I am planning to come to in a later post, concerning the Contract from America. One pervasive theme that seems to exist in a lot of the rhetoric I read or see indicates that we, as a nation, are falling away from both deontological ethics and empirically-based utilitarian ethics, and we are starting to embrace a virtue-based system of ethics. By no means is this switch embodied by one part and not by another; nearly everyone with a microphone or under a spotlight seems to be guilty of this, and the only variance is the degree to which those ethics are supportable a priori or, which is more convincing in government, by way of precious evidence. This is deeply concerning to me; virtue ethics are a turret whose gunman does not require training to operate it.

When you embrace the fundamental truth of virtue ethics, that intrinsic and instrumental value are relative and individually determined, you necessarily trust everyone to make his or her own judgements about the common good and about the production of happiness against a rubric that you admit does not exist. In other words, you could equally defend selfishness and charity, and you can do either one as often and as vibrantly as you feel is appropriate. The kickback, and really the only check against being inconsistent or heinous, is that people eventually just stop hanging out with you, if you are horrible. But what if everyone behaves this way? Where is the check? And how can you tell who is more horrible, if that is all you are used to; or you are given a choice between equally vapid, detrimental options; or you are too ignorant to know the difference between horrible and nourishing? If you refuse to outline a cogent and consistent moral outline, as with deontology, then you lose even an attempt at rigidity or predictability. If you refuse utilitarianism, you admit that past evidence is not sufficient to persuade you that some action or attitude or stance is, or can be, more likely to cause happiness in people than another. And, having shrugged off those two structures, you embrace the whirlwind of relativism which has snapped up virtue ethics, and which can drop that system on its head, in a field a thousand miles away from where it was standing seconds earlier. All the systems have their flaws, and I have written a handful of papers on these; but I don't understand why, when the consequences of the decisions made by our politicians routinely govern our air, our bodies, our privacy, and our futures, we would so quickly abandon the idea that predictability is precious. It seems that we would rather vote for who we think a person is, and we want to leave behind what a person does and why a person chooses what he does.

I am confused by almost every politician who exists, because it seems as though they are either bad at thinking, bad at empathizing, or bad at feeling shame. To be worse is to be all three, and therefore to be the vast majority of suited grinners who we would see in newspapers, if we read them enough to know that you are doing us a disservice even by shaking our hands. I am confused by the people who are allowed to vote in our country, because of exit poll data and because of quotes in media. I am confused by priorities inculcated by most adults, in most states of the union, most of the time. I feel as if my future, or at least my satisfaction with it--my sense of confidence--is standing in front of a pillbox, and I am already looking down at my chest, touching the tear in my scorching jacket, knees weak and teetering, breathing smoke.

In the Morning, and Amazing

2010-09-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

Here's the counter-intuitive key to winning thumb wars: when you get pinned down, what you have to do is push down, not pull up. You only have a ten count to do it, so listen up. When you push down, you create some cushion between your opponent and the top of your thumb, and you can squeeze out if you slip to the outside. If you pull up, you meet your opponent's strength directly, like trying to get through a wall by sprinting. It doesn't matter if you have way more talent, or you're far stronger, or even if you have beaten this same person a thousand times before: it's not about skill, force, or precedent. If you act like a poor tactician, then you are. You pull straight up, and you might as well waste your time praying. Sometimes thoughts like these get to me when I'm working, but I'm not the one in charge.

So what we did was, we went to Munich last weekend. And it turns out Oktoberfest is pretty fun.

Active

2010-09-13T13:07:00.001-07:00

I start my day before the sun does. It's a rare thing for me to be able to say that, which is no surprise to anyone who actually reads this thing. I often say that my three favorite things are sleeping, eating, and napping, and the Austrians certainly make sure I eat well; but as for sleeping, well, my nights are thinner than a butcher's dog. This is a metaphor my headmaster dropped on us in our first week. It's precise.

Sunday is the only off-day that the school provides the students, and it was still as packed as a day of rest can be. Breakfast is at 8, and it was pancakes, and it was fruit and yogurt, and it was hot cocoa, and it was delicious. We then had cakes and coffee at Dallman's, a pastry shop up the road owned by the husband of one of the administrative gurus at the school, a lovely and smiling woman named Natascha. That's how things are in St. Gilgen; everyone is related to everyone, and the fashionable spread of news and secrets very strictly underscores that fact. Then just after noon, we cooked four pizzas the size of Vatican pulpit bibles, and we rode mountain bikes. That is, some of us did: I napped. This is also how St. Gilgen is: we are frenetic in pace, or we are power-switched off. This is the way of the restaurants, of the kids, of the weather coming over the mountains.

The first full week of school is over now, and I finally feel like I can update something worthwhile. This case proved impossible last week for two reasons. First, I knew that I would be way too busy to concentrate on something that calms me down. And second, I figured that most of what I said would have been nonsense, because it would simply change again this week. Both reasons were proved right, but those are no bother now: I have something of a schedule, and even though I'll be ragged come December, I'm glad I finally have a routine. On Mondays and Thursdays, I will take out a team of kids in the quad skiffs that the school reserves, and we'll be doing some rowing around Wolfgangsee. Tuesdays and Saturdays will be football. Wednesdays and Fridays, we have rehearsal for a stage adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes tale, which we will be putting on at the end of the term. Hopefully I'll also be able to shadow the advanced English and Math classes, and the philosophy equivalent in the International Baccalaureate program, which is called Theory of Knowledge. If that sounds packed, then our trips, hikes, mountain bike courses, and team sports visits are peppered into nearly every week of the term. We do, very happily, find ourselves served chocolate mousse or some kind of pastry with every lunch: you just can't complain about compulsory mousse.

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I started my first day of rowing coaching today. It was a delight. For the next year, I will be a member of the rowing club in St. Gilgen, and I will have two sessions a week. On Monday afternoons for four hours, I'm in charge of the juniors. Sixteen girls and one boy, as excitable as house cats, and some of them with equivalent swimming experience. A group of them, however, are remarkably skilled for their young age, and all of them are lovely and excited to learn. Rowing makes you feel like you're in charge, but also reminds you that what you are in charge of is very small and, through the lens of the other agents affecting you, you find that your keep is insignificant: a life lesson which cannot be learned too early, or it makes you tired the rest of your life.

Tomorrow is my day off. I am set to spend it in Salzburg, I think, with another boarding assistant who I am quite fond of, and with whom I get along as well as anyone in presently in Europe. I can't think of what to do yet, even, because my eyes hurt when I blink them and the kids, although this will never happen again, were given an erroneous quantity of sugar right before study period. This had made them unmanageable and dangerous, like gorillas wearing haberdashery. It is decided: tomorrow will be Schloss Leopoldskron, Old Town, the river, and when everyone comes to meet up with us at night, and the river is jetting with the newly lay storm water, it has to be the Augustinerbrau. I'm thankful to be active, finally, but there is just no substitute for the arrival of a very anticipated day off.

The Weight of History

2010-08-25T05:24:00.000-07:00

A thing happened to me when I lived in Washington D.C. that made me realize how old I have become. It also happened to be one of those things which, when it happens to you, you get the immediate and undeniable feeling that you'll always remember it so very clearly: the smell in the air around you will seem to hang the same way as it did at that moment, spiced with the scent of salt water taffy and old books.

It was too big to write about; the import of all these wars, their meaning to their participants and their inheritors. You can stare at the memorials and read up on the battles and acts of Congress, the soldiers, with their hawkish eyes. But I will never feel the foundation of a church thundered out by another country's planes. I will never have to care for or carry one of my countrymen, because he cannot walk, his legs stolen by an enemy mortar. We were at the Smithsonian American History Museum.

The war dedication is my favorite full-length exhibit, although it has every reason not to be. I hate the glory of war. Everything seems set to violin music, or to far away drums. When the throaty commentator on an audiobook tells you stories about these too-long wars, about the men who order them and who comprise them, you think of men with more grizzle and composure than you have, or ever will: and it almost must be that way. To at least somebody, a grainy picture is a hero, if he wears fatigues. I don't quite buy into it, but considering even my objection to it's actual practice, the influence of war is impossible to let alone, or even to undermine. As are the outrageous strength shown by some of its principle agents, foreign and domestic. As are, for a thinking man, its elegant, conciliatory alternatives, which I would favor categorically, and which are borne of compassion as much as calm; as much, even, as cowardice. You sit by the atomic bomb layout, and you think about your generation in every country: how many millions must die because of an argument? An impulse? An accident? An idea? How many today, and how many of their sons? How many brave?

The corner of the exhibit that is devoted to military action taken since the first Gulf War, it's hidden past a shadowy foyer with a drinking fountain and a man with two middle school daughters. The guardians of the present, these three whispy middle Americans. The dad is a balding man in his late forties, whose back looks like the part of a walking cane where your hand goes, and with just as much weight pushing down on him. His daughters were quiet, and narrowed their eyes as they found their words floating past them, in the air: ''But, why did they crash the planes like that?'' Old dad's mouth slanted down and touched the cold tile floor, and his forehead crinkled. He scratched an eyebrow, wondering whether or not a way to answer his girls even existed. They have a favorite movie, by now, and they know what they like having on their pizzas. Each girl has a best friend, each has a personality and an email address, a each has taken vitamins and has read Steinbeck. They have slang, pets, formalwear, secrets. Scars. Journals. Heroes. And they were too young to remember September 11 happening.

City Lights

2009-06-30T22:32:00.000-07:00

The newest punctuation in my life is a brand new living situation, which is fantastic and enervating in a couple of ways. I used to hate San Francisco, because I figured it was basically a confusing and intensely dirty version of San Jose. I remember feeling uncomfortable about the notion, which seemed to be more true every time I visited The City, that the rules that apply everywhere else are void anywhere on the windy peninsula. It's a strange thing to feel like your instincts are irrelevant. But now I'm comfortable with the feeling, which, as it turns out, is reducible to a much more simple, and somewhat more pleasing maxim: everyone gets to act like an adult, and eclectic is encouraged.

The paramount example of that attitude is located about sixteen man-sized steps from my front door, and is actually much closer than that: the window that opens into my living room exposes the upper hill and playground of Dolores Park, the stoic jewel of the Mission District. Fifteen square blocks of rolling green, freckled with palm trees and a footer of basketball courts, are the most attractive option I have found for any day that needs filling. Everything is relaxed there: the attitude, the pace, the rules, the music that flows from novelty stereos and the tin drums of whoever is paddling away. A woman waddles by our strewn-about blanket, offering tamales. A man visits later, selling pot truffles. Old men with cheeks like the palm of a baseball glove collect recyclables and stuff them into muddy burlap sacks. A whiffleball game has started on the south hill, and a speck of plastic lofts across the 74 degree sky. The world teems here, but calmly, and on its own. Time seems to skirt away fluidly, while we lie under the sun and cars flit down the curvy streets lining the park. The earth bumps underneath our ripped cotton comforter, conversation snapshots dance themselves along the wind, and you can fall asleep before you stop smiling.

A Heartbreaking Work

2009-05-27T03:36:00.000-07:00

The decision which was made on May 26th by the California Supreme Court was in every way a concussion to the hope that I have for my future. The decision to uphold Proposition 8, passed in November of last year by a 5% margin, was extremely divisive. I can remember the intense despair that many of my friends and I felt, not because it hampered our ability to marry, but because it spoke so poorly of the tolerance common to the meagerly rational electorate. My view of that degree of hateful discrimination was, as it is ever more, simply this: I cannot bear the thought that so many people who are so bad at thinking are given so much power.

For me, ethical decisions are almost entirely logical processes which, while frequently stressing because of their ability to produce several rationally supported answers, are at the very least justified, arguable on some basis common to opponents, and amenable to scrutiny and revision. I will revisit this point often in this blog entry, in the debates which will inevitably follow it, and indeed throughout my life, owing to the maddening insistence of a worldview that almost any pain is a better option than intellectual numbness. The first part of my criticism stems from the way that people voted on the initial ballot; it is an issue of predictability. Deplorably, the voter data speaks volumes about the way in which lifestyle, not logic, informs the way that people vote.* I thought that in the supreme court, a body whose title trumpets the gravity of its purpose, there must be a tendency to get it right. In other words, I do not have confidence that any random majority will choose the right thing most of the time, but I do hope that a trained and rigorous council of experts will do just that. Today, that sentiment is proved worthless.

Briefly, for those of you who have not had time to read the public content the 6-1 majority decision, or about any of the defenses for either side, here is an unbiased recapitulation of the reason that the appeal was denied. After Proposition 8 was passed, the opponents to the proposition alleged that the vote amounted to a revision, which necessitates that two-thirds of the legislature rule in favor of its ratification. The corollary of this argument is that the law which would be enacted as a result of passing Proposition 8 is not simply an amendment to the state constitution, and therefore not available to the public to decide based on opinion. It is inaccurate, although understandable given the intense frustration prompted by the CASC decision, to suggest that the court ruled that a ban on same-sex marriages is constitutional. In fact, they have done the opposite of this only last year, whereupon over 18,000 same-sex couples were legally married. Rather, the CASC ruled first, in 2008, that marriage should extend to same-sex couples, and has ruled now, in 2009, that the public does indeed have a right to vote that it wants an amendment to the state constitution which would disallow this sort of union. Attorney General Jerry Brown also asserted in his appeal that the proposition would violate a Californian citizen's right to privacy, and that it rescind an inalienable right. The CASC flatly denied both of these appeals, stating simply: "No authority supports the attorney general's claim."

I say categorically that if you have voted in favor of Proposition 8, if you do favor its sentiment, or if you support the efforts of anti-appeal campaigns in that vein, I have an overwhelming and unmatched disdain for your position. There are many opinion-related matters in a wide variety of fields in which I may oppose a certain view in the argument for which I can see some sort of merit. That is to say, it is absolutely the case that I have disagreements with people, but I can almost always see that my opponent has some reasoning. Gay marriage is one instance which is not governed by this general rule of understanding. In my research of the initial proposition and of the recent court decision, I have encountered dozens of criticisms of gay marriage and of the position supporting gay marriage. Every tiny word of it is nonsense, and wholly unsupportable by any mind with the slightest portion of decency, modesty, or honesty. Not only do I firmly revile the desire to ban gay marriage, but I can see absolutely no evidence to support the assertion that is it either ethically supportable or utilitarian. The anti-gay marriage position is small, it is disgusting, and it embarrasses me every last second that it is allowed to be propagated.

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*According to the raw data collected and aggregated by the Sacramento Bee following the poll results, those most keen to vote to restrict the legality of gay marriage were: Republican or conservative (82/85%), black (70%) or Hispanic (53%), Protestant (65%), Catholic (64%), a high school graduate (56%), older than 30 (55% for voters 30-44; 54% for voters 45-64; and 61% for voters 65 and older), gun owners (62%), supportive of the war in Iraq (85%), and supportive of Bush's policies and presidency (86%). According to the same data, those who voted to support the gay right to marriage were: registered Democrats, independents, or liberals (64/54/78%), white or Asian (51%), non-religious (90%), and post-graduate students (60%). Interestingly, 61% of the people who voted YES on Proposition 8 also said that race was a factor for their vote in the Presidential election.

Someone Should Be Studying These Things

2009-05-24T02:23:00.000-07:00

I bet that it would make a good book to collect the bizarre stuff that people think about, and to just have someone clean up the grammar and structure a little bit. I should think that it would be rather nice to wake up on a Sunday, say, around 2pm (as is my custom on Sunday mornings, Saturday mornings, and other mornings when the Giants do not play an afternoon game) and to eat a turkey sandwich, lazily thumbing in and out of some guy's pointless thoughts. It must be at least half-interesting to some of you: after all, you're reading this. And it would obviously be better if you had that turkey sandwich.

Spying on Whales
I begin with the premise that for all the advances that we have made in our study of the myriad species on our strange planet, sometimes our technology is too powerful to be useful. On several occasions, I have seen marine biologists on television, zipping their UltraWhite Smile boats through the Pacific. They drop down their scanners and dials, their cone-shaped sonar dishes and their cooing sonic mechanisms, and they start pulsating coded messages to all the whales in proximity. They're talking, and hoping to hear back. I'm not sure what sort of research is being done by these trials. I do not consider myself an expert on whale conversation, but I thought that we knew pretty much all we really needed to about whale habits. They swim up and down the coast depending on the weather, they eat krill, and they have heroic battles with giant squid the size of space shuttles. Case closed, I figured, but damned if you can't find some guy with a patchy beard and a whole bunch of pockets who wants to sail for a living. Onwards with the funding, then, to invent all these fancy gadgets that let us chirp to whales.

The weird part is, they answer back, these lumbering giants with their bathtub faucet heads. A couple flirtatious, mechanical blips, and these whales quip back with as much undersea gossip as the scientists can haul in and--get this--interpret. Because, you may ask, what good is doing the work if you cannot figure out what the things are saying? I have no idea how this sort of translation is done. I suspect, and now with even more evidence, that we have found an aquatic Rosetta Stone, and those swarthy marine biologists are just keeping it a secret. I have suspected this for years, in fact, and I suppose that it is the exact reason that Porter Ricks was able to understand Flipper; how else, after all, are we to believe this was possible? And good, I say. Otherwise, both Coral Key Park and Marine Preserve and mid-1960s television programming would have been all the worse for it.

How strange it is that we spy on whales? It is probably no weirder than the fact that I am into a third paragraph of writing about it. But there are two particular things in this whole matter that stick out to me. First, I cannot think of any other animal, with the obvious exception of other human beings, that spy on one another, across species or within a species. So, it seems to be that we are the only animals that have a system for recording and interpreting the conversations that other animals have with each other and with our own computers. When you think about it, it is probably a good thing that other animals really do not concern themselves with these sort of trivialities. Only the species that has NASCAR commemorative KFC buckets could invest in whale translation as a profession. Second, I am not sure that I can say, with confidence, that I could never imagine myself in the topsiders of that sailor. There are only a few things left that are a total mystery to us, but have the prospect of being comforting anyway. I can imagine being that lonely scientists, floating askance on a choppy emerald ocean, dropping six-hundred foot of steel cable into the deep, and waiting. Maybe you get a booming sigh back, and you have company somewhere under the unimaginable blueness. Talking to whales may be the intersect of a Venn diagram which addresses things that are magical and things that are scientific.

Real Trust
Actually, when you look at how we generally act towards one another, we probably should not trust airline pilots half as much as we do. Here are the facts. I have probably taken 100 plane flights in my life, and likely more than that, the majority of those having come in the past four years. Each time, my routine is the same: I guard against boredom and people with the cunning use of an iPod, I bring with me several books which I never read, I buy a tremendous wealth of candy for the flight, and I board a several-ton flying bus to be guided in a parabola across the planet by a man I will never meet. This man now has the ability to kill me. But I get on the plane, I clickwheel over to Wilco or Belle and Sebastian or Sufjan Stevens, and I rack out with my face pressed against the plexiglass, nary a thought for the 'morrow. There is no other time in life when we are required to trust so much, given so little. Why do we do it, and without paying this relationship any attention? I think it has to be basically the same mindset which governs our collective respect for Zorro.

What I mean to say is, it seems that we can reasonably infer that if someone is wearing a mask, he's either a hero or a madman. The allure of what is not seen--and therefore, what could potentially be--is enough to inspire confidence in a masked avenger, and is likewise sufficient to bolster our terror of a sheathed lunatic. I think the mask somehow convinces us that our initial opinion is right. And if in cinema, then why not in person? We get a great deal of what we imagine life to be like from the print we read or the films we see, so this bit of transposition is not too big of a stretch. Every girl I have ever dated seems to want, from me, some version of John Cusackitude: so this mask idea might as well have some merit. Someone has entrusted a man with the responsibility to fly a jumbo-sized tuna can through the troposphere--he even gets little uniform accessories, if he's good enough--and if he is mostly an unknown to his passengers, that may actually be calming. The pilot even has the benefit of that speaker system, by which he can, through his trademark drone and slogans, reassure everyone in the cabin that he knows what he's doing and that everyone can go ahead and relax. If I knew that Spiderman was really that spazzy little chemistry student from Empire State University, there's no way I would let him dive off a roof to try to catch me (and by me, I mean whatever chick is playing MJ). But because I don't know who he is, I just trust the mask. I listen to his voice. And I go about my day.

Broken Wheel

2009-05-04T02:29:00.000-07:00

"Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives."
Chuck Palahniuk

About two weeks ago, my knee betrayed me. I have no job, and I have no dependable schedule, so I am clothed in the evils of idleness. I do nothing all day which acts as evidence that I have existed that day. I make sandwiches, I ride my bike, I watch and listen to podcast debates, and I do one-legged pushups on the floor of a cramped bedroom. In the case that I had entered a time machine and I was concerned about irreversibly altering the future by polluting the past, this is the sort of life I would have to life in order to make sure that I affect nothing. Twelve days whipped by like the leaves of a flipbook, and I have made nothing with them. I hope that I do not have to experience this fate, but if it happens that I am one day lain in bed and around me are gathered the people I love, it is possible that I will look back on days like these have been and think to myself, there is no limit to what I would give to have those days back for the doing. I should crumple up the time I waste and shoot it at the wire basket next to my desk, like so much paper that is issued from the hands of writers who are obsessed with--and constantly motivated by--attempting to produce things of merit. I am often one of these; I have not been, recently, and my mood has soured noteably as a consequence.

For the emotional price I have paid by way of this lassitude, I have accrued quite a bit intellectually. I have watched or listened to something north of 20 debates and lectures, mostly revolving around the topics of religion, international human rights policy, or freedom of speech and press. I wish I could record the massive amount of thinking that I've done about these topics as a result of the impressive discourse, but sometimes the density of the material, combined with my poor organizational skills when I'm so furious with ideas, makes it impossible to summon order, especially among the interlacing topics. Here is a very brief list of the blogs which could come as a result of my only best use of time during my convalesence. My hope is that I will be able to turn this attrocious negative into something of a positive and productive experience, although my mood tonight, which is typical of how it has been most of the week, usually fosters either vitriol which I am sad to have thought or slop which I am embarrassed to have written. Intellectually and emotionally, then, it is obvious that I have good reason to resolve both my attitude and my body, but both of them are slow-going and neither mechanism cares much about my preference for not being ill.

1. Something comprehensive about my view on the role of religion in the world. This will easily be several essays, both perscriptive and descriptive. Specific topics needs to include dogmatism of any kind, the role and import of conversation, and the stricture that religion places around the neck of the global struggle to establish and ensure human rights. In each of these instances, I'm not sure that I can manage to reduce away the terrible fear I have about the way in which history will judge the time in which I lived.

2. Something about the terrible legacy of quarreling and antagonism beset upon us by the last administration, and the events that took place in its duration. I cannot listen to a single news telecast or talking heads show anymore without wondering what percentage of the truth I'm hearing. I very regularly hear two people say opposite things about the same event or person, so I believe there is one of two things happening. Either one or both of the people is wrong, or one or both of the people is lying. In either case, the quality and quantity of information to which I have access is depressing; the horrid clumsiness of intellectual pursuit confounds me every single day of my too short life. Should I have to constantly figure out whether or not I am receiving the truth, and how much of it? How can there be partisan news? Why can I not rely on something to just relate one small set of facts in a row? Nothing could be goddamned easier than this, and none of you will do it: you must taint everything. Well this is the world we have, because of it.

3. A short story I am working on about a man whose birth date had been confused.

4. A social contract theory for backpackers.

5. There is a Tennessee Williams quote that goes like this: "Why do I write? Because I found life to be unsatisfactory." So, something about that.

6. One of my primary historical interests, and political interests for that matter, is revolution. I have begun working on a short essay, informed by the ideology present in the entry about Dublin, that revolution must be non-violent in order to be successful.

Oh, to be able to travel again.

Adriaddicts

2009-04-12T17:19:00.001-07:00

11 April 2009. Saturday.

We had one more gelato before we left Split, but you can hardly hold it against us. The lemon flavor was transcendent: we have talked about it several times since we left, and we have conducted several comparative experiments since. It is a serious business, this ice cream sampling, or at least we have made a habit of pretending that it is.

Zipping down the Croatian coast, we stared out the windows as the scenery whirred past us. North of Bosnia, most of the landscape is truly picturesque: the crags are gnarled and gumdrop purple, and peppered with dark, feathery trees. The fields on both sides of the road are rich with these boulders until about 150km south of Split, when the small clusters of rocks give way to impressive mountains with striations of grape crops. The ridges in the east cut across the sky like the edge of construction paper after a pass with those rifled designer scissors. The juxtaposition of the Croatian ranges augments the beauty of the horizon, which turned thirty shades of blue as encroached on Bosnia.

It was time for a swim around 14:30, so we hopped off the coastal road and parked on the top of a hill that overlooked a solid rock beach. Once again without a plan, we sauntered down the choppy hill, leaping from pathway to amorphous pathway in order to reach the rocks 100m below us.We were assailed on several occasions by these large winged insects that looked quite a lot like clothespins. There were no snakes in the hill, but our suspicion that there may be was still elevated enough to make us test every footstep we took before we committed, as if the ground we were stepping on had the potential to be extremely hot, and we kept having to make sure.

Arriving on the rocks was only the first challenge we faced that day. We tested out the shards of coral that lined the shore, trying to determine whether or not they were stable, first, and moreover, whether it would kill our feet to use these as our diving boards. After toeing the water a bit, and bemoaning how much of a shock jumping off would be, we charged boldly into the fray: and yeah, it was chilly. I recall yelping. The water was crisp and a strong light blue, the way you would imagine glacier water to be. We could see maybe 10m down, so we were sure that we in no danger of hitting the bottom. The danger came from a less conspicuous source: the treacherous sea urchins which punctuate the coast like pindots on an Italian silk tie. After our third dive, Adam swam back to shore and clung to the vertical-pancake rocks, scooping his feet towards the platform just under the wave break. I immediately heard a chirp to my left, and saw Adam scoot backwards, wincing: SHARP, he yelped. Shark? No no, sharp! Agghhh!

Back up on the shore, it looked like we had gotten away safely. Three half-inch spikes jutted out of the sole of his right foot, near his pinky toe. Quickly plucking them out and dispatching them into the Adriatic, Adam brushed his foot and examined again. We discovered another 20 smaller spines buried deeper under the skin, only grapite pencil dots now, after the pressure of walking around on the rocks. Over the next couple of hours, and after our arduous hike back up the hill, we efforted to extract as many of the bastards as possible. About 15 still remain, but the pain has greatly subsided. Adam has been an incredible sport about the whole thing, insisting that he can hike with us all day, and leading the initiative to jump of some of the higher cliffs that we have found in Croatia. His pain has, to some immeasurable extent, been abated by a traditional Croatian remedy for sea urchin wounds: an olive oil wrap for three nights consecutive, which is meant to coax the spines from the skin and to numb the skin sufficiently to bear the pain of walking around.

Onwards we sped, then, towards Bosnia, which was an anti-climactic episode: we had truly hoped to receive a stamp at the border, but our passports were not even inspected. Once again, we are victims of the pain often faced by three modestly dressed middle-class white males. When will the prejudices end? Just around the bend from Bosnia, the crayon box of Dubrovnik is visible straightaway. The coast is decorated with houses and beset with very small motor boats for short-term skips between the twelve hundred islands just to the west. We matriculated into the city and found some provisions for the night, located our hostel, and ascended the stairs to down our welcome drinks. In small chalice-type shot glasses, the man who owns the property served us a honey liquor made with grapes from Croatia. To us, and no one else, we said.

After some warm-up exercises on the hostel patio, we ripped into Old Town. Along for the ride is a lovely French Canadian girl called Stephanie, who has been here for several days and had already received a tour of the city. We sliced through the castle walls which were modest and beautiful, and dotted with bullet holes. The ramparts are entirely lit in a muddled orange light, so the entire castle looks haunted and ancient. But just below them, the Easter parties raged with great fervor, especially at the gay bar and the pub just next to it. The chair cushions here were purple and pink and orange, cow-print and leopard-print, fluffy and welcoming. We had travarice, several more pints, and some pretty intense laughs about our surroundings. The end of the night wrapped up with a compliment about my shorts–or shirt, depending on how you interpret the accent–a lesson about Croation pop music, an interjection about Michelle Obama, a Facebook request, an ironic hi-bye interchange across the way from the parking lot, and a great deal of fatigue. Good morning, Dubrovnik.

12 April 2009. Easter Sunday.

Religion: the enemy of commerce. It turns out that there are no shops open on Easter, which we knew, but that there are no…things…open either. This set a fantastic opportunity to go to Lokrum, the island about 4km from Dubrovnik. Of course, to prepare us for the journey, we felt that one more helping of gelato would probably be a wise investment. Lemon, please.

A 40kn boatride later, we rolled into the docks in front of Lokrum’s park, and were greeted by some shrill coos from the peacocks housed there. The F.K.K. awaited us, so we veered north around the island and found ourselves on a rude beach made of enormous boulders and canyons. Water sucked into the alleys between the sunning spots, spraying our feet and misting the air. We skipped the beach. Around the bend and totally secluded, we found a natural cove with the clearest water I have ever known. It was a 50 meter expanse made of blue marbles, at least 30m deep and pummeled by waves. Cliff diving, ladies and gentlemen.

We, uh. We..don't know.

2009-04-12T16:31:00.000-07:00

8 April 2009. Wednesday.

The day started off a bit later than we had supposed it would, mostly for the reason that we had failed to account for our propensity to screw around for inexplicably lengthy periods of time. One of our favorite pre-departure diversions was a mashup game of soccer and baseball, which ended with a sharp line drive into the middle of the lake, and a failed attempt to rangle the errant ball with a bit of a lakeside branch. We were not fazed, and were indeed encouraged by the advent of a particular finding: nutella and bread from the Schloss kitchen. We also took three packets of jam.

Just before we left Salzburg, I suggested that Adam and I might give our manual car a try. After all, having grown up in the States, we were relatively new to the idea that driving could not be done whilst eating a cheeseburger and texting for sports scores, and that one should indeed need to pay attention to shifting gears and tapping a troublesome third pedal. Right around the time that the clutch started to sound like someone was running a roll of quarters through a paper shredder, I decided to switch spots with Daniel and let him drive the ten total hours to Split, bisected on our first night by a short rest in Rijeka. Having thus ceded the driver’s seat, I took up the passenger spot, and Adam sprawled in the spacious (read: miniscule) backseat. He and he alone was to be the guardian of our snack cache, which was comprised largely of the sorts of things that mothers get mad at their kids for eating too much of when they’re 7.

Our plan was to have left by 2pm RST. Given the gracious buffer between our planned time and our probable time, our 8:06pm departure was about half an hour early. We commended ourselves by eating Austria’s version of the Gala apple, a pink and sunburst-yellow beauty of a fruit which, while it lacks crunch, is nonetheless the size of a softball and was thus sufficient for our dinners. Onwards then, we sped towards Hallein and Villach and Lublijana, making good time and fighting back the stinging urges to sleep. We were sustained by 80s rock, several Beatles discs, window breeze bursts, and open-ended questions.

Daniel was a bit sick, so we decided to blitz to Rijeka and knock out in a hostel. Yeah, it’s that easy, we thought: navigate to a country which we have never seen or studied, linguistic fluency for which we do not possess, a map for which we do not have, and with zero idea about how to locate a place to sleep. Foolproof, yeah? We thought so. Well, the darndest thing happened, to tell you the truth: we ended up on a one-way street between a shipyard and an abandoned garage, small matchbox cars zipping past us, staring at an insufficient GPS tracker, and confronting groups of teenaged Croatians about the direction of a suitable hostel. Each of these is a circumstance which is, on its own, less than desirable: together, they are at least formidable, and when it’s 6 degrees outside and you’re wearing madras shorts, they’re nearly unbearable.The young man who offered us directions while the other chatted in Croatian was pleasant enough, but he had an extremely low opinion of the district:

Daniel: We are looking for this place, the Hostel Rijeka.

Croatian: What’s the..why do you come to this shithole town called Rijeka?

Daniel: We, uh. We..don’t know. But we would like to sleep.

Croatian: Yes, that is the good thing to do here.

We plodded down a graffiti-checked street to the hostel which we’d discovered, and then to another, because the poor man’s Rivers Cuomo who ran the hostel said that he was completely booked. Three hostel options later, we decided to park in the lot adjacent to a small lodge off the highway, and to contort ourselves in such a way that sleeping became possible, although not familiar.

The sun comes.

9 April 2009. Thursday.

The next part of our marathon journey started omniously: a bottle of John Jameson Irish Whiskey was left outside the car during our morning tooth brushing session, representing our first casualty of the trip. It will surely be accompanied, although we will try our hardest to make sure that this is not the case (so far we have been successful in this regard, having cleanly polished each soviet red can of the pint cases which we buy daily). Point in fact, there were many ominous symbols on the way to Split, which became our destination on Thursday night when we figured out that Dubrovnik was farther to the south than our wafer cookies would last us.

First, on the side of the road around kilometer 278, there was a massive fire in the center of a rocky expanse to the west. The plume billowed out across the rocks as if it had no origin whatever, but instead engendered itself from amidst the ruby stones and tilted huts which polka-dotted the Croatian landscape. It rose maybe 70 meters in there air, and eclipsed the sun when we laced back towards the coast, temporarily darkening the road ahead. We speculated that it may have something to do with the Easter festival which is taking place this weekend in the devoutly religious country. None of us being a particularly religious man, we did not have any way to justify this supposition, but we felt satisfied, and we celebrated our detective victory with a bit of a baguette which we had bought before leaving Salzburg.

Arriving in Split was simply the first of our tasks before finding the hostel which we had reserved for the night. Our GPS navigator, which we refer to exclusively as “TomTom,” lead us in concentric circles and mobius strips for not less than an hour an a quarter, before we found our site: Silver Center Hostel, affixed just in between the main square of the town and the sleepy marina to the south. The place is on the second floor of one of the set pieces that is used in Saving Private Ryan: an entirely cement building, the ground floor of which is home to a pile of thirty lunchpail-sized oblong stones, broken wall lamps, deteriorating stairs, and exposed electrical wires. On the second floor, we found ourselves in the middle of a delightfully confined makeshift hostel, four rooms and twenty-six beds in total, with the nicest hosts you can imagine.

This city is a very nice one indeed, but it gives you the impression that it is constanly undergoing an identity crisis. It is as if the entire port is the product of a architectural equivalent of some culinary experiment in which Roman columns and facades were thrown into a salad spinner alongside modern docks, cabanas, cafes, and promenades. The resultant city is our lovely Split, whose name fairly accurately reflects the personality of its scenery. It’s a strange thing to swerve through the cobbled streets and to see tagged walls across from massive designer shopping malls, question marks and famous faces painted all over the place, like a city-wide public art display.

10 April 2009. Friday.

We did a bit of the ocean today. About a kilometer to the southeast, Split’s only sand beach is the playground of the speedo-clad and muscle-bound. On this eyelash of a sandbar, they play this game with a little racquetball which roughly resembles catch, except that no one ever catches the ball; or volleyball, except that no one erected a net; or dancing, except that someone brought a racquetball. Adam and I ventured into the ocean while Daniel tuned out on the beach. We had shuffled about 80 paces into the sea, and the water took its time to creep slowly past our knees. Adam, the more courageous, heaved himself into the water as I riffed “Final Countdown,” and I doused my head in the tepid crystal clear water. Back to the shore we strode, kicking the water which started to slink back towards our ankles. On the shore, we played question games as we fell asleep in the afternoon sun: if you had to pick a president to come with us on the trip, who would you choose?
Jackson. Eisenhower. Teddy Roosevelt, we said. Daniel wants Senator Joseph McCarthy, for meddlesome reasons..

This Is What a Travel Journal Looks Like

2009-04-04T03:16:00.000-07:00

I have heard from a couple of people, most notably and persistently my mother, that she figured that this blog would be more of a journal about traveling. It has become something very different from that: right now, it isn't much more than a portfolio. So, for the six people who have ever read this blog, and principally for my mother:

Alright, already. Here it is. Dublin, Amsterdam, and Marseille.

My City Tour

Dublin Blues

I have always had reservations about caring for people, or maybe ‘difficulty’ is a better word for it. It seems to me that some folks just flatly do not appeal to me, or that maybe I am acting in self-interest in not expanding myself too broadly. I have always been better at keeping a close group of friends who are very dear to me, and quite a bit worse at keeping up very many relationships at once. Maybe a part of it is, I feel like I am able to be more of a part of my family if it is relatively small.

I care for cities in sort of the same way. Whenever I travel anywhere, I sort of identify with some part of the city I visit which is in a small way the same as I come to love a friend. Dublin is one of the chief representatives of the group of places for which I care very deeply, at it has been for several years, since the epic union. There is something about the way that the roads there are built, that the people cover up with their collars, that the bars push out string music. Dublin has a unique quality for me, which combines the fantastic and modern with a quaint and noble past. I wince when I think about the way in which cities in the States could never be this way, and moreover how the people are just not designed for it to carry the kind of charm that pulses in Ireland. The sadness here, which I cannot separate from even my fondest thoughts of a nation, is that sometimes the city that you love rips into you in the same way that a person can.

The latest round of political action in Ireland is largely divisive and tremendously violent. Several of the splinters of the Irish Republican Army have taken responsibility for shootings which have rippled through the country over the past couple of months. These attacks, which take place largely in Protestant communities, are being forged against the members of opposing religious factions, and especially against members of the garda or other representatives of the state.

I can understand the appeal of rebellion and of uprising, and even of widespread and enduring angst. I very often fell the desire to react in a more extreme manner towards an opposition which seems to me to be domineering and mislead, including having my interests far from its focus. I cannot tell how often I have my most extreme emotional reactions to these very relationships: it is rage, and frustration, and restlessness, and contempt, and it has to burn itself out every time I get to thinking. In all cases, it seems to me that the problems that I face, when laid against the problems which brew between Irish factions, are not close in duration or in degree. However, I do identify with the climate and the emotion, and my complaint is this: why is war your solution, my rebel brothers? I cannot imagine a world in which one group can strong arm another and produce a better world as a result.

Now, I can conceive that a person or a group could be a rightful or desired winner, and that that group can dispatch an evil or maleficent one. Surely this must be the case, from time to time, or even very often. But the strain which is persistent is the foolish and dangerous axiom that violence solves problems, and any instance in which this is true simply propagates a world in which the eil group continues to persist, and for the very reason that others were defeated. Groups which lose wars of ideology do not go away when they are put down. Indeed they are emboldened by the idea that they might have success the next time if only they can be even more lethal, and how can this breed a better people?

This taste for distaste is a terrible thing, and the worst bit of it, philosophically speaking, is that it works if you look only at each case individually: you see a victory and a loss, and this is a normal thing in any contest. In the loss, of course, you can see shame, or guilt, or anger, and there is a regrouping effect after it. In the victor, you see thrill or relief, ego, and sometimes you are thankful for that party who fought and who succeeded. But you never hear the airy peal of the violins. You see the bundled up street crowds glance away from each other, and the stones in the cobbled streets look just a little more cracked, dirty, and farther apart.

I Amsterdam

We all know the exploits of the political scene in Amsterdam. The social allowances, lets say, such as the government sanctioned sex trade and the relaxed rules on drug enforcement. These and other norms are famous among travelers my age, and are indeed most of the reason that anyone I've met along my way is interested in visiting the city. And fine: it seems that the Red Light and the coffee shops are tremendously popular for the locals just as well as the tourists, very likely for the reason that there is no great hang-up about either of those earthly delights. Both of these practices are freely viewed and, in fact, smelled. Actually, it is marginally difficult for an unfamiliar wanderer of the city to choose just a regular coffee shop instead of one which purveys drugs, and in some districts, the windows go dresses-dresses-shoes-chicks-purses.

At home, you get two kinds of people, basically. One sort will call himself "morally and ethically opposed"--whatever that means--about the sorts of liberties that Amsterdam boasts. The other is into both of of those trades, and is in favor of them really because he'd like it to be easier for him to have access to sex and drugs. I find it difficult to blame the second guy. But there is a better reason to support such liberalism: the city works perfectly. The violent crime rate is extraordinarily low, especially compared to our land of the self-proclaimed free. It is wonderfully clean, and more than that, it is beautiful and manicured with rolling hills and lawns. The people are friendly, giant, extremely well-educated, and distractingly good looking. There are more bikes in Amsterdam than prayers in the Vatican, and the whole nation is one of the world leaders of the environmentally conscious movement. The public transit is safe, and logical, and efficient--look, the whole place is pristine. Every adult is allowed to behave as if he were an adult, and they do with a much higher frequency than they do in the Silicon Valley. The economy also benefits tremendously, as does the populace, I would imagine, from the industries which are strictly maligned in the States. But why are they? They clearly do not hurt the morale or the general spirit: everyone here is extremely gracious and openly welcoming. The quality of the education and the intellect of the average Dane are certainly not lacking: everyone I have met speaks Dutch and perfect English, and very frequently either German or French or both. Interestingly, the most notable negative wave I am aware of in Amsterdam is one that is made possible by their overarching principle of understanding: religious fundamentalism, which indeed conflicts with and forbids the famed practices of the city, is certainly the leading cause of violent crime in the region.

The only regrettable facet of the culture which I have internalized is, how terrifically impossible it would be for our nation to adopt anything like this. The amount and persuasion of tolerance that the States offers is absolutely absurd: it is the truest definition of an illusion to announce that we are founded upon an emphasis on civil rights and liberties and that we live up to this credo. Each European city I have been in, including Amsterdam, has been an occasion for a conversation about the invasive extent of the American legal system. Is that not shocking enough? Students from other countries are aware of and concerned by the degree to which the United States restrict practices and views which they commonly view to be inalienable, or the way in which it similarly mandates things which are so obviously inane and unnecessarily complicated. We permit very little, I have come to realize; we are decades behind many countries' efforts to extend rights to citizens and, notably, their environmental practices. We are laden with war and fundamentalism, shouting and emotional outbursts, celebrity gossip rags and dating trivia. The daft is the easy, is the accepted, is the appreciated. This unfortunate link makes progressive liberty not only absent, it makes it impossible.

Marseille

This place sparkles like San Francisco, and it smells pretty similar too. I can never quite find my way around by way of actual street familiarity, as I am eventually able to do even in towns which are short-lived. Instead, in Marseille as in San Francisco, I generally point myself in the direction of the thing I am looking for, and move that way until I find a landmark or, better, a sign. The streets are polka-dotted with gum and cigarettes, and the homeless population is as abundant, aggressive, and aimlessly talkative. The attitude in the street here is much the same as in The City. There is a sort of funky vibe to the younger Marseillais, but mixed with a feeling like they or their fathers are very reliably in the fishing trade. There are lots of knit, handmade-looking clothes here. Wide-cable knit sweaters, scarves, ill-fitting dresses which look trendy or messy depending on how cute the girl is. It's the sort of place where there are tons of shops, but not many stores. Everything looks to be makeshift and humble, as if the actual buildings are hand-me-downs.

The harbor beams. It is packed with boats which are worked on and loaded and cleaned and inspected every day, while the gulls oversee the activity. The city appears to have two suns; one of them lives under the ocean and blasts through the surface of the water as long as his skyward brother keeps him company. Cafes and boutiques are everywhere, so there is a lot of plate clinking and soft paper flitting. The breeze rips everyone in the city and pushes them through the hilly streets and along the winding coastline.

Spoken Word

2009-02-21T11:08:00.000-08:00

The core session on the role of translation began today. The keynote speech was given by Esther Allen of PEN World Voices New York, who hazarded several challenges about the current state and future of translation. I have virtually no experience in the subject at the moment, but the speech was extremely interesting for its first allusion. In order to tease out the genesis of the problem of translation, Allen called upon the story of Nimrod, whose frustrated appearance in Inferno rouses a harsh scold from Virgil the intellectual. Nimrod is the giant who conceptualized the Tower of Babel, a mutiny which, as the legend goes, rendered the world pluralingual. The punishment that he suffers in hell is noncommunicability; he is unable to understand anybody, is likewise unable to be understood, and rails against his misfortune by belting thunderclap blasts on a tremendous horn. Allen's relation illustrated the lesson that often, this is the very dilemma-turned-paradox that many linguists constantly face: some pieces, for all their nuance and organic beauty, are impossible to translate properly, and still others are so vivid and common to the human experience that they do not require any translation at all.

This dichotomy underscores a principle point, as far as I can tell, about the objection many might have about the nature of translation. Allen notes that an enduring feeling amongst the academic community is that the new work is necessarily of a different, perhaps lesser quality or merit than the original, because it is impossible to put the original author's whole meaning into equivalent foreign words. Additionally, the translator's interpretation of the content of the text is just as prone to misunderstanding at it would be if any reader attempted the original, and it is difficult establish definitively whether a particular translator or reader has provided a version which is more convincing than another. But this idea seems to be more incomplete, the more correct it is. If it is so that language, experience, worldview, and other aspects of culture are so ingrained in the translator and his language that even so skilled a wordsmith loses the original beauty of the text, it cannot be too far of a step to imagine that an average reader in the original language also experiences a novel, an essay, a piece of poetry, or indeed a speech, song, movie or sitcom through this same sort of corrupting lens; it is a non sequitur to condemn translation, because this problem of misunderstanding is common to anyone's experience of any piece of art. If we extrapolate this point, then each great piece of literature has a qualitative deficiency that is proportionate to the amount of diversity in the society which reads it: the more differences between the author and the readership, the higher the likelihood that the piece is going to be misunderstood. Thus, it appears as if literary translators would not necessarily introduce anything corrupt by way of their art that an average reader would not introduce anyway; the specific problem that a translator might contribute seems to be a slightly different one.

At this point, it should be mentioned that the entire argument I am making is inextricable from my belief that in many pieces of literature, the author intends to present a specific message or set of messages; this is an easily disputable issue, and I would imagine that especially among literary translators, the opinion that literature is made even more vibrant with every new reading of the work is equally contended. The problem here is semantic: if literary translation is an art, then it must be referred to as a science just as well, at least in terms of the words used to describe it qualitatively. Regarding a poem or a mathematical proof or a touchdown pass, one could use any one of the synonyms of beauty; but for a translation, this is not so. If a translation is called something like beautiful, it seems to me that this is either a misnomer or a bad thing. When a reader calls a translation beautiful, he could actually mean that the text he is reading is beautiful, or, in other words, that if the translation is accurate (a tenuous word in itself), then the original work is beautiful, and that the translation reflects the quality of the original work. To be reductionist, we might instead say that the translation is good, and that the original work is the one that is beautiful. Alternatively, if the reader truly means to deem the translation itself beautiful, it seems to me that that adjective might support the charge that translation is an intrinsically flawed practice: if beautiful is accurate, that one word represents the dissolution of the original author's voice by highlighting the presence and skill of the translator. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does act as sort of an asterisk for the new piece, which is to say that it should be read as a translation which is additionally a commentary, which may very likely be intentional.

Perhaps we should rather abide by the vocabulary that is more commonly associated with science, not art, both in terms of a goal and an evaluative metric. Of course it is possible for a translation project to look more like a work of art, because these projects seem to be more exercises than assignments. We learned today that there is an author in the States who is taking all the English versions of Comedia, and making a unified English translation of all of those first translations. There was a similarly playful work published in the recent past, in which the dialect was that of rural 19th century Australia. Examples such as these are clearly in a different category from traditional translations, and they more easily fit into the artistic category: the voice of the translator, or some distinct skill that he possesses, is unmistakable. But to bring this same voice to all translated works would, I think, be a tremendous disservice to the canon of second-language works. There is something to be said for those types of creative productions; but also worthy of merit are the translations which intentionally pursue a very precise translation of the words contained in the original text, which may allow a foreign reader insight into the literary technique of the place and period; and further still, equally valuable are the productions which are not necessarily word-for-word transcriptions, but instead are themeatically identical, and would therefore consider a sort of cultural translation as well as a lingual one. If the practice of performing only beautiful translations is instituted, it is plain to see how quickly the closest version of the original work would be a forgotten pursuit; we would be incalculably worse off for it.

On the Practical Irrelevance of the God Question

2009-02-19T01:50:00.001-08:00

One of my principle interests in philosophy, besides logic and ethics, is the very human struggle with ontology. There is no need to delineate the tremendous bulk of speculation about the manner and conditions of our existence, which can be plainly identified in even the oldest texts and oral traditions. I can see the way in which this question of our origin is an enticing one, a useful one to answer, and even a challenge to the brilliant minds which, should they conclude something fantastic about ontology, would be immortalized in the sparse canon of genius. But along with the limitless inquiry has come an equally immeasurable amount of disagreement, which has over the past several thousand years bordered on vitriolic. This is intolerable.

I have heard a dozen or more debates which feature paramount scholars of both sides: one who scoffs at the idea of the existence of a deity, against one who proclaims that at least One must exist. I openly admit that while I am decidedly a resident in the former camp, I have been impressed, on rare occasion, by the argumentation style--and, every once in a while, the content--of the faithful. Most often, debates of this manner seem to generate questions about the origin of the universe, each side asking the other how it is that they conceive of that pivotal moment, and demanding that his opponent prove the case or face falsification; the religious man questions the atheist's lack of a conclusive evidence and classifies his dismissal of divine influence as its own sort of leap of faith, whereas the atheist disregards the religious man's devotion as blind, unsubstantiated, or hypocritical. And reliably so. I do not recall seeing a debate over this issue in which these roles were not filled, and although the rhetorical style sometimes morphs and the quips are nuanced, the skeleton is recognizable. I therefore aim to break with the tradition a bit, to borrow a strain from Cartesian soliloquy, and to pose to the pious man the following thought experiment.

Let us presume that you are correct, and that some divine entity is responsible for authoring and generating the universe, or life on the Earth, or life in general, or any other iteration of "existence" that you wish to assert. I still perceive an extraordinary leap in the suggestion that the Being/s that governed this creation is caring, in two senses of the word. First, it seems to me that it is equally likely, considering the evidence of the whole of recorded human history and present condition, that the divine is a twisted and vindictive Thing, and not a loving or nurturing one at all. Second, it seems far more likely still that even if this creating Entity is omniscient and omnipotent, It is very likely apathetic to the result. In other words, I have no problem with conceding that some Designer created everything in existence, because I have no evidence which demonstrates that it either must be so or that it cannot have been so. I concede the point, in order to support an argument that it is entirely irrelevant whether or not we were created or we happened by chance, because this resolution does not answer the actual question behind this point of contention: how does this distinction matter, if it does at all?

I have labored over the issuance of my atheistic proclivity, and while I stand firmly by it, I actually believe that it is a case no more worth arguing from an evidential perspective, than is the case forwarded by the theists. Neither one of us has any irrefutable evidence that the other will agree is cogent and applicable, so I will let it alone as an argument and instead keep it simply as a stance. But just as life sometimes opens a window when it closes a door, so to say, I too will subvert my humble concession by posing what seems to be an even more daunting challenge: demonstrate, you believers in the unsubstantiated, that It is a Being that we should be glad to have around. It seems incomparably clear that this is an impossible task, so let me suggest this resolution: given that we can extract morality from some other construct, and given that we can still discover brilliant meaning in our lives without the divine to justify it, let the argument instead revolve around the consideration paid to religion in social movements, with specific reference to the extension of civil rights and liberties, for this is one truly measurable way in which deity does govern us, whether It exists or not.

I will concede that one explanation for the origin of the universe might be that some omnipotent being influenced it, to whatever degree. But imagine that you were certain that this is how things happened, that it were somehow provable and verifyable, and that there was nonetheless no holy writ to influence your perception of this being. I wonder if there would be any evidence prove that the diety was a good one, or if there might be evidence to suggest that wickedness or that indifference are at least equally likely. In other words, even with the certain knowledge of the existence of a First Mover, I do not see any evidence to support any inclination whatsoever to worship it any more than fear it, to love it any more than bemoan it. How, I wonder, can you men of faith bear to say that you will think, act, speak, or vote a certain way, which is in keeping with your holy text, when you cannot demonstrate that the holy text reflects a divinity that cares about what you do or that you do at all, to say nothing of whether or not a loving divinity would favor your particular mindset? How can you further suggest that acting in a way that is in keeping with a so-called holy writ, which is in some cases a centuries-old copiously-translated highly-edited text, resembles anything like what it is to act the way that the divine would wish, having already made the tremendous assumption that one exists? How can you know that you have the right god/s, how can you know that you have the right guidelines, and how can you know that you are reading them the correct way?

And ultimately, what if there is no Creator, Governor, Mover? Surely we must take this to mean nothing, in the end, because the alternative would be that we all give up the lives we have so welcomed until now; this is no alternative at all. These are the important questions, I think--the ones which reflect the human decisions and understandings, not the sanctified ones. I assert that these are the meaningful intellectual pursuits in part because, as they are designed to be posited to other humans, they are answerable, even--and especially--with the admission of ignorance. Furthermore, I believe that these are the important questions to ask because the answers to them reveal the way that we each apply whatever opinion we have about holy writ, divine existence, and the ontological question. It is the application which is truly important, not just our respective opinions, or just the actual fact of the matter, because it is not some objective Truth which governs the way we act: at least, this must be true, or else this entire debate is moot in the first place. And what use can there be for debate answers which have no hope for verification; much better to concede one side or the other and to reorient the questioning, especially since the outcome of either answer to the God question is necessarily the same.

Morality in the Modern Communitarian Archetype

2009-02-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

The thrust of communitarianism, as I understand it, is the assessment that we are no longer a nation-wide community, but rather we identify more closely with smaller communities based on some shared human quality, such as an ethical standpoint, pop culture appetite, linguistic distinction, and so on. Although the idea for this entry finds its genesis in a plenary session given by Michael Daxner, I have heard an identical sentiment very often in the States, and in a disturbingly increasing frequency: one man has no right to judge another, at least in part because the first does not and cannot know the circumstances of the other. I assume that in order to give the argument another figment of support, there is a tangential assertion that it is not proper or suitable for one person to judge another because that is not the charge of humans within a community or between communities. Neither of these claims holds any logical weight, not least of all because the people who hold the belief are necessarily all-purpose dunces, and I will seek to dissolve both of them with stark and abrasive force. Daxner raised several brilliant points, well-measured and finely conceived, which linked the idea of communitarianism to the practice of civil disobedience, examined the nature of morality as rooted in our self-consciousness, and then constructed a framework by which we could evaluate the legitimacy of a world court. Ubiquitous in his lecture were the themes of membership, responsibility, and judgement, which will likewise be echoed throughout this reflection.

One of the vicious dangers of communitarianism is that a system of checks is rendered execrable and, in some way, an unwelcome moral imposition. If communities are allowed to establish their own versions of morality and of law, two constructs whose differences I will attempt to outline presently, then it would be difficult to moderate which system of thought prevails in a community, and to determine how efficient and fair is that mode of action which punishes infractions. Indeed this is the crux of communitarianism, which forces a clumsy respect between communities, and more, a tacit permission for each to govern itself, based on internal laws and customs. This concept seems to be grossly incomplete, in two major ways, which confound the mind for their ignorance of the inclusions requisite to complex societies. First, communitarianism fails to acknowledge, and indeed plainly rejects the possibility of objective morality, even in cases which relate to basic efficiency. Secondly, because of the difficulty inherent in defining the boundaries--and thus the constituents--of a given community, communitarianism is a riddle whose amorphism augments the grasp of the powerful and striates the necks of the meek. It seems that if a community is defined too broadly, that is, if a community is based on something so broad as racial background but then contains several different and oppositional political ideologies, it would be impossible for every group to feel as if has a stake in leadership; the opportunity for alienation and subjugation based on ideological disagreement is obviously present, and given the non-interventionism implicit in communitarianism, that subjugation would have to be addressed internally. In simpler words, for all the cultural safety and heterogeneity that communitarianism provides, it likewise confounds the effort to assure intra-communal equality. Objectivism thus destroyed and disregarded, control is also lost, and balance is become dust.

Global Citizenship as a Misnomer

2009-02-10T00:38:00.000-08:00

One of the principle pursuits of the ISP sessions is to establish a groundwork for the term global citizenship. We use the phrase constantly, because a chief concern of the programs run by the Seminar in general is to conceive of a way to work towards a more frequent and dependable paradigm of conversation and collaboration between international scholars. I suppose the theory behind the importance of defining global citizenship is two-fold. In the first place, if we are aimed at revolutionizing the isolationist, elitist attitude that is sometimes prevalent in Western countries, it is prudent to recognize and give a framework to the idea that we each of us share a great deal in common, by virtue of the fact that the reality of a nation-state being an autonomous agent is absolutely void. The extent of the connection between each of our countries is so extraordinary that to qualify it even as a connection misses the point: we are interwoven, in policy and in action, laced together in such a way that the heartbeat of one fuels the arteries of many. Second, to suggest that something like global citizenship exists is to correctly identify our residence on the planet, a conception of self which is not commonly at the forefront. It sets aside nationalism as a defining stripe of identity, and instead repositions the human at the center of a world in which each of his actions spiderwebs out from his fingertips, tugging and nudging at the lives of everyone who he will never meet, all of their options constricted by his choices.

The first manner in which establishing a definition is important, is simultaneously the chief downfall of most of the definitions I have heard so far. It seems to me that a great many thoughts in the academic sphere are reactionary, in that they aim to correct a specific problem which has arisen, usually in the face of declarations that it would arise in the first place. The response to new challenges such as these is often very bold and sometimes fairly aggressive, which needlessly echoes the understandable frustration felt by many of the contributors to the solution. For example, I have heard several advanced faculty suggest solutions which immediately seem unworkable, but which nonetheless highlight the point that some sort of change is dire. Furthermore, many of the suggestions that some visiting scholars have voiced truly reveal the disconnect between the work that they do behind closed oaken doors, and the results that occur in the classroom; the schism between what university faculty imagine that we are thinking, and what--indeed, how--we are actually thinking; the divide between what they believe is meaningful, and the reality that each student faces about what is actually practical and desired by the people who will eventually employ us.

Asked what sorts of elements comprise global citizenship, faculty tend to give answers that are in some way disheartening, because I never see anything that impresses me as being transformative. Appreciation and recognition of the value of other cultures, I have seen. Learning another language: there it is, on the board. Study abroad experience, yes. Ability to identify with the struggles of other classes, creeds, and races. Yes, yes. Yes, there they are, scattered across the graph paper board like a cluttered desk drawer of old newspaper rubber bands. And each certainly a valuable part of cross-cultural understanding, or international competency, or cosmopolitanism, some other term packed tight with buzzwords; each, though, being a definition which must be conceived as independent from global citizenship, because for all their merit, they do nothing to address the pressing concern that each of us faces as a citizen of the globe. In some way, these suggestions underscore the frustrations I have about the identities which many people hold dear. Instead of jumbling together the terms which we believe are germane to a functional, savvy world traveler--skills which no doubt have their place in a person who considers himself to be a global citizen--it is absolutely crucial that we exercise tremendous acuity in imagining each separate definition, lest the functionality of one of the terms--indeed, the utility of the term, because we would lose the ability to charge people with it, and to render them dutiful--should fall away, because its meaning is muddled.

I believe we can extrapolate the identity of a global citizen by thinking first about what it means to be a citizen of any country. Legally, the issue is senseless to argue, because there is no mitigating situation that would prevent someone from being a citizen of the globe; we can rule out all concept of legal standing. I can understand that when a person is raised in a country, he might be indoctrinated with the values of that country, either tacitly or overtly, and that in some way this is unavoidable. Furthermore, it seems to me that in the extreme majority of cases, there is engendered in a person some connection between himself and his land, such that a triumph or a disaster there would be taken as personally as if it had happened to him directly. This is the internal agent of nationalism, that one feels so much a part of his country that the land and the landmarks are extensions of the body. In this way, it is in the soil of identity that citizenship plants its feet, rooting itself in the character of a person yet being sustained by the character of the nation. Thus demonstrated, I would advocate that a weighty part of the definition of global citizenship should reflect this same type of an emotional resonance: a recognition that the world sometimes faces calamity that is somehow intolerable, that it affects a person intimately and meaningfully, and that it becomes of paramount importance to act intentionally to correct the problem. In a very important way, global citizenship is nothing more than taking the globe to be home in the same way that we have traditionally taken nations.

Thus conceived, there are many things that we can infer about how a global citizen must act, and we can delineate the myriad ways that the definitions that have been given by so many scholars are necessary, yet insufficient. In order to keep this essay to a readable length, I will only briefly address some of the most frequent suggestions about what makes up global citizenship, and I will discuss how those fit into the three marginalized terms that I mentioned above. I will also show how it is that those terms are each valuable, but how those ultimately fall short of garnering the solution-oriented mindset that the global citizenship I have defined seems to afford. For the duration of this essay, the idea of global issues or world problems or some such language will be applied, and each of these should be taken to mean some hazard that affects the planet as a body of land on which we all live. In some ways, the definition which I will put forward will be equally workable for solutions to calamities which affect humanity although this is not my express intent, nor do I believe that global citizenship as such should encompass this mode of action. For this type of duty, that is, our responsibility to protect each other and humanity, we might devise some other term, or refer to others which presently exist, such as the ethic of care, a popular tenet of feminist theory and many modern prima facie ethical discussions.

Some of the most commonly suggested terms are perhaps the first to come to academic minds because of their ease to defend, when imagining the sort of world that a mentor would like to create for this pupils. Such suggestions included to build in an emphasis on learning at least one foreign language, participating in study abroad, executing a service project, being able to respect and appreciate other cultures, and possessing a willingness to engage and overcome the differences that one sees between himself and another. These are surely each respectable traits for an individual to have, but they constitute different terms than global citizenship, and if we settle for these as adequate definitions for that term in question, we cheat our way out of rightful ownership of certain universal problems.

In the first place, learning a foreign language does not make a person any more accomplished in the area of addressing a solution that faces the globe. Perhaps a common language would facilitate communication between two parties who engaged a problem together, but increased ease is the only benefit: this commonality would not encourage a certain worldview or additionally persuade a person to be able to address any global problem. It would not be too much to suggest that learning a foreign language might make a person too confident that he is able to identify with the plight or concerns of a people, given that he can already identify with them in some fundamental way. But this presumption would be out of order: it does not follow that two people who are able to communicate with each other are any more likely than any two others to be tightly knit in kinship; look plainly at the existence of civil war to support this fact. It seems absolutely proper to suggest that learning a foreign language is a helpful skill, and even a helpful exercise; but perhaps only in the area of multi-national competence or cultural affinity or something of the sort, because the new skill might spark within a student the passion for travel, or might be taught concurrently with a history course which discussed the country in greater detail. And even if the language is learned with no attention to any other subject, the student is at least able to understand a variety of new texts, navigate a new space, and perform other tasks which might somehow brighten his life. But he is not a global citizen; he is a citizen of more or perhaps two countries, who can trek through either with equal ease, but he does not necessarily care an inch about the rest. Surely, then, he cannot consider himself to be a citizen of the globe any more than he can consider himself to be a lemur.

The misstep of second suggestion echoes that of the first, in the sense that it is simply a physical instance of this tendency towards familiarizing oneself with elements of a foreign culture, and as such, is incomplete. However, just the same as the last example fell short, I cannot see how it is that participation in a study abroad session would necessarily make a student any more than a long-term traveler, which does nothing to demonstrate care about the country which he visits, and none the more for the globe, with which we are more specifically concerned. It is easy to support and prudent to object that traveling to another country would infuse some of that country’s values or tendencies into the traveler, thus making him likelier to be a more socially apt individual; but after all, certainly the opposite might be true. For it cannot be that every student who travels to another country enjoys his experience and internalizes the great truth that cultural diversity is a beautiful occasion of the vibrance of the human appetite. A student abroad is entirely capable, just as any traveler is, of finding something repulsive in the people of the nation he inhabits, and would thus return with a certain distaste for inter-cultural fluency. Notwithstanding, even the best study abroad experience could not ensure that a student would transition from an average collegiate to a global citizen, because travel and cultural savvy do not by themselves constitute, nor would they necessarily engender, a perspective centered around addressing a calamity that faces the world, as if it were just the same as a nation with which he so strongly identified.

Perhaps performing a service project most closely approaches what would count as global citizenship, but only because of the ambiguity of the term. Depending on the aim of the project, service could indeed count as the exercising an act of global citizenship, although it must be service of a certain specific type. It is obvious that ideal service to humankind in whatever form is beneficial to those whom it targets; this is plain to see, and moreover its negation would not serve to disprove the thesis of this essay, so we need not to waste time bickering about whether a particular sort of service is efficient, or whether it cares for the proper people, or any other argument which condemns its practice. In order to count as global citizenship, it seems as if the type of service has obvious constraints: it must act to somehow mend a pressing concern which affects the planet, or it must in other words be aimed at relief of an ailment--such as global warming, oceanic carbonation, overfishing, et al.--which afflicts the physical space of the world, and by implication, our success in it. But the focus must always be external, and founded upon the notion that we must be mindful of the deleterious effect that we constantly exact on a global scale. It is this wording that brings into light a chief concern that I have about generating global citizens, in the sense that I suggest: it seems to be necessarily implicit that if someone cares about the earth itself being in danger, he also cares about human beings being in danger. In other words, it does not seem possible to care about the condition of the earth and nonetheless maintain that humans are not germane to the conversation; it would be difficult to suggest that the planet should exist for its own sake, and that our collective existence should not rightly be considered. However, too liberal of a conception of the notion of care for humankind reduces the composition of a global citizen to the suggest elements which this essay contests; in other words, the notion that service is important serves to highlight the crucial fact that care for humankind is a tangent of global citizenship, but the one does not collapse into the other, nor does the one exist when the other is too prominent.

Two suggestions which sounded incredibly valuable actually carried little weight when constructing a definition of global citizenship, although in another way, they do give global citizenship some meaning. Being able to respect and appreciate other cultures, and possessing a willingness to engage and overcome the differences that one sees between himself and another are certainly relevant to any iteration of talks about two groups of nearly any stripe, but the old objection still holds: these consider relations between people, and miss entirely what seems to be the aim of global citizenship. Instead, as I have suggested already, these cherished characteristics should instead be members of a list of traits which describe ideal peacekeepers, or empathetic diplomats, but surely they are of little consequence when considering our relationship to the planet on which we find ourselves. One sort of term is needed for this interpersonal type of cultivation; quite another is needed to reflect a need for attention to global ailments.

It may be interesting to note here, that much of my conception of a global citizen has a focus which is distinctly reactive, preventative, defensive. This might come from my generally radical approach to how I perceive the world, an attitude which philosophically resembles having constantly to put out fires. Let me then very clearly aim my effort here at ringing the alarm on two distinct fires, thus calling attention to a division which the whole of the conversation about global citizenship seems to miss. There should be one set of terms, along with unique descriptions and goals, for the sort of individual that the conversation about global citizenship has, until now, seemed to describe: a person whom, if we were all a bit more like him, would transmogrify us to a more compassionate, understanding, patient people, and not the least bit xenophobic or ethnocentric. There should be quite another set of terms devoted to the discussion of what it properly means to be a global citizen, that is, a person who considers himself to be a member of the world just as much as he is a member of his nation or his family, and who takes quite seriously any impending misfortune which he can see will befall the planet, with effective respect towards the care for, excellence of, and betterment of humankind.

The persistent theme to be seen in these suggestions is that they are each of them new skills that the educator who mentioned it seeks to instill into his student; or at best, they are passions which the educator believes will make the person more well-rounded, capable of creating a better world. Each of these is probably a fair position to hold, but it no further demonstrates the definition of what it means to be a global citizen, because these oft-mentioned traits only misappropriate the term under examination. The error they encounter is that they each circumvent the crux of the simple language, which can perhaps be understood just a bit better if it is phrased differently: we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to be a citizen, and then, to make the debated definition a practical one, how is it that a citizen of the globe itself would react to a global hazard, given what we know about what it is to be a citizen. In this way, we establish first a definition and then a test, the latter acting as sort of a metric for the former, and each further validated because the other is logically taut and pragmatic. After all, it is unreasonable for us to expect to solve for ourselves the great calamities which now clearly face both our globe and our race, if we neglect to establish a language which properly directs those who are charged with solving such problems.

A New Approach to History

2009-02-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a new group whose purpose is to lobby to President Obama, has affixed this plaque to the earth in Washington, D.C., a tree which springs from a root of etched marble. I cannot concede that they speak on behalf of many people, but certainly the only world which I can conceive of as sustainable will hold this statement as fundamental to its credo. Indeed, such a world would be the realization of exactly this hope, now only lines in a stone.

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I stand now, for the purposes of this thought experiment, in direct opposition to everything with which I have formed a dear and lasting confederacy. I have, for as long as I can remember, been a tremendous fan of knowledge and its acquisition, truth and its dispensation, argumentation and its merits. But the combative position that philosophers often take towards their challenges is dwarfed in scale and in venom by the posture that seems to have won favor in recent years, one constructed on a platform of blind and brutish force. Surely, the examples are plenty: intelligence failures, addressed by silencing any contrary voice with an inspection, a dismissal, and explosion; shrieking talk show hosts, who hector at the height of their lungs to squelch factual evidence and to confound logical process; nations, who would sooner ambush and detonate than sit and dialogue; an emphasis on picking sides, racing to arms, identifying alliances by declaring an enemy, and none of it anchored on the slightest toehold of pragmatism in the mountainous glyph of humanity. Has it become of us, now, that we learn who it is to hate, and then we do our best to perform the task, lead down the righteous path to warring by only the vitriolic legacy of our ancestry? Must we fight today because we are taught that this is the way that we have fought every day for as long as we choose to remember, right the way up until yesterday? To assay the problem which plagues us today, let us dissect the germ of it with the feared antidote of that whole breed of violent action: a willingness to imagine the contrary.

To begin. During an academic session that was held here in Salzburg, I had the opportunity to discuss several prominent issues in intergovernmental policy and meta-ethics with the visiting scholars from the United States and Europe. Along with the ideas that I had not heard before, mostly concerning the new presidential administration and the role of the United Nations in the new decade, there were foisted several ideas that I had. For whatever reason, I immediately weakened in my interest, and instead of listening as acutely as I habitually do, I began to build my defamation case. Several times, a Fellow mentioned the pride that an ambiguous we should feel for our country, by which was meant either the country of our ancestral origin or the country to which we currently declare our citizenship, or both. I can understand the emotional attachment to a country, but only to the extent that we admire some bit of the environment or the culture or the history of a people. It cannot be said, after all, that a person have love for a country, but only for a way or a state of being that used to be common to that country. There was also a great deal of talk about the tragedies of the past and the hope we have for the future, all laden with a tiresome amount of self-affirmation. The linguistic key that it is important to recognize here is that, in cases of prudent assertion of one's sovereignty, it must be the case that there is a force which is doing some subjugating; otherwise, this sort of presentation is either empty, as it is not the result of any actual strife, or it is trivial, as the preening would necessarily fall on prejudiced ears. But who, among this group of highly-educated professional intellectuals who reside in the United States, is being kept down? It is my postulate that these assertions of self are in fact by proxy: the speaker who laments his condition to you is very often a surrogate for the cries of his ancestors.

Before continuing, it should be made clear that there is no reason to believe that even the most privileged among us has not at some point suffered the burn of stigmatization. It should not be inferred by these past few paragraphs that it is improper to feel sympathy or remorse for calamities of the past. These feelings certainly perform some sort of social function, such that we are each of us reminded that the empathy we feel for others is a symptom of our shared nature: that an infraction of one man against the rights or person of another is a slight against his own potential and character. In an ideal society, one could imagine that a high and stable degree of this kind of empathy would be a fundamental practice in the elimination of social injustice, but certainly exaggeration should be left out: it is tempting imagine that a heavy percentage of the people who bemoan the way things are actually mean the way things have been. That sort of criticism is certainly important, in its proper context, but the disconnect seen here between intent and actual meaning--or, more precisely, between accurate representation and transposed urgency--is highlighted by one's experience of history. It is intuitively apparent that the retelling of historical atrocities can have a dramatic impression on anyone, and most certainly on one who has some sort of kinship with the affected group. It is not too much of a stretch too assume that a recollection of the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, for example, would shape the attitude of a young philosopher of any race, or would impress a heavy sense of inheritance upon black and white students in particular. But this is the very issue which strums a dissonant chord: if a historical account stirs the vigor within a person, is it too much to assume that the resultant mind is not preferable? How many agents of cruelty and discord have themselves been avid students of the worst lessons of history, impassioned and fueled forth by the venom they internalized from the story? And worse, how many have we created, who now seek their own version of reconciliation?

This is the inspiration for a thought experiment regarding the import of teaching history as a text instead of extracting only its lesson. Let us take first the common paradigm, which is to instruct students in institutions of learning from the time they are very young until they graduate with their final degree, about the events of history. Very often, the emphasis of these classes is placed on huge reactions, stark developments, prominent and influential people; categorically, the most lasting impression, and very likely the extreme bulk of the instruction, seems to revolve around clashes between two or more ideologies, and the resultant heroism of one party or another. But what about the villain of the story? Surely every hero needs a nemesis to make his struggle possible. The fight between the two has lead us to our condition today, and generally speaking, it seems that the majority seem to be thankful for the dedication and the perseverance of the victor. But a genealogy remains. I have many strains of Celtic ancestry. This very likely means that my people were tortured and killed by the British, or, having escaped that rule, were persecuted, although less vehemently, in the United States. If not, then perhaps they were more affluent, and thus the necessary benefactors of the lucrative practice of slavery, economic brutality, and international wars. Taken too much to heart, either version of that history paints a clear tormentor and a clear sufferer.

I can understand the appeal of having a history, which I will elucidate briefly in an effort to quell the critics I am certain to have built by this point. The extra-experiential ownership of history, that is, the internalization of strife from the past, has its merits. It establishes a sense of belonging, both in the sense of creating an idea of self in the context of a tremendous narrative, and in the sense that it gives a person a feeling of membership to a community which identifies with the same challenges, the same ills, the same triumphs. Further than a casual belonging, a knowledge of history produces in the learner a change to intuit intentionality, of causality. In other words, once some major historical tension and victory is understood, a man can better understand how he it is that he came to be, and thus how it is the he is a product of both the terror and the brilliance innate in the human potential. This understanding is crucial, provided that he is in turn a cog in the giant machine which will irrevocably produce, indeed in some ways determine, the future. In this way, history is an explanation, in addition to being a recollection. If things are bad, they demonstrate the why and the how, which is their link to self-affirmation: one may say--Look at how we have suffered, and yet are now so strong! If things are good, history might demonstrate the transition from poverty to sovereignty, which fosters what I will call achievement complex; or it may demonstrate the same state of good fortune and maintenance, which fosters I will call entitlement complex. History also provides context, by examining the relationship between one group and another, but this facet can be a burden as often as it can be a perk. It seems that a constant and biased re-telling of one kind of relationship has the power to subjugate or embolden the group which hears the story, to shame them or to revivify them: each of these stimuli has its social utility, but surely not a one of them serves to quell tension between two historically combative groups.

Additionally, history as an inheritance establishes an emotional connection to a sort of family narrative, which is disrupted only at the tremendous objection of those who enjoy the comfort provided by this kind of ownership. Inherent in this attitude is the idea that if the past is not retold, it will be forgotten, and the "family" to which each of us belongs would lose significance. There also seems to be pressure from the community of elders to continue some sort of tradition, by custom or by speech, or even by upholding an enduring type of relationship with each different social group. By way of this pressure, there is a tacit acceptance that it is the duty of the next generation to inherit the problems and the solutions of the last. Retelling, then, is a manner of defense of ancestry as much as it is a remembrance: a way to ensure that the fight happened for a reason, not just a commemoration that it happened. But this leap seems to miss the mark a bit. For reasons that will be outlined in the next section, it is feasible to suggest an alternative method of approaching reconciliation that does not include retelling history per se; this model will exclude the story of the embittered struggle, and will demonstrate the way in which animosity can easily fall away. Here, defectors to my upcoming proposition may issue the retort that language presents an exception which seems to fit this function as well, but that language is indispensable from complex society. This objection is respected and accounted, and is probably one of many. But it is easy to demonstrate the way in which language has an independent utility in the way that memories do not. Language allows for more rapid communication of thoughts, which have an equal capacity to praise or to condemn: to create as much good as evil. However, language also permits art, enables cooperation and cohesion, and promotes an ethic of care in the way that memories alone fail to do so. This test is repeatable against other exceptions which may be presented against the following argument.

I cannot understand the import of studying the story itself as it relates to some of the more serious human problems facing each of us today, including inter-class, -creed, -national, and -racial warfare. It is demonstrated that history has its value, but let us for a moment pretend that an institutionalized teaching of the subject was eliminated. Let us suppose further that stories about specific historic strife, with names and faces and alliances, are not told even in the most private of circles. Certainly there is no chance that this experiment could ever be implemented--nor would anyone, I think, suggest that it should--but let us postpone these objections for a moment and imagine that they were, in order to demonstrate the true point of this essay. If each of us is raised without an idea of the historical incongruity of race in the United States, for example, how could there be any animosity between the two races today? And in order to ensure that we do not repeat the injustices of the past, or to counter the theoretical predisposition that a person has to commit such injustices, we must instead simply teach the lesson that we have rightly learned, borne of tragedy.

This is the way to honor the battles of our ancestors. Instead of underscoring the importance of treating each other with respect or governing based on equality by relating the story of Antoine Condorcet or Rosa Parks, simply demonstrate the validity of those lessons a priori. Leave behind tussles between elites which restrict the rights of the public and who battle for power while ignoring the common man; but read the writings of John Stuart Mill and Henry David Thoreau, who have it figured out. We do not need to retell the story of a genocide in order to condemn all genocide, just as we do not need to have experienced falling on a sword in order to appreciate the tremendous pain. Some things are demonstrable, prima facie rights or protections, and an example of their denial does not further prove the case. Anecdotes are good for illustrations, but they might as well be fictitious enough to avoid spawning animosity, for what good is the lesson imparted if the heart is made so callous that the ears ignore a message? A retelling of history opens anew the opportunity to internalize either hatred or shame, which have no part to play in repairing the conflicts that have lasted for so long. A thought experiment works as well as a cultural immersion, if the truth is sound and its speaker is artful. It requires a change in the model we use for learning, and an alteration in our attitude both as students and as teachers. But the merit of this approach to history, while virtually unimplementable, seems to cripple the ability of one group to inherit hate for another, and may go a long way towards humanity's capacity to learn to hate based on group identity.

A Tense Reflection on Theism

2009-01-29T02:06:00.001-08:00

I have learned in the course of my study in philosophy about the construct that we call Knowledge. This is not to say that I have acquired knowledge, necessarily, which is itself somehow true--but that is another point entirely. Rather, I have learned about the manner and nature of knowledge, about its basic makeup. We say that knowledge seems to be the product of three components, although there is quite a lot of well-respected interlocutory about including a fourth. The three pillars, for now, are: belief, truthhood, and justification.

To illustrate the meaning of each of these is a necessary part of understanding the way in which they fit together. First, in order to say, "I knew that," it is obvious that the speaker would have had to have believed in the thing in the first place. It would be senseless to say that I knew the sun would rise today, if I did not believe in that statement in the first place. The second tenet is truth of the statement, for it is impossible to say that you know something which is false. We call this situation simple belief, as it is clearly a misnomer to identify something as knowledge if it actually does not exist; this is a major point of contention for many people, if I assert that they can have an opinion about anything, but that some opinions are just wrong. This statement is based on the disconnect between belief and knowledge, which centers upon the degree of truth present in the evidence: I could not rightly say, "See, I knew the sun was going to rise today!" if it turns out that the sun did not actually do this. Finally, justification is needed in order to validate any belief because we call it knowledge. In the sun example, we might use as justification the evidence that the sun has always risen, and this is in fact what we call daytime; therefore, if the sun rises, it must be day. Ipso facto, it is semantically impossible to be wrong about the sun rising "today", because every time the sun rises, it is day. I also have no reason to believe that the sun would not rise--and I have total reason to believe that it will--because that is the only option that anyone has ever been aware of: it is, for all intents, impossible to imagine a situation in which the sun simply did not rise, and to expect that it will is entirely reliable. Thus justified in my belief, which has indeed turned out to be true, I can satisfactorily say that "I knew the sun would rise today."

By now, I have come to measure all of the statements which hold a claim to knowledge by the rubric of the epistemological triumvirate delineated above. This is why, when claims about plain belief are accepted by others as actual truths during a conversation--or worse, during discourse--I shudder at the blight of intellectualism.

Based on this metric, I cannot classify myself as an atheist. This is manifest in the polarized language of that system of thought: there is no god is a system of thought whose truth or falsity is necessarily and irreversibly undefinable. I can neither classify myself as a a theist, because I do not believe that there is a god, so this claim would fall short on the belief component, in addition to provability. Before I relegate myself to the mired and uninteresting camp of agnosticism--of which we are all necessarily members, incidentally--I offer one parting shot at the theists. I am a man of logic, and a firm believer in its principles as tools for the acquisition of knowledge. So I will be hoisted by my own principles, and lay off of the claim that there is no god. But I am also, at my core, a pragmatist. Let me end this analysis with a thought, then, and one which many thinkers before me have shared: while I do not know one way or the other, I so strongly suspect that a god does not exist that I have come to believe that pursuit of such a thing, or devotion to it in any baseless regard, are each a proper waste of time.

Cobblestones

2009-01-26T07:59:00.000-08:00

Rome is built on top of interlocking stones that link together like pieces in a giant dirty jigsaw puzzle. The buildings, like earth-toned pastel crayons, have banisters and overhangs and balconies which are draped in ivy curtains. The food and drink are rich, and seem to be more like a custom than a necessity: there is ritual in ordering an espresso, in selecting a piece of pizza, in unwrapping the chocolate. This was one of the most charming things about Rome: it seemed as if going out to drink wine was simple, an occasion instead of a party. There is a notable difference between this place and many of the other European cities I have visited. The people do not seem to be acting cohesively. There is no flow of traffic, or center of activity. Instead, everything appears random--due partially to the inclement weather, no doubt--and the streets are comparably sparse, though busy. The way that people move and assemble here reminds me of the way that a pot of water starts to boil. A few bubbles gather around the sides, at first, and then there are small bursts here and there, whose random situation and timing give the illusion of important and rising activity. A busy sky hangs over Paris, a heavy sky over Dublin, and an angry sky over London: Rome will have none of it, choosing instead that its sky should feature the only stillness in the city. Walking everywhere, we took some pictures and climbed over monuments as we skipped in between the rain.

As I have grown up and traveled more, I have become more comfortable in settings such as this one: long train rides, uncertainty about orientation and language, and living out of a duffel bag. I have also began to appreciate some of the things with which I have lost touch. Journaling is one habit that fits into the category. I also spend a lot of time now doing magic squares, thought experiments, reading essays, and counting. I think this past summer was a point of particular drought for those activities, which was good, ultimately, because while I really enjoy the exercise that that sort of thinking provides, I also think it tends to drive you a little bit insane. After all, how stable can a person be if almost everything on his top five spare time activities list relates roughly to things jot down in a notebook?

One recent reconnection which has been a wonderful treat is the new contact I've had with a good friend from elementary school. She was my purpose for going to Rome, and it has been brilliant to get a little closer to her, again. It is always comforting to find someone else my age who openly welcomes the reality that there is no money to be found in studying the classics, and yet cannot choose but to pursue that course anyhow. More than that, it is nice to know that two people can change a whole lot in ten years, and yet still arrive in relatively similar proximity to one another.

The Great Shift

2009-01-21T15:00:00.000-08:00

Below is the content that I have imported from another blog to which I regularly contribute. If you have the time or the inclination, please do visit it, and make absolutely as many comments as you wish. It is very important and interesting work that is being done, there, and one of my greatest hopes is that more people are apprised of it.

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The first plenary session of ISP 29 provided some background information about education theory, and about university responses to the shifts in economics and social stressors. I did not know much about higher education as a field of study before arriving in Salzburg, but given my five-year career as a citizen of the California State University system, I considered myself to be qualified to speak about it experientially, and to analyze the lag between producing a problem and identifying it, between identifying it and lumbering to fix it; and moreover, the synapse between the theory and the application is sometimes so incredibly wide, that it rivals the gorge between recognition and rectification. During my term at San Jose State University, I had the fortunate opportunity to participate on a very few faculty-strong panels, to work closely with individual faculty members on academic pursuits, and to provoke some conversation regarding the often unseen bits of university politics: the committees. But I never got to flick on the light and peer around the pedagogical room. I wonder--and wonder is the only verb whose meaning I might pick, because we undergrads are not allowed to know how most decisions on campus are made--how often professors and deans stay static on their theories of higher education simply because choosing to change would be too much work. Certainly, there is a bounty of examples evident to students which make us say to each other, Why does no one address this? How can it be that they cannot see this imbalance or the other, this deficiency, that flaw? And if they can hear, why don't they listen?

Tish Emerson, who lectured on the nature of university politics, mentioned quite poignantly that "moving from the edges to the center doesn't just change you, it changes the center." In context, Emerson seemed to be charging the university faculty in attendance with actively engaging the groups who currently rest on the "fringes" of the institution. As the conversation around developing this archetype of "student as global citizen" begins to build momentum and to take a discernible shape, this mandate is an important one to keep in mind. After all, it seems to me that if there is a fringe, we must infer that there is some group that is less welcome and perhaps included less often than others. And if we exclude some types some of the time, how, then, can we consider ourselves to be global citizens? This prescription seems to be self-evident to me, and it met with general affirmation from each of the audience members; it was certainly worth making public, so that the idea remains in the forefront and acts as a lens through which to scrutinize the projects that each university will produce.

But surely, when the term "fringe" comes about, we cannot settle for thinking that this is a reference to one economic class or religious sect or cultural background; it is not a term that necessarily recalls an academic discipline or sexual orientation, a language or belief or a custom or any other political stripe. I fall into the traditionally empowered set of virtually every classification, so I am certainly not in a position to complain about personal disenfranchisement. But in my experience, when the university is the setting, sometimes the "fringe" group is the students themselves.

The awkward part for students, I feel, is that much of the important activity takes place behind a sort of administrative curtain, which shrouds from student input all of those decisions which will result in drastic changes to student life. It was my tiny experience that I had a voice, that its use was encouraged, and that its quality was nurtured. But many of my peers, who eventually became frustrated by the confusing maze that can be university bureaucratic procedure, simply grew tired of using that voice to affect any sort of change on our own behalf. I very often felt that I could raise a concern, but that it was as if I was talking into a pillow: the hum of my concern was inaudible, and it went unheeded. I realize that as struggling undergraduates, we may not be able to provide sharp and critical commentary on the university's current or proposed pedagogy, but we are certainly able to tell how the decisions that the faculty make are affecting our days on campus, the quality of our degrees, and our general satisfaction with the institution. It is manifest that we, the students, have neither the training nor the experience to be able to make high-level decisions, but should we not have input? If the administrators are to take Emerson's advice, perhaps the first step would be something of an inventory of all major panels to whom it is charged to make influential policy decisions, and to then examine how much input students are able to offer to the panels; or alternatively, take account of how many of the staple committees in academic affairs or student affairs are chaired by faculty who are champions of student affection, instead of an administrator with whom no student can identify? I just loved my experience at San Jose State. The degree of diversity that I experienced there, culturally and ideologically, was fantastic. My most fervent wish for that institution--and any like it--is that future students will be able to reflect on their tenures, and feel that they were mixed into the center, a part of what the university was.

Every New Dawn

2009-01-20T00:48:00.001-08:00

"I am not asking you to believe in my ability to bring about

real change. I am asking you to believe in yours."

--Barack Obama

The first hours of the day always start out the same. Externally, there is always a bit of a haze, because the light has been shut out for a long while, and the sky is just being allowed to breathe again. Things begin to wake up again, to stretch their arms and to blink their sleep-stung eyes, and to extract themselves from their lethargy. There is a burst of color now, where there was once only opaque streetlight, or darkness. And now, once again, there are options. Internally, some transitions are taking place, but the most important ones are in secret. Getting out of bed because the light is breaking the curtain, everyone can see that happening. But what is different about this day in particular, when it is set against all the other early mornings which have come before it? If the calendar simply flips and another dawn comes, the day skirts away from you without notice or consideration, and then the light speeds away, then you have lost something dear and uncommon: a new chance.

Today is the occasion of the inauguration of Barack Obama, or, as most people seem to conceive of it, it is the last day that George Bush will hold office in the United States. It has been my experience that the reaction is categorically positive, but even so, there is a tremendous amount of gradation. I have spoken to some people who seem to feel that the switch can be nothing but positive, and yet are wary that the promises which have been made far exceed the degree and the quantity that will be possible in the near future. Some people are optimistic about the new president as a person, but are not confident that he, even in concert with other governmental leaders, can rectify the drastic situation in which find ourselves economically and politically. Yet others still profess total faith that Obama will rebuilt and steady the great ship which has been steered astray, torn at by the choppy sea and wrecked upon ancient boulders. For my part, I am not sure that I buy into any of these viewpoints, but that is my general position as a skeptic. I am neither sure that the drive behind any of these beliefs truly matters, considering the sort of world that I would favor.

The concept of America as the dominant power--or maybe even as a world power--is obsolete. It is laughable, quite literally, when politicians talk about restoring the United States to supremacy: that rhetoric holds absolutely no weight with the academics I have met here, who suggest unwaveringly that the arrogance and blindness of our governmental leaders is the exact reason that what they say will happen, will not. Communitarianism and continent-nations in the vein of the EU are coming, and it is simply embarrassing: the assertion that a nation with nearly one-thousand military bases, the third-lowest opinion rating, an atrocious economy, the 15th best access to high-speed internet, and a pitiful healthcare crisis will be restored because we have the liberal thinking sufficient to have elected a half-black man to be president. With the global economic downturn and the morass in the Middle East, both of which are commonly linked to a negative perception of America specifically, the incredible animosity that most of the world otherwise feels towards our nation is immediately evident as an American abroad. A bar fight erupted in Old Town, and the Austrian student I was chatting with mentioned, upon hearing one of the combatants yelling in a Slavic language, "I'm surprised he's not American." Two students from the Fachhochschule asked me if Bush was kidding about not having decided about evolution, and then looked at each other uncomfortably when I apologized for him. It seems as if almost everyone else in the world is uneasy having the United States around.

And the academy knows it. Several of the presentations that we have seen so far have showcased some staggering statistics about the image of America in Europe and Asia. The surveys revealed that those asked cared more for North Korea and Russia than for the United States; they believed that the second biggest shame of the Bush administration, and second leading contributor to a negative view of the United States, is the response to Hurricane Katrina; they voted 97.7% for Obama in a global internet poll, while 52% of Americans did. Guantanamo, and the immaterial policies that echo that physical structure, seem to be third. It is not the case, that the American public is doing direct harm to these people who express ardently anti-American sentiments. But look at the statistics. In that global poll, McCain only carried four nations: the Sudan, the DRC, Cuba, and Iran. The United States, based on percentage of votership, would be fifth on this list. This is the crisis, not the strength of our dollar or the morale of the consumer. It is not that we have no power, it is that we have no companions.

But a new dawn breaks, as it tends to, just when things are in their darkest hue. I do not believe that a new presidency and a new year will mean a new prominence. I believe that a change means a chance, and that perhaps the most important first step is a disintegration of the vision that we project on the conditions in the world. Enough with the obsession about being the last best hope for protecting human rights: we are not that. Abandon the notion that we are deserve or achieve full spectrum dominance, politically: we have failed. The good news, though, is that these statuses are wholly irrelevant in the face of challenges that we must address together. A hegemonic attitude is a reversion, and it confounds us. Let us not permit this day to flight before our eyes; I implore you, on behalf of a youth which has a desperate hope for the success of its shared future: let us blink ourselves awake, take the new dawn into our hands, and make this occasion worthy of positive note.

How to Empathize

2009-01-19T02:56:00.000-08:00

The plenary session today was one that I had heard before: Reinhold Wagnleitner, one of the more eccentric and beloved friends of the Seminar, performed his staple lecture "America and The World: Visions at a Distance". This was the third time that I had heard an iteration of this presentation, and each time I internalize a larger portion of the slides that he shows, a number which easily exceeds 130. The paramount tenet of Reinhold's lecture is that perception, not fact, is a preeminent factor in creating an environment in which global citizenship is possible. This position makes immediate sense. Ironically, the problem of perception seems to be just as present intra-nationally in the United States as it is internationally about the United States.

Here is where we enter the problem of empathy that I want to address. In the discussion after the presentation, a predictable amount of self-gratifying noble liberalism hung thick in the room, while any shrewd or cutting analysis of the way in which we go about changing this negative perception was simply eschewed from the dialogue. Luckily, I have this blog, so the pressure to speak about my ideas (which seem to be decidedly radical, and stand in juxtaposition even more prominently in a mildly conservative demographic such as this one) never becomes so much that my head collapses in on itself like a dying star. The pervasive attitude of many of the speakers seemed to be that in order to fix many problems related to persecution and suffering and human rights violations and greed, these themes must be underscored in the school system. Okay, maybe: but I think that faculty forget sometimes that school matters far less than visual media, in terms of mass education. But I'll concede the point, because my objection about that premise leads nowhere interesting to discuss. From this premise, the room forwarded their next assertion that the best--and perhaps only--way to ensure that these themes are enduring is to demonstrate them in person; for instance, to do service trips and language studies and study abroad would be the best--and again, perhaps only--way to ingrain a lasting impression in students that caring for one another is of vital importance.

Well.

I immediately and fervently objected, and I like the idea! My position is this, and it is simple: I am saddened by the notion, if it is true, that we have become a nation or a people who cannot learn except by doing. There are some things, I think, which a desirable version of a human being is able to intuit, facts about the world which must be true in order to the world to function properly, ethically: to believe otherwise is to deny our soft power of intellect. One of these principles, for example, is that, in any complex society, there must be some meta-ethics that are necessarily true, full stop. I cannot imagine to be satisfied with the notion that in order to understand that slavery or misogyny or racism are wrong, we must directly experience them, or meet with people who might "tell us their stories" of how terrible those things are. Can we not discern that these and other certain acts and attitudes are wrong, a priori, and that the experience is indeed the way that we might change the situations which we have identified as unsatisfactory, rather than the way that we learn about it in the first place? Action as activism, I say; not action as education. And by extension, the message is extremely upsetting: we cannot acquire genuine knowledge of a thing by thinking about it, we must have it happen to us. This assertion implies that certain terrible acts must occur first, before we can determine that they are unwanted. Is that the sort of world that we wish to create, or worse, to encourage?

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Kyle Brown, gentleman and scholar that he is, has written a lovely rumination on the subject of involvement and belonging (but also on the informal subject of San Francisco antics). I have thought a great deal about that subject, as we all are compelled to do. To contradict the point I have just made above, I do believe that it is a necessary pre-condition of self-actualization that a person has felt that, in fact, he does not belong.

On the Brink, All Together

2009-01-18T07:15:00.000-08:00

I charge you, young soldiers of thought and art, to take up the arms of your talent and to boldly declare yourself. During my time in Salzburg, I have been struck by the amount of confidence that faculty from the States and from Europe, some of whom are very reputed thinkers, profess that they have in the world's youth. I see a tremendous discrepancy between the potential that they suggest we have individually, and the means that we are afforded, generically. That is to say, I can count on my hands the number of occasions that I had to hear conversation about university policy, for example, or to understand a justification for a civil law or a process that seemed to make no sense. But if we are the ones who have all this latent potential, then why not offer us a podium? I do not necessarily think that this amounts to hypocrisy or empty flattery, but it certainly does confound any student (or young person, full stop) who thinks about it critically. Why affirm someone's potential, and then squash their opportunity?

On the Seminar's website, I have extrapolated some of the tenets of this mismatch, which I have started to refer to as the academy disconnect. It seems to me that some of the disparity is directly connected to the concept of change. I have heard the old adage about change being the only constant, but I have also heard the contrasting axiom that those who are the authority are uncomfortable with the rustling of change. It simply will not work to disallow the next generation to take gradual, measured steps onto the pedestals of authority, or to dissolve and resurrect them as we estimate they should be. After all, if the leaders of the future are stifled, they very clearly will not have the full perspective of experience, for it is often one's failures which reveal the new and best way to do a thing. I therefore wish to advocate a change in perspective, as a resolution of this disconnect. Instead of viewing a contrary opinion or a burgeoning young leader as subversive, disruptive, or destructive, let us instead conceive of it or him as a product of the full sum of current leaders and opinions. One person must necessarily replace the next, and if a new and strange philosophy comes with him, then the current generation has no one to blame but itself, for it is the creator of all that is incoming. Thus, the viewpoint that one is being supplanted falls away: instead, a new leader or ideology is left in place of the old one, as its successor but also its progeny. As an apple falling from a tree is not cause for the tree to fear that another will sprout up, rather the old tree should be proud that it will engender some fresh new thing: this is the way of progress.

Sponsorship

2009-01-16T16:08:00.000-08:00

My pioneer post on the Seminar's blog has just been published. I know that my readership must linger in the mid-to-high single digits, but I would be incredibly thankful if each of you would please check out the catalog held by the Salzburg Global Seminar. I will do my best to publicize through this blog whenever I post on the Seminar's site, such that you all might be charitable enough to pay a visit to my benefactor. There is some fantastic content to be found there, and it is written by some major world players, such that the articles that are contained on that blog are good lenses through which the generally secretive processes of international NGOs and the UN can be seen with fantastic acuity.

My first entry, which simply takes the form of an introduction of my role on the blog, can be found here. Other links to my Seminar articles will follow in individual entries on this blog, but again, please do visit the Salzburg Global Seminar blog in its entirety. It would be a great service to me, to appear as if I am making a difference which is measurable; everything else I am doing here, it seems, is intrinsically positive, but has no metric. And sometimes, in cases such as these two connected blogs, the tangible evidence is just so satisfying!

The Interim

2009-01-14T05:56:00.001-08:00

It has been very difficult recently to break away enough quality time to constuct a post that merits posting, so I figured that a small update and then a chronicle of impending posts would be sufficient. It can be hard sometimes to maintain the motivation to visit this blog, because whenever I am on the computer at work, I am usually very methodical and I try to be very precise so as not to waste any paper in the machine or space on the page; this blog is antithetical to those constraints, and to add to that, I am sometimes so exhausted after a day at the Seminar that casual writing does not quite seem to fit into my plans. Sleeping wins out, or at least the idea that I should sleep. Alright, then. Here it goes: a quick update, and then an unorganized list of the longer posts I'm currently developing, most of which have a philosophical bent because they were almost categorically inspired by conversations or plenary sessions that took place last week.

First, I have received some exciting news, regarding a special project for next month. Unfortunately, IHJR, which I was looking forward to tremendously, has lost funding sufficient to support an intern; thus, that opportunity has been lost, but as sometimes happens in life, it has been supplanted by another one. David has put to me the idea of organizing and, in some capacity, running the blog for the Salzburg Global Seminar. It is my impression that most of the writing that is currently contained on that blog is conceived of by higher administration, including our president Steven Salyer; because of their status, their presence at the actual sessions in Salzburg is necessarily infrequent, and while the prominent sessions--ones run in partnership with the UN or high government, for example--certainly warrant their presence, they simply cannot record their thoughts about every session that we run. Thus, the job for which I had been highered initially has disappeared, and a job for which I am more appropriately equipped has materialized. Tangentially, it is likely that I will inherit some responsibility to run a social network for ISP alums, with particular emphasis on student outreach. This will very likely mean a facebook account: I am excited about this prospect in an entirely different way. While both of these opportunities will afford me the chance to develop my skills at writing and analysis, and will be supported in purpose by the academic sector of the Seminar, I will also get the chance to practice my research and communication skills, and to exercise a bit of creativity both intellectually and socially.

Last week was extraordinarily busy, requiring a totally different work schematic than I am used to. Instead of last nights and quick bursts of action, the intern office--now a bit lonelier for the absence of Daniel, who has returned to university--ground out some long hours and saw some early mornings. I feel a bit like a man playing a marionette, who works intricately behind the scenes but does not participate with his audience. I am learning a great deal about the manner of office business, about planning and organization for large conferences, and about the way in which university pedagogy really tends to burden the faculty who are the most interested in making a positive change in a holistic fashion. Obviously, there are tremendous financial constraints to be considered, especially these days, and doubly so for small schools, so the breakout group sessions are a great forum for discussing in great detail the creative ways in which the university higher administration must be provoked to part with its funds. It is important to remember, as Jochen wisely interjected, that when we say resources, we should caution not to think of solely financial prospects. Instead, we should remember to consider less material supplies, like effort, energy, time, support, and so on.

There are, as in most university proceedings, frequent mentions of certain ubiquitous key words, which seem to be terms that the faculty use as tools, and yet which have become terms that create some obfuscation to any acute discussion of theory. For example, I heard the words "stakeholder," and "inclusion" many times, but each of these seemed to be references to "those persons which must be involved so that our project is not shut down by those same people"; "broadening horizons" and "matriculation" seemed to be code for "make sure that we have a study abroad program"; "heritage" sometimes as a replacement for "non-white culture" or "non-rich experience". I do not see the way in which this sort of flowery language is helpful: if you mean disenfranchised, just say it. If you mean unacceptable, don't say "challenging" or "unaddressed". To suggest that something is "a new focus for us" is not the same as admitting the truth that is has been, until now, "at least a moderate failure". I know that ego is necessarily involved in this sort of terminology, and I am equally aware that my abrasive criticism of these terms are examples of my own stain of psychological egoism. So, in order to return my focus to addressing a problem instead of simple ranting, let us re-examine the purpose of having these sorts of seminars in the first place: creating a new and better system.

Large amounts of university politics seem to be a game concerning who to please and who to excise, which to attend and which to ignore, when to praise and when to correct. I think that each of these activities is necessary, obviously, but I'm not sure that the best way to reach definite decisions or to execute orders is to link that process to the best way to please the people who control the funds or who run your department; what if, for instance, that those administrators have aims that are otherwise concerned, and are not truly and ardently fixed on producing well-rounded, quality students? Moreover, if an institution endeavors to instill in its students some particular outlook or persuasion--social justice, for example--then how can it be said that this goal is realized and is in fact achieved, if the wording of the message is itself unclear? How is the inclusion of buzzwords in a plan or a slogan or a project sufficient evidence that what you have created is good, or useful?

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Another one of these words which seemed to obscure the conversation around global citizenship is the term itself. I think that it may be that we have considered the nature of the issue incorrectly, in the first place. Instead, I suggest that there should be two terms, each of which will subdivide the term which is now used, and will then occupy its respective field of academia and of social programming. For more speculation on this, see my post entitled "Global Citizenship as a Misnomer".

I have begun to give consideration to the role that historical accounts play in our intercultural narrative. Over the past week, many esteemed professors and scholars who visited the Seminar referenced events from the past that somehow created a schism, or animosity, or otherwise disrupted the fabric of social communication. But something began to twitch in my mind about the import of retelling stories of a traumatic shared past. I have come up with a nascent version of what I believe to be a dissonance between the intent of education about legacy, and the actual outcome of that sort of conversation; I have labored to construct an idea of historicism which I have outlned in the entry "A New Approach to History".

A project which I have been pouring myself into since early summer is a thought experiment about the way in which prayer and worry are connected. There is a passage in Philippians which commends the power of Jesus to relieve a believer of his anxiety, by simply investing oneself in a practice of prayer and ritual. This advice is antithetical to me, so I started to sketch a draft of a playful essay that would outline the link between the existence of prayer and the existence of worry, which I have, without much inspiration, called "On the Interrelatedness of Prayer and Worry".

Finally, during a plenary session held last week, I started to toss around the issue of how ethical theory can be gracefully applied trans-communitively, that is, between different "sovereign" groups of people in the United States. While this too will be a bit of a playful submission, I am genuinely interested in the decline of deontological morality except in very politically conservative constructs, such as fundamentalist churches. There seems to be some link between anti-intellectualism and anti-relativism, but there also seems to be a growing persuasion among the very liberal to condemn an idea of objectivism. That is, it seems as if neither the very conservative nor the very liberal are willing to accept that normative ethics can be categorically perscriptive, and yet moderate and easy to accept and apply. I have titled this entry "Regarding Morality in the Modern Communitarian Archetype".

Thanks for reading, now and in the future.

Thoughts by the Fire

2009-01-07T05:19:00.001-08:00

"...and so we beat on, boats against the current,

borne ceaselessly back into the past..."

--F.S. Fitzgerald

After the welcome reception, a group of the academic insomniacs at the Seminar gathered near the fireplace in the Great Hall. A welcome break from the usual grind which mostly takes place in front of a computer, this chat, which turned into a four-hour demi-debate mostly about international politics. I wish I had a more exact means of recording the content so that my review of the event would have some context, but burying my face in a computer or a moleskin would have sort of an effect opposite from the one I was glad to have achieved.

For the majority of the night, I was the only recent undergraduate student; a few of my colleagues are currently pursuing masters degrees in Europe, so their extended insight stood as a pleasant supplement to my own. Others, who had been or are currently professors, have such a comprehensive knowledge of world events and global political stressors that they seem to speak in a unique language. Interestingly, I heard a great deal of recollection and criticism of historical circumstance, which was often mitigated by an analysis of the way in which those events--and even people, mirrored, and in some cases--foreshadowed, ones that we currently face.

One idea, presented originally by my direct boss and brilliantly creative thinker David Goldman, kept resurfacing. It sounded Orwellian to me, but the scrutiny that the ardent student historian provided proved the archetype to be historically tenable, and hardly just a literary device. Whereas in the past the United States (and to some extent, Europe) had an enemy with a illuminable visage--that is, that it has generally been the case that we could point to a picture of who our enemy is, what he looks like, those issues which he holds to be important and true--the current administration and indeed world now face several respective enemies which are either intangible or or undefinable. An attempt to describe exactly which sorts of things we are fighting politically, for example, seems to be like trying to capture a morning fog with a butterfly net. This is to say nothing of our often maligned military pursuits, our confusing--and for me, virtually incomprehensible!--economic peril, and more broadly, our philosophical positions as ethical agents who must lead as well as apologize.

Another of the men in our group, Reinhold Wagnleitner, who is a perennial ISP faculty, American studies scholar, prime historian, and native Austrian, talked a great deal about the difference between the culture in the United States regarding voting for an issues or a candidate versus the idea that "the Europeans" have of how Americans actually think about those things. For example, he recalled, that even in a conservative Austria, there was a great deal of shock--followed closely by terror, I would imagine--in 2004 when Bush was re-elected. Reinhold outlined that the European electorate would never imagine that an American electorate would consider issues such as abortion rights, gay rights, and so-called "family values" when voting for a commander-in-chief. These are, conversely, the exact issues on which Bush ran his moderately successful platform for re-election; unimportant were his failure in Iraq and largely with any international government relations, his ignorance regarding climate control and environmental concerns, and his confounding stubbornness around the area of rational intellectual process versus stark religious adherence.

Another of the men and perhaps one of my chief mentors academically was Jochen Fried, a scholar whose repute exceeds even my aspiration. The words that the man chooses to use seem to be selected without effort but with great exactitude, and one of these words was "boldness". Jochen used the term to describe a hypothetical strategy which he and I, lone vocal islands in a group of eight, believed Obama may pursue: drop the wars in the Middle East, adopt a bit of an conscious isolationist strategy, and effectively declare to those unsettled and restless nations, "Fine, then: you deal with it, and consider us now left out". In my thinking, our interest in the countries with which we do not currently enjoy very diplomatic relations would now be fundamentally reactionary, in terms of foreign policy: we are willing when they are, any aggression will be addressed post hoc, and otherwise, we are now otherwise occupied with issues which are more likely to benefit from our concern with them (considering further that our isolation is also an acknowledgement that we are not wanted, and that we should therefore refrain from interference where we are not welcome).

I followed with a speculation that was categorized as radical, a term which is generally a good check that I've made a comment worth making. Jochen, I saw, smiled at several points during offerings such as these. In considering the breadth of challenges that face us, I suggested that we might have fallen victim to an iteration of the logical fallacy of false dilemma. In other words, whereas a traditional false dilemma fallacy posits that there are only two solutions to a problem which has many, and then condemns one of the solutions so that the speaker's alternative is portrayed as the only favorable course, this manifestation of the pesky fallacy creates the illusion that there are two alternatives which are pursuable and result-bearing, when in fact there is only one: to address one of the many impending issues that affects human beings categorically. These, which I suggested we might think of as meta-issues, would have a greater potential to yield results, or, conceived differently, absolutely must yield a result lest some sort of drastic and devastating change come about. Upon pursuing a solution to one of these meta-issues, we might, through our posture or our rhetoric, demonstrate: do you see the way in which we, the superpowers in this small world, are working on your behalf as well as ours? And we may challenge: now, what is it that you are protesting? Against whom do you now fight, and should you? It is this sort of realignment of the nexus of goals and ideology that will necessarily undermine any Nietzschean slave mentality aimed at tearing down the nations which control world processes, and similarly, will embolden any country or people whatsoever to achieve something which has not before been conceived: to fight alongside one another out of need, to imagine self-defense as confederacy with present enemies, because the goal has been changed.

Poetry Exchange

2009-01-05T23:33:00.000-08:00

True, we do work hard here at the Salzburg Global Seminar. But most of us, being dedicated and fervent academics, get understandably restless when we work in front of a computer screen all day, producing not essays and research, but spreadsheets and biographies. I think it was waiting to happen for a few days, and finally the dam broke. Our dedicated vice president, Edward Mortimer, wrote a response poem to a clumsy poem written by Roger Angell; the rest is a thread of what followed over the course of the afternoon. Needless to say, the day passed more quickly when this bit of entertainment lightened intensity of the work load.

Rebuke of Roger Angell
...
Is this what you call ein Gedicht?
It reads to me like something sick'd
Up by a cat whose latest meal
Comprised more names than I could reel
Off in a month of zealous dropping,
Trimmed with a rich and creamy topping
Of facile rhymes that make you wince
And certainly do not convince.
Who are these people? Half at least
I know not if they're man or beast,
But hope that one within my range'll
Say WHO THE HELL IS ROGER ANGELL?

--Edward Mortimer

A Defense of Roger Angell

...
Ah, Roger Angell is a scribe
Of baseball, sports and various jibe
He spits a rhyme of games and men
And is published in mags and rags like when

He wrote his famous The Summer Game,

Five Seasons, Late Innings, and other frames

That describe the diamonds, bases, and bleachers

All part of the most American features.
Strike one, strike two, strike three you’re out!
But we must Once More Around the Park, no doubt,

From left to right and up the middle

The catcher and pitcher must end this riddle.
Who’s on First then you ask in rhyme?
Oh, just the writer of note for our ole pastime!

--Ben Glahn

A Criticism of A National Sport

...

Baseball? Of course. I might have guessed –
The sort of man whose every jest
Comes “out of left field” or, or declineth
To reach the “bottom of the ninth”.
But in a real game like cricket
He’ll score no run, nor take no wicket…

--Edward Mortimer

Hating the Game

...

Sir, do forgive me my impudence
But I must display true prudence
In defense of Ben and of our sport
Vis-à-vis this quick retort:
Baseball’s lasting kind appeal
Will, to the cunning eye, reveal,
A deep tradition, wrought in pride,
Mark’d by a graceful, measured stride.
Never has a sport conceived
By man or god been thus received
As baseball has, in our great nation
Which showers it with adoration:
I’ll pay no mind to that persuasion
Which sharply scorns this occupation.

--Travis Campbell

An Encouragement and a Challenge to Ben Glahn

...

The poet’s work, I’m sure you know,
Goes without praise, quite often; though
Nary should he end that craft
By which his truths inform the daft,
Lest men (whose stripes of ignorance
Pay each of us poor consequence)
Are let to run with idle minds
Whilst Time her fragile thread unwinds.
Speak then, of baseball, and Sport, at length
Restore the mighty Man his strength
Relax our minds and ease our stress:
Let your pen to paper press.

--Travis Campbell

A New Battle

...

I wonder how you can brag and boast
About the sports your nations host.
As foreign as your language is to me,
Are you rumblings about the sporting spree.
My origins, as all you know, gave rise poets and philosophers
Compared to which my wit just greatly suffers.
Alas, the aesthetes, to whom I can not aspire,
Unable to withhold all guns and fire,
Give me reason to believe,
The only cure to this enduring beef
Is shots and bangs that pierce even the Great Hall
Borne on neutral ground in a game of proper foosball.

--Daniel Sip

A Tip to Baseball, A Wag to Bonds

...
Excellent idea you have done thrown
Into the chance of electronic drone
But lest it not slip down forgot
I answer here to fill the lot.
You speak of ball and sport and Man,
Yet I know not which your thoughts demand.
My presumption yells The Babe, for sure!
Alas, I fear you mean that one, so poor,

That from his heart wrought green for fame

Swatted 73, but will not be bronzed with filthy name.
Now tis done my renounce o’ him,
I say not sorry nor sing no hymn.
Instead suggest I do the Game
Of which we speak must not go lame.
Come clean good men and hit your stride,

With dreams of spring and much yuletide!

--Ben Glahn

No Need for Name Calling

...
I’d advise you, sir, to tread on soft
For men, by words, I have slain oft
And lesser crimes did they transgress
Than to tarnish the great and strange success

Of players gone (though surely, here

I can admit my secret fear:
There was afoot some cheating scheme
Which tarnished up my oldest dreams)
Nonetheless, the paramount
Conclusion of our poet’s bout
Should be the union of our skills
To trump the rhymes of those whose ills
Condemn our sport, for we both call
Supreme the game of base-and-ball.

--Travis Campbell

A Truce Accord

...
Indeed my friend I can accept
the path on which your verse has stepped

I am advised to chart my course

to keep the choir from remorse

by treading soft with poets strength

but not to cross that dangerous length

where mortals trip and break apart

'neath the weight of tainted hearts.
A union fast of clever tongue,
Ah! never a song was better sung.
To the game itself I do not retort,
for the 60 nights til pitchers report
are better spent on prose on wit,
in the icy calm that winter does emit.

--Ben Glahn

Onwards and Upwards

...
Well pleased am I, upon this news
That poets skilled have called a truce
And now turn wits to pleasures fine:
To conversation, and to wine
To politics, and global cause
Stopping only yet to pause,
And give reflection to our squads,
Who, in March, will stretch their quads,

And trot to first, to short, and right

And against the other clubs, shall fight

To claim that treasured, vaulted prize:
Above the other teams, to rise.
How like our lives, this sport does seem--

That often too, each man does dream

To scamper out amongst the crowd

His noble voice to trumpet loud,

And silence doubt, to turn it back,

To brave maleficent attack,

To test his merit 'gainst the rest

In order to discern the best,

Bring calm to old, and hope to youth

With but one line of regal truth.

--Travis Campbell

Ears

2009-01-04T15:20:00.000-08:00

First, before I lay into my actual topic, I encourage everyone to take a long look at the blog maintained by my good friend Kyle. He has assembled a savant-status review of the music released in 2008, which can be found here, and his proper blog homepage can be found just to the left: it is appropriately titled "Kyle's Grand Scale of Debauchery". Many congratulations to him for such a stellar and comprehensive narrative, and an encyclopedic knowledge about this medium.

------

It has struck me--and here I mean that, although it has always been a sensation that has antagonized me, I have recently began to experience and internalize a sort of visceral disgust--that there are a very few people who are in the public view who are interested in acting in accordance with the advancement of the quality of humankind. It makes me double-over, the intense frivolity that arches over even very serious issues, such as the ongoing violence in the Gaza Strip. I have only just graduated with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and in accordance with that meager status, I am not able to affect a great deal of action: as an individual and single author, I simply have no civic power. A reader might now think it prudent to start a response to this entry, leading in with the feeble comfort, yes, you do have power, for everyone who has a voice has power. But I am embarrassed and something close to heartbroken when I watch television news, or more broadly, any format which allows for people to give their opinion on world affairs or current events and conditions. The amount of triviality, or poor research, or feeble logic, or adulterous ideological barking that fills a segment is inarguably devastating to the public good.

One of the more startling things about these kinds of programs is the prediliction of both the guests and the hosts to know nothing and think badly, but speak loudly. I am not sure how it is that we can allow for the course of discourse to be inexorably linked to the whim of whomsoever controls the largest media conglomerate. It is not the hegemonic power that concerns me, it is the seeming destiny of those powers to pervert truths in order to advance certain viewpoints which is most disturbing, or more exactly, the drive to stimulate in the viewing audience a specific, boisterous reaction; the shows are inflammatory to an audience that cannot decide for itself, and grotesque to an audience that can: they are vacuous. With the broad scale of power that primetime news and talk shows seem to have over the majority opinion, or at least the potential sway that they are permitted, it seems that a shared goal of these organizations should rightly be to infuse some sort of message aimed at correction of a problem.

Ought not we each to seek solutions, instead of create noise for its own sake? One's own opinion--or worse, serving as a proxy for another's opinion--serves no intrinsic purpose, and satisfies no glaring need: it occupies space in our social narrative, but provides nothing in the way of quality. It is clutter. When one does not position himself rightly, and instead he filabusters and exclaims and postures, he objectively discredits his own cause; subjectively, though, he often becomes more appealing because of the lazy intellect and poor decision-making of the American dullard. In other words, two things may happen that make the fool appear amicable, and worse, intelligent: his audience may identify with or be tricked by his raucous language, and thus be set at ease that he has their interests in mind; or, he may, in all of his yattering, shut out the voice of the reasoned speaker, or otherwise turn off the appetite of the audience towards rationality, patience, and keenness. Anti-intellectualism in America is pervasive, and it is self-fecundate--for when all that is offered in the way of information is blind lauding of an ideology as a construct, and not analysis for its specific products, the world and the complex issues it contains become polarized. Thus conceived, all one must do is pick either side, and then curse the other for its vices, never minding a careful reflection about his confederates or about problems that still exist in the world; when a person belongs to a side, that identity is enough to encourage the fool to feel secure that he is making a difference. There it is, then, the great ideological problem of the 21st century: the idiot is made the prince, and his enemy the scholar is become the bore.

Ghost Hunting

2009-01-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

It is a long-standing tradition at Schloss Leopoldskron for interns to spend the night of a new year alone in the greater segment of the castle. Below is the record of that night, gracefully documented by the artful Daniel and his courageous (and ethereal) subjects.

Our first sighting of the unaware specter. The Marble Hall.

An over-shoulder appearance. The Library.

Sighting: mid-right of the frame. The Balcony.

First contact: at the typewriter.

The New Year

2009-01-01T03:52:00.000-08:00

Streets of Vienna on New Year's Eve.

Concert in a Viennese square, New Year's Eve. They did not play Wham, contrary to our fervent demands.

The lake in front of the schloss, frozen over. The carves are from ice skates. Other than those, the surface is glassy to the point of see-through. The geese have to be ticked.

The Schloss, Daniel in the foreground. A day later, we got about 25cm of snow. Look at the sky: idyllic blue, and then by night, snow everywhere. Alps, you cruel temptress..

In the bierstube, last night of the Winter Festival 2008. This photo sort of reminds me of how presidents look when they're younger. Except we're way less rich. And Daniel is german, so he kinda can't be president.

Fireworks at midnight over the Wienfluss. Happy New Year, everybody.

Those Goddamn Yankees

2008-12-30T07:45:00.000-08:00

Alright, let's get something straight here, and Kyle, please back me up on this: the way that the Yankees conduct business in Major League Baseball has become completely unacceptable. Cashman and Steinbrenner, they're like insolent children who got into their dad's closet and are screwing up his broadcloth button-downs, except that instead of dress shirts, we're talking about the fabric of the way in which American sports and the economy are interconnected. The contracts the Yanks have processed this offseason remind me of the way that Oprah gives away Toyota Carollas and Disneyland season passes. For those of you who hide under a sports rock--a considerably insulting and somewhat unthinkable offense to my and my ilk considering that midnight baseball and streaming podcasts are as much a part of my life as showering and dairy--here is a brief but poignant list of the temerity of the Evil Empire:

Tex for 180 over 8.
CC for 161 over 7.
Burnie for 82.5 over 5.
Leaked conversations that revolve around signing Manny.
423.5 in contracts since November. By far the largest payroll in baseball. $27 million in 2008 luxury tax ALONE.
Jason Giambi's 2009 buyout--5 million United States dollars--is more than 75% of the players who are actually playing for the Giants on the everyday roster.

Even though Pavano, Giambi, and Mo are all off the books, if the Yanks keep Matsui and Nady, they'll break their own atmospheric record set last year at $207.1 million, at reset it $222 million; the second place team, the Metropolitans, paid their players $137.4 million, which is just a touch under two-thirds of the Yankees' salary. By contrast, the median mark is in the low 70s and the lowest is 27 (owned by the Florida Marlins, who came in third place in their division, just like the Yankees did, and who finished only 4.5 games behind the team that spent nearly 8 times as much money on its players). And it's not just a recent phenomenon: the four highest contracts in history were for players inked by the Yankees, and Manny would be the fifth. All this in an economic environment which, according to baseball insders and specific GMs, is making people around the league "raise eyebrows".

Major League Baseball, it has been demonstrated, is very much an old boys club type of organization. You do things wrong, and it gets handled in-house, if it gets handled at all. Public admonition of the Yankees' spending habits highlights the amount of discomfort and disapproval that the baseball community at large has with their flamboyance, and suggests an enduring meta-problem with their philosophy: no one else matters, and it doesn't matter. I can't conceive of a team or a city being satisfied with itself if its owner and general manager tosses around this sort of disgusting unitarianism. Can't you feel it, New York? You are despised by fans from all over the nation, but at least a little bit of that is jealousy. You are disowned by high administration in the league of which you are a part, but a little bit of that is likely displaced frustration. But you are objectively wrong, here, and that is a condition from which there is no reproach.

Oh, and all you Boston area sports fans? Here's a bit of scalding rebuke for you, too. Hating New York philosophically does not preclude me from hating Boston pragmatically: how about this. The next time I hear you honking down the street or wearing your stupid cursed faux-fade Sox cap, I get to remind you, way out loud, that the only reason you can see the sun today is that you live in California. Oh, the Celtics are great? The Pats are your team? Go freeze, then: take your T, and your 8 degree weather, and go fight with New York for who can buy the best team. Also, that accent makes my ears want to jump off a goddamn roof. You're lucky you had the Kennedys. Otherwise, everyone would be okay with hating you more openly.

Winter Festival Photos

2008-12-27T06:27:00.000-08:00

Old Town Salzburg, seen from the Festung

Sweet mountain house in Bischofshofen. Two gnarly german retrievers out front.

Our horses. Sleigh ride through Filzmoos to Restaurant Oberhofalm.

Ian Brown, me, and Daniel Sip. St. Bartholomew, across the lake from Konigssee, in Bavaria.

Gothic steeple and town below, Bischofshofen.

Super long exposure, evening mass. Chapel, Schloss Leopoldskron. Christmas eve, 2008.

Ski jumps, Bischofshofen. Scary steep.

Nifty streetlamps in the alley towards the lake in Konigssee.

Ascending

2008-12-23T10:50:00.000-08:00

The attic air hung thick and crisp with winter's influence, so that each breath had to be carved out of the stillness, and each was beat away again by deep, excited huffs. We should not have come. But then, what is adventure if the admonition of authority is excised from the idea? Surely, some of the greatest chances and highest pleasures are the result of an unwillingness to accept a 'should', and a vivified will to pursue a 'must', nonetheless.

A narrow glint of early morning light hung thirty feet away, on the other side of ceiling beams and a pair of lonely wine glasses, which must have been abandoned by an earlier party. One of the glasses, thin and delicate through the stem, was tilted up against a slight metal ladder anchored at the top by the frame of the skylight. How graceful it looked in the blueness--! And how brittle and lonely, a quiet casualty to the intrigue of romance.

Cautiously now, we tip-toed over the beams and lurched at the ladder, tripping in our haste and our ignorance; and in due honesty, we had taken in enough wine to make us warm for the journey. Ah, but no excuse is necessary for wine. Up the ladder we crept, trying to stifle bursts of laugher, and slipping on the rusted bars, guessing where to find the next rung. The roof was ridged and freezing. The slats dug into our calves like tangs on a giant cheese grater, and the flat partitions were spotted with tiny patches of ice: to the chimney, then. Out across the glass-top lake, reflections of the moon and the walkway lights peppered the area between the island and the foremost castle grounds. A few stars ripped through the still fog that otherwise masked the giant mountain peaks in the distance. A fleet of geese interrupted the serenity of the lake, arrowing towards the townhouses to create rolling-pin mounds on the surface. The wind, whipping over the alps and past us, accounted for the only noise in the crisp night. And eventually, as the frost broke and the dark lost its fight, we began to whisper.

Shouting (or, Advice)

2008-12-22T21:22:00.001-08:00

It was about an hour after the evening fireside cocktail party had wound down. Some stragglers still remained, waxing about the past year and nursing a bottle of warming wine. The fire had stopped cracking now, and the candles which beset ubiquitous wreaths ran low, so the two-story Christmas that towered near the bay windows provided most of the light in the Great Hall. Two girls whose parents are yearly participants at the winter festival seem to be the only other attendees who are in their early twenties, and we gravitated towards each other in the name of comfort. I am jarred by the reality that it is so fundamentally different to talk to them.

It seems that a lot of the conversations I have participated in during my adult life--or, more to the point, more of the things that have been said while I was standing in front of the speaker--have been directed at me, as opposed to held with me. I find that I am told what to do a great deal of time, but not from a position of authority; instead--and this is uncomfortably often--people seem to speak as if they have some guidance for me, and yet I have not requested any. Moreover, we are often not speaking about anything the context of which would necessitate guidance in *any* instance..things such as standing in a line for a meal, looking at the food. Make yourself a sandwich, they'd say. Save it for later, because you'll surely get hungry. Try this wine, it's a first fruit. Your new favorite, no question. Oh, this part of the city is certainly the better, in fact that other place you're thinking of isn't worth it. Go this way. Do this thing. Trust us. These are not tips, from someone who has been there before me. Instead they are each a credo: do this, because I know better than you. It is insufferable. Because they do not.

And more than that, they cannot. Many people pretend to know what it is that I prefer, how my mind is designed, or what it is that will make me as happy as possible in the the future. I pity them that they don't realize how foolish it is to assume that I am like they are, or if I conceive of them more gently, that they don't realize that I don't care much for their opinion, regardless of how closely it aligns with my own. And it is not as if they think poorly; in fact, this is far from the case, as the collective degrees, grants, and awards bestowed upon the people who gather in any given year at this Seminar alone is unspeakably humbling. I quite often receive this sort of treatment from professors, or employers, or just from adults in general. Perhaps that is the tragedy of my relationship with some of them: I am young, they are in so many ways experts. But the failure of their pride is that because they are good thinkers, they presume that by extension they are better than I am, or that at the very least, they are more capable than I am at determining something that they simply cannot know better than I do. In some cases, they will be able to outthink me, but it will only be because the data is available for them to do it: in terms of my habits and feelings, I rightly I trust myself more than I will ever listen to an overbearing professor or a stressful boss, or than I would take the advice of even a knowledgeable stranger.

It is not that I do not recognize their right to express themselves: surely, they have that. But do it in some other way, won't you? If you feel supervisory, then why not pay mind to your own screaming children, or admonish at all the ones who are unspeakably rude so often in your presence, or buy a hamster and tend to that. If you are feeling aggressive, then play tetherball, squeeze a bag of sand, write a haiku. If you feel as if you are better than I am, then kindly silence your impulse to demonstrate that triviality; or, remove yourself, and do it quickly.

Photographs (or, Snapshots)

2008-12-20T09:18:00.000-08:00

Photography is becoming and increasingly present element of my life in Austria. Sometimes I shift through an album or a few pages on the facebook, or I'll browse a week of college on my macbook. Then again, there are ever more photos to be added to my computer, as a rare opportunity would be missed if I were to neglect my camera for these next four months. Photos, then, are a product and also a constant task, and moreover one on which I should begin to focus a bit more ardently. A more professional manifestation of this theme is the work with which my colleague Daniel and I are presently preoccupied: the Winter Festival photo board, which displays small headshots and dense biographies of all of the participants for our weeklong program. Daniel has worked exquisitely hard on the festival as a whole, and has been a brilliant role model in terms of work ethic and drive in order to complete the tasks which are assigned to the office.

This photo board, it seems to me, is a bit of a microcosm of my struggle between my present opportunity and desire to travel versus my desire to have a swarm of kids and a goodly wife. The people on this board are all past attendants of some session that has been hosted by SGS: this is a prerequisite for invitation. And most of them are families. The union of these two qualities is something that I hope to foster in my own future, also in general I perceive that constant travel and a maintenance of a cogent family life is a stellar challenge. So I shall learn from the masters, then. Let us see if I can sit here in front of the photo board and discern that which is common, and then I will decide to what extent these incarnations are tolerable.

Actually, a lot of the guys seem to share something in common. I have never met any of them, and I have only read a very few things about them, so my conception cannot be totally correct: this is more playful than anything. But, into the fray. First, in every one of their pictures, they wear a variation of virtually the same exact thing: collared shirt, layering piece, chinos, and a belt. Everyone combs his hair to the side, categorically shaped in that sort of smooth, airy, Yale debate team-style flop-over. But there must be a couple other mitigating factors that have nothing to do with clothing, because otherwise every person who attends a Thanksgiving dinner would be a Salzburg Fellow. And it seems as if a very large percentage of the people who send in group pictures have a field by their house, or at the very least have densely-leaved trees in their yards; every picture with a group, save one, shows the family crouching in a veritable thicket with a novelty-size leaf pile. Alternatively, they all read the same photography tips magazine, and not one of them has a lick of sovereign creativity. Each of them perhaps comes from money, or at least garners a great deal of it now. But after simply reading their biographies, which are scribed by the individuals themselves originally, it is plain to notice a sort of affect that indicates propriety: it is refined in a way that is not express education, and it is sometimes haughty in a way that shows unnoticed and enduring pride. And finally, yet most adversely, no one mentions affection for any sports teams. Where is the appreciation for things that they cannot control? Where is the devotion to something that break your heart, mends it together again? Where is the adherence to a code that unites people of like mind all over the nation and world, and which governs a relationship that fosters pride, and joy, and misery, and heights-then-depths that are lasting and wonderful and bitter and new every brilliant season?

Well then, no, I should not like a life like this. Give me the shirts and the leaves, in the end, and keep the rest. And so onwards, men of like mind: to change the world again, the way we would have it.

Winter Market

2008-12-18T08:41:00.000-08:00

I introduce you to gluhwine (gloo-vine), the nectar of the gods. Red wine, warmed (or scalding, depending how eagerly you drank it), and spiced with cinnamon, orange, and schnapps or rum. The drink is served at the very popular winter market in old town Salzburg, the set-up of which is quite lovely: there are booths everywhere, sort of like at art and wine festivals, and there are large barrels set up as de facto tables for cups of liquor and ashtrays. Lampposts distribute enough light for the frequenters to mingle, which they do at a humming pitch. The whole scene is quite Romantic. I am heading to town in a few minutes with Daniel, who refers to items for which he does not know the English term as a "bucket". We are celebrating Adam's last couple of days at the Seminar, and we're going out with a few girls from the Seminar and their friends. Then back to the bierstube in the castle for some pints, I would imagine, unless the snow directs us otherwise. This is one of the troubles with snow, I have found: when the nearest thing that you walk to is on the long side of twenty minutes away, the snow really inhibits graceful walking. Perhaps the last thing that it is wise to add is a potent mix of alcohol, but such is the price we pay for celebration. Thinking back on it, adding hard alcohol to wine seems like one of those things that you see bartenders do for those girls who come in celebrating some shrieking about a bachelorette party, but gluhwine is maybe the exception to the overkill rule. Instead, it is the domain of something closer to the caveman paradigm, which holds that one good thing plus any other one good thing becomes an equally good or better new thing. Men like twins for this exact reason.

With the snow falling intermittently and the constant traffic around the courtyard, the grounds that lead to my apartment look like the pavement in line to a children's amusement park ride, which demonstrates your intended path by showing with cartoon feet where to put your own. The soles of my penny loafers are slick by now, and it is a tenuous fifteen steps to my porch stairs, to say nothing of the staircase itself. I think the SGS might want to look into a great glass elevator (or a similar device) in order to avoid this opportunity for catastrophe, and related lawsuits.

We have begun work on our UST: a shift in physical states from mortal to "decaying otherness", irrationality, and cannibalism. More updates on this matter to follow as our zombie phenomenology warrants.

Snow is Falling

2008-12-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

We were graced today with the lightest dusting of snow, about two hours after the sun slunk behind the alps. The ground looks like a weather-affected version of toast, when the butter melts and sinks into the bread, and the stairs to my penthouse have become slick enough to think twice about skipping the even ones. Two movie nights in a row have accented very long work days. Another two assignments today, to go along with an extremely long list of biographies for visiting schools, professors, and academics who will arrive in early January for ISP 29. I am also in charge of organizing some documents, reading through reviews of past sessions, assimilating the common data that the schools have reported on, and sifting it into an accessible document in order to improve the effective and efficiency of an upcoming ISP session. One of my on-going, probably interminable projects is to research past session lecturers and attendees, discern missing information in their biographies, verify and update contact information, professional progress, and publications made in the interim. The void in our record goes back about 40 years, so this project will be my Everest.

As a de facto timeline for my two-ish readers, I will be preparing for and facilitating the winter festival until the end of December, two International Student Panels in January, the Institute for Historic Justice and Reconciliation in February, and one final session in early March, just before I leave for Dublin.

One other bit of news that is worth noting: today at lunch, the topic of zombies came up. Apparently, there are no less than four people here, all male, who are pretty into zombies, both in pop-culture references and in classical mythology. We tossed around a few thoughts on the matter, and I mentioned to my colleague Daniel--a man who, by the way, had recently ordered ten books on zombies from Amazon, arrival pending shortly--that we might want to come up with some common identity traits that all zombies seem to share. I have assigned this set a preliminary name: the Unified Selenti Theory (thesis concerning all of the dead). He and I discussed many, many different variables, parameters, and pitfalls to this potential theory, including the ways in which it accesses present and past iterations of the zombie, verses other undead and otherwise horror field archetypes. It occurs to me that philosophy must somehow be connected to this subject, as it generally is to all things both critical and trivial, and for my part, I will do some work playing around with this connection. A website on the subject will be launched soon, as a way to pass our time creatively, and surprisingly, several various publication mediums, even this early in our thought process, are currently being pursued. This is a fantastic success for day two, and one certainly befitting the stirring minds that occupy the intern office at the SGS.

The Welcome Party

2008-12-16T04:43:00.000-08:00

The pioneer post in this new catalog is fittingly dedicated to my arrival in Austria. The length of my stay, which will last until the middle of March, will be occupied by work as an intern for the Salzburg Global Seminar. I have only been here for a day, but the whirlwind has begun: there are a tremendous amount of people working for the Seminar, including my two officemates, Daniel and Adam. Daniel is a 27-year old masters student from Hamburg, who is working on a degree in political science; Adam is a 24-year old Missouri boy going after an MBA, and he is on the cusp of redheadedness, seen only in his traffic lane dash of facial hair. Both men are extremely pleasant and great to work with, have been quite helpful and thoroughly accomodating, and will unfortunately be in company for only a short while.

Today, I got the grand brushstrokes of my training session. As far as ISPs go, there is a fantastic amount of preparation that takes place revolving around each student who visits the Seminar. Most of my day was consumed by learning about the servers and databases that the Seminar features, and further, about how it is that I extract information from those manifests, crunch it down, and produce other documents (biographies and summaries, etc.) that will be used for the duration of the ISP sessions. I can see that there will be a fair amount of office work that will be requisite for all of the interesting matters to take place, so I've sort of resigned myself to getting as much done as quickly as possible so that I might enjoy the lectures and the like when they begin--this should be the first week of January. Until then, we are also preparing to host a winter festival, which will basically feature a huge amount of skiing, sleigh rides, and other more charming versions of the common Christmas in the bay area.

I get the impression that the non-session days here are much more loosely organized than my other jobs have been, which I love. In my limited experience, there is no boss hovering over me to make sure that my job is being completed; no one harasses me for things that they just assigned, nor do they offer constant correction and advice and reprimand; no one "checks in". Instead, I received an assignment yesterday, and I turned it in when I was done; two assignments today went the same way, and this style more properly befits my productivity. In general, the castle is very lovely, things are going smoothly (if quickly) and I am tremendously happy. And so ends the first and simple post.