Redeeming Value

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.

A Heartbreaking Work

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.

Broken Wheel

"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.

A Tense Reflection on Theism

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.

Ears

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.

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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.

Those Goddamn Yankees

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:

1. Tex for 180 over 8.
2. CC for 161 over 7.
3. Burnie for 82.5 over 5.
4. Leaked conversations that revolve around signing Manny.
5. 423.5 in contracts since November. By far the largest payroll in baseball. $27 million in 2008 luxury tax ALONE.
6. 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.

Shouting (or, Advice)

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.