Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Remembering our terrible human flaws
Yes this is Remembrance Day, a remembrance of the suffering of "the six million Jews and millions of others murdered"* during the Holocaust. It was a terrible unthinkable suffering on an unprecedented scale engineered by the Nazi regime which mechanized the dehumanization, suffering, and deaths of people it did not value. This day of remembering in particular, commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz death camp by allied forces during World War II when the horror of starving and gassing and cremating millions of people first began to be known.
On this day of remembrance we can rightly consider our peculiar human blindness that leads a people of any persuasion or ethnicity to take power and crush another that is different without mercy almost as a privilege born of their belief in or assertion of their own "special" place in history, their so called destiny - by dehumanizing and blaming the other, stripping them of their homes, goods, social rituals, food, neighbors, stealing their labor also, and finally cramming them into cattle cars, express to the "showers" a euphemism for communal gas chambers, and subsequently incinerating the evidence leaving only piles of shoes and eyeglasses - so many that the sight is heartbreaking to look at as if the starving skeletal bodies were not enough.
And we say #neveragain and over and over it happens with other groups, over and over, in and out of the light, seen and unseen, large scale and small scale. Sometimes the abused and the abuser (assuming there are survivors) might switch roles over a generation, over a governmental coup.
Don't kid yourself that we as a nation are above this. Consider who this land belonged to only a few hundred years ago. Consider Guantanamo. Consider how it still has to be said that "black lives matter." Consider your favorite political or spiritual enemy who you think is ruining or threatening this country, the economy, the world. How easily each of us could be lead into the dark. How easily we could turn a blind eye while someone else is lead..
And don't you dare say say oh that was a group of Nazi monsters that has nothing to do with us. According to one of the Smithsonian's web pages, the genetic difference between human beings is around %.01. That is, one hundredth of one percent. In other words, we share 99.99% of common DNA with Adolf Hitler. We can embody brave compassion, horrific cruelty, callous indifference. All of us.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Weir Farm Pond Loop - a gorgeous fall walk
Went for a bit of a short walk with a friend at Weir Farm National Park - the Weir Farm pond loop. The day was bright and crisp, and the scenery was rustic and lovely. To view these and the rest of the album: https://plus.google.com/photos/100545602569648912341/albums/6080980231467734241
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Books: My objections to objectivism - on Ayn Rand's the Virtue of Selfishness
The foundation of Objectivism as argued in The Virtue of Selfishness, is Ayn Rand’s assessment of “Human” nature. She argues that the essential human quality is logic and that it is this ability which separates us from “the brutes.” Further she argues that human beings must fly solo as individuals and to blend one’s self-interest with that of a group is a self-destructive enterprise tantamount to the abnegation of the self and to death.These foundation premises seem to me to be the most vulnerable part of Ayn Rand's philosophy. If the essence of man is not logic, if for instance, man is a essentially a part of nature, a complicated social animal who reasons when it's convenient, then the parapets of Objectivism tumble. If overlapping our self-interest with that of a group is a part of our essential nature as human beings - then it is the isolated existence which is akin to death - no matter how logical. Can it be coincidental that some researchers cite isolation as a risk factor for heart disease and other ailments?
Altruism - illogical and anti-life?
Rand says ethics must be based on rational self-interest. Values must be chosen by logic alone. Human exchange should not involve self-sacrifice but logic-based value-for-value trading. As a general rule of thumb in life, few would argue with the idea of value-to-value exchange. But Rand decrees it - all or nothing! Any degree self-sacrifice or altruism is condemned repeatedly as anti-life. After waving this red flag and handily setting up her philosophy as uncompromisingly controversial - she later argues that some sacrifice is okay if it is a logical choice. It’s permitted for a man to risk his life to save his wife for she is important to his happiness. It’s okay to give money to a friend for food instead of buying some inconsequential gadget for one’s self. But a man is not permitted an instinctive response nor the luxury of sloppy compassion - this must be a logical decision arrived at by weighing relative values.When it’s suits her, Rand borrows analogies from nature - saying that in nature individuals must provide for themselves as a condition of life. She uses this as an argument why altruism is anti-life. She conveniently fails to note that in nature, groups of individuals sometimes work together and in some species a single breeding pair is tended by the entire group. Such behavior isn’t necessarily in their individual self-interest - but it is in their genes.
Rand steps carefully around the topic of parenthood - particularly motherhood. She makes no reference to the effort necessary to nurture and raise human offspring - an activity that generates lots of self-sacrifice. Judging by this book, a society ruled circumspectly by Rand’s logic would die out in a single generation. Why not just skip kids so nobody’s rational self-interest will be interrupted? In practice, biology and logic wrestle. Just try putting a lonely, logical, Objectivist guy-scientist into a room of desirable, intelligent girl-scientists. “Say, have you read David King’s writings on Objectivism?’’ he might say awkwardly wiping clammy palms on twill. Quite often biology finds in logic a handy tool for its own purposes.
Mysticism - a sign of mental illness? Maybe....
Rand regards the mystic as a most dangerous individual. Mystics act on faith and commit themselves to beliefs for which they have no sensory evidence nor rational proof I have to admit she has a point here. The danger she finds in mysticism is as an implicit threat to the overall function of the consciousness as the preceptor and integrator of an individual’s reality. Since human consciousness processes sense impressions and integrates them with past experience - inserting a non-sequitor on mere faith might upset the apple cart, Rand says. This assumes though, that scientists and skeptics are universally logical and operate 100% of the time,in a logical way. However all human beings have unconscious motives, and inconvenient emotions from the slippery rat brain. It's what you do with your brain states, mystical and otherwise, that counts, not just having the odd fit of diffuse warm fuzzes.
Perhaps physicists felt a little queasy when one of their number announced the existence of the photon == and light’s contradictory existence as both a wave of energy and as a particle of matter. In the long run, tolerating the ambiguity meant a new understanding of matter’s existence as energy. By the same token, religion sheds light on society (not a god light, just a human light). What ever we think of a particular religion, its structure can usually provide a valuable metaphor for understanding its adherents' society - even if ultimately the entire construction is just another incredible act of human imagination.
Mysticism and altruism seem to have a wide variety of interpretations and applications in the general understanding, but it struck me in reading this book just how much of an “ism” Objectivism is. According to Rand, Objectivism and egoism are not subject to partial practice - it’s all or nothing. She views altruism and mysticism as all-or-nothing propositions as well. However, individual Objectivists do seem to put a high value on freedom, so naturally the on-line content available on the subject seems to indicate there is an orthodox version and several heretical strains. It’s also interesting to note that Rand or her admirers capitalize “Objectivism” much as one might capitalize Catholicism or Buddhism.
The Individual: Man’s Rights
In advocating a free society “its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights,” and Capitalism (also capitalized), is the only system that can uphold Individual rights Rand says. The source of these rights she finds not in god or society but in man’s nature - which she sees as specifically as rational rather than emotional, hedonistic, altruistic or mystical. Rights are the link between the moral code of man and the legal code of society. “Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law,” Rand says. In her world, moral law is to be deduced according to “human” AKA “logical” values.
The foremost rights that Rand ascribes to man are: the right to his own life, the right to own property, (if he earns it ), and the right to free trade. She see no “right” to a job, a roof, a fair wage, a fair price, an education, milk , shoes, etc., and no special rights for the old the young or the unborn. “Those who favor laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.” “Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”
Rand also argues that the rights of rational men would never clash, never incite conflict insoluble by rational means. This of course presupposes that men in general are essentially rational and function rationally in a conflict. This implies that logic always arrives at the same conclusion given the same set of facts. However, as Rand notes, facts are perceived and integrated with past experiences by the consciousness which ascribes connotative weight to each scrap of knowledge based on its past relevance to that individual. This integrative function is a personal spin-doctor for incoming sense impressions and information - a pattern -matching survival routine which checks current conditions against past conditions of danger or benefit.
Varied public reaction to the possibility of a racist police conspiracy during the O.J.Simpson trial is a perfect example of conflict that can not be resolved with logic. Because the facts were integrated with experience, the conclusions differed. Even without the connotative properties of language, the integrative functions of consciousness and the linear presentation of facts within a time context insure that no set of facts is ever communicated or percieved in an entirely objective manner.
Society: Collectivized Rights and the Role of Government
“A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area,’’ Rand says. Coercion is the sole province of the state and is reserved for criminals. In an ideal world government would be financed by voluntary contributions. (Of course in an ideal world, where all men were rational men and never had conflict they couldn’t reason out, government wouldn’t be needed at all.) Rand concedes that isn’t workable now.
“The use of physical force - even its retaliatory use - can not be left to individual citizens,” she writes. However according to Rand the doctrine of collective rights rests on mysticism and harks back to “the divine right of kings.” The rights of the group in a free society must be derived by contractual agreement, she says. Just as men can evade reality so can society, Rand says. She views any requirements of society as a whole as a “switch of the concept of the rights from the individual to the collective - which means: the replacement of the Rights of Man by the Rights of the Mob.” She feels that any notion of collectivized rights implies “that some men have the right to dispose of others in any manner please., and that the criterion for such privileged condition consists of numerical superiority.”
One notion, (which sounds quite palatable to me), is that individual rights must be placed outside the reach of public authorities so that “the lives and property of minorities or dissenters are not at stake, are not subject to vote and are not endangered by any majority decision; no man or group holds a blank check on power over others .” I hope that means that Objectivists can’t round up practitioners of illogic and force them to read Rand’s rants.
Violence, logic and the violence of logic
Though she repeatedly decrys violence, Rand holds that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes are outlaw nations which free nations have every right to invade! She says liberals stand in the way of this by conveniently advocating the idea of national sovereignty or national self determination when just as often they want to dissolve national boundaries and make “one world.” By advocating “national rights,” Rand rants that liberals are helping to spread dictatorships “like a skin disease, over the whole surface of the globe.” “Observe the double standard: while, in the civilized countries of the West the Liberals are still advocating internationalism and global self-sacrifice - the savage tribes of Asia and Africa are granted the sovereign ‘right’ to slaughter one another in racial warfare,” she says.
In the future of nations, as thronging numbers and faster communication shrink the globe until it pinches - I wonder, to what degree will groups be free to do violence to each other on principle? Or will violence be encouraged as population control by default?
Now, if two neighbors each had a Doberman and bloody conflicts ensued along the property line, separating the dogs would be an option - but allowing them to fight to the death would not. We’d consider it cruel. We’d consider the dogs too valuable to waste. Yet if the animals were not owned, if they were free and wild no one would step in to separate them. So are we domestic or wild animals when we fight? What if each side believes it is acting it its own rational self-interest, responding to the previous use of force by the other side?
Since Rand thinks it’s okay to invade - maybe we could just slip something into the water instead. Should it be a logic supplement or a just extra seratonin?
Mysticism - a sign of mental illness? Maybe....
Rand regards the mystic as a most dangerous individual. Mystics act on faith and commit themselves to beliefs for which they have no sensory evidence nor rational proof I have to admit she has a point here. The danger she finds in mysticism is as an implicit threat to the overall function of the consciousness as the preceptor and integrator of an individual’s reality. Since human consciousness processes sense impressions and integrates them with past experience - inserting a non-sequitor on mere faith might upset the apple cart, Rand says. This assumes though, that scientists and skeptics are universally logical and operate 100% of the time,in a logical way. However all human beings have unconscious motives, and inconvenient emotions from the slippery rat brain. It's what you do with your brain states, mystical and otherwise, that counts, not just having the odd fit of diffuse warm fuzzes.
Perhaps physicists felt a little queasy when one of their number announced the existence of the photon == and light’s contradictory existence as both a wave of energy and as a particle of matter. In the long run, tolerating the ambiguity meant a new understanding of matter’s existence as energy. By the same token, religion sheds light on society (not a god light, just a human light). What ever we think of a particular religion, its structure can usually provide a valuable metaphor for understanding its adherents' society - even if ultimately the entire construction is just another incredible act of human imagination.
Mysticism and altruism seem to have a wide variety of interpretations and applications in the general understanding, but it struck me in reading this book just how much of an “ism” Objectivism is. According to Rand, Objectivism and egoism are not subject to partial practice - it’s all or nothing. She views altruism and mysticism as all-or-nothing propositions as well. However, individual Objectivists do seem to put a high value on freedom, so naturally the on-line content available on the subject seems to indicate there is an orthodox version and several heretical strains. It’s also interesting to note that Rand or her admirers capitalize “Objectivism” much as one might capitalize Catholicism or Buddhism.
The Individual: Man’s Rights
In advocating a free society “its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights,” and Capitalism (also capitalized), is the only system that can uphold Individual rights Rand says. The source of these rights she finds not in god or society but in man’s nature - which she sees as specifically as rational rather than emotional, hedonistic, altruistic or mystical. Rights are the link between the moral code of man and the legal code of society. “Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law,” Rand says. In her world, moral law is to be deduced according to “human” AKA “logical” values.
The foremost rights that Rand ascribes to man are: the right to his own life, the right to own property, (if he earns it ), and the right to free trade. She see no “right” to a job, a roof, a fair wage, a fair price, an education, milk , shoes, etc., and no special rights for the old the young or the unborn. “Those who favor laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.” “Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”
Rand also argues that the rights of rational men would never clash, never incite conflict insoluble by rational means. This of course presupposes that men in general are essentially rational and function rationally in a conflict. This implies that logic always arrives at the same conclusion given the same set of facts. However, as Rand notes, facts are perceived and integrated with past experiences by the consciousness which ascribes connotative weight to each scrap of knowledge based on its past relevance to that individual. This integrative function is a personal spin-doctor for incoming sense impressions and information - a pattern -matching survival routine which checks current conditions against past conditions of danger or benefit.
Varied public reaction to the possibility of a racist police conspiracy during the O.J.Simpson trial is a perfect example of conflict that can not be resolved with logic. Because the facts were integrated with experience, the conclusions differed. Even without the connotative properties of language, the integrative functions of consciousness and the linear presentation of facts within a time context insure that no set of facts is ever communicated or percieved in an entirely objective manner.
Society: Collectivized Rights and the Role of Government
“A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area,’’ Rand says. Coercion is the sole province of the state and is reserved for criminals. In an ideal world government would be financed by voluntary contributions. (Of course in an ideal world, where all men were rational men and never had conflict they couldn’t reason out, government wouldn’t be needed at all.) Rand concedes that isn’t workable now.
“The use of physical force - even its retaliatory use - can not be left to individual citizens,” she writes. However according to Rand the doctrine of collective rights rests on mysticism and harks back to “the divine right of kings.” The rights of the group in a free society must be derived by contractual agreement, she says. Just as men can evade reality so can society, Rand says. She views any requirements of society as a whole as a “switch of the concept of the rights from the individual to the collective - which means: the replacement of the Rights of Man by the Rights of the Mob.” She feels that any notion of collectivized rights implies “that some men have the right to dispose of others in any manner please., and that the criterion for such privileged condition consists of numerical superiority.”
One notion, (which sounds quite palatable to me), is that individual rights must be placed outside the reach of public authorities so that “the lives and property of minorities or dissenters are not at stake, are not subject to vote and are not endangered by any majority decision; no man or group holds a blank check on power over others .” I hope that means that Objectivists can’t round up practitioners of illogic and force them to read Rand’s rants.
Violence, logic and the violence of logic
Though she repeatedly decrys violence, Rand holds that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes are outlaw nations which free nations have every right to invade! She says liberals stand in the way of this by conveniently advocating the idea of national sovereignty or national self determination when just as often they want to dissolve national boundaries and make “one world.” By advocating “national rights,” Rand rants that liberals are helping to spread dictatorships “like a skin disease, over the whole surface of the globe.” “Observe the double standard: while, in the civilized countries of the West the Liberals are still advocating internationalism and global self-sacrifice - the savage tribes of Asia and Africa are granted the sovereign ‘right’ to slaughter one another in racial warfare,” she says.
In the future of nations, as thronging numbers and faster communication shrink the globe until it pinches - I wonder, to what degree will groups be free to do violence to each other on principle? Or will violence be encouraged as population control by default?
Now, if two neighbors each had a Doberman and bloody conflicts ensued along the property line, separating the dogs would be an option - but allowing them to fight to the death would not. We’d consider it cruel. We’d consider the dogs too valuable to waste. Yet if the animals were not owned, if they were free and wild no one would step in to separate them. So are we domestic or wild animals when we fight? What if each side believes it is acting it its own rational self-interest, responding to the previous use of force by the other side?
Since Rand thinks it’s okay to invade - maybe we could just slip something into the water instead. Should it be a logic supplement or a just extra seratonin?
Monday, October 13, 2014
In the Gazebo at Harvest Fest - the open mic!
 |
| Jack Cran playing my guitar. Host Don Lowe scanning the horizon. |
With all the great music down on Bank Street - the Pears, the All Stars, the Blue Yodels - up on the green was wide open. The gazebo was the location of the Harvest fest open mic hosted by Don Lowe. His set up made for a great sound! I even saw a New Milford officer tapping his foot as he kept watch on traffic.
My timing was good and I was lucky enough to play for half and hour - around the area I saw host Don Lowe, Jack Cran, Cira Montrays, PJ Shurik, Bob Brophy and Chris Ellis. Afterwards I got coffee down on Bank St and spied Nancy of the Pears packing up from their gig.
Though the audience was mostly down the street the folks who stopped and listened were really wonderful!
 |
| Christopher Ellis playing Don's guitar |
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Artist DeeDee Calvey at Cornwall Bridge Gallery
Artist Dee Dee Ball Calvey is having her first solo show at the Cornwall Bridge Gallery. There's a lot variety & color, arranged with that painterly feeling of touched-ness.  |
Here's the artist herself posing between two of her works. Musician Bo Missinne jumped into the shot - yes the reception was fun!
Wasn't sure until the last minute I would be able to attend (last minute computer support for a relative and who knows how long that might have taken) but I am so glad I made the drive. I wasn't so green of me I guess, but I really enjoyed it.
Thursday, September 18, 2014
I found this chart kind of shocking on both sides....
This is the Pew Research Center's findings on how ideology influences child rearing priorities. I really am shocked by the omissions on both ends of the ideological spectrum. Shocked by how little empathy and persistence are taught at all. Even being well-mannered gets short shrift. And curiosity - asking questions is at the bottom of lot on both sides. This does not bode well for the future.
Here is the link to the article on the Pew Center article:
http://www.people-press.org/2014/09/18/how-is-ideology-linked-to-child-rearing-values/
Here is the link to the article on the Pew Center article:
http://www.people-press.org/2014/09/18/how-is-ideology-linked-to-child-rearing-values/
Friday, September 12, 2014
Staying home and not driving is GREEN
Because of Facebook (which I am not on right now) and other internet connections, I get invited to a lot of events by poets and musicians I know. As a family caregiver, if I don't get out sometimes, I have only a mostly deaf 80 year old for company. And that can be daunting. So I have to go out as much as possible for my own sanity.
Yet somehow, for me getting out is always tricky. A) I am reclusive, and by nature tend to stay home and putter. B) I have family caregiver duties and getting out requires timing, setup and/or advance planning for outside help. C) Conserving resources is a priority. E) Often despite my efforts and intentions, some last minute problem keeps me home anyway.
Increasingly, the merits of driving far seem doubtful. The news about methane, fossil fuels, sea level rise, and the slow march we are making to possible oblivion is not the cheeriest. And the economy is pretty bleak from my point of view.
So now, whether I stay home by choice, necessity or purely by accident, I have this new comforting rationalization: I think, well, at least I am not spending money on, nor burning fossil fuel to get to some near but far location.
As a part time recluse, I enjoy many solitary pursuits. painting, drawing, writing poems and songs, taking walks, blogging, tweeting, thinking, yardening, reading, watching netflix, music practice etc etc. None of these require driving.
Balance is the thing though. Like everyone else I need to see other humans and so I do go out, though I try to make it local. So to all you promoters of far-flung events - I appreciate the invites and heartily wish your events flourish. That said -- I am so sorry to miss your bit, but these days I am often to be found closer to home.
After saying all that I suddenly have an intense desire for a road trip :)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)