Jeff Black: Higher Ground
March 10th, 2010 » Comments »
It is the
sufferings and insecurities
of our lives that, although painful and distressing,
teach us not to cling to the impermanent things of this world.
Not even the greatest master could teach us so well.
We should honor and respect them,
not shun their company.
March 10th, 2010 » Comments »
Slowly, then all at once
Whatever else
one thinks of how we live
these days, it’s hard to not see it
as temporary, historically anomalous,
a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent
my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning
whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting
on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the
lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my
personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I
don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things,
as though all life’s comforts and structural
certainties rested on a groaning
fault line.
…Everything
we know about it seems
to indicate that human beings happily
go along with the program — whatever the program is —
until all of a sudden they can’t, and then they don’t. It’s like the
quote oft-repeated these days (because it’s so apt for these times) by surly
old Ernest Hemingway about how the man in a story went broke: slowly, and then
all at once. In the background of last week’s reassuring torpor, one ominous little
signal flashed perhaps dimly in all that sunshine: the price of oil broke above
$81-a-barrel. Of course in that range it becomes impossible for the staggering
monster of our so-called “consumer” economy to enter the much-wished-for
nirvana of “recovery” — where the orgies of spending on houses and
cars and electronic entertainment machines will resume like
the force of nature it is presumed to be. Over $80-a-barrel
and we’re in the zone where what’s left of this economy
cracks and crumbles a little bit more each day,
lurching forward to that moment when
something life-changing occurs
all at once.
March 10th, 2010 » Comments »
Humans can be a source of love, learning, cooperation, and assistance
…in more
unequal societies, these
problems aren’t higher by ten or
twenty percent. There are perhaps eight
times the number of teenage births per capita,
ten times the homicide rate, three times the rate of
mental illness. Huge differences…We show that these
problems aren’t affected by rich countries getting still richer.
There are problems that we think of as problems of poverty because
they’re in the poorest areas of society, but a country like the U.S. can be
twice as rich as Greece, Portugal, or Israel—the poorer of the rich, developed
countries we look at—and the problems are no better even though Americans
are able to buy twice as much of everything as the poorer developed
societies. That doesn’t make any difference; it’s only the gaps
between us that matter now. And that’s really quite
a striking thing to learn about ourselves
and the effects of the social
structure on us.
…Let me
tell you what I think
is perhaps at the very bottom
of all this. If you think of almost any
animal species, there is a huge potential for
conflict amongst members of the same species,
because they have all the same needs. They eat the
same food stuffs, they need the same nesting sites, they
value the same feeding grounds or territories, they compete
for sexual partners. It was that recognition in human populations
that made the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century
say that human beings, without a sovereign power to keep the peace, would
war against each other and have “nasty, brutish, and short” lives. Amongst
monkeys, inequality takes the form of dominance hierarchies, based on
power and coercion and privileged access to resources: “I get it first
because I’m stronger, and I don’t care if you’re hungry.”
Human hierarchies are similar—it’s why power,
status, and wealth all go together at the top
and why powerlessness, hunger, and
poverty go together at
the bottom.
But human
beings also have the
opposite potential. We can be
the best source of love and learning
and cooperation and assistance of every kind.
In a sense, Hobbes was wrong about people in a state
of nature. He was right about the potential for conflict, but
people have avoided conflict through food sharing, gift exchange,
and great social equality (for example, in hunter-gatherer societies).
The gift in a sense is a symbol that you and I don’t compete for the necessities
of life. We don’t need to fight each other for them. You feel a sense of indebtedness
and you reciprocate the gift, which anthropologists have suggested is a sort
of basic social contract. That symbolism is still really important:
You invite your friends over, sit around the same table, and
share food, the basic necessity of life. The symbolism
is also there in religious services and communion —
these things are very fundamental,
very deep.
Inequality
is a reflection of how strong
hierarchies are, how much we share or how much
we don’t. It shows us which part of our potential we’re developing.
What game do I play? Have I got to fend for myself? Or have I got to get people
to trust me and cooperate with me? Is my survival dependent on good
relationships? Are you my rival? Are you going to steal from
me? Have I got to keep what I’ve got, defend it?
Or can we share? Human beings
can do both.
March 10th, 2010 » Comments »
Many people want change enough to make change
While I once
felt like a marginalized
garbage-nut, I now realize I am part
of a massive community of people, all over the
world, who know deep in our hearts that something is
wrong. Our economy is off track. Half the world’s population lives
on less than $2.50 a day, unable to meet basic needs, while a handful of people
amass obscene levels of wealth. Our industries convert the planet’s resources
into wastelands while pumping out toxic chemicals so pervasive
that they are now present in every body, even in those
of newborn infants. And our culture encourages us
to find fulfillment in rampant consumerism
rather than compassion and
connection.
The outpouring
of support has shown me that
many, many people recognize these problems
and want change—enough to actually make that change!
It’s not just a few little pockets of us in eco-hotspots. All around the
world, parents, students, farmers, activists, religious leaders, writers, engineers,
scientists, fisher folk, businesspeople, and many others are standing up, speaking out,
calling for a new kind of economy and culture that serves the planet and its
people, rather than sacrifices these for the economic benefit of the
few. So, in spite of the dire data on the state of the planet,
I find myself more full of hope than ever.
I am not alone. We are
not alone.
March 10th, 2010 » Comments »
Raul Malo: You’re Only Lonely
March 9th, 2010 » Comments »
I think if
anybody stays close to their
loneliness they’re always staying close to
the edge. So when I’m by myself, which is a necessity
when you’re a writer, I have to constantly deal with that bleak,
despairing feeling. It’s a funny thing about loneliness. No matter what
you try to do to fill it, you can never fill it. At the end of the day it looks at you
and measures you exactly. We do an awful lot of things—at least, I do—
to try to escape it. But when I can blend and merge with
the loneliness, there’s an extraordinary feeling
of fulfillment nothing else can
compare with.
March 9th, 2010 » Comments »
The disaster-after-the-disaster-after-the-disaster in Haiti is about to go off, and you can help if you don’t blow past this
March 9th, 2010 » Comments »
You become a dissident because you are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances
“If we see
the end of this country
it will come from the right and
our failure to provide people with the
basic necessities of life,” said Johnston.
“Revolutions occur when young men see the present
as worse than the unknown future. We are not there. But it
will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office
who are denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors
in Congress, who say we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the
history of the world has existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the
seeds for the destruction of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the
United States of America. They would say they hate the people they are arrayed
against. But the whole idea of the United States is that we criticize the
government. We remake it to serve our interests. They do not want
that kind of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that
democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a
world where they are right and that is it. If we do not
want to do it their way we should be vanquished.
This is not the idea on which
the United States was
founded.”
It is hard
to see how this can be
prevented. The engines of social
reform are dead. Liberal apologists, who
long ago should have abandoned the Democratic
Party, continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf
corporate state and Barack Obama while the working and middle
class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs. Liberals self-
righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury by
Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal
class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs,
the more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited
American liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do
not hold out any hope for their reform. We have entered
an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote,
“the best lack all conviction and the worst
are full of passionate
intensity.”
“If we end
up with violence in the streets
on a large scale, not random riots, but insurrection and
things break down, there will be a coup d’état from
the right,” Johnston said. “We have already
had an economic coup d’état. It will not
take much to go
further.”
How do we resist?
How, if this descent is inevitable,
as I believe it is, do we fight back? Why should
we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair?
Why not carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace
of the corporate state and spend our lives attempting to satiate
our private needs? The power elite, including most of
those who graduate from our top universities and
our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold
out for personal comfort.
Why not us?
The French
moral philosopher Albert Camus
argued that we are separated from each other.
Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate.
We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated.
And yet Camus wrote that “one of the only coherent philosophical
positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man
and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of
hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate,
without the resignation that ought
to accompany it.”
“A living man
can be enslaved and reduced to
the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned.
“But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he
reaffirms the existence of another kind
of human nature which refuses
to be classified as
an object.”
The rebel,
for Camus, stands with
the oppressed—the unemployed workers
being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the
corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor
in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and
those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them
does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the
Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice
while carrying out acts of oppression.
It means open and direct
defiance.
The power
structure and its liberal
apologists dismiss the rebel as
impractical and see the rebel’s outsider
stance as counterproductive. They condemn the
rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and
their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical
language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue
that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel,
however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand
with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation
grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book
contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel
is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The
rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two
beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at
the way things are and the courage to see that
they do not remain the way they are.
The rebel is aware that virtue is
not rewarded. The act of
rebellion defines
itself.
“You do
not become a ‘dissident’
just because you decide one day to
take up this most unusual career,” Vaclav
Havel said when he battled the communist regime
in Czechoslovakia. “You are thrown into it by your personal
sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external
circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed
in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work
well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does
not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power.
He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not
attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises
nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—
and he offers it solely because he has no other way
of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions
simply articulate his dignity as
a citizen, regardless of
the cost.”
March 9th, 2010 » Comments »
1/f
…the basic
shot structure of the movies,
the way film segments of different lengths
are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act,
has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably
wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood
friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated
somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world
is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penélope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn,
and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps,
dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you
look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said
Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital, “they turn out to have
a one over f characteristic
to them.”
So, too,
for many features of our
natural and artifactual surroundings.
Track the pulsings of a quasar, the beatings of a heart,
the flow of the tides, the bunchings and thinnings of traffic, or the gyrations
of the stock market, and the data points will graph out as pink noise. Much recent
evidence from reaction-time experiments suggests that we think, focus and
refocus our minds, all at the speed of pink. If you’re sitting at a task,
Dr. Cutting said, “sometimes you’re good at it, sometimes your
mind wanders, sometimes you’re fast, sometimes you’re
slow, and the oscillating patterns that
occur are generally
one over f.”
March 9th, 2010 » Comments »
Exactamente
Get pleasure
out of life, as much as you can.
Nobody ever died from
pleasure.















