Author: Adriel

Asimov the Polymath

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A new production this year of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is apparently now out on the Apple+ channel (are they called “channels” or what, “streaming service” seems awkward).  There is also somewhere in movie land a pretty fair production of I, Robot.  Long ago I liked to read Asimov’s science fiction but it is really too bad that his other works are lesser known.  In fact, Asimov wrote books on chemistry, literature, philosophy, religion, humor, politics, social science, and well about everything.  He published over 500 books and someone once told a story about him picking up a book that he thought was interesting only to find that he had written it himself many years before.  He was prescient in the world of computers and foretold many of the ideas we now wrestle with including the worries about AI and robotics.  In fact, he invented the word “robotics.”  Here is the OED entry for his neologism:

1941   I. Asimov in Astounding Sci.-Fiction May 53   There’s irony in three of the greatest experts in robotics in the world falling into the same elementary trap, isn’t there?

One of my favorite Asimov book is an enormous work on bible history, Asimov’s Guide to Bible.  It spans 1295 pages and no, I haven’t finished it.  It surely must rank as one of the most objective and thorough examination of perhaps the world’s most influential books. Asimov was a humanist, an atheist who was the president of the American Humanist Society.  His work on the bible is historical and a kind of exegesis of mythology of the Hebrew Tribe.  Asimov himself was born to a Jewish family in Russia but he was a secular Jew, as are many second-generation Jewish immigrants (unless the popularity of Buddhism among secular Jews makes them a little more religious).

I did finish Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor, at least twice.  This is not just another joke book but a light yet perceptive commentary on humor itself.  I have started it again and I was reminded in the first introduction that Asimov had the same disgruntled view of travel as Adriel.  He says he began the humor book during a dreaded weekend vacation.  He writes that “vacations send me into a deep melancholy” that he soothed by spending his time writing in a room of the “elaborate hotel of a type I detested beyond measure”. Asimov also wrote several collections of limericks including one for children.  That one is available but sadly, Lecherous Limericks is out of print although copies are available for $896.00.

More on Sandel

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Elsewhere on this blog I mention Sandel’s discussion of the controversy over diversity in college admissions. He thinks a resolution is reached by considering the telos of the university: what is it for, what is its purpose? (Michael Sandel, in his iTunes U course on Justice, lesson 9). Recently, and especially during the COVID pandemic, university admissions are no longer requiring standardized test scores to be submitted by applicants. Of course, colleges need to increase enrollment and this would help them financially, but it is usually characterized as broadening the student populations. Making it more diverse. Maybe so.

Recently, Razib Khan’s blog raises some concerns (https://razib.substack.com/p/applying-iq-to-iq). Khan shows the relationship between high IQ and other tests scores and academic and even general success such as book writing and patent development. He suggests that by selecting less academically gifted students, the universities could return to selecting more of the elite, the wealthy, and the well connected. The best education has usually, or formerly, been reserved for the elite and the well-born aristocracy. In Europe, the universities were created to prepare aristocrats for a life of, well, aristocracy. But it has been said, that in America, and elsewhere in the movement towards democracy, the purpose of higher education was to prepare for a well functioning democracy. Khan notes “But the age of aristocracy ended in Europe, and a new egalitarian ethos required ways to identify those with talent but no connections or pedigree. Intelligence testing appeared in modern Europe as a way in which to identify talented individuals born outside of the elite.” Khan describes the ancient practice of testing in China as a selection tool for higher office and higher education. But there was a time when testing was not done as we now see happening in American college selections. “When examinations fell out of favor, as occurred during the Eastern Han, the Tang, and the Yuan, the consequences were inevitable. A coterie of great families, or ruling castes, came to dominate the administration, and unattached youth of talent were excluded and marginalized. The testing regime was uniformly disliked by the aristocrats because they already had power, connections, and polish. They perceived in themselves the right to rule. They required no test to validate their self-worth.”

It would seem to me that in America, which strives to be inclusive and diverse. At least in our values, we want everyone to have equal opportunity for a full and prosperous life and that democracy must be equalitarian if it is truly rule by the demos. So whether testing is required or not, the purpose of our universities is to serve us all and they must be some selection method that is not blind to academic qualifications but does not see that alone as the most important entry criterion. And higher education should neither be blind to race or ethnicity nor regional difference or social and economic status but should embrace a multiplicity of backgrounds in student selection.

In Michael Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy, he decries the selling of higher education in terms of financial gain. Universities have always had as part of their purpose to train students for a career. But to value education primarily on the basis of the size of future income is self-defeating. Sandel thinks that if the standards of higher education are no higher than common greed, then universities are no longer serving a higher purpose. A liberal arts education should change a student’s life in a more substantial way than making money.

Recent changes in college life were depicted and satirized in the recent streaming television series The Chair. There has been a trend toward dropping humanistic education and the classics often because these represent white colonial culture. In The Chair, the college administration buckles under student demands for their view of correct behavior. A new book by a man of color pushes back on the regrettable trend of dropping the classics from the curriculum. Roosevelt Montas, a Dominican immigrant, was the director of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, a classics based studies required of all students. His book Rescuing Socrates, reviewed this week by the WSJ, tells of how his own undergraduate years studying in the Core Curriculum gave him a transformational sense of his own self.

Holy Circus

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I have read that in Japan there are common expressions for the blissful state of being in large crowds.  Americans claim that they dislike crowds despite the evidence of massive throngs at music festivals, sporting events, and megachurches.  The Southern Baptist church, Prestonwood Baptist, claims enthusiastic crowds exceeding 15,000 believers (and donors) every week. 

The Church of Trump has them beat.  Twenty to thirty thousand screaming followers can often attend. President Obama drew larger crowds but I doubt his supporters turned over their lives to these events.  Some Trump-crazed supporters would attend dozens of such events, traveling hundreds of miles to worship at these church-like raves.

The journalist Carl Hoffman traveled the Trump rally circuit to interview and even befriend some the rally pilgrims.  He reports on his crazy journey in Liar’s Circus, subtitled A Strange and Terrifying Journey into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies (HarperCollins, 2020).  Hoffman says little about what nonsense Trump had to say at the rallies (God-knows we’ve had enough of that) but rather he writes about the crowd and its true-believer people. 

The rally fans were fanatics, they were worshipers at the altar of crazy.  Hoffman does indeed remark on the quasi-religious nature of the MAGA rallies.  He witnessed rituals, songs, chants, prayers, emotional outbursts, testimony, and wild sermons worthy of a Mississippi tent revival.  Hoffman references the American Great Awakening and he refers to how the rallies, like the 19th century protestant resurgence, swept across the country like a virus.  At the Trump rallies there were prayers and demons who were mostly the wicked liberals who had an “agenda” to destroy the right wing manifest destiny to a Whites-only greatness.

As Hoffman waited with the faithful in long overnight vigils to enter the hall, he befriended several who followed the circus circuit to dozens of rallies.  They had trailers and tents and did cookouts like massive tailgate parties.  They came, mostly by car again and again, from distant states but they didn’t come for politics. They came for the event, for the tent revival, for the crowd.  Sociologists have studied and written about the strange, enormous power of the crowd over the emotions of the individual.  Elias Canetti, in his Nobel Prize winning book, Crowds and Power, explained how tyrants use the power of crowds to gain power over the individual.  The crowd takes on a kind of spooky animation wanting growth and sustaining itself with increasing power over thought and emotion. Individuals in crowds surrender their personal power to the autocrat.  Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about how singing and motion in a celebratory crowd can de-individualize the participant and cede power and adulation to the leader.  

Hoffman “realized Trump was a preacher and this was a fundamentalist revival.”  Trump preached against a loss of our souls to the Satanic Democrats, or immigrants, or the media.  The Trump church endures and the congregations want more and more.  Personally, I am praying to hear less and less.

Vacca, Bos, and Variola

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The antivaxers and antimaskers are out in force adding to the dangers we all face. I remember reading about the opposition to masking during the 1918 influenza pandemic. There was no flu vaccine at the time so the only tools that public health had to work with were masks, social distancing, and the ancient technique of quarantine (quarantine from Latin quaranta, “forty” the days a ship must wait offshore during medieval pandemics). A recent article in the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-history-of-vaccine-mandates-in-america-11631890699?page=1) has provided some clarity on this rhubarb (baseball-ese for a kerfuffle).

The type of immunization that General Washington required of his troops would have set ablaze the hair of the anti-vax screamers. This technique was variolation (from variola, Latin term for smallpox). Variolation was an ancient Asian technique of placing a piece of flesh from an infected person onto the abraded skin of an uninfected person. Obviously this was a dangerous procedure because it transmitted God-knows-what disease along with a possible case of full-blown smallpox. Variolation came into use in the West in the early part of the 18th century. Back in elementary school we all learned about the remarkable discovery by Edward Jenner who observed that milkmaids often became immune to smallpox by working with cows infected with cowpox. Jenner coined the term vaccination (from Latin vacca a cow) and used it in his 1788 paper on the new technique. This was five years after the Washington’s victory. Jenner’s initial technique was pretty gross. He applied the pus from a cow oozing cowpox to a small boy. I wonder if the boy signed an informed consent release but anyway he was successfully immunized. Using cowpox provided a much safer way of immunization.

The British cow that provided the cowpox was named Blossom. A common name for a favorite American cow is Bessie. A certainly false but cute folk etymology is that a bovine is often named Bessie because Ivy League professors who grazed their cow on campus would call the girls home in the cry “Here Bossie! Come Bossie!” using ancient Latin bos another term for a Roman cow. Or they could have been using Greek bos or bous as the word was the same or similar in classical Greek. An early form of written Greek was done in boustrophedon, or “as the ox turns”. In other words, this script was written and read one line going left and the next going right just like plowing field. The “turning” in boustrophedon is the strophe syllable. In Greek drama, the chorus would take dance steps reflecting the stage action. If events took a terrible turn the chorus would strophe or turn dramatically the other way. That step was called a catastrophe. Like the Covid Pandemic or the 2016 presidential election.

Well Worn Jeans

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In the Netflix series “Unorthodox,” a young Hasidic woman flees her husband and family and the oppressive strictures of ultra-orthodox life in New York and seeks a new life in Berlin.  She struggles with a modern society and her own fears and limitations, but slowly, step by step, gains the confidence to survive.  At a pivotal moment in her battle for personal freedom, she puts on a pair of blue jeans under her orthodox prescribed skirt. In the following sequences, she wears the jeans and contemporary clothes as she slips off the burdens of ancient customs and rules.  It seems to me that restrictive blue jeans signify freedom from restriction. 

How we deal with existential fears and mysteries is the subject of Matthew Hutson’s The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking. Hutson doesn’t condemn magical thinking or consider it unusual and thinks it may well be an essential part of a healthy emotional life. We hold tight to things that help us make sense of life.  An old ring that a grandmother had, a numbered shirt worn in a winning game, my dad’s dog-tags.  Significant life changes are usually accompanied by things that don’t change.  There are wedding rings, coming of age body alterations of all types, maybe a tattoo of Amanda (maybe have that one replaced), the holy water of baptism, and, in the end, a granite tombstone. Ancient handprints of Hindu women made just before sati.  Who doesn’t save a special toy belonging to a now grown child or a wedding gown or a Louisville Slugger from a home run?  And I missed my old VW bug named ‘Liz’. 

My old school friend George told me once about a pair of special blue jeans, the almost lucky jeans.  George was, and still is, an artist who made imaginative and beautiful objects of clay and took compelling photography.  As a starving art student at Florida Atlantic University, he slept in the pottery building or the fieldhouse where there were nice showers.  After graduation, he still struggled to survive until his art was recognized.  I lost track of him for a while after college but connected a little later.  Then he said he was a painter.  He painted the lines on the highway for the Ohio road department and was paid well during warm months.  In the winter and spring, he received enough unemployment money to make ends meet while living in a barn of an Amish farm in Ohio.  He traded a little help around the farm for free accommodations in the hayloft while doing what art work he could.   

And as he prepared to leave for his recall to work, the farmer’s daughter comes up to say goodbye.  I asked George if this was the start of a farmer’s daughter joke but he swore to its truth. The young woman of course was wearing her traditional long skirt and Amish clothing. She asked for one small favor.  George, take off your jeans.  George is thinking:  my lucky day! I guess I’ve hit the jackpot.  The farmer’s daughter slipped off her skirt and took the blue jeans and zipped them up snug.  Then she slowly takes them back off and gives them back. She says, George, I just wanted to know for once what it feels like to wear blue jeans. 

The jeans must be long gone now and George is a successful artist and does have the good luck and steady income of an art museum director.  I don’t know what he wears to work. 

Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens

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I did enjoy this best-selling novel about Kya, a girl who grows to a woman almost entirely alone in the marshes of North Carolina. The book, by the naturalist Delia Owens, is a bildungsroman of a girl Mowgli, not raised by wolves but by herself and her sea birds, insects, and and all the teeming wildlife of the marsh.
It was a little off-putting to accept the idea of a girl of six abandoned almost completely by her family except for an abusive alcoholic father who was rarely home and eventually completely gone. So it took a bit of the willing suspension of disbelief to enter the wondrous and dangerous world of a marvelous child with only one day of school who grows in self-reliance to womanhood by her own strengths and curiosity.
There is also a murder mystery here too, not in the sense of a whodunit, but in the more classic sense of the inevitability of tragic consequences. What is so appealing in this book is how the author weaves together the characteristics of the natural world into shaping Kya’s sense of identity. What she learns in her solitary life about the natural world and natural selection is not only how she lives and prospers but how she survives and prevails. Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens, 2018, Putnam’s.

Capital and Taxes

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The New York Times has reported today on a ProPublica study that shows that the wealthiest US individuals regularly pay little or no income tax. The NYT mentions that this has revived an interest in a wealth tax.
A few years ago, there was much excitement over the publication of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Now there is a Netflix documentary which I haven’t seen yet but I did read the Picketty’s book. In record time I think, a full two and half-month for all its nearly 700 pages and I understood some of it. As a matter of fact, Picketty was careful to explain each of his formulas in plain English (translated from the French). Here is the most important one: r > g that is, the r or rate of return on capital will always be greater than g, the rate of growth of the economy which is the source of income for us 99 percenters. Some economists have criticized the book on various points (one accusing him of “mathiness” like “truthiness” using a lot of math to overwhelm the reader into thinking he must be right, it’s math after all). I take it from Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugman, that the book is one of the most important texts of our age. And of course the right-wing suggests the book is just more liberal socialism. Picketty’s book was given to me by my wonderful friend Tom, a dyspeptic but benign old Marxist professor. I think Tom was a little disappointed that Picketty’s Capital wasn’t a modern version of Das Kapital.
Of all the controversy about the book, no one has criticized his major point. Capital relies on labor to increase its value and will always increase faster than labor’s earning power causing increasing income inequality. Picketty spends a lot of time showing the negative effects of inequality including not only poverty and ill health but social upheaval and even violence. Picketty also documents generational wealth, vast fortunes passed along down the ages growing to enormous proportions. Mostly untaxed.
The solution is a wealth tax. In the US we do have one form of wealth tax, the tax on real estate, usually the only form of wealth for most Americans. Some European countries have a wealth tax on assets like holdings in a stock market.
When a significant wealth tax was implemented in France a few years ago, many of the enormously rich elites simply fled. That’s why Picketty proposes that there be an international and therefore inescapable wealth tax that is the same rate universally. Fat chance.
At any rate at least the idea is being discussed. Elizabeth Warren had proposed a wealth tax as one of her many plans, but the Biden folks have dismissed it.
I do wish people would remember when they shell out for the their real estate tax payment, that a retiring Jeff Bezos will be looking down on us all from above the skies in his space ship and just rolling in his enormous billions and paying no tax at all. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Picketty, Harvard University Press. 2014.

New Geezer Files Category

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Today I’m starting a new category: The Geezer Files. Notes on oldness, a term preferable to “aging” or worse, “aged”. Here are a few starters—-

Guys in oldness like telling jokes particularly to kids. Bad jokes. Because the little characters will laugh anyway. In one of my fifty-four jobs, I worked with a nursing home patient who was considerably brain damaged. He coped by telling jokes. The clinical term is “witzelsucht,” combining the German words for joke + telling. Yes it is a malady but the term is interesting and so was the old geezer who told the bad jokes. Bad, yes, but he enjoyed telling them and I enjoyed listening.

Another geezer-word is the Japanese word for a pun. A pun in Japanese is “oyajigyagu”, or “old guy gag” or so I’m told. I love puns, so that tells my age.

And no joke from the Japanese again. One might hope in the time of oldness, one might gain the wisdom of “wabisabi” an acceptance of the beauty and transience of the world.

Siddhartha’s Playlist

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Well, if my experience at Buddhist summer camp is any indication, then Buddha had no playlist and probably had no favorite tune, except for maybe a ringing bowl sounding out time for meditation. Time for meditation: Again. I made a poor yogi I’m sure, but at least I followed the rule of complete silence. Almost.

Some people when they reach that longed-for retirement day, go off on their dream vacation to Paris or the Caribbean or maybe the all-you-can-eat buffet in Harlan, Kentucky. I went to the Insight Meditation Center in Massachusetts for a hot summer week. On entry, the staff interview you and assign a room that comes with nothing more than two very small beds and a roommate. It was high summer so I asked about air-conditioning. No dice. The 20 year old asked about any food allergies or medical condition. Also, “Adriel, do you have any mental conditions?” The spiel was that some people seek meditation as a balm for a troubled mind and I was warned that a week at INS wouldn’t do the trick. I simply said I might have been a little crazy to sign up, that’s all. No response. This guy was all about serious meditation. What ever happened to Buddhist humor?

So I did my best to follow the rules. At first I thought that the no coffee rule was the tough one, along with the monster mosquitoes–no repellent permitted and you get expelled for killing a flea or a fly. I got used to the no talking and more or less was compliant, save for sneaking off to the lakeside on the lunch break to call Paula on the verboten cell phone. But it was the music. No music permitted. No sound. It was such an aural void.

It made me realize how much music there is with radio and digital. Music excites, soothes, saddens, and generally moves us in a better direction. Helps us get a better attitude, although music has got its work cut out for it with me. With cell phones and speakers in cars and homes and stores and gas pumps and elevators it is everywhere. But not at the meditation retreat. Music transports the listener to a better place, lifts you up closer to a higher plane. But at Buddhist camp you must “be here now!” I have read that people love most the music they heard in the year before reaching 30 years of age and not so much after that. I don’t think so. I think a melody becomes a beloved from an experience. Maybe an emotional moment, or celebration. Maybe with friends singing. Or a favorite song and dance show or movie. Or sung in choir or at a time of joy or triumph or even sorrow.

Well when I was no longer “being here now”, leaving a half day short of the week, I admit I felt a renewal, a purging of emotions, a quiet soul afloat on calm waters. I drove off seeking the nearest McD’s for a diet cola and large fries. I clicked on the closest public radio station. I was hungry for trash food but more hungry for some good music. The sound of a celestial Mozart horn concerto filled up my whole self. It was the larghetto romance from the Horn Concerto No. 3 in E flat, K.447. From those little auto speakers it seemed astounding and a sound of extraordinary beauty. Like Pythagoras, I felt it was music that moves the stars and sounds the rhythm of the universe.

I now have every recorded performance I could find on Spotify in my playlist. And every time I hear those slow and sweet and simply glorious French horns the music sweeps me off to nirvana.

Parity for Clams (Pt. 3 of saving clams)

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I read good article in Aeon that has another discussion of the matter of approaching our treatment of animals with respect to the Kantian vs the Consequentialism approach. (refer to my previous entries on the dignity of mollusks)  Peter Godfrey-Smith, in “Philosophers and Other Animals” (https://aeon.co/essays/why-korsgaards-kantian-argument-about-animals-doesnt-work) comments and critiques the approach of Christine Korsgaard in her book Fellow Creatures.  (I have not read that one, but he writes that Korsgaard extends the Kantian approach from a universal principle among persons (what others would do in similar circumstances) to a more nuanced approach.  Korsgaard thinks there is no inherent values, but values derive from valuers. We must respect what others value and that leads us to form moral judgments that are respectful of others—and the “others” include animals.  Obviously, sentient creatures value life and avoiding not just pain but avoiding death.

Peter Godfrey-Smith doubts that all of us will respect the values of others.  He thinks the approach of expecting each person to suss out the valuing process is questionable. 

I am not really sure about this.  First of all, I don’t see how the different the Korsgaard approach is from Peter Singer’s approach of respecting the preferences of others including the preferences of animals.  But I think that this article helps to clarify the idea of “parity and consistency, as well as empathy, reverence and more” that Godfrey-Smith writes about in his approach to the veggie question.  If we make a moral judgment about one thing, it should apply to a similar situation, that would be parity.  And the simple notion of applying empathy to animals and respecting their values, or preferences, should be an important component of our moral decision making.  As Adriel says, “I just want to live in peace with my fellow creatures on this earth.”