Protestors all over the country are demanding greater accountability from the small percentage of Americans who control the vast majority of its wealth. It is only the latest installment in the debate which has gone on since the beginning of human social life.
In a group of social animals, leaders emerge based of clear-cut abilities that give them dominance over the lesser members of their band. As humans evolved, their brains not only gave them more tools with which to manipulate their environment and each other but also superstition and flawed logic with which to create belief systems that would perpetuate the dominance of certain humans and their descendants regardless of the actual abilities of specific individuals.
Dreamers who believe in the unstoppable power of hard work and initiative, and the self-correcting nature of a completely free market are confident that the concentration of wealth is not a bad thing at all, and that it simply gives all the hard-working strivers a goal toward which to work. Taxation is not the way to break up this clot of wealth. They haven't said exactly how the free market will provide the leverage. They're simply confident that the government should not be used as part of the solution.
Compare that point of view for a moment to the pot-smoking teenager who does not want his parents to come into his room. Of course he doesn't want adults coming in telling him he can't indulge himself as he wishes. He may even be making money on a little commerce in his chosen field. If you object to the example of an illegal drug and illicit commerce, substitute chronic masturbation and a stack of Playboy magazines. As distasteful as that habit may be to contemplate, it's still legal as far as I know. And it creates jobs, as our little wanker buys publications to stimulate his imagination and suitable lubricants to ease friction. It shares another characteristic with immense wealth, being that it is done exclusively for the gratification of the one at the expense of whatever else has to be neglected during the pursuit of it.
Like any metaphor, it can be beaten to death. Flogged too hard, as it were.
Most shorthand economic arguments being tossed around today are based on incorrect assumptions, like the notion that rich people are the only job creators. Anyone who buys goods or services is creating demand. Demand creates jobs. Existing jobs need demand to keep them viable. I create jobs.You create jobs. We all create jobs. Hurricanes and earthquakes create jobs.
The margin of error in the debate grows even larger because we're looking only at dollar amounts. A million dollars today is less money than it was ten, twenty and thirty years ago. Who knows what it will be worth in ten more years. Money is just a number. A $100 bill and a $1 bill produce exactly the same amount of heat and light when you burn them. The difference to us is entirely the result of what we make them represent.
Numbers don't lie but people certainly use them as part of many falsehoods and misdirections. Because actual currency and verifiable value are only a small part of our financial world, clever fabricators have developed --derived, if you will -- numerical rat-mazes based on theoretical principles that sweep a few digits at a time into one person's column instead of someone else's. It's done in a room as sequestered from reality as our fantasizing teenager's bedroom, yet its consequences are vastly greater.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Mid Autumn
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
Power
Power doesn't necessarily corrupt but it tends to select for corruption.
As an evolutionary characteristic, power enhanced breeding success. Social customs developed from animal behaviors before the emergence of conscious thought. After the development of language, the power of bullshit could be added to physical qualities such as size and combat skill. Along with thought and reason comes misdirected thought and faulty reasoning. Along with the naturally-occurring errors these can generate, they provide leverage for manipulating people through mistaken perceptions.
Fair-mindedness would cause an ethical leader to step down over certain issues in which a corrupt leader would look for some way to excuse remaining in power. Because various margins for error coincide nicely to provide these justifications, the traditions of leadership tend to accumulate greater tolerance for corruption up to a certain point. Beyond that the dirt becomes obvious. This might not cause a leader to topple if the leader can command enough forces to stay on top of the heap, but it commits that leader to the role of despot rather than merely "flawed" or "controversial."
Uncorrupted leaders still manage to operate even now. Because they tend to limit themselves through their ethics they are still in the minority, where they can be expected to remain. The system as we accept it still favors people who grab for power and cling to it tenaciously. We even praise the qualities of energy and ambition as signs of the ever-valued work ethic almost regardless of the outcome.
Where a would-be leader of old might need to command fighting forces to bolster that ambition, now the seeker of power needs to command money or solicit donations of it. While this can be less destructive in the obvious sense of riding roughshod over the countryside pillaging, it raises corruption to new importance as the supplicant makes deals in return for financial support.
As an evolutionary characteristic, power enhanced breeding success. Social customs developed from animal behaviors before the emergence of conscious thought. After the development of language, the power of bullshit could be added to physical qualities such as size and combat skill. Along with thought and reason comes misdirected thought and faulty reasoning. Along with the naturally-occurring errors these can generate, they provide leverage for manipulating people through mistaken perceptions.
Fair-mindedness would cause an ethical leader to step down over certain issues in which a corrupt leader would look for some way to excuse remaining in power. Because various margins for error coincide nicely to provide these justifications, the traditions of leadership tend to accumulate greater tolerance for corruption up to a certain point. Beyond that the dirt becomes obvious. This might not cause a leader to topple if the leader can command enough forces to stay on top of the heap, but it commits that leader to the role of despot rather than merely "flawed" or "controversial."
Uncorrupted leaders still manage to operate even now. Because they tend to limit themselves through their ethics they are still in the minority, where they can be expected to remain. The system as we accept it still favors people who grab for power and cling to it tenaciously. We even praise the qualities of energy and ambition as signs of the ever-valued work ethic almost regardless of the outcome.
Where a would-be leader of old might need to command fighting forces to bolster that ambition, now the seeker of power needs to command money or solicit donations of it. While this can be less destructive in the obvious sense of riding roughshod over the countryside pillaging, it raises corruption to new importance as the supplicant makes deals in return for financial support.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
The Tenth Anniversary
Today America observes the tenth anniversary of the day that sudden death and the tangible possibility of spectacular murder-suicide entered our consciousness forever. With elaborate and beautiful ceremonies this country marks the event in all its pain and glory, all its loss and hope, all its death and rebirth. It's all about us. That was kind of the problem in the first place.
9-11-01 was a wasted teachable moment. If the president had come out of his trance in that school room and said something wise and insightful to a shocked nation instead of cheerleading for revenge in echo of popular sentiment the nation might actually have been united by the experience.
To be fair, for a few minutes that morning I myself wanted to nuke the troublesome areas of the world until they were a sheet of volcanic glass. I got caught up in the flood of nasty possibilities that a truly effective terrorist network could have prepared to unleash. Why should we have expected a mere human leader to transcend the human response to a serious threat?
The 9-11 attacks joined us to a world where tragic, nasty things happen more frequently, on a less cinematic scale. It was a time when we could have felt not only an insular connection to our fellow citizens but a wider connection to all people similarly wronged everywhere. It could have been a time to examine our human relationship to life and killing, not just a specific fight between certain adversaries. The stated motives for the attacks, and the willingness to die to commit them, highlight the philosophical difference between people who want to enjoy this life and those who only care to leave it in such a way that they earn some sort of cosmic reward that no one can prove exists. The believers believe with every fiber of their being. In a case like that some will say that how one lives matters much less than why one dies, and for whom.
Death surrounds life. We come from a place we can't remember. At some point, each and every one of us leaves for a place of similar mystery. Is there blackness, oblivion? Is there heaven and hell? Paradoxically, some of those who believe that the real action takes place in the eternal afterlife make all kinds of trouble during their brief mortal span over injustices that are guaranteed to be temporary, just as life itself is temporary. None of it really makes sense. It merely justifies the unfortunate human propensity to lash out angrily and hurt or kill someone. That anger may be a brief, passionate flash or a long, slow-burning smolder. Not everyone feels it to the same degree. But those who do feel it are capable of inflicting vast amounts of unnecessary suffering into a world already well supplied.
Terrorism wins the battle to take lives because taking lives is pathetically easy. There are too many ways to kill and walk away. That number goes up exponentially when the killer no longer wants to walk away safely. The only way to screen out most of those possibilities is to give up a lot of freedom where large numbers of people assemble. Who wouldn't submit to a little pat-down if in return for that you have some sense that a killer might be stopped? So the terrorists record a victory either way. They may not have changed our society as much as they hope to, ultimately, but they have certainly changed the way we live and think.
Certainly this incremental erosion of freedom starts a slippery slope. We do it because it's part of our strategy of resistance to our insidious attackers.
On September 11, 2001 a war began that can never end. When neither side will ever surrender, the result is an endless exchange of atrocities.
Make no mistake: the terrorists are wrong. Terrorism exploits dark peculiarities of the human psyche that find their expression in murder-suicide all the time. It feeds on some people's willingness to set deadly traps basically for the fun of it. It gives these creeping killers an ideology to exalt something they would probably do anyway. The terrorists should quit. But don't expect them to surrender. The delusion that propels them is too irrational to see any sense in getting along. Why bother to coexist when you can actually get someone to strap on a bomb and explode their own guts to score a blow against someone with whom you disagree? That power must be intoxicating to someone twisted enough to want to cause mass casualties in the first place.
No one was in the mood to hear that kind of truth after a spectacular defeat with a large loss of life. That doesn't mean it should not have been said. People say the attacks changed the world, but do they have any idea how much? In a way, not much at all. The tendency to do nasty things to each other over petty disagreements is a long-standing human tradition. In another way, it marked the end, forever, of America as we knew it and the hope of a peaceful world in which we enjoy and gain strength from our differences. After a few days at best of stunned unity, the attacks heightened our own disagreements in this country.
We unite again today to commemorate a horrific day that no one who witnessed will forget. The day was marked by courage and devastation that demonstrated the very best and worst about humanity. We won't know for a very long time which quality will prevail. We may simply continue to attack and defend, to wound and heal, to kill and bury and have sex and produce new life and to argue bitterly about what it all means without questioning the irrationality of reasons we state for it.
Life goes on, for now.
9-11-01 was a wasted teachable moment. If the president had come out of his trance in that school room and said something wise and insightful to a shocked nation instead of cheerleading for revenge in echo of popular sentiment the nation might actually have been united by the experience.
To be fair, for a few minutes that morning I myself wanted to nuke the troublesome areas of the world until they were a sheet of volcanic glass. I got caught up in the flood of nasty possibilities that a truly effective terrorist network could have prepared to unleash. Why should we have expected a mere human leader to transcend the human response to a serious threat?
The 9-11 attacks joined us to a world where tragic, nasty things happen more frequently, on a less cinematic scale. It was a time when we could have felt not only an insular connection to our fellow citizens but a wider connection to all people similarly wronged everywhere. It could have been a time to examine our human relationship to life and killing, not just a specific fight between certain adversaries. The stated motives for the attacks, and the willingness to die to commit them, highlight the philosophical difference between people who want to enjoy this life and those who only care to leave it in such a way that they earn some sort of cosmic reward that no one can prove exists. The believers believe with every fiber of their being. In a case like that some will say that how one lives matters much less than why one dies, and for whom.
Death surrounds life. We come from a place we can't remember. At some point, each and every one of us leaves for a place of similar mystery. Is there blackness, oblivion? Is there heaven and hell? Paradoxically, some of those who believe that the real action takes place in the eternal afterlife make all kinds of trouble during their brief mortal span over injustices that are guaranteed to be temporary, just as life itself is temporary. None of it really makes sense. It merely justifies the unfortunate human propensity to lash out angrily and hurt or kill someone. That anger may be a brief, passionate flash or a long, slow-burning smolder. Not everyone feels it to the same degree. But those who do feel it are capable of inflicting vast amounts of unnecessary suffering into a world already well supplied.
Terrorism wins the battle to take lives because taking lives is pathetically easy. There are too many ways to kill and walk away. That number goes up exponentially when the killer no longer wants to walk away safely. The only way to screen out most of those possibilities is to give up a lot of freedom where large numbers of people assemble. Who wouldn't submit to a little pat-down if in return for that you have some sense that a killer might be stopped? So the terrorists record a victory either way. They may not have changed our society as much as they hope to, ultimately, but they have certainly changed the way we live and think.
Certainly this incremental erosion of freedom starts a slippery slope. We do it because it's part of our strategy of resistance to our insidious attackers.
On September 11, 2001 a war began that can never end. When neither side will ever surrender, the result is an endless exchange of atrocities.
Make no mistake: the terrorists are wrong. Terrorism exploits dark peculiarities of the human psyche that find their expression in murder-suicide all the time. It feeds on some people's willingness to set deadly traps basically for the fun of it. It gives these creeping killers an ideology to exalt something they would probably do anyway. The terrorists should quit. But don't expect them to surrender. The delusion that propels them is too irrational to see any sense in getting along. Why bother to coexist when you can actually get someone to strap on a bomb and explode their own guts to score a blow against someone with whom you disagree? That power must be intoxicating to someone twisted enough to want to cause mass casualties in the first place.
No one was in the mood to hear that kind of truth after a spectacular defeat with a large loss of life. That doesn't mean it should not have been said. People say the attacks changed the world, but do they have any idea how much? In a way, not much at all. The tendency to do nasty things to each other over petty disagreements is a long-standing human tradition. In another way, it marked the end, forever, of America as we knew it and the hope of a peaceful world in which we enjoy and gain strength from our differences. After a few days at best of stunned unity, the attacks heightened our own disagreements in this country.
We unite again today to commemorate a horrific day that no one who witnessed will forget. The day was marked by courage and devastation that demonstrated the very best and worst about humanity. We won't know for a very long time which quality will prevail. We may simply continue to attack and defend, to wound and heal, to kill and bury and have sex and produce new life and to argue bitterly about what it all means without questioning the irrationality of reasons we state for it.
Life goes on, for now.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Too Big to Fail?
Extremely principled members of Congress are going to push the government past the deadline to raise the debt limit. That seems inevitable. Whether you agree with them or not, the Tea Party faction of the Republican majority is going to take us all along on their experiment in economics.
Some economists predict dire consequences. Others are less concerned. I've heard a lot more shooting around my rural neighborhood as the deadline approaches, so maybe the survivalist demographic thinks we'll face real social breakdown. Or maybe they finally saved up enough money to buy some ammo after a very quiet early summer.
Because the government's financial obligations won't disappear just because the Tea Party wishes it were so, expenses will rise, further straining the middle class. Because the middle class has been deemed unnecessary, this will be no loss. However, the bottom layer of the top class will start to crumble away as it takes more and more money to maintain a lifestyle that will have to include privately purchased replacements for many services government currently provides.
I'm not sure how much longer we could have afforded ourselves anyway. China is rising, but what will they stand above when civilization as we've come to know it is no longer affordable? We could have staved off a massive change in the not-too-distant future with some small changes back when a nerdy peanut farmer from Georgia suggested them in the late 1970s, but why dwell in the past? We are a nation that has been well served by charging obstinately forward for about three centuries. It's not like the whole thing will come crashing down immediately. Disruption creates opportunity. It doesn't guarantee that everyone will see an opportunity. Change is not always good, and certainly not always good for everyone.
We don't even know how much will change, how quickly.
We do know that there will not be another bailout. We're going to ride this one down to the ground for better or for worse. Happy landings!
Some economists predict dire consequences. Others are less concerned. I've heard a lot more shooting around my rural neighborhood as the deadline approaches, so maybe the survivalist demographic thinks we'll face real social breakdown. Or maybe they finally saved up enough money to buy some ammo after a very quiet early summer.
Because the government's financial obligations won't disappear just because the Tea Party wishes it were so, expenses will rise, further straining the middle class. Because the middle class has been deemed unnecessary, this will be no loss. However, the bottom layer of the top class will start to crumble away as it takes more and more money to maintain a lifestyle that will have to include privately purchased replacements for many services government currently provides.
I'm not sure how much longer we could have afforded ourselves anyway. China is rising, but what will they stand above when civilization as we've come to know it is no longer affordable? We could have staved off a massive change in the not-too-distant future with some small changes back when a nerdy peanut farmer from Georgia suggested them in the late 1970s, but why dwell in the past? We are a nation that has been well served by charging obstinately forward for about three centuries. It's not like the whole thing will come crashing down immediately. Disruption creates opportunity. It doesn't guarantee that everyone will see an opportunity. Change is not always good, and certainly not always good for everyone.
We don't even know how much will change, how quickly.
We do know that there will not be another bailout. We're going to ride this one down to the ground for better or for worse. Happy landings!
Monday, July 04, 2011
Periodic Fiddle Report
Beginning musicians go through two phases. In the first phase, you can't recognize what they're trying to play. In the second phase you can recognize it, but you wish you couldn't. Your mind supplies the rest of the phrase as the player still gropes to pull it out. It's like listening to someone with a stammer. As a player, it's like having a stammer. The thought is there, it just gets jammed up in processing.
Most music students get to the second phase. A certain number never get past it. In a way it never ends. As one fiddle player I know says, "you never get to the finish line in music." A musician pushing further will attempt more difficult music. It will come out mangled a few times before it comes out right.
For the most part, teachers and better players have been very encouraging. Once in a while, though, someone makes a remark that makes me wonder how well I might ever play.
The phrase, "as long as you're enjoying yourself" serves not only as permission to dabble in the province of real musicians, but also a hint that it's not only okay to sound tentative and incompetent, it may be all you can hope for. But "as long as you enjoy it" it's okay.
More ominously, at String Band one night, someone said something about playing a tune well and Seth said, "it's an accomplishment just to play it recognizably." All I could think of was identifying a mangled accident victim from a tiny scrap of visible tattoo or dental records. Wow. Is that all there is?
The leader of the adult classical ensemble I play with said something similar that sounded kind of like, "learn to enjoy being mediocre." She wants us to try our hardest and not to run ourselves down for our musical disabilities, but then the veil seems to slip and we see the inscription on the wall behind it: "Don't kid yourselves."
In the past couple of years I have focused on practicing frequently and well. Last fall I started attending a weekly session run by a local musician and teacher who specializes in folk music.
The term folk music conjures up images of the commercial product in the 1960s, but it really encompasses the indigenous music of the people wherever "folk" gather. Instruments range from recognizable implements one could buy or rent from a music store to weird objects pieced together in places remote from formal music education. It can also include formalized traditions quite different from the music most familiar to people living in Europe and countries derived primarily from European culture.
Most of what we play on Thursday nights in String Band comes from old-time and Celtic genres.
Folk music was the popular music before commercial pop music became widespread in the second half of the 20th Century. Modern popular music owes a lot to various tributary streams from all over the world, mixed together and fed into a microphone during the rise of radio. Because of this, a little or a lot of any given folk tune might have a familiar ring to it. Also, since much of folk music is meant to be dance music, it has the same earworm potential as many modern popular tunes. Like it or not, the pattern digs into part of your brain and won't leave. It may subside, but it is seldom eradicated.
If I like a tune it takes root more quickly in my brain. Unfortunately, all these tunes get into my mind far sooner than they get into my fingers. I can't play a single one as fast as I can hear it in my mind.
On the classical training side, the music is more complex. I find it more difficult to pull off the page than the simple patterns of the fiddle tunes. I could probably turn into a reasonably competent hack fiddler. Becoming a violinist is a lot harder. The two tracks appear to support each other. Fiddle playing, as long as I maintain posture and technique, provides a lot of mechanical practice. The reward is a tune. On the other side, reading more complicated pieces off the page reinforces technique and pattern recognition.
Music is a vast universe. Many modern musicians combine formal training in the classical tradition with explorations in the genres that transmit knowledge with no written notation or with specialized notation developed within a musical subculture. This approach, that blurs boundaries, makes it all accessible. That would seem good. However, some adherents to specific traditions will say that the global musician who drops in, soaks up a few things and moves on, doesn't get the full cultural basis and significance the tradition represents.
I don't know enough to pick a side. Exploratory musicians generally seem like pretty cool people, and I'm all about sharing culture and fun, so I'll try whatever comes my way. It might even come out recognizably.
Most music students get to the second phase. A certain number never get past it. In a way it never ends. As one fiddle player I know says, "you never get to the finish line in music." A musician pushing further will attempt more difficult music. It will come out mangled a few times before it comes out right.
For the most part, teachers and better players have been very encouraging. Once in a while, though, someone makes a remark that makes me wonder how well I might ever play.
The phrase, "as long as you're enjoying yourself" serves not only as permission to dabble in the province of real musicians, but also a hint that it's not only okay to sound tentative and incompetent, it may be all you can hope for. But "as long as you enjoy it" it's okay.
More ominously, at String Band one night, someone said something about playing a tune well and Seth said, "it's an accomplishment just to play it recognizably." All I could think of was identifying a mangled accident victim from a tiny scrap of visible tattoo or dental records. Wow. Is that all there is?
The leader of the adult classical ensemble I play with said something similar that sounded kind of like, "learn to enjoy being mediocre." She wants us to try our hardest and not to run ourselves down for our musical disabilities, but then the veil seems to slip and we see the inscription on the wall behind it: "Don't kid yourselves."
In the past couple of years I have focused on practicing frequently and well. Last fall I started attending a weekly session run by a local musician and teacher who specializes in folk music.
The term folk music conjures up images of the commercial product in the 1960s, but it really encompasses the indigenous music of the people wherever "folk" gather. Instruments range from recognizable implements one could buy or rent from a music store to weird objects pieced together in places remote from formal music education. It can also include formalized traditions quite different from the music most familiar to people living in Europe and countries derived primarily from European culture.
Most of what we play on Thursday nights in String Band comes from old-time and Celtic genres.
Folk music was the popular music before commercial pop music became widespread in the second half of the 20th Century. Modern popular music owes a lot to various tributary streams from all over the world, mixed together and fed into a microphone during the rise of radio. Because of this, a little or a lot of any given folk tune might have a familiar ring to it. Also, since much of folk music is meant to be dance music, it has the same earworm potential as many modern popular tunes. Like it or not, the pattern digs into part of your brain and won't leave. It may subside, but it is seldom eradicated.
If I like a tune it takes root more quickly in my brain. Unfortunately, all these tunes get into my mind far sooner than they get into my fingers. I can't play a single one as fast as I can hear it in my mind.
On the classical training side, the music is more complex. I find it more difficult to pull off the page than the simple patterns of the fiddle tunes. I could probably turn into a reasonably competent hack fiddler. Becoming a violinist is a lot harder. The two tracks appear to support each other. Fiddle playing, as long as I maintain posture and technique, provides a lot of mechanical practice. The reward is a tune. On the other side, reading more complicated pieces off the page reinforces technique and pattern recognition.
Music is a vast universe. Many modern musicians combine formal training in the classical tradition with explorations in the genres that transmit knowledge with no written notation or with specialized notation developed within a musical subculture. This approach, that blurs boundaries, makes it all accessible. That would seem good. However, some adherents to specific traditions will say that the global musician who drops in, soaks up a few things and moves on, doesn't get the full cultural basis and significance the tradition represents.
I don't know enough to pick a side. Exploratory musicians generally seem like pretty cool people, and I'm all about sharing culture and fun, so I'll try whatever comes my way. It might even come out recognizably.
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