Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Over the past couple weeks, politics has come up twice in conversations with folks. This isn’t surprising with the Iowa caucus happening tomorrow and the primary process in full swing. But it is interesting that politics is starting to seep back into the national awareness and into my personal awareness.

I burnt myself out on politics in 2004. I wrote extensively about that election campaign on this blog, from the Dean campaign, to different candidate possibilities, to analyzing the framing of ads and debates. I even went to Ohio for the election itself to knock on doors and get the vote out. Afterwards, I felt I had done everything I possibly could - I had volunteered in the critical battleground state, I had spent several days helping out with the political machine, and all of my efforts had been for naught as Bush had still been elected.

I pretty much gave up on our political process at that point. I’ve only written a couple posts in my politics category since 2005, and the posts that I’ve done are more about meta-politics and thinking about ways to change the system rather than work within the system. I believe that our system of universal suffrage may be broken given that, as Mancur Olson put it, “The effort to inform ourselves and participate in the debate is much more costly to us individually than the benefit that would come to us individually from our efforts to reduce the distortion. Thus, it is rational for us to remain ignorant. At the same time, the narrow interests who reap the benefit of all of our individual contributions (through taxes, higher prices, or whatever the particular policy distortion produces) will always have high-powered incentives to organize and importune the government, ignoring the damages to broader society.” (see this post for earlier thoughts)

At the same time, Churchill’s quip of “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” is apropos. Democracy has been one of the great civilizing influences of the past few centuries and continues to be a beacon of hope around the world in developing countries. Giving the people of a country a way to “throw the bums out” in a peaceful fashion is critical to a country’s stability and prosperity. I just wish voters had better reasons for their vote than “I’m unhappy” or “I’m worried about my job”.

I do think that this primary season will be interesting for the first time in a while - the different candidates provide a wide variety of options, and none of the candidates are a slam dunk, so the electorate choice will tell us something about the criteria being used by the American electorate. On the Democratic side, Hillary seems the most competent but lacks the personal skills, Obama is inexperienced but positioned himself as the candidate of hope, and Edwards is the candidate of economic uneasiness with his “Two Americas” platform. On the Republican side, Giuliani has the experience of being “America’s Mayor” but lacks on the conservative platform, McCain is almost too principled to be palatable to the right-wing nuts, Romney has business experience but has been labelled a flip-flopper, Huckabee is appealing to the religious right but scares everybody else.

I’m still not quite ready to get back into paying attention to politics. I read the Economist, but I’m not going to go to DailyKos or any of the bazillion other political sites. Rather than trying to make the best possible informed choice that I can, I’m going to wing it like the vast majority of Americans because other things are more important to me. I’ll concentrate on “acting locally” by trying to improve the lives of those in my communities and leave the politics and the lobbying to others. It’s not very civic-minded of me, but I’ve got other stuff going on, and 2004 showed me that caring and investing the time doesn’t really make a difference. Maybe I should be more optimistic and more resilient, but I’d prefer to invest my time in areas where my efforts are more likely to matter.

I’ve mostly been able to ignore the subprime mortgage mess. I don’t work in finance (although several of my classmates at Columbia are walking on eggshells), and my investments are mostly long term so the volatility in the markets doesn’t really concern me. But then I read the following paragraph in The Economist:

The boldest suggestion has come from Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a guarantor and supervisor. The crisis is so grave, she argues, that most borrowers who are facing resets but still paying their dues should be given the chance by servicers to switch into fixed-rate loans at the starter rate for the full 30 years.

I’ve since seen other articles indicating that the government is seriously considering plans to freeze these loans at the introductory rate for at least five years. And I’m furious.

When I bought my condo, I looked into adjustable-rate mortgages. They started off at a lower interest rate than a fixed rate, but then would be released to the market rate after the introductory period. I did my research (i.e. I asked my parents) and determined that interest rates were as low as they’d been for decades, so the market rate would almost certainly be higher after the introductory period. With that in mind, I went with the fixed-rate mortgage, despite the initially higher interest rate.

And now I’m being penalized for being fiscally prudent. If they freeze the loans at the introductory rates, then people who made bad decisions are being rewarded by getting to keep their low interest rates, while people like me who made good decisions are penalized with higher interest rates than we otherwise would have had. That doesn’t feel right.

At the same time, I understand the social issues at play here. Having to foreclose on people’s homes doesn’t help anybody - the bank is left with an asset it can’t sell to cover the loan because the housing market has been weakened, and the people lose their home. The government is intervening because the economy is being damaged by the housing market decline. I get all that. But I still can’t get over my initial angry reaction.

Where does social responsibility end and personal responsibility begin? I believe that we should have a social safety net, but I also believe there has to be consequences to actions or the same mistakes will continue to be made. I don’t understand the people who said they didn’t understand what they were getting into and they were misled by evil mean brokers who said they could afford these big loans. Regardless of what they were told, they were the ones signing a contract, and they were the ones responsible for fulfilling the terms of that contract. If they got suckered by a seller in a flea market, we would have no sympathy for them, but because it’s their house, they expect to be bailed out.

There’s been an infantilization of society where people expect that they can make stupid decisions and somebody else will have to deal with the consequences. This has been happening because it removes responsibility from people, and also because institutions benefit by exerting more control over people’s lives (the MIT Freshmen on Campus decision comes to mind). But being an adult and a citizen means taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. It means admitting mistakes and trying to fix those mistakes.

I wonder what can be done to instill that attitude in our citizens moving forward, and how to remove the temptation from institutions to increase their control. That would be the socially responsible initiative, encouraging people to learn from their mistakes rather than seeking to shield them from the consequences of those mistakes.

I saw the movie Sweet Home Alabama yesterday. It was decently entertaining, but later in the evening, I started thinking about the cultural memes that it is propagating, possibly because I have been reading too many of Jessie’s posts. The rest of this post will involve spoilers so if you have not seen the movie and plan to, you have been warned.

Quick plot summary: We first meet Reese Witherspoon as a successful fashion designer in New York City, getting engaged to the New York City Secretary of Housing, who is also the mayor’s son. She tells him she wants to tell her estranged parents about the engagement personally, so she flies back to rural Alabama. There we meet her childhood friends, including her high school sweetheart and husband, from whom she was never officially divorced. Wackiness ensues. By the end of the movie, she chooses her high school sweetheart over the overly coiffed New York paramour.

It’s a bit preposterous on my part to think of such an inconsequential movie as having an agenda, but I thought it was interesting that the film centers on the rejection of New York culture in favor of a simpler, more friendly, family-oriented Southern culture. The New York mayor is portrayed as manipulative and cold, always calculating the political consequences of an action. The Alabama friends are portrayed as living in the moment, having a good time down at the bar each evening. At the climax of the film, where Reese breaks off the engagement at the wedding, the mayor tries to stop her, saying that no poor white trash can do that to her son’s political ambitions, and starts excoriating Reese’s mother. Reese punches the mayor, saying “Nobody talks to my mama like that!” as the crowd cheers this victory over the Yankees.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a snooty New Yorker now, but this portrayal really bothers me. New York seems to represent a lot of what is great about this country. It is a true melting pot, with people of all nationalities mixing together; it’s almost more common than not to hear languages other than English being spoken. It is a land of opportunity, where people move every year in search of their chance to make the big time, whether in finance or media or theater or whatever. Everybody here is ambitious, aspiring to something great. Yes, New York can be harsh, but as the lyrics state, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”.

Meanwhile, the stereotypical Southern culture as portrayed in the movie is far more static. Her childhood friends are all still mostly the same, living in the same town, doing similar things. Reese’s father is a Civil War re-enactor, still fighting for the Confederacy. Nothing had changed in the seven years since she had been home. At one level, it’s very comforting; “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”. However, I could also call it stagnant. It promotes a conservative worldview where we can aspire to nothing more than what we already have. In fact, anybody that does aspire to anything more should be thought of as crazy because such ambition implies that the status quo is not the best of all possible worlds. Such ambition disrupts the comfortable community, and thus the agent of change must be treated as an outcast.

At the end, the film tries to have it both ways, by having the high school sweetheart create a business that he can then move to New York and join Reese, holding true to their past but moving forward together into the future. But I find it interesting that they were unable to carry out their dreams in their hometown. They had to move someplace new, using a new context to create a new identity, as Reese did in her initial move to New York, and as she got her husband to do later in the movie. Even in a movie where New York is portrayed as a shallow glitzy sort of place, it is still an environment of change.

And change is good. Change allows for the possibility of improvements. It can mean progress. Change is also scary and terrifying because it brings the unknown, but that can be good as well. I think we should celebrate agents of change like New York; if it weren’t for people like ambitious New Yorkers striving to make their mark on the world, we would not have made nearly the amount of progress that we have.

I find it interesting that the rest of the country despises liberal bastions like San Francisco and New York, and yet celebrates American ideals like innovation and competition, which are best exemplified by those bastions. Conservatives tend to despise the Old World of Europe for holding on to the past, and yet idealize small-town culture (or the stereotypical Southern culture portrayed in Sweet Home Alabama) which is stagnant and unchanging.

It’s interesting how I ended up with a political rant from an attempted movie deconstruction. Cultural memes are transmitted through movies, which influence people’s worldviews by reinforcing certain attitudes and deprecating others, and those worldviews influence how people end up voting. Frames trump facts. It’s also interesting how I’ve become such an intellectual leftist relativist postmodern freak, for having once had such an objective hard-science viewpoint. But that’s another story and another post.

Responding to my End Times theory, Brian commented “Can we show that one reality is better than another? I hope so!”

I’ve been struggling on and off with this question of what makes one reality “better” than another for at least six years. In that rant (itself a follow-up to these thoughts on morality), I was struggling with whether being tolerant of other belief systems implied that I had to be tolerant of intolerant people. I said no at the time, and still believe that. But it’s essentially the same comparison of realities; in my reality, tolerance is a good thing, and in others, it isn’t, so who’s right? Which one is better?

Beemer’s comment in that six-year-old post was that “you’d be able to tell that Good was Good because Evil eventually annihilates itself when correctly applied.” Interestingly, I think this ties into the End Times discussion. In particular, I feel like Jofish’s comment about the tunnel vision of the End Times scenarios is key here. Intolerant, monocultural realities ignore other factors, which makes them susceptible to being overthrown or made irrelevant by outside influences.

Coincidentally, I recently started reading Seeing like a State. The author, James C. Scott, discusses why state-managed plans are doomed to failure if they do not take into account local customs. He makes the argument that the state, in its attempt to make its subjects “legible”, creates a simplified map of the world that only includes things that the state finds relevant (e.g. one’s income and deductions to the IRS). However, the power of the state leads to a peculiar inversion whereby the state attempts to impose its simplified map as reality onto its subjects. These attempts reliably fail because they do not take into account the true complexity and context of the “real”, localized world. The first chapter, available online, is a good overview of the concept as applied to “scientific forestry”.

Tying that back into the discussion of what makes one reality “better” than another, I wonder if realities that believe they are the whole truth, that think they explain everything, are equivalent to the state-based master plans in Seeing like a State. They are not necessarily “evil” as I originally posited, but by failing to take into account the true complexity of the world, they are thoroughly incomplete; they are like maps missing key aspects of the world. They will eventually be overthrown or made irrelevant (like the state-based plans) when they are brought into contact friction with the real world. At the risk of being political, the example Brian suggests is the neo-conservative “reality” that the Iraqis would welcome the U.S. Army with flowers and cheers colliding with the local reality of armed resistance.

So what makes one reality “better” than another? Realities that accept the fact that there are other realities are “better” because they recognize that they are merely tools. They are maps, necessarily simplified, because a map that is the same as reality is useless. They will cover some things, and not cover other things. Trying to force all realities to fit the map only leads to pain and suffering, as Seeing like a State documents.

Which brings me back to that several-year-old post I did on morality, where I ended up saying that “Other people do not have the right to tell me how to behave morally; conversely, I do not have the right to tell them either. ” They can’t impose their reality on me; I can’t impose my reality on them. Realities that seek to impose themselves are inherently unstable because they do not take into account local customs (other realities), and will eventually fall apart under that friction.

I don’t know. It’s a theory.

P.S. I just realized this can all be re-stated in terms of finite and infinite games. Realities that believe they are the One True Reality are a finite game, with fixed rules. Realities that accept other realities are infinite games, open to changing the rules. I think Carse said at his talk that the only evil he recognized was when a finite game attempted to subsume an infinite game, i.e. when one reality attempts to impose its viewpoint on all others. Interesting, but probably not surprising, that all of my influences say the same thing in different ways.

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Coincidentally: This also ties back into the conversation I had with Brian, because we had talked about how certain things did not come to our attention until we were ready to recognize them. In this case, I first read about this book on Phil Agre’s red-rock-eater list (probably in this post where he reviews it), thought it sounded cool, bought it, but never even opened it. It sat on my bookshelf for years. This December, before my DC trip, I was out of books and my new Amazon order had not come in yet, so I flipped through the unread books on my shelf, and this one jumped out at me. Check out the back cover blurb:

“Why have large-scale schemes to improve the human condition in the twentieth century so often gone awry? James C. Scott analyzes diverse failures in high-modernist, authoritarian state planning … and uncovers conditions common to all such planning disasters. What these failures teach us, he argues, is that any centrally managed social plan must recognize the importance of local customs and practical knowledge if it hopes to succeed.” (emphasis added)

Wow. It ties perfectly into my thoughts about conflicting realities (the state’s reality vs. the local customs), about the importance of adapting the general to the specific, my thoughts on balancing control and autonomy in management, etc. And yet it’s been sitting on my bookshelf for years for me to start thinking about these issues. Is this coincidence? Fate? It’s hard to say, but it’s certainly a bit weird.

I received an action alert from MoveOn today about fighting the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:

Right now we urgently need more information, and we need your help to get it. In the next few hours the Internet will fill with facts, anecdotes and rumors about Harriet Miers. We need your help to sort through it all, select the relevant and important details, and let us know what you find—decentralized, grassroots research.

Does anybody else find this incredibly disturbing? MoveOn is mobilizing its membership to dig up dirt on a woman for political reasons. Who needs a government-created Big Brother when we’re willing to do the job ourselves? It almost reminds me of the snitches paid by the Communist Party to rat out their friends and neighbors.

Supporters of MoveOn will undoubtedly say that the right-wing conservative movement would do the same thing (and did do the same thing to the Clintons). But I’d like to think that fighting a war using their tactics just brings us down to their level.

I still haven’t found a concise way of expressing this idea, which is unfortunate because it comes up quite often, but it’s something like “Inverting a set of ideas only reinforces them.” It’s something like what Lakoff gets at with frames, that if you let the other side set the terms of engagement, you’ve already lost. It also relates to the idea of finite vs. infinite games; when we engage on their terms, we’re playing a zero-sum finite game, rather than changing the game to a set of rules where we move beyond the game.

But regardless, the MoveOn action alert to turn its membership into Big Brother creeps me the heck out.

As the second hurricane in a month is building up power over the overheated Gulf of Mexico, this is my projection as to what President Bush may be thinking:

Well, the problem is that the water in the Gulf is too warm. Too warm. Too warm. Hrm. How do we cool water that is too warm? We use ice cubes! We need to put ice into the Gulf to cool it down so that there will be no more hurricanes and I stop getting bad press!

Ice. Huh. Where can I get ice? Wasn’t I talking about ice recently with Karl? Oh yeah, we were talking about that place in Alaska with the oil, what’s it called, the, um, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? There’s ice there - I remember my oil buddies complaining about how hard it would be to get to the oil with the ice in the way.

Wait a second! I have it! If I take the ice from the refuge, and use it to cool the Gulf waters, I’ll help my oil buddies AND look good to the voters! I’m a genius!!

If this is one of those times when my cynicism gets matched by reality, I’ll definitely weep for America.

[Oops, wrote this over the weekend and meant to post it last night, but forgot, so I’m doing it now]

Brad wrote a post two months ago about free speech and free will. And I liked it a lot. I even commented on it. But I wanted to write it up in my own blog at some point and extend his analysis. But I kept getting distracted by other things. Unfortunately, my thoughts appear to be relevant again, so I’m going to finally write it up.

Basically, Brad’s observation was that speech had two components, an informational component and an emotional component. Informational speech benefits from free and open debate, where ideas can be examined and selected in a Darwinian process, with the best ideas becoming widespread. The scientific community is a relatively good example of this, ignoring personal biases and paradigm shifts.

However, Brad goes on to observe that emotional speech displays a different sort of filter, where the speech that rises to the top and becomes the most widespread is the speech that is the most appealing to crude primitive emotions, because those are the most powerful emotions. Fear was the example he used, fear of terrorism, of losing one’s job, etc.

My comment at the time was that emotional speech works best when it is extreme. It’s hard to get people’s emotions riled up with “We need to compromise”. You need slogans like “No blood for oil!” or “Give me liberty or give me death!”. And that therefore emotional speech was extremely dangerous to civil society, because society and living together is all about compromises.

After thinking about it some more, I’ve realized that emotional speech may contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction. In particular, emotion is exhausting. We can only respond emotionally so many times before we start tuning something out. It’s like the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. He yells “Danger! Danger!” once, and everybody rushes to the rescue. He does it again, and they respond more slowly. Eventually, no one responds at all.

I noticed this because I’m on several liberal activist mailing lists at this point, left over from my excursion to Ohio last fall. And they all use emotional speech. The particular John Kerry email that sparked this line of thought was entitled “Democracy at Risk”. And I responded to it with “Um, yeah, whatever”, because I’d been getting far too many of these emails, and I just couldn’t summon the moral outrage any more. I just couldn’t. My capacity for responding to emotional speech had been exhausted.

It came up again last week with the Supreme Court nomination of Roberts. MoveOn immediately started bombarding its members with messages; I got several emails and even a phone call with a recorded message saying that Roberts was basically a Nazi who would abolish abortion, destroy the rain forests and sell out to the corporations. And it was so hyperbolic that it was completely unconvincing to me. Fortunately, it seems like this immediate appeal to emotion has now died down. That first day after the nomination of Roberts, I was worried that the Democrats were going to fight his nomination tooth and nail in an all-out scorched-earth battle, and then they and their supporters would have nothing left when Bush nominated a completely insane arch-conservative for Chief Justice. It’s a matter of marshalling one’s resources, and picking one’s battles, because emotional speech is exhausting, and people can only stay outraged for so long (although, come to think of it, that’s not entirely true - there are some people I know who live in a perpetual state of outrage, but I’m hoping they’re the exception rather than the rule).

So I think that emotional speech is highly effective, and is dangerous because its effectiveness discourages compromise. But I think that it is also self-limiting, because it does not retain its effectiveness when used continually - eventually the townspeople stop coming when you cry “Wolf”.

Come to think of it, there are cases where emotional speech exhaustion does not come into play. When defending one’s home, or one’s life, one can stay in a state of high emotion indefinitely. And I think that’s what we are seeing in American politics at this time. The fundamentalist conservatives truly believe that their entire way of life is under attack, and that giving any ground would be tantamount to dying. The fear of death is enough to sustain emotion indefinitely, I suspect. And this may be the difference between the two sides at this moment. The conservatives are fighting an emotional battle for their way of life. The liberals are fighting a reasoned battle for abstract concepts such as equality and liberty. And because of that dichotomy, and because of the effectiveness of emotional speech, the conservatives are currently winning.

One other random thought before I end this entry. I think there is one more component to speech that Brad didn’t mention, and that’s the framing component. The frame, as described by Lakoff sets the stage for how the rest of the message will be processed. In fact, the frame determines whether the message contains informational or emotional content. It is precisely because of the power of emotional speech that framing has become so important; if the frame is effective, the speech engages our emotions and our outrage. If the frame is ineffective, the speech tends to be informational and thus requires a lot more effort to inspire action.

I’m not quite sure how all of these ideas tie together as of yet. But I thought I’d throw them out there, because I’ve been mulling them over for a while without making any further progress on them. Let me know what you think.

Picking up on yesterday’s anarchy post, I was thinking about what it takes for anarchy (or even capitalism) to work as a society. I was talking with some other friends last week about the concept of enlightened selfishness, and I think that is one of the keys. What do I mean by enlightened selfishness? It’s the idea that being selfish may actually require going against my short-term interests for the sake of the long term, going against what’s best for me individually by doing what’s best for the community. It’s understanding that while I may profit individually, my actions have consequences and ramifications that will later haunt me.

This is somewhat related to my post last month about why crime sucks. In that post, I tried to make the point that while crime may benefit the criminal, it damages the fabric of society, a society that is built on trust. Dave pointed out in the comments that we may have to accept some level of crime to have the kind of society that we desire.

In my personal ideal world, anarchy would work, because people would be willing to sacrifice some fraction of their personal gain for the sake of community goals. It’d be some weird combination of Randian objectivism and free-form anarchy. People would do stuff because it needed doing, and because they would be rewarded by the community for doing it. I’ve always thought that TEP was essentially an anarchy when I lived there. We had house elections, but most of the time there was only one candidate, and stuff got done because somebody stepped up and took responsibility for it. And it worked. But only because we all lived together, and the social group was small enough that social censure meant something.

Do I think anarchy can work in the real world? No, not really. Too many people are dependent on being told what to do, and don’t really want to think for themselves. They don’t think through the long-term consequences of their actions (the amount of personal credit card debt sustained by people always staggers me). Plus, groups past a certain size lose the social cohesion necessary for our monkey minds to operate. There may be some cleverness we can play where we use “Fakesters” to stand in for real people, as I posit at the end of this post, but I haven’t figured out how to make that work yet (although thinking about it briefly, I wonder if that’s how the various successful tech companies work, using the cult of Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos, creating a personal bond between the worker and the company via the idea of a personal bond with the head. Interesting…)

I’m not really sure what my point is. I think I just really like the concept of enlightened selfishness. I may even use it as an organizing principle in my life. I mean, I already subscribe to it to some extent. I donate money to causes I support, whether the ACLU or Questionable Content. I could be a free-loader, taking advantage of the fact that others will cover costs, but I like what they do, and want them to stay around, and am willing to sacrifice some of my personal gain for that cause. I always buy CDs and shirts of bands I like at their shows, because that money goes straight to the band. I pay my taxes, and don’t try to cut any corners even though I’m sure I’m missing all sorts of deductions I could be taking. I often sit in traffic when I see a merge coming, when I could speed by all the stopped cars and then swerve in at the last second, because I know that such behavior makes everybody’s commute worse.

It’s an interesting idea. I may have to think more carefully about other ways in which it could be applied.

Updated a few minutes later: By the way, I’m well aware that I could and should be doing a lot more to benefit society. I feel like I do the bare minimum necessary as a responsible member of society. But I have to start someplace. And I still feel like I do more than many people out there, even if I rate rather poorly among my friends. That’s just my perception, though.

A friend of mine pointed me at this email, where a reader of Gizmodo criticizes them for having the temerity to insult the Queen of England. In particular, he says:

Some institutions in the world, like the church, must stay intact or it causes a breakdown in civilization. There must be a counterbalance that allows some sort of order; if not you get chaos and anarchy. With this comes another “dark ages”.

This got me thinking. Why is it that so many people treat the concept of anarchy as an undeniable evil? As if there could be no discussion that anarchy is an unmitigated bad. Perhaps it is because such people can not conceive of a society where they are not told what to do, operating at level four of Kohlberg’s moral order. They can only conceive of a society where morality operates via laws, as opposed to the higher Kohlberg levels where universal moral principles supercede laws. So they equate anarchy with evil because no laws means no morals.

My friend pointed out another interesting correlation, that the emailer in question linked anarchy and chaos to the dark ages. Ironically, the dark ages were close to the exact opposite of anarchy and chaos. Not that my friend and I are medieval history experts or anything, but based on our understanding, the dark ages were characterized by a total domination of thought and ideas by the church, and by the rigidly strict social order of feudalism. If anything, the dark ages were characterized by total order and structure, not anarchy and chaos. It was only when mercantilism broke the back of feudalism and the entire social order was overthrown that we came out of stasis and started advancing again.

I think I could make a decent case that the Dark Ages were dark precisely because they were too ordered. There was no place for creativity to thrive, because creativity is always about changing the current order. Creativity thrives in the interstices, in the borders between different systems. A diverse environment, where no one influence dominates, may appear to be chaotic and anarchic, but it’s also where different influences can combine with each other and evolve via some form of natural selection.

So, in some sense, a state of anarchy, a free-for-all where everything is up for grabs, is essential to progress. Order is the enemy of creativity. Order promotes stagnation, anarchy promotes progress. Not that order is an unmitigated evil either. Both order and anarchy have their place. To use Pirsig’s vocabulary, Dynamic Quality (aka anarchy) is how we advance, and Static Quality (aka order) is what ratchets things into place to keep us from backsliding. Once a new influence has been hatched in the nursery of anarchy, and demonstrated its superiority to other ideas, it can be absorbed into the collective order.

Okay, I think I’ve mixed enough metaphors for the evening. Time to call it a night.

P.S. To be fair, I’m biased in that I’ve had a longtime interest in anarchy, and treat it as a state to which to aspire, rather than a situation to be feared; hence my strong reaction to the comment I linked to.

P.P.S. I heard recently that they’re turning V for Vendetta, a graphic novel that is one of my favorite depictions of anarchy, into a movie. I was initially horrified because I didn’t see how they could do it justice, but after checking out IMDB, and finding out that the Wachowski brothers (the Matrix dudes) are producing, and Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving are starring, I’m actually kind of excited. It could be really interesting.

This is the next post in the Latour series so feel free to skip it if you found the other posts boring.

I’d actually started writing this post several weeks ago, when I noticed that while I was reading Latour, certain points resonated very strongly with me, and others I was just kind of skimming over, waiting to get to the “good stuff”. And I noticed that what I meant by “good stuff” was stuff that supported the theories that I already believed. I was essentially only absorbing information that matched what I already thought. Using Latour’s terms, I was essentially skipping his “Constitution” of due process, and only accepting external inputs that matched my pre-existing mental hierarchy. No outside voices were making it past my filters.

In the case of Latour, I eventually slowed myself down and was able to absorb some of his other ideas, which helped to restructure my mental hierarchy. And I absolutely love it when that happens. My original cognitive subroutines post describes that moment when I connect a bunch of different ideas, and a whole set of synapses light up, as things shift into a recognizably better configuration. In Latour’s terms, my personal collective finds a new hierarchy that is able to absorb the new ideas that had been floating around my head. I try to keep my mind and eyes open for inputs that will help me to gain new perspective and let me find different ways of putting ideas together. I’m always looking for ways to add to the internal collective.

This is a good opportunity for a digression back to Latour’s book. He points out that modernism, as he describes it with its coldly rationalist viewpoint, is destructive with time. The final goal of modernist Science is a perfectly rational set of equations which is purely objective - everything else, all multicultural viewpoints and perspectives, have been weeded out of reality. He contrasts that with his idea of collectives that are continually encountering new external influences and finding ways to absorb them, such that the collectives are always growing. I like this picture, especially as applied to my individual collective - I am always reading and looking for new ideas, ones that will help me re-form and re-structure my mental hierarchy, as mentioned towards the end of this post. It seems like a much more life and growth-oriented viewpoint.

Getting back to my original point about filtered world views, the danger of not accepting Latour’s description of the temporal nature of reality, and instead believing in a One True Reality, is that you end up with the situation I originally found myself in, where I only accepted inputs that already matched my internal collective. I was not open to new inputs that might change my mind. And I would guess that most people operate like this.

I’ve addressed this point glancingly in posts like the one on conservative postmodernism but this sort of observation drives home for me the pointlessness of the “object-oriented” Western philosophy (which I describe in this post as our inclination to “try to stuff all of the properties of an object into the object itself rather than the network of relationships surrounding the object”. Huh. Now that I think about it, that “object-oriented” viewpoint is actually another restatement of what Latour calls Modernism, where the true object has an “essence” that exists outside of time, and that our poor human brains are too limited to fully perceive).

Anyway. My point is that because of the filters inherent in our internal collectives, our mental hierarchies, two people can look at the exact same thing and see completely different objects. One person sees the Confederate flag and sees a proud symbol of the Southern states, the other sees a flag symbolizing hatred and racism. Same object, different viewpoints.

And it becomes even more relevant in the case of information. Because of our filters, we only absorb information that matches our internal hierarchy. This comes up most often in the case of politics, when one person sees Bush as being presidential for ordering military action, and another sees him as being imperialistic. Those people live in fundamentally different worlds (or Latour-ian collectives), even though they are experiencing the same events. And that’s even before we get into the separate media that they consume.

This is also why Lakoff’s work on framing is so vital. By controlling the language, we can put information into a form that will get past people’s filters. If it matches up to their mental hierarchies, it sneaks right on in and start subverting some of those hierarchies from the inside. Which sounds horrible and Machiavellian, but the problem is that it works. People change their minds because of this stuff. And the conservatives are using it. So, given that we live in what is rapidly becoming a direct democracy, we can either take the high road and expect people to research issues and develop coherent platforms, or we can accept that they don’t, and fight back.

Man. Do you start to get the sense of what it’s like to live in my brain? In this post alone, I’ve linked Latour’s work with everything from electoral politics to my ideas about art to cognitive subroutines. Everything is linked in my head. It all fits together in some ungainly way. I didn’t even mention the part where the awareness of the temporal nature of reality is another aspect of being a good information carnivore or how I’d noticed the congruence between liberal arts and science myself, but didn’t follow it up, and of course wouldn’t have come up with a process as elegant as Latour’s.

It’s all connected. Everything informs everything else. This blog is my attempts to capture my internal collective on disk. And as it grows more coherent, and as I find the language to make the connections less fuzzy and easier to communicate, maybe I’ll be able to turn it into that book. But enough for now.

I start my new job tomorrow morning, so my time for blogging will probably decrease over the next few weeks while I get up to speed. But I think I’m mostly done with the Latour thread for now, so I’m okay with that. On to new and different topics.