August 2009 Archives

Every once in a while I notice a story about metrology, or the science of measurement, that reminds me how many of our concepts about the world are carefully constructed and contingent.

A few months ago I asked just how long ago the civil war was after hearing a story about a book stolen during the civil war and just recently returned. On the scale of a human life or generation the civil war is very recent history and yet America seems to have completely buried it in the past. Americans aren’t very good at remembering the past so the personal distance to the civil war is not really surprising.

Today I read a story about the kilogram at Chad Orzel’s blog. It seems that defining the kilogram in terms of a fundamental physical constant has proven to be much more difficult than for other constants like the length of the meter or the time of a second.

Attempts to redefine the kilogram have yet to yield anything, though. The problem, as always, is the gravity is so damnably weak.

Gravity may not seem like a weak force, but it is. The simplest illustration of gravity’s weakness is the old “rub-a-balloon-on-your-hair-and-stick-it-to-the-ceiling” trick. When you do that, the attractive force of maybe ten billion extra electrons on the balloon is enough to hold it up against the gravitational pull of the entire Earth pulling on a billion trillion atoms in the balloon. Gravity is preposterously weak compared to the electromagnetic force.

At one of the philosophy meetups I remember Harland arguing that a tree ring entails the age of a tree. But it’s not at all clear that our time words are ever that clear. Even a simple question like “How long is a day?” is really nested inside of an incredible network of assumptions and beliefs. Are we talking about mean solar day? Is a day from dawn to dusk? If I say that an activity took me a day to finish do we mean 24 hours, 8 hours, some other length of time.

With meaning there is a struggle/tension between precision (this is what scientists need in order to do their calculations or run the GPS system), perception (the fact that most people if asked to sit still for a minute would probably guess wrong at the length of time), and usability the exchange of information and coordination that takes place between people and individuals.

So I say long life and success to the metrologists who are constantly trying to improve our measurements.

A note from a few months back when I was reading Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I’m posting it as a reminder to my future self.

Reading Wittgenstein is a challenge. But toward the end of Philosophical Investigations it seemed to me that there were three spheres of argumentation going on in Wittgenstein.

1. There is the sphere of ordinary language. This is the source for the examples and cases which Wittgenstein builds his argument. Ordinary language is the testing ground for his ideas and becomes the touchstone for evaluation.
2. There is the sphere of philosophy. This is where the skeptical argument is mounted, defended, and perhaps defeated or supported. But the skeptical argument is a language game played within philosophy itself and never in ordinary language. Being skeptical about mental states in ordinary language just leads to weird looks and people wondering if you’ve been reading too much philosophy again.
3. There is a metaphilosophy sphere where an argument about the value of philosophy itself takes place. This is where the therapeutic argument is made - too much time in sphere 2 is bad for our mental health.

Wittgenstein is strongly skeptical in sphere 2. He is perhaps too accepting of the truth of meaning in sphere 1. And sphere 3 is suggested by implication - the idea that philosophy should be a type of therapy.

A related question is where does jargon fit in? Jargon seems to be in a middle state. It’s not quite ordinary language but it isn’t really philosophical language either.

It’s been ten years since Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris stormed Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, and killed thirteen people. Dave Cullen has just published the definitive book on the crime titled simply "Columbine". I read through it in less than a day.

Ten years after an event the key part of any retelling of a story is often a reevaluation of facts that we thought we knew: that Harris and Klebold were outsiders, that they targeted jocks and popular kids, that they were part of the trenchcoat mafia, that Cassie Bernall said she believed in God before being shot. Cullen’s task is to deconstruct those myths, most of which were planted by the instant media that surrounded the event, and try to triangulate toward the truth.

Cullen argues forcefully for the thesis that Harris was a psychopath and Klebold was mostly a follower when it came to the actual planning and killing. Klebold was definitely disturbed and depressive but he was more confused by life than actively hating everyone. Klebold’s journals show a painfully shy young man trying to find understanding and love in the world, being rejected and then fatally falling into the orbit of Harris who truly did want to destroy as many people as he could. All of this is supported by the journals and diaries Cullen reviewed.

I already had some inkling that Harris and Klebold were disturbed but I was surprised by the initial plans Harris had made to explode two large bombs in the cafeteria commons in the hope of killing the maximum number of people and then setting two more bombs to explode in the parking lot after the police and paramedics had arrived to kill another wave of victims. Harris was seriously disturbed.

There are some who see the hand of Satan at work in the Columbine killings. Colorado was, and continues to be a hotbed of evangelical Christianity, where the story of Cassie Bernall affirming her faith before death was just too good to pass up. To others it is a case of a psychopath and his companion going on a rampage of death. I think the latter explanation is a bit more comforting, but it still leaves a hole.

Is Twitter or any kind of technology killing poetry? That was the argument I listened to yesterday afternoon at a local Meetup group.

I shake my head, silently, every time these arguments come up because they capture something real about our crazy modern life but also leave so much behind.

To me poetry is just another form of technology - a linguistic one - which we use to communicate with each other. Before the invention of the printing press poetry was one of the most reliable ways to communicate information over long distances because it was an aid to memory. Evidence: the troubadours described by James Burke in The Day the Universe Changed, Ong’s work on oral and written cultures, Yates and the cathedral of memory. Without poetry we’d know even less about the past than we do.

Poetry gives us a sense of presence, reminding us to pay attention to the world around us. But the present of the world is a “buzzing blooming confusion,” according to William James. Poetry does not give us direct access to this confusion, instead it distills that confusion into a unified work of art that gives the impression of spontaneity.

Technology provides certain affordances for poetry. How different would e.e. cummings poetry be without the invention of the typewriter? Will current or future poets write visual poems as easily or fluently as cummings now that the typewriter is disappearing from our normal lives? Consider the relation between the length of most lyric poetry and the size of the usual book page.

The core truth behind the fear of Twitter is real. There is a missing connection at the heart of modern life. Technology, if it plays a major role in this change, affects us by distancing us from interactions with the world. According to Albert Borgmann’s device paradigm, technology acts as solely as a means to an end. So Twitter is a means to gossiping with friends, marketing yourself for a job, or increasing the celebrity of Ashton Kutcher. Poetry, through the distillation of experience, is an end.

A final irony - we all learned about the event through Meetup, a technology of world wide web.

I went to a funeral for my neighbor, Mary, on Friday. I estimate there were 80 people present. As I listened to the eulogy I was struck by the different feelings I had at the funeral and watching the Michael Jackson burial last month.

Joe Bagent already wrote a rant about the system for me.

“It’s only a system,” I told myself during the 24/7 blanket coverage of Michael Jackson’s corpse, deeply suspicious that that so many millions of Americans were really distraught over the loss of this weirdly mutated media flesh puppet. Morbidly curious maybe, but not distraught. There were the high ceremonial triubutory rituals, the carefully written and rehearsed incantations as to how Jackson pushed the global cause of racial equality to new heights. Even Nelson Mandela said so. Why am I not sharing in this great and tragic stirring of the masses? This news event apparently of massive import?

Although I didn’t know my neighbor very well I still felt more connected to her than I ever did to Michael Jackson. The television tells us that we are distraught as a nation over Jackson’s death. But I don’t think that’s real and if it is then we are in more trouble than I thought.

I remember wistfully back in the 1980s listening to neoconservatives, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, argue that any comparisons between the bad things that America did oversees and bad things done by the Soviet Union were the height of irresponsibility. Liberals, like Noam Chomsky, were creating a “false equivalence” between the always-working-for-good America and the devil-incarnate-evil-empire Soviet Union. The whole messed-up thread was most salient during the year I was on the high school debate team and the resolution was about American foreign-policy in Latin America. Any argument that the United States supported terrorists or the overthrow of governments almost always got the Kirkpatrick “false equivalency” argument as a response.

I’ve been watching the current town-hall protests by Republicans and other far-right organizations over the past week in astonishment. But the most frustrating thing is the media narrative, present at MPR and the NYT, that the protests at the town-halls are just more of the same protests that liberals launched during the Bush administration. So here are my reasons why this equivalency is actually false:

1. Corporate backing. I don’t recall any corporations backing the anti-war protests during the Bush administration. Former health care executives are running anti-reform campaigns. Two of the major groups involved in organizing the protests are Conservatives for Patients Rights, a group founded by Rick Scott, an ex-hospital executive, and Freedom Works, chaired by the Republican ex-majority leader of the house, Dick Armey.

2. Republican party-leaders have adopted the outrageous rhetoric of the far-right. During the Bush administration liberals couldn’t get any of their party leaders to lend any support to their outrage. Howard Dean argued against the war but even he was forced to back down from some statements, such as his December 2003 statement about the capture of Saddam Hussein. The Democrat party ignored the anti-war left as much as possible. Just remember the utter failure of the impeach Bush meme. Democrats routinely reject the left, Republicans bend over backwards to embrace the fascist right.

3. The current protests at town-halls are designed to stifle debate instead of encourage it. The great frustration of the left during the run-up to the Iraq war was the rejection of debate by the powers that be. Congress and other groups didn’t want to hear any objection to the war. Today Congress wants debate, that’s why they hold the town-halls to hear from their constituents, but the people right-wingers who show up are shutting down the debate before it even starts.

4. There is also a big difference between media coverage of the current protests and the media coverage of anti-Bush protests. Today the town-hall protesters have major media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and more supporting their cause. I don’t remember there being as many prominent media figures supporting the anti-war protesters. I can only name two: Paul Krugman, and Bill Moyers. There were more but they didn’t have a whole network to promote their views like Fox News does today.

Is there such a thing as an immoral work of art?

I attended a panel on this topic last weekend at Diversicon and have been thinking about the question since then. Opinion among the panelists and the audiences was divided, some clearly thought that a movie or a story could be immoral, others were less sure. There is not an obvious intuitive response to this question.

The major example on the panel was the film Seven Pounds, starring Will Smith. The moderator and a few others objected to the main character, an aeronautical engineer from MIT, deliberately killing himself in order to donate his organs to other people. They argued that Tim/Smith could have done more good by keeping his job and potentially saving hundreds or thousands of lives instead of killing himself and helping only the few who received transplants.

From the perspective of utilitarian ethics I don’t think this objection makes a whole lot of sense. From the description it appears that Tim, the main character, has saved or at least improved the lives of seven people. But we don’t know anything about his past behavior, whether his work in engineering has helped to save lives or not. Nor can we predict the impact of any potential work he might do in the future. The idea that Tim might help the world more by staying alive is a supposition. From a utilitarian perspective it seems clear that Tim made the correct choice, his actions provide more happiness for more people.

There are a lot of different threads behind the reaction of some people to this movie. There is a strain of technological optimism that someone like an aeronautical engineer from MIT has more to give to the world than just his body parts. What if the main character had not been an engineer? How about a lawyer or a homeless person? There is also a strong belief in the efficacy of the individual, and a parallel feeling that no depression at the loss of a love one is so bad that one can’t persevere. It is the traditional American message to just buck up and get on with life despite whatever tragedies we encounter. When someone fails to return to the ring after being knocked-out it shows the weakness of their character instead of any corruption with the system.

More to come on the evaluation of art in moral and other terms.