Every statement should end with a question mark?

My friend Ryan Georgioff recently wrote,

Naturally, I can't help but feel this is one big cosmic joke.

Have you felt it? That hesitant panic that maybe you've been duped, been done over by Zeus and his Creons?

I'm not the first to feel it, I know, but when the curtain falls and Jesus is standing there with uncorked champagne toasting the end of life-as-we-know-it... well, that would just be fucking bizarre.

But no moreso than, say, the way life-as-we-know-it operates.

You really shouldn't read something like Ishmael if you're looking for inner peace, and you sure as hell shouldn't be reading anarchist literature. Yet this is how I've spent my recent days, pondering the perilous paths of precedents in full knowledge of the futile nature of my quest... yet questing nonetheless.

Oh, where my journey has taken me!

In my mind I have smashed the bank teller window and spray-painted vulgar graffiti on the McDonald's arch. I have marched hand-in-hand with flower children and acid-tripping hippies from the Nineteen-Sixties. When the riot police machines come I always throw their tear gas back to them, though they've forgotten how to cry. These glorious and grandiose dreams are then beset by the realities of my life.

No job, no money, and no real desire to have either. Like I said, don't look to Ishmael for a reason to keep at your mindless job or for motivation to stick it out and finish that lingering degree.

My mind is all-over-the-fucking-place.

I am posting this because I can, despite the fact that it's all shit. And to think I want to write for a living.

Ryan approaches his search for personal and spiritual enlightenment with passionate honesty. I admire his courage: I can vouch from personal experience it's terrifying to set off into the wilderness. Imagine climbing the face of Half Dome in Yosemite. Half way up you meet an obstacle, only passable by unclipping yourself from your safety ropes. You face a sickening choice: unclip and keep climbing, or stick with the safety net and lower yourself back to the banal you climbed to escape.

Ryan and I both left our ropes behind. We're at various stages in that climb up Half Dome now. While he's championing his choice, "Oh, where my journey has taken me!", I'm second-guessing myself, clinging wearily to the perilous cliff, wondering if the ropes were really so constraining, if the institutions I abandoned were really so corrupt, really so evil, and imagining how happy my life could have been within them.

Certainly a grassy meadow, however illusory, appeals to a ropeless climber a kilometer above.

While Ryan reveled in the glory of the climb in his post above, I questioned our sanity, in my comment below:

What if this isn't all one cosmic joke. What if it's all true. What if in our efforts to tear down artifice, we pile the rubble in the doorways, walling ourselves in for a cloistered death. Starving ourselves of options by writing off entire movements, entire economies, entire ideas.

What if unfettered embracing, rejoicing, ego, and amorality, really is evil -- what if we evolved into orderly species because those who were disposed towards order procreated most successfully.

What if anarchy is what we fear in mobs. Just it's been tempered so far by the police. What if The Man is like Jesus said: established by Divine Right. And the police are God's fingertips, loving us toughly, for our own good.

What if McDonald's and Dow Chemical and British Petroleum really are symbols of the holiest system of social-darwinism ever devised by the divinely-inspired minds of righteously misogynistic white men. What if WE are genetically defective, unevolved. Is that why we despise dinero. Rejecting the nutrients that sustain us, like a baby refusing a breast.

What if we reach utopia. What if we hate that we've achieved equality and found no superior being to blame. What if we're not optimists. What if we're whiners. What if what Buddha was trying to say was stop suffering for your ideals, detach yourself from your humanitarian lust for justice, put on a suit, smile, and swallow the cum.

Spitting on Michelangelo

The Seattle Times published a letter I wrote to the Editor last week. There's many people who are skeptical of human-caused climate change, and many who view Climategate as vindication for their views. This Letter to the Editor is my response to them:

Conspiracy theorists are like suicide bombers — loud and dramatic — but there are only a few of them, and they are soon forgotten by all but those they injure [“Hacked e-mails heat up Capitol Hill,” News, Dec. 3].

In the case of Climategate, the conspiracy theorists are wearing WMD and may injure us all. They’re generalizing a few pieces of doctored data in an attempt to impede the entire sustainability movement.

While it may be true that a few scientists in the U.K. have manipulated data, and while it may or may not be true that the climate is warming, what is crucial to realize is that both climate-change science and Climategate are red herrings, distracting us from specific, vital issues that threaten humanity.

Whether in climate change humankind has created a monster or a myth couldn’t matter less. Beyond the issue of global warming, readily verifiable facts show we’re running out of fish, forests and fresh, clean water.

If we continue to abuse the Earth, we in the developed world will certainly encounter a drastic decrease in the quality of our lives, while witnessing the excruciating deaths by starvation and poisoning of hundreds of millions in developing regions.

To improve the likelihood any response is well-aimed, allow me to clarify: climate-change and sustainability are two different things. Climate-change as caused by the Greenhouse Effect is not the same issue as overfishing, acidifying oceans, deforestation and desertification, or the exhaustion and poisoning of aquifers.

The issues connect, though they originate from varying causes and are fallaciously generalized as a unified crisis ("Global Warming", et al). Thus, if you claim you can refute one of these crises, you have not achieved victory. You still must face all the others, individually.

One last question I'd like to add: I know many of you are Christians and believe that God gave earth to humanity, choosing Adam and his descendants to subdue the earth as its Steward. If I grant you that, will you explain to me how you justify current human behavior as "stewardship"?

As far as I can tell, we're all spitting on The David, which is like spitting on Michelangelo.

Day 106: Notes on a Country

One of my childhood friends moved when we were teens from Seattle to Muscatine, Iowa. His affection for the home of our youth grew through the years. The longer he was away, the more he found his identity in what he'd left. These days he lives in L.A., but even now he seems to have more zeal for my region than I do.

For perhaps the first time since my friend moved, I can commiserate with him. I'm finding my identity is founded more in what I left behind, than in the reasons why I left. Like the philosopher Hegel said, I'm examining my surroundings to find out which of it is not me. That which I don't reject, that which I affirm, I hold onto as the vague outline of my identity. In Korea I reject a lot. Not much of the culture here resounds with me. Instead, after my years of criticizing my home, I'm surprised to find that the silhouette remaining, my core identity, resembles the US.

I realize now that there's a lot of United Statesian inextricably woven into me. It seems, for all my syncretism, I can't get the American out of me.

Having been out of the US for 9 of the past 11 months, I've very gradually become fond of the hobbling, optimistic people and complex, chaotic, confusing land I left behind. Part of that fondness is fed by the stark contrast Korea presents. Part of it grows from brief moments of hope inspired by small people doing grand things.

I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised. It's the very core of the United States that encourages my criticisms, both in opening a podium for discourse via the first amendment and by enamouring me so I'll come critically to its defense when that podium is threatened.

I love that everyone in the US -- immigrant, CEO, religious, Daughter of the Revolution, bourgeois, ex-con, or student -- is, at least theoretically, allowed a soapbox and equal access to the air that will gladly carry their cries.

Perhaps I'm a bit self-righteous when it comes to our constitution and our incorrigible, polyphonic disagreeability. The same brutish, self-unconscious rudeness I despise in some United Statesians when it occurs in a quiet pub or museum, I love when it heralds fierce patriots parading some cronyist injustice or US-government condoned oppression to the chagrin of the supposedly patriotic.

The US is a noble culture and a fetid culture, but there's room for both. There are plenty of governments-by-the-people-for-the-people doing parts of it better. How I'd love Poland's universal free education all the way through university. How I'd love Canada's extensive support for the arts. How I'd love to see individual states defy the central government more, in the spirit of Ireland, Sweden and Connecticut. I'd love to see more legal equality and social acceptance for minorities.

I love that the US constitution protects both the rights of the majority to dislike the minority and the minority to challenge the majority. At the end of all the name calling, bickering and outright conflict, the constitution prescribes civility and allows enemies to dialogue til they become friends or go to dinner as enemies. It allows universities to explore risque subjects. It's the constitution itself that makes allowances via the court system for resistance, defiance and outright disobedience when such freedoms are threatened.

There's little open discourse in Korea. Friends of mine who teach adults English via topic based conversations complain that in consecutive classes, the same basic opinions are rehashed repetitively. Nor is discourse encouraged. Technically the founding contract of Korea protects freedom of speech, but the government doesn't go in for the whole constitutional law thing much: they're a majority party and they've stacked every piece of government machinery with cronies. Just yesterday a blogger was arrested for speculating Korea's currency, the Won, might collapse.

Beneath the government level, the culture itself discourages dissent. At my school, often horrible ideas proceed without questioning, refinement or improvement. For example, a 4th grader was hit by a car when walking across the street. The next day the school banned 3rd graders and younger from riding bikes to school. I was the only one who pointed out the non-sequitur nature of the mandate. Other teachers said, "It's ok, it's ok!" and "Don't you think this makes sense?" giving me a chance to come to their side. No one is expected to embarrass a leader by questioning their wisdom.

Young people are constantly coerced to do as their elders deign, even when decisions are completely non-sensical. For example, in Korea, boys are circumcised when they're in the 5th and 6th grade. Leading doctors here acknowledge the surgery is pointless at that age, as sanitation is no longer an issue for a 12 or 13 year old.

However, according to a friend who's been advocating against circumcision in Korea for the past 4 years, the majority of doctors know little about the procedure beyond how to actually sever the foreskin. Fathers are too busy at work to take their sons' side, and too harried to be approached. Mothers aren't informed on the details of the operation and so mandate their children undertake it. The boys of course understand the ramifications: weeks bedridden, the embarrassment of bloody pants and the effects of heavy painkillers taken for up to a month. Ignorance and corrupted doctrines of Confucianism perpetuate genital mutilation, which is certainly child abuse.

It's the freedom to dissent and the equality of all humans that I identify most with the in US. Children and adults, principals and teachers are equally defended under the law. There's an ingrained, fierce defence of humanity with all its forms, creeds, lifestyles and ideas. It's this aspect more than others that differentiates the US from Korea. Korea often seems juvenile and uniform. It feels like middle school, whereas the US feels like a university full of disagreement and discourse. That aspect alone makes the US rare and worthy of preservation.

Maybe I only feel this idealism at a distance. I have a feeling one day back in the US would dampen my affections. Yet, many of my cricitisms rose in reaction to Bush administration gaffs and big corporate handouts due to traditional politics. Perhaps later this month, that will begin to change. Maybe, maybe not: new ways and old ways have equal opportunity in the US.

I'll end with a summary statement that concisely conveys my current perspective. It rose from the mind of a British man during a similarly convoluted time in US history: the Vietnam War era. Aptly enough, I discovered the statement through another foreigner, a fellow blogger and traveler from Singapore and Malaysia, when she summed up her study abroad experience in the US. She wrote:

After only 4 months [in the US], I am ill-equipped to form a conclusion on America and I suspect that it'll be a nation that will perpetually baffle me.

One man can, though. And that man is Alistair Cooke, a BBC correspondent who had a weekly radio show about America, Letter from America. Never before have I heard such an articulate and moving description of the country, and a timeless one at that- for it holds true almost 40 years later:

In a self-governing Republic - good government in some places, dubious in others...with two hundred million people drawn from scores of nations, what is remarkable is not the conflict between them but the truce. Enough is happening in America at any one time - enough that is exciting, frightening, funny, brutal, brave, intolerable, bizarre, dull, slavish, eccentric, inspiring and disastrous - that almost anything you care to say about the United States is true.

- From Cooke's broadcast, 19 October 1969 -

America, I have learned, is what you make of it. The freedom to do so is the most beautiful sort of freedom that I have ever encountered.
--------------

Yes. What is remarkable is not the conflict, but the truce. And yes, almost anything you care to say about the United States is true. One country of many nations, with liberty, opportunity, and at least half a chance at justice for all.

Love and peace to you all, and if you're experiencing extreme weather, stock up, hunker down, bundle up and don't forget to enjoy the novelty of the storm.

Galen

PS. Especially to those who disagree with or don't like the next President of the US: As Mr. Obama becomes President, keep in mind his understanding of the country. He sees space for your dissent, whatever your creed, beliefs or lifestyle. I hope this statement lifts your spirits and invites you into discourse: "During the course of the entire inaugural festivities, there are going to be a wide range of viewpoints that are presented. And that's how it should be, because that's what America is about. That's part of the magic of this country is that we are diverse and noisy and opinionated." - President-Elect Obama

Positivity

You know what I like a lot right now? I like the Discovery Channel commercial -- the boom-de-yada one. I just can't get it out of my head.

What I like about it is it's nice to hear what someone likes for once. It's great to see some realistic positivity.

It's something I'm not all that good at. For whatever reason I tend to vocalize things I don't like a lot more than I praise things I do like. Sometimes I scare myself. I remind myself of Holden Caulfield quite a lot. There's this warning Mr. Antolini gives Holden, near the end of Catcher in the Rye, where Mr. Antolini says, "It may be the kind where, at the age of thirty, you sit in some bar hating everyody who comes in looking as if he might have played football in college. Then again, you may pick up just enough education to hate people who say, 'It's a secret between he and I.' Or you may end up in some business office, throwing paper clips at the nearest stenographer. I just don't know. But do you know what I'm driving at, at all?"

I differ from Holden in that he tells Mr. Antolini that he only hates people for a short while and then he misses them. I'd have told Mr. Antolini that he's right and I'm terrified of turning thirty and only running into people I don't like, because there's no kind of people left that I do like.

One of my friends once called me "cynically optimistic" and I like that because it seems accurate -- I'm actually pretty idealistic about things, but then I have this cynical streak on the other side of the teeter totter, except that it's a portly little tyke and when he sits down my idealism falls off. The good thing is that the idealistic kid doesn't get flustered all that much. He just gets up and dusts himself off... I'm losing myself in this analogy.

The point is that even though I'm philosophically cynical -- by that I mean I really like to get to the root of things and pretty much ridicule anything that's veneer or superfluous or hyperbole -- even though I'm cynical in an optimistic manner, trusting the good in people and not locking my car doors, I hate myself when I disregard a person because they aren't as cynical as I am.

To tell the truth, I'm really bored by all sorts of scripted speech and I'll say obnoxious things just to say something original. Like Holden, I really can't stand what he calls "phonies" and I sort of say the exact opposite of small talk to avoid acting like a pretentious phony myself. And see there's the catch: when I disregard the phony, I'm being pretentious and phony, just at a higher level. I'm creating my own clique the phony can't join. It's like magnitudes of infinity. Even if somone's entirely exclusive, I can be more exclusive.

I really generally get along with me and like being around me, but the cynic in me sees no reason to exclude people or to waste energy deriding people.

I'd rather talk about what I like. And what I like a lot right now is this video. Watch it. You might like it too.

Fortune Telling Goes Mainstream

Sometime in the past few years, the news-media picked a new favorite word: "tomorrow". Headlines read, "President to veto Children's Health Care tomorrow," or "Company expected to announce bid for contract tomorrow." The news-media practices a dual art: journalism and divination.

They're not the only entity eagerly foretelling the future. Bush favors the word "pre-emptive"; business analysts use "forecast"; weeklies like Newsweek and Time extrapolate "trends" decades into the future.

We, their audience, encourage them. We check the weather forecast as if a human or computer could actually predict a sunny day. They might guess correctly, but we can't call them accurate until we feel the deep warmth of the afternoon sun on our necks.

We increasingly trust these modern day diviners, repeating the news as if the anchor surely knows what will happen tomorrow. We accept their guesses like the ill wishing for a cure.

We are, like Dave Bazan sang in his "Priests and Paramedics", the hemmoraging wounded on the stretcher screaming to the paramedic, "Am I going to die?" We're happy to hear, "Buddy just calm down, you'll be alright."

Not that they, or anyone else, knows for sure.

I can only hypothesize why we're willing to trust people who clearly know as little about the future as we. Perhaps we've accelerated the availability of information so much that we now demand the news before it happens. Perhaps we want to know what will happen to us so intensely that we'll trust anyone who appears confident. Regardless of our reasons, we trust too much.

We live too dependently on our diviners. When some soothsayer predicts a housing bubble, we act as if they know certainly, thus fermenting a self-fulfilling prophesy. When our Presidents promise us we'll suffer if we don't invade weaker nations we acknowledge we can't know the future and thus can't prove them wrong; so we trust their vision for the future more than ours.

We abort potential works of art because they might not succeed. We scrap potential children because they might mature into criminals.

We have empirical data to support our predictions. Of course, our data occurred in the past and Hume among many others have shown that no past empirical data proves future causality. Every time you toss a ball into the air a miniscule probability increases that the ball will not descend. Just because an action caused an effect once, or a million times, does not mean it will the next time.

Further, I'm increasingly certain nothing is certain. So, if we have no certainty about the past or present, which we have seen and now see, how do we justify making certainty claims about the future? I don't think we can justify our modern divination. We make the future, but "we" contains 6.5 billion people each exerting their own influence, besides the influence of non-human forces. So many inputs make forecasting 99.99999% impossible. Of course, one may predict accurately, especially in controlled situations with far fewer inputs.

Yet, the risk of pre-emption -- of anticipating and then changing the future -- far outweighs the risk of letting que sera, sera.

Or does it? Does potential predicate a right or obligation to opportunity? Must a mother birth the fetus in their womb if they expect the potential child to suffer? Or may the artist discard that incomplete artwork because it may potentially fail? If no mind exists with a precise knowledge of what will happen, than does modifying the future pre-emptively make any difference -- if no one has a plan, then how can you wreck the plan?

It seems there is a general, universal plan infered from universal human rights. The plan entails in every case humans continuing to live. So we do wreck the plan when we trust the soothsaying media, analysts, presidents and economists so much that we will invade and murder other humans in reaction to the "experts'" predictions.

Can we call pre-emptive action "just"? If in hindsight we see certainly a diviner predicted accurately, can we justify our belief and our actions based on those predictions, especially if those actions harmed another in order to protect ourselves?

(I hereby predict someone will bring up Minority Report :P).

Stranger to Oneself

I finished reading Camus' The Stranger a couple of days ago. He makes this eeriest point clear: whether you die at 30 or 70, you die. Which leaves a thoughtful person (such as myself) utterly confused. If death is the end, then there's little point in prolonging life. Nor do we feel compelled to act, whether murderously or altruistically. Yet, we do act altruistically and murderously. It seems clear why humans developed murder -- to defeat a threat to their lives. But why altruism? A recent article in the Atlantic argued altruism developed through typical adaptive cycles where communal, selfless species survived, thus reproducing philanthropic genes. Which seems to say, scientifically at least (and most religions would argue the same), we act kindly because we prioritize existence over non-existence.

So, if we murder and assist both in accordance to our belief that we prefer to exist, what do we do when life becomes entirely absurd, meaningless and death seems no different than life (for life and death mean the same)? Do we go on living? And if we live, in what manner do we live if we may die in another moment? As Pascal wrote: "Between us, and Hell or Heaven, there is only life between the two, which is the most fragile thing in the world."

Sartre posited an answer to the questioning of Camus' era (and ours): there's no compulsion to do anything, yet we're not dead, so we must choose. Even suicide is a choice. Even standing still, inactive, is choosing. There is no imperative to choose one way of life, say serial-killer, over any other, say philanthropist.

However, Sartre notes that when we choose, we choose for all people -- we demonstrate our preferred course of action and others may choose to follow it if it produces the sort of life they desire. So, Sartre essentially appeals to Kant's categorical imperative: Act as if all humans will be forced to act as you do. Another philosopher said similarly, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

I give away my disposition by setting murder and altruism in opposition. Clearly I pose a dichotomy that prefers generosity and service to totem-murder, incest and patricide -- Freud's three universal taboos.

As long as I recall, I have been biased towards altruism. Only recently have I learned words to describe my reasoning. John Rawls, another philosopher, proposed a thought experiment to help us decide how to act. He suggested when faced with a decision, we imagine a veil separates us from the situation, so we do not know what party we will play in the situation. We may be the king; we may be the pauper (there is equal chance). Since we may be the pauper, naturally we will ensure that should we be the pauper, we will be well respected, protected and happy. We want the most benefit for ourselves in the case we should be the least of the society. Rawls called his principle MiniMax: the maximum benefit for the minimum person.

My selfishness masquerades as altruism. I only act to provide an example I hope others will choose to follow. I want the least to be cared for in case I one day am the least. It's why I pick up hitchhikers: to build up my hitchhikers' Karma so I'll get picked up next time I'm thumbing.

I've laid out a couple of viable ways to a satisfying, altruistic life. However, I do not know if I live them, though I try.

Countless questions bother me. Here are two: first, if life is absurd and we evolved, why do we create? There seems no point in striving to make sculpture, music, epic photo montages, poetry and novels. Friendship and altruism are explained by the Atlantic article, but creativity has yet to receive much treatment in philosophy (please, if I overstate, direct me to a place to read).

Second, why does music affect some people so much? Past a philosophy of aesthetics (proportion is related to health and health to survival, so it seems explainable by Darwin's theories), music seems to have little evolutionary value. From my reading in philosophy of music so far today, it seems that music in recent years (enlightenment on) was intentionally developed to express emotions which words and other visual symbols could not, due to a veil of language and bias which separates us from what Kant called "das Ding an sich" and Wallace Stevens called the The -- reality.

But music precedes these theories, and even after these theories, practitioners adapted music to match the human ear, rather than modifying humans to appreciate the music. There are exceptions: it seems it took the human ear time to understand the meaning of compositions like Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- people didn't understand innately. In the normal cases, when music was orchestrated to excite pre-existing biases in humans towards certain meanings for certain timbres of sound, where did those interpretations in humans develop?

I wish I could word this more simply but it's very complicated in my head and, of course, language is an ill-fitted tool to expressing deep pathos.