Баллада о Борьбе – Написана (1975, до февраля) для к/ф “Стрелы Робин Гуда”, использована в к/ф “Баллада о доблестном рыцаре Айвенго”. ►click to continue
September 2009
I have been looking at this and thinking, when no one is reading this post, is the machine still sewing? It punctures and ties at the same time, this must be the secret. But thread and needle already stitched the way for that. ►click to continue
Ruzka Korczak, Abba Kovner, Vitka Kempner, Jewish partisans in Vilnius on July 14, 1944, the day after Russian troops won the city from the Germans. Photo by Ilya Ehrenburg
“In 1944, a band of Jewish guerrillas emerged from the Baltic forest to join the Russian army in its attack on Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. The band, called the Avengers Dam Yehudi Nakam, was led by Abba Kovner, a charismatic young poet. In the ghetto, Abba had built bombs, sneaking out through the city’s sewer tunnels to sabotage German outposts. Abba’s chief lieutenants were two teenage girls, Vita Kempner and Ruzka Korczak. At seventeen, Vitka and Ruzka were perhaps the most daring partisans in the East, the first to blow up a Nazi train in occupied Europe”. (via flickr/bootsartemis)
If you a graduate of anything you have the most important skill of listening to boring and idiotic rants lasting for hours. This is what education in the post industrial society is all about. If you partaken of a religious indoctrination than you have been exposed to hours of deliberate, relentless, mind numbing verbal regurgitation and you surely developed the skill of tuning out, going into the mental shut down while appearing attentive and interested. At the very least you developed the patience for listening to a person no matter what this person says. In fact you no longer expect to be moved and object vociferously when your sweet catatonic listening state is rudely disturbed. Occasionally someone flashes the naïve nerve to disrupt the precious lecture nap, the time when you can be by yourself, rest, enjoy the nirvana of nothingness better than the 3am TV. How impolite.
Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A. A Farm Team, ca. 1812
In my post about Darwin and Prince Kropotkin I quoted from David Sloan Wilson. This is a new concept for me so I would like to write it down as concisely as I can.
- The classic Darwinian evolutionary idea of survival of the fittest. Self interest trumps the interest of others. Two men went into a ring, one left standing.
- But it’s rather obvious that belonging to a strong group could increase your survival odds and therefore altruism and unselfish giving, required for a functional group structure, is also an evolutionary trait. It seems that this aspect of the evolutionary selection was only alluded by Charles Darwin but deemed a heresy by American scientists in the sixties (a huge subject for another day).
The relentless eternal tension is that self interest contradicts group interest. In fact you must sacrifice, even your life, for the benefit of a group. More often a group or a society would only recognize 1st principle and postulate that the human animal needs protection from selfish inclinations by fear. In comes a dictator whose interest is in cultivating the 1st principle and downplaying the 2nd principle. This is also the root of the eternal cynicism about the human nature, when people even in democratic societies long for another Stalin. So you might have a society when a group acts not only contrary to the altruistic principles but even more selfish than a free roaming Neanderthal. When a group betrays its original charter the human animal prefers a group free existence. But it also deprives a person from the genetic evolutionary trait of being altruistic, being giving, being connected to others unselfishly.
Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
Nassim Taleb – Fooled by Rationalism; Lecturing Birds How to Fly:
“The greatest problem in knowledge is the “lecturing birds how to fly” effect. Let us call it the error of rationalism. In Fat Tony’s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all suckers. Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from calling it exactly knowledge. It a way of doing thing that we cannot really express in clear language, but that we do nevertheless, and do well. The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what can be explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.
To make things simple, just look at the second type of knowledge as something so stripped of ambiguity that an autistic person (a high functioning autistic person, that is) can easily understand it.
The error of rationalism is, simply, overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, the academic knowledge, in human affairs. It is a severe error because not only much of our knowledge is not explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, etc., but, further, that such knowledge plays such a minor life that it is not even funny.
We are very likely to believe that skills and ideas that we actually acquired by doing, or that came naturally to us (as we already knew by our innate biological instinct) came from books, ideas, and reasoning. We get blinded by it; there may even be something in our brains that makes us suckers for the point…”
As footnote to Nassim, I have a minor variance. What Nassim calls knowledge I call the field of play. It is the mental gymnastics, the eternal geek game. It really makes the difference, it is the science, the art, dance, even sports. And it’s in the “flying birds” category because for people who are consumed and obsessed by it, it comes as natural as a step. The problem is the entire super-culture that feeds off it. This reminds me the sports stats industry, especially in America. Athletes play games but stats are meticulously preserved and give the fodder for endless commentary, forever talking about the flying birds instead of flying. But Nassim is right that this knowledge super-structure is pretty stupid.
Absolute Flatness: An average color #A79F94 was calculated from more than 26,000 images in the MoMA art collection by Joshua T. Nimoy. Absolute Depth: Recent sandstorm in Sydney via MarchingAnts on flickr.
Eric Spiegelman created this video, he writes: “Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent.
On Wednesday, the Obamas hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which they stood for 130 photographs with visiting foreign dignitaries in town for the UN meeting. The President has exactly the same smile in every single shot. See for yourself — the pictures are up on the State Department’s flickr. And, of course, compressed into 20 seconds for your viewing pleasure.” ►click to continue
Woody Allen in “Take The Money and Run” from 1969. Dedicated to Radloh, ZIY and other funny characters. ►click to continue
Just two or three minutes of this pink glow sunrise and then it’s gone. ►click to continue
Prince Kropotkin
People pondered habits of successful people since the time immemorial. And depending on a culture the habits might be different. But there is a single principle every successful person adheres to. All successful people expect nothing from other people or god(s). No matter the smoke screen or the lip service motions. Only by internalizing this great principle can you move forward on your way to success or a honest failure. Does it mean that nobody cares? The simplistic answer is indeed nobody cares. But the answer is not so simple if you consider the very recent debate between the spiritual followers of Charles Darwin and Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin.
If you follow Charles Darwin and assume that we are an animal with the natural inclination to trample the throat of our fellow animals than the only way to govern is to find a biggest bastard animal around and make sure that people live in fear of the grand bastard and in fear of acting naturally by killing each other. This view has been promoted recently not only by political philosophers but by the contemporary to Charles Dawrin founders of the Chassidic movement.
Now an article in Seed Magazine reviews the new book by Frans de Waal “The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society”:
“The evolution of unselfish behavior has been one of the most controversial topics in the history of science. As early as the 1650s, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that the natural world was a merciless struggle for survival. Only a strong, centralized government (in his eyes, the hereditary monarchy of King Charles I) could prevent the “dangerous disease” of democracy from plunging the nation into chaos…
In the years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Thomas Henry Huxley, widely known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” endorsed Hobbes’ view of nature. Huxley claimed that natural selection was a “gladiator’s show” and a “Hobbesian war of each against all.” And until now, the only voice that promoted an alternative perspective was that of Russian naturalist Peter Kropotkin. His theory of mutual aid, ultimately rejected by evolutionary biologists of the time, has had to wait more than a hundred years to be reexamined.”
Pyotr Kropotkin was ideological founder of anarchism and for the anarchism to be possible it required volunteer cooperation between animals or humans. There needs to be self interest in caring. He wrote:
“In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species.”
De Wal documents in his book many cases of unselfish acts among animals that were assumed to be unique to humans. This in fact further dethrones the assumption that if not for a religion people would be immoral killers. No, monkeys put themselves into mortal danger to save fellow monkeys without Jesus.
Frankly I don’t see how one can find this earth shattering, everyone knows that self interest and power is not enough, one needs a social skill for survival. But important takeaway is that caring about other people is as fundamental and essential to our species as the raw self interest.
But here is the nuance. Everyone knows that it is possible to create a culture or political superstructure that makes people afraid to act as selfish animals. But few people realize that it is possible with equal success to prevent people from acting on the other natural trait, and make people hesitate to care for each other. In fact more people care for each other less they are emotionally attached to a centralized religious authority or a totalitarian political power. Caring for other people is the enemy of a pyramidoidal political or religious state. Over time this subtle indoctrination is internalized and you have the paradox or outwardly anti Darwinian culture that beams out the subliminal “nobody cares” as if the life of civilization depended on it. But it really does.
A much more refined view of this subject is presented as a comment in the Seed Magazine by David Sloan Wilson. David explains that the scientific conversation has been expanded to include various levels of selection and often group selection supersedes self interest – Altruism vs. Selfishness: Case Closed:
“Darwin clearly understood the fundamental problem associated with the evolution of altruism: It is locally disadvantageous. Place an altruist and a selfish individual next to each other and the selfish individual wins. How can a behavior evolve in the total population when it is never at a local advantage?
Darwin also clearly understood the nature of the solution: Altruism is advantageous at a larger scale. Groups of altruists out-compete groups of non-altruists, even if altruism is selectively disadvantageous within each group. This is the theory of multilevel selection, in which different traits are favored at different levels. The term multilevel selection wasn’t coined until later, but the whole point of group selection theory was to solve the problem posed by a conflict between levels of selection.
The rejection of group selection as an important evolutionary force in the 1960s was one of the biggest blunders in the history of evolutionary thought. The extremely simple idea—I was just able to describe in just a few lines—was branded as so wrong that it became deeply heretical. Ever since, most evolutionists have scrupulously avoided using the “G-word” rather than facing the fact that all evolutionary theories of social behavior obey the logic of multilevel selection…
It’s easy to appreciate the short-term benefit to the individual scientist of avoiding the “G-word,” but this is a form of selfishness because the long-term cost to the field as a whole is huge. My lengthy review article with E.O. Wilson titled “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology” can be summarized as follows: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, maybe it’s a duck. Let’s go back to the beginning and build a new field-wide consensus based on the fact that selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups, and everything else is commentary.”
It is easy to see how the post industrial, post tribal, post groups modernity promotes “nobody cares” selfishness and makes the idea philosophically ascendant. There is a certain seepage from the scientific orthodoxy into realm of commonly accepted pop ideas. So if the group altruism is a scientific heresy, it’s then viewed so by the general culture.