John Frederick Lewis, Two horses pulling a plough, viewed from the back, c. 1820
We can’t define an intellectual by the volume of his database. Not even by his or her ability to reason. Alain de Botton writes that “a wealthy family in England in 1250 might have had three books in its possession: a Bible, a collection of prayers and a life of the saints”. They are not less intelligent than a college graduate in humanities after reading a thousand books. So intelligence is not a familiarity with the contemporary European philosophy, comparative fluency or ability to memorize. Intelligence is curiosity. This curiosity in turn fuels the exploration of a subject or an object.
I meet many people who have an enormous mental database covering a vast filed of knowledge. Yet they became jaded and lost their curiosity. It’s hard to describe these people as “intelligent”.
There are the current laments about the lack of intellectuals among the modern orthodox here and here (and not even an expectation about the other streams). This is unfair to people brought up or converted to the dogmatic culture. You can’t hold people responsible for the lack of curiosity if they are indoctrinated into a system that presumes and postulates more answers than questions. Centuries of breeding out the curious and curiosity as an undesirable trait are finally paying off.
Images licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
by Ben Atlas on 02.21.2010.10:38am
I have been thinking about Jaron Lanier’s “mob switch” concept. The fundamental component of any big or small clan always includes a designated group or an individual to hate inside and outside of the clan. So any group requires the internalize hate as part of the membership package. This is a big dilemma for me because I believe that the human need to be part of a group is our prime evolutionary instinct. Can you be part of any group without the negative component, without the hate? Perhaps hate and mobs are inseparable. I can’t think of an example that goes against this theory and I am saddened by this. Here is the original quote:
“Humans, like many other species, Lanier says, have a cognitive switch that permits us to be individuals or members of a mob. Once we enter the confines of what Lanier calls a clan, even a virtual clan, it possesses dynamics that appeal to the basest instincts within us. Technology evolves but human nature remains constant. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history because human beings married the newly minted tools of efficient state bureaucracies and industrial slaughter with the dark impulses that have existed since the dawn of the human species
“You become hypersensitive to the pecking order and to your sense of social status,” Lanier said of these virtual clans. “There is almost always the designated loser in your own group and the designated external enemy. There is the enemy below and the enemy afar. There become two classes of disenfranchised people. You enter into a constant obligation to defend your status which is always being contested. It is time-consuming to become a member of one of these things. I see a lot of designs on line that bring this out. There is a recognizable sequence, whether it is pianos, poodles or jihad; you see people forming into these clans. It is playing with fire. There are plenty of examples of evil in human history that did not involve this effect, such as Jack the Ripper, who worked alone. But most of the really bad examples of human behavior in history involve invoking this clan dynamic. No particular sort of person is immune to it. Geeks are no more immune to it than Germans or Russians or Japanese or Mongolians. It is part of our nature. It can be woken up without any leadership structure or politics. It happens. It is part of us. There is a switch inside of us waiting to be turned. And people can learn to manipulate the switch in others.”
Jaron speaks about this in the video interview by Guardian.
by Ben Atlas on 02.15.2010.5:05pm
If the Ten Commandments were written by my cousin Shmerl or a God is a minor detail. But more importantly in all the denominations a “Rabbi” could be a 50th generation einikle or your friendly dyke, they all have the same job description, to be a DJ. In other words they all spin some dusty vinyls, they don’t create any music. Some DJs are purist and they still spin the real plastic, others are spinning the virtual digital copies, but they all mix old music to a popular beat, they don’t sing in their own voice. You can spin that vinyl to the right or to the left but you must understand the differences between a DJ going through some old tunes and a young Amadeus Mozart. The interpretive strands of the derivative culture are secondary, insignificant variations. You can write an app for the same proprietary OS, but then you can write a new OS. You can aggregate, link and embed, heck, even with comments, and then you can give birth to a poetic expression that changes the way we think, sing and dance.
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photo via flickr/ViniMan
by Ben Atlas on 01.28.2010.7:52am
Why the textification (made-up this word) of our culture? I routinely meet people who don’t mind texting, emailing or IMing for hours yet they are terrified of speaking in person or even picking up the telephone. And it looks there is a strong cultural push in this direction with all the gadgets specifically designed for the purpose and a telephone call now strongly considered a borderline impolite intrusion of privacy.
There is a particular variant of this that I encountered many times. When you speak to a person whatever you say the person considers a signal or a trigger for emptying his “database” about the subject. The specific side effect is that you end up listening to the identical stories numerous times from the same people. There is a post by Philip Guo on this subject – Geek behaviors present during conversations (Struggling with turn-taking):
“It’s a cliche that geeks are known to be bad at maintaining rapport in conversations with non-geeks, so I will begin with this topic. Non-geeks often report having awkward silences when talking with geeks. I think that one root cause of such awkwardness is the geek’s inability to fluently perform turn-taking during conversations.
Normal turn-taking behavior occurs when both participants in a conversation transition smoothly from listening to talking, and then back again. When a socially-adept person talks, he is constantly monitoring the other person’s facial gestures and body language, and when he senses that the other person wants to chime in, he dials down his own talking and allows the other person to begin speaking.
When a non-geek is talking to a geek, awkward silences often arise because the geek doesn’t pay enough attention to his partner’s attention level and doesn’t know the appropriate way and time to naturally pause. This frequently occurs when the geek is ‘in the zone’ proudly explaining some technical concept without realizing that his audience might be growing bored. Worse still, when there is already a silence, the geek doesn’t know how to properly break it in order to continue the conversation.
(On a related note, geeks are more afraid of making telephone calls than non-geeks are, since the visual cues that facilitate turn-taking aren’t available when talking over the phone. Instead, they prefer to use IM, email, or text messaging.)
So the texting or IMs have clear turn talking signals, next IM – your turn to talk. There is no need to expose the awkward inability to interpret the tonality of a voice or a facial expression. There is no need to betray the helplessness in decoding of a pregnant silence or the fear of riding a magnetic high of a semi-hypnotic facial stretch. Marshal McLuhan described in detail how the print culture altered human interactions and thinking, atrophied and removed the vast perceptional range; it seems that electronics are finishing off this process. It’s an aspergers world out there.
P.S. I also think that this has something to do with a generation growing up in a suburban or a semi-suburban setting, with little chance to develop the turn talking fluency. In America there are also Waspy cultural undertones to this phenomenon.
by Ben Atlas on 01.27.2010.9:02pm
The horror of living in the times when grown adults have an emotional relationship with a gadget, when the central cultural event is a new typewriter screen. But it could be worse, or no different really, from the print. You could live in an era when the en-vogue geekery is to emote with a book, instead of to people who speak through the pages, when the words are detached from the conversation. It’s a familiar and infinitely amplified curse.
by Ben Atlas on 01.26.2010.10:15am
Most religions attempt to tackle two fundamental problems – the fear of death and loneliness. But a cultural expression takes unexpected turns, often in direct contradiction to the original intent.
To perish after the granularity of life seems unimaginable. Our soul surely transcends the corporal, there must be an afterlife. Enter a religion to confirm and assure of the immortality. But instead of extending the treasures and the mystery, it demands the sacrifice of this world to the world to come. You must give up this world for the eternity. Instead of extending a life, a religion unwittingly brings the sacrificial death closer into the immediate corporal mix.
Humans seek a social essence. To be understood is to share goals and values with other people. Enter the initiation and conversion into the shared sanctity. But alas the worshipers turn sideways (or more often backwards) to each other and eagerly transfer the meaning, love, care, friendship and emotions to a jealous, remote and unapproachable deity.
Illustrations by Hugh MacLeod
by Ben Atlas on 01.8.2010.1:02pm
I don’t know a single person, from the heretics to the messianists and all the in-betweens, who think that the Judaic State is functional today. People with different degrees of attachments or detachments, the geeks absorbed in the Talmudic abstractions, the utopian dreamers living in the projected past, the rebels and the swindlers, no one can stare at the present without averting his or her eyes.
How would one define a contemporary post-Judaism or post-Orthodoxy? The two most significant ideologies of the last centuries – Marxism and Freudism represent a post-Judaic eruption, except they don’t brand themselves as Judaism anymore. Similarly Christianity and Islam are the plagiarized branches of Judaism, even after they severed their ties with the trunk. The Jewish history itself is replete with what I call the source code hacks, indeed Chassidism itself was a post-orthodox eruption, so was Kabbalah, etc. Is the evolution possible today?
Speaking about the future is futile; you never know when a “black swan” will glide in unexpectedly. We are constructed to see the world in a rear view mirror. Sometimes we can master the heroism to glimpse the present, but never the future.
Contemporaneously I observe two main groups of people in various stages of the Judaic rejection. First are the tiny minority who managed to escape relatively unscathed. You can literally count them on one hand. The second group is the vast majority. I call it nominally the Chulent Brigade, these are the people who reject or more likely were rejected by the religious communities. They feel that the secular world doesn’t understand them, the religious world doesn’t accept them, so they live in the in-between, the intergalactic void. A friend compared them to the Eastern European dissidents – “the commies are evil but the West doesn’t get us”.
Psychologically people who were subjected to the various flavors of orthodox indoctrination can be compared to the victims of a sexual abuse. The survivors of the abuse are forever torn between the hate towards the abusers and the longing, even love. This very confusion is the lethal and unrelenting legacy of a sexual abuse, and blasphemously speaking, the confusion of is the staple of a ideological or religious indoctrination. I just don’t meet many people who can break from this.
In America this predicament is only worse. There is the unprecedented chasm with the secular society. And then there is the cruelty of the mass produced indoctrination. What was traditionally, by and large, a private religious instruction, turned into the factory-like school system, where an ego and dissent are crushed by the debilitating group-think. The proud graduates are measured, rewarded and awarded a Stockholm syndrome degree. Is a post-abuse, a post-Stockholm syndrome possible for a post-human? Not even God can ask that much from a mere mortal.
Illustrations by Hugh MacLeod
by Ben Atlas on 12.31.2009.9:31pm
What’s with the Promethean prose, he said. This got me thinking. I started with the certainty that if only there is a forum, the ideas and the meaning are inevitable. May be it was the osmosis fake, the “wisdom of the crowds” fade, indeed the heroic Promethean idea of the collective gravity take down, the unwise belief that the slaves at the bottom of a pyramid just really want to have coffee, figuratively speaking.
This concept got undone slowly. And then it resonated with ‘All that Music that rises to the Middle’. I realized that the middle is really stupid, not the exception but the rule, and always been that way. So this was the big change this year, perhaps it’s naive. Suddenly the fascinating problem was not why the dictators are holding the people down but how can you rule and control the unpredictable, irrational and mediocre herd. Dan Ariely pointed to the irregularities and Nassim Taleb cast the wingspan shadow of the foreseeable black swan. As the year ended John Nash outlined the game theory. What was apparent has been interpreted, humans are scheming, and to borrow from the cold war metaphors, only mutual annihilation can guarantee friendship.
Speaking of friendships, this was the year when the nominal friendships supplied the game theory with some real case studies, turning disappointment into betrayals. But the good news I am still drunk with curiosity. Not to sound like a geek but just today I figured I can download the 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast on my iPhone and it literally changed my understanding about the past 2,000 years of history in one day. If the past can turn so quickly, it is certainly true for the future. I raise a musical note to that – Time After Time.
by Ben Atlas on 12.29.2009.12:21pm
On the subject of Statistically Below Average. As I wrote in that linked post an average doesn’t really exist. Or more precisely it exists only in imagination, a bleak semblance to the granularity of life. The media and culture are going global, the demarcations are demolished. But the ever increasing part of our knowledge is the media based myth mongering. Media brands are formed by the iconic images or the iconic people, in other words the objects that have nothing to do with the average but are a statistical aberration. So let me illustrate this. What most people think about Russians for example, has nothing to with the Russians they met in real life but rather a summary of films, news, maybe even books, etc. In fact when they meet a real Russian, most are not trying to learn about Russians from that person but they are trying to describe the real person in terms of a preexisting myth. I guess this is OK if you are a Coca Cola, but not OK if you are a human being. Same goes for various phobias of an average homophobe, jewdophobe, etc., and conversely your average francophil, russophil, etc. But if you have to generalize, then generalize the real people please. I am not sure it’s stil an option. May be it was never an option.
by Ben Atlas on 12.24.2009.9:41pm
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Christ on the Mount of Olives, 1819. Escuelas Pías de San Antón, Madrid
On of the most paradoxical realities about the religious community is how promiscuous and unrestrained is that culture. The recent scandals with both Catholic and Jewish clergy is the realization that sin is not only subject to redemption but is in fact sanctified, a mysterious divine will. Conversely the atheist culture is incredibly restrained and hyper repressed, the self-discipline requires more effort. This is precisely the paradox that the contrarian Zizek takes on in his chapter How to Read Lacan - “God is Dead, but He Doesn’t Know It”:
“The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today, we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted – is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are in advance redeemed, since they express the divine will…)”
And you can follow this trajectory in America (and Israel). As the religious prohibitions receded and the multicultural and inclusive society advanced, so did the parallel movement of the vigilance against sexual harassment and the voluntarily suppression of free speech AKA the politically correct codex. The discipline, the prohibitions are internalized and the rules are to be followed instead of to be broken.
“Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.”
And so the redeemer Jesus came to the world to let the children of Irael and the children of God sin and truly be free.
To take my review Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog, a notch deeper. Freudian Death Wish is not a death wish at all. A good rule of thumb with these concepts is to turn the obvious reading on its head. The Death Wish is the desire to control the most uncontrollable event, to become a master of own destiny. Freud’s Death Wish is an attempt to reach for the eternity, to become transcendent, to live forever and ever.
The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) is the latest in line of the characters who can only become good by being bad. This mirroring of good and evil classically played out between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the 1995 hit “Heat”. There Al Pacino is faced with the eternal dilemma – to catch the bad guys he must enter their world, become as bad as the bad itself. Can he stay human in the process?
Fast froward to the Werner Herzog’s take on the subject. The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh descends to the dark side, till he becomes indistinguishable from the criminals, he actually partners with the dealers and killers. He is a gambler, a junkie and by becoming part of a murder he solves the crime. Can he still remain a human? This is an open-ended question but there is hope also involving a symmetry and a reversal. In the beginning of the movie the Bad Lieutenant unselfishly saves the life of a prisoner and sustains a life long injury. The same former prisoner appears in the last frames of the film to save the Bad Lieutenant’s life, again a symbolic reversal. Also in a reversal the killer Big Fate is dreaming of being ” good”, of turning the town around, of a legitimate businessmen as he disposes a corpse.
But there is another character, the Jewish gangster Eugene Gratz (Marco St. John) who seems without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. We know he is a Jew because the writer William Finkelstein (of LA Law fame) makes him say two Yiddish code words – shvantz and punim. And true to the symmetry he must be the very goodness in the evil disguise. In an unscripted moment Werner Herzog shows his swirling soul dance after he is murdered, he is the transcendent. Growing up in the postwar Bavaria, Hertzog knows a thing or two about those hovering souls.
A Virtual Community is an Oxymoron
by Ben Atlas on 02.5.2010.10:30am
Every single thriving online forum is an outlet of a community or an interest that already exists off-line. People who like a certain team, etc. naturally extend the actual interest, a hobby into a virtual community. So the online forums are the reflections of the ideological, religious or national tribes. Online forums complement a niche but they never create a niche (some idiots who claim there are no communities online, they are blind to the fact that online communities only mirror real social and ideological groups).
The cutting edge ideas or the proverbial out of the box thinking gets little traction on the internet. People seek distraction and confirmation not an intellectual disturbance (I wrote about this in The Tension and Pretension of Blogging). This is by the way why I turned off the comments. I reflect about the eclectic mix that has no real life base and is not narrow enough to generate an uber abstract, pointless chatter. But the bottom line is that the people who imagine that they can reverse engineer a community from online into real life, they are delusional liers.