"The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha...which is to demean oneself."*
There are signs of what some call “a collective identity crisis” in Japan. Income disparity, growing numbers of impoverished pensioners and child poverty.
Tough economic times have highlighted the potential of developing nations, China in particular, while Europe is seen as bulky and traditional, struggling to keep up with the Jonses. Japan however is overlooked – still thought to be a victim of its ‘lost decade’ – and now – seen by some – as the setting for a modern portrayal of The Grapes of Wrath. The Economist goes on to say
Hamamatsu, a coastal town south-west of Tokyo, has its share of shattered lives. Workers were laid off right down the supply chain almost as soon as home-town outfits like Yamaha and Suzuki saw export orders slump last year. The lay-offs included many Brazilians of Japanese descent, who had flown to Japan because factories needed cheap, part-time labour rather than expensive Japanese workers on full contracts. The jobless Brazilians live with each other if they cannot pay the rent, and the church provides the neediest with food parcels. At a Catholic church recently, they were making soup to share among those, like themselves, eking out the last of their savings. That included homeless Japanese men, who, unlike the Brazilians, cannot face turning to friends or family for shelter.
Halfway through the feature, I was shocked to read that unemployment in Japan is 5.7%, “low by international standards but a record in Japan.”
Humans perpetually struggle to improve our lot in life – that’s half of the fun in living, at least half the time. When relating to fellow human beings, it’s unfair withhold empathy based on another's lot in life. Afterall, suffering is relative – no matter how bad things are they can always get worse – and suffering is subjective: Its existence cannot be denied.
And yet I could not get this 5.7 figure out of my mind. Unemployment in the US – considered dangerously high – is nearing 10%. The discrepancy points to the relative - perhaps subjective - nature of seemingly objective statistics. There’s a tendency to grasp for numbers as undeniable facts, as stable pieces of evidence which pin us to the ground in an ever shifting world. And used with care they're invaluable.
But consider now the size of this discrepancy – unemployment in the US being around 40% higher than in Japan – next to Japan’s parallel economic struggles and identity crisis: In some ways we are completely different from Japan and yet in other ways very like them. And don’t forget that Japan’s economy remains the second largest in the world.
So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here - not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail
I recently started getting magazines again. Specifically, The Economist and Consumer Reports. Both have proved to be surprisingly insightful.
Leading up to this decision, I had been on a 10 year magazine-hiatus since my teens, when I received Reason and Sports Illustrated. I never read the issues with any regularity, and this left me with a trifle of guilt upon their arrival. When I started college I left behind magazines for good (along with TV) and I completely lost touch with current events. It was embarrassing at times. Like when I wondered why Jim Carey was challenging incumbent president George Bush.
But my real beef with magazines was that I didn’t care about the news. What I craved was insight.
News is temporal, it changes with the scenery. I was reminded of this whenever we visited my grandparents at their Floridian retirement community. The poor residents of that community were barraged with reports of murder and petty crimes. Local news channels invariably resembled Cops, with scenes of police car lights burring at night. Undoubtedly this all appealed to the worn out memory and attention of the elderly, who might as well have been watching reruns of the same broadcast over and over again.
After I decided to return to magazines, it took me months to make my first decision. I ended up going with The Economist, and then Consumer Reports, and I couldn’t be happier with them.
The 2 magazines reflect upon each other in a unique manner. Whenever I go from reading one to the other I feel a nice dissonance.
The Economist is filled with 15-page world and topical surveys. Articles regularly include sweeping statements like this one:
De Tocqueville, in his optimistic phase, said that “the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” America has succeeded brilliantly in repairing the ancestral fault of racism. Thirty-six years after Richard Nixon casually remarked that “there are times when an abortion is necessary…when you have a black and a white,” America elected the child of a black father and a white mother to the presidency. The new administration is trying to correct some of the excesses of the Bush years, much as Ronald Reagan corrected the excesses of the Carter years. (Lexington, July 09)
As noted in a recent Atlantic article, the genius behind The Economist lies in synthesizing, interpreting, and digesting current events, rather than barraging the reader with breaking news or unique scoops.
The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey….As a result, although its self-marketing subtly sells a kind of sleek, mid-last-century Concorde-flying sangfroid, The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.
Such a style of non-objective journalism is certainly prone to pitfalls, but at its best it can be truly enlightening. In The Economist, news is not simply reported for the sake of being news. The best stories link news items to grander constructs and themes. World leaders and CEOs are portrayed as human characters on the world stage. Modern themes playing out are tied to their semi-distant historical roots. Overall trends are elucidated, regardless of whether they are obvious or not. Sometimes the best things to point out are those which are obvious. A friend of mine once commented that what he loved about John Madden’s style of football broadcasting is that he’s not afraid to hark on the obvious. The Economist often excels at doing just that.
Permeating its writing is a supra-macroeconomic perspective (laid out imperfectly in their publication, Making Sense of the Modern Economy). For a while this approach struck me as too unfocused and general. Unlike magazines that are topical, niche, or partisan, it’s difficult to describe. But over time it began to click. The effect is similar to the historian who cries that history repeats itself, only it pulls not from history, but from disparate areas of the world, discussing the sorts of trends, similarities, and contrasts that you might expect to hear from a small group of smart and well-experienced travelers. One example was their insight, critical of America’s drug war, that Mexican drug violence is largely caused by Clinton-era success against Colombian drug czars (On the trail of the traffickers, 05/05/2009)
Consumer Reports in contrast is an expose of detail. Issues feature 20-page specials on kitchen appliances and cars. The advice is so concrete that you can taste its utility: “Stainless [steel refrigerators] might look inviting at the store. But it smudges easily and requires frequent wipe-downs. Clear-coated stainless or faux-stainless vinyl coatings are easier to keep clean.” (p. 27, August 2009 issue). Or “Toto’s Ultra Max II [water-efficient toilet], $510, is among those that use just 1.28 gallons per flush. But clearing the blue dye in our liquid test took two flushes, or a whopping 2.6 gallons.” (p. 47, same issue).
The magazine is geared towards that shopping maven side of you who is looking to make the wisest consumer decision. But its real value comes in teaching you how to think on a very basic level.
The death of news media - many fear - will lead to the end of the well-informed American citizen, who is now more likely to get free news on the internet that to tune into a TV station or buy a newspaper. Following Iran's election protests, The Economist declared, "Twitter 1, CNN 0". Yet we are not witnessing the death of the news industry, so much as its reformation. Gone is the demand for late-breaking news at ones fingertips or on the TV screen. In its place, however, is the need for a more interpretive spin on the news - one which doesn't tell us everything that is happening in the world, but rather is more selective by telling consumers only those news items that they need to know, and perhaps why they need to know it.
For now the media industry - particularly newspapers - is running scared, and no doubt many journalists will lose their job due to lessening demand for such broad coverage. But taking their place are slimmer media outlets that have the capability to not only inform their customers, but to sharpen their wit while they're at it. The mind of the average American news junkie won't so much be an encyclopedia of miscellaneous facts - ranging from local carjackings and rape trials to state elections and abortion debates - but rather it will need to become more discerning, organized and fluid in its abilities. In response to the current adrenaline pocked ADHD news industry, this change will be for the better.
The Washington Post recently had their 3rd annual peeps diorama contest. It consisted of over one thousand artistic renditions of peeps placed in human-like situations. See the gallery slide-show here.
The kitschy Easter marshmallow treats, dressed for the Washington Post contest like humans and placed in culturally resonant context, are surprisingly entertaining. I can't quite put my finger on it. And I hesitate to spin too much interpretation as to overkill the impact of the art. But I can't help but mention in passing of how it speaks to something unique about human perception; to the smallness of our existence pitted against the grandness of our imagination; to our ability to laugh at ourselves; and to the way that inspiration sometimes comes from such strange unpredictable sources - as in this case, from Just Born, a traditional candy manufacturer in Pennsylvania.
On a tangential note, I'm reminded of Virginia Postrell's thesis that there is less of a dichotomy between substance and style than modern society would have you believe. Our modern economy strives to tailor products to willing consumers; and it does this in an infinite number of different ways. The traditional intellectual view is that such is the result of society's vain materialist excesses. Yet it's easy enough to criticize the establishment when you're talking about other people's tastes in general. But in reality, true value is created when you buy a product that is particularly suited to your needs and tastes.
This forms the argument of Postrell's light 2004 book, The Substance of Style, which suggests that people of modern Western society are more developed, sophisticated, and enlightened than our social critics would have us believe. This isn't so much in spite of our materialist nature; rather, in one sense, it's exactly because of it.
Beauty afterall is truth, and truth beauty; and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And though you've probably heard those 2 cliches a million times, they fit together quite well to form a line of inference. In the meantime, I entreat you to view beauty and truth from the brown-speckled eye of the peep.
At 43 Jean Bauby suffered a stroke and awoke to find himself with locked-in syndrome – a rare condition, as terrifying as it sounds, in which the patient is almost completely paralyzed yet remains fully conscious and aware. Able to blink one eye, Bauby was taught to communicate one letter at a time with the help of an aid who recited the alphabet until he blinked. Using this system, Bauby authored the memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; I recently had the pleasure of seeing the movie based on it. “I decided to stop pitying myself,” wrote Bauby, “Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory.” As the narrative digs deeper into Bauby’s trapped mind, it becomes increasingly sensuous, marked by bright colors, strong breezes, swirling cinematography and score.
He’s also visited by various friends. Some of them, like his elderly father, go so far as to compare their condition to his - one of a soul locked within the body. He’s visited by a distant friend who was held prisoner under inhumane conditions for 4-some years. You can lose your body, he advises Jean, but nothing can steal your humanity.
The film has an unfortunate tendency to wander, but its impact remains. Its underlying tragedy is universal: that of not knowing what you have until it’s gone. The narrative goes in 2 figurative directions corresponding to the metaphors in the title: The diving bell sinks further underwater and the butterfly flies effortlessly up.
The film strikes a chord with me, similar to the book Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which attests to the hollowness of objectivism. My political beliefs are generally libertarian, and in high school I enjoyed a few Ayn Rand novels. They seemed empowering at the time. But despite their food for thought, the ideas lacked staying-power with me. From the start, I never understood why her novels were so much more famous than her essays. Novels teach through experience. They’re a perfectly suitable way to get a lesson across, but they’re anything but an objective medium. After reading other authors in college, Rand seemed shallow in comparison.
Rand is often associated with libertarianism – even Alan Greenspan (who describes his views as libertarian-Republican) was deeply influenced by her in his youth. But aside from individualistic values, I’m not sure how much Rand overlaps with libertarianism.
I hate to throw around such intellectual jargon – as if they were interesting in and of themselves – but to come back down to the real world, undue objectivity can often pose more harm than good. Nowhere is this more evident than in the economy.
A frequent myth is the belief that the value of money is objective - that it's fixed. This mistake has led to hundreds of years of mistrust against certain ways to use money. Money-lending is almost universally despised, across cultures and religions, as a greedy way of using money to make money. Despite this hatred towards money-lending, using money to make money, in almost any other endeavor, is considered the norm. This is why the economy is built upon money-lending. Banks play an integral role by distributing money to be used for its greatest potential. Their distributive actions run contrary to liberal concerns about skewed distributions of income; however, trying to “fix” their distribution of money has as dire consequences as toying with income distribution.
Value is subjective. This is why banking works – the value of a small business loan to a businessman of great potential is greater than the value of that loan to someone who won’t know how to use it. Likewise, the value of lending money for interest is worth more to a rich man with no use for that money than to a poorer man. The value of receiving lent money is worth more to someone who needs it and has a reliable credit history. The value of giving a loan to someone with reliable credit is greater than the value of giving a loan to someone of poor credit. Viewed purely objectively, the whole economy – perhaps even freedom - really makes little sense.
Another danger of unbridled objectivity is the use of statistics. This is bared out in the common concern about lying with stats – obviously stats don’t lie themselves, it’s the people who use them that lie. Numbers are of course very objective. But their use – both in gathering and making sense of them – is considered more of an art.
Even Greenspan wrote that he supplemented statistics about the macroeconomy with more subjective measures. During the oil crisis of the Nixon years, he created measures to estimate weekly fluctuations in GDP, which included surveying small business owners about their present difficulties and concerns. The later were of comparable value to objective numbers. During the internet boom of the 1990’s, Greenspan noted that despite rises in GDP, surveys showed that workers were becoming more skittish about the economy, largely due to increased employee turnover. This discrepancy led him to conclude that the rising GDP & stock indexes gave the public an overly rosy depiction of the economy. The takeaway point is that when the stats don’t seem to match reality, the fault is more often found with the former than the latter. This has vast implications, particularly for medicine, which alienates whatever it can’t explain as psychological or somatic. A large chunk of medical progress in the 20th century consisted reclassifying phenomena from psychological/somatic into medical. The fallacy however is that, at any given time, the categorization of conditions as psychological or somatic is thought to reflect the nature of the conditions rather than the progress of science. This has led to many misunderstandings between doctor and patient, and between researcher and object of study.
The vast difference between a human and a computer attests to how off objectivism is. It’s almost a tautology to say that we live in a subjective world. Objectivity is simply one tool among others. It can be a useful tool to help us crawl out of our locked-in subjective holes, but it can also lead to as many misconceptions as truths.
Even emotions – one of the cornerstones of subjectivity – evolved for useful objective reasons. Ignoring your emotions because they’re too subjective would be to block yourself off from one of your most carefully honed tools. I find them useful for intellectual discourse: When an idea just doesn't feel right (or wrong), you can use that as a springboard for further inquiry, and guide yourself in the right direction. Of course you can’t say that something is wrong because it feels that way. But you can use those emotions to then identify objective explanations. Objectivism's distinction between reason and irrationality is meaningless; as both reason and supposed irrationality can have the same utilitarian purpose in their proper contexts.
And what role do dreams play in a purely objective world? Consider what occurs when wake up and feel you've had an incredibly moving dream, but you try to describe to a friend to little avail. The dream's objective content somehow can't stand up to its subjective impact.
Objectivism’s biggest mistake is focusing on the “bottom line”. Because life occurs in everything above the bottom line. Humans come and go; they’re born and they’re dead; they consume calories and they expend calories; that’s the bottom line, that’s the objective perspective, as if from a disinterested party observing us from the moon. Obviously that perspective does injustice to the value of life. Robert Pirsig’s solution to the discrepancy between objective and subjective reality was to meld the two by focusing on the point where they meet. That’s quality, he believed. It's the value gained in voluntary exchange. It’s life. It's the loss that Jean Bauby suffered in the objective; the gain he won in the subjective.
Eve of Tuesday 2019
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Efficiency has been on my mind lately. I would sincerely like to be more
efficient. Yet, the greatest challenge with this statement may be
determining what...
MH370 - Why Search Teams Ignored Georesonance
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*MH370 - Why Search Teams Ignored Georesonance*
As soon as I read about the claims that Georesonance identified an aircraft
wreck at the bottom of the Bay ...
he rent, and the church provides the neediest with food parcels. At a Catholic church recently, they were making soup to share among those, like themselves, eking out the last of their savings. That included homeless Japanese men, who, unlike the Brazilians, cannot face turning to friends or family for shelter.
lot in life. Afterall, suffering is relative – no matter how bad things are they can always get worse – and suffering is subjective: Its existence cannot be denied.
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