Intellectual Property

One thing that has persistently fascinated me is the manner in which ideas refuse to be owned, despite our attempts to claim them (e.g. Newton and Leibniz fighting over calculus, Darwin and Wallace over natural selection). My own research consistently discovers people saying utterly ridiculous things about individual responsibility (e.g. "Plato is largely responsible" for some trope that runs thick through culture before and after him). It seems to me that ideas find people: a really powerful idea will find more than one person (over and over, as people bump into the circumstances that enable it).

I once tried to express this insight to a fellow student (in grad school), and his response was to worry that I would steal his research--and claim it for myself--as though my assertion that I could never really own an idea amounted to an excuse to lie (about ideas that might not even have occurred to me). I was surprised by this (and a little saddened, honestly, that I presented myself so poorly to this person that he came away from our encounter taking me for a thief). For me, the reality that I don't really own ideas is one that invites honesty and openness rather than the reverse. I don't care if you steal my ideas: I relinquish them as assets that I control. I cultivate ideas not because they make me rich or famous or respected (famous in the right places), but because I enjoy thinking--and want to do it mindfully. If there were no external fame and glory in my work as a thinker, I would still do it--and have "a real job" on the side, as so many other thinkers (more skilled than I) have in the past. To live by one's wits is fundamentally, for me, to be an honest charlatan. I see that I claim a kind of superiority over my own thoughts that I don't really possess. I see that thoughts possess me at least as much as I possess them. I see that it is silly to worship me when I am possessed by a thought that society judges to be cool (for whatever reason: the judgement of society, even learned society, is always at some point absurd). I feel this very deeply. I hope I can learn to express it without coming off as some kind of sleazeball (the academic version of an empty suit).

Every good idea I have, including the one for which I get credit (and tenure and κλέος ἄφθιτον), is one that someone else has probably also had (or will have, with as much claim to originality as I). Seeing this reality, I cannot take too much credit for my ideas. This does not predispose me to take credit for your ideas, but to take less credit, and give less, for the mere possession and expression of an idea. Ideas are valuable. People are valuable. People are not valuable to me because of their ideas, but because of their character (the way they use those ideas). This means that I am very comfortable sharing ideas with people whose character I would never adopt. I can think with Hitler, or Lenin, or Osama bin Laden, or anyone, really. I can see their ideas with the realization that these are present, powerful, and real to them--and perhaps to me. But I cannot then act as they do. I must keep my actions, my responses to ideas, filtered by character.

Virtue

There is an interesting choice that civilization makes possible.  We can choose to be sick and weak for an extended period of time (rather than dying in short order as we would in nature). 

Going back to the old Greek fable, civilization puts us at a strange crossroads.  We can head downhill toward Pleasure, who will make our wasting and waning momentarily sweet (and chronically painful as we lose mobility, strength, flexibility, and eventually our lives).  Or we can head uphill toward Virtue, who will make our growth and stasis satisfying and fun in the long-term (while she gives us hell in the short, as we practice mobility, strength, flexibility, and living--hard tasks that really beat us up).  Heracles went up, of course, but his choice is not very popular. 

The thing about Pleasure is that it really wants to look like Virtue.  These days, it goes to the gym and the office.  It eats right.  It passes easy judgement on people who don't do the right thing (i.e. whatever it happens to like doing in the gym, the office, or the dining room).  If you don't look carefully, it wears a very compelling mask of Virtue.  The thing that gives it away, semper et ubique, is its focus on aesthetics over ethics.  It wants to look good.  It wants to win medals.  It wants to play, not work.  When its regimen gets hard, it goes home (and complains about "austerity" in the office, "chalk on the floor" in the gym, etc., while noshing some sweet snack--approved once by some nutrition guru--in the dining room).  It does not see value in learning through loss (what the old poet Aeschylus calls "suffering into truth," the bequest of gods to humanity).  It does not know how to value the suffering that outsiders do not see or recognize (with some external reward, some outward sign of approval that must become ever louder and more extravagant to keep people's pleasure-sensors firing wildly).  Virtue is different because it can take pleasure in defeat, and in victories that the outside world does not see (victories too small to be rewarded with money and prizes and shit, but they are some of life's most important gifts to humanity).

Virtue does not mind if you like to look at yourself in the gym, if your job at the office is mostly make-believe and pretend ("well, the boss needs this BS, so we will give it to him in the best order we can"), or if you indulge in the occasional "bad" food (all food is poisonous to somebody at sometime).  But if you never strive to live beyond your "comfort zone," if you never push away from the apathetic pleasure of relaxing into the active (and pathetic) pleasure of acting, then you will not know Virtue.  Your strengths will decay into weakness, your pleasure into slow pain, and you will live and die prematurely senile (rotting like untreated grapes rather than aging like fine wine).  If you live in the artificial world of civilization, the world in which you are not starving or homeless, then this choice is real for you.  Will you suffer here and now to feel better for years to come?  Or will you kick back and feel good here and now to feel like crap as you move into "the golden years" (which will be pleasantly unpleasant, punctuated by intrusions of chronic illness)?

The mind and the body are not separate in our human environment: we use both, and we use them together.  Naturally, we must exercise both if we want to retain function (and push our little envelope of blood and guts up Virtue's path).  What applies to your muscles applies to your mind, too.  Keep reading.  Keep learning (new information, new languages, new applications for theoretical understanding).  Keep looking for ways to integrate thoughts with action.  Keep looking for inconsistencies in yourself, in your environment, in whatever fantasy of reason or unreason you have constructed to make sense of the world.  The path of Virtue is a path of relentless inquiry--a process of defining, honing, perfecting, breaking, and discarding the self, which must then be built again, and again, and again, over and over as many times as possible until death. 

Some people, devotees of Pleasure, want you to build "the one true self," preferably when you are very young, and then carry it unscathed from adolescence to old age.  This is a recipe for avoiding Virtue.  You must banish "the one true self" from your life, if you take Virtue's path.  You must take a sledgehammer to that self, prove its weakness (for it is always weak), and build another.  There is no end to this process, no perfect self creatable that can withstand everything you or the world might throw at it, but the end-result of a lifetime building and breaking selves is that you become much better at the process.  You still tell lies.  You still make weak selves, mortal selves that disintegrate as you wish they wouldn't.  But you do it so much better--so much better than you did as a little kid, when you scarcely knew what it was to be coherent, to make a self.  

Reflections on Violence

In light of recent events, specifically the murderous rampage of a young male college-student from Southern California who explained his attack as the fruit of being rejected sexually and hating American women (for wounding his self-esteem by rejecting him "unfairly" for other men who struck him as inferior), I offer the following thoughts.  I refer to this particular individual as R in my comments.  

Personally, I feel that there is a profound benefit to be had from breaking the illusion that my importance somehow trumps yours, that my integrity (or esteem or in a word, life) matters more than yours. How do we break that illusion? How do we provide space for young fools like R to realize the limits of their importance or worth without destroying themselves or others? I don't think there is any way to build a society utterly proof against accidents (that will on occasion give us criminals like R who must be put down), but I do believe there are things we can do to mitigate these accidents.

I have heard some folks say that boys are socialized to be violent, and that this is responsible for the creation of monsters like R. I disagree with this idea, though I might agree with some of the practical approaches to dealing with violence that come along with it.  (It is not always clear to me how we are supposed to stop "socializing boys to be violent." With therapy? Religion? I am uncomfortable with these options, for reasons which appear in articles like this one).

Why do I disagree? My disagreement comes from a lifetime (more than 20 years now: I am getting old) spent around boys--my peers growing up, and now my two sons, who are 4 and 6 years old. As a kid, I was drawn to martial arts. This is not unusual in itself, but other things about my life were undoubtedly strange. Unlike many kids, I grew up without access to much TV or movies. My parents put an end to our TV-watching when I was about 7 or 8 years old; the last shows I watched "live" as a kid were Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. Once a week, on Fridays, our family would gather around the VCR (remember those?) and watch one or two movies from my parents' collection. The Internet did not exist as a public utility until I was a teenager. What does this mean? Well, I was drawn to martial arts without knowing who Bruce Lee was (in the '80s), what boxing was, what video games were (we didn't have any), what violent movies looked like (my parents were not into that), etc. I just wanted to move, and to fight. There was no "because"--no social pressure from my folks, no social pressure from my friends, no cogent aspiration on my part to be tough or manly or whatever.  Later on I discovered words and rituals aiming to express the values I already felt as a 9- and 10-year-old kid: martial values, fighting values, values built around violence. The point is that I was not a blank slate upon which society wrote violence. As a little kid, I already contained something people call violence, something my martial arts' instructors recognized and taught me to control with respect. For that I am still grateful to them.

Fast forward to the present. My wife and I have two kids, boys whom we aspire to raise right. I suppose you might say that with my background in martial arts (which I still practice), I accidentally provide some kind of subliminal message to them that violence is golden, that they must fight one another. But my wife certainly doesn't convey that message, and I spend more time breaking fights up than starting them. My observation of their experience (as good little kids, who are learning to be responsible and respectful: I hope they don't grow up to be like R) is that it mirrors my own. They fight naturally with each other or with me (not with strangers, and they are learning not to fight with kids at school, not even their friends). I did not teach this, any more than I taught my dog to bark and bite my heels when we bought him as a tiny puppy. The violence is already there in animal nature, masculine nature especially (perhaps). The question is what to do with it.

I think it is very dangerous to let people spend their lives unchallenged, to accumulate experience winning that does not involve loss. My martial arts background was very useful to me in that it taught me to respect not just myself but also my opponent, who might not look like much but could now and again whip my ass (in ways that I would have to respect: getting caught with a stiff kick to the liver teaches you not to gloat too much when you are the kicker). The values my martial arts instructors had were explicitly geared toward minimizing physical damage: you don't want everyone leaving the art prematurely aged and broken, even if you are a selfish bastard as my teachers weren't.  As a result, I came away from my years of training physically developed (enhanced rather than broken) and mentally balanced.  I was not going to go out and hurt other people because "Life is unfair!" I knew in my gut, from years' experience, that you don't complain to the ref when the other guy takes you down and wins the match. You smile, shake his hand, and give your best effort the next time. Defeat is simply the other side of victory, a price that we must pay to win responsibly. The contest need not be fair--your opponent is different from you, with physical attributes that you don't have, and vice versa--and the best way of handling that asymmetry is with respect and deference (particularly when you win: you must show the loser that you respect his effort, that you are not the kind of asshole that R would call "alpha male"). 

For those who wisely require more than just my personal observations and experience to back these ideas up, I offer this National Geographic article on elephants.  Consider these two paragraphs in particular:

Bradshaw speculates that this early trauma [seeing older elephants killed or carried off by poachers], combined with the breakdown in social structure [no older elephants left to guide the tribe in the bush], may account for some instances of aberrant elephant behavior that have been reported by field biologists. Between 1992 and 1997, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg Game Reserve in South Africa killed more than 40 rhinoceroses—an unusual level of aggression—and in some cases had attempted to mount them. The young elephants were adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot in cullings at Kruger National Park—sanctioned killings to keep elephant populations under control. At that time it was common practice for such orphaned elephant babies to be tethered to the bodies of their dead relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to new territories. Once moved to Pilanesberg, the orphans matured without the support of any adult males. "Young males often follow older, sexually active males around," says Joyce Poole, "appearing to study what they do. These youngsters had no such role models."

One effort to repair the torn fabric of an elephant group lends further support to the idea that early trauma and a lack of role models can lead to aggression: After Joyce Poole suggested that park rangers in South Africa introduce six older bull elephants into Pilanesberg's population of about 85 elephants, the aberrant behavior of the marauding adolescent males—and their premature hormonal changes—abruptly stopped.

My observation of R and his kind tells me not that we socialize violence too much, but the opposite: we socialize it too little. Too few violent kids like R grow up without the kind of socialization into violence that I experienced (with peers and older men, mostly, who served me as role models for respectful, socially constructive ways to channel violence). Instead of watching older men court older women respectfully, R was watching college freshmen. Instead of watching older men fight in the arena, R was watching reality TV (or some other garbage remote from real life, until he mistook himself for the hero in an action film and charged out to die stupidly). I am profoundly grateful that I do not live R's life, that when I graduated with a BA as a virgin (no sex for me until I married at age 26), I was not homicidal. I knew that "real men" (the men I grew up with) don't kill women who don't want to go out with them. I knew that "real men" don't jump from "Life is unfair!" to "Kill everyone!" These are really valuable lessons, lessons that I hope to pass on to my sons as they grow up and come to terms with the violence they embody.

My Own Small Vision of Happiness: Introduction

Ever since I can remember, I have had what you might call a hunger for life (what German romantics or at least their interpreters would call Sehnsucht).  As a small child, I couldn't really describe it very well.  I remember standing in the playground outside my old elementary school (when I was about eight years old, before my family moved from Alabama to Georgia and began homeschooling), thinking to myself, "I must remember this moment.  There are trees over there, wind in my face, the sun overcast with a few clouds behind me, and a fence right there in front of me.  I must remember this moment, so that I can look back from the future and see what it was like to exist here and now."  I knew that there was something significant in that moment.  I knew that life was something important.  I knew I had many things ahead of me, many unknowns, and that what I was experiencing right then was somehow meaningful.  But I could not see how.  I did not know what life was.  I had the feeling I was going into something, but I couldn't see what (or what I was supposed to do about it).  As a result, I would repeatedly stop and try to "capture moments" like this one (which remains lodged more deeply in my memory than most of the later ones, though I sometimes think I remember some of them, too--memory being the tricky thing that it is).

As I grew older, my hunger became more concrete (more identified with definite things in my personal environment).  I learned to satisfy it with particular goods, goods that I encountered in my personal experience and cultivated as something unique to me.  These goods could be material things, but in my experience they were always more.  I loved books, not because of the paper or the particular information that they contained, but because there was something incredibly vital and satisfying about sitting down for several hours and reading, learning things about animals, people, places, and things I had never seen (or at least never recognized: books taught me that each thing in my ordinary experience contains a world of context to which I remain always more oblivious than not).  I loved books as an experience more than as things.  Significantly, the experiential value of books was always greater when I chose my own reading.  The books I have enjoyed most throughout my life (from the time I asked my dad to read me The Lord of the Rings out loud before bedtime as a five-year-old until now) have been the ones I picked myself.  I don't want the things people want me to have (books, diplomas, car, house, family, kids, jobs, career, cursus honorum).  I want the experiences I choose for myself (reading, working, friendship, love, victory and defeat, birth and death, virtus).  I didn't have words to say this as a little kid, but it was true then and remains true today.

As I grew up, I learned more about the hunger I carried inside.  I learned that it could be destructive as well as constructive.  The most powerful illustration of its awful power was provided by my interaction with institutions.  Naive and idealistic (like many before me and many since), I identified unreservedly with the groups of people around me, constructing my own virtus deliberately to reflect communal values in the social groups where I participated.  I aimed to be a perfect picture of Mormon virtue (as taught in my local LDS ward), martial virtue (as taught in my local martial arts dojo, which was run by a Southern Baptist preacher), and political virtue (as taught all over in my family, church, the dojo, and eventually the American universities where I studied).  Looking back, I think that this mistake is inevitable and even good, but that doesn't make it universally, unreservedly good (or safe: life is always dangerous, lethally so).  Sometimes, my eagerness to serve the collective paid off in good ways: I became a good student, a strong kid, and a hard worker.  Other times, not so much: I also became neurotic, pessimistic (depressive and obsessed with ways in which I fell short of perfection), and a glutton for others' approval (eager to confess sins and receive absolution, eager to be commanded in all things, slow to do things on my own initiative that might turn out "badly" for my standing with the group that I worshipped too much).  Also, I occasionally lost sight of my own ideals.  I was so concentrated on doing my part for the group that I forgot to take care of myself.  Serving visions of God and fellowman and country, I lost sight of myself.  I lost my own vision.  Committed to collective values, I didn't notice that my own values were becoming increasingly incoherent and even irrelevant (as I deliberately smothered my own idea of good to pursue somebody else's).

For years I did my best to ignore my own visions of good (which were scarcely coherent anyway, in part because I feared the threat their coherence might pose to the incoherence increasingly apparent in the collective values around me).  But it was all in vain.  The day finally came when I awoke--when I found myself sitting under my own bohdi tree, standing on my own mount of transfiguration, hearkening to the daimonion on my own shoulder. The issue of my awakening has been both positive and negative. On the positive side, I have become much more aware of what it is that I really value. This makes me easier to relate to as a person, and has made my friendships more authentic and enduring. On the negative side, people do not always like what I value, particularly when they know me only through my ideas (which occasionally sound much crueler and/or crazier than I like to think I really am). Expressing my personal virtus makes me obnoxious to people who wish that I would just sit quietly and like (or at least pretend to like) what they want me to. Inasmuch as I too feel dislike, I understand on some level the disgust that I inspire, and I think I have come up with some good ways of dealing with it—ways of relating to myself and others that allow us all to be authentic without compromising unnecessarily or impossibly our conflicting ideas of what constitutes happiness. In the posts that follow this one, I want to share some of my ideas about happiness—my own vision of what “the good life” looks like. While this vision necessarily includes the visions of others, I don't mean to dictate what people should like or do. My vision of happiness won't be yours, and that is as it should be. Like my vision or not as you please. My aim is always to make it as little obnoxious to you as possible, as little restrictive of your own moral autonomy as nature allows.

Knowledge and Wisdom

My mind is full of thoughts lately.  I cannot write them all down fast enough, it seems.  Here is something that came to me this morning that seems worth preserving.  Note that much of this reflects the outlook evident in Nassim Taleb's latest book, which I am really, really enjoying.  He is living proof for me that I am not utterly unusual in the way I instinctively approach the universe.  He knows math better than I do, and I cannot always judge his technical comments as well as I aspire to (one day, if I ever have nothing better to do than crack some math books open again), but his philosophical outlook is so close to mine as to make us practically identical twins.  People used to ask me why I elected to study dead languages and whatnot in college, and I would come up with vaguely uncomfortable answers--self-deprecating jokes to postpone their interest until I found some better way to respond.  Taleb has given some of the best answers that I have heard from somebody else.  I wish I could have read him earlier (when he still did not exist in print): having a perspective like his available in language I could understand might have saved me some awkward moments as an undergrad (or even in grad school, at the beginning).  I instinctively value wisdom more than knowledge, and I did not have the vocabulary to talk meaningfully to people (laypeople or my professors) about the difference.

In modern practice (and jargon), it seems to me that intelligence has become the ability to perform to an arbitrary standard on certain set tests. These tests are built around knowledge, which is conceived as regular and predictable narrative unfolding the truth about life, the universe, and everything: intelligent people are supposed to see data and turn them into narratives, with the most coherent narrative being the most intelligent (regardless of any untoward consequences that it might have when people take it seriously).

Wisdom on the other hand, when I invoke it (as a student and a reader of ancient wisdom literature: there is an impressive collection of the stuff that few people nowadays read) is about deconstructing narratives as much as building them. It knows that it does not know, and finds values the ability to doubt at least as much as the ability to have positive faith. It values the lack of knowledge (and intelligence) as much (or more than) its possession, and puts perfect knowledge (if it even admits this as a possibility) firmly outside the human realm. (No man can know the ways of the gods: the lord in Delphi does not speak; he merely offers signals that we perceive through a glass, darkly; in this life we never see clearly.) Intelligence is a terrible, devilish burden as well as an awe-inspiring, divine gift. "The serpent tempted me with the gods' ambrosia, and I did eat: at first it was sweet beyond all sweetness, but the aftertaste was most bitter." Not all of us have the stomach for the wine of the gods, and infinite amounts of it will destroy any man. We have lost sight of this reality in modernity, seeing the positive effects of being drunk on intelligence and knowledge without noticing the negative ones (since our larger social networks have allowed the drunkest fools to pass their hangovers on to somebody else, somebody too clueless to recognize what is happening).

The message of religions the world over is mostly true. What isn't true is the human element: our priests, like our other "experts" in so many domains, have become drunk on their own intelligence, so drunk that they have failed to recognize the difference between the sacred (that lies outside their grasp) and the profane (that they can understand and manipulate without hurting anyone). They have blasphemed against their own gods, making a mockery of sacred things and replacing the real divinity (the uncertain) with false idols (of impossible certainty). They have turned myths (the Garden of Eden) into history ("our earth is precisely 6000 years old ... or 14 billion years old"), wisdom ("the ways of God are not our ways, and they never will be") into knowledge ("I can see into the mind of God with this perfect rain dance: the math is truly beautiful and elegant, no?"), humility ("I must live limited by my human capacity") into arrogance ("I can make any god I please in my own image: I am the mind of your god and mine, and all men must bow to me!"). They are fools, and the vengeance of God will surely find them, no matter what they believe: like many turkeys before them, they simply do not understand Thanksgiving.  ("There is no evidence that any bird will be slaughtered tomorrow, since none of us has been killed in the past: on the contrary, we have been fattened and treated very well!")

It is hard to teach wisdom, because wisdom values failure more than success (or at least makes the two equally important), whereas modern life is all about writing failure out of reality (in the impossible myths that it creates to paper over unpleasant truth that it doesn't want to see). The most wise are those who fail and survive to tell their lack of success (to themselves and others); the false prophets of knowledge dislike this kind of wisdom. It doesn't sell well. It doesn't grow the economy (in the short-term). It undercuts the intelligent illusion that life is fundamentally some kind of virtual game that we can recreate to suit our fancy through massive mutual daydreams ("If we all imagine this crazy world without evil together, then it will become reality! No more death! No more social violence! No more bankruptcy! No more moral depravity! Imagine! Hey, you over there, stop ruining our outcome by refusing to drink the Kool-Aid with everybody else. That is antisocial behavior, and we will not tolerate it. Bottoms up, or you get to go into permanent time-out, on Ritalin, in a cubicle somewhere").  But real life is not the World of Warcraft, no matter how fun that game might be, no matter how smart the people who make it. And wishing will not make it so. Screw the visionaries who demand that we all live by their vision, as though it were the reality it can never be. I laugh derisively in their general direction, even as they fart philanthropically in mine. But whose emissions smell better in the end? That is the question we are trying to decide, I guess.