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.

A Small Rant against Modern Sport

These thoughts have been stewing in my mind for a long while, and I finally decided to get them out there for someone else to read.  The catalyst was an article about how red wine may mask elevated testosterone levels.

It always makes me laugh when I read about anti-doping policies in sports. Why do people care so much? Someone always tells me that it is "for the children," who are apparently so hopelessly naive and gullible that they cannot help seeing Lance Armstrong (or whomever) somewhere on TV and thinking, "Cool! I want to live my life exactly like that guy! I wonder what kind of crap he stuffs his face with every day?  I want me some of that!"  If my kids turn out this dumb, then (in my opinion) they will be beyond help (from me or anyone else). Idiots will always do stupid stuff, and professional athletes will always do things to enhance their performance (duh!).  There is no way to change this, the world over.  Fighting the reality is wasting everybody's time (and changing nothing that matters: as is, we just award prizes and then snatch them back reactively when the "right" evidence appears, revealing that the stupid fans were worshipping the wrong sports idol, yet again).

Let the athletes be athletes. (Their risk, their reward. Do I really care how many gold medals somebody wins?  How many world-titles?  How does stripping some prizes away every so often for performance-enhancing behavior make my life better?)  Let the kids be kids.  Tell them what the athletes do, and let them see what happens. (The smart ones will probably realize that professional athletics is no way for most people to make a decent living.  This is one thing that seems to be true regardless of how anyone strives to enhance performance on the playing field.  On the other hand, when some kids want to make a trial of the athletic life, at least they will have the reality clear before they go out into it: they will know that they are responsible for the risks they take to get the rewards they want.  Don't forget to look at something besides steroids: e.g. concussions in football, knees in MMA, heart-attacks in marathoners.)

I want to kill the idea that sports are somehow inherently noble, that they necessarily make participants better people in every way.  Somebody can think this for himself, if he wants to, but forcing it on everybody else is just wrong.  Kids don't need the kind of fake "role-models" that professional athletes too often become.  That cute crush that your ten-year-old has on Lance Armstrong does not need to be saved.  It needs to be broken, shattered into a million tiny pieces and scattered to the four winds.  Lance is a person like any other person, not a "role-model" to be worshipped and imitated with sacred rituals (the sipping of the holy protein shake, the sleeping in the holy altitude chamber, and perhaps even the injecting of the forbidden holy needle into the most holy buttocks).
 
In general, people take sport way too seriously.  Read the words uttered by US federal representatives in hearings conducted over baseball, of all things--a bunch of dudes throwing a ball and hitting it with sticks--and weep.  Our government can't be bothered to balance its budget or ascertain whether the wars it keeps waging make any sense, at all, and yet it has time to make solemn pronouncements on the proper way to hit balls with sticks, an activity which apparently has grave moral consequences.  (Such stupid s***!  Heaven forbid the populace "lose faith" in their favorite pastime, in the congressmen's words.  We wouldn't want that, would we?  No.  Keep the idiots happy with their bread and circuses, even if the bread is sawdust purchased with the blood of future generations and the circuses a transparent farce from beginning to end.) 

Some Thoughts on True Love

I had another thought about wanting to change people this morning. The awful truth, as I see it, is that even when this succeeds (and you manage to change your partner to be closer to some ideal you value and s/he doesn't), the result is bad. You become more set in your ways, more attached to unrealistic fantasies (not just those that relate to your spouse). You become more fragile, more liable to be upset when life upsets your fairytale applecart. Victory in this context is actually worse than defeat.

Looking at my own close relationships, I see great value in commitment.  There is particularly great potential for person growth in a long-term romantic relationship ("marriage"): if you approach marriage honestly, with humility and openness (starting well before the ceremony) and commitment (especially afterward), it can teach you so much about yourself (individually) and human nature (generally).  You learn to adjust your expectations to match reality.  You become more open to other people (not just your spouse: being intimate with another person makes it easier to relate to non-intimates, I think, in that it teaches you to read and anticipate human nature in new ways).  You "grow up" in ways that you could never anticipate or mimic (as far as I can see) in a life-path without that kind of intimacy. Such has been my experience.

But I also see (in the lives of some unfortunate people around me) the opposite as well. Some people retreat into marriage instead of advancing into it boldly. They "settle" for one another passively rather than choosing each other for better or worse. And their marriage makes them weaker, less open (to each other and the outside world), less capable (of anticipating and providing for their own needs, let alone anyone else's). They become nags and cheats--small, mean souls fighting constantly over little stuff that real people would scorn as beneath their notice. They look back fondly on the puppy love of their youth as though it were some great thing, some immense purity that they lost. They try over and over to recapture it instead of moving on to the higher ground, the love beyond romance which many of them don't even know exists. 

The naive simply don't see that intimacy is more than lust or romance. The rush of hormones behind puppy love is great, of course, but to get the really good stuff from life's loving-cup you have to drain it to the dregs--all the way to the last, bitterest drop. That is when you see that true love is as bitter as it is sweet, and you realize that there is no sweetness you would trade for such exquisite bitterness. A really good lover isn't just someone you were once infatuated with. A really good lover is someone you would follow into heaven or hell without counting the difference--and you prove this to yourself when she opens that door, either one of them, and you march blithely in.  No second thoughts.  No regrets.  Total commitment.

I know too many people willing to make their spouses suffer, and not enough willing to suffer joyfully with their spouses (though this latter category contains a lot more people than the most cynical among us might expect: for some reason, the real lovers never get much publicity; if you rely on Hollywood and Disney for your romantic education, you might not even know that they exist).

Many young people think that love is about getting what you want and giving whatever comes naturally. Marriage done right teaches us to educate our desires (so that we don't want impossible things) and give gifts so wonderful we never even conceived that they could exist. Marriage done right shows us that we all want to give more than to receive (anyone can take stuff, but it takes a real person to give something worth having), and that our capacity for giving is much greater than we ever dreamed (much too great for the kind of meanness that comes out as spite or jealousy or any covetous lust for control: we want to give each other little moments in heaven, freely and with no obligation, not squabble over whose turn it is to do the laundry or what kind of paper towels to buy with whose money). But it requires absolute integrity (from both participants) in order to work. Like any really great thing, it is not accomplished on an adolescent whim (not even when a prophet of God invokes the sealing power: that power is just a feeble rhetorical sign-post that means nothing without our blood, sweat, and tears).

In Defense of Religion Done Right

Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House, 2012.  ISBN: 1400067820.

I am slowly making my way through this book, which I am enjoying a lot (as I have enjoyed all of Taleb's work that I have read thus far).  Taleb articulates well why I am reluctant to abandon traditions, including religious traditions, even as I question the utility of dogma, including religious dogma, as a transparent guide for human life.  I like traditions.  I think they are useful, providing more upside (more opportunity for large profit) than downside (risk of serious damage).  I dislike dogma.  I think it provides more downside than upside, more risk than reward (and the rewards are nothing special, no matter what kind of dogma we are talking about: the more seriously you take any dogma, the more likely it is to ruin your life, hurting you deeply).

In brief, I love Christmas (tradition) and loathe the idea of trying to force myself or others to believe literally in Santa Claus (dogma).  I am open to Santa existing as people imagine him (recognizing that people's imagination paints him very differently as historical situations vary), but I am not invested in him existing.  I couldn't care less.  My Christmas is beautiful rather he comes down the chimney physically or not.  Assuming he does make it to my stocking in person, I don't even care whether he leaves gifts or coal.  He can do whatever he pleases.  Historically, this means leaving me alone.  The closest I came to seeing him for real was when I tried to imagine him sitting in a pile of presents one year under the Christmas tree.  I recall announcing to one of my sisters that I had seen Santa, that he was sitting under our tree.  Thus did I become an allegorist, like better men before me, choosing to illustrate my life with myth even as I failed to find it literally true: there was no jolly old gent sitting under my Christmas tree, sitting pretty in a holiday coat and handing out presents to all and sundry.  My experience with God to date is exactly the same: divinity is a picture I project onto circumstances, a word I throw out into the void to give it shape.  "Santa" represents generosity, kindness, presents, Christmas, and a bunch of related things.  I invoke him to point to these.  "God" represents many of the same things.  He is a picture I can call up to illustrate and/or point to things like justice, love, hatred, vengeance, and so on.  In my experience, he is not a real person the way I am.  We have never met as human beings.

But that does not mean that I have no use for religion, no appreciation for tradition, no reservations about innovators who proclaim the end of everything old and the rise of new truth (whether some new religious dogma or scientific theory supposed to revolutionize the world: I distrust both, for the same reasons).  Distrusting the latest costume-dresser pretending to be Santa is not the same thing as hating Christmas.  With that in mind, I offer my defense of a religion, which comes from a position essentially identical to that of Nassim Taleb.

I really appreciate religion, even now that I am no longer comfortable practicing the LDS faith I was born into. I wish that apologists (especially the LDS apologists I am familiar with) didn't spend so much time fighting impossible (and absurd) battles, as though it really mattered what happened in the past. (Do I care whether there were coins in ancient America? Horses? Chariots? Old World civilizations in the New that disappeared without leaving a trace? Must I care in order to save my life? If so, I am doomed.) Why seek to control the past, which is beyond control (especially in our modern world)? Why not focus on the real weakness in much opposition to religion, weakness that shows up in blind trust in scientists and socially empowered bureaucrats (who can be just as dumb and selfish as any prophet or priest)? So many religious apologists just settle for being really bad scientists and bureaucrats, when they might offer so much more.

Religion has historically helped us solve problems otherwise insoluble (like how to galvanize a community of people who cannot see eye-to-eye intellectually, not for lack of education but for fundamental disparities in individual capacities: we are not all adapted to think the same things about life, the universe, and everything). Religion gives people "safe" ways to place bets with the universe that we actually live in (the universe of social ties, biological urges, irrational and unexpected outcomes: not the academy or the lab), ways that even the most incapable can turn to solid profit (and we are all incapable at some point of our lives, perhaps even most of our lives: science cannot make us smart; it just illustrates more precisely how dumb we are). Religion done right releases us from the illusion that the universe is comprehensible, that it all makes sense somehow, that if we only got in good with the right people (or obtained the right information), we would understand it all and never suffer anything we didn't want to suffer. Somehow, some uppity religious folk always turn this formula on its head and end up trying to shove their personal worldview onto everyone else as some kind of absolute truth (as though priests were like physicists and/or kings: they aren't, not at all, and they wear both roles very badly, as the really good priests have always recognized). The idea that we might save the world by indoctrinating people in Darwinism (vel sim) is honestly as ridiculous as the idea that we might save them by indoctrinating them in correlated Mormonism. People don't need classes in advanced physics to learn how to drive cars. They don't need classes in biology to know how to live and be healthy (any more than birds need classes in flying, as Nassim Taleb says). Here is something that apologists could contribute. They could make the positive benefits of religion more evident, allowing people to make better use of them (while avoiding misapplications of religion, misapplications which people are noticing more every day, despite all the apologists' efforts). They could embrace the unity that binds faith and doubt (which are just two words for the same thing), instead of trying to fight it by begging every question and coming up with caricatures of scientific reasoning that even a dense kid with no rigorous academic grounding can see through (if he cares to look, as many of us just don't).

Religion is about practice. It is about how the individual imagines himself in the world, how he sees himself acting and being acted upon. It is fanciful, not factual. It never became factual until philosophers and theologians made it so, attempting in good faith to arrive at a kind of truth that is not universally available (the objective, rigorous truth that exists in physics but is impossible in social science, where there are too many variables and nonlinearities to allow for simple, elegant truth: mathematics can tell the truth in physics; in social science, equations almost always lie). Religious apologists could leverage this reality. They could defend religion, instead of joining the parade of fanatics that have been burning her down to the ground ever since somebody decided to oppose faith and doubt to one another and persecute with violence those on the wrong side of their arbitrary line. The greatest irony for me since my "awakening" in grad school has been the realization that religion's most ardent enemies include a great many clerics, including many who profess to defend the faith (and are obviously sincere in some cases: they just don't realize that their hard position weakens and ultimately destroys the plot of land where they want to build the kingdom of God).

The Dark Side of Happiness

Recently my attention has been drawn repeatedly to the (disconcerting and even unpleasant) reality (1) that human beings do not understand why things happen and (2) that individual recipes for happiness are not universal.

(1) Life is full of problems.  This appears universal (to the animal world, not just the human species), and so as observers we slip easily into the habit of talking about it as something singular: we point to it in the aggregate with words like evil or the human condition.

Confronted on a daily basis with evil (the human condition), we naturally react.  There are as many reactions as there are individuals, but two common reactions are anger and sorrow.  These emotions drive us to move (an emotion is what propels us to act in response to stimuli, breaking the trance that holds Buridan's ass forever between water and food).  Our motion takes many shapes, too numerous and different to define (e.g. lashing out in anger or scorn, or reaching out in sorrow or pity).  We cannot help this (our reaction), though we can with effort learn to control it a little bit (muting reactions so that we don't express them in ways we find unsettling).

Life does not wait for our reactions, however.  It goes on.  More importantly, it does not depend on our reactions.  We don't get this.  We think that we can make things happen the way we want them to.  We think that if we do the right dance, performing each step perfectly, the universe will give us release from our troubles (a release that we refer to with words like happiness).  Some of us base our entire outlook on life around the idea that we can make our own happiness, that we can defeat evil (the human condition) and avoid the suffering that it brings.  This attitude is problematic when we apply it to ourselves (for reasons I hope to get into in a moment).  It is disastrous when applied to others.

What I am trying to say will make more sense if I give you an analogy to illustrate it.  Think of the fly that charges against a closed window repeatedly, doing its best to escape the stifling environment of the house for the great outdoors (where it can end its brief existence properly, experiencing whatever it is that flies have developed to regard as happiness over the course of their evolution).  Sometimes, the window that the fly is bumping into is closed, and it remains closed.  In these cases, unless some factor intervenes (e.g. a human with a flyswatter), the fly that charges the window will eventually wear itself out, give up the ghost, and fall dead on the windowsill.  From the perspective of a fly, that death is almost certainly evil.  But not all flies charge the same window.  What happens when the window is open a crack (or more)?  Under these circumstances, the fly that charges it may eventually get out (and find happiness in its release from prison).  Now, imagine that the second fly (whose window happened to be cracked open) somehow finds itself able to communicate with the first.  Naturally, it will tell the first fly that happiness depends on pursuing the ritual that it used to escape from the prison that both of them experience.

"Keep charging the window!" it will say. "That is how you get out!"

The first fly may agree or not.  Being a fly, it is likely to agree: flying against the window is what comes naturally for it.  But the promise of happiness that seems so certain to the second fly is really anything but.  Hard as this is to understand or accept, the condition of happiness lies outside the power of the individual organism (whether we talking about flies or human beings, as far as I can tell).  Things happen to us, things that have consequences beyond our power to control, no matter how we may react.  I could do anything, but I am not going to change the fact that I was born at a particular time to particular parents. I am always determined by more than just my next emotion, and not everything that determines me is under my control.  I cannot control what other people do.  I cannot control the weather.  I cannot always even control myself (when I react involuntarily or lose consciousness or capability owing to external factors like poisonous gas, to give one example that occurs to me right now).  Even if I do everything in my power to secure what looks like happiness to me ("charging against the window" with all my might and main), that happiness remains fundamentally and irrevocably dependent on factors beyond my control (the window has to be open).  As a human being, I do have more resources than the fly.  I can think.  I can reason (using the experience of others to guide mine).  But I cannot control historical outcomes, and my lack of control is not momentary or fixable (with the right regimen).  There is no "right" way for a fly to charge a window; when the charging fly fails to escape, it is not because its flight was deficient in any way.  It simply did what flies do, did it well even, and did not get lucky.  Sometimes that is what happens.

(2) Because of all the foregoing, success can actually be a bad thing for understanding (even if it is good for happiness).  The fly that succeeds has no patience for its friend that doesn't.  It doesn't understand that the happiness which it found through charging the window isn't universal.  This happens all the time in human life.  Somebody makes a lucky bet in the market.  Somebody gets a nice job.  Somebody stumbles into very good health.  Somebody has really good relationships with friends and family.  And, inevitably, somebody starts telling other people how to be happy. 

"If you live the way I do, then you will be happy!  Just make this bet (not that one).  Go for this job (not that one).  Read this book (not that one).  Do this exercise (not that one).  Say these words (not those ones)."  And so on.

But life doesn't work like this.  My happiness is not yours.  I cannot tell you what makes you happy, what will make you happy, because I cannot know that.  If I could tell you, the answer would almost certainly reveal that happiness exists beyond human control.

("Well, you need to be born to good parents in perfect health, live your long life free of troubles that you can handle without breaking down, avoid the foods and climates that make you ill, and remember to pass this advice along to others--for a small fee, if you like!")

I advise all people to avoid being hit by cars.  I think that getting hit by a car would be unhappy.  But some people are going to be hit by cars, no matter what they or anyone else does (and if we somehow lose all access to cars, then they will die by some other accidental means).  What is happiness for them?  The good news is that many of them do discover happiness.  The bad news is that they must always find it for themselves.  You cannot make others happy. 

You especially cannot make others happy when you do not understand how they are miserable.  Misery and happiness are really just two words for the same thing in human experience (our attachment to ourselves and those around us, our expectations for life).  We call it misery when we don't like it, happiness when we do.  But it is in itself neither miserable nor happy, neither evil nor good.  Flies crash into windows because that is what flies do, pure and simple.  It does no good for the fly who made it out to lecture the fly who hasn't ("Charge harder! Have more faith! Power through it!").  It may be comforting to think that we make our own destiny, that we control where we end up and how, but that does not make it true.  It is certainly comforting to think that we can help those around us, but when we actually attempt this, it becomes clear pretty quick that "helping" is much more about "compassion" (literally "shared suffering") than it is about anything else (e.g. "happiness").  You can hold someone's hand and say that you are sorry that she feels bad.  You cannot make her feel better.  You don't have what it takes.  She doesn't have it, either (at least not all to herself, under her control).  If she is lucky, then she will stumble across it someday (when the window happens to be open). 

When it comes to explaining and/or creating happiness, much moral advice is worse than useless.  It merely makes "failed" people feel worse (they already feel bad).  It makes them feel helpless instead of hopeful (since the easy solutions that work so well for others don't work for them: if the window is closed, it doesn't matter how a fly charges it).  It closes them to new solutions rather than opening them (since they see how the obvious ones really, really don't work: this causes them to lose hope altogether sometimes).  It makes them feel like irredeemable pariahs (all their friends made it through the window: why are they so dumb? so lazy? so whatever that they cannot power through the glass in front of them the way others have?).

So there we are.  Happiness is not universal.  It is not even securely happy (since it is at root the same thing as misery: happiness is what we call life when we like it; misery is what we call it when we don't; none of us likes life all the time).  It is not verbally communicable.  It cannot be handed down in easy recipes.  The most we can do for those we love when they are miserable is "mourn with those who mourn" and hope that they stumble across the bright side of misery eventually.

Brujo Encadenado

Robert M. Pirsig. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. New York: Bantam, 1992.  ISBN: 0553299611.

This book is as interesting (to me) as Pirsig's other one, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Where the earlier book sees reality existing outside our ability to understand it, this one talks about different ways that we respond to our historical inability to grasp reality wholly.  The earlier book sees an indefinite (and humanly undefinable) quality as the foundation of reality: the word quality points toward the reality that is too big to understand, too irregular and dynamic to be contained by our limited intelligence.  The second book talks about different manifestations of this quality in human life.

According to Pirsig, quality as we experience it comes in two kinds: (1) static quality and (2) dynamic quality.  Lila is an extended portrait of these two different kinds of quality. 

(1) Static quality comes in four kinds: (i) inorganic static quality; (ii) biological static quality; (iii) social quality; (iv) intellectual quality.  Life exists as different patterns of these kinds of quality that are related.  Inorganic molecules exist in static patterns that enable static patterns of biological life, which rely on them without being determined by them (the same way computer languages rely on electronic circuits: the circuits make the languages possible, but you could not predict the particular historical development of the languages from the existence of the circuits).  Biological patterns exist in static patterns that enable static patterns of social life, which rely on biology without being determined by it (the same way computer software applications rely on programming languages: the languages make the applications possible, but you could not predict the particular historical developments of the applications from the languages).  Finally, social patterns exist in static patterns that enable static intellectual patterns, which rely on society without being determined by it (the same way a novel in a word-processing application relies on that software to exist without being deducible from it: my knowledge that OpenOffice exists does not tell me what novel you may be using it to write right now).

(2) Dynamic quality is the wildcard, the irregularity that makes quality impossible for us to understand (i.e. the simple quality that Pirsig talks about in his first book).  Dynamic quality is rebellious: for some reason, inorganic molecules decide to work against forces of natural decay in the universe; they join together in ways that allow biological life to exist (against expectations).  Then, for some reason, biological life works against the restrictions of physical reality, fighting against forces of decay to create more and more complex organisms that challenge physical laws (like gravity: all organisms move--crawling, walking, or flying in defiance of the forces pulling them down).  On top of this, organisms come together (for some unknown reason) and create social conventions, taking the biological value known as sex (for example) and overlaying it with rules known as marriage.  Finally, human beings (and maybe other living things too) reflect rationally on the existence of social norms (like marriage) and try to make these rational (e.g. extending the benefits of marriage to different kinds of people who merit them, say homosexuals or people of a different race or creed than the dominant one in a particular culture).  Dynamic quality always bucks the regular systems of static quality, challenging the norms that hold these systems together.  It occasions the transformation of static order, altering the nature of a static system radically and unpredictably.

At one point in the book, the author recounts an anecdote from the modern history of the Zuni people in North America.  In a particular Zuni community, there was an odd man who flouted social norms, peeping in windows without talking to his fellow tribesmen.  The Zuni call such people witches (brujos in Spanish: Pirsig prefers the Spanish term because it carries less problematic baggage than the English witch).  One day, he got drunk and told the local authorities (priests) that they would never control him.  They arrested him and hung him up by his thumbs.  He sent for local Western authorities (off the reservation), who rescued him (and took him to the hospital).  Afterwards, the priests who had disciplined him resigned their authority in the community, and the witch became the community leader.  He ended up leading the Zuni into a new kind of social order, one in which relations with the Westerners was more cordial and open (in part because he made a point of meeting regularly with outsiders and sharing Zuni stories with them).  Western anthropologists had a hard time explaining this event because they wanted to make the brujo a conventional leader in his society.  They tried to understand his rise to prominence in Zuni terms, seeing it as a natural event inside the traditional Zuni culture.  From Pirsig's point of view, this is the wrong approach, precisely because the brujo's power came from outside the Zuni.  He was not traditional.  He was dynamic, innovative, a wild card.  This is why the priests, guardians of traditional Zuni culture, attempted to suppress him.  He represented a dynamic threat to the static quality of their society.

Every social order produces outcasts, people on the fringes who don't exactly belong.  These people can be dangerous.  They represent a challenge to the stability of static quality (which provides some benefits: order, predictability, regularity).  But they are not always dangerous.  No static state is ever perfect.  Each lacks something.  Each is maladapted in some respect.  The outsiders can help here.  Given the chance, they can transform the static quality of an established community so that it survives as circumstances around it alter.  The old Zuni priests were less adept in preserving their society from outside influence.  The brujo became a leader because he was better at dealing with people and culture outside Zuni.  He used his position as an outsider to make the position of the Zuni people safer than it was, insuring the survival of Zuni better than the priests could by changing the nature of the community (in ways that the priests found utterly abhorrent).

I confess I sometimes feel like a Mormon brujo.  While I have no intention of being a leader, I do value certain things in Mormon culture (the focus on friends and family, the commandment that every man seek his or her own divine revelation, the drive for a community that is something more than just abstract economics seeking to amass the most material wealth possible).  I have always valued these things.  I thought the institutional church valued them the same way I did.  Even when my personal position on certain matters differed from positions held by institutional leaders, I thought we were on the same team, interested in pursuing the same overarching goals.  To some extent, I think we still are.  But I think that many Mormon priesthood leaders have much less sympathy for me than I once believed.  I think they are barely willing that people such as I exist, provided we keep our mouths shut and defer to their judgment without protest (however rational or respectful).  I don't think they should give in to us.  I don't think the church would be better led if they all abdicated and handed power over to folk of the fringe, such as I have been most of my life.  But I wish there was a place for us in Mormon culture, a place for modern backsliders like Sterling McMurrin, who believe in the gospel even if they insist on misunderstanding it (from the point of view of someone like Joseph Fielding Smith or Bruce R. McConkie).  If that place had existed, then I might still be an active Mormon today.  But I am not really the Zuni brujo.  I am not willing to be hung by the thumbs to save the community.  Forced to choose between saving myself and saving Mormonism, I admit I picked me.  No hard feelings, I hope.

In Pirsig's book, he talks about the twentieth century as a war between social quality (the Victorianism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West, especially the USA) and intellectual quality (the drive to make society rational).  He takes the side of intellectual quality against social, arguing that it is more moral for an idea to destroy society than for society to destroy an idea.  I confess I am not convinced he is right.  To me, it seems that ideas are too unpredictable and dangerous to merit that kind of respect.  But I do wish that we could find better ways in the USA of accommodating outsiders (including intellectuals) who want to participate in society in a positive way without crucifying themselves in the process.  While I do not fight with Pirsig in the war, I do think that the war is there, and I do not think we are fighting it in the best manner possible.  There are better ways to deal with me than forcing me to become a liar (heretic) or an apostate (outcast).  Or maybe I just wish there were.  Sometimes, life is just really tough (a problem without happy solution). 

My American Dream

I have found myself participating in several political conversations recently.  What follows is a summary of my rumination on those conversations.

Neither political party has effectively addressed the reality that America must collectively and individually accept responsibility for national insolvency: it is not the other guy's fault; it is your fault, and mine--ours. And the solution requires that all of us tighten our belts (including politicians: it may be peanuts when measured against the $16 trillion we are in the hole, but why do former Presidents make ~$240,000 per annum guaranteed and adjusted for inflation as long as they live? where is the panache in pretending that all problems are somebody else's fault and then stuffing your face on the public dime, using funds that don't exist?).

We are all going to lose jobs and/or make a lot less. We can come down gradually, trying to put some real faith back into our monetary system (which is currently jacked beyond easy repair)--or we can wait for another Black Tuesday to take us down for the Great Depression 2.0 (which is still coming regardless of who won the recent elections: Republicans and Democrats both did this to us, and they did it because we asked them to; they listened to the public and did their best to give it what it wanted).

The biggest problem I have with all this is the inability politicians on both sides seem to have when it comes to admitting their own mistakes. Instead of owning those mistakes, they pass the buck to their opponents and come up with empty plans that all boil down to more of the same: "We'll simply do what we've always done, but I will be in charge, so it will work!" As if unserviceable debt were somehow OK under a Republican (like W) but not under a Democrat (Barack)--or vice versa. Are we trying to get back to the Reagan years or the Clinton years? In either event, we are chasing a chimera, and the sooner we recognize this and snap out of it, the easier our return to the current reality will be. Clinton and Reagan aren't coming back. They weren't gods. They made some very human mistakes. Their policies do not promise the utopia that partisans imagine--no matter how many doors you knock on, how much "spirit" or "hope" you have, etc. Chasing their shadow is a distraction from our real problem, which is that as a nation we are currently living in a fantasy world where we can all have our cake and eat it, too.

Wall Street is not too big to fail. It never was, and it never will be. America is not too big to fail: we've proven it before (when we did fail and had to work hard to recover), and we are in the process of proving it again. I wish politicians and the people they represent would man up and take some freaking responsibility. Maybe I am not personally wholly responsible for all the crap going on right now, but I am at least partially to blame. I support (with patronage) businesses and companies whose practices are unsustainable. I am part of the fragility inherent in a large global society--the fragility that means that I could be out of a job tomorrow (at least I am not living in a nation where that means sudden death, in the literal sense: here I have a chance to recover, a chance that I should take sooner rather than later if I want the transition to be smooth). Every day, we all make bets with the universe. And we all lose sometimes. The key is not to bet more than you are willing (and able) to lose. You have to take responsibility for yourself, rather than looking for somebody else (e.g. Satan, the other political party, "illegal" immigrants, gay people, rednecks, religious nutjobs, racists, etc.). We are all just human beings, dumb human beings who make mistakes (no matter who is leading us: our leaders are human, too).

If the American dream is about other people making you happy, then it is an impossible fantasy (no matter who you are, how you vote, or who wins any election). If you want your dreams to be real, then you have to dream something that might be real (as the really good dreamers in our history have consistently done: where are they now? why do they never get elected to public office? maybe because we don't appreciate them until after they are dead?). Maybe we need somebody to tell us honestly what we really look like, as a people. Maybe we don't look much like the kind of heroes we seem to expect our politicians to be. Maybe we shouldn't expect more of them than we do of ourselves. Maybe we should set our personal standards a bit higher. Change and hope don't come from other people. The way is not in heaven, not through election, not in the system outside you: the way is in the depths of your heart, yours and mine. We need to go there and face what we see (the way some of us already do, some of us who are not winning or losing elections, some of us who are too busy suffering to care about finding somebody else to blame).

In offering these reflections, I am not putting myself forward as the ideal American. I personally at this time see myself as more part of the problem than the solution. I am not in a position to save myself and my family. I have not put myself in that position. I have kept my head down and done what I was told, and I rely on other people a lot, probably too much. Mitt Romney was right to call me parasite, I guess I am saying; where he is wrong is in supposing that he escapes the same blame. He is playing the game he was born into, just like I am, and (as far as I can tell) losing it the same way (even though he was born with a better hand). We are all in this together, and we all (or most of us, anyway) suck (at least some of the time). We need to accept this, I think, and recognize that our suckiness has and will have consequences that will make our lives and our children's lives different than they would have been otherwise. 

I will not tell my kids that their lives will be better than mine. I don't believe that. I think it is wrong to set people up with false expectations, to tell them that someone else will look out for them always, that there exists a path to meaningful happiness that is not paved with their own blood, sweat, and tears--blood, sweat, and tears that might ultimately yield nothing (or at least, nothing like what they expect when they set foot on the path). There are no guarantees. There is no sure hope. I wish politicians would just say that (tell us the truth), and then do their best to let us see how they are making bets with our best interests--bets that might fail, bets against which we personally need to take out insurance, on our own: no program can take all the risk and make it disappear, no matter who runs it.  God himself could not redeem this people, or if he could, then he almost certainly will not, if history is any indicator: he will sit back and let things be however they turn out.