The Spiral Staircase

My first triathlon of the season is in a couple days. As in the past, I’ve been both anticipating and dreading it, and I feel underprepared. I’ve had a few different thoughts this time around, though. The first is that because it’s so early in the season, the water temperature of the lake in which we will swim is only 59 degrees Fahrenheit. I thought perhaps the swim portion would be cancelled or converted to an extra running leg, but it appears the swim is on. I’m definitely not looking forward to jumping in that water.

That dread over the extraordinary discomfort of physical cold caused me to wonder why I’m bothering to put myself in harm’s way beyond the obvious fitness and health benefits of athletic activity. It dawned on me today that much as I’ve tried to keep my gnawing sense of impending doom at bay, I nonetheless believe that we’re in for a world of hurt within my lifetime, and it may be that I’m using the triathlon in part to harden myself for the suffering I expect us all to experience sooner rather than later.

I’m not a competitive athlete; I’m way too slow. For me, the trial is all about endurance, though the cold water (even in a wetsuit) promises to create a different sort of discomfort. I’m habituated by now to fatigue and the strain of keeping moving when I’d rather give up. It’s odd, though, to consider that the ongoing work at tri sports may have intuitively become a proxy for other discomfort, deprivation, and downright suffering yet to come. Unlike many others who have grown soft and will most likely feel their pains quite acutely, I know that I’m prepared to bear it — for a while at least.

I rarely blog on politics. That topic is covered awfully well elsewhere — almost everywhere else, it seems. But this caught my eye. Based on how the brief story is reported, Pres. Bush is not searching his soul or experiencing a moment of contrition. Either of those would have required too much depth. But the weight of events during his presidency has at the least soured his golf game and taken the joy out of it. I remember an interview (really, more like a few glib quips) made on the tee box, which found its way into one of Michael Moore’s movies. Back then, it appeared the job had little emotional gravity to Pres. Bush. Things must have changed.

One thing that has steadily worsened is his job approval. This site tracks his ratings, and the table below appears on the third panel on the right. (I believe the table is set to update automatically.)

Pres. Bush hasn’t suddenly become Ratsputin or anything, but he’s got to realize that people are more than a little mildly unhappy with him.

Hillary Clinton is similarly out of touch. None of the news reports discuss her candidacy any longer in terms of policy. Rather, it’s all about when she’s going to admit defeat and give it up. She’s like a thoroughbred horse: born to run (and run and run and run) — even if that means breaking her own legs and destroying herself.

In a former career, I was a librarian, or more precisely, a media cataloger. Although I cataloged pile upon pile of books (fiction, nonfiction, humanities, etc.), my niche was music (scores, LPs, CDs, DVDs, etc.) and books about music. It was a fascinating job in many respects, a large part of which was converting old card catalog entries into digital files for on-line catalogs (a process called retrospective conversion), which meant I looked at a lot of old materials, many of which date back to the early part of the 20th century and some even earlier. Inspecting and describing those materials gave me a fairly narrow, bibliographical sense of publishing practice spanning over one century. During that time, some things changed while others remained largely unchanged. The LP, analog cassette, and VHS tape each came and went in progressively briefer spans of time. Yet other media were introduced but never adopted by the public. Despite its failing sales, the CD is by now a venerable standard that has yet to be fully displaced by something better. (The CD is perhaps in the process of being displaced by MP3s and other digital media, but they’re certainly not better in any respect other than their portability and ability to be copied, and thus infringed.)

Other venerable standards, including the book and the musical score, are still going strong despite challenges from a variety of wannabes. However, forward-looking content managers, including publishers, archives, and libraries, are in a race to digitize the gargantuan backlog of books and scores published over the past four centuries. The first such project is probably Project Gutenberg, which was founded in 1971. Although it boasts over 100,000 titles thus far in a variety of languages, I suspect that it will be overtaken in terms of number of titles (if it hasn’t already) by Google Books and a variety of virtual libraries created and being added to by research libraries. It’s still unlikely that digital media will be adopted any time soon by pleasure readers and practicing musicians. It’s just not much fun curling up with a Kindle or laptop loaded with the latest great American novel, and reading and annotating music from a screen is still far inferior to the printed page. Still, digital media are a terrific tool to researchers, academics, and some industries, such as law and medicine. Keyword access and extensive hyperlinked reference notes make the process of finding information much faster than older research styles undertaken in the card catalog and stacks.

The drive to get as much material scanned and digitized as soon as possible has been a considerable technical hurdle, at least until this device:

This baby can turn book pages and is reported to be able to scan 1500 to 3000 pp. per minute while unattended. Companies and universities with deep pockets can buy a few of these and chew through  yards of books (as library holdings are often measured) in almost no time at all. Of course, there are other considerations beyond simply creating digital files. Although folks may not always recognize it, librarians are all about providing access, and that means describing and cataloging the media, whether a book, CD, magazine, or digital scan. That requires a lot of man hours.

The information glut produced by having so much content, both old and new, available at our computers has done little to stem the decrease in readership for books, newspapers, magazines, etc. I’ve considered the waning of the typographic mind and the rise of the pictorial mind in the past. As with all media, the effects of embracing new forms and abandoning old ones have consequences that few care to contemplate and that are frankly difficult to anticipate or observe except with the advantage of considerable hindsight. For example, we still don’t fully understand the awesome effect of TV, which has been in wide use for over half a century.

Some cultural critics believe that American-style democracy can’t function without an informed and engaged citizenry. Yet everything about modern culture points to the swarming masses disengaged from public life and instead hunkered down the media bubbles housed in their living rooms and dens (and their ridiculous SUVs, which increasingly resemble rolling living rooms). But as with most cultural shifts, no one is purposely causing this to occur. Rather, it’s an unintended side effect of the tools we create for the dual purposes of entertaining ourselves and conducting business.

This post is reposted from Creative Destruction.

There are three principle types of intellectual property: patents, trademarks, and copyrights. Each of them awards exclusive rights over an intangible creation or tangible invention, which is balanced by a recognized need for a free flow of ideas to foster further creativity.

In the area of patents, a creation might be a business method, a design for a manufactured item, or an invention or improvement on an invention. A patent owner is given a monopoly on use and/or license of the patented creation for a period of 20 years, after which the property falls into the public domain. In obtaining patent rights, the workings of an invention become public information, and others are encouraged to design around the patent to improve technology. If disclosure is undesirable, an inventor may decide not to seek patent rights and keep the invention secret. The recipe for Coke is an example of a trade secret.

In the area of trademarks, a monopoly is granted to use a word, phrase, slogan, design, logo, or combination of these to distinguish the source of certain goods and/or services. Most of us are familiar with trademark use in connection with brand development. Trademarks are renewable in perpetuity.

In the area of copyrights, the creator of a work, such as a novel, a poem, a painting, or a musical composition, is granted a monopoly to copy, modify, distribute, perform, and display the work publicly. Copyright duration for a work created after 1976 is the life of the author plus 70 years, after which point the work falls into the public domain.

Public domain means that anyone, for any reason, can use, adapt, and/or reproduce the work without having to pay a licensing royalty to the creator or his/her assigns. Shakespearian plays are public domain, as are the writings of Thomas Jefferson, or the musical compositions of Johannes Brahms. The mere fact that something is made public does not mean that it is public domain.

U.S. intellectual property law stems from English Common Law. Intellectual property rights are granted in the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8), which states that Congress shall have the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The first United Kingdom patent was issued in London in the fifteenth century; in the U.S., the first patent was granted in 1790. The first United Kingdom trademark legislation was in the late nineteenth century; in the U.S., the first Federal trademark legislation was enacted in 1870. In the United Kingdom, the Statute of Anne from the eighteenth century established the first copyright protection; in the U.S., the first copyright law was passed in 1790.

Ongoing tension exists between the right of a creator to enjoy the fruits of his or her own creation and the public’s desire to either make use of others’ creations (often in derivatively) or simply copy a creative work — especially when modern technology allows for an efficient and low-cost or cost-free mechanisms for doing so. It is considered an infringement of the rights of an intellectual property owner to defy the exclusive rights granted to him or her and enshrined in law. The government does not generally police acts of infringement. It is up to the owners of intellectual property to monitor use of a creation and to seek redress for unlawful use. Unlike other laws, a decision to not seek redress for infringement — sitting on rights — does not relinquish those rights. The monopoly includes the right to tolerate a certain level of infringement.

Creeping fascism has been a problem for some years now. Without much recourse short of armed revolt, considering how ineffectual the election process is for instigating real change, many citizens (including me) stood idly by and watched their rights and civil liberties ebb away on a daily basis and the state consolidates its control over all aspects of daily life. The precedent for today’s emerging fully operational security state (or surveillance society, as I’ve seen it called) lies in the early days of the Cold War. Having just emerged triumphant from WWII yet seeing ongoing threats on all sides, many in government began assembling a paranoid and invasive apparatus for gathering intelligence and protecting American interests. It’s almost inevitable that spending one’s life addressing external threats (and increasingly, internal ones) would warp one’s perceptions and judgment, and accordingly, it’s fair to suspect that many operatives both then and now suffer from what the French call a déformation professionnelle.

If you think this is mere hyperbole, I submit you haven’t been paying attention. A quick visit to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) website quickly gives readers the sense that the country is under siege. Its mission statement reads as follows:

CBP is one of the Department of Homeland Security’s largest and most complex components, with a priority mission of keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the U.S. It also has a responsibility for securing and facilitating trade and travel while enforcing hundreds of U.S. regulations, including immigration and drug laws.

My visit to the website was for a simply customs issue, but navigating the site and perusing its content was more than a bit spooky. The front-and-center pointer to terrorists and weapons, while a legitimate concern of the agency, may not be a primary concern of the citizenry except for the agency’s Orwellian interest in keeping everyone constantly on edge. Blissfully missing was a flashing banner with the current alert level status, which is discomfiting enough when it blares over PAs at airports and transportation hubs, as though travelers had any meaningful response. (Reminds me of the air raid sirens tested on the first Wednesday of each month during my youth — rather needless in retrospect, since no one was every really coming for us.) Indeed, the website appears to be equally informational and public relations efforts, with public opinion toward its mandate being shaped heavily.

More significantly, consider that many functions of state security and surveillance are now being handled by InfraGard (isn’t the misspelling of guard rather cute?), a private organization with chapters throughout the U.S. that works in conjunction with the FBI. This is from its website:

InfraGard is an information sharing and analysis effort serving the interests and combining the knowledge base of a wide range of members. At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the FBI and the private sector. InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States. InfraGard Chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories. Each InfraGard Chapter has an FBI Special Agent Coordinator assigned to it, and the FBI Coordinator works closely with Supervisory Special Agent Program Managers in the Cyber Division at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

This arrangement has been criticized by The Progressive as effectively deputizing private industry to spy on people and granting business leaders unwarranted access to “an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.” As with privatization of many former functions of the military, this is more than a little bothersome.

But it gets worse. A book by Nick Turse titled The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives describes how fully the Pentagon has infiltrated and coopted everything for its purposes, which bears comparison to the movie The Matrix as a comprehensive thought control experiment brought to life. A lengthy excerpt appears in an article in TomDispatch.com with preliminary commentary, from which I quote this portion:

At one point in his farewell speech, Eisenhower presaged this point, suggesting, “The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [of the conjunction of the military establishment and the large arms industry] is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.” But only Hollywood has yet managed to capture the essence of today’s omnipresent, all-encompassing, cleverly hidden system of systems that invades all our lives; this new military-industrial-technological-entertainment-academic-scientific- media-intelligence-homeland security-surveillance-national security-corporate complex that has truly taken hold of America.

And yet more bad news was delivered over the weekend, at least if you subscribe to the famous Benjamin Franklin quote: “Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times (and elsewhere) describe how the Justice Department, rather than acting as a check on the excesses of the Executive Branch, has given support to Bush’s authoritarian interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, stating that interrogation techniques used would be judged on a sliding scale depending on the identity of the detainee and the information he or she is believed to possess. I’ve blogged before on the use of torture by our government, and despite its repugnance to most of the public, different branches of government — in defiance of international treaties — still insist upon it as a necessary tactic.

It’s difficult for me to imagine the motives behind authoritarian types for whom the modern security state would have been the wet dream of budding Cold Warriors. Are they benevolent tyrants, protecting the population for its own good, or mere profiteers, gathering riches, power, and influence to themselves? And is there some point at which the moment will crystallize into a realization by the general public that the U.S., with its gargantuan military budget and astonishing level of incarceration, has devolved into a fascist state run by a despotic oligarchy?

For a short while, it appeared that screenwriters had moved beyond cheap stereotypes when concocting characters. Lots of actors were cast against type, and we had a chance to see some good stories and real acting. However, it didn’t last long and was probably a mistaken impression anyway. Movies often reinforce tired old categories with such ham-fisted inelegance that one wonders why so many lame efforts even get made. The answer is that it’s frequently profitable to make bad movies, which is one reason why cinema doesn’t qualify as art — it’s too bound up with the bottom line.

Two recent movies trot out nearly identical stereotypes in the course of their narratives: Live Free or Die Hard and Transformers. Admittedly, both movies aim low: they’re noisy, cheesy, popcorn movies intended as cheap entertainment (despite being quite expensive to make) and are utterly without pretension to greatness except perhaps in the area of special effects. They’re both loaded with stock characters that are easily recognized and therefore expendable: cops, military guys, villains, kids in peril, and the inevitable hottie or two. What struck me, though, is how similarly the two movies employed a deus ex machina in the form of a computer hacker. Reliance on characters with supernatural power who extricate others from implausible plot tangles is usually considered a narrative crutch. These movies elevate that function to a central theme.

Both movies are about loss of control of technology (or perhaps the threat of superior technology), and there are many computer operators fumbling to maintain or regain control. The supreme hacker characters are startlingly similar. They’re introduced with a knock on the door of a home, where it’s immediately revealed the hacker lives with his mother (or grandmother), is relatively young (usually a teenager), is overweight (presumably from a junk food habit and sitting on his butt all the time), and sorely lacks social skills, being more concerned with his games and gear. (Yelling at or being yelled at by the mother/grandmother is an obvious touch.) But he’s got mad skillz on the computer, and within moments, using only a few keystrokes, he can disable all security precautions and access top-level government or corporate computer networks. (As with handcuffs, if network security were really so easy to bypass, couldn’t one of the computer genius designers work out the equivalent of a padlock? At least then it would only be vulnerable to brute trauma, which hackers never use.)

Omniscient characters who seize control of the computer/ship is a basic element of the Star Trek canon, from Khan to Sybok. We’re not usually bothered with the details of how control was gained. In fact, it was established pretty quickly that showing someone in film actually computing was the kiss of death, so hackers are almost always given an impossible task and 15 seconds to accomplish it. Because that’s more, um, exciting, um, yeah. Maybe if you’re brain dead. Using hackers of relatively good or even flexible character to combat villainous hackers is a self-referential rhetorical device that apparently places both character and plot beyond impeachment by plebian audiences who couldn’t possibly understand the complexity (really, stupidity) of what’s happening onscreen. It’s basically a clash of titans, only using brain power instead of fighting skill. In the real world, I suspect such conflicts would take place over time and in relative silence, like a chess game, each side plotting strike and counterstrike until the king is toppled. For instance, in War Games, the hacker autodials phone lines until he stumbles upon a back door to the Whopper, a supercomputer that runs nuclear scenarios. He then does research at a library to guess the password. It all takes time for the puzzle to develop and be solved. In movies today, I guess one has to check all intelligence at the door, suspend disbelief, and settle in to watch shit blow up, including the computers, until one last mighty typist remains.

This post is moved from Creative Destruction.

I overheard a mother at a bus stop trying to interest her son in the video iPod she was carrying, apparently loaded with the usual kid shows. He was having none of it, though he wasn’t causing any disruption or disturbance, while she was in effect a drug pusher. The scene got me thinking about how we soothe our boredom, especially that of children.

Almost every parent insists that children’s unrelenting need for both attention and stimulation is exhausting. Given the tools at hand, it’s inevitable that parents use various means of pacification, increasingly electronic distractions. Some parents recognize that plopping the kid(s) in front of the TV means selling their children down the river of advertising (training them as rapacious consumers), and for some, there’s a sense of guilt. Lately, kids have portable electronic distractions (e.g., GameBoys and iPods) so that even the relative wholesomeness of summer camp is no longer free of electronics. And it’s bleeding into adulthood. Never mind the countless hours routinely forfeited to TV; now a gaming system, an Internet connection, a cellphone, a DVD collection, and a BlackBerry also clamor for time and attention. Workouts, rush hour commutes, plane rides, and virtually any idle time must now be complemented by an iPod or DVD. (I was flabbergasted by the number of passengers on a recent flights I took who were jacked into their laptos like they were IV morphine.) Electronics makers must be rolling their hands and twirling their mustaches, having convinced most of the population to be plugged in at all times, just as soft drink purveyors convinced previous generations that a meal isn’t complete without a soft drink.

So what’s with the cavernous emptiness of boredom that screams to be filled, even if only with the most banal of stimulation? Why is it so difficult to be content in silence, alone with our own thoughts? Like the T-Rex that can only sense movement in its field of vision, we’re evolved to notice and seek change rather than stasis, which has turned into a fetish for novelty. Many of us are also so ill-equipped to use our own creativity as a source of self-amusement, whether it be writing, singing, or even thinking, that we must instead turn our attentions outward and, in our general laziness, gather whatever stimulation is most readily available. With our current electronics options, much of that stimulation is empty of meaningful content, much like the graphics on a TV news program that do nothing but tantalize the eyes, or the variety of new musical styles that are all hook and beat and thump.

It used to be that when a child complained “I’m bored …” to a parent, an aphorism was delivered: “Boredom is the mark of an uncreative and impoverished mind.” The implication of that rebuke was that, by using the imagination, one could dream up things to do that would provide amusement and generate enthusiasm. Perhaps some parents still instruct children that way, but in public at least, the complaint “I’m bored” is usually interpreted as a fire alarm, sending parents scrambling to find something to quench the fire before some mischief sets in. The restless mind of youth transforms into the mind at rest, like the effects of a depressant. And the habit is easily formed: the expectation that stimulation is done to a person rather than something a person does for him- or herself. Over time, one effect is that one’s enthusiasms are dominated by outer directedness, which is to say that we cathect with celebrities, consumer goods, sports teams, alcohol, and drugs, all of which release us from the torments of being ourselves.

UPDATE: I just came across this new product. It’s a shopping cart with seating for kids and a TV screen. For the love of all things holy, don’t look away from the TV screen!!

I’m hearing more and more stories lately about some young person in middle school, high school, or even college who makes the strange decision that he or she would rather not work so hard and then abjures skills, experiences, or a degree program being offered on a silver platter. (Attracting people to actually work at something has never been harder.) It puzzles me that even ingenues could lack the foresight to recognize that building a foundation or developing oneself pays dividends over time, unlike frittering away one’s time and having nothing later to show for it. The declined opportunity could be joining a sports team, learning to play a musical instrument, studying nursing, etc. Doesn’t matter. What they have in common is that they all take a commitment of time that provides substantial benefit. Even modest time commitments like a nature hike are declined as too much effort.

As a youngster, I had the usual spans of free time: after school, weekends, and glorious summer. I spent a great deal of time in Boy Scouts, reading, studying, playing trombone, playing tennis, swimming, riding my bike, and various other endeavors that kept me occupied. But I also worked — a lot. It started with the time-honored paper route and transitioned to winters spent shoveling neighbors’ driveways and summers tending lawns. There was rarely a time when I didn’t pitch in and do the work. It would never have occurred to me that it was too much effort to be worth my time. At least two things provided motivation: self-discipline and a Protestant work ethic. Whereas self-discipline is an acquired skill, the Protestant work ethic is a value system. In hindsight, I was lucky to grow up in a family where both were operative, and I instinctively responded in kind. I may also have been lucky not to have grown up at a time with too many easy distractions (other than TV, of course).

Not so with many youngsters these days. Despite some unevenness in their diffusion, almost everyone who wants them has access to cellphones, video game systems, computers, DVDs, and an impressive array of cable channels. Although enjoyable enough, these distractions’ greatest benefit may be a thumb workout. Otherwise, the way they’re typically used, they’re monstrous time sucks. One doesn’t have to go far to find a kid (or sadly, an adult) who would rather sit at the computer and watch an endless string of YouTube videos rather than, say, go on a 10-mile bike ride. The ride is just too much work.

My suspicion is that in our current consumer culture, many kids have absorbed the imperatives of the day (as I did in my day), which are built on the premise of enjoy now, pay later. By my lights, it’s easier to get a job or do the necessary work first, bank the earnings and acquired skills, and go without things I can’t afford until later. Indeed, part of my motivation was that unless I lay a substantial foundation, I’d never be in a position to reap rewards. The current model is reversed: build up debt (or cognitive and educational deficits) first and work it off (or repair one’s failings) later. Put another way, one can spend a period of youth working hard to avoid a lifetime of hard work or enjoy leisure in youth and pay for it with a lifetime of work.

What’s at work here? I think that marketing machinery that has matured over the last 30 or so years has successfully sold people (not all youngsters by any means) a bill of goods, namely, that the good life is characterized by having lots of stuff but without necessarily haven’t worked (yet) to acquire that stuff. As children, provision of that plenitude is on one’s parents’ backs, but especially as young adults, many learn quickly that while working as baristas at Starbucks they can’t afford the luxuriant lifestyles their parents afforded them. Yet they rely irrationally on the promise of rescue by inheritance, lottery winnings, fame, or some other quick, painless event involving no effort. It’s a recipe for disillusionment and suffering.

I’m not sure when it began exactly, but manufacturers, producers, and creators of all manner of goods, services, and entertainments now typically include some sort of behind-the-scenes or under-the-hood content for the general public. It can be observed in many manifestations. For example, the intricacy of analog wristwatch mechanisms is too tantalizing to hide behind a clock face, so many watches are now designed to expose their inner workings.

In another example, some high-end restaurants now offer seating not in a private dining room but at the kitchen table, which is literally a table in the kitchen of the restaurant. The noise, bustle, and harsh lighting of that location couldn’t possibly offer an very intimate or enjoyable venue, but the opportunity to observe the inner workings of a restaurant kitchen is apparently worthwhile to some diners.

Bonus features on a typical DVD, which weren’t available on VHS, are a better example of true added value in behind-the-scenes content. Typically, consumers have access to deleted scenes, “making of” featurettes, and commentary tracks. The best examples of these do not discuss merely technical aspects of filmmaking, which are primarily of interest to other filmmakers (and boring to the general public), but reveal decisions made to strengthen the narrative structure or coax better performances out of the players. One major failing of commentary tracks is typically the heaping of praise on celebrities, as though they were curing cancer or negotiating peace treaties. A few slice-of-life anecdotes are preferable.

I had the opportunity a week ago to travel the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, which is a modest two-lane road linking a variety of whiskey distilleries, large and small, that offer tours and tastings. I never knew such a thing exists and wasn’t especially interested even when I found out about it. However, due to his enthusiasm, I agreed to accompany a friend to the Maker’s Mark distillery in Loretto, Kentucky. The tour was free, and I was surprised to discover how interesting the history and process of making bourbon whiskey turned out to be. Pictures of the distillery from the 1950s revealed an small, modest industrial site of little distinction or appeal. Since then, the campus has been turned into an almost Epcot-like attraction, with the greater part of the actual distillery operation presumably taking place out of view. One striking detail on the trail was the four-story barns scattered around the county, clearly visible from the road, filled to capacity with “bourbon-eligible spirits” that age in five to seven years into the real stuff.

Already having an insider’s view of a number of different industries, processes, and endeavors, I’m not always very interested in pulling the curtain back to reveal other men and women doing their respective things. But I was charmed by the low-key approach at Maker’s Mark and will be less hesitant to detour off the beaten path in the future. Of course, if things go well, the Kentucky Bourbon Trail could become a victim of its own success, with swarms of people descending on the various sites like locusts.

This post is recycled from a lengthy comment made on Morris Berman’s blog Dark Ages America (after the book of the same name). I have edited it slightly since it no longer has the context of that comment thread and included two of Prof. Berman’s objections from his response to my comment.

In a blog post about the purpose of a humanities education, Prof. Berman provides two numbered lists of facts and factors regarding the deplorable state of education in America. It has become almost a fetish among the cognoscenti to iterate examples of plebeian ignorance and misapplied sense of value, which provides an odd psychological satisfaction. Similarly, prophesying the imminent collapse of social, governmental, and economic structures and institutions imparts a bizarre nihilistic thrill for many able to peer a little bit over the horizon. Frankly, they’re both well-established postures. Of course, in the long run, societies, governments, and economies do eventually collapse, so such prophets are proved correct, though usually not in the timeframes they foresee. Current conditions make it very seductive to assert that we really are on the brink of collapse, that it’s different this time. That’s hard to dispute, so I won’t try. What’s interesting is the number of intelligent, educated people who now think of themselves as “doomers” — modern-day Cassandras reporting our demise but who are largely ignored by the masses, who are busy getting on with life (perhaps in the very fashion that will seal our doom). I fall somewhere between the extremes of ignoring what’s occurring and relishing reports of ruin.

Nonetheless, I feel a deep sadness that we’re quickly abandoning the Enlightenment legacy that has served us for some 400 years. Perhaps it deserves to be left behind, considering how it’s built on a lust for power and dominance over all of nature and indeed each other. Science has by now bequeathed to us the technical power to wreck the environment, which we’ve accomplished handily in a modest 150 years. I can’t imagine a worse injustice. Jim Kunstler writes that people can be divided into two groups: “those who believe we will ‘high-tech’ our way out of this predicament; and those who believe we’ll organize our way out.” He refers to economic collapse, but I suspect collapse of the biosphere may be the trump card — the bigger problem from which we cannot escape.

Abandonment of the questions posed by the humanities and revaluation of human life on mostly financial terms was discussed by Karl Marx in The 1844 Manuscripts, where he states that money is the “visible divinity” in a capitalist world. This is further described by Daniel Pinchbeck:

“By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as almighty being. Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.”

The establishment of money as the ultimate measure of value has lured us into a trap. Our orientation is no longer as participants in communities or as a humble part of nature. We’re now free (condemned, really) to exploit nature and compete against each other in a Darwinian fight for survival, or more properly, struggle for personal wealth. The inevitable perversion of this new orientation is greed, loss of empathy, and narcissistic concern solely with ourselves. The best of Enlightenment thought was a projection of the human mind out into the world and the universe. That’s mostly gone now, replaced by inwardness, radical egotism, and sybaritism. For example, recent news of the discovery of a solar system like our own is disdained as irrelevant and a waste of time to think about now that computers and virtual life technology have created a program called Spore that allows people to evolve their own virtual life forms. Discovery of actual extraterrestrial life no longer holds so much interest because now we have very cool video games.

The extraordinary incuriosity of the masses toward learning may be a harbinger of the completion of a cycle away from the Cartesian mind toward what Rousseau called the “sleep of reason,” where a utopian minimalist state is characterized by “abandonment of books and other accouterments of intellect in order to cultivate enjoyment of the senses and good health” [borrowing here from E.O. Wilson]. Oddly, this cultural drift may be the very thing described in Berman’s final chapter of The Reenchantment of the World and recommended in Coming to Our Senses (though as Prof. Berman protested, without discarding the intellect). The upbeat descriptions contained there are an apparent obligation of cultural critics — the sugar-coated cures for our ailments. What we actually have instead is characterized by loss. Reason won’t be merely dormant, it will be forgotten. We are very likely in the midst of a paradigm shift, a restyling of human consciousness. In the process, we have jettisoned the ideals of the Enlightenment and failed to truly answer or even address the central question of the humanities: “What is the meaning of human life?” That failure may be out of laziness or misdirection, but probably not. Rather, it’s in our nature, perhaps best put by John Gray in Straw Dogs (in a quote I’ve used in the past and with which Prof. Berman disagrees):

“The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth — and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction …. Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs — even if the result is ruin. When times are desperate they act to protect their offspring, to revenge themselves on enemies, or simply to give vent to their feelings. These are not flaws that can be remedied. Science cannot be used to reshape humankind in a more rational mold. The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than irrational.”