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2004-02-29

The Transgression of Preference

Kierkegaard on friendship.

As noted, I've been reading widely in the philosophical literature on friendship. Even old Kant had a few kind words to say about the phenomenon. But only one writer gets it precisely, passionately, perfectly wrong: Kierkegaard. His thinking on friendship is, to my mind, like Marx's thinking on the free market: both men correctly understand the phenomenon, but their evaluation is diametrically opposed to truth. Consider Kierkegaard on friendship:

One should take pains to clarify the point of contention in order calmly to admit in the defence that Christianity has thrust romantic love and friendship from the throne, the love rooted in mood and inclination, preferential love -- in order to establish spiritual love in its place, love to one's neighbor, a love which in all earnestness and truth is inwardly more tender in the union of two persons than romantic love is and more faithful in the sincerity of close relationship than the most famous friendship. One must take pains to make very clear that the praise of romantic love and friendship belongs to paganism, that the poet really belong to paganism since his task [the celebration of friendship and romantic love] belongs to it -- in order with the sure spirit of conviction to give to Christianity what belongs to Christianity: love to one's neighbor, of which love not a trace is found in paganism....

Self-love, egocentricity, is sensuality. Consequently Christianity has misgivings about romantic love and friendship because preference in passion or passionate preference is really another form of self-love....

What paganism called love, in contrast to self-love, was preference. But if passionate preference is essentially another form of self-love, one again sees the truth in the saying of the worthy father: "The virtues of paganism are glittering vices"....

Christianity has never taught that one must admire his neighbor -- it has taught that one shall love him. Consequently there must be admiration in romantic love's relationship -- and the greater, the more intense the admiration is, the better, says the poet. Now, to admire another person certainly is not self-love, but to be loved by the one and only object of admiration, must not this relationship turn back in a selfish way to the "I" which loves -- loves its "other-I"? It is this way with friendship, too. To admire another person certainly is not love, but to be the one and only friend of this rarest object of admiration, must not this relationship turn back in a doubtful way to the "I" from which it proceeded? Is it not an obvious danger for self-love to have a one and only object for its admiration when in return this one and only object of admiration makes one the one and only object of his own love or friendship? Love of one's neighbor, on the other hand, is self-renouncing love, and self-renunciation casts out all preferential love just as it casts out all self-love -- otherwise self-renunciation would also make distinctions and would nourish passion for preference....

Love to one's neighbor is eternal equality in loving, but this eternal equality is the opposite of exclusive love or preference. This needs no elaborate development. Equality is just this: not to make distinctions; and eternal equality is absolutely not to make the slightest distinction, is unqualifiedly not to make the slightest distinction. Exclusive love or preference, on the other hand, means to make distinctions, passionate distinctions, unqualifiedly to make distinctions.

Dear Kierkegaard, I could not agree with your description more, but I could not agree with your evaluation less. Yes, love and friendship are preference in passion and passionate preference. Yes, the praise of love and friendship belongs to paganism (as you call it), and could not be conceived of by a dull, desiccated wraith of churchly religion such as yourself. But the aristocratic admiration inherent in the highest forms of love and friendship are too far from "eternal equality" to register in the blinkered consciousness of your small, self-satisfied, self-renouncing soul. Truly, the virtues of paganism are glittering; but they could be called vices only by one who is unable, or unwilling, to recognize the precious gold of what the ancients called greatness of soul.

Posted on 2004-02-29 at 20:33. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Mixing Waters

Emerson on friendship and great conversation.

In doing some research on friendship for a paper I'm writing, I came across this fine quote from Emerson:

Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

By the way, don't conclude from Emerson's use of the word "men" that he was a male chauvinist; in fact, two of his closest friends, whom he valued deeply for their acumen and insights, were Margaret Fuller and Caroline Sturgis.

Posted on 2004-02-29 at 17:55. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

The Randian Imperative

Organized Objectivism and intellectual organizations.

Last night, Diana Hsieh spoke at a local Objectivist group regarding her statement of disassociation from The Objectivist Center (formerly the Institute for Objectivist Studies). Since I'm persona non grata at gatherings of this local group (that's another story) and since I prefer to spend my Saturday nights doing some good cooking and a little blogging rather than arguing about Ayn Rand, I didn't attend Diana's talk. But naturally I do have opinions in the matter. In fact, as one of my email correspondents pointed out, I've been expressing those opinions for quite a while now. Here are some relevant weblog and journal entries:

1. TOC (2002-12-14)
2. Why I Am Not an Objectivist (2001-08-26)
3. Ladders (2001-06-22)
4. Changing the World (2001-03-24)
5. The Future of Objectivism (1999-07-19)
6. Anti-Movement (1999-07-15)
7. Anti-Group (1999-01-19)
8. Intellectual Organizations (1998-11-06)
9. Individualism is Hard (1998-09-01)
10. On Independence (1996-02-03)
11. Why I'm Not a Randian (1995-11-28)

So I guess I declared my intellectual independence as long ago as 1995.

Posted on 2004-02-29 at 11:27. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

2004-02-28

Symbiosis

Classical eudaimonism and individualist anarchism.

Roderick Long argues that classical eudaimonism provides a key to reconciling the egoistic and natural-rights justifications for a voluntary society, since eudaimonism holds that justice is part of human flourishing. Long adduces Socrates as the originator, and Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics as early developers, of the eudaimonist tradition; he also notes that eudaimonist views on the content of justice are quite foreign to the theories of justice inherent in individualist anarchism. It's interesting to me that he left Epicurus off the list of eudaimonist thinkers, because certain Epicurean positions seem to present an approach to justice that is much closer to individualist anarchism. Consider these passages from the Principal Doctrines:

Natural justice is a pledge to be useful by neither harming one another nor being harmed. (31)

Justice is not a thing in itself, but is a contract to neither harm one another nor be harmed that arises at some place or another in people's dealings with each other. (33)

Generally speaking, justice is the same for everyone, since it is something useful in people's relationships with one another.... (36)

... If someone passes a law and it does not turn out to be in accord with what is useful in mutual associations, then it no longer possesses the nature of justice.... (37)

... If circumstances change and the same things which had been just turn out to be no longer useful, then those things were just as long as they were useful for people's relationships with one another.... (38)

For Epicurus, justice arises from a pledge of non-aggression, a reciprocal agreement to not harm others and not be harmed by them. Such a contract benefits both parties and therefore is of great utility for people's social relationships. But if someone passes a law that that is not useful in this way, then it is unjust. Sounds a lot like a libertarian approach to social philosophy.

All those Aristotelian libertarians out there might want to investigate Epicurus more deeply.

Posted on 2004-02-28 at 21:07. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Good Books

Thoughts of unusual daring.

Here's another fine quote from Thoreau (this time from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers):

Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap. The front aspect of great thoughts can only be enjoyed by those who stand on the side, whence they arrive. Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institutions -- such I call good books.

Posted on 2004-02-28 at 20:17. File under society.

~ link ~

Leaving the Woods

Thoreau on returning to civilization.

My recent post on Tom Elpel may have made it sound as if Thoreau advocated a return to nomadic living. Far from it. After all, Thoreau was satisfied most of the time to ramble around Concord, Massachusetts, not the wilderness. Sure he did explore a bit in New England (he even climbed Mount Katahdin back when that part of Maine was pretty remote), but he was no hunter-gatherer. For one, he was much too individualistic to argue for a return to a nomadic existence, which does and did not put a great value on solitude or the individual (the whole point of small-band living is to ensure the survival of the band). Thoreau's celebrated sojourn at the cabin on Walden Pond was an experiment in living, not a statement that it was the one right way to live (and let's not forget that even while living by the pond he often dined at the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson -- he wasn't exactly roughing it in the wilderness). Consider what he wrote in Walden about ending that experiment:

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there for a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Just as Marx was not a Marxist and Rand was not a Randian, Thoreau was not a Thoreauvian.

Posted on 2004-02-28 at 20:04. File under society.

~ link ~

2004-02-27

Atomic III

Jabber feeds.

I just created some ATOM feeds over on jabber.org for news, JEPs, and the Jabber Journal. I guess that means the Jabber Software Foundation is now AtomEnabled.

Posted on 2004-02-27 at 16:36. File under technology.

~ link ~

JJ #17

The latest Jabber Journal

In the just-published issue #17 of the Jabber Journal I answer that burning question: what does IETF approval mean for the Jabber community?

Posted on 2004-02-27 at 15:59. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2004-02-26

The Art of Nothing

Forward or back to freedom?

Claire Wolfe links approvingly to two essays by Tom Elpel: Escaping the Job Trap and The Art of Nothing. Illustrating my distinction between Aristotle and Thoreau, Elpel outdoes even Thoreau in advocating a return to the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer! Having just read two books on early humanity by John E. Pfeiffer, I find it difficult to understand how someone could think the nomadic life is realistic in this day and age, let alone an ideal. Talk about saying "No!" to the flow of history: the hunter-gatherer mode of existence became effectively extinct about ten thousand years ago when the human population grew too large to be supported by hunting and gathering, and people turned to agriculture. Concomitant with the rise of agriculture and settled life ("civilization" means literally "city living") came an ever-expanding individualism, as opposed to the oppressive egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer bands. A libertarian hearkening for small-band living is just about as incongruous as Oscar Wilde's individualist defense of socialism in The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Better, methinks, to look forward to a post-state society than back to a pre-state society.

(BTW, talk of hunter-gatherers reminds me of one of my favorite cartoons.)

Posted on 2004-02-26 at 21:51. File under politics.

~ link ~

SEK3

The passing of a libertarian legend.

I never knew Samuel Edward Konkin III in person, and knew of him only through his moderation of the LeftLibertarian mailing list. But he seems to have made quite an impression on the modern libertarian "movement". This interview captures the flavor of his thinking (see also his essay on copyright). He's best known for The New Libertarian Manifesto, which presents an "agorist" approach to politics and society (from the open marketplace of the Greek agora) that eschews party politics and working through the system. I must say I still doubt the realism of his analysis in many respects, since his faith in the withering away of the state seems just as misplaced as that voiced by the Marxists. But it makes for provocative reading nonetheless.

Posted on 2004-02-26 at 21:23. File under politics.

~ link ~

Dave

My choice for president.

Let's face it: American politics is a joke.

So while those of a libertarian persuasion debate the merits of voting and others bemoan America's two-party hegemony, I've decided there is a clear choice for president in 2004: Dave Barry. Why accept the laughable candidates offered (thrown?) up by the political duopoly? Exercise your constitutional freedom to write in a truly serious candidate! Heck, he's even got a weblog.

Posted on 2004-02-26 at 20:34. File under politics.

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CAP

A new JEP.

Thanks to prodding and assistance from Boyd Fletcher at the DoD, I've just published JEP-0127: Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) over XMPP. The Common Alerting Protocol, developed by the good folks at OASIS, provides an open format for hazard warnings and alerts, such as used by law enforcement and the National Weather Service. Since such notifications need to get delivered in a hurry, it makes perfect sense to send them over Jabber.

Posted on 2004-02-26 at 16:50. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2004-02-25

Atomic II

Feeding time.

This blog now has an ATOM feed.

Not sure I grok the syntax fully yet, the examples I was following might be wrong in some ways, and my XML source format is a bit suboptimal for converting the full content of each blog entry to ATOM (but I'm too lazy to fix it right now).

While I was at it, I added categories to my blog entries, which enable people syndicating this blog (all two of them ;-) to separate, say, the interesting Jabber entries from the boring political entries. Might come in handy when someone decides to make the "Planet Jabber" website that aggregates content from all the Jabber-related weblogs (something ralphm mentioned to me the other day).

The categories I'm using so far are:

• art (covers music, literature, and the like)
• jabber (all about my favorite XML streaming technology)
• personal (those uncommon entries about my personal life)
• philosophy (musings about ideas and various thinkers)
• politics (all my anarcho-capitalist ravings)
• society (economics, law, history, and the like)
• technology (general tech stuff not covered under jabber)

And I'm not sure I like the "file under" markers I'm putting at the end of each entry, so don't get accustomed to them because they might disappear. :-)

Posted on 2004-02-25 at 21:31. File under technology.

~ link ~

Atomic

You can syndicate any boat you row.

Sorry, reference to Dig a Pony there. ;-)

In any case, hildjj (now at the 3GSM conference in Cannes) recently pointed to a post by Sam Ruby on messaging and presence protocols at the IETF, specifically ways that they could be used to transport ATOM data for syndication purposes. Sounds like I need to go atomic (or at least get AtomEnabled). I agree with Joe that it should be straightforward to do ATOM over Jabber/XMPP, and that PubSub is the right way to go for a scalable, manageable solution. An IETF WG is on the way for ATOM, too (though I'm not sure I have time for yet another mailing list). As Jeremy Zawodny says, tools need to aggregate ATOM. Look for a JEP on the topic soon...

Posted on 2004-02-25 at 17:31. File under technology.

~ link ~

2004-02-23

Real World 101

Academia and freedom.

The sample size is small, but Arnold Kling finds a correlation between years out of academia and respect for economic freedom among commentators on the dismal science. Not surprisingly, academics and recent escapees tend to have less respect for markets than those who've had to make a living in the market economy for a longer period of time.

Posted on 2004-02-23 at 21:31. File under society.

~ link ~

IP Redux

More thoughts on intellectual property.

Over the weekend I found some thought-provoking writings on so-called intellectual property by economics professors Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. A good summary is here.

Posted on 2004-02-23 at 21:28. File under society.

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Getting Drafty

Is military conscription on the way back?

Wendy McElroy asks a good question: Is there going to be a draft? Certain rumblings and stirrings indicate that some folks in power want to do away with the all-volunteer army and bring back military conscription. Scary.

Posted on 2004-02-23 at 21:24. File under politics.

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Utopia

The value of an ideal.

In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde writes:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopia.

Do utopias thus serve a purpose? We commonly deride those head-in-the-clouds people whose vision of life is utopian: they are at best impractical dreamers, and at worst opportunistic schemers. But it could be that a utopian vision enables people to visualize, and therefore create, a better life for themselves. I grant that most past utopian visions have been simplistic and unscientific in the extreme. I grant that most of them have focused on strategies of controlling the individual. I grant that "utopia" means literally "no place", not "good place" (which would be "eutopia"). Granting all that and more, I think there may be a place for utopian literature and utopian thinking -- in particular, a utopian vision that honors the individual and does justice to the complexity of living systems and human societies. Market anarchism, anybody?

Posted on 2004-02-23 at 20:42. File under politics.

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2004-02-19

JEP City

Protocol progress (of sorts).

Today I published updated versions of seven JEPs:

• JEP-0124: HTTP Binding
• JEP-0085: Chat State Notifications
• JEP-0080: User Geolocation
• JEP-0107: User Moods
• JEP-0108: User Activities
• JEP-0112: User Address
• JEP-0118: User Tunes

JEP-0124 is the big one, a binding of XMPP to HTTP rather than TCP (greatly improved thanks to the comments of Ian Paterson of ClientSide). JEP-0085 (linuxwolf calls it "CSN", which always makes me wonder: "What about Neil Young?" :-) is intended to supersede the old message events protocol (we'll see if that comes to pass). The last four are part of what I'm calling the great infobits reversion, which included the retraction of JEPs 120, 121, 123, and 125.

Whew, I think that's enough jepping for today! But at least I'm making serious progress on my .plan now that I've mostly finished my work with the XMPP WG.

Posted on 2004-02-19 at 21:22. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2004-02-16

Photographs and Memories

A few pictures.

Speaking of idiosyncrasies, I must also admit that I don't especially care for photographs. I've never owned a camera, and I have no urge to take pictures of places I go or people I meet. I'd rather experience the moment than record it. But at least I don't mind any longer when people take my picture (I used to hate that!). Here's evidence: I've even created a web page of photos folks have taken of me over the years. My favorite is the picture Joe Hildebrand took of me (using his camera phone) at the Hell's Kitchen restaurant during IETF 58 in Minneapolis last year.

Posted on 2004-02-16 at 21:15. File under personal.

~ link ~

Making vs. Reading

Jabber in the news.

As you might have noticed over at jabber.org, Jabber and XMPP (the IETF name for the formalization of the core Jabber protocols) have been much in the news of late. The funny thing is, I have a confession to make: I never read news stories about Jabber. I guess I'd rather make the news than read it. Chalk it up as yet another of my idiosyncrasies. ;-)

Posted on 2004-02-16 at 21:10. File under jabber.

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Aesthetics

Two essays on the arts.

I'm close to finished with writing two essays on literature and the philosophy of the arts that I've been thinking about for a long time: Image and Integration in the Novels of Ayn Rand and The Conceptual Nature of Art. Ping me if you'd like to read either one before I submit them for publication, most likely to the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

Posted on 2004-02-16 at 20:58. File under literature.

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The Grumbling Hive

Some similarities between Mandeville and Lao Tzu.

I've been invited to participate in an upcoming colloquium held by the Liberty Fund, the topic for which is "Shaftesbury, Mandeville, and Smith on liberty, virtue, and prosperity". It's an honor to have been invited, though I must admit I feel a bit guilty about participating in such a shamelessly intellectual gathering (I've been down in the practical trenches for a long time now). In any case, I've started on the reading list, which includes Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. The following passage struck me as similar to some things that Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching:

All untaught animals are only solicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their own inclinations, without considering the good or harm that from their being pleased will accrue to others. This is the reason, that in the wild state of nature those creatures are fittest to live peaceably together in great numbers that discover the least of understanding, and have the fewest appetites to gratify; and consequently no species of animal is, without the curb of government, less capable of agreeing long together in multitudes than that of man....

And Lao Tzu said:

The sage, in ruling, hollows their hearts, stuff their stomachs, weakens their wills, builds up their bones, always causing the people to be without knowledge and desire.

Yet Lao Tzu had more faith in the ability of people to agree in the absence of coercion:

I take no action, yet the people transform themselves.

I am fond of stillness, yet the people correct themselves.

I do not interfere in affairs, yet the people enrich themselves.

I desire not to desire, yet the people of themselves become as simple as unhewn logs.

When government is anarchic, the people are honest.

When government is meddlesome, society is lacking.

BTW, the little verse pamphlet from which The Fable of the Bees grew was entitled "The Grumbling Hive"; what a great name that would be for a curmudgeonly weblog!

Posted on 2004-02-16 at 20:54. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Albums

A list of my CDs.

I've keyed in a list of all the CDs I own -- 563 and counting. Let me know if you'd like to borrow something. ;-)

Posted on 2004-02-16 at 20:32. File under music.

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Blooming Ridiculous

Occupational licensing goes too far.

I'm no fan of occupational licensing, but this is ridiculous: Louisiana is the only state that requires a license to be a florist! Thankfully, the Institute for Justice is on the case.

Posted on 2004-02-16 at 20:28. File under politics.

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Fedora

Linux on the desktop?

I recently installed Fedora on my old VA Linux box at work (replacing a borked Debian install). Talk about easy! I've never experienced a more pleasant and straightforward Linux installation. Maybe Linux on the desktop really is a possibility for the vast majority of users (not just geeks like me).

Posted on 2004-02-16 at 20:12. File under technology.

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2004-02-12

Aristocrats All

No more proles!

Roderick Long reflects on the idea of individualist anarchism as a universalization of aristocracy. He quotes George Woodcock:

In reality the ideal of anarchism, far from being democracy carried to its logical end, is much nearer to aristocracy universalized and purified.

Or as Shelley said: "The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys."

Roderick also quotes Ernest Lesigne on socialism vs. anarchism:

Both desire equality. One by lowering heads that are too high. The other by raising heads that are too low.

His long quote from Anne Rice's novel The Vampire Lestat is quite intriguing, too. (And he's got me quite interested in reading Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism.)

Aristocracy for everybody!

Posted on 2004-02-12 at 20:52. File under politics.

~ link ~

A Visit to Orkutia

Social networking and Jabber.

So I've been doing the whole Orkut thing. Some people think these social networking sites are just a fad. I'm not so sure. In the age of online dating, why not online networking? I've asked a number of people why they engage in social networking, and a surprising number of them tell me that the sites have proved been quite useful in connecting with old friends, new business partners, and the like. I've definitely gotten in touch with some folks I used to correspond with, some of whom are even using Jabber, with the result that we've gotten to chat in real time. (Speaking of which, it is simply criminal that Orkut doesn't give you the option of listing your Jabber ID -- how could they be so uncool?) If social networking sites are useful, they'll survive. If they're indispensible, they'll thrive. I don't think they've gotten to the indispensible stage yet by any means.

For a while now we've been talking in the Jabber community about the perceived need to enable people to find other people over Jabber. The usual example of a basic application of this kind is the people search feature offered by ICQ. Having experimented with social networking sites, I can say that they offer something much richer than that basic ICQ functionality, and something that the Jabber network on its probably cannot offer. For one thing, networks that are Jabber-agnostic (not limited only to Jabber users) will experience bigger network effects. More fundamentally, Jabber is a way to communicate with people you know or like, but it's not our core vision to provide a way to find people you might like to know. I'm thinking now that it's probably best for us to focus on building the best real-time communications infrastructure on the Net, not on building real-time social networking applications. Now, if a site like Orkut built Jabber into their offering, I think they'd be on to something unique, because they could build presence and real-time communications (e.g., a chatroom for every group) into what they do, and that would enable a relatively static site to blossom into a more interactive experience. It's all about the real-time Internet, and Jabber provides the building blocks (presence, notifications, groupchat, etc.) to make that come alive.

(I have yet to clarify in my own mind the implications of this line of thinking for some of the protocol work I've done over the last six months, such as Infobits and Entity Metadata, but I hope to devote some time to that tomorrow.)

Posted on 2004-02-12 at 20:37. File under jabber.

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2004-02-08

The Nature of the Net

The more things change...

The ever-insightful Doc Searls continues to reflect on the dot-Dean implosion. He links to his 2001 article The New Vernacular, which impresses me even now. In it, Doc situates the Net and the open-source community within the various levels of temporal change, from slow-changing nature to fast-changing fashion. Open source is a culture of freedom one step above nature; in his blog entry, Doc says that "the Internet is a Nature-level change in civilization" because it "sits beneath everything" and therefore "changes everything" (which may be one reason the forces of fashion and commerce want to change the Net before it changes them). Similarly, in another post-implosion analysis, Jay Rosen quotes Jeff Jarvis to the effect that the Net "can do miraculous, wonderful things, but it can't win an election. It can change the world, but it can't win an election."

Think about that last sentence: the Internet can change the world, but it can't win an election. A corollary is that elections don't change the world. The advertising mongers at the major media like to think that governance is deeply important (right up there with fashion and commerce on the evening news), but they have no clue about the Nature and Culture levels that Doc has explicated. The hard truth is that politics and governance are decidedly secondary. Those who take the long view don't get excited about this or that candidate and don't especially care who won last week's primary. They are, in a profound sense, anti-political. Nietzsche meant something similar when he said (La Gaya Scienza, Section 338):

Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions, should be a mere murmur for you.

Three centuries. The year 2304. The kind of time-scale on which SF writers think. Will anyone know or care who John Kerry or George Bush was in 2304? I doubt it. But they will honor those who built the Internet, if not by name then at least by acknowledging the nature of their achievement.

Posted on 2004-02-08 at 21:31. File under technology.

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Ick

Thoughts on a visit to johnkerry.com.

OK, so I visited John Kerry's website. Wow, a true Massachusetts liberal! A faithful standard-bearer for the American Socialist Party! Class warfare his major (perhaps only) theme!

By golly, we just have to roll back those tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, now don't we? Never mind that the IRS itself provides the following facts about who pays income taxes in the United States (a summary is here):

• Top 1% -- 34%
• Top 5% -- 53%
• Top 10% -- 65%
• Top 25% -- 83%
• Top 50% -- 96%
• Bottom 50% -- 4%

That's right: every tax cut is a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, because they pay almost all the taxes in the first place (in fact, the 80/20 rule pretty much holds: about 20% of the people pay about 80% of the income taxes).

Naturally, it's easy for Kerry to talk: he conveniently married the heiress to the Heinz fortune and therefore is worth at least $500,000,000 (yes, that's 5 followed by 8 zeroes -- five hundred million dollars). If Kerry and his ilk would just pony up some of their money, I'm sure we could get this deficit problem solved in no time.

Posted on 2004-02-08 at 20:46. File under politics.

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NOTA

A reason to vote.

Voting is pretty much useless -- a ritual activity devoid of meaning. A big part of the reason, at least at the level of U.S. congressional elections, is gerrymandering: the jiggering of electoral district boundaries to ensure that very few contests are competitive. Another is that the so-called choice between Democrats and Republicans provides no alternative: the Democrats believe in tax-and-spend, and the Republicans (especially under George III) believe in spend-and-borrow. What's the difference? If only all ballots included a "None of the Above" option -- I'd happily vote NOTA every time!

Posted on 2004-02-08 at 20:29. File under politics.

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2004-02-06

For the Love of Wisdom

My name is Peter and I was a philosophy major...

Tyler Cowan links to a story about a call from the executive director of the American Philosophical Association for career success stories from former philosophy majors. All that the normally-astute Prof. Cowan can say is "good luck". Please, professor, keep the snarky comments to a minimum: the study of philosophy is great preparation for lots of careers other than taxi driver. Heck, it's even helped me be a successful protocol geek (though I think my other major -- Greek -- has played a part too).

That said, I find it a bit sad that the only criterion that the APA values is career success. Whatever happened to living a reflective life, coming to understand oneself and the human experience, achieving happiness? There's more to life than one's career (says I, the workaholic). But I suppose that most modern-day philosophers would prefer to argue about symbolic logic than to dig deep into the big issues of life.

Posted on 2004-02-06 at 21:15. File under philosophy.

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Irks

Two pet peeves.

<rant>

Weblogs, and websites in general, annoy me to no end when they:

• Force me to re-size my web browser
• Don't load because they're trying to contact sitemeter.com

First, it's not that hard to design a web page so that it doesn't right-scroll in reasonable browser-widths (and no, I don't want the damn browser to take up my whole screen!). Second, I don't care how many times people have viewed your weblog -- I care if it's well-written, not if it's popular.

And oh yeah, don't get me started on cookies...

</rant>

Posted on 2004-02-06 at 21:06. File under technology.

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A New Politics

Is a re-alignment underway?

The traditional picture of political alignments is left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative. The always-provocative Frederick Turner argues that the traditional picture may soon be rotated 90 degrees. The result? A spectrum that is libertarian vs. communitarian rather than liberal vs. conservative. (Never mind that the original meaning of 'liberal' was what we nowadays call 'libertarian', and that modern-day communitarians are quite conservative.) Jay Manifold thinks that sounds good, but disagrees about the likelihood of such a major realignment.

Me, I'm becoming more and more anti-political. Is the best politics no politics? Thoreau said:

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, "That government is best which governs not at all."

Put me down as a Thoreauvian in that regard.

Paradoxically, I'm not in a huge hurry to create a fully voluntary society (no bomb-throwing revolutionaries need apply at this domain), in part because I'm still not sure what it would look like, in part because I think it's too early, and in part because I think there are matters more important than fighting the state. So I guess for now I'm a moderate anarchist...

Posted on 2004-02-06 at 20:57. File under politics.

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2004-02-03

The Wave

Meter and rhythm in music and poetry.

The book Robert Frost on Writing contains a conversation on the craft of poetry between Frost, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Kenney Withers. Here is an excerpt (pp. 155-156):

WARREN: Well, I'm sure you're right about the dramatic quality being the basic quality of good poetry. That would bring up the relation of meter and rhythm to the dramatic moment -- moment by moment -- in a poem, wouldn't it?

FROST: That's right.

WARREN: I'd like to hear you say it in your way, how meter enters into this picture -- the dramatic quality.

FROST: The meter seems to be the basis of -- the waves and the beat of the heart seems to be basic in all making of poetry in all languages -- some sort of meter.

WARREN: The strain of the rhythm against the meter. Is that itself just a dramatic fact that permeates a poem?

FROST: From those two things rises what we call this tune that's different from the tune of the other kind of music. It's a music of itself. And when people say that this will easily turn into -- be set to music, I think it's bad writing. It ought to fight being set to music if it's got expression in it.

WARREN: Yes, there's something resistant and unique in it; you can't turn it into something else. This is to overstate the matter, but I do want to get it clear, if I can for myself: would you say that even though the meter is based on the human pulse or some kind of basic rhythm in our natures, still for the poet it's something to be played against -- it's not something to be fought with, to be tussled with? It's not directly expressive -- ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA, ta-DA.

FROST: No, it's doggerel when you do that. You see, and how you save it from doggerel is having enough dramatic meaning in it for the other thing to break the doggerel. And it mustn't break with it. I said years ago that it reminds me of a donkey and a donkey cart; for some of the time the cart is on the tugs and some of the time on the hold-backs. You see it's that way all the time. The one's doing that and the other -- the one's holding the thing back and the other's pushing it forward -- and so on, back and forward. I puzzled over it for many years and tried to make people see what I meant. They use the word "rhythm" about a lot of free verse; and gee, what's the good of the rhythm unless it is on something that trips it -- that it ruffles? You know, it's got to ruffle the meter.

Now, I find this interesting because I think Warren and Frost are getting at something -- the interplay of meter and rhythm -- that holds true for music as well. The best expression I've found of it is in Victor Zuckerkandl's book Sound and Symbol (p. 172):

Such is the case in all metrical music. To put it metaphorically: the ground upon which the tones fall is itself in wave motion. The wave is the meter; rhythm arises from the different arrangements of the tones on the wave. The greatest possible latitude is accorded to the nature and manner of these arrangements. The tones may be distributed over the measure regularly or irregularly; may fill the measure in rapid succession or leave it empty for long stretches; at one place crowd close together, at another spread thin; may follow the pattern of the measure with their accents or run contrary to it. This freedom of distribution and arrangement makes it possible for the tones to give the constant basic form of the wave a changing, perpetually different profile. In accordance with the will of the tones, the wave will display contours now soft and rounded, now sharp and jagged; will beat softly and calmly or with ever-increasing impact; will heave, topple, break against resistances. This playing with the wave by the tones, this shaping of the substance of the wave; the conjunction and opposition of two components, their mutual tension and continuous adjustment to each other -- this, in music, we experience as rhythm.

In both poetry and music, the meter provides an underlying wave of forward motion -- iambic feet and duple time being the most familiar (interestingly, most poems in the English language put the accent on the second beat, whereas most metrical music puts the accent on the first beat). But if one relies too heavily on mere meter, the result is poetic doggerel (ta-DA ta-DA) or unsophisticated music (the OOM-pah OOM-pah of bad polkas). The dramatic possibilities of rhythm are realized when the words or tones ruffle the meter, resist it, play with it, push it forward and then hold it back, break with it without breaking it.

Posted on 2004-02-03 at 20:39. File under literature.

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