The need for good things to last

Listening to Wendell Berry in conversation with Michael Pollan on City Arts and Lectures on NPR.

Early on he mentioned something about this new or revived interest in sustainability and interpreted it as society recognizing the need for good things to last. As wrapped up as I've been in agriculture, food politics and environmentalism lately, something about that definition strikes me.

It obviously applies to the usual natural resources, tools that aren't instantly obsolete, and workers treated fairly, but it reminds me of how easy it's become to let a good thing go, like love and human relationships, as if we don't need anything, but I believe we do. I believe we do.

The Fountainhead

As often as I cursed audibly while reading it, I didn't hate all of the Fountainhead.

Ayn Rand and I can agree on the nobility of the human spirit. I do believe there is strength in our frail human hands. I know the fierce flame of invincibility Howard Roark likes to call pain that goes down only to a certain point.

I have not yet decided which of us has the greater hope for humanity - my puppeteer fingers or her steel heart - but I don't believe the lot of us are better off working against each other. I maintain a faith in engagement.

To make a man so unlike other men and to raise him up seems a cheat. To tell her believers that to be human is to deny your humanity feels a contradiction.

I may have a certain fondness for our weakness, for our softer spots. To feel your person shrunk to the size of a floating pea and to know your strength even then, that is the powerful, the fantastical shapeshifting, the pure magic of being human.

There remains the matter of compromise, of collaboration. For someone who exalts her fellow individual (those few among us), Ayn Rand has such hateful things to say about the masses between. I can understand how a brush with communism might color her political leanings, but to prescribe one truth for all of us, albeit an opposite truth, strikes me as small.

And so you have it. I may well be a Roark myself, as unwilling to budge as I am; I recognize the similarity of our methods.

Photography vs. legend

Thinking lately about photography and legend. And how the happenings of daily life could be turned into myth a millenium or a century for now, if it weren't for our obsession for documenting everything "how it is."

I almost don't want to take photographs anymore because it's too easy to let snapshots replace memory and storytelling. There's no space for legends to grow. And I don't like that about photography - photography in a journalistic sense, I mean, as opposed to mechanical photography of posed subjects, which has its uses and doesn't pose the same level of threat to myth.

Photography at its best is about capturing and telling. It is giving your eyes to someone else for a split second. It communicates some connection, some understanding incommunicable by words alone.

But cameras are everywhere now. I don't have to tell you about how there's a spot in the north of Iceland where the earth erupts into a series of jagged peaks unlike anything you've ever seen because you can see it in satellite photos or any of a million other images of the place. Myth has been reduced to snapshots.

So, I've taken to paying more attention to the magic of the time and place, to the daily fantastic. I like to ride the bus as if I'm part of a story in which anything could happen. The story that's been told since the beginning of time, that we relive constantly with different names and architecture as if it were the first time.

There was really something to shapeshifting, to seeing past people in their skin, to recognizing repeated themes in new bodies. I want stories to be dynamic again. I want to be able to wrassle with experience and misremember it until it feels right.

I think when can capture that on film, when I can see a legend in a moment, a connection between the past and the future, when magic exists again, I'll be able to pick up my camera.

Cross-pollination

Thinking about how it's so easy for academics to get buried in their own subject material - like architects never leaving the lab or meeting non-architects. Architects are better than most, I think, at entertaining ideas outside their own field, but the trend in general strikes me as unnecessarily limiting.

I guess what I like best is taking ideas from one field and applying them to the next. Asking what it all means. What does it mean that photons can act as a particle or a wave? Where is the line between the metaphors we use to understand that concept and its applicability to our living, working and curious investigation of the world?

So many of the cool famous people of the past used to hang out together and bounce ideas off of each other. I want there to be collectives of academics across fields to share ideas and play out the influences of theories across fields as a way of being more human, more true to your full nature. This sort of thing has happened before like with social darwinism, philosophy of physics, agriculture as metaphor, but I feel like the scientists aren't at the table anymore once those discussions are happening.

As someone who is making the moves on science, I want to be the one having those discussions. Cross-pollination, exploring the connections between things, sussing out why things matter, and explaining back. I feel like that's my thing, my one thing if I have one.

Tiki Tuesday

Newness is indeed goodness when your friends are whisking you off on a week night to a magic island cove. Such a great little expedition. Yay for bandmate-friends.

During our drunken yet intellectual chatting, we toyed with the idea of music and accessibility, and I wanted to jot down a bit of that thought while it's still lingering.

Our collective sentiment was just that nothing should be out of reach, especially not art and creativity. Music is music no matter how it's made, who is making it, or what other people think. There's no such thing as cheating. Open tunings are not cheating, electronica is not cheating, mixing is not cheating.

Not everything needs to sound polished or even needs to be right all the time, which is not to say that every kid taking piano lessons should have a record contract, but that it's a shame if something as primal as music and self expression is limited to a handful of virtuosos not just because offbeat artists like Joanna Newsom or even someone like Bob Dylan or Igor Stravinski can stretch and challenge ideas about what good art is, but because art should be a basic human right.

Also, that folk music is where it's at. The music of the people. We want people to feel like art and creativity are within reach, that the creative impulse exists outside of the pursuit of fame or money. Folk music is where it's at - the music of the people. Let there not be a hierarchy. Just let your voice be heard.

If you want to start a band, do it. Even if you can't play a single instrument, chances are you'll wind up in a tiki bar one Tuesday in Alameda happy to be alive and know the people you know.

Amendments

It has been pointed out to me that humanism does so take responsibility for itself, that humanism is every bit as free as free will, that humanism distinguishes itself from fatalism by biting its thumb at fate and the predetermined. The humanist's days are his own and his future his own making.

What is still interesting is how these sorts of ideas shake out in daily life, the ways the same logic can bring two actors to opposite conclusions. There is still an element of personality to it, I suppose. He is a curious beast, personality.

So, what is personality then? If we are in control of our own character and are operating by the same principles what right does it have to claim distinctions? If you allow that personality is given to you, you have something of a quandary on your hands.

I suppose you could claim to have constructed your own personality through the accumulation of decisions along your freely willed path, but would you not still fall victim to some element of chance?

And what of those experiments that show brain waves flashing before your conscious recognizes its desire to click the experimental button of its own volition?

I wonder what quantum mechanics might have to say about this all. What does the possible existence of parallel future states (or even present states) really mean?

The longest 46 hours

I believe it's the theory of relativity that states that moving fast enough changes your experience of time. I don't suppose my body was traveling so much more quickly than usual, though I covered a lot of ground from Los Angeles to San Diego to Pomona to San Diego and back to Los Angles, but my essence, my spirit, my shadow has been all over the place and in many of those places all at once.

It was every kind of time, really, including the best time.

What is still hanging on is a question of philosophy. This trip seems to have been about free will, fatalism and humanism.

I would define free will as a sense of power, that humans are active agents with the ability to affect the outcome of the future, which is not to say that free will is absolute power. It has little to do with truth and everything to do with intention. It is prescriptive, but not predictive.

Fatalism, on the other hand, reminds me of hopelessness. Fatalism means giving oneself over to the whimsy of chance. It accepts no responsibility for the past or future. There is no such thing as a promise, and no need for apologies. The comfort seemingly is that you can do no wrong.

Humanism is where it gets interesting. Humanism is about desire and possibility. It seems to have all the freedom of free will, unfettered by responsibility, but I don't think philosophical humanism is quite the right title for the philosophy wedging itself between fatalism and free will this past week. This one had more to do with truth. It seemed to be a descriptive art concerned more with acknowledging the fallibility of intention than with the potential to achieve its desires.

What I don't understand is the interface between free will and humanism. It seems wrong to conflate humanism with fatalism, but if free will can accept that truth is fleeting and variable, that humans are not the sole determinants of future outcomes, what problem does humanism have with intention?

The interesting thing is that humanism should be able to go either way. You could focus on human weakness or human power, but this seemed to be more of a fatalistic breed, in which the ability to pursue the desires afforded by fate is an inalienable right. Fate or chance, once it comes into the picture, seems to give everything a sense of urgency that free will doesn't as much feel because it is empowered to recreate circumstances to its own benefit.

But yes, I am curious about this tug between truth and intention, action and contentment.

Half-thought on GMOs

I've never been a fan of genetically modified anything on principle. My instincts tell me to let nature run its course and propagate polycultures of heirloom crops, rather than fuel the industrial agriculture beast by buying Bigger, Better crops for a premium.

...But I was listening to the radio* the other night, and there was a guy talking about Africa, the green revolution, and ending world hunger, and he mentioned that he'd be in favor of offering small scale African farmers GM crops as long as they were beneficial to the farmers (as opposed to something that just made your corn a prettier shade of yellow for end consumers). I am leaving out the bulk of his argument, but the gist was that these guys need all the help they can get.

I am torn. On the one hand, I'm still concerned about selecting for unkillable pests, but plant diseases (as I'm learning) can be more than a handful, and I'm not sure I'd begrudge a small farmer disease resistant crops if it meant he could use fewer pesticide sprays (that a lot of these guys administer themselves by hand - chemicals on one shoulder, and a kid on the other) and possibly saved him and his family from hunger in a bum year.

Is there really such a big difference between natural evolution and human-assisted mutation? Maybe it really is a pipe dream to think we could feed the world's hungry without disease resistant varietals. At some point I should properly look into this sort of thing and weigh the pro's and con's. I'd be more willing to give GMOs a chance if you could take the big business aspect out.

In any case, I still maintain that polyculture never hurt anyone...


*(Broadcast of The Forces Behind Famine - Roger Thurlow speaking at the World Affairs Council on 8/11/2009)

Back to basics

Had a nice chat with a coworker over lunch today about cultural knowledge, and how with all this technology we can operate (and survive, for now) at a high level without knowing how things work.

Take food, for example. I think in so many cases, the connection between food and plants and animals is lost. Barbara Kingsolver talks about kids who didn't want to eat vegetables that had fallen on the ground outside, as if all their potatoes and carrots hadn't been in the ground in the first place, and hadn't been covered in dirt themselves before they were washed off. It's as if food is generated spontaneously and just appears clean in a grocery store or in a restaurant.

I heard somewhere that if you talked to an Inuit (or maybe it was another Native American tribe), anyone in the tribe could tell you how to build an igloo, how to skin a seal, what the designs on their parkas signify, and so on, whereas I couldn't begin to know all of the things we've learned collectively as a society. I don't know how to build electronics or a lightbulb. I can use a computer, but don't totally know how they work at a base level.

That's not a bad thing in itself, but I'm disturbed by a couple of things:

1. That if we had to start over, I'm not sure we could build what we have again. I feel like civilization is building this massive structure, and people's knowledge is moving up and up and after a point, we won't know how to get back to the bottom. We imagine one thing to stand for another and another and another until we can't remember what it signified in the first place.

2. We (or at least I) no longer really have the means to fully assess the implications of a lot of our actions or decisions. I have shares in a mutual fund, but don't really know what sort of business practices I'm supporting. Or, I buy a laptop - granted mine is supposedly a 'green' one - but I don't really know what it means to have equipment built from one sort of metal or another. You hear about diamond mines in Africa, but we could be strip mining all manner of beautiful places to make me something I might not have wanted if I knew.

In any case, everyone doesn't have to know everything. That's the benefit of society, of civilization.

My coworker said she'd be tempted to teach her kids useless things like the classics, that we should bring back cooking and wood shop into the schools, but that's my point - that it isn't useless. I want to know how everything works. I've gotten to a point where I want to start exploring backwards. I think it's healthy to know how to build a table, grow your own food and bake bread from scratch. That's why I'm going back to school: to do real things in the real world. Or, maybe it's simple things in a basic world. I want to understand the connection between the things I do, to act responsibly to the best of my knowledge.

Waxing economic

I was listening to Professor Robert Frank of the Johnson School at Cornell University talk about economics, the economy and what we can do about it the other day on the Commonwealth Club. He claims that in another 100 years, Charles Darwin will have replaced Adam Smith as the father of modern economics, the key difference between their philosophies being that Smith's theory assumes that individuals acting in their own best interest will result in everyone getting what's best, whereas Darwin's theory leaves more room for improvement.

He gave the example of elephant seals: as a male elephant seal, it behooves you to be as massive as possible so that you can fight your competitors for a harem and send your genes into the next generation, which over time results in enormous elephant seals. Male elephant seals today can weigh up to 6,000 pounds. 6,000 pounds! All in all, Frank says, elephant seals as a population would likely prefer to be a third that size. They could escape predators faster and wouldn't have to find as much to eat, but such is evolution.

And this is where Frank says we as humans can step outside this cycle. We don't have to be victims of a vicious cycle. We can change the rules. In considering the current economic crisis, he emphasized the Keynesian government spending, saying that now is not the time to balance the federal budget by cutting spending, imbalanced as it may be. Even without fully knowing the implications of that sort of policy, it's heartening to hear an economist recommend that the government put more people to work, and not just digging holes and filling them back up à la FDR, but getting some real work done, like hiring people to inspect all those bridges and dikes and then actually fixing them to help prevent disasters.

The idea that really intrigued me though - and I'm not one to be intrigued by economics in general - was called something like the graduated consumption tax. It goes something like this - rather than taxing you on your gross income, the government would tax you based on how much you spent in a given year, and tax rates themselves could be (on the surface at least) much higher. For example, Frank proposed 100% tax for upper spending brackets, which I suppose in the end may be similar to the current tax structure in terms of how much money we bring in, except that it would encourage saving, a good behavior. Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in 1976 for this kind of thinking. All in all, it sounds to me like a pretty neat idea.

Fortunately, someone in the audience asked the question I was thinking of, which was - do we really want everyone stuffing all their money into savings right now? Don't we need that economic stimulus? And his answer was that, yes, consumption tax wouldn't be a good idea right now, but it would be a good idea to put it on the table for later. If we said we'd be converting to a consumption tax structure in some number of years, people would be incentivized to spend now, which would give us that extra kick we need, and then spend more moderately in the future.

For example, say you're a millionaire and you're just itching to build an addition onto your mansion (so as not to be outdone by your neighbors) and you're aiming to spend $2M on your project. If you know a consumption tax is on the horizon, you have two options: build a $2M addition now, or build a $1M addition later and pay another $1M (assuming you're in the 100% tax bracket) in taxes. Having the consumption tax on the horizon encourages you to build now, and anyone looking to build later will be incentivized to scale back, which, if everything goes according to plan, will help address the tendency for excess.

Future moderate spending is ok, he says, because money stored in banks and mutual funds isn't actually tied up. It's moving around as capital on the market.

Then, as I'm finishing dinner, feeling optimistic, the World Affairs Council wraps up and BBC World News starts up, main story: California lawmakers finally balance budget by cutting spending on education and social services. Sigh.