Psybertron Asks

Reading Thoreau’s “Walden” pretty thoroughly this time around, should be capturing more notes that I am noting mentally, and this is one.

In his chapter entitled “Reading” Thoreau extols the virtues of reading the wisdom of the real classics, widely and in the original (original dead languages) where possible, but balances this with the warning not to let reading replace maximum experience of real life, as you’d expect from one of the founding fathers of US-Pragmatism.

Ironic that the Great Books movement of Chicao University (Adler / Mckeon) should be responsible for rejecting the pragmatism of Dewey, and turning posession of their published collections into a Brittanica-style negative sell. Something no self-respecting family should deprive their kids of. One wonders how many of those editions were read, and read in any way that the educational value of their sources was understood as originally intended ?

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Is a line from the wonderfully ironic “The Devil Wears Prada” a film I saw for about the 3rd or 4th time yesterday … just killing time … one of those films that always seems to be showing on some TV channel. I don’t know anything about the original writing behind it, and there is plenty of Hollywood Rom-Com cheese to disguise just how many levels of irony there are within it. The clue is that the subject matter of fashion journalism is about as thin a veneer for real value as you could conceive … there is a magnificent lecture on the trickle-down from those whose opinions of this stuff matter.

The line “everybody wants to get ahead” is a pretty simple statement of the received wisdom of the Darwinian struggle and the measure of progress … it’s a jungle out there, it’s an arms race, it’s a war on anything you care to mention … just add you own cliche.

The reason the value of the irony struck me was that I had just written a longish post on the “Zeitgeist – Addendum”, in response to gav on MoQ.Discuss (*). As usual, I have to distance myself from any idea of an “international bankers conspiracy theory” take on why the economic struggle, and its global political consequences are perverse in terms of real human interests. But I have to say the film, despite its rhetoric, is pretty good at identifying alternative models of real value … and the real solution; education, education, education. (The real conspiracy is the objectivist meme, easy value in countable things, about which I’ve said more than enough.)

Of course one reason why this is more and more scary to more and more people, is the mass and pace of global communication. The reality is more apparent to more people, and the pace at which bad decisions can lead to new conflicts, means that urgency is part of the concern. Doomsday scenarios are ever easier to envisage.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having time to acquire any new value for each other. … We have had to agree on a certain set of rules called etiquette and politeness to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. … we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and … we lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications.

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden” (1847)

Thoreau wrote that at a time when he considered the number of penny posts worth a penny that he had ever received, he could count on one hand, and that the recently invented telegraph and shared timekeeping, had no future value beyond the novelty of intercity rail travel. Little did he know. He did know that it was more valuable to build a school or a library than a new bridge – connectivity is good, but you can have too much of it (per his quote above.)

“Everybody wants to get ahead” is a culturally conditioned meme. What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding ?

[Post Note (*) – note the Pirsigian / MoQish-vs-SOMist language, if it’s new jargon to you. Basically “Subject-Object” (mutually-exclusive, post-rationalised-empiricist, static-dualist-objective world-view is inferior to a “Quality” (collectively-inclusive, immediately-participated, radical-empiricist, dynamic-qualitative-relations) world-view or metaphysics. Read Pirsig’s ZMM and Lila, and William James for a start, then Alan Rayner’s natural-inclusionality. That’s a dense collection of adjectives for a world-view, but trust me enough to unpick it.]

Saw Rodney Crowell at the JD in Oslo last night. It was packed-out. Didn’t know much about him beforehand, but I’d noticed he was supported and backed by Will Kimbrough and Jenny Scheinman. I saw Will just the once before at Norm’s (Cumberland) River Road House just outside Nashville, playing with Tommy Womack. Folks in North Alabama / Tennessee who knew I was a fan of Tommy were forever pointing out his association with Will and with Todd Snider. Loved all three of  ’em.  Coincidentally, during the first set Will actually mentioned playing with Todd previously at the same Oslo venue.

Both the first Will & Jenny set and the main Rodney, Jenny & Will set were entirely acoustic except for a little keyboard fill – excellent country folk guitar and fiddle with some great poetry.

Great to hear Will do his “Hill Country Girl” again – it stuck in my mind on the only previous occasion. Houston boy Rodney Crowell did really impress too; I’m going to have to listen to more of his stuff – “Sex & Gasoline”, despite the highlight of the evening being when Jenny brought the house down with a solo fiddle virtuoso piece.

It’s a rare treat when an unexpected gig turns out that good.

Sign of the economic times that this is is happening I guess, and an industry in which I have a long personal involvement, not just in the UK, but I thought this comment was an interesting statement of the root problem in globalization.

Where is the humanity in ruining someone’s local environment by building a massive industrial refinery and then bringing in people from around the world to work there?

My Akismet comment spam filter has been working fine except to a few Russian (cyrillic) posts and links getting through. But these have always been easy to spot and delete / mark-as-spam.

Today I noticed a bunch and went through deleting them, only to discover that each deleting of a spam comment also deleted one real comment … I have all comments now deleted since 7th Dec !!! apologies to anyone affected.

Bigger problem for me immediately is to find out how and stop this recurring. Anyone ?

Only yesterday I noticed this image of protesters in Nice carrying “Solidaire” banners (solidarity presumably ?) and had John Martyn’s “Solid Air” going round my head all day as a result.

Spooky to hear at the end of yesterday that John had died.

First saw John Martyn in my student days, ’74/’75 ish, backed by Paul Kossoff. Went for years never really noticing that John remained active – unlike say, the way I continued to look out for Roy Harper in that vein, until I bought a live double CD just a couple of years ago. Apart from “Solid Air” itself, I would say “John Wayne”, backed by Dave Gilmour was my most memorable.

Equals R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

I keep pointing out that the World Wide Web model of information is enlightened enough to actually have trust at the top of the stack – ie however information is organized and presented on the web (or anywhere for that matter) it ultimately depends on trust in people in enforceable authority, even if the expert authority is earned in advance. Anything based (entirely) on the power of crowds risks overlooking this important fact.

I often note it in references to limits to freedom in free-democratic-governance at any level, most recently in the Brittanica / Wikipedia story. More frequently in the serious psychological deficiencies of most web information models – like “unfriending” in social network situations.

As a Brit resident in Norway, I can’t help thinking this survey may prove significant.

Perhaps a little harsh, but this cartoon posted by Georganna, rings true.

Blog post writing can barely do justice to the impulse to “hold that thought” or “capture that link”. Quality writing might need a different vehicle.

(The cataloguing, categorizing and linking of thoughts is of course a very Pirsigian approach to writing, and he didn’t do so bad.)

One of my pet subjects is the fact that in (free democratic) systems of governance, there must be institutions that are not free and democratic, not in the sense of the popular “one man one vote” mantra.

OK, so most people quickly see that total freedom for popular decision-making is a recipe for anarchy, not democracy, which demands institutions to defend and preserve rights and freedoms of individuals and groups from other individuals and groups. There are “greater goods” than individual rights and freedoms. And it is easy to see that pragmatically authority has to be delegated to elected representatives or delegates in order to achieve timely decisions and actions on behalf of the electorate.

However what is harder to see, because it appears paradoxical at first, is that some of those institutions must also have intrinsically “elitist” non-democratic arrangements.

At the very least they need to have meritocratic arrangements that are insulated from direct popular democracy. They require a caucas of people “who know better”. Of course they have to be “trusted” to know better, trusted to make “unpopular” decisions without the question of direct public decision-making input. There must ultimately be free and democratic sanctions, answerable to the “popular” constituency when that trust is lost, but that trust does not have to be sought on the same timescale as the operational decisions of that population.

Of course any sophisticated national government with a history knows about meritocratic appointees to high-ranking public servant positions, high-court judges and the like. These will be appointed democratically (well, by political horse-trading maybe) by one or other house of popular elected government institutions (one level removed from popular vote) and on tenures longer than the popular election cycle of those elected institutions (a second level of insulation from popular voting).

That way the appointers can consider their candidate appointees independently of their electoral considerations, and merited in terms of greater considerations of quality, value, truth and good. Of course the higher (public) profile the particular positions, the greater the (public) political pressures anyway, but the principle is well established.

This is rarely noticed however in new / young institutions embracing the free & democratic “dogma”. And the “received wisdom” view of evolution, particularly in the power of crowds empowered by free access to communications media and technologies, is to completely overlook this issue, and to positively rail against any hint of attempted, even suggested, control by higher “authority”. Two or three posts into a discussion on the subject and some well-intentioned individual – supported by a crowd baying for blood –  is invoking liberty and personal freedoms, accusations of control-freakery or pretensions of higher knowledge, screaming “censorship” and pointing out Hitler, Mao and Stalin and the historical lessons of fascism. Well, all the easy bits ayway, the popular received wisdom of the lesson, minus anything else of value – necessarily of greater value, since by defintion they will be valued by fewer of the population – paradoxically, the opposite of democratic. (There’s a name for that syndrome – counting how many posts before someone makes a “fascist” reference in a  contentious correspondence thread – lost it for a moment.)

 Anyway, memes always promulgate the easy to understand bits, never the valuable subtleties.

I have pointed out before that excellent inventions like Wikipedia are wonderfully valuable in capturing high quality knowledge where the content is uncontentious and low profile … anywhere where it is “political” the mechanism fails and is replaced (devalued) with a power of conflicting wills and attrition, often disguised by many layers of rhetorical and ironic game-play.

Encyclopedia Brittanica seems to understand this – avoiding falling for the obvious Wikipedia model. Somethings, to be definitive, need to be authoritative. W3C itself knows this [Figure 7 Semantic Web Layers], by having “trust” at the top of its architectural stack of web technologies, but those using the power of mass communications often ride over this with their personal democratic dogma.

Some things need to be managed by those with the pretensions, the presumption, the wisdom …. to know better. That’s really, really, really free.

[Post Note – Hooray, and even Wikipedia itself has seen the error of its (simple popular) democratic ways …. nobody said the alternative was easy, just better … as with any publicly shared reference data, publication can be fast, but quality can take a little time. ]