State of the Blog 2011

First of all, Happy New Year from everyone here at the nuclearheadache staff.  Of course, that staff is mostly just me.  So, I guess that means Happy New Year from me.

There are some benefits to running a one man operation.  I can make my own hours, set my own terms, and come and go as I please.  So, I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce that it's time for another break here.  I'm not sure how long.  It could be a month, or maybe more.  At the very least, I'll probably start posting on the Night Owl blog in the early spring.  The change in the weather always seems to put me in a sentimental mood.

In the meantime, I'm trying to work on some ideas for a Kindle series, something fictional, something serialized.  I'm open to suggestions.  Also, I'm sure I'll be kicking some nonsense up onto the FARNC from time to time.  And although I've neglected my Encyclopedia of Sheep for the past few months, I always hope to have some dreams to report over there.

So you won't be rid of me completely.  I'll still be around, reading everybody's blogs.  I just need to kick back for a while, go into a low power mode, amass my ideas and get my ducks in row.  Maybe I'll work on my metaphors a little.  I'd be a little more specific about time tables and such, but that's the point, I need to be a little unspecific for a while.  I need to relax.  Anyway, rest assured, one way or the other, in one capacity or another, I'll keep blogging and writing.  I can promise you that.

And finally, this blog topped 30,000 pageviews this morning!  Thank you slender man, wherever you are!   

Out Here Among the Stars

I was pleasantly surprised when I recently learned that Carl Sagan's Cosmos series is available through Netflix's streaming video service.  I don't know if it's a new addition to the service, but it is a welcome one.  I've seen most of the series' short thirteen episode run here and there in various different ways over the years, but this gives me the opportunity to watch it all in order and at my own leisure, which, naturally, is the nice thing about the Netflix service.  I find that, like all works that resonate deeply with me, I return to it time and again with a different perspective that reflects my own progress as a person.  It becomes like a touchstone or a familiar place; it remains constant and serves as something to mark your own change and growth by.

For instance, watching it now, I keep thinking about recent conversations with my friend Vincent, who has a somewhat passing, almost mild, antagonism towards science, depending on what kind of mood you catch him in.  Vincent isn't alone, of course, and there are plenty of other people with similar feelings.  Yet, I can't help but wonder if their problem isn't as much with science - as a collection of data and a discipline of factual inquiry - as much as it is with the attitudes and mind-sets of certain scientists who rub them the wrong way.  One might be tempted to cynically conclude that they just resent more sober minds raining on their fairy tales, and that they lash back with any means at their disposal.  But I'd like to think there's a little more to it than that.  I suspect that when Vincent thinks of science, he tends to think of Richard Dawkins or someone similarly disposed.  

Yet, the problem with Dawkins isn't necessarily that he's a scientist or even that he's an atheist.  Rather, the problem is the implicit insistence on an almost militantly prosaic viewpoint whereby he arrives at his conclusions.  He comes off as the sort of smug jackass who subjects a religion to ruthlessly "logical" interrogations, not as a way of trying to learn more about it and gain insight into its tenets, but as a way of holding it up to mockery as an irrational farce.  It's the sort of game a person is up to when they ask how Noah fit all the animals on the Ark or how reincarnation accounts for population growth.  These aren't necessarily invalid points, but the people raising them usually aren't looking to know; they're looking to deflate.  Consequently, some people come to feel like they are under fire from science and reason.  The irony is that the prejudice and dismissive close-mindedness that underpins such smug games goes against the very spirit of science and reason.

Most likely, Sagan would have agreed with Dawkins on nearly all matters of scientific fact, but it's the man himself that makes all the difference in the world.  His Cosmos series was billed as "A Personal Voyage", and it takes a moment's pause to appreciate the significance of this.  Clearly he wasn't talking about "personal" in the sense of "biographical", and there's little about the man himself throughout the series.  What is personal is Sagan's passion and wonder for his subject matter, his sense of amazement when he tells us that we are all "made of star stuff", his hopefulness of finding intelligent life out there in the universe, his benevolent optimism towards the human race, and his urgent concern about the possibility that we might destroy ourselves which he mentions again and again as a warning and a leitmotif through the series.  Sagan sees poetry where Dawkins insists on prose.  They may draw many of the same conclusions and believe much of the same things, but for entirely different reasons.

Throughout the Cosmos series, Sagan displays a boundless enthusiasm that fits him well in his role as a teacher.  He constantly puts things in a perspective that's deliberately designed to evoke awe and curiosity.  I particularly liked the calender model he uses to try to bring the fourteen billion year existence of the universe down to a manageable scale that the mind can grasp.  He stands on a stage with a giant illustrated calender laid out on the floor.  The calender year represents the entire life-span of the universe, and down in the right hand corner is a tiny little spot, the last few seconds of December 31st, which represent all of recorded human history.  "Everyone we've ever known, every story ever told, happened right here.", he tells us, and suddenly the majesty of the universe, and our fragile place in it, is as clear and touching as it has ever been.  This is the amazing achievement of Cosmos.  "What we do at the beginning of the next cosmic year is up to us.", he continues, touching again on the themes of optimism and concern.

So, I come away from all this wondering if there isn't another dimension to how we draw the lines between us.  We get hung up on the differences between our beliefs and ideologies that we tend to lose sight of the fact that it's the people behind those differences that really matter.  Whatever side of whichever line someone falls on, it's the spirit of the person, the humanity, the compassion, that bright eyed warmth that really matters.  A heart in the right place is worth far more than the details of any particular dogma, as far as I'm concerned.  We focus on the difference between things like science and religion, and we forget about the difference between people like Dawkins and Sagan.  We're all on the same journey, turning and revolving out here among the stars.  Sometimes it's how we feel about that journey that makes all the difference.

Sartre's Anguish

I remember the first time someone told me what would happen if you were outside on a cold winter day and you stuck your tongue to a metal post; how you were likely to find yourself securely fixed until the paramedics arrived.  This idea held a grip on my imagination for days, weeks, even months after that.  I was afraid that I would find myself in a situation where I would just go ahead and...stick my tongue to a metal post.  It wasn't that I wanted to do it.  I wasn't particularly curious about what would happen, and I had little cause to doubt what I'd been told.  And I could hardly imagine a situation where I would need to stick my tongue to a metal post.  In fact, I really had no conceivable reason what-so-ever for sticking my tongue to a post, but despite all that, I was still afraid that somehow I was just going to go ahead and do it anyway.  I suspect that many of you at one time or another have had a similar experience.  Sartre calls this feeling "anguish."

Anguish, as Sartre uses the term, is a special breed of fear: fear before one's self.  A soldier going off to war may understandably be afraid of the enemy, of battle, of leaving home, and many other things, but there's another sense in which he may fear the potential of his own actions.  He may be afraid that he won't measure up in his duties as a soldier.  He may fear that he'll run when he should have taken cover, or that he'll take cover when he should have ran.  He may spend long, sleepless, hours possessed by the thought of inexplicably sticking his head up out of a hole at the wrong moment to see what's going on and catching enemy sniper fire right between the eyes.  More even than the fear of being killed, it's the fear of doing something stupid and getting himself killed that seizes the soldier's heart with such a powerful rush of anguish that it takes his breath away.  So he tries to be a soldier, as a thing in a uniform equipped with a weapon, a machine designed exclusively for war.  If he must die, he wants to die as a soldier, not through his failure to fulfill the responsibility of that role.

Of course, we don't need to invoke the special circumstances of war to find anguish.  There is, perhaps, no more common or appropriate illustration of our experience of anguish, than our morbid fascination with suicide.  I'm sure that most of us probably have no pressing wish to kill ourselves or serious plans of doing so, but yet the thought does flutter in now and then, doesn't it?  We think of the opportunities that might present themselves, the rigged noose and the chair, the gun laid in our lap.  We sense all too well that we are capable of pushing through all those layers of resistance, all those reasons not to do it, and with a quick flip of the foot or twitch of the finger we could end our lives....Snap! Just like that.  It's enough to turn your blood cold.  It's the feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff and knowing that you could just say the hell with it and hurl yourself over the edge and nothing would stop you.

It's not a all a question of mortality.  It crops up in a number of little ways.  I remember a while back when I debating some of the finer points of free will and determinism with Mr. John Myste, I used the example of how I had to continually force myself to get up for work night after night, how I had to perpetually sustain my role as a responsible family man.  I told him that I could throw it all away at a moment's notice.  I could just get in my car and drive off into the dark, never to be seen from again.  Even writing those words gave me a flash of anguish, a dizzy spin of vertigo from the cliff's edge.  It's not even that it's a particularly terrible prospect.  It's just that facing the fact that you could change your life so radically at the snap of your fingers is exhilarating and yet horrifying at the same time.

Naturally, a determinist would insist that these are baseless fears, a odd glitch in our psychological programming.  They would say that this agonizing over suicide, for instance, is a pointless waste of time.  They would say that no one has ever been seized by such a reckless impulse of self-destruction; no one has ever pulled a trigger because they were overcome by their own willpower.  But yet, people do kill themselves, do they not?  Who's to say that all of those people had better reasons for doing it than you or I do?  Where do you draw the line?  Where does the determinist stand over the body lying on the floor with the smoking gun and say, "causality led to this"?  I submit that not only would I disagree that no one has ever pulled the trigger out of sheer willpower, I'll go as far as to say that it always goes down just the way we fear.  It's rarely a clear cut case of a person just wanting to kill themselves.  There's struggle, conflict.  There's nearly always some reasons to live.  But the person pushes past all that, says the hell with it, and does it anyway.

This all makes anguish sound like a negative thing, but it's actually a necessary part of our existence.  It serves much the same purpose psychologically, that physical pain serves biologically.  It is the constant pin prick, keeping us on our toes, reminding us of our responsibility for our actions.  It drives the soldier to train, to learn, to sustain his role as a soldier.  The sobering awareness that he is not merely a soldier, as a thing, that he has within him the capacity to fail to live up to the demands of being a soldier, prods him and drives him on.  To try to defuse that feeling, as determinism does, is dangerous and deadly.  A soldier without anguish, a soldier who has fallen into bad faith, has sealed his fate.

And suppose I'm wrong, and Sartre's wrong, and free will is all just a big delusion.  Well, then what difference does it make?  Whatever's going to happen is going to happen, and I have no more control over the fact that I believe in free will than I do over my own eye color.  Ironically, there's always, behind a determinist's argument, an implicit subtext that they came by their position by choice.  They keep telling you why they're a determinist and why you should be a determinist, even though from their position "why" shouldn't matter a bit.  They are a determinist as the western wind blows and nothing more.  So, if I'm wrong, it makes no difference, and I can't even help being wrong anyway.  But if I'm right, and we really are free, then believing in free will makes all the difference in the world.  It means that you assume ownership of this life, and all the possibilities open to it.

For now, we end our adventures in Sartre's theory of free will out along its most paradoxical outskirts: will beyond reason, choice beyond control.  We face the disconnection between the person we dream ourselves to be and the consciousness which is free and unbound by the limitations of that dream.  We face anguish with that nauseating drop in the pit of our stomach as well fall into nothingness, free almost even from ourselves, overwhelmed by that freedom.  Sartre said that we are doomed to be free.  Well, so be it.  Let's make the most of it.             

Get Your Slender Man Buttons, Coffee Mugs, and T-Shirts

A recent check of my stats for this blog shows that I've gone well over four thousand pageviews for this month, and I'm well on my way to topping five thousand by the end of the month, possibly even topping 30,000 total pageviews by the end of the year.  This has easily been the most successful month so far here at nuclearheadache...at least traffic-wise.  Unfortunately, I find this achievement to be somewhat hollow, and I don't get much satisfaction or sense of accomplishment out of it.  It seems that I owe all the credit to that Stretch Armstrong of child abductors known to his friends and family as...The Slender Man.

Pictured: NOT Slender Man.

Yes, there appears to be quite a Slender Man following out there, a thriving sub-culture much larger than I would have ever guessed.  They want to know his hopes, his dreams, his passions, his obsessions.  They want to know where he buys his suits and how he knots his ties.  Some are looking for pictures of "real Slender Man sightings", while the more skeptical are looking for reassuring confirmation of a "Slender Man hoax."  And apparently this ravenous wave of curiosity is washing up on my nuclear doorstep.  In a little over a month since it was posted "Ballad of a Slender Man" is far and away the most searched and viewed post on this site.....Or at least the pictures are.

That isn't him either.

So let me set the record straight here, folks.  This is not a special Slender Man blog, providing one stop shopping for all your Slender Man needs.  I'm afraid I don't have exclusive, never before seen, video footage of Slender Man.  In fact, I have the same incredibly realistic photos of Slender Man that everyone else has.  I do not, NOT, possess the secret, shocking, truth behind the Slender Man legend.  I'm not giving away free Slender Man pizza coupons, or offering amazing bargains on Slender Man ink cartridges or pre-paid Slender Man cell phones...just in case anyone was wondering.  And...I can't be adamant enough about this...I most certainly do not provide Japanese, crossover, Slender Man, tentacle, fan-fic, anime, fetish porn.  Nope.

Ehhh...Close Enough.

There.  That should clear things up ;D       

The Invention of Smiling

Yesterday my wife asked me a question that I had been wondering about myself for quite some time: Why didn't people smile in old pictures?  Since I've never liked to be stumped by one of my wife's random questions, I took a stab at pronouncing the word "daguerreotype" and speculated that the long exposure times that were originally involved in taking a photograph necessitated keeping your face still and relatively expressionless.  I further speculated that this tradition probably persisted for a long time after taking a photograph became a much quicker affair.  A quick Google search of the matter shows that I've scored a direct hit with this answer.  Either that, or someone else came up with the same dumb idea that I did.  Nevertheless, the real question now becomes: When was the trend reversed?  When did people start smiling in old photographs?

Well, my exhaustive and notoriously thorough research led me to a man by the name of Dr. Karl Bruegger.  Dr. Bruegger was a Bavarian dentist who had immigrated to America and set up a private dental practice in the late 19th century.  One day an eager young photographer was admiring the photographs which lined the walls of Dr. Bruegger's office, portraits of the dentist's patients proudly displaying their healthy white teeth.  What struck the young photographer, however, was not the quality of the dental work, but rather the blissful expression that the teeth-baring pose lent to the subject's faces.

When the photographer asked about the oddly charming expression in the portraits, Dr. Bruegger was obligingly eager to explain his technique for obtaining the unique pose.  He began by drilling a small but precise hole in the subject's skull.  Then he would proceed to poke around in the hole with some of his surgical instruments, removing a few excess cubic inches of brain tissue.  The subject would then lapse into a state of stupefaction.  Their mouths would hang loose, showing their teeth, and the blissful expression that the photographer had observed in the photographs would settle over their faces.  It was a quite simple procedure, as the dentist kindly demonstrated for the photographer on the next patient that arrived that afternoon.

It became known as the Bruegger Technique, and it soon became popular in photo studios through-out the world.  World leaders, famous celebrities, and rich debutantes all lined up to have their "Bruegger Holes" drilled.  After undergoing the procedure, one high society lady was quoted as saying, "uhhhh..."  The procedure was a rousing success, but it seems that the word "smile" did not appear until 1914 in a book by Samuel Westabahn called Plasticity and the Human Form.  Westabahn proposed an alternative method to the Bruegger Technique, which had been showing a distinct loss of effectiveness over time.  Drilling new Bruegger holes wasn't helping.  One man had had sixteen such holes drilled and his face hung slack and loose and he was quite unresponsive.  The "Westabahn Method" dispensed with the barbaric drilling of holes in the subject's skulls.  Instead, Westabahn administered a heavy dose of arsenic to his subjects.  After a fairly uncooperative struggle, the subject's heart and breathing would eventually stop and they would settle into a state which Westabahn called "the period of plasticity."  At the this point, the features could be manipulated into the proper expression which would finally solidify once rigor mortis set in.  A special liquid solution dropped in each eye would given them the proper sparkle and the whole procedure would "achieve the desired pose known as the 'smile.'"  However, it's not clear where Westabahn first heard this term.

Eventually, sometime during the 1920's, photographers learned that the same expression could be prompted simply by asking their subjects to say "cheese" before take the photo, and the rest is history...more or less.            

Reflections on the Meaning of Christmas

When I was a kid, there was a rather strange couple that taught a few of the Sunday school classes at the church that I went to.  Their family adhered to a very strict orthodoxy, which included a few extra and unusual stipulations that they had thrown in themselves for good measure.  For one thing, they didn't believe in owning a TV, as they considered the idiot box to be inherently sinful regardless of what channel it was tuned to.  Furthermore, they didn't really celebrate Christmas.  I mean, being Christians, they naturally believed and observed Christmas, but they didn't celebrate it in the traditional manner.  In other words, they didn't give gifts.

I can still recall that woman's syrupy, pious voice, and all the countless times she explained it to us.  "Christmas is Jesus' birthday.", she told us.  "How would you like it if everyone else except you was getting presents on your birthday?"  Seriously.  She said that.  I can almost imagine a certain sanctimonious wink accompanying this pronouncement.  They thought they were awfully clever.  They were going to celebrate Christmas the right way.  They didn't buy each other gifts.  They didn't buy gifts for their kids.  No fruit basket for the neighbors.  No token of appreciation for the mailman; not even a card.  They didn't even buy a special treat for the dog, but then again, I don't think they had a dog.  They probably considered having pets to be some form of pagan animal worship.  They could probably show you the chapter and verse to back it up too.

But hold up a minute.  Let's think about this.  It's not like you could ever get Jesus a tangible, physical gift.  What are you going to do?  Buy him a pair of socks?  Get him a sweater that says "World's Greatest Savior", or a coffee mug that says "#1 Begotten Son"?  I mean, what exactly do you get the omnipotent Lord of time and space that literally has everything?  Well, what if people presented a gift that could only be offered through their own free will?  Something like, say....oh...I don't know, maybe peace on Earth and goodwill towards men.  Yeah, that has a nice little ring to it.  Oh, and hey!  Maybe they could demonstrate this gesture of peace and goodwill by giving each other gifts and generally trying to be decent human beings to each other.  Crazy idea.  I know.

Of course, when I was a kid I was just appalled at what this woman was suggesting and the whole notion of not getting toys on Christmas.  I was horrified when my mother even seemed to give it a few seconds of serious thought.  But now that I'm older I see that the matter goes beyond Christmas.  These people were an extreme case, but I grew up around quite a number of these "Super Christians" who never missed a church service, prayed before every meal, made sure that the boys' hair wasn't too long and the girls' dresses weren't too short, who could quote you an endless stream of Bible verses for any occasion, and yet they didn't have the slightest clue what their own religion was all about.

Christianity isn't about not owning a TV, or trying to turn your life into an ascetic monument to your own self-righteousness.  Christianity is about accepting that you're never going to be able to mold yourself into this perfect person "worthy of God's love", and yet realizing that God, in His grace, loves you anyway.  It's about opening your heart to that love, and showing that love in return to your fellow human beings.  It sounds like a trite notion, older than the dirt itself, and it's certainly been devalued over the ages by people paying lip service to the words without really embracing the spirit.  It's definitely a case of easier said than done.

Take the present example, this family that I've been talking about.  Part of me clearly harbors a certain anger towards them.  I'm annoyed by their smug "holiness" in the service of such misguided ignorance.  I'm angry that their kids never got to enjoy a proper Christmas, and I'm angry that for a split-second they almost ruined my own Christmas.  And yet, there's another part of me, like a quiet calm whisper out beyond all that, a part of me that realizes that these people were just trying to do what they thought was right.  Christianity is about embracing that feeling, and letting everything else go, the anger and the hostility, because it doesn't do me or them any good.  But it isn't easy.  And this isn't even a difficult case!  There are definitely things that are much harder to forgive.  But beyond all the noise and anger that quiet whisper is always out there, reminding me that we are all lost and confused children in this world, trying to get by the best we can. 

Jesus brought an idea to the world, so enchantingly simple and yet so difficult to practice.  He told people that the vicious cycle of vengeance and retribution could end with them.  They just had to lay down their arms, turn the other cheek, let go of their suspicions and their resentments, sincerely open their hearts, and have faith that their friends and enemies alike would do the same.  It's a risky proposition and few people have been fool enough to commit to it fully, but the stakes are plain to see.  Peace on Earth is at our fingertips, anytime we want it, and whenever we're ready for it.  It's completely up to us.  It's up to us as the whole human race, and it's up to each of us individually.  That's where it has to start.

I may be fuzzy on the details; I may have my own spiritual and metaphysical doubts from time to time, but I believe in the idea.  And the idea here goes beyond a matter of religion, beyond the question of whether there's a bearded man in the sky or whether there's a cloud and a harp with your name on it somewhere.  It's about what we make of life here on Earth.  Jesus has had two thousand and eleven birthdays, and we've had two thousand and eleven chances to get it right, and we keep handing in the same badly wrapped gift with most of the pieces missing and all scuffed up here and there with our wars and the pain we constantly cause each other.  Hopefully one of these days we'll get it right.

(Note: This post is an entry is yet another one of Rachel Hoyt's Sociology Studies.  I could have mentioned that at the top, but I didn't want to break my rhetorical momentum ;D )      

How to Disarm a Nuclear Book

When it comes to dark dystopian visions of the future, George Orwell's 1984 is the standard-bearer, the prototype.  It's not a subtle work, by any means, but it is an extremely powerful one.  It's a dire warning about totalitarian government, an indictment of censorship, a defense of the nuances of language, and a text book on brainwashing, all rolled into one.  It relentlessly follows the logic of its premise to its most extreme conclusion.  It makes no compromises; it takes no prisoners.  It drives its point home like a railroad spike through the skull, and it achieves a sort of strange ruthless beauty as a result.  When I first read the book nearly twenty years ago, if someone would have asked me if there was one thing in this world where people could not possibly miss the point, I would have said, 1984.

But alas!  Time and experience have shown me otherwise.  I've seen quite a number of misinterpretations, misapprehensions, and misapplications of the book and it's ideas over the years.  Some read the book as a political novel, specifically a roman a clef' of Soviet Russia.  This is a strictly journalistic reading, as if the book were simply a magnification of newspaper headlines and historical events.  Although the story operates in a political milieu and the landscape has a certain Soviet touch to it, there are much more universal themes at work.  It's about the group mentality, mass hysteria, blind devotion, obedience driven by fear, the corruption of absolute power, the boot stomping on the human face forever.  It's about the individual vs. the state, reality vs. consensus, freedom vs. control.

To look at Big Brother and see only Stalin is to miss the forest for the sake of one mustachioed tree.  Big Brother is the archetypical figurehead.  In the story he serves at a galvanizing point of focus.  He consolidates the power of the party in a single individual, serving as an object of unquestioning loyalty for the people and a point of reference for the agendas of the party as a whole.  It's a mistake to look for any one person in Big Brother.  Even in the book itself, it's not entirely clear if Big Brother is a real person, and it's strongly hinted that he isn't.  It's the principle at work that matters, the people's response to Big Brother.  In fact, you could even go through and replace every instance of the name "Big Brother" with the word "God", and I think you'd be quite surprised and more than a little disturbed at the result.  In the end, Big Brother isn't nearly as important as the atrocities committed in his name.

On the other hand, the term "Big Brother" has recently developed into a sort of short-hand for surveillance of any kind.  While I can certainly appreciate the term becoming a sort of watchword reminding people of their right to privacy, such a reading of the term is a gross over-simplification.  As a result, some people fail to see the difference between the U.S. Patriot Act and a store's closed-circuit security camera.  They focus so much on the surveillance, that they forget that the issue is really about rights.  Big Brother isn't about cameras, it's about the attitude behind the cameras that says, "If they've got nothing to hide, then they shouldn't mind if we have a look."  It's about inferring suspicion, making crimes out of thoughts, and building prosecution out of pure speculation about your intentions.

And then, as with any work which has become such an iconic part of the culture, you have people who come out of the woodwork to apply their own pet theories to it.  Robert Pirsig, in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book which deserves some consideration of it's own one of these days), applies a particularly misguided interpretation.  In addition to his heap of other missteps in his quest for "Quality" with a capital Q, he declares that 1984 represents a rationally efficient society.  Well, I don't know what book he was reading, but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly rational about Oceanic society, and as for efficiency...well, as Goldstein himself says in "The Book", "Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police."  But I suppose if you imagine a world like 1984 when you think of reason, then you're going to see a reasonable world when you look at 1984.

But it wasn't supposed to end up like this.  "1984" wasn't supposed to become a pointless buzzword of paranoia that people stopped taking seriously a long-time ago, something indiscriminately applied to anyone's vague dis-satisfaction with their government, another bogeyman, another internet Hitler.  "Big Brother" wasn't supposed to be become a casual joke and the title of a reality TV show.  1984 was supposed to be the guardian, the antidote against the very world that it was warning us about.  Don't let them disarm the book.  Don't let them relieve the guard from his post.  1984 is just the sort of thing we need to keep 1984 from happening.

                   

The Philosophy Tree

When we think of philosophy, we tend to think of an esoteric subject far removed from the actual practice of living.  We think of the obscure terminology, the perpetually ponderous "isms" and the various schools of thought which bear their names.  We tend to think of the great names of philosophy, Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, and so on, those giants of wisdom who's names we invoke in intellectual arguments as though they were the patron saints of their own peculiar ideas.  If we're in a particularly imaginative or hypnagogic state, we may even picture philosophy as the domain of the wise hermit living on the mountain top who pilgrims have to brave treacherous paths and passes to reach in order to hear his sage advice.

In short, we tend to focus on the vast body of work done on the subject of philosophy, accumulated in books and texts, rather than on the object of study itself.  While the stars serve to remind us what the astronomer is looking at, and the flowers are there to remind us what the botanist is up to, philosophy studies something that isn't quite so easily brought to mind.  It seems like something more intangible and remote.  So it's easy to fall into the misconception that philosophers are off hunting ghosts in another dimension with no relevance to the real world.  "That's all well and good.", we say, "But we've got work to do and bills to pay.", and we move on with our lives.  This is a dreadful mistake.  Philosophy isn't hard to fathom because it's so remote from our lives.  Quite the contrary.  We have a hard time seeing it because it looms so large in our lives, because it is so fundamental and all encompassing.  Philosophy is nothing less than the study of existence itself.  Deeper still, it's the study of our understanding of existence and our place in that existence, and our understanding of ourselves.  It makes all the difference in the world.

Imagine that you and I and everyone else has a tree growing somewhere deep in the core of our minds.  As trees tend to do, this tree branches out from a central trunk, and those branches branch out into more branches and those into even smaller branches, and so on.  This tree and these branches form a kind of network which connects all the ideas and opinions and beliefs that you have about everything, from the seemingly inconsequential things like the etiquette for parallel parking out along one of the small twigs, to more meatier issues like where you stand on the death penalty on one of the sturdier limbs.  Your position on fundamental matters along the main branches are going to affect all the smaller branches that lead off from it.  It's all connected.  The tree as a whole represents our concept of the world and our attitude and approach to life.

Philosophy is the study of that tree.  More than that, it's a way of caring and tending, trimming and maintaining that tree.  Many people don't bother.  They let the tree grow wild, the gnarled branches twisting haphazardly around each other at random, choking the life out of some branches and leaving others neglected in the shadows unexposed to the nourishment of the sun.  They suffer the consequences of this in their actions, their choices, and in their very feelings towards life itself.  There are others who do tend to the tree, but some of them end up doing even worse damage because they don't know what they're doing, because they're not careful, and because they don't take the task seriously to begin with.  They cut into some vital organ and leave the tree half-barren, lifeless, and rotted from the inside.

If I say that I am a philosopher, I don't mean that as a matter of vocation or title.  I am a philosopher in the sense that I am an eater, a dreamer, a bather, and a sleeper.  I am a philosopher because I tend to my tree.  I've devoted a large part of my life to tending to my tree.  I've nursed it to health through the long, grey winters; I've cultivated its blossoms in the spring.  I've tried more than one ill-advised method and risked permanent damage, but hopefully I've learned something from my mistakes.  It's nearly a full-time job, taking on the task myself.  It takes time and thought and study and research.  But so far I've resisted the temptation to farm the job out to any religious group or political affiliation.  I have consulted a few experts on occasion, though.  I let Nietzsche have a go at it one summer.  The tree grew tall and strong, and even a little terrifying to behold.  Kant proposed putting a box of mirrors around the tree, blocking out the sunlight completely.  I sent him packing.  And of course Sartre still drops by now and then in the evenings.  He smiles and nods and reminds me that the tree is mine to make what I will of it; the choices and the possibilities are up to me.

And it's up to you as well.  You can tend your own tree, or you can ignore it altogether, or you can hire someone else to do it and find all of your ideas in their debt.  But make no mistake about it.  You have that tree too.  We all have that tree.  Philosophy studies something which is relevant to all our lives.  We all have some way of looking at the world.  The question is: Are you going to let that view fall into place by a random accident of jumbled ideas, or are you going to cultivate that view deliberately and help it to grow into something wonderful?  The choice is yours.                    

Sartre's Bad Faith

"Bad Faith" is Sartre's rather odd term for a rather odd concept.  The nearest equivalent that I could think of is "self-deception", although taking the term at face value as a description of misplaced faith might be appropriate as well.  Neither interpretation quite does the term justice.  The former is a bit misleading in its tone and the latter is a bit too broad in its scope.  Sartre employs the term with an implicit sense of familiarity, so I suspect the issue may be one of translation.  It seems to designate a certain type of self-deception, or an even better description might be: our perpetual quest to find substance and definition for the void at the core of our being.

Sartre provides the example of a cafe waiter.  He describes the waiter's quick steps, the eager way he leans forward when you speak, the deftness with which he balances his plates and trays.  All of it adds up to a kind of performance.  In a sense, the waiter is playing the part of a waiter.  He is carrying on as though the style and the purpose of all his actions were dictated by his being a waiter.  He is carrying on as though being a waiter were to be a thing, as a table is a table or a chair is a chair.  This sort of phenomenon isn't restricted to waiters, of course, as Sartre goes on to say, "there is the dance of the tailor, the grocer, the auctioneer."  Sartre suggests that these tradespeople lend this shallowly mechanical touch to their duties partly as a way of making their clientele more comfortable, "A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer."  But this sort of thing isn't restricted to the world of trade and commerce.  We do this in all walks of life.

In this context, Sartre describes determinism as "a perpetual game of excuses."  It is the veritable dogma of Bad Faith.  Certainly the waiter is a waiter in the sense of the contingency of his circumstances and situation and choices.  He has taken a job as waiter; he has to arise at a certain hour in the morning to fulfill his duties as a waiter; he gets the tips and pay and benefits of being a waiter.  But yet, he is not a waiter in the sense of being simply a thing in the world.  He can not rely on being a waiter as something that will dictate his behavior.  On the contrary, being a waiter is something he has to sustain with his behavior, a part he is compelled to play if he wishes to maintain his station in life.  

Likewise, an orphan is an orphan in the sense of the contingencies of their situation and circumstances, but yet they're not merely an orphan as a chair is a chair.  True, they haven't chosen to be an orphan, as the waiter has chosen to be a waiter, but regardless of whether they arrived at their situation by choice or not, one thing doesn't irresistibly dictate behavior any more than the other.  One cannot be an orphan as a thing in the world, any more than one can be a waiter as a thing.  One's being cannot be entirely exhausted in the concept of "orphan", any more than it can be exhausted in the concept of "waiter."  The orphan is always something more than an orphan, and the waiter is always something more than a waiter.  We continually transcend the concepts, the contingencies, and the "excuses" by which we might try to define ourselves.  We are always more than the sum of our parts.  There's is always something in the orphan and the waiter which can step back, consider themselves as an orphan or a waiter, and consider the possibilities which transcend those things.

Bad Faith is our attempt to deny this transcendence.  It is our attempt to find security and substance in a kind of a role which we can play in a given situation or in life in general.  It is a woman on a first date stepping into the coy flirtation of a "woman on a date."  It is a "Capricorn" or an "alcoholic" or a "middle child" or a "single mother" turning to these things as ready-made characters to play, essential parts on the stage of life with lines to read and marks to hit, rather than contingencies to grow beyond and rise above to see possibilities that are open to them.

There's a certain comfort in thinking that you can wake up in the morning and put on the uniform of a policeman or clock in as a waiter and find yourself consumed in the role.  You know your place.  You know what you need to do.  You try to assume a certain confidence that you'll do what needs to be done because you're a policeman, or because you're a waiter.  This is the comfort of Bad Faith.  It is the comfort of trying to escape the burden of maintaining the being of this policeman or this waiter, even the being of the orphan or the alcoholic, hoping instead that these things will sustain your being.  Once you strip away the waiter, the middle child, the Frenchman, the dyslexic hemophiliac, you find yourself staring into a most uncomfortable void.  You open the door and find no one there.  The problem is that that no one is you.  So we turn to Bad Faith rather than face this.

It's not easy being nobody, but there's freedom in being nobody, there's possibility.  Years and years before I ever heard of Sartre, I had long expressed my misgivings towards the growing trend of diagnosing teens and kids with all kinds of disorders like ADD and depression and so forth.  My feeling was that at such a young age, when these kids are still groping for an identity, they would take these diagnoses the wrong way.  They would treat them as something that they could hold onto, something that would define them, rather than something to be overcome.  Unfortunately, that trend has kept growing.  We may all fall back on that "perpetual game of excuses" from time to time, but we shouldn't be in such a hurry to indoctrinate our children in the church of Bad Faith.                             

A Fresh Look at the Expansion Theory

When I first heard of the Expansion Theory years ago, I don't think I ever really considered taking it seriously.  It struck me as the sort of cornball idea that's only good for shaking up your preconceptions and possibly motivating you to consider different perspectives, the typical sort of thing that inevitably comes up in conversations about "thinking outside the box", something akin to my "microcosm" idea mentioned a few months back.  But yet, the theory has stuck with me, nagging at my mind from time to time, and tucked away on some back shelf where I didn't really bother talking about it.  Today, however, it somehow came up in a conversation I was having with my daughter, and this leisurely day of leftovers and laying around watching TV provided me with an occasion to dust it off, bring it down from the shelf, and reconsider it.  After some brief hunting around on the internet, I found some people who actually take the idea seriously, as well as some interesting arguments for and against.  Some of the advocates of the theory seem a bit...crackpot-ish, even a little too...Flat Earth, but some of them seemed to make a fairly sober and compelling case.  I won't say that I'm completely sold on the idea.  Far from it.  But I'm no longer so quick to dismiss it either.

For those of you who've never heard of it, the Expansion Theory is basically the idea that all the matter in the universe is in a constant state of expansion, and this expansion is fairly uniform.  Since (under this theory) we're expanding along with everything else, this expansion is nearly imperceptible.  If fact, it only manifests itself in one obvious way: gravity.  Confused yet?  Don't worry, my daughter didn't know what the heck I was talking about either.  Let me see if I can't find a way to make it clearer.

If I hold a ball in my hand, and I let it go, it appears to fall to the ground as though pulled there by a force of attraction.  What the Expansion Theory is saying is that the ball doesn't fall at all; it doesn't actually even move.  The Expansion Theory says that the Earth and the ball come to meet each other as they expand, filling the space between them.  Because I'm growing, and the room is growing, and...well, everything is growing, then I don't see that the ball gets any bigger.  I just see the ball and the Earth rapidly colliding.  You see, as long as I'm holding the ball in my hand, and I'm standing solidly on the ground, then the ball and I are both being pushed outward through space by the expanding surface of the Earth.  But the second I let go of the ball, it stays at that same point in space until the surface of the Earth expands to meet it.  To our eyes, it appears to fall.  (See figure below.)

I know, it sounds crazy, right?  The idea that you, your computer, and the room you're sitting in have all doubled in size while you've been reading this seems absolutely ludicrous.  But is it really any more ludicrous that attributing gravity to a curvature of space that you can't see?  Anyway, like I said, I'm far from completely sold on the idea.  It has a few obvious problems, and a few not-so-obvious problems.  For one thing, you have the fact that gravity gets weaker with distance.  At first glance this seems to definitely contradict the theory, but I've come across some intriguing proposals for tackling that problem.  Again, I haven't gone off the deep-end completely.  It's just something interesting to pursue on a lazy day while I lounge around the house digesting my turkey, a little worthwhile time spend outside the box.  I'll keep you posted.             

The Aliens Who Already Walk Among Us

What I am about to tell you is shocking.  If you have small children then you might want them to leave the room.  Of course, then you'd have to come back here to read the rest of the post, and that would leave the little tike unattended.  There's a good chance that they could hurt themselves or start crying because you left them alone.  That would be a big distraction.  To be on the safe side you should probably wrap them up in duct-tape and shut them up in a closet until you're done reading this.  I wouldn't want them to be traumatized.

If you've seen the show Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, then you probably know by now that aliens built the Egyptian pyramids.  If you haven't seen Ancient Aliens, it's basically a show made by people who think Occam's Razor is something you use to cut up lines of coke as you spin more outrageous alien theories for you next episode.  They use aliens as a ready explanation for all the mysteries of archeology, as though they had an unlimited tube of the stuff.  Primitive stones cut with amazing precision?  Must have been aliens.  Hieroglyphic carvings found in darkened chambers?  They must have had alien light bulbs.  Impressive feats of engineering?  Here, let me squeeze a little alien on that.  There you go.  It may at first glance seem like the stupidest show ever put on TV, but Giorgio Tsoukalos (pictured on the right) passes the History Channel's "fringe theory/crazyman beard" test, so there must be some credibility to what he says.  Yep, that's pretty sane looking facial hair he's got there.  Nothing weird looking about that guy.

Okay, so I think we've pretty much established that aliens built the pyramids to everyone's satisfaction.  I mean, we've established it to everyone's satisfaction, not that the aliens built the pyramids to everyone's satisfaction, although we do seem pretty happy with them.  Thank you, aliens.  Anyway, while the aliens were hanging around, overseeing the construction of these pyramids that were having built so that they could...ummm...well, uhhhhh...so that they could...ohhhh...  Anyway, they probably had camps set up on the site, and maybe they even had their families with them.  And maybe, just maybe, they even brought some of their household pets with them.

Now, we also know that the legendary Egyptian gods were actually aliens.  I think I heard that on Ancient Aliens too, or maybe it was that Stargate movie.  Anyway, that's not important.  The point is that if the Egyptians considered the aliens to be gods, then it figures that they would consider the aliens' pets to be gods as well, or at least highly superior beings, objects of reverence in their own right.  So what would happen if some of these alien pets got loose and ran away, as pets are known to do?  And what if some of these pets were left behind after the aliens had departed?  And what if the Egyptians found some of these strays, and because of their reverence for them, decided to keep them as pets themselves instead of cooking them over a barbeque?

So this is what an alien looks like, right?

Okay, you ready for it?

Ready!?

BOOM!  I rest my case.

              

The World (Reposted)

I originally wrote this piece for a project which Vincent and I were working on during this past summer.  I'm not sure how much sense it will make when taken out of the context of that project and all the strange metaphysical disputes Vincent and I were having, but I figured it might serve as something appropriate for Rachel Hoyt's latest sociology study which is on the theme of "doors & windows."  Anyway, it is what it is.  It's about the World.  I'm not sure how else to put it, so I'll just let it speak for itself.

It's Early Morning.  The light is just beginning to show in the sky outside my window.  A bird perched somewhere in the tree below greets the day with its delicate call.  Man has several names for this bird and this tree in various languages, and science has names for them in Latin which identify their genus and species.  I don't know these names, but then neither do the bird or the tree.  These names were not affixed to them by nature, but rather by man.  However, these names do identify genuine natural realities about them.  The words "bird" and "tree" signify them as something distinct from one another, and their particular names signify their distinctions from others of their type.  If it is a sparrow in the tree, we call it so in English because it possesses those attributes in common with birds of the type "sparrow", and in contrast to the attributes of another bird which we would call a "blue jay."  It has possessed these defining attributes for millennia before mankind affixed these attributes with the name "sparrow", for millennia before there even was such a thing as man, and it was certainly long, long before man began to be confused by himself and to doubt himself and to doubt the world and to ask, "Where is this 'sparrowness'?  Is it real?  Is it in the bird somewhere?  Could I find it if I cut the bird open?"  But the sparrow has gone on, simply being what it is, contently singing its unique song sung only by sparrows, oblivious to the sweet, simple, and breathtakingly obvious answer its providing to our question.

At this hour there is very little traffic passing by on the road below.  The road and the vehicles that travel on it are creations of man.  They were ideas conceived in the mind of man, and turned into physical realities by shaping and manipulating matter, giving it the form and function designed by the human mind.  These things stand as a testimony, as evidence of the co-operation between reality and the mind.  The matter involved behaves according to physical laws, and the people who designed these things were able to do so because they discovered these laws, they believed these laws, and they shaped the material involved in such a way that they would be able to use these laws to their advantage.  The car travels on the road because of the laws of motion, of thermodynamics, of combustion, and many more besides.  If these laws were simply the invention of man, or if they existed solely as a fantasy in the mind of man, or if they had no relation to physical reality outside the mind of man, then the matter involved in the car and road would behave completely indifferently to these laws.  They would slump like stubborn horses refusing to stir as man struggles at the reins of his desires.  They would sit rotting in a field as useless heaps of junk.  For they themselves are objects which lie outside the mind of man and beyond its direct control.  The fact that the car works stands as proof of the accuracy of man's concepts of these laws.  Like the bird and the tree, man has named these laws, man has studied these laws and formulated theories about them, man has designated them by the general word "laws" because of his confidence in his own ideas about them, but the functions and relationships between physical matter that they designate are genuine realities.  And again like the bird, these functions and relationships existed long before man discovered them, long before man existed.  "Nature", Francis Bacon said, "to be commanded, must be obeyed."  The car drives by as elegant proof of this.

As the car passes, its sound increases in pitch as it approaches me, and then abruptly switches to a low pitch as it goes by and speeds off in the other direction.  This is called "The Doppler Effect", and it is a peculiarity of my perception.  The sound of the vehicle never actually changes, but yet this effect is not entirely an illusion either.  It is a relationship between my ear, the speed of the vehicle relative to me, my position relative to the vehicle, and the compression and decompression of the sound waves as they travel the distance between the car and me.  There are a number of such peculiarities.  These are not delusions or unrealities, but rather consequences of my perspective on the world.  The way the information of the world reaches my senses and my mind is itself part of the world, and it too behaves natural law.  Like the Doppler Effect, these things can be discovered, scrutinized, and studied as part of the reality with which we all have to deal.

Sometimes these peculiarities have led man astray, and such an example is appearing now just over the trees.  In casual speech we still say the sun is rising, but by now it is common knowledge that the Earth is turning to meet the sun.  It is true that I have no first hand verification of this fact, and that I'm forced to take other people's word for it.  It is possible that mankind is in error about this "common knowledge", or that a vast number of people have lied to me about it all my life.  But when I consider the evidence that the human race as a whole claims to possess on the matter, my mind is set at ease on the issue of error.  When I consider the number of people that would have to be involved in a "lie", various world governments, various space programs, phone companies, GPS manufactures, astronomers...well, the list goes on....I'm persuaded to accept this "word" as honest in the face of the alternative.  I'm confronted frequently by such situations, most of them not as clear cut and easy to decide on.  I weigh the available information, consider the agendas of the source, consider its fidelity to other information, and consider how much internal sense it makes unto itself.  It may not be the most solid foundation to decide what one believes in, but given the limits of my own first-hand experience, it's the best that I can do if I hope to learn anything beyond the limits of my own life and the things that I personally witness.  I am not omniscient, nor do I claim to be, nor do I believe anyone else can claim to be.  It is always possible that I am mistaken, or that I have been misled.  But I believe that the truth is constant, irregardless of my wanderings.  I have seen Saturn through the lens of my own telescope, and I have seen that Venus has phases like our moon.  This is valuable corroboration of what I've been told, as well as an awe-inspiring experience.  There's nothing quite like seeing it for yourself.

Although I must occasionally rely on my fellow man for factual information, it is not through man that this information is fact.  Whatever the actual relationship between the sun and Earth, or the actual nature of anything else for that matter, the facts of these things exist without regard to whether they are known or believed by ten or ten million people.  I may rely on my fellow man in my belief that the world is round, but if the world is round, it is not out of respect to the opinions of men.  For thousands of years, man believed that the Earth was flat, and the world stayed round in absolute indifference to that belief.  When Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth by comparing a shadow made by the sun at Alexandria with a shadow made by the sun in Egypt, the truth of the round Earth was waiting there to be discovered, outside of the ignorance of man.  When Copernicus discovered that the Earth went round the sun, the rest of mankind was still in the dark, scratching their heads over retrograde motion.  If facts existed entirely through men, then the entire history of science would just be men making things up and then selling the rest of mankind on the idea in order to make it fact.  It was the evidence presented by Copernicus and Eratosthenes that changed the minds of man, not the minds of man which changed the evidence.  The power of consensus is in its persuasiveness, not in its control over reality.  How can I know this for sure?  Another car drives by, reminding me of the physical laws by which it operates, reminding me of man's cooperation with those laws as facts beyond themselves, reminding that the inventions of man have often worked in defiance of consensus and the general faith of the population.

If I decide to trust in my fellow man, not as the determiners of my reality, but rather as fellow travelers seeking to discover its true objective nature, then I am able to gaze with them beyond our solar system, beyond our galaxy, and out to a distance of 14 billion light years in any direction.  This is not believed to be the limits of our universe, but it is the limit of what we can see.  We believe that this is so, because we believe that the universe came into being 14 billion years ago, and light from anywhere beyond that hasn't had time to reach us.  This last idea is bit controversial back here on Earth, it challenges what many other people believe, and leads to a lot of arguments along the frontiers of what we know, and what we are capable of knowing.  But like my sparrow, the universe goes on, placidly indifferent to the conflicts and confusion of man.  It is what is.  Whole stars are born and die out without man ever setting eyes on them, possibly without anyone ever setting eyes on them.  They burn just fine without the fuel of being seen.

So, this is the world as I find it.  My confidence in it begins with me, with my first-hand experience and with the rational conclusions that I have drawn from that experience.  I extend that confidence to the experiences, the explorations, the discoveries, and the ideas of my fellow man, depending on what degree I'm willing to trust them and how much I concur with their conclusions.  But I believe that the world out there beyond me and the facts of that world exist without regard for my confidence, or my confidence in my fellow man, or their own confidence in what they think they know.  I believe that the world out there is what it is regardless of what I think I know about it, or what anyone else thinks they know about it.  First-hand experience has convinced me of that much at least.  The world has demonstrated its constancy to me time and again.  I go to sleep, and reawaken and the world shows every evidence of having gone on steadily without my knowledge.  The world has cut me and bruised me many times to prove its solid existence.  It has often frustrated my efforts and at other times it has rewarded them in turn to demonstrate its indifference to my whims and wishes, and its obedience to my cooperation with its facts.

My understanding of the world begins here with me, in this room.  I can doubt the things I've been told about it.  I can doubt my own conclusions that I've drawn about it.  But I can not doubt the world itself.  I can not doubt the foundation of it, which begins for me with my immediate experience.  It could be said that I have no grounds for believing in this world, but yet I have no grounds for doubting it either.  The world itself transcends belief and doubt, because the grounds for those things have to be found in the world.

Suppose I do try to doubt the world.  I reject the world wholesale as it begins for me here in this room.  I try to flee from it through a door marked "doubt."  I find that this door opens onto this same room, and it returns me right back to the world, searching for the grounds with which to justify this doubt.  I dismiss this world as a dream, and again I try the door hoping it will return me to waking reality.  I find myself right back in this room facing the world which provides me with no evidence that I am asleep or that there is any "waking" world beyond this one.  I defiantly declare that the world is an illusion unto itself, and I flee again through the door, only to find myself dumped again on the solid floor of this room, the world showing me no distinction between physical matter and the illusion of physical matter.

As a thinking being, it is my privilege to keep insisting on trying that door for the rest of my life if I like, to perpetuate my attempt at doubt indefinitely, but I can not escape the fact that that door will always return me right back to this room.  It is not that I have grounds for believing in the world.  It is not that I have a reason to believe in the world.  It is simply that the world is inescapable.  My only choice is between the futility of trying that door over and over, or embracing the world as I find it, as it begins here with my immediate experience in this room.  Only by embracing the world can I leave this room, to explore it, to learn about it, to understand it, and to experience it.