Writing – Page 64 – a sibilant intake of breath

Chapter 246: In which Milan demonstrates philosophical ineptitude

In the middle of the afternoon, I made a concerted effort to read the Heidegger paper that Tristan sent me a few weeks ago: The Question Concerning Technology. It was meant to be a contribution to my ‘discretionary reading on environmental politics related matter’ effort. I know it will annoy him to say that I found it mostly incomprehensible – in both approach and diction – but that is assuredly the fact of the matter. Heidegger goes on and on about Greek and the nature of silver chalices. While I am sure the example would be brilliantly illustrative if I had any idea of what he was talking about, it serves no purpose for me. It’s akin, I think, to someone who knows nothing about computers sitting down with a dense text on scripting and the UNIX command prompt.

Just as arcane knowledge of computers alienates you from everyone who does not have it – by stripping you of the ability to communicate as richly as you could if you were alike in ignorance – such knowledge leads to tremendous frustration whenever you deal with someone who has it in the opposite quantity. The computer geek is as frustrating and incomprehensible to the neophyte as the neophyte is to the geek. The knowledge that is a source of pride for the geek is often marked off as unnecessary to the neophyte, for whom it only serves an instrumental purpose: a purpose that can be achieved indirectly, by enlisting the aid of the geek. What enlisting the aid of philosophers means, exactly, I don’t know, but I consider much of philosophy to be marked off in the space of “information for others to deal with.”

This is not necessarily an embracing of ignorance, but perhaps more properly a response to the impossible vastness of knowledge and the sheer variety of dialects in which that knowledge is stored and discussed. It’s paradoxical, but ultimately obvious, that increased understanding of something can actually strip you of the ability to explain it or deal with people who don’t understand it. Attending lectures of someone who has colossal knowledge of a truly obscure field is among the best possible demonstrations of how knowledge is a cage.

Of course, when were talking about the physical sciences, there can be an external referent for expertise. I may not be able to understand what an engineer means when they talk about stress factors or the properties of metals, but I can see whether the bridge stays up or crashes down. Likewise, physicists and chemists can make predictions and develop technologies that demonstrate that their knowledge is – in some sense – correct. What comparable contribution can philosophers or, for that matter, international relations scholars make?

So much of what we do is like the nuances of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony: only those with considerable specific knowledge could ever know whether what was being performed was correct or merely a close approximation. No observer not steeped in the tradition could tell and, in a broad sense, the tradition itself is completely arbitrary. If we had all argued our way to some other equilibrium, it would serve exactly the same role as this one.

Much appreciated correspondence

This morning, thinking it may have arrived, I went to the Lodge early and found the letter that Alison said earlier that she was sending. It is always brilliant to receive letters from friends elsewhere: whether physical or electronic and rendered with the kind of care that defines a letter. Alison’s demonstrates an awareness of aesthetics and design that I could never emulate. I am listening to the enclosed CD now: it is demonstrative of her expertise about current music, as well as her excellent taste. As she indicates in her letter, the track “Come on! Feel the Illinoise!” by Suffian Stephens is particularly good. Like Neal, she has taken a turn into country music appreciation.

I’ve already begun composing a reply that is similarly distinctive, but it will take me a while. I conversed with a number of other friends today, both my email and the five instant messengers I have configured Adium to aggregate. In particular, it was good to correspond with Astrid and converse with Meghan.

I should do another batch of reading before tomorrow’s core seminar and then go to sleep early. I don’t feel particularly well.

PS. While I shall not get into the specifics, this weekend showed that some hopes I had been entertaining were misplaced. While it’s not a pleasant thing to learn, it’s probably better than persisting in misunderstanding.

10^4 visits (10011100010000 in binary, 2710 in hex)

Since the 4th of November 2005, a sibilant intake of breath has received 10,000 visits. That’s almost exactly 100 a day, though the average is more like 110 during term time and 80 during breaks. It represents an average of 42 visitors per post. The busiest day by far was the day of the election, during which I got about 750 visitors.

57% were from North America, 36% from Europe, 3% from South America, 2% from Australia, and 2% from Asia. 42% were from Canada, 33% from the United Kingdom, and 15% from the United States. Visits from the west coast of North America are twice as frequent as those from the east coast.

In any case, my thanks go out to everyone who has taken the time to read this. The ten thousandth reader was from Vancouver, and found the page through Sasha Wiley’s blog. Whoever they may be, you can tell they’re a savvy user, since they use the superior Firefox browser.

On knowledge and Google

Looking through my server logs to see how people found the blog is often a gratifying experience. It’s a reminder that there is hardly anything you can write about that people don’t care enough about to search for information on. From “sainsbury’s “isle of bute” scottish cheddar” to the name of virtually every restaurant I’ve ever mentioned, people have found the blog. From song lyrics, place names, event names, current event descriptions. Some of the search strings have been rather odd:

how to make a complaint at sainsburys when the security guard treat you like a criminal
“brute force” at2 os x
“I require access to all human knowledge”
buy and sale computation, using nominal rate in phils. setting
happy moon pps
capital T does not work OSX
newfoundlands noral weather in summer and winter

That said, the vast majority of searches are comprehensible and really do relate to something I’ve written about – whether well or badly, usefully or not.

Through this, and projects like Google Print, I suppose that eventually a really huge portion of the stock of written human knowledge will be available in readily searchable form. Whether searching can still be intelligible in the face of such volume isn’t something we can really know yet, though enterprises like Google lend one optimism.

The webcam on this site provides a stunning view of Vancouver. It is located above the Burrard Street Bridge, looking across Kits and Point Grey at the University of British Columbia. The sunset shots are especially nice.

Cartoons and cultural clashes

A quick comment regarding the continuing row about the Danish cartoon depictions of Mohammed. No collective response to an incident becomes this big or carries on this long without some kind of coordination and organization. While the whole situation is clearly based on a great deal of legitimate anger, it is nonetheless sentiment that is being excited and manipulated. That’s not to imply that some kind of global conspiracy is at work, but simply to say that I don’t accept that these protests are spontaneous or free of manipulation. Given their destructive nature, I think it will be instructive to eventually determine what forces have been trying to exploit this issue, through what means, and to what level of success.

As I was discussing with Tristan earlier today, the symbolic character of conflict is an essential dimension for understanding it. It’s one that requires examination both of individual psychology and the ways in which groups of people think. One excellent book I can recall from Brian Job’s security studies class at UBC is Kaufman’s Modern hatreds: the symbolic politics of ethnic war. Those wanting a far better explanation of some of these issues than I can provide should have a look.

Mohammed comics follow-up

By now, it has become obvious that the response of many people in the Muslim world, and elsewhere, to the Danish comics has exceeded all reasonable bounds. To take umbrage against a perceived slight is perfectly acceptable in a free society. To start burning down embassies and calling for the murder of the nationals of the countries where the comics have been printed is insane. It’s not something that can be defended according to any reasonable system of ethics – by which I do mean to say that a religious ethic that required such a thing would be indefensible – and it’s not something that can be construed as acceptable conduct.

To actually believe that there is a God who would require or encourage such conduct is to effectively close out the possibility of their being a God who is both omnipotent and benevolent to humanity in general. It has always been absurd to say that you could have a God benevolent to all mankind yet still insistent on the practice of a particular faith. A benevolent being would not condemn to damnation worshippers in cultures where a different faith is the norm. Given that the faith of your parents is by far the best predictor of the faith you will adopt, it simply doesn’t hold water to say that anyone could be expected to convert to the ‘one true faith.’ It contradicts good sense and basic ideas of fairness.

A being that required people to adopt a certain faith in order to be treated decently would either be non-benevolent, and therefore not worthy of veneration as such, or simply incomprehensible and equally unworthy of respect or admiration. A being with ethics that cannot be understood or shared by human beings is no more worthy of veneration than a bolt of lightning, which is similarly powerful and lacking in comprehensible ethical purpose. A vengeful God is potentially consistent with the character of the world: a charitable one, much less so – and perhaps not at all.

My earlier post on this topic
Some thoughts from other Oxford bloggers

Library Court Kitchen Cleanup

8 February 2006, 5:00pm

I’ve finally become sick enough of the stench from the fridge, and the shelves full of food that was purchased when Khrushchev was still in power, that I am organizing a purge and cleanup of the Library Court kitchen. Hopefully, I will not be the only one who shows up and people will pay heed to my signs requesting that they remove any food they don’t want discarded for those few hours. I shall have to buy some bleach. A haiku, for the occasion:

Bad prokaryotes
Multiply in the kitchen
Kill them all, with bleach

The plan is to empty the fridge, discard all the random, smelly, moldy food that has been in there all year, and then wipe it down with bleach and hot water. Also, I plan to clear the shelves of the dust and dead insects that have been accumulating there, as well as taking a chisel (as Nora suggested) to the more tenacious bits of dirt on the stove and counters.

Anyone from Library Court or Staircase 19 who wants a more sanitary kitchen is very much encouraged to come help. If someone has access to bleach, that would save me the small annoyance of having to go buy some.

Idolatry and modernity

I’ve been thinking about the Danish cartoon row during the course of reading today, and I find it a difficult problem to deal with. My automatic response is to side with the Danes and others who are protecting the ideal of freedom of speech. It seems outside all proportion to be threatening violence in response to political cartoons.

That said, I really can’t imagine a mindset from which the simple depiction of a figure in such a way could create such outrage. The satirical modification of various symbols and icons is part of the stock and trade of western media and art. While such depictions can sometimes exceed the bounds of good taste, it’s hard to imagine them creating genuine anger – at least among the relatively level headed. Because I can’t imagine such agitation being a legitimate response, it seems like a contrived or artificial over-inflation to me: a sub-conscious conclusion based upon my own assumptions rather than an understanding of the situation, from the perspective of many of those involved.

The biggest question raised is about the appropriate boundaries on religious tolerance. At what point can we legitimately call a belief that someone holds unacceptable, at least insofar as it isn’t allowable to act upon it. A religious duty to make human sacrifices, for instance, few people would object to curtailing. On a matter like this, where there is a genuine schism of values between different groups, it’s much more difficult to make that kind of a call.

To me, it seems as though mature ideologies – whether political, ethical, religious, or otherwise – need to be able to stand up to legitimate criticism. That’s perhaps the defining characteristic of their maturity. While it may be incredible patronizing to say that Islam needs to develop an internal dialogue about the direction it is to take in the future, it still seems to me that such is the case. I hasten to add that a similar dialogue is necessary on the part of other ideologies that serve as a source of normative directions about how to behave in the world. Just like we need to rethink nationalism (if not abolish it entirely), there must be self reflection and fairness within ideologies that expect respect from those outside of them.

All in all, it’s an area I feel particularly hesitant about. I would be especially interested to hear what people think.

Seventeen days until the equinox

During our qualitative methods class today, on institutions, Dr. Ngaire Woods made an excellent point. Each of us has a year to become an expert on a particular subject. There are hardly any people in the entire world who ever have the chance to devote such time and attention to an issue and there is a good chance that, at the end, we will know more about our subject than anyone in the world. This underscores both the importance of choosing a topic well and of really committing yourself to writing something excellent. Producing something that will be read by people beyond the examination committee and people kind enough to edit it for me would also be a big advantage.

The institutions section of the qualitative methods course is much better than the scattershot attempt at foreign policy analysis that came before it. That is welcome, especially since I have a take-home exam to write on the course between the 9th and 13th of this month – most inconvenient timing. Hopefully, I will be able to get the thing mostly done next Friday, leaving the weekend relatively unencumbered.

After class, this afternoon, I had coffee with Claire, Josiah, and another of her St. Cross friends who I am embarassed to be unable to remember the name of. Followed that closely was tea with Joelle Faulkner. We tried the Tieguanyin tea that Neal sent. It’s more subtle than I expected, though not nearly so much so as the Jamine Pearl tea that Kate once gave me. I am going to try making it with bottled water, in the knowledge that the amount of dissolved minerals in Oxford tap water is quite substantial.

Hopefully, tomorrow I will be able to finish most of Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffer’s Democracy, Liberalism, and War, William Connolly’s The Terms of Political Discourse, and what remains of this week’s readings on institutions. I have a paper due for Dr. Hurrell on Wednesday, evaluating the democratic peace theory. I will also have a new issue of The Economist upon which to complete a preliminary read.

I’ve now finished the first book of The Wind up Bird Chronicle and perhaps the first tenth of Democracy in America. I don’t know if it’s an overly self-serving thing to believe, but I don’t think that any kind of reading is irrelevant or a distraction. While there are certainly things that it is more urgent for me to read, to neglect other areas of interest would ultimately be counterproductive and unwise. Neither American democracy nor Japanese literature are even distantly divorced from the question of democratic peace, and good writing is never irrelevant.

25 things I am:Canoeist, geek, webmaster, environmentalist, caucasian,
student, heterosexual, reader, writer, photographer,
Czech, Ukranian, atheist, Oxfordian, skeptic,
liberal, vegetarian, single, Canadian, hiker,
bilingual, healthy, rich, educated, male.

Day spent examining strings of 26 different shapes, along with gaps and dots

I am feeling increasingly as though journalism will be the thing to do once I finish my M.Phil. I want to travel and one of the things that I am fairly good at is writing: especially the kind of writing that must be done quickly and consistently. I am fairly sure that I would be able to get a job in the field, even though I know nothing of its inner workings, and it may serve many of the purposes that I have for myself in the coming years. There is only so much, after all, that can be learned from books. Academia is, in general, somewhat terrified of talking to people – a fear that I have grown to share, outside the narrow confines of fellow students and other members of a close cabal. Even where we deal with outsiders, it’s behind the bulletproof glass of case studies and surveys, interviews with pre-selected questions vetted by ethics committees. My perception of the greater authenticity of journalism is a draw, even if journalistic thought and action is not immune from other forms of criticism.

This is not a thing that I see myself as doing indefinitely. It’s something I would want to do in a roving fashion: out seeing things rather than sitting behind a desk in Manhattan. I don’t think it would be sustainable over the long term, but I do think it would be a really effective counterpoint to what I have done so far. Perhaps it would also be a good lead-up into whatever is to come after.

Talking with Tristan and Meaghan Beattie tonight was really good. One of the oddest things about living in Oxford is my near-total lack of people with whom I have substantive, personal conversations. The closest it comes is discussion of the M.Phil program. It’s something that will come with time, I hope….

I learned today that, since the tour she is going on may already be entirely booked, I may not be going to Greece or Malta after all. That said, the possibility remains and I will have to wait and see. I very much hope it will come together.

…

Scheduling conflicts continue to plague the mooted bloggers’ gathering.