Character is revealed by the details
Really good reason NOT to vote for the president.




- posted by Chris @ 1:23 PM

 
Underwhelmed ...
... and overwhelmed. The quality of our general citizenship is poor, but is it any poorer than it's ever been? Do you think there were people in 1789 who thought "why bother to vote ... George W's got it locked up?" Or was voting important ... vital to a person's self-interest, not just to the national (federal) interest? Was there ever a "golden age" of citizenship? I'd love to think so, so I could wax nostalgic for some era of greater involvement, real understanding, and better choices.

I started a book called "Culture Wars," but got so depressed by the first chapter that I had to skip to the conclusion and be done with it. As recently as the 1920s and 30s, there were people who thought that skin color affected intelligence, that "white" people [we're actually mostly pink, with orange highlights and blue veins] had some special claim to God's grace and good will, that factual information about history, religion and sexuality could not be permitted to enter the ears of vulnerable young people. How can humans be so stupid and still be able to reproduce? Our big brains are capable of all kinds of evolution, but in every generation we seem determined to put limits on our potential.

I'm reading much scary stuff about the influence of corporations and religious fundamentalism on the presidency of George W Bush ... and yet half, at least, of the voting population in this country is not bothered ... and can't be bothered. Yet on the other hand, John Kerry seems determined to undermine any vote in his favor by playing to whatever the issue of the day is.

And I will never be able to run for office because too many people have heard me say, "I'm a pagan" ... which I am, but most people seem to think that means I worship the devil. Which means their history education sucks. Which most people's does, either because they slept through inadequate instruction time, or they weren't smart enough to be interested in a subject that affects them daily.

Whew ... rant over, I think.
- posted by Chris @ 1:03 PM

 
The Glass Is ...
Half empty? Half full? Hard to know, but Gregg Easterbrook's book The Progress Paradox says that we should be more grateful all around (if we live in America or Europe), because life is zillions of times better now that it was for even our grandparents. We're not happier, though, because we've got too much time to think about what we don't have. Hmm.

Does evolution reward negative thinking? Meaning, is it in our evolutionary best interests to be skeptical of success, and anticipatory of failure, so that we don't become complacent and jeopardize our ability to move genes into the next generation? Hmm again.

How long does it take hard-wiring to reset? If ever?
- posted by Chris @ 9:53 AM

 
Multiple perspectives
The Right Nation helped me look at my world from a slightly different perspective for the couple of weeks it took me to get through it (don't take that as a scary thing; I just couldn't read it for hours on end like I can a novel).

In the end, however, I ended up where I began -- it's just Not Okay for this country to be under the spell of either fervent religiosity or rampant individualism that corrupts the ideals of our Founding Fathers. They worked really really hard to put together a government that could handle diversity ... and there was diversity here, even in the beginning. Why then, are so many of us so ignorant of the work they did? We can't have everything we want, and we all have to commit to building a community that works, not just one that rewards us in turn with favors and goodies.

Sometimes it's just too hard not to run away from all the spewing of political season. But like a good citizen, I'm paying attention and trying to make a good choice. I wish I had better options, don't you?
- posted by Chris @ 4:14 PM

 
Are we losing sight of what we're supposed to be learning?
I was slogging along through this interesting, but dense, post on the nature of a university education, and I came to this:

By putting a world of facts at the end of a key-stroke, computers have made facts, their command, their manipulation, their ordering, central to what now can qualify as humanistic education. The result is to suspend reflection about the differences among wisdom, knowledge, and information. Everything that can be accessed online can seem equal to everything else, no datum more important or more profound than any other. Thus the possibility presents itself that there really is no more wisdom; there is no more knowledge; there is only information. No thought is a challenge or an affront to what one currently believes.

Am I wrong to think that the kind of education on offer in the humanities now is in some measure an education for empire? The people who administer an empire need certain very precise capacities. They need to be adept technocrats. They need the kind of training that will allow them to take up an abstract and unfelt relation to the world and its peoples—a cool relation, as it were. Otherwise, they won’t be able to squeeze forth the world’s wealth without suffering debilitating pains of conscience. And the denizen of the empire needs to be able to consume the kinds of pleasures that will augment his feeling of rightful rulership. Those pleasures must be self-inflating and not challenging; they need to confirm the current empowered state of the self and not challenge it. The easy pleasures of this nascent American empire, akin to the pleasures to be had in first-century Rome, reaffirm the right to mastery—and, correspondingly, the existence of a world teeming with potential vassals and exploitable wealth.

Whoa, nelly! This looks remarkably like the world I am not having fun being in right now!

Read the whole thing.

- posted by Chris @ 5:25 PM

 
I've said it before ...
I'll say it again: What kind of god/transcendent power/undefinable "Is" would care how you decide to worship it?

Religion-influenced conflict is just another way for humans to express their most basic stupidity: that tribe is more important than species.
- posted by Chris @ 10:07 AM