Rational Philosophy

On the recession, real or imagined, chronic problems that beset the nation, and the celebration of taste and art in a great cup of coffee.

With all that’s been written about the current economic crisis, be it mountain or molehill, it’s been surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) difficult to get to the bottom of the situation. I can’t escape the impression that the economy moves according to forces too complex for anyone to fully or reliably understand. The wisdom of hindsight abounds, but those still willing to predict what comes next sound more like doom-mongers or soothsayers than thoughtful, commanding economic theorists and commentators.

The Times has a piece that hints at some concrete economic indicators: According to David Rosenberg, a Merrill Lynch economist, the stock market is overvalued by 10 percent relative to corporate earnings and interest rates. And, judging by historic norms (by comparison to salaries and rents,) house prices are overvalued by 30 percent across much of Florida, California and the Southwest and about 20 percent in the Northeast. More about the rationality of these indicators later.

Bob Herbert points to a more urgent matter than the economy, if we judge urgency by the degree of current and long term impact. Bob’s gloomy picture of the shameful state of schools in South Carolina stands as a sad example of the disparity between the haves and the have nots, and, because the poor conditions in South Carolina seem to relate to entrenched and systematic racism, the vast distance between the kind of country we want to believe we live in, and the kind of country we do live in. Talking about a school he happened upon, former South Carolina commerce secretary, Charles Way, says he couldn’t really believe his eyes. “It was the most deplorable building condition that I’ve ever seen in my life. How the hell somebody could teach in an environment like that is really just beyond me.” (Ben Tillman to the right, infamous racist, prominently honored at the SC statehouse.)

A school text book had a volume with the title: “One day man will land on the moon.”

Another dispiriting story reveals that the United States ranks at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among 149 countries for its environmental performance. The United States contributes a quarter of the new releases of greenhouse gas emissions globally.

And how do I reconcile the current economic woes, the chronic, unaddressed problems facing the nation’s poor and its minorities, and the environmental disaster underway with my glee at reading about a $20,000 coffee maker?

I love coffee. I buy premium roasted beans from small companies. I grind them right before I brew. And I take great care to try to get the brew just right. So, the story about the lengths to which coffee houses will go to brew a great cup of coffee drew me in. It made me want to go downtown to Cafe Grumpy’s so that I can try a cup of coffee from an $11,000 coffee maker…

Back to the economic indicators of stock value relative to corporate earnings and interest rates, and house values relative to salaries and rents. Even if we take the calculation on trust, can we agree that these constitue reliable, rational economic indicators? I think not. As the world changes so economic norms change.

Judging stock valuation by earnings and interest rates perhaps works reasonably well over a short time period, but can it be applied consistently, without modification, over a long time period? Here’s one example of why I’m dubious. Technological innovation and the surge in importance of the Internet gives more reason to expect future innovation and technological growth now than ten or fifteen years ago. Isn’t it then appropriate to value companies, in general, somewhat higher than we would have valued them ten to fifteen years ago, because we expect future earnings to be higher?

And the model for judging house values by comparison to salaries and rents must surely change over time, too. As more people squeeze into urban and suburban areas, the relative value of land and space may increase more rapidly than salaries (that are affected by things other than land and space). Also, raw materials for building houses have changed in relative cost, building regulations have changed the way houses are built and what they cost to build, and the skill-sets of the laborers have changed… How can the model work without modification from one period of time to the next?

I’m still ruminating on how I can be so thrilled about a great cup of coffee when the state of South Carolina, for one, discriminates against minorities by so woefully neglecting their education. From a philosophical perspective I understand that I’m not the master of my desires, and that when living in society we need to grapple with our own desires and needs as well of those of others. Ideally I know I should balance my own interests with those of people around me. Which doesn’t necessarily mean disavowing my love of coffee.

If we’re to try to get the balance right, we need more exposure to the problems in our society. The increased public attention given to global warming has finally begun to have an impact on the way we live and the choices we make. We need more exposure to the lingering problems of racism, too. I agree with Bob Herbert that our politicians should be addressing matters of racisim rather than dancing around them.

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On chubby cops, porky porcupine, and bouncy breasts.

The New York Post brings to our attention the breadth of the city’s police department… not in experience, but in waistline. It comes as little surprise to those of us who live or work in and around the city to learn that the NYPD has overweight officers. A quick trip to the bagel store or Dunkin Donuts and you’re bound to run into a cop or two. It’s hard to blame them. With the city’s precipitous decline in crime, what else is a peeky police officer to do all day? The Post seems to think it’s a problem that the city could have a 500-pound cop on the force. (Paul Soto, the Post informs us, retired with a body-mass index of 78.3, a mere 43.3 points over the level for someone considered obese.) This obsessive focus on smaller is better seems a little short-sighted.

As a case in point, Uruguayan scientists have found fossil evidence of a very large rodent, a distant relative of the porcupine that would have been more than eight feet long and a couple of thousand pounds. Showing an appreciation for this massive creature, researcher, Ernesto Blanco says, “It’s a beautiful piece of nature. You feel the power of a very big animal.” Where was Ernesto when the Post took a scoop out of poor Paul Soto?

And another size matter in the news touches on the touchy subject of breast augmentation. After reading a sobering piece in the NY Times I’d suggest that women who get implants should hold on to that warranty. Implants don’t last forever, the story tells us. After ten years they’ll probably need replacing. And if you’re unlucky you may need additional surgery to remove associated scar tissue.

While the Times registers only subtle disapproval for women who resort to implants to achieve bigger breasts (what else, I ask, is a woman supposed to do if she wants bigger breasts?) the Post is more blatant in its bias against bigness. The sensation-seeking rag completely overlooks the rationale for a law enforcement body to maintain a wide range of weights.

This is conjecture on my part as the NYPD hasn’t stooped to defend its policy against the Post’s attack, but no doubt it can be very useful to have a few Paul Sotos on the force. How else to infiltrate a ring of doughy criminals, matching them pastry for pastry without raising suspicion? And I’m sure that the flyweights in the department invariably looked to Soto to sit on (not literally of course) a resistant arrestee. Fitness, speed and agility are valuable attributes, but they’re not everything.

Being a man and less amply endowed than Officer Soto I won’t have to worry about my breasts until I turn sixty. But I ask you, how many of us men would be considering cosmetic surgery today if the Lancet were to announce a successful and seamless procedure for penis enlargement?

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On ideas that don’t meet at the ends: Catching up with the slippery Fish, and digging into Farmer’s flawed reasoning.

Last week I thought I had refuted Stanley Fish’s doubts about the value of the humanities. But it seems that I wasn’t alone in misunderstanding Fish’s point. Fish explains today that he was talking about the academic field of “the humanties” not about art, literature, philosophy, etc. themselves. Fish clarifies his argument: Do humanities courses change lives and start movements or have any other measurable value? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized? He admits that teaching humanties can be one way for people to learn critical thinking, and that it provides people with a better range of subjects for conversation. But he then dismisses these values as being far from the exclusive realm of humanties courses. Now that Fish has made himself clear, I still disagree with him.

Another educator, John Farmer, who teaches at Rutger’s Law School, argues that the criminal justice system isn’t necessarily the right place to pursue the war on terror. Farmer argues that the prosecutions of Jose Padilla and Hemant Lakhani take criminal justice into dangerous territory, toward endorsing the pursuit and prosecution of terror conspirators who have not yet done more than pursue. So far so good. Farmer’s making sense. But then he argues that this situation should be remedied by taking terror law enforcement out of the criminal justice system, permitting the government some mechanism for “preventive detention.” “Considering norms of criminal law and the paucity of evidence the government had at the time,” Farmer says, “its only alternative was to leave him free. Law enforcement should have had another choice.” Hmmm. So to prevent the erosion of our civil liberties we should permit indefinite detention without charges of those we have doubts about.

Stanley Fish puts forth a subtle brand of sophistry in his twin salvos against the usefulness of the humanities. And this sophistry seems to indicate an ulterior motive. Fish’s true motive isn’t relevant to proving him wrong, but I would guess that he likes the idea that his academic pursuit rises above the demands of demonstrating value. He reaches a passionate pitch when he states “the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their value.” Fish prides his field of study on its “refusal to bow” to pragmatic ends, and, rhetorically, argues that this refusal supports the justification for its worth.

My short rebuttal (”bullshit”) still stands.

Fish’s sophistry is this: He starts with three questions about the humanities “what is the value of such work, why should anyone fund it, and why (for what reasons) does anyone do it?” to which he appends, without drawing a logical connection, the following tests — that if it has value, the value must be measurable, that unless the value is measurable it cannot claim funding, and that those who do it must have consistent, valid and measurable reasons for doing it. Fish then flops around quite happily having avoided answering his own questions.

1. A value need not be measurable for it to be a value. Heat was a value before mssrs Farenheit and Celcius devised their scales and methods of measurement. Or, to take an example more closely related, “justice” is a value that cannot be measured (can we count how many people are rightly convicted? Of course not.) Pleasure and cleverness are not measurable values, neither is academic interest.

2. Funding for academic study always involves some element of uncertainty. There is no logical connection between whether a field of study has a measurable value or not and its appropriateness for investment.

3. People do all kinds of things for the oddest reasons. Fish’s assertion that humanities professors don’t do what they do to impart value is, even if it is correct, entirely irrelevant. Perhaps the best reason that any educator can have for being in the teaching business is that they relish their subject area. Who wants a teacher focused on the value that the course is imparting, rather than the knowledge and enthusiasm for the material?

Fish is carefully stepping over the real reasons that the humanities have value. They have value in the same way that any academic field of study has value, in exploring the world we live in. Humanities studies the world of art and literature. I can thing of few things more intrinsically valuable than studying the way that the creative world lives within, alongside and outside the real world. To say that such study has no intrinsic value makes me want to plea for Fish to take a sabbatical.

John Farmer makes a less subtle blunder. The current administration has been stretching, bypassing and thwarting the criminal justice system to meet its own ends. Farmer is right in saying that we shouldn’t allow this. But to claim that instead we need a whole new arm to the judiciary so that the government can continue to confine, hold and interrogate people who perhaps intend to do harm, seems about as wrongheaded as you can get.

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On sexism, racism and any other ism: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Gloria Steinem; the importance of drawing distinctions, and the unfortunate side-effect of bigotry.

Gloria Steinem’s Op-Ed yesterday — “Women Are Never Front-Runners” — shows that even a fervent anti-ismist can get tangled up in her own knitting. Ms. Steinem laments that Hillary Clinton faces an uphill struggle convincing voters that she’s a viable leader just because she’s a woman. Steinem contrasts Clinton’s task with Obama’s, arguing that Clinton has it harder. Although Steinem presents no evidence, I wouldn’t try to argue that she’s wrong. Unfortunately though, her thesis swells with the rhetoric of bias, ending with what’s supposed to be a rallying cry against isms ‘We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”’ And this would demonstrate lack of bias how?

Human beings have developed an extraordinary ability to draw distinctions and categorize the world around them. Consciousness requires that we do so. The first glimmer of consciousness rests on the awareness that there is a self and a non-self. From this primary and fundamental distinction we begin to separate the world into up and down, in and out, hot and cold, blue and pink, soft and hard… This ability has been honed to a fine point because it has provided an evolutionary benefit. The better able we were to draw distinctions, the more skilled we became at identifying safe foods to eat, suitable materials for clothes and tools and shelter, etc.

In another story today, brewers pursuit of ever hoppier beers and consumers pursuit of ever more gratifying flavor, gives an example of just how far we’re prepared to go along the road of differentiation and distinction. The whole enterprise of humankind rests to a large degree on the striving for new distinctions.

But the faculty to draw distinctions, while it can be trained or enhanced, is fundamentally indifferent to the nature of those distinctions. In other words, although some of us can’t distingush Bach from Hayden we can all distinguish a jackhammer from a songbird, a pen from a pencil, and our own cell-phone ring tone from everyone else’s. We draw distinctions so naturally that they become easy pegs for our murkier judgments.

This is where isms come in. When we derive arbitrary judgments from a characteristic, no matter how well distinguished that characteristic may be, we fall into the trap of the ism.

By all accounts, Hillary Clinton is a woman. Identifiying her as a woman is not an ism. Saying she’ll make a better or worse leader because she’s a woman is an ism. There’s no rational basis for making such a connection. (We can easily find many examples of both men and women leaders who are wonderful and many who are awful.)

To get to an ism from a distinction we have to apply flawed logic and reasoning, or blind ourselves to logic and reason. Racism in all its forms, for example, requires the racist to suspend his or her faculty of reason. But why do we do that?

Isms are born of ignorance or fear. Either we are too ignorant to understand that our judgments are flawed, or we are afraid of some group that’s different from us, or of losing our power over them, or of being forced to recognize their equality.

The antidote to isms is reason and logic, persistenly, patiently, blindly, and tirelessly applied.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

PS. Of the IPAs I’ve tasted, my personal favorite is Smuttynose IPA. Highly recommended.

On Stanley Fish’s views on the humanties, and congress’s obsession with baseball.

Stanely Fish has this to say about whether studying the humanties can change us for the better: “Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us? The answer in both cases, I think, is no.” Fish argues that the humanities serve no purpose whatsoever, but that this is OK, since “an activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good.”

To which feel moved to give a short rebuttal (”bullshit”) but feel a sense of duty to respond with something longer and more thoughtful. Back to that in a minute.

The other matter that has me scratching my head again today is all the fuss in congress over baseball drug use. Perhaps this is one of those cultural or political gaps that comes from being born and raised elsewhere, but why on earth does the government feel it should spend taxpayers’ money investigating drug use in baseball? Roger Clemens has been desperately defending himself against the allegations in the recent report. And he should be held accountable if he’s sullied the name of baseball, but by the government?

How does this relate to Stanley Fish and his misapprehension of the value of the humanities? Well, you can find echoes of Kafka and Beckett and Heller in the congress’s pursuit of the baseball players abuses, just as you can find echoes of Kafka and Vonnegut and, yes, Heller again in the Bush administration’s press to invade Iraq and chronic abuse of human rights.

Over the weekend I saw “Charlie Wilson’s War.” Granted not a film of any great artistic merit, although effectively done, but it helps illustrate the point. I came out of the theater with a renewed sense of urgency about the value and hidden dangers of the political process, with a new sense of outrage at the current administration’s deliberate mishandling of the current war and manhandling of our rights. Could I have reached the same sense of outrage without the movie? Sure, but that’s not the point.

The humanities, along with news media, word of mouth, personal observation, government and independent reports, etc., give us a picture of the world we live in. In some cases, the humanities give us a picture that we couldn’t get in any other way (because it’s purely imaginitive or impressionistic or surreal). I would pose the reverse question to Fish. If humanities don’t serve a purpose, why do they exist?

We strive to create art because we want to represent something — an emotion, an impression, an urge, a feeling – that seems important to us. Art is the tangible manifestation of our humanity. Without art we have no tangible manifestation of our humanity. Some can live in such a world, perhaps, but most of us cannot.

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(Or Reading, Writing and Ramifications…)

“The Fall” by Albert Camus was the first book of literature I read by choice. (Before that I think I’d read mostly books from Ian Flemming’s James Bond series,
Agatha Christie’s detective series, science fiction, and the like). “The Fall” opened up for me a whole new world of reading. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it also opened up a whole new world of thinking.

A new study has shown that the flu is more common in the winter because the virus remains more stable and lives longer in cold dry weather. The debate about why the flu was more common in winter had raged for decades. The researcher’s clue to testing the flu’s communicability under controled conditions (more explicitly, what animal to test on — Guinea Pigs) came from reading a report from 1919 about a flu pandemic in New Mexico. (The author of the report noted in passing that Guinea Pigs at Camp Cody had succumbed to the flu.)

And in a New Orlean’s court case today, where the defendants may be asked to present their genitals for review in order to help prosecute a rape case, Defense attorney Robert Jenkins made the comment “I’ve never seen it before. Even in fiction, you don’t see this kind of stuff.” Which, when you think about things you do see in fictionalized court cases, is a statement as bold as the prosecutor’s request.

My wife, a lover of purchasing books if not always reading them, has set herself the challenge of reading ten books while she’s pregnant. When she asked me if I had any suggestions Camus’ “The Fall” was right up there. It’s a short book and she’s about half way through. Last night she felt so affected by what she was reading that she paused and read out loud a passage in which the narrator recalls a traffic incident in Paris. Stopped at a traffic light behind a stalled moped the narrator, who saw himself as the victim of events, ended up being seen by everyone around him as the villain. I don’t remember enough of the book to summarize its themes and aims, but my wife has been struck by the way that Camus exposes the layers of psychology that enwrap our everyday lives: Why do we try to be nice and good? Do we have an ulterior motive? Is that our only motive? How do we know? What makes up a person, his actions or his thoughts?

Camus, Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Graves, Gunter Grass, James Joyce, Proust and so many other great writers wrote fiction that provokes inquiry and thought about the nature of the human condition and, in many ways, the nature of existence. Reading such texts communicates this process. We don’t need to agree with the writer’s perspective, and rarely is the writer’s perspective explicitly declared or even implicitly declared, but it is difficult to read the books of such writers without pausing to reflect. And it is difficult to reflect without acquiring some new insight.

The flu researcher makes his own case for writing down points of interest that may seem incidental at the time (such as Guinea Pigs with flu), but that can open up whole new realms of insight for readers in a dim, distant and indeterminate future. “Sometimes it pays to read the old literature,” says Dr. Palese, who made the discovery.

And the Defense attorney in the New Orleans court, unwittingly I think, points to the value of fiction as a way of expanding the realm of the possible. Fiction has been instrumental in changing what’s acceptable, possible, and conceivable. That the Prosecutor in the case has outdone fiction is a credit to his imagination if not his legal prowess.

All of which makes me want to go and read.

But before I do, I must stop to consider the flip side of this literatic love-fest. Even the best of texts can be misunderstood and misused. And the worst of texts can be downright dangerous in the wrong hands. The intent of the writer and the perspective and persuasion of the reader will determine whether a particular text generates more good than ill.

And what’s considered a dangerous book by one generation may be lauded as a groundbreaking work of innovation and courage by the next. (James Joyce’s Ulysses springs to mind; although it may not be the best example unless the sample group happens to be students of modern literature.)

Can we say then whether the overall value of literature and writing is in general positive, negative or neutral?

(This reminds me of a discussion I had earlier this year with someone who questioned, since truth and scientific understanding is not absolute, whether we can say that science has made progress.)

The question, in practice, is clearly unanswerable. Even if we were to agree on definitions for positive and negative, how would we compile a quantitative inventory of all of the positive and negative influences of things written and read?

Which reminds me that things written, while they should stir and prompt our own thinking, should not replace our own thinking. Whatever dangers exist in things written don’t derive from the writing itself, however inciteful and twisted, but from our being influenced by them without sufficient reflection and questioning. Just because we read Justine doesn’t mean that we’ll become amoral. Although if we swallow de Sade’s words without reflection, we may well come away worse off than when we arrived. But surely that would be our fault, not de Sade’s?
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I just put out a music video for My Darkest Hour, a song from my album ‘nylon.’ The song and the video aim to express in artistic terms what it’s like to grapple with compulsion — in my case a compulsion to drink. Addictions, as they’re sometimes called, can be very easy to acquire and very hard to drop. Compulsion plays a very broad role in life, appearing in many guises and to many degrees. But what is it, why do we have it?

A NY times story today reports on Korean efforts to address an issue that has hit hard in a country where almost all homes have high speed Internet connections — web addiction. Alarmingly, some young people have apparently died from exhaustion after days without a break playing on-line games, and millions more young people may be at some risk of addiction.

Also in the Times, Amy Harmon writes about the obsessiveness of having access to one’s DNA data. She found herself spending hours every day sifting through the many genetic markers (SNPs) that would tell her about her predispoition, or lack of it, for everything from a dislike to brussel sprouts to alzheimer’s.

Such introspective compulsions affect the people who have them and the people in their lives, but I was also reminded that the effects of one person’s compulsion can go much further. Take Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, for instance, who has announced deep consitutional changes and sweeping reforms that will cement his vision for a revamped Venezuela and consolidate his position long term as the overseer of that vision. His biographer, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, had this to say about the current situation: “This is not a dictatorship but something more complex: the tyranny of popularity.”

We could say that genetics and circumstance result in compulsion and leave it at that. But there must be some reason for a tendency to compulsion and perhaps some insight that can help us thwart it through understanding it better.

I remember news stories about the polar bear in Central Park zoo obsessively swimming endless little laps because he was so bored. We human beings have become hypersensitized to boredom. Living in New York City you see the highly intensified impact of this. People everywhere walking and talking on their cell phones. People wearing earphones even in the elevator on the way up into the office. People exercising on treadmills while watching TV or reading. People watching portable movie players on the subway. We cram our lives full of activity to squeeze out the threat of inactivity. But, unlike our ancestors, much modern activity is artificial and unnecessary.

There’s an intersect then between the level of compulsive activity and the degree of ease with which we can ensure our basic survival needs. (The Korean boot camps for Internet addicts get the addicts away from their computers and involved in physical activities outdoors — whether this works or not, it seems conceptually well-directed.) But what about the origin of compulsion? What is compulsion and why do we succumb to it at all?

Compulsion comes about when we return frequently and strongly to a perceived or actual need or desire. It’s a pattern of response that comes about either genetically or circumstancially. It’s also helpful to regard compulsion as existing on a spectrum, and as a response that can be harmful or helpful.

My theory is this: Compulsion is a necessary trait. Without some degree of compulsion organisms wouldn’t have a mechanism to draw them to do the things that are good for them or good for the species. Bees wouldn’t build hives, cats wouldn’t lick themselves to clean their fur, people wouldn’t have sex. But compulsion becomes problematic either when circumstance puts us into a situation we’re not genetically prepared for (drinking alcohol, shooting heroin) or when we have an imbalance between free time and purposeful time, leading to boredom.

Chavez has found himself in a circumstance with which he is unprepared to cope effectively. The compulsion to keep feeding himself a steady diet of power and control, to guarantee that he will be able to keep experiencing that power, has overcome his ability to balance his own desires with the responsibility he has assumed for his people. Unfortunately, when it gets to this point, the prognosis is not good.

On a happier note, the Central Park zookeepers devised mechanisms to relieve Gus, the depressed polar bear, from boredom. He is now a much happier bear by all accounts. What would it take to wean Chavez from his addiction to power? One thinks that it may take him going cold turkey.

(Or, the beauty of non-conformism.)

In one of the many magnificent set pieces of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Yossarian, a Second World War B52 bombadier, proposes to another character (Doc Daneeka, I think) that he should be allowed to return home. “Where would we be if everyone thought that way?” he is asked, “Then I’d be crazy not to,” Yossarian replies. A valid point.

In the world of science, examples of unorthodox thought that ultimately sweeps away a whole body of ill-formed ideas abound, as do examples of the hard road that the non-conformist must often trek — Galileo Galilei, for instance, found himself under indefinite house arrest for supporting Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the solar system. These days, a proposal that the sun revolves around the earth would be so ridiculous that it wouldn’t even draw ridicule, never mind the attention of the Inquisition.

In a lovely, scathing testament to his burning disdain for orthodoxy, Arthur Schopenhauer subtitled his essay On The Basis of Morality “not awarded a prize by the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies.” (His was the only entry to the competition.)

And just yesterday, MIT sued Frank Gehry’s architecture firm claiming design and construction failures in its Stata Center which has developed cracks, leaks and other problems. “These things are complicated,” Gehry said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.”

Many at MIT are happy with Gehry’s construction, as the NY Times reports: “It is a joy to work in this building,” said Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics, “and I know that many of its occupants feel the same as I do about it. We asked Frank to give us a building that fostered communication, and he delivered.”

But it seems that Gehry is no stranger to disgruntled clients. Sometimes the very isolation of the lone voice speaks to the depth of its insight.

There’s an important philosophical aspect of non-conformism that I think we do well as a society and as individuals to remember. Human understanding works through three important processes:

1. Direct, immediate understanding. (A baby knows instinctively to reach for its mother’s nipple when hungry.)

2. Received understanding.  (What we know or think we know from being told or from reading or otherwise learning about how things work.)

3. Deduced, rational understanding. (What we piece together rationally from what we observe.)

The rational non-conformist then works from the third kind of understanding to debunk flawed examples of the second kind. Galileo used scientific observation to unseat the non-scientific theories of the geocentric worldview. When someone speaks out against an established understanding, then, we should ask ourselves whether that established understanding is something that we have simply accepted as fact, or whether we have arrived at it ourselves through a process of rational examination. If our answer is that we have no reason to believe it other than that everyone else seems to believe it, we should consider giving the non-conformist view our diligent attention.

This is, I think, what the Buddha had in mind when he said the following:

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” — Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha), 563-483 B.C.

It’s perhaps not immediately obvious how this applies to Gehry; but I think it does. Implicit in Gehry’s architecture is the debunking of our expected ideas of what a building should look like. Apart from some very creative and aesthetically adventurous designs, his work says, “you don’t need to start with four walls at right angles.”

The wonderful thing about non-conformists of course is that they break the mold not just for themselves but for all future generations. We’ll never go back to believing that the sun revolves around the earth (well, most of us won’t). And, post-Gehry, innovative architects will never be afraid to make buildings look like we don’t expect them to look.

In The Darjeeling Limited, Jason Schwartzman plays a writer who uses moments from his real life as the basis for his short stories, then insists to his brothers that the highly recognizable characters are fictional. The Darjeeling Limited is a gem-like movie, and this aspect of the story left me with a new insight, or the beginning of an insight into the relationship between art and life.

The actions of Schwartzman’s character create a text within the text. Schwartzman co-wrote the screenplay with Wes Anderson, the film’s director. So, we have the screen-writer playing the role of a writer who fictionalizes real moments in his life. The movie isn’t about art, Schwartzman’s fiction plays a minor role in the plot, but the film is about artificiality in life. The characters keep the world at arm’s length, rarely entering into events fully, yet believing that they do.

We use and appreciate art as a construct and technique to distance ourselves from reality. When it works, this distance provides a perspective that permits us to apprehend reality more fully, or to access a part of our perspective that would otherwise be hidden from us.

The artist takes a feeling or perspective, conscious or subconscious, and transfers it to some external medium (canvas, music, sculpture, text, etc.). After watching The Darjeeling Limited I was left with a new sense of life as unconscious art, or if not art then something akin to it.

Today is Halloween. Never in my recollection have I wanted to wear a Halloween costume nor enter into the spirit of the holiday, much to the disappointment of my wife and children. As I walked to the train this morning and reflected on this and on the premise of The Darjeeling Limited I felt a strong correlation between the two and the overlay of art in life.

If we think about distancing and abstraction as a critical construct of the artistic process, all of a sudden much of what we do in life starts to seem if not artistic then representational. Two days ago I got my hair cut, for instance, and felt disquieted by the relative neatness and attractiveness of my hair afterward. I now think that I was put out by the artificial construct of a haircut. We clothe ourselves partly for warmth, but the way we clothe ourselves is to a greater or lesser degree a representation of the image we seek to project to those around us. We are wearing an abstract perspective of ourselves.

The way we speak, the way we behave, the way we move, everything but the most automatic, innate impulse bears the impression of conceptual intervention. Focus on your breathing for a moment and all of a sudden you become conscious of how fast, how deep, how measured and the pattern of your breathing changes even if it doesn’t in fact become faster, deeper, more or less measured. The observation of your breathing makes it somehow different.

But whereas good art uses distance to bring us closer to something real, affectation in life distances us without achieving this ultimate closeness. Good art lets us feel or apprehend something more directly, more pertinently. A good haircut does nothing to bring us closer to reality. In fact, it takes us more deeply into the concept of ourselves as a person with attractive hair.

I’m not suggesting that we go about wearing sacks and with long, lank locks. But I am suggesting that being aware of the artificiality we invest in a good part of our waking life may actually be a step toward living more fully in the moment rather than in our minds.

Monet’s “Le Pont d’Argenteuil” at the Orsay Museum in Paris - badly damaged by intruders Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007.

(You can see the 4 inch tear below the bridge.)

In a related article, the French Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, calls for better security and tougher sanctions against people who commit such acts of vandalism because, as she said “they are attacking our history.”

Another interesting aspect of the report is that it seems that the painting can be repaired. Presumably it would be impossible for a future museum visitor to know whether the painting had been repaired or not.

This reminds me of two other incidents: One from a New Yorker article, and one from my own life.

The New Yorker, September 24, 2007, article on Marie-Laure de Noailles - The Surrealist’s Muse, at one point describes how one of Marie-Laure’s lovers — a Spanish painter named Oscar Dominguez — made money by by copying Marie-Laure’s Picassos and selling the originals, leaving his forgeries in their place.

My wife bought me a lovely old Alfa Romeo “Spider” sports car for my birthday. It turns out that the car’s floor is rusted, a fatal problem. But in the course of investigating what could be done, if anything, to repair the damage, I discovered that, with old cars, enthusiasts value authenticity, including authenticity of a repair, so highly that an inauthentic repair (using a modern, custom-shaped floor panel rather than an original panel) would render the car practically worthless.

Is Albanel right in saying that an attack on a work of art is an attack on history? If a clever forgery can fool its owner, does the value of a work lie in the art or its pedigree? And if a car looks and drives as if it were intact, does the knowledge that it is patched with a modern piece of material diminish its inherent value?

All of these questions seem interrelated. The core question seems to be how and why do we attach the concept of value to an object or the idea of an object?

We may have several reasons for perceiving value in Monet’s painting of a bridge: We find the painting itself aesthetically pleasing. We find Monet’s work generally pleasing and therefore value this work as part of the body of his work. We value the effort and skill exerted in producing such a work of art. We find value in the work of art as a component of our cultural history… I’m sure there must be several other distinct reasons for perceiving value in the painting.

Likewise with my Alpha Romeo. I value it because I like the way it looks and drives. An enthusiast may value it for its authenticity and degree of intactness. A scrap metal merchant may value it as a heap of smeltables.

The concept of value in a forgery is a little trickier. Before we know it is a forgery, we may believe we value it for its place in a body of work, or for the skill of the original artist. But knowledge of its true pedigree makes it impossible to value a forged Picasso as a Picasso. (Although we could still value it as a skillful copy.)

All of which results in two important clarifications: When we think or talk about the value of a thing, it helps if we’re clear about the ground of the value, what is it based on from our perspective, allowing that others will have their own perspectives. The second clarification is that when we attach our sense of value to the idea of a thing (its pedigree, its place in a greater body of work, etc.) we are no longer valuing the thing itself, but an idea of the thing.

This second point, I believe, resolves the paradox that we can at one moment believe something very valuable, only to realize a moment later that it is worthless. The thing itself hasn’t changed, but our idea of it has.

For a work of art to have inherent value for us, then, that value must be attached to something immediate, such as its aesthetic impression.

This brings me back to my original conundrum. While I feel the emotional tug of the sentiment expressed by the French Culture Minister, that those who damage works of art should be more heavily sanctioned, I can’t find the logical support for it. What the idiots did was to damage a painting. Any attack on history resides only in the minds of those who perceive the idea of Monet’s painting as a part of French cultural history. Should criminal sentencing be influenced by something so subjective?