Whooshing Up

I want to criticize David Brook's column today, but I am not sure I can. His column today is a review of All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. "They take a smart, sweeping run through the history of Western philosophy. But their book is important for the way it illuminates life today and for the controversial advice it offers on how to live.

"In today's secular world, where "there is no shared set of values we all absorb as preconscious assumptions ... we should have the courage not to look for some unitary, totalistic explanation for the universe. Instead, we should live perceptively at the surface, receptive to the moments of transcendent whooshes that we can feel in, say, a concert crowd, or while engaging in a meaningful activity, like making a perfect cup of coffee with a well-crafted pot and cup. We should not expect these experiences to cohere into a single 'meaning of life.'"

I am sure some obnoxious nerds would argue with Brooks' definition of secular society and say that secularism really means no centrality of religion. A society, however, in which religion is not central does not provide the shared values as opposed to encouraging individual development in a certain context that is broader than the context provided for individual development in a religious society, at least AT THE SURFACE.
But more important is Brooks' attempt to engage with Dreyfus and Kelly's idea of whooshing up. The psychological sensation of excitement (including passive excitement) described as whooshing up is only one of many psychological sensations that people exprerience over their entire lives. If you concentrate on the experience of this feeling, you can easily fall into either the passive destructiveness of laziness (and addiction) or the active destructiveness of enthusiasm for its own sake. Of these, enthusiasm for its own sake is a threat but is also easily countered when it becomes a threat. Laziness (and addiction) are more difficult to counter, but they are also not as obviously threats.

Brooks acknowledges the danger of the active destructiveness of enthusiasm for its own sake, which is in some ways similar to enthusiasm that is based on a unitary, totalistic understanding of the uverise, when he writes "Though they try, Dreyfus and Kelly don’t give us a satisfying basis upon which to distinguish the whooshing some people felt at civil rights rallies from the whooshing others felt at Nazi rallies." The violence that can come from enthusiasm for its own sake can also come from enthusiasm can be fought with force (either the neutral bureaucratic force of a modern state or the enthusiasm of others), but it can also be replaced with laziness and addiction.

Laziness and addiction arise by concentrating on whooshing up that happens passively, without much effort from the person expreiencing or enjoying that whoosh. Are people really pursuing happiness ( to say nothing of following a law of nature) when they go to football game? Brooks tries to address this when he writes about "engaging in a meaningful activity, like making a perfect cup of coffee with a well-crafted pot and cup." This, however, means that people are giving special meaning to certain activities, an intellectual attempt to define their existences independent of whooshing up itself, which can them cause a whoosh up. It would be easy at this point, to suggest that David Brooks is, within the elegant word-count limits of the New York Times, introducing a more nuanced understanding of whooshing up that is more related to the fact that people's minds have other functions than the experience of excitement, but there is another explanation. This is that for the people David Brooks at least imagines as his readers, the people at the top, there is still both a possibility and even necessity of personal meanings in a highly technologized world. But even they should be open to considering life in terms of the sensation of excitement in case they join the remainder of civilization and have nothing left but the bread and circuses of whooshing up.

Moshe Katsev

Moshe Katsev, former President of Israel, has been convicted of the sexual assault of two women. I would not be surprised if Julian Assange, whose legal troubles involve being accused of rape by two women, is looking at this case with anxiety. The important issue is that Katsev and his accusers got the opportunity to present their cases in court and that political influence was not enough to keep Katsev from being held legally responsible for what are said to have been his actions. That being said, I do not claim to know what actually happened between Katsev and these women, but I do know that it is all unfortunate.

Snow

Mike Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, has said he is "extremely dissatisfied" with the city's attempts to clean up the snow that has recently fallen. Although streets in the parts of Manhattan crowded with residences and businesses may have been cleared earlier than other streets, there is really no good place to put snow when you are shoveling streets and sidewalks where almost every single square sqaurefoot is so important to so many people that it becomes important to the work of the city. Because there is no good place to put snow in the most important part of the city, it takes a lot of workers and machines to get rid of the snow, either moving the snow quickly to outliying areas of the city or to less crowded areas of Manhattan (like parks.) Because it takes so many workers and machines to clean Manhattan, there are fewer workers and machines who can work in other parts of the city. Because there are fewer workers and machines who can work in other parts of the city, there can be delays clearing the streets in those parts of the city.
My only point in this is to present an arguement that snow-removal is a negative consequence of density. That being said, I do not think that snow on the streets is the most important concern facing people in communitiies like New York in America and around the world.

Wikipedia

If wikipedia does not reach its fundraising goal for the year it is because Jimmy Wales thought it was a good idea for people to look at his face for 2 months.

Economy and Ecology

Paul Krugman has an interesting essay in the New York Times. The subject is the rise in commodity prices caused by the increasing prosperity of China and other recently poor countries along with droughts caused by unusual weather. Krugman mostly argues with people on the right who have said that this is a symptom of inlation which they say is caused by the policies of the Federal Reserve. This is interesting and true. There is so much unnecessary paranoia about inflation. The Federal Reserve is making money available to try to stimulate economic growth, but because of the weak economy, the money has not been spent in ways that have caused any serious increase in inflation that would discourage those who, like Rush Limbaugh, want Obama to fail, and also those who are highly fearful of inflation because of their deep fear of change or deep hostility to people who can think in abstract terms instead of considering money only as something they can use consistently to sustain and define themselves. Krugman does not discuss long-term risks of inflation by the Federal Reserve making so much money available and negative consequences associated with that inflation, like weakening the predictability which is important for a funtional economy (even for people who are not deeply fearful of change) and redistributing wealth in arbitrary ways that do not at all reflect how far people go in contributing to a market of goods for consumers, but it would be unreasonable to expect him to because there is no reason to give arguments for the people he is arguing against.
What is most interesting, however, is something that is only at the edges of this essay. When Krugman writes that "over the past year, extreme weather — especially severe heat and drought in some important agricultural regions — played an important role in driving up food prices. And, yes, there’s every reason to believe that climate change is making such weather episodes more common" but he does not bother to connect this speculation to what he had written before in the same essay about "As more and more people in formerly poor nations are entering the global middle class, they’re beginning to drive cars and eat meat, placing growing pressure on world oil and food supplies." As more people drive cars and eat meat, the resulting pressure is not only economic in terms of greater demand for agricultural goods and fossil fuels, but also possibly environmental. As more and more people drive cars and eat meat, there are more cars and cows. As there are more cars and cows, there is more emission of greenhouse gases might contribute to climate change. As long as there is more emission of greenhouse gases from countries like China, and if there are already enough greenhouse gases being emitted to cause climate change, then the only changes in countries like Paul Krugman’s America that could have any effect on climate change are very deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. If the only changes in countries like America that could have any effect on climate change are deep reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, it may not be worthwhile for the government to impose cap-and-trade or carbon tax programs that only make things more expensive for Americans whose lifestyles or jobs require the emission of greenhouse gases while not actually addressing climate change in any serious way. While one could say, as I used to say, that it is possible that any step in the right direction may be good enough to address aspects of climate change in some way as opposed to eliminating it completely, that possibility may not be probable enough to justify cap-and-trade and similar policies and I only said that in the first place to argue with stupid blowhards. So there!

Medicare and Advance Directives

In a recent post I included as an example of conservative American conspiracy theorizing the belief that Barack Obama was trying to create death panels to encourage euthanasia through the new healthcare law. Obama is now using the regulatory process to issue a rule that Medicare will pay for voluntary advance care planning annually, instead of the version proposed for but then dropped from the health care bill that would pay for it every five years. This does not make the conservative conspiracy theorizing any more outrageous. These visits do not encourage euthanasia. They do not let the government make decisions about the patient's end of life on its own as 30% of people (over 65 years old) believed according to a September 2010 poll. They inform people about their options. It is still inaccurate conspiracy theorizing, therefore, to insist that this proposal is an attempt to kill people.

Maureen Dowd and Patti Smith

I am surprised that Maureen Dowd's column today would write about Patti Smith, a obviously talentless beneficiary of affirmative action for women. Why would Dowd invite the comparison? I suppose neither the friends nor family of either Maureen Dowd or Patti Smith would like my description, which they almost certainly will not read, but the fact is that those are really not good at what they are paid to do.