A Cornucopia of Savings

If the barrage of commercials aimed at early Christmas shoppers is anything to go by, the American economy, at least, is not going down without a fight. Under blue skies gleaming cars drive us towards unbelievable savings; smiling models in mittens and scarfs remind us that great deals are to be had just in time for the holidays; breathless announcers fill the airwaves urging us to hurry, for prices this good cannot last forever. Thanksgiving in the United States has long been as much about wallet opening as giving thanks, as retailers across the country traditionally use the late-November long weekend to begin their holiday-bargains blitz.

This year is no exception. Despite the mind-numbing din of doom-and-gloom economic forecasts clogging our media, the sales to be had at a New York Walmart on Black Friday (So-called after the "extreme stress and chaos" which the super deals cause) were just too good not to trample anyone in the way of the bargain racks. Apparently the "doorbusting" prices, such as $2 dollar DVDs, really did cause the doors to bust, and an employee died after the doors collapsed and savvy bargain hunters rushed in on top of him. Not even the brandishing of defibrillators could deter shoppers from achieving their goals. Fortunately, not all such tramplings ended so horribly, and one intrepid shopper who was also trampled managed to pick herself up and make her purchases before going to the hospital and filing a police report. A triumph of the human spirit!

After the great success of Black Friday, the busiest shopping day in the US, will the inevitable lull which follows spur end-time, well at least "18-month-recession," thinking to resurface yet again? Fear not brave consumer, Cyber Monday is just days away! Prepare to click and spend our way back to the robust economy of yesteryear!

Let's get 'em boys!

Crap for Christmas!

This Christmas as you solemnly gaze at your grandmother's nativity scene be sure to check if any of the figures look out of place. Is that angel laying a turd beside the donkey!?

It's not impossible, especially if she once traveled to the autonomous Spanish region of Catalonia. For centuries it has been a yuletide custom there to decorate homes with small pooping statues. Each year children eagerly seek out the defecating figurines among the nativity's usual suspects. Called Caganers, which apparently translates as "The Shitting Man," they come in all sorts of guises, from footballers and movie stars to Obama and Osama, all preferences are catered to.

The original purpose of the custom is not known for certain, but one intriguing theory is that the original Caganer, a defecating peasant in a red hat, promised a fertile growing season and bountiful crop. Displaying one or more of the little poop statues is a good omen, a sign of health, happiness and prosperity in the coming new year. Another view is that the statue, placed as it is among the most holy symbols of the Christian tradition, represents the shared earth-bound humanity of all God's children. It's a nice thought, and a hilarious means of expressing it.

I read somewhere that we should expect the business of being serious to be funny. On the surface this seems like a not very clever paradox, but my own experience has been that some of the greatest insights come with tears of laughter streaming down your face. Romping farce masterpieces such as Joseph Heller's Catch 22, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk achieve this. I can hear Mary Poppins singing, "Just a spoonful of humor helps the deep unsettling truths go down, the deep unsettling truths go down, the deep unsettling truths go down, Just a spoonful of humor helps the deep unsettling truths go down, in the most delightful way." (Note the executive making deals whilst dropping turds. Is this metaphorical or literal given our present "economic crisis"?)

The Quick and the Stupid

An interesting piece in the Boston Globe about the rise of "group think" in academic scholarship suggests that far from broadening perspectives, it turns out that having the world at our fingertips means we tend not to reach very far. In a short article published by James Evans in Science (I will attach it when I learn how) over the summer, the American sociologist showed that as academic publications began to be available online towards the late 1990s, there has been a tendency to cite fewer and more recently published articles. Evans argues that while online availability greatly improves accessibility and efficiency, it has also tended to narrow searches and accelerate consensus. Of particular importance is the use of hyperlinks which allows researchers to immediately link to other material thereby enabling them to "quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion," which in turn leads to "more citations referencing fewer articles."

What to make of this? Is it possible that the plainly beneficial efficiency and functionality of computers and the internet are actually narrowing our intellectual standards? While this is not necessarily the case, it seems that presently the trend is to reference what everyone else is referencing, to conclude what everyone else is concluding. In certain disciplines racing to consensus can make sense, especially in the sciences where conflicting theories can cause stagnation. The author of the study above points out, such consensus building probably reflects the fact that your work will likely be overlooked completely if it doesn't fall somewhat in line. But rather than reflecting some ominous Big Brother authoritarianism, such consensus forming is more about staying relevant - ensuring your work reaches others in your field.

The internet is enabling greater homogeneity outside of universities too. In a famous article by Wired editor Chris Anderson in 2003, he described what he called "The Long Tail" of the entertainment industry where, though summer blockbusters and the latest Lil' Wayne album take the bulk of attention, a long tail of lesser known products find their way to diverse consumer preferences. The internet, in his view, was opening up a new era of consumerism where the most particular and arcane tastes had the opportunity of being fulfilled. The internet allowed for a greater variety of tastes and opinions - "niches by the thousands" - than ever before. But this optimistic view of things is being contradicted by research which shows that particularly in the entertainment industry, more people are watching and listening to less.

The pooling together of certain ideas or products at the expense of countless others is partly a function of the necessity of organizing the seemingly infinite amount of data available through the digital medium. But ranking articles according to their citations, or web-pages according to their hits, will inevitably emphasize popularity above all else. In some cases, this may indeed be a matter of the cream rising to the top. But just as often if not more so, pure random chance, arbitrary fate, is responsible for one thing being held up above all others, and this is no less at work in the realm of ideas than any other human endeavor. Schopenhauer greatly resented his contemporary Hegel's enormous influence and prestige when compared to his own obscurity. Back then, in the age of wooden lecterns and leather-bound books, the latter was an intellectual rockstar and the former hardly a roadie. He would have been driven bonkers in our age of blogs and wikipedia.

The internet makes research appear extremely easy, click a few buttons and you've achieved in minutes what less than 20 years ago took weeks of patient searching and filtering. As nobody wants to work harder than they have to, it makes sense that scholars and researchers are making use of online journals and articles. But clicking buttons which an algorithm has made into a hyperlink is not equal to actually doing the work yourself. Sifting through tables of contents can often provide more general insight than looking for a particular word or phrase in thousands of articles. We should be very careful not to let the efficiency and convenience of our technologies diminish our ability to do research the old fashioned way: hard work.

"Fetch the goddamn thing yourself!"

Hip Hip Hooray! It's World Philosophy Day!

If you've noticed a little spring in your step this morning, well then you too have the World Philosophy Day spirit. Started in 2002 under the auspices of UNESCO, the day aims to,

"Encourage people to share their philosophical heritage, to open up their sphere of daily thinking to new ideas and to foster a public debate amongst thinkers and civil society on the challenges facing societies today... Reflection on the unsolved problems and unanswered questions of contemporary society has always been at the heart of philosophical analysis and thinking. As such, it is a discipline that contributes to fostering the conditions in which peaceful co-existence may flourish."

More generally, the goal is to bring philosophy down from its notoriously exclusionary tower, to muck about in the blood, sweat and earth of the real world. As the mission statement for this year's program states, World Philosophy Day has "the constant objective of making philosophy accessible to all." This is a sentiment which I agree with completely but I remain a little doubtful about its potential for success. Philosophy builds habits of questioning which encourage a deeper engagement with the world, but unfortunately, this makes philosophy among the least commodified and easily consumable of book-requisite learning. For most of us, cultivating a philosophical perspective takes time; hours, days, months and years of confused head scratching interspersed with occasional eureka moments of clarity. And even when you do achieve an understanding on some topic, new or overlooked considerations find a way of creeping into the cracks of your hopeful and illusory certainty.

How does the event propose to improve philosophy's accessibility and prestige? If the program of this years conference in Palermo, Italy is anything to go by, our would-be philosophic ambassadors do what all other scholarly philosophers do: organize conferences where few outside the field would be interested to, let alone dare, go. This year's theme is "Rights and Power" and the talks planned are though slightly less obscure, filled with just the sort of jargon that makes philosophy marginal in the first place. Try, "The inter-subjective dynamics of power: recognition, prestige and authority," or "Philosophy, chaos and law." While it is obviously supremely unphilosophical to judge a talk by its title, these examples reflect ways of framing philosophical problems in pretty standard ways. My point isn't to criticize their approach, but rather to emphasize the inherently difficult and therefore exclusionary nature of patient critical thinking; there's simply no way to dumb this stuff down.

The point is to make patient critical thinking valuable. What's the good of a philosophical perspective? At present, there are apparently innumerable ways of being human which don't seem to require such thinking in order to be successful. Selfishness, greed, cold-heartedness and many other odious characteristics can in many instances contribute to a person's appearing successful in their community. Speaking of the English-speaking world, intellectuals have their certain circles, whether in universities or the media, which are almost unanimous in their opinion that in general western culture is in a state of decline. How to combat such trends? Mostly by writing grim forecasts of the coming dark age brought about through television, computers and celebrity worship. All this is probably true and also why those "Philosophy and... name your show" books are increasingly clogging the meager philosophy shelf at the local bigbox bookstore.

My own suggestion for how to make philosophy relevant and interesting to those outside the devoted herd is to make it "cool," for lack of a better word. The smartness of philosophy needs to be dressed in a Cohen brothers film starring Johnny Depp. The same old, "philosophy as thought experiment" tact gets us nowhere but likely serves to confirm the prejudices of those who already dislike and doubt the purposes of philosophy. Jumping into the canned "what ifs" of this approach tells people that, just as they had thought, philosophy is far removed from reality, abstract and impotent, a waste of time. Philosophy needs to reclaim the passionate engagement with the world which characterized so much of its history up to modern times.

All the best to the philosophers in Palermo. Take your discussions out of the seminar rooms and into the piazzas!

The blazing women of northern Iraq

Is there a form of protest more disturbing than burning oneself alive? Most people have probably seen the 1963 image of that flaming Buddhist monk which graces the cover of the first Rage Against the Machine album. In that case, the monk was making a statement about the persecution of his religious order. Earlier this month in India some 35 "untouchables" made the news after they sent a petition to President Pratibha Patil requesting permission to ignite themselves in protest of their hideous social marginality. Self-immolation can also reflect less political concerns though. Last month, a former employee at the University of Washington lit himself ablaze after losing his job. A few days ago an 11-year-old girl in India did the same after getting yelled at by her teacher. Whatever the reason, it's hard to imagine a more disturbing or powerful way to protest a real or perceived injustice; a burning person screams out that something's not right.

That is why it is surprising that such sparse information is available which tells of the plight of Kurdish women in Iraq. Over the past several years reports have trickled in about hundreds of cases of self-immolation. The prohibition against suicide in Islam means that most instances are explained away as unfortunate "cooking accidents." But the routine admission of badly burned women in hospitals suggests more than simple kitchen mishaps. Of course these are not cooking accidents but reflect the atrocious conditions facing girls and women in Iraqi Kurdistan. Male relatives have carried out thousands of honor killings in the region, and brothers, husbands and fathers themselves are not above occasionally opting to use kerosene and a match to reclaim their honor.

This horrific and tragic "suicide epidemic" brings to light the absurdity of the American invasion of Iraq from a new perspective. The Kurdish region in the north of the country was the first post-invasion to have governing powers handed over to the inhabitants, albeit solely to the males. It seems that in addition to taking advantage for the first time in centuries their right to self rule, Kurdish males are also taking the opportunity to destroy their female kin. My disgust prevents me from seeking to understand the motives of their barbarity with anything approaching cool reason.

These terrified and hopelessness women who have lit themselves on fire deserve the very best our distant, remote empathy can muster. Just as random men in their midst wish them harm and death, random people a world away can wish them peace and health. If on no other day, this upcoming International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov. 25, the women of Iraqi Kurdistan deserve better. Let their burning bodies serve as a beacon towards better living standards for the sisters, friends and mothers they leave behind. Perhaps some of their light might even penetrate the cob-webbed caves of tradition in which many of their male kin continue to reside.

The Iconification of Barack Obama

True magic is found in random encounters at rain-soaked bus stops in Victoria.

“American elections are all a bunch of hocus pocus!” Poof! From out of the confines of a leaky bus shelter came this succinct little political critique, and so began my recent conversation with Jerry, a retired watch repairman. “Just look at all the money going into those campaigns.” What followed was two hours of entertaining and insightful talks that took us each from being stranger to friend.

To be sure, this topic found an audience in me for a reason. My partner and I had just returned from an inspiring trip to Seattle to celebrate the election of the first black American president in US history, an up-till-now incomparable and unprecedented social, political and cultural achievement.

This in a country that just over 200 years ago built its White House with black slave labourers, shackled to a brutally stubborn mentality that kept them indentured for generations because they looked not altogether unlike the new soon-to-be president Obama.

The long and ongoing history of the black American experience, their citizens’ struggle, so well articulated in Obama’s speech on race, is indeed long and ongoing. The majority of black Americans continue to be ghettoized. Among the groups most affected by the recent subprime mortgage crisis in the United States are African American families. More black youth are still to be found in prisons than they are in universities.

Still, we travelled to the United States to feel closer to the moving symbolism being crafted out of the new American political landscape. After all, it is symbols that have populated our lives, not grey and unending statistics. And a symbol, Barack Obama most certainly is.

If it wasn’t clear by that feeling in your chest as you watched him make his acceptance speech, or by the African American newscasters finally breaking down on air, or by football players risking it all to raise a black and white glove to the air, or by the tears of Jesse Jackson, Oprah and the millions of other black, white, Hispanic (the list goes on) Americans and foreigners alike, I should take this time to articulate here for the first time—Barack Obama is fast becoming a powerful icon. His stoic profile populates street posters, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons in a style reminiscent of Che Guevara propaganda, incubated in Havana and taken to its logical conclusion upon the chest of Chad Kroeger of Nickelback.

People (myself included) are clearly moved by Obama’s story. And for a moment during that speech, things felt strangely different everywhere. Like America was unrecognizable. True, the critique given by Jerry and others still stands. Obama raised over $640 million throughout his campaign, much of it corporate money, a staggering sum. But I suspect not much can be settled for certain at this moment in history. Among that $640 million was an equally enormous amount of small donations made by ordinary citizens, and much of the Obama campaign was organized spontaneously by waves of affected volunteers. Much depends now on how much of that organized political pressure is kept on him to lean more progressively.

But for now I'm rather happy being enchanted by the symbolism of it all. And so it seems is another unusual political pundit. Speaking from death row on his radio program was Mumia Abu Jamal, the ex-Black Panther accused of murdering a Philadelphia cop in 1981. On election night he had this to say about the newly minted president-elect, a man who does not oppose the death penalty unequivocally. Speaking on the meaning of victory he reads:

“We cannot deny its symbolic value. In millions of Black homes, his picture will be placed on walls, beside Martin, John F. Kennedy, and a pale painting of Jesus. I'd bet that quite a few African homes (especially in Kenya) will also boast his smiling visage.

But beyond symbol is substance, and substantively, some scholars have defined Obama as little different from his predecessors. Yet, symbols are powerful things. Sometimes, they have a life all their own. They may come to mean something more than first intended.

History has been made. We shall see exactly what kind of history it will be. From death row this is Mumia Abu Jamal.”

Q: Who is John Galt? A: Who cares?

As someone who kind of enjoys having my blood boiled by opinions I find in opposition to my own, I am delighted to learn that Obama's election is causing some to consider "dropping out" of society in protest. In response to the specter of raised taxes for the minute few who haul in a quarter of a million a year, some are considering pulling a John Galt and removing their skills and services from the American market place.

John Galt is a character from Ayn Rand's exceedingly repetitive and literarily bland Atlas Shrugged. The book is Rand's magnum opus, espousing in fictional form her supposed contribution to Western philosophy, which can essentially be summed as such: The competent, industrious, entrepreneurial and productive minority make the world go round; everyone else is dependent or worse. Rand's ideas have an intellectual sheen using terms like "individualism" and "objectivism," but really she developed and promoted a philosophy of hierarchy (yup, just like a caste system) which not only values some lives over others but absurdly premises the livelihood of the many on the productivity of the few. It has enjoyed wide influence and prestige, especially among those who see themselves as the real world examples of the novel's gritty unsung hyper-competent heroes, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart. Rand's objectivists see the world "as it really is," see "the facts" others fail to see and work harder than your ordinary schmuck. For this reason they are a beacon of civilization and progress amidst the barbarous and inept societies in which they are forced to live.

The book is all passion and abstraction and unbearably bad to boot yet this hasn't stopped influencing many who are attracted to her idealization of selfishness. Earlier this year, reports spoke about private companies actually paying universities to make Atlas Shrugged compulsory reading in business courses. Former US Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan was a longtime associate and disciple of Rand and used to write for her Objectivist newsletter. Greenspan recently made headlines when he conceded, in a very opaque and round about way, that the let-the-John-Galts-do-as-they-please approach of his chairmanship had, ahem cough sputter, perhaps been "flawed." It will be interesting to see following hundreds of billions in government aid, whether the captains of the economy will continue to idealize the virtue of stuffing one's pockets, er, I mean smelting new alloys.

So what will happen if America's self-appointed "producers" ensconce themselves a la John Galt away from society in a Rocky Mountain commune? My bet is that they'll spend all their time creating a railroad directly linking them to Mexico's border so that they might gather cheap labor to carry out their advanced, under-appreciated wills. Chewing wet cigars while overlooking their industries, they will grimace in exhaustion and disgust, dictating their memoirs and longing for those wistful days when a man could rapaciously exploit in peace and quiet.

Ralph Nader's enormous testicles

You may have heard by now, but if you haven't let me proclaim far and wide that Barack Obama has been elected the 44th president of America. In a very under-reported election on Tuesday Obama leveled a massive defeat over his unusually jowled adversary John McCain, receiving a full 8,538,559 million more votes and 192 more crucial electoral votes.

While the world watched as America "made history" electing the first president who cannot deny his African genealogy (not that he would, I'm merely insinuating that human genealogy is far more homogeneous than our intuitive but glib "Golly-gosh, he don't look like me!" emphasis on skin color would have it), the real maverick of the presidential race, Ralph Nader, quietly picked up 652,811 votes or 1% of the vote. This time round, Nader was far from reprising his role as "spoiler" which he was accused of by all and sundry for supposedly enabling George W. to assume power back in 2000. Nader has for years obscurely and unpopularly labored to bring greater attention to the ongoing conflation of private economic interests and political power. For years he has been the albino rhino of American politics, offering a sober, informed and skeptical without being cynical perspective on issues which, at the public level, hardly deviate from the standard boiler-plate cliche.

This election he was practically a non-entity, with very little interest by the media or the public for what he had to say. Nevertheless, he continued to talk and a day before the election he posted an interesting open letter to Obama where he is as ever unapologetically critical and incisive, especially on the topic of Obama's position on a US-led Palestinian-Israeli settlement. He also points out that far from being a different political animal than free-market fanatic McCain, Obama received unprecedented corporate endorsement and sponsorship during his campaign. While Obama's consistently profound eloquence does raise hope for change after years of Bush's stammering cynicism, we'll have to wait and see whether he will do anything to change a system of government which has long been morphing into a facilitator to private economic interests, the idea being that it's the government's role not to provide itself but rather to ensure conditions (low taxes, loose labor laws, low environmental standards) conducive to the flourishing of private services, industry and investment. To the extent that Obama also views the government's role as such - and his victory speech hinted at this when he said "we know that government can't solve every problem" - it remains to be seen whether in this regard, he will be as profoundly different from McCain as his oratory would suggest.

Nader is 74 years old and it's highly unlikely that he'll muster the energy and resources to run again in 2012. That is why it is regrettable and even a little sad that such a transparently decent public servant has received so little thanks and so much smug criticism in this, probably his last venture into public politics. In an interview with the nauseating Shepard Smith on Fox the night of the election, Nader looked exasperated and exhausted. At issue was Nader's use of an "uncle Tom" reference he made (see above link) while discussing Obama's probable election as president. Smith was the perfect Fox talking head, filled with a righteous indignation at Nader's supposed racist comment, lizardly repeating the phrase to the titillation of all the closeted bigots (and me!) undoubtedly tuned in.

You're welcome Mr. Nader, now you know that political choice should involve nothing more complicated than flipping a coin. After half a century of toil as a public advocate and servant, you are hereby given our highest honor: An interview with smug infotainment clone Shepard Smith who denounces you as irrelevant and dispatches you to oblivion. And let that be a lessin' to ya!

Dawkins and the Dodo

Popularizing science is a difficult task in our present day, few care to know about it and those who do must grapple with ideas seemingly far removed from their day-to-day experience. These days, there is little public debate about any subject outside of the biological sciences, and what debates there are have less to do with the quality and direction of the science itself than with the supposed implications of whatever theory, usually natural selection, on religious-minded laymen. It seems to me undoubtedly the case that we are, in North America at least, at a low ebb in both an interest in and understanding of science.

That is why it is sad to learn that Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most prominent English-speaking scientist alive today, has announced that he is retiring from his position as Oxford University's Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. Dawkins has been at the forefront of lucid science writing ever since his controversal book The Selfish Gene was published in the late 1970s. The book provides his famous "gene's eye view of evolution" and notoriously implied, to some, that human beings and all other organisms for that matter were merely "survival machines" for the genes which comprise them. Dawkins produced numerous other monographs and anthologies all of which aimed at normalizing and publicizing the profound and exciting implications of Charles Darwin's theory.

It is telling that Dawkins is leaving the position just ahead of the 150th anniversary of Darwin's landmark On the Origin of Species next year. I can't imagine him lying low during such a momentous occasion given his apparent obsession with combating religious "readings" of science, especially those categorized as "creationism" and "intelligent design." In recent years Dawkins has been gadfly par excellence to religious folk who hope to infuse science education with their always particular and exclusionary views. He pestered disgraced evangelical Ted Haggard about this issue, published a best-selling book on the topic subtly entitled The God Delusion, and most recently helped put together a so-called atheism ad campaign in London. It's hard to imagine these debates without Dawkins' abrasive eloquence.

Dawkins' successor to the Simonyi chairmanship is Oxford mathmatician Marcus du Sautoy. Du Sautoy will likely be a breath of fresh air, and has a long and proven track record in popularizing the arch-arcane domain of mathematics. Most recently, he presented an illuminating series on the history of math for the BBC. Time will tell if du Sautoy will be as controversial and confrontational as his predeccessor. It seems likely that he will try to steer his position into other areas given the inordinate emphasis on biology in our conflicted times. Du Sautoy, who brings an enthusiasm and relative youthfulness (he is 43) to the job, has stated that he is "passionately dedicated to giving as many people as possible access to the exciting and beautiful world of mathematics and science."

Unfortunately he will face an uphill battle despite Dawkins' dogged efforts. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Dawkins discussed his work as Simonyi chair and the work still left to do: "I would say that when my academic career began there was probably just as much ignorance," he says, "but less active opposition [to science]." So that's where we are at today, not simply is there indifference to science but a growing opposition is emerging, and not only in Afghanistan's caves. Here in the science-buttressed West we too are turning away from science. I guess science doesn't really matter much these days, unless of course it comes in neat little technologies with bovine-friendly user interfaces!