"The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them."
Dialectic of Enlightenment, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)
Moo Orders Milk
Sunday, July 04, 2004
Saturday, July 03, 2004
Sirius--The Dog Star
There once was a dog named Sirius
Who’d chase his tail, until he became quite delirious.
He’d run round and round
Until he wound down
And couldn’t tell his front from his rearious.
Who’d chase his tail, until he became quite delirious.
He’d run round and round
Until he wound down
And couldn’t tell his front from his rearious.
Not As Pretty As I Feel
I’ve recently discovered, that for far too long, I’ve thought of myself as smarter, better-looking, and taller than it turns out, I really am. This may come as a terrible shock to you, dear reader, to learn this. I know that it certainly did to me. Disappointingly, I’m not really that tall, that good looking, or that smart. (Oh, the crisis of enlightnement!) And I’m now struggling with the question of what to do with this new, regrettable knowledge. I’ve thought about going back to school, but that doesn’t help with the issues of height or beauty. Maybe cosmetology school?? No, I don’t think that will address the crux of the problem. And what about height? Elevator shoes? Well as I ponder the "ugly truth" you may wish to read some of the other entries in this Blog. See the "Previous Posts" section.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Is Edukation Good for America, or (You'd Better) Get Rich Quick!
Is Education Good For America?
As you well know, in America, most people believe that the ills of society can be cured by education (by which they usually mean, “schooling”). Education, it is thought, is good, and more education is gooder. But the truth, of course, is that knowledge is not nearly as powerful or effective, as ownership of property. Preferably, ownership of property in the means of production. (Which now means ownership of Microsoft as much as it once meant US Steel.) That’s the real ticket to good fortune and individual prosperity. And of course, inherited wealth (stocks, bonds, that sort of thing) is the best kind of wealth, because it means that there isn’t the slightest chance that education or intelligence may be construed as a prerequisite for securing one’s riches. If one inherits one’s wealth, one need not have attended a single day of school in order to live well. One can be as dumb as one pleases, and still be, well…wealthy. (Of course it still is humanly beneficial to know how to read and write—but this is beside the point.) Ownership of property in the means of production is one of the beauties of capitalism. One might even say, one of the geniuses of the capitalist system. To wit: Even the dumb can be rich. And of course, this point is proven, time and again, by the empirical evidence. Take a look at George Bush, for instance. What has education done for him? Or, in the immortal words of our chief executive: "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.'' (George W. Bush, Feb. 21, 2001.) Or perhaps even more prophetically, "Rarely is the question asked: ‘Is our children learning?’" (Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000.)
Anyway, if ever given the chance, I would wish to disabuse the American public of the misconception that education is the key to success. Why do Americans believe so strongly in education, anyway? Could it be that there is no alternative to believe in? No hope for redistributing the real sources of wealth and power in this society? “Oh no,” the prevailing wisdom of false consciousness maintains, “leave private property alone. You never know, one day, Wal-Mart employees may, after much hard work and self-sacrifice, rise to own Wal-Mart”—or so the implicit belief goes. “Let’s leave private property in the means of production (and in this case, distribution) intact. Let’s instead redistribute knowledge! Yeah that’s the ticket. All anyone really needs is more knowledge. More education.” Phoooooey, I say. Let the masses eat books!
As you well know, in America, most people believe that the ills of society can be cured by education (by which they usually mean, “schooling”). Education, it is thought, is good, and more education is gooder. But the truth, of course, is that knowledge is not nearly as powerful or effective, as ownership of property. Preferably, ownership of property in the means of production. (Which now means ownership of Microsoft as much as it once meant US Steel.) That’s the real ticket to good fortune and individual prosperity. And of course, inherited wealth (stocks, bonds, that sort of thing) is the best kind of wealth, because it means that there isn’t the slightest chance that education or intelligence may be construed as a prerequisite for securing one’s riches. If one inherits one’s wealth, one need not have attended a single day of school in order to live well. One can be as dumb as one pleases, and still be, well…wealthy. (Of course it still is humanly beneficial to know how to read and write—but this is beside the point.) Ownership of property in the means of production is one of the beauties of capitalism. One might even say, one of the geniuses of the capitalist system. To wit: Even the dumb can be rich. And of course, this point is proven, time and again, by the empirical evidence. Take a look at George Bush, for instance. What has education done for him? Or, in the immortal words of our chief executive: "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.'' (George W. Bush, Feb. 21, 2001.) Or perhaps even more prophetically, "Rarely is the question asked: ‘Is our children learning?’" (Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000.)
Anyway, if ever given the chance, I would wish to disabuse the American public of the misconception that education is the key to success. Why do Americans believe so strongly in education, anyway? Could it be that there is no alternative to believe in? No hope for redistributing the real sources of wealth and power in this society? “Oh no,” the prevailing wisdom of false consciousness maintains, “leave private property alone. You never know, one day, Wal-Mart employees may, after much hard work and self-sacrifice, rise to own Wal-Mart”—or so the implicit belief goes. “Let’s leave private property in the means of production (and in this case, distribution) intact. Let’s instead redistribute knowledge! Yeah that’s the ticket. All anyone really needs is more knowledge. More education.” Phoooooey, I say. Let the masses eat books!
Lost in the Dark of "Shruburbia"
Last February we visited my mother, who has recently moved to a place called Murietta California, which is a bedroom community approximately 50 miles east of LA and about 60 miles north of San Diego. An odd vector, if ever there was one. It’s been a long time since I have spent any time in Southern California, so I have almost forgotten how the dry, semi-arid foothills look, when paved with endless rows of tract homes, mini-marts, condos and strip malls. Oh yes, and large nationally hegemonic Target stores and Walmarts. The whole town appeared to have been literally rolled-out in a single instant, like some kind of wall-to-wall carpeting or one of those lawns that arrives, in rolls of sod, which are “installed,” rather than grown. All the architecture of Murietta is of a kind--- a pestering, mock, semi-Spanish/Moroccan/Mediterranean stucco. Low lying, like intestinal bacteria. It reminded me a bit of some of the pictures I’ve seen of Sadam Hussein’s palaces—only far less tall. And, I dare say, less charming. And everything is painted in a lilting shade of Tuscan beige, which makes what would otherwise be merely an annoyingly standardized, ex-urban, built-environment, appear as if it were maliciously conceived and executed by a sole demon intelligence, or by the folks at Disney (whichever is most pernicious.)
Our first night in Murietta was really something. We landed in San Diego, and with no further ado, rocketed up the freeway in our rental car to Mureitta, where we retrieved my mother from her home in a sprawling, indistinguishable, gated community, and headed out to find a restaurant in the Murietta vicinity. Within 1.5 minutes of departing my mother’s house, we were as lost and bewildered, as if we had been traveling for days, without a compass or a guide, in the deep recesses of the Amazon. Of course, my mom was of absolutely no help in directing us—she hadn’t spent any time outside of her retirement enclave since moving there, and as a consequence, could not recognize even a single landmark by which we might orient our increasingly desperate search for a bistro. In all fairness, I must confess that anyone—especially my mother--- would have been disoriented; the planned suburban sprawl appeared to be purposely devised for muddling both the good citizens of Murietta and hapless visitors, alike. At night, every corner mirrored the last, and every successive block looked exactly the same as its predecessor (a phenomenon unchanged I discovered the next day, by the addition of daylight.) It is staggering to think that human intelligence, even if in the form of a California real estate development conglomerate, actually deliberately designed and built a place as devoid of character, even mock character—as this.
Anyway, after much aimless wandering about, we finally did manage to find a place to eat—a large cafeteria-like complex that served us massive quantities of soup and salads—in an all-you-can-eat style. Expansive, although, not expensive. Patterned after a Ford factory, I think. My wife named it the “Soup-a-tarium” because it had a mass, hospital-like, institutional quality. I preferred to call it “Souploitation” for reasons that are not now entirely clear to me—maybe it was the overpowering sense that I didn’t want to eat there, but feared starvation even more?
Thinking back now, it occurs to me that our driving around in the dark that night, famished, amidst wall-to-wall “shruburbia”, feeling almost completely lost and disoriented , with my mother snapping out occasional, and entirely useless driving directions, is somehow a perfect metaphor for my life, or at least parts of my life. I will have to explore this more at another time (too scary to do so now), but suffice it to say, I’ve felt lost and in the dark, steered by forces that are somehow related to me, but who do not at all have my best interests at heart. I have been redeemed occasionally by blind luck, the occasional kindness of strangers and friends, and serendipitous flashes of bright light. But much of the rest of my life has been beset by confusion, darkness, and the perpetual need to “get my bearings.’ Wandering around in the wilderness! Yikes!
Our first night in Murietta was really something. We landed in San Diego, and with no further ado, rocketed up the freeway in our rental car to Mureitta, where we retrieved my mother from her home in a sprawling, indistinguishable, gated community, and headed out to find a restaurant in the Murietta vicinity. Within 1.5 minutes of departing my mother’s house, we were as lost and bewildered, as if we had been traveling for days, without a compass or a guide, in the deep recesses of the Amazon. Of course, my mom was of absolutely no help in directing us—she hadn’t spent any time outside of her retirement enclave since moving there, and as a consequence, could not recognize even a single landmark by which we might orient our increasingly desperate search for a bistro. In all fairness, I must confess that anyone—especially my mother--- would have been disoriented; the planned suburban sprawl appeared to be purposely devised for muddling both the good citizens of Murietta and hapless visitors, alike. At night, every corner mirrored the last, and every successive block looked exactly the same as its predecessor (a phenomenon unchanged I discovered the next day, by the addition of daylight.) It is staggering to think that human intelligence, even if in the form of a California real estate development conglomerate, actually deliberately designed and built a place as devoid of character, even mock character—as this.
Anyway, after much aimless wandering about, we finally did manage to find a place to eat—a large cafeteria-like complex that served us massive quantities of soup and salads—in an all-you-can-eat style. Expansive, although, not expensive. Patterned after a Ford factory, I think. My wife named it the “Soup-a-tarium” because it had a mass, hospital-like, institutional quality. I preferred to call it “Souploitation” for reasons that are not now entirely clear to me—maybe it was the overpowering sense that I didn’t want to eat there, but feared starvation even more?
Thinking back now, it occurs to me that our driving around in the dark that night, famished, amidst wall-to-wall “shruburbia”, feeling almost completely lost and disoriented , with my mother snapping out occasional, and entirely useless driving directions, is somehow a perfect metaphor for my life, or at least parts of my life. I will have to explore this more at another time (too scary to do so now), but suffice it to say, I’ve felt lost and in the dark, steered by forces that are somehow related to me, but who do not at all have my best interests at heart. I have been redeemed occasionally by blind luck, the occasional kindness of strangers and friends, and serendipitous flashes of bright light. But much of the rest of my life has been beset by confusion, darkness, and the perpetual need to “get my bearings.’ Wandering around in the wilderness! Yikes!
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Life's Really BIG Questions and some Comments
Some of Life’s Really BIG QUESTIONS (according to Moo Moo Camus)
The Universe
(Including ALL space and ALL time.)
It is a really big and violent universe. Things are exploding in it all the time (stars, supernovae, black holes, etc.) It’s an awfully unfriendly place, too. Not terribly hospitable to biological creatures like ourselves, who prosper only in very particular and rare kinds of bio-environments. And, by the way, space is really cold and, according to recent evidence, is getting bigger by the light-year.
So,why should we humans have good luck and hope for happy and pleasant lives? Most of what we know about what’s “out there” is really not that warm and fuzzy. Let’s thank our lucky stars that we made it this far, and let’s keep our fingers crossed!
“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.”
Quoted in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Existence, being
One of the perennial questions of philosophy is, ‘Why is there anything, anyway?’ Why does anything exist? Oh yes, and just what the heck is existence, anyway? (Unfortunately, I can’t read, let alone, comprehend Heidegger!)
Some possible answers:
1. God “needs” a universe to make his/her/it’s power and being manifest (Hegel, I think?) Though, why this manifestation is so important to an omnipotent god is not at all clear to me? (Couldn’t God just as easily choose not to be?)
2. What would a universe” be” without anything in it at all, a universe in which nothing exists? What would nothing, really nothing, “look” like? (Thomas Nagel, I think?)
Essentially, I think the argument runs, you’ve gotta have something (even if most of it is dark matter).
Death
Why do living things (of course, I will not mention any specific species or proper names, here) come to an end? Why do beings die?
Possible explanation: No death, then no intergenerational evolution. No evolution, then no innovation. No innovation (i.e. biological innovation), then no adaptation to changed circumstances and environments (assuming changed circumstances, of course). No adaptation to changed circumstances and environments, then species DEATH!
This (i.e., species death) is not good (counterproductive) for being, especially human being!
It would appear then, that individual (ontogenetic) death is the necessary price we pay for species being (phylogenetic) in an ever-changing universe.
Does this mean the species prospers, i.e., learns and improves, because we, as individuals, die? Yikes!
Human Evolution
OK, this is a long story, so I will keep it short, here. It looks like we evolved from something (Prosimians) that lived in trees about 40-50 million years ago, then into monkeys, then more upright monkey-like beings. (We share a common ancestry with apes, chimps and gorillas.) Then a bunch of splits in the hominid family tree and, so on, till there you have it, humans. (Good thing the dinosaurs went extinct or it would have been a whole other story.) The process continues as we speak, of course, and who knows where it (and we) will end?
If there are a lot of failed branches in the family tree, extinctions that were “selected out” because of insufficient or adaptively “weak” characteristics, could it be that homo sapiens, too, are only one moment in a larger evolutionary stream which in the end may not include humans? Who says we are privileged survivors in the long run? Oh, Oh!
Human societies and inequality. You know the story. Societies have to scavenge or produce stuff in order to survive. When societies reach a point where they are not simply living hand-to-mouth, that is, when they reach a point above the level of subsistence, they have to decide how to distribute the social surplus (i.e., everything that isn’t immediately consumed.) “Who gets what” and “Who decides who gets what (a strongman or a market?) are among the key questions. Who gets the goodies and how they get them has differed in different societies. Usually, it’s priests, kings, capitalists, you know, the usual suspects. In capitalism, of course it is impersonal markets that decide, (assisted by armies, states, politics and other sorts of extra-market institutions.) Result: Lots of inequality. Bad.Economic equality becomes more important than ever. On it, rests social equality, and perhaps the fate of the species.
We live in a world of immense disparities. One hundred and thirty five of the world’s most wealthy individuals have assets that equal those of nearly two billion of the earth’s “less fortunate” people.
It occurs to me however, that we know (all too well) what inequality looks like. But we don’t know much about what global equality, would look like. Hmm, I wonder???
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