A WEEKLY DISCUSSION SERIES

MEMBER MONDAY

THE ARCHIVE NARRATIVE:

Member Monday grew out of Highland's book club which began in May 2006 and ran sporadically through 2013. We certainly had some fine evening discussions though it became clear participants were drawn more to the respective topics than they necessarily were to the underlying books. Some were put off by the time commitment these books demanded, especially in the earlier days, when we ran one session per month.

A new format was thus instituted in mid-2016, stepping up the frequency to change it from the previous monthly evening session format into a weekly lunch discussion and to replace a full book as the discussion catalyst into a more approachable article (or two) with an introduction to help set the stage.

Member Monday held its first session on Monday July 5, 2016. The topic for that inaugural session was, in fact, a spillover from the very last session of the previous book club, centered around A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. Instead of an article, though, a more extensive introduction was prepared to capture the essence of Zinn's book and to frame the discussion. There had been some thought given to breaking down his lengthy work into bite-size chapters as the basis for a series of future Member Monday discussions but, in the end, we decided to stick with the original plan and serve up a new topic each week…continue reading…

Nostalgia

The enduring landscape of nostalgia was on full display in our last presidential campaign with its slogan: Make America Great Again. Americans seem wistful now for some long-ago idea of themselves -- you know, when wars were just, manners were exquisite, marriages endured, honor mattered, and people answered their own damn land-line. An element of elegy often haunts discussions of excellence, quality, and righteousness.

The campaign tapped into a sentiment as old as the ages i.e. the longing for a lost past, the past even of another country or another era. Per the subject article (click: Look Back With Danger), Nietzsche’s eighteenth century teutonic lament was “to go home” to ancient Greece. Homer’s heroic world was that of gods, not of men. One watches “Chariots of Fire” with a nostalgic pang, taken in by the pursuit of excellence and the unambiguous moral lines of 1924 England. The viewer then nods and says, “Just look around, will ya’, nothing but dreck.”

Steve SmithJuly 31, 2017Comment

Hallucinogens

Psilocybin -- the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms -- s enjoying quite a rehabilitation of reputation these days. Once the subject of Timothy Leary's counterculture playground and Nixon's anti-drug vendetta, it has found its way into the research labs at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and the Imperial College in London. The subject of this current research is of a decidedly non-recreational nature i.e. its application to substantially reduce the anxiety and depression attendant to terminal patients' impending death:

Steve SmithJuly 24, 2017Comment

The Uninhabitable Earth

This is not some sort of apocalyptic doom porn. However, no thinking person could deny the clear and present danger represented by our post-industrial abuse of the earth -- clear in the sense of known scientific certainties; present in the sense of a timeframe relevant to many alive today. As such, a special invitation is extended to the third-floor millennial members as we discuss climate change in terms of what is already baked into the future and the additional threats that loom without aggressive action…

Steve SmithJuly 17, 2017Comment

Populism

It's more of a feeling than a thought -- that America has lost the narrative, the story it tells about itself -- as the Pluribus pinwheels out of a splintered Unum. Check your politics at the door as we discuss an issue that transcends party affiliation and traditional left/right divisions. Many fervent supporters of both Trump and Sanders were driven by the very same fundamental anti-unum impulse. Our discussion article (click here: The Revolt Of The Public) has been described as an impressive think-piece about the decline of trust and the rise of populism.

“In a healthy society, the supreme task of the elites is to elucidate the master narratives binding together the classes and ideologies that make up a modern nation. The digital age has been an extinction event for long-standing narratives. Elites have lost the ability to mediate between events and the old shared stories. The mirror in which we found ourselves reflected in the world has shattered.”

Steve SmithJuly 10, 2017Comment

China

A hint about the scope of China's ambition comes from the Chinese language word for the country itself -- zhong guo -- meaning "Middle Kingdom" where middle, in this case, refers to everything that lies between heaven and earth. The whole rise of the West has been largely regarded as an intervening "century of humiliation" on the way to this ultimate destiny. Thus, most everything we in the West have busied ourselves with on the geopolitical stage has been nothing more than a mere sideshow…

Steve SmithJune 26, 2017Comment

Nuclear Roulette

There's a decidedly non-PC scene in that satirical slapstick Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles in which the witless lily-white citizens of Rock Ridge get the first glimpse of its new sheriff -- make that its new black sheriff -- whom the good white folks embrace with a call for his immediate lynching; thereupon said wiley sheriff (Cleavon Little) grabs self by throat and, pointing gun to his own head, drags self away declaring he's a hostage and warning the crowd to "stop! . . . or the (sheriff) gets it" whereupon the would-be lynch mob backs off exclaiming, "whoa, he really means it!"

Steve SmithJune 12, 2017Comment

Envisioning A Post-Work World

These words by my favorite essayist, Lance Morrow, on the question What Is the Point of Working?: "When God foreclosed on Eden, he condemned Adam and Eve to go to work. Work has never recovered from that humiliation. From the beginning, the Lord's word said that work was something bad: a punishment, the great stone of mortality and toil laid upon a human spirit that might otherwise soar in the infinite, weightless playfulness of grace."

Hardly a day goes by without yet another prediction of robots or at least some manifestation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) supplanting humans in the work world. Allow ourselves to take that on as a thought experiment: would we soar or sour in a world without the element of work as a central component of a meaningful life. That is the subject of the discussion article below (click on title to open). It is largely a question addressed at the personal level.

Steve SmithJune 5, 2017Comment

Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged

Let's wrap up the first full year of Member Mondays with a subject guaranteed to start a food fight i.e. capitalism in America. First, though, there is little question about how it powered our post-WWII economy. No, that's not the discussion.

The subject is the role of capitalism in today's reality of resource constraints, global interdependence, deepening income disparity, regulatory capture, and a distorted monetary system. Consider these words written in 1957:

"You may know society is doomed when you see that, in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them from you; (and) when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice." (Atlas Shrugged, 1957)….

Steve SmithMay 22, 2017Comment

The Brain

Our next Member Monday (5/15) discussion will be second and last installment of the Neuralink series we started this week (5/8) . . . . Dr. David Torres will help us achieve a basic understanding of this organ of almost incomprehensible complexity, making us who we are . . . . an appreciation of such will certainly help us to better explain all things human, from love to political convictions.

Steve SmithMay 15, 2017Comment

Neuralink

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Academy (DARPA) in early 2016 set its sights on the holy grail of the data world i.e. bridging the Bio-Electronic divide:

"A new DARPA program aims to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world. The interface would serve as a translator, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology. The goal is to achieve this communication link in a biocompatible device no larger than one cubic centimeter in size, roughly the volume of two nickels stacked back to back."

This $60 million so-called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) would initially fund the integrated breakthroughs across the numerous necessary disciplines including neuroscience, synthetic biology, low-power electronics, photonics, medical device packaging and manufacturing, systems engineering, and clinical testing. It would host the collaborative "pre-competition" sharing of research and information technology among industry participants enabling them to transition into later application spaces…

Steve SmithMay 8, 2017Comment

Schizophrenia / A System Gone Mad

The lunch talk by Susan Klebold a few months back was probably the most affecting presentation our club has witnessed. Sue projected an almost Buddha-like serenity as she told her story.

Her story: sending her son off to school one morning. Good-bye, honey. See you tonight. There would be no tonight as her son, Dylan, along with his friend, Eric, a few hours later let loose the black bats at Columbine which resulted in not only their deaths but those of at least a dozen other students and a teacher.

John Donvan's review of "No One Cares About Crazy People," by Ron Powers (the title derived from a quote by Scott Walker's aide assessing the political influence of this particular contingent i.e. none) (https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-your-sons-are-schizophrenic-1490994144) reports on the author's view that few of us care about the challenges of mental illness until the emergency is inside our own home. But it's probably also a safe bet that, among each of our extended families or that of a friend, there lurks some sort of mental illness -- schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or acute depression.

Steve SmithApril 17, 2017Comment

Kludgeocracy in America

"Kludgeocracy in America"

(link: http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/kludgeocracy-in-america) is a highly readable and concise article teaching you more about government today than all the civics classes, political speeches or, indeed a close reading of the Constitution ever could. It lays bare the perverse incentives that drive the complexity and incoherence in the system. The accumulation of all these distortions results in a modern democracy that is but a funhouse mirror reflection of anything our Founding Fathers had originally envisioned.

The root -- kludge -- comes from a well-known reference to those clumsy inelegant patches that may address temporary problems but which collectively and inevitably lead to system compromise or even breakdown. One of the ironies is that the very nature of the phenomenon blinds us to the cause.

Steve SmithMarch 27, 2017Comment

The Fourth Turning

Sometimes it takes a grand unifying theory – say, for example, quantum mechanics to explain the laws of physics beyond that which Newton could teach – to really make sense of the world. The ambition of The Fourth Turning is no less profound: to discern and explain the evolutionary patterns of America’s culture to describe her past, understand her present, and anticipate her future…

Steve SmithMarch 20, 2017Comment

Evolutionary Dialogues

“How did it happen that, when the dregs of the world had collected in western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust, and brutality — how did it happen that, from all of this, there should come the Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, . . . . St. Augustine’s City of God . . . ?”

How did it happen that, when the American trajectory nosedived into self-doubt, paranoia, and internecine political warfare — how did it happen that, from all this, there should come . . . . ?

Steve SmithMarch 13, 2017Comment

Escaping Our Skull-Sized Kingdom

The focus piece for our next Member Monday (3/6) discussion is a commencement speech delivered to the Kenyon graduating class of 2005 titled "This Is Water." (Pdf, below) The audience was perfect for two reasons. First, the members had just received the benefit of a top-flight education. Second, they knew nothing about the world.

They were taught the purpose of education was learning how to think. A key David Foster Wallace message: no, the key to life is learning what to think about. Otherwise, one is condemned to a life lived in a default condition. One becomes totally alone, the total center of the universe, hardwired to experience the world as nothing more than communication that has to be filtered through the lens of the self to be real.

Dustin SimantobMarch 6, 2017Comment

Masters and Johnson Revisited

We last encountered the subject of sex a mere decade ago at our book club (double) session where we discussed Jared Diamond's "Why Is Sex Fun?" and pondered the following:

The book title begs the question. Sex. Is it? Fun? It certainly runs the cosmic gamut from the most sublime to the punchline of a dirty joke.

Is the subject simply the sum of all those things, or even greater than the sum: a gestalt of every fantasy, release, anticipation, pursuit, seduction, rejection, reptilian urge, and candlelight cliche; the sum of all fears animating every Portnoy complaint and Woody Allen anxiety; from bell-ringing ecstasy to the ultimate source of profound loneliness; a cruel biological trick to propagate the species; the very concept of oneness yet sometimes the mere substitute for talk; faded memories of past loves, both requited and unrequited? All that, is all that, rolled into the word "fun?"

Steve SmithFebruary 27, 2017Comment

Culture of Spin

There are reports of dystopian novels flying off the shelves these days. People see those old works in terms of life imitating (literary) art. Member Monday regulars already understand this. After all, we covered the use of of language as a mechanism of totalitarian control months ago (11/14) in our discussion of Orwell’s 1946 classic essay, “Politics and the English Language”.

In the political world it's called spin, a term that's spin itself. On campuses it's sometimes labeled political correctness. Whatever the term, it's the intentional use of language to create a new reality through the elimination or distortion of a discarded truth. Today's easy example, of course, is in the citation of 1984 as the warning of a Trump-driven threat to our Republic ( Why '1984' Is a 2017 Must-Read - The New York Times)…

Steve SmithFebruary 13, 2017Comment

What Science Says About Race and Genetics

We're all familiar with the Nature/Nurture debate i.e. how much of an individual's attributes is the product of inherited (genetic) biological factors and how much is a function of one's post-conception environment. Our focus article, “What Science Says About Race and Genetics” (http://time.com/91081/what-science-says-about-race-and-genetics/?iid=sr-link1) applies that question to culture itself.

Advances in human genome decoding over the past ten years provide some new insights that update the widely-accepted theories of natural selection set forth in Darwin's 1859 Origin of the Species.

Steve SmithFebruary 6, 2017Comment

Sleep, Insomnia, and Dreaming

Our next Member Monday discussion centers around a topic that the more fortunate among us manage to do over one-quarter of their lives. The "others," not so much. The first portion of our discussion will be dedicated to them i.e. the ones who can't count on six hours of uninterrupted sleep. The topic: Sleep, Insomnia, and Dreaming. The remainder of the session, somewhat more whimsical, will then embrace everyone as we flirt with the subconscious.

We'll start things off with a nod to the poets and their various sleep-related idiosyncrasies, featured in the focus article Staring Into The Soundless Dark” (click to open link, then click again). Poets are particularly qualified to speak on the subject of insomnia. First, they are over-represented in the sleep deprivation department. Second, poetry itself has been characterized as a form of sleep.

Steve SmithJanuary 30, 2017Comment

Religion's Role in a Democracy

Our next Member Monday(1/13) discussion topic may test the club’s safe-space boundary i.e. what is the proper place of religion in a functioning democratic society.

James Chappel sets up the matter in his very readable article, “Holy Wars: Secularism and the Invention of Religion” from the Boston Review (link: http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/james-chappel-secularism-religion). The piece synthesizes four recent books in such a way that it avoids pedantry and abstractions as it frames the issue(s).

Our next Member Monday(1/13) discussion topic may test the club’s safe-space boundary i.e. what is the proper place of religion in a functioning democratic society.

James Chappel sets up the matter in his very readable article, “Holy Wars: Secularism and the Invention of Religion” from the Boston Review (link: http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/james-chappel-secularism-religion). The piece synthesizes four recent books in such a way that it avoids pedantry and abstractions as it frames the issue(s).

At its heart is the question: How can people live together in a democracy if they have fundamental, irreconcilable beliefs about the nature of the universe? Think in terms of the impulse to limit/ban/vet Muslim immigration to view the matter at the wholesale level. Think in terms of Kim Davis (the Kentucky county clerk who refused, on grounds of violating her Christian faith, to issue a marriage license to a gay couple) to see it at the retail level. Per one of the cited philosophers, what a conversation-stopper: if someone claims to be acting for religious reasons, what is there to say?

Steve SmithJanuary 16, 2017Comment