MEMBER MONDAY

There is a moment in one of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels (“The Gift”) when the narrator sees a mirror being unloaded from a van on a street in Berlin. Suddenly the mirror, by a tilt of grace, becomes “a white parallelogram of sky.” Nabokov notes the sun's flash to be consciousness that is sometimes reflected in the Everyday.

Let us be open to such a tilt of grace in Member Monday (8/28)/From Russia With Love as we probe the so-called "Russian Soul" through the eyes of three extraordinary native Russian women (native defined here more in terms of cultural identity than political boundary).  Maria, Lina, and Alice will share their lives, their values, their perspectives. Their "gift" is the authenticity of their formative experience and their openness to share it….

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Were it not for the existential implications of the unfolding North Korea drama this would make for fun game theory.

Thought experiment: despot leader, sporting a bad haircut and a massive insecurity complex, calculates that his tenuous hold over the half-starved population rests on totalitarian control and abiding fear. An even more hostile outside world is thus conjured as theater. Only the Supreme Leader, his magic bullet, and the threat of its use staves off a fate worse than the “life” currently experienced.

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Contemporary culture and its relationship to Nature is of a Goethean allegory. Faust (culture) seeks a pact the the Devil: grant the unlimited knowledge, power, and efficiency afforded by Technology and, in return, take our collective natural-born spirit. Nature now faces foreclosure time.

Our next Member Monday (8/7/17)/Nature Calls (Biophilia) discussion is all about the so-called biophilia hypothesis i.e. the human innate need for a (re)connection to nature and the consequences for failure to do so. Ret Taylor, fellow Highland member, has thought a lot about the subject and will co-host this session.

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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.”

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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:

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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…

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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.”

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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…

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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!"

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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.

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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)….

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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.

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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…

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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.

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"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.

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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…

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“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 . . . . ?

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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?"

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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)…

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