MEMBER MONDAY

A weekly reading group in Venice, California just completed a twenty-eight year cycle discussing Finnegans Wake (Finnegans Wake Discussion Group) , a span longer than the seventeen years it took James Joyce to write the novel in the first place . . . but, wait, there’s more – given that the last line of the novel loops back to the very first, the group just decided to embark on a brand new cycle starting on page three. Such an inspiration for Member Monday but, more to the point, a way to introduce our next topic, a critical look at academia through our focus piece The Ends Of Knowledge.

What came to mind while reading the piece were the lives of certain grad student friends of mine “back in the day” in their pursuit of academic specialization as they studied more and more about less and less, leading to that holy grail: knowing everything about nothing. One five-year post-grad ended up working for the post office.

Our discussion topic is the question that was served up: what could learning look like “if it were reoriented around emergent ends rather than inherited structures?” More pointedly, were we to accept that needs evolve with new areas of study opening up with others diminishing, at what point do we start closing departments?

While you may choose to skip over the article's historic accounting for those “inherent structures” – served up in that somewhat annoying self-important academic style – the underlying question remains quite relevant today i.e. how does one optimize those four (or more) years in academia and that $100k student tab. How would you advise others?…

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What do you mean I might not have free will? Look here, I just decided what I wanted to write. See there, I just changed my mind. I might do so again. Or I might forget the whole thing and go for a walk. So, you see, it’s me, it’s mine, it’s free – the will to do as I decide.

That’s a myth, maintains Free Will NYT Robert Sapolski, reflecting determinism, which postulates that all our decisions and behaviors are invariably determined by previous events and by natural law. Free will advocates, on the other hand, point to the human capacity to make uncoerced choices.

Libertarianism holds that individuals have complete free will and is thus incompatible with determinism, while compatibilism attempts to reconcile free will and determinism, arguing that they are not mutually exclusive (though suggesting our underlying desires and preferences may be influenced by previous events and experiences).

The Western world seems tangled up in its own underwear over this debate given the difficulty in establishing causation with any sort of scientific certainty. While specific studies have been hyper-focused on select causal links e.g. the role of genetics as a factor, the application of determinism to predict future states with any degree of certainty beggars the imagination given the menu of deterministic factors: physical (physical laws); biological (genetic factors and physiological conditions); psychological (past experiences, memories, and learned behaviors); and social (social environment and cultural norms)…

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Knock. Knock. Who’s there? Ukraine. Ukraine who? You know, the Ukraine that has been the subject of the three MM sessions since the Russian invasion. So why now? Because maybe it’s always prudent to reassess foreign entanglements, given so many over the past seventy years have been like lobster traps: easy to enter; hard to live in; nearly impossible to exit.

How do you spell collateral damage? One of the most sinister terms in the language of geopolitics has to be Proxy War. It makes warfare sound like some sort of video game. Just feed it money and weapons so long as no American blood is shed. An exaggeration? Here are the exact words of Mitch McConnell last week:

“If you look at Ukraine assistance, let’s talk about where the money is really going. A significant portion of it is being spent in the United States, in 28 different states. We’re replacing the weapons that we sent to Ukraine with more modern weapons. So, we're rebuilding our industrial base. No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine. The Ukrainians are destroying the army of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that. I think it’s wonderful that they’re defending themselves.”

That’s it, throw money and weapons into the killing fields, bolster our industrial might (with plenty of pork to the states), all the while upgrading our military. Pax Armamana. Okay, the preceding might be a stretch but it does raise topics for legitimate debate…

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Lance Morrow sets the stage on the subject of evil with his essay "Your Periodic Reminder That Evil Is Real" (click: Morrow, Evil Is Real), a subject we first discussed in our book club session some seventeen years ago with reference to his then-published “Evil: An Investigation.” Our discussion back then was but a dress rehearsal for the glimpse of the skull on display today.

Yet it seems like yesterday we struggled with such questions as: Can we even define evil or is it a case of we know it when we see it? How do we even know we can see it? Is it understandable only in terms of its duality with good? Lance Morrow offered a shortcut, maintaining it’s something (any) decent conscience, uncontaminated by ideology, knows what it’s looking at.

That ideological contamination qualification opens the way to a deeper analysis where a view of evil is refracted through the lens of a fundamentalist religion with its ideological celebration of death over life. The Middle East then begins to  look like a sanctioned murder-suicide situation – the only wrinkle being people not agreeing who is the murderer and who is the suicide…

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Melancholia, as it was known in Ancient Greece, was thought to be due to an imbalance of the four basic bodily fluids, or humors. This condition, now afflicting roughly twenty percent of adults and the leading cause of disability, is better known today as Depression.

A dizzying array of hypotheses, whether based in science, medicine, neuroplasticity, psychology, physiology, or even philosophy, have now overtaken that ancient theory such that the layperson might be tempted to default back to the humors explanation. Nevertheless we shall identify a couple of the more modern approaches in hopes of deriving something worth discussing.

Even the basic science behind Depression remains provisional with the current research now citing the lack of any clear evidence behind the once-established belief that Depression is caused by a "chemical imbalance," a lack of the neurotransmitter serotonin, in the brain. The focus article cites two books that offer alternative explanations i.e. the "stress response run awry" theory leading to this "total-body" illness felt in the mind or, the second book, the result of a malfunctioning immune system (Breaking Through Depression).

Both books thus suggest antidepressant drugs would be better directed at altering the fundamental cognitive bias behind one’s perception of the world i.e. seeing this “doom-laden” thinking more in terms of a neurodegenerative disease. Reframe the brain. Gee, the layperson might think, this sounds like a restatement of existing cognitive behavior therapy. Maybe, but there’s more…

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The originally-scheduled session has been deferred one week for us to perhaps regain some sort of equilibrium after the recent nightmare disorientation playing out right now in the Middle East. Let us first set expectations by saying it would be presumptuous for us to suggest the goal of the session is to arrive at some sort of definitive answer. We’d be taking a big step simply to pose the right questions.

Highland member Matt Query has provided a very readable historical reference point, citing the rhetorical question posed by Sam Harris (i.e. what would the adversarial parties do if they had the absolute enabling power) as context for the parade of horribles we are now witnessing and is the subject of our discussion.

Let us first stipulate that, at least until the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel was the heroic and democratic underdog struggling for its very existence in the vast and hostile Arab wilderness. For a couple of thousand years, Jewish morality presupposed a kind of victim's righteousness, the special blamelessness of those without great collective power.

That basic sentiment seems to have somehow morphed over the decades with the growth of Israel’s relative military strength. Some of the vitriol recently expressed against her by certain segments of the world comes across as anti-semitism dressed up to look like righteous indignation. It is certainly not for the rest of the world, meaning, implicitly, the historical tormentors of Jews, to presume to give moral instructions to the Jewish people…

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Somewhere in the deep recesses of your soul you must have imagined what your life would have been like – call it a temporary release from the life sentence of the mirror, an anti self – but for certain life decisions you’d made. Perhaps it was an early career choice. Maybe it was whether and whom to marry.

It is sometimes said that big decisions are emotionally made and intellectually justified. Ben Franklin, on the other hand, advised the best course of decision-making was to rely on explicit, conscious thinking i.e. divide a sheet of paper into two columns, writing over one “Pro” and the other “Con,” wait three days, put down hints, and after a day or two of no additional considerations decide accordingly (focus article (What Science Says About Decision Making). Spock surveying the universe.

The article, in support of what Franklin had labeled “prudential algebra,” makes the central argument: “There is no free lunch when it comes to tricky decisions; you have to do the thinking. The alternative, delegating decisions to the lower reaches of the iceberg and hoping that the unconscious will decide fate for us, is misguided.” The remainder of the article addresses and ultimately discounts evidence that some “ghost in the machine” is there to guide us…

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The reason the term kafkaesque is often overused and misunderstood is that it had been introduced to many of us sophomores (i.e. wise fools) by means of difficult allegory in those bizarre stories -- you mean Gregor Samsa wasn't a real cockroach?

That eponymous term came from the dark recesses of Franz Kafka's soul after a life defined by struggle, whether against time (early 20th century), place (dark Prague), religion (Jewish), citizenship status (immigrant), occupation (insurance clerk), and family (especially father).

That's too bad as we tend to experience its underlying themes – the fear, isolation, and bewilderment of a nightmarish dehumanized world -- only in our post-puberty real world. In a sense, the term has become the "representative adjective of our times" NYT 12/29/91 The Essence of "Kafkaesque".

Any of you Kafka scholars out there (didn’t think so) might like to dive into his life and writings, which came to light after his best friend chose to ignore the dying man’s final request to burn his works Kafka Agonistas. The rest of us may share any of our possible experiences of anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness, often in the context of an administrative setting, where we have felt somehow powerless in the face of the nonsensical…

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Some time ago a book was published destined to sell more copies over the ensuing two centuries than any book bar the Bible. That time ago was 1486. The book was Malleus Maleficarum (latin: Hammer of Witches), explaining how to identify, capture, torture confessions from – and eventually kill – Satan’s handmaidens.

It was during such time and context that the pope issued an edict known as the "Doctrine of Discovery" (only recently rescinded by the Vatican after 500 years) asserting that European civilization and Western Christianity were superior to all other cultures, races, and religions (Doctrine of Discovery).

Our focus article (The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy) sees that doctrine as the root of the belief this country was divinely ordained to be the promised land for European (and, by extension, all) Christians. It further maintains this matter continues to play out today and will likely be a determining factor in the 2024 elections.

James Baldwin, ranked as one of the top African American writers, may have had that in mind when he labeled “white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” History, you see, rather than a series of discrete events, is all part of an overriding narrative, animating our previous MM discussions surrounding Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project…

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The notion that memory is but a weird elastic was captured by Lance Morrow in this portion of his essay The Fire Hose Of History:

“Robert Frost wrote a poem called ‘Out, Out —-’ in which a boy using a buzz saw to cut stove wood is momentarily careless and cuts his own hand off, and then dies of shock. The others in the farmyard are stunned. But Frost ends the poem with an interesting chill:

And they, since they

were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”

Such it is when it comes to so much of history as even that so-called “a day that will live in infamy” eventually faded into little more than a factoid as we, not being the ones dead, so quickly turned to our own affairs. To the young, Vietnam today might just as well be the Punic Wars. So it is when it comes to the grand sweep of history. So it is when it comes to individual lives.

So, then, whence comes this vague sense of one’s importance, of significance, of permanence? Maybe think in terms of life as a kind of performance art – believing other people are watching you, judging you, thinking about you. They aren’t. They’ve long turned to their own affairs. I probably wasted three decades thinking otherwise…

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Anthropologists tell us the instinct for group identity is rooted in some tribal need for the mutual survival and preservation of a common culture. Maybe. But such seems somewhat anachronistic outside, perhaps, biker gangs preserving their outlaw existence.

We’d once discussed an expanded view of “tribalism” from The Tipping Point with its take that human brains are simply not adapted to working with large populations and thus the need for some combination of hierarchical schemes, stereotypes and other simplified models to understand so many people.

Thus born, synthetic affinity groups. How else to explain the ridiculous, sometimes rabid, loyalty demonstrated when it comes to a professional sports team where the players are simply readily replaceable corporate piece-parts and the only constant is the uniform (“How ‘bout them Broncos”)….

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"Barbie" as a litmus test: women were advised by one film reviewer to dump their partner if he fails to "get" the Barbie message; to that, men might be advised to preemptively head for the exits if that take-away message is to simply reassign some asserted historical patriarchal role to women. Move over, Ken, it’s retribution time for the years, the centuries, of male domination and oppression. After all, revenge is a dish best served cold.

What can leave the movie-goer somewhat off balance is the way the film conflates two issues. On the one hand, it might be viewed as an indictment of any exploitative social structure. Retribution would thus be seen in the same way that, say, the bourgeoisie deserved every bashing it took under Soviet communism as the Zhivago family retreated to a corner of their Moscow mansion where the proletariat abused their former masters and broke up the furniture for firewood.

The film’s literal coloring (ubiquitous pink), however, would suggest something more targeted i.e. the deconstruction of masculinity itself. People come in two models: women, good, nice; men, the heavier, hairier life-form. The “manly” virtues (bravery, strength, discipline, and, egad, the very idea of machismo) remain admirable only by being quietly reassigned to women. The best a man can say for himself is that he is harmless.

Like Ken…

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Generational bookending: at one end, a generation represented by archetypes of lives well lived, about wisdom and accomplishment . . . . at the other end, a generation represented by archetypes of life's yearning for itself, about fulfilling human potential. How do values and wisdom pass between generations?

The two nonagenarian archetypes who embody the spirit of accomplishment need no introduction:

Member Oak Thorne, Yale graduate, is practically an institution in his own right, having founded and operated Boulder's Thorne Ecological. He is all about mentoring young people having also served as an admission liaison for his alma mater

Member Bob Davis, Harvard-educated Phd economist, called to Washington D.C. in the early 60s, alongside the so-called Kennedy whiz kids, to take lead positions in the Department of Interior with a focus on economics and the BLM, spending time in Africa and other parts of the globe…

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Prometheus was the Greek mythological figure best known for having defied the Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge, and civilization. He was condemned to eternal torment for this transgression by being bound to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver only for it to grow back overnight so that it might be eaten again in a daily cycle. In the Western classical tradition, Prometheus represented human striving which carried the risk of overreach or unintended consequences.

American Prometheus is Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning biography of a man – J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb – consumed by such striving. It was he who pulled this unimaginable nuclear fire out of Einstein’s quantum Olympian blackboard equations to unleash such existential power that it’s synonymous with the very term Armageddon (or nuclear holocaust). The biopic Oppenheimer, released last week to wide acclaim, was based on that story.

You need neither to have read the book nor have watched the film, however, to appreciate the many underlying moral issues raised by that "event" some eighty years ago. Our discussion piece is An Extended Interview With Christopher Nolan as the director of the biopic discusses his painstaking effort to faithfully capture the science and the ambiguous nature of the man behind the program known as the Manhattan Project…

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In 1947 W.W. ("Mac") Brazel discovered some unusual debris -- tinfoil, rubber strips, and sticks -- on his New Mexico ranch. People have been talking about it ever since. The military fostered the initial intrigue by claiming the recovered debris was from a "flying disc" only later walking it back with explanations centered around a weather balloon, then a top-secret project to detect Soviet nuclear testing, then a balsa wood frame carrying a radar target.

Too late. The July 9, 1947 headline in the Roswell Daily Record blared "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch In Roswell Region." Mr. Brazel helpfully added he did not believe that the debris was from a weather balloon.

The so-called Roswell incident became the centerpiece of all sorts of fear, speculation, intrigue, fascination, projection, and conspiracy theories, as the United States and other countries became enveloped in a "flying saucer" craze. “UFOs” have fired the imagination for some seventy-five years now.

The term UFO has actually been neutered by the more scientific “Unidentified Anomalous (previously, Aerial) Phenomena,” the official name given for subsequent sightings. Ongoing investigations are classified as either "identified" with a known astronomical, atmospheric (or otherwise human-caused phenomenon) or "unidentified" meaning there was insufficient information to make an identification with a known phenomenon. The latter category makes up six percent of total sightings…

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Do you recognize him in others or perhaps in yourself? Meet “Roy,” a masters student, whose perfectionism (as reported by his professor) led to his undoing (Roy):

His work became ever more dazzling and the delays in submission more protracted. When he came to see me a week before the deadline for his final dissertation, I spotted an angry rash across his forehead. In some alarm, I asked if he was well.

“It’s fine,” he snapped. “I just rub away at the skin when I’m stressed, that’s all.” I then noticed that his nails were bitten past the quick and his fingers had swollen red pads. I directed Roy to the student-counseling service ... Roy’s counselor helped him stretch [the deadline] until the following January.

Just before Christmas Roy came to see me, unkempt and staring glassily into the middle distance. There was no chance of getting his dissertation completed in time, he told me. By now I had learned the art of gentle remonstration. This was a Masters dissertation not his life’s work, I pointed out. It didn’t need to be perfect…

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A serious question posed to you vacation travelers: Is the going still good? The environment has changed since we first addressed the matter seven years ago (MM 11/21/16 Is The Going Still Good?) with the observation of 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

So why the need to travel? To penetrate mysteries? The earth scarcely withholds any secrets anymore, or at least not otherwise easily discoverable without all that expensive motion. For the trophies? For the bragging rights? Because it fosters some new forms of understanding? . . . .

. . . . which, as we addressed in the featured focus piece from that previous session: It may be a narcissistic fallacy of travel to imagine that one's mere passing through sets up a charmed understanding between traveler and native, or even a bare comprehension. A kind of Heisenberg Principle usually goes to work: the observation of visitors alters the behavior of the observed, sometimes in ugly ways. Theodore Roosevelt, age eleven, recorded a story in his diary of the family's grand tour in 1869. The Roosevelts tossed small pieces of cake to a crowd of Italian beggars: "We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it." Like chickens, like pigeons in the park.

That same youngster, by the way, grew up to experience an altogether different level of travel as chronicled in River Of Doubt, the featured book in one of our pre-MM book club discussions, describing Teddy Roosevelt’s 1914 post-Presidency exploration of an undiscovered tributary of the Amazon. The number and the magnitude of the perils faced by that exploration party defies description but consider this: provisions were gone; the starving men were reduced to dynamiting the river to stun piranha; one man collecting fish, held another in his mouth; stunned fish comes around and bites off man’s tongue. Now that’s a travel experience…

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In the Arab world, there is a widespread belief that if a child is too beautiful or brilliant, s/he may attract the evil eye (Hasad). Parents are sometimes advised to avoid posting pictures of especially pretty babies in order to protect them (click: Evil Eye).

While perhaps it was an evil eye that was cast upon a certain kindergartener pageant queen in Boulder on that tragic Christmas day in 1996 -- call it the Jon Benet Ramsey effect --  Western culture generally bestows great privilege upon the beautiful. They tend to get more parental attention, better grades, more money, and overall satisfaction from life (click: Moral Hazards Of Being Beautiful, text also linked here).

Research seems to suggest that physically attractive people often cultivate self-serving beliefs in their superior power and status, even goodness, in a world that is fair and just and rewards merit. In short, unacknowledged entitlement. Just spend seven minutes here with Tina Fey (The Beauty Bubble).

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John Donne's sonnet Death, Be Not Proud is a reflection on mortality, presenting an argument against the power of death. Addressing Death as a person, the speaker warns Death against pride in his power. Such power is merely an illusion, and the end Death thinks it brings to men and women is in fact a rest from the world-weariness of its alleged "victims." The speaker further deflates Death's ego by calling it a "slave," beholden to such lowly, despicable earthly things -- like the things chronicled in our focus article How Not To Dig Your Own Grave, reflections on mortality by a human identification expert.

The author chose her career out of some uneasy feeling she should do something significant in her life. Her choice provided access to the endlessly fascinating hidden corners of America. She became an advocate for the voiceless, the dead. It’s up to you to decide whether all of that is something significant.

After fifteen years she echoed the sentiment of the speaker in Donne's sonnet -- a sense of relief for the victims, whether they be Bosnian war dead, the homeless, crime statistics of all ages and social standing, or even the specimens of her first encounter as a 22-year-old graduate student practicing a niche forensic discipline called Forensic Archaeological Science – applying the scientific rigor of archeology to crime scene work…

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Some years ago Constantin Reliu dropped out. He left his home country for a decade in Turkey. He lost all contact with his family. His wife sought and obtained his death certificate. Mr. Reliu returned. He appeared in person to appeal the finding. Appeal denied. It was time barred -- too late, ruled the Romanian court, he would have to remain deceased. His life becomes caught up in a Kafkaesque construct – now you see it, now you don’t (Who Are You?).

Mr. Reliu, very much “alive,” no longer existed, at least in the legal sense. We might now probe the meaning of existence in a different context – that of technology or, more specifically, the world of AI with the power to create virtually what the law, in Mr. Reliu’s case, presumed to cancel by declaration. The presumptive “you” may someday be exposed, created, transformed and, yes, canceled.

As a start, a website of four years ago This Person Does Not Exist renders, almost as quickly as you can click, random hyper-realistic portraits of completely fake people. We have also explored the degree to which AI has enabled deep fakes to the extent a “non fiction” book about Russian hackers was so real with its compelling narrative, extensive interviews, and vivid pictures that its authenticity remained totally unquestioned for months. The fact of its fakery was only revealed after the Norwegian “author” confessed, his broader point having been made (MM 1/24/22 Brave New (Fake) World). This example turns out to have been little more than a warm-up of things to come…

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