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Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
Later |
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Why Overseas Call Centers Are No Fun
As you guys both know, I can sometimes be a bit of a slob, above all in the prolific effusion of crumbs I generate when eating. My keyboard, a special model provided by Bloomberg, has long had the keyboard equivalent of dandruff. Turn it upside down and a gentle snowfall of food flakes blankets the desk. This morning, I delivered the coup de grace, somehow contriving to spill milk -- from a cereal bowl, don't ask me how -- into it. I rang up Bloomberg tech support to order a new one, which they usually provide for free. Since it was well before New York business hours, I reached their Singapore call center. I explained that my keyboard had ceased to function properly, and the representative started to ask me questions as she filled in whatever interal form Bloomberg requires be completed before sending out a new keyboard. She got to the final question: "describe the problem with the keyboard." I paused for a second before replying: "It appears to be lactose-intolerant." The representative repeats back to me, "lactose intolerant" as she types it into her terminal. No sense of humor! We'll see if I get a new keyboard for free this time...
[4/22/03 08:25] |
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Your poignant photo montage leads me to ask if some cultures simply produce more angry people. I don't mean that the circumstances people in that culture face make them angry, but rather given a fixed set of provocations, people in certain cultures will march, chant, flail, burn flags, while in other cultures the provoked merely shrug their shoulders. Arab culture has to take the prize for the angriest people. True, their culture has fared poorly in the last few centuries. Compare them to the Russians, though, and you'll have to agree that Arab culture has enjoyed something of a cakewalk. Yet, you very rarely see Russians taking to streets or even ranting and raving individually. Zhirinovsky for that reason was seen to be such a prodigious innovation in Russian politics.
How can we explain this choleric gap? Is it the relative abundance of intoxicating liquors in Russia as compared with the dryness of Dar-al-Islam?, Do people immitate their gods, the Arabs their wrathful god, the Russians the more merciful god of Orthodoxy? You would think that a religion as vivid a picture of the afterlife as Islam has would breed patience and resignation. Alas, it takes very little to set the Arabs off. For the sake of thought experiment, let's say that the creation of Israel constituted an injustice. Even so, on the scale of twentieth century iniquity, we are talking about a relative misdemeanor. The Arabs lost a narrow strip of lightly populated agricultural littoral. They gained independence on territory that holds something like 2/3rds of the world's known oil reserves, reserves that other people's capital and know-how had discovered and developed. Probably half a dozen Soviet nationalities got deported en masse, not next door to a culturally similar neighbor (and a UN camp), but to gulags several time zones away. (And, while, technically speaking, Siberian oil reserves are enormous, their discovery occured only recently). Nevertheless, it's the Arabs who are angry. I'm puzzled.
[4/20/03 09:30] |
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The question about what message our invasion of Iraq sends to other dangerous regimes is an interesting one. We can deter dictators from certain behaviors, but we can't deter them from existence. If we attack a regime because its existence is obnoxious to us, then, as you note, Doug, every dictator will feel immensely threatened and hasten to acquire nuclear weapons. Of course, the line between existential and behavioral offense is a bit fuzzy. We've tended to use a proxy: the line between domestic and international actions. The idea is to leave a certain amount of space for a dangerous regime to indulge itself so that it risks losing something if it tries to misbehave outside of it.
Let me make two observations on this strategy. First, Clinton's bombing of Serbia probably put paid to the notion of regime immunity for domestic actions. Milosevic, like Saddam, had a homicidal history of invasion and plunder; and as with Saddam, the U.S. (and the rest of the international community) did not try to topple him at that point. The U.S. starting raining bombs on Serbia after Milosevic did not agree at Rambouillet to Albright's scheme for Kosovo, a province of Serbia, and clearly an internal affair. Leaving aside the question of whether in the specific case of Kosovo BEFORE the U.S. bombing started Milosevic was clearly in the wrong, it clearly fell far short of what he did during the breakup of Yugoslavia. At the time, I argued that the U.S. was risking a very perilous unintended consequence in the message it was sending to other rogue regimes. Before Kosovo, a dictator could feel fairly certain that internal repression along the lines of Kosovo would not elicit a U.S. military response; afterward, the dictator faced a destabilizing uncertainty about what might trigger a U.S. response. A dictator might rationally respond by seeking security through other means -- namely pursuing WMD, which itself might conjure a U.S. attack; but if an attack might come anyway, unpredictably, a WMD program could be worth the risk.
Second, I think the Bush administration realizes it risks at least reinforcing this destabilizing notion through the Iraq invasion, and as a result it has taken steps to mark Iraq as, as you say, Doug, a sui generis situation. The attempt to link it to Sept 11 -- sort of a sui generis event in itself -- is one way, even (or maybe especially) if the causal link is itself tendentious. It's sort of a way of saying that right now is an exceptional time and the issue of the U.S. and the Middle East is exceptional. It was not mad Koreans but rather mad Koran-toters who took down those buildings. The somewhat surprisingly laid-back reaction to the North Korean revelation of its uranium enrichment program may serve the same purpose.
Whatever the influence of this invasion on the future decision calculus of dictators, though, we should take a moment to recognize what has been accomplished for the people of Iraq right now. It would take a hard heart, indeed, not to feel an uplift of joy at the sight of Iraqis dancing in the street around the ruins of a toppled Saddam statue.
[4/9/03 13:07] |
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Yeah, sorry I fell off the wagon there. I want to thank you guys from abstaining from war commentary -- for a week I went cold turkey on all media and was happier and more productive than I'd been in a long while. Since then I've tried to keep surfing etc. to a minimum, and noticed, of course, an inverse relation between amount of surfing and happiness/productivity. Still trying to keep it down. But feel free to post whatever you like.
Ben H., I didn't mean to imply that Castro is as bad as Hussein; he certainly isn't. Only that people who think refraining from war is an obviously and immeasurably better way to defeat tyranny are deluded. Today the Villejuif magazine, put out by the Communist-run city council, came out. The cover is a smiling white dove holding an olive branch in its beak, with some anti-war slogan. Sure. All we have to do is refrain from invading, and birds will chirp and the children will sing and the torturers in Saddam's dungeons will quit and apply for social-worker jobs. Whatever.
The truth is that, while I object to this war against Hussein, I could envision one I supported. ("Une meilleure guerre est possible!") This war is America's fuck-you to the Arabs for September 11 and to the rest of the world for standing in our way. Not that this is necessarily your motive, Ben, or any given Bush adviser's, but it's the motive that underlies most public support for it. The most telling statistic of this war isn't the number of bombs of category X dropped, or the number of people in class Y to suffer fate Z, it's the number of Americans who think Saddam was directly involved in September 11. (42%, according to a February poll by the New York Times/CBS.) The media have whipped Americans into a state of fear and rage. And yes, Fox News is a main culprit (Damn you, Rupert, why couldn't you have stuck with "Melrose Place"?). It's weird and I'm not sure why it happened. I was full of fear and rage after September 11. Like everyone. I'm not proud to admit it, but when I saw pictures from Afghanistan of Taliban soldiers on their knees begging the Northern Alliance to spare their lives, and then getting shot in the stomach, I cheered: "Suck on that, motherfucker!" Rage and hatred are bad and I repent of them, but still, there was nothing to do but wipe them out (serenely). The Taliban and Al Qaeda really were inextricably linked. They were actively preparing to kill our civilians. They had to be stopped.
But then the fear and rage should have subsided. After we wiped out the Taliban, why wasn't there closure? Just because Osama got away? Because the anthrax mailer got away? Because the Arab world as a whole did not issue a formal apology? All those things, yes, but those things aren't sufficient. I think the White House and the media thought it was to their advantage to keep the rage and fear alive. They did not come to this conclusion at a meeting in a secret chamber out of an Oliver Stone movie, but a thousand people making a million little half-conscious decisions kept the fires burning for more than a year. (There's a good article in the recent New Yorker -- largely responsible for restarting my war interest -- on why and when Bush decided to take out Saddam no matter what. Conclusion: it's quite a mystery!) The media never stated any outright lies about Saddam organizing September 11, but it perpetuated the fear and rage and oblique connections that led to the 42% figure quoted above. (They also led to you, Ben H., admitting your fear of promotional-snack-distributors, and to your "parallel Iraq-Osama threat" argument below, which is so clunky it causes some versions of Netscape to crash.) Combine this with Bush's active contempt for the rest of the world throughout his tenure (you know the list), combine it with the U.N. debacle, combine it with France's preference for standing smugly on the sideline over helping the U.S. find a compromise and keep itself from shooting itself in the foot, and you get a war that history, outside and possibly even inside America, will remember as unjustified aggression.
The war I would support starts in January 2001 with George W. Bush implementing a generous internationalist policy. It continues in January 2002, after the Afghan war, with George W. Bush convoking a serious world summit on a comprehensive solution to Mid-east problems. (Even the U.N. itself has admitted in a recent report that the Arab world is horribly backwards and needs to reform.) It continues with some kind of world consensus that Saddam is a despicable tyrant who must be overthrown, if the Arab world is ever to escape its miserable state. Overthrown regardless of his cooperation with various U.N. demands. If France refuses to agree, force it to insure us monetarily against Iraqi attacks, along the lines of the ingenious scheme you suggested a while back.
The unconditional overthrow is a key point; one of the main reasons the current war is bad is that it sends no good "message" to other dictators. We told Saddam: follow our orders or die. He followed our orders -- deny it if you want, cite Powell's presentation if you want, but there's just no evidence of a WMD program. But we're still going to kill him. So the message to other dictators, e.g. the North Korea guy, is: if we start getting tough with you, you'd better get some nukes, and fast, 'cause it's the only way to save your sorry ass. I know that the overthrow-Saddam consensus I just proposed isn't exactly a obediance-reinforcing one either, but it would make clear that the Iraq problem is sui generis. "We will remove Saddam because the larger and terrible problem of the Mideast is insoluble otherwise, not because any general principles force the removal of dictators." Anyway, once you have this consensus, and Saddam sees the entire world arrayed against him, he's less likely to hold out, or to take heart in the "hang in there old buddy!" messages coming from the Vatican and the Elysee. Even if we have to go in with troops, we do so under the blue flag, and America avoids incurring the hatred of the world. Which it is incurring under "Operation Reap the Whirlwind" or whatever this one is called.
[4/9/03 11:05] |
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Gentle pressure over the course of a generation may well prove the appropriate course for Cuba. It does not pose the same dangers as Iraq. The closest Cuba has come to invading other countries is providing support for largely unsuccesful rebel movements in part of Latin America. Cuba does not have a meaningful program to develop weapons of mass destruction. To contain Cuba, the U.S. does not need to base troops in a country where their presence provokes hostility. Cuba is the last holdout in a region which has adopted, for the most part, the norms of open society. I hesitate to distinguish between tyrranies lest the distinctions take the appearance of praise, but the very fact that there ARE poets, librarians, etc, in Cuba who are recognizably members of the opposition places is a marked contrast to Iraq. Baghdad would not bother with a trial and an announced sentence, but would simply shoot dissenters at the first peep of complaint. Many Cuban activists are written of as being "in and out of jail." The second preposition would not apply in Iraq...
Hey, Doug, I thought we had a moratorium on war commentary! Had I known otherwise, I would have been ranting and raving all week!
OK, to your point that you don't know what it means to "be" rather than to "have been" against the war. On the train back from Westchester, I saw a woman with a big button demanding, "No War in Iraq!" As we exited, I pointed to her button and said, "in about 3 days, you'll have your wish."
[4/8/03 20:51] |
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A Totally Irenic Post
The English language has some spectacularly evocative names for diseases. The national talent for coinage, though, is not today apparent. Rresent onomastic practice with respect to new maladies runs toward bland acronyms. A virulent new respiratory syndrome rips through Asia: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. What happened to spirit of creativity in the face of plague that brought us "mumps", "measles", "chickenpox", "glanders", and, my personal favorite, "shingles" ? Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS, may describe a sickness with precision, but it does not evoke its manifestation with anything near the vividness of "mumps." The scientific establishment now claims naming rights, and its precision, while helpful in treating and understanding diseases, produces a kind of bleaching effect when it comes to naming them. Before scientists identified the AIDS virus, the first African communities striken by it came to call it "Slim", probably reflecting the wasting it visited upon its victims. The Spectre of Slim Stalks San Francisco makes for a much better headline than the equivalent with "AIDS." Maybe its palpable creepiness would have changed some people's behavior and saved their lives. Any ideas for a better name for this new coronavirus sickness than SARS?
[4/1/03 14:10] |
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As promised, a link to Lissajous.org where I put a new cryptic puzzle called "War Distraction". I highly recommend using this and other methods to avoid thinking about the war. I have cut myself off from all media for three days and counting, and it's done wonders for my mood. For all I know the war is already over. Let me know when it is -- then we can discuss who was right about the wisdom of starting it.
[3/27/03 17:53] |
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Exactly, right, Ben. On Friday, the press spoke knowingly of a "wave of steel" which would be upon Baghdad in a day. The military commanders tried to suggest such predictions bubbled over with excessive optimism, but they went unheard, drowned out by embedded yammerers. On Monday, we had another Guadalcanal on our hands. The military commanders remonstrated that the campaign was running largely on target. Now, which of the two sets of commentators has the credibility problem?
I spent the weekend in Milan for IADB meetings. I noted on my shuttling around the city that from many windows hung rainbow colored "PACE" (peace) flags. Walking down one street, I saw an Arab woman in hijab wearing the flag around her shoulders. I suggested to my colleague that we, too, should wear flags. I'd have an American flag reading "SHOCK" and he could sport a Union Jack reading "AWE."
[3/25/03 07:08] |
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Decepticon/Iraqi Menance Brought to Book
Optimus Prime joins the fray!
Optimus Prime is heading out to the Middle East with his guard unit on Wednesday to provide fire protection for airfields under combat.
Prime took his name from the leader of the Autobots Transformers, which were popular toys and a children's cartoon in the 1980s.
"I got a letter from a general at the Pentagon when the name change went through and he says it was great to have the employ of the commander of the Autobots in the National Guard."
[3/21/03 17:45] |
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As America prepares to launch bombs, France is launching consumer products, and I am CLEANING UP. Walking around the Latin quarter, which teems with not-yet-brand-loyal college kids, I've been handed Crunchy Snickers, Axe deodorant (meaning "axis", as in "axe du mal"; I just applied some and it has clearly been designed to mask fourth-day-post-shower odors, not that I want to resuscitate the canards about French hygiene, which hold true only of the bums, who do in fact smell hideous, they should really hand out Axe to them), and something called Bolino from Maggi. Maggi is a French or Swiss brand, which may or may not now be owned by Nestle -- I don't feel like looking it up, doesn't matter. Their mainstay product is, I believe, a soy-based sauce with beef extracts, much prized by the Vietnamese. Anyway now they're launching Bolino, some kind of instant pasta bolognese to which you just add boiling water as in those self-contained ramen cups. Sounds scary; someday I will feel sufficiently unenthusiastic about cooking dinner to try it, and I'll let you know. Speaking of not wanting to cook dinner, today I was tired and my back hurt, so I picked up a rotisserie chicken on the Rue Mouffetard, something I rarely do. (Aside: you may remember that the loser guy whose box of childhood stuff is returned by Amelie Poulain buys his rotisserie chicken on this road too.) So I get home and cut it up and the inside is still raw for Christ sake! I mean what the hell? You guys only cook a hundred of these things every day for decades on end! Have you discovered no general laws relating cooking time to degree of doneness? It's called inductive reasoning! Look into it! I can imagine many conversations I might have within the guy tomorrow ("Rose, tu m'entends? Rose comme le con de ta putain de mere!") but of course I won't say anything. I get pissed off so rarely that when I do I usually stammer for lack of practice. I screamed at this EasyCar clerk the other day when we went to look at possible wedding locations but my French was not quite fluid enough under pressure to be effective. Anyway screaming never really accomplishes anything. So we had "refried chicken" tonight. Not such a terrible fate, all in all. Beats having your face shorn off by an exploding Tomahawk warhead, for example.
John G. passes on this interpretation of Homeland Security Department icons: very funny. These icons are not the worst of that Department's inanities, nor the most horrific of its horrors. I don't want to start a long debate about the merits of this department; I just want to ask whether, if Team Bush had deliberately set out to create the most authentic B-movie backdrop of Orwellian dystopia, it could have done any better than that logo, that font, that terror-alert scale in that font. Fuck. I swear I'm ready to vote for anyone who'll take on Bush. Hillary? Show me the booth and hand me the stylus. Damn right. I'll take a Department of LovingKindness and a Secretary of Meaning over this bullshit, if only to keep the pendulum swinging.
[3/19/03 17:44] |
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I have been watching on TV (soundless, on the trading floor) the coverage in the run up to war. Some have compared the media representation of Gulf War I to a video game. I thought at the time that the comparison was facile. This time, however, the coverage so far has followed to a tee the Super Bowl pre-game show format. A graphic of each weapon wooshes across the screen, followed by a pop-up box detailing its vital statistics, while the commentator drones on in the background about its more subtle features, much like John Madden expatiating on the virtues of a particular defensive back. Over and over, various experts break out the screen-pen and draw all sorts of lines and arrows over the map of Iraq. We have the sound off here, so whenever I see such graphics on CNN, I cry out, "the key, Pat, for the Iraqis, is to stop that devastating American running game early in the first quarter."
[3/19/03 06:58] |
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Why attack Iraq? Because of the connection between Osama and Iraq. THat connection (probably) isn't one of direct support, but of parallel threat. Saddam, like Osama, bears emnity against the U.S. and is empowered beyond his rationality. Why attack now? I suppose the case for the timing is weaker than the case for attack generally, but I still think it is a case that can be made; the timetable is not merely a product of Bush's personality. Didn't some rock-n-roll pacifist say that the best way to ensure our safety is to, "not have enemies." Well, every day we have soldiers in Saudi Arabia, we make more enemies. And, while no one knows how far Saddam is from making a nuclear bomb, we can assume that bomb-development is governed by a Poisson distribution and that the cumulative probability of bomb-development increases with time. THe opponents of a attack on Iraq do not disagree merely with the timing, but with the act itself. Let's say we give more time to the Blix the Balanced. If the Swedish Clouseau's team finds nothing, the French will say that Saddam doesn't have WMD and sanctions should be lifted. If they find something, they'll say that the inspections are making progress and should therefore continue. By their logic, that we should not attack Iraq is an unfalsifiable proposition.
People suggest that Bush is using 9/11 to justify at attack on Iraq the timing of which is essentially arbitrary. I prefer to think that the decision not to attack, or really the many decisions not to attack, from the moment Bush Sr. pulled the plug on a march to Baghdad, to each time Saddam flagrantly violated the sanctions, to his assassination attempt on Bush Sr. -- these were the arbitrary decisions.
Cryptics:
HOMEOPATHY is the only one I can get.
On the topic of odd food retailing ideas, do you guys remember Webvan? Thousands of internet punters turned over their money to an enterprise that promised to make money by delivering fresh groceries to customers' doors without charging for delivery or marking up product prices above their supermarket level. Not surprisingly, the venture failed, though not before supplying my non-driving girlfriend's grocery needs at low cost for over a year. The deterrent effect of Webvan's flameout didn't last long. A new enterprise called "Fresh Direct" is trying the same thing in New York. They promise $50 in free food on your first order. I see their refrigerated trucks blocking side streets all over my neighborhood. How the heck can this capital-intensive model compete in a city where every grocery store has an army of West African illegals who'll wheel a grocery cart to your building? If I kept food in my apartment, I'd order from them and keep whatever Fresh Direct lagniappe they'd give me alongside my UrbanFetch and Kozmo t-shirts.
[3/16/03 21:19] |
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I want three full-scale global nuclear alerts, with every army, navy, and air force unit on eternal standby!!
Agreed, Osama Neutron cannot be deterred, and must be killed or captured -- but why the attack on Iraq?
"Shocking and awing" is not Bush's sole goal, of course, but it's prominent enough to make the Mr. Neutron parallel striking. The causes of the coming war -- and it looks like Bush may have the temerity to ignore the personal e-mail I sent him, and start the war anyway! -- are so complicated that when I hear the slogan "Stop the war! Spare the children!", I can only picture the pitiable schoolkids of tomorrow having to memorize the canonical list of "Reasons for the Second Gulf War", just like we did with World War I. Will HarperCollins's textbook-airbrushers have the balls to keep "Bush's contemptuous, obstinate, short-sighted messianism" in the list? Don't count on it.
Cryptic Relapse
I haven't seen much action on my &-lit there, and I think it's my fault -- I'm less and less satisfied with it. The answer was "Z + ESTER"; maybe you can come up with a way to salvage it. Here's a non-&-lit clue, less bad:
To make friends quickly, greeting Yugoslav dictator very loudly (3,2,3)
Dao is actually helping me make the first full crossword I've made in years. I'll post it on lissajous.org soon, hopefully in time to provide a diversion from war-related surfing. (Although I think the lissajous.org server may be shutting down soon -- may have to move it.) Highlights:
Homeboy with boron deficiency taking train from Newark to Manhattan to get alternative medicine (10)
Ayn Rand hero has license to kill oaf (6)
Tea, Earl Grey -- Iced
Imagine a man named Picard at the helm of a futuristic enterprise, clean shiny brightly-lit spaces with sliding doors everywhere, where any food you want can be reconstituted in a small box. Tomorrow's fantasy? No, today's reality -- in France. You see these Picard stores all over the place, and all they sell is frozen food. Seems like a weird unifying principle for merchandise, but then so did the 99-cent store. What's even weirder is that these stores are in France -- where food is a religion, artisanship is a religion, and artisanal food is like some nutty, cuckoo super-religion. How does flash-frozen factory food find a market here? "Secret subversive pleasure" is one theory, but the food is actually good, and the customers show no outward signs of "fighting the power". I think the answer is that artisanal food is mostly a religion of the elite, like stoicism was in Rome, and ordinary people don't get all that worked up about it to begin with.
We had some time to kill a few weeks ago, so we went into a Picard, and ended up buying some chicken cordon bleu and tuna rostis. Verdict: chicken okay, rostis good. If we ever threw a party, I think it would be a Picard theme party. It would be agreeably kitschy, the catering would be a snap, and if the microwave pooped out from overuse, well then, we'd just reverse its polarity.
[3/16/03 16:27] |
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Quick, find Teddy Salad! He'll know where Osama Neutron is hiding!
I don't think the U.S. is scaring anyone, at least anyone we'd like to scare. To take fright requires a rational outlook. The super-empowered individuals that menace the U.S. are imperturbable loonies. Team Bush understands this, which explains why half-century old strategy of deterrence must be abandoned. If we can't deter an enemy, what course is left to us? We can surrender, we can bribe or we can pre-empt. Islamofascists don't want anything we've got, we can't surrender (except for the French, first state of Eurabia, whose instinct for surrender has extended even to demographics) since our offense is existential, so we're left with pre-emption. The Soviets did not represent as thorny a strategic challenge. The free world and the Soviets squared off in their respective corners and threatened unthinkable consequences if the other side breached the boundary between them. But with respect to Islamofascism, the world literally isn't big enough for the both of us.
[3/16/03 13:30] |
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I was thinking of Monty Python's "Mr. Neutron" episode this morning, not only because it's one of the high-water marks of the human spirit, but because the American Commander reminds me of the Bush administration. Recall that Mr. Neutron, "the most dangerous man in the universe", the original super-empowered individual, is on the loose, and the Americans are trying to track him down.
Commander: Yes?
Carpenter: Captain Carpenter here, sir. We've been on red alert now for three days, sir, and still no sign of Mr Neutron.
Commander: Have we bombed anywhere? Have we shown 'em we got teeth?
Carpenter: Oh yes, sir. We've bombed a lot of places flat, sir.
Commander: Good. Good. We don't want anyone to think we're chicken.
Carpenter: Oh no! They don't think that, sir. Everyone's really scared of us, sir.
Commander: Of us?
Carpenter: Yes, sir.
Commander: (pleased) Of our power?
Carpenter: Oh yes, sir! They're really scared when they see those big planes come over.
Commander: Wow! I bet they are. I bet they are. I bet they're really scared.
Carpenter: Oh they are, sir.
Commander: Do we have any figures on how scared they are?
Carpenter: No ... no figures, sir. But they sure were scared.
Commander: Ah! But it's not working?
Carpenter: No, sir.
[3/16/03 03:54] |
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Hola amigos. Been a while since I rapped at ya. I've kind of been in an energy trough here. Although I recovered physically from two bouts of flu this winter, I don't know if I've had a full moral recovery. Maybe the fact that I let my gym membership lapse is partly to blame; maybe it's this God-damned Iraq thing. (I'm so sick of it. Somebody just wake me up when our army has definitively kicked Saddam's ass, or gone home.) On the gym front, I think I expected my gym company, which was bought by Club Med last year, to send me a flurry of renewal offers with bargains asymptotically approaching their expected cost of servicing me. That's how it works in the Homeland after all. But no: just one indifferent form letter, which did not even mention specific renewal options. Vive la difference. Current plan is to check out the gym of the university where I'm signed up for Vietnamese classes. Thanks to subsidized education, I seem to get a year of classes,12 hours a week, plus gym benefits, for about 150 bucks. Vive la difference encore. Now you know why they cannot afford an army.
[3/9/03 18:56] |
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From penises we turn to the philosophy of Henri Bergson. I finally found a used copy of "La pensee et le mouvant" today (along with two other books, for all the added apartment-clutter of which Dao will scold me, forgetting to count her blessings since that is the average daily haul of Ben H's girlfriend). Just in reading the introduction I had the amazing thrill, admittedly half-expected, of meeting a precursor, of meeting someone who was driven by roughly the same thoughts I'm trying to capture in my own book. (Nietzsche gushed about this feeling but I can't remember who he thought his precursor was. Anyone?) Bergson is a model philosopher. He writes cleanly and vividly. No jargon. Palpably cares about the subjects he discusses. Puts his finger right on the central knot of issues. Sort of like his contemporary William James, then, whom I saluted a while back on my old Web log. Maybe there's a pattern here -- maybe all turn-of-the-century philosophers wrote and thought so lucidly. To some extent, sure. This nasty strain of jargonotoxin-producing inanity infects our era, and not theirs. But I must give Bergson his particular due. Like James, he finds exactly the doors to those dark rooms where the most central problems lie, and like James he shows where these rooms fit into the overall structure of our intellectual life. Bergson goes father, though, and in broad colorful strokes he paints what he senses must be in these rooms. He sketches the solutions that he knows would be revealed if we could somehow turn on the lights. He projects vivid metaphors into the spaces where science and analysis can put only blackness:
This is how metaphysics was led to seek reality outside of time, beyond what moves and changes, outside, therefore, of what our senses and our minds perceive. From this point it could only be a more or less artificial arrangement of concepts, a hypothetical construction. It claimed to go beyond experience; in reality it only substituted, for full moving experience, for growing and deepening experience full of wonders, a dried, pinned, emptied extract, a system of abstract general ideas, pulled from this experience, or rather from its superficial layers. You might as well expatiate on the cocoon from which the butterfly escapes, and claim that the flying, changing, living butterfly has its raison d'etre and its perfection in the deadness of the shell. Let us sweep away this cocoon; let us re-awaken the butterfly; let us give back to movement its mobility, to change its fluidity, to time its duration.
Now passages like that will probably only impress you if you already bear a grudge against the "metaphysics" Bergson fingers, only if you feel yourself in constant danger of being crippled by those analytic habits that Mill calls "a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues". Most Americans are not in this class, needless to say. But the French, Bergson's own countrymen, certainly are. They are paralyzed by conceptualizing, by intellectualizing; they're a nation of graduate students, of Hamlets. Which makes it extremely curious that Bergson is relatively forgotten here.
-- France prides itself on its secular, scientific worldview.
-- France produced Lagrange, Laplace, Poincare, and other heroes of the mechanist worldview.
-- These heroes' exploits have long been taught in French schools, so that this mechanistic worldview has seeped into the French consciousness.
-- Hardly a French thinker exists who wants to grapple with the depressingness of mechanism. They either ignore mechanism today, or simply report "dispassionately" on its most horrible instances and pride themselves on their unflinching "realism", or claim to be "way beyond" mechanism, launching into dissertations on aleatory intertextuality and regulons in the mediasphere.
-- The French invented cinema, which naturally suggested a world-as-sequence-of-frames view. (Bergson explicitly makes this movie-world view his opponent. See also Agnes Varda's "Gleaners" with this in mind -- you'll see why I found it so depressing.)
-- But the depressingness usually bubbles to the surface: the French are the depressed people par excellence. Check out Camus and Sartre. And if you think they're a strictly 1940s-1950s phenomenon, check out the current popularity of Michel Houllebecq and Catherine Millet, or the previous popularity of Zola. (Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, dates a peculiar "Parisian" brand of pessimism to 1850).
-- The idea that the world is just one of a fixed set of mathematical structures pops up surprisingly often in popular culture, e.g. Bernard Werber's best-selling "L'Arbre des possibles" and the new leftist slogan "un autre monde est possible".
From all this I infer that the French desperately need someone to explain how the world might not be one of a fixed set of mathematical configurations, to suggest that not all possibilities for life "pre-exist". This is precisely Bergson's core message. The French desperately need Bergson. Why have they let his memory fade so much? Not because he wrote too dryly. Not because he wrote too technically. Not because he was an outsider to the French academy (in fact he had a super career). I can't quite figure it out. Maybe he was in a no man's land between "cool" "advanced" philosophy (e.g. the phenomenologists) and political philosophy and history-of-philosophy, so that not enough disciples furthered his work. Maybe because France thinks of the mechanist worldview as its cherished possession, and clings to it to the detriment of its own mental health.
Maybe it's also because, despite the fact that Bergson opens this book I just bought with the sentence "what philosophy has lacked most is precision", his ideas are quite imprecise, his books filled with beautiful, almost poetic metaphors rather than with scientific-sounding words. I've been spending most of my time here in France doing what I can to make Bergson's core idea -- the world as the creation of new possibilities -- more concrete.
Maybe it's also because Bergson, a proper scholar, the opposite of a self-promoter or self-help guru, drew too little attention to the importance of his ideas to everyday happiness. Sure, he would say (and believe), the denial of mechanistic philosophy is important, but he never tried to "vulgarize" his work. He was no Alain de Botton, and is far as I can tell he had no Alain de Botton at his service. Call me vain; my dream is to further Bergson's work this way too.
Maybe it is also relevant that Bergson's family was not ethnically French -- Jewish father via Poland, Anglo-Irish mother. Who does this guy think he is, solving all our problems?
P.S. I found Nietzsche's precursor, about whom he talks in the letter, written from Sils Maria, which I'm pasting below.
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now,was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine?namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect? but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange! Incidentally, I am not at all as well as I had hoped. Exceptional weather here too! Eternal change of atmospheric conditions!?that will yet drive me out of Europe! I must have clear skies for months, else I get nowhere. Already six severe attacks of two or three days each!! ? With affectionate love
[2/28/03 13:05] |
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Ben A. |
Ben H. |
Doug |
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Pop some popcorn, boys!