Come to think of it...

Municipal Government

2012-02-11T12:26:00.000+02:00

Lapland Landscape with Power Line, Muonio, 2010

Last week, the Finnish government dropped a bit of a bomb. They presented their plan for reforming municipal government in Finland. That would entail cutting down the number of municipalities from around 350 to around 70. That's a pretty huge change, and it will certainly not happen exactly as they're planning. Municipalities are tied to local identity, which makes such a reform explosive to start with; what's more, there are going to be losers as well as winners, and the losers are going to fight against it tooth and nail.

It got me thinking about municipal government. It doesn't get the press of international or national government, which is a shame because it has more impact on people's everyday life—and individual people have much more power to affect it, too. I discovered that I'm actually woefully uninformed about how municipal government even works in Finland. Yet this is important enough that I think I ought to have some opinion about it.

Municipal government is the foundation of any working democracy. In Finland, most everyday government business is run at the municipal level. Municipalities are responsible for most roads and infrastructure, for healthcare and social services, and for education. All this is paid for by municipal taxes, which are levied on income and on property. This stuff matters, arguably more than which party is is sitting at the head of the table in the Parliament House.

Our municipalities are a bit of a mess. They are what they are for historical reasons. They're of wildly different sizes, in terms of population, surface area, and wealth. They also often jealously guard their independence, and get along poorly with neighboring municipalities. This has led to oddities like the municipality of Kauniainen, which is an 8600-strong enclave inside Espoo, the Western neighbor of Helsinki. Kauniainen will be violently opposed to the municipal reform, because its population consists of relatively well-off people, which means that they pay two and a half percentage points lower taxes than the residents of nearby Vantaa, while getting a good deal better services than them.

Too small municipalities lead to feedback cycles which see wealthier people migrating to richer municipalities and poorer people left in poorer ones. Because the cost of the services the municipalities need to provide doesn't change all that much, that means that the richer ones will be able to lower their tax rates even as they improve the services, whereas the poorer ones will get caught in a cycle of deficit spending, tax hikes, and deteriorating services, which naturally further drives the gentrification/ghettoization process.

Not good.

To patch up this problem, we have the Byzantine system of "state portions"—a misnomer, really, because it's actually state-mandated redistribution of tax receipts from richer municipalities to poorer ones. It's Byzantine because the criteria that determine who pays and who receives are very complicated, and they result in bizarre and frankly unjust situations where the relatively middle-of-the-pack Vantaa pays about 70 M€ a year, whereas the regional capital of Tampere receives twice that.

The upshot is that everybody agrees that the system stinks and should be reformed: the poor municipalities because they're getting the sticky end of ghettoization, and the rich ones because they're having their tax receipts siphoned off and inefficiently redistributed. The trouble is that nobody can agree about exactly how it should be reformed. Everybody's in favor of merging other municipalities, voluntarily of course, but our municipality doesn't need any merging, thank you very much.

To make it even more complicated, there are the politics of language. Finland has a Swedish-speaking minority of about 4%. It has certain special privileges defined by law. The Swedish-speakers are concentrated along the Southern and Western coasts and in the archipelago, in mostly bilingual municipalities, most of them majority Finnish-speaking. The Swedish-speakers will oppose any changes to the municipal system that would dilute the proportion of Swedish-speakers in a municipality. Kauniainen, for example, is nearly 40% Swedish-speaking. Many of them would consider it a cultural death sentence to be absorbed into a Greater Helsinki, with maybe 6% Swedish-speakers. I sympathize; they're a relatively small minority, and without constant effort to maintain their language, identity, and culture, they would get absorbed into the Finnish-speaking majority pretty quickly, which would be a real loss.

But it does make things more complicated.

Yet another complication is the long-standing Finnish policy of providing—or aspiring to provide—the same level of services everywhere in the country. This is a great deal more expensive (per capita) in the sparsely-populated East and North of the country. This ties in with the greater goal of keeping the entire country populated, which is bound to the question of agricultural subsidies. All of this will hit us splat in the face when considering municipal reform.

Personally—and this is probably no surprise, coming from a reddish-green city liberal—I think we need to rethink these goals. The Finnish population is aging and declining, and there aren't all that many jobs in agriculture anyway. If someone wants to raise dairy cattle north of the Arctic Circle, I have nothing against it—but I don't think it's right that they expect someone to pay for the electricity to heat the stables, or the fuel to transport feed and milk across long distances, or the extra feed they need because they're too far north to grow enough of their own. If we could manage a gradual migration of people from the widely dispersed countryside to regional centers and let the wildernesses go back to the wild, I would not think that a bad thing—as long as we did everything possible to take care of the people being displaced. Property values would fall to zero due to a change in politics, and it would not be fair if the people affected were left high and dry. And if someone wanted to live in the emptied countryside despite the relative lack of infrastructure and services, I would have nothing against that either.

Finnish politics have gotten interesting again, and with this municipal reform, they're going to get more interesting still. We're embarking on a major experiment at social engineering. Stay tuned, there will be lessons for everybody. I hope they won't be too disheartening.

Inventory of Political Positions

2012-02-02T14:43:00.000+02:00

I follow politics a quite a bit, and have opinions about lots of stuff. I sometimes wish I had a nice, coherent framework to plug everything in, but that's regrettably not the case. In fact, I rarely even take stock of my political positions as a whole, rather than simply looking at things individually. Therefore this post—an attempt at making an inventory of sorts, of that part of the furniture of my mind that is labeled 'politics.'

Who knows, I might even come up with more posts on specific topics, since this is a very high-level overview.

Self-indulgent, but then what are blogs for?

Fundamental principles

I am a reformist, not a revolutionary. Revolutions are messy. Sometimes, but only very rarely, a system is so oppressive and locked-down that a revolution is the only way to reform it, and even more rarely, the system resulting from the revolution is clearly better than the one that preceded it. Usually revolutions get co-opted by the counter-revolution, or end up with tyrannies that make almost everyone even worse off. They are also difficult to roll back when things go wrong. Most revolutionary ideologies are also based on idealistic views of what a 'perfect' society ought to be like. I don't believe this can ever work. You can't wipe the slate clean. Every society is what it is; a hugely complex system of values, institutions, habits, relationships. Smashing the institutions will do little to change the substructure from which they grow, and that substructure does not change quickly.

This does not even consider the acute suffering inflicted on a society by violent revolution.

A reformist approach, on the other hand, is based on incremental change. We work with what we have, trying to make it better. We try something out and then roll back the change if it didn't work. It also lets you gradually evolve the social substructure towards something better than what it is. It is slow, but the cost of making mistakes is lower, and the process itself is inherently less violent than sudden revolutionary change.

The General Will Return, Beirut, 2005. This was from the first of the Occupy movements...

As to the direction of change, I believe it should always be towards greater individual liberty. By "liberty" I mean something like "the number and quality of attractive options available to individuals in a society." This is considerably broader than the way most people who bandy the word nowadays use it. Libertarians, for example, tend to see liberty in narrowly economic and legal terms—freedom of contract, a free market, property rights. I believe that the liberty to stay at the Ritz or sleep under a bridge is a pretty shabby kind of liberty. If the accident of birth loads the dice so heavily that one baby has more than even odds of spending a part of his life in prison, whereas another is more than 75% likely to graduate from college, then that is wrong, and we ought to do something about it. Property rights, the market, and freedom of contract should be viewed in context of the power relations created and maintained within them.

There are two opposed ways of thinking about liberty. Classical liberalism and libertarianism take the view of negative liberty: they define liberty as freedom from interference by political power. They assume that a human being is intrinsically free, with that liberty abridged by laws, which therefore should be minimally intrusive. I subscribe to the opposite view. I think of liberty in terms of positive liberties—attractive options available to people at any given time. I believe that humans are intrinsically unfree, bound by chains of laws and social convention, blinkered by incorrect or overly narrow worldviews and lack of education, and walled in by lack of opportunity. Political freedom is only one aspect of this whole. The right to vote isn't worth much if the candidates are selected from among an oligarchy; equality before the law won't help if you're born in a slum and treated as a criminal from birth; citizenship means little if all your energy has to be directed to brute survival.

These approaches lead to different ways of thinking about the role of politics in the world. A libertarian would want to hack away at the restrictions on liberty explicitly imposed by laws; someone like me would try to identify the chains, walls, and blinkers that restrict the real choices people have, and use political power to break them.

This brings us to another important concept: equality. There can be no liberty without equality. Or, rather, liberty and power are conditional on each other. If power—economic, political, or other—is distributed unequally, then so is liberty. The flip side is that measures to reduce inequality will also limit liberty. This makes the maximization of liberty a very complicated optimization problem. I do not pretend to know what the optimum distribution of wealth or power to maximize liberty is, but I am certain that almost all societies that currently exist have too much inequality in both.

I do not always see eye to eye with libertarians.

Climb to Power, Helsinki, 2005

Society

I am socially liberal. I believe consenting adults should be free to live however the hell they please, as long as their choices don't deprive other consenting adults of similar freedoms. When such freedoms collide, we should arbitrate them in a way that maximizes them for the largest number of people. We must be extremely careful of restricting such choices, and should only do so for excellent reasons. When we do so, I prefer incentives and disincentives over a simple permitted/forbidden dichotomy.

Take narcotics, for example. It's clear by now that the current strategy of prohibition just isn't working. Thousands die in the war against drugs that's been going on for a century now, yet it's perfectly easy to get access to illegal narcotics anywhere. A far better approach would be to treat drug abuse as a problem to be managed rather than an evil to be eradicated. We already do that for tobacco and alcohol. Why not drugs as well?

I believe that the state and public institutions should be religiously neutral, and people should have the freedom to believe, practice, and worship as they please—or not, if they so choose. I believe a secular society is in the advantage of believers and atheists alike, and is in fact the only realistic way to construct a society in today's ever more interconnecting and multicultural world. Finland has two state churches, and I would like to see them eventually be treated the same way as any other organization of civil society; however, in practice both religious freedom and freedom from religion are very well realized even with the current arrangement, so I see no pressing need to push for formal separation of church and state at this time.

I believe in the right to national self-determination, and I believe this is best realized in a state that is nationally neutral, just like freedom of and from religion is best protected in a religiously neutral, secular state. States should not privilege one national group over another based on a mythos that declares that state as 'belonging' to that 'nation.' Minority nationalities should be afforded special protection, and given enough room to create cultural safe spaces so they're able to maintain and develop their cultures. Language is a practical matter. It is not practical to provide all services in all languages, so there must be a variety of regional languages of trade and administration in addition to local and national languages. The educational system must see to it that everybody has sufficient fluency in these languages in addition to their own.

I don't think the politics of sexuality even deserves much of a mention here, the conclusion is so obvious.

I'm a great believer in education. Nothing expands genuine freedom of choice quite as much as education. Democracies cannot function if the public is ignorant, and, conversely, oppressive polities can only persist as long as they keep their subjects in the dark. The best thing about Finland is our system of primary education. Our universities are nothing much to shout about, but we do a pretty fine job of making it possible for anyone, regardless of birth or location, to get a solid primary education that opens up possibilities elsewhere. That shows everywhere, and makes for a solid foundation for the future. Without good primary education, everything else will erode. The future of our world rests on the shoulders of primary schoolteachers.

Ecology

I believe the most pressing problem humanity currently faces is the planetary ecological crisis. We are in the middle of—and the cause of—one of the mass extinctions that punctuate the history of life on Earth. I have no doubt the Earth will recover and evolution will repopulate the niches we have cleared, but that will take a million years or so, and will not be pleasant for us. We desperately need to stop the destruction of biodiversity, anthropogenic climate change, and unsustainable use of non-renewable natural resources.

One very positive development has been the rapid emergence and evolution of biological agriculture—that is, agriculture that is not based on massive use of phosphate fertilizers, monocultures, and chemical pesticides and herbicides. It will soon reach similar levels of productivity as chemically-driven factory farming. The big agricultural conglomerates have started to sit up and take notice, and to shift a part of their production to such methods, for economic rather than ideological reasons. People who are in it for the ideology hate this development (and, for what it's worth, I much prefer produce farmed by such people to produce farmed by a Monsanto subsidiary, biological or not), but if it's ever to make a real difference to the ecology, biological farming must become the norm rather than an indulgence for bobos who can afford it.

Besides which, phosphates will start to run out in another few decades. If we haven't figured out how to manage without them by then, we're kinda screwed.

As an aside, this is why I think vegans—ideological vegans, mind, not just people who only eat plants for some other reason—have got it wrong. Animals are a necessary part of biological agriculture. Fields need to be fertilized, and if we don't use phosphates, it'll have to be manure. It's not likely that we'll keep animals around just for the poop, and I don't see how that would be any more ethical than keeping them for milk, eggs, or meat. Perhaps recycled human waste will get a part of the job done too, but that does have some public-health issues that need sorting out.

At this point, this is just an aside, naturally. The current situation is that we eat way too much meat, so for the time being, the more vegans, the better. I think it'd be better if most people ate less meat, though, than some people eating none and the rest carrying on as before. I also think we ought to steer ourselves and each other to eating better meat—sustainably produced meat, rather than the factory-farmed stuff that imposes such awful conditions on the animals as well as having all kinds of other nasty side effects. It'll cost more, for sure, but then we wouldn't have to eat so much of it.

Crow Taking Flight With Frozen Treetops, Helsinki, 2010

To stop climate change, we need to solve our energy problem. I don't believe it's likely that we'll persuade people to consume so much less that it'll make a difference soon enough; they'll only do that when they have no choice. Therefore, we should aggressively pursue any avenue that will wean us off fossil fuels.

Before the Fukushima disaster, I believed nuclear power would be a necessary part of this mix; however, it put a serious dent in my faith in our maturity as a society. I still think there's no technical reason we shouldn't be able to produce a great deal of our energy from nuclear power, but if even Japan isn't able to do it without cutting the corners that gave us Fukushima, perhaps we really shouldn't be doing it at all, and reserve nuclear power for the applications where there really is no other choice—planetary exploration, for example.

On the other hand, recent developments in the cost and efficiency of solar and wind power, as well as relatively simple ideas on improving the efficiency of distributing and allocating electrical power, have convinced me that we can get rid of fossil power without having to rely on nuclear. I asked many years ago why we don't just cover the Sahara with solar panels and run off that. This is now on the table, and, even better, the initiative is coming from the people living there rather than neo-colonial corporations wanting to profit off them.

But we really do need to kick the carbon habit, pronto. My vision for a post-carbon energy economy has us producing the electricity we need with solar and wind, buffering fluctuations with various methods such as pumping air underground or water uphill, and especially by producing hydrogen from water with electrolysis. The hydrogen can then replace gasoline and other chemical fuels we need to run motor vehicles.

I don't think biomass is a good idea, at least the way it's done now, because it relies heavily on factory farming chemically fertilized monocultures. If there's a way to sustainably harvest biomass from the sea or similar, then maybe.

Ultimately, we do need to change our social mores to something more sustainable as well. Ever-bigger TV's don't really add to anyone's happiness. We need to shift our consumption patterns away from throwaway material goods, back to fewer but more durable, more repairable goods and especially services. There simply aren't enough primary resources to keep producing junk at the rate we do.

And yeah, we do need to learn to recycle much, much better than we do now, too. Our landfills are full of perfectly usable primary materials. Eventually we'll have to start mining them. Before that, we need to stop filling them.

Economy

Economically, I'm a middle-of-the-road Euro-style market socialist. I believe the market is the best way to allocate scarce goods, if conditions permit a healthy market. By "healthy market" I mean a market that has a large number of participants participating on a relatively level field, with no huge information asymmetries, and nobody strong enough to be able to be predatory, and no externalities big enough to do much damage.

These kinds of markets are relatively uncommon, and they are not stable. Markets tend to concentrate wealth and power, which produces cartels, oligopolies, and monopolies. This is the situation in which the world finds itself once again.

Hauling Goods, Istanbul, 2011

Therefore, I believe that political power must regulate and police the markets pretty intrusively. Cartels, oligopolies, and monopolies must be broken up. Infrastructure which leads to 'natural' monopolies cannot be handed to the market at all; it must be maintained by direct public control. Externalities such as pollution must be priced in. Only governmental power can do this, and it can only do it effectively if it avoids regulatory capture by market participants.

This is why democracy—the active participation of informed citizens in governance—is so vital. Rejuvenation of our democratic traditions is the biggest political challenge we currently have. Without it, nothing will stop our slow slide back into feudalism.

There is at least one area in which most people would probably label me a 'radical.' This is intellectual property. I believe the system of copyrights, trade marks, and patents that define the way we relate to intellectual property is broken beyond repair. It has become a mechanism for rent-seeking. I'm willing to be convinced that we could still take it and go back to its roots, where patents and copyrights were short-term monopolies granted to the originator of an idea to encourage further innovation. However, at this time I'm skeptical about this possibility.

Transparency is vital to democracy. Our current system of intellectual property is hostile to transparency. It inhibits the dissemination of information, where it should encourage it. What's more, the means to enforce intellectual property are also admirably suited to controlling information flows and monitoring people's behavior. Measures like SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA corrode the very foundations of the open society that we've worked so hard to build. Whatever you may think of the notion of intellectual property itself, the measures copyright- and patent-holders have taken to protect it are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

Therefore, I believe it would be better to scrap the idea of intellectual property altogether, allowing complete freedom to copy, modify, and disseminate ideas and information artifacts. This would, naturally, obsolete most economic arrangements built on the notion of intellectual property, but I'm quite certain new ones would emerge. There were composers, artists, actors, philosophers, scientists, inventors, and writers before the concept was formulated.

Being a reformist, I do not believe we should (or could) do this overnight. We must give enough time for these new models to grow.

In the meantime, I still don't pirate.

International relations

Another area of radicalism of mine has to do with international relations. I detest the notion of the nation-state. It was one of the worst political inventions ever, and I hope to live to see it being buried in the graveyard where duchies and kingdoms now reside. The idea that one 'nation' has the 'right' to a given piece of land has given us the worst wars and the most lethal massacres ever. I am in favor of any measure that weakens it, whether it's immigration, emigration, secession, federation, or confederation... as long as it does not involve weakening democracy, which I believe is even more important. I am an enemy of the nation-state. All of them.

This does not mean that I am against the concept of national identity, or national self-determination. On the contrary. I just believe very strongly that nations should not be given armies to play with. National self-determination is best, most fairly, and most safely realized in the context of a nationally neutral state, just like freedom of religion and protection of religious identity is best realized in the context of a religiously neutral, secular state.

Most of my positions on international politics spring from this principle. I am an internationalist. I would very much like to see the European Union weather its current crisis and emerge from it stronger, stabler, and above all more just and more democratic than before. I do not see any compelling reason why the current one-size-fits-all model of integration should be better than a model of concentric rings of deeper integration, contingent on the maturity and capacity of the polities joining it.

I think this new and improved EU should be built around Germany. They're the natural center of gravity of the EU as it is, and since we've pretty thoroughly wrung out the militarism from their culture, it'd be simplest just to rename it the Bundesrepublik Europa and have the rest of us join as new Länder, starting with North-Western Europe. Naturally, the door should be open for any country to join if it meets stringent entry criteria.

Besides, the eagle is cool.

I see no reason to deny countries like Turkey or Russia the possibility of joining either, if and when their polities and economies are similar enough to Germany's to make it feasible. In the meantime, I think we ought to have concentric rings of weaker integration, allowing countries to participate in the European project with whatever they have now.

I also believe any region should be able to de-integrate, should its people wish to do so. By 'region,' I mean any geographically and politically defined unit, from the municipality on up. A Europe of free cities loosely bound in a federation or confederation would not displease me at all; in fact, one historical precedent of ours that deserves a close look is the Hanseatic League. However, should a region want to divorce from the EU, I would consider it a serious setback for the European project. Integration should proceed because it is more attractive than isolation; if isolation becomes more attractive, then the way integration proceeds must change.

I believe one of the fundamental mistakes of the European project has been integrating too many countries, too deeply, too fast. There are some countries within the Eurozone which should not have been admitted (or applied to join), and some countries within the EU which should have the same status as Turkey today. If we had more concentric rings, I believe these problems would have been avoided, and everybody would have been better off.

I am, generally speaking, anti-interventionist. Interventions have a terribly poor track record, whatever the motives. The Libyan revolution appears to have already gone sour, with the winners imposing much the same hardships on the losers as Qaddafi would very likely have imposed on them, had there been no intervention. I am not categorically opposed to them, however; I believe that should someone have been in the position to intervene in the Rwandan genocide, for example, they should have. But the bar should be set very high, and regime change by an external power should always be off the table, however odious the regime. Yes, this applies to Syria, Iran, Burma, even North Korea.

I do not believe international politics is, or ever was, a zero-sum game. Nor do I believe that the only guarantee for peace and stability is a hegemonic power calling the shots. We can make a multipolar world work. In fact, we must—like it or not, American pre-eminence is in the past, just like European primacy. On the other hand, I don't think China or India will be in a similar position any time soon. We're also far more interdependent than we ever were. The only way to go is to negotiate. It won't be easy, but jaw-jaw beats war-war, as some limey put it.

The future

We're currently living through several upheavals. There is the ecological crisis of climate change and resource depletion. There's the demographic crisis of transitioning from exponential population growth back to stable or even declining populations. Most of our societies will go through a period where there will be lots more old people than young ones, after which things will sort themselves out again. We have the productive capacity to get through it with no problems at all; the difficulties are about distribution. That big, graying demographic bulge built that productive machine. It is in no way unfair that we and our children will see a good deal of 'our' production redistributed to our comfortably retired elders. They've earned it, and we will inherit that machine in our turn.

Once these upheavals have played themselves out—in another forty, fifty years or so, perhaps; maybe I'll even live to see it—the world will look a good deal different. Ultimately, I'm an optimist. I think we'll muddle our way through. It won't happen by itself, though; we will need all our ingenuity for it. We've gone through worse, and we've never had the kinds of tools we do now.

In the meantime, I believe very strongly that we shouldn't neglect doing the kind of stuff that makes it worth being human. We should continue to stage operas, explore the Solar System, do big science, construct beautiful architecture, play football world cups, create computer games, and generally make the most of our time here. None of us have all that much of it, after all.

Globe East, by NASA. Photos by NASA are in the public domain. Wouldn't it be cool if everything was?

Coffee

2012-01-29T09:26:00.004+02:00

Girl Making Espresso, Helsinki, 2005

I really like coffee. At the office, it's the usual barely-drinkable drip stuff, although because of the sheer volume being consumed, from freshly-opened packages, so it's not actually rank unless it happens to be the dregs in the pot.

At home, however, I brew my coffee with a moka pot. There are a number of reasons for this choice. My wife doesn't drink coffee, and usually I only make one cup a day, in the mornings, sometimes two on weekends. That rules out devices that need to be used more or less continuously to work. Our kitchen isn't huge, which means that an espresso machine would take up rather a lot of space for little utility.

Real coffee snobs seem to look down on moka pots. I say they're deeply if understandably misguided.

A moka pot is a beast that needs to be tamed. Every model is individual, and behaves differently on different heat sources. The grind of the coffee makes a big difference, as does, naturally, the variety and roast of the beans. Beans that make for superb espresso might not work out all that well for moka, and vice versa.

The quantity of water matters too, but there's less wiggle room there. If the moka pot has a spacer that lets you halve the amount of coffee in the funnel, you can make something that approximates a lungo or americano by using the full measure of water for a half-measure of coffee.

The basics of making good coffee are pretty generally known. Use fresh, good-quality beans, grind them just before brewing, and clear the grinder of any stale grounds first. If you're making drip coffee or using an automatic or semi-automatic espresso machine, that about covers it—it will probably not turn out too bad whatever you do from there on out.

Not so with a moka pot. Moka pots are cantankerous creatures. If you're in an unfamiliar kitchen with an unfamiliar grinder and unfamiliar pot, the odds are that the first cup you brew is going to be pretty awful. In fact, I have a theory that the conventional wisdom about having to "break in" moka pots is a myth: the first cups taste bad not because there's anything wrong with the pot, but because you haven't yet figured it out.

The two variables that most affect the taste of a cup brewed with a moka pot are the grind, and how you've filled the metal funnel containing the coffee. There is no single "right" way to do this. It all depends on the beans, the water, and your heat source. The only way to get it right is to experiment, by making one adjustment at a time and seeing if it makes it better or worse. Here's how to go about that.

First, time it. It should take between 30 seconds and a minute and a half for the coffee to come through, starting from the first drops that come out to the time the crema stops flowing. The exact time varies. If it's faster than 30 seconds, your grind is too coarse or the grounds are packed too loosely and you'll end up with a watery brew, and if it's longer than a minute and a half, you've packed the coffee too tightly, and you'll end up with something that's very bitter, almost burned.

If the coffee is bitter or burned, either your grind is too fine, or you've packed the funnel too tightly. No moka pot needs tamping, like an espresso machine, but sometimes it is better to press down the grounds a bit. Others should just be filled up and smoothed out.

If the coffee is watery, you're using too much water, or your grind is too coarse, or you should pack the funnel a bit tighter, or you're using too much heat to blast the water through the grounds too fast. This can happen on an induction hob. I turn mine down to about 6 once the coffee starts flowing. Moka pots aren't intended to create the kind of pressure you get making espresso, and attempting to push them won't make the coffee better. It'll just make it less like a good moka and more like a bad espresso.

If the coffee is muddy, your grind is too fine or too uneven.

If the coffee is nice and aromatic, but has a "sandy" aftertaste, your grind is too fine.

The coffee beans—as long as they're fresh—only start to matter when you've got your brewing process about right.

A good coffee grinder makes a quite a lot of difference. The difference between good and cheap—even a cheap burr grinder from, say, Braun or Krups—is in how even the grind is. The cheaper grinders produce a lot of coffee dust mixed in with the grounds. These produce a muddy or "sandy" taste. That means that if you're fine-tuning your coffee with one of these grinders, you might not be able to extract all the aroma without getting the sandy aftertaste. Espresso snobs will tell you that it's a waste of a good grinder to brew the coffee in a moka pot. I say they've never had a good cup of moka.

Moka is not espresso, nor an espresso with more water in it. A moka is about the size of a lungo or americano, but richer and more aromatic. It's not as eye-wateringly strong as a short espresso. In my opinion, it does not mix well with milk, although you could make a passable French-style café au lait with it. A moka should be enjoyed straight, or perhaps with just a little sugar if so inclined.

A moka is not at all like drip coffee.

It is possible to make good drip coffee too, though. I know, because I've had it. Once. It was at a party hosted by some Colombians. They had brought their own coffee, from Colombia. I do not know what black magic they used to brew it, but it was good—aromatic, rich, and not at all watery or bitter.

As to beans, I find that I get the best moka from pure Arabica with a fairly dark roast. There's a Peruvian variety that you can find in some supermarkets here which is still my favorite, although I did try one South Italian blend with about 20% Robusta which was extremely good too; the only problem with that one was that it was so high in caffeine that my jaw would only un-seize around lunchtime. Beans are largely a matter of preference, although I doubt very many would find a moka made from, say, a light roast of Guatemalan coffee very enjoyable.

The equipment to brew a really good moka isn't anywhere near as expensive or space-consuming as the gear you need to make an equally good espresso. What's more, it lasts almost forever. Unfortunately, cheap stuff doesn't. I had a basic Krups burr grinder which lasted about ten years, after which time it was producing more dust than grounds and complaining while doing it. The replacement—which did cost a good bit more—produces a much better grind, and promises to give many more years of service. It also looks much nicer.

The same goes for moka pots. They don't really make much difference to the quality of the coffee, but they do have different lifetimes. I've broken the handle off a badly-made one, which had other bits starting to come off at the time too, after less than two years of daily use.

The classic aluminum Bialetti polygon lasts forever, but unfortunately can't be used with an induction hob. I've tried a few that can, before finding something that's truly satisfactory. It is a beautifully crafted hand-made object; heavy cold-worked stainless steel with a Bakelite handle, with everything, even the funnel, polished to a mirror finish. The way the funnel spacer works is especially clever—the floor of the funnel is reversible and held in place by friction, which means it'll stay put when knocking out the grounds. That moka pot is also one of the most robust pieces of kitchenware I've seen. I figure the odds are that it will outlast me.

Together, the grinder and the pot cost about one-fifth of the cost of one of those push-button fully-automatic espresso machines for the home. As luxuries go, that's pretty reasonable.

Not least, that buys you the pleasure of controlling every aspect of your own coffee, just as much as the most devoted of baristas.

Blue Remembered Earth: A Book Review

2012-01-25T17:06:00.000+02:00

I've been reading a good deal of new sci-fi lately, thanks to the efforts of the generation of authors writing stuff sometimes lumped under the New Weird and New Space Opera headlines. These include Iain M. Banks, China Miéville, Ken MacLeod, Hal Duncan, Hannu Rajaniemi, and a relatively recent acquaintance, Alastair Reynolds. I'm having just as much fun as when I first started reading sci-fi. Like, when I was eight, or thereabouts.

Alastair Reynolds's latest novel is titled Blue Remembered Earth, and it's something of a departure from his previous work. Reynolds is known for sweeping, epic, galaxy-wide (and occasionally even intergalactic) space opera. An additional twist comes from his professional background as a physicist: while the science is often wildly speculative, it manages to stay within the bounds of the barely possible better than most space opera, classic or New. In particular, he sticks to c as the cosmic speed limit. So no faster-than-light travel and no causality violations. Yet somehow he still manages to write up galaxy-wide ancient precursor civilizations, wars that span light-years and aeons, space battles that destroy entire solar systems, and the usual good, clean, space opera fun.

Blue Remembered Earth is painted on a smaller canvas. It is set only about a century and a half in our future, within the Solar System. Perhaps he finally ran out of epic in House of Suns. The more familiar locations, scope, cultures, and characters of the relatively near future are a welcome change of direction.

Reynolds also breaks out of some staid science-fiction conventions. For one thing, in his future world, the dominant cultural, economic, and scientific power is Africa, and all but one of his main characters (Jitendra, of Indian origin) are Africans. Like Ursula K. LeGuin, he doesn't rub your face in it; it's just that much of the action happens in the shadow of Kilimanjar, it's noted that the characters speak Swahili, and the only time somebody's race comes up is if it departs from the norm—i.e., s/he's Chinese or white.

Also, elephants.

I'm pretty much completely clueless about African cultures, so I have no idea how well—if at all—Reynolds has managed to work in cultural particularities of his Kenyan-Tanzaniyan protagonists. I have a suspicion that a Kenyan or Tanzanian might have written it in more strongly: as it is, the only things that struck me as unusual—other than the décor—were the family ties of the Akinya siblings and cousins. They are a good deal stronger than usually portrayed for typically individualist sci-fi heroes.

Blue Remembered Earth is an optimistic book. That's also a very refreshing change from the ever-grimmer dystopias of many current sci-fi authors, and indeed the sticky end Reynolds envisions for his own Revelation Space universe. In his future, humanity has managed to survive the Anthropocene—the near-catastrophic results of climate change—and has entered a new golden age. War is a barbaric feature of the receding past, crime and disease have been eradicated so thoroughly that an attempted murder in Finland or a death from cancer in Australia make the news in Nairobi, and the ecology has been brought back into balance. Colonization of the Solar System is well under way, with the ones too adventurous to live in the Earth's Surveyed Zones emigrating to more anarchic colonies on the far side of the Moon, or Mars, or even further.

Utopias make for pretty boring stories, though, so naturally there's a fly in the ointment. The story is a straightforward treasure hunt across the Solar System, to uncover a deadly family secret with the potential to change humanity's future, or perhaps destroy it. Yes, suitably epic again, in true Reynolds fashion.

I thoroughly enjoyed Blue Remembered Earth, and am looking forward to further instalments in the Poseidon's Children cycle, which the book begins. There are enough loose ends to make sequels possible, but also like most of Reynolds's work, the novel stands very well on its own. As all good sci-fi, Blue Remembered Earth has a lot to say about the world we live in, by portraying a possible future one.

Besides which, who wouldn't love spaceships and astronauts and Martian colonies and iceteroid mining?

Blue Remembered Earth was published by Gollancz on January 19, 2012. I read the Kindle edition. It seemed appropriate.

Socially Engaged Buddhism, Again

2012-01-22T09:06:00.000+02:00

Uku of Kajo Zendo recently wondered why there's so little discussion among Buddhists about concrete ways to alleviate suffering in society, exhorting Buddhist groups in Finland to get off their incense-perfumed asses and do something about it. Some discussion followed, and his polemic was even cited in Kotimaa, the Christian news site. All kinds of ideas came up, including a rather endearing one of getting together to knit wrist-warmers for the homeless. (Maybe they could knit some homilies on them. "Form is emptiness" on the left one, "Emptiness is form" on the right. That oughta cheer 'em right up.)

In other words, he discovered Socially Engaged Buddhism, as previously introduced by Bernie Glassman and several others.

I'm not a big fan of Socially Engaged Buddhism. Plain ol' socially engaged Buddhism is another matter. In fact, I think that a Buddhism that doesn't eventually nudge you to engage concretely with suffering around you is a pretty shabby kind of Buddhism.

Brad Warner has already addressed the question of why there's so little discussion of concrete ways to help people among Zennies much better than I ever could, so I'll consider some of the other points raised instead.

At the personal, everyday, "micro" level, helping people is pretty simple. You notice something that needs doing and you do it. It's usually something pretty trivial that you probably won't even remember later. Sometimes you don't even know that you're doing it; just being there with the right kind of vibe might make the difference between life and death—literally—for someone. Sometimes it's something a bit more dramatic and concrete, like dealing with an accident scene. But it really isn't, or shouldn't be, anything special. Just being a mensch, as the Yiddish word expresses it.

This type of helping doesn't really need much discussion about the how of it. The how happens moment to moment. "The hand reaching for the pillow," to borrow a phrase from Dôgen Zenji.

I believe that Buddhist practice done right will help you be more of a mensch, whatever names you call it: awakening your inner Avalokiteśvara, cultivating the paramitas, following the bodhisattva way. I'd even go as far as to say that if it doesn't, you're probably doing it wrong. But as Barbara O'Brien points out, I don't think you can force the pace.

Organizing helping activity is a whole 'nuther ball of yarn. Organizing it specifically around Buddhism is a big tangly knotty ball of yarn.

Organized aid work is not easy. It's a profession, and requires professional skills. It's a particularly hard profession at that, because you're face to face with massive amounts of suffering, with which come all the other dark sides of humanity. Suffering doesn't make people nice. Aid recipients aren't all doe-eyed innocent wonderful people ready to fall on their knees in gratitude. Some will try to cheat, steal, or rob; out of desperation or less morally defensible motives. What's more, receiving aid can be deeply humiliating. Nobody wants to 'accept charity.' The very act of being helped can perpetuate the problem you're out to ostensibly solve, and drive people deeper into misery.

Doing it right requires a deep understanding of the specific problems being addressed, excellent organizational skills, gobs of common sense, and massive sensitivity to the people being helped. I know people who have spent most of their lives doing such things, and one thing I hear quite consistently is that starry-eyed, well-intentioned amateurs can make a huge mess of things, quite often putting themselves in danger in the process.

Do I mean that there should be no organized helping at all? Of course not. What I do mean is that it is serious business. Competent professionals should be in charge, and amateurs should ask them if there's some way they can help. There are plenty of organizations that recruit amateur volunteers and get them to do stuff that is actually helpful and makes use of the skills they have. If you think you can do this better on your own, you are seriously deluding yourself.

Second, "intentional helping" of the kind Uku demands in his blog—"let's discuss how we can help people and then go do it"—has a trap. So you have a guilty conscience and feel you need to do something for other people. Great.

Trouble is, it's insanely easy to pivot from the wish to help people into the desire to make that guilty conscience go away. This makes it all about you and your guilty conscience again, not about whichever kind of suffering caused that compassion to spring up in the first place. Helping becomes just another way to masturbate your ego. So you knit your wrist-warmers or have a nice outing with your buddies helping people get the ice off their windshields or go pour cocoa at the Night of the Homeless, and then you feel you're a nice good person. If you have a tendency to assholishness, you'll very likely feel entitled to lecture others about their lack of social engagement too.

That's several steps backwards—your attempt didn't help much or may actually have done harm, you wasted some perfectly good compassion, and you turned into more of a prick to be around.

I believe that aid organizations based on religious identity are particularly prone to this kind of trap. That's because religions come with pretty strong ideas of what a person should be like. Buddhists are 'supposed' to be concerned about all beings; Christians are 'supposed' to love their neighbors (and spread the Gospel), and so on. People gravitating to these groups are likely to hold such ideas especially strongly. The aid organization becomes one gigantic circle jerk, and might well end up doing something that has precious little to do with alleviating suffering. So we get Buddhists buying live fish from the market and releasing them into lakes, which only condemns the already dying fish to a longer, more lingering death—and spreads diseases and parasites into new ecosystems into the bargain.

Secular groups consist of more diverse people with a wider range of worldviews and different reasons they give themselves for bothering. This makes them a little less prone to producing sanctimonious asshats, and a bit more likely to keep their eye on the ball.

This is why I feel strongly that we should prefer secular, nondenominational aid groups over religiously-defined ones whenever they are available. Less ideological baggage, less tribal identity, fewer hidden agendas, and more diversity of views, therefore more focus on the problems being actually addressed and less potential for turning the whole thing into a jerk circle.

I also concur with Huija, a commenter on Uku's blog: dharma centers should concentrate on doing what they do best, which is to provide a space for practice, and support the practice for people who for whatever reason make their way there. Organizing other types of helping activity on top of that is putting a head on a head; it'll just introduce massive amounts of complications into something that's already more complicated than you might think, probably won't even help, and might actually do harm.

Finally, creating a space for practice is already helping. It helps the people practicing, some of whom are in dire need of help. This has saved lives, and if the practice awakens compassion in the people doing it, it will have knock-on effects elsewhere. What goes around, comes around. This applies to kusala karma just as much as the more commonly encountered nasty variety of karma. If a dharma center continuously awakens more of Avalokiteśvara's eyes and hands, it is making a difference—even if the people helped by those hands never realize it.

So which secular aid organizations do I think are worth their salt? I'm not going to say. If you're genuinely motivated to support their work, with time, money, or something else, you will have enough motivation to find out about them on your own. Do your homework and make up your own mind. Or just watch this video of a dog who likes guitar. I can't get enough of it.

Enlightenment, Commonalities, and Differences

2012-01-19T07:55:00.000+02:00

We had a zazenkai last Sunday. It was very well attended; lots of new faces as well as familiar ones. Ari held a dharma talk about the notion of enlightenment, the way it's seen in our tradition, and some comparisons with other traditions, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. There was some conversation about the topic over tea as well.

It got me thinking.

One feature of Buddhist practice is exploration of a dimension of human experience that's often labeled 'mystical.' It consists of subjective, internal experiences that are extremely difficult to describe. There's art and there are descriptions that may or may not seem familiar, but conventional categories break down pretty quickly. It becomes increasingly problematic to say anything at all about them. People can compare notes, as it were, but I think this process only works at all face to face. Second-hand accounts—written down, sung, painted, whatever—are suggestive, but easily misunderstood.

These experiences can be powerful, even transformational, and to make things even more complicated, some traditions—including the one I practice in—make them a focus of the practice, which adds a quite a bit of baggage to them. Kenshô—the 'breakthrough' or 'enlightenment experience' or 'experiencing nonduality'—is kind of a big deal in Sanbô Kyôdan, perhaps more so even than Rinzai and certainly more so than in Sôtô, which also recognize the phenomenon and discuss it in similar terms.

Each of these approaches comes with its own neuroses. Rinzai can devolve into gung-ho macho 'leatherneck marines of mysticism' posturing, Sôtô can devolve into buji Zen—denial that there is any such thing as awakening or anything to awaken to—and Sanbô Kyôdan can devolve into neurotic socially-pressured chasing after kenshô. Eido Tai Shimano is Rinzai gone wrong, just as Genpo Merzel is Sanbô Kyôdan gone wrong, or funeral-director Zen is Sôtô gone wrong. Yet many manage to steer clear of the reefs.

The way I see it, mystical experiences in and of themselves aren't very worthwhile. At least they're no more worthwhile than any intense experiences. Their value comes from what they do. Being transformational, they have the potential to transform. Enlightenment as such isn't very interesting, but the enlightened activity that is said to flow from it is.

I think we're capable of a huge range of mystical experiences, as varied as the full range of our "everyday" experience, perhaps more so. However, because of the difficulty of sharing or discussing these experiences, and the baggage associated with them, it's easy to fall into all kinds of traps when attempting it. Here are a few I've run across more or less frequently that I believe are problematic:

Mystical experiences are all the same. What Zen Buddhists call kenshô, Catholics call theosis, Pentecostalists call being touched by the Holy Spirit, Sufis call fana, and so on.
Perennialism: the further idea that all religions are fundamentally 'the same,' as they are based on 'the same' mystical experience.
Mystical experiences are worthless. They're just brainstorms, no different from getting high on LSD or having some kind of epileptic fit.
Mystical experiences are the whole point of the exercise. Everything else is of secondary importance, the only thing that really matters is how "far" you've gotten.

'Spiritual' traditions induce, direct, describe, and interpret these mystical experiences. They do this in deeply different ways. Pentecostals touched by the Holy Spirit appear to acquire a set of behaviors that's rather different from those of enlightened Buddhists, or liberated Hindu yogis, or Sufi masters. They also describe the experiences in widely divergent terms. A Mahayana Buddhist will experience emptiness; a Hindu yogi will experience unity with iśvara, a Sufi will experience annihilation in God, a Pentecostalist will experience a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Even within single traditions, words may mean different things—kenshô, satori, and anuttara samyak sambodhi are all often translated as 'enlightenment,' but they clearly don't mean the same thing.

Relatively few people have had mystical experiences in more than one tradition, and even the few who had may simply be reinterpreting their old baggage, as it were. This makes it extremely difficult, perhaps impossible to compare mystical experiences. Whether the touch of the Holy Spirit and kenshô are 'the same experience' may be a fundamentally irresolvable question. All we have to work on are the secondary sources—the interpretations, the practices, and the descriptions. I don't even think it's a particularly interesting question.

The traditions that direct and make sense of them are very interesting, however. These traditions pose themselves very different questions, provide very different answers, and produce very different behaviors. These are worth looking at. For Christianity, the problem is sin and the solution is redemption; for Islam, the problem is pride and the solution is submission to God; for Buddhism, the problem is suffering and the solution is enlightenment. Different problems, different solutions, different interpretations, different behaviors. Even the importance accorded to mystical experiences varies enormously. It is, in my opinion, dangerous to carelessly blur the differences. Commonalities matter, but so do distinctions.

Yet I find the Zen approach of de-emphasizing interpretation also fruitful. The views are there, and they do matter, but they are held lightly. One effect religions often have on people is getting them to latch tightly onto the explanations or interpretations provided by the religion they practice. Relative truths become absolute; signposts become dogma, the map becomes more important than the terrain.

Vasubandhu wrote that all views are false. Yet he also wrote volume after volume of such views. Something to consider, that.

Solidarity with protest against SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T13:09:00.001+02:00

This blog is dark today in solidarity with the protest against SOPA and PIPA. They may be American bills, but they affect all of us. Stop them. That is all.

Musings on the Euro Crisis

2011-12-17T14:18:00.002+02:00

I've liked to snigger at the USA's apparent inability to govern itself out of a wet paper bag, in contrast to our competently-run social democracies on this side of the pond. The ongoing crisis of the euro has made it clear that I really don't have all that much to snigger about. This is a monetary crisis. It's about money. Money is not wealth. It's a representation of wealth. That means that there are technical solutions to it, whether it's about splitting up the euro into more reasonably functional currency areas, or coming up with a program to keep it together until the eurozone's economies converge enough to be one.

Yet we're clearly not able to come up with those solutions. We keep kicking the can down the road and hoping it'll go away.

I love the European idea. The EU and its predecessors have managed to bring an unprecedented period of stability, peace, and prosperity to what is historically probably the most war-ridden region in the world. Even now, we have countries queuing to join. It is a unique experiment in political history; a voluntary empire with no emperor and no single hegemonic people, family, religion, or political ideology. It's hardly surprising that it's not an easy thing to maintain, since we're in uncharted territory all of the time. I would really hate to see it go.

The EU can only function if it's democratically legitimate. Until now, this has been achieved—to the extent that it has been achieved—by making it a system of treaties between sovereign states, which are—in principle and, to a pretty large extent in practice, considering—democratically governed. The problem is that the EU has grown too big for this model. With 27 member states, the requirement for unanimity in all EU-wide decisions makes it practically impossible to govern. Yet there are situations that simply cannot be resolved without making decisions at the union-wide level.

This currency crisis, for example.

My big worry with the way it is being approached is that we've been drifting towards instituting precisely these centralized decision-making mechanisms without creating any mechanisms to ensure their democratic accountability. We know exactly what happens in this kind of situation. Corporate government. People with money will simply buy the levers of political power, and we will have governance of the banks, by the banks, and for the banks. That's great if you happen to be a banker. For the rest of us, not so much.

The whole point of democratic government is to provide a counterweight to unchecked economic and political power. It may not be a great way of picking honest and competent leaders, but it is the best way we have come up with to kick out incompetent and dishonest ones. I love Europe, but I love democracy more. We absolutely have to find some way of making it work without turning it into yet another permutation of corporatism. I don't really care all that much about how we do it. I'm willing to do my bit to pay for it.

Whatever we do, we must not sacrifice the European Union, which works, on the altar of the euro, which doesn't.

Talking Buddhism with Christians

2011-12-11T21:03:00.001+02:00

Ghost of the Cathedral, Helsinki, 2005

I stumbled into a pretty fun conversation the other day. It was on the website/blog portal of the major national Christian newspaper, Kotimaa. There was an article there mentioning that December 8 is Bodhi day for Buddhists. A short discussion in the comments followed, mainly between one individual asking "what does this have to do with Christianity?" and others pointing out that even Christians would do well to know something about other religions.

That had inspired a slightly humorous blog post, freely translated as "When the Buddha had an insight: fur real nobody ain't really nuttin' at all." And more discussion. Pretty good and surprisingly well-informed discussion too. One guy had a pretty good idea of what Buddhism is about, even though he admitted up front that he doesn't really understand it.

Also, Buddhists have a reputation that's way too good for their own good. That opponent of Buddhism seems to regard Buddhists as some kind of spiritual supermen:

That kind of hypocrisy wouldn't wash in Buddhism. They start by spending years learning to see people as people without discrimination and then express themselves in an extremely civilized manner. It would be nice to get a peek at some real Buddhist blogging.
– comment by Tauno J. Jokinen

Er. Right. Buddhists would never, ever get into petty fights on blogs. Way too much upekkha for that.

Hoo boy, if he only knew.

There was some more discussion about contemplative practices in Christianity, before it devolved into a conversation about how to eat an elephant. (One piece at a time.)

It's an interesting web portal, that. They host a very broad range of views, from hyper-conservative Biblical literalists to highly liberal voices. There seem to be a few atheist regulars there too, injecting sarcastic comments about "imaginary friends" and such. And, apparently, the aftermath of a massive flame war.

People will be people, it seems. Sometimes a peek over the fence is a good reminder of that.

Istanbul Impressions

2011-12-07T20:04:00.001+02:00

Flag Merchant, Istanbul, 2011

I just got back from a short jaunt to Istanbul. I had never been there before, which is kind of odd, really, because it's not all that far away—closer than Marseilles, for example. It is a quite an amazing place. Clichéd or not, it really is caught between East and West, a Byzantine history, an Ottoman past, a Kemalist present, and an unknown future. You can't help feeling that it's bound to return to its usual position of dominating the Mediterranean, like it did from Constantine the Great to Mehmed VI, with nary an interruption.

Now It's Time For Liberation Of East Turkestan!

In places, it feels like you could be in Beirut, except that it's far more approachable and there's far more stuff you can do on your own, without someone local to show you around. The obligatory sights are truly magnificent; I don't know if I've been anywhere you can feel the weight of history as strongly as in Aya Sofia, and a visit to Süleymaniye Mosque makes it clear why Mimar Sinan is regarded as one of the greatest architects in history. Yet the most impressive thing about Istanbul is, I think, the site itself: the confluence of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Golden Horn. I've never been anywhere geopolitics is so palpably present. Constantine was no dummy when he picked this spot for his capital, with all the Roman empire to choose from.

Halvdan Was Here. I can see him, a Varyag guard in the Byzantine Emperor's service, scratching his name on the balustrade as he's bored to tears during some interminable ceremony he doesn't understand, or care about.

On that site are layers upon layers of history. A Roman tower lately redecorated by the Genoese. Aya Sofia itself; once a basilica, then a mosque—with a minbar and mihrab askew, angels rubbing shoulders with the names of God, the Prophet, and the Rightly-Guided Caliphs—and now a museum. The aqueduct of Valens, only a hundred years or so out of use, cutting through the city along the spine of the peninsula.

Elephant Pillar, in Sultanahmet Mosque. Sumptuously decorated, but I was more impressed by the spaciousness and lightness of Süleymaniye Mosque.

Mosques. Mosques everywhere, with their needle-slender minarets and rounded domes, and in-between, stately buildings that could be in Budapest or Paris, Madrid or even Stockholm.

Reflection.

The vibe of Istanbul is strangely similar to that of St. Petersburg, I thought. It's as if the two cities are mirror images of each other. So different, yet so precisely opposites that they meet again. Where Istanbul has mosques, St. Petersburg has churches, and vice versa. Where St. Petersburg is rectilinear, spacious, flat, and exhaustingly sprawling, Istanbul is twisty, hilly, and confusing. Yet there is a sameness, perhaps from both being capitals by fiat, even if a millennium and a half separated in time.

Sultanahmet Cat.

Cats. Cats everywhere. Sleek, self-satisfied, confident, well-fed cats, who always seem to pick a spot to meditate in that matches the color and pattern of their fur. They help themselves at a bucket of catfood at a pet shop, wait for scraps at a kebap place, or just lounge in the December sun, content to be admired.

Books. Istanbulli love their books. There are bookshops all over the place. Small ones, big ones, religious ones, secular ones. One that sells reproductions of antique maps—and, I think, some genuine antiquest too—and books with photos; another that sells political literature; one that sells Bibles, another that sells Qur'ans. Beautiful books, big books, small books. Even the bookshop at Atatürk Airport is the best of its kind that I've seen—small but with a very carefully chosen collection. Rumi's Masnavi rubs shoulders with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, Orhan Pamuk with George Martin, Turkish cookbooks with a general history of the Arabs. I could've bought a dozen titles from there alone, although I only bought two.

Any city that loves its cats and its books as much as Istanbul can't be all bad.

Fresh Fish, Kadiköy.

Food. Universally excellent. Simple, fresh, with an almost home-cooked feel. Served in a no-nonsense way, much like in an Italian osteria. You order what you like, and if it's not enough, you order more. Everybody at the table has a bit of everything. Sharing is the default, no need to ask for two plates for one dessert. You can tell which places are licensed by the smell; they're stronly perfumed with the anise fragrance of raki.

Istiklal Caddesi After Dark.

Istiklal Caddesi. It has to be one of the world's great promenades. Istanbulli must really love to party, because the damn street is packed, even on a weekday night in chilly December. An antique tram forces its way through the crowd, bell ringing. Men sell chestnuts from pushcarts. Music floods onto the street from meyhanes, lilting Turkish and Arabesque notes competing with the thump-thump-thump of disco. An emaciated, elderly man playes a fast, skippy tune on a bowed string instrument; a metrosexual young man dances to it with fierce dedication. We buy some double-pistachio loukoum from Ali Muheddin Haci Bekir's shop, with over 300 years of practice making it. The man behind the counter is surly, but the loukoum is fantastic.

The whole of Beyoglu seems to be one continuous party, with only short breaks to sober up and rest, every once in a while. If the AKP intends to turn Turkey into a properly moral Islamic republic, they have a bit of work to do.

Why? Bye.

It costs three lira to take the tünel down the hill from Beyoglu to the Galata Bridge, but only two to cross from Eminönü to Kadiköy on the Asian side. Go figure. Maybe they feel that the ferry is a necessity, while the tünel is for lazy people only. Point, that.

Süleymaniye Cami, Exterior

As we visit the Süleymaniye mosque, the muezzin sounds the call to midday prayer. They don't throw us out, but sit us down to the side where we can follow the proceedings. He has a beautiful voice. It is a simple ritual, not all that different from what goes on in the zendo, actually, especially if there's a recitation. It is strange to think that for over five hundred years, the language of the people they conquered has been chanted here, in the heart of the Ottoman empire.

Inscription, Süleymaniye Cami. Could this be the architect's signature, of sorts? His name is not on it, but the date is about right...

The streets are clean and many look newly paved. The trams are likewise new. Signs of a rapid rise in wealth and living standards are everywhere, as the new displaces the old. Walk a few steps and turn a corner, though, and you're suddenly in a dusty, run-down street that looks like it hasn't changed much in the past hundred years.

Railway Alley.

Chickens, In The Street.

There's a lot of traffic—really, a lot—but it's nowhere near as chaotic as in Beirut, or even Rome. I'd hate to drive in the small streets though; the corners are often so tight even practiced drivers need to go back and forth a bit to get around them and none of the streets appear to be one-way, so if someone happens to be coming in the other direction, someone's going to have to reverse. Plus it's often uphill or downhill, very steeply too.

The dogs have little tags on their ears. Maybe it's a rabies vaccination tag. I hear there's rabies in Istanbul, what with all the cats and dogs. The dogs look sleepy and well cared-for, and definitely don't try anything with the cats. Sometimes they tag along obediently with their masters. I didn't see a single one on a leash. No dog poop anywhere either.

Market Stall.

Market stalls, everywhere. It's as if everything street-level is a shop, and every open space, in underpasses and on squares, has someone selling something.

Bazaar Merchant.

The Grand Bazaar. It's a building that has its own map in Google Maps. It is enormous, truly like something out of Thousand Nights and One Night. Arched corridors, broad and narrow, decorated in blue and red, with light coming in thrown windows cut in them, going endlessly and fractally in all directions. There are eateries, cafés, drinking fountains, even a mosque in there. Some corridors are broad like avenues, others are narrow like back alleys. And everywhere, things for sale. Good stuff, mostly. I'm sure that if you did some research you could make some real finds there. I'm no expert, but some of the rugs looked fine. It's easy to imagine what it must've been like when goods from all corners of the Empire, and beyond, were on sale there.

Gulls.

Kadiköy, on the other side of the Bosphorus. It has a quieter, less frenetic feel to it. Almost like a small town. Reminded me a bit of Byblos, maybe. Almost no tourists to be found. A friendly local helps us find the place we're looking for. More very good food. An open market street with fresh fish and vegetables. Nearby, a shopping street with a "bio" store. Joanna buys some a jar of carob and a bottle of pomegranate molasses.

And then we're back at the airport, looking at the Departures board. London. Tashkent. Berlin. Doha. Tel Aviv. Helsinki. Tehran. Stockholm. Constantinople, Istanbul. The city in the center.

Golden Horn Sunset.

More on Copying, Stealing, and the Precepts

2011-12-01T21:38:00.001+02:00

Please smile, Brisbane, Australia, 2010

Since Jayarava appears to have banned me from commenting on his blog, and also indicated that he will be ending the discussion on intellectual property and the Second Precept, I'll post my thoughts here instead. A few interesting points were raised, and as stated, I think this is a topic that's important and tricky enough that it needs discussion.

First, I think Johannes made a very valuable contribution to the discussion by bringing up the parallel of taking a drink of water from a stream. He did it to point out that there is also "taking" that does not deprive anyone (noticeably) of anything, as a counterpoint to the argument that copying should not be regarded as taking because copying does not deprive the person being copied from of the artifact being copied. In this sense, copying is very much like taking a drink from a stream.

Thing is, I think you'd be very hard-pressed to find anyone who would consider taking a drink from a stream as ethically problematic in any way. I'm pretty sure the Buddha—or whoever came up with the precepts—didn't have in mind a monk who stops to drink at a stream without asking permission of the stream's owner.

On the other hand, wars are being fought over water rights. These arise when someone upstream removes so much water from the stream that people downstream are impacted. Clearly, the ethically charged action is here: depriving the people downstream of the water they would need.

This really is very similar to copying intellectual property. In fact, it's kind of striking that the metaphor of the river pops up pretty often, at least in Zen.

For forty years I've been selling water
By the bank of a river,
Ho, ho!
My labors have been wholly without merit.
—Harada Daiun Sogaku

Copying is not stealing, because the one being copied from is not deprived of the object being copied. Therefore, the second precept cannot automatically apply. Some other precepts might, naturally. For example, Jayarava described someone copying his entire mantra website and presenting it as his own work. That is clearly unacceptable, because the person is lying about where he got it. There's a precept that specifically prohibits that already.

Jayarava's main contention in the comments appears to be that the discussion of ownership is a red herring and irrelevant to the discussion of the precept against taking that which is not given. I find this a pretty illogical position to take. Taking automatically implies a taker, an object, and a possessor. It is simply not possible to discuss it without considering these other three concepts. If there is disagreement about these definitions, there is bound to be disagreement about the applicability of a rule of conduct governing taking. Rather ironically, Jayarava is hectoring his readers about demanding that others abide by their views of what constitutes 'ownership,' while simultaneously ruling out any discussion of the concepts—thereby imposing his personal views of the definitions on them.

Jayarava also appears to entirely misunderstand what is being said about these definitions. He goes on about "this awful post-modern denial of ownership" or "Marxist critique of ownership." This is a pretty big misrepresentation of the position I—and, I think, most of the others criticizing his equating of copying with stealing—are arguing. We are not critiquing the notion of ownership per se. What we are critiquing is the notion of intellectual property: the conceit that an idea can even be an object of ownership. There is nothing recognizably Marxist about this critique; libertarian would probably be closer to the mark, since many libertarians consider intellectual property to be a government-imposed artificial monopoly and restriction on the natural rights of people. I don't see it quite that way, but still.

Finally, there is one concept that is entirely central to Buddhist ethics completely missing from the discussion: namely, intent. Jayarava only alludes to it tangentially, by assuming that the motivation of anyone copying something is acquisitiveness. Yet Buddhist ethics is entirely intentionalist. This remains, in fact, one of the central disagreements between Buddhists and Jains, and has been since the early days of Buddhism.

We don't live in a vacuum. Things are connected. Copying something always involves more people than the copier and the person being copied from, which brings in complex motivations and chains of cause and effect. Nor is the claim of the person being copied from to the artifact being copied always equally strong. If I were to grab Shakespeare's Collected Works from Gutenberg.org, went through them very carefully to remove any typos, missing characters and poor formatting, added top-notch tables of content and what have you, what would result would still be Shakespeare's work, not mine. I might still demand that nobody makes a copy of it, but my right to make that demand would be highly dubious.

That's why intention is so crucial to the ethical reasoning. That of the copier, and the copy-ee. Why is someone making a copy from, say Dharma Torrents? Is acquisitiveness the only possible motive? I don't think so.

This is a gray area. Life is full of them. Ethical exegesis that leads to universal black-and-white prescriptions for all situations is highly suspect to start with. Each of us has to work out how to deal with these gray areas. It can be useful to listen to how others have worked them out in their lives, but to demand that everyone else follows the same prescription in all circumstances is presumptious in the extreme. As Jayarava himself puts it: "The precepts are training principles that you take on in order to modify your own character, not to beat up other people. ... What I don't think is admirable, on principle, is that you would expect other people to live by your standards and rules."

Copying and Stealing

2011-11-28T22:18:00.001+02:00

One of the blogs I most enjoy reading is Jayarava's Raves. Jayarava is one of the few Buddhist bloggers with genuine scholarly chops. His dissections of Buddhist source texts are always meticulous, extremely knowledgeable, often highly perceptive, and sometimes extremely relevant to the questions modern Buddhists are grappling with. For example, see his short post on the case of Bhadda. He has substance and originality, which is something that's in sorely short supply in the mostly commentarial blogosphere.

But this time he put his foot in it, and on a topic I consider to be of so much importance that it deserves to be addressed. In Taking the Not-given, his posting about Buddhist Torrents, a site containing links to copies of books about Buddhism, he argues that the Second Precept—"I undertake the training of not taking that which is not given"—unequivocally prohibits copying intellectual property:

Let me just be quite clear here. Copying is theft. All those pirated books, DVDs, and CDs are stolen. There is no grey area here.

In the remainder of his post and the subsequent comments, Jayarava appears to be blissfully unaware of the massive—and massively important—controversy about what, exactly, constitutes intellectual property: can it even be a "thing" that can be given or withheld? In fact, he is even mistaken about the relatively basic notion of fair use—contrary to his claim, fair use does most certainly apply to commercial use as well, not only not-for-profit use. Much criticism, commentary, parody, and scholarship is commercial.

To claim that copying is theft...no gray area is simply wrong. There is a tremendous gray area there, with a broad range of entirely defensible positions.

To take that which is not given presupposes a "that" which is held as property by someone. This is perfectly reasonable when applied to physical objects. If I have a loaf of bread and you take it, then you have a loaf of bread and I have none. When applied to the concept of intellectual property, it is less clear: if you have a sutra and I make a copy of it, then both of us have a sutra. Not the same outcome at all. To be sure, there may be other consequences, some of them positive, others negative, but the immediate outcomes are clearly different.

The concept of intellectual property is a relatively recent innovation. It is a child of the Industrial Revolution. It started to emerge some time during the 17th century, and was crystallized into copyright and patent laws some time in the 18th. For most of that time, information artifacts were still bound to physical objects. Only the information revolution, which made copying virtually cost-free, truly changed the nature of the problem.

Therefore, it is a bit of a stretch to take a precept that could only have applied to physical property, and apply it unthinkingly to the new and entirely invented notion of intellectual property.

We live in a world of symbolic property. There are concrete artifacts, such as this computer I'm typing on. Most of my property is symbolic in nature, however. It is represented by bits in a bank's computer, and a paper in the bank's vault—my bank account, my mortgage, and the deed to my apartment, which is itself a symbol: a share in the housing cooperative which owns the building in which I reside. Nevertheless, the relationship between these artifacts and physical objects I can or could own is relatively unambiguous. It's not very likely that someone will challenge my right to live in my apartment because it's derived from a chain of symbols based on a piece of paper.

Not so with intellectual property. It does not apply to any concrete artifact. It is a monopoly granted to an individual, giving the right to restrict the supply of a "work." What that "work" is, is also rather poorly defined. Almost nothing is entirely original; it all builds on something else. Yet a copyrightable work must meet a threshold of originality that, ultimately, is defined on a case-by-case basis: that thing meets it, this one doesn't. Like pornography, I suppose.

That is a concept that is pretty far removed from the notion of actual, physical property.

It is particularly problematic, I think, when applied to something like the Buddhadharma. I am no scholar of Buddhist history, but the impression I get is that spreading the Dharma has been considered a meritorious act. Monks copying, distributing, and translating sutras are spoken of very highly. The kings and emperors locking them away, not so much. Looked at this way, the one copyrighting a Dharma book, and thereby attempting to limit its readership, would be the one in the wrong. I would be very interested to hear what Jayarava could come up with, should he dive into his sources looking for case studies that did deal with what we would now call intellectual property.

So how does this apply to the precept of not taking that which is not given?

Suppose you came across a man who claimed that the glitter of the sun on the sea is his property, and attempted to charge you for looking at it, or chase you away if you refused to pay. Most people would consider him insane: the glitter of the sun on the sea is clearly not something to which anyone can claim ownership. Nor do I believe that the precepts provide an unambiguous answer about how to behave in this situation: perhaps sometimes it might be better to humor him, but at other times it might be kinder to try to get him to snap out of that particularly painful delusion. Buddhism can't be about never doing anything someone might object to. That would turn you into a doormat.

Now, if a Buddhist sincerely believes that intellectual property is no more a "thing" that can be given or withheld than the glitter of the sun on the sea, then from his point of view, the creator so jealously guarding his right to his creations is as barking mad as the guy charging for viewing the glitter of the sun on water.

Admittedly, intellectual property is rather murkier than sunlight on water. There are many at least somewhat defensible positions in the debate, ranging from complete abolition of the idea to rights inheritable in perpetuity.

Gray area, in other words.

I believe the notion of intellectual property as we currently have it is deeply wrong-headed. However, many of our social and legal structures operate under the assumption that it works the way it works. That means that many people who rely on royalties for their livelihood would be harmed if it was abolished all at once. I believe these structures must be reformed, and we must either go back to something like the idea of intellectual property as it was originally envisioned—or, even better, a whole new system where we get rid of it altogether, but nevertheless create incentives for innovators to innovate and creators to create.

In the meantime, anything we do is problematic. If we follow the rules of intellectual property scrupulously, we contribute to maintaining the poisonous system of copyrights and patents that stifles so much innovation today, and may deprive the world of some positive contribution we daren't make because it builds so much on someone else's work that it would fall into the morass of "derivative works." If we don't, we risk damaging a genuine innovator's livelihood.

I'm a software developer by vocation, and my employer does not release the code I write under open source licenses, despite my efforts to steer things in that direction. I'm also a writer and photographer in my spare time. This I do make available under the most permissive Creative Commons license available. And I do not pirate. I try to steer a course in these rocky waters somehow, but certainly don't have an unambiguous, one-size-fits all answer to suite all dilemmas.

Gray area.

Furthermore, I believe that the Buddhist precepts are pretty damn useless as guides to politics. If someone claims that the copyleft movement is un-Buddhist, I conclude that he has his head up his ass.

And to baldly claim that "copying is stealing, no gray area," for Buddhists or ordinary mortals, and that advocates of intellectual property reform "are not people who are creators," or "are already successful and therefore have nothing to lose," or "subvert the whole of Buddhist morality," or "try to wiggle out of keeping precepts by trotting out rationalisations," or "spout anti-capitalist ideology and allow it to cloud the issue," or are "not really Buddhists," or are "punters setting the value of my life's work at zero," or "people who's [sic] only talent is to use ctrl-c to acquire and accumulate files" ticks pretty much all the boxes in Jayarava's own comment policy: false, harsh, slanderous, and useless.

Not your brightest moment, Jayarava.

Claims about the Nature of the Mind

2011-11-22T21:14:00.000+02:00

Shadow Play, Helsinki, 2005

Sante Sensei has started a blog. He has a couple of posts up about emergence and free will. He's discussing the contention—by neurobiologists and other people working with the plumbing of the brain—that the mind is an emergent property of the brain, and that it can be, in theory at least, completely understood by understanding the physical processes that go on in it.

There are a quite a few very hairy philosophical questions involved, particularly with regards to free will, determinism, and randomness. From the neuroscientists' point of view, the brain is either a deterministic system, or a random one. As Sensei points out, it is not immediately obvious how determinism or randomness can be reconciled with the notions of intention and volition—free will, that is.

I've gotten into a few discussions about these same topics here, and posted some of my thoughts on the matter.

My main beef with any claims about the "essential" nature of the mind—that it is nothing but blind firing of axons in a fully deterministic system, or a partially random system, or that it's an emergent property of complexity, or that it's the action of an immaterial soul, or that it's an irreducible property of the universe, and so on and so forth—is that none of those claims really add anything to our understanding. They're just words. On their own, they're claims with no implications, much like the "weakly theistic" claim that there is a God but He is outside the Universe and has no effect on it whatsoever. If that's the case, then who cares?

What's more, these types claims are unfalsifiable. How would you demonstrate the metaphysical contention that the mind is an emergent property, or, for that matter, its opposite, that there is no such thing as an emergent property? What is this whole mind/brain duality anyway? Couldn't we treat the two as two sides of the same coin? How is "emergent property" different from "Goddidit," other than being somewhat simpler? How does this 'emergence' happen? What does it imply? As far as I can tell, not a damn thing. That makes them pretty much meaningless, in my book.

It's only when you start piling stuff on top of these basic contentions that implications start to appear, and most of the time the stuff you're piling on is more tractable with various conceptual tools that we have at our disposition. For example, most Christians would claim that the mind is action of an immaterial and immortal soul, and that God wants that soul to return to Him through His grace, therefore, you should A, B, and C. That posits a whole bunch of new entities—a God with volition, a state of being separated from God (bad) and united with Him (good) and so on and so forth. All of these have more surface area to latch onto, to examine what's really being said, and on what basis.

I don't care for metaphysics. I'm not all that interested in demonstrating metaphysical claims through argument. Instead, I'm perfectly happy to accept any of them, and then look at the contentions that follow, instead. If those contentions say something meaningful about the world, awesome, I'll keep the metaphysical assumptions in that context. If not, I don't have much use for them, and even less use for the metaphysics. Usually there's more meat in that discussion.

Finally, I don't think that free will is incompatible with either determinism or randomness. There was a pretty good discussion of it on a NY Times blog lately. Here's another way of looking at it—a thought experiment if you will. And no, it doesn't have "quantum consciousness" in it, even though it starts out with a weird possible implication of quantum physics. And yes, I did lift the premise out of Signal to Noise by Alastair Reynolds.

Let's suppose that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. That is, that every potentiality is an actuality in some universe, and that at every instant, our universe diverges into an infinity of other universes, each of which is just a little different from the others. So there are an infinity of Petteris typing on this blog; some of them will finish this post, others will thing better of it and scrap it, and so on and so forth.

Let's further suppose that a brilliant physicist named Zahra invents something she calls the Higgs Resonator. The Higgs Resonator is a device that connects two universes at the point of their divergence, and allows Zahra to pass information between these two divergent universes. She can put a webcam in both universes and talk to her counterpart through it. Before Zahra makes the connection, she is pointing a webcam at herself. A nanosecond after it, the Zahra she sees on her screen is infinitesimally different. Then things start to diverge. She can even introduce divergence between the universes, say by putting a Geiger counter and a lump of mildly radioactive material next to the webcam, and deciding that whichever version of her registers a click first will be the first to say "hello."¹

Suppose Zahra already made this invention, but just hasn't gotten around to publishing it. In fact, on February 17, 2011, she created 100 Higgs resonators and started following the goings-on in the diverging versions of her home country, Libya, through them. In particular, she's observing how Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the son of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, is behaving in each of these universes.

She tabulates the results on November 19, 2011, the day Saif got captured in this version of Zahra's universe.

In 82 of the universes, Saif decided to side with his father and enthusiastically cracked down on the revolutionaries, and in 63 of those universes the crackdown succeeded. In 6, he scarpered for Saudi Arabia as soon as things got seriously uncomfortable. In 7, he led a coup against his father and attempted to negotiate with the revolutionaries. In 5, he convinced his father to go into exile in Venezuela. In 4 of those, he joined him in exile, and in 1, he stayed in Libya to help a peaceful transfer of power from his clan to make room for a new, democratic Free Libyan government.

This is a random distribution. Zahra would have seen a very similar table had she decided to observe, say, the pattern of rainfall in Saint-Jean de Lys. Being a physicist, she concludes that the so-called acts of will of Saif al-Islam Qaddafi were really no more than diverging quantum potentialities actualizing in the tiny sample of divergent universes she was observing.

Except I don't think so. I contend that each individual version of Saif, in his line of psychological continuity, made choices. He could have chosen otherwise: in fact, 99 of the other Saifs did, some in dramatic ways, others in more trivial ones. One of the Saifs should be hailed as a hero of uncommon courage and wisdom and one of the fathers of a new and better Libya; 82 of them should go in the dock. The fact that there was a random distribution of Saifs does not in any way cancel out the moral responsibility of any individual one.

Nor does the mechanism of his acts of will make any difference to the moral calculus. Maybe Saif is right, and the mechanism is an immortal soul created by a transcendent God. Maybe Zahra is right, and it is all just axons firing, driven by blind, mechanistic biochemical processes. Maybe Sante Sensei is right, and it was a non-physical, irreducible property of the universe at work.² Maybe the Pastafarians are right, and it's all the doings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and His noodly appendages, playing the mother of all practical jokes. It doesn't make any difference.

Okay, so much for Zahra and the Higgs resonator. Let's drop them, and only consider the Saif we know of. We might still live in a quantum multiverse, or we might not. Even if we don't and the paths not taken only exist as hypotheticals and counterfactuals, we still have potentialities crystallizing into actualities. Saif is still morally responsible for the actions he took vis a vis February 17. He is still thinking, feeling, experiencing, choosing, and acting. Only a universe that is not only deterministic but fully nonrandom—which has no potentialities at all, only actualities that have or have not yet happened—is incompatible with free will. That's John Calvin's bleak universe, where God has preordained everything and chosen His own in the beginning of time, and there ain't a thing anyone can do about it.

We already know we don't live in that universe.

Ultimately, the concepts of "free will" and "consciousness"—just like "emergence" or "irreducible quality" or "atman" or "brahman" or "animus," or, for that matter, Vasubandhu's "appropriating consciousness"—are mental constructions invented by us to explain and communicate our experience. Any philosophy rests on unprovable metaphysical assumptions, and will break down when you attempt to apply it to an area where its conceptual framework doesn't work. Ratiocination can only get us so far.

I don't believe the question of what the mind is in a metaphysical sense is tractable with the tools of philosophy or science at all, even if we might be able to discover a good deal more about the how of it. There's an unbridged and I believe unbridgeable gap there. What is it that emerges, or is an irreducible nonphysical quality, or an atman or animus, or dies and is reborn (or not?)

I don't know. I don't believe it can be known, at least in the conventional sense of knowing. Is there some other way of knowing, one that cannot be communicated with the usual methods of discourse and argument? I don't know that either, but I am inclined to believe there is.

That is why I keep coming back to face the wall.

Thinking about Thinking

2011-11-21T16:07:00.001+02:00

There was a discussion recently on Barbara's Buddhism blog regarding the uses and drawbacks of philosophy, especially Western philosophy, in Buddhist practice. Barbara was a bit ambivalent about it, having come across plenty of smartass know-it-alls who are all too eager to explain how Buddha got it wrong.

That got me thinking about thinking, and the uses thereof. Philosophy is, to a great extent, thinking about thinking.

I find thinking about thinking a useful exercise in many ways. For one thing, it's challenging, and practicing it will help you think about other, more practical things as well. It gives you more things to relate and connect to, which makes it easier to get a grasp on new ideas and even new fields. It can be a drawback as well, naturally, since there's often a superficial familiarity to things that causes you to assume you understand them before you actually do. "Oh cool, Nagarjuna is just like Baudrillard. What about Vasubandhu?" Except he isn't, even if the two have some overlaps.

Another benefit thinking about thinking has given me is a degree of ability to switch conceptual frameworks on the fly, as it were. "What is true depends a great deal on your point of view," as some Jedi or other put it. Conceptual frameworks are always incomplete, but they can be very useful, and it's often helpful to switch between modes. For example, I find the Marxist conceptual framework highly useful for understanding "big picture" history, whereas I find classical economic theory highly useful for understanding how markets work. This can also help communicate ideas, since I can attempt to understand what kind of conceptual framework my interlocutor is using and then try to express whatever I want to express in terms of those concepts.

However, I don't think this is quite all there's to it. There's a particular experience related to thinking about thinking that's been very meaningful for me. It happens rarely, and when I'm struggling with some conceptual framework I don't yet quite understand. There's a moment when things start falling into place: everything shifts, I manage to drop free of the framework I've been using to understand the new one, but I haven't yet adopted the new one either. There's space and freedom in that moment of not-understanding, like standing on the edge of an unexplored continent.

It never lasts, though, regrettably. Very quickly, I end up with a new framework to think in, which is often enriching, interesting, and useful.

But I think that there is something more to that moment than just learning new things. After all, that monk who knew the Diamond Cutter Sutra inside and out did eventually see through it too, when the candle went out. Perhaps he wouldn't have, without having twisted his mind around that text so intensively before.

Philosophy can be skilful means too, I am quite sure. All those mountains of sutras and commentaries would be a bit of a waste if it wasn't, really.

Clockwork

2011-11-13T15:22:00.001+02:00

I'm exploring a new hobby. I do that every few years. I'm tinkering with mechanical wristwatches.

My first objective was to take apart a watch movement and then put it back together so that it still runs. I just accomplished that yesterday, and I feel as proud of it as if it's an egg I just laid. I even sorted out a problem it had. It doesn't run very well, but no worse than when I started, and I didn't actually do anything that ought to make it run better. Just disassembled and reassembled it. Three times, actually; I had done something wrong the first two times and it didn't run.

I still need some tools to be able to try my hand at cleaning and oiling it. That's my next objective. I figure the odds of the watch surviving my tender ministrations are about 25%. Yesterday morning I would've said 5%, so that's an improvement. It's a really beat-up looking Citizen about as old as I am, and I picked it up at a fleamarket for not much money, so it's no great loss to humanity even if it gives up its life in the name of science.

I've learned a quite a lot already, about what makes watches tick, and what I'm looking for in watch projects, and even a bit about why bother in the first place.

I like tinkering with stuff. I like solving problems. I'm pretty good at fine detail work; when I was a kid I built lots of model ships and planes and such, and painted D&D miniatures. I've enjoyed tinkering with bicycles, but ever since I built a fixed-gear, there hasn't been much to do there, the damn thing just doesn't need any tinkering. Anyway it's a bit messy to do in an apartment. And I've always liked watches.

Another thing is that I'm getting increasinly pissed off at our throwaway culture. Watches are a perfect example of it, replete with ironies too. The Chinese are making some excellent knock-offs of classic Swiss movements, copies so exact that individual pieces are interchangeable. These movements are designed to be serviced. There are spare parts available. Everything comes apart, down to the last machined component.

Yet it makes no economic sense to service one—simply because at the labor costs we have, you can buy four new ones for the cost of professionally cleaning and oiling one. So they're thrown away. The same applies to just about any mechanical wristwatch that isn't one of the luxury brands—Omega, Rolex, Breitling, and so on. Yet the cheap Citizen I messed with is just as capable of running for just as many generations as the fanciest of Patek Philippes, if somebody just takes care of it.

I figured it might be fun to be that somebody.

I'm not that somebody yet. I'm only just starting. But I proved to myself yesterday that basic watch repair is a skill I can teach myself, and it's something that can be endlessly deepened. And I really enjoyed it.

I've bought three junk watches so far. One of them is the Citizen. One of them is irredeemably broken; I bought it so I could have something to experiment with without having to worry about breaking it. One runs really well and has been pretty well maintained too, but it has a cheap brass case with chrome flaking off and is actually kinda ugly. I think it also has a radium dial, and I'm not sure I want to inhale any of the lume that has flaked off. So I'm not sure what to do with that one.

I'm not going to attempt to mess with anything that's actually valuable at this point. Perhaps later. But if you have an almost-working mechanical wristwatch knocking around in a drawer somewhere—stainless steel case, preferably—drop me a line. I might be interested in taking it off your hands and making it my next project.

And if I get any of them working, I'll send them out into the world again, one way or another.

Zen Choir Boys

2011-11-04T23:21:00.000+02:00

When you first walk into a zendo to do a couple of rounds of zazen, it feels like not much happens, other than in your mind of course, which is going to be about as Zen as a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide, if it's anything like mine. Yet there's a surprising amoung of choreography going on there. In fact, everybody there has a role to play, even if that role is "only" to sit still between the bells, get up, walk, sit down, bow, and chant according to them.

I'm only really realizing how much ceremony there is now, since I agreed to be something of a Zen choir boy and help that choreography happen. I got to ring bells yesterday, for the first time. I screwed up the final complicated bit, naturally, but nobody was hurt, so it was no big deal. I'll try again next week. If they'll bear with me, I figure I'll eventually learn it.

Ringing a bell is much more interesting than I expected. It's not at all easy to get anything like a pure sound out of it, and even more difficult to get more or less the same loudness, say, three times in a row, even when you're not at all nervous. A bell does exactly what you make it do; the sound is very revealing of the way you hit it. Hesitation or tension makes it sound broken. And you cannot, indeed, un-ring a bell. On the other hand, a nice, good, clean Ting! is very rewarding.

Here's how it works at our zendo. This is the basic no-frills Thursday zazen—three rounds of a half an hour each, with kinhin (walking meditation) between them. On Sundays there's also recitation, and sometimes there are more complicated rituals. On retreats, when the teacher is present, there's yet more.

First, the roles. The full complement consists of two stick guys, one bell guy, one wood board guy, and one incense guy. Or girl, natch; in fact, the other new stick guy is, in fact, a woman. As are about half our sangha leaders and one of the two teachers, for that matter, and the membership too. But I digress.

The first stick guy is in charge, and basically promises to show up. If he can't make it, he can make arrangements for someone else to fill in. He gets other people to perform the other roles. If there aren't enough people able to play some or all of these roles, there are always fallbacks; if there's only the first stick guy, then he'll do any of the other jobs that he can, including ringing the bells.

The stick guys and the bell guy sit along the wall of the zendo opposite the altar. The others can sit wherever they like. Everybody starts out facing the wall, or a partition screen clad with burlap.

About five minutes before the zazen starts, the bell guy gets up, opens the zendo door facing the altar, and sounds the big bell. Three strikes, about eight seconds between them. Then he dims the lights and locks the front door, and returns to his spot.

When the stick guys hear the big bell sound, they turn around to face the zendo instead of the wall. The first stick guy makes a sign to the second stick guy about which round or rounds he's supposed to go around with the stick. Normally it's the second round, but sometimes not. More about that later. This is also the signal to get yourself into the zendo, if you're not already there. You're supposed to bow at the door, when exiting or leaving, or at least raise your hands in gassho (like this _/|\_).

The altar guy gets up, walks up to the altar, puts his hands in gassho and bows to the Buddha. Then he picks up a (long) stick of incense, lays it across the cup with ashes in it that's on the altar, picks up a box of matches from the right of the altar, strikes a match, and lights the stick of incense (the left-facing end, if he's right-handed). Then he puts out the match by pulling it through the air vertically, and puts it in a little clay pot next to where he took the matchbox, and also returns the matchbox to its place. Then he picks up the burning stick of incense and extinguishes the flame on it the same way as the match, and sticks it in the cup with the ashes in it. Then he puts the hands in gassho again, bows, and returns to his place. Oh, and, through the whole thing, he's supposed to be facing the altar, and if one hand is free, that's held in gassho too.

Two or three minutes later, the first stick guy gives a signal to the board guy, who beats a series of knocks on a wooden board, called a han, with a wooden mallet. The board hangs outside the side door of the zendo. The pattern is like this:

X x x X x X x X x (repeat until things have quieted down) X x x [X]

The big X's are louder claps, the little ones softer ones, and the [X] is a really loud one. This is the last moment you can get to your place in the zendo, but normally everybody's already arrived after they hear the big bell.

When the bell guy hears the board guy start beating the series, he picks up a pair of rounded hardwood sticks from a little cushion to his right, and holds them pressed together. When he hears the [X], he bangs them together, which makes a really sharp, loud "crack." Then he puts them down and picks up a bell on a stick, called an inkhin, and waits. The board guy puts the mallet back where it belongs, walks to the zendo door, closes it, walks to wherever he's sitting, and sits down. When the bell guy hears him do that, he sounds the bell-on-a-stick with a little brass stick that hangs from its handle, three times, about 10 seconds between each strike. After the third "ting" has faded, he puts the bell down on the cushion to the right, with the brass stick laying across the padding on the bell that's there for this purpose.

Then we sit.

About 15 minutes through the round, the stick guy who's doing the rounds for that time—the first stick guy for the first and third rounds, usually, the second stick guy for the second round and sometimes the third if the first stick guy is giving daisan—gets up and walks to the altar, and bows, hands in gassho. He then picks up a flat wooden stick laying across the altar, in front of the cup with the ashes and the incense. He bows and raises it above his head, straightens up, and turns it so he's gripping the thick end. This makes a slight wooden sliding sound. Then he walks around the zendo twice. Anyone who wants to be hit on the shoulders with a stick will raise his hands in gassho when he's passing. He lays the stick on a shoulder, and gives two sharp raps on both shoulders, diagonally, on the muscles between the spine and the shoulderblades. Then the guy being hit makes gassho again, and the stick guy bows while holding the stick over his head. When the two rounds are done, the stick guy returns to face the altar, bows with the stick held over the head again, then turns the stick around so the handle faces left (the Buddha's right hand, that is), and replaces it on the altar. He bows in gassho again, and returns to his spot.

About a half a minute before the end of the round, the bell guy picks up the bell and gets ready to sound it. Then he makes one "ting." Everybody who's able (sometimes you get pins and needles, and you can't) stands up, putting hands in gassho. He makes another "ting." Everybody bows, and starts walking in a circle around the zendo, hands clasped across the chest. The stick guys—or whoever they've asked to do this—open the windows for air.

After about six minutes of walking or so, when the bell guy reaches the middle of the zendo, he makes one "ting." When everybody reaches their spot, they stop there and wait until everybody's in place. Then the bell guy makes another "ting," and everybody sits down. Somebody closes the windows unless the stick guys already did, during the walking. The bell guy puts down the bell and picks up the hardwood sticks. After a bit he bangs them together to make that sharp "crack" again. He puts them down, finds a good sitting position, picks up the bell, and waits for things to quiet down a bit. Then, three "tings," with maybe a little longer interval than for the first round.

Rinse, repeat, twice. Except the end of the third round is a bit different. When the bell guy sees (from a watch or timer in front of him) that there's about three minutes until the end, he picks up the bell again. Then all hell breaks loose, at least if you're the bell guy for the first time ever.

First stick guy: "Four vows."
Bell guy: Ting!
First stick guy: "All beings
Everybody: (chanting) ...without number I vow to liberate"
Everybody: "Endless blind passions I vow to uproot"
Everybody: "Dharma gates beyond measure I vow to penetrate"
Everybody: "The great way of Buddha I vow to attain."
Bell guy: Ting! (turns to face the zendo around now)
Everybody: "All beings without number I vow to liberate"
Everybody: "Endless blind passions I vow to uproot"
Everybody: "Dharma gates beyond measure I vow to penetrate"
Everybody: "The great way of Buddha I vow to attain."
Bell guy: Ting!
Everybody: "All beings without number I vow to liberate"
Everybody: "Endless blind passions I vow to uproot"
Everybody: "Dharma gates beyond measure I vow to penetrate"
Bell guy: Ting!
Everybody: "The great way of Buddha I vow... to attain." (The last bit isn't chanted, just spoken in a diminuendo.)
Bell guy: Ting!.. Ti-Ting!... Ting...Ting...Ting..Ting..Ting.TingTingTingTinTinTiTiTitititi... (everybody except bell guy get up, if they're able.)
Bell guy: Ting... (everybody bows to the ground toward the altar, then raises hands, palms up.)
Bell guy: ...x (lays brass stick across the bell to cut the sound) (everybody stands up)
Bell guy: Ting... (everybody makes another bow to the ground)
Bell guy: ...x (everbody stands up)
Bell guy: Ting! (everybody bows to the ground)
Bell guy: Ting... (when first stick guys knees reach the floor)
Bell guy: ...x (everybody gets up)
Bell guy: Ting! (when first stick guy is about halfway up; then stands up; everybody faces the altar, hands in gassho)
Bell guy: Ting! (everybody bows toward the altar, then turns to face the centerline of the zendo, so the people on the left are facing the people on the right)
Bell guy: Ting... (everybody bows to each other)
Bell guy: ...x

We chant that in Finnish, natch. The English is from the Rochester Zen Center website; we're in the same lineage so we do this the same way, more or less. The cadence is different, and they used a bigger bell for their recording, though, probably one of the ones that look like kettles.

Then everybody straightens out the spot where they were sitting, and return all extra cushions to the shelf from where they came, and that's about it. Then there's tea, sometimes.

Before that, naturally, somebody had to make sure the altar is nicely decorated, that there are tea and biscuits, that the rent is paid, and so on and so forth. Quite a song and dance for staring at a wall for an hour and a half. But it makes it worth it, somehow. I don't think the specifics of the ritual matter all that much, but I think it's pretty important that there is a ritual. All that activity serves to create a space which wouldn't be there if we just showed up, sat there, and went home.

It also barely ever goes entirely, 100% according to plan.

Then again, starting my fifth decade on this planet by becoming a Zen choir boy wasn't entirely according to plan either.

Greece and Germany

2011-11-02T18:30:00.001+02:00

The Eurozone looks like it's about to unravel. Greece announced that it's holding a referendum about the austerity/bailout package offered to it by the EU and the IMF, and it's pretty likely that such a referendum would reject it. It's quite likely that it won't even be needed, as the mere announcement has gotten stuff moving so quickly that by the time there is such a referendum, it'll be too late.

The EU leadership has completely failed to address the crisis. I'm really disappointed in it. There's a simple, basic refusal to face reality. The reality is this:

GREECE IS BROKE.

This has been entirely obvious for at least a year now. Instead of accepting this and dealing with it, the approach has been to go "BLAA BLAA BLAA I'M NOT LISTENING I'M NOT LISTENING" and pretend that it's a liquidity problem, and that "confidence" and "voluntary debt forgiveness" that just might, if we're lucky, get the Greek debt/GDP ratio to about 120% instead of 140% in another decade or so, will magically sort things out.

It doesn't really matter how Greece got there. That's the reality, and it needs to be dealth with. Dealing with insolvent debtors is pretty simple. They default, and then the creditors and the debtor come to some kind of arrangement about who recovers what of the debts, if anything. The rest are written off as losses, and then life goes on, with everybody the sorrier but, it is to be hoped, the wiser. It wouldn't be the first time, and certainly not the last.

Another complicating factor with Greece is that the Euro functions much as the gold standard did in the 1930's depression: it makes it impossible to devalue, which means the only way the economy can adjust is through a fall in wages, which only happens through massive and very persistent unemployment. Years of pain, in other words.

Germany has been the big problem here. It wants something that's mathematically impossible—to simultaneously maintain its massive trade surplus with Southern Europe, and to stop lending Southern Europe more money. A trade surplus means that goods go in, money comes out. If money comes out, money has to go in. If Southern Europe can't in turn export to someone else to get money to come in—which it can't as long as it has a currency that's massively overvalued for their economies—that money has to be borrowed. It doesn't matter how much Angela Merkel hectors Greece about "living up to its commitments." It can't do that. It's broke, and nobody's lending it any more money.

Oh, and, austerity doesn't produce growth. Never. Structural reforms might make an economy more competitive in the long run, and Greece absolutely needs to do something about its utterly rotten system of governance, but that won't help with the immediate crisis. That can only happen once the dust settles, and will be needed to stop this from happening again. But not now.

I was wrong about the Euro. I believed it could work as a way to get the diverse European economies to converge, and the difficulties inherent in such a diverse currency zone could be worked through by political action. That was clearly not the case. Turns out that Paul Krugman does understand economics better than me. Imagine that.

Right now the best solution for everybody is to bite the bullet and get this over with. Greece should leave the Euro and default, and the let the drachma drop as far it has to. If—as seems very likely—the crisis will spread to Italy next, Italy should do the same. As should any other countries to which it spreads. This could include France. If that happens, what's left doesn't have much to do with the Euro as it used to be, and the European Union itself would be in grave jeopardy.

That would be a shame. Europe used to be the most war-ridden continent in the past thousand years at least, and the EU has brought it a period of peace, stability, and prosperity that it has never experienced. I believe that the EU could be a huge stabilizing influence simply by virtue of existing and functioning; an empire with voluntary membership and no emperor. I would hate to go back to a system of jingoistic nation-states beggaring each other.

This crisis is a pretty good acid test of the whole European idea. If Europe can't manage to resolve this, it doesn't deserve to survive.

I'm pretty bummed about this. But bravo, Greece, about that referendum thing. It's about time someone faced up to the reality, and if Merkel and Sarkozy aren't able to do it, it's gotta be you.

So please, let's get this over with. Then we'll pick up the pieces.

Thoughts of Food

2011-10-30T11:45:00.000+02:00

Thoughts about food bring out the weird in people. Otherwise agreeable, laid-back folks get a weird glow in their eyes when talk turns to ways of eating. We are what we eat, in a very concrete sense, and also in a variety of more or less metaphorical ones.

—How do you spot a vegan at a cocktail party?
—Don't worry, he'll let you know.

Food is a marker of identity. The Inquisition even came up with a special dish to make sure that Iberian Jews who had converted really had done so. It's made with pork and shellfish. The Greenland Norsemen preferred to die out as Christians rather than eat seal like the Inuit, when the Little Ice Age hit.

There are the traditional identity foods—national or regional dishes, sometimes associated with particular holidays. Pumpkin pie and turkey. Fattouche. Mämmi. Eisbein. Gefilte Fisch. Borshch. Shchi. Beijing duck. Fugu sashimi. Wot with injera. Surströmming.

Nowadays, there are whole new tribes marked by dietary choices coming up. Paleos. Vegans. Vegetarians. Low-carb. Dieters. Fasters. Slow foodies. Fenno-vegans. Macrobiotics. These are the ones that really weird me out. They're so absolutely certain about the rightness of what they do. Diet becomes a moral imperative, and a universal one. Those who don't eat the right way are not merely other, or weak-willed, or self-destructive, or otherwise inferior, but actually evil.

It's not that they're completely wrong, either. There are ethical issues related to food, and there will be until the day nobody has to go hungry, and all food is produced with no exploitation of people, animals, or nature. Could take a while.

These ethics get hairy, which makes simple absolutes like the vegan "meat is murder" position so attractive. Find a rule and stick to it, and you'll get a clear conscience. Except that it ain't quite so either. Lots of vegetables are grown in scarily unsustainable ways, by ruthlessly exploiting vulnerable people—and very often animals too. Focus on sustainability and social justice, and you'll find yourself eating lots of delicious, varied, and high-quality food... if you can afford it. Which means you're right back up the top of the food chain, like Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdesses in the English garden of Versailles.

Our general cultural approach to food and health is really off. I come across articles on healthy living or healthy eating, and they're mostly written in terms of punishment and reward; discipline and "treats." Eat thus-and-so, and you'll be a morally upstanding good citizen and be healthy, thin, and beautiful. And, there's always a reminder, you can reward yourself with the occasional treat. A couple of hamburger meals a month, or some candy, or a creamy dessert.

This strikes me as wrong-headed in many ways. It creates all kinds of equivalences and oppositions, most of which are completely or almost completely spurious. "Right eating" ~ "ethical living" ~ "healthy living" ~ "self-discipline" ~ "suppression of bad impulses" ~ "repression." The "bad" things you're not supposed to eat become forbidden rewards, and as such, even more attractive.

This mode of thinking is there, regardless of the specific definitions of "right" or "wrong" eating. Paleos, vegetarians, whole-fooders, slow-fooders, vegans, macrobiotics, dieticians, national health experts, physicians; they all approach it this way. No wonder people have so much trouble with their diets.

There's got to be a better way to approach this.

I've significantly changed my diet over the past three or four years. It has improved my health and general sense of well-being. By and large, I've just done it by paying attention to how I feel when eating something, and after eating something. I don't like the way I feel after overeating, or not eating enough, or eating a burger, and I'm aware of that feeling when I'm doing, or not doing, any of that. The upshot is that I rarely want to eat burgers. If, on occasion, I do want to eat a burger, I eat a burger, and end up rediscovering that yup, yuck, it does make me feel like crap afterwards, and I didn't really enjoy it all that much even while I was eating it.

At the same time, I've been exploring all kinds of interesting things to eat, many of which are, according to someone anyway, "good." I've also been exploring how the way they make me feel. And I've been considering where the food comes from, who grew or farmed it, what kind of mark it left on the world on the way to my plate. That informs my food choices as well. I don't want to eat stuff that I know is doing a lot of damage.

Another thing I've had to come to terms with is that my knowledge about this web of cause and effect that food comes from is incomplete and often incorrect. I'm not certain about any of this. I don't really know how a factory-farmed broiler feels during the few short weeks of its life in a tiny little cage. I guess. Nor do I know how, say, a moose feels during its life in the Finnish forest, or how much it suffers when someone shoots it, or how much they would suffer if nobody shot them and they died of starvation and disease through overpopulation instead, or eaten by wolves.

I think it'd be great if we had enough wolves to keep down the moose population. But I'm not at all convinced that a moose would prefer being chased down and torn apart by wolves to a clean shot in the chest, if there was a way to ask him.

So I make guesses about suffering, and consequences, and alternative scenarios. And I eat venison, but not factory-farmed chicken, or plantation-grown bananas, if I can help it. And I try to remember how incredibly privileged I am to be able to fuss about choices like this, instead of having to wonder how to find enough of any kind of food to stay alive, never even mind healthy.

Fussiness has negative consequences too. Refusing food on ethical grounds has consequences for the people whose food you refuse, and yourself. Do so, and you cut yourself off from them, in a very concrete and immediate manner. Hector them about their food choices, and you cut yourself off even more. That is action with ethical implications too.

Finally, food is just a part—and not even the biggest part—of the impact our actions have on each other and our environment. The clothes you wear. The car you drive, or the planes you fly. The place you live in. The electricity you use. The Internet you connect to. The computer you're typing on. The job you work in. The people you vote for, or against, or neglect to vote for. The everyday little interactions with people. It all leaves a mark. It's all ethics. Actions with consequences. Generating karma. Some good, but always, always some bad.

It really would be cool if there were arahants who have stepped out of that. Who really can act without generating karma.

But somebody grew the rice they eat, too.

What Happened to the American Dream?

2011-10-24T18:26:00.000+03:00

I don't really care for Johnny Cash. I've tried listening to his songs a bunch of times, but they never really spoke to me. Some have been played so much that they've become cliché, Ring of Fire for example. Yesterday, however, I ended up playing a few of his songs again, after wandering there via "Flowers On The Wall" by The Statler Brothers. I was playing them more or less at random, still going "meh."

Until I stumbled upon "The Man In Black." And, perhaps for the first time, really listened to the lyrics.

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.

I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen' that we all were on their side.

Johnny Cash. The quintessential white, working-class, Christian American. There's an enormous heart there. How in the name of Beelzebub did we get from there to the howling hordes of the Tea Party, baying for the blood of "the 47 per cent"—parasites, ne'er-do-wells, welfare queens?

Finland has a thing about America. In some, occasionally pretty endearing ways, we're the most American country in Europe, in good and bad. For example, we have a bad case of suburban sprawl. On the other hand, we have some pretty cute subcultures, such as the "Fiftarit" thing that's pretty big in rural Finland. That's people living an imagined Fifties lifestyle. American Fifties, natch, seen through the romantic haze of Rebel Without A Cause or Happy Days. The Fifties in Finland weren't all that much fun; it was mostly about reconstruction and war reparations, settling Karelian refugees and fearing a Soviet takeover.

The Fiftarit wear baseball jackets and bombshell dresses, put Brylcreem in their hair and drive lovingly restored Ford Fairlanes and Cadillac Fleetwoods, listen to rockabilly or Bill Haley and the Comets. Hundreds of thousands of Finns have emigrated to the USA in search of a better life, and most of them—I'd wager—found it. Some of my relatives did, too. The American Dream still draws us.

When I was a kid, that American Dream was something pretty simple and understandable. It was the idea of going somewhere you could make a good life for yourself and yours, no matter where you came from, what you looked like, or who you were, and nobody messed with you while you were doing it. That good life is pretty much what the Fiftarit embody—a little house, a car with chrome and Leatherette on it, cheerful music, time with friends and family, good honest work.

That's all gone. Somehow, that American Dream—something entirely realistic and attainable in America, at least if you're white—became something different. It turned into a dream of Making It Big. Becoming Rich. Making lots of money. Not just a Ford Fairlane and a clapboard house and a picket fence, but a mansion in a gated community, a country club membership, flying first class. Not small luxuries. Big ones.

That's not the same dream. It's a mirage. And it poisoned the heart from which Johnny Cash sang his song. Instead of looking out for the sick and lonely old, the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold, it's about mercilessly clawing your way to the top. There's no room for compassion there; it's a fight for survival, red in tooth and claw, where only the toughest and meanest make it, never mind the rest.

So here we are, running a machine of production that's far more powerful than anything humanity has ever seen. We have the material means to eradicate hunger, make sure everyone—everyone!—gets a decent education and access to reasonable health care, as well as food, shelter, and clothing. The problem is one of distribution. That won't get solved if enough people don't want to solve it. And that gets right back to values and ideas.

Who wears the black for the poor and beaten down? What happened to the American dream?

Is Johnny Cash a deadbeat Commie hippie now?

Of Police States and Occupations

2011-10-21T20:42:00.000+03:00

The Occupy Wall Street movement and its offspring seem to be building up steam around the world. I like that. It's pretty unlikely that it'll result in the kind of revolution many of its adherents would like to see, but it's already shifted the discourse. Stuff that just wasn't talked about is back on the agenda. Some good ol' progressive ideas have been dusted off, and a bunch of new ones are being floated.

This kind of change is good. So carry on, occupiers. I'll be cheering from the sidelines, and maybe even showing up with my "The System Stinks" sign every once and anon. Thanks to Robert Aitken Roshi for that slogan.

It's brought out the nasty, too, in new ways. I haven't been a huge fan of the USA for a quite a while, but some of the ways the political establishment there has reacted to it has shocked even me. The American system really has come scarily close to a police state, and it's even possible that this will push it over the edge.

I'm incredibly fortunate to live in one of the few countries of the world where the police come pretty close to living up to that "to serve and to protect" slogan of theirs. Finns trust the police, and by and large, the police live up to that trust. They're not easily bribeable, they generally don't harass or mess with you, and if there's a problem, you really can call them and expect them to help. Conversely, they're watched pretty closely—just about every police shooting goes through the courts, for example, and there's a pretty high standard for justifying that. But it works: the cops rarely overstep their authority, and people, by and large, trust them.

That means that my basic reflexes when dealing with cops are dangerously wrong in most of the world. I've tangled with the militsiya in Russia and Ukraine a few times, and only gotten away with having to pay a $20 bribe once out of sheer luck. I chatted with a Syrian mukhabarat at a checkpoint once, and while I intellectually knew that he had the power to do some incredibly nasty stuff to us, I didn't feel that fear. I simply do not know how to deal with the police as they are in most of the world.

I remember being bewildered when I visited a friend of mine in Montana in 1999. There, it was perfectly clear to everyone that the cops were bad news. You avoided them as much as possible, and talked as little as possible if approached by them. It seemed like there was a law or an ordinance in place preventing just about everything fun. That meant everyone was doing something illegal, which meant that the cops could easily find some perfectly legitimate reason to arrest you, which gave them a lot of power.

This video scared the bejeezus out of me, and explores this characteristic of the American landscape in more detail.

That's the thing with police states. They can only emerge if the laws give the police enough power to cause basically "normal" people a lot of trouble. Even in utterly corrupt police states the police tend to operate within the letter of the law... to start with. Once they've put you on the wrong side of the law, you're theirs. That opens the door to bribery, police violence, political imprisonment, and what have you.

That Russian militsioner who caught me did so perfectly fairly. My crime was that I was carrying a cell phone. There was a law on the books stating that all travelers to Russia must declare any radio communication equipment at the border. I don't recall if I was aware of this law. Even if I were, I wouldn't have bothered, as I would've had to get out of the train, stand in line for easily a few hours, and pay a fee, and I didn't even have a ticket for the next train. There might not even have been a next train the same day. So I was a criminal, and when the militsioner patted me down at the entrance to the Lenin mausoleum, he found my phone, and voilà, I was at his mercy. The punishment for my crime would've been a fairly small fine, but procedure being procedure, he could've locked me up at the precinct for at least the rest of the day, perhaps longer.

So I made a date behind a corner, slipped him a $20 note, and went happily on my way. It was all very businesslike.

I was privileged. I'm a Finnish citizen, and the worst he could threaten me with was a day at the precinct waiting to be 'processed' and a smallish fine. I could've called the embassy, and they could've made a fuss he probably wouldn't want.

Imagine if I had been, say, a Tajik guest worker, and the militsioner just didn't like my face. Or had a grudge against me. Or something else.

A friend of a friend of mine, also a Finnish citizen, was killed in Moscow, almost certainly by the cops. So it's not like we're immune.

None of this can happen in a system where the laws are relatively sensible, relatively well understood, and, most of all, limited. Where you know where you stand. Where you actually have to knowingly—or grossly carelessly—transgress to get on the wrong side of them. Without laws like that, cops are automatically much more powerful than they have any business being.

Most of the world doesn't have laws like that.

It's too bad there's not even much of a fuss about it. An open society can't survive without them.

Perhaps something for the Occupiers to think about there, too.

Meditation on a Watch

2011-10-07T13:38:00.000+03:00

I can tell what kind of day I'm having by looking at my watch.

On some days I look at it and go "Damn, those hands are crooked, and the detailing isn't very good, and I'd really rather have a completely different kind of watch. Like an aviator watch maybe."

On other days I look at it and go "Hey, that is one fine watch."

On other days I look at it and wonder if it's fast, or slow.

On yet other days I look at it and go "It's 12:30."

The first kind of day is not a pleasant one.

Comments are enabled again.

Identity, Doctrine, and Consensus Buddhism

2011-09-24T19:32:00.000+03:00

I've recently stumbled into some discussions that have gotten me thinking about identity and doctrine, specifically Buddhist identity and Buddhist doctrine. There's a debate ongoing for roughly two and a half millennia about what, exactly, is Buddhism, and who should be considered Buddhist and who shouldn't. Currently, one division in the debate goes between a group I'll dub the 'non-sectarians,' and another one that I'll dub the 'fundamentalists.' I can't think of any better terms, although these ones are a bit loaded. Let it be stated up-front that I fall pretty clearly into the 'fundamentalist' camp, despite not identifying as a Buddhist and not having formally taken refuge as one.

The 'non-sectarians' feel that we shouldn't attempt to define what Buddhism is or isn't. They believe that such an attempt is not merely futile but actually harmful, since it causes division between people who would otherwise share values and goals, and, equally importantly, distracts from the practice of Buddhism, which is best left to each individual Buddhist to define for himself. The Buddhist traditions, in their intellectual, religious, ritualistic, and 'spiritual' dimensions, are something to be drawn from, not something to be codified or analyzed.

The 'fundamentalists,' conversely, feel that despite the broad variety of traditions it consists of, Buddhism can and should also be treated as a coherent philosophy with identifiable core features, that this philosophy forms a doctrinal structure that is indispensable in grounding and guiding the practice, and that movements and teachers that materially deviate from these core features should no longer be regarded as properly Buddhist.

The near enemy of 'fundamentalism' is, clearly, well, fundamentalism—a rigid and inflexible adherence to a set of doctrinal positions that become unchallenged and unchallengable dogma, and a corresponding intolerance of points of view that do not share these positions.

The near enemy of 'non-sectarianism' is a mushy anything-goes tolerance that refuses to challenge bad behavior, exploitation, or outright abuse, giving cover to cults, hucksters, and conmen of all stripes.

The term Consensus Buddhism—coined by its opponents, I think—refers to the somewhat amorphous but pretty large group of first- and second-generation American Buddhists that got going in the 1960's and 1970's, and subsequently went on to establish institutions. While they represent a broad variety of traditions, they do share an identifiable ethos. One opponent of Consensus Buddhism (with whom I agree on this point but disagree strongly on a number of others) argues that it is mostly a Western Liberal hippie ethos dressed up in Buddhist ritual and tradition. Consensus Buddhism frowns strongly on 'fundamentalism' and is very big on 'non-sectarianism.'

In my opinion, Consensus Buddhism has strayed so far into mushy anything-goes territory that it has largely lost sight of what Buddhism originally was about. It has become a religion of self-help, self-improvement, good behavior, and emotional security. It's about reducing suffering, becoming a more functional citizen, and getting comfortable in the life you're living. Challenging notions like 'awakening' and 'renunciation' are edited out, by denying their validity altogether, or their applicability to Western society, or by mythologizing them, or by treating them as 'symbolic', or by just not talking about them at all. Due to its fierce non-sectarianism, Consensus Buddhism has repeatedly and persistently failed to address blatant abuses by people and groups operating under its umbrella: the ongoing Eido Tai Shimano and Dennis Genpo Merzel scandals are particularly egregious examples, but a whole undergrowth of sometimes frankly scary stuff thrives under the protection of its omertà. There's "Zen Master Rama's" Frederick Lenz Foundation, deeply embedded in the structures of the Consensus, all kinds of dodgy characters peddling their schtick under the banner of 'non-sectarianism' or 'post-modernism,' unchallenged by them, or in some cases actually a part of the Consensus.

That stuff stinks. It stinks so bad and so far that one of the reasons I don't identify as a Buddhist, and have no intention to start to do so, is that I don't want any of that stench on me.

Therefore, a discussion of what is and isn't Buddhism is absolutely necessary, even with the concomitant risk of sliding into the 'near enemy' of rigid dogmatism or sectarianism, or, Amida forbid, provoking dissension and strife among 'Buddhists.'

One of the usual ways any such discussions tend to get derailed is that a discussion of doctrine—philosophy, teaching, whatever—gets conflated with a discussion of identity. These are two separate but related notions. There are lots and lots of Buddhists (Catholics, Protestants, Shi'ites, Sunnis, Shaivis, Vaishnavis, Trotskyites, Republicans, whatever) with very strong Buddhist (etc.) identities. Many, perhaps most of them are also highly heterodox. That's just the way things are. There are Buddhists who hold un-Buddhist beliefs or practice un-Buddhist practices, and I see no compelling reason to attempt to deny them their identities. On the contrary, I would find that highly offensive. People should be allowed to define their identities however the hell they want.

However, that is not the same question as looking at Buddhism, or an individual Buddhist tradition, as a doctrinal and philosophical structure. Because of the sheer mass of material and variety of traditions, there are bound to be contradictions and conflicts in it. Yet it's not hard at all to identify salient features that distinguish Buddhism from neighboring doctrinal systems. Buddhism is not the same as Advaita Vedanta, nor Taoism, nor Shintoism, nor Confucianism, nor Sufism, nor existentialism, nor postmodernism, nor Western Liberal hippie-ism. There is overlap with all of these doctrinal systems, and more, but there are also divergences. By looking at these commonalities and divergences, a picture starts to emerge. We can then look at that picture and refine it, debate what's in it and what's not.

This leads to the second common way such a process gets derailed: it turns into an attempt at defining 'true' Buddhism, the one that has all of the central distinguishing features, and none of the 'accretions.' It becomes very easy to go from that to, say, dismissing Ch'an as Taoism with meditation, Zen as Ch'an with samurais, Tibetan Buddhism as Theravada with earth spirits, and so on and so forth. Down that road, too, lies madness.

But that debate needs to be had. My view is that a Buddhism that substitutes reduction of suffering for liberation from suffering, group therapy for eyebrow-to-eyebrow encounter, emotional security for challenge, productive citizenship for awakening, spiritual consumerism for renunciation, homilies for rigorous thinking, the ego, id, and superego for cittas, caittas, dhammas, and skandhas, niceness for truth, is no longer recognizably Buddhist. I certainly want no truck with such a religion.

Not now, not ever.

Genderqueer

2011-09-17T18:47:00.000+03:00

Shooting the Frog Prince, Marburg, 2011

I had an interesting discussion the other day with two of my fellow bloggers, Nathan and Nella Lou, over at her blog, Madhushala. They were trying on the descriptor "genderqueer" for themselves, despite being heterosexual. Turns out the term means something like "non-conforming. Not comfortable with behaving or thinking in those gender programmed ways," as Nella Lou describes it.

The discussion felt a bit odd. The reason for that is that from where I'm at, there's nothing particularly strange about either Nella Lou's or Nathan's views or actions regarding gender issues that I can see. On the contrary, both are eminently sensible and level-headed about these issues. And by "sensible," I mean they think like any right-thinking person should, namely, me.

This whole gender wars thing is a bit of a new acquaintance for me. I've been snorting at Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus style tripe from time to time, but I never had to think of it. That's privilege talking there, naturally—I'm white, straight, and male, and most of my "non-conforming" behaviors or thought patterns are not immediately obvious. In fact, I think most of them are about things I don't do rather than things I do do, which means they're invisible most of the time. Such as having no interest whatsoever in competitive sport, either as a spectator or a participant. But "not caring about ice hockey" rarely causes any obvious friction; all I have to do is shut up when others are talking about it. So I've never really had to think about it. Privilege.

As to the less obvious things, I think they only come up in fairly close conversation. I've been told by a number of women over the years that I talk with them—and, perhaps, listen to them—differently than most men. They seem to quite like it, whatever it is. I wouldn't know, since I've never talked to men while being a woman. I guess I'll have to take them at their word, that there is something "non-conforming" there.

And in case you were wondering, no, whatever it was did not invariably and automatically condemn me permanently to the friend zone.

I think I've had the biggest communication problems with women who try really hard to be feminine; I never see the person behind the mask. Then again, I have that same problem with anyone who tries really hard to act out any kind of identity. Extremely Buddhisty Buddhists, to pick one example.

It's the acting bit that sticks. There are hyper-feminine women who really are that way, and don't need to act it out. And there are hyper-Buddhisty Buddhists who also really are that way and don't need to put on an act either. I usually have no problems relating to them either, nor, as far as I can tell, they to me. It's the people who put on a persona I have problems with.

Lately I've been keeping more of an eye out for this gender normativity thing, though, and yeah, it does look like a lot of people, perhaps even most people, have some pretty weird ideas about gender. It's never really occurred to me to think that women are somehow fundamentally different from men. There is the plumbing, of course, and there may be some statistically significant differences in some specific areas that you can tease out if you pick a large enough population and look hard enough, but overall "male" or "female" really tells very little about anyone.

Yet, if you look out for it, the world is chock-full of generalizing statements about men or women, and lots of people seem to really believe them. Strange. Not to mention pressure to conform to those norms; the kind of stuff that gets young girls to pose half-naked for evening papers, or, I think, pushes a certain subset of young men to give up on the hope of ever having a girlfriend and retreating into sullen misogyny instead. Or rampant, oblivious privilege, like in this little incident for example.

A part of this is probably cultural. I'm fairly certain that few of my friends and acquaintances really think of men and women in terms of stereotypes; the few that do tend to stick out, and we tend to condescend at the poor cavemen, which must irritate them no end. But then I don't know how typical the circles I move in are.

I don't think gender roles ever were quite as deeply divided in Scandinavian countries as, say, Central European or Anglo-Saxon countries. Our deep roots are in peasant egalitarianism; a society of small farmers tilling land they own. There wasn't all that much leisure, and while there certainly was a division between men's work and women's work, there wasn't quite as much of a status difference to it as elsewhere. I just read that some archaeologists had re-examined the bones of Vikings who arrived in England, and it turned out that lots of the people they'd categorized as men were actually women: they'd made the mistake because they'd been buried with their swords and shields. Real-life Valkyries. That rings true too. And certainly, by most measures, the Nordic countries are among the most gender-equal in the world. Our countries have or have had women as presidents, prime ministers, archbishops, corporate executives.

Which isn't to say there is complete equality, or even close to it. There isn't. But compared to most places, the Nordic countries really are a bit different, even if Finland is about 20 years behind Sweden, as usual.

But a part of this non-conformity of mine certainly stems from personal experience. One in particular stands out: my primary school years, between the ages of nine and twelve. We had a fairly unusual class, in that we never segregated into boys' and girls' groups. Instead, we just kept on playing together, until we hit our teens and started to hang out together for rather different reasons. That was a bit unusual, and I'm sure it would have made a big difference if that split had happened; if there had been several formative years of "eww, cooties" followed by the hormonal storm that is puberty. Why did this happen? I don't know, but I have a hunch our teacher had something to do with it. She was a genius. Her name was A. Mattsson, so naturally we called her the Amazon. We loved the hell out of her.

If the world declares Nella Lou and Nathan—and, presumably, me too, since I can't see where their take differs from mine—genderqueers, then it's the world that has its head up its ass about gender. I selfishly hope this really is an Anglo-American thing, and I haven't just been oblivious to it all my life. If it is the former, well hey, welcome to Scandinavia. With climate change, it's gonna be nice and toasty here too, in another few years, if the sea level doesn't get us first.

Man and Superman

2011-09-12T19:49:00.000+03:00

I just saw Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs at the Finnish National Opera. That's four operas totaling nearly nineteen hours, one every other day for a week. I had seen all of the individual operas before, some live, some on TV, but never in a row, as a single, coherent cycle. It was a bit overwhelming. On Thursday, between Die Walküre and Siegfried, I tottered home from work around six and crashed straight to bed. Missed my regular Thursday zazen, and Sunday's zazenkai too.

Boy howdy was it worth the effort. There really is nothing quite like the Ring. Wagner is utterly uncompromising. Doesn't apologize. Doesn't talk down to you. Doesn't court you. Doesn't try to entertain, amuse, or edify. He is utterly free of sentimentality or conceit. He just grabs you, sits you down, and throws you in the middle of a storm of art, music, philosophy, verse, and stagecraft, and then lets you make of it what you will.

Which is kind of ironic, since by all accounts in real life he was a real bastard. Never forgot, or forgave, a slight, and held a grudge like the worst of his villains.

The main hero of the cycle is Siegfried, even though he only first appears in the third opera of the cycle. The first two, Rheingold and Die Walküre, are his origin story. Siegfried is Wagner's representation of the Nietzschean Superman. Not the guy in tights and a cape, mind, but Nietzsche's idea of what a perfect human would be like.

Siegfried is joyous. He is free. He is unhesitating, guiltless, and guileless. He does not understand fear, doubt, guilt, or shame, and is the only one immune to the curse of Alberich's Ring, since he doesn't desire worldly power either. He joyously reforges his father's sword, slays a dragon, kills his scheming foster father, awakens, wins, and loves Brünnhilde. Then he equally joyously, guiltlessly, and guilelessly disguises himself as someone else and rapes her.

All the villain of the piece, Hagen, needs to manipulate Siegfried into doing that is a magic potion that makes him forget he ever met her, and to fall in love with someone else. The rest happens by itself. Siegfried wants something and reaches for it. It doesn't even occur to him to consider the consequences for others.

Nietzsche really liked the Ring, I hear.

Twilight of the Gods was not Wagner's final work. That would be Parsifal. Nietzsche hated that one.

I saw Parsifal last year in Dresden, and wrote up a piece about it. According to one Paul Schofield, Parsifal is actually a reborn Siegfried. I still think his take on Parsifal as a straightforward Buddhist morality tale isn't quite right, but I think I'm going to have to give him Parsifal as Siegfried, on a thematic if not literal level at least.

The Ring is a tale of growth and development. All of its main characters change through the cycle. Wotan goes from the embodiment of Will to grimly sitting on his throne in Valhalla, waiting for the End he welcomes; Brünnhilde is transformed from an angel of death into a passionate human woman; the Rhinemaidens from playful nixies to desperate, fading seducers, to embodiments of cosmic justice. Even Alberich goes from a horny old goat to a broken old man, by way of Dark Lord of Nibelheim.

All except one. All except Siegfried. He alone is unchanging, unchanged, and complete, from the moment he first strides on stage to complain about Mime's cooking, to his last gasp as he lies mortally wounded by Hagen's spear.

Nietzsche may have felt that Wagner betrayed his ideas by making Parsifal the hero enlightened by compassion. However, I think Wagner already refuted Nietzsche's Übermensch in Twilight of the Gods. How could the perfect man, the embodiment of Reinmenschlichkeit, "pure humanity," so lightly and easily commit the horrendous crime that is the rape of Brünnhilde? If that is not a reductio ad absurdum of Nietzschean morality, I don't know what is, whether Wagner intended it that way at the time or not.

Perhaps it is this very dissonance that pushed Wagner beyond Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, to write Parsifal. Because there Schofield is right: when Parsifal first walks on in his opera, he is Siegfried. Not merely someone like him. The same. He is instantly recognizable, in his freedom, his sincerity, his joy, his unhesitating way of reaching for whatever he wants, his complete lack of concern for others.

But Parsifal does not stop there. He changes and grows. Siegfried never knew fear, or guilt, or shame. Parsifal learned them, went through them and beyond them, and became fully human in the process. Parsifal of the second and third acts would not have fallen for Hagen's scheme, however strong the magic potion. He could not have raped one woman to win another, however fiercely he loved her.

Nietzsche's Übermensch as personified by Siegfried is really no better—or worse—than a young child, or a cat perhaps. A paragon of pure humanity he is not. It is not enough to be joyful, free, guiltless, and guileless, to love simply, purely, and fiercely. Wagner might not have consciously realized this when he wrote Twilight of the Gods, but the moral truth of the Ring expresses it nonetheless.

It has some pretty damn good music, too.

Twilight of the Gods

2011-09-11T11:33:00.001+03:00

Something burned down. Something else was built. It opened on September 2.

Karl Marx described history as a series of stable states punctuated by revolutionary crises. A stable state is one where the social and political order reflects and supports the relations of production. A crisis occurs when internal contradictions in the system cause a shift in the relations of production, making the social and political order no longer compatible with its economic basis. This causes a revolution, out of which emerges a new social and political order, more suited to the changed relations of production. So we go from the slave states of the ancient world to medieval feudalism, and from there to capitalism.

The big picture behind the ongoing economic, political, and social crises is a Marxist one. There has been a fundamental shift in relations of production, and the social and political order we currently have isn't compatible with the new state of affairs.

Until now, the capitalist economy has been constrained by the availability and productivity of labor. More labor and more productive labor -> more production -> more wealth. The redistributive system that emerged in the rich part of the world after the Second World War did a pretty good job of balancing out the market's tendency to concentrate wealth at the top, resulting in an enormous and enormously rapid and broad-based rise in living conditions for everyone lucky enough to be born in one of these rich countries. Several formerly poor countries have managed to reproduce this same take-off.

A part of the current malaise is the completely unnecessary and tragic dismantling of this redistributive system in what was until very recently the world's leading economy, the USA. However, that's only a contributing factor, not a structural cause.

We are now entering a phase where the constraint of production is no longer labor, but capital and natural resources. Automation has become so effective and so pervasive that labor accounts for a pretty small fraction of manufacturing costs. That means that the foundation of advanced capitalism, a broad-based, prosperous middle class, is eroding. The machinery of production just doesn't need that many skilled—and therefore well-paid—workers anymore. It doesn't even need all that many unskilled—and low-wage—workers. Robots are more reliable, cheaper in the long run, and don't go on strike.

We just don't need all that many people to produce whatever we want. Just a few highly-skilled workers designing and running the automated means of production. No matter what happens to manufacturing—whether it's actually done in China, the European Union, or Ghana—good jobs for the masses aren't going to come back. Not in the way they used to be. Nor are new technologies and new challenges, such as transitioning out of fossil fuels, going to do more than mitigate the problem.

A consumerist economy can't function without consumers. Consumers can't consume if they don't earn more money than they need to spend on consumption. Debt can keep the machine running for a bit longer, but that will hit a wall too, pretty quickly. That means that the entire machine is broken, from everybody's point of view. We're currently on our way to one of William Gibson's dystopias, of a tiny number of people who are incredibly rich, a small global minority or corporate citizens, and a large majority of poor, living near the subsistence level.

The real irony is that we got here because we got too good at producing stuff. Collectively, we have the technology to eliminate hunger and abject poverty and halt climate change and other ecological destruction. We could go to Mars if we wanted to. Yet we keep acting as stupidly as we ever did.

Work—what Weber used to call the Protestant Work Ethic—is deeply embedded in our way of life. If you're jobless, you're worthless. A parasite. A good-for-nothing. Even in societies with a peasant-egalitarian culture, which lack, say, the American imperative to 'succeed' at all costs, you're expected to do an honest day's work. Your identity, your happiness, the meaning of your life is bound in your professional pride.

This ethic functioned well enough in a system where work was needed. It's going to cause an incredible amount of unhappiness in a world where work is scarce. People who have jobs fear losing them. People who don't fight desperately to get them. And those who can get them will sneer at those who can't, who will find their sense of self-worth and dignity gone.

The good news is that the revolution always comes. Sometimes in a spectacular and bloody crisis. More often in a gradual transition that takes decades or more. We will, eventually, come up with a society that works with automation.

The bad news is that we may not live to see it. These things can take a long time. We will need to challenge our fundamental assumptions of what it means to be a good citizen; a good human being. Of the obligations we have for one another. Of the notions of right and wrong. Of wealth. Of private property.

It would be good if we did some of that challenging explicitly.

I don't know what kind of system will emerge. What we'll be like in it. What our values, identities, ideas, sense of self-worth will be based on. There's a lot I'd like to keep about the system we have now, as far short of its lofty aspirations it falls. Notions like universal human rights, or that everyone should have the right to participate in the political process, or rule of law rather than rule by administrative decree. It would be a shame if all that goes, as well it might.

I'll be going to see Wagner's Götterdämmerung—Twilight of the Gods—later today, at the Finnish National Opera. It's very appropriate for September 11, 2011, I think.

Why I Didn't Like Human Revolution

2011-09-04T12:50:00.000+03:00

Deus Ex is something of a cult classic computer game. It's eleven years old, and still being replayed and fondly remembered. That's because it's one of the few games that has real meat on its cyberpunk-stealth-shooter gameplay bones.

Deus Ex is about the collapse of the post-war social and political system, which had already started when it came out eleven years ago. In some ways, it was eerily prescient: terrorists had blown up a major New York landmark triggering a global war on terror, governmental power had been sidelined or co-opted by corporate power, the divide between rich and poor had grown ever deeper, and technology was on the skin, and under it. If Deus Ex was a novel or a movie, it would be somewhere up there with Neuromancer or Blade Runner. It had a sequel which sort of flopped, critically and in the marketplace. For good reason.

Another sequel just came out, called Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's been very well received. I think the critics are wrong. Human Revolution is as badly flawed as Invisible War was. This time, not because of the gameplay, but because of the content. Deus Ex, the original, was a radical, subversive, thought-provoking game. Human Revolution is a profoundly conservative one.

On the surface, both games follow the same template. You take the role of a cybernetically augmented super-soldier working for a powerful organization, to uncover a conspiracy of global reach as well as buried secrets about your own past. Ultimately you get to make a choice that determines the future of humanity. There's only one really significant difference in the main story arc: in Deus Ex, you discover about halfway through that the organization you're working for isn't all it appears, and go rogue. In Human Revolution, you remain a loyal toady right up to the very final scene past the last boss battle.

That makes all the difference.

Both games are, on the surface, about choosing between competing political visions. There's the reactionary choice—going back to the system that was breaking down even in the year 2000, of stability and relative prosperity built on lies and shadowy forces pulling the strings behind the scenes. There's the anarchist choice, of smashing these organs of power, and allowing whatever emerges to emerge. There's the transhumanist choice, of opting for a technological revolution that would profoundly change what it means to be human. And in Human Revolution, there's also a nihilist choice, although it's bizarrely presented as something altogether different.

The difference is that in Deus Ex, the advocates of each of these visions were allowed a genuine voice. You fought against each of them, and with each of them. You met genuinely sympathetic characters from each of them, and genuine villains. While it was pretty clear where the sympathies of the writers lay, they made an honest effort at seeing things from the other points of view. The Silhoutte are not mindless fanatics. The world offered by the Illuminati really is a kinder and gentler one, for most people. And the utopian choice is a real leap into the unknown. This made the story meaningful. While—like in any more or less linear game—you were being told a story, you were not being told what to make of that story. That choice was left up to you, and clicking that final button after the final boss fight was not an empty thing.

In Human Revolution, only one of the choices is presented by a sympathetic character. All of your friends work for him, and believe in him and his mission. All through the game, in the various scripted conversations with other people, you defend his interests and his ideas. The other choices are presented by horrific villains, oleaginous, opportunistic politicians, or war veterans so badly traumatized they can't think straight. In Deus Ex, corporate and political power had merged into the unholy monstrosity that is UNATCO, the agency you start out working with. In Human Revolution, the character representing governmental power is opposed to corporate power, seeking to stifle its creativite power by, horror of horrors, 'regulation.'

Deus Ex, the original, invited you to question the status quo. Deus Ex: Human Revolution invites you to support it. The two games are similar only on the surface. In terms of message and intent, they could not be more different.

Fear and Silence

2011-09-01T08:36:00.000+03:00

There was a post on Memeo today, about "complacency advocacy" -- people vehemently arguing that you should STFU and not rock the boat. It got me thinking, because I've noticed that phenomenon too. Memeo says:

Complacency enforcement in the form of policing activists is to be expected from those in advantageous power positions, yet it appears too often among those who are on the losing end of that scale.

Perhaps it is due to fear. That’s the only insight I have into it at the moment after having read a lot of these kinds of comments and having been on the receiving end of them more times than I like to remember.

Yeah, I think it's fear. I know a quite a few "normal people" (as the Russian expression has it) who grew up in police states or civil wars. Most of them have this as a built-in reflex: keep your head down, don't rock the boat, and don't go near anyone who doesn't keep her head down. Express strong opinions at odds with the consensus only among close family, if that. Don't even go see a remotely controversial movie because someone might be watching, or you might bump into someone, or there might be trouble.

I don't blame them. And I'm overawed when that fear breaks and cracks open the system. But even when it does, most people still stay home and keep their heads down. That's how fear-based polities work, by psychologically atomizing society, so networks of opposition never manage to coalesce. Not all Egypt was at Tahrir. Only the ones who somehow managed to crack that shell of fear.

I have noticed it more in our "free" societies as well, lately. It's the same vibe: the undertone of "you'll get us all into trouble." I don't think that it's a coincidence that despite these societies getting safer by the numbers -- less homicide, less violent crime, less rape, fewer war dead, less famine, longer life expectancy, fewer terror attacks, fewer traffic accidents, fewer victims from natural disasters etc. etc. -- our risk-aversion has grown far faster than the risks have fallen. If you believe that you're surrounded by deadly forces outside your control, keeping your head down and huddling in a silent mass, sheep-like, is a natural thing to do.

But sad.

I read a bit of news reporting a few months ago where they had interviewed three people, one born in the 1950's, one in the 1970's, and one in the 1990's, in a certain part of Helsinki. They'd asked them to map out the physical territory they roamed as children below the age of 12. The 1950's kid was all over the place, shooting rats at the harbor with a BB gun, climbing the rocky vacant lots in Kallio, getting into scraps with the kids from the neighboring neighborhood, taking long walks to Seurasaari, and so on. The 1970's kid's map covered the general quarter of the town pretty well, but had none of the 1950's kid's expeditions. The 1990's kid went to school, some friends houses nearby, and was driven by his parents to do sports and other hobbies. His map had a few disconnected spots on it.

This mirrors my experience as a suburban kid in the 1970's, the stories my parents' generation tell of their childhood, and their parents' generation of theirs. Nowadays it is unthinkable to see a 10-year-old kid by himself, or only with friends of the same age, out playing in the streets five or ten kilometers from home these days.

All because of fear. Yet Helsinki now is a great deal safer than Helsinki in the 1950's, with its heroin-addicted war veterans, more lethal traffic, general lack of safety barriers, unexploded ordnance left over from the war, and so on.

It really is too bad about fear.

The Race Card

2011-08-25T09:59:00.000+03:00

Race is back on the agenda. It's been a while since I've heard anyone bleating about the post-racial society. That's a good thing, because there's no better way to shut down discussion of something unpleasant than to get "everyone"—that is, a majority big enough to make it conventional wisdom—to believe that it's no longer a problem.

Unfortunately, race talk itself isn't much fun. It's charged, and often slides into fighting that only deepens divides rather than helps bridge them. Usually this happens when a discussion about race gets derailed into a discussion of 'the race card.'

'The race card' is shorthand for accusing someone of trying to win a debate by painting his opponent as a racist. This does happen from time to time, and it's very ugly when it does. For example, J-Street just accused Richard Silverstein of Tikun Olam of being a racist, because he wrote a blog post criticizing Jesse Jackson Jr. for going on an AIPAC junket to Israel and then writing a heavily slanted, anti-Palestinian op-ed in Jerusalem Post.

I think it's fair to assume that whoever posted the accusation from J-Street's Twitter account is not black.That would be typical. In my experience, the race card is most commonly played by whites against other whites. Blacks (Arabs, Roma etc.) tend to be pretty careful about accusing whites of racism, simply because the social price for doing so is big. To my recollection, I have been accused of racism by a black person exactly once, whereas I have been accused of racism by whites many times. Specifically, anti-Semitism, due to my position on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

That social penalty comes from the 'playing the race card' card.

That's a card that I've seen played much more commonly than the actual race card. It's mostly played by whites against blacks or other minorities, rarely by blacks against blacks (etc.), much more rarely by whites against whites.

The 'playing the race card' card is a really effective way to derail a discussion. Whatever the topic was, it becomes about whoever raised it. That person is no longer someone pointing to a social, cultural, or political problem; she becomes someone with a chip on her shoulder, cynically exploiting the charged issue of race to win points in a discussion. Suddenly nothing she says needs to be taken seriously anymore, since it's now just petty personal spite, or envy for those smarter, wiser, and more fortunate than she. You know, people who don't care about race. Who, usually, happen to be white.

This is much nastier than the race card. First, because it's more common; so common that you might not even notice unless you're paying attention to it. It's one of the cornerstones of the chilling climate that makes discussions about race so difficult. And second, because it's, by nature, one-directional: a cudgel that can only wielded by the privileged against the marginalized.

Both the race card and the 'playing the race card' card are forms of the ad-hominem fallacy; attacks on the person rather than the argument. I would very much like to see the last of both of them. Of the two, the 'playing the race card' card is clearly the bigger problem. It's a lousy way to counter the race card in any case, even when it really does get played, and it's a big part of why these discussions we so desperately need to have are so fraught.

It would be nice if we could stick to the matter at hand rather than attacking the messengers. Wouldn't it?

Well, it worked

2011-08-22T08:10:00.003+03:00

Tripoli has fallen to the Libyan Transitional National Council. I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have happened without the NATO intervention that I was feeling so ambivalent about. There are no significant foreign ground forces in the country either; the Libyans did all of the face to face fighting. That is good.

Libya now is a very fragile polity. It's entirely possible that it'll fragment along tribal, ethnic, or geographic lines. That would be tragic, as such wars drag on for a very long time.

But if it doesn't, and what emerges is something resembling a decent state, then the intervention will have been worth it. North Africa from Egypt to Tunisia will no longer be in the hand of corrupt authoritarian dictators. That is good news for Algeria and Morocco as well, although perhaps not their leaders. It also ought to hearten the Syrians, who have nothing to give their revolution but their bodies.

Face to Face

2011-08-20T14:17:00.000+03:00

Tourist Want A Cracker? Sydney, 2010

One of the most enduring features of Buddhist training is the face-to-face encounter with a teacher. This is especially strongly emphasized in Zen, with its founding myth of special transmission outside the scriptures, from Mahakasyapa's smile on down through the centuries. In the group where I practice, there are two flavors of face-to-face encounter: dokusan and daisan. Dokusan is an encounter with a teacher, and daisan is with a senior student; someone who's not a teacher but has been authorized by one to do that.

These encounters have been immensely helpful to me. Indeed, if there is any one thing that makes me feel part of a tradition, it has to be dokusan. It's a simple, strange, and ancient ritual, and there is a real feel of continuity there. That teachers and students have been facing each other through the centuries. That even if the chain of Dharma transmission has broken here and there, the chain of sitting face-to-face has not. There might be the odd incompletely credentialed ancestor here and there, but even they have surely sat face to face with a teacher, and while some of the names chanted in the line of ancestors might be entirely mythological, someone has been there, right down to December nights in northern India.

Perhaps the most precious thing about dokusan for me is that it is the ultimate permission to speak freely. There are things about this practice that are significant but very difficult to talk about. There's a lot of baggage hanging from those things too. There's the big E, of course, which is such a hot potato that there's a lot of weirdness about it, from the caricatured Rinzai attitude of going all Leroy Jenkins at it, to the caricatured Theravadin attitude of breaking it down to attainments and paths and racking them up like XBox achievements, to the caricatured Soto attitude of angrily denying that such a thing is worth even talking about. And lesser things in the same category; little unfoldings that change things. Moments of seeing the world in a different light. And, naturally, the immense capacity for self-delusion that most of us have; conjuring up insights that are really just phantoms.

That face-to-face encounter is the only space I've experienced where it's possible to speak freely of such things. It is sacred space. What passes there, stays there. Even if nothing is said in words, the silence is eloquent. Even if there is nothing there but surface thoughts and words and confusion, that is eloquent too. There may be words of reassurance, words of guidance, even a word that stings, to deflate a delusion. Or just silence.

There is fear too. Fear of being exposed. Of looking foolish. Of not measuring up. I think a big part of it is facing that fear. I've noticed that lots of newcomers to our zendo are very nervous about going to daisan, let alone dokusan, and seem to put it off, sometimes indefinitely. I was dreadfully nervous the first time I took dokusan, and that wasn't a very long time ago. I'm still nervous. But if it happens that someone's reading this who has the opportunity to take it, but hasn't done so because of nerves or any other reason, please, do it. It's probably not going to be what you think (it never is for me anyway), and if you decide it's not for you, nobody says you have to go again. But if you're wondering whether you ought to go, just do it. It doesn't matter who you are or at what level you imagine yourself to be or how full of shit you think you are, just go. It'll sort itself out. Or not.

The significance of these encounters goes far beyond the actual encounter. A while ago, I felt that more was better; I would have liked more frequent access to my teacher. Now I'm starting to think that the relative rarity of these encounters may be useful in and of itself. Just the knowledge that the possibility is there, that there will likely be one, ground the practice in and of itself.

Tomorrow is a zazenkai. No teacher there, but daisan is offered. I don't know if I'll go. I'll decide when I'm there.

Zen Master Corto

2011-08-14T11:14:00.001+03:00

I've been thinking about right action lately a good deal. The stuff that's usually filed under 'ethics' or 'morality.' When I was somewhat younger, I did a bit of study of systems of ethics; conceptual constructs that can be used to determine whether an action is 'right' or not. Intentionalism and consequentialism. Absolutism and relativism. Imperatives and intuition. That sort of thing. At one point, I defined my ethical stance as that of policy utilitarianism.

Lately, though, I've come to think that none of that really works all that well. One underlying assumption with all these systems of ethics is that people know what they're doing. That they're working with enough information about the situation to be able to draw meaningful ethical conclusions from them. This is very similar to the fundamental assumptions underlying free market economics—that there are no information asymmetries, that all economic actors are rational utility-maximizers, and so on.

This just isn't true. Most of the time, we have no idea what we're dealing with, or entirely the wrong idea, or at most, a very superficial, partial picture of the situation. Here's where any systematic system of ethics falls down, no matter how rational or well grounded it is—by definition, any such system is a construct of imperatives, and if you feed it bad data, bad conclusions come out. And in ethics, these conclusions can have awful implications. Genocides wouldn't happen if the people perpetrating them wouldn't be really, deeply convinced that despite all the horror what they're doing is right.

Buddhism—especially Zen, I think—takes a completely different approach to the morality of action. The notion of Right Action isn't bound to any set of imperatives to be followed. Instead, it sidesteps the whole question, stating that Right Action springs from wisdom—prajña—moment by moment. The 'rules' you find in Buddhist teachings aren't ethical imperatives at all; they're forms of practice intended to help you discover this wisdom. Vinaya monks aren't supposed to sit on high chairs not because it's 'wrong,' but because not sitting on high chairs is helpful for their practice.

Needless to say, this is deeply unsatisfying, philosophically speaking. There are no answers to be found to ethical dilemmas there. Buddhism has nothing to say about the Trolley Problem or the Survival Lottery or any of the other thought experiments fiendish ethicists have concocted to acid test various systems of ethics.

Instead, Buddhist lore has reams of stories of buddhas and bodhisattvas, Zen masters and monks resolving thorny situations in unconventional ways. Of bodhisattva action in the moment; paramitas in action. Those aren't intended to be models to be emulated either, but rather as fingers pointing the way. Somewhere.

Corto Maltese is a fictional character. He was created by one Hugo Pratt.

Corto is an adventurer, sailor, soldier of fortune, smoker of thin Brazilian cigars, ever searching for the Great Treasure that ever evades him. Towards the end of his life, Hugo Pratt got pretty deep into all kinds of esoterica, about Atlantis and the Lost Continent of Mu, and his drawing got a bit sloppy too. Corto's adventures got weirder and weirder, spinning into psychedelic dream sequences and conversations with long-lost priests of Atlantis. I much prefer his earlier works, which are, on the surface of it, straightforward adventure tales in exotic locations. Only, they have no beginning and no end. Corto is introduced to the reader floating bound to a raft, to encounter and old enemy, or friend, in the middle of a story. At the end of that story, he sails off again. There is no real story arc, no dénouement, no satisfying conclusion. Just an endless wandering from place to place, story to story.

Through it, the character of Corto himself is a constant. Or, rather, it's almost as if he doesn't exist. His actions make no sense from the point of view of conventional motives. The question of why Corto does what he does in a given situation just doesn't arise. Why does Corto take the Armenian girl under his protection? Raspoutine variously suggests he wants to rape her, or seduce her, or is just an old sentimental. Yet Corto's actions suggest none of that. He barely even speaks to the girl, barely pays any attention to her at all, gives her no reassurance, makes no promises, creates no connection. He just has her tag along through the civil war of Turkey, to the one of Russia, and drops her off when she no longer needs him. When he plays cards for the life of a villain—and cheats: "Five aces in a deck with no jokers. Never in my life of gambling have I seen such a wonder," he says of his hand, and hands over the villain to his worst enemy, a convicted killer whom he has abused—he does it with a similar equanimity.

There's a familiar note there, the same one that rings in the Sayings of the Layman P'ang, or those stories of Nansen and Joshu, Rinzai, or Bodhidharma. In the situations they find themselves in, none of these characters have any special concern for themselves. It's as if they've removed their ego from the ethical equation altogether. The actor is at exactly the same level as every other character in the situation. He does what has to be done there. Yet there is no notion of self-sacrifice, self-abasement, or self-negation either. And no calculation, reflection, ethical hand-wringing. Only action. Sometimes things go wrong, but if so, there are no regrets either.

Could this be a hallmark of Right Action: the disappearance of the notion of motive? Should Sensei Corto be admitted among the Ancestors?

Trolled by the State Department

2011-07-31T20:38:00.004+03:00

Looks like I've gotten into a bit of a trollfest, over at Barbara's Buddhism blog. Since now someone's impersonating not only Tassja (I checked) but also me and possibly others, I'll keep a list of comments that I've made here, as well as any comments from fake Petteri that I happen to catch. If it's not on this list, assume it's fake Petteri.

Real Petteri

July 31, 2011 at 8:00 am
July 31, 2011 at 1:03 pm
July 31, 2011 at 1:37 pm

Fake Petteri

July 31, 2011 at 12:51 pm

Note on the identity of the troll

In a comment dated July 31, 2011 at 9:03 pm, Barbara O'Brien posted the originating domain of fake Tassja's and fake Petteri's comments (the same for both):

The fake Tassja and fake Peter are the same individual, and according to a WHOIS search this person is in the Washington, DC, area and using a sherman.state.gov ISP host.

That's a US Department of State server. Stupid Hillary, you'd've thunk she's got better things to do than troll Buddhist blogs.

Added August 1, 9:15 am CET

Stuff I Learned About Beestings

2011-07-30T15:23:00.000+03:00

I've learned a quite a lot about beestings in the last day or two.

If you're out cycling on a windy day in an area with lots of flowering fields and apiculture, you're likely to get stung.

You should get the sting out as soon as possible. It keeps pumping in venom even after the dying bee has fallen off. Also, the longer it's in, the bigger the risk of a secondary infection.

If stung in the head, see a doctor. You can get secondary infections from beestings. If the infection is in the head, there are all kinds of ways bacteria can make their way inside the skull, which is really bad news. Antibiotics are good against those. You can even get tetanus from a beesting, so it's good to keep that particular shot up to date!

You might be allergic, but you'll only know when you get stung a second time.

The allergy can be quite specific. Wasp stings might not do much at all, while beestings might be very nasty.

The allergy can be bad enough to be life-threatening. This doesn't appear to be the case with me; mine is only enough to cause me to break out in hives. From now on, I'll be keeping a fast-acting antihistamine with me when out and about in areas with lots of bees.

Desensitization works well for dangerous beesting allergies.

Lying down makes the swelling from a head sting worse, simply due to gravity. Water flows down. Converse for stings in the legs.

There are lots of plants that are good for reducing swelling, such as witch hazel and plantain. Unfortunately I didn't have any of the ones I found out about to hand, so I couldn't try them out for myself.

The lymphoid system, which removes fluid from swollen tissues (among other things), relies on muscular and cardiovascular action to do its work. Therefore, gently tapping the swollen area with your fingertips, working towards the heart, and working the muscles around it help reduce swelling.

Apitoxin is a pretty impressive chemical cocktail. It's acidic, which causes immediate, burning pain. It has histamines in it, which provoke an allergic reaction. It has anticoagulants and agents that dilate blood vessels, allowing it to spread further. It has an agent that breaks down cell walls, causing tissue damage and even necrosis.

An individual beesting only has about 5-50 micrograms of venom. That's less than the weight of a grain of table salt!

The honeybee is the only stinging insect that dies after stinging. The sting has evolved to win fights between insects, but it fails catastrophically when used against a creature with thick, flexible skin, such as a human or another mammal.

Seeing the world through one eye is kind of interesting. I'm suddenly terribly clumsy: without depth perception, passing the salt or reaching for a glass of water become actions that require conscious attention and concentration. Conversely, TV looks a lot realer: my brain knows that the world is in 3D, and since the TV screen now looks the same, I sort of see it as being 3D too. Almost.

My dog is a lot better at dealing with this kind of little mishap than I am. He got something in his eye a while back—a flat seed of some kind—and while it had come out by the time we got him to the vet the next day, his right eye looked more or less like mine now for a few days. Yet it didn't seem to bother him at all. He just went about his normal business using his left eye. I think that's partly just due to being a dog and therefore being naturally able to take things as they come, and partly due to having a more balanced set of senses to work with. With a dog's smell and hearing, he's less reliant on vision than I am.

I am well taken care of by the kind people around me. I am grateful. Thank you.

About that Men's Rights thing

2011-07-28T20:58:00.000+03:00

As a side-effect of the Oslo tragedy, I've encountered the so-called Men's Rights Movement. It seems Anders Breivik shared many of their ideas.

I had previously only encountered one of their claims. It pops up in the media from time to time. They allege that fathers are treated unfairly in divorce courts, especially with regards to child support and custody of children. They claim that courts tend to favor mothers in custody cases, and impose heavier child-support payments on fathers, all else being equal. This seems to be a recurrent theme and one of their main beefs.

I haven't checked out the data, so I don't know if it's true. However, it does sound perfectly plausible to me.

What's got me scratching my head is this:

If this is, indeed the case, isn't the likeliest explanation the built-in male privilege in our culture and society? That is, men are still seen as the breadwinners, responsible for the economic well-being of the family, and women as baby-makers and child-carers? With this bias, it would only be natural that mothers get custody and fathers get child support payments.

So, if this is what the men's rights movement really is worried about, why aren't they allying with the feminists to change this patriarchal culture? It doesn't strike me as very logical to simultaneously want to go back to traditional gender roles, and expect equal treatment in custody and child support cases.

I thought I might be missing something obvious, but after reading a bit more commentary from that bunch, it seems likelier that they're just not being very logical. The atmosphere is rather nasty; a mix of cultural conservatism and resentment over eroding privilege, coupled with a relentless "othering" of anyone not agreeing with them. If I piped up on MRA SubReddit, I'd be dubbed a mangina and run out of town on a rail in no time flat.

But if I am missing something obvious, I'd be happy to be enlightened about what it is.

Faces of Nonviolence

2011-07-24T16:01:00.001+03:00

Faces of Terrorism

2011-07-24T13:19:00.000+03:00

Killing people is not an acceptable way of sorting out our differences.

Memory, Rebirth, and Past Lives

2011-07-23T11:33:00.001+03:00

A comment on Dangerous Harvests, Nathan's blog, got me thinking about rebirth again. For some reason, it irritates the bejeezus out of me every time some convert Tibetan blithely declares whichever Dharma gate he happens to be knocking on to be the end-all, be-all, indisputable Truth of Buddhism, and those times usually involve hell-beings, god-beings, pretas, and rebirth.

But it gets me thinking, so it can't be all bad.

On the other hand, I've been browsing some stuff by Theravadin monks with Western backgrounds lately, and the more I see of them, the more I'm impressed. They're direct, to the point, understandable, sensible, and refreshingly free of supernaturalism—and they manage to explain really complex stuff in comprehensible ways. I've been especially impressed by talks by the monks of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia. If you don't care for video (I don't, generally speaking), check out Ven. Shravasti Dhammika's explanation of karma, for example. Going by the results, Theravada seems to be working out a lot better for Westerners than Vajrayana!

One thing both Tibetans and Theravadins take as a given, though, is rebirth (although the Theravadins tend not to belabor the point). As evidence for rebirth, they offer accounts of enlightened people being able to recall their past lives. This features in the Tipitaka and other Buddhist writings, of course, but there are also plenty of contemporary or near-contemporary accounts of it.

I have no reason to doubt those accounts. My question is, what, exactly, is being recalled, and what does it mean?

Vasubandhu on Memory

The great Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu outlined a pretty damn useful model of the personality in a series of works in the 4th century CE. He sees the personality as consisting of a big bundle of interlaced streams of consciousness-moments (cittas, in his terminology). These cittas are conditioned by sensory impressions and preceding cittas. Psychological continuity is created by citta-streams that flow below the level of conscious awareness, in what he called the store-consciousness or seed-consciousness (Skt. ālāyavijñāna). Memories are created when a citta conditions another citta—or "seed"—in the store-consciousness. They're recalled when a citta triggers one of those submerged streams to break surface into conscious awareness.

The interesting feature of this model is that there is nothing static or permanent in it. Everything is just cittas conditioning other cittas. The memory isn't like a book where you write something, and then read whatever you wrote, later. It's a flowing, changing thing. When you recall something, the citta that breaks into your consciousness could—in theory—be traced back to the seed deposited by the citta that started the stream, but it's by no means the same. It's a descendant, and often a pretty far-removed descendant at that. Remembering is more reconstructing, not recalling; perhaps a bit like reconstructing an acorn by looking at an oak.

This model meshes rather nicely with more recent studies of memory. It's notoriously unreliable. Even very recent events are remembered differently by different people. They're conditioned by prejudices, previous experiences, suppositions, assumptions, and the further away you get from the event being reconstructed, the looser the relationship between the memory and the event. Memories do certainly contain information about past events, but they contain a great deal more information about the person doing the recalling—and without other sources to work from, it's completely impossible to disentangle the two.

Recall of what?

So, when an enlightened being recalls his past lives, what, exactly, is he recalling? What relationship does his reconstruction bear to past events? What information about "actual" past events do such memories contain? I prefer to leave that as an open question—but I think the idea that recollections of past lives are more accurate than, say, recollections of early childhood sounds pretty unlikely. That would require positing some deeper substructure of the mind that does provide perfect, reliable recall; a storehouse below the storehouse that is everything the memory we do know about isn't—unchanging, with limitless capacity, with limitless accuracy.

This is a pretty big assumption, and as far as I'm concerned, an unlikely one.

Which certainly doesn't rule out the idea of One Mind (aka the Original Face, the True Self, etc.). It would just mean that One Mind has nothing to do with information. I kinda like that idea.

Somewhere Else

2011-07-22T12:10:00.001+03:00

We're on vacation. Naturally, we went Somewhere Else.

We just took a little vacation from our vacation, to go Somewhere Else from Somewhere Else.

We stayed at a maison d'hôtes that was rather unusual. It had an Oriental garden, complete with koi pond and aviary with a flock of rather sullen cockatiels. Each of the rooms had a theme. Ours was Mexico. It was fuchsia and blue and brickword and had a sombrero, a lamp shaped like a cactus, and colorful tiles. Bali was next door, just past the Buddha. The others were Morocco and Caribbean. I hear Morocco is particularly sumptious.

So you could go Somewhere Else, from Somewhere Else, from Somewhere Else. In your imagination at least.

The place also had an éspace Zen. That involved a ridiculously beautiful view over the Îles d'Or of Hyères, a jacuzzi that sprayed perfume and played musique Zen at us, a room with a massage table and aromatic oils, a bottle of chilled rosé wine, and a tray of anchoïade, tapenade, and délice de tomates on croûtons. Plus a clock with a Buddha on it, a big oil painting of a Buddha, and a plaster statuette of a portly monk bowing deferentially in gassho towards the jacuzzi.

So you could go Beyond Somewhere Else, from Somewhere Else, from Somewhere Else, from Somewhere Else.

It was fun, but a little surreal. Like being in somebody else's dream.

Is there a pattern here?

Sur la Plage Ensoleillée, Carqueiranne

Privilege

2011-07-16T22:22:00.001+03:00

The Modulor, Marseilles, 2011

Privilege has broken into the mainstream. Until now, it's been confined to the margins. It's something that pops up in specific corners, among groups that have coalesced specifically around questions of privilege. Feminists. Gay rights activists. Race activists. The rest of us have been able to happily ignore it.

That, in fact, is one of the things that define privilege—the ability of the privileged to be unaware of it. That it is now being shoved in our faces is, in itself, an indication that it is eroding.

I've been following three unrelated but concurrent discussions of privilege lately. One was sparked by the True Finn electoral victory in Finland. Another is the Elevatorgate flap in the atheist blogosphere. A third is the firestorm in the Buddhoblogosphere started by the response to a post by one Tassja, describing how she—a Sinhalese Buddhist born to the identity—perceives Buddhists in the West.

National privilege. Male privilege. White privilege. Religious privilege. Straight privilege. Good.

Neuroses are bastards. They're so powerful because we're not aware of them. They're invisible puppeteers pulling our strings. I just discovered one of mine the other day. Interestingly, once I acknowledged it, it immediately loosened its grip somewhat. Damn things don't like daylight.

Privilege is a lot like neurosis, only meaner. That's because neurosis is mostly just you, but privilege is collective. It's a shared neurosis. Everybody acting weird in the same way, so only the people with the fuzzy end of the lollipop even notice it, and sometimes not even them. The house nigger isn't just a rhetorical device. Everybody gets locked into the neurotic system.

It drove Karl Marx nuts. That's what all the stuff about the opiate of the people and class consciousness and workers of the world unite was all about. Getting the proletariat to stop buying into the very system that upheld—upholds!—the privilege of the class screwing them. Marx was also very well aware that members of the privileged classes were just as completely locked into the system as the oppressed classes, only their conditions of detention were much nicer.

If you're doing something like Buddhism, I think you'll eventually have to shake hands with your neuroses. Attempting to avoid them is just running around in circles. That includes the social ones, like privilege. Denying it is a dead end, and not a very pleasant one at that. It's an angry and frustrated kind of place.

Acknowledging privilege doesn't mean feeling guilty about it, or apologizing for it, or rejecting it, or pretending not to be white/straight/male/able/rich/etc. That's just another kind of neurotic behavior. You can't get rid of privilege just by wanting to. You can, however, be aware of it. If you can hear the privilege talking, you can sometimes shut it up instead of dancing to its tune. That gives a measure of freedom, and makes you less of an asshole into the bargain.

It might not be possible to be entirely free of neurosis, but it is possible not to be a marionette, jumping on its strings. Sometimes. That's pretty worthy, as goals go.

About that picture: it's the Modulor, the architectural scale of proportions invented by incredibly influential Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier. It's based on the golden ratio and the proportions of the human body. By "human," he meant "English male." The big projects he did in India are based on it.

He was one of the progressive ones.

City of Bodhisattvas

2011-07-14T12:59:00.001+03:00

In the Radiant City, Marseilles, 2011

Marseilles has a bit of a rough reputation. It's known for pastis, sailors, rioting youth from the Northern Suburbs, pétanque, corruption, aggressive driving, unemployment, and particularly grim, pessimistic crime fiction known as "aioli thrillers," polar aïoli.

Approaching Marseilles by land is not particularly inviting. You'll be driving along a crowded motorway with graffitoed concrete embankments and underpasses, as it winds through craggy hills of bleached limestone and dark-green scrub, with blocks of ugly tenements springing like mushrooms from a ground of red brick roofs. Then you'll drive past one of Europe's biggest ports, with its cranes, containers, and stockyard, through a massive construction site—the Euroméditerranée project—and get dumped into the Old Harbor, which is a rectangular basin full of relatively modest boats and yachts, with a busy street circling it, and rather grim, bleached stone fortifications around the entrance. In the distance you will see the bare-rock Frioul isles, with the stark silhouette of the prison-fortress of If of Count of Monte Cristo fame.

The standard visit of Marseilles would include dropping by Notre Dame de la Garde, the basilica on the hill with its huge, gilt Holy Virgin, a walk through the twisty alleys of Le Panier, maybe a visit to the ancient abbey of St Victor, and perhaps a look at the shops along the Canebière boulevard. The more adventurous or curious might take a peek around the corner to check out the immigrant quarters to the left and right of the Canebière, maybe even have a barley couscous at the Femina or smell the spices at the distinctly Arabian style market streets there.

Nothing all that special. The abbey is impressive enough, but not as impressive as Senanque. The basilica is nice, but Avignon's are nicer. The Canebière is a passable shopping street, but pretty shabby compared to even nearby Aix's Cours Mirabeau. And it's nowhere near as picturesque, immediately charming, or accommodating as Nice.

So you shrug, and move on.

Or not.

I've visited Marseilles a few times over the past twenty years or so, and it's growing on me. It's not a city that gives up its secrets easily. It's big and sprawling, and every quartier is different. And boy does it make you walk, around bends and street corners, up and down stairs, in twists and turns that feel like they're deliberately trying to get you lost.

And then you start discovering things.

There's the quiet, gently curving Rue du Vallon de l'Oriol, wending its way between the wooded hill of Roucas Blanc with its villas and the small, twisty streets of the Septième. It has palm trees and pastel walls, with baroque concrete ornamentation side by side with pure white art deco architecture. Families stroll along the narrow sidewalks towards the Beach of the Prophet. Behind a turn of the Corniche John Fitzgerald Kennedy is a miniature fishing village tucked away in a creek. Children play in the streets—in the streets! in the 21st century! in a big city!—as the people of the quartier are grilling sardines and playing pétanque on a court just by. The Mediterranean water is still clear and warm and welcoming.

There's the food. Not necessarily in the sprawling sidewalk cafés near Old Town, mind, but in the little family restaurants tucked away in side streets, or if you're in the mood to splurge, at Chez Fonfon where they'll serve you the catch of the day cooked to perfection in a simple, unadorned way. (Not cheap, though!)

Then you start noticing the people. All colors, shapes, sizes. Italian faces. Freckled redheads. Silver-haired dignified elderly ladies. Young women in their summer dresses, or hijabs, or blue jeans. East Africans with faces like carved ebony. Tattoos. Some clearly hacked by bored sailors on long voyages, or perhaps in prison. Some artistic, abstract designs with thin lines and curves and arrowheads. Tattoos that look like rashes. Yakuza tattoos. Motorcycle tattoos. A Polynesian with a broad face and the build of a Maori warrior, but pure Marseilles tattoos, and he's carrying a brightly-colored picture book for children. Mediterraneans with their olive skin and rounded features. Stocky, round-headed Armenians.

Marseilles has about three thousand years of practice at being a port. It is and has always been a city of immigrants. An elderly gent named Charles is sitting in a restaurant in an overgrown garden right by the Vieux Port, drinking pastis and grousing about there being way too many Arabs here these days. Turns out his parents were Armenian. They came to Marseilles after the massacres in Turkey. I'm pretty sure that fifty years from now, there'll be a Mourad or a Hakim there, grumbling about the damn Texans snatching purses, graffitoing up the walls, and hogging the beaches.

Ever since the Romans annexed the Greek colony of Massilia, Marseilles has been ruled from somewhere else. Most European cities of this size—and a great many that are much smaller—have been stamped by the ambitions of feudal lords. There are palaces and castles, cathedrals and boulevards; the kings and dukes, princes and princesses live on in street names, and sometimes in tabloid headlines. Aix's principal street is named the Court of Mirabeau. Marseilles' takes its name from hemp—in the age of sail, the ships using its port needed a lot of it. It is no coincidence that the Marseillaise hails from Marseilles: it has always been a working city, not a city of leisure, pleasure, pomp, or circumstance. And a revolutionary city. There's a tremendous energy for change there.

The Marseillais have a particular way of being. There's a tough edge to it; a sharp and ironic wit, an assertiveness; a low tolerance for bullshit that sometimes comes across as rudeness. But there's also an openness. A lady sweeping the street next to her home will stop to chat and complain about the "city" trimming the hedges but leaving the branches cluttering things up, and then point out places nearby worth seeing. A smile will be met by a smile: open, friendly, unabashed.

An old man gets on a bus. He's infirm, so much that he can barely walk. His steps are about a finger's length, and he leans on his cane. From somewhere, hands appear to lift him onboard and help him into a suddenly vacated seat. A few stops later, someone sees him start to move, and yells to the driver "Hé! Monsieur wants to get off here!" The doors open, more hands appear to help him out of his seat, through the magically parting crowd to the doors. Someone gets out and helps him gently, carefully onto the sidewalk, then climbs back in and shouts, and the bus moves along. Entirely naturally, automatically, without a second thought. I'm quite sure that Monsieur can navigate the whole city that way, carried on the 30,000 arms of Kanzeon.

I love cities. Most cities I love to visit. A very few I would like to live in. Marseilles is one of them.

Happy Quatorze Juillet, France.

If you're looking to visit, you could do worse than stay at Monique Vincent's B&B, Providencia. Say hello from les Finlandais. And ask her about things to do, places to go, places to eat.

The Big Deal about Chögyam Trungpa

2011-07-10T13:13:00.001+03:00

I finally got around to reading Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa. I tend to get an aversion to a book if too many people recommend it to me. Go figure why. Also, Trungpa's personal history put me off—what with the affairs with students and the drinking and such, he exemplifies a lot of what went wrong with Eastern gurus that came to teach Flower Children in the West in the 1960's and '70's.

But I finally read it, and am glad I did. Because it really is one hell of a fine book. It's simple, clear, to the point, utterly unpretentious, utterly non-dogmatic, and I'm left with the overwhelming impression that he absolutely and completely gets it, whatever "it" is.

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is an unusual choice of title for the book, I think. It's a thoroughly Buddhist book. In fact, it's the best primer about Buddhism that I've come across. It starts out simple, lays out the fundamentals of what Buddhism is about, and what someone attempting to practice it can expect. Spiritual materialism is a point of view, not a subject. Trungpa felt that it was the trap his students were most likely to fall into: to start treating the Buddhist path as yet another consumption choice; picking stuff from it and adding it to the junk stores in their heads. Buddhism certainly provides lots of material for that kind of pack-rat activity; robes and initiations and ceremonies, titles, teachers, and gurus, koans and yidams, paths and bhumis. Not to mention actual, physical junk.

I was also struck by how unsuperstitious and universalist the book was. Everything but the last chapter was plain vanilla Buddhism, nothing particularly Tibetan about it, except that he picked scenes from the lives of the likes of Marpa, Naropa and Milarepa rather than, say, Nanchuan, Chaochou, or Layman P'ang for illustration.

Whatever has become of the institutions Chögyam Trungpa founded, and however unorthodox his lifestyle, this has got to be one of the best books about Buddhism intended for a Western readership that I've come across. If you're at all curious about what this stuff is about, you could do enormously worse than start here.

Oh, and, it's also available on the Kindle. Finally.

Samba, Pizza, and Cultural Appropriation

2011-06-28T23:25:00.001+03:00

Where Does She Stow It?, Helsinki, 2005

Some 25 years ago or thereabouts, I got into a heated disagreement with a very good friend of mine. He's American, and was in Finland as an exchange student. We were making pizza. I don't remember the exact point of disagreement, but it had something to do with the recipe. To my recollection, at some point he snapped something like "It's not like you invented it." That, naturally, awoke my pan-European patriotic spirit, and I rose to heroically defend the honor of the Italians.

We made up, eventually. He was the best man in my wedding, and I returned the favor a few years later. But it remains the worst dispute I've had with him. Over pizza.

Only it wasn't really over pizza. It was over cultural appropriation. He felt that I—or, rather, we Finns—had appropriated a tasty, crunchy slice of his culture, and I felt that he had done the same. For a somewhat broader value of "our," not being Italian. Finns do like to do covers of Italian hit songs, though. Many evergreen Finnhits are actually Italian. There's this one called Olen suomalainen (I'm a Finn) by Kari Tapio, which is actually a cover of L'Italiano by Toto Cutugno.

I digress. Sort of.

Cultural appropriation goes on all the time, and in all directions. In food. In music. In the way Japanese pop culture references end up in Internet memes. In the way Japanese like to have Christian-style weddings for the pomp and ceremony. And in Buddhism.

Most of the time this kind of cultural borrowing is pretty benign. People who identify with the culture being borrowed from may feel flattered or pleased or sometimes flabbergasted ("what have the Germans made of our sauna?") but rarely offended. That's because most cultural borrowing isn't offensive.

Sometimes it takes an ugly turn.

There's the Versailles royalty staging village feasts and playing at shepherds and shepherdesses in the carefully constructed fake countryside, even as the real shepherds and shepherdesses scrabble for a meager living. There are the white-toothed Negroes prancing merrily about and singin' how all God's chillun got rhythm in Marx Brothers movies. There are fake Gypsy musicians playing fake Gypsy music, while real police are beating up real Roma in squalid slums all over Europe.

These ugly turns involve power relations. A dominant culture appropriates from a subjugated or marginalized one, and throws in a healthy dose of condescension into the bargain. "There, we took the nice tradition you've been so kindly preserving for us, got rid of the distortions and misunderstandings, discovered its essence, and are now doing it right. Please, feel free to learn from us."

This sort of thing happens a quite a lot with Eastern religions brought to the West. That includes Buddhism. There's a shitstorm ongoing about it that I don't really want to wade into, largely because it's not my fight. We have our own racist assholes to worry about at the moment. I've left a few links at the bottom of the post in case you're not au courant and want to read up on it.

I just recently came across a book review about the way American Zennies have repurposed the mizuko kuyo ritual from Japanese Zen. In Japan, it's a ritual to help along the spirits of aborted or miscarried fetuses. It makes perfect sense in a context where you've internalized the existence of hungry ghosts (in the same sense that we've internalized the existence of other people). In a context that lacks that internalized belief, it becomes something else. It no longer means what it meant before.

I believe there is something in the Buddhadharma that transcends cultures and individuals, and speaks about something fundamental to what it is to be human, perhaps even what it is to be sentient. However, that something can only be expressed in terms of cultural artifacts. Words. Actions. Practices. Rituals. As it crosses cultural boundaries, the meanings of these vessels change. Some dharma gates close. Others eventually open. The mizuko kuyo dharma gate is closed to me, because I don't think of pretas existing in the same sense that you or I exist. And I don't think the American version -- repurposing it as a sort of group therapy -- necessarily captures whatever it is that mizuko kuyo is expressing.

This stuff is dynamite. It speaks to the most deeply felt, personal bits of a person there are. If we can kick of a rousing row over pizza, how could some really difficult shit not come up with cultural appropriation of Buddhist rituals, texts, robes, titles, architecture?

We cannot help but borrow and appropriate. But I don't think it's unreasonable to ask us to consider how the people being appropriated from feel about it. And, perhaps, listen to them if they work up the courage to speak up about it. Sit with their voices, as Nathan put it.

Un-Friending Facebook

2011-06-24T12:31:00.003+03:00

Photo by Joanna.

I terminated my Facebook account yesterday. I had that account for almost exactly five years.

I liked some things about Facebook. Some of them I liked quite a lot. Others only a little.

Finding people.
Being found.
Sharing links.
Sharing pictures.
Looking at other people's links and pictures.
Whimsy.
Messages.
Knowing classmates still exist, and a bit what they're up to.
Conversations.

Ultimately, the things I didn't like started to pile up. Some of them were niggling little annoyances. Others were big philosophical differences.

Asking to be "friended" by people I didn't really know.
Refusing to be "friended" by people I didn't really know.
Spammy applications.
Spammy "friends."
The social cost of un-friending someone.
The social cost of refusing "friend" requests.
Farmville.
Apps that try to trick you into giving them rights, then vacuuming your profile and doing something nasty with it, like putting it up on a dating site.
Invitations that felt just wrong and awkward.
The social cost of refusing invitations.
Being asked questions and nagged about not answering them.
How they make it so easy to sign off your privacy, and hide the ways to get it back.
How they sign off your privacy without telling you, so you have to know what buttons to click to get it back.
Frequent, pointless changes in user interface behavior.
Lack of trust in Facebook's intentions.
Facebook's view of identity.

Most of my dislikes of Facebook spring from two root causes. I fundamentally disagree with Mark Zuckerberg's view of identity, and I deeply distrust his intentions.

Zuckerberg thinks that identity is an indivisible, unitary, and essential whole. Every individual can and should have only one, and present that same identity in every context and every situation. He believes that someone who does not subscribe to this view is not merely wrong, but morally deficient: that an individual who wishes to have multiple identities is dishonest, duplicitious; fundamentally a liar.

Without even getting into the Buddhist-y stuff about the self and identity, I just don't see how it could work this way. I do not present the same aspects of my identity to my wife as to my colleagues; to my parents as to my sisters; to my role-playing game friends as to my Zen friends; to my old friends as to my Net acquaintances. Some of these aspects have very little to do with each other, beyond the fact that I'm involved in all of them. Mixing these aspects causes confusion. Keeping them distinct is clear and honest.

Facebook's default mode is that of the broadcast. It is possible to target messages, but these possibilities aren't built into it. I tried, for a bit, but managing these tools was laborious and error-prone, and it was always easier to share something with everybody than with only some people. What's more, there's a relentless push to simultaneously expand your network of friends, and to share ever more with all of them -- photos, locations, thoughts, ever more personally identifying information.

I don't want to share everything with everyone. That means that I have to be constantly on alert about what I say and how I say it, because everyone is watching. That precludes any real trust, real intimacy, real communication beyond the inoffensive, bland, and superficial. And even so, a tremendous amount of information gets transmitted. In aggregate, the little bits add up to much more than the sum of their parts.

And all of it goes into Facebook's bowels. Facebook knows not only who my friends are, but which ones I most interact with, which profiles I visit, who visits my profile, who searches for me, who I search for. Which brings up the second big issue. Trust.

Giving up Facebook is no big hardship. I never was all that deeply involved in it, emotionally or concretely. Quitting wasn't even any big political statement (although these political and philosophical aspects certainly are a factor); it's more that the inconvenience of keeping it under control started outweigh the stuff I got out of it.

But if Google turns evil, I'm in real trouble.

Google reads my mail.
Google keeps my appointments.
Google knows the phone numbers of all of my contacts.
Google knows my search history.
Google reads my blog.
Google knows what blogs I read.
Google knows which news I follow.
Google stores my documents.

The difference is that I trust Google more than I trust Facebook. Google's not perfect, that's for sure. Those anti-trust probes aren't just a matter of evil government trying to bring the good guys down.

But it does seem to me that Google is more trustworthy than Facebook. The vibe I get from Google is something like "What else can we think of that people would like to use?" with "And how can we make it pay?" coming second. Their bloopers have seemed more like honest mistakes than relentless, creeping evil. The vibe I get from Facebook is "How can we get people to sign off more of their information so we can squeeze more cash out of those who want to pay for it?"

Put another way, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find that Facebook sold everything it knows to spammers, the Camorra, the Chinese government, and the FBI (through back channels, natch), but I would be if it turned out Google did the same.

Could be I'm tragically mistaken about this, of course. That's really too bad as for now I don't have a plan B.

A couple of years back, some people who were even less happy with Facebook than I am kicked off a project called Diaspora. I tried it out as soon as there was a public alpha. I liked their approach.

You can get the source code.
You can set up a node of your own.
You present aspects of yourself, not a unitary identity.
You can create clients to connect it up to other things.

When I first tried it, it was in disastrous shape. I could only sign up and send invitations. I couldn't even "share" with another user in the same node (or "pod") whose address I knew. Plus the user interface barely did anything to start with.

I looked at it again yesterday, and while it's early days yet, it has come a long way. I was able to set up a number of aspects, find a number of people on the network and connect them to these aspects. Someone else there found me. I fired off an "Is this thing on?" and got an answer. There are help texts. There's a profile where I can actually put stuff. I'll try to put a photo there later today.

Put another way, I can do stuff with it. More to the point, I can manage my degrees of intimacy there.

Therefore, I'm issuing an open invitation to anyone reading this blog: find me on Diaspora and share with me in some aspect, and I'll share back in some aspect. I'm primejunta@diasp.org (that's not an email address, it's my handle and the pod I'm on). I'll only refuse spammers and bots.

Social networking is a great idea. There's just got to be a better way to do it than Facebook. Maybe Diaspora is it. If it is, most of all it needs us -- people joining it. You can sign up on the diasp.org pod here.

If you don't care to join Diaspora and still want to keep track of me, you can also find me on Twitter as PrimeJunta. Or here, natch.

Dungeon Mastering

2011-06-11T11:34:00.000+03:00

I've been running pen-and-paper role-playing game campaigns for most of my life, on and off. When I and two friends of mine started, I was about thirteen or fourteen. In the beginning, we took turns dungeon mastering (nobody wanted to), but eventually that role settled on me. I don't think I've been a player in a pen-and-paper campaign since then, except one very brief foray into a Rolemaster campaign some fifteen years ago. I figured out that wasn't for me after it took ten minutes to resolve that I had shot an arrow, and missed.

Dungeon mastering -- or gamekeeping, or gamemastering, or whatever, depending on the ruleset in use -- has been one of my most significant creative outlets. One game system calls it storytelling, and I think that hits pretty close to the mark. They're like group improv sessions in many ways. Quite often I have no idea whatsoever where a session is going to go, and the ones I find most satisfying are precisely the ones that take off in unpredictable directions, with the players riffing off each other and me riffing off them. Usually the ones where I've done my homework are the boring ones.

I do work on the background a bit. On occasion, I even write stuff down, or draw maps. There was one story arc that involved a bit of warfare, and I had to know the lay of the land for that. But even that emerged collaboratively, with the players asking questions about locations and the map emerging as the story progressed.

Entire geographies, mythologies, histories, pantheons, religions, and philosophies have emerged that way. It's a kind of magic. From the illusion school, I think, with perhaps a bit of enchantment thrown in. I'm often as surprised by them as my players. Sometimes the most fun bits emerge precisely from the poorly thought-out bits, when there's a contradiction or an impossibility that demands resolution.

The trick is that I don't need to know all that much more about that background than my players. I just need to be able to supply enough detail on the fly, as things progress. Since we don't write stuff down, the past is somewhat flexible as well. It's a continuing story that only exists as it happens, and then in the fragmented memories of each of the participants. I don't need to know exactly how far it is from Last Canal to Capital City, or what's in between. The players don't know either. Nor do the characters; they're just traveling, on foot or by cart, by barge or on horseback, asking for directions as they go. Eventually they get there, unless they get sidetracked and end up somewhere else.

Sitting around a fire, telling each other stories. That's what it is, really.

Obama's big Middle East speech

2011-05-20T16:28:00.001+03:00

My reaction: meh. Parole parole. Lots of rhetoric, precious little substance. Good political theater, with the Israelis pretending to be righteously indignant even though the speech didn't actually change anything with regards to them.

The 1967 borders have been official American policy since 1967. Sometimes the Prez brings them up, sometimes not, depending on which way the wind blows. It was news back when George W. Bush appeared to backtrack from them in a letter to Ariel Sharon, but even that didn't become the official American line; Obama's speech is only significant to the extent that it goes back to the rhetoric before that bit of correspondence.

Both Obama and especially Netanyahu are way behind the curve. The initiative is now with the Arabs.

The Fatah-Hamas accord is big news. It should be welcomed by anyone who cares about peace in the Middle East -- it puts a pretty significant price tag on any stupid shit Hamas might want to pull, which can only be good. Hamas isn't going to disappear, which means that the best possible outcome is that it drops violent resistance. It has now done so, however provisionally and tactically.

Similarly, the Palestinian initiative to go for recognition of independence in the UN is big news. It would change the discourse in the region. I doubt Netanyahu is ready to take the kind of steps needed to put that on hold. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. If the result is an independent Palestine with the 1967 armistice lines as its official borders, things will be rather different. Shit will get real, in one way. It might even make the two-state solution workable again. Might. I still think there are too many "facts on the ground" for that to work, which means that a binational state is the likeliest outcome, however long it'll take to get there.

A few different takes on the speech from some people whose opinion I respect.

Obama just lost the Palestinians, by Larry Derfner
Obama and the Dilemmas of US Middle East Policy, by Juan Cole -- clearly the most cheerful of the bunch
President Obama delivers his AIPAC speech early, by Jeremiah Haber
Obama's Middle East Speech -- He Just Didn't Get It, by Richard Silverstein

Errata: fixed Richard Silverstein's first name. Thanks, David.

Doubt

2011-05-01T11:00:00.000+03:00

NellaLou has an excellent post up about the Genpo Merzel hoopla. It got me thinking, although not so much about Genpo Merzel. About doubt. The zazenkai a week ago did that too.

One of the first teishos I heard when I got into this here Zen thing a couple of years ago was about great faith and great doubt. It didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time. It's starting to do so now, though.

As far as I know, Zen is fairly unique in making doubt an engine of spiritual practice. In the Abrahamic religions at least, faith and doubt are opposed; faith is good, doubt is bad. What's more, at least in Western Christianity, faith is conflated with belief, and doubt with skepticism. Yet these are actually quite distinct things.

Belief is about intellectual acceptance of a proposition. Skepticism is intellectual questioning of the veracity of a proposition. St. Thomas wasn't actually a doubter; merely a skeptic—he wanted evidence of the Christ's resurrection before accepting that proposition, and, according to the story anyway, when presented with the evidence, his doubts were dispelled.

Faith and doubt have another dimension, though. If you're climbing down a rope, you have faith in the rope's strength to take your weight. If you doubt the rope's strength, you won't make the climb. The concepts of belief and faith, skepticism and doubt are related, of course, but they're not a perfect overlap: you might intellectually accept that the rope will take your weight, but will find yourself unable to make the climb anyway. A smoker might intellectually accept that smoking is likely to kill him in one of several highly unpleasant ways, but will keep smoking anyway.

One facet of Zen practice is the cultivation of doubt. Questioning everything. Digging out those things that are so fundamental that it doesn't even occur to you to question them. Who am I, really? What is consciousness? Where do thoughts come from? Why did I just do what I did? Why does that stimulus create this kind of experience? What is this stimulus and experience anyway?

A lot of what I am is story. For forty years, I've been playing to a script. It's the usual one provided for someone lucky enough to be born in a first-world country to loving, educated, intellectual middle-class parents. There have been a few minor deviations, for sure—I never graduated from university, for example—but on the whole, I've been a pretty good citizen. I'm happily married to a wonderful woman I love tremendously; I'm gainfully employed; I live in a nice apartment just where I want to; I have my mortgage and cat and dog; we try to be good citizens of the planet, for the most part.

It is not altogether pleasant to find myself questioning this script I'm living. Why do I work? To earn money so I can buy stuff. What would I like to buy? Well, a Leica M9 with a Summicron 35/2.0 IV and a Zeiss Sonnar 50/1.5 would be nice. I could afford it, too, just about, not having bought anything much for a while. But then what? Cameras are nice, no doubt, and I would certainly derive a good deal of pleasure out of it, but I'm pretty sure it would not actually make me any happier. Worse, I'm not even sure that "happier" is the right way to look. "Happier" is about experiences or possessions or such, and the beastly thing with them is that they always raise the bar. The more I have, the more I want, and the less satisfied I am with things that made me happy when I first got them.

So that's doubt there. Starting from camera lust, fading via my job right into heavy-ass existential shit. What is all of this for? I don't know.

Who knows, perhaps this has fuck all to do with Zen. Or perhaps Zen practice just forces the pace; makes it more difficult to run away from stuff that comes up anyway. Most guys my age seem to get over this sort of thing by buying a motorcycle and/or taking a mistress. Neither of these options seems particularly appealing to me at this time.

As to great faith... now, that's another post, perhaps. But I think I'm getting some idea of what Sensei meant in that teisho of his that played from a tape a couple of years ago. Quite a neat mechanism there, in fact.

Like the Internet, but for Energy

2011-04-22T10:47:00.000+03:00

The Green Party was one of the big losers in the recent Finnish election. Their number of seats went from 15 to 10. They lost voters both to the left and the right, with people defecting to the Left Coalition, the Social Democrats, and the National Coalition. Being one of the defectors, I'm not surprised at all. It looks like the only thing they can agree on is "no more nukes" plus a general social liberalism shared by both the Left and National Coalitions, which isn't much to build on.

If you Greens want my vote back, you're going to have to do better.

You fucked up big-time in the electoral campaign. Trying to make political hay from Fukushima with your big "no more nukes" posters, after sitting in a governing coalition that approved permits for two more, is as transparently cynical as electioneering gets. Being allowed to vote against it after tabling the proposal, knowing that it would pass, doesn't make it any better. We're not that stupid.

You badly need a positive vision, not a laundry-list of things you're against. This whole energy discussion was a perfect example. Nuclear? No way. Hydro? Nuh-uh, it'll inconvenience the fish. Coal and oil? Of course not! Wind? Only if it won't make the landscape ugly. So what then? Simple, just shut down our paper and pulp industry, it's what's using up all the electricity.

For a party who's supposed to be thinking globally, that is outrageously irresponsible. Shutting down our energy-hungry industries will simply get them to move somewhere else. Finland might be able to meet its Kyoto obligations, but somebody else won't. We won't be helping the planet; we're just greenwashing our hands. Lame.

Thing is, there is a vision out there that would be perfectly suited for the Greens. It's ecological, progressive, and global. It makes use of the cooperation mechanisms European Green parties already have in place. As a bonus, it would even give the European Union a whole new meaning at the very moment its raison d'être until now is in crisis. And it's not even new.

The main problem with wind and solar power is that it only produces energy when it's blowing or shining, respectively. That means that it's not possible to base energy production on it locally. However, weather conditions average out over a large enough area, and over time. If it were possible to transfer power from where it's produced to where it's needed, and store power when it's produced for use when it's needed, the problem would be solved.

A group at Stanford University has been researching this, and recently came up with a scenario that would have fossil fuels and nuclear power phased out totally over 20-40 years. I'm no expert, but from where I'm at it looks totally feasible, technically that is. Politically, however, it's a challenge. That's where the Greens come in.

The scenario is based on a smart grid, which automatically and instantly moves power from where it's produced to where it's needed, and allows plugging in power generation and storage devices anywhere on it. So, for example, if you drive an electric car, you can plug it in to be charged; if there's a spike in power demand, the grid will draw off, say, 10% of the battery (and credit your account for the energy taken). If you install solar panels or a little wind turbine on your roof, any surplus power you generate will go into the grid, and whatever extra you need will be drawn off it.

Now, if wind and solar are the backbone for energy production in this kind of grid, it has to be very big. A country-sized grid won't do it. It has to be continent-sized. Only that's big enough to average out local weather conditions that would otherwise lead to too big fluctuations in power production. The Stanford paper calculates that with such a grid in place, it'd be possible to generate about 90% of power by wind and solar, with the remainder—adjustable capacity—produced by hydropower, tidal power, and other renewables.

The beauty of this solution is that it would start producing benefits immediately, even as construction starts locally. Existing power sources, both centralized and decentralized, could be plugged into it, and as new technologies emerge, they can be integrated into it with no trouble. If we extended it to North Africa, we could build as much solar power capacity in the Sahara as anybody would want—which would have the added benefit of us having to get serious about the political instability there.

Finally, there's not limit to the possibility of extending the grid. If Russia wants on board, welcome. China? Awesome. Turkey, Syria, Iran? Ahlan wasahlan. The bigger it is, the more everyone will benefit. Like the Internet, but for energy.

The challenge is that this requires political underpinnings that currently don't exist. The idea of national energy self-sufficiency would have to be scrapped. Since energy is one of the most strategically important assets a country has, that makes the whole national sovereignty thing look rather outdated. We would be dependent on each other in a much more immediate and concrete fashion than through the creaky currency union and its political trappings that we currently have.

Why aren't the Greens—in Finland and elsewhere—banging away at this vision? You could drop the "no more nukes" sloganeering, since in this scenario nuclear power would become uncompetitive and unnecessary, and would be phased out of its own accord. The only reason to have it would be to dispose of existing nuclear waste and atomic weapons in fourth-generation plants, which I still think is the only responsible way to handle that.

Seriously, Greens. Get your act together. Show us some vision that goes beyond saying "no" to stuff you don't like. You have the internationalist outlook and the genuine care for ecology that it would take to get this ball rolling. Do it.

About Those Bailouts

2011-04-20T09:03:00.003+03:00

Well well, it looks like Finland is going to throw a spanner into the works about that Portugal bailout, and by extension the whole Euro stability mechanism. Who'd've thunk. Anyway, here's the deal in brief, with my thoughts about it.

The slow-motion train wreck we've been seeing in Europe is due to reality catching up with a structural problem that was inherent in the Euro to start with. The Euro is a currency that has a monetary policy but no associated fiscal policy. That means that the money supply is controlled by the European Central Bank, but bonds are issued by sovereign governments, who also set taxes and control government spending. It also spans a much wider range of different kinds of economies than, say, the dollar.

A number of Eurozone economies—Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain—have gotten their public finances into trouble. The reasons for this vary. Greece is just a structurally unsound economy, with a corrupt, bloated public sector; Ireland was seduced by the neo-liberal chimera and went from a massive debt-fueled boom into an equally massive bust; Spain and Portugal had a property bubble driven by plentiful foreign money, and Italy is... well, Italy. Each in their own way fell victim to hot money and the illusion of stability provided by the euro.

At the same time, the export-driven economies of North and Central Europe are well into recovery.

Now, if each of these countries had their own currency, things would be relatively straightforward. They'd still be in a mess of trouble, but they could export their way out of it. They could simply float their currencies, which would drop, make their economies internationally competitive again, and jump-start their economies. The downside is that imports would get a lot more expensive, which would make a nasty hit in the standard of living, but at least the shock would be distributed more evenly than having that adjustment through massive unemployment. That wouldn't obviate the need for structural reforms, of course, and those countries with foreign liabilities would see the burden increase relative to the domestic currency; the worst case is that they'd have to default partially on their debts, but that ain't the end of the world either. Portugal has been in default a number of times over past decades, and it's still hanging there on the edge of the Atlantic. Nice place too. We went there for our honeymoon nearly eleven years ago.

However, the countries are stuck with the Euro, for now anyway. The currency is too strong for their own good. That means that the only way out of trouble is through internal devaluation—i.e., cutting wages across the board. That's much more painful and slow and difficult than accomplishing the same by devaluing the currency. Nobody wants a pay cut.

This situation is a nasty cocktail of related problems, each of which makes solving the others more difficult.

The Euro is too strong for the problem economies. They need low interest rates and a weaker currency to restore competitiveness and stimulate spending.

Interest rates are too low for the strong economies. I'm currently paying a negative real rate on my mortgage: my interest rate is less than the inflation. The bank is paying me for lending me money. Of course, I personally ain't complaining, but that kind of situation is a recipe for trouble in the big picture: it's what asset bubbles are made of. The other Northern export economies are in a similar situation. The over-strong euro is counteracting this to an extent and preventing a totally nutty bubble, for now anyway.

The problem economies are still in dire shape fiscally. Simply put, it's unclear if they'll be able to raise enough taxes to service their debts.

The bailout is precisely about preventing default by these governments. There are pretty good reasons to avoid that scenario, if it's at all possible. The debt of these governments is mostly held by European banks. If they do default, that'll be a punch in the gut into the banking system—and it's already been severely weakened by the 2008 crash and subsequent crisis. A credit crisis on the European scale would be very nasty, and lots of innocent bystanders would be hit by the shrapnel. It would certainly cause another global recession in the same scale if not worse than the one that's just winding down. If there's a way of avoiding that, I'm all for it.

The brute-force way of avoiding a default is dead simple: just pass the risk onto taxpayers of countries that aren't in bad shape. If the EU as a whole agrees to guarantee the debts of the problem countries, default is as good as avoided, and everyone can sleep easy. That, in fact, is pretty much what the current deal states.

Except that it assumes that Germans, Finns, and Dutch will happily pay off the debts of Spaniards, Greeks, and Portuguese, while the bankers who took on that risk to start with walk off with their cushy bonuses.

We're not happy about it. It just ain't fair. Wherefore the success of the True Finns.

Or, in pundit-ese, "such a solution may prove politically impossible."

If that turns out to be the case, the stability mechanism will unravel, and we're right back to where we started—looking at the possibility of sovereign defaults causing a collapse of the European banking system and another worldwide recession. Fuck.

Thing is, the brute-force stability mechanism we have now isn't the only way to address this problem, not by a long shot. I still think breaking up the Euro isn't practically doable, and it would very likely trigger that very crisis it's trying to avoid... even though I am starting to think it may have been a stupid idea to start with.

The main problem with the bailout is the injustice and the moral hazard, as well as the general sleaziness of the whole affair—the back-room deal with Greeks buying German tanks with their money, for example. Now we're not only bankrolling a corrupt government and fat-cat bankers, but the fucking German military-industrial complex! How could we possibly make it any more sleazy?

The bottom line is, I don't think this goose will fly. Whether it's Soini's gang or somebody else, the stability mechanism as it currently exists isn't... stable. We'll have to think of something else.

For example, we could do this the old-fashioned way. Let the governments go into default, but not in full-on panic mode. Decide that they pay back, say, eighty cents on the euro, or whatever it takes to get them on a stable footing. Then back up the banks with the usual guarantee mechanisms scaled up: if the hit is too big for a bank to handle, nationalize it, re-capitalize it with public money, and then sell it once the crisis is over.

Obviously this is going to cost money, which we need to raise somehow. I would suggest a transaction tax on capital transfers—something like the Tobin tax—which would have the additional benefit of reducing volatility due to hot money flows. If we simultaneously shut down tax havens like the Cayman Islands and slapped a nice big tax on executive bonuses and capital gains, we could raise the revenue in no time flat, and the burden would be borne mostly by the people who benefited most from the bubble.

So yeah, let's bail out Greece and Portugal, and Ireland and Spain if they need it. We are all in this together after all. Just not this way. Let's not socialize the risks and privatize the profits anymore. The money should come out of the pockets of those who made out like bandits during the boom.

The crisis of the stability mechanism is also an opportunity. Let's do this right this time. And if it works out, we'll all owe the True Finns.

Democracy in Action

2011-04-18T23:36:00.001+03:00

Shame On You Parties

I'm not drunk. Just depressed.

I love democracy in principle. It can just get really depressing to see it in action. Yesterday was one of those elections. You might've heard about it, it was on BBC, Financial Times, the NYT, and Russian media too.

The international commentary mostly gets it a bit wrong, though. No surprise there; it's not exactly worthwhile to keep experts on Finnish local politics on call, most of the time. Here's a bit of clarification about who these True Finns are, and what their landslide victory means, and what a landslide victory actually is about under the Finnish system.

First off, True Finns is a mistranslation. The nuance is wrong. A closer translation of the party's name would be Basic Finns, or Regular Finns. It doesn't have the connotation that those who aren't True Finns aren't true Finns. So calm down, they're not quite the Nazi Party. They have neither the discipline nor the ideology. They're actually a grab bag of people who only really agree that the current political parties stink and that the EU bailouts are a waste of money and unfair to boot.

I kinda tend to agree with them on those counts. Kinda.

Their nasty side is that the party ran a quite a few relatively nasty candidates, and when called out, says "Oh, but it's their personal opinions, not the party line; we can't thought-police everybody." Be as it may, they included at least one Holocaust denier, and the party has a strong fraction that's mostly running on an anti-immigration platform, some just this side of racist, some clearly over the line. In fact, the most depressing feature of the election was the massive support the figurehead for this group, one Jussi Halla-aho, got.

But does that make the True Finns the Nazis reincarnated, as the BBC portrays them in an uncharacteristically sloppy article? No. American Republican Party rhetoric with its open Islamophobia and coded anti-Hispanic and anti-black racism is a good deal nastier than even Halla-aho and his clique. Never even mind our home-grown European crypto-Nazis in a variety of countries.

But somehow, "not quite as bad as the Republicans" and "not really a Nazi" is... unsatisfying. Halla-aho does represent a nasty strain in Finnish society.

Democracy's a bitch, though. Even the nasty strains have the right to be represented, if they can get the votes.

The appeal of the True Finns isn't really about policy. Their policy statement is deliberately vague and a bit silly. It's about resentment, and not resentment driven by privilege. This was a revolution of silent men, as one commentator put it. Thing is, the many political parties in our system have left those silent men behind. There's just nothing for them there.

There's the National Coalition, with our foreign minister Alexander Stubb their iconic representative. I can't not like Alexander Stubb. He's just so damn likable, with his likable stunts, like referencing Angry Birds in his electioneering, or, rather more ballsily, the time he put his face on the Finnish version of the "it will get better" video campaign—you know, the one intended to cheer up LGBT teens struggling with their identities. I have a feeling he really meant that one, and it was far from a risk-free vote-winner. Stubb is the most popular kid in class. The one who's great at sports, looks out for everybody, stars in the school play, gets the Mr. Congeniality award from the teacher, is every mother's dream son-in-law, and makes sure the school party is creative, fun, safe, and everybody has a great time.

Pity about his unabashedly regressive tax policy.

Then there are the bleeding-hearts, the vegans, progressives, artists, musicians, revolutionaries. They get to drink red wine and smoke thin cigarettes and occasionally something else, and get all the hot hippie chicks. The smart and bohemian set who piss on consumerism and the idea of a Volvo and Labrador and house, but somehow most of 'em end up with them anyway.

And somewhere to the side, there are those guys who always get overlooked. A little slow. A little pudgy. The ones who only talk when spoken to, and then not a whole lot. The ones who'll grow up to sit on a porch in their track suits, waiting for the sauna to heat up, drinking Karjala beer straight from the can.

They have nothing in common with the cosmopolitan marathoner with his chromium smile, or the bearded lefties, queers, and greens, or the church lady, or the Swedes, or even the suddenly-urbanized sold-out-to-business wheeler-dealer Center Party apparatchiks. Nothing.

Now they voted, many for the first time, for the guy who's also a bit pudgy although not at all slow nor silent, with the football scarf, who articulates what they grumble to each other over their beers on that porch. They're not bad people, nor is he.

So, the deal.

Yeah, it was a landslide. They got 19.1% of the ballot, and are now the third-biggest party in Parliament, only a hair behind the Conservative National Coalition and the Social Democrats.

It's good to keep in mind, though, that 80.9% of the electorate didn't vote for them. It's also worth remembering that they're the most opposed party: if we had been allowed to cast "nay" votes, they would've been somewhere around -5%, and the biggest loser of the election, the social-conservative Center Party would've come out on top. More or less.

So, this is nothing like, say, a Republican landslide in the US, or a Conservative one in the UK, where the winning party really gets to call the shots.

What it does mean is some very interesting politics. We need a governing coalition. The obvious one is a combination of the National Coalition (blue), Social Democrats (red), and True Finns, for a BlueRedNeck coalition. The problem is that the blues would have to flip on their tax policy, or they won't get the reds and the necks to play along, and the necks would have to flip on the Portuguese bailout, or the blues won't play along. Something like that anyway. So there's a good chance that that won't work out. And even if it does work out to start with, the True Finn parliamentary group is a bunch of loose cannons that would very likely start shooting in every direction at the first sign of trouble, and could very well bring the whole thing down.

But if it does work out, things could go kinda OK. The Reds and the Necks would give us a nicely progressive tax program, and the Reds and the Blues would keep us from getting totally sidelined in Europe.

The alternative is a narrower majority with some pretty weird combination of parties, possibly including the big loser of the election, the Center Party. I can't see the Left Coalition happily governing with the National one; they're just about as far from each other as it gets. That'd very likely mean a sequence of short-lived governments falling to no-confidence votes, with not a whole lot getting done. Not good.

The burning issue on the table is the Portuguese bailout. If Finland votes against it, it'll get blocked. This could trigger a cascade of rather nasty events, which in the worst case might end up plunging the world economy into another recession and even finish off the Euro. If Finland abstains, it could go ahead without us; we're a small economy after all, but the abstention would certainly cause more resentment in those countries that would end up picking up our burden.

And it doesn't exactly help that it turns out that Greece is using eight billion euros of their bailout money to buy German tanks and fighter planes. Where's our share of the filthy lucre, dammit?

As a friend of mine put it, "no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in."

Arrxism!

2011-04-17T11:35:00.000+03:00

Political movements start from ideologies, and ideologies are based on philosophies. The strength of a movement doesn't really correlate well with the solidity of the underlying philosophy; one of the strongest in the USA now is largely based on Ayn Rand's romance novels, and a certain Austrian corporal had a measure of temporary success with his Blut und Boden romanticism.

However, movements based on a silly philosophy tend to collapse once the philosophy collides head-on with reality. Hitler's nearly took a whole continent down with it, and Rand's is taking a declining superpower. Ideologies based on more respectable philosophies can survive a good bit longer. Two such mature ideologies have done more than any other to shape the world we live in. One is Adam Smith's, and the other, Karl Marx's.

Good political philosophies start from good questions. The good questions relate to current conditions. Adam Smith was marveling at the changes happening in the world as the old feudal order was crumbling and the industrial and mercantile bourgeoisie was rising. His philosophy was an intellectual giant's attempt at coming to grips with the why and the wherefore of it. Marx wrote during the noontide of industrial capitalism. He was concerned with the mystery of exploitation: how is it that as the productive capacity of mankind suddenly expands at a faster rate than ever, most of it remains in ignorance and misery?

Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and the intellectual currents they and their heirs represented eventually produced a pretty good working model of industrial society. They didn't have all the answers, but they gave us a framework for asking meaningful questions about it. As we attempted to answer those questions, we were running a society that was pretty successful by most standards.

I was born in that society, but it ended some time between my childhood and now. The framework of Marx and Smith, Keynes and Friedman, Bernstein and Rawls no longer works. The rules of the game have changed. Something gives. Things don't work as they're supposed to. Perhaps there's no individual thing you could point to; rather, it's a combination of factors. It's the gradual dissolution of national borders to the movement of people, goods, and especially capital; it's the relentless connectivity of the Internet; the globalization of culture; the reversal of the East-West polarity in the flow of cultural influences; the ever-larger role pure information plays as a factor of production. Things that shouldn't work, do, and thing's that should, collapse.

We need a new political theory: something that factors in those matters the ones we currently work with neglect. Environmental degradation; globalization; information; the erosion of the nation-state; the loss of comprehensive, shared ethical frameworks and the emergence of much looser but broader ones. Perhaps a Marx of our time is already out there, typing away on a blog somewhere.

I think such a philosophy is emerging, and I think I know from where it will emerge. It will emerge from the chaos of Wikileaks and Anonymous, 4chan and LOLcats, The Pirate Bay and TOR, Copyleft and Creative Commons. Say hello to Arrxism.

Arrxism is, as yet, inchoate. It hasn't begun to give answers, and even the questions are half-formed and poorly articulated. Yet the ingredients are there.

What if Wikileaks was unnecessary, because government had no secrets? Our current governmental processes have levels of secrecy deeply built in. Even in stable democracies with media freedom, much if not most of the dirty business of governance happens behind closed doors. What would government look like if every information artifact it produced was out in the open, available for anyone who wanted to look?

What if the notion of intellectual property was abolished or reinvented? We expend a huge amount of effort to prevent the spread of ideas, through copyrights, patents, trade secrets, and trademarks. Intellectual property protections have been getting stronger even as technology makes it ever easier to violate them. A great many currently dominant business models would simply not work without them, from pharmaceuticals to cell phones, computer games to recorded music, professional sports to industrial agriculture. We tend to think of these structures as permanent and immutable. People state in all seriousness that nobody would make music anymore if copyright-based royalties from recordings weren't available. Yet they're a relatively recent and constantly changing social artifact too.

What would flash mob politics look like? Electronic communications has the potential for mobilizing and coordinating people like nothing before. It has been instrumental in triggering and coordinating the revolutions and revolts in the Arab world this spring, and in marshaling international support for them—and I don't mean warplanes. What would it mean to expand this mode of political activity in developed democracies?

What would planetary politics look like? The politics of Anonymous are geographically unbounded. Activists work together between vastly different countries. Syrians cooperate with Americans, Burmese with Chinese, Pakistanis with Indians. The movement has planetary politics in its DNA. It is as such uniquely equipped to address the real doomsday issues affecting the entire planet. Climate change. Loss of biodiversity. Hate spiraling out of control.

The Pirates are now roughly where Communists were before Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. That was in 1848, another great year of upheaval and revolution. The counterrevolution won that time, and again in 1871. In 1917, the revolution won in Russia, and promptly collapsed into something worse than what it overthrew. Democratic socialism and social democracy only emerged as functional political movements since then. Marxism had a profound effect on Western societies, from the New Deal and the Great Society in the US to the European welfare states, even if many of these societies did fly the red flag of revolution. It will be a while yet before Arrxism reaches the stage of doing more than galvanizing people into activity.

We have general elections today. I will not vote for a Pirate Party candidate, although there's at least one I could very well vote for as an individual. Our politics are party politics, and the Pirate Party is, as yet, not a party; it is just a collection of individuals who only agree—more or less—about intellectual property. On everything else, they're literally all over the map, from libertarian to communist, radical feminist to the guy who wants to put immigrant women in brothels, and I don't want my vote to support a lot of that stuff. For now, I'll be voting for one of the parties that has some kind of rough consensus about the big picture; choosing the lesser evil as is usual in this type of system.

We need a positive vision of how things should be. Now we're just sticking fingers into an ever leakier dam, which is both depressing and will fail in the long run. I hope I'll live long enough to see Arrxism come up with such a vision. I would like to be a part of that.

The Truth of Anger

2011-04-15T20:33:00.000+03:00

Buddhist theory states that acting out of anger or other destructive, selfish impulses creates suffering, both directly through the results of the action, and indirectly by reinforcing these unskilful patterns of behavior in yourself and others. Conversely, acting out of compassion or other unselfish impulses paves the way to transcending suffering, again both directly and indirectly. In Buddhist jargon, acting unskilfully creates akusala kamma which, when it matures, creates more unbeneficial states of mind, which push you to more unskilful actions, and so on. And vice versa.

Ergo, to make the world a better place, avoid acting unskilfully and act skillfully, thereby reinforcing skillful behavior in yourself and others, and letting unskilful behavior wind down. Simple enough.

Only it's not, when you try to apply it.

Anger is destructive. It should be avoided. Sometimes it can be. Only, then we never know about it. Anger was avoided. Beneficial impulses predominated. Akusala kamma was not generated. The question of what to do with anger never came up.

When the question does come up, it's too late. Anger has not been avoided. It's there, demanding action. Like a red-hot ball of iron in your throat. Swallow it, and it'll burn you up from the inside. Spit it out, and it'll burn the Earth. Then what?

Everybody carries a load of akusala kamma, which means that everybody has a lot of those unbeneficial impulses coming up all the time. They have to be dealt with somehow. But how? "Just let them go" is great advice, but, again, not exactly easy to apply. Perhaps it isn't even possible to "just let them go." Whatever we do in an unbeneficial state of mind is unskilful, even if what we do is "nothing."

What's more, we're not in this alone. When my unskilful behavior intersects your akusala kamma it will often trigger unskilful behavior in you, which will trigger more unskilful behavior in me, and so on: together, we give the karma wheel a great big heave. No wonder running off to sit all by yourself in a cave for a decade or three is so popular among would-be arahants.

When people figure this out and try to practice it, something unpleasant often happens. Instead of letting go of the unbeneficial and only acting on the beneficial, we tend to repress the unbeneficial. We never allow that akusala kamma to mature; instead, we bury it and try to avoid it, pretend even to ourselves that it isn't there. Then it bubbles up in some other and often more insidious way, in action that we may even think is skillful, but is really caused by that buried unbeneficial state of mind. Rather than face the anger, I pretend it's not there; pretend that I'm the kind of person I want to be, or you're the kind of person I want you to be.

I think a great many of our problems comes from this turning away.

Maturing kamma is a messy business, and I don't think there are any magic solutions to completely get rid of the mess, even if there are particular medicines that work, to an extent, against particular poisons.

The upshot is a particular pattern of unskilful behavior. Covert aggression. Exhortations to "abandon the ego" and "let go," to become a Zen zombie floating above it all, like a corpse in a river. Resolution avoidance by walking away from conflicts. Hidden vices. Things left to fester, sometimes for years, until they explode in a fountain of pus. I have a hunch that many of the Zen scandals that have been plaguing the scene lately have to do with this pattern, and I think I can see it playing out in a small way among a quite a few Buddhists.

If I do something to piss you off, you have a choice. Your palette of options depends on your internal state. Your karma. If you have a lot of kusala kamma – i.e., you've worked hard at reinforcing skillful patterns of behavior – you may find a genuinely skillful way of acting, something that allows us both to resolve whatever akusala kamma caused me to do whatever I did to piss you off, and whatever akusala kamma of yours manifested in your getting pissed off. I believe that's what's known as 'enlightened behavior.'

A lot of the time, you and I just don't have what it takes. Skillful action is out of sight; out of reach. Instead, you're left with a set of unattractive options to choose from.

You can cast aspersions on my ancestry.
You can walk away and go meditate, for a half-hour or a week.
You can try to pretend that you're really not pissed off, to yourself even.
You can engage in fierce but civil debate attempting to prove I'm wrong.
You can call me a mean poopie-head.
You can write a hatchet piece about me on your blog.
You can troll me on mine, anonymously or not.
You can hire a hitman to break my knees.

All of these options are action arising from an unbeneficial impulse. They all create more akusala kamma. Buddhists often seem to prefer the ones that don't involve open aggression: walking away, suppressing the anger and trying damn hard to act civil, and so on. While it's obvious that some of those possible behaviors are more destructive than others, I'm not at all certain that those passive options are less destructive than some of the active ones.

There's a particular truth in anger. It's indicative of kamma maturing; a chance to resolve that bad stuff and really get over it, rather than just burying it again and carrying it along. But how to express the truth of anger without being destructive about it? Is it even possible? Are we doomed to solitude, trying to work out this kamma in bubbles of our own?

If genuinely skillful behavior is out of reach, out of the remaining options I have a strong preference for behaviors that lead to resolution over behaviors that avoid resolution, even if the cost includes a measure of open aggression.

Put another way, if I piss you off, I would prefer that you call me names or engage me in debate to prove how I was wrong, rather than walk away and dedicate your next round of zazen to me. That way, we can bash heads and get it over with, and then maybe make up and be friends again—or, perhaps, discover that we didn't like each other all that much after all, which is OK too.

But please, no hitmen. I'm a dreadful coward with a low pain threshold.

Thanks to Nathan of Dangerous Harvests for the post that sparked this one.

Reflections on Social Networks

2011-04-13T20:29:00.000+03:00

I have lots of different kinds of relationships with lots of different people, online and off. Together, these relationships form my social network, or, really, a set of different, sometimes overlapping social networks. However, I often find myself grouping them into roughly three tiers: the agora, the village, and intimates.

This blog and my Twitter feed are in the agora. They're public space. Whatever I put there, I intend to be "out there," visible to anyone who happens to stop by. My other agora activities include my Flickr feed and the occasional article I've gotten published in print media, my professional identity, and so on.

At the other end of the scale is a circle of intimates. This includes family, a few friends, and one or two people I only know over the Internet. Some of them I see regularly in meatspace; others more rarely, but with all of them there is a level of trust that goes beyond the superficial. I'm ready to share things with them that I'm not ready to write about here, for example.

In-between lies a range of villages. These are larger and looser groups of people, such as family friends and old high school classmates, people I know from the Helsinki Zen Center, and people I've interacted with to some extent on various Internet communities. People drift between these networks; some drift from the agora into a village; some villages fade into the agora, and sometimes someone from the agora or a village drifts into the circle of intimates.

The Internet is a great connector. Facebook, Twitter, various BBS's and forums, and plain ol' email make it possible to create and maintain relationships across geographic boundaries, with people you would otherwise never meet. They span the full range from superficial and transitory to deep and intimate. I met my wife over the Internet, back when that was not very cool, for one example.

However, the Internet's great strength is also its tragic flaw: its designed-in openness. It's impossible to keep things from spilling over the imaginary boundaries between these networks. Everything tends to leak into the agora, and the Net never forgets. Stuff I've said fifteen years ago in one particular village—alt.atheism, and believe me, it was a village at the time, with plenty of idiots too—is still out there, available for anyone to see.

Lately, I've been re-engineering my Internet social networks. I cleaned up my Facebook friends list, removing people I only know from the agora, with whom I've had little or no personal interaction off it. I'm attempting to turn it into one village I live in, one overlapping with my other villages, and composed of people with whom I feel some kind of affinity and whom I know from more than just the agora. Ditto for Twitter: I decided to treat that not as a village, but as one view into the agora. I pruned my follow list down to about a hundred, the sole criterion being that they're saying more stuff that interests me than what doesn't, whether I have some personal affinity with them or not.

And email? That's the great gateway. My address is public; anyone can mail me. It's also one way I stay in touch with my intimates. But even email leaks, not least because I use GMail. Google knows a scary lot about me. They read my mail, know my appointments, know my location (if I switch GPS on in my phone), have drafts of everything I've ever thought of publishing here, as well as a whole bunch of documents written for other purposes, and so on and so forth.

The Faustian bargain I've made with Google is pretty representative of the whole Internet thing, only more so. Doing anything in Internet's agora or its many villages involves giving up something you probably wouldn't want to give up. The alternative—creating a bunch of separate identities for different villages and then using the best privacy technology that's out there to keep them separate—is a lot of trouble, will by definition exclude the Net's greatest strength, the synergistic way different villages feed into each other, how agora interactions slide into village interactions, and a few of those into friendships. Plus it'll probably eventually fail anyway; it only takes one slip to blow an identity's cover, and over time, such slips will inevitably happen.

In a way, we're right back to where we came from: the village where there are no secrets and everybody knows everybody else's business. The only difference is that villages had their secrets, whereas on the Internet, village secrets are open for anyone to uncover. Social control, for good and for ill.

Marx, Consumerism and the Buddha

2011-04-09T12:03:00.001+03:00

Prioritize the spiritual life in your spending plan.
— Laura Jomon Martin in Buddhadharma

Our bearded friend, Karl Marx, is responsible for a quite a few paradigm shifts in the ways we look at people and societies. One that's not all that often mentioned is about the relationship between personal ethics and society.

Philosophers and social scientists before him tended to look at societies in terms of morality. Adam Smith's first major work wasn't The Wealth of Nations, it was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Enlightenment philosophers in general were primarily interested in questions of ethics. They worked from the individual on out, trying to understand how people should behave in order to create a just society, or trace the evolution of moral sentiments over the course of history.

Karl Marx turned that inside out and upside down. He saw ethics and morality as social constructs, determined by the deep economic and social structures of society. He saw society as something of a great, always evolving machine of production. The individual cogs in it were defined and shaped by their place in it, and ethics were simply their way of rationalizing their actions in it. For Marx, society and economics define ethics, not the other way around. The system can be described as more or less just or unjust, depending on what kind of exploitation goes on in it, but the personal ethics of the individuals making it up are a matter of point of view. The capitalist is not immoral for being a capitalist; he is every bit as much a prisoner of capitalism as is the proletarian, even if his cell is furnished rather better. He has no choice but to exploit, since if he tries not to, he will be driven out of business by some other, more exploitative capitalist.

That's not all he thought, of course. There was his whole theory of revolution; a description of how the oppressive capitalist system could be overthrown by raising the class consciousness of the proletariat and liberating it from the shackles that held it in place. All moral theory that, too.

He had a point.

The society we currently live in isn't the capitalism Marx described, but it is a system that locks us in place just as tightly, if not more so. We live in a consumer society. It's not just that we like to consume. It's that we have to consume, or the whole system breaks down. If "consumer confidence" flags, and people stop buying junk they don't really need, we get into serious trouble. Factories run idle. Cafés empty. Ships stand in ports. Planes fly with seats vacant. Government budgets go into the red. Then people are laid off, run out of money, and get driven into depression and, especially towards the already disadvantaged end of society, into actual penury and physical want.

And when the recession lifts, the wheels of consumerism start spinning again, everyone heaves a big sigh of relief and goes back to performing the vital function without which our society will collapse into anarchy and destitution: buying stuff and throwing it away.

The engine of the consumer society is the constant, unrelenting manufacturing of craving. I'm partial to cameras myself. Ever since the digital photography revolution started, I've been in a cycle of lusting after a camera, buying it, enjoying the pleasure of owning it for a while, and then lusting after some other camera. Everyone who's lived in this system knows this cycle as intimately as the most intimate of bodily functions.

Crave, buy, throw away, crave. Compared to the work put into that cycle, the manufacturing of the actual goods being bought and discarded is almost incidental.

Buddhism strikes at the very heart and soul of the consumer society. It is a deeply subversive system of thought, far more than, say, classical Marxism, whose promised paradise is a thoroughly material one. The precondition for becoming any good at Buddhism is, as one of the Four Vows puts it, to uproot blind cravings: the very cravings that keep the consumer society powering along.

It works, too. In the less than two years that I've been practicing Zen, I've discovered that my attitude towards consumption has shifted. Slowly and almost imperceptibly; I've only noticed it after the fact. I've lost much of my pleasure in buying stuff. I do still lust after cameras (mmmm, Leica, give it to me, baby), but more out of habit than any real compulsion. The last time I bought something mostly for the pleasure of owning it was maybe six months ago. Since then, my biggest purchase has been a bunch of opera tickets. My disposable income is piling up in my bank account, forlorn and unloved.

That has led me to question this whole thing I'm doing. The script says that I work to earn money to be able to consume, and my craving for stuff I can't afford spurs me to work harder to earn more money to get it, so I can then crave for more stuff I can't afford at that level so I want to make more money, and so on and so forth. What if I already have more than I need? Then other stuff about what I do will start coming to the fore. Besides keeping the wheels of the consumer society spinning, what social utility does my work have? What social utility does the rest of what I do have? What should I do with the money piling up in my bank account? Should I give it away? If so, to what? Somehow, the idea of keeping on doing what I'm doing and then just donating the whole shebang to the Red Cross or something feels unsatisfactory too. Should I work less so it'd stop piling up? If so, then what should I do with my time? Volunteer in a soup kitchen? Become a part-time revolutionary? Write a novel?

In short, I'm turning into a bad member of society. If everybody did this, it'd be recession-time again, and we'd be in real trouble. As it is, it's no problem since my bank will helpfully lend my money to someone more inclined to spend it: the system is set up so neatly that I'm powering the consumer society even if I'm not consuming; I've just shifted that part of the job onto someone else.

Buddhism is not compatible with consumerism. If it catches on, one of the two will have to go. Either Buddhism will have to be transformed into just another consumption choice, one where you "prioritize the spiritual life in your spending plan," as per the quote from the American Buddhist magazine above, or we're going to have to come up with some new way of arranging things so that we can live meaningful lives on this rock without the the craving machine driving us along.

So far, it's pretty clear that the consumer society has been winning most of the battles. Slavoj Žižek describes the result rather well in his much-ballyhooed essay of Buddhism being the perfect complement to capitalism. Right Mindfulness turns into stress reduction; Right Livelihood into a particular set of consumption choices, Right View into a mindless disengagement from systemic injustice.

Something like this has happened every time Buddhism has become more than a marginal movement; it has been subverted and turned into a pillar of whatever society it lives in, injustices and all, from the feudal slave economy of Tibet to the intolerant ethnocentricity of Sri Lanka, the cruel autocracy of the T'ang Dynasty, or the corrupt misgovernment of Thailand. (And all through, among the Genpo Roshis and Andrew Cohens and Ken Wilbers there has been a Rinzai with his dozen students in some obscure temple somewhere, keeping the lamp lit.) Is there any reason to believe it'll go any differently this time around?

Thing is, the consumer society as we know it is not going to last anyway. There's just not enough raw materials for us to keep on making stuff and dumping it in landfills. We could patch it up, of course—put more resources into recycling, generate energy sustainably, and so on—but even so, it's just not physically possible for everybody to have more of everything forever. That, the fundamental, underlying illusion of consumerism is nearing the breaking point, and our movement towards it is accelerating as the billions in India and China hit their stride as consumers.

The consumer society is also a pretty recent phenomenon. It only really arose in the 1950's in the USA. Before that, people related to objects quite differently. I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandfather, and he did not see things as consumables; in fact, one consequence of the collision of his values with the consumer society was that he piled up an enormous amount of broken junk that he figured might come in useful someday for some purpose: an attitude that made perfect sense in the economy of scarcity where he grew up, but was actually destructive in the society of plenty where he spent his retirement. He almost caused some serious environmental damage with his stockpile of heating oil: a few more years and the drums would've rusted through.

Not all change is revolutionary or sudden. Sometimes big shifts happen slowly over time. Perhaps the consumer society will collapse spectacularly. It's equally possible that it'll gradually, almost imperceptibly be transformed into something else. I don't believe it's possible or even desirable to go back. The pre-war world of rigidly stratified social classes and naked racism and imperialism wasn't any great shakes, nor the age of absolute monarchies before that, nor the age of fighting principalities, nor the Middle Ages, nor even antiquity with its slaves and wars and obscenely rich monarchs. We'll have to go forward.

Revolutions are generally nasty affairs. I'd much rather see the consumer society evolve into something better than have it overthrown in a blaze of glory.

Social engineering is a bit like software engineering. Both involve complex systems with shifting parameters, unclear requirements, highly abstract concepts, and people working together, and the object being worked on tends to take on a life of its own. Sometimes software does get to the point where the best choice really is to dump it and start from scratch. Often it doesn't although it may feel like it. Even incredibly messy software can be fixable. You just have to do it a little bit at a time. You take the worst problem you have, and you solve it, in such a way that you also resolve any causes for the problem that you were able to discover. Repeat that on the worst remaining problem. Keep doing that until you run out of problems, or forever (usually forever).

There's much good in the society we live in. Never before have so many people been so widely connected to each other. Fewer people than ever live in poverty. More people than ever are literate. Women are treated as citizens rather than property in more countries than ever. In my country, for the first time ever, we have people reaching retirement age who have never experienced war. More people than ever live longer than ever, and healthier lives than ever. It would be tragic if all that was lost.

That's why I'd like to see the consumer society evolving into something better, rather than collapsing catastrophically. That will require a gradual shift in values and attitudes, and concrete action, one problem at a time. Our great strength as a species is our ability to cooperate; to emulate each other, and to evolve socially and culturally. An individual opting out of consumerism and choosing to live in genteel poverty instead doesn't mean jack shit, but a broad shift in values and attitudes means everything. There, I think, the Buddha's insights into the nature of craving can come in quite handy, even if "Buddhism" turns into Žižek's caricature of it. Thing is, Buddhist thought makes sense, and even if most people mangle it almost beyond recognition, there will always be some out there ready to do the work needed to get it, intellectually or spiritually.

We can't have more of everything forever. However, we could have better things forever, or at least as long as human creativity lasts to make things better. We have to decide what it is we mean by "better" first. Perhaps that's one place to start.

April

2011-04-04T17:45:00.001+03:00

The winter's barbed-wire breath has left
my North-facing room, sulking. It rained last night
and left a thin mist, like a caress
on my face. My room faces South.

A pretty girl smiled at me on the street.
Or perhaps she smiled at my dog.
Either way, it was nice.

I asked the wall again, "What is it?"
The wall hasn't answered.
Nor my dog, when I asked him
if he has Buddha nature.
He just stares back at me, puzzled.

The wall is not puzzled. It is just mute.
Without eyes it stares back at me.
It knows what it is, but hasn't told me.
I thought I was close, a little while back
but then I got scared and drew away.
It will tell me, I think, when I'm ready.

Unless the wall doesn't know,
and it's the mist of April rain, or
the pretty girl's smile after all.

The cat knows, I'm sure of it.
But I offended her, and she hid.

I bought tickets for the Ring.
Eighteen hours of Wagner.
Row fourteen, right in the center.
Four seats.
(I made a reservation. Only bad seats left now.)
September's rain will see me there.
The rentacop smiled at my dog.
(This time, it was definitely the dog.)
He makes friends easily.

This winter was too long. Like a guest
who keeps droning on and on
and doesn't see the host looking at his watch,
he arrived in November, and kept telling
the same story again and again.

I will die in April, I think. Perhaps not
just yet, although the doctor said
my blood pressure's a little high.

T.S. Eliot was right.
April has eyes like knives, in a grimy face
streaked with snowmelt
and sparrows practicing scales
in the naked trees.
Only her breath is sweet.

I was born in April, or so I'm told.
My medical records will be kept
in perpetuity. A statistic
for public health officials to put in their models.

The Persians have it right.
The year doesn't end in December.
Nothing happens in December, but sleep.

I will be forty. Old enough to have had one life
but young enough to have another
before this bag of meat I'm in falls apart.

Perhaps I should die this April
and make my birthday a birth day.

But now, I will clean my room.

Faultlines

2011-03-27T09:41:00.000+03:00

This Arab Spring has been uncannily like the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, only this one's entirely made by humans. Like continental plates grinding against each other, tensions that can't go on forever have been going on way too long. Once they shift, the energies released are as implacable and unstoppable as a tsunami. Mass movement is scary, more like a force of nature than a volitional act.

Volitional acts do matter, though. In both natural disasters and manmade ones.

Revolutionary situations expose the faultlines usually hiding beneath the surface of a political superstructure. While the unrest of the Arab Spring has spread in ever wider circles, events in the countries where it has broken out have followed rather distinct trajectories. While situations like these are extremely fluid and anything but deterministic, a good deal of what's going on is explicable by the hidden faultlines within the societies now coming to the surface.

Egypt and Tunisia are rather robust societies and polities. There are minorities—in particular the 10-million-strong Coptic one in Egypt—but they're not big enough to endanger the unity of the society. Both countries have relatively stable institutions, and local, tribal, or sectarian identities aren't strong enough to tear the country apart. Their revolutions were from the start a contest between an autocratic state and a relatively uniform people. In both cases, the people triumphed in the revolutionary phase, and both countries have since moved to a post-revolutionary phase, where the contest continues at a lower intensity and with relatively little violence. The prospects for an outcome that's significantly better than what went before look pretty good, even if it's certain to fall far short of the dreams of the revolutionaries.

Bahrain is fractured along sectarian lines. The migrant workers making up half the population have not participated much in the revolutionary activity. The citizenship is about one-third Sunni and two-thirds Shi'ite, with the institutions of power held by the Sunnis, and the revolutionaries mostly Shi'ite. Clearly, the regime's threshold of using lethal force on the revolutionaries was lower. It has now turned into a sectarian conflict, with external powers drawn into the game. This is a recipe for civil war. Too much blood has been shed already for either party to step back from the brink, and a great deal more will have to flow before one of them is defeated, and it is unlikely that whatever emerges will bear much resemblance to a state of, by, and for all of its citizens equally.

Libya is a tribal society, and its character has quickly asserted itself. The situation has been so fluid because tribal leaders have been switching allegiance between the rebels and the loyalists, some more than once. Tribal loyalties are stronger than national ones, or loyalty to Tripoli or Benghazi. There's no way of knowing how that'll go, nor of what will emerge if and when Qaddafi is finally toppled. The possible outcomes range from a long and protracted tribal civil war to some kind of new arrangement between the tribes to restore a semblance of normalcy and perhaps even some kind of open society.

Syria is in a class of its own: a 70% Sunni Muslim country with a large variety of minorities, and the summit of the ruling clique from one of them, the Alawites. That makes it very difficult to predict what will happen there, since so much depends on the decisions of that ruling clique.

I just came across an interesting article about the correlation between the level of violence in a revolution and the type of system that emerges from it. Nonviolent revolutions have resulted in consistently better systems than violent ones. That means that prospects are pretty good for Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen if things don't spin out of control there in the endgame, but rather bad for Bahrain and Libya. Clearly there's no single template that the revolutions will follow; much depends on local conditions and structures as well as the path the dynamic, unpredictable, and fluid revolutions themselves take.

It is pretty powerful argument for nonviolence, there. That violent revolutions aren't worth the sacrifice, because what emerges won't be any better.

To Intervene Or Not To Intervene?

2011-03-24T19:28:00.000+02:00

Fading Mural, Dresden, 2010

There's a lot of debate about the Libyan intervention. That can only be a good thing, I think. Not so good is much of the quality of the arguments in that debate. There's a lot of knee-jerk nonsense on both sides, and a few very solid arguments, also on both sides. I'm really having a hard time deciding whether I support this action or not.

Bad Arguments Against

"If we're intervening in Libya, why not Darfur, Bahrain, Yemen...?" Yeah, sure, there's a double standard. International politics is a jungle. An intervention will only happen if somebody powerful enough to intervene feels that it's in its national interest to do so—or at least not against its interest not to do so. It will never be possible to intervene everywhere it's needed. That means that the logical implication of this argument is "we should never intervene anywhere," but there are much better arguments in favor of that position. The big flaw with this argument is that it implicitly concedes that intervention is justified in all of these places, then plops you in a place where you can't in practice intervene anywhere. That's a bit too much like a witch's trial by fire for my blood.

"It's only about the oil." We already had Libyan oil. Who d'you think was pumping it? BP, that's who. The oil companies were entirely satisfied with the arrangements they had with Qaddafi, and would have been quite happy to keep them going. Obviously we'd be less interested if there was no oil to start with, but this clearly isn't the imperialist grab for oil that some quarters make it out to be. If it was that, we'd be propping up Qaddafi, not tearing him down.

"It's an imperialist war." The assumption behind this statement is that the Western powers are irredeemably bad, and therefore by definition anything they do anywhere is also irredeemably bad. I don't think so. I think the Western powers are no worse than other powers, and perhaps a little better than some. We're not really all that special. Turkey serves as a nice case in point—despite being a poster boy for Islamic democracy, they've been playing a great power game with the best of them, and as the Arab Spring wrecked that strategy, have been pretty much out of the game. Nor do I think the rising powers of China, Brazil, and India are likely to be any more benign on the world stage than the declining Western ones. Nor worse, for that matter.

Bad Arguments For

"It is our duty to intervene whenever we can stop bloodshed or bring liberty." Is it? Who appointed us—for any value of "us"—as policemen of the world, riding to the rescue of suffering people anywhere? One of the slogans of the Third Reich was "Deutscher Sieg—Europas Freiheit." Everybody everywhere fights for justice and freedom. These kinds of broad appeals can be used to justify anything. Perhaps the only use of Bad Argument (1) above is to counter this bad argument. There are way too many commentators shedding a manly tear for the courage and compassion we show by getting into this thing. This is pretty much a rehash of Kipling's famous White Man's Burden: paternalistic, myopic, and incredibly irritating.

"We must save the Arab revolution." We're not, and we can't. It's an Arab revolution, remember? The Arabs have had quite enough of being "saved" by Westerners, thank you very much. Even if the intervention succeeds in toppling Qaddafi, we will have stolen the Arab revolution, not saved it. Once more, their fates will have been decided from on high, in European cabinets.

"We're only stopping a humanitarian disaster, nothing more." No, we're not. We're intervening in favor of one group against another group. Once in, we're in, and it'll become increasingly more difficult to get out. These things tend to escalate, and it's by no means out of the question that Europeans and Americans will be in Libya as occupiers a few years down the line.

Good Arguments Against

"Interventions, however well-intentioned, have a lousy track record." I've been racking my brains about it, and I can't think of a single Western intervention since World War II that has been an unqualified success, and only a few that have resulted in a situation arguable better than the alternative. The usually touted model, Gulf War I, is at best a mixed bag: a great success for the US and Kuwait, and a definite improvement for Iraqi Kurds, but a disaster for millions of Iraqis, especially the Shi'ite majority.

"What's plan B? What's the strategic objective? What's the exit strategy if this fails?" I've discussed this previously, and would really like to know. Suppose the no-fly zone and air strikes on Qaddafi's armor fail to stop him. Then what? What if this fails disastrously in some way. How do we get out? We can hardly just keep bombing the damn place forever, can we?

"Who are these rebels, really?" I have no idea, and some of the information coming from there is... worrying. They're already fighting with each other. It's at least a big possibility that if Qaddafi does go down, Libya will collapse into civil war between the tribes that make it up. There's also no guarantee that the rebels' reprisals won't be in the same ballpark of awful as Qaddafi's reprisals against the rebels would have been. This could drag on for decades and kill more people than even the awful massacre Qaddafi would surely perpetrate if he did win. And if the rebels end up stringing people from the lampposts too, how will we feel about that?

"This is a fight for the Libyans, not us." A revolution stolen by external powers is worse than a failed revolution. If the rebellion does fail, we could help the Libyans in other ways—deal with the refugees, put political and economic pressure on Qaddafi, find ways to help the resistance against him as it moves underground, and so on. This is their fight, and it is both hubristic and paternalistic to think we can win it for them.

Good Arguments For

"Doing nothing carries a cost too." Qaddafi was poised to retake Benghazi. That would've been an epic bloodbath. It's quite clear that that's been averted for now. Should we really have just stood by and watched as his thugs hang people from the lampposts? Intervening is dangerous and uncertain, but so is not intervening. Is the cost of intervention—human and otherwise—really higher than not intervening?

"If not Libya, then when?" The Libyan intervention has formal approval by the United Nations, making it unquestionably legal internationally. It was requested by the Arab League. It has broad international participation. The intervention is in favor of a genuine popular uprising that has both requested it and enthusiastically supports it. Qaddafi is just about as awful a dictator as you get, and he had overtly threatened to kill everybody resisting him. If we're to make humanitarian interventions at all, then what more could we possibly ask for, in this messy world we live in?

"Speed is of the essence." We could've kept debating the justification for the intervention, carefully constructed an alliance, set up plans A, B, and C, assembled a command structure, liaised with the rebels... and by then, it would've all been over and we would be dealing with a victorious Qaddafi perpetrating a huge bloodbath. Doing it at all means dealing with all the uncertainties in Good Arguments Against (2).

"We can't give dictators free rein." We may not be able to intervene everywhere, but not intervening here would've made it clear to the other Middle Eastern dictators that we would not intervene anywhere, giving them a free hand to do whatever they see fit to their captive populations. They would have been encouraged to turn violent oppression into unrestrained bloodbaths, from Yemen and Bahrain to Syria and Algeria. Is it right to do that?

Where Does That Leave Us?

At least me, conflicted. I almost wish I had a clear-cut, strong ideological base to dispel all this confusion. If I believed that violence is never justified, even in self-defense or defending another, there would be no problem: this is just wrong and we should find other ways to help them. If I believed that Western powers are irredeemably corrupt and dead-set on oppressing and exploiting every other people on the planet, no matter what, it'd also be dead simple. Conversely, if I believed that Western powers are shining paragons of freedom and democracy and the highest summits of social, political, and moral development the world has yet seen, there would be no problem either. White man's burden and all that commotion.

But I lack that kind of moral clarity. When I look at what really happens, it's almost always unexpected consequences that rule the day. This holds for both sides of the argument. We know that not intervening would have awful consequences. The ultimate outcome of intervention is far less certain, both for good and for ill. I do know I'd tilt more in favor if some of those uncertainties about Plan B and who, exactly, we're dealing with were dispelled.

So I'm right back to where I started. If I thought the intervention had a good chance of achieving its aims—swiftly toppling Qaddafi and helping along a transition to a freer and more decent Libya—I'd be all for it. But I'm not. On optimistic days, I think that something like that is a possibility. On pessimistic ones, I feel that the likeliest outcome is worse than not intervening at all—a victorious Qaddafi getting his bloodbath anyway, and then taking it out on everybody involved, or perhaps a blood-drenched and protracted civil war.

As it is, I'm just glad my opinion doesn't matter the least bit. If I had to be actually making these life-and-death decisions, I would not be sleeping well at all. It would make feel a little bit better to hear that Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama aren't sleeping that well either. This question is anything but simple.

The French Moment

2011-03-23T18:27:00.000+02:00

One of the things that's most been bothering me about the Libyan intervention is the why. This kind of thing demands a lot of effort and big risks. Why? What's the payoff to justify all that? No answers yet, but I'm starting to have a few ideas that make some kind of sense to me. What follows is extremely speculative, essentially me thinking out loud, so take it for what it's worth, i.e., not a whole lot.

First, a little speculation about the "what."

This thing has Nicolas Sarkozy, Président de la République, written all over it. The situation in Libya—all the MENA in fact—has been developing extremely quickly. The intervention itself has clearly been in the execution phase for an absolute minimum of two weeks before the first bombs fell, with Special Forces teams in place scoping out the terrain and what have you. Since Libya only blew up around a month ago, somebody's moved extremely quickly. Nicolas Sarkozy is highly intelligent and audacious, and a very fast mover. Just ask Carla.¹

The "what" proceeded something like this.

North Africa has been a strategic priority for France for about two hundred years now. France sees her former colonies as part of her sphere of influence. In recent years, this has taken the form of all kinds of political, cultural, and economic initiatives. It's a long-term project that includes stuff like the massive EuroMéditerranée infrastructure project in Marseilles.

The Arab Spring took Sarkozy by surprise, just like everyone else. His response to the Tunisian situation was totally confused; he even ended up having to sack his foreign minister for apparently siding with Ben Ali, the now deposed dictator. With Ben Ali gone, he started scrambling to get the initiative back. He was still behind the curve with Egypt; there was even a bit of a public oopsie when an evacuation boat he sent in had to return empty after all the evacuees had already taken a plane home.

So he ordered the French intelligence agencies to get on top of the situation in the entire MENA region, but especially North Africa, and the diplomatic corps to find out exactly how every country worth a damn feels about the developments and how they could be swayed. A crisis is always an opportunity; little pushes can move big things, if you're audacious enough to move when others are dithering. France has got lots of diplomatic, intelligence, and military assets already in the region. Pretty soon, he would have Special Forces teams all over North Africa: the French Special Forces and intelligence has the great advantage of being able to draw on recruits with roots in the countries, so they have no trouble blending in when under cover. This effort is feeding him a constant and improving stream of human intelligence.

A few weeks later, he's got enough data to start making predictions. The shit hits the fan in Libya. He's the first to know about the tide turning as Qaddafi's generals stop wavering and his military re-coalesces. He also knows that the rebels are missing a Trotsky and don't yet have a military capable of resisting Qaddafi's army for long. He sees his opportunity and kicks into high gear.

France has possibly the best diplomatic corps in the world. Sarkozy has been getting some really good information from it, and now uses it for the next step: persuading, fast-talking, bribing, or blackmailing the Arab League into issuing a call for a no-fly zone. He needs that to get a UN resolution: his diplomats tell him that allies say that they couldn't possibly support one without Arab support, no doubt believing that the pusillanimous, corrupt, and eternally divided Arab League will never be able to do anything beyond deploring tragic loss of life, thereby letting them off the hook. His master diplomats pull a rabbit out of a hat, and before anyone has time to think, succeed in fast-talking the Security Council members into accepting resolution 1973—with some pretty broad language in it too, allowing just about any action short of a full-on occupation, which he doesn't want to do anyway.

Simultaneously, his diplomats fast-talk some allies into joining the enforcement: Cameron in the UK, Spain, Italy, Qatar, and the US being the most important ones. He probably took Cameron in on the game earlier than the others; the Brits were suspiciously ready to go when the resolution was approved.

I have no idea exactly what favors he had to call in, what bribes to pay, and what promises to make to make all of this happen, but he did—and you gotta hand it to those diplomats, they know their job.

And here we are, bombing Libya, with pretty much the entire world scratching their heads and going "I attacked who last night?"

Sound crazy? I don't think so. When confronted with sudden shocks, we humans go into monkey mode. That means we freeze and look around what everybody else is doing. That means that if one monkey has a bright idea and acts on it decisively, it's very likely he'll get lots of other monkeys following. This diplomatic conjuring trick is a large-scale repetition of what happens on a smaller scale when a crowd starts rushing somewhere with no apparent reason. Diplomats and leaders are monkeys too, and susceptible to just the same kind of monkey business.

So, the "why."

There are lots of little "whys" there, of course. There is a genuine humanitarian motive there somewhere, I'm sure. There's the matter of showing off the capability of those weapons systems France is trying to export—the Rafales waxing that armored column without taking a scratch before any SEAD missions had been flown will look good on the sales brochure, and the F-15E pancaking in a field a few days later won't hurt. There is Sarkozy's wobbly domestic situation that a nice, victorious war will surely sort out neatly. There's Libyan oil. There's France's large Arab minority with whom such a fraternal intervention is surely hugely popular.

But while all of that factors in, and I've no doubt all of it has been used as arguments to sell the intervention in that huge diplomatic effort, I don't think that's the big "why."

In addition to his other qualities, Sarkozy is also a visionary. He thinks big. Grandiose, even. He wouldn't exactly mind being written down in history as the Président de la République that restored French leadership to Europe, and European leadership to... if not the world, at least a big chunk of it. L'État, c'est moi, et l'Europe, c'est la France.

That's what this is about.

After the débacle in Tunisia, Sarkozy sees a new order developing: one where the corrupt old dictators of the Middle East fall one by one, to be replaced by systems that are if not exactly democratic, at least popular. The great tide of history is sweeping them away. It might not all happen now, but he believes it will happen sooner rather than later. The ones clinging to the old order will end up sidelined in the new one, and the ones in early will get the biggest rewards. He wants to be first to side with the winners.

When he sees the first signs of Qaddafi rallying, he sees his chance. France will save the rebellion, and thereby the entire Arab Spring. After the mess the USA has made in the Middle East, French colonial sins are fading into the background. They really will welcome them with roses. So he goes for his great gamble, and the show is on. Perhaps he has a plan B, or perhaps he figures he'll continue to improvise, play it by ear, as a fluid and fast-moving situations develops. I'm quite sure that his corps diplomatique is working like mad all over the place, as are intelligence and special ops teams.

That's gotta be crazy difficult, what with the NATO allies going WTF?, a lukewarm Obama not used to seeing the USA riding shotgun, the Turks wanting nothing to do with it, Putin and Medvedev crashing into each other like ice hockey defenders outmaneuvered by someone too small and fast for them, the Germans being scandalized about proper procedure not being followed, and the Swedes wanting to get in on the action and show off their JAS Gripens in some real fighting so maybe somebody somewhere would buy one, and poor Amr Moussa looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights, going "What did I just do?"

This is a very high-stakes game. I'm doubtful about its chances of success. But it might, and if it does succeed, the payoff for France—and Sarkozy personally—would be huge. The USA would be as good as out of the game in the Middle East, France would be the unquestioned leader there, and would have strongly strengthened its position in the EU as well. This also explains why Turkey is so pissed off about it—despite being the poster-boy of democratic Islamism, they've been quietly pursuing a long-term Great Power strategy in the Mediterranean. Libya has been one of the linchpins of that strategy; they've had a good thing going with Qaddafi, and if the French plan succeeds, that'll all have gone to waste.

And if it fails... well, the French are used to terrorism, and it'd be mostly the Libyans bearing the brunt of it. Can't make une omelette without breaking a few eggs and all that, eh?

This is getting very interesting indeed. Sarkozy isn't one to get caught in a stalemate. Expect something imaginative and possibly quite crazy to break it. We'll see lots of twists and turns before this is over, and if it fails, it'll be almost as spectacular as the unraveling that kicked it off.

But Arab Spring it is no more. Once more, this has reduced the Libyans at least to pawns rather than players. That is tragic, no matter who emerges from the smoking wreckage of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania.
_____________________

¹Speaking of Carla, it seems she's tight with Sheikha Mozah, wife of the Emir of Qatar. Could that have something to do with Qatar being the only Arab country to actually contribute military assets to the operation?

Something Fishy About Libya

2011-03-21T18:58:00.001+02:00

The more I think about Libya, the less I like what's going on. Something here just doesn't add up.

This is going way too fast. You can't order precision airstrikes at the drop of a hat. You need to get special recon teams in to identify and designate targets. That means that this has been in the works for at least two weeks at an absolute minimum, which is a good deal longer than the political process on the surface.

The Arab League resolution calling for a no-fly zone. Amr Moussa is now backpedaling on it, shocked that it's actually being implemented. I get the feeling that they were tricked into it somehow. How? By whom? What happened?

The UN resolution 1973. Putin is now backpedaling on it, yet Russia abstained. What did Russia and China get for abstaining? How was that arranged?

What's plan B? Plan A appears to be something like "take out Qaddafi's heavy assets from the air; this will demoralize the officer corps and cause the regime to collapse when the rebels move on it." Fair enough. But suppose the regime doesn't collapse. Then what? The Western powers doing the bombing can't just call it off and go home. I'm pretty sure they don't want a protracted war, what with Iraq and Afghanistan, and they don't even have the resources for a full-on invasion and occupation.

Is there are a backroom deal with the Egyptian military to step in and save the day? That could be a winning plan for everybody involved, but a big, big loser for democratic evolution in the Middle East – the last thing Egypt needs is a wildly popular victorious army with a charismatic general ready to take the reins, although that would suit Western interests just fine, no doubt.

Don't get me wrong, I have zero sympathy for Qaddafi, and if some Special Forces squad had managed to infiltrate Green Square and blow his head off when he was making one of those long-ass speeches of his last week, I would've been all for it. And it would be heartbreaking to see the revolution fail in Libya, with the horrendous bloodbath that would surely result. Nor am I absolutely opposed to use of military force, or even of armed interventions, under any and all circumstances. I'm sadly lacking in moral clarity of that kind.

There are times when military action, even intervention is justified. Most of the time it isn't, though. This one is clearly less unambiguously evil and wrong than the 2003 Iraq invasion for example. However, the more I look at it, the less I like it. This isn't what it seems. None of the usual explanations offered smell right—protecting civilians, toppling an evil dictator, seizing Libya's oil, propping up a beleaguered Sarkozy, making nice with the new democratic Arab order... yeah, no, maybe.

I generally don't buy into conspiracy theories of hidden cabals pulling strings in the background to create major events. It's usually way more obvious than that; the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion was painfully visible; anyone who wanted to look could see the propaganda and political machine grinding away right in the open. Not here. Instead, I get a feeling that somebody pulled a massive strategic surprise on everybody—the Arab League, Russia, China, NATO, perhaps even the US— not just Qaddafi's armored divisions with their pants down in the desert. This is more Great Game than Cold War, let alone the Leroy Jenkins shit the US has been pulling since. But who are the players, what are the rules, and what are they playing for?

I'm not used to groping in the dark about stuff like this, and I don't like it one bit.

Libya: This Had Better Work

2011-03-20T00:36:00.002+02:00

Photo by B.R.Q. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Muammar Qaddafi isn't big on that forgiveness thing.

Almost exactly 25 years ago, President Ronald Reagan decided to send Qaddafi a little love letter, in the shape of some cruise missiles with his name on them. That was for some nasty shit Qaddafi had pulled in West Berlin some time previously. Qaddafi narrowly escaped that time. Lockerbie was his thank-you note to the USA. Hell, it's 1986 all over again, even a nuclear disaster going on at the same time.

If he survives, you might not want to fly Air France for a while.

I blew my strategic overview big-time a few blog posts ago. Sorry. At least I'm in fairly good company; not a great many people have been guessing this one right. I really wish the War Nerd weighed in, he's uncanny. But then perhaps his secret is to only call the obvious ones and leave the rest to us amateurs and wannabies.

Over the past week or so, Qaddafi has gotten his military shit together, and he decided to go for the jugular. He repelled the attack on Sirt easily enough, and decided to let Misrata sit for the moment and go straight for the rebel capital, Benghazi. He's been pushing towards it really fast, on the order of 30 km/day or more. That means that he's not been meeting much effective resistance on the way. No surprise there; now that he's got his air force and armor working together again, you really don't want to face them in the open, and everything between Tripoli and Cyrenaica is open. Next on the menu would have been some really brutal urban fighting: the rebels know it's a fight to the death, and will fight house to house. I wouldn't even guess how that would go, except that I thought Saif's "all will be over in 48 hours" was a tad optimistic. The Libyan army hasn't been fighting all that well; the rebels have captured armor and other heavy gear intact, which is pretty good for irregulars.

But in a symmetrical face-off between improvised infantry with light weaponry and a combined-forces assault by a regular army, the guerrillas will lose, unless they're the Hizbollah or the Tamil Tigers, and even the Tamil Tigers ended up losing. And that's the action we've been seeing lately.

So what happened? If I had to guess, I'd say that the officer corps that was wavering between sticking with the devil they know or going with the revolution, decided to coalesce around Qaddafi. That got the machinery rolling. After that, it was a bit like the Russian Civil War scenario, with Qaddafi playing the role of the Bolsheviks—they lost most of the country but kept Moscow, then they got their military act together, and then recaptured everything they lost, and eventually more.

And then the United Nations passed that surprise resolution in practically no time flat. I didn't see that coming either. So what's the deal with that?

If you want my wild guess, here it is: France and Lebanon. Nicolas Sarkozy is in very hot water domestically, and there's nothing like a short, victorious war against a universally hated villain to sort that kind of unpleasantness out. Libya was a godsend. And in Lebanon, the Hizbollah is currently the top dog, and they have some very personal beef with Qaddafi: he disappeared Imam Musa Sadr, the founder of the Movement of the Disinherited, which got the ball rolling on the whole Lebanese Shi'ite thing. Musa Sadr is like Jesus to the Lebanese Shi'ites–his face is all over the place in Shi'ite parts of town there. Deserved it too. If he had lived, things might've gone very differently and altogether better.

Hizbollah isn't very big on forgiving and forgetting either. Almost as bad as those guys going on about the Japanese tsunami being karmic retribution for Pearl Harbour. I guess it really is that hard to let go of old grudges.

Anyway, France and Lebanon have very close ties. Lebanon has very close ties with the rest of the Arab countries. The Hizbollah wants Qaddafi's head on a plate. Sarkozy wants a distraction. Voilà, leadership: the Lebs take care of the Arabs, the French take care of the West, and together they find some way to pay off Russia and China to stop them from vetoing the thing. Nice and clean, and everybody's happy, except Qaddafi.

There's just the small matter of winning the damn thing, and I don't see that as a given at all.

Militarily, things suddenly do look pretty grim for Qaddafi. He's been pushing fast for Benghazi, which means his armor is nicely strung out in the open desert. Suddenly he's lost his air supremacy. Hell, he can't even take off after the US-British cruise missile strike taking out his airfields. Those tanks are sitting ducks for French and British fighters. He must now be hoping that the French and the Brits take that "no-fly zone" thing to the letter and ignore the "all necessary measures" bit, and just settle for parading around keeping the air clear of jets, letting that armor make its way to Benghazi, win quickly and decisively there, and that would be that. I'd like to say that they couldn't possibly be that squeamish or stupid, but unfortunately I can't rule that out either. The French and the Brits didn't use to be squeamish at all, but their warfighting glory days are long gone.

But let's assume they're not, and do intend to wipe out that armor. Then what? Back to technicals and RPG's, that's what. And I really have no idea how that'll play out. Or, rather, I have way too many ideas, and all of them seem totally possible. Maybe Qaddafi's army will cave and whack him and the show will be over by Wednesday next. Or maybe they won't, and will beat the rebels even without armor and air support. Maybe the country will split into two warring halves. If Qaddafi survives, he'll face a post-Gulf War I style blockade, and we'll see mysterious explosions on Air France jumbo jets. Maybe he will invite in Al Qaeda and let them set up training camps right in the open just to spite the French and the Americans, like he threatened.

But the stakes just went up big-time. If he survives, he'll make life very uncomfortable for really lots of people. His list of friends is awfully short. There's Chavez and maybe Cuba, and Syria and Turkey are sort of lukewarm-ish about it, but that's about it really.

I'm feeling very conflicted about this intervention. On the one hand, there's a really big urge to do something—anything—but on the other, this is damn risky and could end up making things worse, and even in the best remaining scenario, it'll rob the Libyans of their revolution. Better that than being shot in the back of the head or tortured to death, I suppose, but a hell of a lot worse than the Arab Spring that looked like it was flowering just a few weeks ago.

Fucking Middle East. Never hope, that's a recipe for heartbreak.

Fukushima

2011-03-17T10:32:00.001+02:00

Broken Power Line, Lebanon, 2005

If the Fukushima disaster really causes us to give up on nuclear power, I hope to God it won't mean more coal, because that's what's really destroying the planet. I'm feeling terribly depressed about it. Unreasonably depressed, perhaps. At some level, I'm still the teenage nerdy techno-utopian that I was a quarter-century ago. The 1950's dream of abundant, clean energy has always held a special allure for me. Imagine what we could do with it – eradicate war and hunger, go to the stars, pursue the arts and sciences... Yeah, it was a beautiful dream.

I still think we have the technological capability to do it. A thorium-based economy is totally feasible, and we know how to make nuclear plants safe. The Fukushima disaster has, however, shaken my already fragile faith in our social capability.

We could do nuclear right, but we're not. The plant was to be decommissioned this month. It's forty years old, which is about 20 years more than you should run a nuclear plant. It wasn't designed for a seismically unstable area to start with: the reserve power generators were at the bottom floors, within reach of the tsunami, and the cooling systems were not on the same concrete block as the reactor cores. Now there's talk of spent fuel going re-critical, which could only happen if some pretty huge corners were cut – stacking so much of them in the cooling pond that re-criticality is prevented only by boron plates or boric acid in the water.

I still think that nuclear power itself is a red herring, and the anti-nuclear movement has in fact done enormous harm to our efforts to find a way to live sustainably on this rock. The problems are with our society, with its insatiable thirst for energy, and the economic incentives that prevent it from being produced sustainably. The way the cards are stacked, that means that whatever's cheapest in the short term will get built. That means coal and keeping old nuclear plants running. If we managed to address those social problems, I think the issue with nuclear power would go away by itself. Perhaps we'd find that we could produce all the power we need from renewable resources; after all, we've only begun to explore those possibilities. Or perhaps we'd take nuclear security seriously enough to use that technology responsibly.

There's a lot of spent fuel sitting around in cooling ponds all over the world. It can't stay there forever. I don't believe that burying it is a responsible solution; it'll be there for thousands of years, radiating away, as our civilizations rise and fall. The only way we know of to really get rid of it is yet more nuclear technology – the so-called fourth-generation plants that China has just decided to research on a massive scale. The anti-nuclear movement will reflexively oppose funding that research, or building those plants. As any new technology, it'll be riskier than the more mature technology it replaces. It could well be that there will be a disaster in one of those plants. Given the political cost of nuclear power now, how likely is it that that research will be properly funded?

The worst outcome is that we're going to be building new coal and oil, running our existing nuclear plants beyond their expiry dates, and having that spent fuel sitting around in ponds until the inevitable happens and Fukushimas and Three Mile Islands and Chernobyls become routine occurrences rather than once in a quarter-century tragedies. And that, I fear, is the way things are going, thanks to the combined efforts of the power companies pushing for the cheapest solutions and the anti-nuclear lobby pushing against anything atomic.

Living in denial is looking increasingly attractive these days.

Come to think of it...

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Reflections on Social Networks

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Faultlines

To Intervene Or Not To Intervene?

Bad Arguments Against

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