I decided to share a truly awesome poem with the rest of you English-only speakers. A little background: Goethe can be described as Germany's national poet. He is to the Germans what Shakespeare is the the British, what Poe is to the Americans. He was, by the way, also way more than just a poet. ("just a poet"?!?! I ought to shoot myself for saying that). Nevertheless, he was also a playwright, essayist, and knowledgeable critic of many, many things, ranging from poetry to literature to art and architecture. He is most famously remembered outside Germany for his amazing poem written in play form (or play, written in rhyming poetry) Faust, a magnificent piece of work redone and referenced and copied and so forth by many people and artists in many languages, the foremost of which comes to mind is the Trans Siberian Orchestra's album Beethoven's Last Night which replaces the doctor/philosopher Faust with the musician conductor Beethoven, then follows the exact plot, and even much of the dialogue. It has been reworked for the modern stage, and for television by the BBC, and for the big screen as well.
His second most famous work, and a poem that can be recited by almost any German, apparently, is Der Erlkonig, ofttimes mistranslated as "The Elf King" but should actually be rendered as "The Erl King," a mistranslation from a Scandinavian flower, alder, as old Danish folklore was the source of inspiration for this poem. Here is the original and my translation on the right.
A word on the translation: I am not fluent in German, and have chosen to translate more literally than beautifully, as any attempt I made at rhyming while keeping true to form and meaning would have undoubtedly fallen drastically short.
A word on the poem itself: Besides the narrator, the father, the child, and the Erl King all speak. The first three are easy to spot, in case you are wondering about the Erl King's lines they are stanzas 3, 5, and the first two lines of 7. Unfortunately, we never get to hear the Erl King's daughters (see below).
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Who rides, so late, through Night and wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; It is the father with his child;
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, He has the boy tight in his arms,
Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm. He holds him safely, he keeps him warm.
"Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?"
“My son, why do you hide your face with fear?”
"Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht? “Father, don't you see the Erl King?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?" — The Erl King with crown and tail?”
"Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif." “My son, it's only a wisp of fog.”
"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir! “You lovely child, come, go with me!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir; Many beautiful games I'll play with you;
Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand, Many colorful flowers are on the shore,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand." My mother has many golden robes.”
"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht, “My father, my father, and don't you hear,
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?" — What the Erl King quietly promises me?”
"Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind; “Be quiet, stay calm, my child;
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind." — The wind is rustling in the withered leaves.”
"Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehen? “Dear boy, do you not want to come with me?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön; My daughters shall well wait for you;
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn, My daughters lead the nightly dance,
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein." And rock and dance and sing you to sleep.”
"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort
“My father, my father, and don't you see there
Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?" — The Erl King's daughters in the gloomy place?”
"Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau: “My son, my son, I see it fine:
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau. — " The old willows appear very grey.”
"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt; “I love you, your beautiful form entices me;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt."
And if you're not willing, then I need to use force.”
"Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an! “My father, my father, now he's grabbing me!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!" — The Erl King is hurting me!”
Dem Vater grauset's, er reitet geschwind, The father shudders, he rides swiftly,
Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind, He holds the moaning child in his arms,
Erreicht den Hof mit Müh' und Not; He reaches his farm with trouble and misery;
In seinen Armen das Kind war tot. But in his arms the child was dead.
Besides being a national treasure and a masterpiece of a great poet, this is a good example of German poetry at the time. Even though in the twilight of its popularity, this type of unexplained mysticism can still be found in German culture. The dark forests of Tolkien's world was heavily influenced by German folklore describing their own Black Forest, which once covered most of Germany, and the various elves, nymphs, faeries, and spirits they invented to explain the other-worldliness of that ancient place.
One of the reasons I like this poem so much is the dynamic of the various voices. I imagine it being performed as one of the ancient Greek plays. A very common (even to the point of necessary) element of Greek plays was the presence of the "chorus." This was usually performed by a group of men standing to one side, singing their lines rather than speaking them. They could narrate, describe the characters or settings, act as an emotional guide to the audience by bemoaning all the horrible things going on onstage, or even speak directly to the characters. If Der Erlkonig had been an ancient Greek play, the Erl King himself, being never actually seen, would probably have been voiced by the chorus.
An interesting take on this poem is a remake/tribute to it done by the modern German hard rock band "Rammstein." Their version is set on an airplane, and so, in typical ironic/mocking Rammstein fashion, is named Dalai Lama, because the actual current Dalai Lama is afraid of flying. The song, though, is very much just a modernization of the original poem. What is very interesting, though, is that Rammstein chose to include an actual chorus, sung by women, throughout the song, voicing the Erl King's daughters, whom we never get to hear in the original. I have underlined their lines. Here is their song with my translation.
Ein Flugzeug liegt im Abendwind An airplane lies on the evening wind
An Bord ist auch ein Mann mit Kind On board is also a man with his child
Sie sitzen sicher sitzen warm They sit there safe, they sit there warm
und gehen so dem Schlaf ins Garn and fall into the snare of sleep
In drei Stunden sind sie da In three hours they will be there
zum Wiegenfeste der Mama at mother's birthday party
Die Sicht ist gut der Himmel klar The view is good, the sky is clear
Weiter, weiter ins Verderben Further, further, into destruction
Wir müssen leben bis wir sterben We must live until we die
Der Mensch gehört nicht in die Luft The man hears nothing in the air
So der Herr im Himmel ruft Thus the god in the heavens calls
seine Söhne auf dem Wind his sons on the wind
Bringt mir dieses Menschenkind “Bring me this man-child!”
Das Kind hat noch die Zeit verloren The child has yet lost time
Da springt ein Widerhall zu Ohren Then an echo springs to his ears
Ein dumpfes Grollen treibt die Nacht A muffled rumbling drives the night
und der Wolkentreiber lacht and the cloud-driver laughs
Schüttelt wach die Menschenfracht He shakes the human cargo awake
Weiter, weiter ins Verderben Further, further, into destruction
Wir müssen leben bis wir sterben We must live until we die
Und das Kind zum Vater spricht And the child speaks to his father
Hörst du denn den Donner nicht “Do you then not hear the thunder?
Das ist der König aller Winde That is the king of all the winds,
Er will mich zu seinem Kinde He wants me for one of his children.”
Aus den Wolken tropft ein Chor Out of the clouds a choir drops
Kriecht sich in das kleine Ohr Crawling into his little ear
Komm her, bleib hier Come here, stay here
Wir sind gut zu dir We will be good to you
Komm her, bleib hier Come here, stay here
Wir sind Brüder dir We are brothers to you
Der Sturm umarmt die Flugmaschine The storm embraces the flying machine
Der Druck fällt schnell in der Kabine The pressure falls quickly in the cabin
Ein dumpfes Grollen treibt die Nacht A muffled rumbling drives the night
In Panik schreit die Menschenfracht In panic the human cargo screams
Weiter, weiter ins Verderben Further, further, into destruction
Wir müssen leben bis wir sterben We must live until we die
Und zum Herrgott fleht das Kind And to the god the child begs
Himmel nimm zurück den Wind “Sky, take back the wind!
Bring uns unversehrt zu Erden Bring us unharmed to earth.”
Aus den Wolken tropft ein Chor Out of the clouds a choir drops
Kriecht sich in das kleine Ohr Crawling into his little ear
Komm her, bleib hier Come here, stay here
Wir sind gut zu dir We will be good to you
Komm her, bleib hier Come here, stay here
Wir sind Brüder dir We are brothers to you
Der Vater hält das Kind jetzt fest The father is now holding the child firmly
Hat es sehr an sich gepresst He has him pressed tightly against himself
Bemerkt nicht dessen Atemnot Not noticing his labored breath
Doch die Angst kennt kein Erbarmen But fear knows no mercy
So der Vater mit den Armen So the father, with is arms,
Drückt die Seele aus dem Kind Squeezes the soul out of the child
Diese setzt sich auf den Wind und singt: Which goes upon the wind and sings:
Komm her, bleib hier Come here, stay here
Wir sind gut zu dir We will be good to you
Komm her, bleib hier Come here, stay here
Wir sind Brüder dir We are brothers to you
As you can see, they changed the meaning somewhat (though I imagine the argument could be made that that was what Goethe was insinuating, but I don't believe it) but much of the feel of the poem is the same. In place of the horse, you have the plane. In place of the fog, you have turbulence. And just like in the original, you have the child hearing the voices on the wind. The addition of the chorus (if you heard the song, you'd agree) I always found creepy and disturbing, thus totally in keeping with the feel of the original. Please do not think, though, that I am really comparing Rammstein to Goethe. I show their song merely for interest's sake.
A side note for those who actually payed attention to the original German: When I translated "komm her" as "come here" and then "bleib hier" as "stay here" I did not make a spelling mistake. "Bleiben" does mean "to stay, remain" and "hier" is pronounced the same and has the same meaning as the English "here," and "komm" is from the verb "kommen," meaning "to come," but "her" (pronounced like the English hair) is actually a part of the verb "kommen." This forms what is called a separable-prefix-verb. These are a class of verbs in German that have a prefix, usually a preposition or pseudo-preposition attached to it, that separates and goes to the end of the sentence, though even in that case they are not treated as prepositions of the verb, but rather as an actual part of the verb, modifying the verb itself. "Her" is a difficult preposition, not translatable by itself into English, but usually used with verbs of motion, insinuating motion towards the object of the subject's attention. Therefore: "hergehen" separates to "ich gehe her," "I'm going to 'that place we were speaking of'." As you can see, in this case, considering that the verb "kommen" is used in the imperative (command) sense, the object of the speaker's attention would logically be the speaker's own locale in this instance, both "come here" and "come to me" are perfectly adequate translations. I merely chose the former for the sake of brevity (which, I now realize, has long been forsaken).
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Book Review: Farthest Star, by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson
Or, more aptly titled, "A Discussion of Morality." But first...
First of all, let me say that collaborative efforts are rarely very good. This is no exception.
Secondly, let me say that I am a huge Frederik Pohl fan and even his bad stuff is pretty awesome.
Thirdly, let me start this review with a few thoughts on science fiction novels and short stories written from the 50s through the 70s. Much like the roaring twenties in hollywood, the first century of the Roman Republic, that brief period between 1870 and 1890 in the American west, this was the true golden age of science fiction writing. Our first step into space, putting a man on the moon, was during this time first a dream, then reality, then food for futuristic thought. The atom bomb laid open whole new doors of speculation, and the newly propagated chaos theory gave science fiction writers entire new worlds of imagination in which to expound their theories.
And expound they did. Modern "hard science fiction" is a term to describe sci-fi written with a knowledge of our modern understanding of astrophysics, and incorporating that into whatever worlds the writer cares to dream up. "Soft" science fiction didn't really rely on an understanding of science, but rather the setting of a story in a fantastical world, like Robert Heinlein did. Science fiction, as it dealt with and relied upon space-related subjects, but left out the physics. But the thing is, the more the understanding of our universe has given us, the closer the boundaries these worlds find themselves wrapped in.
But in the days before Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize for Physics for drawing his little squiggly lines to describe certain sub-molecular particles pathways through the strange and unknown gravitational wells that the atom possesses, writers like Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Larry Niven, and others built entire universes starting only with the foundations of modern science. The gateway to the universe was open, and as of yet, few constrictions and boundaries existed. These were writers who not only knew the craft of telling stories, like Robert Heinlein, but also possessed a great amount of knowledge of what was known about astrophysics, and many other areas of science, at the time. They were able to make very real and believable universes and situations and to describe the awesomeness of the unknown with such scientific clarity as to baffle the minds of the readers. Anyone who has read Protector by Niven can grow to understand and appreciate the complexity of the theory of evolution, even with the entirely fantastical twist he gives it. Anyone who has read World at the End of Time by Pohl will never look at the night sky again without feeling a pressing sense of terror at the infinite magnitude of both time and distance that he describes and portrays so well, and then theorizes about so fluently. Reading anything in Asimov's robot series will tell you more about human psychology by contrasting it to robot psychology than you would think possible in a fictional novel, despite the fact that, though based on modern understanding of both the human mind and what steps we have made with artificial intelligence, it is entirely theoretical.
So, with the universe open and unaccounted for, these writers in this time period had a far greater area of freedom within which to work. And they took full advantage of that. If the genre of science fiction had not been invented, there is little doubt in my mind these writers would have been great psychologists, behaviorists, and sociologists. They took advantage of these free worlds by using the ideas of "aliens" to shine a mirror on humanity itself. They put man outside his element and into space to better describe mankind. Science fiction afforded them a far larger arena to explore human psychology, by pushing the mind to its limits in the never-ending terror of the unknown. They were able to explore evolution thoroughly, because they weren't bound by Darwin's rules, as they took his rules then added to them as they saw logically fit. They were able to discuss religion and philosophy in ways that had never been done before, letting us as a species see these subjects from an outsider's perspective. When it comes down to it, science fiction was just a by-product of academic curiosity, and the search for new areas in which to shine light on the culmination of the human experience.
All of which is to explain, by the way, my appreciation and respect for science fiction written during this time period. Which leads me to the current review of a most interesting book, which has brought up a most perplexing question regarding morality; one which I have wrestled with now for some time.
But first (or fourth or fifth or one hundred and fifth, sorry), a little lesson in science.
The tachyon is not quite scientific fact yet, but has been theorized about for some time, especially after observing certain particles behaviors. Years ago I found an article (and clipped it and kept it) in the science section of the Houston Chronicle about paired particles. Now, I had heard about these before, and the tachyon is merely an extension of this theory (I think, more or less). The weird thing about paired particles, that is still baffling scientists the world over, as it totally defies all modern understandings of the universe, is that you take a couple of particles that come in pairs, measure them, catalog them and so forth. Then you send one of them way over there. Could be miles, could be light years away, distance doesn't matter. Then you take the one here, affect it in a way as to give it an opposite spin (say, for simplicity's sake, that it had a clockwise spin, and you nudged it counter-clockwise), you will find that the other particle, already millions of miles away, will automatically spin the exact same way that the particle here spins. That means that there is some form of communication between these particles, and it happens faster than the speed of light. Crazy, yah?
So now we have a theoretical particle that can basically be thought of as two particles at an undefined distance from each other, yet inexplicably connected. Nudge one, and the other is nudged the same way. How is that relevant or practical? How else do you think you could construct an inter-galactic telegraph system? Put it in binary, use them to describe colors, bump them in timed series to produce acoustic waves and send the latest top-40 hit to Alpha Centauri with no time delay; anything is possible given the ability to manipulate them.
So what Frederik Pohl does in Farthest Star, getting back to the book review (finally! I know...) is take this idea one step further. Given the ability to use these tachyons as messages over distance, and the ability of a tachyon receiver to receive these messages and organize them as a blueprint, then use that blueprint to organize matter on the receiving end in the appropriate way, you basically come out with a copier/transporter. You take something here, map it out, send the blueprint via tachyon there, which reads it, copies it, and arranges the matter and voila! You have a perfect copy sent light years away.
Frederik Pohl raises the morality issue by posing the question of copying a human, and using this ability to send the copy on a suicide mission.
Think about this carefully. Say there is a space probe in dire need of repair. The knowledge it could accumulate can help humanity very much. You volunteer to copy yourself/send yourself out there to fix the probe, which is bathed in radiation due to its power source to the extant that anything organic on that probe will die within a week.
Now YOU volunteered for this. This is YOU going out there. But when you step out of the tachyon transmitter, YOU are still here, able to grab dinner and go to bed then go to work as usual the next day, while a perfect copy of you, with all your memories and feelings, including volunteering, steps out of the tachyon receiver on the probe with the full knowledge that *you* have a job to do, and after you do it, you die.
You remain here, and you go there. At the same time. Which one of you is YOU? You volunteered for this, and the you that is on the probe is the same you that volunteered, but really, the you that volunteered still gets to live back at home. When you step out of the tachyon sender, do you breathe a sigh of relief that YOU are still here? And when you step out of the tachyon receiver, do you curse that you lost the coin toss, and YOU are the one that was sent?
Could you, in all conscience thought, really send this copy to die, knowing that your selfless act of sacrifice was really sacrificing a part of you that was merely a copy (though in every way possible, exactly as real as the you here, making you both, essentially, a copy of the original you)?
Messes with the mind, yah? There's an ethics question that you won't find in text books. This is what I love about good science fiction. It is able to pose questions like these because it has the advantage of a far larger vocabulary than most other writing.
On a side note (seeing as how this started, or was supposed to start, as a book review) the book itself is quite enjoyable, though the parts written by Pohl and the parts written by Williamson are too easily definable, and I'm afraid that Pohl, in exploring the morality issue, lets the plot get away from him a bit. But if you can read Charles Dickens (who, in my humble opinion, though one of the greatest novelists in the English language of all time, couldn't hold onto a plot to save his life) this mightn't bother you too much. Williamson is a rather bland and far-reaching novelist himself, and may have bitten off more than he could chew in doing this with Pohl.
First of all, let me say that collaborative efforts are rarely very good. This is no exception.
Secondly, let me say that I am a huge Frederik Pohl fan and even his bad stuff is pretty awesome.
Thirdly, let me start this review with a few thoughts on science fiction novels and short stories written from the 50s through the 70s. Much like the roaring twenties in hollywood, the first century of the Roman Republic, that brief period between 1870 and 1890 in the American west, this was the true golden age of science fiction writing. Our first step into space, putting a man on the moon, was during this time first a dream, then reality, then food for futuristic thought. The atom bomb laid open whole new doors of speculation, and the newly propagated chaos theory gave science fiction writers entire new worlds of imagination in which to expound their theories.
And expound they did. Modern "hard science fiction" is a term to describe sci-fi written with a knowledge of our modern understanding of astrophysics, and incorporating that into whatever worlds the writer cares to dream up. "Soft" science fiction didn't really rely on an understanding of science, but rather the setting of a story in a fantastical world, like Robert Heinlein did. Science fiction, as it dealt with and relied upon space-related subjects, but left out the physics. But the thing is, the more the understanding of our universe has given us, the closer the boundaries these worlds find themselves wrapped in.
But in the days before Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize for Physics for drawing his little squiggly lines to describe certain sub-molecular particles pathways through the strange and unknown gravitational wells that the atom possesses, writers like Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Larry Niven, and others built entire universes starting only with the foundations of modern science. The gateway to the universe was open, and as of yet, few constrictions and boundaries existed. These were writers who not only knew the craft of telling stories, like Robert Heinlein, but also possessed a great amount of knowledge of what was known about astrophysics, and many other areas of science, at the time. They were able to make very real and believable universes and situations and to describe the awesomeness of the unknown with such scientific clarity as to baffle the minds of the readers. Anyone who has read Protector by Niven can grow to understand and appreciate the complexity of the theory of evolution, even with the entirely fantastical twist he gives it. Anyone who has read World at the End of Time by Pohl will never look at the night sky again without feeling a pressing sense of terror at the infinite magnitude of both time and distance that he describes and portrays so well, and then theorizes about so fluently. Reading anything in Asimov's robot series will tell you more about human psychology by contrasting it to robot psychology than you would think possible in a fictional novel, despite the fact that, though based on modern understanding of both the human mind and what steps we have made with artificial intelligence, it is entirely theoretical.
So, with the universe open and unaccounted for, these writers in this time period had a far greater area of freedom within which to work. And they took full advantage of that. If the genre of science fiction had not been invented, there is little doubt in my mind these writers would have been great psychologists, behaviorists, and sociologists. They took advantage of these free worlds by using the ideas of "aliens" to shine a mirror on humanity itself. They put man outside his element and into space to better describe mankind. Science fiction afforded them a far larger arena to explore human psychology, by pushing the mind to its limits in the never-ending terror of the unknown. They were able to explore evolution thoroughly, because they weren't bound by Darwin's rules, as they took his rules then added to them as they saw logically fit. They were able to discuss religion and philosophy in ways that had never been done before, letting us as a species see these subjects from an outsider's perspective. When it comes down to it, science fiction was just a by-product of academic curiosity, and the search for new areas in which to shine light on the culmination of the human experience.
All of which is to explain, by the way, my appreciation and respect for science fiction written during this time period. Which leads me to the current review of a most interesting book, which has brought up a most perplexing question regarding morality; one which I have wrestled with now for some time.
But first (or fourth or fifth or one hundred and fifth, sorry), a little lesson in science.
The tachyon is not quite scientific fact yet, but has been theorized about for some time, especially after observing certain particles behaviors. Years ago I found an article (and clipped it and kept it) in the science section of the Houston Chronicle about paired particles. Now, I had heard about these before, and the tachyon is merely an extension of this theory (I think, more or less). The weird thing about paired particles, that is still baffling scientists the world over, as it totally defies all modern understandings of the universe, is that you take a couple of particles that come in pairs, measure them, catalog them and so forth. Then you send one of them way over there. Could be miles, could be light years away, distance doesn't matter. Then you take the one here, affect it in a way as to give it an opposite spin (say, for simplicity's sake, that it had a clockwise spin, and you nudged it counter-clockwise), you will find that the other particle, already millions of miles away, will automatically spin the exact same way that the particle here spins. That means that there is some form of communication between these particles, and it happens faster than the speed of light. Crazy, yah?
So now we have a theoretical particle that can basically be thought of as two particles at an undefined distance from each other, yet inexplicably connected. Nudge one, and the other is nudged the same way. How is that relevant or practical? How else do you think you could construct an inter-galactic telegraph system? Put it in binary, use them to describe colors, bump them in timed series to produce acoustic waves and send the latest top-40 hit to Alpha Centauri with no time delay; anything is possible given the ability to manipulate them.
So what Frederik Pohl does in Farthest Star, getting back to the book review (finally! I know...) is take this idea one step further. Given the ability to use these tachyons as messages over distance, and the ability of a tachyon receiver to receive these messages and organize them as a blueprint, then use that blueprint to organize matter on the receiving end in the appropriate way, you basically come out with a copier/transporter. You take something here, map it out, send the blueprint via tachyon there, which reads it, copies it, and arranges the matter and voila! You have a perfect copy sent light years away.
Frederik Pohl raises the morality issue by posing the question of copying a human, and using this ability to send the copy on a suicide mission.
Think about this carefully. Say there is a space probe in dire need of repair. The knowledge it could accumulate can help humanity very much. You volunteer to copy yourself/send yourself out there to fix the probe, which is bathed in radiation due to its power source to the extant that anything organic on that probe will die within a week.
Now YOU volunteered for this. This is YOU going out there. But when you step out of the tachyon transmitter, YOU are still here, able to grab dinner and go to bed then go to work as usual the next day, while a perfect copy of you, with all your memories and feelings, including volunteering, steps out of the tachyon receiver on the probe with the full knowledge that *you* have a job to do, and after you do it, you die.
You remain here, and you go there. At the same time. Which one of you is YOU? You volunteered for this, and the you that is on the probe is the same you that volunteered, but really, the you that volunteered still gets to live back at home. When you step out of the tachyon sender, do you breathe a sigh of relief that YOU are still here? And when you step out of the tachyon receiver, do you curse that you lost the coin toss, and YOU are the one that was sent?
Could you, in all conscience thought, really send this copy to die, knowing that your selfless act of sacrifice was really sacrificing a part of you that was merely a copy (though in every way possible, exactly as real as the you here, making you both, essentially, a copy of the original you)?
Messes with the mind, yah? There's an ethics question that you won't find in text books. This is what I love about good science fiction. It is able to pose questions like these because it has the advantage of a far larger vocabulary than most other writing.
On a side note (seeing as how this started, or was supposed to start, as a book review) the book itself is quite enjoyable, though the parts written by Pohl and the parts written by Williamson are too easily definable, and I'm afraid that Pohl, in exploring the morality issue, lets the plot get away from him a bit. But if you can read Charles Dickens (who, in my humble opinion, though one of the greatest novelists in the English language of all time, couldn't hold onto a plot to save his life) this mightn't bother you too much. Williamson is a rather bland and far-reaching novelist himself, and may have bitten off more than he could chew in doing this with Pohl.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
little bit of down time
I spent the last week working in Illinois (absolutely nothing resembling anything of value to be said or heard about anything having to do with that (bleep)hole state) and now I have to spend the week following Thanksgiving in Kansas (see above comment in parentheses.)
On a side note, I was actually looking at Twitter, trying to decide if it was worth selling my soul to be able to keep up with my favorite sports players on their Twitter accounts, and ran across a study that showed that 40% of all Twitter messages fall under the term "pointless babble." (That's their term, not mine, but I couldn't agree more.) This was the largest piece of the colorful pie chart they made for the non-statistically inclined. Pointless babble is linguistically referred to as "small talk" or, "commenting on what is perfectly obvious."
I'm really surprised it was as low as 40%.
From a linguistic point of view, small talk falls under ritualized communication, much like a dog barking because it heard another dog bark. Except I think it's a good chance that the dogs are displaying a better use of their mental faculties than most humans do in this case. The sad thing is, that in today's world, small talk is no longer pointless babble, it is babble that has taken on a very real point, that is, affirming one's own place in this world. Like scared children wandering through a hallway at night on their way to the bathroom who will sing to themselves as a form of self-assurance, human beings today feel the need to constantly flap their lower jaw and force air through their windpipes to prove that they exist, they are important, and they demand attention. No longer the image of the quietly self-assured, confident of his own existence. Now we have hairless gorillas, slapping their chests and pulling up grass to impress others.
Noam Chomsky wrote a few decades ago his theories on universal grammar. Taking the idea from a linguistic point of view, he showed how the parts of human psychology that are shared amongst all races show that the human mind will form, quite predictably, common ways to express thoughts or feelings common to all, and these modes are shared by all languages. Which is why even languages as radically different as English and Japanese have so many similarities in the thought processes which create the grammar, then vocabulary, of those languages. In every language I've ever heard of, a noun is a noun, which means that a thing is defined and it's existence taken for granted. A verb is a verb and describes action and therefore assumes that things undergo change in accordance with our common perception of time. Universal grammar. The implications are pretty far-reaching. Now, personally, I think Chomsky is an idiot who needs to be beaten with a stick every day for the rest of his life, but if this theory happens to be true (even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then) what does that say about humanity if the most common, global-wide form of communication (which, remember, shows the areas of human psychology and mental-makeup that can be found in all of us) is pointless babble?
I am reminded of Douglas Adam's theory on why humans talk so much. His alien character, Ford Prefect, on observing humanity ultimately decided that if human's mouths stopped moving, their brains started working.
Needless to say, I did not sign up on Twitter.
On a side note, I was actually looking at Twitter, trying to decide if it was worth selling my soul to be able to keep up with my favorite sports players on their Twitter accounts, and ran across a study that showed that 40% of all Twitter messages fall under the term "pointless babble." (That's their term, not mine, but I couldn't agree more.) This was the largest piece of the colorful pie chart they made for the non-statistically inclined. Pointless babble is linguistically referred to as "small talk" or, "commenting on what is perfectly obvious."
I'm really surprised it was as low as 40%.
From a linguistic point of view, small talk falls under ritualized communication, much like a dog barking because it heard another dog bark. Except I think it's a good chance that the dogs are displaying a better use of their mental faculties than most humans do in this case. The sad thing is, that in today's world, small talk is no longer pointless babble, it is babble that has taken on a very real point, that is, affirming one's own place in this world. Like scared children wandering through a hallway at night on their way to the bathroom who will sing to themselves as a form of self-assurance, human beings today feel the need to constantly flap their lower jaw and force air through their windpipes to prove that they exist, they are important, and they demand attention. No longer the image of the quietly self-assured, confident of his own existence. Now we have hairless gorillas, slapping their chests and pulling up grass to impress others.
Noam Chomsky wrote a few decades ago his theories on universal grammar. Taking the idea from a linguistic point of view, he showed how the parts of human psychology that are shared amongst all races show that the human mind will form, quite predictably, common ways to express thoughts or feelings common to all, and these modes are shared by all languages. Which is why even languages as radically different as English and Japanese have so many similarities in the thought processes which create the grammar, then vocabulary, of those languages. In every language I've ever heard of, a noun is a noun, which means that a thing is defined and it's existence taken for granted. A verb is a verb and describes action and therefore assumes that things undergo change in accordance with our common perception of time. Universal grammar. The implications are pretty far-reaching. Now, personally, I think Chomsky is an idiot who needs to be beaten with a stick every day for the rest of his life, but if this theory happens to be true (even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then) what does that say about humanity if the most common, global-wide form of communication (which, remember, shows the areas of human psychology and mental-makeup that can be found in all of us) is pointless babble?
I am reminded of Douglas Adam's theory on why humans talk so much. His alien character, Ford Prefect, on observing humanity ultimately decided that if human's mouths stopped moving, their brains started working.
Needless to say, I did not sign up on Twitter.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
The End of Mankind
I believe humanity faces a serious problem right now.
For the last ten thousand years humanity has scratched and clawed it's way to the top of the food chain. Nobody intelligent would argue that right now, of all species, humans are the masters of the world. We have struggled against nature and the other predators in the animal kingdom to emerge truly victorious. The road has been an interesting one.
Man is the most intelligent by far. Our infants have to be born with an already over-sized head. And even then, an average child's head will nearly double in circumference in the first three years of life. Because they are born with such large heads, our babies have to be born earlier and less developed than most other species, to allow passage through the birth canal. So over time, as our brains got bigger, our children arrived younger and weaker. Horses, giraffes, and many others can walk from day one. Many can at least forage for their own food within the first month. A human infant is extremely helpless for at least the first few years of life, unable to feed itself or defend itself from predators, even by flight. The natural outcome of this is that humanity began to develop society as a way to protect their young. They were simple at first, then increasingly complex. The more complex family-lifestyle society became, the more difficult it was to maintain that society as a hunter/gatherer one, so humanity began to tame nature itself by growing their own food. Thus farming was invented. Farming led to building, to social hierarchies, to stability. And to technology. Our huge brains and perfect tool-making bodies compensated for our slowness, lack of strength, and susceptibility to the environment. And it all took off from there.
Now, there is a theory (which I have studied a lot and now accept as fact) that once a species reaches a certain level of technological achievement which provides for the stability and comfort we now have, that species can no longer evolve.
Ancient man was at constant and total war with both the natural environment and the animal predators he was surrounded by. He evolved out of necessity. He created fire to ward off the cold. He created bows and stone flint arrows, then bronze weapons to ward of the natural predators as well as other men. Necessity has proven throughout time to be the mother of invention. History shows that most of mankind's greatest achievement comes from a reaction to war, ie, self-preservation.
Nowadays, though, we see something totally different.
Total war is defined as an entire society dedicating every single member and every single resource to the war effort. Accepting this definition, the US involvement in WW2 pales in comparison. In fact, no human society has seen a total war effort for at least a few centuries, if even that recently. Germanic tribes in the ages following the collapse of Rome may have dedicated everything from their small villages to survival. Greece and Rome were both too powerful to ever necessitate total war, though some of the smaller "nations" they fought were known to even send their women, young, and old into battle (the Celts for one). Besides that, you would have to go before recorded history, to when society in the agricultural sense was just being formed to see a true example of total war.
The good thing about total war, from a standpoint of human evolution, is that it is truly survival of the fittest. Only the strongest and fastest and smartest could survive. The best warrior, clad in leather and fur and carrying hand-made weapons of wood, who hid his infants most cunningly and taught his woman to fight most shrewdly and was strongest and most skilled was the one to survive and protect his family.
Today, when a society goes to war, we send a tiny fraction of our people to fight for us. And if not the best, they are far from the worst. They are usually of the most athletic, and most trained at survival. Those are the ones who die, and natural selection is ignored as the rest of society, no matter how stupid or slow, proliferates.
The very aspects of humanity that allowed us to do so much and become so great are the same things that allow the weak and stupid to live, and the strong to perish.
Thus, mankind is no longer evolving. We haven't truly had to evolve or adapt for thousands of years now. So we have reached a point of social stagnation. We, as a species, are going nowhere.We carried the wave of technological achievements made in desperation and necessity by the last world war; nuclear power, medical vaccines (though between 22 and 25 million people died in combat in ww2, between 32 and 50 million people, soldiers and civilians, died of famine and disease. WW2 saw the beginning of several breakthrough medical advances to combat this), the invention of the computer by von Neumann at Princeton (first begun as a result of needing to perform the complex calculations needed to build the A-bomb). But since then, our technological achievements have been built primarily on earlier ones. Smaller computer chips, better anesthesia, smarter traffic grids, etc.
Technology has seemingly peaked, as has mankind's rise in the world. The only thing that keeps growing is our population of increasingly ignorant and lazy consumers of resources.
So how do we fix this problem. The seemingly obvious answer is a total disregard of human rights and promoting total warfare, even a third world war in order to jump-start natural selection again. Of course, with the advent of nuclear power, a third world war would involve the destruction of half of humanity (at least) and the crippling of the natural world from nuclear disaster and fallout.
But the life on earth has survived comets that are today portrayed by hollywood as "global killers." Over the approximately 4.5 billion years this earth has been in existence, there have been at least five "great" mass extinctions, and dozens of smaller mass extinctions, caused by comets, volcanic upheaval the likes of which we can't even comprehend, radical changes in the environment, and God knows what else. The most famous happened 65 million years ago, and wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs. But crocodiles survived. As did sharks. Neither of those species has changed much at all since before that extinction ever happened. And mammals, a small fraction of life before then, not only survived but were finally enabled to proliferate, what with t-rex gone missing and all. But that wasn't even the biggest one. There were several bigger. The biggest extinction this world has seen was 250 million years ago, and that killed off about 90% of all life on earth. 90%. Yah, and we think a nuclear war would be the end of the world. There is nothing we could do to compare with what this earth has gone through and survived before mankind ever came along.
So maybe that wouldn't be so bad. Whoever did survive the war would definitely be held accountable to natural selection just to continue surviving after the war. Nature, ravaged and unforgiving, would ensure that only the strongest and smartest survived to continue the human species. It would probably be one of the best things to happen to humanity as a group.
But seriously, who wants that for their children. I can't in all conscientiousness, having love for my own nieces and nephew, and respect for life itself, advocate a nuclear holocaust.
Another option also involves the horror of totally disregarding the value of humanity's inalienable rights. The increase of violence on a massive, social scale would definitely curb the weaker and less intelligent of our species, but again, conscience decries and deplores the advocacy of such acts.
But there is another theory, one that suggests we as a species won't have to do anything about this at all. Going back over the fossil record, it shows us that there is a mass extinction on one level or another approximately, give or take, every 62 million years. The last one was 65 million years ago. There are some who think that we are high due another one. And another thing about all the previous mass extinctions throughout the earth's violent and turbulent history, is that we can't prove what caused even half of them. Oh, we can find iridium dust in layers around the world at the time of a few of the extinctions. And yes, iridium is a huge part of an asteroid's chemical make up, so logic follows that at least a couple of asteroids have smacked the crap, and a lot of the life, out of this little planet before. But for the most part most mass extinctions are not even shown to have been caused by outward events.
Thus the theory that sometimes a species can cause it's own destruction, or partial destruction. A further part of that theory, and how it applies to the human race, is that it occurs when a species, through becoming so dominant as to wipe out all natural predators, reaches the point where it can no longer evolve. It becomes stagnant, and then dies. This is a theory for at least one of the three great dinosaur extinctions, and it is a theory for humanity itself.
Our problems may solve themselves. But it won't be pretty, and we may not survive.
Ok, in previewing this post, I just noticed how much that last line sounded like something out of a movie preview. I apoligize for the cheeziness.
For the last ten thousand years humanity has scratched and clawed it's way to the top of the food chain. Nobody intelligent would argue that right now, of all species, humans are the masters of the world. We have struggled against nature and the other predators in the animal kingdom to emerge truly victorious. The road has been an interesting one.
Man is the most intelligent by far. Our infants have to be born with an already over-sized head. And even then, an average child's head will nearly double in circumference in the first three years of life. Because they are born with such large heads, our babies have to be born earlier and less developed than most other species, to allow passage through the birth canal. So over time, as our brains got bigger, our children arrived younger and weaker. Horses, giraffes, and many others can walk from day one. Many can at least forage for their own food within the first month. A human infant is extremely helpless for at least the first few years of life, unable to feed itself or defend itself from predators, even by flight. The natural outcome of this is that humanity began to develop society as a way to protect their young. They were simple at first, then increasingly complex. The more complex family-lifestyle society became, the more difficult it was to maintain that society as a hunter/gatherer one, so humanity began to tame nature itself by growing their own food. Thus farming was invented. Farming led to building, to social hierarchies, to stability. And to technology. Our huge brains and perfect tool-making bodies compensated for our slowness, lack of strength, and susceptibility to the environment. And it all took off from there.
Now, there is a theory (which I have studied a lot and now accept as fact) that once a species reaches a certain level of technological achievement which provides for the stability and comfort we now have, that species can no longer evolve.
Ancient man was at constant and total war with both the natural environment and the animal predators he was surrounded by. He evolved out of necessity. He created fire to ward off the cold. He created bows and stone flint arrows, then bronze weapons to ward of the natural predators as well as other men. Necessity has proven throughout time to be the mother of invention. History shows that most of mankind's greatest achievement comes from a reaction to war, ie, self-preservation.
Nowadays, though, we see something totally different.
Total war is defined as an entire society dedicating every single member and every single resource to the war effort. Accepting this definition, the US involvement in WW2 pales in comparison. In fact, no human society has seen a total war effort for at least a few centuries, if even that recently. Germanic tribes in the ages following the collapse of Rome may have dedicated everything from their small villages to survival. Greece and Rome were both too powerful to ever necessitate total war, though some of the smaller "nations" they fought were known to even send their women, young, and old into battle (the Celts for one). Besides that, you would have to go before recorded history, to when society in the agricultural sense was just being formed to see a true example of total war.
The good thing about total war, from a standpoint of human evolution, is that it is truly survival of the fittest. Only the strongest and fastest and smartest could survive. The best warrior, clad in leather and fur and carrying hand-made weapons of wood, who hid his infants most cunningly and taught his woman to fight most shrewdly and was strongest and most skilled was the one to survive and protect his family.
Today, when a society goes to war, we send a tiny fraction of our people to fight for us. And if not the best, they are far from the worst. They are usually of the most athletic, and most trained at survival. Those are the ones who die, and natural selection is ignored as the rest of society, no matter how stupid or slow, proliferates.
The very aspects of humanity that allowed us to do so much and become so great are the same things that allow the weak and stupid to live, and the strong to perish.
Thus, mankind is no longer evolving. We haven't truly had to evolve or adapt for thousands of years now. So we have reached a point of social stagnation. We, as a species, are going nowhere.We carried the wave of technological achievements made in desperation and necessity by the last world war; nuclear power, medical vaccines (though between 22 and 25 million people died in combat in ww2, between 32 and 50 million people, soldiers and civilians, died of famine and disease. WW2 saw the beginning of several breakthrough medical advances to combat this), the invention of the computer by von Neumann at Princeton (first begun as a result of needing to perform the complex calculations needed to build the A-bomb). But since then, our technological achievements have been built primarily on earlier ones. Smaller computer chips, better anesthesia, smarter traffic grids, etc.
Technology has seemingly peaked, as has mankind's rise in the world. The only thing that keeps growing is our population of increasingly ignorant and lazy consumers of resources.
So how do we fix this problem. The seemingly obvious answer is a total disregard of human rights and promoting total warfare, even a third world war in order to jump-start natural selection again. Of course, with the advent of nuclear power, a third world war would involve the destruction of half of humanity (at least) and the crippling of the natural world from nuclear disaster and fallout.
But the life on earth has survived comets that are today portrayed by hollywood as "global killers." Over the approximately 4.5 billion years this earth has been in existence, there have been at least five "great" mass extinctions, and dozens of smaller mass extinctions, caused by comets, volcanic upheaval the likes of which we can't even comprehend, radical changes in the environment, and God knows what else. The most famous happened 65 million years ago, and wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs. But crocodiles survived. As did sharks. Neither of those species has changed much at all since before that extinction ever happened. And mammals, a small fraction of life before then, not only survived but were finally enabled to proliferate, what with t-rex gone missing and all. But that wasn't even the biggest one. There were several bigger. The biggest extinction this world has seen was 250 million years ago, and that killed off about 90% of all life on earth. 90%. Yah, and we think a nuclear war would be the end of the world. There is nothing we could do to compare with what this earth has gone through and survived before mankind ever came along.
So maybe that wouldn't be so bad. Whoever did survive the war would definitely be held accountable to natural selection just to continue surviving after the war. Nature, ravaged and unforgiving, would ensure that only the strongest and smartest survived to continue the human species. It would probably be one of the best things to happen to humanity as a group.
But seriously, who wants that for their children. I can't in all conscientiousness, having love for my own nieces and nephew, and respect for life itself, advocate a nuclear holocaust.
Another option also involves the horror of totally disregarding the value of humanity's inalienable rights. The increase of violence on a massive, social scale would definitely curb the weaker and less intelligent of our species, but again, conscience decries and deplores the advocacy of such acts.
But there is another theory, one that suggests we as a species won't have to do anything about this at all. Going back over the fossil record, it shows us that there is a mass extinction on one level or another approximately, give or take, every 62 million years. The last one was 65 million years ago. There are some who think that we are high due another one. And another thing about all the previous mass extinctions throughout the earth's violent and turbulent history, is that we can't prove what caused even half of them. Oh, we can find iridium dust in layers around the world at the time of a few of the extinctions. And yes, iridium is a huge part of an asteroid's chemical make up, so logic follows that at least a couple of asteroids have smacked the crap, and a lot of the life, out of this little planet before. But for the most part most mass extinctions are not even shown to have been caused by outward events.
Thus the theory that sometimes a species can cause it's own destruction, or partial destruction. A further part of that theory, and how it applies to the human race, is that it occurs when a species, through becoming so dominant as to wipe out all natural predators, reaches the point where it can no longer evolve. It becomes stagnant, and then dies. This is a theory for at least one of the three great dinosaur extinctions, and it is a theory for humanity itself.
Our problems may solve themselves. But it won't be pretty, and we may not survive.
Ok, in previewing this post, I just noticed how much that last line sounded like something out of a movie preview. I apoligize for the cheeziness.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Platonic dialogue, logic, and the absense of logic
I was reading the dialogues of Plato last night. I absolutely love the way he makes philosophical points through the use of argumentative conversation, in rhetorical question and answer format, nowadays known as Platonic dialogue. The idea of the form is for the person making a point in his argument to ask questions of his opponent, simple questions to which there are simple, obvious answers, which come together logically one upon the other to prove the questioner's point. This was used by another Greek, a playwright (Aristophanes, I believe, but I may be wrong) humorously to show how if you start with an incorrect premise, then you can "logically" prove just about anything. This is what he called "the bad logic" versus "the good logic."
This cracked me up when I remembered a passage from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In this scene Huck is trying to explain the idea of foreign languages to the slave, Jim, who thinks it to be ridiculous for two people to speak differently. Twain uses a very simple form of Platonic dialogue between the two quite hilariously:
Huck:
"That's a Frenchman's way of saying it."
"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."
"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"
"No, a cat don't."
"Well, does a cow?"
"No, a cow don't, nuther."
"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"
"No, dey don't."
"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't it?"
" 'Course."
"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?"
"Why, mos' sholy it is."
"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that."
"Is a cat a man, Huck?"
"No."
"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a man?-er is a cow a cat?"
"No, she ain't either of them."
"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"
"Yes."
"Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he talk like a man?"
This is a perfect, if somewhat simple, example of a bad premise for the argument, and simple bad logic to prove that speaking another language is ridiculous. It is an argument based on ignorance of cultures and languages. With such ignorance, it is easy with seemingly logical steps to prove that the moon is made of cheese.
For example, take a person who has no knowledge whatsoever of astronomy, distance, or other types of cheese than a wheel of Swiss cheese that he is examining with another person:
"Is this cheese round?"
"Yes, it's round."
"And is the moon round?"
"Yes, it's round as well."
"And is the cheese full of pits and holes?"
"Why, yes, it is."
"And can't you see pits and holes on the moon?"
"Why, yes, they look very similar."
"Well, then, don't they look so similar as to be the same?"
And you see how it works. I would like, at this time, to posit that stupidity, in fact, is the root of all wrongdoing.
I'm trying really hard not to go into a crazy rant about the ignorance of our age... trying...trying... TOO LATE!!! Here I go...
THIS REMINDS ME of a speech I saw by President Obama at a college shortly after his election. Now, please believe me; I am NOT making this up. I am dead serious. This happened. Really.
He was talking to the students and grad students about his plans for the economic stimulus packages and creating job opportunities and the typical political rhetoric, and then took some questions from the audience. One student who was about to graduate told President Obama that for the last four years he had been working at a McDonald's to help pay his way through college. He then asked the president what his plans were for reimbursing those like himself who had worked at lower paying jobs before Obama's presidency. Basically, asking if the government was going to pay him the difference in wages between his job at McDonald's and an average hourly wage.
Yah. I'm serious. This question was really asked, in all seriousness, by an Obama-supporter.
Where to begin? where to begin?
First of all, this is what happens when you accept a bad premise. His logic (that he was owed money from the government due to having worked a lower paying job) was perfect when based on the following assumptions: 1)That he was entitled to help from the government, 2) that the government had limitless right to redistribute wealth, ie, take it from someone who had worked a higher paying job the last four years, combine it with his wages from the last four years, whack it down the middle and redistribute it between them, and 3) that it wasn't his fault that he worked at a McDonald's the last four years (ignoring that if he worked harder at his job, he could have been promoted, ignoring that if he had worked harder at jobs during high school, he might have, with the previous training, been able to get a better one in college, ignoring that nobody forced him to work at McDonald's, or forced him not to seek better employment elsewhere, ignoring that if he didn't get better employment elsewhere, having sought it, that it was probably because he wasn't good enough for the job, and somebody else was, and therefore had earned that job and the better pay).
Secondly, when you take these assumptions to be fact, then the logic follows. He has been told that he is entitled to help from the government. Therefore of course he turns to the government to fix everything, instead of trying to better his situation himself. He has been told that he deserves as much happiness as everyone else. Therefore if he is less fortunate than others, that is unfair and the government needs to do something about it. He doesn't ever need to worry about working towards a promotion. He needs no additional schooling or training to justify earning more, even retroactively. Therefore if someone else makes more than he does because they worked for it, no worries, the government will give him a share.
Thirdly, this sense of entitlement that has pervaded our society is the natural precursor to justifying the limitless redistribution of wealth by the government. Obviously, if you felt you are owed more than you have earned, than wealth itself is not personal at this stage. Thus, wealth can be seen as a communal pool. Who else to distribute this wealth? The government, naturally. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, as they say, and so it goes with the natural law as well, apparently. The government distributes the wealth. The government has the wealth. It is, in fact, the government's wealth that they then dole out to us, the citizens. And why should it be handed out any way but fairly, regardless of what a person has earned? Earning something doesn't matter, innately deserving it does, for no actual reason at all other than that it doesn't belong to anybody, only the government, and the government's place in this world is to hand it out.
Anybody who thinks for two seconds can see that this reeks of unparalleled insanity. Yet this student had apparently gone through 12 grades of government-provided education and almost four years at a government-run college without ever once thinking for two seconds.
Obama's reaction? Surprisingly, a shade of disbelief crossed his features. As an answer he just spouted out some of the usual empty blah blah about creating job opportunities and stimulating the economy and pretty much the same crap he was saying before. The fact that he was surprised by the question just shows that he hadn't realized what his political ideologies were leading to (which takes about 3 seconds thought) and that shows that Obama apparently went through 12 grades, 4 years college, however many years law school and experience practicing law, without having once sustained a thought for 3 seconds.
This cracked me up when I remembered a passage from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In this scene Huck is trying to explain the idea of foreign languages to the slave, Jim, who thinks it to be ridiculous for two people to speak differently. Twain uses a very simple form of Platonic dialogue between the two quite hilariously:
Huck:
"That's a Frenchman's way of saying it."
"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."
"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"
"No, a cat don't."
"Well, does a cow?"
"No, a cow don't, nuther."
"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"
"No, dey don't."
"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't it?"
" 'Course."
"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?"
"Why, mos' sholy it is."
"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that."
"Is a cat a man, Huck?"
"No."
"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a man?-er is a cow a cat?"
"No, she ain't either of them."
"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"
"Yes."
"Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he talk like a man?"
This is a perfect, if somewhat simple, example of a bad premise for the argument, and simple bad logic to prove that speaking another language is ridiculous. It is an argument based on ignorance of cultures and languages. With such ignorance, it is easy with seemingly logical steps to prove that the moon is made of cheese.
For example, take a person who has no knowledge whatsoever of astronomy, distance, or other types of cheese than a wheel of Swiss cheese that he is examining with another person:
"Is this cheese round?"
"Yes, it's round."
"And is the moon round?"
"Yes, it's round as well."
"And is the cheese full of pits and holes?"
"Why, yes, it is."
"And can't you see pits and holes on the moon?"
"Why, yes, they look very similar."
"Well, then, don't they look so similar as to be the same?"
And you see how it works. I would like, at this time, to posit that stupidity, in fact, is the root of all wrongdoing.
I'm trying really hard not to go into a crazy rant about the ignorance of our age... trying...trying... TOO LATE!!! Here I go...
THIS REMINDS ME of a speech I saw by President Obama at a college shortly after his election. Now, please believe me; I am NOT making this up. I am dead serious. This happened. Really.
He was talking to the students and grad students about his plans for the economic stimulus packages and creating job opportunities and the typical political rhetoric, and then took some questions from the audience. One student who was about to graduate told President Obama that for the last four years he had been working at a McDonald's to help pay his way through college. He then asked the president what his plans were for reimbursing those like himself who had worked at lower paying jobs before Obama's presidency. Basically, asking if the government was going to pay him the difference in wages between his job at McDonald's and an average hourly wage.
Yah. I'm serious. This question was really asked, in all seriousness, by an Obama-supporter.
Where to begin? where to begin?
First of all, this is what happens when you accept a bad premise. His logic (that he was owed money from the government due to having worked a lower paying job) was perfect when based on the following assumptions: 1)That he was entitled to help from the government, 2) that the government had limitless right to redistribute wealth, ie, take it from someone who had worked a higher paying job the last four years, combine it with his wages from the last four years, whack it down the middle and redistribute it between them, and 3) that it wasn't his fault that he worked at a McDonald's the last four years (ignoring that if he worked harder at his job, he could have been promoted, ignoring that if he had worked harder at jobs during high school, he might have, with the previous training, been able to get a better one in college, ignoring that nobody forced him to work at McDonald's, or forced him not to seek better employment elsewhere, ignoring that if he didn't get better employment elsewhere, having sought it, that it was probably because he wasn't good enough for the job, and somebody else was, and therefore had earned that job and the better pay).
Secondly, when you take these assumptions to be fact, then the logic follows. He has been told that he is entitled to help from the government. Therefore of course he turns to the government to fix everything, instead of trying to better his situation himself. He has been told that he deserves as much happiness as everyone else. Therefore if he is less fortunate than others, that is unfair and the government needs to do something about it. He doesn't ever need to worry about working towards a promotion. He needs no additional schooling or training to justify earning more, even retroactively. Therefore if someone else makes more than he does because they worked for it, no worries, the government will give him a share.
Thirdly, this sense of entitlement that has pervaded our society is the natural precursor to justifying the limitless redistribution of wealth by the government. Obviously, if you felt you are owed more than you have earned, than wealth itself is not personal at this stage. Thus, wealth can be seen as a communal pool. Who else to distribute this wealth? The government, naturally. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, as they say, and so it goes with the natural law as well, apparently. The government distributes the wealth. The government has the wealth. It is, in fact, the government's wealth that they then dole out to us, the citizens. And why should it be handed out any way but fairly, regardless of what a person has earned? Earning something doesn't matter, innately deserving it does, for no actual reason at all other than that it doesn't belong to anybody, only the government, and the government's place in this world is to hand it out.
Anybody who thinks for two seconds can see that this reeks of unparalleled insanity. Yet this student had apparently gone through 12 grades of government-provided education and almost four years at a government-run college without ever once thinking for two seconds.
Obama's reaction? Surprisingly, a shade of disbelief crossed his features. As an answer he just spouted out some of the usual empty blah blah about creating job opportunities and stimulating the economy and pretty much the same crap he was saying before. The fact that he was surprised by the question just shows that he hadn't realized what his political ideologies were leading to (which takes about 3 seconds thought) and that shows that Obama apparently went through 12 grades, 4 years college, however many years law school and experience practicing law, without having once sustained a thought for 3 seconds.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
in defense of misanthropy
So I'm standing in line at the self-checkout registers at the grocery store. The 50-or-so year old woman in front of me (and the other ten people in line) is about as slow as possible. Not only is she buying way more than the 15 items allowed (not that I'm a stickler about that, but, c'mon? 30? 40?) but she chooses to pay with cash, and then carefully count out the coins to pay the exact amount.
It is 5 pm. As I said, there are ten people (now 12, now 15, etc) waiting behind her.
The self-checkout is the fast line. I, and everyone else in line, are carrying a few items each, just trying to get out of the hellhole that is your friendly neighborhood supermarket.
But there she stands, with her shopping cart full of bags that she has carefully tied and put into the cart one at a time then rearranged so the freakin' bread doesn't get freakin' squashed. Then she carefully takes her receipt from the machine, and actually stands there at the check-out counter, leaning on her cart, carefully checking every item on the receipt versus every item in her cart.
At this point I walk up and slam my microwave pizza and chips as loud as I could onto the counter right beside her (shattering the chips far beyond any dipping use now, but hey, sometimes you have to make a point) and give her my best I'm-two-seconds-away-from-ripping-your-stinkin'-throat-out look. There's a security guard 20 feet away, so I refrain from yelling (I know that someday I'll be kicked out of a grocery store raving like a lunatic but I'm trying my best to forestall turning into THAT guy for as long as I can). I'm six feet six inches, happen to be wearing black, and have a freshly shaved head, and I don't mind looking scary to strangers when they're pissing me off. Needless to say, she finally gets the point and moves along.
As I took less than a minute to ring up and pay for my groceries, I briefly wonder what the people behind me are thinking. Do they secretly congratulate me and thank me in their minds for doing what they all wanted to do? Or are they thinking "boy, that guy has got problems"?
Then I started thinking, while I was concentrating on lowering my heart rate to get the blood to stop pounding in my ears, that hey, maybe I do have problems. Yah, it might even be possible that I overreacted slightly in getting that mad at that lady.
But then I dismissed that thinking as quickly as I would walk away from that same woman if she was on fire in the middle of the street screaming in pain. I realized, I'm not just pissed at her. I'm pissed at everything she represents. There is a type of person who will take the time to realize that there are other people besides himself in the world, and life would be a little more bearable to all of us if he acted accordingly. Then there is a type of person who has never learned to think about anybody but themselves. They go through life not caring, not even realizing, that their very existence is inconvenient to those around them. Its not just unnecessarily holding up a line at the grocery store. Its sitting in the no turn lane with your blinker on, stupidly waiting an opportunity to turn the wrong way up a one way, while the cars pile up behind you. Its sitting in a drive through staring at the menu for five freakin minutes before you finally order. Its the idiot blasting his crappy music from the four open windows in his car at a red light while you're stopped beside him with a sleeping child. Its the person who pays for a 50 cent coffee at the gas station with a check, or the dumb hick who holds up everyone just buying their morning caffeine on the way to work because he has to ponder the lottery scratch-offs and which ones to buy. Its the self-absorbed, inconsiderate a-hole who won't even hold the door he just walked out of for the guy loaded down with an armful of boxes. And a million other examples.
When I get so mad over what most people would call "nothing, just a little inconvenience," I'm not just mad at that one person. I'm mad at everyone like that, and the thousands of ways they make my life a little harder every day, which add up and add up and add up, the whole time I'm screaming inside my head "WHY?!?! OPEN YOUR EYES AND LOOK AROUND YOU!!!"
Common courtesy is dead. They have no need for it on reality tv, so they have no need for it in the real world, apparently. I wish I could (as I usually do) blame it on my own crappy, moronic generation, but that is sadly not the case. Almost every example listed above has been perpetrated by every age, race, and gender.
I was reading a study the other day that will help illustrate my point. This study, based on Littlewood's Law, states that, over the hours of the day that an average human being is awake and alert, he will experience one event per second, or about a million over a 35 day span. Thus, when a one-in-a-million event happens, he should not attribute it to divine intervention, but as the probable outcome of chance.
Now, however you feel about that, let us take the same study and apply it to me getting shafted by the rest of humanity. One event per second. Figure in the amount of people I come into contact with on my average work day. I don't feel like doing the math, but I'm sure the numbers are very compelling. The long and short of it is that I have only a finite amount of patience, and there have been, over the 28 years I've been alive, a number of events forcing me to deal with the stupidity of humanity that comes so close to infinite as to make no practical difference.
I don't think I have much time left. I can see the headline now: "Man Dies Of Heart Attack Screaming At Old Lady In Supermarket." Wow, what a way to go.
It is 5 pm. As I said, there are ten people (now 12, now 15, etc) waiting behind her.
The self-checkout is the fast line. I, and everyone else in line, are carrying a few items each, just trying to get out of the hellhole that is your friendly neighborhood supermarket.
But there she stands, with her shopping cart full of bags that she has carefully tied and put into the cart one at a time then rearranged so the freakin' bread doesn't get freakin' squashed. Then she carefully takes her receipt from the machine, and actually stands there at the check-out counter, leaning on her cart, carefully checking every item on the receipt versus every item in her cart.
At this point I walk up and slam my microwave pizza and chips as loud as I could onto the counter right beside her (shattering the chips far beyond any dipping use now, but hey, sometimes you have to make a point) and give her my best I'm-two-seconds-away-from-ripping-your-stinkin'-throat-out look. There's a security guard 20 feet away, so I refrain from yelling (I know that someday I'll be kicked out of a grocery store raving like a lunatic but I'm trying my best to forestall turning into THAT guy for as long as I can). I'm six feet six inches, happen to be wearing black, and have a freshly shaved head, and I don't mind looking scary to strangers when they're pissing me off. Needless to say, she finally gets the point and moves along.
As I took less than a minute to ring up and pay for my groceries, I briefly wonder what the people behind me are thinking. Do they secretly congratulate me and thank me in their minds for doing what they all wanted to do? Or are they thinking "boy, that guy has got problems"?
Then I started thinking, while I was concentrating on lowering my heart rate to get the blood to stop pounding in my ears, that hey, maybe I do have problems. Yah, it might even be possible that I overreacted slightly in getting that mad at that lady.
But then I dismissed that thinking as quickly as I would walk away from that same woman if she was on fire in the middle of the street screaming in pain. I realized, I'm not just pissed at her. I'm pissed at everything she represents. There is a type of person who will take the time to realize that there are other people besides himself in the world, and life would be a little more bearable to all of us if he acted accordingly. Then there is a type of person who has never learned to think about anybody but themselves. They go through life not caring, not even realizing, that their very existence is inconvenient to those around them. Its not just unnecessarily holding up a line at the grocery store. Its sitting in the no turn lane with your blinker on, stupidly waiting an opportunity to turn the wrong way up a one way, while the cars pile up behind you. Its sitting in a drive through staring at the menu for five freakin minutes before you finally order. Its the idiot blasting his crappy music from the four open windows in his car at a red light while you're stopped beside him with a sleeping child. Its the person who pays for a 50 cent coffee at the gas station with a check, or the dumb hick who holds up everyone just buying their morning caffeine on the way to work because he has to ponder the lottery scratch-offs and which ones to buy. Its the self-absorbed, inconsiderate a-hole who won't even hold the door he just walked out of for the guy loaded down with an armful of boxes. And a million other examples.
When I get so mad over what most people would call "nothing, just a little inconvenience," I'm not just mad at that one person. I'm mad at everyone like that, and the thousands of ways they make my life a little harder every day, which add up and add up and add up, the whole time I'm screaming inside my head "WHY?!?! OPEN YOUR EYES AND LOOK AROUND YOU!!!"
Common courtesy is dead. They have no need for it on reality tv, so they have no need for it in the real world, apparently. I wish I could (as I usually do) blame it on my own crappy, moronic generation, but that is sadly not the case. Almost every example listed above has been perpetrated by every age, race, and gender.
I was reading a study the other day that will help illustrate my point. This study, based on Littlewood's Law, states that, over the hours of the day that an average human being is awake and alert, he will experience one event per second, or about a million over a 35 day span. Thus, when a one-in-a-million event happens, he should not attribute it to divine intervention, but as the probable outcome of chance.
Now, however you feel about that, let us take the same study and apply it to me getting shafted by the rest of humanity. One event per second. Figure in the amount of people I come into contact with on my average work day. I don't feel like doing the math, but I'm sure the numbers are very compelling. The long and short of it is that I have only a finite amount of patience, and there have been, over the 28 years I've been alive, a number of events forcing me to deal with the stupidity of humanity that comes so close to infinite as to make no practical difference.
I don't think I have much time left. I can see the headline now: "Man Dies Of Heart Attack Screaming At Old Lady In Supermarket." Wow, what a way to go.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Book Review: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
From now on, once a week (more or less, depending on my mood or opportunity) I'm going to post a book review of whatever book I'm currently reading from my collection.
This week's review is on Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, the sometimes-called quintessential American Poet.
I bought this book because it was on sale in the bargain section at B&N about a year ago. I picked it up again recently to give it another try. Also, I felt that I was required to own a copy and read at least part of it, as it is, apparently, such a big part of literary history.
If you just want a thumbs up or thumbs down without having to read the whole review (I'm well aware that I tend to ramble) then here it is: Don't bother even picking this up.
Or perhaps you should. I have always maintained that one should not have an opinion of something that one knows nothing about. Before ripping anything apart, I personally choose to read/watch/listen to it, and then tear it to pieces, mocking everything about it. Partly (aside from the logical and obvious non-merit of any ignorant opinion) because uneducated opinions are a hallmark of modern society, and therefore should be despised. And secondly, it is far more entertaining to myself to be able to rip into somebody for their stupid "thoughts" while actually knowing more about what they're talking about then they do.
To continue...
First of all, a little background on Walt Whitman. He published Leaves of Grass in 1855, in the wake of some of the greatest poetry ever written (Tennyson, and the rest of the Romantic era poets were still quite popular, and the Victorian era was under full swing). He published with his own money. He was known to have written several reviews of his own book under fake names, praising the book highly, in order to boost sales. He was, earlier in his life, opposed to slavery, then switched later in life to be anti-abolitionist and maintained until his death the idea that even freed African-Americans shouldn't be allowed to vote. He is known as one of the fathers of free verse, or what can be called, in my opinion, the absolute total disregard of poetical structure due to a lack of skill. (This opinion does have a few exceptions. I have found a few poems in free verse written so cleverly and worded so well, with inner structures and hidden repetitions/alterations that I had to admit they were really rather good). He was also the main poetical subject of that ridiculously over-rated piece of crap film The Dead Poet's Society.
He was also a self-described deist, amending that title to say that he believed in all religions equally. Considering that most of humanity's religions are not mutually compatible, this is obviously a sign of insanity and/or a pathetically miniature IQ. (I'm reminded of a character in a movie who had tattoos from half a dozen different cultures. Another character pointed out that that doesn't make him a citizen of the world, it makes him full of BS).
The edition I bought is 679 pages long. I made it a little over 100 pages through the endless thousands of lines of blank, free verse. Rambling, rambling, rambling lines with no discernible point, no rhythmic or metric measure, no structure of any sort other than an occasional paragraph break. After the first hundred pages I started skipping around, reading a poem here, a poem there, throughout the whole book, reading a total of about 200 pages or so, trying to see if it would get better. It didn't. Here are a few examples of some of his better passages, as I'm afraid to show his really bad, or even mediocre poems, as they might cause the reader's eyes to boil out.
For him I Sing
For him I sing,
I raise the present on the past,
(As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present
on the past,)
With time and space I him dilate and fuse the
immortal laws,
To make himself by them the law unto himself.
(page 30)
Homosexual overtones aside, I'm forced to ask "HUH?"
There was a Child went Forth
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he
became,
And that object became part of him for the day
or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
(page 457)
Yah, as I said, rambling. He tended to do that quite often. The above poem actually continues on for dozens of lines more, describing the lilacs the child saw, then this, then that. Each "stanza" first named it, then said something nonsensically existentialist (without any actual philosophical thoughts put into it), then went on to list every mundane thing the child ever saw; listed one after the other, line after line, blah blah blah.
Isn't one of the most basic and admirable qualities of poetry the ability to extract and glorify real human emotion or lofty and idealistic thoughts through the use of equally lofty and beautiful language? Whatever happened to The Lady of Shallot, by Tennyson, or Eldorado, by Poe, or Ozymandias, by Shelley? That is Poetry. That is Art.
Let's get one thing straight. Walt Whitman was no poet. He was simply a man with an inclination towards verbosity as amazing as his poetical skill was not, with altogether too much time on his hands. His poems were considered rather risque, hence his current popularity, as anything today praising homosexuality, the responsibility-free lifestyle, and naturism is awarded greater merit based upon subject matter rather than quality.
Though I have no problem with the above subjects, as they are real parts of the emotional and philosophical human experience, praising the subject over the presentation is as insane as watching a presidential debate where the one screams "conservatism conservatism conservatism!!!" and the other screams "liberalism liberalism liberalism!!!" and having each side lauded by their respective followers for their political brilliance and amazing oratory skills.
Yet, aside from understanding why certain groups would admire the subject of some of Whitman's supposed "poetry", I can find no real value or quality in it.
This week's review is on Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, the sometimes-called quintessential American Poet.
I bought this book because it was on sale in the bargain section at B&N about a year ago. I picked it up again recently to give it another try. Also, I felt that I was required to own a copy and read at least part of it, as it is, apparently, such a big part of literary history.
If you just want a thumbs up or thumbs down without having to read the whole review (I'm well aware that I tend to ramble) then here it is: Don't bother even picking this up.
Or perhaps you should. I have always maintained that one should not have an opinion of something that one knows nothing about. Before ripping anything apart, I personally choose to read/watch/listen to it, and then tear it to pieces, mocking everything about it. Partly (aside from the logical and obvious non-merit of any ignorant opinion) because uneducated opinions are a hallmark of modern society, and therefore should be despised. And secondly, it is far more entertaining to myself to be able to rip into somebody for their stupid "thoughts" while actually knowing more about what they're talking about then they do.
To continue...
First of all, a little background on Walt Whitman. He published Leaves of Grass in 1855, in the wake of some of the greatest poetry ever written (Tennyson, and the rest of the Romantic era poets were still quite popular, and the Victorian era was under full swing). He published with his own money. He was known to have written several reviews of his own book under fake names, praising the book highly, in order to boost sales. He was, earlier in his life, opposed to slavery, then switched later in life to be anti-abolitionist and maintained until his death the idea that even freed African-Americans shouldn't be allowed to vote. He is known as one of the fathers of free verse, or what can be called, in my opinion, the absolute total disregard of poetical structure due to a lack of skill. (This opinion does have a few exceptions. I have found a few poems in free verse written so cleverly and worded so well, with inner structures and hidden repetitions/alterations that I had to admit they were really rather good). He was also the main poetical subject of that ridiculously over-rated piece of crap film The Dead Poet's Society.
He was also a self-described deist, amending that title to say that he believed in all religions equally. Considering that most of humanity's religions are not mutually compatible, this is obviously a sign of insanity and/or a pathetically miniature IQ. (I'm reminded of a character in a movie who had tattoos from half a dozen different cultures. Another character pointed out that that doesn't make him a citizen of the world, it makes him full of BS).
The edition I bought is 679 pages long. I made it a little over 100 pages through the endless thousands of lines of blank, free verse. Rambling, rambling, rambling lines with no discernible point, no rhythmic or metric measure, no structure of any sort other than an occasional paragraph break. After the first hundred pages I started skipping around, reading a poem here, a poem there, throughout the whole book, reading a total of about 200 pages or so, trying to see if it would get better. It didn't. Here are a few examples of some of his better passages, as I'm afraid to show his really bad, or even mediocre poems, as they might cause the reader's eyes to boil out.
For him I Sing
For him I sing,
I raise the present on the past,
(As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present
on the past,)
With time and space I him dilate and fuse the
immortal laws,
To make himself by them the law unto himself.
(page 30)
Homosexual overtones aside, I'm forced to ask "HUH?"
There was a Child went Forth
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he
became,
And that object became part of him for the day
or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
(page 457)
Yah, as I said, rambling. He tended to do that quite often. The above poem actually continues on for dozens of lines more, describing the lilacs the child saw, then this, then that. Each "stanza" first named it, then said something nonsensically existentialist (without any actual philosophical thoughts put into it), then went on to list every mundane thing the child ever saw; listed one after the other, line after line, blah blah blah.
Isn't one of the most basic and admirable qualities of poetry the ability to extract and glorify real human emotion or lofty and idealistic thoughts through the use of equally lofty and beautiful language? Whatever happened to The Lady of Shallot, by Tennyson, or Eldorado, by Poe, or Ozymandias, by Shelley? That is Poetry. That is Art.
Let's get one thing straight. Walt Whitman was no poet. He was simply a man with an inclination towards verbosity as amazing as his poetical skill was not, with altogether too much time on his hands. His poems were considered rather risque, hence his current popularity, as anything today praising homosexuality, the responsibility-free lifestyle, and naturism is awarded greater merit based upon subject matter rather than quality.
Though I have no problem with the above subjects, as they are real parts of the emotional and philosophical human experience, praising the subject over the presentation is as insane as watching a presidential debate where the one screams "conservatism conservatism conservatism!!!" and the other screams "liberalism liberalism liberalism!!!" and having each side lauded by their respective followers for their political brilliance and amazing oratory skills.
Yet, aside from understanding why certain groups would admire the subject of some of Whitman's supposed "poetry", I can find no real value or quality in it.
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