Number 184, the conversational nature of reality With David Whyte

I am not so certain about David Whyte’s claim that a good poem has to be something you can’t understand on the first reading. Poetry has to have two things: imagery, and careful use of language. Neither of those require incomprehensibility in order to work. There are certainly brilliant and well-loved poems which can be immediately and deeply understood on the first reading.

His concept of the frontier between what you want of the world and what the world expects of you—this “conversational zone”—is intriguing, though I am not sure what good it does any one. In physics we used to say that if your theory couldn’t make any real-world predictions, then it was really nothing more than philosophy.

But what if some philosophy you like doesn’t have any impact on how you live your life? What is on the next rung down on the usefulness ladder? Maybe we call that poetry? I.e. if a philosophy resonates with you but still doesn’t make you want to change your life, then it’s just poetry?

I like his concept of three marriages in your life (to your spouse, your job, and yourself). Joining to the person to whom you bare your soul and break your physical boundaries is, of course, the usual idea of a marriage. Whyte adds to this a marriage to your vocation, in the sense that it is a long-term commitment that is supposedly a mutual advantage. Think of the stereotypical captain who is married to his ship. So now here is yet a third marriage--and this one, to yourself. Is this related to those women who photos of themselves in wedding gown and claim they are marrying themselves? Indeed, that may be the very core of it. In some, Whyte means we should all be doing that--continually seeking to self-improve, and to build our lives around satisfying not only our spouses and our bosses, but ourselves.

You might object that this third marriage is an elitist concept, less germane to those content to live the unexamined life. But really, any projection of our preconceptions of an ideal marriage runs the risk of being presumptuous. In all three domains. Some people remain single, some people end up contentedly in a meaningless job, and some people prefer to stream Netflix instead of improving their meaning of their lives.

Near the close, Whyte makes a wildly important point that when you are on your deathbed you will have a very different opinion about what parts of your life were the most important than now when you are running around paying bills and getting to career development meetings and buying glitzy trinkets. I suppose we all know that at some deep level. It’s good to be reminded of it.

Delusional, Hyperpartisan... or Just Plain Stupid?

Ideological blind spots and wishful thinking can only explain things so far. At some point you have to wonder if Trump supporters are only deluded, blinded by partisan loyalty... or if their ability to process data is just defective. In other words, are they stupid?

Ask a Trump supporter and what good he has done for the country, and you will inevitably hear about the stock market. Press them on this point and ask them how a president can possibly affect the stock market, and you will get this fantasy, unsupported by any evidence: lowering taxes helps the economy. Try to drill down on that point and ask how Trump’s cuts and deregulations are different than Reagan‘s, which brought the country to a crippling deficit and took eight years of Clinton austerity to repair? Or different from what Bush Junior did, which came just before the worst recession since The Big One? You will be met with such incompetent non-thinking that you will recognize the futility and give up.

Ask about anything else—the Ukraine business, the border wall, the sophomoric tweets, the trade wars—and you will either be referred back to the stock market, or you will be subjected to more wishful thinking.

I wonder how the average Trump supporter even copes in a world that increasingly requires technical competence and the ability to see through scams.

The antiabortion segment of his base may perhaps be less guilty of delusional thinking, as Trump and McConnell actually have done what they claim: they have shifted the politics of the courts.

This isn’t to say that everyone who opposes Trump does so for intelligent reasons. But it does make me wonder if the Trump base’s famous antipathy toward “elites” is just another dogwhistle.

For people smarter than them.

181 The Illusory Self, with Richard Lang

The purported niceness of Sam’s guest notwithstanding, I found this to be among the least interesting podcasts of the past year.

But I do like the meditation app! Don’t get me wrong. I just—well, I have a different agenda, apparently, than the one Sam has preordained for me. Because I don’t really get the point of all this milling about with like-minded souls and nattering on about how you don’t have a head, and how there’s really this reflective bubble of the universe (the “youniverse” as Lang puts it).

It reminds me of the waiting room to get into a nudist colony, with all these happy and enthusiastic people talking about how great it will be to finally free yourself of your artificial and restrictive clothing, and then when it finally happens and you’ve got your clothes off and you’re standing there among a bunch of nudists...

...nothing. Nothing happens.

Your bits get cold, maybe. Or a mosquito bite in a place you wouldn’t normally get one. But by and large, this game-changing experience—that was guaranteed to make you realize you’d been living life all wrong—well, it just hangs there, limp. Maybe it has even shrunk a little.

So Sam and Richard go on and on about how wonderful their perspective is, and how hard it can be for the uninitiated to understand. And I couldn't help but think, "it doesn't sound like it it's getting you anything." Or, as they laugh that the devil would have me say, "so what?"

But really Sam and his guest, neither of whom believe in free will, shouldn't be ascribing my reaction to the devil. In fact they are quite certain I don't have a choice in the matter of my reaction. So, there we have it. Too many notes.

I don't see any benefit from an understanding that we can't see our own faces. The whole thing strikes me as a very Godel-ian corollary to the observation that you can't "see" everything about a system, from the inside. Sam references the blind spot in the eyeball in this podcast, to which I respond, "yes! That blind spot is every bit as real, and every bit as inconsequential!"

It's like saying a shotgun can't shoot itself, so therefore it doesn't have a barrel.

I dunno. Whatever. You can play the podcast if you want to, and you can get all excited about the revelation that no one has a head, if you want to.

Or you can head to Baker's Beach in San Francisco, strip down to your birthday suit, and frolic in the waves with the other naked people. Either way, I say, have a great time!

And don't forget the sunscreen.

#180: Sex and Power, with Meghan Daum

Disclaimer: as a white male, I recognize I am susceptible to Confirmation bias,to uncritically buying what Meghan has to say in her book, The Problem with Everything. That said, I think this was one of the more engaging conversations Sam has had lately. I feel like there was a lot discussed which made me stop and think critically about cultural phenomena that I'd been taking for granted, stuff which had been unnoticed by banality. It would be an excellent podcast to dive into for someone who'd never listened to Sam before.

So here are some of the observations that struck me in the course of listening to this podcast, presented in a more or less random fashion:

1. Meghan wonders about recent regression from a more gender-neutral period of the 70s and 80s…? Disney princess movies and pink v. blue toy store aisles are a worrying trend.

2. George Will wrote, way back in the 90s, about the phenomenon of the victim club, but since he was writing about women and he is an old white male, he had no credibility with Meghan. But she has since seen the truth in what he was saying.

3. Sam and Megan acknowledge the logical fallacy of claiming that people not within a population demographic have no right to talk about the experiences of that demographic. They don’t say it explicitly, but it strikes me that this is just reverse racism from the proponents of the fallacy.

4. Another surprise: Betsy DeVos corrected a federal guideline in which kangaroo courts decided biased and sometimes debunked university cases brought by women against men.

5. In the case of white boys listening to dangerously non-liberal podcasts, the real story was that misapplied intersection was demonizing innocent children; making them more curious about the only websites which did not falsely blame them. In other words, a reprise of the theme “if the smart, thoughtful people are not willing to tell the truth about an issue (such as the fake reporting of sexual assault on campuses) then only the stupid, thoughtless people will be doing so.“

6. “Glenn Loury and John McWhorter are the most intellectually honest brokers you’re going to find (on the internet)" according to Meghan and Sam, which makes me want to check out their podcast next.

7. We may be moving to a society where people no longer interact with each other face-to-face, and they only interact via multitasking platforms such as texting or social media, in which case there will be a flattening of context and tone losing the richness of a face-to-face conversation. Humanity may have to evolve to learn how to coexist in this mode. As of now, it seems to be tearing us apart.

New Book of short fiction is being released

It's been quite a week to look woebegone: no new SH podcasts. But at least we're closer to removing the National Boil!

In the absence of any new SH work, here's a shameless plug for my newest book:

A Thousand Ways to Fail, & Other Stories
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081XHKGNC

#174: Life & Mind, with Richard Dawkins

This was a nice, juicy one and a great introduction to a Sam Harris conversation for any Sam-curious folk.

I don't have an over-arching theme to extract from the conversation, but here are a few tidbits that struck me as interesting:

Dawkins points out that we are mostly descended from young ancestors, which is why the species doesn’t live very long. In general, what promotes a species' ability to reproduce at an early age is usually antithetical to living to an old age. The classic example is a brightly colored songbird--the great colors in sure his appeal to the opposite sex, but also his visibility the predators

Dawkins invented the word "meme" to be some concept or artifact adopted by a human population. (I don't think other species can have memes...?) 

Dawkins introduces an elaboration, the "meme complex" such as buildings or religion. He is careful to explain these are not the same as "extended phenotypes." The latter are dictated by genes. So a cave dwelling might be an extended phenotype if every human, naked and unprotected and looking for shelter, would move in an stay there. But a castle or apartment building, whose design has to be learned through the surrounding culture, is a meme complex.

Here's a fun little throwaway most of the way through the conversation: "the only remaining problems in genetics are the origin of life, sex, and consciousness." Oh, is that all?

They moved into religion and mysticism later on, and Sam monologued for quite a while on the paradox that those enlarged spirits in history had to interpret their epiphanies through some iron-age mysticism. But he says that in this modern age we should be able to reach an profound understanding of reality through isotropic drugs or meditation. You don't need some primitive superstition, but instead an understanding of the plasticity of consciousness.

This invokes one of my objections to Sam’s belief in meditation as a way to free one’s ego from illusion. He thinks that because you cannot identify where a thought comes from, and that means it doesn’t come from you. But it seems to me that not being able to identify where you are located, where your seat of consciousness exists, in no ways means that it doesn’t exist. It just means that you can’t see the other side of a mirror. For Godel, it made sense that you couldn't measure the span of a mathematical system from within the system.

In his closing statements at the end of the interview, Sam talks about gives reasons to the skeptic for trying meditation. I felt that this really spoke to me, as I have become less and less enamored with his meditation app, the further I get into it. I have begun to suspect that people who meditate are in search of some sort of mystical non-reality, an escape from their day-to-day mind. Perhaps some out-of-body experience? Proof that our existence is more than mere software inside a meat computer? Why spend an hour upon hour trying for some elusive goal of non-experience? 

Sam suggests that the doubting novitiate might consider himself an explorer or a scientist embarking on the study of his own mind. What if he is more like a fisherman sitting by the bank of an empty lake, waiting for nothing to bite?

#172: Among the Deplorables, with Andrew Marantz

Another intellectual from the not-terribly-left-of-center who finds himself butting heads with Sam over subtleties that Sam seems genetically unable to perceive!

As expected, the Reddit chatter seems to favor Sam over Marantz early on. Yet I was encouraged by the growing group of people who understood what Marantz had to say, didn't dismiss him out of hand, and shared some of the feeling I have that Sam has a rather noticeable blindspot where it comes to "wokeness." Kind of ironic for the author of the Waking Up podcast.

I won't weigh in on the conversation any further than to post this for your entertainment pleasure, the title poem from my recently released collection:

Confession to the Cockroaches

Apparently, you’ve learned to read

and come upon this volume. Know, then:

it lead to your rise.

You might scoff: “These poems didn’t

lead the humans toward their final war!"

But dig a little deeper.

The missiles haven’t launched yet,

but the masses have begun their spiral.

Their vitriol grows daily.

Okay, it wasn’t just this author. It was

the readers, too. All of us who, unmindful,

worshiped the idol of Merit:

“of course the elite should get the best,”

we declared, anointing ourselves

with all rights and privileges. With crowns.

We stacked the deck, blinded by our

narrative of just rewards.

We hogged the wealth. Off-shored it.

As the masses lost livelihoods,

we only shrugged: “Their fault!

They should go to college. Get retrained.”

As though honest work shouldn’t pay.

As though college was for everyone.

As though we deserved our good fortune.

Already I hear the distant drumbeat.

Dumpster fires warm the whole globe.

Cheering, at the precipice.