Everyone Wants to be Special

Why do people gamble when the odds are close to certain that they will lose money? Obviously because they enjoy it. But why do they enjoy it? There is the pleasure of occasionally winning, of course. But that doesn't completely explain it as that pleasure much be matched, and even overmatched, by the more common losing. There almost certainly is some social pleasure--although plenty of people gamble alone at a slot machine. My sense is that people gamble because when they win they feel special--a kind of Hobbesian exhilaration or Veblenian status. I won and you didn't: even the remote possibility of that occurring is what propels them to lay down money that will most probably be lost. This is undoubtedly related to human competition in general and may indeed account for all sorts of odd human behavior--the compulsion to shop, the inability to cooperate, the need to display wealth and to dominate others.

Yet this need to feel special is, from another perspective, deeply problematic, for it means that most people make decisions based on emotions, not logic. It is particularly problematic in a democracy where individuals often vote in seemingly incomprehensible ways--, for example,voting against their own interest. And it may account for the reality that many people often support dictators or moral monsters because they believe that this person will make them part of somthing special--the dominant or exceptional nation, for example. La Boetie's On Voluntary Servitude would seem to reinforce this notion--one can feel special through a kind of identification with someone else or some fantasy.

The La Boetie piece I know only through reading Sarah Bakewell's A Life of Montaigne, a very intelligent biography and commentary on the French writer. And I've read Montaigne on and off over the years, but her discussion really clarified his attraction. He makes clear our limitations and our inconsistencies: he conveys what it feels like to be alive and conscious, in our limited and inconsistent way. Perhaps his perspective underlies the moral imagination--the ability to imagine someone else's life, an ability sorely lacking in many individuals. (I say this conscious, I think or hope I think, of my own limited moral imagination.)

Lord Russell and the Nature of Truth

I finally finished The History of Western Philosophy in which Bertrand Russell essentially sees that history as a long series of missteps and misunderstandings. Most philosophers, Russell contends, have based their ethical and political systems on their metaphysical systems: in this way, they are like poets who begin with an assumption and then proceed to write a poem, never really considering the nature of their original assumption. Yet it would seem inconceivable that philosopher after philosopher would be incapable of interrogating his original assumption--although one supposes that, in any intellectual process, one must start somewhere. Nonetheless, while philosophers are not necessarily responsible for the subsequent horrors their ethical and political systems anticipate--Russell looks at Plato, Rousseau, Byron, and Nietzsche, among others, as leading to Hitler and Locke as leading to Roosevelt and Churchill and Bergson to Vichy--there is still the suggestion that, in some way, their status as "philosophers" ultimately legitimated the ethical and political monstrosities that did eventually emerge (although Roosevelt may not necessarily be included as a progenitor of a monstrosity). Russell is particularly keen to criticize subjectivist or idealist philosophers and their systems, for they inherently diverge from any kind of shared (not necessarily objective) sense of truth, either allowing for a worthless democracy of truths (truth is what each individual believes is true or what each individual simply creates as true--e.g., the Bush administration) or the truths of self-identified "great" or "noble" men (or man) who then proceed, in general, to impose their truth on others. "The concept of 'truth' as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control," writes Russell, "has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness--the intoxication of power . . . to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone" (828). Where this humility can be found in previous philosophers as Russell discusses them is not clear to me; still, as he wrote the book mostly during World War II and its attendant horrors, there is much to agree with in this statement. He concludes: "I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster" (828).

Feeling Small

Here's something from Stephen Jay Gould: "Six millions years ago at most, if the molecular clock runs true . . . , we shared our last common ancestor with gorillas and chimps. Presumably, this creature walked primarily on all fours, although it may have moved about on two legs as well, as apes and many monkeys do today. Little more than a million years later, our ancestors were as bipedal as you or I. This, not later enlargement of the brain, was the great punctuation in human evolution" (The Panda's Thumb, 132). Of course, Gould's point has more to do with refocusing on what he considers the more important evolutionary transformation--bipedalism, not brain size. But. for me, again, the sweep of time--so casually waved away with a "six million years" or "a million years later"--is almost too much to comprehend. Actually, it is too much to comprehend. It would be easy to dismiss whatever joys and agonies we experience in life with the larger sense that, in the larger sense, it just doesn't matter. The awful effort of the human to make sense of the senseless. I read an infuriatingly bad history of Chicago and finally was drawn only to the photographs, one in particular of people waiting to enter the Chicago World's Fair of 1893--each with his or her mind and consciousness and every one of them long dead and gone: as gone as any impossibly ancient human ancestor. Surely someone was lying on the African savannah, however many million years ago, and looked up and around and wondered what it was all about. That moment of self-consciousness is the awful miracle of our existence, a bizarre, anomalous instance of something in the incomprehensibly large universe that came together in such a way and asked the simple question, "Why?" Or more ironic is the idea that consciousness was no meaningful adaptation--rather just the unanticipated side effect of brain enlargement, a mutation that helped an otherwise vulnerable species survive. The ability to ask the question "why" doesn't help us improve our chances at reproduction--it just came along. Lucky, huh?

I'm Back

I'm back, with a host of comments on books I've read. Here something from Melbourne, a 1950's biography of the Whig Prime Minister William Lamb, born and bred for leadership, so to speak, but clearly one of the most useless human beings ever to be alive. In the late 1820s he was appointed Irish Secretary, and this is what an oblivious David Cecil has to say about the Irish--this is, recall--written in the 1950s: "Under a frail veneer of eighteenth-century manners, [Ireland] wallowed in bloodstained medieval chaos. The Protestant governing class divided their time between bullying the natives, wild Hibernian rollickings and killing each other in duels. The mass of the people, savage, superstitious and on the edge of starvation, now fawned on their masters in oriental servility, now gathered together in secret societies with fantastic names--Caffees, Bootashees, Whiteboys and Ribbonmen--to plot their overthrow by means of atrocity and assassination" (193). Where to begin? "Savage"? "Superstitious"? "Oriental servility"? Lamb himself liked to do nothing, and when faced with momentous challenges to the feudalistic governing system in England, did everything to delay, defer and vacillate. Yet the Irish are seen as "natives'--much like any usual group of barbarians, barely under control of themselves. Is this the history of the world: a kind of ignorant incapacity to understand others who, through the very policies and actions devised by their masters, deign to rebel against the intolerable? I can see parallels between George W. Bush and William Lamb, useful tools for a coporate elite.

Claustrophobia: Part III

In Steven Weinberg's introduction to cosmology, The First Three Minutes--along with enumerating a dizzying, even ludicrous array of subatomic particles--he describes the beginning of the universe as well as speculates on the end of it. Near the end of his discussion he comments on the reality of the universe: "Flying over Wyoming en route home from San Francisco to Boston . . . below, the earth looks very soft and comfortable--fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" (154). Earlier, in commenting on the end of the universe, when it "collapses" and atoms separate into constituent elements and particles, he asks: "Can we really carry this sad story all the way to its end, to a state of infinite temperature and density? Does time really have a stop some three minutes after the temperature reaches a thousand million degrees? Obviously, we cannot be sure. All the uncetainties . . . in trying to explore the first hundredth of a second . . . will return to perplex us as we look into the last hundredth of a second. Above all, the whole universe must be described in the language of quantum mechanics at temperatures above 100 million million million million degrees (10 32nd degreee K), and no one has any idea what happened then" (152-3). Somehow, words like "Wyoming," "San Francisco," and "Boston" seem comprehensible and tolerable, especially when juxtaposed to "infinite temperature and density." But, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter. Still, what does Robert Frost write? "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars--on stars where no human race is. / I have it in me so much nearer home / to scare myself with my own desert places" ("Desert Places" 195).

The Universe Again

From Bill Bryson's folksy survey of scientific knowledge, A Short History of Nearly Everything: "It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity [the dimensionless 'spot' into which all matter had been squeezed, so to speak, and from which the universe in a sense emerges] as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no 'around' around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from" (10). And our universe? "Now the question that has occurred to all of us at some point is: what would happen of you traveled out to the edge of the universe and, as it were, put your head through the curtains? Where would your head be if it were no longer in the universe? What would you find beyond? The answer, disappointingly, is that you can never get to the edge of the universe. That's not because it would take too long to get there--though of course it would--but because even if you traveled outward and outward in a straight line, indefinitely and pugnaciously, you would never arrive at an outer boundary. Instead, you would come back to where you began . . . " (16-17). The curvature of time and space in the universe and all that. In such a condition, do anxieties like claustrophobia mean anything? And so I am answered (see posting on 5/31/10): we're not really in a floating cigar. Ultimately, from a cosmic perspective, we're nowhere at all.

The Cognitive Dissonance of the Fuhrerdammerung

I just finished Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945, his account of the final major European battles of World War II. The Russian soldiers--enraged by Nazi German atrocities in the Soviet Union, whipped into a fury by Soviet propaganda, and undoubtedly driven by the brutalization of war itself--overwhelm the hopelessly outnumbered and equipment and ammunition poor German troops and rape every woman they can get their hands on. (The German civilians attribute the attacks to Slavic bestiality, of course.) On the other side, lunatic Nazi leaders continue to believe that they will prevail. During the last days of the fight in Berlin, with the remaining German forces driven back into the city center and fighting from cellars, of course there are still military police who are executing anyone they suspect of cowardice. One might think that, at that point, they might as well join the fight against the Soviets themselves. But no. Along with Hitler and his other fanatics, there are other officers and soldiers who still believe in the cause. All of which suggests that, despite evidence otherwise, there's always someone who won't acknowledge reality. At times, our delusions don't necessarily harm us--especially if we have the assets (money, wealth) to recover from them or if they simply don't put us into a position to harm ourselves. This is especially true for the upper and, to a degree, middle-classes--or in a racialized society whatever group that designates itself as the elite. But if a true crisis hits, then even privilege can't protect us from its consequences. Any number of people oppose universal health insurance in America--and for some of them, they will never have to face the consequences of their attitudes. But there will be some. They may not recognize it--but that will be the reason.