Category: Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Caveat: 15) 내 이웃과 주위에있는 모든 인연들의 감사함을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다

Buddhism & Zen / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The 108 / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting my gratitude for all my ties to my neighborhood and surroundings.”

This is #15 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).

…
13. 입을 수있게 해 준 모든 인연 공덕을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
       “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting the public virtues of – and my ties to – all those things that I am able to wear.”
14. 이 세상이 곳에 머물 수있게 해 준 모든 인연들의 귀중함을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
       “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting the preciousness of all my ties to the things that allow me to stay here in this world.”
15. 내 이웃과 주위에있는 모든 인연들의 감사함을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.

I would read this fifteenth affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting my gratitude for all my ties to my neighborhood and surroundings.”

Wow – what a downer, coming so close after Thanksgiving day. I’m not sure how I feel about being urged to forget gratitude. It’s certainly a point of divergence in comparison to Christian thought, wherein gratitude is, at least for some, profoundly central to worldview. The concept of grace, and the consequent gratitude, is an aspect of Christianity with which I have often felt some resonance, despite my extreme discomfort with some other aspects of Christian cosmology and even ethics.

There may be some irrationality to this sympathy for Christian notions of Thanksgiving – rooted in the oddly central role that the American Thanksgiving holiday played during my notably un-Christian childhood. Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday, by far: more so than Christmas, which seemed slightly alien to me, even as a fairly young child – not because of some rejection of gift-giving (I was all for that, like any child) – but because as soon as I realized the reason for Christmas, I sensed immediately that our own celebration of it was slightly ironic or even vaguely inappropriate. I think I understood, the moment I realized there was no Santa (and, in fact, my parents made zero effort to perpetuate such a fantasy, being the rationalists that they were – so I was only maybe 4 years old), that we were “borrowing” some else’s holiday.

But, although Thanksgiving has some roots in Protestant (and specifically Puritan) ideas of grace and gratitude, it stands more elegantly – from a cosmological perspective – on its own as a secular holiday. In fact, perhaps the reason I’m comfortable with grace and gratitude is that they don’t, per se, require the existence of any higher power to “work.” So it’s striking to me that another belief system (ie. Buddhism) that manages to (mostly) stay standing despite the elimination of a concept of a higher power, nevertheless seems to be setting itself in opposition to a concept of gratitude.

I have no idea where I’m trying to go with this. Or even if it makes sense. I’m just thinking “out loud.” I feel inclined to read this affirmation as a sort of reminder to not to get attached to the sangha – despite the fact that sangha is one of the refuges. ….which is hard to wrap my mind around.

[UPDATE: So it occurs to me, on rereading this much later, that I have misunderstood this aphorism – this one, and all those that have the same structure “…misdeeds lived, forgetting…”. The “forgetting my X” is in fact an example of the “misdeeds lived” – which is to say, you’re repenting for failing to experience the feeling in question.]

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Caveat: … the vast Libyan dessert

Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Language & Linguistics / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

… or, catching the internet with its pants down.

It’s pretty hard to capture the ephemerality of hilarious spelling mistakes and typos on well-maintained websites. But I did it. And with only a little bit of guilt, I post the result here. I mean no disrespect to Max Fisher of The Atlantic, where I found the error – in this age of automatic spell checking, errors of this sort are easily made and missed – I’m guilty of much worse ones, myself. But I do find a delicious irony in the specific error made, given that he used to be a food writer.

So having said that, the absolute best part of his article about last year’s secret nuclear standoff between the US, Russia and Libya was the serendiptous typo that allowed him to write, “U.S. officials worried about the security of the casks. It would have been easy for anyone with a gun and a truck to drive up, overpower the guard, use the crane to load the casks onto the truck, and drive off into the vast Libyan dessert.”

I so enjoyed the poetic image of a gang of terrorists driving truckloads of enriched uranium around a Candylandified Sahara.

Sadly, the error was very rapidly corrected. In the time I took to write this post, the delightful dessert was Orwellianly transmogrified into a workaday desert. But I had the amazing fortuity to have done the page “refresh” in a different window, and hadn’t closed the original.  Consequently, I am able to present, with great pride, exceedingly rare “before and after” screenshots of the error in question, below. [Click thru images to view original full size]

Before:

picture

After:

picture

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Caveat: The Glass Brain

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I have adopted the term "glass brain" for the increasingly common phenomenon of living one's life quite publicly on the internet.  Perhaps this is parallel to the idea of living in a glass house, but without the house – just a brain that anyone can look into. See also, "el licenciado vidriera" – one of my favorite of Cervantes' short stories, which deals with a man who came to believe he was made of glass.

Actually, one can manage one's transparency fairly effectively, for the most part.  If one is careful, which I try to be.  Thus, a great deal of "me" is "out there" in the online world, but it's a pretty-carefully-managed "me" (seasoned with equal doses of sly circumspection and passive-aggressive snarkiness).  I can hide a great deal behind a façade of abstruse vocabulary and sheer volume of apparently random, pseudo-academic, semi-autobiographical blather.

Nevertheless, I've taken what feels like a big step further in the direction of this "managed transparency," recently:  I've submitted this blog to a list called the Korean Blog List.  Apparently the link "went live" sometime in the last 24 hours, because already I've noticed several incoming links.

…And so, behold, after blogging for 5 years (and intensively – daily – for 3 years), I've suddenly made a move which may render this blog much less of a "just for friends and family" than it has been, to date.  We'll see.

Regardless… To my friends and family:  I still view you as my primary audience.  If others are "listening in" that's great.  Perhaps they'll derive some entertainment or insight.  To those listening in:  this is not an effort at journalism.  It's only journaling.  I reserve the right to make stuff up and leave stuff out.  I exist at the center of my own subjectivity, fully aware of that limitation.

Caveat lector:  read at your own risk.   Remember the line at the top:  "재미없으면 보상해드립니다!" ("If it's not fun, we give a refund!") – this is clearly meant ironically, since there's no charge to read this.  Guaranteed refunds on free blogs consist solely in the readers' ability to deftly navigate away from said blogs.  If it's not fun, stop looking.

Caveat: 13) 입을 수있게 해 준 모든 인연 공덕을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다

Buddhism & Zen / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The 108 / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting the public virtues of – and my ties to – all those things that I am able to wear.”

This is #13 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).

…
11. 배울 수있게 해 준 세상의 모든 인연들을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
       “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting any of all the origins of the world that can be learned.”
12. 먹을 수있게 해 준 모든 인연들을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
       “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting my ties to all those things that I am able to eat.”
13. 입을 수있게 해 준 모든 인연 공덕을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.

I would read this thirteenth affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting the public virtues of – and my ties to – all those things that I am able to wear.”

Humility. Humility.

[UPDATE: So it occurs to me, on rereading this much later, that I have misunderstood this aphorism – this one, and all those that have the same structure “…misdeeds lived, forgetting…”. The “forgetting my X” is in fact an example of the “misdeeds lived” – which is to say, you’re repenting for failing to experience the feeling in question.]

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Caveat: up to page 9 – empirical syntax?

Language & Linguistics / Less Banal Than Usual / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Twice before, I’ve referenced my efforts to read a recently-acquired book entitled Understanding Minimalism (Hornstein, et al.). In my last entry about it, I’d made it up to page 5, and I was making some initial complaints.

HornsteinetalNow I’ve progressed to page 9, and I’m regaining some positivity about why it is I decided to try to undertake reading this book. I have long felt that the “traditional” Chomskyan approach to syntax theory is epistemologically naive. It relies far too much on a sort of ideologically blinkered introspection with respect to the “syntactic evidence,” and thus disregards the real linguistic production that’s out there in the “real world” – with all its strange, un-sentence-like constructions, incompletions, ellipses, mispronunciations (or typos, in text-based communication), etc., ad nauseum.

All these things are fully understandable, and “typical,” unsophisticated native-speakers rarely are able to enunciate, much less elucidate, judgments of “grammaticality” such as abound in most linguists’ efforts at syntactic theory (as I discover, almost daily, when trying to get Koreans to help me understand their language, in my own efforts to acquire it).

So this “minimalist project” is appealing to me because it promises a return to empiricism. Here is a quote from page 9, spanning the end of one paragraph and the beginning of another, that expresses something I’ve wished I could do myself, before (if I was actually a linguist and not just a dilettante):

…one minimalist project would be to show that all levels other than LF [Logical Form = representation of meaning in the brain] and PF [Phonological/Phonetic Form = actual spoken language passing through the air] can be dispensed with, without empirical prejudice. More concretely, in the context of a GB [Government and Binding]-style theory, for example, this would amount to showing that D-Structure (DS) and S-Structure (SS) [DS and SS are components of “traditional” Chomskyan syntax, e.g. Government and Binding and antecedent theories] are in principle eliminable without any empirical loss.

I remain suspicious about what level of empiricism will be achieved – there still is a reliance on “introspective judgments of grammaticality” which I always have disliked.  And worse, there is the mere fact of labeling the “internal representation” end of any linguistic faculty as a “Logical Form.” The problem with this conception is that it flies in the face of most of what we understand from neurology or empirical psychology: human brains don’t do much logic, on the inside. “Logic” such as is used in LF engines in syntactic theory is artificial, external, mathematicized, philosophical. It’s precious Montague semantics and beloved lambda calculus. Such things may have some “real” correlates in neuronal/synaptic architecture, but I don’t think we’re going to make much progress with the “brain as logic engine” model – if we were going to make such progress, we’d also be making progress with artificial intelligence (which is simply the inversion: “logic engine as brain”) – which we’re most definitely not.

I would prefer a more neutral conception of the “internal representation,” that doesn’t betray such preconceptions – as the term “Logical Form” does – about how it might actually work. Semantics strikes me as by far the shakiest of the foundations of contemporary linguistic theory – we really don’t seem to know a lot about how semantics work.

What is meaning? In passing, I will return to pointing at Taylor’s important work, Linguistic Categorization – which addresses the important intersection between semantics and what one might call meta-syntax – what do we really know (as unreflective speakers, not as epistemologically well-grounded linguists) about the grammaticality of what we are saying?

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Caveat: Why I’m Not Vegan

Food & Drink / Life in Korea / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I should be vegan. But I'm not vegan.

At core, I am entirely sympathetic with both the ethical and health-based arguments in favor of a vegan diet.

RE Ethics:
I'm not even thinking in terms of the animal-cruelty / infliction-of-suffering issues. Those are concerning, but for me, they don't really offer a compelling case in and of themselves, because I suspect that, in the broader scheme of things, suffering on the part of individuals is inevitable – it's a part of existence. Do animals raised for food suffer more than animals in the wild? Yes, certainly, many times – especially in factory farming that is so common nowadays.  But animals suffer more in nature, too, sometimes. If we pursue this ethic to it's logical end point, we end up banning carnivorism from nature, and throwing tigers or eagles in prison.   Silly.

No, for me, the ethical argument is about sustainability, carbon-footprint, environmental impact. I'm one of those who believes the eliminating meat from the human diet would probably have more impact on global CO2 emissions than eliminating the automobile. Seriously – this is very likely true. If we want to have an environmentally sustainable future, we must, as a species, move toward a sustainable diet, and such a diet really can't include meat for 6~7 billion plus humans.

RE Health:
When I was losing my 60+ pounds (25 kilos) in 2006~2007, I did so, mostly, while consuming a vegan diet. I felt healthier, and it was much easier to keep within the calorie rules I'd set for myself. But several things favored that approach, at that time, including leading an almost entirely solitary lifestyle (not going out with friends, not having an out-of-home job e.g. I was working from home, etc) and living across the street from a very well-stocked and progressive grocery store (the Lunds in Minnapolis's Uptown).

The fact is, however, when it comes to actually practicing veganism, there are two contravening factors: my laziness and my character.

RE Laziness:
I am stunningly lazy. And being vegan in Korea (where everything you eat, when eating out, in infused with animal product; and where meat-eating is fetishized to an even greater degree than in the US – really!). Also, my laziness affects my ability to resist cravings and habit, too. I have a craving for, and a habit for, things like dairy products, especially. I just simply like them, and not eating them is hard. Kind of like jogging every day is hard. And so, because of my laziness, I don't do it. I buy cheese, and eat it. I keep butter, because I like it. I have tuna, because it's easier than making sure I've complemented my grains and legumes properly in every meal so as to get the right dosage of protein. Laziness.

RE Character:
I am socially a chameleon. I'm timid, in a way. I don't like to "make waves" when socializing with people, and socializing with people is often done over food. I prefer seek out moderation, and seek out the path of least resistance in social situations. And especially in Korea, declaring one can't eat or drink anything (anything!) leads to a lot of difficult excuses, white lies and justifications, for Koreans take near-personal offense if one doesn't eat or drink something on offer. Some in younger generations or who have lived abroad will keep their mouths shut about this, but the offense and confusion, even in those cases, is still there. Trust me.

It's very difficult for Koreans to understand NOT eating something.  Perhaps it's the fact that only 2 generations ago, starvation was common, even in South Korea. Starving people rarely make judgments about the suitability of different types of food. And I feel uncomfortable coming across like I'm judging other people, which any declaration of dietary rule-following tends to come across as – it's not my place. Character.

So I'm an opportunitarian. I never buy meat for at home, because I don't actually like meat, so not eating meat is easy for me. But I am unable to kick the dairy-products habit, and I keep eggs and fish, sometimes, too. And when I'm out, I'll eat whatever is given to me:  strange Korean things… raw flesh of animals and sea monsters, blood sausages, barely dead creatures, etc. I'm just trying to be polite. It creates a lot of goodwill in my hosts. That goodwill is important.

Caveat: 12) 먹을 수있게 해 준 모든 인연들을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다

Buddhism & Zen / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The 108 / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting my ties to all those things that I am able to eat.”

This is #12 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).

…
10. 일가 친척들의 공덕을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
        “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting any of the pious acts of my kin.”
11. 배울 수있게 해 준 세상의 모든 인연들을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
       “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting any of all the origins of the world that can be learned.”
12. 먹을 수있게 해 준 모든 인연들을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.

I would read this twelfth affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting my ties to all those things that I am able to eat.”

This is not a call to fast, nor a commitment to disregard starvation. It’s a call to renounce one’s ties to food – not to renounce food. It’s a hard distinction. Perhaps easier to understand at a philosphical level than at a pragmatic one. Since my personal interest in Buddhism lies more at the pragmatics than in any type of abstraction, this is an important puzzle to solve.

[UPDATE: So it occurs to me, on rereading this much later, that I have misunderstood this aphorism – this one, and all those that have the same structure “…misdeeds lived, forgetting…”. The “forgetting my X” is in fact an example of the “misdeeds lived” – which is to say, you’re repenting for failing to experience the feeling in question.]

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Caveat: Chomsky

Language & Linguistics / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I am drawn to Chomsky, intellectually.  Yet I find actually attempting to consume his intellectual production, in either linguistics or in ideology (politics), extremely annoying.  He's an annoying, self-righteous narcissist.  But an undeniable genius. 

There's a very interesting interview with him, recently published at Tablet.  It focuses on his specifically Jewish identity raised as a "cultural Zionist." 

In conclusion, though… he's not a moral relativist:  "You can’t get out of your skin. But when we get down to the moral issue, it’s independent of one’s personal background."  

Caveat: 11) 배울 수있게 해 준 세상의 모든 인연들을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다

Buddhism & Zen / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The 108 / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting any of all the origins of the world that can be learned.”

This is #11 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).

…
9. 부모님께 감사하는 마음을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
     “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting my heart full of thanks to my ancestors.”
10. 일가 친척들의 공덕을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
        “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting any of the pious acts of my kin.”
11. 배울 수있게 해 준 세상의 모든 인연들을 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.

I would read this eleventh affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting any of all the origins of the world that can be learned.”

This seems like one of the aspects of Buddhism that I find least attractive: a sort of epistemic nihilism, an abrogation of curiosity in the nature of reality. “We know the ‘real’ reality, so all this reality we see around us doesn’t really interest us.” Then again, that seems to be a feature of any kind of religious certainty, perhaps. Including faith-based atheism?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the “purity narratives” (which all of these affirmations reference, via the concept of repentance), too.  They bother me.  I’m not interested in purity, and I don’t view defilement (i.e. lack of purity) as a valid concept in a philosophically materialist (anti-transcendent) worldview.  But even such as statement as “not a valid concept” is actually a sort of purity narrative, isn’t it? “Material reality is being polluted by concepts of purity! Oh no!” … stuck in a paradox of dialectical thought…

[UPDATE: So it occurs to me, on rereading this much later, that I have misunderstood this aphorism – this one, and all those that have the same structure “…misdeeds lived, forgetting…”. The “forgetting my X” is in fact an example of the “misdeeds lived” – which is to say, you’re repenting for failing to experience the feeling in question. This is especially relevant in the context of this one, since my misunderstanding sent me off on a bit of an ideological tangent about epistemology and “purity narratives”, that turns out to have been unjustified by the original text. The tangent stands, but the cause has disappeared. A koan?]

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Caveat: The Meanwhile Knob

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

Overheard on NPR, this morning (well, yesterday afternoon, in NPRland):  Lynda Barry (cartoonist, author and one-time romantic interest of Matt Groening) is talking about someone else's innovation on the time-machine concept, with the introduction of a "meanwhile knob."  Not much detail is provided as to how the "meanwhile knob" works, but I'm deeply intrigued.  I've long thought that a good time-machine should include more than just a simple "front-back" control.  I've long enjoyed the Heinleinian conception of a multidimensional "alternate-universes" control, where you can go back or forward not just to "your" past or future, but, by missing the correct calibration, end up in infinitely variant alternatives as well. 

But the idea of a "meanwhile knob" is even more interesting.  I think for Barry, based on the context of her comments, it's intended to capture the fact that "inside time" – how we perceive time and carry it around with us – things are in fact rather non-linear.  You can have multiple narratives going:  the immediate outside-your-body surroundings, the recent memorable event being reviewed, the historical novel in front of you, the upcoming meeting which you're planning out in your head.   So a time machine with a meanwhile knob suddenly becomes as much a device for altering consciousness as one that somehow alters physical reality.  Which, of course, given the physics of time travel, may, in fact, be the more plausible way to take on time travel.

Meanwhile, I'm going to get another cup of coffee.  I have an intense day coming up, at work.  More bigwigs will be visiting our English classroom – there's going to be an "opening ceremony" along with a demonstration class that I and my coteachers will have to do.  Someone (read:  the nuclear power plant people) has put a huge amount of money into this poorly-designed, high-tech language classroom, and now they want to see how it worked out – it's up to us to make it look good. 

Caveat: Speculative Affirmation

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / My Poetry & Fiction / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I came across an intriguing challenge: can you summarize your life philosophy in two words?  I came up with “speculative affirmation,” which is borrowed from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s slightly impenetrable statement: “ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation.” I’ve cited this quote in this here blog three times before. That’s much more than I’ve returned to any other quote, I think. I guess it’s the closest you could get to my favorite quote.

And in other news about gnomic utterances:  I’ve made a resolution to post only one-word “statuses” in facebookland. I’m curious about how much I might be able to communicate, posting only one word at a time. Think of it as an effort at lazy, minimalist poetry, or if you prefer, as just a typical manifestation of my obtuse nonsequiturism.

I had a grumpy day at work. I wasn’t coping well with the lack of communication thing, although I should know better than to hope for it. The classes themselves went fine, for the most part, but the in-between times, with my fellow teachers, less so. I kept wanting to say, “why is this happening?” But I knew I’d get nothing logical or meaningful in response. Would it be different if I could be more competent in the language? I suspect not.

Um, so that aforementioned grumpiness doesn’t represent speculative affirmation, does it? It’s not always easy, even if it is an effort to make a life philosophy.

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Caveat: Jeffers’ Answer

Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism 
"The Answer"

Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.

- Robinson Jeffers (American poet, 1887-1962)

Caveat: Principles & Parameters

Language & Linguistics / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Before I plow into actually trying to read the book on Chomsky's Minimalism, after having skimmed through the first few pages, I want to record my "before" snapshot:  where do I stand in current understanding and/or lack-of-understanding of contemporary syntactic theory?

I last studied syntactic theory in the early 90's, when I was exposed to John R Taylor's book Linguistic Categorization, which for me personally was deeply influential.  Because of that, though, I already find on page 5 of Understanding Minimalism (by Hornstein et al.) something I find deeply suspect:  "[the Principles and Parameters Theory] now constitutes the consensus view of the overall structure of the language faculty." 

Really?  Maybe… if the definition of "consensus" = "what Chomsky thinks."  Which is not, per se, beyond plausible.  But…. although Chomsky is without a doubt a seminal and key thinker in the field of linguistics, I don't see him as infallible, nor do I see him as the sole source-of-truth.  Am I being overly sensitive to what I have always perceived as an embedded authoritarianism in Chomskian syntax?  Probably.

I have no quibbles with the principles and parameters theory, actually.  It's scientifically trivial, in fact, as long as you leave open what those principles and paramaters might be.  My personal "gut instinct," though, is the principles and parameters in question are not specific to a "language faculty" as Chomsky and his followers have always advocated, but rather instantiations of more general "rules of cognition" that are innate to the human brain by virtue of it's neurological anatomy and chemistry.  Which is to say, language truly is "thinking out loud."  This is not a totally naive view, but it's perhaps not part of the "consensus" in the field, either. 

OK, out of time.  More later.

Caveat: Metahomophobia – or, going out on a limb

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Over the years, I have almost completely avoided commentary on DADT, marriage equality, and on broader gender identity issues. I have done so because I’m pretty sure that my views on these issues tend to offend (or at the least, make uncomfortable) both liberals and conservatives, activists on the left and right, equally. I’m a “deep libertarian” on these issues. Here’re a few short paragraphs, in an effort to try to summarize my beliefs and thoughts.

There is no “default” gender identity in a given human being – we each have innate tendencies, perhaps, but gender identity is something we construct as part of our socialization. I believe in nurture over nature, I suppose – with the following caveat: we don’t have much conscious control over how that nurture works out – either as children growing up ourselves, nor as parents and mentors guiding those children. I think the whole “gender identity” question would be very well-served by completely eliminating such broad-brush-strokes categories as “gay” or “straight” and recognizing that it works more like a complex, multi-dimensional rainbow spectrum of preferences, interests, likes, dislikes, fears, discomforts, etc., all under the constraints of thousands of years of evolved cultural expectations.

I hate such “typing” as is exemplified in declaring “I’m straight” or “I’m gay” – I view it as unscientific and ultimately naive. There’s little difference between that kind of “typing” and the strangely one-dimensional views of people who used to go around saying things like: “there are four races of humans: yellow, white, red, black.” Get real: it’s a continuum. The first instance of miscegenation falsifies the whole construct. Likewise, the first instance of genuinely queer gender identity (as in the person who checks “other” on the form) falsifies the gay-straight dialectic.

On the question of marriage equality, my prescription is stunningly simple, and consists of trying for a rational answer to the following question: what business does the government have in anyone’s marriage? Get the government out of the business of recognizing marriage, altogether. If two people want to derive benefits of partnership (survivorship, parenting privileges, etc.) let them form a business partnership using civil business laws that have nothing to do with cultural tradition or churches or temples or ordination, etc.

On the question of DADT, I have always been annoyed with what I perceived as a certain shallowness and misunderstanding, on the part of critics, of the human psychology behind the desperation evident in military’s insistence on DADT. Finally, someone has nailed it (see this editorial in the NYT). Dale Carpenter writes, succinctly: “Gays are to be excluded, not because of their own merits, but because we fear that some people around them might not be able to handle the truth. [DADT] is not a judgment about gays at all, but about heterosexuals.” Put another way, it’s a fear of homophobia. Homophobophobia? Metahomophobia?

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Caveat: 8) 조상님의 은혜를 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.

Buddhism & Zen / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The 108 / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting the favors of our ancestors.”

This is #8 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations.

…
6. 나의 몸을 소중하게 여기지 않고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
     “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, not regarding my body as something dear.”
7. 나의 진실한 마음을 저버리고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.
     “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forsaking my true heart.”
8. 조상님의 은혜를 잊고 살아 온 죄를 참회하며 절합니다.

I would read this eighth affirmation as: “I bow in repentance of any misdeeds lived, forgetting the favors of our ancestors.”

The Bodhidharma was a 5th century Buddhist evangelist who traveled from India to China. He is credited with being the first major proponent of “zen,” within the “great path” type of Buddhism, called Mahayana. I’m reading a collection of some of his works translated into English by someone called Red Pine (I’m not sure what kind of name this is – that’s what it says on the cover).

In a section called the “Bloodstream Sermon,” Bodhidharma says:

The mind is the buddha, and the buddha is the mind. Beyond the mind there’s no buddha, and beyond the buddha there’s no mind. If you think there’s a buddha beyond the mind, where is he? There’s no buddha beyond the mind, so why envision one? You can’t know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself.

[UPDATE: So it occurs to me, on rereading this much later, that I have misunderstood this aphorism – this one, and all those that have the same structure “…misdeeds lived, forgetting…”. The “forgetting my X” is in fact an example of the “misdeeds lived” – which is to say, you’re repenting for failing to experience the feeling in question.]

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Caveat: It all comes down to education

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Teaching & Methodology

Which is what I already believed.  But, anecdotally, at least, Nicholas Kristof's recent editorial in NYT really hammers the fact home.  I don't always find what he writes particularly compelling or even interesting, but when he editorializes on the issue of how good and universal education can transform societies, he's spot-on. 

Good and universal education are way more important than "democracy," in promoting world peace.  That may be a fact that makes people uncomfortable, especially Westerners accustomed to believing that the former is somehow possible only with the latter.  But the facts "on the ground" seem to be irrefutable, to me.

The problem, of course, is that universal education takes a long time to produce the effect – in essence, an entire generation.  Whereas "democracy" can be "imposed" (via some type of election or other) almost immediately.  It suits our desire for quick results.  But getting people to vote in "failed states" (e.g Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia) solves almost nothing.  Building schools and making sure they're used will, in about a generation, solve a great deal.

Caveat: Objectivism

Language & Linguistics / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

"Objectivism: the spongy white bread at the Great Buffet of Human Ideas" – John Scalzi, in his screedtastic bloggings on the topic of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  I would add:  spongy white bread is delicious and comforting, but not good for you, and may contribute to health problems if not to an early death.

Perhaps this is what Scalzi has in mind.  I think I can agree with a large proportion of what he's saying, which is hard for me to find among people who actually enjoy Rand's writing.  His main insight:  Rand writes "nerd revenge porn" – which is why fans of Rand are mostly to be found somewhere on the Aspergers spectrum.  I will not be so proud as to deny I might be along there somewhere, myself.

My main thought on being a nerd:  being a nerd is like being an acoholic or a drug addict – you cannot be cured, but you can be recovering.  I am a recovering nerd.  As long as I accept this, I can make progress.  Rand's writing is a different approach:  it says that being a nerd is holy, and there's nothing to recover from.  In essence, it denies the normality of human collective social experience.  Rand is to being a nerd as William S. Burroughs is to being a herion addict.  Personally, I think both are wonderful writers.  But I don't think they're offering viable life-philosophies.  It's fantasy.

Caveat: Metamoderation

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

"Moderation in all things. Including moderation." – Mark Twain

I think I've found a new favorite quote.  Now, to work with implementation – I'm actually really not that good at moderation – I've always had a degree of "all or nothing" about my personality.  Hence this Twainian metamoderation seems likely to be exceptionally challenging.

But I've been thinking a lot about habits, lately, and about bad habits and good habits.   Small things – eating well, exercising, getting work done rather than procrastinating, mostly abstaining from alcohol but not being a teetotaler, etc.  I watch myself, over time:  I build up a habit, good or bad, and then tear it down again.

I found written in my private journal, a few days ago, the following disconcerting observation (or was I attempting poetry?):  "I slip into and out of my private dysfunctions with a great deal of grace."

Caveat: (bio-)diversity

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Science & SciFi

New York City is justifiably famous for being one the most diverse places in the world, in human/cultural terms.  But it turns out that the city is equally notable for its biodiversity, according to an article in New York magazine (that I found out about in Tom Scocca's blog).  Partly, it seems that it's not just humans that land in New York City as immigrants and find the city a hosptitable place – the population of "invasive species" is huge.  But it all seems to sort of work.  Kind of just like the human experiment called NYC.

Interesting.

I read about things like this.  I reflect on the complex coexistence of nature and urbanism that I see in a country like South Korea (which I read is the second most densely populated country in the world, after Bangladesh – if you take city-states such as Singapore and Monaco out of the running).  I begin to wonder if those "population alarmists," who feel that the world is doomed due to human overpopulation, are completely wrong.  Human population is, without a doubt, radically altering ecosystems – including, of course, global climate change.  But… that doesn't mean that these radically altered ecosystems will necessarily "collapse" or be unsustainable.

I guess, when you get right down to it, I'm not a apocalypticist, but rather a transhumanist, in futurist matters.

Caveat: “Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.”

Language & Linguistics / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, in an interview published in Paris Review, quotes Saint Paul.  But then he makes his own version.  I'm impressed.

“Now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” For me the sentence would be “Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.”

I may be an American, with a "mexican soul" as some have accused, and with an intractable fascination for things Korean and Japanese, but philosophically I have always been incurably French.

Caveat: 1) 지극한 마음으로 부처님께 귀의합니다

Banalities & Journaling / Buddhism & Zen / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The 108 / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

“I turn to the Buddha with all my heart.”

I’m definitely sick. I thought I was feeling better, yesterday morning, but I felt like I had a fever all day.  Often, when I know I have a fever, I deliberately don’t take medicine, because my understanding is that a low-grade fever can help the body fight whatever infection it’s fighting – the fever has the function of making the environment hostile to the infection.  I have no idea if this really good practice, but it’s always been my way of coping, though it’s uncomfortable. Partly it’s because I just don’t like taking medicine.  It always feels like an assault on my existential autonomy, although that’s philosophically inconsistent if not downright ridiculous.

Last night, when I got home, I felt really rotten. I began watching some shoot-em-up action flick on the TV, but it was really annoying. I have limited patience for Bruce Willis. I changed to the Buddhist channel. I sometimes will watch this as sort of background noise, because there’s lots of complex Korean to listen to, it’s culturally interesting, and the wacky-yet-banal informercials can be an entertaining contrast.

I’ve come to realize that every evening around 6 PM, the Buddhist channel runs a sort of day-end prayer, which are in the form of 108 affirmations. Lots of Buddhist ritual comes in sets of 108, which is an important number for Buddhists.

Anyway, the title to this blog entry is affirmation number one:

1. 지극한 마음으로 부처님께 귀의합니다.

Google translate, with typical guileless aplomb, asserts that this means “Buddha mind is extreme ear.”  Which might make a good title for a comedy involving a philosophical meditation on the daredevil the body parts of great thinkers.  But I think a good translation might be:  “I turn to the Buddha with all my heart.”  The first word, “지극한” is an adjectivalized form of the descriptive verb “지극하다,” which literally means “extreme” but in this context, I think it can mean “the depths of,” i.e. “all,” modifying “마음” “heart.”

I am not becoming a Buddhist. Not in terms of commitment. I can’t – I’m a dialectical materialist, and deeply committed to an anti-spiritual, anti-transcendent worldview. But I have strong sympathies for Buddhist practices, and I have found a lot of pragmatic “peace of mind” in Buddhist-style meditative practice, specifically (such as Zen and Vipassana). And I have been encouraged by the fact that when I say things like “I’m an atheist” to Buddhists, I don’t get the shocked and alarmed reaction of Christians, who immediately begin to worry over the fate of my soul. Buddhists, on the other hand, generally say things like, “that’s OK,” or “It doesn’t really matter.” Because they express no hostility toward my worldview, I feel no hostility toward theirs. Peace begets peace.

The morning is foggy. One thing I like about the weather in Glory County, Korea, is the prevalence of fog. It takes me back to my childhood, and the Pacific fogs of the Northern California coast.

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Caveat: How Kindness Works

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

 

I found this while surfing online. It’s called “The Starfish Story.”

Once upon a time, there was a man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up. As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean. He came closer still and called out "Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?" The young man paused, looked up, and replied "I’m throwing starfish into the ocean." "I must ask, then… why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" asked the somewhat startled man. The young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die." Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and that there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!" At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, "It made a difference for that one."

I'm not so good at this, sometimes. But I believe in it.

Caveat: The Wilderness Downtown

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

"The Wilderness Downtown" is an experimental music "video" written using HTML5 by googloids.  It's pretty cool – you need Chrome to view it.  You put in your home address, and it uses footage from Google Earth and Street View to incorporate your actual house into the video, dynamically.  I can't decide if this is creepy or awesome.  Call it crawesome.

I put in my childhood home, in Arcata, and saw the very recognizable dead-end street with Peggy and Latif's cars in the driveway (Peggy and Latif being the current residents of the house where I grew up).  And there were some animated trees marching up 11th street.  Very strange.

The music is by Arcade Fire.  Not too bad.  The technical implementation of the video – which calls up large numbers of windows in a rather random way – is deficient in that it fails to deal very well with the small, non-standard-size screen of my Asus netbook computer.  The windows all hide each other and you can't see more than half of the ones it calls up.  The code would have to somehow do better at reading the display size and used scaled-down, lower resolution windows depending on what it found, maybe.

Caveat: Genesis Defunct

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

I was reading in the 13.7 blog on NPR's website that the Big Bang theory, as a theory of beginning (and not in its role of describing the universe's conditions billions of years ago), is becoming more and more precarious, scientifically.

I've always wondered a bit about this, but my take on it is more related to the problem time itself presents:  it's just a dimension, which happens to have a sort of built-in directionality or "slope" (forward), that our perceptions roll down.  And to talk of beginnings or endings in the broad sense of the whole universe neglects the very real possibility that time is a local condition, rather than a universal one.  Which is to say, there's no meaning to concepts of begenning or ending without any time.  Beyond time.

I suppose you could say that I'm trying to apply the so-called anthropic principle to time, and suggest that time is just an accident of our (local) universe that seems special but isn't.  It seems special because it's part of what gives our consciousness its unique, weird, consciousness-like characteristics.  But in the bigger picture, it's a minor, even irrelevant characteristic, or a sort of emergent property of other, deeper things, in the same way that there is a specific value for pi that emerges from the mathematical relations between points in a plane, or that we experience something we call temperature, which is really just the fact of a large bunch of particles wiggling at a certain average energy level.

Caveat: 좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈

Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

picture“좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈” is the title of a Korean western. Yes, western, as in western genre movie. It takes place in 1930’s Manchuria, which was a bit of a wild land at the time, with the Japanese trying to exert imperial control, while the Chinese, British, Germans and Russians tried to regain spheres of influence, and with disgruntled and outlaw-ish Korean freedom fighters and Mongolian tribesmen thrown into the mix.

The title is an homage to Eastwood’s classic American western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” – it translates as “the Good, the Bad and the Weird.” The title itself tells you there will be some interesting post-modern things going on. It’s over-the-top in terms of violence, but worth seeing.

I love how it includes all these seemingly out-of-sync cultural objects and references – 1920’s big-band dance music, Japanese soldiers, Korean merchants or black-marketeers, Mongolian tribesmen sitting on horses on hilltops looking like Native Americans…  but I would imagine it might not be that far off vis-a-vis what Manchuria must have been like in that era. Of course, everything is exaggerated and re-imagined, just in the way American westerns re-imagine North American history, too.

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Caveat: The faith-based economy

Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

picture

I don’t normally like South Park that much. But sometimes I watch it, because the social and cultural commentary can be so amazingly intelligent and deep-cutting. One such episode I caught recently was the one entitled “Margaritaville” about the way that what we believe really drives the economy. Kyle becomes a Jesus figure, and saves the economy by taking on everyone’s debt (the way that Jesus takes on everyone’s sins) and thus allowing everyone’s lives to return to normal. It’s pretty funny, but scarily accurate in the way that it explains how the government bailouts are supposed to work.

And another episode where Mickey Mouse beats the crap out of the Jonas Brothers is funny, too, although much nastier and cruder, more in alignment with the South Park norm.

picture

[UPDATE 2024-04-18: Originally there was a link to the episodes discussed, but that link rotted and I have no replacement link. Thank you, internet!]

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Caveat: Le Corbusier’s Fantasy, Manifest

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Walking along the Juyeop Park Esplanade yesterday in Ilsan in the humid, still evening, I watched the children playing among modernist statuary, parents playing ball with their kids, kids walking to or from hagwon as if they were college students, grandparents strolling, an old woman selling onions and garlic.  All around, a rectilinear park-like environment, punctuated by a seemingly endless array of identical high-rise apartment towers of dubious individual architectural merit.  This is Ilsan, a city of half a million that didn't exist the first time I came here, in 1991.

Yet unlike so many Modernist planned cities, Ilsan seems to work, at a very fundamental level.  Imagine something with all the charm of Cabrini Green (Chicago's infamous 1960's era Modernist housing projects), but inhabited by a mostly Lake Forest demographic.  The children play happily amid the soulless buildings, the parents are a bit overwrought, but deeply bourgeois.  This is not typical Korea, either, but it feels very much like the future.  The future that visionaries such as Le Corbusier and other Modernist "new city" proponents supposedly got so wrong. 

Ilsan represents to me the proof of the fact that although most contemporary urbanist thinking seems to focus a great deal on the way that we can influence lifestyles through how we plan our urban spaces, when you get right down to it, there are very few elements of the physical urban space that are guaranteed to make a difference, positive or negative.  Density is significant, but Ilsan is probably as automobile-reliant as any American city, if only because of the upper-middle-class status of most of its inhabitants – they need their cars, as aspirational objects, above all else.  Perhaps it makes me a bit of a cultural determinist (read:  marxist), but what makes urban spaces work has more to do with the socioeconomic position of the inhabitants than with how they are put together.

Caveat: Perseverance Predicted

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The Wonders of Work

I sometimes look at tarot cards.

pictureIt’s not that I believe that they’re predictive.  I’m dedicatedly anti-spiritualist; I’m deeply anti-transcendentalist. I don’t believe in any kind of magic, I don’t believe anything supernatural, religious or otherwise. Nevertheless, I’ve always been fascinated by tarot cards. They are symbolically “loaded” and full of interesting interpretative possibilities. In field of semiotics, they might be termed “hypersignifiers.” I guess I view them as a sort of self-administered Rohrsach test, when I lay them out.

Anyway, this morning, I laid out three cards. Recent past, present moment, upcoming near-term future. The meanings of the “past” and “present” cards were unremarkable: ambiguous and uninteresting to me. But the “future” card was striking… in its irrelevance. It was the nine of wands. The interpretative meanings are:

Perseverance — Persisting despite all setbacks and against all odds
Having the hidden reserves to prevail, to defend what is yours
Boundary issues, being defensive
Defining your “space”
“That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

I distinctly remember thinking: that doesn’t seem to apply to my near future. The recent past, maybe. But just now, I feel as if I’ve reached a kind of equilibrium with respect to my living situation and work, finally. I’ve been settling in. I thought: something would have to get much more messed up for that kind of near-term future to be meaningful or important.

But by the end of the day, today, I was muttering “perseverance, perseverance” to myself. Yes, things felt messed up at school, today. Not for me, directly – but I was witness to some majorly messed-up personnel management (which in-and-of-itself is no surprise in a Korean workplace, admittedly). I won’t describe it in detail – it’s an ongoing crisis, and not really my business, and involves people who probably know about this blog, too. Maybe I’ll discuss details later.

For some reason, I have a really hard time watching other people being treated badly in their work. Even when they somewhat deserve it or have brought upon themselves, as I’m certain is the case, here. But the situation still reeks of injustice and inhumane management. And hypocrisy – that always bugs me. And I have to deal with feeling caught in the middle. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t have a solution that anyone appreciates or even wants to hear. I don’t want to have to watch it play out in slow motion in the staff room beside me. It makes my life unpleasant. So the rest of it checks out as well. Example: boundary issues – why am I being drawn into this? Why do I have to watch and comment on this?

OK.  I still don’t believe tarot are predictive. But, it was a day with interesting psychological resonances. I’m just going to sit by, and try to keep my face looking like the guy in the picture, above.

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Caveat: Be lamps unto yourselves

Buddhism & Zen / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

"Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in your books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher.  Be lamps unto yourselves." – Gautama Buddha.

This is why I am more interested in Buddhism, despite my confident atheism, than in other religious traditions.  It offers a sort of "freedom of conscience" that e.g. Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or Islam don't appear to offer.  When I say, "I'm an atheist," I have had more than one Buddhist answer, simply, "That's OK."  It's hard to imagine a Christian saying that.

Caveat: “God’s Right”

Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

pictureThis cartoon summarizes, perfectly, my feelings about the immigration debate.

When those who oppose immigration, legal or illegal, have each taken the time and made the effort to learn at least one Native American language, and have considered the merits of Native American spirituality and culture and “walked a mile in their shoes,” only then will I take their arguments about the need to “control” immigration, and their sanctimonious arguments about “rule of law,” at all seriously.

Until then, I think Herman Melville (160 years ago!) summed up the only, truly ethical stance on immigration quite succinctly, when he wrote: “If they can get here, they have God’s right to come.”

Period.

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Caveat: bp cares

Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

pictureSo now that I have some internets, I’ve been doing some surfing around.

There’s a guy who goes by the nom-de-twit of Leroy Stick, who is apparently behind the fake BP PR tweets on twitter that have been such a hit. A sampling:

Not only are we dropping a top hat on the oil spill, we’re going to throw in a cane and monocle as well.  Keeping it classy.

I found his press release on Huffington Post, and he actually seems pretty smart. I really like the following line:

You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions.

This is brand management 101 – and it’s why 90% of marketing people don’t get it. And why the remaining 10% of marketing people are the secret masters-of-the-universe behind the magic of ethical capitalism, by functioning as the watchdogs that keep businesses honest. And it’s why I don’t believe that marketing as a profession is a bad thing.  It can be – and often is – a bad thing. But it can also be right up there with saving the world. Too bad BP doesn’t seem to have any of those types of marketing geniuses on staff.

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