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In Love With Hubble

My new post on Natural History's blog, facTotem.

Reading Sotomayor's "Wise Latina" Speech

Cross-posted from Ambiance

Thanks to Maxwell in the comments on the previous post for giving me the link to the whole speech.  I'm going to "liveblog" my reading of it.

First of all, it's in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal.  That alone speaks volumes.  Berkeley is Berkeley and "La Raza" is "the race."

What identity politics did was to turn a negative special identity into a positive one -- even the bad experiences of discrimination became a kind of ennobling crucifixion (á la Karl Marx's thinking when he somehow assumed the oppressed classes were something other than human and, having experienced injustice, would inevitably be just).  Finding the positive in precisely what has been defined as negative can be a useful step towards full participation (as I found out with my "elevator," feminism).  Minority conservatives found advantages in skipping that step (they were rewarded for volunteering to be poster children for the idea that you could skip that step, a step that can release unseemly anger).  Identity politicians found advantages and rewards in getting stuck in it and wallowing there.

(Sorry, blogger's disease -- you can't read a sentence or even so much as a title without blathering a Talmud on it.)

Second:  the subtitle of the symposium in which Sotomayor's speech was delivered is "Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation."  As someone pointed out yesterday, the judiciary is not a representative body.  That's the legislature.  The judiciary ideally represents something that is impartial and above all particular identities:  the law.  If any part of government should be colorblind, it's the judiciary.  The way to be "represented" in the judiciary is to produce competitively excellent legal minds.

But presumably Sotomayor didn't run the symposium, she just took part in it.

Someone also pointed out that her parents, who came to the U.S. during World War II, were not "immigrants" in the usual sense because they were already U.S. citizens!  I'll break my usual fact checker's rule and quote Wikipedia:  "In 1917, the Jones-Shafroth Act granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship . . .  As a result of their new U.S. citizenship, many Puerto Ricans were drafted into World War I and all subsequent wars with U.S. participation."

Then it turns out ethnicity is all about warm memories of special foods and music.  Right, that we can all appreciate.  That's about where it belongs.

Tension between melting pot and salad bowl?  Exactly.  And why is that a problem?  What's wrong with being a 100% American who likes pigs' intestines? . . . Okay, in American society it's also "struggle" that forges a minority ethnic identity.  Hate to say I told you so.

Tsk, she doesn't know you're not supposed to say "Afro-American" any more.

Spanish is so cumbersome, or should I say formal and flowery?  Have you ever noticed, in a bilingual sign, how much longer it takes in Spanish to say something like "No Smoking"?  The language requires her to say "Latino or Latina" every time.

Bean counting:  "Those numbers [on the judiciary] are grossly below our proportion of the population."  Hello, not a representative branch of government.  Naturally it will take a come-from-behind group longer to populate the highest echelons of the professions to roughly its percentage of the general population.  The concern should be for pushing, not pulling -- for improving education and aspiration at the lower levels, not engineering outcomes at the top.  But maybe she'll go ahead and say this.

Not so far.  More bean counting.  "Sort of shocking, isn't it?"  She sounds outcomes-focused, pro-affirmative action.

Now we're getting to the crux of it.  Paraphrasing Judge Cedarbaum:

Now Judge Cedarbaum expresses concern with any analysis of women and presumably again people of color on the bench, which begins and presumably ends with the conclusion that women or minorities are different from men generally. She sees danger in presuming that judging should be gender or anything else based. She rightly points out that the perception of the differences between men and women is what led to many paternalistic laws and to the denial to women of the right to vote . . .

While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law.

Judge Sotomayor wonders "whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases," and "whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society."

Whatever the reasons why we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning, are in many respects a small part of a larger practical question we as women and minority judges in society in general must address.

Sloppy expression; not at all clear whether she means the two sexes might have "basic differences in logic  and reasoning," an argument that some brain studies can be used to support, or whether she goes further and extends that same speculation to "races," which would be a real shocker. That way lies Leonard Jeffries, former head of Black Studies at New York's City College:

Blacks are "sun people," Jeffries explains, and whites are "ice people." New York Newsday quoted Jeffries as telling his students last year, "Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in world history." Jeffries believes melanin, the dark skin pigment, gives blacks intellectual and physical superiority over whites.

You wonder if there's a subtle strain of that kind of thinking in Sotomayor's key remark about the "wise Latina woman."

She acknowledges Stephen Carter's and Judith Resnik's point that the experiences, opinions, and voices of any group of people are not monolithic.  "No one person, judge or nominee will speak in a female or people of color voice."

Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration . . . [emphasis added]

No one would argue with the second bolded sentence, but the first -- realism or relativism?  Sotomayor's examples raise more questions than can be answered without knowing the particulars of cases:

The Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of this. As reported by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit Court, three women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting agreed to grant a protective order against a father's visitation rights when the father abused his child. The Judicature Journal has at least two excellent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart to uphold women's claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal defendants' claims in search and seizure cases.

Whoa, women judges have more "empathy" for criminal defendants?  Yikes.

In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women.

So what?  Isn't that exactly as it should be?  The point is that even though the judges were all white males, they heard those advocates.  Call it empathy or call it justice.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. . . . I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise.

I am not so sure that I agree with that statement.  Minnow (or Minow) is the relativist who is helping Sotomayor to wriggle out of the law's aspiration to universality.  Some Republican senator should read Minow and then challenge Sotomayor with particular quotes.

Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

There it is in context, and I still can't tell whether she's talking about all cases or particularly about cases that involve "that life."  That question of mine remains unanswered, Maxwell.  Many of her following statements, though, seem uncontroversial:

Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar.  I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage. . . .

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations.  [OK, but tricky balance to be struck -- you can't aspire if you're too quick to accept.] I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.

That's intelligent -- it suggests that she will strive to be aware of her sympathies and biases, not to deny them but to see beyond them.  In the next breath, though, she's back to numbers and "representation," with its implication that only women can justly judge women, and so on.  Her argument is that it takes too long to educate and broaden everyone's imagination, and in the indefinite meantime, affirmative action/more proportional representation is the only way to assure justice for the historically oppressed:

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench.

It's much like the argument in literature that you only have the right and ability to write about people like yourself.  There go Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina . . .

The link between imagination and justice -- now there's an interesting subject.

Abortion, Again.

Cross-posted from Ambiance

A blogfriend sent me the link to a Chicago Sun-Times column by Neil Steinberg, titled "What's Behind the Anti-Abortion Frenzy?", which revives the old canard that pro-lifers are really anti-sex.  More interestingly, it links to Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman's essay "Safe, Legal, and Early," which maintains that the legal question about abortion shouldn't be "Yes or no?" but "When?"  This was my response.

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Obviously, Waldman's position (I read through the link) is the one the great majority of people hold, myself included.  I'd like people to be a lot more conscious of the real stakes when they consider having an abortion at any stage (or, a significant step back, having unprotected sex risking an unintended pregnancy), but most traditions (the Jewish tradition certainly) have long recognized a continuum on which the woman's (or family's) decision prevails early in pregnancy and that shifts as the fetus develops.

I don't know that it matters whether the abortion debate is a proxy for a desire to make sex safe, legal, and rare (LOL).  I used to think that, but second-guessing and psychoanalyzing pro-lifers' moral convictions has come to seem condescending and insulting to me.  What matters is whether they can impose their own choices, noble as they may be, on everyone else, and whether, if they can't, they view it as an utter defeat by a satanic society.  (The rhetoric around Notre Dame's invitation to Obama -- from some of my own blogfriends, I might add -- was so overblown, it was really depressing to me.)

Maybe no change happens without absolutist fervor (as a commenter says here, "Seriously, it’s nice to be civil, but Obama has to realize that it took a wild-eyed extremist (John Brown) and the death of 600,000 Americans to end slavery and make it possible for him to be President"), and without the feminist push for "abortion on demand" all abortion would have remained illegal and dangerous, and without the pro-life movement people would have blown off the moral momentousness of the decision and settled down in a very degraded place.  To the extent that I'm getting my wish of people being more conscious of the stakes, the push-back by pro-lifers is largely -- no, almost solely -- responsible.  Thanks to free speech they've done a beautiful job of dragging our attention back to the gravity of wishing away a unique human being.  Thanks to that, we are within reach of finally getting the legal balance right.  If the absolutists on both sides will let it happen.  Which requires the vast middle to finally speak up.

Thanks, maybe I'll even post this, although the whole topic hits me on my broken heart.  I will repeat that I'm grateful for the change in the culture the pro-life movement has wrought, and that it is culture, not law, that could have tipped my own decision the other way.  Just living in today's culture, instead of on the condom-littered beach where the tide of the '70s had just begun to creep out, would have been enough.  I want us to continue moving, voluntarily, in that direction.

P.S. Steinberg coins a rather chilling term for abortion:  "murder lite."  Here is what I think is the most literal and accurate description of what early abortion is and what it does:  nipping a human life in the bud.

Roll Your Own.

Cross-posted from Ambiance

Via the Anchoress, John Podhoretz opines that mainstream, mass pop culture is dead.  That sounds right.  He and the Anchoress both speculate on the reasons.  I'd like to throw in mine:

People are now making their culture instead of consuming it. All these new devices and venues have been nothing but empowering, liberating.  We're our own and one another's pundits and publishers, storytellers and networks.  The audience has rebelled, risen up, and thrown off its chains of passivity.  The inmates are running the asylum.  And the resultant anarchy is creating a rich, deep layer of life, as fertile and self-organizing as soil.

Don't miss the comments over there.

My Mom Writes a Book Review

Cross-posted from Ambiance

My mother has always been a good writer, but now she's at the top of her powers.  She's 85.  So I guess there's hope for the rest of us.

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It took me all these years since this book was published (2005) to get up the courage to read it. It is pretty remarkable. For those acquainted with grief--and who isn't?--there is insight to be gained as you recognize the overwheming humanity of loss and the bewildered responses of the newly bereaved. We do negelct the mourning and grieving that has always been part of existence. Whether this book compensates for that or not, I can't say.

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it." In The Year of Magical Thinking, her account of a life upended by her husband John's sudden death, Joan Didion chronicles the craziness, the jumble of events, emotions, memories she endures as she tries to make sense and order out of his death and her life. But what sets this book apart is Didion's meticulous documenting of her mind's twists and turns, her application of magical thinking to escape the inexorable rules of time and place and create a different ending for what has already happened. But all the king's horses can't repeal the law of the Democratic Republic of Death and alter an outcome. It is her straightforward narration, in all its dignity, complexity, and pathos that makes this such a riveting story. Not a "comfort book" in the conventional sense, it is a saga for explorers into the human heart and spirit, the Marco Polos, the Walter Raleighs, the Shackletons who enter unknown territory.

Maybe part of why I wanted first to make myself read that book and then to write something about it is that being old gives one a changing persepctive on death, maybe even on the act--or art--of dying, the part of the phenomenon of life that we don't deal with very well. If being alive is a fulcrum, then life is one arm, death the other. I envision a seesaw. The death end is shrouded in fog and fear. Why?

~ Jean S. Gottlieb

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Chutes and Ladders

Cross-posted from Ambiance

Okay, since economics is what we find ourselves talking about, I'll bite:  here's an aspect of economics, contentious and critical to economic policymaking, that strikes me as important and fascinating.

It's the study of how impulses, incentives, and consequences shape human behavior.  I think it's called behavioral economics:

Economic Man makes logical, rational, self-interested decisions that weigh costs against benefits and maximize value and profit to himself. Economic Man is an intelligent, analytic, selfish creature who has perfect self-regulation in pursuit of his future goals and is unswayed by bodily states and feelings. And Economic Man is a marvelously convenient pawn for building academic theories. But Economic Man has one fatal flaw: he does not exist.

When we turn to actual human beings, we find, instead of robot-like logic, all manner of irrational, self-sabotaging, and even altruistic behavior. [...]

Nonetheless, neoclassical economics sidelined such psychological insights. As recently as 15 years ago, the sub-discipline called behavioral economics—the study of how real people actually make choices, which draws on insights from both psychology and economics—was a marginal, exotic endeavor. Today, behavioral economics is a young, robust, burgeoning sector in mainstream economics, and can claim a Nobel Prize, a critical mass of empirical research, and a history of upending the neoclassical theories that dominated the discipline for so long.

This new field doesn't just pick the brains of psychologists (to whom, one senses, it could give a whole new useful life), but those of neurologists, and, implicitly, of sociobiologists, who view these hard-wired behavioral mechanisms as winners of the competition to survive:

“Economists specialize in taking really complex things and boiling them down to simple principles,” says David Laibson. “So, rather than treat the brain as billions of neurons, or trillions of neurotransmitters, we want to ask, what is the right level of analysis? It turns out that the brain has two key subsystems. One, the limbic and paralimbic system, rules the intuitive and affective parts of our psyches. It’s shared by all mammals and seems to do a lot of emotional cognition—how we feel emotionally, how we respond to other humans, or to being treated unfairly. This system seems to function unconsciously; we don’t have access to it and maybe can’t even control it. It’s experiential and rapid in function.

“Contrast that with the analytic system, centered in the frontal and parietal cortexes,” Laibson continues. “It controls a lot of the thought processes we learn to do: calculated, conscious, future-oriented thinking. It’s not based on past experience; you could have the rules of a brand-new game explained and the analytic system would be able to figure out how to play.”

Brain researchers have shown that an interaction of the limbic and analytic systems governs human decision-making. The limbic system seems to radically discount the future. While the analytic system’s role remains constant from the present moment onward, the limbic system assumes overriding importance in the present moment, but rapidly recedes as rewards move into the future and the emotional brain reduces its activation. This explains impulsiveness: the slice of pizza that’s available right now trumps the dietary plan that the analytic brain has formulated. Seizing available rewards now might be a response pattern with evolutionary advantages, as future benefits are always uncertain.

There it is right there:  the seat of no-tomorrowism!

Strangely, even more interesting to me than the study of human motivation (which is only going to end up proving what the wise have always known, verifying millennia of maxims and canny clichés) is the engineering angle:  the study of how to motivate humans.  It interests me, I think, because it's what so much of the disagreement between right and left comes down to.  What optimizes motivation?  Struggle or security?

America, relatively speaking, lacks a social safety net.  There's a feeling -- I've felt it -- that you have to succeed to survive.  It's very starkly Darwinian:  there isn't much middle ground.  Is it this anxiety that spurs us on to great heights as a nation?  Or does it actually sap creativity, condemning all but the entrepreneurially fierce and fit to waste their lives and gifts struggling to get by?  Does assuring people's basic survival, at the root of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, free them to climb that tree and be curious and creative?  Or does it take the edge off and make them lazy and dependent?  I don't know the answer, but suspect it's not totally either/or.  On the one hand, our nervous systems are tuned to peril and triumph.  On the other hand, beyond a certain degree of stress we lapse into "learned helplessness," the depressed state of experimental animals that have learned there's nothing they can do to predict, avoid, or prevent random electric shocks.  The Maslovian view posits way too much Rousseauian optimism about human nature.  The social-Darwinian view selects for manic extraversion, creating a bit of a one-note culture.  Introverts must medicate to keep up.

A related question is:  what is definitely in society's collective interest to provide, overriding concerns about the effects on individual self-reliance and moral fiber?  The common defense, clearly.  The internal version of defense -- law and policing, the maintenance of public order.  Sanitation, a no-brainer.  I think a strong case can be made for education:  not that the public sector should monopolize education, but that it should make it available to all as the default.  Very much in the collective interest -- anyone care to count the ways?  Scientific competitiveness (from Sputnik to the new spur of globalization) is only one.

Far more controversial:  various forms of the basic income guarantee, and health care.  To many liberals it seems self-evident that providing single-payer health care is in the collective interest.  Conservatives say that market incentives make American health care, for all its problems, much more innovative and effective.  You saw the arguments that Natasha Richardson would not have died in the U.S.

Incentives and consequences are the most fascinating part of the picture, on every level.  The elusive preventive aspect of health care, for instance.  This is one of the areas where the limbic system presents a major stumbling block.  When the supermarket is packed with snacks and advertising issues perpetual siren songs for supersized this and that, how do you help the analytical forebrain override the impulse with remote concerns about longevity, economy, and even vanity, a limbic reward that requires an analytical abstinence?  The limbic brain doesn't get the time lag between eating a pint of Ben & Jerry's and gaining a pound.

And then, when there are penalties for good behavior, and rewards for bad behavior, what do you think you're going to get?

Front page story of today’s NYT discusses the small, well managed, profitable, risk averse banks.

Indeed, as Chris Whalen has so frequently noted, the vast majority of banks in the United States are Triple A by his standards. Its just that these 6,500 banks hold a minority of the total deposits in the nation, with biggest dozen or so banks sitting on 65% or so.

Talk about burying the lead: The Times also noted — in the very last paragraphs — how the big incompetent banks and their very pricey bailouts are screwing these small healthy banks:

“At DeMotte [State Bank, an 11-branch operation in the northwest part of Indiana, Bank President] Mr. Goetz is bracing for a steep increase in a crucial overhead cost: the bill from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which is basically an insurance fund underwritten by banks.

Last year, DeMotte paid $42,000 into the fund. This year, because of failures in other parts of the country and particularly among national banks, that sum will rise to $500,000 or more.

“Isn’t that the American way?” he says, folding his arms. “Whoever is left standing, whoever was prudent, is always the one who has to pick up the pieces.”

Thus, yet another reason why these bailouts are so absurd: They punish the risk averse and reward the irresponsible . . .

Why do we have different standards for large institutions and little guys?  I've long been fascinated by what I think of as "selective Darwinism" -- applying the stringency of survival of the fittest to some categories while bailing out others.  (I guess you could argue that getting too big to fail is a form of fitness, a special case of the general point that mega-success is the surest path to survival.) Our thinking, both right and left, seems extremely muddled in this regard.  Incentives and consequences -- chutes and ladders -- are what it's all about.  Both the sages and the neurologists will tell you that.

I wish I could do a better job of thinking this through, but I've already stolen too much time from work.  Please jump in.

UPDATE: And speaking of incentives, what do you think of paying kids to learn, promoted by Newt Gingrich?

[T]he Learning Makes a Difference Foundation [...] focuses on innovative learning programs, such as Learn, Earn and Achieve, which offers students financial rewards for studying math and science.

[...P]reviously uninterested students not only improve their math and science scores but discover the thrill of learning for learning's sake.

The pilot program is called Learn, Earn & Achieve.  It may not be idealistic -- it turns my vestigial hippie stomach, sure -- but it's realistic, isn't it?  Remuneration is one of the reasons why we do what we do.  Getting up, getting dressed, and "going to school" in the morning already trains you for getting up, getting dressed, and "going to work" in the morning.  School is a kid's job.  It has the same structure.  For better or worse, it's training for adult life in our society.  Why not teach them that good work brings good pay?  Instead of an allowance?  (And instead of the basic income guarantee?)  Of course, then parents would have to help them decide how much of it they should save for college tomorrow and how much they can blow on gear today.  That could be good training too.  What do you think?

I guess the part of it I might question is that last:  discover the thrill of learning for learning's sake."  Would kids who got paid for learning ever see any point in doing it voluntarily for free?  But then, school as it is today doesn't exactly consistently convey the thrill of learning for learning's sake.  Raise your hand if you enjoyed the Great Novels you had to read?  The thrill of learning for learning's sake depends most on the quality of the teacher.

UPDATE II: @newtgingrich "Learning IS the most important civil right in the 21st century and it should apply to every american of all ages to compete with china"

And, as stated above, in society's collective interest to provide, for many reasons, scientific competitiveness being only one.  Think of the advantages of having an informed, critically thinking populace -- or more to the point, a populace with the skills to inform itself.  Or, even more to the point, think of the disadvantages of not having such a populace.

Don't miss the comments over at Ambiance.

Are We All Blogged Out?

(Cross-posted from Ambiance)

It's been quite a topic on Twitter among our little loosely-defined community.  A bunch of us seem to have gone blooey all at once, as if responding helplessly to some shift in the heavens, or in the collective unconscious.  The cultural wavefront has moved on, but whither?  Twitter feels transitional, somehow.  But blogging just seems to have peaked and ebbed . . . to have reached a saturation point, or point of diminishing returns.  Maybe after several years of emptying out our minds daily (like chamber pots?) a lot of us are running out of things to say, or feel in danger of repeating ourselves.  Maybe, with the exception of those blogs that have broken through -- become established institutions in their niches, sustained by massive rewards, expectations, and inertial momentum -- a lot of us just couldn't keep up the effort any longer.  Myself, I felt right on the borderline between private and public:  blogging was no longer something I was doing just for myself, and so there was guilt and sorrow involved in (mostly) quitting.  But I plum ran out of gas.  (A gasbag without gas?)

It's interesting to ponder Ann Althouse's role in all this.  As the sort of leader of this particular pack, did she issue the cue we're all following, or was she just an early responder to something larger?  I suspect the latter, even though it feels to a lot of us as if the sun has deserted its faithful planets and run off to join a twin star.  Oh, she's still blogging, but you get the sense that her heart, quite understandably, isn't in it to nearly the same extent.  And so it is for many of us in miniature:  "real life," and even "real writing," calls.

Of course there's an element of pure practicality, of energetic economy, to it all.  Are you getting enough calories out to keep putting them in?  I was amused to read, yesterday, "Is Blogging Keeping You Poor?

We drive ourselves to creative exhaustion by expecting ourselves to pump out a never-ending stream of remarkable content — a stream that, even in the best of cases, only pulls in a couple hundred bucks a month in advertising revenue. . . .

To say we are overworked and underpaid is an understatement. . . .

[C]reative energy is a finite resource. You can probably summon enough to write a few quality posts, but once you’ve done that, there’s no creative energy left for anything else. It doesn’t matter how hard you push yourself. When you’re out, you’re out.

This character goes on to say the solution is working less and "monetizing" more, but that's not what most of us want.  To be blunt, we -- at least the "we" who write, have written, or aspire to write and be sustained by it -- want to work just as hard, or joyously harder, and get paid for it.  A friend of mine who did women's-magazine writing and editing for years, and wrote three amazing, groundbreaking books -- all of them probably just a little too subtle and unsettling to be smash hits -- is now writing online in the same vein, and being expected by major commercial women's websites to be grateful for the opportunity to provide content for free.  "I used to get paid for this," she said to me recently in a dazed and rueful "What happened??" tone.  The Web is full of writers who never quite broke through "in real life" and have failed to break through here too, in the sense of making a living wage.  Obviously, it's our "fault" -- we haven't hit a major nerve,  we haven't built a "platform," we have neither wakefully figured out how to exploit ourselves nor obliviously embodied the spirit of the age, which are the two roads to having a name that pulls its weight.  We're "minor" and we're proud.  And tired.

It's sad, though.  It's the end of a mini-era that's lasted five years or so.  Where now?  We have to follow where the piper leads.  It's interesting to me to watch what we're talking about here when we're talking at all.  It's mostly the economy, stupid, with a minor in my obsessive theme of science and religion.  It's interesting to become aware of the extent to which blogging has been a political medium.  The death of blogging, at least in its familiar voice and form, is linked to a sense of the profound inadequacy of politics to address what ails us.  But politics, it turns out, was easy to talk about.  Whether you took one side or the other or spun your web between them, it provided a ready-made framework for and spur to words.  And now?  What do we take off from?  What do we react to?  We're like baby spiders floating in space with our little bits of silk, having as yet found nothing to attach them to.

Le blog est mort, vive le blog?

Squirrels: A Political Allegory [UPDATED]

(cross-posted from Ambiance)

One morning early this month, I noticed that my cats were riveted by something outside the glass porch door.  Two sawed-off young squirrels, perfect miniatures not half the size of a grown one, plumy tails carried forward over their backs like comb-overs, were apparently taunting the cats -- leaping on the screen, running up and down it, all but sticking out their tongues and flapping tiny fingers.  They were either too young and dumb to know what a cat was, or they were smart enough to understand that these couldn't get at them.  They were having fun.

I had what a soft-hearted, mush-headed human being thinks is a good idea:  I threw a handful of birdseed on the porch from last year's failed bird feeder (which was, of course, taken over by squirrels) to keep them coming.  Everyone was having such a good time.  No harm, no foul.

And of course, they kept coming with a vengeance, sometimes two, sometimes just one, vacuuming up the birdseed and giving the cats' nervous systems a workout.

I don't know when it happened, but this morning I looked out and saw two young squirrels of very different sizes.  One was about 2/3 the size of an adult and the other was tiny, about 1/3 the size.  And lo and behold, the hefty one was driving away the little one.  He/she/it seemed almost more interested in defending its territory than in eating:  every time the tiny, obviously very hungry (to a human's imagination) squirrel ventured timidly towards the food, the big one aggressively chased it off.  Only then would the hefty one return to eating, literally scooping the seeds together with its paws and shoveling them into its mouth.

There are two possibilities here.  One is that we have two siblings, one of whom is succeeding at the other's expense.  Happens all the time in nature.  Two or three cubs or kits or chicks are born and the balance tips early on:  one or more gain an edge and use that greater strength to gain more and more strength until the the weak ones starve to death.  Baby birds of many species in the nest will even shove their weaker sibling overboard, or peck him/her to death.  Parents do not intervene.  It's a jungle out there, and you have to be capable of looking out for yourself.

The other possibility is that the little one is simply younger, a baby squirrel from another, later litter, and the big one is chasing away a genetically unrelated (or less-related) competitor.  In that case, it's just a matter of first come, first served.  Who said life was fair?

Having already screwed with nature by putting out this unnatural treasure trove of food, now what (if anything) do I do?  The point is not what I do, but the political correlates of my conflicting impulses.

Do I let the cats out?  You know what would happen -- not what I intended:  they would get the little one.  (But then at least its existence wouldn't be for naught.   They also serve who only die and are eaten.)

Do I intervene on behalf of the little one, driving the big one away?  This would be the liberal solution, but also the Christian one.  God created all and He loves the weak -- with their less obvious, less material strengths -- even more than the strong.  He just has an awfully funny way of showing it.  But He created soft-hearted humans and bags of birdseed to redress the imbalance.

Or do I (pretending I haven't already skewed things) "let nature take its course," even secretly admiring its ruthless efficiency at selecting the most resourceful and robust?

Is the big squirrel the better businessman who drives inefficient competitors out of town?  Or the amoral businessbrute who will do whatever it takes to succeed?  Is it Bill Gates, enforcing the de facto monopoly of mediocrity that he got by being first out of the gate?  Is it Wal-Mart, using the size it has already gained to prevent start-ups from getting market share?  Is it an African kleptocrat stealing all the aid while the intended beneficiaries starve?

What I do:  throw more handfuls of seed out there (bailing out General Motors?  no, that would be an old, toothless squirrel) in the hope that Biggie will get so full that he/she staggers off belching before all the food is gone.  And that's exactly what happens:  the little one gets a chance!  But whether because it is younger or weaker, it is indeed an inefficient eater, picking up seeds slowly, one at a time, and leaving before it has made much of a dent in the remainder.

You just can't help some squirrels.  Even God helps those who help themselves.

UPDATE: Just spoke to a friend, the same one referenced in the post on saving newspapers.  I helped him write a foundation mission statement, and in the process learned a great deal about the futility, if not harmfulness, of much development aid.  Out of the blue, he happened to tell me that in a project he once supported in Haiti, where an idealistic doctor is trying to produce peanut butter to nourish children’s brains in the crucial years up to age 5, even if they manage to get the peanut butter made and distributed to homes, the children’s stronger older siblings steal the peanut butter from the little ones and eat it themselves.

The Longest Day: My Excellent Adventures Offline

(cross-posted from Ambiance)

I. I don't know exactly what made me decide to take an Internet sabbath yesterday.  I think it was Twitter that was the last straw.  Now I had a new thing to run and check every few minutes, and before each segment of my workout, and instead of vacuuming, and . . . there I was, ending a long yet too-quick day, already riddled with time online, by catching up with the whole Twitter stream and even trying to goose it along a little bit, refreshing the browser in the hope that someone would still say something . . . My disabled husband was deteriorating from neglect (and my deadline excuse ended Friday), my young Siamese cat came and stared intently cross-eyed into my eyes, touched my face with a paw to invite me to play, and I couldn't be bothered because I was reading somebody's damned tweet, or writing one.

I was disgusted with myself, and a little alarmed.  When I first got to New York, 21 and very shy, at some point I realized I was using a glass or two of wine to loosen up socially.  That dependency set off an alarm bell and I stopped drinking anything alcoholic for a while.  This was like that.

I didn't have any big plans to quit -- going online is not a dangerous drug, after all, it's a semi-productive and understandably beguiling activity -- just take a day off to break the insidious stranglehold it was getting on me, like some caressing, immobilizing vine.  The only way to do it was to decide that going online Sunday was simply not an option.  When at one point I needed to look up a medical item in my archived e-mail -- the only time I touched the computer all day -- I felt a stab of panic and hope:  how could I do that without getting today's e-mail, and thereby getting sucked back into the vortex?  Much as I felt the sick habitual tug, I really didn't want to go there.  Simple:  turn off AirPort.

But what if my parents try to reach me, and worry? They'll call you, idiot.  Better yet, you call them.

II. An hour or two in -- time spent doing chores with uncommon focus and dispatch -- I think, I feel like a better person already.

I think about how much fun it will be to go online tomorrow and post about what a better person I was when I wasn't online.

Notice that with chagrin.  Think, what the hell.  Might as well go online right now and write a post called "Failed Experiment," concluding that I am a bad person.

Oh, no you don't.  Not an option.

So then I think of writing all these thoughts down so I can make them into a funny post tomorrow.  (And I actually did:  otherwise I'd never remember all this.)  My funny post will be famous:  most e-mailed!  Most tweeted!  And then I think, what the &%@#?!  I'm not online, and I'm still online!  I'm still playing the game, still not playing with the cat, cleaning up, or working out, much less attending to my husband.

III. Every time I have a thought, even a trivial one, I feel an urge to share and/or display it -- because I can.  Each thought coins itself in crisp, sharp words, almost as if already typed out.  But if I don't actually type it out, it will quickly blur, and then dissolve and be washed away without a trace, the way most thoughts in human heads were before all this was invented.  Why did you think they were called "passing thoughts," dolt?

The reality, though, is that even if I do type it out, it will still blur, dissolve, and be washed away.  We're all thinking into the Intertubes the way we're pissing into the plumbing:  the vast majority of our thoughts merely mingle as they flow through the sewer system and out to sea.

No matter.  If I've typed mine out in a public place, even if no one sees or remembers them, I've written my "Kilroy Was Here" on an underpass of the universe.

IV. I develop a grudging new respect for the people who are online to flog blogs and Twitter for commerce.  At least they're getting something out of it besides primate jollies.  It's mortifying to be spending so much time in what is essentially glorified grooming.

V. God, there's a lot of time out here!

On a usual Sunday morning, the beginning of This Week overtakes me:  I look up from the computer screen and I've already missed the first ten minutes.  This morning I wait for ten o'clock and it dawdles and dallies toward me.  It's 9:50! I go into the bathroom and read an old Vanity Fair for half an hour.  I come out and it's 9:55!

This is refreshing, especially when you've been feeling like you were lashed to the front of a bullet train hurtling deathwards.  I feel as if I've suddenly stumbled on the secret of long life and it isn't, like we joke in my family, Keep breathing! It's Quit tweeting!

There is lots of time -- more than you know what to do with -- and there is also a superabundance of free attention to lavish on each thing you do, to surround it with from all sides.  Each thing you do is very three-dimensional; you have time on your hands and bandwidth in your brain to contemplate it from infinite angles, like Picasso.  You realize you've been living in Flatland -- everything reduced to a screen.

I discover what I've been escaping from.  I discover the bleakness of paying steady attention to a mentally disabled companion.  I discover that it would be possible to clean house incessantly, as my mother almost does -- there's always one more thing to put away or wipe up -- and what does it get you?  A clean house.

J confounds all my resolutions to dedicate myself to his revival; all he wants to do is sleep.  So I tackle my files.  I compulsively organized them once before, but then for a year or more I just threw everything into a bottom file drawer, to be sorted out "later."  But now it's later:  I'm going to have to do the taxes, so I tear through these piles of paper fast and furiously, throwing an enormous amount out (envelopes, fly cards, bill inserts) and organizing the rest.  Being an all-or-nothing kind of person, I save and file scrupulously by date things I know I'll probably never need.  Unless the IRS audits me.  But I don't feel there's order unless there's order down to the bone.  That's why I let things get into such a mess, if that makes any sense at all.

It's only when I take a break from filing that I feel a pang of the urge to spend my break online, and it's only habit -- each pang gets fainter, like fading echoes.

I do laundry.  I hand-wash my delicate shirts.  I vacuum.  Finally J wakes up and agrees to work out with me.  And he starts to come out of his decline and daze.  For the first time since before I went to Florida, he can stand up with the walker just long and strong enough for me to grab the waistband of his pants (I'm standing on the bed with one foot on the seat of the wheelchair) and swivel him into the wheelchair.  He does some vestigial stretches and karate punches sitting down, and I see the moment when he comes even more into focus.  After we work out I take him to K&W Cafeteria for supper.  We come home and I watch The Negotiator and In Treatment with him.  I get him into bed.  I play with Rainy for a good long time.

Only then do I warily circle around writing this.  I feel as if I've completely lost the fevered beat, and it feels good, like finally getting free of an earworm.  It's reassuring that I can de-adapt so fast.  And it's pleasurable, so I'll want to do it again.

VI. I still don't think the Internet is a bad drug.  On the contrary.  The blogosphere and the Twitterverse are places of amazing ferment:  a hive mind to which each brings a dab of nectar; a teeming sourdough starter for the next culture.  Their genius -- and their jonesiness -- is being at once a place to chatter and brag and play for laughs, as comes so naturally to us tribal primates, and a place of contagion and mutation, an agora where ideas cross-fertilize as fast as viruses swap genes.

It's just that, like anything, it isn't everything.  And when it starts to become everything, it's time to turn off, tune out, and drop in.  Real life is the mother lode.  The more you go there, the more you'll have to bring back.

Trembling on the Brink

Cross-posted from Ambiance

. . . of huge changes, we are.  Will we make it across this threshold?  Will we fall back into comfortable darkness, still warm and smelly and shaped to our bodies like a dog’s nest?  Will we disintegrate trying to cross the threshold, like a spaceship shuddering apart under the stress of approaching the speed of light?

Science has everything to do with it.  Working with science is making me perpetually uneasy.  First of all it is disorienting.  And humiliating.  Finding out how infinitesimally tiny and limited we are.  We’re just big enough, and just smart enough, to have found out how tiny and dumb we are, in a teeming, swarming universe that doesn’t need us and that we’re too short-lived and body-burdened, with our brief window of negentropy before we fizzle out like Roman candles, even to get a tiny little piece of.  We were better off when we were as myopic and as obsessed with our own blown-large biological affairs as ants, or rutting deer.  (Maybe I’m only speaking for myself and how fearful it is to lose the rosy blinders and the purpose of sex.)

With science comes terrifying power that we’re not wise enough to wield, and . . . and a loss of orientation that is expressed both in the unwarranted cockiness of atheists whistling in the dark and in the head-in-the-sand atavism of all kinds of fundamentalists.  We’re going over the threshold into an understanding of the cosmos and the gene that will require that we throw out the horse-and-buggy metaphysics that got us this far and almost start over from scratch.  Anybody — New-Ager, “Bright,” or traditionalist — who thinks there’s a quick, easy, comfortable answer to that is in denial.

How to stay open, yet to have some guidance . . . what a challenge.  You see it in this post at Althouse about Sharia, and you see it in these recent notes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Even more tha[n] in Hayek’s days, the ecology of the real world is becoming too complex for Aristotelian logic: very, very little of what we do can be safely formalized, meaning asymmetries matter more than ever. Which puts the Western World today at the most dangerous point in its history: unless we get the Bernanke-Summers crowd out of there, it will eventually be destroyed by the machinery of arrogant, formal-thinking civil servants, and Ivy-league semi-retards.

Finally, beyond the current mess, I see no way out of this ecological problem, except through that tacit, unexplainable, seasoned, thoughtful, and aged thing crystalized by traditions & religions –we can’t live without charts and we need to rely on the ones we’ve used for millennia. Le 21e siecle sera religieux, ou ne sera pas!

Is that so?  Can religion handle this?  Can anything aged handle this, anything that was built on the snug foundation of our ignorance?  Can the moral parts of religion withstand cosmology’s assault on its myths?  Isn’t religion a willfull staying childish?  And isn’t atheism just braggart adolescence with zits?  Aren’t all bets off?  Can religion’s knowledge about us, what we are, what we need, survive stripped of the myths?  Or are the myths part of what we need?  If so, then we cannot evolve beyond our current condition, we should never even have gotten this far, and we’ve hit a wall.

Economic lack of confidence coming at the same time is a double whammy.  Boom times make people feel manic and optimistic and anticipatory.  It’s like those pirates chewing qat for courage.  Bust times make us feel shadowed and threatened and like no good can come of this.  We’ve swum out too deep, it’s cold and the drug is wearing off.

Afterthought: Maybe we must cling to the comforting husk of religion for a while (a century?) the way a butterfly or moth clings to the chrysalis it has just crawled out of while its wings expand.  (I’m not saying religion’s knowledge of human nature isn’t deep and wise.  I’m saying that scientific discoveries are shattering the myths and explanations that were among religion’s major mechanisms for managing that nature.  Of course, I think those discoveries are also shattering the assumptions of mechanistic atheism.  So again, all bets are off.)