AmbivaBlog

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.)

WordPress Weirdness

How bizarre is this?

Hi,
Most of our themes do not display the authors name with the post. You would either need to switch to a theme that does display the author or have the authors include their name in the contents of the post.

And this from a service that allows group blogs with up to 35 contributors for free???

So if you post on Ambiance, you'll (or I'll) have to sign your post, above or below, with your handle of choice.

Oh well.  It's worth at least what you pay for it.

Ambiance

OK, I signed up at WordPress.  You can have 35 users for free -- I think that will amply cover us in terms of people who might actually want to post from time to time.

Ambiance

There's nothing there yet, and the template (ugh) is just a placeholder.  I have a . . . what do you call it?  subtitle?  epigraph?  in mind.

A couple of questions.

Would someone like to be a co-admin and design the damn thing?  You can do custom CSS over there, but I don't have time to learn it.

How do people feel about white-on-black?  It's a no-no, right?  Just looking for that introspective nightime-café, under-a-rock feeling (overexposed to political daylight), but there must be a better way.

You could post, or just comment, or both as the mood strikes.  The only annoying thing is that if you want to post you have to become a WordPress user, but there's nothing to that.  As for those who might consider posting:

• pointer posts will be welcome, including to your own blog
• cross-posts will be fine
• very brief posts, no problem

The idea is just to start something.  Or even just to put an observation out there to contemplate.  A mood will develop, and shift.

A place to meet a little more intimate and with a longer attention span than Twitter, which is like square-dancing in Grand Central Station.  Gimme shelter.

Me Miss . . .

. . . me blog.  :(

The Only Online Dating Service . . .

. . . I'd consider.

A Tweet for Pete and Meade. [UPDATE]

And all (male) gardeners.

UPDATE:  An Iraq war vet becomes a father and a gardener at the same time.  Coincidence?

"It both must be implemented and can’t be implemented at the same time."

More of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's uncommon sense ("Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial.") [Quick, free registration required.]  That's why other economists say (to quote Theo Kojak), "never happen, baby."  A commenter called Ilya says, "This is simply an indication of the limits to how much we should be listening to Taleb."  (But goes on to say:  "Paul Wilmott make a similar point today on his blog when he takes about society reaching the limits of its own incompetence. This is a very powerful observation, I think: modern life has become so complex as to challenge our abilities to cope and our competence.")

Blaise Pascal Wrote My Epitaph.

My blog's epitaph, that is:

Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.

(Pascal also said:  "Imagination decides everything."  Go on, get your mind blown!)