Rational Philosophy

The unfolding hostage (just freed) and bomb threat at Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign office provides a sobering example of the difference between rhetoric and reality. As an armed man stands off with a bomb strapped to his chest the sparring between campaign candidates doesn’t seem the slightest bit important. Reality trumps rhetoric every time.

Critics of former mayor Rudy Giuliani have stepped up their attacks on his rhetorical device of bandying about mistated, inflated or exaggerated statistics to present his mayoral accomplishments in a brighter light. Here, it seems, rhetoric and reality combine to demonstrate that Giuliani, if elected, would prove to be a deceitful and egotistical leader. Something that by now we’ve surely had enough of.

Then there’s the “outcry” in the Sudan over the thankfully relatively lenient sentence (15 days in jail versus six months and 40 lashes) meted out to Gillian Gibbons for allowing the children in her elementary class to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Sudanese demonstrators have called for Gibbons to be executed. But witnesses indicate that the protesters were supplemented  (or perhaps seeded) by government workers. And the outcry seems to provide convenient rhetoric for the Sudanese government as it tries to block Scandinavian peacekeepers from being sent to Darfur — this in response to last year’s publication in Scandinavia of cartoons that depicted Muhammad and offended muslims.

And for all of the endless rhetoric about Iraq, when one reads some of the details of the violence there (as I’ve been doing in the New Yorker (Inside The Surge)) one realizes just how bloody and brutal and real the war is, and how divorced from those facts is the rhetoric.

The aim of rhetoric, when it has an aim, is to sway the listener or audience. The speaker uses rhetorical devices (such as emphasis, repetition, sarcasm, humor, logic or sophistry, the inducement of fear, omission, bullying, and charisma) to highlight his or her points, and to persuade the listener that his or her perspective has greater merit than any other. Unfortunately, the better the speaker the harder it becomes to differentiate a valid, worthy perspective from an invalid or fatuous perspective. And, given the established methods we employ to select the leaders of our regions, cities, states, and countries, rhetoric must remain for now an indispensible part of the process.

Rhetoric is employed so pervasively around the world that it’s almost impossible to imagine processes of government and leadership without it. But perhaps that’s because we’re not trained to recognize and counter rhetoric. Plato’s Socratic dialogs or their teachings should be required readings in schools. If we could learn to decode rhetoric and diminish its influence the world would be a better place.

Reality on the other hand often gets too little attention. It takes a lot of reality to impinge upon our consciousness. And all too often it’s the sensational stuff that we focus on. In the past few days I’ve been struck by the number of high profile news stories that have focused on tragic disappearances and deaths for no other reason than there was something odd or grizzly or heartbreaking about them (the hoaxed teenager who killed herself, the missing teenager who’d been involved in porn, the couple who allegedly killed their two year old child, the ex-cop who may have killed his wives). I’m not saying that these tragedies aren’t worth our attention, but should they occupy, relatively speaking, so much of our news-space? News serves two purposes — it delivers information of note and it keeps society apprised of things that we should care about and perhaps act upon. Of course, news media don’t make the news, it’s the consumers (us) who dictate our appetite for sensation to the savvy editors and pundits. What would it take to bring about a more enlightened media? A more enlightened public…

One can only hope that the armed hostage taker in New Hampshire is defused. I’d rather have more rhetoric than that kind of reality.

What is reason?

I’ve probably written about fifty posts already on this blog, but it occurred to me just yesterday that I have yet to write about “reason.” Since the name of the blog is rationalphilosophy.net and since it’s my stated goal to analyze subjects of interest from a rational perspective, I think I should correct the omission.

We can encapsulate the realm of reason as follows: Reason involves the logical manipulation of abstract concepts.

To unpack this: “Reason” itself is an abstract concept that describes a mental process. This mental process is what happens when we use logic to explore and analyze other abstract concepts. “Logic” is the consistent application of definitive rules (it’s also an abstract concept).

So, when we take any set of defined rules and apply them consistently to analyze ideas, we are using reason.

Notice, we’ve said nothing about whether the rules reflect reality. Neither have we said anything about whether the ideas being analyzed reflect reality. Reason doesn’t require real objects. But as we evolved the rational faculty we first apprehended reason through our interaction with the real world, because that’s our primary and immediate point of reference. The real world also provides us with myriad situations that can be abstracted and anaylzed through reason. Reason is what we do to some extent and with varying degress of success day in day out just to stay alive.

When I was a boy I used to enjoy logic puzzles. Many of them conjured up odd worlds populated by fanciful tribes (one springs to mind about three different groups that sometimes, always or never told the truth). After setting out the rules of the imaginary world and posing a problem, the puzzles left the puzzler to figure out a rational solution. The unspoken dictat being that if the puzzler applied logic, he would find a definite solution.

In real life, we often find ourselves presented with problems or challenges for which no definite solution exists. Either the set of concepts is incomplete or the rule set to be applied isn’t definitive.

Here are some examples from current news stories:

Credit available to US business apparently shrank by an unprecedented 9% since August, perhaps pressaging a recession. The story and the information set reveal that it is impossible to deduce rationally whether the credit shrink indicates that a recession is nigh. The history that connects previous credit shrinks to recessions hasn’t established a definitive causal link, the circumstances surrounding the current credit shrink are unique, and the actions that people and institutions will take in response to the credit shrink are undetermined. But rationally we can say that we have cause to be concerned about a recession given the news about a credit shrink.

After the latest round of middle-east peace talks ended with a commitment from both sides to work toward peace in ‘08 and a two state status quo, Ehud Olmert is quoted as saying: “If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” Olmert asserts this as rational fact, but he is inferring a future event by comparison to a similar set of circumstances. He is probably correct to draw the comparison, and he may be making a reasonable guess about the outcome, but the categorical tenor of his statement leans on emotion rather than logic.

Bill Clinton this week said that he opposed the Iraq war from the start. Records of his statements at the time indicate that he spoke in favor of completing WMD inspections rather than rushing to war. Clinton recalls that he didn’t speak out more plainly because it would have been inappropriate for a former president to question the military decisions of an acting president. Clinton could be recalling correctly and his statement may be true. Or he may be deliberately mistating his former position on the war in which case his statement would be false. But he may also be mistaken in his recollection, in which case his statement would be false in fact, but true in its own internal logic (derived from his faulty recollection). We cannot know which is the case unless Clinton kept some kind of definitive record of his true position on the war at the time.

The elusiveness of definitive information and fully understood conditions means that when it comes to real life we’re often working with approximations and likelihoods. We don’t know that something will happen (like a recession) but we try to deduce the likelihood and weigh the risks or benefits of certain actions in the face of this likelihood. This, I believe, leads to a very common mistake. When we’re faced with incomplete information, we often replace questions of “what is likely” with “what is possible.”

A striking example of this is religious belief. Religious belief is a matter of faith. We don’t have enough information to draw a rational conclusion about whether a god or supreme being exists or doesn’t exist. When many people argue about religion, they invert this logic to say that we don’t have enough information to draw the rational conclusion that a god or supreme being doesn’t exist. That’s true, but just because the two statements are true doesn’t mean that they infer the same likelihood of god’s existence.

Let’s put it this way: If I claim that a large frog lives on the far side of the moon, you cannot prove that I am wrong, but you can demonstrate with a very high degree of likelihood that I am wrong. I can also say that can’t prove that the frog doesn’t exist, and while this is true, I can’t demonstrate it with the same high degree of likelihood.

After a simple review of the world’s greatest conflicts we quickly determine that they are not caused by insolubly complex problems but by the refusal of people to engage in thoughtful, rational debate and problem-solving.

Reggie Miller, in commenting on Stephon Marbury’s ill-fated split from his old Timberwolves basketball partner Kevin Garnett, had this to say about one’s time in the game: “You only got so much time in this league, and you want to make the most of it.” The same can be said of time in general.

For rats on Rat Island, time may be running out. Scientists plan on trying to eradicate rats from the island so that birds and other species can return and flourish. Rats have been eating birds’ eggs and the birds themselves and destroying the island’s natural habitat for the last couple of hundred years. The extermination plans represent a tough break for the rats, but a boon for other, less-resilient forms of life. (How did the rats reach the island in the first place? A ship that ran aground.)

And at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service an ex-administrator’s narrow concerns with her own needs may have hurt the chances of survival of several endangered species. Julie MacDonald meddled with scientists’ recommendations on what should make the endangered species list. (And so it goes with people and our see-saw interference with other species.)

Scientists and philosophers debate the nature of time. What is time? Is there such a thing as a flow of time? Is the present moment all we have or is it an illusion? Does time have a direction? If so, why?

Such questions seem hopelessly unimportant, I’m sure, if you’re on the endangered species list, or if you’re a Norwegian rat and the planes swoop in to drop poison on your island. They may also seem unimportant if you’re reaching the twilight years of your basketball career on a beleaguered team with a losing record and with your prospects for a championship medal rapidly dwindling.

Firstly, any analysis of the thing we call Time applies only to the existence of this universe and the things in it. (As if that isn’t enough.)

Secondly, our perception of time and Time itself (if such a thing exists) are not one and the same thing. (We perceive things indirectly through our senses and mental impulses, not directly.)

Thirdly, time has no meaning without space and matter. We only know of time through causality (things that happen in space).

With these three reasonable points of analysis we have a great deal of insight.

Let’s take the example of carbon dating — carbon dating relies on measuring the relative proportions of different carbon isotopes in the sample being considered. If the logic of the method is sound, we can start with causality and say: “The fossil is so-and-so million years old.” In other words, the data of our experience induce the reasonable conclusion that time passes at a measurable rate and that with enough data we can map out a pretty good idea of what existed when in what state.

But, and this is a very important but, those millions of years are just an extrapolated record. We can’t encompass the time passed by measuring its data points. It (time passed) doesn’t “exist.” We just infer it.

The present moment is no more than a state of existence which we can infer was preceded by prior states of existence beginning at the point of origin of the universe (the first moments of the big bang). Again the present moment cannot be measured, defined or encompassed.

We perceive the present moment as “something” because our minds compile a fluid picture out of all of the impulses of our organsim. These include the impulses from our nerve endings, including our eyes, ears, nose, as well as the impulses of our immediate memory, all combined to induce the perception that the present moment is palpable and substantive.

If we project forward to future states of existence, we can reliably say that eventually the sun will cool down, the universe will grow cold, the earth will cease to support life. Looked at this way, each of us and every living thing belongs to an endangered species. More pointedly, we human beings each have a life expectancy of only seventy or so years, a much more abbreviated horizon.

However, viewed through Reggie Miller’s pragmatic lens, we can find liberation and energy in acknowledging our ultimate fate. There may be no “now” but we can enjoy the complex illusion that our mind shapes for us, and we can make the most of our own ability to influence the way that that illusion gets shaped.

Barrack Obama has been criticized for being too honest in talking about his past drug use. Unlike Bill Clinton and George Bush, Obama spoke openly about drinking and using drugs as a young person. His critics feel that too much information can be harmful to young people. Others feel that in speaking openly he did the right thing. But how can we know?

An Oprah.com article today discusses the benefits of developing an optimistic rather than pessimistic perspective on our lives. Good advice perhaps if for those who tend to be neurotic and hard on themselves. Not such good advice for those who blame everyone except themselves for their problems.

The formal field of psychology has exploded in the past half century, but as an informal area of investigation and observation it has been practised for thousands of years. For as long as we’ve been able to frame ideas and concepts, we’ve been able to wonder why we behave as we do. Psychology is insight into human motivation. Why do we do what we do. Why do we think what we think. Unfortunately, psychology too often puts an appealing layer of frosting on reality, gooey and sweet and distracting, but not very nutritious.

Without understanding the underlying principles that shape our motivations, we can’t hope to map out a solid and reliable foundation for our psychological insights. The psychological studies that get press and attention tend to focus on narrow and specific aspects of human behavior. But what is the big picture? If we want to understand motivation from first priciples, where do we begin?

We must begin, I believe, with the principles of existence. After all, psychology comes about from the application of abstract principles to human behavior. And human behavior comes about from the principles that shape evolution. And evolution comes about through the operation of the universal principle of persistence (see the meaning of life) in living things over time.

Once we accept that all human behavior derives in some way shape or form from the instinct or impulse to further the persistence of life, we have a skeletal framework upon which we can begin to build a self-consistent science of psychology.

For example, if we want to figure out whether Obama is right or wrong for being honest about his drug use, we need to understand the pros and cons of honesty as it relates to the strength of society, and we need to understand the pros and cons of admitted drug use. Honesty would seem integral to a strong society because it promotes trust and trust promotes collaboration and empathy. Admissions of drug use in and of themselves would seem to diminish taboos about drug use by our elders or those in authority, but this in turn would seem to remove one of the strongest impulses for the young person deciding whether to try drugs — the desire to rebel and be different from those in authority.

We could further flesh out this trivial inspection to include other perspectives and layers of insight, digging down into the subordinate impulses to relate them to the persistence of life. The deeper we go, the more nuanced will be our insight. And if we use the principle of persistence as our guide, we will run less risk of going astray.

Until we have a solid foundation for arriving at conclusions about people’s motivations, the science of psychology will remain messy and maleable, and pretty much useless as a vehicle for helping society move forward. But if we adopt a rational, reality-based foundation, guided by the principles of existence, we can take our understanding on a new, productive and fascinating path.

(If you want to read more, LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive further explains the origin, elaboration and application of the principle of persistence.)

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Humility, ironically, arises out of an enforced awareness that one isn’t all one’s cracked up to be. Young children have a supreme sense of power and entitlement. My son needs constantly to be reminded to append the word ‘please’ to his commands. For a three year old he’s not unusual in this regard. He hasn’t yet learned that supreme power is never as supreme as it seems.

(As a parent, on the other hand, I am assured a constant supply of humility as I grapple with the need to balance my needs and desires with those of my children. Suffering a “Maisy” DVD, for instance, not to keep my son quiet (or not primarily so) but because that’s what he wants to watch and who am I to tell him that it isn’t compelling viewing?)

Pervez Musharraf has announced that he will step down from his position as head of Pakistan’s military on Thursday. He’s promised this before and reneged, but this time the circumstances would lead me to think that he will follow through. Musharraf has been served a dose of humility by Saudi Arabia. He’d gone there to ask King Abdullah to keep ex-leader Nawaz Sharif in exile until after the elections. The king demurred, saying he didn’t want to get in the middle of Pakistan’s politics. Musharraf’s hold on power apparently wasn’t as clear to the king as it once had been. As Sharif returns to Pakistan with a flourish, it’s likely that Musharraf will forgo his military position in the hopes of holding onto his political position.

It’s unclear whether President Bush has been experiencing humility or not. Having lost control of Congress and hoping to stay relevant, Bush has turned or has been turned toward political strategies that his administration had derided. He has been signing executive orders to outlaw the fishing of endangered species in Federal waters (a practice that’s already banned), clearing airspace for holiday flight schedules, and setting up a bilateral middle east peace summit (something he had poo-pooed in the past). Across the globe in Australia, the ousting of Prime Minister Howard removes another Bush crony from world politics. The new Labor PM, a speaker of Mandarin, will likely remove Australian combat troops from Iraq and may stop the sale of Uranium to India, since India hasn’t signed the international nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Although Bush undoubtedly can find it in himself to confess his love for Mandarinians, his loss off a staunch ally in Howard surely should make him feel even more isolated. But although the signs would indicate that Bush should be feeling humbled, it’s not a certainty that he does; one of Bush’s defining traits seems to be self-confidence in the face of his own incompetence.

And the GOP, faced with a shortfall in donations for campaign financing, has been targeting wealthy potential candidates in the hopes that they will fund their own campaigns. This is a turnaround. Usually it’s the Democrats who find themselves strapped for cash. Does the GOP feel humbled? Well, for now perhaps, but in the long run I doubt it.

Unfortunately, humility often doesn’t stick.

Sharif has been away long enough that people seem to have forgotten his own frightening ideas and tactics. (Sharif wanted to throw out the Pakistani legal system in favor of a system of law based strictly on the Koran.) Musharraf wasn’t the only one to denounce him as a fascist. Sharif’s own leadership was rocky to say the least. Kicked out of office and exiled for many years one would think that he has had time to reflect and reconsider his egotistical ambitions. Now he returns promising to save the country. Oh, dear.

In politics, while personal humility is rare one feels that it can happen, whereas humility of a party or group seems elusive at best and probably impossible.

Humility, I think, comes in two flavors — expedient humility and true humility. I induce expedient humility in my son when I tell him to say please and thank you if he wishes to continue to get the things he’s asking for. He complies because he understands the risk of non-compliance. So, too, the politician who finds himself in a position of compromised power knows that he must adapt or sink. For a while he swallows his pride and does things that he doesn’t really want to do.

True humility comes about when one acknowledges that one’s own desires and ambitions must be measured and tested against those of others, and that, if we want to avoid oppressing others, we must err on the side of favoring their desires of others over our own. For a political party, or an inveterate politician, true humility is an anathema.

One can only hope that whoever attains power after the shakeout in Pakistan feels enough pressure to induce expedient humility. The same can be said for next year’s election here in the US. For our children, on the other hand, we can hope that repeated reminders of the benefits of humilty will induce the self-reflection and awareness required to inculcate true humility. This way lies the better future of the human race.

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On tradition and legacy: Thanksgiving, turkey-pardons, and barbarism.

As an English national I’m supposed to feel ambivalent about celebrating Thanksgiving (not as ambivalent as I am supposed to feel about Independence Day, but ambivalent nevertheless). I’m sure that many people would have to pause if you asked them what we’re supposed to be celebrating on Thanksgiving. Although, does it really matter? It’s a holiday. We get together. We eat. We drive.

In Rome yesterday archaeologists unveiled a cave thought to have been adorned by the Roman emperor Augustus who believed it to be the place where the wolf nurtured Romulus and Remus after fishing them from the river Tiber. The idea of this cave, two thousand years old, fifty two feet inside the Palatine hill, lovingly decorated with seashells and marble, inspires a sense of connection to a rich and vital past state of humanity, one in which myth and reality intertwined. But there’s a brutal aspect to the reality and legend, too, just as the slaughter of turkeys can put a damper on the idea of Thanksgiving. As the story about the Paletine cave mentions, Romulus, for whom Rome is named, went on to kill his twin brother Remus in a power struggle.

The story of Romulus allegedly killing Remus reminds me of two pieces related to Bush this week: Firstly, his Thanksgiving witticism (yes, it was actually funny) in which he skewered his boss, I mean his vice president. In announcing the winners of the emancipated-Turkey naming contest, Bush quipped that the winning names “May” and “Flower” were much better than those proffered by Cheney — “Lunch and dinner.” (What’s behind that mean-spirited reference to Cheney’s voracious appetite, one wonders?) The second Bush tale is less amusing. Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, in publicizing his new book, reveals that when Bush pressed Scott to announce that Rove and Libby had nothing to do with the Plame leak, it wasn’t true. Scott stops short of accusing Bush of lying, but the indictment of the administration is clear. The question remains whether this administration’s historical legacy of deception and audacious egotism will be recognized by posterity.

Another story today turns up another dark aspect of tradition. A young Saudi woman has had her sentence increased from 90 lashes to 200 lashes. Her crime: Going out in public with a man to whom she was not related. It gets worse. Her crime came to light in the first place because she was the victim of abduction and gang rape.

We may find this punishment abhorrent. I do. But our reaction is mostly a matter of timing. Up until recently, corporal punishment was considered an entirely appropriate punishment in most corners of the world for many crimes. And in this country going back less than two hundred years many slave-owners thought nothing of beating men and women alike for crimes real and imagined, and society in general accepted it.

Tradition, history, and legacy work as a double-edged sword. They can help to maintain some of the best traditions, remind us of great moments, movements and passges in our history, and it can help maintain some of the worst. Without thoughtful reappraisal and rational questioning of why we hold onto certain laws or patterns of behavior, we will inevitably hold onto bad laws and patterns of behavior. For this reason, I think, we are right to question even those seemingly innocent and well-respected traditions. Today’s cause for celebration, after all, may be tomorrow’s cause for shame.

The NY Times today reports on a ritual of harassment at Jets home games. Crowds of men chant for women to expose their breasts; often the women oblige. Some Jets fans apparently attend the games more for the bawdy action than for the football. There have also been incidents in which the crowd throws money then throws objects at the children who go to collect the money. Hmmm.

In a CNN story, scientists on two continents have announced success in producing stem cells from the cells in human skin. Although the technique currently achieves this by disrupting the DNA in the cells and therefore comes with a risk of cancerous activity, scientists report confidence that the technique can be improved to overcome this problem.

(The White House claims that the president had just this kind of groundbreaking stem cell research in mind when he vetoed two bills to extend the funding of embryonic stem cell research. After going back and reviewing what he said at the time, this seems to be correct. I also find myself agreeing with the logical thrust of president’s ethical position: if he feels that embryos are human life, it was right for him to veto the bills, regardless of the potential value of the embryonic research.)

My mind somehow draws these two threads together into a single thought — what a huge spectrum of behavior and endeavor exists in the world. (I have to confess that, in its raw form, my thought was somewhat less charitable toward those who throng the Gate D ramps at Giant’s Stadium during Jets games.)

In another story, David Brooks gets it wrong today, I think, when he talks about the segmented society as observed through the lens of music. Brooks proposes that music, as with many other spheres, has become ever more fragmented and disconnected from its history, and that as a result society has lost this connection, too. “We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation,” Brooks opines, “It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.”

Far from driving fragmentation, it seems to me that technology removes many hurdles to synthesis, shared knowledge and collaboration. The Internet brings people into contact from different spheres of life, different cultures and geographies. Want to know how to play a particular guitar chord? Look it up on-line (I do this). Want to collaborate with someone in a different country, producing a different kind of music; just write him or her a message. (I’ve done this, too, collaborating with a French Canadian experimental cross-genre musician who’s music I liked on MySpace.)

Brooks attributes Van Zandt (guitar player with Springsteen’s E Street Band) the notion that “most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs. As a result, much of their music … stinks.”

While it’s true that the music of most young musicians sucks, that’s always been true. Looking at it more broadly, many people thought that Bruce Springsteen sucked when he became popular back in the eighties. For that matter, many people still do. He’s got broad appeal, but has he achieved anything momentous and original as a musician or a songwriter?

Unfortunately, Brooks comes across as an old fuddy-duddy. Vital, cross-cultural, original music is being produced all over the place today. Take just one example: Joanna Newsom. To quote Wikipedia Ms. Newsom “has been strongly influenced by the polymetric style of playing used by West African kora players.” If you doubt her originality and talent, you need only listen to some of the music from her recent album Ys. The landscape has changed and the challenges are different, but that doesn’t mean that we need institutions to keep our cultural heritage alive.

And finally, I reach my point, (I had no clear idea until just now where this was going), in honor of France’s typically passionate strike against a change they voted for, I coin a French phrase to tie together these several odd themes: The French toast “Vive la difference!” narrowly used, extolls the differences between the sexes. But if we think of it more broadly we could apply it to all differences —

The difference between raucous Jets fans and gene researchers. The difference between David Brooks and anybody who listens to Will Oldham or Joanna Newsom or Sufjan Stevens or any of the other immensely talented musicians writing and recording vital music today.

For a while I thought that variation in life forms might be a universal principle of life’s existence. But after further analysis, it seems to be instead a very natural outcome of other fundamental principles. Nevertheless, variation in life, while not required, is inevitable, and it’s better I think to embrace it than deny it.

I’ll end with two quotes, the first from a man who attended the Jets game with his family and the other from a young woman who happily obliged the cheering Jets fans:

“That’s a disgusting practice and the police have to get involved, put a stop to it.”

“I love my body and I like what I have, so let everybody share it.”

I find myself sympathizing with both perspectives…

I just put out a music video for My Darkest Hour, a song from my album ‘nylon.’ The song and the video aim to express in artistic terms what it’s like to grapple with compulsion — in my case a compulsion to drink. Addictions, as they’re sometimes called, can be very easy to acquire and very hard to drop. Compulsion plays a very broad role in life, appearing in many guises and to many degrees. But what is it, why do we have it?

A NY times story today reports on Korean efforts to address an issue that has hit hard in a country where almost all homes have high speed Internet connections — web addiction. Alarmingly, some young people have apparently died from exhaustion after days without a break playing on-line games, and millions more young people may be at some risk of addiction.

Also in the Times, Amy Harmon writes about the obsessiveness of having access to one’s DNA data. She found herself spending hours every day sifting through the many genetic markers (SNPs) that would tell her about her predispoition, or lack of it, for everything from a dislike to brussel sprouts to alzheimer’s.

Such introspective compulsions affect the people who have them and the people in their lives, but I was also reminded that the effects of one person’s compulsion can go much further. Take Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, for instance, who has announced deep consitutional changes and sweeping reforms that will cement his vision for a revamped Venezuela and consolidate his position long term as the overseer of that vision. His biographer, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, had this to say about the current situation: “This is not a dictatorship but something more complex: the tyranny of popularity.”

We could say that genetics and circumstance result in compulsion and leave it at that. But there must be some reason for a tendency to compulsion and perhaps some insight that can help us thwart it through understanding it better.

I remember news stories about the polar bear in Central Park zoo obsessively swimming endless little laps because he was so bored. We human beings have become hypersensitized to boredom. Living in New York City you see the highly intensified impact of this. People everywhere walking and talking on their cell phones. People wearing earphones even in the elevator on the way up into the office. People exercising on treadmills while watching TV or reading. People watching portable movie players on the subway. We cram our lives full of activity to squeeze out the threat of inactivity. But, unlike our ancestors, much modern activity is artificial and unnecessary.

There’s an intersect then between the level of compulsive activity and the degree of ease with which we can ensure our basic survival needs. (The Korean boot camps for Internet addicts get the addicts away from their computers and involved in physical activities outdoors — whether this works or not, it seems conceptually well-directed.) But what about the origin of compulsion? What is compulsion and why do we succumb to it at all?

Compulsion comes about when we return frequently and strongly to a perceived or actual need or desire. It’s a pattern of response that comes about either genetically or circumstancially. It’s also helpful to regard compulsion as existing on a spectrum, and as a response that can be harmful or helpful.

My theory is this: Compulsion is a necessary trait. Without some degree of compulsion organisms wouldn’t have a mechanism to draw them to do the things that are good for them or good for the species. Bees wouldn’t build hives, cats wouldn’t lick themselves to clean their fur, people wouldn’t have sex. But compulsion becomes problematic either when circumstance puts us into a situation we’re not genetically prepared for (drinking alcohol, shooting heroin) or when we have an imbalance between free time and purposeful time, leading to boredom.

Chavez has found himself in a circumstance with which he is unprepared to cope effectively. The compulsion to keep feeding himself a steady diet of power and control, to guarantee that he will be able to keep experiencing that power, has overcome his ability to balance his own desires with the responsibility he has assumed for his people. Unfortunately, when it gets to this point, the prognosis is not good.

On a happier note, the Central Park zookeepers devised mechanisms to relieve Gus, the depressed polar bear, from boredom. He is now a much happier bear by all accounts. What would it take to wean Chavez from his addiction to power? One thinks that it may take him going cold turkey.

The NY Times today published “Candidates in a Box,” a subjective categorical appraisal of the various presidential candidates. This marvellous mechanism for political commentary permits us to compare and contrast the distilled opinions of op ed columnists David Brooks and Ben Schott with our own. The beauty of the grid is its laser-like focus on the defining traits of Clinton, McCain, Obama, Giuliani and the rest. This focus drives us toward some categorical conlusions. When we see Giuliani’s character described as “strong but disturbing,” for instance, we may either agree (yes, that’s him) or disagree (I would have said, bullyish and disturbing), but we cannot leave the box without arriving at the conclusion that Giuliani’s character can be summed up and must affect our thinking about his viability as a leader of the nation.

As I mentioned last week, much political commentary distracts rather than focuses our attention. The categorical grid reminds us that candidates are people, not video clips, and that people tend not to change (and certainly not for the better when they get more power). What we see in the candidates now is what we will get if we elect them. Here are some of the grid entries that made me stop and think (or chuckle):

Mike Huckabee - Judgment - ‘Pre-Darwinian’
Barak Obama - Character - ‘Afraid of conflict’
Fred Thomson - Logic - ‘Unused’
Hillary Clinton - Character - ‘Hidden’

In his metaphysical deduction, Emanuel (or Immanuel) Kant aimed to show that twelve pure concepts or categories provide the framework for all possible experience. He divides these twelve, three each, between the four Aristotlian classifications of judgment - quantity, quality, relation, or modality. At once, the desire for such symmetry (why three in each bucket?) raises a red flag, something that Schopenhauer pointed out in his World As Will And Representation. The beauty of his thesis beguiled Kant, and after 11 years and 800 pages, this seduction of the categories steered him wrong. Categories become dangerous when we invest them with too much meaning. Rest a whole foundation of knowledge on neatly symmetric categories and you’ll almost certainly come unstuck.

Likewise, we should avoid relying solely on categories for something as important as decisions about who to elect as president.

We like categories because they can help us understand and remember things more clearly. I would go further and say that categorization is a function of consciousness. The conscious mind must distinguish between objects, actions, and impressions, in order to arrive at analyses and decisions. Consciousness permits us the ability to assess a situation and to choose to act in a particular way. If we’re not able to categorize the circumstances of the situation we’re not able to choose how to act.

This brings us back to voting.

Let’s imagine two voters. The first watches the debates, reads about the candidates, listens to the commentators, but does so without drawing distinctions, without reaching conscious conclusions. When he goes to vote, he votes from his ‘gut.’ This impulse from the gut is guided by subconscious impressions, but the voter hasn’t used his consciousness to influence his choice. A second concerned citizen watches the debates, reads about the candidates, listens to the commentators, and forms a reasoned analysis about the candidates, she consciously draws distinctions and when she goes to vote she uses these distinctions to try to elect the most eligible candidate.

If we think about the candidates themselves, the importance of a predisposition toward reasoned analysis becomes even more important. Should we elect (again) a president who ‘knows’ what is right and chooses based on his unconscious convictions? Or should we look to elect a national leader who reasons and reflects, using balanced judgment to further his or her thinking on a matter.

Disturbingly, in the analysis presented by the NY Times, of the sixteen candidates only Joe Biden and Chris Dodd receive good reviews for their judgment and logic. A sobering thought.

“Expediters” exist as a wonderfully bizarre byproduct of the inefficiency of the NY City Buildings Department. For a mere few thousand dollars the expediter can help your application jump the queue, furnishing you with a work permit in a few days rather than a few months. Raking in money from the relatively wealthy for doing something that wouldn’t be necessary if the city’s bureaucracy worked better has a tragi-comic element to it. Add to that the down-to-earth nature of your average expediter (how else can he successfully negotiate the underbelly of the buildings department?) and you can readily imagine that a vulgar sense of irony might pervade the expediter’s workplace… You’d be right. My wife, being a venturesome soul, didn’t flinch at being the one to engage an expediter on our behalf earlier this week (I think she quite relished the prospect). And our expectation of scoring some low comedy along with our work permit didn’t go unrewarded. Here’s an example: “I’d be gay,” said the expediter to my wife at one point, “if it wasn’t for the gross sex.”

Which is a long preamble to my point of inquiry. I’ve been thinking about the inevitable infusion of levity into everyday life, the capacity and craving we seem to have for all things fluffy, amusing, and distracting.

CNN’s list of most popular stories today features “Diet Tricks of The Stars,” “Guess Who Bought a Huge Diamond?” and “Celine Dion Tries Some New Things” at numbers 6, 7 and 8 respectively (ahead of stories about quake aftershocks in Chile and torture and murder allegations in Columbia). Our capacity for meaningless distraction is seemingly insatiable.

The fashion designer Marc Jacobs has been broadly pilloried in the last couple of years for not being serious enough (in the fashion industry?) A lovely quote from Mr. Jacobs in an interview with the NY Times amplifies both the silliness he strives to represent and the silliness of the outcry against that silliness. “People don’t really want reality,” the NY Times quotes Marc Jacobs as saying. “They want surgically enhanced, scripted reality. The perversity of life today is so thrilling to me. It’s like a circus out there. It’s cartoon land.” It’s hard to imagine that those who have been lambasting poor Marc Jacobs don’t otherwise relish the very unreality he’s been reflecting in his work.

From the other direction, a profile on Mit Romney reveals the coexistence of Mit’s burgeoning passion for serious issues at an early age with his penchant for quoting cartoon characters in his letters home from a Mormon mission in France.

From a philosophical and psychological perspective such things as getting wrapped up in how the stars lose weight, or finding humor in the minor tragedy of our everyday lives, or wanting reality to be surgically enhanced and scripted as Mr. Jacobs so eloquently puts it, seems to stem from the same urge that we have to engage in play. We play because we want a safe place to experience activities that wouldn’t be safe if not wrapped in the distancing of acting out. Animals and children wrestle and play-flight as a low-risk mechanism for learning how to wrestle and fight. Such things as humor, gossip, and fantasy serve a similar purpose for adults. When we’re not wrapped up in our own angst, we can reflect on the serious matters of everyday life with a more balanced perspective.

(If there were ever any doubt that playfulness extends to animals, it would be eradicated, I think, by a look at this NPR slideshow of a wild polar bear playing with huskies.)

Of course, when we take things too lightly we risk avoiding the appropriate weight of difficult experiences. If we go through life evading hardship and pain, physical or emotional, we will live a stunted and “unreal” life. Likewise, if we suppress the urge to play, we will go through life without enjoying the fulfillment that we can find through an objective, playful perspective.

In summing up the inverse of this sentiment, Mel Brooks perhaps said it best: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.